Whereas general corpora have been used successfully by linguists and language practitioners for more than 40 years now, corpora that capture the language of particular discourse communities are only recently becoming the focus of attention. The chapters in the present collection, edited by Connor and Upton, respond to the growing research interest in academic and professional discourses and illustrate the profitable use of specialized corpora in linguistics and in the learning and teaching of English for academic purposes (EAP) and English for specific purposes (ESP).
Preceded by a brief introduction in which the editors sketch the contents and structure of the volume, the 12 chapters are unevenly grouped into four sections (without any specific headings). Apart from Flowerdew's general overview chapter on specialized corpora—which constitutes section 1 of the volume—each of the contributions has the same reader-friendly internal structure: The authors describe the benefit of a corpus approach to the type of discourse that they analyze, give an overview of the corpus used, discuss the type of analysis carried out, and summarize the pedagogical and practical implications of their studies. With its convincing argument for using specialized corpora in researching and teaching academic and professional language, Flowerdew's chapter provides a very nice introduction to the case studies that follow in sections 2–4.
The three chapters in section 2 all deal with corpus approaches to academic English. First, Simpson analyzes the forms and pragmatic functions of frequent formulaic expressions (FEs), such as “you know what I mean,” in the Michigan corpus of spoken academic English. Simpson not only makes observations on the distribution of FEs in the language of professors and students, she also analyzes what it is that makes such expressions so valuable and prevalent in academic speech. In the second contribution, Reppen explores four registers from the TOEFL 2000 spoken and written academic language corpus and nicely highlights the linguistic challenges that the different academic registers present to the student. Hyland's chapter then centers on features of persuasion (e.g., self-mention, citations, questions) in a corpus of research articles from a range of academic disciplines, pointing out a number of interesting disciplinary peculiarities.
Section 3 turns from academic to business English contexts. The first two chapters in this section (by Warren and Cheng) discuss the design and research potential of the Hong Kong corpus of spoken English (HKCSE). Whereas Warren's chapter is more concerned with issues of corpus compilation, Cheng draws upon data from a subsection of the corpus to present a case study of lexical-grammatical and prosodic patterns in hotel checkout discourses. It becomes clear that not only researchers in language for specific purposes (LSP) but also practitioners of the hotel industry can greatly benefit from a systematic collection of spoken texts such as the HKCSE. In the next contribution, McCarthy and Handford explore spoken discourse in the Cambridge and Nottingham corpus of business English; they combine qualitative, quantitative, and register-comparative approaches, leading to valuable insights, especially for learners and teachers of business communication. Bhatia, Langton, and Lung then turn to investigating the discourse of legal professionals and make a strong case for the integration of quantitative and qualitative analyses.
The four chapters in section 4 are based on the two-million-word Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication (ICIC) fund-raising corpus. First, the editors apply corpus techniques and a Swalesian move analysis to a subsection of the corpus, hence providing a systematic description of the structure and distinctive textual features of nonprofit fund-raising proposals, which should be equally interesting for readers and (novice) writers of such texts. A different portion of the ICIC corpus is investigated in the chapter by Connor and Gladkov, which focuses on the development of an operational system of the three persuasive appeals (logos, ethos, and pathos) and the application of this system to direct-mail fund-raising letters. Also working with direct-mail letters, Goering investigates how different types of metaphor are used by different organizations to establish and maintain relationships. Crismore then sheds light on metadiscoursal features in fund-raising letters by two groups of writers: people from health and human services and those from educational organizations.
With its broad coverage of specialized discourses and its strong focus on pedagogical and practical issues of linguistic research, this volume can certainly be recommended to anyone interested in LSP, discourse analysis, or applied corpus linguistics. The contributions to this volume clearly demonstrate that the use of corpora makes a difference and that findings based on corpus data can have a strong impact on teaching language for academic and professional purposes.
