English in Europe: Volume 2 English as a Scientific and Research Language: Debates and Discourses 9781614516378, 9781614517498, 9781501501111

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Ramón Plo Alastrué, Carmen Pérez-Llantada (Eds.) English as a Scientific and Research Language

Language and Social Life

| Editors David Britain Crispin Thurlow Founding Editor Richard J. Watts

Volume 3

English as a Scientific and Research Language | Debates and Discourses English in Europe, Volume 2 Edited by Ramón Plo Alastrué Carmen Pérez-Llantada

ISBN 978-1-61451-749-8 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-61451-637-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-0111-1 ISSN 2364-4303 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter, Inc., Berlin/Boston Typesetting: PTP-Berlin, Protago TEX-Production GmbH, Berlin Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Series preface The biggest language challenge in the world today is English. School children are expected to learn it, and the need to succeed in English is often fired by parental ambition and the requirements for entry into higher education, no matter what the proposed course of study. Once at university or college, students across the globe are increasingly finding that their teaching is being delivered through the medium of English, making the learning process more onerous. Universities unquestioningly strive for a greater level of internationalization in teaching and in research, and this in turn equates with greater use of English by non-native speakers. The need to use English to succeed in business is as much an issue for multinational corporations as it is for small traders in tourist destinations, and meanwhile other languages are used and studied less and less. On the other hand, academic publishers get rich on the monolingual norm of the industry, and private language teaching is itself big business. In the market of English there are winners and there are losers. The picture, however, is more complicated than one simply of winners and losers. What varieties of English are we talking about here, and who are their ‘native speakers’? Is there something distinct we can identify as English, or is it merely part of a repertoire of language forms to be called upon as necessary? Is the looming presence of English an idea or a reality, and in any case is it really such a problem, and is it really killing off other languages as some commentators fear? Is the status and role of English the same in all parts of the world, or does it serve different purposes in different contexts? What forms of practical support do those trying to compete in this marketplace need in order to be amongst the winners? These are all questions addressed by the English in Europe: Opportunity or Threat? project, which ran from January 2012 to October 2014. This international research network received generous funding from the Leverhulme Trust in the UK and was a partnership between the universities of Sheffield (UK), Copenhagen (Denmark) and Zaragoza (Spain), Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic) and the South-East Europe Research Centre in Thessaloniki (Greece). Each of the partners hosted a conference on a different topic and with a particular focus on English in their own region of Europe. During the course of the project 120 papers were presented, reporting on research projects from across Europe and beyond, providing for the first time a properly informed and nuanced picture of the reality of living with and through the medium of English. The English in Europe book series takes the research presented in these conferences as its starting point. In each case, however, papers have been rewritten,

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and many of the papers have been specially commissioned to provide a series of coherent and balanced collections, giving a thorough and authoritative picture of the challenges posed by teaching, studying and using English in Europe today. Professor Andrew Linn Director, English in Europe project

Contents Series preface | v List of contributors | x

Part I: The socio-cultural scenario Ramón Plo Alastrué Debates and discourses on English as an academic and research language | 3 Karen Bennett Towards an epistemological monoculture: Mechanisms of epistemicide in European research publication | 9 Ruth Breeze Citing outside the community? An investigation of the language of bibliography in top journals | 37 Claus Gnutzmann, Jenny Jakisch, and Frank Rabe Resources for publishing in English as a foreign language: Strategies, peers and techniques | 59 Marina Bondi Language policy in web-mediated scientific knowledge dissemination: A case study of risk communication across genres and languages | 85

Part II: The discourse community scenario Renata Povolná On cross-cultural variation in the use of conjuncts in research articles by Czech and native speakers of English: Can conjuncts contribute to the interactive and dialogic character of academic texts? | 115 Sonia Oliver Spanish authors dealing with hedging or the challenges of scholarly publication in English L2 | 141

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Josef Schmied Academic writing in English in comparison: Degree adverbs, connecting adverbials, and contrastive/concessive markers in the ChemCorpus and comparable data-bases | 159 Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova Cross-cultural variation in citation practices: A comparative analysis of citations in Czech English-medium and international English-medium linguistics journals | 185 Ana Bocanegra-Valle Peer reviewers’ recommendations for language improvement in research writing | 207

Part III: The language policy scenario. English as a lingua franca in linguistics? Jennifer Schluer English as a lingua franca in linguistics? A case study of German linguists’ language use in publications | 233 Maria Kuteeva Academic English as “nobody’s land”: The research and publication practices of Swedish academics | 261 Laura Mihaela Muresan and Mariana Nicolae Addressing the challenge of publishing internationally in a non-Anglophone academic context: Romania – a case in point | 281 Branka Drljača Margić and Tea Žeželić The implementation of English-medium instruction in Croatian higher education: Attitudes, expectations and concerns | 311 Joanna Lewińska Teaching English as a Lingua Franca in a multilingual environment: The evaluation of native and non-native teachers of English by Polish university students | 333

Contents

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Carmen Pérez-Llantada Teasing out the tensions between English monolingualism vs. plurilingualism in European academic and research settings | 353 Index | 363

List of Contributors Karen Bennett Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal Ana Bocanegra-Valle Universidad de Cádiz, Spain Marina Bondi Universitá degli Study di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy Ruth Breeze Universidad de Navarra, Spain Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova Masarykova univerzita, Brno, Czech Republic Claus Gnutzmann Technische Universität, Braunschweig, Germany Jenny Jakisch Technische Universität, Braunschweig, Germany Maria Kuteeva Stockholms universitet, Sweden Joanna Lewińska Wszechnica Polska, Warsaw, Poland Branka Drljača Margić Sveučilište u Rijeci, Croatia Laura-Mihaela Muresan Academia de Studii Economice din Bucureşti, Romania

Mariana Nicolae Academia de Studii Economice din Bucureşti, Romania Sonia Oliver Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain Carmen Pérez-Llantada Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain Ramón Plo Alastrué Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain Renata Povolná Masarykova univerzita, Brno, Czech Republic Frank Rabe Technische Universität, Braunschweig, Germany Jennifer Schluer Universität Kassel, Germany Josef Schmied Technische Universität Chemnitz, Germany Tea Žeželić Sveučilište u Rijeci, Croatia

| Part I: The socio-cultural scenario

Ramón Plo Alastrué

Debates and discourses on English as an academic and research language 1 Introduction Over the past decades, the advancement of English as the main vehicle for the exchange, dissemination and publication of scientific knowledge on a global scale has been a major focus of scholarly attention. Debates and discourses on English as the predominant international language of science have provoked lively scholarly discussion and comprehensive theorization. The issues tackled are varied, ranging from Englishization as a dimension of globalization (Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas 1993; Graddol 1997; Swales 1990, 1997), linguistic imperialism (Phillipson 1992) and English monolingualism (Ammon 2001; Hamel 2007) to the geopolitics of academic writing (Canagarajah 2002; Lillis and Curry 2010), to cite but a relevant few. In the European context, the advancement of English has been a widespread phenomenon both in research and academic (higher education) institutions. The communication dynamics within research institutions has been notably influenced by globalization processes and the socioeconomic interests of many countries. The main target is to increase international cooperation and development. As the OECD (2009) Higher Education to 2030 report explains, these shifting research trends account for global socioeconomic development interests in gaining international visibility, reputation and prestige (see also UNESCO 2010; OECD 2012). In addition, scholarly debate has also addressed issues related to national-level research policies on research assessment. These policies have promoted English-medium publications for scientific exchange, dissemination and publication purposes to the detriment of other languages of science. The shift towards English-only communication in academic settings has been motivated, among other reasons, by the recent internationalization policies adopted in European higher education institutions. Broadly speaking, these policies have sought to increase staff and student mobility, institutional visibility and international recognition. Debates on the role and function of English in academic and higher education contexts maintain that English stands as the lingua franca for communicating with speakers of languages other than English (see, e.g., Seidlhofer 2005; Mauranen 2012). What thus seems clear is that socioeconomic trends along with research and internationalization policies mirror broader sociological phenomena resulting from the processes of globalization

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and increased transcultural flows (Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas 1993; Pennycook 2007). The role of English in academic and research contexts is primarily instrumental – as House (2003) puts it, English is a shared language of communication for people with different linguacultural backgrounds (see also Seidlhofer 2003). Debates on current language policy and practice also give strong support to the idea that English is the premier language catering to the specific communicative needs of the international academic and research community. It is interesting to note that the geopolitical and language policy debates mentioned above have mainly been built upon sets of analytical binaries: global vs. local dynamics, inner vs. outer/expanding circles, core vs. periphery scholars, native English speakers vs. non-native English speakers, Anglophone vs. non-Anglophone (Kachru 2009; Flowerdew 2009; Englander and Uzuner-Smith 2013; Kuteeva and Mauranen 2014). Debates and discourses on the role and functions of English as the language of science have likewise revolved around binaries such as big language vs. small languages, English as a privileged language vs. minority languages, and standard English vs. academic Englishes (Mauranen, Pérez-Llantada, and Swales 2010). The rationale underlying this volume is an attempt to explore the tensions posed by these analytical binaries in a comparative manner. Within the English in Europe: Opportunity or threat? project¹, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and running from January 2012 to October 2014, it was deemed necessary to gain comparative insights across different European locations as regards the lingua franca role that English has assumed in different domains, namely, business, higher education, research and tourism. As part of this project, the second of a series of five consecutive international conferences was held in Zaragoza (Spain). Entitled “English as a Scientific and Research Language”, this conference sought to discuss the role and status of English in academic and research settings with specialists in different fields. Topics included controversial issues such as attitudes and language policies towards the advancement of English and its hegemony versus minority national languages, the “publish in English or perish” dilemma and the current dominance of English as a lingua franca and its influence on the process of academic enculturation. Comparative views across different domains and geographic locations in Europe – covering Northern, Central, Eastern and Southern European countries – clearly pointed to a predominant role for English. Concurrently, these views brought to the surface the complexities underpinning the linguistic and sociocultural idiosyncrasies of each local context.

1 http://englishineurope.group.shef.ac.uk/

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Drawing on a selection of papers presented in the conference, the common goal of the chapters included in this volume is to identify both shared and divergent trends and challenges and contextualize scientific English usage across the local specificities of various geographic locations in Europe. The volume seeks to identify current trends in language use – as well as the tensions originated – and to invite reflection on their possible influence in the domain of global academia. To explore this area, we propose three different scenarios – (i) the “socio-cultural”, (ii) the “discourse community” and (iii) the “language policy/language planning” scenario – in which English supports the communication exchanges and social interactions taking place in academic and research settings. The aim of this volume is to examine how multidisciplinary theoretical frameworks and (quantitative and qualitative) analytical methods are applied to gain a better understanding of the role of English in the European context. The contributions in Part I, devoted to the “socio-cultural” scenario, examine how the use of English for research communication involves culture-specific stances and different cultural approaches to English-medium scientific communication (i.e., for research publication purposes and aiming at a highly-specialized audience) and science communication (i.e., for disseminating scientific knowledge to a non-specialized audience). The following chapters in this first section raise a number of issues related to the effects of the prevailing Anglophone academic norms vs. the attested culture-specific rhetorical traits in L2 academic English discourse: Karen Bennett (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal): Towards an epistemological monoculture: Mechanisms of epistemicide in European research publication Ruth Breeze (Universidad de Navarra, Spain): Citing outside the community? An investigation of the language of bibliography in top journals Claus Gnutzmann, Jenny Jakisch, and Frank Rabe (Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany): Resources for publishing in English: Strategies, peers and techniques Marina Bondi (Universitá degli Study di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy): Language policy in web-mediated scientific knowledge dissemination: A case study of risk communication across genres and languages Part II, the “discourse community” scenario, investigates the effects of Englishonly research publishing practices across local communities of European researchers with different L1 backgrounds. This part specifically addresses the linguistic challenges faced by non-Anglophone scientists and researchers in different geographic locations in Europe who use English as the medium of research construction, publication and dissemination. The contributions provide both

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textual (linguistic) and contextual analyses of English-medium research communication. Cross-cultural differences on the one hand and linguistic inequities on the other hand are discussed: Renata Povolná (Masarykova univerzita, Brno, Czech Republic): On cross-cultural variation in the use of some text-organizing devices in research articles Sonia Oliver (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain): Spanish authors dealing with hedging or the challenges of scholarly publication in English L2 Josef Schmied (Technische Universität Chemnitz, Germany): Academic writing in English in comparison: Degree adverbs, connecting adverbials and contrastive/concessive markers in the ChemCorpus and comparable data-bases Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova (Masarykova univerzita, Brno, Czech Republic): Cross-cultural variation in citation practices: A comparative analysis of citations in Czech English-medium and international English-medium linguistics journals Ana Bocanegra-Valle (Universidad de Cádiz, Spain): Peer reviewers’ recommendations for language improvement in research writing Part III of the volume examines the “language policy/language planning” scenario and offers insightful perspectives on academics’ perceptions and attitudes to English as a shared language, to their own national languages and to other foreign languages that may also act as lingua francas. The effects and the impact of language policies are examined with a view to identifying shifting attitudes and perceptions towards English as a shared language for international research communication on the part of non-Anglophone researchers and academics. Last but not least, the contributions listed below offer several suggestions for instructional intervention and pedagogical approaches to the teaching and learning of languages for academic and research purposes: Jennifer Schluer (Universität Kassel, Germany): English as a lingua franca in linguistics? A case study of German linguists’ language use in publications Maria Kuteeva (Stockholms universitet, Sweden): Academic English as “nobody’s land”: The research and publication practices of Swedish academics Laura-Mihaela Muresan and Mariana Nicolae (Academia de Studii Economice din Bucureşti, Romania): Addressing the challenge of publishing internationally in a non-Anglophone academic context: Romania – a case in point Branka Drljača Margić and Tea Žeželić (Sveučilište u Rijeci, Croatia): The implementation of English-medium instruction on Croatian higher education: Attitudes, expectations and concerns Joanna Lewińska (Wszechnica Polska. Warsaw, Poland): Teaching English as a lingua franca in a multilingual environment at the academic level

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It is hoped that the whole picture provided by these three interdependent, and at the same time convergent, scenarios helps the reader to obtain a clearer vision of the current position of English in Europe, reflects its complexity and the particularities of the different areas, identifies forthcoming challenges and becomes, in turn, the source of further debates. We would like to thank the English in Europe: Opportunity or threat? project for financial support for the organization of the 1–2 December 2013 conference in Zaragoza (Spain), in which the present volume originated. We are also indebted to our EiE partners and all those other scholars who contributed to the double-blind peer review process of the contributions included in this volume. Their help and kindness in guaranteeing the academic rigor of the contributions has been very valuable and their positive critical responses and helpful feedback are very much appreciated. We would also like to acknowledge the support of several institutions: the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the project “English as a lingua franca in specialized discourses” (Plan Nacional de I+D+i, FFI2012-37346); the Vice-rectorate of Research at the University of Zaragoza (Project “English as a Scientific and Research Language” (Ref. 245200) and to our colleagues of the InterLAE research group for their institutional support. It is hoped with this volume to recognize the important contributions that researchers in Europe have made to our growing understanding of English as an academic and research language. It is also hoped that the topics and issues discussed, the connections and dialogues with other debates and discourses, and the value of the comparative nature of the outcomes reported in the volume have made it an enlightening examination of the position of English in the particular domain of scientific communication.

References Ammon, Ulrich. 2001. The dominance of English as a language of science. Effects on other languages and language communities. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Canagarajah, Suresh. 2002. A geopolitics of academic writing. Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburg Press. Englander, Karen. & Sedef Uzuner-Smith. 2013. The role of policy in constructing the peripheral scientist in the era of globalization. Language Policy, 12. 231–250. Flowerdew, John. 2009. Goffman’s stigma and EAL writers: The author responds to Casanave. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 8. 69–72. Graddol, David. 1997. The future of English. UK: The British Council.

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Hamel, Rainer E. 2005. Language empires, linguistic imperialism and the future of global languages. Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico. http://www.hamel.com.mx/Archivos-PDF/Work%20in%20Progress/2005%20Language% 20Empires.pdf (accessed 11 July 2014). House, Julianne. 2003. English as a lingua franca: A threat to multilingualism? Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4). 556–578. Kachru, Yamuna. 2009. Academic writing in World Englishes: The Asian context. In K. Murata & J. Jenkins (eds.), Global Englishes in Asian contexts, 111–30. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan. Kuteeva, Maria & Anna Mauranen. 2014. Writing for international publication in multilingual contexts. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 13, 1–4. Mauranen, Anna. 2012. English as a Lingua Franca. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mauranen, Anna, Carmen Pérez-Llantada & John M. Swales. 2010. Academic Englishes: A standardized knowledge? In A. Kirkpatrick (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes, 634–652. London, New York: Routledge. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 2009. Higher Education to 2030. http://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/44101074.pdf (accessed 11 July 2014). Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 2012. OECD Factbook 2011–2012: Economic, environmental and social statistics. Paris: OECD Publishing. Pennycook, Alistair. 2007. Global English and transcultural flows. Oxon: Routledge. Phillipson, Robert. 1992. Linguistic imperalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Phillipson, Robert & Tove Skutnabb-Kangas. 1993. Englishisation: One dimension of globalisation. AILA Review, 13. 19–36. Seidlhofer, Barbara. 2003. A concept of international English and related issues: From “real English” to “realistic English”. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Seidlhofer, Barbara. 2005. English as a lingua franca. ELT Journal, 59(4). 339–341. Swales, John M. 1990. Genre analysis. English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swales, John M. 1997. English as tyrannosaurus rex. World Englishes, 16(3). 373–382. UNESCO. 2010. UNESCO science report 2010. The current status of science around the world. Paris: UNESCO publishing.

Karen Bennett

Towards an epistemological monoculture: Mechanisms of epistemicide in European research publication Abstract: The term “epistemicide” was coined by the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos to describe the systematic eradication of Third World knowledges by “Western” science. However, even within Europe there are various epistemological traditions encoded into different discourses in different languages that are now being threatened by the inexorable expansion of English academic discourse (EAD) as the only acceptable vehicle for knowledge in the modern world. This chapter examines the way that epistemicide operates in the current academic context. It suggests that the primary mechanism is discursive – implicit in the translation, revision and editing procedures used to bring academic papers into line with the dominant norms – but that this is backed up by a series of nondiscursive mechanisms that reinforce the hegemony of EAD and, by extension, the empiricist paradigm, through “quality-control” and, crucially, resource allocation procedures. The result, it is argued, will be an epistemological monoculture of global proportions in which alternative knowledges are systematically eliminated in the interests of “quality”. Keywords: English academic discourse, epistemicide, empiricist paradigm, cultural gatekeepers, research funding

1 Introduction English is today the unrivalled lingua franca of academia, the language in which most research articles are published, conferences held, reading is done, learning transmitted and partnerships are forged. In most of Europe, individual and institutional achievement is now measured predominantly by a track record of international publications, and it is this that determines research funding, career advancement and, in some cases, academic survival. Thus, mastery of English academic discourse (EAD) is a highly valued asset, which many will go to considerable lengths to acquire. This situation has brought benefits and drawbacks on both the personal and institutional levels. For individual researchers, command of EAD obviously offers access to a much vaster disciplinary community than that provided by the national language, bringing unprecedented opportunities for mobility and

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career advancement, as well as intellectual enrichment. However, there is evidence that non-native-English-speaking (NNES) authors find it more difficult to get their articles published than their native-speaker colleagues (Lillis and Curry 2010; Salager-Meyer 2008; Ferguson 2007; Uzuner 2008) and often have to spend considerable time and money in rewritings and revisions before they manage to get their work into print. Thus, linguistic standardization seems, ironically, to have created an unequal playing field in which the game tends to be dominated by certain players for reasons that may have more to do with rhetoric than with academic prowess. The situation is equally ambivalent on the level of the system as a whole. Universities that offer courses in English are better able to attract students from all over the globe, boosting not only their coffers but also their competitiveness in the rankings. However, countries that pursue this policy systematically often find that it has a detrimental effect upon their national language. Some languages, such as Swedish and Dutch, are undergoing a process known as domain loss (i.e., the gradual erosion of their academic registers through lack of use), resulting from situations of diglossia, when English is used for cutting-edge research and high-level teaching with the local language most often reserved for popularizations and lowlevel teaching (Gunnarsson 2001; Ferguson 2007). Others, like Portuguese, are instead revealing signs of language change, in that their traditional scholarly discourses are gradually altering to become more like English as a result of constant contact with the lingua franca, (Anderman and Rogers 2005; House 2008; Bennett 2012). In both cases, there is a gradual erosion of cultural specificity, which must inevitably bring psychological and sociological repercussions on the level of collective and individual identity (Ivanič 1998). Grave as these matters are, there is another dimension to this issue that is potentially even more serious but which has received scanty attention to date from scholars working in the field. If we believe, with the Critical Discourse Analysts (eg. Kress and Hodge 1979; Kress 1985; Fairclough 1989, 1992; Wodak 1989, etc.) that language is never neutral and that discourses inevitably encode value and ideology in their very structure, then it becomes less easy to accept that EAD is the transparent vehicle of objective “truth” that it has traditionally made itself out to be. Indeed, work into the historical origins of scientific discourse (Halliday and Martin 1993; Atkinson 1998, 1999; Ding 1998) has shown that it was forged in a very particular sociocultural context (the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century) precisely to serve as the vehicle for a new paradigm of knowledge that defined itself in opposition to one that had gone before (the text-based knowledge of the

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Medieval scholastics and Renaissance humanists).¹ Hence, it is scarcely surprising that the theory of knowledge espoused by those early scientists (positivism and empiricism) is encrypted into the very grammar of this discourse, into its terminology-building conventions and also into the norms governing the organization of academic genres like the research article and abstract. Halliday and Martin (1993) have described how, over the course of three centuries, the discourse of science gradually acquired prestige in the Anglophone world through its associations with technology, industry and capitalism, which enabled it to colonize neighbouring disciplines until it eventually became the “discourse of modernity” (p. 84), used whenever factuality is asserted and authority claimed. Today, that same association with technological “progress” and wealth is driving its relentless expansion around the globe. One of the more sinister results of this process is the gradual and surreptitious imposition of the empiricist paradigm as the only valid form of knowledge in the modern world. The concomitant silencing of other scholarly discourses (and by extension, other theories of knowledge) is therefore a kind of epistemicide, which, if left unchecked, may ultimately result in the elimination of epistemological² diversity and its replacement by a monoculture of global proportions. This chapter, then, examines the way that epistemicide operates in the current academic context. It suggests that the primary mechanism is discursive – implicit in the translation, revision and editing procedures used to bring academic papers into line with the dominant norms – but that this is backed up by a series of non-discursive mechanisms that reinforce the hegemony of EAD and, by extension, the empiricist paradigm, through “quality-control” and, crucially, resource allocation procedures. As such it is an excellent example of what Foucault (2002: 34–85) called a “discursive formation”, which not only constitutes the very object it claims to explore but also constrains the range of things that can be said about it. As I shall attempt to show in the next section, the current dominance of EAD and the paradigm that it conveys has more to do with its associations with power and wealth than with its capacity to effectively explain the world.

1 Cf. Francis Bacon’s famous exhortation that knowledge should focus on “things not words”. See Conley (1990), Croll (1969[1929]); Vickers (1993) for the rhetorical perspective. 2 Epistemology is a branch of philosophy dealing with theories of knowledge. Empiricism is only one of several theories of knowledge that have been entertained by philosophers over the centuries, yet it has such status in the Anglo-Saxon world that its insights are accorded the status of infallible truths, with the concomitant devaluation of alternative theories.

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2 Knowledge paradigms and scholary discourses The term “epistemicide” was coined by the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos (1996, 2001) primarily to describe the systematic eradication of Third World knowledges by “Western science” – knowledges such as traditional medicines, community justice systems and local lore about the natural world, which cannot be understood within the categories set up by modern scientific discourse and are thus being effectively wiped out in the name of progress. Yet “Western” knowledge-building is itself no monolithic univocal enterprise, and within Europe there are other epistemological traditions embodied in different languages. As many of these rarely make it into English (for reasons that will be described below), the hegemonic culture is, by and large, ignorant of their existence; hence, there is a tendency to assume that any text written in English implicitly subscribes to the theory of knowledge that is dominant in the Anglophone world, which is not always the case. The most significant fault-line within the European system is surely the gulf separating Anglo-Saxon empiricism from so-called “Continental philosophy” (as represented by German idealism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, French poststructuralism, etc.), which are so different from each other that they may even be considered incommensurable. In the first case, “reality” is believed to precede language, which means that it is perceived in much the same way by everyone, irrespective of linguistic or cultural background; hence, language serves merely to name things that have an objective existence in some extralinguistic domain (a philosophy known as linguistic realism). The second, on the other hand, holds that humans learn about external reality through the categories set up by their mother tongue; thus our entire experience of the extralinguistic world is not only mediated but actively constructed by culture (a philosophy known today as constructivism). It is not surprising that these different theories of knowledge have yielded very different attitudes to academic writing. In the empiricist paradigm, as language merely labels a pre-existing reality, it makes sense for its discourse to be as concise, precise and “transparent” as possible in order to faithfully reflect the outside world with the minimum of authorial interference. Hence, short simple sentences are valued, as is clearly defined vocabulary, a hierarchical text structure, impartial style and structured rational argument supported by evidence.³ This is, therefore, a kind of “writing degree zero” (Barthes, cit. Swales 1990: 112), in which

3 A survey of academic style manuals on the market (Bennett 2009) showed a remarkable consistency in the type of advice offered, irrespective of disciplinary area.

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the referential function of language takes precedence over all others (indeed, the aesthetic, emotive and ethical dimensions that were so important in the Classical Rhetoric tradition are effectively suppressed in the interests of objectivity). In contrast, texts produced within the “constructivist” or “hermeneutic” paradigm will often focus on negotiating the meaning of words or illuminating hidden meanings lurking in the collective unconscious. Such texts are thus constructed with artistry, deliberately exploiting the connotative and figurative resources of the language in order to generate particular effects. The result is a kind of prose that has, in many respects, more in common with literary writing than with technical discourse, as meanings are not fixed and immutable, but rather open-ended, shifting and susceptible to multiple interpretation.⁴ One of the most significant differences between these two discourses is their attitude to rhetoric (understood as the manipulation of language in order to produce a particular effect upon the reader). As language is central to the hermeneutic approach, many authors working within this paradigm will make overt use of the tropes and figures enshrined in the Classical Rhetoric tradition in order to generate certain effects and explore aspects of meaning. In scientific writing, on the other hand, rhetoric has to be covert. As the whole paradigm rests upon the assumption that there is an unmediated relationship between the categories set up by its discourse and the world outside, authors are expected to sound as “objective” as possible, clearly distinguishing between “fact” and opinion, and avoiding emotive language and “dubious persuasive techniques”. Thus, the academic author will aim to “deceive the reader into thinking that there is no rhetoric . . . and that the facts are indeed speaking for themselves” (Swales 1990: 112), an undertaking which, ironically, requires a great deal of rhetorical skill. It is in the humanities and social sciences that this paradigm difference is most keenly felt as these disciplines are, by definition, culturally and linguistically embedded (De Swaan 2001; Becher and Trowler 2001; Hyland 2000). That is to say, as their object of study is humanly constructed and context-dependent, they are less susceptible to the kind of universalizing claims that characterize the exact sciences. Thus, studies of the history, literature or cultures of non-Anglophone nations or social groups have tended to take place primarily in the language of that community and are disseminated via networks involving those countries’ former colonies, when these exist, or supranational partnerships of countries with related cultures (Iberian or Slavic groupings, for example) (Burgess 2014; Petrić 2014).

4 It should be pointed out that there have been some efforts made to marry the two, particularly in the social sciences, with varying degrees of success.

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That is to say, alternative knowledge flows exist on the margins of the hegemonic culture that by-pass the English-speaking world completely. There are partnerships, exchanges, conferences, courses, journals and entire bibliographies in French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Serbo-Croat, etc., which rarely reach the attention of the Anglophone community (Bennett, ed. 2014; Burgess 2014). Significantly, many of the publications produced by these groupings tend to be in traditional paper format, rather than electronic, which means that they are practically invisible beyond the borders of their immediate readership. This might, in part, explain why they remain largely unstudied by scholars of contrastive rhetoric, who have tended to focus their attentions on disciplinary areas that subscribe to the dominant paradigm. Until the 1990s, historians, literary scholars or ethnographers working with non-Anglophone cultures were generally content to publish their research through these alternative channels. However, since the Bologna Declaration of 1999 and the launch of initiatives such as the EU Research Framework Programmes within the context of a standardized European Research Area, there has been increasing pressure upon these academics to publish in “international peerreviewed journals” instead. This is part of a general drive by many of the nonAnglophone countries of Europe to rid themselves of their perceived peripheral status by espousing the values, methods and assessment procedures of the hegemonic centre. The fact that traditional humanities research is heavily disadvantaged by this model is scarcely considered by the politicians and policy makers ultimately responsible for funding allocation; indeed, one characteristic of the current epistemological climate is its privileging of the scientific paradigm, as indicated by the ring-fencing of funding for the so-called STEM subjects (i.e., science, technology, engineering and mathematics). What counts in today’s world, it would seem, is the ability to generate wealth, directly or indirectly, and forms of knowledge that have no obvious applications in this domain are gently allowed to fall by the wayside.

3 Mechanisms of epistemicide Like any other powerful discursive formation, EAD maintains its status through a combination of symbolic and tangible mechanisms. On the symbolic side, its associations with wealth and power, combined with the “grand narratives” (Lyotard 1979) that continue to link the empiricist paradigm to the values of progress, modernity, equality, etc., have brought it prestige, which enable it to effortlessly recruit new subscribers by the day. This feeds the multi-million-pound language

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industries (Bennett, ed. 2014) that have grown up around it – the teaching of English for Academic Purposes (EAP); translation and editing services; the production of style manuals and EAP coursebooks, and also of terminological databases and online resources – which in turn gives work to linguists who are generously funded to describe how the prestige discourse works and then produce materials to transmit it. The effect of all this activity is the reification of this particular way of construing knowledge, the crystallization of certain discursive practices into a set of rules that are today so set in stone that few in the Anglophone world can conceive that other discourses might even exist.⁵ As for the tangible mechanisms, these operate largely on the monetary level through a system of financial incentives and rewards, which in turn bring promotion, prestige and the possibilities for further research. Thus, the system perpetuates itself tautologically, setting and enforcing its own rules, and acquiring adherents for reasons that have more to do with power than with the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. Let us take a closer look now at both sets of mechanisms and how they operate in practice.

3.1 Discursive mechanisms Lillis and Curry (2006, 2010) have described the important role played by editors, proof-readers, language revisers, etc., in bringing NNES researchers’ texts into line with the dominant norms, a task which they call “literacy brokering”. However, the examples given concern authors that write directly in English and who will have had prior experience of reading and processing English-language texts in their field (as tends to be the case with researchers that involved in the sciences or in other disciplines that overtly subscribe to the empiricist paradigm). The situation is very different in humanities disciplines, such as those described above, which have traditionally been formulated primarily in the authors’ mother tongues or in some lingua franca other than English (French or Spanish, say). As these disciplines are culture- and language-dependent, the relevant ter-

5 This is not to deny the existence of myriad disciplinary variations in EAD, as argued by Becher and Trowler (2001), Hyland (2000) etc. However, with the exception of some of the counterhegemonic approaches that developed in the closing decades of the 20th century in fields such as postcolonialism and the qualitative social sciences, these all take place within the dominant (empiricist) paradigm and subscribe to its assumptions. This only really becomes clear when we are confronted with radically different discourses such as those produced within the Continental philosophical tradition (see 3.1 below).

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minology may not even exist in English (de Swaan 2001) and the discourse may be constructed in accordance with different philosophical principles. For researchers in these fields, then, producing texts in English requires a major philosophical shift. Unlike the scientists, humanities scholars in many European countries may have inhabited a quite different universe up to the moment that they are called upon to write their first paper in English, and thus find themselves ill-equipped to deal with the demands of the new global academic marketplace. For this reason, many of them do not even attempt to write their text in English themselves, but instead resort to the services of a professional translator. However, the whole process of translation may also be highly fraught, particularly for older academics that have accrued prestige in the home culture with a more traditional style of writing that has little in common with EAD. The kind of radical reformulation that is often necessary to bring their texts into line with the dominant norms may be experienced as a violation of their identity and values, and bitterly resented. In this section, I shall describe three cases of Portuguese academic texts that were submitted to me for translation into English between 1993 and 2011. The first two were written by senior academics, who had received their education at a time when French, rather than English, was the dominant cultural influence in Portugal and the main foreign language taught in schools; hence, their universe of reference was non-Anglophone, as is clearly revealed in the style of discourse, textual organization and bibliographic allusions. The third author, who was younger, also used a Romance-oriented style of writing, but was more keenly aware of the pragmatic need to publish in English and less concerned by the ideological costs of doing so. The fact that translation was requested in each case represented an attempt on the part of each author to enter the hegemonic culture, sometimes for the first time. However, only one of them was successful, significantly because she was prepared to accept alterations so profound that they effectively destroyed the epistemological infrastructure of her text. The other two texts remain unpublished in English: one because it was essentially uncategorisable in terms of the conceptual categories set up by the dominant paradigm; the other because the author resisted the domestication strategies required by the translation in the interest of maintaining his own voice.

3.1.1 Case Study 1. The uncategorisable text The first case that I would like to look at is a flagrant example of a text that has been constructed within a paradigm that is alien to the Anglo-Saxon empiricist worldview and therefore difficult to assimilate within the conceptual categories

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set up by it. Its very title, ‘A Fenomenologia de Sexualidade: do Desejo ao Amor’ [‘The Phenomenology of Sexuality: from Lust to Love’] immediately indicates its affiliations with the Continental philosophical tradition, and indeed the author explicitly states in his introduction that it is “an attempt to observe sexuality from the phenomenological perspective, particularly informed by the ideas of Husserl, Jaspers, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty” (Pio Abreu 2000: 141, my translation). The paper was first presented in Portuguese at a sexology conference in Coimbra, 1993, and was published seven years later as Chapter 7 of a collection of essays entitled O Tempo Aprisionado: Ensaios não-Espiritualistas sobre o Espírito Humano (which could be translated as “Time Imprisoned: Non-spiritualist essays on the human spirit/soul”). The book was successful in Portugal (the author is a very prominent figure in the field of psychiatry/psychology), which was probably what prompted him to commission a translation of the chapter with a view to trying to get it published in the Anglo-Saxon world. However, it soon became evident that none of the English-language journals of sexology, or even general psychology, would be receptive to a work of this nature due to its unconventional structure and style. For rather than following the classic research article layout, this piece is organized into 26 short numbered sections, each of which is only a few lines long, and it eschews the detached objective discourse of science in favour of an impassioned first-person style sprinkled with literary quotations and philosophical allusions. These strategies are consistent with the phenomenological orientation of the article: the structural fragmentation is designed to reflect the movement of the mind as it flits and hovers over certain ideas in turn, while the subjective voice is possibly the only appropriate vehicle for phenomenological reduction or epoché. Yet this tradition has had very little expression in the Anglophone world, and as a result, the text sounds strange and unfamiliar – indeed is not really recognisable as academic discourse. Extract 1. Original text 15 Amar, diz Jean Paul Sartre, é devotar-se à subjectividade do outro, é animar o meu corpo com o desejo do outro. É, de algum modo, perder-me nele, perder a minha vida na subjectividade do outro.... 16 Pelo amor me ofereço em holocausto pela vida do outro. Devoto-me, não já ao seu corpo, mas ao seu desejo, à sua subjectividade, ao seu espírito. (Lines of poetry by Camões) 17 Já não vejo, e sobretudo não me vejo, pelos meus olhos, mas pelos olhos do outro. E à sua visão me moldo como objecto. Se o outro me quer alegre, eu rio, mas choro se ele me quiser triste. Sou activo ou passivo, inteligente ou embotado, consoante os seus desejos.

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Se o outro me quer sem corpo, o meu corpo deixa de existir para mim. Deixo os prazeres e a comida, e ele vai desaparecendo. Mas sempre sobra corpo, e por isso me acho gordo. Podia bem ser esse o desejo do escrupuloso pai amado pela filha anoréctica. Extract 1. Translation 15 To love, says Jean Paul Sartre, is to devote oneself to the subjectivity of the other, it is to animate my body with the other’s desire. It is, in some way, to lose myself in him, to lose my life in the other’s subjectivity. . . 16 In love, I offer myself to be burnt up by the life of the other. I devote myself, no longer to her body, but to her desire, her subjectivity, her spirit. (lines of poetry by Camões) 17 I no longer see. In particular, I no longer see myself through my own eyes, but through the eyes of the other. If the other wants me happy, I laugh, but I cry if he wants me sad. I am active or passive, intelligent or feeble, in accordance with his wishes. If the other wants me to be incorporeal, my body stops existing for me. I give up pleasures and food, and my body withdraws. But there is still too much body, and so, I think I am fat. This could well be the desire of the anorectic daughter towards her beloved but scrupulous father. In practice, the author had problems placing his article because there were no English-language journals available that accepted articles written for such a purpose and in such a way. Indeed, this kind of knowledge is not really susceptible to disciplinary categorization. By proposing an epistemological attitude based on the subjective experience of reality, it deliberately elides the various oppositions that underpin the empiricist paradigm, undermining some of its most important premises. Hence, from the point of view of that paradigm, it scarcely deserves to be considered as “knowledge” at all. Yet this author was no maverick doing his own thing in gay disregard of community assumptions and conventions. On the contrary, he very clearly signals his affiliation with the Continental philosophical tradition and adopts a writing style that is in keeping with that used by some of the major figures of that tradition. The fact that such writing is effectively unpublishable as current ongoing research in English testifies to the reluctance of the Anglo-Saxon world to give voice to this episteme on its own terms.

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3.1.2 Case Study 2: The undomesticated text While the psychology text described above made explicit mention of its affiliation with the phenomenological tradition through its title and invocation of the landmark names in the field, this is not the case with the next two texts I am going to look at, both of which are in the field of history. Instead, I shall argue that the Continental philosophical tradition is implicit in the kind of discourse used by most Portuguese historians, which is markedly different from that used by their Anglophone counterparts and therefore raises tremendous difficulties for translation. Portuguese historiography has traditionally been influenced much more by French currents than by English, a tendency that is manifested not only in the mobility patterns assumed by Portuguese historians but also in the bibliography that they draw upon. A study of the holdings in the Institute of Social and Economic History at the University of Coimbra (Bennett 2012) showed the overwhelming influence of the French Annales School of historiography, whose works were abundantly represented in both their original language and in Portuguese translation. It is therefore unsurprising that Portuguese historians should have imbibed not only the theoretical and methodological premises underpinning this school but also the kind of discourse used. In fact, Portuguese history discourse shares many of the features of a broader humanities discourse that is commonplace in many disciplines, not only in Portuguese (Bennett 2010a) but across the Romance languages, and which was described in Bourdieu and Passeron’s 1965 French study, Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power. In many respects it seems to be a direct descendent of the Grand style of Classical Rhetoric, which persisted in Catholic countries long after it had been abandoned in England, in that it values verbal copiousness and linguistic complexity as signs of mental sophistication, makes overt use of the full range of Classical figures of speech to generate certain emotional and aesthetic effects, and deliberately cultivates a high abstract register often peppered with Latin and Greek expressions. Other aspects of this discourse reveal its affiliation to a non-empiricist theory of knowledge. There are rarely any overt statements of “fact”; instead, the referential dimension tends to be subordinated to the interpersonal, with the result that observations of the past are presented as filtered through human perception rather than as independently existing facts in themselves. There is also marked lack of the kind of causal and temporal linkers that we might expect in English historical writing, and instead the relationships between phenomena are left vague, as if they are merely impinging upon the consciousness of the observer. Finally, the Romance convention of using the historic present and future tenses to describe

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past events also generates a sense of dramatic immediacy that is entirely absent from conventional English past tense accounts. Some of these features are evident in the following extract from an article about the Portuguese overseas expansion of the 15th century, presented to me for translation in the early 1990s. The “facts” (the royal charter, the lifestyle of the merchants, the dependence on foreign wheat, etc.) are presented indirectly, embedded in a framework that instead highlights the interpersonal dimension of the writer/reader relationship (‘And before we go on, allow us to point out. . . ’; ‘Let it be registered that. . . ’), leaving the precise nature of the connection between them unclear. Extract 1. Original E, ainda antes de avançarmos, seja-nos permitido relevar, por um lado, a dimensão do modo de vida dos que não só em Lisboa, como no Porto e em outras cidades e vilas litorâneas, se dedicavam aos serviços da fretagem naval, bem como ao transporte de encomendas e ao comércio marítimo, a ponto de uma outra carta régia, também de 1414, para evitar burocracias excessivas, aceitar como prova dos direitos alfandegários o juramento dos mestres do navios reinóis e dos mercadores que fretassem navios estrangeiros; por outro, registe-se a já crónica dependência nacional em relação ao trigo de fora, designadamente ao do Noroeste Europeu e do Mediterráneo.⁶ Extract 1. Literal translation And, before we advance, let us be permitted to point out, on the one hand, the dimension of the lifestyle of those who, not only in Lisbon, but also in Oporto, and in other coastal cities and towns, dedicated themselves to the services of naval freight, as well as to the transportation of goods and to maritime commerce, to the extent that another royal charter, also of 1414, to avoid excessive bureaucracies, accepted as proof of customs rights the oath of the masters of Portuguese ships and of the merchants that freighted foreign ships; on the other, let it be registered the already chronic national dependence in relation to wheat from abroad, namely from northwest Europe and from the Mediterranean.

6 From an unpublished article by João Marinho dos Santos. Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. See Bennett (2007a: 183–186) for a more in-depth discussion of the problems raised by this passage.

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The translation that was submitted to the history journal was only partly domesticated, because the author had expressed the wish that his style be maintained. The long sentence was split into several shorter ones and the magisterial ‘we’ of the first sentence (‘let us be permitted to point out’) was replaced by an impersonal construction (‘two things need to be pointed out’). This then becomes a topic sentence, imposing English paragraph structure. However, there was no attempt to create more explicit connections between the stated events; instead the translation broadly follows the author’s interpretation of them. Extract 1. Submitted translation Before we proceed, two things need to be pointed out. Firstly, the lifestyle of those involved in the shipping industry, not only in Lisbon, but also in Oporto and other towns and cities along the coast, was so lavish that another royal charter, also issued in 1414, reduced excessive bureaucracy by allowing the shipmaster’s word (in the case of Portuguese ships, and the merchant’s in the case of freighted foreign vessels) to be taken as proof of customs rights. Secondly, the country was already registering a chronic dependence on foreign wheat from northwest Europe and the Mediterranean. This translation was rejected by the journal on the grounds that the English was unnatural and “excessively vague”. The author initially requested a retranslation, but did not like the result because it compromised his “voice” (which was understandable, as the new version radically changed the focus of the text, removing the interpersonal frame, fronting the factual information about the royal charter so that this then became a given from which to proceed to the new, and making explicit the connections between the various circumstances). Hence, the matter was dropped. Extract 1. Domesticated version Another royal charter, also of 1414, reduced bureaucracy by allowing the shipmaster’s word (in the case of Portuguese ships, the merchant’s in the case of freighted foreign vessels) to be taken as proof of customs rights. This illustrated the immense power wielded by those involved in the shipping industry in Lisbon, Oporto and other coastal cities and towns, and also reflected the chronic national dependence on foreign wheat from northwest Europe and the Mediterranean. This case clearly illustrates the tension that exists between these different discourses and the level of psychological distress that domestication can provoke

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in authors that have spent their whole lives working within another paradigm of knowledge. In this case, the author, who was already at the top of the academic career, decided that publication in English was not worth pursuing. This was not the case with the next author I shall look at, however, who was writing in a different socio-political context when publication in international journals had become a prerequisite for academic advancement.

3.1.3 The domesticated history text Despite having been written almost twenty years after the previous one, this history text has many features in common with it. The sentences are long and complex, with a great deal of subordination; there are inversions and parallelisms for rhetorical effect; the “factual” information is again embedded within a framework that foregrounds the textual structure and author/reader relationship, and there are few logical relations of the type we are used to seeing in English academic texts (causal or temporal linkers, for example) – instead the phenomena are introduced circumstantially as they present themselves to the historian without any obvious relationship between them. In addition, there is also notable deferral of the main clause to create suspense. Extract 2. Original Partindo da premissa que, na Época Moderna, o acesso a certos bens e serviços evidenciava a distância social, material e cultural dos indivíduos e sabendo-se que, desde cedo, os diferentes Reinos se preocuparam em criar entraves ao consumo de bens de luxo, através da legislação, acentuando as diferenças entre os grupos sociais e entendendo que o luxo era nocivo à boa ordem do Reino, devido à saída de numerário, não podemos deixar de notar que a posse de bens móveis e imóveis indiciava o lugar de cada um na sociedade. Assim pensavam os teóricos da economia e da arrumação social e assim pensavam os moralistas, só se começando a manifestar vozes dissonantes durante o século XVIII.⁷ Extract 2. Literal translation Starting from the premise that, in the Early Modern period, access to certain goods and services indicated the social, material and cultural distance

7 From “Do Trabalho e dos patrimónios das Cristãs Novas nos séculos XVII e XVIII” by Isabel Drumond Braga. Reproduced with the kind permission of the author.

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of individuals and knowing that, from early on, the different kingdoms were concerned to create obstacles to the consumption of luxury goods, through legislation, accentuating the differences between social groups and understanding that luxury damaged the good order of the kingdom due to the exit of money, we cannot fail to note that the possession of realty and chattels indicated the place of each one in society. Thus thought the theoreticians of the economy and social order and thus thought the moralists, only starting to be manifested dissonant voices during the 18th century. In this case, the author – aware of the differences between her style and the style in English – allowed me free rein to make any changes necessary to bring the text into line with the target culture norms. Hence, the information was entirely reorganized so as to clearly state the theme at the outset (topic sentence) and the events were presented in a way that would seem logical to an English reader (this involved the imposition of a chronology and cause-and-effect relations that were not present in the original). The aesthetic and interpersonal dimensions of the original were entirely eliminated. Extract 2. Domesticated translation In the Early Modern period, the social, material and cultural position of individuals could be judged by the access that they had to certain goods and services. However, from early on, many kingdoms tried to block the consumption of luxury goods through legislation on the grounds that such items drained the financial resources of the country, leading to disarray (a belief that was held by both theoreticians of the social/economic order and by moralists, and which persisted through to the 18th century, when dissenting voices started to be heard). This legislation accentuated the differences between social groups, with the result that the ownership of property, both realty and chattels, offered a reliable indication of an individual’s status in society. (Braga 2011) The translated text was accepted, thereby fulfilling the author’s purpose. However, this case serves to illustrate the radical reformulation that is required to enable Portuguese history texts to be published in English-medium journals. The phenomenological episteme that underpins the original (in the sense that the data is not presented as incontrovertible objective fact, but as unconnected phenomena filtered through perception of historian) has to be eliminated and replaced with a positivistic one. This is why it may be called epistemicidal.

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3.2 Non-discursive mechanisms Academic translators are of course not operating in a vacuum, nor do the decisions they make result from the exercise of their own free will. Like the other participants in the process, they are the agents of a much larger machine, which determines what is considered as valid knowledge and what is not. In this section, I shall take a closer look at the various non-discursive mechanisms that protect and propagate the hegemony of EAD and the paradigm that it conveys. As we shall see, these operate on many different levels and affect everyone from authors to publishers and policy-makers. In most cases, the individuals involved are faced with a fairly stark choice: comply with the dominant norms or face loss of reputation and possible exclusion from the institutions that guarantee their survival.

3.2.1 “Publish or perish” As Canagarajah (2002b) points out, one of the characteristics of more peripheral academic cultures is the absence of the “publish or perish” ethos that is so prominent at the centre of the system. In such countries, academic advancement tends to depend upon factors such as patronage and institutional service rather than upon research track record; it is thus possible for academics to achieve senior positions without any significant international publications. Until relatively recently, many of the countries of Southern and Eastern Europe fitted this pattern. However, following the implementation of standardization measures such as the growing internationalization of European universities and the European Research Framework described above, they have come under pressure to bring their systems into line with those of the more prosperous North. Amongst other things, many are now attempting to convert to a meritocratic culture by making departmental funding and individual career advancement dependent upon academic production (Bennett, ed. 2014). The effect upon individual researchers has been dramatic. In many of these countries, academics that had considered themselves to be in secure jobs for life have suddenly found themselves, in middle age, confronted with the need to publish intensely in order to sustain their positions and reputations, while their younger colleagues cannot hope to even get a foot on the ladder without a respectable track record in this domain. What is more, the application to humanities subjects of scientometric methods used in the hard sciences has meant that the traditional national or regional outlets are no longer valued. Hence, scholars are not only faced with an increased pressure to publish; they are also

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required specifically to publish in international peer-reviewed journals, which almost inevitably means publishing in English (Burgess 2014; Uysal 2014). Attitudes to this situation tend to vary. Surveys of NNES researchers from different cultural backgrounds (Tardy 2004; Duszak and Lewkowic 2008; Bennett 2010b; Barros 2014) have reported a sense of disadvantage in relation to Anglophone colleagues, and in some cases, a keen awareness of the epistemological colonization that is the subject of this chapter. But they also reveal great pragmatism. Rather than reflecting about the philosophical and ideological issues underpinning the cultural shift, many simply accept it as a fact of academic life, a necessary price to pay for access to a larger and more prestigious discourse community. One of the solutions they find is to enrol in one of the many language courses designed to equip NNES academics with the skills they need to operate in the international arena. The burgeoning of the market for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) is clearly one of the most significant consequences of the spread of English as a lingua franca in academia. But the process is circular rather than linear, as these courses also contribute to epistemicide through their uncritical espousal of the empirical paradigm and failure to problematize its underlying assumptions. The manuals that exist for the purposes (and there are literally hundreds, catering for every possible niche in the market) do not consider the possibility that there could exist other ways of construing knowledge, but instead present the dominant discursive practices as if they were set in stone. Similarly, the individuals that minister the lessons (native English speakers for the most part) are usually trained to operate in an entirely Anglo-oriented way and therefore assume that EAD is the only vehicle for scholarly discussion in the modern world.⁸ This encourages NNES researchers to view their own culture’s discourse habits as defective or backward, with the result that some of them will go on to become active agents of epistemicide themselves, working to replace traditional processes by the hegemonic ones in the interests of progress.

3.2.2 Literacy brokering Although a certain amount of literacy brokering is done by colleagues on an informal basis, the increased demand for these services has led to a rise in the number

8 The current known as Critical English for Academic Purposes has actively sought to counter this tendency, but it remains a fringe phenomenon and is not always well received by the students involved (see below).

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of professionals (individuals and agencies) specializing in the translation, editing and revision of academic texts for international consumption. These professional literacy brokers are clearly agents of epistemicide in that they work to bring “deviant” texts into line with the dominant norms, even if that means destroying the infrastructure of the original, as we have seen. However, they themselves are also highly constrained, not least by their clients’ expectations. In most cases, their remit will be clear – to put the text into a form that is publishable in a reputable journal – and if they fail in that mission, there will be significant repercussions on the level of their own professional reputation. The training that these translators receive at the start of their career, which focuses upon the efficient fulfilment of real-world commissions, also tends to discourage any acts of subversion against the hegemonic culture. In Anglo-Saxon culture, academic texts are perceived as containers of factual information (reflecting the dominance of the empiricist paradigm) and so they are approached as instances of technical rather than literary discourse. Hence, when such professionals are presented with texts such as those given in the case studies above, they are likely to presume they are badly written rather than instances of epistemological otherness. Even if a translator does perceive an epistemological conflict between source text assumptions and target culture expectations, there are few incentives to adopt a translation strategy that privileges the former. Although this has been advocated (e.g., Venuti 2010), such a stance is only possible if the translator has other sources of income. Anyone that is dependent upon the activity for their own material subsistence has to bow to market forces, which usually means ensuring the text’s acceptance in a prominent academic journal, as we have seen. Systematically swimming against the tide would lead to professional suicide (Bennett 2007a, 2007b).

3.2.3 Impact factors and citation indexes Publishers are usually deemed to be the most important gatekeepers to the hegemonic culture as it is they that take the all-important decisions about which texts reach the public domain and which do not. And yet even they are not free to act of their own accord. As translation scholar and publisher Mona Baker⁹ has pointed out, publishers also need to court prestige in order to attract authors and read-

9 Until 2014, Mona Baker was the owner of St Jerome Publishing house in Manchester, which publishes the journals The Translator and The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, as well as books

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ers, and any that flout the dominant conventions by publishing works that are not considered to be acceptable by the academic community will see their own reputation suffer, bringing consequences for the future of the business. The situation is even more crucial for journals, of course, whose success depends upon their impact factor and listings in citation indexes. Once again, the system is self-perpetuating: the higher the impact factor, the more prestige the journal will accrue, which will mean that it will be perceived as a desirable place in which to publish and will sell more issues. In order to achieve the kind of scholarly reputation to which all aspire, the most respected journals ensure that submissions are read not only by their editors but also by members of their advisory board or by other reputable scholars working in the field. It is these reviewers that advise the publisher about which articles are acceptable as they stand, which require revision and which should be rejected outright. The challenge for publishers to avoid turning away works that are likely to prove ground-breaking, as these will obviously boost the journal’s reputation, visibility and sales, while at the same time screening out anything that is unlikely to be considered poor quality by the discourse community. Distinguishing between what is substandard and what is merely different is not always an easy task, as we have seen.

3.2.4 Peer-reviewing Peer reviewers are generally scholars that have already acquired enough of a reputation in the field to enable them to act as authorities about what should and should not be published in a given journal. They thus represent the solid core of the discipline and are expected to uphold its standards and values. They are asked to read the articles that have been submitted for publication (usually blind to prevent distortion of judgement) and then to advise the editors about their suitability. As the main quality control procedure in the world of academic publishing, the existence of peer-reviewing processes is a fundamental indication of a journal’s scientific seriousness, and journals that do not have such a system in place cannot hope to achieve a place in the international rankings. We might expect, then, that peer reviewers wield considerable power in determining what is academically acceptable and what is not. However, once again,

on the subject of translation. This comment was made during a debate at the conference Research Methods in Translation II, Manchester (29 April to 2 May 2011).

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there is a tautological relationship between the journal and its advisory board that generates circularity and incestuousness. That is to say, a famous scholar will bring prestige to a journal, but being included on the advisory board of a famous journal will also bring prestige to a scholar. It is therefore in the interests of both parties not to rock the boat too much. Unsurprisingly, then, the whole reviewing process tends to be very conservative, favouring texts that are clearly operating within the dominant paradigm over those that are more problematic. This is why articles such as those described in Section 2 above have to be drastically altered before they are publishable. The only exceptions are texts by NNES authors who have become so famous that they cannot be ignored (such as Foucault, Derrida, etc., back in the 1970s and ‘80s), when the dynamics behind the translation process are entirely different. In all other cases, broad compliance is required or else publication does not ensue.

3.2.5 Funding The last case I would like to look at is the supra-individual level of the university department or research centre. As in the other cases, these are also simultaneously perpetrators and victims of epistemicide: perpetrators because they pressurize their members to publish only with the most prestigious publishers and journals, rather than in lesser organs which might be more open to other forms of knowledge; and victims because they themselves are under pressure to boost their own ratings in order to attract students, top-level researchers and funding. Universities and research institutions are today subject to the logic of global capitalism and have to compete intensely with each other for a slice of the economic pie. They simply cannot afford to back epistemological paradigms that are lacking in prestige. The buck does not stop here of course. We could continue our analysis up to national funding bodies and the governments that control them, and then on to supranational formations such as the European institutions that regulate what happens in their member states. Indeed, as I pointed out at the beginning, many of the changes that have been implemented in European universities in recent years are directly due to the effects of the internationalization of European universities and the setting-up of the European Research Area, which themselves were created in order to be able to compete with the United States (Commission of the European Communities 2000: 4). Knowledge-building might therefore be far from being the disinterested activity that it was once believed to be. On the contrary, it is firmly embedded in the network of economic relations that structures the Western world and there-

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fore tightly bound up with issues of power and wealth. Hence, all the players in the system, from the policy makers at the top to the individual researchers at the bottom, have to be committed to the same broad goals. Otherwise, they put their very academic survival at risk.

4 Conclusion English academic discourse is clearly an excellent example of the kind of “discursive formation” that Foucault described in his 1969 work The Archaeology of Knowledge – that is to say, an institutionalized mode of communication that determines what it is possible to say, when, where and by whom, and which is generated and sustained by a network of power relations in the extralinguistic world (2002: 34–85). Like all discourses it embodies a particular understanding of the world (in this case, an empiricist epistemology resting on a system of binary oppositions: subject/object, mind/world, appearance/reality, etc.), which is rarely articulated explicitly but instead underpins individual discursive events as a cluster of unvoiced assumptions which effectively naturalize what is contingent and present institutionalized subjectivity as objective truth. Like all discourses it also “tends towards exhaustiveness and inclusiveness” (Kress 1985: 7), seeking to “colonise the social world imperialistically, from the point of view of one institution” (Kress 1985: 7), and in this it has been particularly successful. Non-empiricist forms of knowledge, such as those that once formed the mainstay of humanities and philosophy departments around the world, are either being assimilated to empiricist models (through translation or reformulation, as described in this chapter, and also via funding application protocols, which often insist on IMRD¹⁰-style presentations and citation-based forms of assessment) or are excluded altogether for failing to meet its standards of “excellence”. And yet the system is entirely tautological, for its standards are both set and enforced internally by a discourse community that has vested interests in maintaining the status quo. The result is a vast hegemony that has effectively determined what is considered to be valid knowledge in the modern world. Why, you may ask, should this hegemony be resisted? What is actually lost if the individual researcher subscribes to its values and ideology, and perpetuates them in his/her practice?

10 The format used by the empirical sciences for the presentation of research (i.e., Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion).

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The answer to this question is epistemological diversity. As I have attempted to show over the course of this chapter, the empiricist paradigm is not the only theory of knowledge in the world, nor is it the most convincing in terms of its explanatory potential; moreover, it has achieved hegemonic status through its connections with global capitalism, rather than because of any inherent truth value. Anyone that is motivated by a genuine desire for understanding would surely wish to resist the conceptual restrictions that this imposes upon philosophical inquiry in order to acquire the freedom to be able to think outside the categories imposed by its discourse. Hence, the insistence on “excellence” that currently characterizes research carried out at the centre of the academic system is, paradoxically, a source of stagnation, as it effectively excludes all forms of knowledge that do not comply with its basic principles and mission. Is there any escape from this kind of circular thinking in the current context? Is it at all possible to introduce alternative forms of knowledge into a system that is predisposed to reject them at the outset without actually risking one’s own credibility and status in the process? After all, the rewards and incentives that encourage compliance also work in the opposite direction, bringing loss of status, exclusion and ultimately silence to those that resist. To my mind, the only course of action possible at this particular conjuncture is consciousness-raising, which may be done at any level of the system. As we have seen, the hegemonic paradigm recruits subscribers through promises of prestige and power, convincing them to voluntarily relinquish their old allegiances by convincing them that they are backward or defective. In most cases, this process occurs at an entirely subliminal level, in the sense that the parties involved are barely aware that it is happening at all. Hence, it may be possible to counter this to some extent simply by problematizing it more explicitly in the various contexts where it occurs. To some extent this has already been attempted in the EAP classroom with the current known as Critical English for Academic Purposes (e.g., Benesch 2001, 2009; Canagarajah, 1999, 2002a; Pennycook, 1997, 2001; Norton and Toohey, 2004), which seeks to raise students’ awareness of the ideologies and power relations inherent in the discourse they are being taught to use, and to empower them by suggesting ways of intervening in the discourse. There have also been calls for resistance in translation through the use of strategies that do not merely domesticate the foreign text but instead seek to intervene in the target discourse by introducing foreign elements that deliberately cause estrangement (e.g., Venuti 2005, 2010; Tymoczko 2007, 2010). However, to date, none of these approaches have been very successful, largely because their proponents have underestimated the extent of the hegemony and the strength of its hold upon hearts and minds. In the EAP context, Canagarajah

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mentions more than once the “embarrassing predicament of students resisting pedagogies of resistance” (1999: 194), which he attributes to the immigrant drive for success (“the students are tense, goal oriented and achievement driven. . . They want to get things done right – and quickly – in order to pass the final standardized test” [2002: 230]); while Tymoczko (2007: 321) bewails a similar lack of interest amongst trainee translators (“Many translators and their teachers are actually content to stay inscribed in dominant frameworks and to be disempowered by the effacement of their agency. Indeed the profession attracts some people who . . . often choose a somewhat passive orientation to their cultural agency and their lives in general, defining for themselves small circles of affiliation and disavowing any geopolitical role”). I would suggest that a less radical approach may be more effective in both the teaching and translation of academic discourse in order to avoid alienating the people we most want to reach. The aim at this stage would merely be to open people’s minds to the possibility that other ways of construing knowledge might exist, without compromising the short-term goals of those that need to operate within the system for their very economic survival. Hence, in the language teaching classroom it is possible to problematize the hegemonic discourse by teaching it contrastively, with reference to the traditional discourses used in the students’ own culture. The aim is to generate a discussion about the epistemological assumptions underpinning each one, thereby relativizing dominant practices while continuing to equip the students with the tools that they need to function within the system. This might help to raise a generation of researchers who are simultaneously empowered and aware, and who might therefore be in a position to introduce more far-reaching changes in the future. In translation, the situation is more complex as the cultural gatekeepers are so thorough in their vetting of submitted texts that even mild attempts at subversion are likely to arouse resistance. However, the translator may have an important role to play as a cultural mediator, raising awareness of the issues involved amongst authors and editors, and attempting to negotiate compromises that do not entirely efface the voice of the original. If this practice were institutionalized through translator training programmes, there might eventually be a build-up of opinion that could help change dominant practices in the long term. Finally, linguists also have an important role to play in raising awareness amongst all the practitioners involved in the process. Initiatives such as the one that has given rise to this volume are extremely important in countering the hegemony of EAD and the paradigm it conveys, as they raise crucial questions that might otherwise have been ignored. It is to be hoped that the conferences and publications that arise from it will contribute substantially to generate awareness of the issues involved, thereby resisting the intellectual impoverishment

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that would inevitably result from the consolidation of an epistemological monoculture.

References Anderman, Gunilla & Margaret Rogers (eds.). 2005. In and out of English: For better, for worse? Clavedon, Buffalo & Toronto: Multilingual Matters. Atkinson, Dwight. 1998. Integrating multiple analyses in historical studies of scientific discourse: The philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1675–1975. In John T. Battalio (ed.), Essays in the study of scientific discourse: Methods, practice and pedagogy, 139–165. Stamford and London: Ablex. Atkinson, Dwight. 1999. Scientific discourse in sociohistorical context: The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1675–1975. New Jersey & London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Barros, Rita Q. 2014. Portuguese academics’ attitudes to English as the academic lingua franca: A case-study. In Karen Bennett (ed.), The semiperiphery of academic writing: Discourses, communities, practices, 105–120. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Becher, Tony & Paul R. Trowler. 2001. Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual enquiry and the culture of disciplines. 2nd edn. Buckingham: The Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press. Benesch, Sarah. 2001. Critical English for academic purposes: Theory, politics and practice. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Benesch, Sarah (ed.). 2009. Critical English for Academic Purposes. Special edition of Journal of English for Academic Purposes 8(2). 81–85. Bennett, Karen. 2007a. Galileo’s revenge: Ways of construing knowledge and translation strategies in the era of globalisation. In Myriam Salaama-Carr (ed.), Translation and conflict. Special issue of Journal of social semiotics. 17(2). 171–193. Bennett, Karen. 2007b. Epistemicide! The tale of a predatory discourse. In Sonia Cunico & Jeremy Munday (eds.), Translation and ideology: Encounters and clashes. Special issue of The Translator. 13(2). 151–169. Bennett, Karen. 2009. English academic style manuals: A survey. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 8(1). 43–54. Bennett, Karen. 2010a. Academic discourse in Portugal: A whole different ballgame? Journal of English for Academic Purposes. 9. 21–32. Bennett, Karen. 2010b. Academic writing practices in Portugal: Survey of humanities and social science researchers. Diacrítica – Série Ciências da Linguagem 24(1). 193–210. Bennett, Karen. 2012. Footprints in the text: Assessing the impact of translation upon Portuguese historiographic discourse. In Anthony Pym & Alexandra Assis Rosa (eds.), New directions in translation studies. Special issue of Anglo-Saxónica 3(3). 265–290. Bennett, Karen. 2014. Discourses of knowledge: Cultural disjunctions and their implications for the language industries, Ibérica 27. 35–49. Bennett, Karen (ed.). 2014. The semiperiphery of academic writing: Discourses, communities, practices. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Bourdieu, Pierre & Jean-Claude Passeron. 1994 [1965]. Academic discourse: Linguistic misunderstanding and professorial power, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Braga, Isabel Drumond. 2011. On the property and occupations of 17th and 18th century New Christians. Paper presented at the international conference on The Position and Self-Image of Women in Sefardi Sources, Jerusalem January 2011. Burgess, Sally. 2014. Centre-periphery relations in the Spanish context: Temporal and cross-disciplinary variation. In Karen Bennett (ed.), The semiperiphery of academic writing: Discourses, communities, practices, 93–104. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Canagarajah, A. Suresh. 1999. Resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Canagarajah, A. Suresh. 2001. Addressing issues of power and difference in ESL academic writing. In John Flowerdew & Matthew Peacock (eds.), Research perspectives on English for Academic Purposes. 117–147. Cambridge, New York & Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Canagarajah, A. Suresh. 2002a. A geopolitics of academic writing, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Canagarajah, A. Suresh. 2002b. Critical academic writing and multilingual students. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Commission of the European Communities, 2000. Towards a European Research Area. http://eurlex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2000:0006:FIN:EN:PDF (accessed 23 March 2014). Conley, Thomas M. 1990. Rhetoric in the European tradition. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Croll, Morris W. 1969 [1929].“Attic” and baroque prose styles: The anti-Ciceronian movement. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Ding, Dan. 1998. Rationality reborn: Historical roots of the passive voice in scientific discourse. In John T. Battalio (ed.), Essays in the study of scientific discourse: Methods, practice and pedagogy, 117–135. Stamford and London: Ablex. Duszak, Anna & Jo Lewkowicz. 2008. Publishing academic texts in English: A Polish perspective. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 7. 108–20. Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and power. London & New York: Longman. Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ferguson, Gibson R. 2007. The global spread of English, scientific communication and ESP: Questions of equity, access and domain loss. Ibérica 13. 7–38. Foucault, Michel. 2002 [1972]. The archaeology of knowledge. London & New York: Routledge. Gunnarsson, Brit-Louise. 2001. Swedish, English, French or German – the language situation at Swedish universities. In Ulrich Ammon (ed.), The dominance of English as a language of science: Effects on other languages and language communities, 229–316. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Halliday, Michael A. K. & Jim. R. Martin. 1993. Writing science: Literacy and discursive power. Pittsburgh & London: University of Pittsburgh Press. House, Juliane. 2008. Global English and the destruction of identity? In Paschalis Nikolaou & Maria-Venetia Kyritsi (eds.), Translating selves: Experience and identity between languages and literatures, 87–107. London & New York: Continuum. Hyland, Ken. 2000. Disciplinary discourses: Social interactions in academic writing. Harlow: Longman.

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Ivanič, Roz. 1998. Writing and identity: The discoursal construction of identity in academic writing. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kress, Gunther. 1985. Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural Practice. Victoria: Deakin University Press. Kress, Gunther & Robert Hodge. 1981[1979]. Language as Ideology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Lillis, Theresa & Mary J. Curry. 2006 Professional academic writing by multilingual scholars: Interactions with literacy brokers in the production of English-medium texts. Written Communication 23(1). 3–35. Lillis, Theresa & Mary Jane Curry. 2010. Academic writing in a global context: The politics and practices of publishing in English. London & New York: Routledge. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984[1979]. The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Transl. G. Bennington & B. Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Norton, Bonny & Kelleen Toohey (eds.). 2004. Critical pedagogies and language learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pennycook, Alastair. 1997. Vulgar pragmatism, critical pragmatism, and EAP. English for Specific Purposes 16(4). 253–269. Pennycook, Alastair. 2001. Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction. London & New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. Petrić, Bojana. 2014. English-medium journals in Serbia: Editors’ perspectives. In Karen Bennett (ed.), The semiperiphery of academic writing: Discourses, communities, practices, 189–209. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pio Abreu, J. L. 2000. O tempo aprisionado: Ensaios não-espiritualistas sobre o espírito humano. Coimbra: Quarteto Editora. Salager-Meyer, Françoise. 2008. Scientific publishing in developing countries: Challenges for the future. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 7. 121–132. Sousa Santos, Boaventura de. 1996. The fall of the Angelus Novus: Beyond the modern game of roots and options. Working paper series on Political Economy of Legal Change, 3. University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sousa Santos, Boaventura de. 2001. Towards an epistemology of blindness: Why the new forms of “ceremonial adequacy” neither regulate nor emancipate. European Journal of Social Theory 43. 251–279. Swales, John M. 1990. Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swaan, Abram de. 2001. English in the social sciences. In Ulrich Ammon (ed.), The dominance of English as a language of science: Effects on other languages and language communities, 71–83. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Tardy, Christine. 2004. The role of English in scientific communication: Lingua franca or Tyrannosaurus Rex? Journal of English for Academic Purposes 3. 247–269. Tymoczko, Maria. 2007. Enlarging translation, empowering translators. Manchester: St Jerome. Tymoczko, Maria (ed.). 2010. Translation, resistance, activism, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Uysal, Hacer Hande. 2014. Turkish academic culture in transition: Centre-based state policies and semiperipheral practices of research, publishing and promotion. In Karen Bennett (ed.), The semiperiphery of academic writing: Discourses, communities, practices, 165–168. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Uzuner, Sedef. 2008. Multilingual scholars participation in core/ global academic communities: A literature review. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 74. 250–263. Venuti, Lawrence. 2005[1995]. The translator’s invisibility: A history of translation. London & New York: Routledge. Venuti, Lawrence. 2010 Translation, empiricism, ethics. Profession. 72–81. Vickers, Brian. 1993. The recovery of rhetoric: Petrarch, Erasmus, Perelman. In Richard Roberts & James Good (eds.), The recovery of rhetoric: Persuasive discourse and disciplinarity in the human sciences. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Wodak, Ruth. (ed.). 1989. Language, power and ideology: Studies in political discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Ruth Breeze

Citing outside the community? An investigation of the language of bibliography in top journals Abstract: To build their reputation, academics not only need to develop their own contribution to the discipline, they must also learn to manage relationships with the global discourse community. Citations play a major role in this by signalling membership. Anglophone scholars have been found to make scant use of material not published in English. However, academics based in expanding circle countries also rarely refer to papers in other languages. This chapter shows how leading journals within the social sciences cite few publications in languages other than English. This raises issues such as information loss, identity construction, and the geopolitics of academic publishing. Keywords: Academic publication, professional identity, discourse community, language of publication, citation practices.

1 Introduction It has always been important for academics to publish books and papers in order to make their ideas or findings known to other people working in their discipline, and perhaps to a wider audience. But in today’s increasingly sophisticated systems of academic recognition, there is unprecedented pressure on university teachers and researchers to produce results. In this, the greatest prestige is to be won by publishing articles in high-quality journals, whose quality is guaranteed by the process of blind peer review by leading members of the disciplinary community. At the same time, indices have been developed to make comparison (or even rivalry) possible between journals in similar areas. All this generates a scenario that is both more complex and more organized than in the past, against a background in which the stakes are increasingly high in terms of personal career prospects, department funding, and institutional prestige.

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On an individual level, this situation is reflected in growing competition between academics to appear in leading journals, not least because of the stringent criteria for assessing the publications of researchers, research teams and departments imposed by national accreditation agencies and funding bodies. Even in the humanities and social sciences, the academic world has moved towards homogenizing practices and quantifying achievements in a way that was previously thought to be characteristic of the hard sciences. Moreover, this trend now extends far beyond the “inner circle” of English-speaking countries (as defined by Kachru 1988). Even though publishing in top journals is virtually synonymous with publishing in English and following Anglo-American academic conventions, the same criteria of excellence are being applied to gauge the potential of people working in every continent and from practically every language background. The consequences of this have particular impact in Western Europe, but are beginning to be felt worldwide (Hendrik and Henkens 2012). As the pressure to publish is heightened, the gatekeeping power of leading English-medium journals has increased (Belcher 2007), tugging academics worldwide into an intensely competitive upward spiral (Ammon 2001; Curry and Lillis 2004). Although some welcome this tendency in the name of scientific progress, its critics have pointed out that this “publish or perish” culture has many negative consequences: it tends to lead academics to overspecialize, to focus on publication at the cost of other important aspects of their work, to section what should be a single paper in order to scatter results across different journals, and in general to become more inward-looking, which could have unfortunate long-term consequences for academia and for society as a whole (Hendrik and Henkens 2012). Broader effects of this trend include the increasing marginalization of entire academic communities based outside the English-speaking core (Flowerdew 2000; Belcher 2007), and the knock-on effect on academic genres in other languages (Belcher 2007). If we focus our attention on the impact on individual researchers, it is obvious that the current scenario is particularly challenging for those working outside mainstream Anglo-American academia (Swales 1987; van Dijk 1994; Flowerdew 2001; Canagarajah 2002; Belcher 2007). Taking a broad theoretical perspective, we can see that these questions relate to world systems of power, prestige and influence, and to the geolinguistic balance which operates in favour of the centre and against the periphery (Wallerstein 1991; Hewings, Lillis, and Vladimirou 2010). In the concrete case of academic research, language issues conspire with cultural factors, making it much harder for those on the periphery to make their mark. The difficulties faced by authors who are not ab initio members of an English-speaking academic community are inevitably much greater than those confronting academics who have undergone their education and academic apprenticeship within

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a UK or US university (Pérez-Llantada, Plo, and Ferguson 2010). In response to issues with language and academic genres, a considerable volume of research has grown up on teaching academic writing, and on ways in which English language departments and writing centres can support scholars from non-Anglo-American backgrounds by providing them with skills, tools and facilities that enable them to publish on the same level as scholars from within the inner circle (Breeze 2012). However, it is not only a question of language or style: academic training is at least partly a question of socialization into a discipline, and into its specific ways of doing, thinking and writing – in other words, into a “discourse community” (Kuhn 1970; Swales 1990; Flowerdew 2000; Curry and Lillis 2004). Since key journals and leading universities tend to be the dominant voices in such discourse communities, both setting the tone for discussion and establishing unwritten norms about what should be talked about and how, it is not surprising that outsiders have to struggle to be accepted. Although a certain amount of attention has been directed towards the phenomenon of Anglo-American academic hegemony from a critical perspective (Flowerdew 2000; Belcher 2007; Hewings, Lillis, and Vladimirou 2010), there is so far little evidence of concern within the mainstream academic community. According to Canagarajah (2002), even though many leading journals vaunt their international character, in reality most of their boards are dominated by US, UK, and to a lesser extent European academics. In view of the obvious global academic power imbalance, a few journals have begun to develop guidance for “international” authors about how to publish their work (Flowerdew 2001; Iverson 2002). However, these attempts are still in their early stages and there is as yet little published evidence as to their effectiveness. It could be that in the world at large there is tacit acceptance of the adoption of one language and one set of conventions and parameters in the name of greater communicative potential and a wider audience. It might be argued that English is the new Latin, facilitating communication between researchers and thinkers of all nations, and breaking down the barriers that once separated the members of different national or language communities. If everything were published in English, then less information would be lost, and dialogue would be more inclusive and more fruitful – Babel would be overcome. However, to counter this optimistic view, we should take into account various other issues that arise in this new scenario. First, there is a real risk that ideas or approaches that do not translate easily into English or fit well with the dominant empirical paradigm will be lost to the world academic community. This could be either because they will not be accepted for publication in English, and will therefore be ignored, or because their authors decide that it is simply not worth pursuing such lines of research because they have little weight on the new scales by which academic achievement is mea-

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sured. In particular, there is a genuine danger that the Anglo-American ways of thinking and doing research will supplant other approaches, silencing new voices from the periphery (Canagarajah 2002) and ultimately leading to intellectual impoverishment and “epistemicide” (Bennett 2007). Although some commentators take the more optimistic view that the ultimate outcome will be a new fusion of ideas, genres and even linguistic norms as different practices and standards from different areas of the world come together to influence what happens in mainstream English-language academia (Pérez-Llantada 2012; Björkman 2013), there are as yet few signs that this is actually happening. Secondly, there is the related issue of freedom of expression. In a fundamental sense, authors are mostly free to publish whatever they think fit, within the self-imposed limits of democratic society (of course, there are also many nondemocratic countries in which authors are constrained by the authorities, but this sad truth is not the subject of the present chapter). But although authors are generally at liberty to publish in any language, using any appropriate paradigm, in any journal be it local, national or international, this freedom is somewhat illusory if publishing in certain journals (mainly international publications in English which rank high on the list of indexed journals) will mean promotion or funding whereas publishing in others will not. This will influence both what these authors write, and how they write it (Hendrik and Henkens, 2012). The underlying structures of power and prestige will thus condition the freedom that individual researchers have, and make a major impact on the decisions that they take. In the present study, my intention is not to attempt an in-depth analysis of this immensely complex, swiftly changing panorama. Instead, I propose to focus on one particular aspect of the dilemma facing scholars from outside the inner circle which gives rise to a particular kind of paradox. This is a question that goes directly to the heart of the issue as to how non-native scholars write for publication and how they see their own position within the international scholarly community. The object of this study is the extent to which scholars in general – and most particularly, scholars based in “outer” and “expanding circle” countries – include references to work in languages other than English when preparing papers for international publication.

2 Research background: citation practices The question of what kind of bibliography researchers cite has major consequences, both for the individual scholar and for the discourse community as a whole. Against the background described above, in which English increasingly

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dominates as the main language of academic publication, the likelihood of publications in other languages being noticed by the world academic community is dwindling. Although there are exceptions in some disciplines that are closely tied to a particular country or language (for example, some areas of history, literature and law), in most fields, publishing in a language other than English means lessening the odds of being read and cited by other scholars, and ultimately reducing one’s chances of receiving promotion and research funding. The ultimate outcome of this dynamics might well be a decline in both the quantity and the quality of publications in other languages. However, at the present time, an established body of research in most fields exists in languages such as French, Spanish, German and Russian. These “local” publications may be of considerable quality, and may offer unique contributions that are not found elsewhere: we need think only of the delayed reception of Vygotsky, Bakhtin and other Russian thinkers in the west to see how the language barrier and political circumstances may mean that it takes an extremely long time for new ideas to be transmitted (Emerson 1997; Daniels 1996). This phenomenon is by no means limited to the humanities, but is also found in the empirical sciences, despite the general perception that knowledge transfer between language groups functions more effectively in the harder sciences. For instance, Swales and Feak (2000: 159) cite the example of a cranio-mandibular muscle first fully described in a publication in German in 1954, which was then “discovered” by Portuguese scientists in 1978, and finally “discovered” for the English-speaking world in 1996. Each group of scientists presented this finding as entirely original, we assume, in good faith, because language barriers made the work of the earlier group(s) inaccessible. In fact, the last publication received considerable media attention, but was then put in its place by a further paper which provided a detailed overview of the repeated “discovery” of this muscle from the nineteenth century onwards (Türp, Cowley, and Stohler 1997). This curious example could be used to illustrate the usefulness of having one single language for research dissemination, but also to show the importance of being aware of what is published in other languages. In the social sciences and humanities, where databases and indexing systems are less developed, one suspects that examples of needless repetition and information loss may abound. In this somewhat gloomy landscape, the gradually increasing contribution of non-inner-circle scholars to indexed journals might seem to offer a ray of light. We might assume that they would be ideally placed to introduce ideas from other backgrounds and other cultures to mainstream debates, and make known the work that is being done by researchers in their own countries and languages. In a sense, these authors could build bridges between cultures, bringing fresh ideas and a new vision based on their own cultural heritage. At the very least, it might

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be thought, they would provide references to work published in their first languages, which might open the door to further enquiry. But it is enough to take a brief glance at a representative selection of publications in English by an international selection of scholars to see how the reality fails to live up to this expectation. At least in leading international journals, few academics appear to cite research published in other languages. If we wish to explore why this is so, we need to reach a deeper understanding of the role of citation in the way academic writers shape their authorial persona and construct their relationship with other members of the disciplinary community. As previous authors have amply shown, citation practices play a key role in the way academic writers relate to their readers (Hyland 1999; Thompson 2001; Harwood 2009), and it is likely that their configuration across different geographical and disciplinary areas would bear further investigation. To persuade peers of the merits of their research and build their own reputation through publication, academics have to do more than simply develop their own personal contribution to the discipline and present it to readers. They must also show that they are conversant with disciplinary conventions and epistemological assumptions, including those embodied in the who, how and why of citing practices. It is usual for aspiring scholars to indicate their membership of a particular disciplinary community by demonstrating familiarity with the work of significant members of that community. In a sense, by doing this, they are using these figures’ established reputation to underwrite the reliability of the ideas or facts that they are quoting, thus lending greater credibility to their own work. In this, writers implicitly accord these previous authors the status and role that they are consensually understood to have, and position themselves discursively in an appropriate relationship towards them. One of the main ways this is achieved in practice is through the appropriate management of citations. Citation practices in different disciplines have received some attention from researchers in the areas of applied linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Although ostensibly citations are used in a neutral sense to provide relevant references to previous important work, there is considerable evidence that this is not the only factor motivating the choice and use of citations. Some empirical research from the 1990s and early 2000s suggested that various complicating factors are also at work. Some of these may be conditioned by practical issues such as familiarity or availability. Thus, for example, it was found to be more likely that particular scholars would cite their own colleagues (Cronin and Shaw 2002, 2003), or compatriots (Herman 1991), possibly due to ease of access (Lawrence 2001), or to their particular language skills (Yitzhaki 1998). However, practicalities seem to account for only some of the observable citation behaviours. Taking a more radical stance, Hyland (2003) contends that

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citation practices can be understood socially as part of individuals’ wider strategy to promote themselves, and it seems likely that the same may apply to groups: members of a research group may often cite each other, for promotional as well as scientific reasons. Thelwall (2003) contends that a combination of academic, practical and promotional factors is probably at work. Subsequent researchers have suggested that a three-step process is taking place, in which authors first narrow down the possible references to those to which they themselves have access, then to those that have a particular role in the text, and finally to those that the authors deem to be most expedient, such as colleagues or editors of the journal in question (Camacho and Núñez 2009). In his detailed analysis of referencing practices in computer science and sociology, Harwood (2009) found that authors reported using citations for a variety of reasons, ranging from the practical (saving space, avoiding digression) and the didactic (helping less informed readers), to more complex functions of assertion and alignment within the academic community, such as displaying their own expertise, building a basis for their own work or tying themselves in with a particular approach. Although it might be too much to think of this as the academic equivalent of a celebrity endorsement, something similar to this takes place when writers choose to align their work with that of acknowledged experts. Such applications may be interpreted as embodying different ways of signalling membership of a particular community, or – particularly if the writer’s position in world academia is somewhat peripheral – laying claim to the author’s own position as a community member. In this, the actual language of the bibliography used has particular relevance, but has been analyzed only rarely. One previous study that focuses specifically on the language of the references cited is that by Yitzhaki (1998). In his study of sociology journals in the USA, UK, Germany and France between 1985 and 1994, he found that although a large proportion of research in social science is published in languages other than English, English-speaking scholars make scant use of it. In his sample, 99 % of the references included by American and British writers were in English. The trend to cite only in one’s own language or the language of the present publication did not extend to journals published in France and Germany, however. German scholars ranked next, preferring German sources in 75 % of cases, while French authors referred to French sources in 66 % of instances. Although Yitzhaki’s results are interesting, he does not deal with the obvious geopolitical issues at stake, but rather adopts a pragmatic principle based on a somewhat uncritical assessment of “information loss”. By this principle, an author who only cites references in English is less likely to omit important information than is an author who cites only in German, since in Yitzhaki’s view, most of the “important” information is to be found in English.

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Other previous research has revealed certain general tendencies which suggest that scholars in the expanding circle refer to their compatriots less than might be supposed. For example, Palmer Silveira and Ruiz Garrido (2005) found that Spanish linguists specializing in English and publishing in Spanish publications devoted only around 20 % of their references to work published by scholars based in Spain. However, since their article centres on English studies, their results might be atypical. Other research suggests that non-inner-circle academics carefully adapt their citation behaviour to the type of journal in which they aim to publish. Hewings, Lillis, and Vladimirou (2010), in a study of citation practices among psychology specialists, found that central and southern European researchers tended to include more references to work in their national language (20 %) when publishing in locally-based English-medium journals than when they published in international English-medium journals (10 %). On the other hand, specialists affiliated to Anglo-American universities drew on virtually no references to work in languages other than English. These authors concluded that such authors “look both ways” when writing in their own country’s journals, but not when writing for international publications (Hewings, Lillis, and Vladimirou 2010: 111). Although these previous studies are useful, they provide few insights into the reasons underlying the phenomenon of English-only citation practices. The present study thus begins with an exploration of the way leading journals include references to publications in languages other than English. In order to triangulate these results and seek possible interpretations, I then carried out qualitative interviews with a small group of authors and editors, which are reported and analyzed. The discussion section identifies some of the reasons why authors from outside the inner circle choose not to cite from their other language, and analyzes this situation within a critical perspective.

3 Study design With a view to achieving a balanced view of the phenomenon of the language of references, I designed a two-stage study consisting of a quantitative analysis of the language of bibliography, triangulated by interviews with authors and editors. Mixed-methods research is frequently used to investigate second language writing (Yasuda 2011). The decision to use semi-structured interviews rather than a questionnaire was motivated by the desire to keep the interview open to emerging topics (Hammersley and Atkinson 1995). In the first phase of the study, since the aim was to obtain a cross-section of citation practices in leading journals, I assembled a sample which consisted of the last issue in 2011 of 10 journals rated

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as “excellent” in the CIRC database, all of which could be grouped loosely into the category of “social sciences”: Journal of Advanced Nursing; Political Communication; European Review of Social Psychology; British Journal of Sociology; International Journal of Advertising; System; Applied Linguistics; Economic Policy; Journal of Economic Geography; Journal of Management. The motivation behind this choice was to avoid the pure and biomedical sciences, where almost all the major publications are in English and the practice of only publishing and citing in English has long been consolidated, but also to avoid disciplines such as law or literature where there might be a particular bias towards the law of a particular country or the literature of a particular language, reflected in the type of contributors and the range of possible references that might be cited. In fact, a cursory examination of the contents of these journals revealed that their scope was indeed international in terms of the content and the affiliation of their contributors. During this initial phase, a straightforward procedure was used to obtain information from the journals. First, the authors’ affiliation was noted and classified. Since the articles usually gave no information about the authors other than their institutional affiliation, they were classified according to their affiliation: for example, an author with an ostensibly German or Chinese name based at an American university would be classified as belonging to the USA. Then, the list of references at the end of each article was reviewed, and the total number of articles, books and other sources referred to was counted. The sources or references with titles that were not in English were then counted and classified according to language. For example, an article with forty references with English titles and five with Swedish titles would yield a total number of forty-five references, forty English and five Swedish. For reasons of study design, only the language of the title was taken into account. No attempt was made to track the country of issue of the articles cited or the affiliation of the authors of those articles. It should be noted that it is not standard practice to translate the titles of articles without also providing the original title: an article published in Swedish, say, would normally be cited with its original Swedish title, possibly followed by an English translation in brackets. This means that it can safely be assumed that articles with titles cited in English were actually published in English. In the second phase of the study, semi-structured interviews were carried out with ten authors and two journal editors. Although my main focus was on authors’ views of the writing, submission and editing process, some criticism has been directed towards exclusive use of self-report data (Harwood 2009) and approaches which take the authors’ word as definitive (Camacho and Núñez 2009), and I felt that the editors’ long experience of handling papers from different countries would help me to put the findings from the author interviews into perspective. The authors were all based at two universities in Spain, and were working in

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the area of social sciences as defined above. They had all published recently in international peer-reviewed journals. Two were native speakers of English who had spent most of their career in Spain, whereas the others were L1 Spanish speakers. In the context of this study it is relevant to note that the Spanish university promotion system is structured by an agency known as the ANECA (Agencia Nacional de Evaluación de Calidad y Acreditación), which operates a points system that heavily favours publications in international indexed journals. The interviews with authors were conducted using an interview schedule consisting of eight open-ended questions and recorded in note form by the author. The interviews lasted an average of 27 minutes. Following Harwood (2009), I took care to elicit the authors’ own account of what they did and why, rather than to impose a pre-determined set of criteria. The first four questions therefore covered issues relating to the difficulty of getting published, problems with English language and style, and dealing with referees’ comments, while the last four questions in the interview schedule centred on citation practices, only homing in specifically on the language of the bibliographical references at the end. It was thus intended that the subjects should explain their approach and attitude in their own words, before directly confronting the issue of language of citation. The notes were later analyzed thematically. The interviews with editors were conducted in person and followed up by email. Both editors were British and based at leading UK universities. They were both responsible for social science journals ranked as “excellent” (these journals were not included in the study sample for practical reasons). These interviews followed a very similar schedule to that used with authors, with the same question about language of citation at the end.

4 Results 4.1 Journal study In total, the ten issues of the journal contained 83 articles excluding editorials and book reviews. These had 191 authors, since many of the articles had two or more authors. Figure 1 shows the distribution of the authors’ affiliation in the whole sample. It should be noted that the list contains five English-speaking countries (the USA, the UK, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand), which accounted for 61.3 % of the authors. Regarding the language of the references used, the picture that emerged contrasted strongly with the map of authors’ affiliation. Overall, these findings overlap substantially with those of Hewings, Lillis, and Vladimirou (2010), strongly

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Fig. 1. Authors’ affiliation by country.

suggesting that authors writing for high-ranking journals published in English tend to avoid citing publications in other languages. In the present study, only 0.81 % of the sources referred to were in a language other than English, confirming the original hypothesis that even authors based outside the inner circle choose only to cite sources in English, or are encouraged to avoid non-English references by the editors or referees of the journals. In total, the 83 articles in the sample included 5565 references with titles in English, giving a mean number of 67 Englishlanguage references per article. Within the small sector of references not in English, in this particular sample only seven languages figured: Swedish, German, Dutch, Chinese, Spanish, French and Japanese (see Figure 2). Some differences emerged between journals on this point: two journals (Journal of Management (JoM) and European Review of Social Psychology (ERoSP)) only included references in English; Journal of Advanced Nursing (JoAN) and Journal of Economic Geography (JoG) both included references in three other languages; System (Syst.), Economic Policy (EP) and British Journal of Sociology (BJoS) included references in two other languages; and Political Communication (PC), International Journal of Advertising (IJoA) and Applied Linguistics (AL) included references in one other language (see Table 1).

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Fig. 2. Proportion of references in languages other than English (clockwise from top).

Table 1. Distribution of references by journal and language.

JoEG Syst. EP AL JoAN BJoS JoM ERoSP PC IJoA

English

Swedish

438 456 230 209 718 437 790 1447 444 396

5

German

Dutch

Chinese

Spanish

4

French 1

1 9

Japanese 1

3 1 6

3 1

1 1

6 4

As for the particular languages that appeared, Swedish and German appeared as the first, with 14 titles each, followed by Dutch with eight, Chinese with five, Spanish with two, and French and Japanese with one. Articles in German were cited in four journals, Dutch in three, Swedish and Spanish in two, French in two, and Chinese and Japanese in only one. Although this may in some cases simply be a reflection of the number of authors based in countries where these languages are used, it should be noted that none of the authors was affiliated to a university in China or France. Chinese affairs formed the topic of several of the articles in the issue of Political Communication studied, and it was only here that Chinese appeared as a language of references. The fact that French references were cited in two different journals even though none of the authors was based in France provides some slight evidence for the continuing intellectual influence of France beyond its own borders, or may simply be a reflection of the fact that French is the only foreign language with which many English speakers are familiar. The nature of the references cited is also worthy of attention. References in English covered the entire range of possibilities, including classic works, theoretical studies, empirical studies, newspaper and magazine articles and other sources. References in other languages were often to what might be described as primary

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sources, including laws, government documents, and the like. By way of example, we can consider the case of an article about the German advertising industry in the International Journal of Advertising: two of the German texts in the references are the “Bundesgesetz über Radio und Fernsehen” (German Radio and Television Act) and the “Leitlinien für die Programmgestaltung der ARD” (Guidelines for Programmes in the German Public Broadcasting Corporation). Another striking phenomenon observed was the relative scarcity of references in the language of the country that formed the object of study. For example, many articles contained no references in that language. One article in Journal of Economic Geography on the development of the Amsterdam publishing industry contained only four references in Dutch. It was also noteworthy that among several articles in Political Communication focusing on aspects of Chinese politics, only the articles by authors with ostensibly western surnames contained references in Chinese (transcribed into the Roman alphabet); the articles by authors with (apparently) Chinese names contained no references in Chinese.

4.2 Interview data The notes taken during the interviews were analyzed thematically using standard procedures, and several key issues were identified. In the first half of the interview, authors explained the difficulties they had experienced in getting published, commenting on the associated belief that indexed journals are less willing to publish research from non-inner-circle scholars, and outlining the strategies they had adopted in order to achieve their goal. In the second half, focusing specifically on citation practices, the main themes that emerged with both authors and editors were: the importance of referring to the most important, up-to-date, authorities in the field; the perceived tactical usefulness of using English-only references as part of a wider strategy to present oneself as a member of the international (or specifically English-speaking) discourse community; the pragmatic expediency of only citing English references, which enables the author to include the maximum necessary information in the smallest number of words, and also to communicate with the widest possible readership; and a certain recognition that it would be dangerous for other languages if everyone were to use English-only references. Although the point of view adopted by authors and editors was slightly different, since the editors tended to focus more on what their particular journal would be likely to accept, while the authors were clearly considering strategies to get published in general, the comments that they made tended to show substantial agreement. For this reason, the ideas are organized thematically, rather than according to source.

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First, the use of English references only as part of a wider strategy to present oneself as a member of the international academic community was mentioned by almost all the authors interviewed. This clearly points to the importance of the “alignment” function of citations explained by Harwood (2009), but with a very specific slant: the interviewees preferred to align themselves only with the international target community, rather than with more local scholars who might form part, say, of the way their discipline is structured nationally. Several academics justified their practices in common sense terms, starting from the premise that everything important should be published in English: “Of course I only refer to things published in English. Why would I include anything else?” However, one specifically focused on the desire to associate her own ideas with the elite of her discipline: “I never cite publications that are not in English. That’s because I only cite the top publications. It would be weird to cite things that are not in the top journals”. Others consciously understood the choice of English-only references to be part of a deliberate bid to forge an identity as an international scholar: “If you want to establish your credibility as a member of the international academic community, you have to show that you are thoroughly conversant with what is going on there. That’s what matters, not what is being published on a local level”. This desire to use citations to engage with the main ideas and leading figures in the discipline echoes Cronin and Shaw’s contention that citation is a way of showing with whom writers “voluntarily align themselves in intellectual space” (2002: 34). Moreover, it also reflects several of Harwood’s findings (2009): first, these authors tried to establish their own academic credibility by using “competence”-affirming citations to demonstrate their familiarity with the “hard-hitters” of their discipline (2009: 510). Second, the interviewees also used what Harwood would term “supporting” citations (2009: 503) to justify their choice of topic, methodology and argumentation. Third, they often established the basis for their present research on top of “building” citations from leading authorities (2009: 507). In view of Flowerdew’s finding (2001) that journal editors frequently criticized non-native submissions for lack of familiarity with the literature, it is quite understandable that non-inner-circle academics should adopt this strategy. What matters, for these scholars, is to be able to justify their own work with regard to “what’s going on” at the centre of their disciplinary community. Along similar lines, but perhaps reflecting some aspect of the “didactic” function of citations to orientate less experienced readers (Harwood 2009: 501), another academic justified his use of English-only references in terms of quality: “An article has to refer to the important papers on the topic. The important papers are all in English”. Finally, it is interesting to note that some of the respondents claimed that although they habitually only used English-language references, they had never thought about why they did so until they were consulted for

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the purpose of this research. This may indicate that the trend not to refer to work in other languages is now simply taken for granted by non-inner-circle scholars and is rapidly becoming an unchallenged orthodoxy. However, the motivation behind the English-only strategy was also interpreted more negatively by several of the authors in the study, who placed the assumption that everything cited should be in English within a context of prejudice and disadvantage. One author made the following comment: “Journal editors and referees in certain countries are prejudiced against writers from other countries. If you want to get published there, you have to disguise your own identity in every detail, including the bibliography you refer to”. Another author said: “I have noticed that when I co-author a paper with a Chinese or Spanish author, the journal almost always says that we should have the English checked by a native speaker. When I co-author a paper with another English author, this never happens. But the English that I write is always the same. If you seem to be foreign, they will be harder on you. Using English-only references is a way of staving off prejudice”. On this point, one of the editors questioned said, “People are desperate to get published. Referring to things from local publications, rather than international ones, just doesn’t look good. So they opt to refer only to things published in English”. The second editor added that: “The main point is to reduce the level of ‘foreign-ness’ in the text. Not referring to things published in other languages is one way to do this”. The word “foreign-ness”, in turn, would seem to reflect a facet of Flowerdew’s finding that editors often perceived submissions from peripheral countries to be “parochial” (2002). What is “foreign” or “parochial” is somehow non-central and unlikely to appeal to the journal’s target readers. However, it might be worth exploring whether articles about, say, the USA, are reported to be “parochial” in terms of a world readership. All of the above comments fit well with Hyland’s (2003) theory that citation practices form part of academic writers’ general self-promotional strategies. By citing particular publications in English, authors are staking a claim to membership of a particular high-prestige English-language discourse community. By citing publications in other languages, they would risk sending out the wrong signals to a world that does not value publications that are not in English. The arguments of practicality and reader-friendliness were also voiced by my respondents. Expediency was used by four of the authors as a way to justify English-only citations, not only because “less information is lost if you only cite sources in English”, but also on the grounds that “you are only allowed a certain number of words, so you don’t want to waste words citing things that are not essential”. In other words, one should cite only what is essential, and work in other languages is, apparently, never essential. Arguments concerning relative availability of bibliography in different languages were not raised (compare Lawrence

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2001), presumably because the Internet has largely brought down the barriers that existed between countries and language groups in terms of access to books and journals. The more attractive argument of reader-friendliness was raised by one of the authors, who stated that to his mind “it depends who the readers of the journal are. If I think that the readers of that journal will not understand the language of the publication I want to refer to, then I look for an alternative reference in English”. The arguments voiced here tend to tie in with Yitzhaki’s (1998) notion of avoiding information loss: publications in English are more likely to be read, noticed and mentioned. It is risky to cite publications in other languages, and might give rise to confusion. Although the ironies of this are obvious (avoiding references to publications in all languages other than English can hardly mean avoiding information loss), this makes a certain sense, particularly in forwardlooking, fast-moving disciplines such as the hard sciences. On the other hand, the consequences of applying the same criterion to the humanities and social sciences might potentially be quite devastating. Finally, three of the authors also expressed the view that, all things being equal, writers should refer to sources that are in other languages, in order to make publications in those languages better known. One of these authors was quite outspoken on this point, stating that when she refereed papers for journal, she usually said that “Authors ought to refer to important publications in their own language. If they are not doing so, I ask them why not”. One of the editors also stated that in his journal, he would be pleased if authors included references to important publications in languages other than English, since it would “open doors for people who are not familiar with work in those countries”.

5 Discussion Any discussion of the foregoing results inevitably brings us back to the issue of global power imbalance in academic discourse communities mooted in the early sections of this chapter. In the current world scenario, most of the top-ranked journals are published in English, many of them are dominated by native speakers of that language, and editors of journals published in other languages have grave difficulties when trying to get them included in major databases. None of the phenomena analyzed here would make sense if it were not for the considerable pressures on scholars associated with other language backgrounds to publish in prestigious international English-language journals. These pressures may originate in the person’s own professional ambitions, but are more often generated by national accreditation or research audit systems which assess academic merit according to the rank of journal in which papers are published.

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It is interesting to note, however, that the dynamics of language choice appear to work in various different ways. At least three distinct mechanisms seem to be at work, often simultaneously. First, as previous researchers have noted (Ammon 2001; Canagarajah 2002; Curry and Lillis 2004), there appears to be a genuine fear that papers which are not from an English-speaking country are less likely to be published. Authors who make this point are sensitive to the reduced role of their own language on the international academic plane, and feel that they would compromise their chances of publication in prestigious English-language journals if they referred to large numbers of sources published in other languages. This fear of putting oneself at a disadvantage would seem to be borne out by the comment made by one of the editors consulted, who offered the advice that writers should “reduce the degree of ‘foreign-ness’ in the text”. After all, if a paper is more likely to be rejected because it is noticeably “foreign”, it is a basic matter of survival for the author to reduce such elements as far as possible. A second position suggested by some of the interviewees is motivated by aspects related to aspirations and self-image on the part of the author him/herself. Authors aspire to being fully-fledged members of an international discourse community, and the English-only policy relating to references is one of a range of promotional strategies that authors adopt (Hyland 2000; Harwood 2009). Since they perceive their target discourse community as operating monolingually in English, these authors choose to behave to all intents and purposes as though they were English monolinguals. They thus ignore publications that are not in that language, because the admission that they have used sources or secondary bibliography that is not published in English would pose a threat to their identity as an international scholar. As one scholar remarked, it would be “strange” to refer to publications that were not in English: in other words, by doing so, one would be stepping out of line. The stance adopted by the interviewees who advocated assuming an English-monolingual identity suggests that such authors are compliant with the dynamics in operation, and cooperate by exercising self-regulation. Perhaps there is a link here to a fear of seeming to address local issues and communities, rather than the international one. Readers will recall that Flowerdew (2001: 135) found that “parochialism, or failure to show the relevance of the study to the international community” was the most important objection to foreign scholars’ work voiced by journal editors. Although in principle this concept refers mainly to the contents of the paper, rather than to its bibliography, it is likely that a substantial body of references to work in another language might create an impression that primarily local, or non-English-speaking, readers are being addressed. Finally, allied to these other positions there is also a highly pragmatic view maintained by some authors that publishing in English, with English-only references, makes sense on a global level because such an approach will make it

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more likely that their work reaches the largest possible audience. The choice of English on all levels here responds to the type of pragmatic and didactic concerns explained by Harwood (2009). Scholars taking this point of view tended not to regret the dominance of English, but rather to welcome its democratising potential in spreading knowledge. On a critical note, we may observe that both positions one and two suggest that a great deal of voluntary self-censorship is at work. Among these interviewees, some voiced regret at the loss of knowledge that might arise if only English-language publications were taken into account, unconsciously aligning themselves with the kind of cultural critiques expressed by van Dijk (1996), Canagarajah (2002), and Curry and Lillis (2004). In contrast, the respondents who held position three tended to express themselves in common sense terms, and regarded their approach as unproblematic. The scholars who unconditionally accept the dominant role of English tend to conceive of language as purely instrumental to knowledge, and are not concerned with potential areas of cultural, epistemic or linguistic loss. One further notable feature is the marked difference between these results and those obtained by Yitzhaki (1998). Far from preferring to cite authors from their own language background, these scholars appeared to prefer to cite authors publishing in English and largely to ignore colleagues publishing in their shared native language. Along the lines documented in Ammon (2001), we may assume that the 20–30 years that separate this study from the earlier one have seen an acceleration of globalization processes accompanied by an unprecedented magnification of the role of English in global academia, to the extent that ambitious scholars worldwide are now much less likely to cite material in their own language than they were in the past. As a result of this, they are also less likely to cite colleagues or compatriots than formerly, unless these researchers are also active on the international academic scene. In this, the findings of the present study add to the ongoing literature on the geopolitics of academic publication (Curry and Lillis 2004; Hewings. Lillis, and Vladimirou. 2010; Hendrik and Henkens 2012) and shed light on the dynamics of language choice at grassroots level.

6 Conclusion This chapter adds to our understanding of the geopolitics of academic writing in two ways. First, the quantitative study shows that remarkably little work not published in English is cited in indexed journals, even when the authors are not based in English-speaking countries or when the topic being discussed is directly related

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to internal issues within such a country. Second, my analysis of interviews with authors and editors provides insights into this situation, corroborating and complementing previous work on citation practices, and shedding new light on specific issues affecting academics outside the inner circle. The discussion of these factors reflects on the mechanisms that are propelling us towards an English-only academic world, the compulsion and compliance operating within the academic community, and the knowledge loss that may result from this practice. Given the small corpus of journals, and the fact that all the authors interviewed worked within the social and applied sciences and were based in the same outer-circle country, the conclusions of this study are obviously subject to considerable limitations. It is not possible on this basis to provide a definitive picture of everything that is happening across world academia. Further studies are needed to explore this issue in greater detail, and to establish whether the trends observed here extend to journals in other disciplines and to researchers in other language areas.

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Flowerdew, John. 2001. Attitudes of journal editors toward nonnative speaker contributions. TESOL Quarterly 35(1). 121–150. Hammersley, Martin & Paul Atkinson. 1995. Ethnography: Principle in practice. London: Tavistock. Harwood, Nigel. 2009. An interview-based study of the functions of citations in academic writing across two disciplines. Journal of Pragmatics 41. 497–518. Hendrik P. van Dalen & Kène Henkens. 2012. Intended and unintended consequences of a publish-or-perish culture: A worldwide survey. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 63(7). 1282–1293. Herman, I. Lucrezia. 1991. Receptivity to foreign literature: A comparison of UK and US citation behavior in librarianship and information science. Library and Information Science Research 13(2). 37–47. Hewings, Ann, Theresa Lillis & Dimitra Vladimirou. 2010. Who’s citing whose writings? A corpus based study of citations as interpersonal resource in English-medium national and English medium international journals. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 9. 102–115. Hyland, Ken. 1999. Academic attribution: Citation and the construction of disciplinary knowledge. Applied Linguistics 20(3). 314–367. Hyland, Ken. 2000. Disciplinary discourses: Social interactions in academic writing. Harlow: Longman. Hyland, Ken. 2003. Self-citation and self-reference: Credibility and promotion in academic publication. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 54(3). 251–259. Iverson, Cheryl. 2002. US medical journal editors’ attitudes toward submissions from other countries. Science Editor 25 (3). 75–78. Kachru, Braj. 1988. The sacred cows of English. English Today 4(4). 3–8. Kuhn, Thomas. 1970. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Palmer Silveira, Juan Carlos & Miguel Ángel Ruiz Garrido. 2005. ¡Estoy aquí! Referencias bibliográficas a instituciones académicas españolas en artículos de investigación nacionales relacionados con el inglés como lengua de especialidad. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada (Special Issue). 233–257. Pérez-Llantada, Carmen. 2012. Scientific discourse and the rhetoric of globalization. The impact of culture and language. London, New York: Continuum. Pérez-Llantada, Carmen, Ramón Plo & Gibson R. Ferguson. 2010. “You don’t say what you know, only what you can”: The perceptions and practices of senior Spanish academic regarding research dissemination in English. English for Specific Purposes 30. 18–30. Swales, John M. 1987. Utilizing the literatures in teaching the research paper. TESOL Quarterly 21. 41–68. Swales, John M. 1990. Genre analysis. English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swales, John M. & Christine B. Feak. 2000. English in today’s research world. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Thelwall, Mike. 2003. What is this link doing here? Beginning a fine-grained process of identifying reasons for academic hyperlink creation. Information Research 8(3). http://informationr.net/ir/8-3/paper151.html#yit98 (accessed 1 November 2013). Thompson, Geoffrey 2001. Interaction in academic writing: Learning to argue with the reader. Applied Linguistics 22(1). 58–78.

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Türp, Jens C., Terrie Cowley & Christian S. Stohler. 1997. Media hype: Musculus sphenomandibularis. Acta Anatomica 158. 150–154. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1991. Geopolitics and geoculture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yasuda, Sachiko. 2011. Genre-based tasks in foreign language writing: Developing writers’ genre awareness, linguistic knowledge and writing competence. Journal of Second Language Writing 20. 111–131. Yitzhaki, Moshe. 1998. The language preference in sociology: Measurements of “language self-citation”, “relative own language preference indicator”, and “mutual use of languages”. Scientometrics 41. 243–254.

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Claus Gnutzmann, Jenny Jakisch, and Frank Rabe

Resources for publishing in English as a foreign language: Strategies, peers and techniques Abstract: Academic publishing in international, English-language journals has become the norm for researchers in many disciplines. The steadily growing number of non-native researchers publishing in these journals testifies to this development. Assuming that, generally, non-native speakers do not possess full nativelike competence in English, it seems plausible that they need to draw on a multiplicity of resources in order to cope with the demands of academic writing and publishing in a foreign language. To give more weight to a relatively underappreciated view of academic writing and publishing as a social activity, this chapter therefore investigates how multilingual researchers make use of resources – i.e., learning and writing strategies, help from native and non-native speaking peers as well as techniques such as googling English phrases. Drawing on the interview corpus of the PEPG (Publish in English or Perish in German?) project, it is shown how the interviewees employ different resources and how this varying use influences their ability to publish in English. The results of this study have potential implications for the teaching of academic writing in that they challenge the widespread belief that an individual’s language competence is always the main determining factor in publishing success. Keywords: Academic writing and publishing, multilingual researchers, learning and writing strategies, resources for writing and publishing, techniques for writing and publishing

1 Introduction The use of strategic, socioacademic and technological resources is of great importance for non-native English-speaking researchers publishing in English as they often need to make do with not fully native-like language competence. It is in this vein that non-native speakers of English and their writing and publication strategies have been studied from as early as the 1980s (e.g., St. John 1987 for Spanish scientists). Some of the questions discussed in these studies are still relevant today, such as the uses of the first and second language in academic writing and publishing (Pérez-Llantada, Plo, and Ferguson 2011) or whether and how strate-

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gies of novices in research differ from those employed by more established researchers (e.g., Gosden 1996). Contrary to most existing studies which focus on one discipline (e.g., Cheung 2010 for applied linguistics) or one level of academic experience (e.g., Dong 1998) this paper tries to reveal which resources are commonly used by multilingual researchers in principally all fields and which may be more specific to certain disciplines or levels of experience. This way, new insights concerning the use of resources in writing and publishing English-language articles can be gained. After the introduction, in which the PEPG project is presented, we provide a discussion of the terms strategies, peers and techniques. The second section illustrates some typical problems encountered by German-speaking researchers when writing in English. This is followed by an analysis of the interviewees’ resource use during the writing, editing and publishing of English-language articles. The article concludes with a summary.

1.1 Publish in English or Perish in German (PEPG)? A research project on academic writing and publishing in English as a foreign language The research questions raised in this paper will be pursued by drawing on an interview corpus that was compiled in the context of the PEPG project. Since categories, concepts and assumptions employed in this project are also relevant for this article it is appropriate to briefly sketch some of the tenets insofar as they have a bearing on this chapter. Given that English has become the most important language for disseminating research results worldwide (e.g., Ammon 2001; Ferguson 2007), many researchers feel that they have to be able to use this language for publication purposes. Although the trend towards English as the dominant language of research publication is usually associated with the natural and engineering sciences, processes of internationalization and the anglicization of research communication are at work in the social sciences and humanities, as well. Hence, publications from all disciplines must usually be written in English if they aim to address an international readership. The PEPG project, which is funded by VolkswagenFoundation¹, deals with the consequences of this development and investi-

1 We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Volkswagen Foundation for funding the “Publish in English or Perish in German?” project as part of their programme “‘Deutsch Plus’ – Wissenschaft ist mehrsprachig/Knowledge is Multilingual”. We also wish to thank our colleague, Michael Bacon, for making improvements on the language and style of this article. Naturally, we are solely responsible for any remaining mistakes and imperfections.

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gates its impact on scientific writing and publishing within the German academic context. Starting from the premise that non-native English scholars have a communicative disadvantage over their native colleagues (cf. Ammon 2003; 2012), the project sets out to identify challenges, problem-solving strategies and attitudes of German researchers and editors when using English for publication purposes. As language policies, writing and publishing traditions and discourse conventions vary between different countries, it is essential to conduct a study that is tailored to the German context and the sociocultural setting surrounding German academics. In addition to that, disciplinary cultures, such as those found within the natural, engineering and social sciences as well as the humanities, are given special attention in this study. Epistemological positions, research methods and attitudes as well as areas of inquiry vary considerably between disciplinary cultures and this makes them an influential factor in investigating academic writing and publishing. A case in point is that of researchers from the natural sciences, where research is focused on laws of nature and where a strong inclination towards experimental research methods can be found. These and other factors have to be taken into consideration when explaining why writing in these disciplines is often conceived of as “a subordinated activity, following the ‘real’ work” (Lehnen 2009: 281, our translation; cf. also Becher 1994). In contrast, writing in the humanities seems to be perceived as central for knowledge creation. These examples underline the importance of disciplinary cultures in academic writing and publishing, which is why they are systematically considered throughout the project. Against this background, the PEPG project addresses the following research questions: – What problems and obstacles do non-native researchers encounter in their preparation of research articles in English? – What resources do they deploy in order to overcome these problems? – How does immersion in a disciplinary culture influence the attitudes of researchers towards English and German as scientific languages? – On the basis of the research results, what recommendations can be made for the use of English and German in academia, in particular with regard to academic writing and publishing? In order to answer these questions, 36 semi-structured interviews were conducted with German-speaking researchers from several universities in Germany. 12 of these are from a wide range of disciplines, the other 24 are “subject-specific”, i.e., six each from the field of biology, mechanical engineering, German linguistics and history. From the six researchers in each of these four fields, there were two on the doctoral level, two were doing postdoctoral work and two were tenured

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professors. This “socialization-sensitive” data collection reflects the diverse positions researchers at different career levels occupy in their discourse communities (e.g., novices or experts) and the possibility that this position may affect their attitudes and practices. Moreover, it was required of participants to have had published at least one article in English. Although individual language learning backgrounds cannot be reported here, it can be stated that all researchers had studied English at school and most continued some form of English language learning (e.g., university language courses, stays abroad, reading scientific literature) after that. Complementing corpus-linguistic or genre-analytical methods, which largely focus on linguistic aspects of published texts, interview studies allow for the description and reconstruction of (implicit) social practices, attitudes and professional identities. This is why they are a valuable method for analysing the significance of German and English as academic languages and for laying open the potential disadvantages experienced by non-native users of English. Differences concerning the use of resources not only exist between the two major groups of native and non-native English-speaking authors, but also within the group of non-native speakers of English.² Among this group, the use of strategies, peers and techniques may vary considerably. It is for this very reason that, where applicable, the interviewees are differentiated with regard to their discipline and career levels. Many existing studies on writing and publishing strategies (e.g., Parkhurst 1990; Shaw 1991) mainly deal with science disciplines such as natural and engineering sciences. It is usually assumed that these disciplines are more globally oriented than others (Okamura 2006: 70). This may well be, as international visibility plays an important role in these disciplines, but in our interview corpus humanities scholars from German linguistics and history also showed an increasingly international orientation in their research practices, thus representing a valuable addition to the disciplinary canon under investigation.

1.2 Approaching the concepts of strategy, peer and technique The concept of strategy is a basic and popular notion in many diverse disciplines, including marketing research, game theory, psychology or biology. For

2 Although native English speakers without a doubt show variation concerning resource use, it also seems convincing that non-native English-speaking scholars in general need to rely more extensively and intensively on these resources. A case in point is the widespread use of dictionaries or (professional) proofreaders.

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the context of this study, Second Language Acquisition (SLA) recommends itself as a first point of departure, since the investigation of (language) learning and communication strategies has long been an established tradition (Cohen and Macaro 2007). Oxford (1990: 17) deserves credit for providing us with an elaborate taxonomy of different learning strategies, among which are different types of cognitive, metacognitive, affective, social, memory and compensation strategies. The following quote illustrates the immense diversity of strategies in research settings: Let us consider Divna, whose goal is to conduct research in chemistry with the help of articles written in the L2. She is a busy professional without a lot of extra time for reading journals, but she needs the information contained in them. To meet the need, she plans a manageable task: finding and reading one L2 article per week on chemistry until she develops a rapid reading rate and is able to identify and understand published research findings. Other strategies to help Divna accomplish this task might include scheduling time each week to search for an article in the library or on the Internet, as well as preparing herself by looking at articles on related topics in her own language. In addition, she could use strategies such as skimming for the main points, reading carefully for supporting details, keeping a notebook for L2 scientific vocabulary, using the dictionary to look up difficult words, guessing the meaning of words from the context, and making a written outline or summary if needed (Oxford 2003: 9–10).

Although this classification allows for a very precise representation of strategy use, it may also be too narrowly focused on the individual, thus leading to the “overlooking” of other potential resources such as peers (or more generally speaking socioacademic resources) or media-based techniques (such as using the internet as mentioned in the above quote) and the role they play in achieving research writing and publishing goals. While a lot of conceptual work has been done on learning and communication strategies in language learning in general (e.g., Rampillon and Zimmermann 1997; Hawkins 1998; Raupach 2009), this does not hold true for theorization on academic writing and publishing. Here, the term strategy is frequently employed without defining it (e.g., Okamura 2006; Flowerdew 1999; Pérez-Llantada, Plo, and Ferguson 2011), possibly due to its widespread use and acceptance. As a first point of reference, Ellis (1994: 295) defines strategy as follows: “In general, the term is used to refer to some form of activity, mental or behavioural, that may occur at a specific stage in the overall process of learning and communicating”. Although this definition stays relatively vague, it contains two important notions: a strategy can refer either to taking action in the real world (i.e., behavioural) or to cognitive or affective processes involved in communicating and learning (i.e., mental). If one looks at definitions pertaining more specifically to writing strategies, it becomes clear that these are sometimes linguistically-

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oriented and focus on solving writing problems in the area of syntax, morphology and lexis (for such an approach see, e.g., Mlakar Gračner 2011). Linguistic conceptions of strategies put emphasis on the textual dimensions of writing. However, academic writing and publishing in most contexts cannot only be conceived of as an individual linguistic activity. Rather, it is also a social process characterized by cooperation and communication (Lei 2008: 219), which is why it seems important to also consider “socioacademic” or communication-oriented dimensions of strategies as well as the use of technological means for academic writing and publishing. As Hyland (2009: 65) puts it: “[E]xperiences, including those in the academy, all help to shape our values and ideas and how we express these and realize our social roles”. It is for this reason that this paper embraces the concept of resources – an umbrella term for the notions of strategies, peers and techniques. These three forms of resources exhibit a certain overlap (i.e., some strategies involve the inclusion of peers³), but they allow for a focus on the agents, such as individual writers or academic peers, as well as on (technologically-based) techniques involved in academic writing and publishing. Especially against the background of widespread academic cooperation and media use it seems useful to include these dimensions in the analysis of how non-native English-speaking researchers go about accomplishing the writing task. Hence, the notion of resources helps to go beyond limiting the focus of strategies on the individual researcher. Figure 1 illustrates the three types of resources and their overlap. At the same time this distinction permits us to distinguish between complex, long-term oriented strategic actions (e.g., tailoring a text to a certain audience) and locally and temporally more limited activities (i.e., techniques) such as the use of a bilingual online dictionary. This theoretical distinction is best illustrated by looking at an example from an interview with a German-speaking scholar, who is describing the correction of a manuscript (see Figure 2). The example illustrates that the use of resources such as correction strategies goes beyond the individual and often involves both technological resources (i.e., the track-changes function provided in word processing software to annotate and trace changes made to an existing text) and peers (here a proofreader). Moreover, this tripartite distinction may be pedagogically relevant. Whereas techniques can be relatively easily learnt and taught, the adequate employment of socioacademic resources and writing and publication strategies is dependent on a variety of factors. Moreover, adopting these resources appropriately usually

3 It is not uncommon to consider the reliance on peers as one type of social strategy (cf. Ellis 1994).

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Fig. 1. Defining resources – strategies, peers and techniques.

Fig. 2. An example interview excerpt annotated for strategies, peers and techniques

requires a certain level of academic experience, which develops in the course of an academic career and often is a result of having received certain feedback (e.g., through peer review). Instead of learning them through direct instruction, it is more likely that they can be “taught” by raising awareness of research as a social process.

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2 Point of departure: perceived problems of German-speaking researchers Since resources are usually employed in response to challenges that researchers face, the problems interviewees perceive (cf. Figure 3) are a good starting point to find out in which areas the participants saw obstacles in writing and publishing in English. Assuming that non-native English-speaking researchers on average possess lower levels of English language competence than native English counterparts do, it is likely that they need to compensate for this “handicap” when writing in English. However, when we refer to “problems” in this section we take the term as an indication of what was most likely to create some difficulty for the interviewees. It is not suggested, though, that all researchers in the interview corpus considered these hindrances to be insurmountable or that they kept them from eventually publishing their research. As is shown in Figure 3, the 36 interviewees reported 51 problems when writing and publishing in English. For those, the researchers had to find solutions, for example in the form of coping-strategies or more generally through the use of resources.⁴ The first area of complication in Figure 3 relates to language (35 % or 19 responses) and represents the quantitatively biggest group. Of the 19 responses 12 re-

Fig. 3. Problems interviewees perceived when writing in English (36 interviewees; 51 problems named in total).

4 It is worth noting that problems the researchers consider as “solved” may not be mentioned here anymore, and that the resources used to tackle these problems may also not be mentioned in consequence.

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late to difficulties in phrasing English and 7 more specifically pertain to a grammatical or lexical area. This result is in line with many other studies (e.g., Okamura 2006; Dong 1998; Flowerdew 1999) in which lexical items in the foreign language, including subject-specific collocations, were established as a recurrent challenge for non-native English-speaking researchers. The second item refers to questions regarding the actual publication process of manuscripts (22 % or 12 responses) after having finished writing them. Most of the responses in this item problematize the peer review procedure, for example stating that reviewers’ demands were perceived as being too extensive. The third item, problems relating to content (16 % or 9 responses), refers mostly to issues such as not having incorporated enough literature in an article or being on the wrong track with a certain idea. In the item organisation (16 % or 9 responses), lack of time was a typical worry mentioned by the interviewees. It should be added here that native speakers of English may experience similar challenges regarding the items of publication, content and organization, since these are not necessarily very closely tied up with language. However, it can be assumed that these issues can be an additional obstacle when having to deal with a foreign language. The last item, other fields (11 % or 6 responses), relates to concerns such as paying for translation or proofreading services. In summary, it seems that the interviewees predominantly mentioned problems in relation to language and publishing, for which they had to find suitable ways of coping if they wanted to publish in English. In contrast to this, at least 7 interviewees reported that they needed less “effort” when working on an article in their L1.⁵ Some interviewees went on to explain what made writing in German different, e.g., not having to use dictionaries as often or not having to pay so much attention to language issues or proofreading. Although this can certainly not be said for all interviewees, one researcher summarized his perception as follows: “In German it’s . . . easy. I just type it up” (I 2, biology). In the next section, we will turn to some cases of resource use discovered in the interview data.

3 Interviewees’ resource use In sections 3.1–3.3 the results found in the interviews regarding resource use will be discussed. To make a more systematic treatment of these data possible, we de-

5 It has to be kept in mind that some of the interviewees, especially biologists and mechanical engineers, publish their research in English only and therefore can hardly make comparisons with writing in German.

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cided to deal with the resources according to the phases in which they are predominantly drawn upon. So, in Section 3.1 we will look at resources drawn upon during writing, Section 3.2 will focus on editing and revising and Section 3.3 deals with resources that come into play during the publication phase. Despite this rather “linear” arrangement, it has to be kept in mind that writing and publishing are iterative and recursive processes (Flower and Hayes 1981) and that the phases distinguished here can only serve as idealized approximations of the actual writing and publication phases.

3.1 During writing As was already pointed out in section 2, interviewees stated that they often find themselves in situations where they cannot express themselves adequately when writing academic texts (cf. item 1 in Figure 3) (for further non-Anglophone contexts cf. e.g., Flowerdew 2007; Pérez-Llantada, Plo, Ferguson 2011). While this may also happen in native language writing, it seems that the intensity and frequency with which this happens when working in a foreign language is disproportionately higher. To shed more light on how German researchers cope with this challenge, the language resources they most commonly use will be presented and discussed in this section (see Figure 4).

Fig. 4. Resources the interviewees reported using for writing English-language articles (includes multiple answers)

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We will limit ourselves to discussing the first four items in Figure 4 – both online and paper dictionaries, disciplinary publications and googling – since they can be considered common techniques among the interviewed group of researchers. Moreover, they are relatively specific in that they are not necessarily employed by native speakers of English, or at least not to the same extent.

3.1.1 Dictionaries and Google The use of dictionaries is the most frequent answer among the interviewees (29 responses). As such, this is not very surprising and has also been found in other studies (e.g., Okamura 2006). Given the high degree of anglicization and even scientific monolingualism in some of the disciplines in the corpus – almost 100 % of scientific literature is read and published in English in biology – it seems interesting that all the interviewees except one reported using a bilingual dictionary (mainly LEO, but also dict.cc or Beolingus⁶). This means that almost 80 % of the 36 researchers surveyed use a lexical resource that enables them to build on their knowledge of German. This finding is thus a first sign of the importance of German as a resource in writing English-language articles even in academic environments that are often considered to be dominated by English. It also indicates that we should further investigate how German and English, or any national language of science for that matter, interact in academic writing and publishing. Paper-based dictionaries still seem to be used by some interviewees (10 responses), albeit to a lesser extent. This was particularly the case when the vocabulary in question was specialized subject-specific terminology that may not necessarily be found in general dictionaries. Less widespread than the use of dictionaries is the use of Google as a corpus. Although 8 interviewees mentioned using Google, only 6 of those employed it to test English phrases for their prevalence and acceptance (the two others used the search engine to find information on how to write an article). The following two quotes illustrate the application of Google as a verification technique: A real problem is the adverb position with verbs: “I always think”, “I think always” or something like this. This would be (. . . ) I’m sometimes not sure what to do. So I google it. I google it and check how often the phrase comes up. (I 27, German linguistics) By the way, [. . . ] I work with Google to check phrases: what can you say, what can’t you say. (I 8, political science)

6 The most popular dictionary the interviewees used was the bilingual LEO dictionary (“Link Everything Online”; http://dict.leo.org/ende/index_de.html).

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The two interviewees use Google results to establish whether the phrase in question has already been employed in other texts. There were only few interviewees who put Google to use in an even more efficient fashion, i.e., by equalling out the “weaknesses” of the commonly used bilingual dictionaries, such as missing information on collocations, or by considering the origin of Google hits in addition to their mere number of occurrences: Well, a dictionary such as LEO is always open. [...] But sometimes you aren’t sure in which context you can use a word. Then I try to google that, whether you can somehow find example passages in other texts. (I 9, computer science). [A]nd I have often noticed that I tend to use Denglish⁷, that certain phrases can only be found on German-speaking websites. (I 6, economics)

Considering that only 6 interviewees stated using an internet search engine to improve their own manuscripts suggests that teaching the judicious utilization of these techniques in writing courses and workshops could be intensified. It also has to be pointed out that more “advanced” search options, such as conducting a wildcard search or looking for information on Google Books to search only in officially published books have not been described by any of the interviewees. The same holds true for using academically-oriented corpora such as the COCA academic (Corpus of Contemporary American English, cf. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/), which allow for a range of linguistic search options that regular search engines do not offer (see Davies 2013 for a comparison of Google and COCA as corpora). 3.1.1 Existing publications as a resource in subject and language learning Reading English-language publications is a common activity for all participants in the four disciplinary discourses surveyed and can be considered a fundamental means of academic socialization. While Okamura (2006: 73) categorizes activities such as reading an article as “subject-oriented strategies” (contrary to “languageoriented strategies”), this view is probably too reductionist, since a clear separation of language and subject is usually not possible and disciplinary practices are always reflected in language practices (cf. Hyland 2013). This view is also supported by 16 of the 36 interviewees who stated that they acquired their English language competence by reading English-language articles, representing the third

7 Denglish or, in German, “Denglisch” (“Deutsch + Englisch”) usually refers to the use of a form of English with strong influences from German lexis or syntax. For studies on similar phenomena in other languages such as Portuguese cf. Bennett (2010).

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most frequent answer after learning English at school and through stays abroad. It is also reflected in the use of resources, where 11 participants (cf. Figure 4 above) mentioned using articles to learn the special language, genre conventions and typical argumentation structures of their discipline. In this respect, it seems particularly striking that 5 out of 6 biologists identified existing publications as a language learning resource, but only 2 mechanical engineers, 1 linguist and no historian mentioned this (the remaining three interviewees were from other disciplines). The following quotes illustrate that learning disciplinary language from published articles seems to be a common practice for German researchers: The only thing that helps, well, is to really read the usual English literature until you have developed a certain feeling for how to actually put things into words and which terminology to use. (I 25, mechanical engineering) I have the feeling that my phrases, partially through reading English articles, somehow have become clearer and also more scientific, not as student-like anymore. (I 31, German linguistics) Well, for one thing, when you are well-versed in a certain topic, you are familiar with certain formulations, you know what pops up repeatedly. There are certain key words that come up again and again and you can basically adopt those. (I 6, economics)

As seems quite obvious from the quotations, the interviewed researchers read English-language articles not only as a subject-oriented resource but, by some form of “reading-immersion”, adopt and make use of the expressions they find there, although not always consciously. As mentioned above, it is first and foremost the biologists who state that they go beyond the implicit learning of disciplinary language through reading English publications by directly copying language and recycling it in their own work. Possibly due to the very rigid and formulaic nature of research articles in biology, there is a widespread practice of “language re-use” (Flowerdew 2007: 19). This ranged from the copying of complete sentences from existing papers and simply replacing numbers or values to systematically collecting phrases which can later serve as a ‘language pool’⁸ when writing articles: You become better and faster of course, because you have these sentence templates. Initially, for my first poster presentation I needed two weeks – now I write one in three days. (I 21, biology, doctoral student)

8 It is surprising that other resources, such as the Academic Phrasebank from the University of Manchester (http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk) for academic writing or UniComm Englisch (http://www.mumis-unicomm.de/english/) for academic communication in general, are largely unknown to the interviewees or were at least not mentioned by them.

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Once you’ve read enough papers, you know there is a fixed term and [. . . ] you simply adopt it, right? Or there is one sentence written there. This sentence must be there, because [the experiment] was conducted like this [. . . ]. So you just copy what’s written there, and that’s it. (I 2, biology, postdoctoral researcher) I’ve got a collection of phrases, taken out of their context, that pop up in all papers, which help me out when I can’t come up with something. (I 19, biology, professor)

The systematic re-use of formulaic language hints at the inextricable link of language and content in science, which is underpinned by the learning experiences the interviewees describe in detail above. It is also striking that this practice does not seem to be linked to either novice or expert status and that, in our corpus, biologists at all career levels employed some form of language re-use. It seems understandable to borrow language that is considered to convey relevant disciplinary content and to employ it for one’s own language production. As content in research communication is encoded in language, it cannot be separated from the “surface forms” visible in the texts of a given discipline. Against this background, learning disciplinary content generally cannot be accomplished without “borrowing” generally accepted language forms.⁹ This is why the plagiarism debate has to be understood as partly influenced by disciplinary values and traditions: for instance, in biology practices such as copying sentence fragments are already considered normal during university studies and are partially transmitted systematically (cf. Lehnen 2009), whereas in the humanities there is a tendency to consider such practices as intellectual theft. Whether one condones copying practices or not, the question necessarily arises as to how both natives and non-natives are supposed to learn subject-specific language if not by imitating or “copying”, be it consciously or unconsciously. There is certainly a case for teaching academic novices how to incorporate language forms “legitimately”, i.e., by respecting intellectual property and creativity but also by providing suitable “language moulds” for recurrent ideas and propositions.

3.1.2 Freewriting-like strategies In another writing strategy that could be identified from the interviewees’ descriptions, the writing process was divided into phases of orientation towards content and phases with a focus on language. The interviewees were not asked directly about this strategy but offered this information in other interview contexts, such

9 For some of the dangers involved in blindly accepting existing language and genre patterns see Canagarajah (2002).

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as a description of how they usually go about writing an English-language paper. The approach they described is similar to freewriting in that a first draft is written “without checking every single sentence on style or correctness or anything” (I 18, biology), which was perceived as permitting a focus on what to say first without being interrupted by correction activities. The initial draft will then be reworked to meet the language requirements. Of 4 interviewees (I 12, electronic engineering; I 18, biology; I 20, biology; I 31, German linguistics) who used this strategy, only one described a bilingual strategy where German words and sentence fragments were inserted in English-language texts and later replaced with the adequate English terms: Well, sometimes I write in a mixture of English and German [...] my notes are sometimes really mixed-up. [...] Later on you think about how to phrase it correctly, but it’s about getting my thoughts on paper first. (I 20, biology)

It is somewhat striking that of the 4 interviewees who were using a freewritinglike strategy three were doctoral students. This could mean that more experienced researchers may depend less on separating these two phases, but there is also a professor of biology who seems to prefer this style of writing: I write directly in English. I just type it up, without checking whether every phrase is stylistically ok or concerning correctness or whatsoever, that would be a second, third, fourth, fifth step, to refine and improve again and again. (I 18, biology)

Since this sort of strategy did not figure among the questions asked in the interviews, it seems possible that dividing the writing phase up into phases of contentorientation and orientation to more “formal” matters could be more widespread than the four instances in the interview corpus suggest. While this strategy is wellknown in creative writing contexts, it may also be important for multilingual researchers as a coping strategy to deal with the additional foreign language element. In the next section, we will turn to how the interviewees employ resources in the revision stage of writing an English-language article.

3.2 During revision Revising and editing a manuscript are important parts of academic writing and have been given some attention in writing research (e.g., Lillis and Curry 2006; Bisaillon 2007; Willey and Tanimoto 2013). Reformulating and correcting already take up a lot of time in the L1; so it is obvious that these phases have to be given special attention when writing in a foreign language.

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3.2.1 Proofreaders of manuscripts Possibly the most important resource during the revision and editing of manuscripts is help from other researchers or proofreaders (or, more generally, peers). This importance has been recognized by scholars in academic writing research: [I]n addition to named authors, successful English-medium academic text production is influenced by a significant number of others—‘literacy brokers,’ such as editors, reviewers, academic peers, and English-speaking friends and colleagues, who mediate text production in a number of ways. (Lillis and Curry 2006: 4)

If one transfers the notion of literacy brokers to this study by focusing on the socioacademic resources interviewees describe, it becomes evident that they heavily rely on peers in their writing and publication processes (Figure 5).

Fig. 5. Interviewees’ responses to the question “Who corrects English-language manuscripts?”

Before discussing each individual item, it should be pointed out that there is a certain overlap in Figure 5, as the item “both native and non-native speakers of English” suggests. This, however, is not a methodological shortcoming but rather a first indication that some interviewees (9 to be precise) do not exclusively rely on native or non-native speakers of English to correct their manuscripts, but instead try to gain access to both types of proofreaders. It is also striking in this respect that only two interviewees did not mention any proofreaders (I 17, sociology; I 19, biology) involved in the editing of their English-language articles. In other words, for almost all interviewees, including a revision phase where they get feedback from peers is essential in writing English-language articles and often extensive, too: “Usually one goes through 15, 10 to 15 correction steps” (I 2, biology).

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The German researchers, regardless of their career level, most frequently relied on non-native English-speaking proofreaders (26 responses), as is shown in Figure 5. These proofreaders were usually colleagues or co-authors and thus subject experts and peers. In addition, other approaches of proofreading, some of them discipline-specific, have been described by the interviewees. One such model can commonly be found in engineering disciplines, where often only one person proofreads a manuscript before it is submitted to the publication outlet, this person being the co-author (I 12, electronic engineering; I 13, electronic engineering; I 36, mechanical engineering). Sometimes, the manuscript has to be given to the director of the institute for approval (e.g., I 7, materials science; I 11, automation engineering), thus involving a third person. Of the 26 interviewees who enlist help with corrections from non-native English-speaking peers, 17 exclusively use non-natives. This would suggest that consulting with native Englishspeaking proofreaders for English-language publications is either considered unnecessary or for some reason is not feasible (e.g., financial costs, problems finding qualified proofreaders). Concerning the comparison of the four disciplines, it can be stated that almost all researchers across the disciplines studied here make use of non-native English-speaking proofreaders. The only exception to this is history, where only three out of six researchers used non-natives, but instead relied more heavily on native English speakers. This result has to be seen in connection with the next item in Figure 5, i.e., manuscript editing conducted by native speakers of English (17 responses). It is interesting in this respect that all six historians report that they use the services of native English speakers; three of them even exclusively turn to natives for their corrections. There could be several reasons for this strong orientation towards native-speakers of English (compared to the other subjects – history 6/6 interviewees, biology 2/6, mechanical engineering 2/6, German linguistics 4/6): One explanation could lie in the higher language demands of historical papers, as the language used in these papers is closer to the common language than in experimental biology for example (cf. Gnutzmann and Rabe 2014), therefore requiring a native-like grasp of English writing norms. Another might have to do with the strong orientation of historians towards Inner Circle (Kachru 1985) anglophone journals, which further suggests a leaning towards native English-speaking discourse and language norms (cf. Dong 1998: 380 for non-US doctoral students and their preference for native English-speaking proofreaders). German linguists, although not as extreme as historians, also seem to trust in native English speakers as proofreaders more often than interviewees in the natural or engineering sciences. This could have to do with a certain reverence for native speakers as the authentic guardians of “correct” language. However, it also stands in contrast to other utterances made by German linguists:

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We linguists are rather modest people when it comes to language matters. [. . . ] And the style or rhetoric in which results are published is not of major interest in linguistics. We are mostly an empirical-analytical science – there is a problem and one wants to analyse it and our colleagues do it the same way. (I 32, German linguistics)

While the interviewees regularly fell back on non-native speakers of English when publishing in English, this seems to be somewhat different for native Englishspeaking proofreaders, as can be seen in Table 1 below. It further shows how often or under which conditions native English proofreaders were employed. Table 1. Overview of subcategories for the item “native English speakers” (NES) in Figure 5. Responses (of 17)

Subcategory

6 4 3 2 2

Uses NES regularly Uses NES occasionally Reason: importance of publication Reason: co-author is NES Reason: NES proofreading provided by the journal

Of the 17 interviewees who stated that they made use of native speakers of English, only six said that they did so regularly. An important factor in this respect seems to be the availability of qualified native speakers of English, because all six interviewees in this group had reported having a continued, longer-lasting proofreading “relationship” with a native speaker, which they considered an advantage for their publishing activity in English. 4 interviewees said they occasionally used proofreading services provided by native speakers of English. The interviewees did not elaborate as to why these services were only used occasionally, but it could be assumed that high costs and availability may also play a role here. Not having access to native English-speaking proofreaders, contrary to finding proofreaders in German, seems to be a problem for at least some interviewed researchers: [T]he problem I have when I write in English is that I can’t give it [the manuscript] to as many people who critically proofread it, contrary to when I write something in German. When I have a problem with something like this in German, I can more easily give it to someone to look at it and help me if I get stuck somehow. (I 29, history)

Beside these factors, Table 1 provides some conditions for drawing on native English speaking proofreading: 3 interviewees said the decision depended on the importance of a paper, and only papers felt to be very important were considered to require native English proofreading. 2 interviewees only relied on help from

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native English speakers if they happened to be co-authors at the same time, and 2 more interviewees said they only made use of these services when they were provided by the journal. All in all, only 8 out of 34 interviewees made exclusive use of native Englishspeaking proofreaders when revising their manuscripts. This allows for several interpretations: the first is that besides factors already known such as high costs and availability, authors’ “linguistic dependency” may be another reason. It seems that, especially in the disciplines of biology and mechanical engineering, interviewees perceived of these services as a “luxury” and sometimes even as superfluous, but not as an imperative to publish their work successfully. Other factors could be the interviewees’ improved English language competence as well as the efficient use of available resources. Additionally, the rigid genre and language patterns found in research articles in experimentally-oriented disciplines may have an effect on the effort needed during proofreading (cf. Gnutzmann and Rabe 2014). This may also have an effect on the attitude shared by many interviewees in the natural and engineering sciences, i.e., that “exchanging information” is considered to be more important than reaching a high level of language correctness (such as native English-speaking proofreading implicitly promises): It’s not about preserving the [German] language, but about exchanging information, which works best in English. (I 20, biology) Usually it’s about publishing content that has been gathered in the context of a research project. And if it is from a bad university in England, their publication is unlikely to be preferred because they write better English. (I 12, electronic engineering)

A subset of the two groups discussed above are those interviewees who rely on both native as well as non-native speakers of English (9 responses) to proofread their articles. This seems to be the case especially in history (3/6 interviewees) and German linguistics (3/6 interviewees). For instance, some of the interviewees stated that they had non-native speakers comment on their manuscripts first and then had a native speaker proofread the paper with a focus mainly on language issues (I 22, I 26, I 28, all history). This hints at the possibility that in these cases there may well be a complementary distribution of proofreading. The non-natives are preferred with respect to commenting on “disciplinary issues” (for which they were seen as being competent), whereas the native speakers of English were considered necessary to additionally improve the language and intelligibility of an article. The small group of other proof readers (5 responses) is different from the previous groups in that these could be considered what Willey and Tanimoto (2013) call convenience editors. In other words, a person one has privileged access to

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because of personal relationships is doing the proofreading. In the case of this study, four of the proofreaders in this group were partners of interviewees, who for instance worked as teachers of English and thus were considered helpful in improving the manuscript.

3.2.2 Peers as a valuable literacy resource As has already become clear from the data above, peers can be a valuable resource when writing and publishing in English. However, there are some cases in the interview corpus where single peers are so vital to the publication process that they merit presentation here. In the first example, one employee who studied for a year in the US fulfills the function of “language broker” (Lillis and Curry 2006) for a whole institute: Right now most articles land on {Mr. X’s} table. He needs to check them, because his English is the ‘freshest’. It is of course a different starting point to have spent a whole year in an English-speaking country, moreover working scientifically. This is certainly an invaluable advantage the other employees necessarily have to make use of. (I 7, materials science)

This means that most of the English-language manuscripts in this institute are proofread and edited by one person, most likely with a higher level of subject language competence in English than his co-workers. This also entails (the interviewee explicitly stated this) that the institute usually does not make use of external native English-speaking proofreaders, and in a further abstraction, that even researchers less competent in English may be able to get published owing to privileged access to competent peers. A similar case was found in our group of mechanical engineers, where one employee is doing the language brokering for her superior, a professor of mechanical engineering: Well, she [the employee] is an engineer and she just speaks, well her mother tongue is Arabic, she speaks German very well and has grown up in the US. So she is certainly not a native speaker, but I can actually always rely on [her corrections] being appropriate. (I 14, mechanical engineering)

It should be added that it is probably not the language skills alone that make these employees so valuable for other researchers, but rather how they combine both subject and English-language competences.

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3.3 During publication The themes dealt with in this section relate to the phase that comes after the actual creation of the manuscript. It focuses on strategies some of the interviewees use to get feedback on their articles or to find a suitable publication outlet. Whereas they do not relate directly to writing as such, they are an essential part of any research dissemination.

3.3.1 Submitting an article without proofreading One strategy two interviewees described was to submit their manuscripts to a journal without having had them proofread beforehand: Ah yes, when I submit an article for the first time I do not have it proofread. You get reviewed and the paper is accepted or rejected, and if it is accepted you always have to revise it. Only once the content revision is completed do I have it proofread. Because it’s not worth doing this for each new version. And my English is good enough not to get rejected because of it [. . . ]. (I 3, German linguistics) Another option is that I just submit it [the manuscript] to a journal, knowing that it won’t be published as it is. Simply to get some feedback from people who are very far away from this [i.e., my research], who know about the subject, but who you don’t know personally and who will give you truthful comments. (I 34, German linguistics)

Both interviewees seem to embrace this strategy to their advantage, as they argue in the interviews. While the first interviewee chooses this strategy because he or she thinks that the financial or time effort is not justified considering their English competence, the second interviewee uses this strategy to receive “unfeigned” feedback on the value the manuscript has for other subject specialists. A third interviewee is more critical of this strategy and emphasizes its possible downsides: A big problem is all those new revision versions. To get into a journal, language quality plays an important role in the social sciences, because we are a text-based science. I have experienced this in England [. . . ]. They were publishing an English-language journal there and I noticed that my colleagues, who were reviewing for this journal, were rejecting articles by Germans because their English wasn’t good enough, arguing that they didn’t make a reasonable effort. What I learned from that is that you have a problem if you don’t have it proofread by a native speaker before submitting, because even with good content the reviewers might reject it. The problem is that there is always a new version after the review and there you need a native speaker again, which makes the whole thing costly. (I 8, political science)

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The interviewee points out that using this strategy is contingent on several factors and may well lead to being rejected in certain cases. Looking at these results from a pedagogical point of view highlights the problem that strategies cannot always simply be taught in the form of prescriptive recipes. While some strategies may work well for some researchers, this may not be the case for others. 3.3.2 Placing a publication Finding a suitable publication outlet represents a major decision in the publishing process. There seem to be several ways of achieving this, partially depending on the discipline. A case in point is that of the biologists in the corpus (and other natural scientists such as I 10, chemistry), for whom the impact factor – a measurement of how often “average” articles from a journal get cited – is considered an important criterion for selecting an appropriate journal: It’s not about publications as such, it’s about the impact factor of a given journal, it’s about – and everybody is aware of this – it’s about citation frequency, when you have a nice story. (2) Publication as such is nothing. It’s about where you publish and how often you get cited. (I 19, biology)

In mechanical engineering, too, the impact factor, as well as acceptance rates at conferences, are of great importance: In our field conferences are very important. But a conference usually is peer-reviewed and the conference proceedings are published online afterwards, so that a publication there is considered to be fully-fledged. Of course the impact and the reputation of journal articles are higher, yes, but usually you cannot successfully place a journal article if you haven’t enough publications in conference-proceedings in the field before, right? That’s how it is. And the different conferences vary in terms of reputation and there are conferences with an acceptance rate of three percent. (I 36, mechanical engineering)

Another placement “logic” was, for instance, observed in German linguistics, where the search for a suitable journal worked differently: Well, either the most prestigious, well not really the most prestigious [journal], but one where you have the feeling they could still accept it. Yes, or journals, where, because of personal contacts, you know for example that they quickly review submissions. So really, where you have a hunch that this could be a good thing. Well, and then I would go down further. Or, actually have already gone down further. (I 27, German linguistics)

Clearly, publishing also involves making strategic decisions. While this was not found in our corpus, Okamura (2006: 73) pointed out that having an influence on other researchers in the field was another important reason for publishing in a

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certain journal, citing a Japanese scholar: “Well, we had to think about where each research group tends to publish their papers, so we chose this journal because our rival group often publishes their work here, you know; we choose a certain journal to have an impact on them” (Okamura 2006: 73). It can be summarized that most interviewees in biology and some in mechanical engineering seem to be strictly oriented towards a quantitatively measurable instrument, i.e., the impact factor. This, of course, does not mean that other factors, such as being acquainted with an editor, do not play into these choices and that researchers from other fields do not consider the impact factor important.

4 Summary and conclusion In this paper, it has been shown that German researchers, as representatives of non-native speakers of English in the European context, depend on effective resource use during writing, revising and publishing English-language articles. – A clear majority of researchers employ a bilingual online dictionary when writing articles in English, showing that German is still a valuable resource even when writing English-language articles. This is only sometimes complemented by searching the internet to verify the context and the acceptability of language used in these articles. – The practice of “borrowing” language is an established practice in many disciplines. However, only in biology does it seem to be a standard procedure to systematically copy formulaic language from existing publications and then reuse it in English-language articles. – The help of native English speakers is less frequently relied on than proofreading help from peers who are non-native speakers of English. This goes to show that the dependence on native English-language help is not a universal phenomenon for German scholars, but is contingent on a variety of factors such as the perceived necessity or feasibility. – As to non-native speaking peers, it can be concluded that they are a vital part of most publishing projects conducted by our interviewees, sometimes even to the extent that their subject-language skills help several scholars within a department. By making effective use of peers, i.e., team members’ strengths, even researchers who lack the necessary skills in English are able to publish. – Some researchers found it unnecessary to proofread their English-language articles on first submission to a journal. However, this seems to be dependent on the researchers’ language skills and experience in publishing.

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–

Especially in biology, the impact factor was emphasized as the main criterion for choosing a certain journal for publication. This seems to be much less important in other disciplines, where other factors may be more important in determining to which journal an article is sent.

These summarized results show that the extension of the traditional, language learning oriented notion of strategy to include socioacademic or technological resources can be advantageous in that it allows a shift from the individual to the researchers’ social surroundings and their roles in an institutional context. However, some of the limitations associated with the method used in this study should also be mentioned. One obvious point is the nature of self-reported perceptual data, which cannot be taken at face value or “objective”, but rather has to be seen within a framework of the interview as embedded in a communicative situation (cf. Talmy and Richards 2011). The data yielded by interviews therefore needs to be analyzed as situated and contextualized. Furthermore, the resource use described by the interviewees may not be exhaustive (some forms of resource use could simply have been forgotten) or may not necessarily reflect what the interviewees really do in order to get published (talk about practice and actual practice do not always coincide). None the less, there are some potentially far-reaching pedagogical implications that can be drawn from the data: not only can individual strategies become a topic in academic writing courses (how do researchers write and revise articles), but also using techniques proficiently (such as the use of Google to check, for example, the occurrences and frequencies of linguistic constructions) and recruiting peers for proofreading could become part of such courses. Even though there are doubts concerning the teachability of strategies (Hawkins 1998), fostering some awareness of the social embeddedness of academic practice, in the sense of academic language awareness, could be helpful for students and novice researchers alike. It needs to be highlighted in these teaching contexts that research and academic writing are not usually individual endeavours, but are based on cooperation with colleagues, reviewers, proofreaders and others. It is in this light that one could also conclude that publishing success may not always be related to individual language competence.

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References Ammon, Ulrich (ed.). 2001. The dominance of English as a language of science. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ammon, Ulrich. 2003. Global English and the non-native speaker: Overcoming disadvantage. In Humphrey Tonkin & Timothy Reagan (eds.), Language in the 21st century, 23–34. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ammon, Ulrich. 2012. Linguistic inequality and its effects on participation in scientific discourse and on global knowledge accumulation – With a closer look at the problems of the second-rank language communities. Applied Linguistics Review 3(2). 333–355. Becher, Tony. 1994. The significance of disciplinary differences. Studies in Higher Education 19(2). 151–161. Bennett, Karen. 2010. Academic discourse in Portugal: A whole different ballgame? Journal of English for Academic Purposes 9. 21–32. Bisaillon, Jocelyne 2007. Professional editing strategies used by six editors. Written Communication 24(4). 295–322. Canagarajah, Suresh. 2002. Multilingual writers and the academic community: Towards a critical relationship. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 1(1). 29–44. Cheung, Yin Ling. 2010. First publications in refereed English journals: Difficulties, coping strategies, and recommendations for student training. System 38. 134–141. Cohen, Andrew D. & Ernesto Macaro (eds.). 2007. Language learning strategies: Thirty years of research and practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, Mark. 2013. Google Scholar and COCA-Academic: Two very different approaches to examining academic English. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 12(3). 155–165. Dong, Yu Ren. 1998. Non-native graduate students’ thesis/dissertation writing in science: Self-reports by students and their advisors from two US institutions. English for Specific Purposes 17(4). 369–390. Ellis, Rod. 1994. The study of second language acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ferguson, Gibson R. 2007. The global spread of English, scientific communication and ESP: Questions of equity, access and domain loss. Ibérica 13(1). 7–38. Flower, Linda & John R. Hayes. 1981. A cognitive process theory of writing. College Composition and Communication 32(4). 365–387. Flowerdew, John. 1999. Problems in writing for scholarly publication in English: The case of Hong Kong. Journal of Second Language Writing 8(3). 243–264. Flowerdew, John. 2007. The non-Anglophone scholar on the periphery of scholarly publication. In Augusto Carli & Ulrich Ammon (eds.), AILA review: Vol. 20. Linguistic inequality in scientific communication today, 14–27. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Gnutzmann, Claus and Frank Rabe. 2014. “Das ist das Problem, das hinzukriegen, dass es so klingt, als hätt’ es ein Native Speaker geschrieben”. Wissenschaftliches Schreiben und Publizieren in der Fremdsprache Englisch. Fachsprache. International Journal of Specialized Communication 1–2. 31–52. Gosden, Hugh. 1996. Verbal reports of Japanese novices’ research writing practices in English. Journal of Second Language Writing 5(2). 109–128. Hawkins, Roger. 1998. Learning strategies. In Keith Johnson & Helen Johnson (eds.), Encyclopedic dictionary of applied linguistics: A handbook for language teaching, 195–197. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Hyland, Ken. 2009. Academic discourse: English in a global context. London & New York: Continuum. Hyland, Ken. 2013. Writing in the university: Education, knowledge and reputation. Language Teaching 46(1). 53–70. Kachru, Braj B. 1985. Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English language in the outer circle. In Randolph Quirk & Henry G. Widdowson (eds.), English in the world: Teaching and learning the language and literatures, 11–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lehnen, Katrin. 2009. Disziplinenspezifische Schreibprozesse und ihre Didaktik. In Magdalène Lévy-Tödter & Dorothee Meer (eds.), Hochschulkommunikation in der Diskussion, 281–300. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Lei, Xiao. 2008. Exploring a sociocultural approach to writing strategy research: Mediated actions in writing activities. Journal of Second Language Writing 17(4). 217–236. Lillis, Theresa & Mary Jane Curry. 2006. Professional academic writing by multilingual scholars: Interactions with literacy brokers in the production of English-medium texts. Written Communication 23(1). 3–35. Mlakar Gračner, Doris. 2011. Schreibstrategien beim gemeinsamen Verfassen mutter-und fremdsprachlicher Texte (Slowenisch/Deutsch): Eine Fallstudie. Jezikoslovlje 12(2). 229–248. Okamura, Akiko. 2006. Two types of strategies used by Japanese scientists, when writing research articles in English. System 34(1). 68–79. Oxford, Rebecca. 1990. Language learning strategies: What every teacher should know. Boston: Heinle & Heinle. Oxford, Rebecca. 2003. Language learning styles and strategies: An overview. Learning styles & strategies/GALA. 1–25. Parkhurst, Christine. 1990. The composition process of science writers. English for Specific Purposes 9(2). 169–179. Pérez-Llantada, Carmen, Ramón Plo & Gibson R. Ferguson. 2011. “You don’t say what you know, only what you can”: The perceptions and practices of senior Spanish academics regarding research dissemination in English. English for Specific Purposes 30(1). 18–30. Rampillon, Ute & Günther Zimmermann (eds.). 1997. Strategien und Techniken beim Erwerb fremder Sprachen. Ismaning: Hueber. Raupach, Manfred (ed.). 2009. Strategien im Fremdsprachenunterricht (Special issue of Fremdsprachen Lehren und Lernen 38. 3–188). Tübingen: Narr. Shaw, Philip. 1991. Science research students’ composing processes. English for Specific Purposes 10(3). 189–206. St. John, Maggie Jo. 1987. Writing processes of Spanish scientists publishing in English. English for Specific Purposes 6(2). 113–120. Talmy, Steven & Keith Richards. 2011. Theorizing qualitative research interviews in applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics 32. 1–5. Willey, Ian & Kimie Tanimoto. 2013. “Convenience editors” as legitimate participants in the practice of scientific editing: An interview study. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 12(1). 23–32.

Marina Bondi

Language policy in web-mediated scientific knowledge dissemination: A case study of risk communication across genres and languages Abstract: The use of English in knowledge communication has greatly extended its potentialities in the context of the World Wide Web. Language choice becomes a key issue in European agencies in charge of communicating scientific knowledge at national, supranational and international level. The chapter looks at the language policies adopted by one of these agencies and at the strategies implemented to disseminate specialized knowledge through the different genres of its website. The case study proposed is that of EFSA (European Food Safety Authority) and the issue chosen for the case study is that of GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms). The chapter explores the genres constituting the thematic sections of the website – moving from scientific reports to guidance documents to website news and popularizing videos – as well as forms and functions of expressions of ‘risk’ in matters of food safety. The focus is on the interplay between language choice and communicative genres in the dissemination of expert scientific knowledge, where English is the dominant language in the most technical sections and translation into other languages is only involved in the introductory and news sections. A small-scale study of translation issues is presented on the basis of a parallel English-Italian corpus of news. Keywords: English in Europe, genres, language policy, scientific knowledge communication

1 Expert discourse on the web and organizational language policies The use of English as an academic and research language in Europe has greatly extended its potentialities in the context of the World Wide Web. The web is gradually becoming the site where expert knowledge is exchanged and disseminated through websites, blogs, open source materials, etc. How this is affecting language use and communicative practices still needs to be assessed. In a world where knowledge is increasingly central to human life, it is important to pay attention not only to the challenges and opportunities of knowledge dissemination, but also

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to the multilingual dimension of knowledge communication. How do experts convey their specialist knowledge to experts and non-experts? How do they make it relevant to different audiences? What languages do they choose and to what purpose, in multilingual and plurilingual contexts? The present-day dominance of English as the language of international communication has received great attention in the context of studies on academic and scientific communication (Carli and Ammon 2007), often leading to debate on linguistic inequality and disadvantage for the non-native speaker (Ferguson, Pérez-Llantada, and Plo 2011), as well as to the tension between unity and diversity (House 2012) and to how English is shaped by non-native speakers (Mauranen 2012) in academic contexts. Worries about “linguistic imperialism” characterized by “structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages” (Phillipson 1992: 47) have been particularly intense around the dominance of English in academic discourse, described with the metaphor of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, a “powerful carnivore gobbling up the other denizens of the academic linguistic grazing grounds” (Swales 1997: 374). And yet, both descriptive and policy studies have concentrated on academic publications and instructional contexts, paying less attention to the issues raised by the recent upsurge of the web as a major channel for knowledge communication and dissemination to audiences that may include the general non-expert user or experts in other fields. This is an area of much greater variation not only in communicative purposes, but also in language choice. Knowledge dissemination can be best seen as a process of recontextualization (Calsamiglia and Van Dijk 2004), rather than simplification. Questions relating to different degrees of explicitness become central, much in the same way as they come to the forefront in intercultural communication through a lingua franca (Mauranen 2012: 167–200). Communicating knowledge to members of different discourse communities requires “mediation” across knowledge asymmetries (Kastberg 2011) and bridging across discourse communities (Bondi 2015) characterized by different purposes as well as different background knowledge. The reasons why individuals or organizations decide to disseminate the results of research may vary greatly and range from promoting individual or organizational expertise to supporting a specific view point or reinforcing values and expectations. Similarly, readers may have different purposes: acquiring knowledge, confirming views, getting advice, challenging expertise, etc. At institutional level, in particular, there is growing awareness of the importance of adopting appropriate communicative strategies when representing one’s own public function and activity for an international and relatively undefined audience, such as that of the web. A generally widespread awareness of the needs of intercultural communication should be seen side by side with a growing awareness of

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the need to account for the interpretative needs of different kinds of potential readers. The web has become the focus of increasing interest in discourse studies on computer-mediated communication (Herring, Stein, and Virtanen 2013). The notion of literacy has long been extended to the new media (Kress 2003), in explorations of the impact of new technologies on written communication in general (Baron 2000, 2008; O’Halloran 2004), drawing attention not only to the inevitable semiotic complexities of multimodal communication (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001; Bateman 2008), but also to interactivity (Crystal 2001: 18), hypertextuality (Nelson 1980; Landow 1992) and to the process of re-mediation (Bolter and Grusin 1999) or “genre migration” (Garzone 2007: 18). In a genre perspective, however, the web poses a number of interesting questions (see Giltrow and Stein 2009 for an overview). Genre studies focused originally on classes of communicative events sharing communicative purposes and recognized conventions accepted by a discourse community (Swales 1990 and 2004; Bhatia 1993 and 2004). If conventions and predictability have proved particularly useful in computational studies of web genres (Mehler, Sharoff, and Santini 2010), the emphasis on purpose and participant role relationships clearly highlights the problematic nature of web hypertexts, potentially establishing communication with the widest range of participants – at widely diverging levels of expertise – at the same time (Askehave and Nielsen 2004). This extension in the participation framework increases the range of interactive patterns and discursive identities construed in each text. The issue should thus be seen in the light of the tension between generic integrity and generic creativity highlighted by Bhatia (2004: 112–152) in the investigation of the origin of genres and how their web-based representations evolve (e.g., Garzone 2012 on blogs). Early studies on web discourse focused on the impact of the medium on discourse (e.g., Boardman 2005). It is now the time to look more closely into how the extended participatory framework of the web influences both language choice and communicative practices. While early studies tended to generalize from English data, in the context of a largely accepted dominance of English as the language of the web, greater attention has been paid more recently to issues of multilingualism and language choice (e.g., Danet and Herring 2007), not only in multilingual discussion groups, but also in institutional communication on the web (Callahan and Herring 2012). When the Web is used for the dissemination of scientific knowledge and research results, hypertextuality should not only account for different reading purposes, but also for different language and cultural backgrounds. Knowledge needs to be recontextualized for users who speak different languages and come from different knowledge background. By providing a communicative environment that is

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by definition open to a whole range of addressees (or “users”), the web offers excellent material for a study of how individuals or organizations cope with this variety of communicative contexts. The issues involved in websites addressing multilingual communities, however, are still largely underexplored. EU agencies in the field are a case in point: how do they deal with the different language and cultural backgrounds of potential users? It is my contention that language choice is a key element of organizational language policy. It is important to see what languages are chosen for the website and for each individual area and page of the website as part of the general language policy of an organization in different areas of activity. Websites have become a major asset in the external and internal communication activities of public and private organizations. They contribute to disseminating information, as well as to constructing and reinforcing organizational identity before stakeholders. It is important to note, however, that websites can hardly be seen as single genres: they are rather hyper-genres or genre networks, typically comprising a whole set of genres and combining obligatory elements (the homepage), widely spread elements (e.g., FAQs, About us) and genres that may characterize specific types of organizations (e.g., newsroom, on-line shopping) (Bondi 2009: 115). All of these can be analyzed as separate genres, but specific features of their organization can best be illuminated by studying them in the context provided by the website itself (see also Catenaccio 2012 for an overview of the issue). Similarly, the issue of language choice requires a focus on the whole website. Awareness of potentially different language backgrounds does not simply suggest translating discourse into the languages of potential readers, or resorting to a largely shared language, e.g., ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) or EIL (English as an International Language). It suggests paying attention to a language policy for internal and external communication. What I would like to call “organizational language policy” emerges as a consistent set of language choices reflected first of all in monolingual or multilingual policies. Multilingual policies are further defined by what sections are translated into what languages and how key issues are presented differently across different languages and genres within the same website (according to implicit or explicit guidelines for translation). Translating for the Web has indeed become a specific area of research and professional practice, often on the margin of audiovisual translation (Chiaro 2009), and special attention is paid to issues of localization (Esselink 2000; Pym 2011) and internationalization (Yunker 2002; Singh and Pereira 2005), but websites as such are rarely considered as an object of translation studies. A holistic perspective, on the other hand, might be advisable in translation (Nauert 2007). For one thing, there is a problem of translational consistency that of course transcends the limits of the single document. The reader is likely to move freely from one section to the other and to interpret the language used in one section in the light of

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what is found elsewhere in the same website. Furthermore, the choice of a specific language policy for a website is closely linked to an indication of the intended audience and of the stakeholders that are considered to be involved in each section of a website. A clear organizational language policy can contribute to both the informative and the promotional purposes of a website. In terms of its information purposes, the language policy adopted can contribute to the readability of a website and to efficient navigation on the part of intended readers. From a promotional point of view, the language policy adopted contributes to the creation of the organizational identity proposed by the website. What languages are used for what sections will not only determine the range and kind of the potential readers, but also the image created in the mind of even the occasional surfer: does the organization address an international and multilingual audience? Does it pay attention to the different functions a language can have for the individual, including both communication and identity purposes? These are questions that most organizations should face more and more systematically in a context where the web has become the site of key strategic activities. The importance of an organizational language policy becomes even more obvious when tackling European institutions, whose potential audience should be set against the background of a complex network of national, supranational and international constraints. The multilingual policy of the EU, based on the principle of “unity in diversity”, has been deeply influenced by the Enlargement of the Union to Eastern countries (Cosmai 2007), thus moving closer to the risk of an “English-only Europe” (Phillipson 2003). If multilingualism remains a political priority, language choice has come to the forefront of debate, not only because of the now twenty-four official and working languages, but also because of the increasing awareness of the spread of English for academic and research purposes in general. Many of the European agencies implementing EU policies have tasks of a technical, scientific, operational and/or regulatory nature. Their communicative practices provide solid ground for an exploration of the current role of English in institutional communication of scientific knowledge. Matters concerning public health and safety are obviously at the centre of such an exploration, influenced as they are by the increased importance of public opinion and global transparency, with the new media acting as the driving force of change. The rest of the chapter looks at the organizational language policies adopted by one of these agencies and at the strategies adopted to disseminate specialized knowledge through the different genres of its website. The case study proposed is that of EFSA (European Food Safety Authority) and the issue chosen for the case study is that of GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms). The chapter explores the genres constituting the thematic sections of the website – moving from scientific

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reports to guidance documents to website news and popularizing videos – as well as forms and functions of expressions of “risk” in matters of food safety. From the point of view of organizational language policy, the focus is on the interplay between language choice and communicative genres in the dissemination of expert scientific knowledge, where English is the dominant language in the most thematically specialized sections and translation into other languages is only involved in the introductory and news sections. A small-scale study of translation issues is presented on the basis of a parallel English-Italian corpus of news.

2 The present study The area of risk communication is central to the case study chosen. Risk communication as such is becoming an increasingly important area of research (Nohrstedt 2011). Food risk communication in particular is taking up a distinctive role in risk communication (Lfstedt 2006; 876), most probably because of the daily intimate relationship people have with food, as against many other risk factors (Ferreira 2004). The experience of vulnerability always fosters a widespread desire for knowledge and increases the responsibility of institutions whose task it is to communicate risk effectively. This is especially the case in a “post trust” era (Löfstedt 2005) in which the public increasingly places trust in campaign groups and NGOs rather than in governmental authorities. Issues that seem to have a particularly relevant linguistic dimension are those related to transparency and trust (Löfstedt 2006: 872–874), but there is to my knowledge very little work done on mapping the language resources involved in constructing these discursively. The role of quantifiers and expressions of certainty has recently been explored in a psycholinguistic approach to the perception of risk (e.g., Juanchich, Sirota and Butler 2012; Sirota and Juanchich 2012), but when looking at discourse the range and complexities of words in combination seem to call for specific attention. Using materials from the EFSA website, I aim to map: a) language policy: what languages are used in the various versions of the document? What languages are used for the publication of introductory pages, scientific opinions, guidance documents and news? b) generic variation: what are the different functions of risk assessment in different genres? c) language variation: what are the different language resources used to assess and signal risk in the different genres? How are they reflected in the multilingual sections of the website?

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2.1 Background: EFSA EFSA is one of the many decentralized agencies of the EU. Its primary aim is to provide support and expert advice to member states and citizens on issues of food safety. Headquartered in Parma, Italy, EFSA was set up in 2002 as part of a wide-ranging programme to protect consumers and restore confidence after a series of food crises in the 1990s. The agency aims to provide independent scientific advice on the most up-to-date scientific knowledge and is now recognized as the European reference body for risk assessment on food and feed, nutrition, animal health and plant health in all the matters that are regulated by the EU. EFSA works with the help of its scientific panels and keeps regular contact with the national food safety authorities of all member states. The communication of risk is the other central element of its mandate, side by side with risk assessment. The aim is here to bridge the gap between scientific knowledge and the consumer, but its stakeholders also include consumer groups, NGOs and marker operators. Risk communication as such is characterized by a specific communication strategy and specific working groups. Corporate documents include a four-year plan (EFSA’s communication strategy 2010-2013 perspective¹), published in 2009, and communication guidelines (When Food Is Cooking Up a Storm – Proven Recipes for Risk Communications²), published in July 2012. The organization has an Advisory Forum Working Group on Communications (AFCWG) ensuring coherence across the EU and an Advisory Group on Risk Communications (AGRC) providing advice to the Executive Director and publishing minutes of regular meetings as well as special reports.

2.2 Analysing the thematic section on GMOs: procedures The study combined discourse analysis, genre analysis and corpus analysis, looking at both communicative functions and lexico-grammatical distribution. Study of sample lexical elements (making use of Wordsmith Tools, Scott 2008) included attention to phraseology and semantic sequences (Hunston 2008), i.e., sequences of elements that may differ formally but involve the same meanings. The analysis focused on different sets of data and followed three steps. First of all, the general structure of the website and of the thematic section was analyzed with a view to defining the general language policy of the website in terms of language choice. Special attention was paid to the thematic homepage, framing the discourse of

1 http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/scdocs/doc/comm100505-ax1.pdf. 2 http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/corporate/pub/riskcommguidelines.htm.

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scientific reporting and of news reporting with background information and creating links with other areas of the website. The second step of the analysis focused on the role of risk assessment in the generic structure of different types of materials involved (publications and news), using the English version of the website only. This led to a comparative analysis of the language and the strategies used to present the results of risk assessment in the different genres. The emphasis was on characterizing how the results of scientific research are projected in the news section of the website, i.e., the language and the communicative strategies of a genre that is both informative and promotional. The final step of the analysis went back to the language choice question and analyzed translation issues in the small parallel corpus of English-Italian news.

2.3 Data The corpus collected for the purpose included all the “publications” and all the “news” available on the website in the thematic area on GMOs on September 16th 2013. The publications included (Opinions, Statements, Guidance and Technical reports) had been published online between June 2009 and April 2013. The news items had been published online between February 2007 and July 2013. The materials collected were grouped for comparative purposes into two corpora. The Genre Corpus (GMO-GC) included all the scientific documents and the news present in the thematic section, as outlined in Table 1. Table 1. Genre Corpus (GMO-GC).

EFSA Documents (62) EFSA News (38) Total

Tokens

Types

777,102 19,160 796,262

28,186 2,006 28,310

The EFSA Documents section of the corpus comprised all the official documents released by EFSA concerning food safety (e.g., human consumption of genetically modified plants or seeds). These include different types of scientific outputs, ranging from scientific opinions to technical reports. The documents are all instances of English-medium institutional communication as well as scientific discourse. They are produced by multilingual panels of experts and can be classified as forms of expert-to-expert communication, in that the intended addressees are mainly the scientific community and economic agents submitting applications

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for regulated products. These are to be evaluated by EFSA to be authorized in the EU. The EFSA News section includes news items mostly related to updates on new assessments produced. These are often closely related to scientific materials published on the website and provide excellent examples of institutional knowledge dissemination genres. The news items are meant to communicate the main points of the opinions expressed by EFSA on GMOs issues to the widest audience. They act as “trailers” for experts who might then want to go on and read the Opinion document, but they also act as key documents for users who are just interested in checking on the final assessment provided by the Agency and on the issues involved. These are mostly translated into three other languages: French, German and Italian. The GMOs Parallel News Corpus (GMOsPNC) (Table 2) includes all the news that had a translation into Italian (37 out of 38), so as to allow for an analysis of translation strategies. Table 2. GMOs Parallel News Corpus (GMOsPN).

Number of texts Number of words (tokens) Number of types Type/Token ratio

English texts

Italian texts

37 19,064 1,971 10.66

37 21,889 2,800 13.12

3 The analysis 3.1 Language and communication policy The Agency’s slogan “Committed to ensuring that Europe’s food is safe” occupies the key top left corner of the current lay-out of all webpages³, together with the logo of the agency as shown in Figure 1. The image top right in the banner provides implications and connotations characterizing the role of EFSA: the image of the child eating reminds users of the centrality of food safety concerns in everyday life and everyday concerns with the future of our families and society in general. The slogan emphasizes the positive role of EFSA in providing advice that can contribute to improving food safety in Europe. The obvious complementarity of 3 httpp://www.efsa.eu.

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the negative notion of “risk” and the positive notion of “safety” is well recognized in the Agency’s lexis. The aim is specified in the “About EFSA” section in terms of “risk assessment regarding food and feed safety”. The “What we do” area is neatly divided into two pages: “Risk assessment” and “Risk communication”, thus identified as the two main fields of action of the agency. The website is organized into eight directories, listed in the banner menu. These include highly expected sections such as “About EFSA” and “News and events”, as well as sections that are determined by the organizational structure of EFSA (“Panels and Units”), its advising activity and output (“Applications helpdesk”; “Publications”) and its collaborative and consultative activity (“Collaboration”; “Calls and consultation”). Based on the 2009 communications strategy advocating a new thematic approach for outreach (cf. points 19 and 20 of the perspective adopted), the website also includes a thematic section on significant “Topics”. This is organized into (currently 70) thematic areas listed alphabetically (from acrylamide to zoonotic diseases). Each thematic section consists of a page with links to relevant internal and external strategic documents. At the bottom of the page there are links to all updates, news and publications. The lay-out of the section homepage (Figure 1) points to the central text, which provides the framework on the issue by listing basic definitions and general documents. The text is very long and requires a lot of scrolling. Accordingly, the textual structure moves from general to specific, with the information for the very general reader at the beginning, followed by general information for applicants and other stakeholders and, finally, by more specific information on the procedures followed by EFSA in risk assessment and the kind of consultation and collaboration involved. The introductory paragraph provides the definition of GMO. This is followed by a number of sections, each with links to relevant documents. Starting with the EU regulatory framework, the text moves on to EFSA’s role and activities, emphasizing that “EFSA does not authorize GMOs, which is done by the European Commission and Member States in their role as risk managers. EFSA’s role is strictly limited to giving scientific advice” and outlining the role of scientific panels and working groups. The central part of the page provides information of more practical nature relevant to economic agents interested in applying for the necessary assessment of their product/produce. The sections on “Assessment of GMO applications” and “Renewal applications” frame the kind of information that is required in the scientific dossier that should accompany applications. A specific section is devoted to “Guidance documents” that “detail the type of scientific data that applicants must include in GMO applications and outline the risk assessment approach to be applied”.

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Fig. 1. The GMOs section of the EFSA website.

The sections in the lower part of the page provide closer detail on the activity of ESFA in the field of GMOs. Starting from Collaboration with member states, and moving on to detailing the process and methodology of Environmental Risk Assessment & Post-Market Monitoring of GM plants, the final sections are devoted to Safeguard clauses (allowing member states to provisionally prohibit the cultivation or use of a GMO in their territory) and on the Use of antibiotic resistance marker genes in GM plants. The introductory text is accompanied by an introductory video. This is one of a series (Understanding Science) where scientists working at EFSA explain what they do and why, in relation to some of the key thematic sections. The visual structure of the video is typical of instructional materials: the scientist uses visuals on a white board and addresses the audiences directly through greetings, selfpresentation and engagement markers like use of deictics: Hello. My name is Claudia Paoletti. I’m a scientist and I work in EFSA, European Food Safety Authority. I’m here today to talk to you about the work we do on genetically modified organisms and why we do this work. Let’s start from the beginning of the story.

The structure of the “mini-lesson” (3 minute and 48 seconds) follows a pattern that goes from preliminary definitions and classifications – “a GMO is an organism in which the genetic material has been altered in a way that does not occur natu-

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rally”, written on the white board and paraphrased by the scientist – to the example of an insect-resistant plant, which is used to illustrate how EFSA goes about assessing safety through a comparative approach. The final part of the video goes back to the role of EFSA and specifies its role as independent agency collecting information by investigating the scientific literature and producing a document called “scientific opinion” which is then addressed to policy makers: This document contains all the information and the evaluation of the safety of the GM plants. In such respect, EFSA is not in favour, nor against GMOs, because it does purely a scientific work. And its opinion is used then by policy makers, who are the one ultimately responsible for the decision making process and can authorize or not a GM plant on the European market. Thank you.

The video targets at the very general public and tells us more about EFSA as an independent agency than about GMOs or applications for assessment. The emphasis is on the role of EFSA as reviewing research and producing a scientific opinion that summarizes the results in terms of health or environmental risk assessment. The language used is clearly oriented to readers’ “engagement” (deictics, imperatives, questions) and instructional genres, characterized by definitions and exemplification. The language policy enacted by the website is basically in favour of translating only introductory pages and news into the four chosen community languages – French, German, English, Italian – while leaving both scientific opinions and instructional videos in English only. The policy adopted is thus based on genre, rather than audience or general communicative function. One could expect dissemination genres like news and videos to be translated to make the general information available to the widest possible local audience, but videos are found in English only, just like scientific opinions. The instructional nature of the video, the multimodal redundancy of messages and the non-native character of the English spoken make it easy to understand, but probably not really accessible to the widest range of citizens. In both cases, what we have is an example of the use of English as the international language of science, whether addressing experts (as in the opinions) or popularized for the general public (as in the videos). The scientific opinions are produced by multilingual panels as forms of joint review of the literature on the issue raised. The videos are produced by EFSA itself with the help of their own multicultural staff. It is important to notice, however, that the language of scientific opinions is largely standard but typical of public administration, with a lot of the technical and legislative specific lexis of European institutions (Communications directorate, advisory forum, within the remit of ). The language of videos, on the other hand, is not only more informal, but also full of traces of the regional

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accent of the scientist (with a nice range of European accents all over the website) and of the typical phonetic reductions, morphological reductions and types of rephrasing that often characterize English as a Lingua Franca.

3.2 The language of risk assessment across genres EFSA provides an explicit classification of its documents into communicative genres.⁴ The data in our corpus were classified into the categories chosen by the Agency, as shown in Table 3. Table 3. Document types. Document type A. A.1. A.1.1 A.1.2 A.1.3 A.2. A.2.1 A.2.2 A.2.5

EFSA scientific outputs Scientific Opinions of Scientific Committee/Scientific Panel Opinion of the Scientific Committee/Scientific Panel Statement of the Scientific Committee /Scientific Panel Guidance of the Scientific Committee/ Scientific Panel Other scientific output of EFSA Statement of EFSA Guidance of EFSA Scientific Report of EFSA

B. B.1

Supporting publications Technical Report

No.

Total 60

48 4 3 3 1 1

(55)

(5)

2 2

From the point of view of the classification of the Agency, then, the corpus included 55 scientific opinions produced by the scientific committee or by scientific panels, together with more institutional documents, prepared by an EFSA working group and/or by EFSA scientific staff. If the Agency adopts a classification primarily based on authorial identity, other categorizations may be relevant to linguistic analysis. For example, it may be useful to distinguish documents on the basis of their main communicative aim. In terms of communicative aims, the difference between opinions and statements of the scientific committee/scientific panel becomes almost irrelevant: “A Statement of the Scientific Committee or Scientific Panel is a scientific output in the form of a concise document that does not go into the same level of detail as an Opinion”. In both types of documents the

4 http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/riskassessment/scdocdefinitions.htm.

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scientific literature and the data provided are reviewed critically to establish level and nature of risk. In guidance documents, on the other hand, the aim is not to produce a specific risk assessment, but rather a methodological statement about how applications should be made and processed (useful for applicants). The generic structure of opinions can be represented as follows (with optional elements in brackets): 1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 2. 3. 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

Introductory Materials Abstract and keywords (+Acknowledgements) Summary Table of contents (Preamble +) Background Terms of reference (+Legal Context) (+Acknowledgements) The body of the Opinion: Assessment/Opinion/Evaluation Concluding materials (Stakeholder consultations and public consultations) (for guidance documents) Conclusions and recommendations Documentation provided by EFSA References (Appendices and/or Glossary/abbreviations)

The introductory materials are highly standardized. The abstract maintains the typical features of an informative abstract, representing (in the present tense) the key elements of the abstracted text. The summary is more extensive and reports narratively (generally in the past tense) the sequence of events leading up to and including the assessment, with a synthesis of the conclusions and recommendations. The background move provides the facts that led up to the request for an assessment, whereas the terms of reference specify the essential elements of the mandate. The Assessment/Opinion/Evaluation move constitutes the body of the text and has a recursive structure listing subtopics, all with their specific introductions, background sections and conclusion sections. The structure varies in length and articulation. Sections usually start from data provided in previous opinions or applications and move on to a critical survey of the literature, to reach a conclusion on the implications for risk assessment. The concluding materials synthesize the most interesting elements from the point of view of risk assessment, providing the official conclusions and recommendations. Most of the materials that follow the conclusions are simply evidence of the data and literature available to support the assessment.

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The guidelines provided by EFSA for risk communication focus on factors impacting on the level and type of communication. The level of risk, for example, is classified into none or negligible/ low/ medium/ high/ unknown. Other factors are accompanied by a checklist of questions to be asked: what is the hazard? What do we know about the related risk? Have scientists already performed a risk assessment?, etc. The guidelines start with the terminological distinction between hazard and risk – [. . . ] a hazard stems from the ability of an organism or substance to cause an adverse effect. Risk, by comparison, is the likelihood that such adverse effects will occur taking into account possible exposure to the hazard in question (When Food Is Cooking Up a Storm: 13). No attempt is made, however, to include more specific guidelines on how to achieve clarity or consensus in the value to be attributed to expressions of risk probability. There is great terminological variation even in the definition of the key activity of the Agency. The area of meaning covered by words such as assessment/evaluation/opinion is a case in point. In the classification of documents above, the word opinion is used both as hyperonym and as hyponym, referring in the first case to all documents expressing the position of the Scientific Committee/Scientific Panel, and in the second case to a specific document expressing an evaluation of risk assessment. In the structure of the genre called Opinion, the body of the analysis is called indifferently opinion/assessment/evaluation. The three terms occur with very different frequencies in the corpus of documents and are characterized by different phraseology. Opinion is most typically associated with the document produced by activities of assessment/evaluation. The word is quite frequent – 2,685 occurrences, 17 pttw (per 10,000 words) – and often followed by a specification of the assessing authority (Opinion of the scientific/GMO panel, 13 occurrences in a sample of 200). It is most typically qualified as scientific (87/200) and draft (17/200), thus emphasizing the nature of “document”, final result of a process. Assessment is by far the most frequent of the three words, with its 4,839 occurrences (31 pttw). Its collocational profile shows a very strong collocation with risk (with 91 occurrences of risk assessment in a sample of 200 concordance lines) and adjectives like nutritional (16/200) toxicological (8/200) comparative (6/200) environmental (22/200), categorizing the type of assessment implemented. Evaluation is the least frequent: 1,116 occurrences, 7 pttw. It is very similar in meaning to assessment but shows a slightly different collocational profile: the most frequent collocation is safety evaluation (20/200), whereas other frequent collocates are of a more generic nature: further evaluation (14/200), statistical evaluation (7/200) or evaluation of allergenicity (8/200). The final section of opinion documents is also often denominated Overall risk evaluation and conclusion.

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Evaluation and assessment are thus quasi-synonyms, but evaluation can often be taken to be the final phase of risk assessment – as also shown by the frequency of expressions like evaluation of risk assessment or evaluation of environmental risk assessment – but it may also be used to refer to the general process. In general, the word highlights the interpretative activity of the scientist. On the other hand, assessment is more closely related to the scientific and quantitative analysis of data (the nature of the hazard and the factors determining risk) and seems to highlight the existence of appropriate procedures. The already noticed tendency to collocate differently with the complementary terms risk and safety (risk assessment vs. safety evaluation) seems to be in line with this distinction: there are scientifically agreed procedures for assessing risk, but an evaluation of safety seems to require a more complex and more qualitative interpretative procedure, based on quantitative analysis. Many of the abstracts of the documents in our corpus actually state the purpose of the study with formulae that involve all the three terms, where opinion refers self-referentially to the document produced, evaluation to the interpretation of the data and assessment to the standard analysis of the data. The elements constitute a clear “semantic sequence” (Hunston 2008), as shown in Table 4:

Table 4. Statement of purpose in abstracts. Self-reference

Content identification

Pragmatic function (interpretation)

Scientific procedure (data analysis)

Aim of analysis

This (scientific) opinion

– reports on – is

an evaluation of

a risk assessment for

– Renewal of the authorization – Placing on the market

The fuzzy borders between evaluation and assessment may also depend on the complexity of making a statement on matters of risk and safety, where matters are rarely to be defined in absolute terms and probabilities are always difficult to interpret. The most distinguishing feature of the language of risk assessment is modality in all its forms, i.e., assessments of probability through modal verbs and adjectives or nouns, often in combination with quantifiers and expressions of frequency, e.g., Some of these factors may overestimate and some may under-estimate the likelihood of transfer. An interesting word is the adjective potential (2,394 occurrences,

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15 pttw), ranking as n. 70 in the frequency wordlist (after negatives, should and may). Its collocates show a clear association with the notion of ‘risk’: allergenicity, hazards, changes, allergens, interactions, change, impact, unintended, IgE, risk, allergenic, effects. The probability value expressed, on the other hand, is neutral and typical of problem-setting rather than proposing an assessment. When presenting conclusions, gradable expressions of probability and frequency of occurrence become central. Relevant expressions are highlighted in bold in example (1): (1) The EFSA GMO Panel considers that maize GA21 has no altered agronomic and phenotypic characteristics, except for the herbicide tolerance. The likelihood of unintended environmental effects due to the establishment, survival and spread of maize GA21 is considered to be extremely low, and will be no different from that of conventional maize varieties. It is highly unlikely that the recombinant DNA will transfer and establish in the genome of bacteria in the environment or human and animal digestive tracts. In the rare but theoretically possible case of transfer of the mepsps gene from maize GA21 to soil bacteria, no novel property would be introduced into the soil bacterial community and thus no positive selective advantage that would not have been conferred by natural gene transfer between bacteria would be provided. (document 2480) Conclusions may take the form of general unqualified statements or of specific statements referred to the specific study through qualifications or tense, as exemplified in Table 5. Table 5. Conclusions. General statements

– (1) Adverse effects on human health and the environment resulting from X are unlikely – (2) Y, if occurring, is considered to be of low frequency compared with Z – (3) Xs occur at different frequencies in different species, isolates and different environments, in naturally occurring Ts

Specific statements

– (4) no indication of potential concerns over the safety of Y have been identified – (5) Z had no adverse effects on human and animal health or the environment – (6) X has not been shown to occur either in natural conditions or in the laboratory in the absence of T – (7) Y analyses have demonstrated that Ts are present in all environments investigated

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These structures become crucial when EFSA is communicating with the public at large. EFSA’s goals include the dissemination of the results of its activity not only to all its stakeholders, but to the lay-reader interested in his/her health. EFSA’s news section is designed to create public confidence in its risk assessment of food and feed and its reliability is ensured by shortened and more accessible versions of EFSA’s scientific outputs, a fine balance between comprehensibility and technicality. If titles of Scientific opinions are meant to identify EFSA’s mandate and the issue to be reviewed, news headlines are meant to highlight the conclusions reached. Thus, a publication entitled “Scientific Opinion on application (EFSAGMO-UK-2008-53) for the placing on the market of herbicide tolerant genetically modified maize 98140 for food and feed uses, import and processing under Regulation (EC) No 1829/2003 from Pioneer Overseas Corporation” (Document 3139) produces a news story with a headline like “Inadequate data prevent EFSA from concluding on safety of GM maize 98140” (News Story, 16 April 2013). A comparison of the abstract of the opinion and the related news story may help illuminate the nature of news. Table 6 on the opposite page reports both texts showing correspondences by underlining corresponding text. Both texts also present – shown with no underlining – background information that is missing in the other text. The abstract provides biochemical information on the GM under examination that is the necessary first step in the argument for the expert reader, whereas the general reader would probably find the information unnecessary, if understandable at all. The news story, on the other hand, provides background information on the comparative approach and on the role of EFSA, which is clearly well known to the expert reader but contributes greatly to institutional outreach, by building an appropriate image of the legal framework, the nature of the assessment process and the social responsibility of EFSA. The basic procedures at play in the creation of the news story from the Opinion are thus omission (of irrelevant or incomprehensible detail) and explicitation (of background information that fits the process of recontextualization). Explicitation turns out to be the key strategy at play even at more local level. Where the abstract says that the minimum standards for the design of field trials [...] were not met, the news story reduplicates the proposition (thus giving great emphasis to the violation of the standards) and makes it more explicit by specifying the standard violated: the plant variety chosen by the applicant as a comparator was not valid. Reference to the proteins is accompanied by results that are not included in the abstract (and would require going into the summary or the full document), such as for example that there was no indication of allergenicity, the kind of information the general reader can easily relate to.

Maize 98140 contains a single insert consisting of the gat4621 and the Zm-hra expression cassettes, providing herbicide tolerance. ::: Bio::::: informatic analyses and genetic stability studies did not raise safety issues. ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: The levels of the GAT and Zm-HRA protein in maize 98140 have been ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: sufficiently analysed. The minimum standards for the design of field :::::::::::::::: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .trials, . . . . . set . . . .out . . . in . . .the . . . EFSA . . . . . GMO . . . . . Panel . . . . . .guidance . . . . . . . . document, . . . . . . . . . .were . . . . .not .. _ _ _EFSA _ _ _GMO _ _ _ _Panel _ _ _ was _ _ _not _ _ i_n_a_position _ _ _ _ _ _to_conclude _____ .met. . . . Therefore the on _ _the _ _ _comparative _ _ _ _ _ _ _ assessment _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _of _ _the _ _compositional, _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _agronomic _ _ _ _ _ _ and __ phenotypic _ _ _ _ _ _ _characteristics, _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ on _ _ the _ _ _basis _ _ _of_ the _ _ _data _ _ _provided. _____ In the _ _the _ _absence _____o _f_conclusions _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _on_ _ _ _comparative _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _assessment _ _ _ _ _ _ _of _ _com__ position, _ _ _ _ _ the risk assessment was restricted to the newly expressed proteins and to specific metabolites resulting from the acetylase activity of the GAT4621 protein. _The _ _EFSA _ _ _GMO _ _ _Panel _ _ _ _has _ _identified _ _ _ _ _ _a_gap _ _ i_n_the _ _data __ on _ _the _ _ agronomic _ _ _ _ _ _ _and _ _ _phenotypic _ _ _ _ _ _ _characterisation _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _of_ GM _ _ _maize _ _ _ _98140 ___ and _ _ _considers _ _ _ _ _ _that _ _ uncertainty _ _ _ _ _ _ _ over _ _ _ these _ _ _ _characteristics _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _remains. _____

However, _ . _ . _ . _ . _the _._.o _f. this _ . _ application, _ . _available _._ . _ . _ . _ . considering . _ .scope . _ . _ . _ . _ . the . _ . _ . _ .data and _ . _ . _ . _land, _._ _ . _poor _ . _ . _ .capacity _ . _ . _ . of _ .maize _ . _ . outside _ . _ . _ .cultivated . _ . _the . _ .EFSA . _ . the . _ . survival GMO _ . _ .is_very _ . _ . _ . _ of . _ . _Panel . _ . _concluded . _ . _ . _ . _that . _ .there . _ . _little . _ .likelihood . _environmental ._._._._._ effects _ .the _ . _accidental _ . _environment . _ . _ . _due . _ .to . _ . _ . _ . _release . _ . _ . _into . _ . the . _ . _ . _ . _ . _of. _viable ._._ grains _ . _ maize _ . _ . _Considering _ .intended _ . _ . _ . use _ . _as . _ . _ .from . _ . _ .98140. . _ . _ . _ . _ .its . _food . _ . _and . _ feed, ._._ interactions _ . _the _ . _ .and _ . _abiotic _ . _ . _ . _ . _were . _ . _ . _ . _ .with . _ .biotic . _ . _ .environment . _ . _not . _considered ._._._._ to _ . _issue. _ . _ . associated _ . _ . _ . _ . _with _._._._._ . _ be . _ .an . _ . _ .Risks . _ . a_n. _unlikely . _ . _ . _but . _ . theoretically possible _ . _ . _98140 . _ . _ . _ horizontal . _ . _ . _ . _gene . _ . _transfer . _ . _ . _from . _ .maize . _ . _to . _bacteria . _ . _ . _have . _ . _not ._ been _ . _ . _ . _intervals _._ . _ . _identified. . _ . _ . _ . _The . _ monitoring . _ . _ . _ . _ plan . _ . _and . _ .reporting . _ . _ . _were . _ . _in. line with _ . _ of . _ . _the . _intended . _ . _ . _ .uses . _maize . _ . _ 98140. ._._._

NEWS The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) could not conclude on the safety of genetically modified (GM) maize 98140 after the applicant failed to supply essential data to allow a full risk assessment to take place.EFSA was prevented from reaching a conclusion overall on the potential risks posed by herbicide tolerant GM maize 98140 to human and animal health as the . . . application . . . . . . . . . . did . . . .not . . .meet . . . . .all . . the . . . .minimum ....... standards . . . . . . . . . set . . . out . . . .by . .the . . . Authority’s . . . . . . . . . .guidance . . . . . . . .document. ........ Experts _ _ _ _ _from _ _ _the _ _ Authority’s _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Panel _ _ _ _on _ _Genetically _ _ _ _ _ _ _Modified _ _ _ _ _ Organisms _ _ _ _ _ _ _(GMO) _ _ _ _ found _ _ _ _it was not possible to carry out the comparative assessment of the GM maize because _ _ _ _ _ _studies _ _ _ _ submitted _ _ _ _ _ _ _as _ _part _ _ _of_ the __ application _ _ _ _ _ _ _ contained _ _ _ _ _ _ _insufficient _ _ _ _ _ _ _data _ _ _ on _ _ _the _ _plant’s _ _ _ _ _characteristics, _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _such _ _ _as _ _its _ _composition _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _and __ appearance. _______ Comparative assessment is the fundamental requirement for the risk evaluation of GMOs. It compares GM plants, and the food and feed derived from them, with their respective conventional counterparts, known as comparators. The basic assumption of this method, which is required under current European Union legislation for all GMO applications, is that food and feed from conventionally-bred plants have a history of safe use. They can therefore serve as a baseline for the risk assessment of food and feed derived from GM plants. Following an initial assessment of the field trials by the applicant,EFSA concluded that the plant variety chosen by the applicant as a comparator was not valid. As with nearly all GMO applications submitted to EFSA (98 % to date), scientists from the Authority requested additional data from the applicant so GM maize 98140 could be properly assessed. However, the information supplied by the company relating to field trials performed for the comparative assessment again failed to meet the criteria in EFSA guidance documents. There were, however, aspects of the application where the GMO Panel was able to complete a safety ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: assessment. EFSA concluded there was no indication of allergenicity relating to the newly expressed ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: proteins GAT4621 and ZM-HRA in the GM plant. EFSA also confirmed that the elevated levels of certain :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: . _ . _ . _ . _ . _ . _ . _ . _ . _ . _ . _ . _ . _ . _ . _ . _ . _ . _ . _ constituents of. GM _ . _maize _ . _ . _(amino _ . _ . also _ . _ .found _ . _ . _in. conventional _ . _ . _ . _ . _ .plants) _ . _ . _did _ . _raise ._._._._._ . _ . _ .98140 . _ . _ . acids . _ .not . _ . _safety ._._ concerns _ . humans _ . _ . _ .and _ . _animals. _ . _ . _also _ . _ . _ . _that _ . _GM _ . _ . was _ . _ unlikely . _ . _ . _ .for . _ . _ . _ The . _ . Panel . _ .concluded . _ . the . _ .maize . _ . _ . _to . _have . _ . _any ._ adverse and _ . _environment _ . _ . _ .of_ .its _ .intended _ . _ . _ . _uses _ .food _ . _ .and _ . _feed _ . _ import . _ . _ . _effect . _ . _ on . _ .the . _ . _ . _ . _ .in_ the . _ . context . _ . in . _ . and ._._._ ._ processing. ._._._._ EFSA’s risk assessment of GM maize 98140 was delivered in line with its remit to provide independent scientific advice to decision-makers in the European Union. Risk managers in the European Commission and Member States take EFSA’s evaluations into account, along with other factors, when deciding on the authorisation of GMOs.

SCIENTIFIC OPINION

Table 6. An abstract and a news story.

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The creation of the news story clearly makes use of a number of other procedures that help recontextualize the information for the general reader in the framework of news published on an institutional website (with their informative and promotional nature). The most obvious feature is third-person self-attribution (The European Food Safety Authority could not conclude; The panel also concluded, etc.). The order of elements also follows the typical inverted pyramid of a news story, with the lead-in paragraph giving the main event (the conclusion reached) and a clear view of agency contributing to the promotional function of website news (the applicant failed to supply essential data; the Agency had set appropriate standards). The order of elements follows a general-to-specific structure, with the most technical information moved to the bottom part of the news item (e.g., reference to the GAT and ZM-HRA protein). The lexico-grammar of the text also produces a combination of omissions and explicitations, e.g.: a) most acronyms are explained, e.g., the EFSA GMO Panel becomes Experts from the Authority’s Panel on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) and those that are not (GAT and ZM-HRA) are however accompanied by their categorization as proteins); b) technical terms are paraphrased in forms that sound more familiar to the general reader, by omitting the most specific elements: the compositional, agronomic and phenotypic characteristics become the plant’s characteristics, such as its composition and appearance; Paraphrase, however, may occasionally touch on those key issues of risk assessment that highlight the fuzzy nature of probabilistic statements: where the abstract says there is very little likelihood of environmental effects, the news item follows the widely spread practice of turning pre-modification into post-modification and abstract nouns into adjectives, but by doing so also changes the degree of probability attributed to the statement by saying that the GM maize was unlikely to have any adverse effect on the environment. It remains to be seen, of course, how far the general reader will perceive the difference between very little likelihood and unlikely as relevant, and one more worrying than the other.

3.3 Translating risk A brief overview of translation issues in the Italian and English versions of the news highlights further challenges. Leaving aside the theme of translating probability and frequency, which is clearly well beyond the limits of the present paper, the discussion will be limited to two examples where the translation

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highlights the generalizing and explicitating tendency of knowledge dissemination. Firstly, the two fundamental terms assessment and evaluation are used less systematically in news items and their translation into Italian further annuls their distinction. Consider the following examples: (2) This is crucial as comparative assessment is the fundamental requirement for the risk evaluation of GMOs in the European Union (EU). This approach compares GM plants, and the food and feed derived from them, with their respective conventional counterparts, known as comparators. The basic assumption of this method, which is required under current EU legislation for all GMO applications, is that food and feed from conventionally-bred plants have a history of safe use. They can therefore serve as a baseline for the risk assessment of food and feed derived from GM plants. (13 June 2013) (3) GM comparators are the non-GM plants with which the GM plant is compared during the safety evaluation. The underlying principle for the safety assessment of GM plants is that of substantial equivalence, meaning that the GM plant should be as safe as its conventional counterpart. (20 November 2010) In the first example evaluation refers to the general interpretative process whereas assessment is employed to refer to established scientific procedures. In the second example, on the other hand, evaluation is used for the analysis of both non-GM plants and GM plants (the above-mentioned comparative approach) whereas assessment is used in the second line for one of the steps of the process to avoid redundant repetitions. In the Italian translations, this nuance is neutralized, the two terms being translated with the Italian valutazione, the immediate equivalent for both of them: (4) Si tratta di un aspetto essenziale, poiché la valutazione comparativa è il requisito fondamentale per la valutazione del rischio da organismi geneticamente modificati (OGM) nell’Unione europea (UE). Secondo questo approccio le piante geneticamente modificate, e gli alimenti e i mangimi da esse derivati, sono confrontati con i rispettivi omologhi ottenuti con metodi convenzionali, noti come varietà di controllo. L’assunto alla base di tale metodo, previsto dalla legislazione dell’Unione europea vigente per tutte le richieste di autorizzazione di OGM, è che, poiché l’uso sicuro degli alimenti e dei mangimi derivati da piante coltivate in modo convenzionale è ben documentato, questi possono fungere da riferimento per la valutazione del rischio da alimenti e mangimi derivati da piante GM.

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(5) Le varietà di controllo per piante GM sono le piante non geneticamente modificate con le quali la pianta geneticamente modificata viene confrontata in sede di valutazione della sicurezza. Il principio alla base della valutazione della sicurezza delle piante geneticamente modificate è quello della sostanziale equivalenza, secondo il quale la pianta geneticamente modificata deve essere altrettanto sicura della sua controparte convenzionale. The direct consequence is that forcibly valutazione abounds in the Italian corpus, creating highly repetitive texts and backgrounding any distinction. In the English corpus, assessment occurs 249 times while evaluation 40 times. On the other hand, there are 296 occurrences of valutazione in the Italian corpus. This depends also on the fact that the word sometimes translates the word review (6), the verb to assess (14) and the acronym for environmental risk assessment, ERA, (5) instead of the Italian correspondent. Assessment is translated with esame (‘exam’) only twice and one time with analisi (‘analysing’), which seems to be preferred for translating evaluation (2). Another crucial issue, which can be observed from the examples above, is the use of the acronyms ERA/VRA, GM and GMOs/OGM. The Italian version does not use the acronym VRA (29) as often as the English ERA (35). By the same token the Italian version shows a preference for the explicit expression geneticamente modificato e organismo geneticamente modificato instead of GM and OGM: in the English corpus the acronyms GM and GMO appear respectively 223 times and 229 times, whilst in the Italian corpus 97 times and 112 times. This obviously leads to longer Italian texts, even if more explicit. If length can be taken to be an obstacle for outreach in a medium such as websites, it is true that the Italian reader may not be so familiar with acronyms that are perceived as too technical, thus redefining the balance between comprehensibility and technicality of these texts. These are open problems which need further investigation.

4 Concluding remarks The case study of the European Agency EFSA has highlighted a range of issues in the definition of an organizational language and communication policy that can contribute to both the informative and the promotional purposes of website genres devoted to informing and disseminating scientific knowledge. Web-mediated institutional communication needs to balance issues of readability and accessibility with features that can contribute to the organizational identity proposed by the website. The issues considered by the study included first of all a language policy, oriented to defining both what is to be translated and what kind of national/

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international variety of a language (English in this case) best fits a supranational organization. The analysis confirmed the overall impression of a largely accepted dominance of English as the language of the most technical reports as against the choice of a multilingual policy for the genres that most explicitly address the wider public. The fact that English comes out as the language of technical documents and scientific conclusions on risk assessment has obvious implications for any stakeholders interested in understanding scientific implications or in applying for authorization of their products (and requiring EFSA’s assessment): normative documents and general information are provided in four languages, but scientific assessments and guidance documents for applicants are provided in English only, and therefore subject to English standards. On the whole, however, it appears that the website can be seen as an example of limited multilingualism. Not only because of the number of languages included (four as against the twenty-four official languages of the EU), but also because of the partial functionality of three of the four languages: Italian, French and German are only present as languages of legal discourse and of written knowledge dissemination. The situation envisaged in the area of scientific discourse is one that resembles diglossia (or multiple diglossia at the most), where English is used as the lingua franca of scientific discourse and the other community languages are used for knowledge dissemination purposes. This seems to confirm theories that see the hegemonic role of English in the present world as leading to forms of functional diversification of languages, not only on the web (e.g., Dor 2004, Danet and Herring 2007, Callahan and Herring 2012), but also in scientific communication, with potential risk of domain loss for regional languages (Ferguson 2007: 14–19). How EFSA compares with other agencies, of course, still needs to be assessed. The case study presented here could be further illuminated through comprehensive analysis of the range of policies reflected across European agencies. It would also be interesting to conduct more extensive analysis of the variety of English used. The language used in the instructional videos showed interesting signs of awareness of the existence of a multicultural reference community. Given the limited focus of the study, however, it would be hard to say whether this is a deliberate attempt to move towards forms of English as a Lingua Franca, and whether this is the sign of a weakening or strengthening of the hegemonic role of English vis-à-vis other European languages. This would require a longitudinal study. If it is true that the web, originally “an Anglophone phenomenon”, “has rapidly become a multilingual affair” and that “[m]any corporate websites now employ multilingual strategies making choice of language a ‘user preference”’ (Graddol 2006), this is mostly in the form of “imposed multilingualism” (Dor 2004), determined by the forces of economic globalization turning regional languages into commodified tools of communication. The language of science, on the

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web as well as in research publications, is still largely English, even in websites of European agencies characterized by an explicit multilingual policy. If giving European citizens access to scientific knowledge remains a strategic issue for the EU, it would be important to extend empirical studies of the language policies enacted in institutional websites. The burden of bridging across discourse communities requires communications policies that should be able to reach all citizens through accessible genres and appropriate translation policies, as argued by Tosi (2013), promoting linguistic diversity and democratic communication with citizens. The study also focused on key issues of risk communication in two main genres (opinions and website news), with a view to highlighting the generic structure and the role played by risk assessment statements in scientific reports and in news stories. The analysis highlighted the centrality of expressions related to the notion of evaluation of risk assessment and to the area of defining probability/frequency. These turn out to be key areas that certainly require closer study. Similarly, given the common policy of translating the results of scientific analysis into knowledge dissemination genres (such as the website news), the study has highlighted the need for further investigation of how translation into languages other than English can contribute to or influence general communication choices. The dominant role of English in scientific communication has a clear impact on key areas of international policy such as the communication of risk, clearly requiring multilingual policies. The overview presented here, though necessarily limited to mapping areas of interest rather than conducting in-depth analyses of specific issues, points to the need to explore the issue in terms of genre-based language and communication policies built on close analysis of the key language structures. The study carried out suggests that existing regulation of scientific terminology could be integrated with specific multilingual guidelines for semitechnical language. This often plays a key role in giving the general audience an exact idea of the scientific conclusions reached and the procedures involved in establishing them. In the area of public discourses on risk, health and science, the internet has long become a key channel of communication (Richardson 2005), widely acknowledged by health professionals themselves (e.g., Korp 2006). The contribution of applied linguistics could help define and improve best practices in organizational language and communication policies.

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| Part II: The discourse community scenario

Renata Povolná

On cross-cultural variation in the use of conjuncts in research articles by Czech and native speakers of English: Can conjuncts contribute to the interactive and dialogic character of academic texts? Abstract: English performs the role of a global lingua franca of academia. However, the overwhelming majority of writers and readers of academic texts written in English are not native speakers of English. The question arises whether it is justified to impose the linguistic standards and style conventions typical of the Anglo-American discourse community on international academic communication and whether qualities such as linearity, clarity and effectiveness in communication should be viewed from the perspective of native speakers of English. The aim of this chapter is to discover whether there is cross-cultural variation in the use of conjuncts (Quirk et al. 1985), since it is assumed that these important text-organizing devices can enhance the interaction and negotiation of meaning between the author(s) of the text and the prospective reader(s). At the same time, it is expected that conjuncts as markers of intertextuality foster the interactive and dialogic character of written academic discourse. The research, which has been conducted on two specialized corpora of research articles (RAs heretofore), one representing Anglo-American academic texts and the other academic texts from the Czech discourse community, investigates which semantic relations, such as apposition, contrast/concession, listing and result, tend to be expressed overtly by conjuncts and which semantic classes of conjuncts contribute to the interactive and dialogic character of written academic discourse. Keywords: conjuncts, cross-cultural variation, dialogue, interaction, negotiation of meaning, written academic discourse

1 Introduction With the ongoing process of increasing internationalization of all scholarship it is indisputable that English performs the role of a global lingua franca of academia. However, many studies on written discourse used in academic settings show cross-cultural variation (e.g., Ventola and Mauranen 1991; Čmejrková and Daneš 1997; Duszak 1997; Chamonikolasová 2005; Mur-Dueñas 2008; Vogel

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2008; Bennett 2010; Pérez-Llantada 2011; Schmied 2011; Wagner 2011; DontchevaNavratilova 2012; Povolná 2012). This variation concerns both form and content and results mainly from the influence of L1 writing habits and culture and language-specific conventions and academic traditions which authors working in different fields of research transfer from their L1 to their texts written in English (Čmejrková and Daneš 1997; Hedgcock 2005). Since the overwhelming majority of writers and readers of academic texts written in English are not native speakers of English, the question arises whether it is justified to impose the linguistic standards and style conventions typical of the dominant Anglo-American discourse community on international academic communication and whether qualities such as linearity, clarity and effectiveness in communication should be viewed from the perspective of native speakers of English, i.e., “the native speaking minority” to use Mauranen, Hynninen, and Ranta’s (2010) words, or from those who come from communities that speak other languages. Discourse communities share certain discourse patterns and expectations and utilize and thus possess “one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of [their] aims” (Swales 1990: 26), which may involve topics, forms, functions and “positioning of discoursal elements, and the role texts play in the operation of the discourse community” (Swales 1990: 26). In the case of the international academic discourse community it is the genre of research articles that mostly serves as a tool for conveying scholarly issues. When experts from language backgrounds and intellectual traditions other than the Anglo-American want to be recognized in their respective research fields within their native language discourse communities and in particular within the international academic community, they have to write RAs in English and undergo what is sometimes called a process of ‘secondary socialization’, i.e., the process of developing academic credentials within their non-native environment (Duszak 1997). This concerns both expert and novice writers from academic traditions other than the AngloAmerican.¹ While Anglo-American academic texts are usually said to be more dialogic and interactive, thus providing sufficient space for interaction and negotiation of meaning between the author and the prospective reader(s), academic texts written in some Central and European languages such as Czech, Slovak, Polish and German tend to be rather monologic and less interactive (e.g., Clyne 1987; Duszak 1997; Chamonikolasová 2005; Stašková 2005). Similar claims have been made

1 For a discussion on the current dominance of English academic discourse, see Bennett in this volume.

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regarding several languages in South Western Europe, for example, Portuguese (Bennett 2010) and Spanish (Pérez-Llantada 2011). The fact that Anglo-American academic texts are mostly considered more reader-oriented stems from an overall linear organization of discourse through, for example, clear division of the text into sections and subsections, chapter and section headings and explicit clues on content that include text-organizing devices such as discourse markers (DMs) (Schiffrin 1987; Fraser 1999), including conjuncts which are at the core of the present chapter. The research has been conducted on two specialized corpora of RAs, one representing Anglo-American academic texts and the other Central European academic texts from one discourse community in Central Europe – the Czech Republic. The aim of the investigation is to discover whether there is cross-cultural variation in the use of conjuncts (Quirk et al. 1985; Biber et al. 1999), since it is assumed that these text organizers, in particular some of their semantic classes, can enhance the interaction and negotiation of meaning between the author(s) of the text and the prospective reader(s) and thus foster the interactive and dialogic character of written academic discourse.

2 Interactive and dialogic character of written academic discourse Texts can be defined as “the visible evidence of a reasonably self-contained purposeful interaction between one or more writers and one or more readers, in which the writer(s) control the interaction and produce most of (characteristically all) the language” (Hoey 2001: 11). This is in accordance with Bakhtin’s view (1986) that writing is always an ongoing dialogue between the author(s) and the reader(s). While producing written texts authors tend to “draw on and incorporate ideas and forms from [their] past experiences of texts” (Hyland 2004: 80). Therefore, texts in general and academic texts in particular are unavoidably dialogical in the sense that any part of the text is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other parts with which it enters into one relation or another, but different texts of course differ in the degree of what can be called ‘dialogization’ (Bakhtin, as quoted in Fairclough 2003: 42). “For any particular text or type of text, there is a set of other texts and a set of voices which are potentially relevant, and potentially incorporated into the text” (Fairclough 2003: 47), since genres – including the genre of RAs in the case of this chapter – “link users to their discourse community and they link texts to each other since real academic discourse is a constant development of intertextuality” (Schmied 2011: 5).

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As regards written academic discourse, authors enter a permanent dialogue with other researchers working in the same field. They can let their voices be heard either directly, notably through direct quotations of their current or previous opinions and attitudes, or more indirectly, by means of paraphrases or reported speech, both of which are among the most explicit techniques representing intertextuality (Bazerman 2004). In conformity with Fairclough it is supposed that “when the speech or writing or thought of another is reported, two different texts, two different voices, are brought into dialogue, and potentially two different perspectives, objectives, interests and so forth” (Fairclough 2003: 48–49). And this is exactly where DMs including conjuncts can play a crucial role. By virtue of their specific meanings conjuncts enable the expression of semantic relations such as apposition, contrast/concession, listing or result between different parts of texts. Thus they function as markers of intertextuality, i.e., “the explicit and implicit relations that a text or utterance has to prior, contemporary or future texts” (Bazerman 2004: 86–88) and contribute to the interactive and dialogic character of otherwise rather monologic written texts. Authors can enter a dialogue not only with other authors referred to in the text but also with their own previous, current or future research or with some generally shared hypotheses and standpoints which may be different from their own views. Conjuncts, which can be classified as “metatextual elements” or simply “connectors” (Mauranen 1993), let the author step in explicitly “to make his or her presence felt in the text, to give guidance to the readers with respect to how the text is organized, to what functions different parts of it have, and what the author’s attitudes to the propositions are” (Mauranen 1993: 9). Consequently, conjuncts can be understood as interactive items, which help authors indicate a way through the text and enable readers to interpret pragmatic links between ideas (Hyland 2005: 49–52). They establish textual, interactional and interpersonal relations in texts, since “texts are inevitably and unavoidably dialogical” (Fairclough 2003: 42).

3 Text-organizing devices under investigation: conjuncts Conjuncts – conceived here as DMs (Fraser 1999) – signal a relationship between the possible interpretation of units of discourse, i.e., the unit they introduce and are part of, and the prior, not necessarily immediately adjacent discourse unit. By signalling how the writer intends to relate the current message to the previous discourse and by conveying logical linkage between ideas expressed in texts, conjuncts perform text-organizing functions and are thus viewed primarily as

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cohesive means which “reflect underlying connections between propositions” (Schiffrin 1987: 61). Conjuncts – included in Halliday and Hasan among “conjunctive elements” – “are cohesive not in themselves but indirectly, by virtue of their specific meanings” (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 226). They are often mentioned in connection with the concept of “metadiscourse”, which is concerned with “writer-reader interactions” and the aim to produce “coherent prose in particular social contexts” (Hyland 2005: ix). Conjuncts also contribute substantially to the readability of texts because a text is usually processed more easily and faster if the relationships between its parts are signalled overtly (Haberlandt 1982). If readers have no lexical clue on which to rely while interpreting the author’s communicative intentions, they may face problems in arriving at a coherent interpretation and adequate understanding of the text. So it is not surprising that DMs including conjuncts are often listed in English academic style manuals (Bennett 2009). Apart from establishing cohesion, conjuncts enhance the reader’s interpretation of the message, ideally in harmony with the current author’s communicative goals, and also contribute to the perception of coherence, which is understood here as “the result of the interpretation process” (Tanskanen 2006: 20) and a dynamic hearer/reader-oriented interpretative notion dependent on particular readers’ comprehension (Bublitz 1999). “Coherence (. . . ) resides not in the text, but is rather the outcome of a dialogue between the text and its listener or reader”; it necessarily follows that “(. . . ) some texts may be coherent and meaningful to some receivers but uninterpretable to others” (Tanskanen 2006: 7). Unlike coherence in spoken discourse, which can be negotiated permanently on the spot by all discourse participants (Povolná 2009), coherence in written discourse cannot be negotiated explicitly, since the context is split (Fowler 1986) and therefore the writer has to anticipate the “expectations of the reader and to use explicit signals” (Dontcheva-Navratilova 2007: 128) such as conjuncts. The appropriate use of conjuncts, similarly to other cohesive devices, is undoubtedly important for coherence relations (cf. rhetorical relations in Taboada 2006), in particular if the author is aware of the standard genre conventions for building blocks of arguments and establishing a dialogue with the reader(s) (Hyland 2005), and intends to meet academic style conventions and adhere to the so-called scientific paradigm, which is related to “clarity, economy, rational argument supported by evidence, caution and restraint, and the incorporation of accepted theory through referencing and citation” (Bennett 2009: 52). Conjuncts represent one of four possible broad categories of grammatical function adverbials can perform (Quirk et al. 1985: 501), i.e., adjunct, subjunct, disjunct, and conjunct. As the term itself indicates, “conjuncts” connect two linguistic units, which can be very large or very small, such as a constituent of a

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phrase realizing a single clause element, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, or even larger parts of a text, by expressing a semantic relation between them. Other frequently used labels for what is discussed under the term “conjuncts” in this chapter are “linking adverbials” (Biber et al. 1999: 761), “sentence adverbials” (Leech and Svartvik 2002: 187) and “connective adjuncts” (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 775), to name just a few. It is indisputable that all these terms emphasize the primarily connective function of this group of adverbials. It may also be interesting to compare “conjuncts” (traditionally called “half-conjunctions”) and “conjunctions” using Sweet’s description (1891), in which Sweet states that “the difference between half- and full conjunctions is that half-conjunctions connect logically only, not formally also, as full conjunctions do” (Sweet 1891: 143, as quoted in Greenbaum 1969: 231). Since the study is based on Biber et al.’s semantic classification of adverbials (1999: 875–879), it is necessary to mention here the six general semantic categories the authors distinguish: 1. enumeration and addition; 2. summation; 3. apposition; 4. result/inference; 5. contrast/concession; and 6. transition. Accordingly, the adverbials will be labelled listing (enumerative and additive), summative, appositive, resultive/inferential, contrastive/concessive, and transitional conjuncts. As for the possible realization forms of conjuncts, these are classified as follows: 1. adverb phrases (including simple adverbs, e.g., first, next, then, compound adverbs, e.g., however, nevertheless, and two or more words with an adverb as a headword, e.g., even so); 2. prepositional phrases (e.g., in addition, on the other hand); 3. finite clauses (e.g., what is more); and 4. non-finite clauses (e.g., to summarize). Finally, it remains to be stated that since conjuncts are always included in the subsequent part of the text and express a semantic relation to the previous not necessarily adjacent part(s), they enable the ordering of discourse units in a natural way, which entails the placement of a discourse unit with known information first, i.e., before new information or some new aspect within it (for the “basic distribution of CD”, see Firbas 1992). Since conjuncts as explicit signals of semantic relations between segments of discourse (Fraser 1999) contribute to both cohesion and coherence, they are expected to be relatively frequent in all academic discourse in which convincing argumentation and clear presentation to the reader(s) of the author’s standpoints are of great importance (Biber et al. 1999: 880). Conjuncts are applied intentionally by the writer(s) as guiding signals in order to help the prospective reader(s) arrive at an interpretation which is coherent with the author’s communicative intentions and to enable negotiation of meaning between the discourse participants. Accordingly, the research questions to be answered in this investigation are formulated as follows:

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Which semantic relations, such as apposition, contrast/concession, listing and result, tend to be expressed overtly by conjuncts? Can conjuncts contribute to the interaction between author(s) and reader(s) of a text and thus enhance the interactive and dialogic character of academic discourse? Is there any cross-cultural variation in the use of conjuncts in RAs by Czech speakers of English on the one hand and native speakers of English on the other?

4 Corpus and methodology The language data used for the investigation were taken from two specialized corpora, one representing RAs by experienced native speakers of English (amounting to about 78,000 words), the other comprising RAs by non-native speakers of English, namely experienced Czech writers (amounting to about 58,000 words). While the former corpus comprises articles selected from the journal Applied Linguistics, the latter consists of RAs written for the linguistics journal Discourse and Interaction, all published between 2001 and 2011. Despite certain limitations in terms of size, representativeness and generalizability of their results the two specialized corpora selected for the analysis were considered sufficient and more appropriate than large general corpora for a comparative study of written academic discourse, notably for analysis of particular language features such as conjuncts in one particular genre (cf. Flowerdew 2004). In order to obtain comparable data for the analysis it was necessary to exclude from the data all parts of texts which comprised tables, figures, graphs, references, sources, examples, and long quotations. All the results discussed and exemplified in this chapter were normalized for the frequency of occurrence of conjuncts per 1,000 words, actual numbers being mentioned only occasionally. As for the methods applied during the investigation, all the texts were first computer-processed using AntConc, a concordance programme typically applied as a text analysis tool for processing corpus data. In addition, it was necessary to examine the texts manually to obtain both qualitative and quantitative results since some of the language items analyzed performed functions other than those of conjuncts.

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5 Comparison between non-native and native speakers of English The overall frequency rates of all conjuncts included in the study are broken down in Table 1. It is evident that non-native speakers of English apply conjuncts as explicit guiding signals of the relationships between parts of a text to a much higher extent (12.28) than native speakers of English (8.80). When building coherence relations, i.e., “relations that hold together different parts of the discourse” (Taboada 2006: 567), writers in both corpora use all semantic classes of conjuncts, but each group applies them slightly differently. The most noticeable variation concerns the extent to which certain semantic classes are used: two groups, namely listing and appositive conjuncts are applied by Czech writers with a frequency of occurrence double that of native speakers (for comparison with Czech novice writers, see Povolná 2012). Table 1. Frequency rates of all semantic classes of conjuncts in both corpora. Type of corpus

Native speakers’ corpus (NSC)

Non-native speakers’ corpus (NNSC)

Semantic role

No.

Norm. frequency

No.

Listing Summative Appositive Resultive/inferential Contrastive/concessive Transitional

78 9 182 178 219 16

1.01 0.12 2.35 2.30 2.82 0.21

122 3 271 154 151 9

2.11 0.05 4.69 2.66 2.61 0.16

Total

682

8.80

710

12.28

Norm. frequency

In order to provide a comprehensive picture of the types of conjuncts non-native speakers apply in comparison with native speakers of English, this section discusses the individual semantic classes of conjuncts as found in the data while illustrating their contribution to interaction between author(s) and reader(s) of a text and showing whether these particular classes can enable voices other than the author’s to enter the text, thus enhancing the interactive and dialogic character of academic discourse.

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5.1 Listing conjuncts Listing conjuncts in general are used either for the enumeration of pieces of information in an order chosen by the author, in which case they are more specifically labelled enumerative (Table 2a), or to add pieces of information to one another, in which case they are known as additive conjuncts (Table 2b). Writers in both corpora apply enumerative conjuncts with approximately the same frequency as additive ones, although non-native speakers use them with double the frequency (2.11) applied by native speakers (1.01). As regards the actual results given in all the tables in Section 5, it should be noted that all conjuncts with a normalized frequency score higher than 0.1 tokens per 1,000 words are given in bold.

Table 2a. Listing (enumerative) conjuncts.

Table 2b. Listing (additive) conjuncts.

Types of conjuncts

NSC

NNSC

Types of conjuncts

NSC

finally first firstly in the first place last lastly next second secondly then

0.08 0.05

additionally also further furthermore in addition in particular moreover similarly too

0.01 0.03

0.03 0.03 0.34

0.29 0.05 0.09 0.05 0.07 0.05 0.05 0.03 0.09 0.31

TOTAL

0.49

TOTAL

0.52

1.09

0.06 0.13 0.04 0.03 0.18 0.01

NNSC 0.09 0.03 0.17 0.07 0.09 0.36 0.21 1.02

Since listing conjuncts as a whole are more common in the RAs produced by Czech writers, the following example illustrates several types typically applied in NNSC: (1) NNSC, Text 2A The length tendencies become even more apparent if we trace the number of tokens. Here again, we decided to scrutinize the two extremes of a cline. First, we focussed on the number of tokens of the longest paragraphs (exceeding 10 C). Second, we surveyed the number of single-C paragraphs. Paragraphs exceeding ten C turned out to be extremely rare in both the journalism subcorpora (one paragraph in the newspaper subcorpus out of 345 and six paragraphs in the magazine subcorpus). They grew in significance in children’s fiction and natural sciences (11 instances each). However, the longest para-

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graphs turned out to be rather common in humanities (48 tokens) and in adult fiction (60 instances). . . . Finally, we investigate the average length values. The mean paragraph length in the overall research corpus corresponds to 4.49 C. Examining individual style corpora shows some significant tendencies. The academic corpus typically featured rather long paragraphs (5.70 C per paragraph on average). It was followed by the fiction corpus with an average 4.39 C. Finally, journalism paragraphs tended to be the shortest of all (3.37 C). Moreover, we have noticed some striking differences even among the subcorpora examined. The mean length value of the humanities subcorpus (6.36 C per paragraph) exceeded its natural sciences counterpart (5.04 C). Example (1) provides evidence that the category of listing conjuncts is often used in order to help the reader(s) follow a path through a text full of mostly quantitative information and thus help them interpret the text as a coherent piece of discourse, which is in agreement with the scientific paradigm mentioned above. As for other voices entering the text, it is important to mention that the text has just one author, although she uses the personal pronoun we when referring to herself, i.e., to the single author of the RA. Probably this happens under the influence of the author’s mother tongue, since in the Czech academic tradition it is quite common to use the authorial plural pronoun we even when the text is single-authored (see Dontcheva-Navratilova 2012). The most frequent listing conjunct in NSC and the second most typical in NNSC – the enumerative then – is illustrated in (2). Although then tends to be rather informal, the author applies it relatively often, for example when describing the editing procedure. Its common use is probably connected with a slightly more informal style which usually characterizes native speakers’ academic writing. However, its frequency in NNSC shows that Czech writers adopt this tendency, too (see Table 2a). (2) NSC, Text 5 To begin, it may be useful to summarize briefly the whole editing procedure, insofar as it concerns the English for Specific Purposes Journal. It is as follows. When a manuscript is received, it is prepared for blind review by having the name(s) of the author(s) removed, plus occasionally any references that may give strong clues about the author’s identity. The editor then selects two reviewers, usually members of the editorial board who have expressed interest in the subject area, but also occasionally people from outside the board with a particular expertise or interest in the topic of the manuscript. The ‘blinded’ manuscript is then sent out to the reviewers, who in turn send back their reviews within a specified time period – usually two to three months. The editor

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will then read through the manuscript and the reports and write the editorial letter, the main purpose of which is to convey the editor’s decision about the manuscript and to provide both a summary of the reviews and suggestions for revision of the manuscript.

5.2 Summative conjuncts Conjuncts expressing summation (Table 3) indicate that what follows serves as a summary or conclusion of the information in the preceding part(s) of the text. Since this class is represented only scarcely, just one example of the most common conjunct follows. It is to summarize, which is in fact the only conjunct realized by a non-finite infinitive clause that has more than one occurrence in the data (cf. to conclude in Table 3 and to be specific in Table 4 below, each occurring only once).² (3) NSC, Text 9 A native English-speaker knows that herrings (being fairly ordinary fish) are a silver colour, and that the term red herring is an idiom unrelated to either the colour ‘red’. . . , or the fish ‘herring’ (except in its historical explanation of a smoked fish being dragged over a trail to confuse trackers, see Goatly, 1997: 32). As ESL/EFL learners cannot be expected to know the historical background, this knowledge will not be considered relevant. Red herring is thus proved by the test to be non-compositional. Our test can be applied only in some given context: in the unlikely event of red herring meaning a fish which has been painted with red paint, it would, of course, be compositional by our definition. To summarize, a test for compositionality is whether replacing each word in an MWU with its dictionary definition (in the interests of creating a practical system usable by teachers and students) gives the same meaning as the phrase in context. If it does, the MWU is compositional. If it does not, the MWU is non-compositional. We have already seen, however, that many figurative expressions are non-compositional. It is to such non-idiomatic but noncompositional expressions that we now turn. Example (3) testifies that even when summarizing their results and arguments many authors cannot avoid expressing contrasts, realized in particular by however, which according to Biber et al. (1999: 885) represents the most typical conjunct in all academic texts written by native speakers of English. The expression of

2 For to summarize in a different function than that of conjunct, see the first line of (2) above.

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Table 3. Summative conjuncts. Types of conjuncts all in all in summary overall taken together to conclude to summaris/ze TOTAL

NSC

NNSC 0.02

0.01 0.04 0.01

0.02 0.02

0.05 0.12

0.05

contrasting attitudes, opinions, etc. clearly contributes to the dialogic character of academic texts.

5.3 Appositive conjuncts Conjuncts expressing apposition (Table 4) are applied to introduce either an example (exemplification) or a restatement (reformulation). In the case of exemplification (e.g. in (4) below), the information provided is in some sense included in the previous part(s) of the text and the receiver of the message can assume that there may be other alternatives besides the one already mentioned. By contrast, conjuncts expressing reformulation (in other words and i.e. in (4) below) signal that the second unit is to be regarded as “a restatement of the first, reformulating the information it expresses in some way or stating it in more explicit terms” (Biber et al. 1999: 876). (4) NNSC, Text 1B In the FSP analysis, subordinate clauses are usually taken as separate units (and so their constituents are interpreted in the framework of the whole unit, e.g., thematic, even though – if taken separately at Level 2 – these would be considered rhematic); see e.g., subordinate clauses containing although or wherever in clause 6 in Table 1 below. In other words, only main clauses are analysed further into individual communicative units. If a syntactic constituent (Level 1) is realized by further communicative units (clauses, semiclauses or noun phrases), it provides a sub-field, i.e., a field of lower rank (Level 2); within such a sub-field all its constituents operate as separate communicative units with their own FSP. Example (4) comprises two tokens of e.g.. This abbreviated conjunct is typically used for exemplification, together with the unabbreviated for example and for in-

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stance. Apart from the appositive conjuncts used for exemplification, (4) includes one token of i.e., a conjunct which dominates in the category of appositive conjuncts used for reformulation above all in NNSC, where it reaches the highest frequency rate of all conjuncts found in the data (1.85). By contrast, it occurs relatively scarcely (0.09) in NSC. This result can be explained by the fact that non-native speakers of English, although experienced in their respective research fields, often find it necessary to enhance their scientific credibility within the academic discourse community by providing the reader(s) with explanations and evidence, often in the form of reformulations and restatements, thus helping the reader(s) interpret the text as coherent. Another conjunct used for reformulation shown in (4) – in other words – also tends to be more common in NNSC (0.33) than in NSC (0.03), which further testifies my assumption that non-native writers consider it important to provide the prospective reader(s) with reformulations and restatements in order to support their argumentation. Table 4. Appositive conjuncts. Types of conjuncts

NSC

NNSC

e.g. for example for instance i.e. in other words more specifically namely specifically that is to be specific what is more

1.03 0.75 0.15 0.09 0.03 0.01 0.13 0.05 0.10

1.09 0.43 0.16 1.85 0.33 0.19 0.48 0.05 0.08 0.02 0.02

TOTAL

2.35

4.69

On the topic of exemplification it is worth noting that native speakers of English use the unabbreviated conjunct for example to a slightly greater extent (0.75) than non-native speakers do (0.43), even when introducing examples in brackets, as in (5). However, when taken together as a group, the appositive conjuncts e.g., for example and for instance have a similar frequency rate in both corpora (1.68 and 1.93 in NNSC and NSC respectively). It can thus be stated that it depends on the individual author’s stylistic preferences rather than on cross-cultural differences which of these three conjuncts he/she chooses for exemplification, as in (5), where

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the author resorts to the conjunct for example quite regularly. This example represents an interesting way to introduce other authors’ voices in an academic text, namely by exemplifying and referring to similar or different views expressed by other researchers working in the same field, a strategy which clearly enhances the interactive and dialogic character of academic discourse. (5) NSC, Text 3 Interest in communicative language teaching has led researchers in applied linguistics to focus on the use of communication strategies (CSs) by second language (L2) learners. The study of CSs is important, as it looks at how learners are able to use the L2 in order to convey meaning. CSs are defined in different ways by different researchers. Some (for example Faerch and Kasper 1983) restrict their definition of CSs to cases in which the speaker attempts to overcome linguistic difficulty, whereas other researchers (for example Tarone and Yule 1989) consider them to include all attempts at meaning-negotiation, regardless of whether or not there is linguistic difficulty. For reasons that will become clearer later in the article, the CSs that are examined in this study conform to the former, narrower definition. These CSs are referred to by some researchers (for example, Poulisse 1990) as compensatory strategies. The conjunct for instance is interchangeable with for example; however, as the present results illustrate, it is much less common, and, as Biber et al. state, the use of for instance “appears more a matter of author style” (Biber et al.1999: 890). The appositive for instance can also be used successfully to introduce other voices in a text, as in (6), which testifies my assumption that appositive conjuncts such as e.g., for example and for instance can all be applied to contribute to the interaction and dialogue between the author and other researchers in the same field. (6) NSC, Text 2 This enabled them to mate more often, and so produce more offspring with the same characteristic. Sexually selected characteristics (e.g., large horns or elaborate plumage) are often found in males, and this reflects the fact that in many species it is males who do the courting while the role of females is to choose among potential mates. Peacocks, for instance, engage in ‘lekking’ ritually displaying themselves in areas frequented by peahens. Some scholars think that language fulfils analogous functions among humans. Geoffrey Miller (1999, 2000), for instance, argues that human languages are much more elaborate than they need to be to serve purely communicative purposes. This can be explained by hypothesizing that speaking served the purpose of displaying the (male) speaker’s reproductive fitness.

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Another appositive conjunct worth mentioning is what is more, since it is the only type realized by a finite clause. However, with its single occurrence in NNSC, it is rather exceptional. Example (7) also comprises two other appositive conjuncts – i.e. and namely – both used for reformulation and restatement, especially in NNSC. The abbreviation i.e. can be viewed as an alternative form of the conjunct that is, which is much less common. The reformulatory conjunct i.e. with a frequency of occurrence of 1.85 is, as stated above, the most common conjunct in the RAs written by non-native speakers of English in my data. Its relatively high frequency is caused by the authors’ tendency to support their arguments by some evidence, a tendency which is in agreement with the so-called scientific paradigm mentioned above. (7) NNSC, Text 2A Examining first the average number of U falling to a paragraph, we notice a striking variability in paragraph lengths, ranging from one to as many as 29 U. It should be noted, however, that paragraphs containing one to three U made up 60.34 per cent of the overall corpus. What is more, paragraphs containing one to six U amounted to 88.31 per cent of the investigated corpus. It follows that the relatively longest paragraphs, i.e. those ranging from seven to 29 U, were clearly marginalized, covering only 11.69 per cent overall. Interestingly, the extreme length of 29 U was detected only in one source, namely in F5, and, moreover, in a single paragraph. Example (7) also includes two tokens of conjuncts that are more typical of NNSC, namely the listing (additive) moreover and contrastive however.

5.4 Resultive/inferential conjuncts Resultive/inferential conjuncts (Table 5) indicate that what follows states the result or consequence of what precedes, thus enhancing the readers’ interpretation and establishing coherence. Conjuncts of this group are distributed rather unevenly, some of them having a frequency of occurrence of one or two tokens in both corpora, while others amount to a normalized frequency rate of 1.06, as is the case of thus, which is the most typical resultive conjunct in the academic texts produced by non-native speakers of English in my data. Two resultive conjuncts, therefore (with a frequency rate of 0.76) and thus (with the frequency 0.46 in NSC and 1.06 in NNSC) represent more than half of all resultive conjuncts found in NSC and approximately two thirds of those in NNSC. It is worth noting that therefore and thus (both shown in (8) below), along with contrastive however and appositive for example have been reported to be the most

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Table 5. Resultive/inferential conjuncts. Types of conjuncts

NSC

NNSC

(and) so accordingly as a consequence as a result consequently for this reason hence in that case in this case in this respect in this way now of course so that then therefore thus

0.25 0.04 0.01 0.03 0.04

0.09

TOTAL

2.30

0.05 0.03 0.01 0.01 0.03 0.08 0.50 0.76 0.46

0.02 0.10 0.02 0.07 0.02 0.09 0.07 0.02

0.09 0.28 0.76 1.06 2.66

typical conjuncts in all academic texts written by native speakers of English (Biber et al. 1999: 885). (8) NNSC, Text 5 As follows from the above mentioned, the originator or producer of newspaper discourse cannot be viewed as an individual; therefore, we can hardly speak of the ‘sender’ and his or her intentions, which we would normally consider in spoken interaction, for example. In our view, it is not possible to compare the ‘communication’ that takes place in newspaper discourse between the ‘writer’ and ‘reader’, as we would analyze it in face-to-face conversation because with newspaper discourse the negotiation of meaning is excluded (for negotiation of meaning in face-to-face conversation, cf. Povolná 2009). The traditional sender/receiver model is thus insufficient for news discourse analysis and, as Scollon (1998) suggests, should be abandoned. The terms ‘writer’ and ‘reader’ need to be understood as general concepts, which do not denote particular individuals. The relatively frequent use of the resultive then (0.50) and so (0.25) in NSC is not surprising since these conjuncts are considered rather informal and typical in particular of conversation (Biber et al. 1999: 886); thus their common application in

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the native speakers’ writing in my material gives further evidence of a more informal and dialogic way of expression typically connected with academic texts written in English by native speakers. Although these two conjuncts also occur in the RAs produced by Czech writers, they are not so common, which may be caused by non-native speakers’ awareness of their rather informal stylistic value. The resultive then used in a correlative pair with if is shown in (9), while so used in combination with and is illustrated in (4) above. As for the rather formal hence, it is worth noting that with its frequency rate of 0.05–0.07 it is very rare in the two corpora analyzed, which aligns with Biber et al.’s (1999: 887) claim that hence is used only in one fifth of all academic texts. (9) NSC, Text 10 A contrastive frequency of ±0.14 was chosen as the cut-off point for the three categories: if the contrastive frequency is 0.15 or above, the representation is regarded as more frequent. If the contrastive frequency is –0.15 or below, then the representation is regarded as less frequent. Since there is no occurrence of cos in the student data, it can be categorized in the ‘less frequent’ column, although its contrastive frequency is only –0.14. Hence, it was decided that if the figure falls within the range between –0.14 and 0.14, the representation of DMs is regarded as comparable.

5.5 Contrastive/concessive conjuncts Contrastive/concessive conjuncts (Table 6) mark either contrast or difference between information in different discourse units, or indicate concessive relationships. It follows from the meaning these conjuncts can express that they clearly contribute to the dialogue between the author of the text and the prospective reader(s) as well as other scholars’ standpoints referred to in the text (see Malá 2006, Povolná 2010). Contrastive/concessive conjuncts as discussed in this chapter subsume those expressing contrast as well as concession, since concession is viewed as a special case of contrast, notably that between the expected or usual causal relationship and the actual situation (Dušková et al. 1988; Fraser 1999) and, moreover, “in some cases, elements of contrast and concession are combined in uses of linking adverbials” (Biber et al. 1999: 878–979). Although the most common contrastive conjunct however has been exemplified above, let me now discuss another example that clearly testifies how voices other than the author’s own can enter an academic text owing to the application of conjuncts such as however. It must be admitted, though, that apart from conjuncts

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Table 6. Contrastive/concessive conjuncts. Types of conjuncts

NSC

admittedly after all albeit alternatively anyway at the same time by comparison by contrast conversely however in any case in contrast instead nevertheless nonetheless of course on the contrary on the one hand on the other hand once again or else rather still though yet

0.01

TOTAL

2.82

0.05 0.03 0.01 0.03 0.05 0.01 1.43 0.09 0.08 0.23 0.03 0.10 0.01 0.03 0.03 0.03 0.01 0.10 0.25 0.04 0.18

NNSC 0.02 0.03

0.02 0.02 0.16 1.57 0.02 0.03 0.14 0.02 0.03 0.03 0.16 0.03 0.03 0.16 0.03 0.10 2.61

there are other language means that enable the expression of contrast/concession and reference to other authors’ standpoints. These include conjunctions such as although, one token of which is shown in (10), where although is used in combination with a direct quotation, i.e., a language means which evidently introduces a voice other than the author’s current own into the text. (10) NSC, Text 9 This work is interestingly different from the simulation work described earlier because it explicitly positions itself within a framework defined by nonlinear dynamical systems theory, and explicitly uses a neural network model. However, McNellis and Blumstein’s (2001) work is also characterized by very small lexicons – in their case only four words – and although they consider that their work is “a reasonable first approximation to the system we envision

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with respect to much larger size vocabularies”, proof of this claim is explicitly left to further work. The category of contrast/concession as a whole tends to be frequently expressed not only in my data, with a frequency of occurrence of 2.61–2.82, but in written academic discourse in general since, as stated in Kortmann (1991), concession can be regarded as “the most complex of all semantic relations that may hold between parts of a discourse” (Kortmann 1991: 161). Therefore, it is not surprising that it tends to be expressed explicitly by DMs including conjuncts³. Although they are important means of guiding the reader(s) through the text, most writers, especially those from non-native academic traditions, do not resort to the whole repertoire of contrastive conjuncts at their disposal and usually give preference to a few favourites. In addition to however, other conjuncts typically used include on the other hand in NNSC and yet in NSC; both of these are included in the following examples, where they introduce other authors’ voices in the text. The former is more common in NNSC, where probably it tends to be applied under the influence of the writers’ mother tongue, namely the Czech phrase na druhé straně. The latter not only introduces a voice other than the author’s into the text, it also illustrates how other voices can respond to the voices of yet other authors. Example (12) also includes one token of though, which is common neither in NNSC nor in NSC. This conjunct is used together with the resultive then, which occurs in the adjacent clause as part of the correlative pair if . . . then, thus testifying a tendency by some authors to cumulate certain types of conjuncts. (11) NNSC, Text 9 The usage of swear words has been closely associated with male behaviour and masculinity and seen as more acceptable, even appropriate when coming from a men. Women, on the other hand, have always been exposed to more pressure when it comes to following the rules and living up to the expectations of society (e.g., Cameron 1997, Chambers & Trudgill 1998, Crawford 1995, Romaine 1999). (. . . ) Latest research, however, shows that “the use of expletives as symbols of both power and solidarity is no longer the exclusive privilege of males alone” (Bayard & Krishnayya 2001: 1) and that “the frequency gap between men’s and women’s swearing is decreasing” (Jay 2000: 166). (12) NSC, Text 2 A basic assumption made by all parties to the debate is that the phenomena they discuss – instances of sex/gender-related variation in linguistic behav-

3 For similar tendencies in novice academic writing, see Wagner 2011; Povolná 2012; Vogel 2013.

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ior can in principle be explained in terms of inherited biological traits. Yet as Derek Bickerton (2006) points out in a response to Locke and Bogin, this entails conflating what are arguably two different things: language itself and the uses to which it may be put. Few linguists dispute that there is a biological basis for the mental faculty which enables all developmentally normal humans to produce grammatical speech, but many would join Bickerton in questioning whether such applications of that faculty as gossiping or telling stories are themselves part of our genetic endowment. If they are not, though, then it is surely a category mistake to propose an evolutionary explanation for them. Two contrastive conjuncts, namely conversely and still, have the same frequency in NNSC; however, their frequency rates in NSC differ greatly, since conversely is used only in one case (0.01) while still is slightly more common (0.25). Example (13) exemplifies that some writers, such as the author below, who uses the conjunct conversely repeatedly instead of resorting to a different one from the same semantic category, give preference to certain types only. (13) also testifies the possibility of using appositive conjuncts such as e.g., for the introduction of the author’s own previous voice (see, e.g., Pípalová 2005, 2006). As stated above, writers of academic texts often compare their current research with their previous attitudes, approaches and results in an attempt to foster their scientific credibility in the academic community. (13) NSC, Text 2A In the researched corpus, the comparably most pronounced rhythm in paragraphing, presumably governed by the eye-appeal awareness, seems to be characteristic of journalistic writing. Conversely, the greatest variation in paragraph length was characteristic of fiction. Furthermore, a significant role may be attributed to the type of the selected paragraph build-up, together with the presence (or absence) of a subtle paragraph-internal hierarchy. As we have shown elsewhere (e.g., Pípalová 2005, 2006), higher consistency and stability in paragraph build-up, as a rule, reduce paragraph length. Conversely, build-up instability, inconsistency, or else elaborated internal hierarchy tend to connote lengthier paragraphs. Example (13) also comprises one instance of the listing conjunct furthermore, which is, as with the majority of listing conjuncts, more typical of NNSC.

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5.6 Transitional conjuncts Although transitional conjuncts (Table 7) can be further subdivided into discoursal and temporal, they are fairly infrequent in the data. Both subgroups mark the insertion of information that does not follow directly from the previous discourse. The former indicates a shift in attention to a different or only loosely related topic, or to a temporally connected event, as the use of now in (14) and (3) above illustrates. Although Quirk et al. (1985: 636) consider the discoursal now to be rather informal, the examples in my data, both in NSC and NNSC, prove that despite its assumed informality it can appear even in the formal genre of RAs. (14) NSC, Text 5 Having outlined the move structure of the letters in general terms, we will now look at two letters in detail. The first has been selected because we consider it to be quite close to the prototypical schematic structure. The second has been chosen because some of its schematic features are more complex. Table 7. Transitional conjuncts. Types of conjuncts

NSC

NNSC

by the way initially meanwhile now

0.01 0.01 0.01 0.17

0.16

TOTAL

0.21

0.16

Conjuncts from the latter subgroup, represented by initially, meanwhile and by the way, each with one occurrence in the NSC, seek to signal either a move away from the normal sequence in discourse (Quirk et al. 1985: 640), or a subsequent step, as is the case of initially, which provides guidance for the reader(s) through the text, as in: (15) NSC, Text 9 Word A gets its inputs from Word C and Word E; Word B gets its inputs from Word A and Word C; Word C gets its inputs from Word B and Word E; Word D gets its inputs from Word C and Word B; and Word E gets its input from Word C and Word D. Initially, all the words are unactivated. However, let us suppose that an external stimulus temporarily activates Word B. This causes a ripple of spreading activation to percolate through the entire system, as shown in Figure 3.

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Example (15), similarly to (3) above, further testifies that authors often use contrastive conjuncts, such as however, to enhance the dialogic character of their texts.

6 Conclusions Drawing on the results exemplified above, the following answers can be suggested to the research questions formulated in Section 3: 1. Which semantic relations, such as apposition, contrast/concession, listing and result, tend to be expressed overtly by conjuncts? Although conjuncts as important means of text organization are applied in both corpora to express all possible semantic relations that may hold between parts of discourse, Czech authors consider it of greater importance to use conjuncts for the expression of listing (enumeration as well as addition) and apposition. The former relation is expressed overtly to guide the reader(s) through a text which is often full of quantitative information, while the latter is made explicit to support the author’s argumentation by evidence, thus fostering his/her scientific credibility within the international academic community. This predilection is in accordance with the scientific paradigm mentioned above, which, as my results indicate, is still an important aspect of Czech academic texts written in English. 2. Can conjuncts contribute to the interaction between author(s) and reader(s) of a text and thus enhance the interactive and dialogic character of academic discourse? Based on my data, it can be concluded that conjuncts can contribute to the interaction between author(s) and reader(s) of a text, which is particularly evident with semantic relations often considered most informative and thus most important of all, i.e., contrast/concession and result/inference (Kortmann 1991), both frequently expressed in all the RAs analyzed. 3. Is there any cross-cultural variation in the use of conjuncts in RAs by Czech speakers of English on the one hand and native speakers of English on the other? There are only minor cross-cultural distinctions between the ways Czech and native speakers of English use conjuncts, notably in the choice of the most frequent types within each semantic category. This can result from differences in particular writers’ styles (e.g., a preference for the use of for example rather than for instance or thus rather than therefore), topics under examination (e.g., some re-

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quiring frequent exemplification and thus appositive conjuncts such as i.e. and namely) and individual writers’ preferences which can be influenced by L1 writing conventions (e.g., the frequent use of on the other hand, probably under the influence of a similar phrase in the Czech language). The conjuncts considered most typical of all academic discourse, i.e., however, thus, therefore and for example (Biber et al. 1999), are commonly used in both corpora. In addition, Czech writers frequently resort to conjuncts expressing apposition (i.e., e.g., and namely) and native speakers of English use the appositive e.g., and resultive then not only to exemplify their arguments and support their reasoning, but also to enhance the interaction and dialogue between the author of the text and the reader(s) on the one hand and between the author and relevant previous research including their own previous standpoints on the other. The assumption that academic texts written by native speakers of English tend to be more interactive and dialogic, thus supposedly comprising more conjuncts, has not been verified. As my results indicate, Czech authors of RAs attempt to adopt Anglo-American academic style conventions such as linear organization of discourse through clear division of the text and explicit clues on content which, of course, include an appropriate use of conjuncts discussed in this chapter. In spite of certain limitations in terms of size and representativeness, it is hoped that this small-scale research has presented some interesting and revealing evidence of current tendencies in written academic discourse produced by writers of RAs from one discourse community in the Central Europe – the Czech Republic – and thus made a valid contribution to the volume on English as a scientific and research language in Europe. Only further research which should comprise more data from other genres and perhaps also from other non-English speaking communities can confirm the conclusions postulated above.

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Tanskanen, Sanna-Kaisa. 2006. Collaborating towards coherence: Lexical cohesion in English discourse. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ventola, Eija & Anna Mauranen. 1991. Non-native writing and native revising of scientific articles. In Eija Ventola (ed.), Functional and systemic linguistics. Approaches and uses, 457–492. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Vogel, Radek. 2008. Sentence linkers in essays and papers by native vs. non-native writers. Discourse and Interaction 1(2). 119–126. Vogel, Radek. 2013. Sentence adverbials in academic texts: Preferences of native vs. non-native writers. In Josef Schmied & Christoph Haase (eds.), English for academic purposes: Practical and theoretical approaches. REAL Studies 7. 81–93. Göttingen: Cuvillier Verlag. Wagner, Susanne. 2011. Concessives and contrastives in student writing: L1, L2 and genre differences. In Josef Schmied (ed.), Academic writing in Europe: Empirical perspectives. REAL Studies 5. 23–48. Göttingen: Cuvillier Verlag.

Sonia Oliver

Spanish authors dealing with hedging or the challenges of scholarly publication in English L2 Abstract: The growing and generalized use of English in research publication today has created the need for non-native scholars not only to learn English, but to have a good command of the discourse features of all research genres (Swales 2004: 43). This pressure to publish in English has made visible the existence of certain rhetorical and epistemological differences across languages. This is, for instance, the case of Spanish medical discourse and its Anglophone counterpart. As stated by Piqué-Angordans and Posteguillo (2006: 383), “[m]edical English (ME) is a significant area of research in the wider fields of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP)” and much more attention has understandably been paid to it than to other languages. Only more recently, due to the increasing interest in the study of rhetorical patterns both interlinguistically and interculturally, can we find some research based on the study of Spanish academic writing (Connor 1996; Valero-Garcés 1996; Moreno 1997; Burgess 2002; Oliver 2004; Martín-Martín 2005; and Morales et al. 2009). Within disciplinary discourses, the appropriate use of hedging devices is vital for authors presenting their knowledge in their scientific and academic discourse communities as “researchers are expected to modulate their assertions with the appropriate degree of commitment in order to make their work acceptable for publication” (Lafuente Millán 2009: 65). Thereby, in this paper we focus on Spanish and 3 main genres in scientific discourse, in other words, the research paper, the case report and the book review in order to describe and analyze hedging expressions and attitude markers from a cross-linguistic (English vs. Spanish) and cross-disciplinary (medicine vs. linguistics) approach. In this sense, we have developed a corpus of 120 English and Spanish samples and the analyses of the two corpora suggest that hedging devices are more common in English than in Spanish and that mitigation strategies in medical discourse may differ from the ones used in the linguistics field, indicating, then, a cross-linguistic and a cross-disciplinary variation in terms of frequency and typology. Therefore, the results of the present research might interest those involved in the writing, editing, translating, teaching and learning of academic and scientific texts. Keywords: hedging, specialized discourse, academic literacies, contrastive rhetoric, corpus linguistics and ESP

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1 Introduction There is no doubt that English plays a key role in today’s specialized communication. In fact, it has become the lingua franca in science as Arabic, Greek or Latin were before. However, in spite of the increase of speakers of Spanish and other languages there is an obvious trend towards its use and its influence in general language usage: new concepts, new objects, new techniques (most of them coming from the Anglosaxon context). English, being a worldwide spoken language, enjoys an important index in terms of human development, prestige and influence in languages for specific purposes and this can be observed in scholar publication in particular (Salager-Meyer 2001, 2003; Hyland, 2002). Hyland (2002: 24) notes that “English is now more than ever the language of science. Consequently non-native speaking (NNS) scientists have to cope with a specific literacy not only in their L1, but more importantly in English which may be their L2 or even L3”. This pressure to publish in English has made visible the existence of certain rhetorical and epistemological differences across languages and, in particular, between Spanish discourse and that of the Anglophone tradition. In this paper I focus on Spanish and English academic writing in order to describe and analyze hedging expressions and attitude markers from a cross-linguistic and a cross-disciplinary and generic approach.

2 Theoretical framework 2.1 Genre analysis We could say that so as to interpret and process information what we read is shaped by what we know and what we have read before. . . Therefore, genres belong to discourse communities (with public goals, means for communication, information and feedback opportunities, genres for those purposes, a lexis or jargon and experts) (Swales 1990: 24–25).

Following discourse analysis we can understand the relationship between what is being said or written and what it is meant, in other words, the author’s intention while writing and presenting his/her claims within a discourse community in particular. It is precisely the contextual analysis of a specialized text that will “give us tools to look at larger units of texts such as patterns of vocabulary and textual organization that are typical of particular uses of language” (Paltridge, 2000: 3). Within those prototypical uses we could foresee the genres (Swales, 1990) that belong to specific discourse communities that share a common lexis for experts

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and have certain format and content constraints or protocol to be followed. In the present study we will be comparing 3 main genres in scientific discourse – in other words, the research paper, the case report, and the book review both in English and Spanish – therefore, it is very important to take into account the main features of each genre before attempting to analyze sociopragmatic and linguistic resources such as, hedging and attitude markers in academic written discourse.

2.2 Contrastive Rhetoric Researchers in the field of Contrastive Rhetoric argue that the existence of intercultural differences across writing styles are due to the different expectations of such diverse discourse communities. As Connor (1996) points out, most L2 writers may transfer their textual and rhetorical strategies before having totally absorbed L1 audience expectations. On the other hand, Day (1998: 25) claims that in order to master discourse conventions an L2 writer has to adopt the standard conventions of the predominant (Anglophone) academic style and the genre strategies used by the members of the discourse community. In our view, an emerging trend leading, perhaps, to nowadays plagiarism or patchwriting (Howard 1995; Pecorari 2003) in English L2 production in students and novice writers that could be somehow avoided by the careful study and application of contrastive studies worldwide. In this sense, Connor’s (1996: 5) illustrative definition of this framework of investigation shows its importance for L2 academic writing: Contrastive Rhetoric is an area of research in second language acquisition that identifies problems in composition encountered by second language writers, and, by referring to the rhetorical strategies of the first language, attempts to explain them.

In the following section of this chapter we will introduce the concepts of hedging and attitude markers, which are the two main objects of the present study as they characterize the rhetoric of scientific and academic discourse across languages and genres.

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3 Focus of study 3.1 Hedging It is frequently claimed that instead of saying “I know”, members of the academia should rather assume or suggest when they preferably say how things might be, or how things perhaps are. Hedging has been linked to highest-level peer communication such as professional specialist to specialist research articles [...] and the use of hedges is thought to be particularly characteristic of discourse between medical specialists (Varttala, 2001: 178).

The view of texts and their surrounding social context helps authors introduce their claims with more caution and, hence, modulate their statements in such a way that they might be more widely accepted by their colleagues and, thus, create a space for intellectual debate. Therefore, in the first part of the present study we follow previous research carried out by Salager Meyer (1994), and Hyland (2000), among others. And based on such studies we have developed a hedging taxonomy to help detect and analyze hedging devices in medical discourse according to the following variables: a) the pragmatic category: shield, approximator, author’s personal doubt and involvement, and agentless strategies b) their function in discourse: to protect the author, to make things vague, to emphasize the interpersonal dimension in discourse or to fulfil academic conventions, c) the linguistic items involved, such as modal verbs, semi-auxiliaries, probability adjectives, epistemic verbs, adverbs of varied typology, conditional forms and the strategic use of personal pronouns and passive voice or nominalizations, d) the linguistic level: lexical, morphological or syntactic (phraseological), as it is shown in Table 1 below. As to the four pragmatic categories used in the analysis of our corpus, made up of interlinguistic and intergeneric academic writing samples, they are: 1) shields, 2) approximators, 3) author’s expressions of doubt and personal involvement, and 4) agentless strategies. In the following lines we have included a selection of examples of each category both in English and Spanish. 1.

SHIELDS. To protect the subject and anticipate negative feedback. a) English: “. . . they seem to have biological activity and similar functions to those of cytokines . . . ” RP-ENG2 b) Spanish: “Aquellos pacientes con una baja actividad enzimática pueden presentar efectos secundarios como la citotoxicidad y aplasia medular” CR-SP1

4. AGENTLESS STRATEGIES

3. AUTHOR’S PERSONAL DOUBT & INVOLVEMENT

C. To emphasize the interpersonal dimension: evaluate & assess one’s material and negotiate the status of one’s claims. Encourages dialogue with the audience and facilitates discussion. Hyland (1998) D. To fulfill academic conventions, to sound more precise & more scientific. Salager-Meyer (2003)

a) passive voice b) despersonalization (nominalization & non personal forms)

a) modal verbs b) semi-auxiliaries c) probability adjectives d) probability adverbs e) epistemic verbs Adverbs of: a) quantity b) degree c) frequency d) time Non personal forms* a) conditional b) 1st person markers

A. To protect the subject and anticipate negative feedback or the so called “boomerang effect”. Allows scientists to present their knowledge cautiously and introduce claims Salager-Meyer (1994) B. To make things vague and to indicate probability. It is related to the author’s avoidance of personal involvement and the impossibility of reaching absolute accuracy Salager-Meyer (1994)

1. SHIELDS

2. APPROXIMATORS

LINGUISTIC ITEMS

FUNCTIONS IN DISCOURSE

PRAGMATIC CATEGORIES

Table 1. Hedging taxonomy proposed by Oliver (2005).

SYNTACTIC

MORPHOLOGICAL

LEXICAL

LINGUISTIC LEVEL

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2.

APPROXIMATORS. To make things vague. a) English: “With BP-em, the blockade achieved maximal effect slightly later, but it was of significantly longer duration” RP-ENG1 b) Spanish: “. . . esta inflamación causa síntomas que están usualmente relacionados con una obstrucción difusa y variable de las vías aéreas, que es frecuentemente reversible de forma espontánea . . . ” RP-SP9

3.

AUTHOR’S EXPRESSIONS OF DOUBT AND PERSONAL INVOLVEMENT. To emphasize the interpersonal dimension and encourage dialogue. a) English: “Most of what we know has been obtained from in vitro experiments with mucosal fragments of epithelial cells” RP-ING3 b) Spanish: “Por tanto, podr´ıa considerarse que la situación nutricional de sobrepeso en la edad escolar supondr´ıa . . . ” RP-SP3

4. AGENTLESS STRATEGIES. To follow academic conventions and show certain detachment towards what is being stated. a) English: “Significant morbidity and mortality have been reported in patients with SAHS” RP-ENG3. b) Spanish: “Numerosas evidencias han propiciado que se haya llegado al consenso de . . . ” RP-SP6 Regarding the analysis of hedging we can foresee some challenges, in particular, the fact that a single expression can convey several meanings and that an author can hedge his or her statements using a set of pragmatic strategies and choose certain linguistic items (e.g., modal verbs) belonging to specific lexical, morphological and syntactic linguistic levels (e.g., the use of the passive voice). Not to mention, some authors can be confused because of the academic expectations in terms of expression of doubt and certainty in different cultural contexts and depending on the target audiences. Thus, in our research we expect to uncover a potential hedging variation according to the IMRD (Introduction Methods Results Discussion) section in the case of the Research Paper and the Case Report, which follows a similar pattern. And, most likely, significant differences in hedging frequency and typology in Spanish and English academic written discourse.

3.2 Attitude markers As previously stated in this paper, academic written discourse has become a central topic of research in recent years and it is, especially, in scientific communication where the argumentative-rhetoric component characterizes many of the

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discourses in use – being one of its main research concerns the analysis of interpersonal features and, within this broad scope, the study of appraisal. Hence, in the second part of this study we follow Appraisal Theory, developed by the Sydney School (Martin and Rose 2003; Martin 2005; Martin and White 2005), as a system of evaluation in discourse interaction. At this stage, we have developed a corpus of 60 medical book reviews (30 in Spanish and 30 in English). In this vein, Book Reviews (BR) aim to inform the scientific community about the latest research in the field by providing an assessment based on certain values toward what is considered “science”. In Hyland’s (2000: 43) words, “[reviews] contribute to the dissemination and evaluation of research while providing an alternative forum in which academics can set out their views . . . allow[ing] established writers a rhetorical platform”. As to this theory, appraisal draws upon an interpersonal meanings system. In other words, appraisal resources are used to negotiate social relationships when communicating with an addressee, how we feel about things or people and how we evaluate them. As a matter of fact, there is also some judgement on the scientific work involved and a personal appreciation or/and affect, which may vary from one culture to another, across disciplines and/or cross-linguistically. In fact, certain attitudes not only refer to the expression of affect but, actually, have to do with the object’s assessment (appreciation) and the evaluation of people’s behaviour and feelings (judgement). In Table 2 we present the categorization of appraisal resources following Martin and White (2005) to highlight the category in study (Attitude). Table 2. Categorization of Appraisal Theory resources. CATEGORY

FUNCTION

EXAMPLE

Engagement

It focuses on the way the author introduces the statements of others.

The author claims/states The author explains/ informs

Graduation

It consists on the strength given to the author’s words (Hedging/Boosting)

A really good book It has a slightly different organization

Attitude

It focuses on the different options to express a negative or positive evaluation.

The well-known reputation of this author

Being the objective of this second part of the study the analysis of attitude markers to identify linguistic forms used in academic book reviews, especially, to create a certain reaction-interaction-toward within specialized discourse communities

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and through the assessment of their content, we have focused on the following 3 categories: 1. Affect, 2. Judgement, and 3. Appreciation. 1.

Affect. Direct or indirect involvement of the reviewer in the text. Examples: a) As I read the book, I looked forward with interest to the last section, although I equally enjoyed the first, with its historical focus. (NEJM BR1) b) The chapters on attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder and cerebral palsy reflect that we are still at an early point in the identification of genes that produce these conditions. (NEJM BR1) c) To be fair, the sections in which surgical aspects of treatment are discussed are well balanced . . . (NEJM BR9)

2.

Judgement. Reviewer’s attitude towards the reviewee. Examples: a) On this topic, Glick presents few new sources or fresh insights. (NEJM BR4) b) The authors include many experts in clinical research and basic science. They eloquently address what is known . . . The authors present evidence for why things are not so different from the way they used to be. This discrepancy is helpful in illustrating the unknowns in this area of study. (NEJM BR5) c) The authors’ ability to draw together an immense and diverse knowledge base into a logical and comprehensive overview is impressive, and while the review of the current evidence base is authoritative, the human face of manic depression and the experience of this disorder among artists, writers, and composers are illuminating. (NEJM BR6)

3.

Appreciation. Reviewer’s attitude towards reviewee’s book. Examples: a) Overall, the book hits the mark by offering a great deal of information in a relatively short book. The chapter on the history of mental retardation is filled with facts that have gone unnoticed or been forgotten. (NEJM BR1) b) An Introduction to Human Molecular Genetics will be a useful resource for medical and dental students, as well as for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, research scientists, and physicians. The abundance of clearly presented information renders this textbook a chef d’oeuvre. (NEJM BR2) c) . . . future editions of this book would benefit from a more comprehensive discussion of predictive genetic testing and its ethical, social, and legal ramifications. (NEJM BR2)

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It is, precisely, this contrast of judgement, appreciation, and affect categories that allows us to critically interpret the appraisal criteria used by each discourse community. In the following section of this paper we will describe the methodology that we have used and we will also depict the corpus that we have developed in the two different stages of the present investigation. Firstly, to study hedging devices in Spanish and English biomedical discourse (research papers and case report genres) and secondly, to analyze the use of attitude markers in book reviews across the same languages and in two academic disciplines: medicine and linguistics. It is important to clarify why the two aspects of research were conducted in the same study.

4 Methodology In the first stage of the present study, a comparable corpus was compiled similar to the one compiled by Salager-Meyer (1994) to study hedging devices in medical discourse. In order to replicate her investigation and shed some light into the situation of Spanish scientific writers writing in Spanish and in English L2 from years 1999–2002. In this vein, our first corpus consisted of 10 research papers and 10 case reports published in reputed journals in the Spanish medical settings, namely, Archivos de Bronconeumología, Atención Primaria, Medicina Clínica, Revista Española de Anestesiología y Reanimación, Revista Española de Cardiología, and Revista de Neurología. The second corpus was made up of 10 research papers written in English L2 by Spanish scientists and published in journals in the field of Biomedicine, such as Anesthesia and Analgesia, BMJ, CHEST, Clinical Nutrition, Critical Care Medicine, Gastroenterology, Gut, and Thorax. In the second stage of our investigation, a total of 120 book reviews published between the years 2006–2011 was selected. The samples were selected according to the relevance of the journal in the field, the linguistic background and geographical origins of the author and its online accessibility, following the comparison criteria proposed by Moreno (2008: 38) when making two corpora comparable for research purposes. Therefore, the texts used for this study can be considered representative current models of the discourse genre analyzed (BR) as they are BRs published in the 21st century, in high impact factor journals, on-line access and written by native speakers of the language (English and Spanish respectively) with a balanced contribution between British and American English texts and Peninsular and South American Spanish texts published by native speakers of the language according to their surnames and affiliations.

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Regarding the journals selected, it is worth mentioning that we created the following corpora: 1) a subcorpus of 30 full texts from the field of biomedicine in English and 2) a subcorpus of 30 full texts from the field of biomedicine in Spanish. In this sense, texts from: a) The New England Journal of Medicine (NEMJ), b) British Medical Journal (BMJ), and The Lancet. On the other hand, the Spanish subcorpus comprised 60 full texts (30 from each field), being the English Applied Linguistics Spanish corpus 10 full texts from each of the following journals: a) Discurso & Sociedad (D&S), b) Revista de la Sociedad Española de Linguística (RSEL), and c) Revista Signos (Rev Sig) and the 30 Spanish full texts from medical journals were selected from: a) Anales Médicos (An Med), b) Revista Española de Cardiología (REC), and c) Revista Médica de Chile (Rev Med Chile). As stated before, the steps we followed in this study included a first stage where we focused on hedging devices and: 1) created a corpus for research, 2) developed a Spanish taxonomy and 3) carried quantitative and qualitative analyses on hedging in a corpus of medical case reports and research papers (including statistical SPSS software and an inter-rater reliability study). The results of the latter are shown in Table 3, where all hedging categories were validated in the Spanish corpus but the fourth category (agentless strategies) was not validated in the English corpus since the second rater did qualify nominalizations and passive voice as a fulfilment of the academic conventions rather than hedging strategies. Table 3. Inter-rater correlations to determine hedging taxonomy validity. CR-SP

RP-SP

RP-ENG2

Shields

95 % P-value ≤ 0.05 %

99 % P-value ≤ 0.01 %

99 % P-value ≤ 0.01 %

Approximators

82 % NS

99 % P-value ≤ 0.01 %

99 % P-value ≤ 0.01 %

Expressions of doubt & involv.

99 % P-value ≤ 0.01 %

95 % P-value ≤ 0.05 %

94 % NS

Agentless strategies

99 % P-value ≤ 0.01 %

99 % P-value ≤ 0.01 %

—

And a second stage where we: 1) created an extra corpus for research on a third genre (book review) and also 2) carried out quantitative and qualitative analyses on attitude markers across disciplines (medicine and applied linguistics).

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In this second phase of our study we tried to answer the following four research questions: a) How is attitude expressed in Spanish and English academic book reviews? b) Are they positive or negative attitudes? c) Which kind of attitude is more relevant: affect, judgement, or appreciation? d) Are there any differences in the Spanish and English academic communities? In the following section we will deal with the results of both our analyses. First, the study of hedging devices in biomedical case reports and research papers in English and Spanish and then, book reviews across the same two languages (Spanish and English) and two disciplines (biomedicine and linguistics).

5 Results In the first part of the present study, the analysis of the corpora suggests that hedging devices are more common in English (10 %) than in Spanish (5 %) and that mitigation or hedging strategies in medical discourse may differ in terms not only of frequency but also typology (more presence of the categories shields and approximators than agentless strategies in English, for example) and also across genres as medical case reports and research papers are more hedged if compared with medical book reviews at a later stage of the present research. Therefore, there are rhetorical differences in hedging by Spanish and English authors in terms of frequency and typology and hedging devices in specialized discourse are different according to the genre used, in other words, case report, research paper or book review and the writer (Spanish native speaker or English native speaker) as we can see from the information contained in the following graphs. Figure 1 shows the results of hedging devices in terms of frequency per IMRaD section (Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion) in the English and Spanish corpora of Medical texts: CC-ESP (caso clínico Español), AI-ESP (artículo de investigación Español) and AI-ING2 (artículo de investigación Inglés L2). In this sense, we can observe that the Methods and Introduction sections of the IMRD pattern are the most heavily hedged sections in both the research paper and the case report genres across languages. As to the frequency of hedging devices per pragmatic category: a) shields, b) approximators, c) expressions of author’s doubt and involvement and d) agentless strategies. As seen in Figure 2 (below), agentless strategies and shields are the most frequently used pragmatic categories of hedging in both languages (English and Spanish).

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Fig. 1. Frequency of hedging devices per IMRAD section.

Fig. 2. Frequency of hedging devices per pragmatic category.

Fig. 3. Frequency of hedging per genre: case report vs. research paper.

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In terms of total frequency of hedging across genres and languages, Figure 3 shows a steady presence of hedging devices. In other words, when the Spanish scientist writes in English L2 he/she makes more use of the sociopragmatic phenomenon of hedging. As seen in Table 4, the increase of hedging strategies is even more evident when a native speaker of the language is the author of the scientific text. Table 4. Hedging frequency across languages: Spanish, English L1 and English L2. Studies on Hedging

Oliver (2005) RP-SP

Oliver (2005) RP-ENG2

SalagerMeyer (1994) ENG1

Fortanet et al. (2001) ENG1

Shields

10.70 %

18.20 %

40.7 %

42 %

Approximators

13.90 %

15.78 %

23.2 %

26 %

Expressions of doubt and involvement

19.52 %

11.98 %

7%

7%

As seen in Table 4, the percentage of hedging strategies increases when Spanish authors write in English L2 (18.20 %, 15.78 % and 11.98 % vs. 10.70 %, 13.90 % and 19.52 %) when the authors write in Spanish L1. Moreover, when those results including the three pragmatic categories validated and studied in this paper: shields, approximators, and expressions of author’s doubt and involvement are compared with the results obtained from previous studies carried out in English L1 by experts in the field, such as Salager-Meyer (1994) and Fortanet et al. (2001), the results reveal an increase in the former two categories but a decrease in the latter due to the seemingly major implication/visibility of the Spanish author in the scientific text, in other words, presenting a less hedged discourse. In the second part of the study, the different use of attitude markers in medical book reviews seems to indicate that although the percentage of appraisal might be similar across languages, the strategies used to criticize another author’s work might be more “veiled” in the case of the English corpus, where the reviewer focuses much more on the object/book (appreciation) rather than directly on its author (judgement). Our interest in finding out whether attitudes are positive or negative revealed that 83 % of the book reviews in Medicine are positive in English. And even slightly higher (87 %) in Spanish. As to the kind of attitude marker more frequently used, the results reveal that there seems to be a variation across appraisal categories (affect, judgement, and apreciation). As a matter of fact, there is more appreci-

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ation (51.6 %) than judgement (28.1 %) and more judgement than affect category (20.3 %) in English. In this sense, the expressions of judgement and appreciation in the Spanish book reviews subcorpus in medicine overlap, as shown in the following example: La monografía, cuidadosamente editada, va presentando ordenadamente los conceptos y principios básicos, así como los que pueden considerarse más especializados, de la morfología. Detenerse en todos ellos no resulta posible, y menos necesario, de modo que aquí haré referencia a aquellos contenidos donde la aportación de G. Booij a un estudio introductorio como el que presenta resulta a mi entender relevante. Puede sin lugar a dudas juzgarse como tal la diferenciación que el autor establece en la sección 5 [. . . ] (5th paragraph of text 2R)

However, this overlap does not seem to be so obvious in the case of the English book reviews under study in the present chapter. It would therefore be interesting to conduct further analysis of this preliminary result and some discussion in further research where, most likely, inter-rater reliability tests will be carried out to account for validity in attitude markers categorization. It should be stressed that another important issue raised in the present investigation focused on the possible differences between the Spanish and English academic communities and, in this sense, from the findings discussed above, it seems that in Spanish book reviews, judgement and appreciation, that is to say, the evaluation of the behavior of an author and the quality of his/her book are “mixed”; but, as we previously stated, in the case of English book reviews this combination of judgement and appreciation appears to be less evident. Nevertheless, we would like to insist that more data is required to prove so that this tendency can be empirically confirmed in greater detail and further discussed in relation to previously-reported scholarly findings on hedges in academic discourse.

6 Conclusions In this chapter, we have presented a study of hedging and attitude markers across 3 academic genres (case reports, research papers and book reviews) and languages (English L1 and L2, and Spanish L1). In this vein, the first part of the study shows an existing difference in the use of hedging strategies in terms of frequency and typology according to the native language of the author (English or Spanish) and the second part of the present research indicates, somehow, that the linguistic units used to convey appraisal in the book review genre may also differ, too. As discussed above, BRs are a highly “appraising” genre, unveils certain relevant attitudes in discourse because they are often linked to affiliations and com-

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plexities that take place in the interpersonal relationships within the varied discourse communities. All the examples presented here are looking for the “applause of the reader”, when strongly recommending the piece of work being reviewed by using positive nouns and adjectives and/or reinforcing them with “intensifying” adverbs and specific discourse markers in the first person. In scientific communication, clarity and rigor, wisdom and carefulness together with soundness and completeness are very much appreciated in a piece of work. These values constitute, then, the identities of the participants involved in each of the discursive practices (their positioning toward what is said). In fact, the linguistic way these values are expressed in English and Spanish BRs may sensibly differ as in Spanish BRs they are qualities referred to the author of the book (as a form of judgment), and to the book at the same time (as an appreciation) but in the case of English BRs the judgement of the author’s book reviewed is less evident. Finally, we could see other tasks to be performed as future lines of research, namely, to select a larger corpus made up of BRs from other disciplines; a closer look into the categories of analysis and, once perfectly defined by an inter-rater reliability analysis, carrying out a quantitative study to find out the most frequent categories and their context of communication. Moreover, it would be interesting to do some research on generic variation from an interlinguistic and critical point of view by observing whether other genres have different “requirements” and if the appraisal of a book or research is performed following the same assessment criteria across research communities. So as to explore such criteria within communities we see the need to explore the “ethnography path”, by interviewing the BRs writers. These interviews will allow us to collect relevant “insiders” information on BRs authors’ process of composition and their intended and unintended meanings while writing in specific academic genres. We could focus, then, on the drafting and personal reflection prior to delivering the final version of the text that we, as members of the community, finally read. In this vein, the results of the present study on hedging devices and attitude markers across languages and genres might interest those involved in the writing, editing, translating, teaching and learning of academic and scientific texts.

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References Burgess, Sally. 2002. Packed houses and intimate gatherings: Audience and rhetorical structure. In John Flowerdew (ed.), Academic discourse, 196–215. London: Longman. Connor, Ulla. 1996. Contrastive rhetoric. Cross-cultural aspects of second language writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Day, Robert A. 1998. How to write a scientific paper. 5th Edition. Oryx Press. Phoenix, Arizona, USA. Flowerdew, Lynne. 2005. An integration of corpus-based and genre-based approaches to text analysis in EAP/ESP: Countering criticisms against corpus-based methodologies. English for Specific Purposes 24. 321–332. Howard, Rebecca M. 1995. Plagiarisms, authorships, and the academic death penalty. College English 57(7). 788–807. Hyland, Ken. 2000. Praise and criticism: Interactions in book reviews. Disciplinary discourses. Social interactions in academic writing, 41–62. Hyland, Ken. 2002. Writing: Teaching and researching. Harlow: Pearson Education. Lafuente Millán, Enrique. 2009. Epistemic and approximative meaning revisited: The use of hedges, boosters and approximators when writing. In Sally Burgess & Pedro Martín-Martín (eds.), English as an Additional Language in research publication and communication. Linguistic Insights, 61. 65–82. Martín-Martín. Pedro. 2005. The rhetoric of the abstract in English and Spanish scientific discourse. Bern: Peter Lang. Martin, James R. 2005. Invocación de actitudes: El juego de la gradación de la valoración en el discurso, Revista Signos 38(58). 195–220. Martin, James R. & David Rose. 2003. Working with discourse. Meaning beyond the clause. London & New York: Continuum. Martin, James R. & Peter R. R. White. 2005. The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. London: Palgrave. Morales, Oscar., Daniel Cassany, Sonia Oliver, Carolina González & Ernesto Marín. 2009. ¿Es la escritura académica odontológica hispanoamericana un discurso matizado? Estudio de la atenuación en artículos de investigación. Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos 15/16. 135–157. Moreno, Ana. 1997. Genre constraints across languages: Causal metatext in Spanish and English RAs. English for Specific Purposes. 46(3). 161–179. Moreno, Ana. 2008. The importance of comparable corpora in cross-cultural studies. In Ulla Connor, Ed Nagelhout, & William Rozycki (eds.), Contrastive Rhetoric: Reaching to Intercultural Rhetoric, 25–41. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Oliver, Sonia. 2005. Análisis contrastivo español/inglés de la atenuación retórica en el discurso médico. El artículo de investigación y el caso clínico. Tesis Doctoral. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. http://tdx.cat/handle/10803/7582 Paltridge, Brian. 2000. Making sense of discourse analysis. Gold Coast: AEE Publishing. Pecorari, Dianne. 2003a. Good and original: Plagiarism and patchwriting in academic second-language writing. Journal of Second Language Writing 12. 317–345. Pecorari, Dianne. 2003b. Are we encouraging patchwriting? Reconsidering the role of the pedagogical context in ESL student writers’ transgressive intertextuality. English for Specific Purposes 27. 267–284.

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Piqué-Angordans, Jordi & Santiago Posteguillo. 2006. Peer positive and negative assessment in medical English written genres. In Maurizio Gotti & Françoise Salager-Meyer (eds.), Advances in medical discourse analysis: Oral and written contexts. Linguistic insights, 45. 383–406. Bern: Peter Lang. Salager-Meyer, Françoise & Nahirana Zambrano. 2001. The bittersweet rhetoric of controversiality in 19th and 20th century French and English medical literature. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 2(1). 141–175. Salager-Meyer, Françoise, M. Angeles Alcaraz Ariza & Nahirana Zambrano. 2003. The scimitar, the dagger and the glove: Intercultural differences in the rhetoric of criticism in Spanish, French and English medical discourse (1930–1995). English for Specific Purposes 22. 223–247. Swales, John M. 1990. Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swales, John M. 2004. Research genres. English as an academic and research language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Valero-Garcés, Carmen. 1996. Contrastive rhetoric in ESP: A cross-linguistic analysis of finite verb profiles in English and Spanish medical abstracts. UNESCO-ALSED LSP Newsletter 20(2). 22–36. Varttala, Teppo. 2001. Hedging in scientifically oriented discourse. Exploring variation according to discipline and intended audience. Electronic doctoral dissertation. Acta Electronica Universtitatis Tamperensis 138. http://acta.uta.fi/pdf/951-44-5195-3.pdf (accessed 15 June 2012) The Appraisal Website: Homepage. The Language of attitude, arguability and interpersonal positioning. http://www.grammatics.com/appraisal/ (accessed 15 June 2012).

Josef Schmied

Academic writing in English in comparison: Degree adverbs, connecting adverbials, and contrastive/concessive markers in the ChemCorpus and comparable data-bases Abstract: This contribution describes a corpus of recent (i.e., post 2000) academic texts written by German students of English at Chemnitz University of Technology, the ChemCorpus, and demonstrates how it can be investigated in comparison with similar collections, not only the well-known traditional International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), but also the more recent British (the BAWE corpus) and Czech (the Brno Corpus) corpora of academic writing. It focuses on the differences between authors (e.g., native vs. non-native writers) and text types (e.g., timed/untimed text productions). It analyzes degree adverbs, formal and functional types of linkers, adverbials and conjuncts, and concessive/contrastive markers, to illustrate how texts by students from different writing cultures and teaching conventions can be compared. On this basis, it develops recommendations for teaching functionally supported usage conventions for different student groups and asks whether a common European lingua franca could be developed on this high level of writing competence, which could be called (Non-Native) Standard European Academic English. Keywords: academic writing, writing cultures, research genres, L2 academic writing

1 Introduction For the past 25 years, the comparison of student writing has been undertaken in different conceptual frameworks. First, the idea of learner English was discussed in the wider context of the International Corpus of English (ICE; Schmied 2011a) but whereas the collections from first- and second-language backgrounds (ICE) focused on the variety of text types and genres that were derived from the Survey of English Usage and Brown/LOB traditions, the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) focused on one text type which at that time was the prototype in European foreign language teaching, argumentative essays. Although argumentative essays were criticized in the relevant literature as untypical of academic writing (Hyland 1990), a comparative database has been developed and ICLE publications have documented comparative research by and for language

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teachers around the world (Granger (ed.) 1998; Granger, Hung, and Petch-Tyson 2002; Granger 2010). Parallel to this, based on the genre approach proposed by Swales (1990, 2004), a broad debate about academic genres has been developing, which is not focused so much on the learner perspective but on a higher perspective of English as an international language of academic research and publication (Mauranen 2012). On this new basis, a different style of comparative research has developed that includes only partly the “native speaker models”, the Michigan collections MICASE and MICUSP (Hardy and Römer 2013; Römer and O’Donnell fc.) or the corresponding British versions, the Corpus of British Academic Spoken and Written English, BASE and BAWE respectively (Alsop and Nesi 2009). In contrast to these collections in English-speaking universities (although they also include texts by non-native writers), several institutions have started compiling their own databases on their students’ writing, i.e., non-native writers in English departments at non-English universities. In Brno, for instance, publications have documented an analysis of teachers’ academic English that is quite compatible to the ChemCorpus analysis mentioned below (e.g., Hůlková 2011 or Dontcheva-Navratilova 2012). Similar debates on a higher level have been held at Modena (Poppy and Cheng 2014) and Zaragoza (Pérez-Llantada 2012 and this volume). On this basis, new comparisons are possible, which can be combined to discuss empirically to what extent a new European non-native standard of English is developing in European institutions. The academic discourse on local, national or global traditions in written academic discourse has been discussed at numerous conferences and in collections with titles such as Written academic discourse: Anglo-American traditions in the European context (Chamonikolasová, Chovanec, and Kamenická 2012). This tradition has to be seen in at least two “cultural” dimensions: the national as well as the disciplinary, and the two have often been discussed as determining factors (e.g., Yakhontova 2006 or Schmied 2013). The standard hypothesis is that changes in national academic traditions are spreading from the natural sciences through social sciences to humanities according to Anglo-American traditions (cf. Pérez-Llantada 2012). This contribution to the EiE volume compares the ChemCorpus from Chemnitz University of Technology (CUT) to the other non-native and native corpora mentioned above. After a brief description of the corpus, results from three small studies by the Chemnitz research team are discussed: degree adverbs (detailed in an unpublished MA thesis by Bräuer 2013) are categorized as amplifiers, with boosters and maximizers, and downtoners, with approximators, diminishers and minimizers (based on Biber et al. 1999). Linkers (detailed in an unpublished BA thesis by Albrecht 2013) are defined as a list of conjuncts and adverbials classified under the semantic categories additive, adversative, causal, and sequential

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(based on Halliday and Hasan 1976) and are closely related to conjunctive adverbials (detailed in an unpublished MA thesis by Herzog 2014). The fourth study in the research group (reported in full in Wagner 2011) uses contrastive and concessive connectors, even only a single lexeme like whereas and its initial or noninitial position, to show differences between the comparable academic corpora discussed here. In each section, a qualitative part introduces the linguistic features analyzed on the basis of real examples from the different corpora (the reference to real data can be traced back by the codes used after the sample sentences¹) and a quantitative part offers comparisons with ICLE, BAWE/MICUSP or Brno corpora; in the last case study, this database has to be expanded into the (academic parts of the) megacorpora for British and American English (BrE and AmE; cf. Davies 2004- and 2008- and 2.2 below), when the single lexeme whereas is analyzed to show that relatively speaking their large absolute figures do not contradict the small absolute figures from the academic corpora focused on here. Which research questions can be asked in each case depends on the corpus and the frequency of the linguistic feature analyzed. All three case studies are reported here to show that BA and MA students can work on the academic English at their own BA/MA level, hopefully combining theory and practice, i.e., adding a small component to the analysis of the ChemCorpus and adding to their practical academic English skills. This article concludes with a few teaching recommendations and a few more theoretical comparisons on how academic writing as advanced ELF fills a gap in the comparative research on non-native varieties of English.

2 Description of the ChemCorpus 2.1 Description The ChemCorpus was started for two reasons. First, it kept a record of the development of students’ writing in the English Department at Chemnitz, in particular the students specializing in English Language and Linguistics, partly in con-

1 Thus in the first examples in the contribution, MG stands for Chemnitz Magister theses, FR and SW for French and Swedish sections from the ICLE corpus, respectively (the respective manuals accompany the corpora and are important for the proper comparable use of the data). The ChemCorpus acronyms include a code for the gender of the writer, which is usually not the case in the other corpora, because many Chemnitz students were interested in male/female preferences in academic usage, although the personal data are traditionally removed from the corpus texts so that anonymous texts are studied and the basic socio-biographical data can be deduced from the text codes or retrieved from the manuals.

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trast to students specializing in English Literature and Cultural/Social Studies. Second, it includes different text types, which partly reflect the development of the prototypes of what is considered prototypical in academic writing. Traditionally, Magister theses (the traditional first theses at German universities, roughly equivalent to MA theses today) were “untimed”, although officially students were supposed to hand in their theses after a limited time; many students in fact took much longer, since there was less direct time pressure to finish their studies than under the new Bologna model. In contrast to this untimed work, in a “timed academic essay” students wrote four hours on a topic in the field of their choice based on the literature on their approved reading list. Usually, the students were advised not to write a draft but to write a clean paper immediately and spend enough time (advisably, a fourth of the total time permitted) to revise the paper thoroughly. Unfortunately, the result of many essays showed that the students used far too much time for the first draft and did not have enough time to revise or even finish the paper. Under the new Bologna model, a BA stage was separated from an MA stage, so that we cannot compare different production types or genres, but different levels of student development. Theoretically, the BA paper is a student’s first attempt at academic writing, the MA paper the second, based on the BA experience and usually more explicit academic writing instructions, before the PhD thesis as a “master-piece” establishes young scholars in their field of specialization (Schmied 2012). This means that the two genres from the old system cannot be compared easily with the two text types (or genres?) from the new system, but with on-going collection the development of writing skills in the same institution can be analyzed and students have a comparable reference data-base that allows them to evaluate their own language use. The ChemCorpus as a whole contains more than 2 million words, but the following comparisons are based on different compatible parts. The first case study compares the BA thesis section with 35 theses of about 875,000 words. The second case study compares the timed and untimed sections of Magister students work with 52 papers of about 137,000 words and 33 theses of about 922,000 words; the related third case study adds term papers and thus analyzes a subcorpus with almost 1.5 million words (cf. Table 1), but it does not contain the BA theses and over 100 term papers compiled so far that constitute the “novice end” of academic writing at a German university today. The last case study adds other text categories to discuss developmental processes in conjunct usage. These studies with different parts from the ChemCorpus show that the ChemCorpus is flexible and can be adapted to other corpora whenever necessary.

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Table 1. The subcorpora of the ChemCorpus including average length of text types and word totals (adapted from Herzog 2014: 22). Sub-corpus

Average length

Magister Theses (Linguistics) Magister Theses (Culture Studies) Magister In-Class Bachelor AP (Linguistics) Bachelor AP (Culture Studies)

23,000 26,000 2,000 5,000 5,000

Total

Texts

Words

25 10 52 22 69

595,930 265,771 103,721 120,105 388,075

178

1,473,602

2.2 Comparison Thus, the ChemCorpus can be compared with other available current academic corpora of student or academic writing, less to the ICLE Corpora, which have mostly been compiled in the 1990s of argumentative student essays which are a different genre and not really part of academic writing today, more with the BAWE Corpus, in particular if we take the English or the linguistics parts and students that have German as a first language only. It can be compared quite well with the Brno Corpus, which was developed in a parallel project over the last five years and includes a clear division between linguistics, literature and methodology specializations. These non-native academic corpora can also be compared to the academic or academic humanities parts of the British National Corpus (BNC; from the early 1990s) or the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; or even the TIME magazine), bearing in mind that those are of course much more heterogeneous as far as the production date and the socio-geographical data of writers are concerned (Davies 2004- and 2008-). For explorative purposes the academic corpora mentioned above can of course be used when the frequency of linguistic phenomena analyzed is normalized, per 1 million words, for instance.

3 Degree adverbs in different academic traditions 3.1 Qualitative analyses Degree adverbs are extremely important in academic writing because they “can be used to mark that the extent or degree is either greater or less than usual or than that of something else in the neighboring discourse” (Biber et al. 1999: 554). Awareness of “cultural collisions in L2 academic writing” (Steinmann 2003) moti-

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vated by the differences between the Western notions of academic rhetoric and the L1 rhetoric of non-native English-speaking writers can be developed by corpusbased analysis of both L1 and L2 English. Within native and non-native writing contexts, different traditions and attitudes towards certain adverbs (like unfortunately, extremely) have developed. In our qualitative analysis, different types and subtypes of degree adverbs can be exemplified and discussed. Amplifiers intensify or amplify certain qualities and can be subdivided into maximizers and boosters. Maximizers (1 and 2) occupy the highest position on the intensity scale and most commonly modify non-gradable words such as alphabetical, medical, utter, etc. (cf. Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 531); boosters (3 and 4) indicate only a high degree of intensity, not the highest and modify fully gradable words such as cold, pretty, young (cf. Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 531). However, maximizers and boosters not only differ in their semantic meaning, but also in the way that “especially boosters, form an open class, and new expressions are frequently created to replace older ones whose impact follows the trend of hyperbole” (Quirk et al. 1985: 590). (1)

They should also be clearly marked and distinguished (. . . ) (Chemnitz, Ling5)

(2)

Its true effect can only be fully understood when (. . . ) (BAWE, Lit, 3006a)

(3)

Deserts are regions that are very hot and dry (. . . ). (BAWE, Ling, 6011h)

(4)

(T)he abstract was strongly related to (. . . ). (BAWE, Lit, 3006c)

In academic prose, amplifiers like entirely, extremely, fully, highly, and strongly are used frequently to highlight the specific features of scientific achievement, i.e., newness, difficulty, and complexity (as in 5 and 6). (5)

The tenor dimension is extremely difficult for students [. . . ] (BAWE, Ling, 3127b)

(6)

Kurtz is a highly complex character. (BAWE, Lit, 3008i)

Downtoners are the second group of degree adverbs, but they have a very different meaning and function in academic writing. Similar to amplifiers, many downtoners apply to gradable adjectives, but other than amplifiers they indicate a low degree on an intensity scale (cf. Biber et al. 1999: 555) as in 7 and 8. (7)

(It) seems to be somewhat arbitrary. (ChemCorpus, Ling15)

(8)

(It) was nearly impossible. (BAWE, Ling3)

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Biber et al. (1999: 555) suggest that “some of these adverbs are related to hedges”. Some scholars make a clear distinction between degree adverbs (e.g., almost) and hedges (e.g., kind of ). By degree adverbs they mean items that “primarily modify intensity”, while hedges refer to items “that primarily mark imprecision or estimation” (Biber et al. 1999: 556), but that distinction is not clear in the last example above (8). According to Quirk et al. (1985: 597), downtoners can be divided into four subgroups, representing semantic distinctions. Approximators are used to express an approximation on the verb, which reveals more than is actually relevant (e.g., almost, nearly, practically, virtually). They differ from others in that “they imply a denial of the truth value of what is denoted by the verb” (Quirk et al. 1985: 599) as in (9)

I almost resigned (but in fact I didn’t resign). (Quirk et al. 1985: 599)

Compromisers (e.g., quite, rather, enough, sufficiently) depend on the item they modify, since they can be used for either extreme, maximizing and minimizing, they are omitted in the following analysis. Diminishers (expression diminishers like partly, slightly and attitude diminishers like simply, just) have a lowering effect and basically mean “to a small extent” (cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 599). Minimizers, the opposite of maximizers, make the version “more strictly true rather than a denial of the truth value of what has been said” as in (10) (Quirk et al. 1985: 599). (10) She scarcely knows me (in fact she doesn’t know me). (Quirk et al. 1985: 599) In academic prose, downtoners mark the extent of comparison or are used to “specifying the amount of difference” (Biber et al. 1999: 567) and thus the adjective different commonly collocates with this type of modifiers. Downtoners are very style-sensitive: informal downtoners (such as hardly, little and only) are rather frequent in informal spoken discourse, whereas formal downtoners (such as nearly, merely and fairly) are prevalent in academic writing.

3.2 Quantitative analyses The difference in usage between native and non-native academic writing has been a matter of great debate (cf. above). A simple research hypothesis would be that native speakers use more degree adverbs, but the distribution may in some cases be culture-specific, since downtoners are associated with politeness, for instance. Since the ChemCorpus and the Brno Corpus are compatible with the American and

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British models, MICUSP and BAWE, they can be compared and significant differences can be calculated. Table 2 displays the distribution per 1 million words of each degree adverb in the combined native speaker (BAWE and MICUSP) and nonnative speaker corpora (BrnoCorpus and ChemCorpus). Here the surprising result is that L2 texts display more degree adverbs, partly even with highly significant differences (even with the p-value < 0.001) in amplifiers as well as in downtoners. If we look at individual link words, we notice that the most frequent booster very accounts for most of the differences, followed by the most frequent maximizer; Table 2. Frequencies per 1 million words across L1 and L2 corpora (adapted from Bräuer 2013: 34). L1 Writings

L2 Writings

1,464.48

1,932.44

Booster considerably highly strongly tremendously very Maximizer absolutely clearly fully extremely thoroughly

949.70 19.66 124.09 63.89 1.23 740.84 514.78 12.29 230.97 90.92 157.26 23.34

1409.99 73.16 131.13 58.66 5.52 1141.52 522.45 40.72 333.35 61.42 69.02 17.94

Downtoner

600.78

694.99

Approximator almost nearly virtually Diminisher a bit slightly somewhat to some extent Minimizer barely hardly scarcely

303.46 229.75 58.97 14.74 254.32 38.09 93.37 104.43 18.43 43.00 12.29 25.80 4.91

359.57 291.94 48.31 19.32 211.19 37.27 120.78 33.82 19.32 124.23 8.28 107.66 8.28

2,065.26

2,627.43

Amplifier

Total

p-value

0.01 < p < 0.05 > 0.05 > 0.05 > 0.05 > 0.05 0.001 < p < 0.01 0.001 < p < 0.01 < 0.001 > 0.05 > 0.05

> 0.05 > 0.05 > 0.05 > 0.05 0.001 < p < 0.01 < 0.001 > 0.05 0.001 < p < 0.01 > 0.05 > 0.05

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this follows the principle that L2 writers go for prototypical expressions. The same holds for the approximator almost and the minimizer hardly. The higher frequency of diminishers is accounted for by somewhat, a most significant difference between native and non-native writers. Thus Table 2 does not confirm our hypothesis. L1 corpora do not contain more degree adverbs, nor do MICUSP and BAWE more downtoners than the Brno and ChemCorpus. If we want to analyze whether the German or the Czech writers are responsible for the unexpected frequencies in degree adverbs (e.g., the Germans are more “direct”), we have to compare significant differences. The higher number of boosters in Czech texts is based on the preference for very (whereas Germans prefer considerably significantly more often). The higher figure for maximizers in German texts is based on clearly (whereas Czechs like absolutely). Almost all downtoners are used more frequently by Germans, almost as approximator, slightly as diminisher and hardly as minimizer. To conclude our simple juxtaposition of the four students writing corpora in two groups (British and American, German and Czech) we cannot find a simple explanation on the bases of the texts alone – more background knowledge on the previous teaching and more detailed look at the sociobiographical data might help (and reveal that a considerable number of Germans are included in the BAWE data-base, for instance, cf. below).

4 Connecting adverbials in timed and untimed student papers in the ChemCorpus and ICLE 4.1 Qualitative analyses The use of connecting adverbials in academic writing has been a subject of academic teaching for a long time. Since Halliday and Hasan (1976), they have been considered a major component of cohesion in texts in general and in consciously constructed academic texts in particular. They established the four functional link categories: additive, adversative, causal and temporal (including the traditional formal categories adverbs and conjunctions). This classification was directly adopted by Bolton, Nelson and Hung (2002). They use the Hong Kong and the Great Britain components of the International Corpus of English and four categories of cohesive devices: additive, adversative, causal and sequential to investigate the over- and underuse of connectors in Hong Kong undergraduate student’s writing. For this reason, they compiled a corpus of ten untimed essays and ten timed examination scripts, with a total of 46,460 words. Unfortunately, they do

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not go into detail of the effects of timedness on writing. They use the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) as a reference corpus to investigate the over- or underuse of connectors, but we use the ICLE learner corpora as a reference, since it also includes texts by non-native writers. The clear distinction between timed and untimed students’ writings makes the ICLE corpus the best counterpart for this analysis. The four types of linkers can also be interpreted as more and more complex semantics from additive to adversative or temporal/sequential to causative. Additive is defined as a derived form of coordination and the ‘and’ relation (Halliday and Hasan, 1976: 244), thus additive connecting adverbials link two units of text that belong to the same topic and express similar meaning. Adversative they define as “contrary to expectation” (Halliday and Hasan, 1976: 250). Consequently, adversative connecting adverbials link two units of text that are related, but the second unit expresses meaning that deviates from the expected meaning that could be deduced from the first unit of text. Causal connectors express a cohesive relation in which a text unit logically entails another (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 256). Finally, temporal connecting adverbials express succession, as one unit of text is “subsequent to the other” (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 261). This includes not only connecting adverbials that directly relate to a simple temporal sequence (such as simple then), but also all items that express a form of succession (such as first, second, third). Furthermore, Halliday and Hasan define a number of subcategories for each group. The following qualitative analysis gives real examples from student corpora to illustrate the wide choices available in the four functional categories established. By far the most frequent additive adverbial (Table 1) is and (1), in all types of writing by all types of writers. However, there are also many others, of which also (2) is most interesting in several ways. First, because it has been discussed in usage guides (like Fowler 1926) and a general recommendation is to avoid it clauseinitially. Second, it has been noticed that non-native English users tend to overuse it dramatically, in particular in clause-initial position, irrespective of whether this is permitted in their mother tongue or not (as in German). More complex linkers (like in fact in 13) show writer awareness and advanced language skills. (1)

Law and political correctness forbid it and an entrepreneur certainly does not want to risk a lawsuit (MG03Ft_AD)

(2)

issued by the Conservative party, also characterized the education policy (MG08Ft_CB)

(3)

In fact, regarding linguistic environment, I can draw (. . . ) (MG08Mt_MH)

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The most prototypical adversative linker is of course but (4), again this is mentioned in some usage guides. More formal versions are however and though (5 and 6), which have been discussed in native and non-native writing (Wagner 2011). (4)

(. . . ) discussion about anglicisms going on in all spheres of society, but I do not want to include this in the present paper. (MG02Ft_KV)

(5)

(. . . ) they can, however, report striking similarities to the accent of the English (. . . ) (f_W0809_A_S)

(6)

(. . . ) a novel about separation, about isolation though the characters are constantly speaking. (FRUC2009)

The most prominent causative linker is because (7; again dealt with in some usage guides) and more formal alternatives like since (8), which is ambiguous, however, since and for are recommended; both are ambiguous, however. The strongest and most formal is therefore (9): (7)

(. . . ) it is vital once again because it is a way to learn how to relax (. . . ) (BGSU1047)

(8)

(. . . ) in our case however, it does not work since we still cannot know whether these words are truly the most frequent (. . . ) (S10_D_L)

(9)

(. . . ) they do not have any experience therefore they do not know what to do (. . . ) (SPM03012)

The most prominent sequential linker is, of course, then; although it is by far less prototypical than the others and not seriously discouraged in usage books. More specific sequential linkers are next (10) and finally (11): (10) Next, the errors indicated (. . . ) (MG05Ft_KD) (11)

Finally I would like to say that (. . . ) (SWUL9001)

These examples show that all semantic categories of connecting adverbials can be found in our academic corpora, but what is really important is their different frequencies related to student level or proficiency and text type.

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4.2 Quantitative analyses For a quantitative analysis, we can take different parts of academic writing from our ChemCorpus depending on comparable corpora and variables, “timed” vs. “untimed” is a variable in several corpora, e.g., in ICLE. The most logical contrasting sections are the Magister theses and the exam papers written by the same type of students – if we bear in mind that the former are much longer (averaging 20,000 to 30,000 words) and more consciously produced text-type, whereas the latter has to be produced in four hours and is relatively short (1,200 to 2,400 words). The standard research hypothesis could then be that the latter contains fewer and more prototypical linkers (incl. connecting adverbials) than the former. A subsequent research question could be whether advanced learners replace semantically simple (e.g., additive) connectors by more complex (e.g., causal) connectors in the reediting process. However, Fig. 1 clearly shows a remarkably similar pattern of all four functional types of connecting adverbials (normalized to one million words, because the texts do not have the same length). Only the semantically simple additive adverbials are used more often in timed student writing, the more complex linkers are not used significantly differently. As expected, additive connectors are used more often than all other types together. Thus, our standard hypothesis is not confirmed and the subsequent research question is not really confirmed either.

Fig. 1. Connecting adverbials by functional category (per one million words) in the ChemCorpus (Albrecht 2013: 30).

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Fig. 2. Connecting adverbials by functional category in ICLE (per one million words) (Albrecht 2013: 30)

If we analyze the same categories in ICLE (Fig. 2), the general pattern is similar to the ChemCorpus, but the differences between timed and untimed are closer to what we had expected. Students use more connectors in untimed texts (since they have time to edit their texts more carefully), except for sequential connectors. Thus our standard hypothesis above is partially confirmed. Finally, Fig. 3, the (normalized) comparison of the ChemCorpus and ICLE, does not show any striking differences. Although one could have expected higher figures for untimed texts, this is not the case generally.

Fig. 3. Functional categories (per one million words) of connecting adverbials, timed – untimed, in the ChemCorpus and the ICLE (Albrecht 2013: 30)

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If we compare individual connectors, we find a wide choice of different forms with quite different frequencies between prototypical and specific linkers, but this makes the interpretation of individual infrequent linkers difficult. ChemCorpus writers can be called more advanced or more formal writers, because they do not use the most frequent linkers in each semantic category (and, but, because) as frequently as the ICLE writers, they even use quite formal hence, maybe at the expense of the every-day causal then and they seem to love consequently. If we focus on the variables corpus and timedness we find that generally the difference between the corpora (and maybe text types) is more significant (