Professional and institutional discourse
Prof. discourse plays a great role in any society. Now PD refers to any specialist, who has undergone proff. training.
Sweden Prof. Brit Granesser produced a detailed account of prof. discourse in a number of domains (business, education, science, medicine)
The expert character of PD insists that PD is produced by the members of a specific group or discourse community.
A prof. environment is held together by a set of common goals which are usually specified in certain documents. Explicit goals are often related to actions leading to concrete results.
Ex:”court” jury, judge,prosecutor. Goal: to protect or to punish
PD is also to a large extend explicitly situated and takes place in situations specified in terms of comm. events, participants and place. Participants can be a single person or 2 people facing.
Practices established within a profession are created in order to obtain special goals in special situations.
PD is much conventionalized and PD is often part of socially organized and structured set of activities.
Professional Discourse
It is worth noting the work of Bazerman and Paradis (1991a) and their perspective on the notion of PD. These authors suggest that the structure of PD is founded on a textual dynamics that gives form to a profession. Bazerman and Paradis (1991b) review a series of related articles describing the way in which professional communities organize themselves based on their own relevant texts. PD, in this sense, is formed by those texts which bring together specific knowledge of the world, which, in turn, constitutes the purposes of the professional community (Berkenkotter, Huckin, & Ackerman, 1991; Doheny-Farina, 1991; Bathia, 1993, 2004; Christie & Martin, 1997).
B.L. Gunnarsson in the book “Professional discourse” (2009) uses the term “professional discourse” to refer to text and talk in professional contexts. The author distinguishes the following features of professional discourse:
1) Expert character of professional discourse is reflected in terminology, text genres, conversation patterns which vary from domain to domain.
2) Professional discourse has explicit goals and occurs in professional situations which specify the participants, place and communicative event.
3) Professional discourse is strongly conventionalized.
4) The further point mentioned by the author is the fact that professional discourse is part of a “socially organized and structured set of activities within a workplace unit” (Gunnarsson, 2009:8).
|
|
|
4) Another feature of professional discourse is its dependence on different societal framework systems such as legal-societal, technical-economical, socio-cultural and linguistic. Undoubtedly a lot of documents as well as communication rules appear as a result of internal or external regulations. Rapidly developing technology influences professional discourse as well. Socio-cultural and linguistic frameworks are taken into account as life generally and professional life in particular is becoming more and more culturally, socially and linguistically diverse.
5) The last distinguished feature is dynamic character of professional discourse, which is witnessed in the type of knowledge and skills necessary for professional communication at different stages, changes in the labour market and politics, globalization of economy.
We assume that professional discourse is a combination of the corpus of texts and talks united by professional world view, thesaurus, the theme, genre together with extralinguistic factors which are determined by the person’s professional activity. Each type of professional discourse determines the language used while communicating. Generally, we can say that terminology reflects the knowledge structure, and the more ancient professional discourse is, the more complicated concept stands beyond the term.
Institutional discourse
ID is a form of power that circulates in a social field.
Rusahova distinguishes 3 main characteristics of ID:
1) Formulations with a social institution;
2) Control of a subject world view;
3) States role relations (have a certain role: a doctor, a patient
ID imposes on subject clichés language and communication strategies as a set of speech actions aimed at achieving certain comm. purposes.
ID appeared as a conversational discourse first.
The concept itself of ID originated in sociology, it is used to describe those activities by which individuals construct and maintain inst. society (some ling. Properties and social)
Sociologist William Samna (20c.) explained ID and origin of these words by studying the nature of humanity. “All humans have the same basic needs in order to satisfy these needs (?)
|
|
|
ID is very much related to power (face to face disc.) participants are unequal, one has power, another is powerless.
The study of ID the study how people use language to manage practical tasks or to perform some particular activities associated with their participation in institutional context.
Institutional Discourse
We argue that language is fundamental to institutionalization: institutionalization occurs as actors interact and come to accept shared definitions of reality, and it is through linguistic processes that definitions of reality are constituted. Broadly speaking, scholars define institutions as conventions that are self-policing (e.g., Douglas, 1986). Within the tradition of new institutional theory, scholars define institutions more specifically as “historical accretions of past practices and understandings that set conditions on action” through the way in which they “gradually acquire the moral and ontological status of taken-for-granted facts which, in turn, shape future interactions and negotiations” (Barley & Tolbert, 1997: 99; also see DiMaggio & Powell, 1991; Jepperson, 1991; Leblebici, Salancik,Copay, & King, 1991; Meyer & Rowan, 1977;Zucker, 1977).
Institutions are social constructions, produced through meaningful interaction. (e.g., Meyer & Rowan, 1977). Extending this observation we see that institutions are not just social constructions but social constructions constituted through discourse (Kress, 1995; Parker, 1992). As Fairclough (1992) has noted, discourse constructs its own conventions, making sense of reality through the way it rules in or rules out certain ways of thinking and acting. Fairclough stated that “Each institution has its own set of speech events, its own differentiated settings and scenes, its cast of participants, and its own norms for their combination.”
What differentiates institutions from other social entities that are constituted in discourse are the self-regulating, socially constructed mechanisms that enforce their application (Jepperson, 1991). In other words, while all institutions are discursive products, not all products of discourse are institutions. There are many products of discursive processes that do not have the socially constructed controls that characterize institutions, distinguishing them from the multitude of other social constructions that make up the social world.
|
|
|
Institutional discourse is, as defined by M. Foucault (1987) put it, a form of power that circulates in the social field and can attach to strategies of domination as well as those of resistance.
Foucault (1971) says that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality.
Social institutions are the source of a certain world view which is imposed on the subject, according to P. Bourdieu (2001). S. Sarangi & C. Roberts define institutional discourse as a discourse containing “features which are attributed to institutional practice, either manifestly or covertly, by professionals”, and is “characterized by rational, legitimate accounting practices which are authoritatively backed up by a set of rules and regulations governing an institution” (Sarangi & Roberts, 1999, p. 15).
The determinacy of a discourse by social institutions is emphasized by Russian linguists and philosophers of language as well (E. Sheigal, 2000; V. Dauletova, 2004; V. Karasik, 2004; O. Rusakova, 2008 et al.). O. Rusakova, for example, says that institutional discourse is a power resource influencing the process of attributing and interpreting meanings, evaluating, positioning and identifying the subjects and their relations (2008, pp. 261). She emphasizes three main characteristics of institutional discourse: firm relations with a social institution, control over subject’s world view, and communication observing status-role relations.
Institutional discourse imposes on the subjects not only role characteristics and clichéd language but also communication strategies as a set of speech actions aimed at achieving certain communication purposes. The communication strategies of an institutional discourse are determined by the nature of the activities of a discourse expert community. Thus, institutional discourse generates an institutionally determined subject that may be legitimated in discourse only as a producer of discursive practices of the expert community. Losing his personality characteristics the person, as R. Wodak (2, pp. 73) put it, feels “comfort” as he is under protection of the institution which deprives him or her personal characteristics. Now let us emphasize the characteristics typical of institutional legal (!!!) discourse. They are as follows:
|
|
|
1) Stable relations of the subject with the discourse expert community that controls the hierarchy of institutional roles;
2) Depersonalization conditioned by feeling of being deprived of his/her own thoughts, actions, ego;
3) Normative nature of communication, controlled by the discourse expert community;
4) Clichéd nature of communication;
5) Imposed strategies of communication;
6) Stereotyped communicative situation (court hearing, making of a will, etc.);
7) Limited number of genres.
Дата добавления: 2019-02-26; просмотров: 1138; Мы поможем в написании вашей работы! |
Мы поможем в написании ваших работ!