Engagement in Professional Genres 9789027202185, 9027202184

Table of contents :
Foreword: Bringing in the reader / Ken Hyland --
1. Networking engagement in professional practices: Towards an integrative view / Carmen Sancho Guinda --
2. Positioning and proximity of reader engagement: Authorial identity in professional and apprentice academic genres / Feng (Kevin) Jiang and Xiaohao Ma --
3. Authorial engagement in business emails: A cross-cultural analysis of attitude and engagement markers / María Luisa CarriPastor --
4. Challenging the concept of pure objectivity in British and Spanish hard news reports: The case of the Second Lebanon War / Anne McCabe and Isabel Alonso Belmonte --
5. Rebuilding trust in the banking sector: Engaging with readers in corporate press releases / Yvonne McLaren-Hankin --
6. Interrogative engagement as a pragmatic and textual function in Legal Studies / Michele Sala --
7. Patients engaging their doctors in the doctor-patient relationship: Discourse perspectives on relationship-centred care / Robyn Woodward-Kron, Emily Wilson and Jane Gall --
8. 'Let's have that conversation on next quarter's call': (Dis)engagement markers in Q&A sessions of earnings conference calls / Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli --
9. Multiplying engagement: Visual-verbal intersemiosis in an online medical research article / Daniel Lees Fryer --
10. Researchers' move from page to screen: Addressing the effects of the video article format upon academic user engagement and knowledge-building processes / Jan Engberg and Carmen Daniela Maier --
11. Recruitment websites and the socialization of new employees: Dialogicity and graduation / Ruth Breeze --
12. Verbal and nonverbal engagement devices in business persuasive discourse: The elevator pitch / Mercedes Díez Prados --
13. Scifotainment: Evolving multimodal engagement in online science news / Yiqiong Zhang --
14. How much do U.S. patents disclose? A generic game of hide-and-seek / Ismael Arinas Pelln --
15. Gestural silence: An engagement device in the multimodal genre of the chalk talk lecture / Chloë G. Fogarty-Bourget, Natasha Artemeva and Janna Fox --
16. Silence and engagement in the multimodal genre of synchronous videoconferencing lectures: The case of Didactics in Mathematics / Mercedes Querol-Julián and Blanca Arteaga-Martønez --
17. Organizational metadiscourse across lecturing styles: Engagement beyond language / Edgar Bernad-Mechand Inmaculada Fortanet-Gmez --
18. Engagement of readers/customers in the discourse of e-tourism promotional genres / Francisca Suau-Jiménez --
Notes on contributors --
Index.

Citation preview

Engagement in Professional Genres edi t ed by Carmen Sancho Guinda

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Engagement in Professional Genres

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&bns) issn 0922-842X Pragmatics & Beyond New Series is a continuation of Pragmatics & Beyond and its Companion Series. The New Series offers a selection of high quality work covering the full richness of Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field, within language sciences. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/pbns

Editor

Associate Editor

Anita Fetzer

Andreas H. Jucker

University of Augsburg

University of Zurich

Founding Editors Herman Parret

Jef Verschueren

Robyn Carston

Sachiko Ide

Paul Osamu Takahara

Thorstein Fretheim

Kuniyoshi Kataoka

John C. Heritage

Miriam A. Locher

Jacob L. Mey

University of Southern Denmark

Belgian National Science Foundation, Universities of Louvain and Antwerp

Belgian National Science Foundation, University of Antwerp

Editorial Board University College London University of Trondheim University of California at Los Angeles

Susan C. Herring

Indiana University

Masako K. Hiraga

St. Paul’s (Rikkyo) University

Japan Women’s University Aichi University

Universität Basel

Sophia S.A. Marmaridou University of Athens

Srikant Sarangi

Aalborg University

Marina Sbisà

University of Trieste

Volume 301 Engagement in Professional Genres Edited by Carmen Sancho Guinda

Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

Sandra A. Thompson

University of California at Santa Barbara

Teun A. van Dijk

Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

Chaoqun Xie

Fujian Normal University

Yunxia Zhu

The University of Queensland

Engagement in Professional Genres Edited by

Carmen Sancho Guinda Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

doi 10.1075/pbns.301 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 2018046661 (print) / 2019001463 (e-book) isbn 978 90 272 0218 5 (Hb) isbn 978 90 272 6294 3 (e-book)

© 2019 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com

Table of contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Foreword: Bringing in the reader Ken Hyland

xi

chapter 1 Networking engagement in professional practices: Towards an integrative view Carmen Sancho Guinda

1

Section I.  Monomodal genres chapter 2 Positioning and proximity of reader engagement: Authorial identity in professional and apprentice academic genres Feng (Kevin) Jiang and Xiaohao Ma chapter 3 Authorial engagement in business emails: A cross-cultural analysis of attitude and engagement markers María Luisa Carrió-Pastor chapter 4 Challenging the concept of pure objectivity in British and Spanish hard news reports: The case of the 2006 Lebanon War Anne McCabe and Isabel Alonso Belmonte chapter 5 Rebuilding trust in the banking sector: Engaging with readers in corporate press releases Yvonne McLaren-Hankin chapter 6 Interrogative engagement as a pragmatic and textual function in Legal Studies Michele Sala

29

47

67

87

101

vi

Engagement in Professional Genres

chapter 7 Patients engaging their doctors in the doctor-patient relationship: Discourse perspectives on relationship-centred care Robyn Woodward-Kron, Emily Wilson and Jane Gall chapter 8 “Let’s have that conversation on next quarter’s call”: (Dis)engagement markers in Q&A sessions of earnings conference calls Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli

119

137

Section II.  Intersemiotic genres chapter 9 Multiplying engagement: Visual-verbal intersemiosis in an online medical research article Daniel Lees Fryer chapter 10 Researchers’ move from page to screen: Addressing the effects of the video article format upon academic user engagement and knowledge-building processes Jan Engberg and Carmen Daniela Maier chapter 11 Recruitment websites and the socialization of new employees: Dialogicity and graduation Ruth Breeze chapter 12 Verbal and nonverbal engagement devices in business persuasive discourse: The elevator pitch Mercedes Díez Prados

157

179

197

217

chapter 13 Scifotainment: Evolving multimodal engagement in online science news Yiqiong Zhang

243

chapter 14 How much do U.S. patents disclose? A generic game of hide-and-seek Ismael Arinas Pellón

259



chapter 15 Gestural silence: An engagement device in the multimodal genre of the chalk talk lecture Chloë G. Fogarty-Bourget, Natasha Artemeva and Janna Fox chapter 16 Silence and engagement in the multimodal genre of synchronous videoconferencing lectures: The case of Didactics in Mathematics Mercedes Querol-Julián and Blanca Arteaga-Martínez chapter 17 Organizational metadiscourse across lecturing styles: Engagement beyond language Edgar Bernad-Mechó and Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez chapter 18 Engagement of readers/customers in the discourse of e-tourism promotional genres Francisca Suau-Jiménez

Table of contents vii

277

297

321

341

Notes on contributors

359

Name index

365

Subject index

367

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the authors in this volume for their enlightening contributions, their own engagement with this project and their patience, and Prof. Ken Hyland for his friendship and generosity. I also feel indebted to John Benjamins’ Series and Acquisition Editors, Prof. Anita Fetzer and Isja Conen, for their guidance and support, to the two anonymous reviewers, and to my Research Assistant, David López Villamarín, for his dedication, professionalism, encouragement and human quality.

Foreword Bringing in the reader Ken Hyland

School of Education and Lifelong Learning, The University of East Anglia, UK

Engagement is the ways writers rhetorically acknowledge the presence of their readers in a text. While a central concept, however, it has always seemed the poor relation in discussions of interaction. Instead of lording it in the up-market bars of the financial district like stance and voice, the ways we acknowledge an addressee’s presence has too long slinked around in the low rent areas of discourse analysis. Indeed, there wasn’t even a term for it until 10 or 15 years ago. This is the age of ‘me’ and the author/speaker’s perspective is what matters: what he or she thinks or feels about something, or decides to tell us, ranging from everything between one’s favourite colour to assessments about the status of knowledge. Voice is even grander, carrying around, as it does, literary and aesthetic overtones from rhetoric and criticism. If stance is, more formally, a writer’s rhetorically expressed attitude to the propositions in a text, voice is more dialogic and social, and has been asked to represent associations from discipline to the ideological expression of western cultural hegemony. But interaction is impossible without engagement. We need to recognise and include readers in our talk, reaching out to acknowledge them and let them know we are not off on an extended monologue: we know they are there. We are communicating with them. There are always social purposes to communication as we seek to persuade, inform, entertain or instruct our interlocutors in ways they will find familiar and which acknowledges they have a choice. Engagement pulls readers or listeners along with what is being said, but it also gives them the space to opt out. Interaction, then, always involves others and a successful text, written or spoken and in any register, needs to make assumptions about its readers or listeners, reaching beyond individuals to the community and context to which the text contributes and forms a part of. It therefore turns on the degree to which writers present themselves as sharing, or perhaps failing to share, attitudes and how they manage solidarity and affiliation.

https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.301.00hyl © 2019 John Benjamins Publishing Company

xii Ken Hyland

For these reasons engagement is a key part of the small corner of applied linguistics in which I am most interested: interaction in academic written texts. Affiliation with readers is, of course, created in numerous implicit ways and is highly contextual. Selecting a particular topic or methodology, referencing certain theorists or approaches, or even the choice of one word over another can all signal insider attachments which may be opaque to the analyst. As outsiders, we have only the text to guide us and so the notion of engagement focuses on surface features, the points at which writers intervene in a text to introduce readers as real players in the discourse, rather than merely as implied observers of the discussion. Research writing is only successful to the extent that writers are able to create an appropriate relationship with their readers: crafting a text which establishes solidarity, or at least a disciplinary connection, helps to support a writers’ community credentials and heads-off objections to their arguments. Partly, of course, this involves addressing topics of interest to the community and using theories and methods that peers recognise as effective, but it also demands careful rhetorical choices suggesting shared beliefs, experiences, expectations, and values (e.g. Swales 2004; Bazerman 1988). Readers not only need to follow an argument set out in a way they expect, but want to feel that they are being taken into consideration too. Writers must make assumptions, both about the nature of the world and about their audience, which means the ways they present their ideas, signal their allegiances, and stake their claims represent careful negotiations with, and sensitivity to, their colleagues. Engagement, then, points to the fact that we seek to write with the interests, background knowledge and expectations of readers in mind and, more generally, the ways that we do this reflects something of how we see our communities, especially their epistemological and interpersonal conventions. When I first used the term ‘engagement’ (Hyland 2004) I was unaware that it had been developed independently by Martin and White (2005) to refer to the ways writers position themselves to other voices. This is closer to the notion of stance and the resources for conceding, attributing, hedging, boosting and otherwise modalising the status of an utterance. In contrast, my own view refers to the overt marking of what Thompson (2001) calls the ‘reader-in-the-text’. But while the term is relatively new, theorizing about the general idea of engagement is not. Linguists have long been concerned with the interpersonal functions of language and how individuals establish connection and affiliation. Brown and Gilman’s Pronouns of Power and Solidarity (1960), the extensive politeness literature based on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) work, Sacks and Schegloff ’s (1974) concept of recipient design, the notion of relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1995) and more recently, the appraisal framework (Martin and White 2005) have all contributed to our understanding of this idea. In academic writing, Myers (1989), Biber (2006), Hyland (2004) and others have sought to show how interaction is not

Foreword xiii

only achieved by the projection of authorial stance but by language choices which display an orientation and sensitivity to readers. The notion of engagement therefore takes seriously the Bakhtin-inspired view that all verbal communication is dialogic (Bakhtin 1982). Even the most “monologic” text involves the speaker/writer in responding in some way to what has been said before on the subject by others and in anticipating in some way how those addressed will themselves react to what it being asserted. Clearly, to be effective, academic arguments must always incorporate the active role of an addressee and be understood against a background of other opinions and viewpoints. A research paper thus locates the writer intertextually within a larger controversy and within a community whose members are likely to both hold a position on the issue under debate and to recognise only certain forms of argument as valid. But while writers have to project the perceptions and interests of a potential audience, academic research may have multiple audiences, and be read by specialists, students, practitioners, lay people and interested members of the discipline. Audience is rarely a concrete reality in academic environments. Essentially the term represents the writer’s awareness of the circumstances which define a rhetorical context, so that writers construct an audience by drawing on their knowledge of earlier texts and relying on readers’ abilities to recognise intertextuality between texts. This view highlights the dialogic role of discourse and underpins the notion of engagement. The chapters in this volume demonstrate the potential of engagement and how far it has come in its short life. Exploring the concept in a range of professional and academic genres, and delving into the use of engagement in face-toface, computer-mediated and multimodal communication contexts, we see how the concept can be exploited to offer rich and nuanced understandings of interaction in different contexts. Here the connections between interlocutors and between interlocutors and contexts are unpicked in different genres and communities to show how engagement is a key rhetorical tool, concerned with galvanising support, expressing collegiality, resolving difficulties and heading off objections. We see, through a variety of carefully drawn scenarios, how it is a key way writer/speakers can seek to monitor readers’ understandings and responses to a text and manage their impression of the writer. More generally, they show how engagement locates participant relationships at the heart of communication, assuming that every successful text must display the producer’s awareness of both its receivers and its consequences.

xiv Ken Hyland

References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1982. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bazerman, Charles. 1988. Shaping Written Knowledge. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Biber, Douglas. 2006. University Language: A Corpus-based Study of Spoken and Written Registers. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.23 Brown, Roger, and Gilman, Albert. 1960. “The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity.” In Style in Language, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok, 253–276. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511813085 Hyland, Ken. 2004. “Patterns of Engagement: Dialogic Features and L2 Student Writing.” In Analyzing Academic Writing: Contextualized Frameworks, ed. by Louise Ravelli and Robert Ellis, 5–23. London: Continuum. Hyland, Ken. 2005. “Stance and Engagement: A Model of Interaction in Academic Discourse.” Discourse Studies. 7 (2): 173–191.  https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445605050365 Martin, James R., and Peter R. R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.  https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230511910 Myers, Greg. 1989. “The Pragmatics of Politeness in Scientific Articles.” Applied Linguistics 10: 1–35.  https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/10.1.1 Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.” Language 50 (4), Part 1: 696–735. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.1974.0010 Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Swales, John M. 2004. Research Genres: Explorations and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139524827 Thompson, Geoff. 2001. “Interaction in Academic Writing: Learning to Argue with the Reader.” Applied Linguistics. 22 (1): 58–78.  https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/22.1.58

Chapter 1

Networking engagement in professional practices Towards an integrative view Carmen Sancho Guinda

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain

In this chapter I revisit the concept of metadiscursive engagement, track its major courses of research up to date, and discuss the interpersonal and discursive assumptions it entails. In light of these assumptions, I draw connections among the different contributions to this volume, present a networked picture of engagement resulting from their different understandings, and finally pinpoint challenges and emerging issues. The global and open vision of engagement offered here not only intends to bring together the three major theoretical frameworks resorted to in this volume (i.e. the Appraisal System, the Hylandian Metadiscourse Model and Multimodality), but also to suggest relating them with the idea of ‘distance’ between sender and addressee, explored by both the Appraisal System itself and the pragmatic theories of Proximisation and Politeness. Keywords: engagement, interpersonality, metadiscourse, stancetaking, professional discourses, genre

1. Overview: Framing research on professional engagement This volume explores the multiple notions and realisations of engagement in professional discourses, under-researched in comparison with the large body of literature existing on interpersonality in academic settings. A few exceptions apart, such as Bamford and Bondi’s (2006) look at interaction within the business field and its academic projection from an intercultural and interdiscoursal perspective, comprehensive research on audience awareness in the professions has been disperse and relatively scarce. More often than not it appears in isolated articles, many of which are indexed in the Journal of English for Specific Purposes, a leading publication in the field, as well as in monographs on professional communication, either general (e.g. Gunnarsson 2009) or specialised (e.g. Sales 2006). It may also be found in https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.301.01san © 2019 John Benjamins Publishing Company

2

Carmen Sancho Guinda

compiled works involving metadiscourse under cross-disciplinary, cross-generic and cross-linguistic approaches that interlace engagement with authorial imprint, or in analyses of a given register or genre (e.g. Gotti 2008), as a particular rhetorical feature. The purpose of the present collection, by contrast, is to focus solely on the phenomenon of engagement and offer a panorama of outlooks and strategies across communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998), from a variety of theoretical angles with which to study diverse genres, workplace environments, and the effects of different channels and media affordances on its materialisation. Yet this tight focus on engagement inevitably entwines numerous perceptions, mainly rooted in Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal System, Hyland’s Metadiscourse Model (2005a; 2018), and Multimodal Analysis (O’Toole 1994; Norris 2004, and Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, among other scholars), which are informed by Bakhtin’s (1981) dialogism. From this common dialogical ground we can establish points of connection between the three frameworks, whatever their centres of interest and taxonomical intricacies: engagement is but an acknowledgement of the addressee’s presence, a stance on the audience. The Appraisal System (Martin and White 2005, 95) defines the concept as an ‘inter-subjective positioning’, comparable to evidentiality and epistemic stance, that situates addressers in relation to their messages and may embrace heteroglossia by anticipating the potential responses of actual or imagined addressees (pp. 36, 40). Along a similar line, the Hylandian contentions that all metadiscourse is interpersonal (Hyland 2005a, 39, 41; Hyland and Tse 2004, 161) and that presenting and supporting a position “always assumes a dialogue” (Hyland 2001, 551), may be seen to converge with the Appraisal Model, but differ from it in considering engagement complementary to the addresser’s individual or communal stance or attitude towards propositional content and not part of it. Hyland qualifies engagement as an addressee-oriented alignment function that constitutes “the other side” of any interaction (Hyland 2014, 4). In his own words, stance and engagement, the two pillars of his metadiscursive model, are “two sides of the same coin” (2005b, 176; 2008a, 92) with “a dialogical purpose” (2009a, 74), a vision openly shared by Jiang and Ma (this volume), who refer to engagement as “the flipside of the interactional coin”. Stress on the flexible interrelationship between stance and engagement harks back to Dubois’ (2007, 163) encompassing notion of stance as an overt and evaluative “dialogical act of alignment with others”. Jaffe (2009, 3) and Sancho Guinda and Hyland (2012, 4, 9) have also stressed such flexibility, respectively speaking of “affective stances” and remarking the “circular relationship” of stance and voice and their dynamics of “reversible flow”. Likewise, in the chapters following we will also find authors (Carrió-Pastor, McCabe and Alonso Belmonte, Arinas Pellón, Suau-Jiménez, Querol-Julián and Arteaga-Martínez, Bernad-Mechó and Fortanet-Gómez) who more or less straightforwardly draw on this interrelation between stance and engagement and identify



Chapter 1.  Networking engagement in professional practices

the latter, as does Hyland (2009a, 74; 2014, 4; 2005b, 176), with the guidance of interactants towards a certain interpretation of the message. The reason is that conjunctions may be interactionally motivated or bear an interpersonal orientation (Hyland and Tse 2004, 163) and it is not always easy to discern attitudinal markers from engagement items (Hyland 2004a, 113; 2005b, 182; Hyland and Tse 2004, 162). Due precisely to this difficulty, Carrió-Pastor includes attitudinals (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbials) as categories in her taxonomy for analysis, based on Hyland’s, and McCabe and Alonso Belmonte expose how engagement and attitude resources may work in tandem to regulate subjectivity according to the ideological standpoint of the medium when reporting facts. Arinas Pellón, on his part, incorporates hedges of various kinds (e.g. hyperonyms and deverbal adjectives), Suau-Jiménez attends to all stance components (i.e. boosters, hedges, attitudinals and self-mentions), Querol-Julián and Arteaga-Martínez explain how silence episodes work to engage online students by signalling lecture structure, and Bernad-Mechó and Fortanet-Gómez zero in on the engaging repercussion of verbal and paralinguistic organisational metadiscourse, especially endophorics, across teaching styles. These expanded taxonomical options point to a convergence with the idea of heteroglossic engagement in Systemic Functional Linguistics and entail taking the concept to mean involvement with the addressee in a broad sense, as a superordinate term, and not only through the explicit means collected in traditional repertoires. Multimodality, the third big theoretical strand in this book, multiplies meaningmaking resources with the advent of new affordances and the clear and careful targeting of audiences through compositional elements and arrangements in (audio) visual design (Machin 2007, viii). Since technological affordances make new engagement ways possible, and the marking of stance and engagement is, according to Hyland (2005b, 177), “a highly contextual matter” that complicates fine-grained typologies, it is not surprising that expansions of his five-item engagement inventory (directives, questions, addressee mentions, asides, and shared knowledge) are becoming common: Sancho Guinda’s (2014) or Jiang and Ma’s in this volume, in addition to the book contributors mentioned so far, instantiate this apparently incipient trend. 1.1

Meaning-making resources and theoretical eclecticism

Chapters have been organised into a binary structure based on the meaning-making potential of genres, which are divided into monomodal and intersemiotic, the first subdividing in turn into oral and written. This classification enables us to trace how engagement devices vary along with channels and media affordances. The fields of activity and sectors dealt with comprise medical, educational and legal research, corporate, healthcare and business communication, journalism (both

3

4

Carmen Sancho Guinda

political and scientific), banking and finance, tourism, university teaching, and the vindication of intellectual property in science and technology. The interests and social conventions of these disciplinary cultures are embodied in the catalogue of genres studied, which embraces research articles and doctoral confirmation reports, doctor-patient consultation interviews, business e-mails, ‘elevator pitch’ presentations in entrepreneurial contexts, patents, news reports, online science news, corporate press releases, earnings conference calls, lectures (conventional chalk-and-talk and online), and company and tourism websites. Purely advertising or political genres have not been selected, given the growing commodification (Swales 2004; Pérez-Llantada 2012, 47) of discourses and the ensuing ‘mixing’, ‘embedding’, ‘strategic interdiscursivity’ (Bhatia 1993; 1994; 1995; 1997; 2004) or ‘hybridisation’ (Fairclough 1993) of discourses and genres: traditionally not profit-oriented human activities, such as science or education, are being marketized and institutional and corporate branding are also on the increase. Nowadays the promotional component is almost omnipresent, a circumstance that has developed into a new dimension, labelled by Pérez-Llantada (2012, 94) as “sell and tell”. Jones (2014, 523) underscores this dramatic evolution of the traditional advertising culture, in the past overtly persuasive, one-way, interruptive in nature and consisting in discrete announcements anchored in place and time, into ‘viral marketing’ and ‘consumer-generated’ promotion, which may be intentional or automatic when a certain product is used and covertly integrated in recent genres (even in tweets) thanks to the social media. Similarly, political discourse may be detected in genres outside Politics. In Charteris-Black’s (2014) view, ‘political style’ does not so much revolve around content-related keywords but focuses on the personal discursive resources for conveying a persuasive message. These resources may range from epistemic and deontic modality and reader pronouns to emotional language, intensifiers and metaphors. Breeze’s chapter on corporate recruitment websites aptly exemplifies the calculated use of many of those features (e.g. bare assertions side by side with vague expressions, directives in the imperative form and direct appeals to the reader, visual and verbal metaphors) to arouse empathy with potential employees while imbuing them with the firm’s ideology. In this manner, organisations gradually prepare the ‘social and ideological contract’ (Cockcroft et al. 2014, 185) that underlies any successful interaction between persuader and persuadee. The studies gathered here, moreover, bring forward a wide array of frameworks and methodologies. Although most of the authors adhere to an integrative, interactive, interpersonal or ‘thin’1 model of metadiscourse, and Hyland’s categorisation 1. While for integrative approaches metadiscourse plays an interpersonal function, nonintegrative and reflexive visions (e.g. Mauranen 1993; 2010; Ädel 2006; 2010; Pérez-Llantada 2010) restrict metadiscursive functions to the world of discourse and exclude the context:



Chapter 1.  Networking engagement in professional practices

and the Appraisal System from Systemic Functional Linguistics predominate, the characteristics of texts and contexts in some professional communities demand fruitful conceptual blends to create analytical tools for better capturing their communicative singularities. Thus, to fusions of stance and engagement within Hyland’s approach in the work of Carrió-Pastor, Arinas Pellón, Suau-Jiménez, Querol-Julián and Arteaga-Martínez, Bernad-Mechó and Fortanet-Gómez, add manifold theoretical combinations: – Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal System and Hyland’s (2005a and 2005b) model (McLaren-Hankin, Sala, Crawford Camiciottoli, and Díez-Prados). – Systemic Functional Linguistics and Social Semiotics (Fryer). – Appraisal and Critical Discourse Analysis (McCabe and Alonso Belmonte) – Knowledge Communication Research (Kastberg 2007; Engberg 2012 inter alia) and Multimodality (Engberg and Maier). – Multimodality and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Zhang). – Rhetorical Genre Studies (Artemeva and Freedman 2006, inter alia) and Hyland’s model (Fogarty-Bourget, Artemeva and Fox). – Multimodality and Conversation Analysis (Querol-Julián and Arteaga-Martínez) – Hyland’s model merged with Multimodality and Ädel’s (2010) taxonomy of organisational metadiscourse (Bernad-Mechó and Fortanet-Gómez). – Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics (Jiang and Ma, Arinas Pellón, CarrióPastor, Sala, and Suau-Jiménez, among others). Synchronic research prevails (recourse to diachrony is found only in Zhang’s chapter) and the range of methodologies and procedures covered is extensive: all of the authors have worked with corpora (monomodal, bimodal or multimodal) and/or sampled and examined audio- or video-recorded texts electronically and/or manually. Examination has sometimes involved mixed approaches (i.e. qualitative and quantitative) and tasks such as transcribing, subdividing, coding, (part-of-speech) tagging, comparing frequency counts, text-mining, interviewing, contrasting, inter-rating, and adopting specific methods, as is the case of McCabe and Alonso Belmonte’s investigation of (non)factuality and evaluative lexis and Querol-Julián and Arteaga-Martínez’s saturation sampling method. Composite approaches like Fryer’s intersemiotic, interstratal and logogenetic analysis, Engberg and Maier’s study of lower-level and higher-level multimodal actions, Díez-Prados’ contrastive multidimensional analysis, and Zhang’s lens on navigation and layout features and information density, complete the methodological spectrum. metadiscourse is ‘text about text’, and thus the interpersonal component is not necessary to clarify interconnections between expressions, sentences or parts of the message. Ädel and Mauranen (2010) call integrative, discourse-analytical approaches to metadiscourse ‘thin’ and qualify the non-integrative and reflexive perspectives, linguistically based, as ‘thick’.

5

6

Carmen Sancho Guinda

2. Issues arising: Research directions and challenges Researching engagement in professional communities carries a series of interpersonal and discursive assumptions. The former bring along concerns related to power, responsibility, creativity, and constraints. The latter, issues and cases derived from the dynamism and complexity inherent in metalanguage. 2.1

Interpersonal assumptions

Firstly, interpersonal relationships occur in a specific context. Of the three contextual elements distinguished by Cutting (2002, 3): the communicative situation, the background knowledge of the participants, and the cotext, the first two are crucial to any profession, as they shape a sense of belonging based on membership. In effect, the members of the community not only share norms, attitudes, tools, and concepts, but also some relational expertise and domain-based literacies (i.e. terminology, genres, discourses, narratives, and routines, roles and procedures – among them the interaction with insiders and outsiders) that separate them from the rest of society. Gunnarsson (2009, 19) highlights the importance of this separation from the out-group for the acquisition of a “professional we feeling” or identity, mirrored by the community’s genres. Questions such as how this separation takes place, how much guidance is given to non-experts to bridge knowledge gaps, and whether or not genre ownership is exclusive to the community raise the issue of power. Our second assumption is that engagement always marks an asymmetry: of status, knowledge, opinion or belief between communication participants, or of physical distance (i.e. the addressee is absent or far away from the sender). Knowledge asymmetries may have to do with background information and skills (i.e. training, education, experience) or with in situ circumstances of the communicative situation. This last case might correspond to an interaction between peers with the same educational and experiential background but in which their intentions could be unstated, postponed or disguised, and their argumentative strategies indirectly crafted, either to meet private goals or to build up a climax of suspense more engaging than conventional linear reasoning. In this regard, Arinas Pellón shows to us that patents are genres in which segregation of the out-group is particularly stark and formulaic (by means of stereotyped phrases like ‘those/one (not) skilled in the art’) and much expert knowledge is taken for granted or vaguely expressed to dissuade competitors who can claim intellectual property over improvements on a given invention. Paradoxical as it may seem, patent drafters employ engagement devices (fundamentally appeals to the reader, directives and shared knowledge) to achieve disengagement. The obverse process (i.e. disengage to finally engage the audience) takes place in ideologically-aligned



Chapter 1.  Networking engagement in professional practices

news reporting, as shown by McCabe and Alonso Belmonte, and in the earnings calls scrutinised by Crawford’s Camicciottoli, which avoid the complete disclosure of adverse financial outcomes in times of crisis in order not to upset stakeholders and to simultaneously transmit a positive corporate image. To this end, executives resort to negative constructions containing verbs of speech (e.g. ‘I’m not going to comment…’, ‘I can’t answer…’). Another prime example of engagement with a hidden agenda in the service of vested interests is provided by McLaren-Hankin, whose examination of bank press releases on customer’s complaints reveals that engagement may be aimed at building the corporation’s ethos of competence and benevolence through informativeness and empathy with customers, assigned different roles with the ultimate goal of regaining their trust. While research articles and patents2 take for granted that sender and addressee interact on an equal footing, still the information flows from the ‘authority’, that is, from the most informed interlocutor to the least informed one. In other genres, nonetheless, interaction is by necessity more democratic: the message is co-constructed by equals and the information flow is reversed – the text runs from the public to the authority or, more simply put, the public becomes the authority. Such a role transformation happens in the tourism websites of Suau-Jiménez’s chapter, where the boundaries between experts and non-experts have been blurred by digital technologies: online forums and chats admit the evaluations and comments posted by consumers sharing their experiences out of solidarity, which in the long run will likely affect the corporate or institutional branding of the entity being evaluated. Two other cases of communicative democratisation, although of an ‘intermediate sort’, are Zhang’s science news online and Engberg and Maier’s video-research articles. In them the expert figure of authority rules the interaction, the text has not been co-constructed in its inception, and the borderline between the expert sender and his/her lay addressees is less fuzzy than in tourism websites, but digital affordances (hyperlinks, forums, chats) permit the addressee to choose his/her own reading, listening or viewing paths and react to them. Unlike websites and video-articles, the PhD candidature confirmation report, heir to the structural and interpersonal rigidity of the research proposal and the doctoral dissertation, is an apprentice genre written for examiners whom the author knows personally. Jiang and Ma observe that the conjunction of academic 2. Equality – that is, a similar status and knowledge background, is assumed between patentees (i.e. competitors) and between the patentee and the patent examiner, at least in what concerns knowledge of the patenting procedure and the document’s layout and format, but not between the patentee and potential sponsors or the general public. The widespread expectation that these two groups should be discursively ignored in the text is nevertheless beginning to recede and therefore code glosses, frame markers and transition markers are increasingly appearing in U.S. patents as a sign of acknowledgement of the presence of investors and other lay readers (Sancho Guinda 2012a).

7

8

Carmen Sancho Guinda

genre conventions, the status differences between interactants and the frequently preliminary nature of the research reported, deepen the rift between experts and non-experts and display a higher use of inclusive reader mentions (‘we’ instead of ‘you’) to attain proximity and establish solidarity than the veteran writing of published research articles, but ask less questions because, like the second-person pronoun, they would seem too direct and daring. The opposite tendency may be appreciated in Sala’s study on legal research articles: the versatile functionality of interrogatives as textual organisers and pragmatic (politeness) devices at the same time makes them doubly empowering for the reader. They divide the content to facilitate its comprehension and the reading path they put forth is not imposing but gentle, never as dogmatic as an unmodalised assertion. Questions, then, act as face-savers for both the addressee and the sender. They mitigate the addressee’s ignorance, whether of the topic, of a concrete reasoning scheme and its particular tactics and their consequences, or of in-community concepts and ways if (s)he is an outsider in the field, whereas the sender may guide the audience towards the desired understanding in a ‘well-mannered’ fashion that builds him/her a reputation. “Good writing is good manners”, assures Trimble (2000/1975, 10), and therefore skilled writers actively imagine their readers and are sensitive to them. Power relationships lead us to reflect on a second paramount issue: that of responsibility. Who should foster or practise engagement? Woodward-Kron, Wilson, and Gall draw our attention to the responsibility shared by doctors and patients, who above knowledge asymmetries and professional distance, embark on a ‘therapeutic alliance’ that requires initiatives and actions from both parties in a context of patient-centred medicine. The novel viewpoint presented by these authors is one in which patients initiate rapport-building episodes during consultation, in order to persuade doctors to stay in remote rural areas under a shortage of caretakers in Australia. Thus far, Discourse Analysis has not paid much attention to addressee-responsible engagement in general (save in Academic Writing in Anglo cultures),3 whereas it is central to disciplines such as Marketing and Advertising, mostly in digital environments, and interactive Visual Arts. In her chapter, Suau-Jiménez describes the linguistic and rhetorical repertoires of e-tourism consumers when it comes to assessing services and facilities. What impels these internauts to make their opinions known is a supportive psychological state that results from having undergone

3. Hinds (1987) posits that in English-speaking cultures responsibility for an effective communication falls upon the writer, not the reader. Conversely, the reader is held responsible in Japanese and presumably in Korean, classical Chinese and Spanish. For these four languages, Hyland (2003, 48) reminds us, “Coherence is in the eyes of the beholder”.



Chapter 1.  Networking engagement in professional practices

similar experiences and previous interactions (in blogs, recommendations, written reviews, etc.) and ends up interweaving a co-created evaluation. Slightly different from this seemingly spontaneous psychological state is the concept of engagement in direct Marketing and Advertising, which define it (Heath 2007, 1) as an induced “subconscious emotional construct” or “the amount of feeling/empathy going on” when an advertisement is being processed. In promotional contexts, engagement must be distinguished from active attention, essentially a conscious rational construct – in other words, ‘conscious thinking’ – because there may be high involvement with little attention and vice versa. ‘Involvement’, ‘commitment’, ‘activation’, ‘empowerment’, ‘interaction’, ‘alliance’, and even ‘retention’ and ‘loyalty’ are terms frequently used by Organisational Psychology to tentatively define advertising and marketing engagement, provisionally understood (Gambetti and Graffigna 2010) as a driving force, a process, or a dynamic phenomenon behind consumer behaviour and decision-making, or as a necessary precursor of emotion (Wang 2006; Green 2007). Zhang (this volume) mentions the “state of connection” (Lorenzoni et al. 2007) impinging on the co-dependent spheres of cognition, affect and behaviour when addressees align with the semiotic resources in the text. Extrapolating all these views to fields other than Marketing and Advertising, we may conceive engagement across the professions as a ‘state’, a ‘force’, a ‘feeling’, or a ‘nearing process’ subsuming acts of interaction, alliance, involvement and commitment. Despite having been induced by the media, engagement in Marketing and Advertising depends ultimately on consumers (Green 2007), who are just led to the advertisement and at the most put into the right frame of mind to decode and retain the information. For example, media placement (Green 2007) can give saliency to messages that otherwise would go unnoticed: the first TV commercial during a programme break is more likely to be recalled than if released towards the middle of the pause. An akin concept is Wang’s (2006) contextual relevance, which he considers the driver of advertising engagement. It informs addressees of prominent meanings and connections via three devices: the ‘spatial adjacency’ of the message to certain contents (visual, verbal, or multimodal), some ‘novelty/surprise’ (i.e. unusual collocations, positions and uses of the message), and ‘emotional bonding’. In the Visual Arts, engagement does not either depend so much on the sender and pivots around ample rhetorical functions rather than target linguistic and rhetorical items (unlike Hyland’s five-item taxonomy of questions, directives, addressee pronouns, asides and markers of shared knowledge). A case in point is the loose and pervious model proposed by Edmonds, Miller and Connell (2006) for engagement in interactive Visual Art. It consists of three broad attributes, namely attractors (i.e. attention callers), sustainers (i.e. elements sustaining attention), and relaters (i.e. elements that encourage a continuing relationship to grow, so that the audience returns to the work on future occasions).

9

10

Carmen Sancho Guinda

In connection with some of these attributes, the chapters by Fryer and Zhang illustrate the intricate complexity and the synergy of visual and verbal intersemiosis as engagement trigger in the dissemination of science, and dissect its role in expanding and contracting dialogic spaces through monoglossia or multivocality, the handling of visual distance, and naturalistic or schematic choices. Zhang underlines the malleability of multimodal resources and the ongoing evolution of engagement towards non-verbal strategies in the field of science communication. Fryer casts a glimpse on the multi-functionality of established visual taxonomies (e.g. O’Toole’s 1994 and Kress and van Leeuwen’s 2006/1996), which applied to Edmonds et al.’s (2006) model could serve indistinctly as attractors, sustainers and retainers, and once more emphasizes the fact that “it is the reader who gives the text its voice(s).” These voices, however, will be correctly interpreted only if addressees have enough experience with genres and disciplinary and national cultures or develop a specific visual literacy through instruction. The need for cross-disciplinary visual conventions and training in a basic cross-disciplinary visual literacy is perhaps more urgent for graphical abstracts (Sancho Guinda 2015; 2016), increasingly demanded in academia and vehicles of a heavy promotional load that superposes to their original research-screening function and makes them border on Advertising. Their extreme succinctness and limitation of verbal text, together with the lack of unified guidelines for the use of visuals in specialised journals, turn them into low-engagement genres sometimes very difficult to interpret, even for experts. Visuals, furthermore, may alter the expected formal register of an interaction and turn it into more conversational, confer it a promotional tone, and foreground aspects logically neglected in monomodal environments. Engberg and Maier, for instance, claim for the value of physical posture, gesture, speech patterns, attire or even the furniture visible as engagement items and potential identity traits in the recorded interactions of hypermodal scenarios like the video research article. In this genre, modal density shortens distances between interactants, increases informative disclosure, and discovers new engagement devices as new affordances and communication trends emerge. Engagement tends to concentrate as well on non-verbal devices in the ‘elevator pitch’ oral presentations by entrepreneurs in the business sector and in university lectures. Díez-Prados’ analysis spots insightful connections between engagement, persuasion, genre moves, stance markers and gender in the oral messages presented by entrepeneneurs, who make use of vocal resources (e.g. sound lengthening) untapped in other professional speech genres. One of them is the lecture, represented here by three chapters that delve into engagement features in higher-education settings: the study of Fogarty-Bourget, Artemeva and Fox on the traditional chalk-and-talk teaching of Mathematics, Querol-Julián and Arteaga-Martínez’s investigation of synchronous videoconferencing lectures on Mathematics Didactics,



Chapter 1.  Networking engagement in professional practices

and Bernad-Mechó and Fortanet-Gómez’s contrastive research on different styles of filmed lectures dealing with Social Sciences and the Humanities. These three chapters shed light on how engagement manifests itself in three variants of the same genre, two of them being closely related from a disciplinary point of view – those teaching Mathematics and its Didactics – and the other one pertaining to distant (i.e. soft) fields and focusing on styles of interaction. Fogarty-Bourget et al. and Querol-Julián and Arteaga-Martínez concur on the recognition of silence (verbal and gestural) as a flexible multi-purpose engagement device, while Bernad-Mechó and Fortanet-Gómez pinpoint the role of multimodal endophorics, more dependent on personal idiosyncrasies than on lecturing styles or disciplines. The issue of responsibility unavoidably links with that of creativity and constraints. We have just seen that intersemiosis, modal density, and hyper- and multimodality open up new roads to engagement, but what limits its metadiscursive repertoire, besides monomodality and genre conventions? How much leeway is made for interactants? The impact of constraints is remarkable in two monomodal written genres: news reports and business e-mails, curbed respectively by political ideology and national culture. McCabe and Alonso Belmonte’s bicultural comparison of print news reporting points up the interplay between alignment and disalignment in the texts written by centre-left winged journalists, who distance themselves from the words and thoughts of those they report on in pursuit of objectivity. As for the incidence of national culture, Carrió-Pastor concludes that Spanish businesspeople use many more engagement markers (above all reader pronouns and attitudinal adverbials) in their electronic correspondence than their Chinese counterparts, more inclined to directives and appeals to shared knowledge. Suau-Jiménez also heeds sharp cultural differences in the quantitative and qualitative use of engagement items between the Spanish and English discourses in an intersemiotic genre – the e-tourism website. The scholars assembled in this monograph investigate diverse means for attaining engagement that are unusual owing to their disciplinary, genre and medium specificity, and therefore rarely found in deep-seated taxonomies. They may comprise contexts, discourses, embedded genres and pragmatic and lexico-grammatical categories that evince the need to update metadiscourse inventories or even expand the scope of the engagement notion: – Allusions to logical reasoning, routine conditions and familiarity with research tradition as components of the Hylandian engagement marker ‘shared knowledge’ (Jiang and Ma) – Intertwining of stance and engagement markers (Carrió-Pastor, Suau-Jiménez and several others), including modal verbs (Carrió-Pastor) – Use of counter-expectancy, appraisal polarity, and scare quotes (McCabe and Alonso Belmonte)

11

12

Carmen Sancho Guinda

– Role projection of sender and addressees through transitivity choices, by means of verbs denoting mental and verbal processes (McLaren-Hankin) – Question-answer pairs as a typical realisation of questioning for engagement in Legal Studies (Sala) – Humour and social talk (informal slangy conversation) (Woodward-Kron, Wilson, and Gall) – Hortative expressions, conditional clauses and markers of incomplete disclosure and disengagement (Crawford Camiciottoli) – Naturalistic/schematic semiotic choices, visual narrative pathways, verbal reference to the visual in genre moves, hypertexts, and diagram legends (Fryer) – Close-up video images of researchers interacting, speech patterns and register shifts to colloquial conversation, visual disclosure of look and attire, posture and furniture, and hypermodal resources like chats (Engberg and Maier) – Video testimonies and success narratives of corporative role models for employees and visual and verbal metaphors from the source domains of ‘adventure’ and ‘scientific enterprise’ (Breeze) – Presence of certain genre moves (e.g. greeting, thanking, prompting questions), hedges embedded in expressions of shared knowledge (e.g. ‘as many of you…’), sound lengthening, quasi-lexical sounds, and clusters of non-verbal signs (e.g. smiling, single blinking, sideways look, assured walk, etc.) (Díez-Prados) – ‘Scifo-posts’ in online science news , head-tail layout in headlines, social media hyperlinks, stock images (decontextualised and symbolic) as shared knowledge (Zhang) – Vagueness (Arinas Pellón, Breeze, Crawford Camiciottoli), including hyperonymy (Arinas Pellón) – Gestural silence/stillness as a marker of attentive listening or as dialogue initiator (Fogarty-Bourget, Artemeva and Fox) – Silence management by handling manipulatives, questioning students, reading out students’ contributions, writing on PowerPoint slides and sharing online resources (e.g. videos, websites, etc.), and inserting comments in openings and closings (Querol-Julián and Arteaga-Martínez) – Clusters of iconic gestures and parenthetical intonation, paraverbal endophorics, head and hand movements (Bernad-Mechó and Fortanet-Gómez), and eye contact (Díez-Prados, Querol-Julián and Arteaga-Martínez, Bernad-Mechó and Fortanet-Gómez) – Network sources (traveller forums, portals, commentaries) and stance as engagement device in Spanish e-tourism discourse (Suau-Jiménez) We may wonder, in any case, whether these engagement means are easily noticeable and consciously used by every addresser, or only by a few with a trained eye. Should they be explicitly taught to novices and become part of professional



Chapter 1.  Networking engagement in professional practices 13

literacies? Academic and technical style guides do not normally encourage the use of engagement items of this sort and stick to conventional ways that treat verbal text and images separately or, what is more common, do not contemplate intersemiotic engagement at all. Sword’s (2012) ‘rules of engagement’, for example, just mention illustrations in passing, and in the rest of manuals commonplace pieces of advice referred to the verbal text abound. Some of them are draw closer to the reader (Ross-Larson 1999, 49), empathize with readers, anticipate readers’ responses and be ‘considerate’ and ‘other-oriented’ (Trimble 2000/1975, 8, 10), show respect for the audience and not antagonize it (Hairston and Keene 2003/1981, 82), or guide readers (Zinsser 2006/1976, 264–265). Occasionally, recommendations are made in directive form, which oozes a slightly dictatorial tone: “Make sure the reader knows who is speaking” (Strunk and White 1972/1959, 76), “Always remember the reader over your shoulder” (Pinker 2014, 63), and “Find out about your audience” or “Write from a reader perspective” (Wallwork 2014a, 20; 2014b, 35). Advice not only may be too general, but at times also contradictory. While Wallwork (2016, 24) discourages the insertion of parenthetical information, Ross-Larson (1999, 30) and Sword (2012, 85, 158) endorse the use of asides, anecdotes and first-person pronouns because they ‘humanize’ the author, and Turk and Kirkman (1996/1982) urge to avoid excessive impersonality and clue about what might strike as over-impersonal in scientific, technical and business documents. Contrastingly, from within the technical field, Tichy (1988, 300) warns scientists and engineers against the risk of irritating readers with shared knowledge expressions of the type ‘as you know/may recall/are aware’, whereas Pinker (2014, 167–168) is in favour of adjusting the number of connectives to the expertise of addressees and bear in mind their state of knowledge. Further, some academics stimulate making writing “more conversational” (e.g. Ross-Larson 1999, 32) or sprinkling direct admonitions to the audience (Ross- Larson 1999, 32; Sword 2012, 85; Wallwork 2014b, 35) and others, contrarily, prescribe the avoidance of ‘you’ except in textbooks, as well as of verbal contractions (e.g. Swales and Feak 1994; Lane and Lange 1999). How much ‘conversational’, then, should professional and academic discourses be? With respect to visuals, specialists recommend the use of illustrations to attract the addressee’s attention, clarify abstract concepts and make them more memorable (Sword 2012, 108), but hardly do they suggest concrete measures.4 The same happens with the journal guidelines to authors on the engaging use of visuals for science dissemination through graphical abstracts: very few discipline-specific directions are given and the exemplars provided are uncommented (Sancho Guinda 2015;

4. Turk and Kirkman (1996/1982, 148–194), however, stand out for devoting a whole chapter of their style guide to technical writing to the choice and use of tables, illustrations, and graphic presentation techniques.

14

Carmen Sancho Guinda

2016). Only two impact journals, Cell and the publication of FEMS (Federation of Microbiological Societies) issue concise instructions. They ask authors to reduce verbal text to a minimum in labels or indications, avoid speculation and the inclusion of data, mark clear starts and ends with reading paths from right to left or from top to bottom, discard saturating colours in order to minimize distraction, and confine the illustration to a single panel, but the requested quality of being ‘appealing’ or ‘engaging’ is not spelt out whatsoever. Overall, this brief description of the reality of writing guides and journal style sheets proves how indispensable it is to facilitate writers the interaction norms of their own communities of practice, and to expand or redesign, if necessary, the current engagement taxonomies to integrate multimodality in their categories. 2.2

Discursive assumptions

Being a metadiscourse constituent, engagement is subject to a pair of major assumptions: it is dynamic and complex. Because of its dynamism it changes across contexts, as this book shows, and over time, since the affordances brought about by technological advances may produce new genres, contexts, audiences, roles, and communication habits. Hence, new forms of engagement may arise. Corpus evidence from Hyland and Jiang’s 2017 study demonstrates that written academic discourse has gradually become more informal over the last 50 years (their data span the period 1965–2015), and most notably in the hard sciences. These two researchers enrich the inventories of informal discourse features customarily published in style guides5 by incorporating items such as unattended reference, sentence-initial conjunctions, preposition endings, exclamations, and split infinitives, and determine the incidence of direct questions and the second-person pronoun, for decades deemed a stylistic “taboo” (Hyland and Jiang 2017, 44) in academic prose. This general tendency towards informality in academic writing, all the same, is counterbalanced by a recent inclination, detected by Biber and Gray (2016), to compressed phrasal and clausal expressions, which saves processing time among experts but enlarges the knowledge gulf between them and novices and laypeople. The obverse happens in digital intersemiotic genres, which, as Zhang’s chapter suggests, are concentrating most of the engagement in the visuals and dissolving expertise differences. The conclusion drawn by Hyland and Jiang (2017, 42) is that engagement is an essential and gradable ingredient of (in)formality, which attempts to establish “a particular kind of relationship” with the addressee and, as defined by Heylighen and Dewaele’s (1999), is basically grounded in the interplay of involvement/detachment 5. Frequent informal items are first-person pronouns, WH questions, enumerative expressions of the type ‘such as’ and so on’, or verb contractions.



Chapter 1.  Networking engagement in professional practices 15

(Vassileva 2001), vagueness/accuracy and flexibility/rigidity. In previous work, Hyland and Jiang (2016) had already noticed the considerable decrease of engagement in social science research, presumably because it has become more empirical and impersonally reported due to its growing specialisation and its more informed readership, which needs less glosses and explicitness than before. The opposite phenomenon, although much less dramatic, characterises biology and engineering research articles, whose engagement is growing little by little thanks to the use of directives, now guiding non-expert commercial sponsors through the lines of argument. Outside research, though, the digital media tend to diminish guidance. Yus (2014) attributes this fact to the non-linear structure of arguments in computer-mediated communication, which blurs authorial intention and engages addressees in multitasking to process small portions of texts at the risk of “infoxication” (i.e. intoxication caused by an excess of information). In such scenarios, where relational markers are not fixed or predictable and interactive affordances (e.g. chats, forums, comments, etc.) curtail the need for marking the addressee’s presence in the text, Yus (2014, 195) hints that the term ‘interpersonality’ should be replaced by “cross-personality”. The scientific illustrations studied in Fryer’s chapter are a good exponent, as the author notes, of a mélange of voices (those of the researchers, artists, designers, typesetters, editors and reviewers) that condition interpretation. The other discursive assumption, complexity, may be broken down into five main features: fuzziness, ‘embedded-ness’, reflexivity, non-discreetness and paradox. Hyland’s most recent reflections on metadiscourse (2017) sort out the causes of its fuzziness, which every so often makes taxonomical divisions problematic: 1. Multiformity and multifunctionality: One form may perform several functions (informative, phatic and persuasive) and the same one function may be fulfilled by several forms. 2. Instability: The variation caused by time and the context-bound nature already commented on under ‘dynamism’, be it due to national or disciplinary cultures. 3. Non-discreetness or gradability regarding (de)personalisation, addresser- or addressee-orientedness and reflexivity. 4. Elusiveness: Some metadiscourse items may go unnoticed, frequently because of variations in size, embeddings, and category overlaps. 5. Trans-modality: Metadiscourse may adopt different forms and functions across modes. 6. Category overlaps: An endophoric referring to a graph or figure in the text, for instance, may function simultaneously as a code gloss, an evidential, a hedge, a booster of the argument, and an engagement marker (a direct or indirect directive, depending on whether it is accompanied by an imperative like ‘see’ or ‘note’). Other frequent conflations occur between boosters and attitudinals or between these and code glosses, as is the case of metaphors and similes.

16

Carmen Sancho Guinda

7. Size: Asides and shared knowledge items may consist of words, phrases, sentences, passages, images and multimodal bits isolated or in sequence. But, are there any limits to their extension? How long should an aside be? 8. Intermediate status between the rhetorical (i.e. the interactive) and the propositional (i.e. the interactional). From the Appraisal Model of Systemic Functional Linguistics, the property of metadiscursive embeddedness has been tackled by Thompson (2014). He defines it as the occurrence of a series of nested evaluations and terms one of its possible effects “the Russian doll dilemma/syndrome”, as the matryoshka image fittingly represents the possibility of successive insertions within the attitude systems (affect, judgement and appreciation): one category of attitude may function as a ‘token’ (i.e. an indirect expression) of a different category, susceptible in turn to functioning as token of another and so on. Those evaluations run along a cline of explicitness ranging from ‘inscribed’ (i.e. explicit) to ‘invoked’ (Martin and White 2005, 61), and on the whole may pose problems for quantitative analysis. In the Hylandian model, metadiscourse items beyond the phrase may too contain several other items: let us imagine, in the case of engagement, an aside including shared knowledge appeals, questions, directives, and addressee pronouns, or even another aside. There might be quantitative conflicts as well, and fuzziness could appear, generated by overlaps between stance and engagement categories or between engagement items themselves. The reflexive property is key to non-integrative and alternative approaches to metadiscourse (Ädel 2006; Ädel and Mauranen 2010; Mauranen 1993; 2010), as it constitutes the basis for their definition of the concept and frames it within the world of discourse. In the Hylandian interpersonal model, this text-centred ‘metatalk’ quality is taken for granted but not as salient, since the interactional dimension is paid more attention. Still, when defining engagement in one of his first works, Hyland (2005a, 53) lays emphasis on the explicitness factor (my bolds), through which as addressees we can identify metadiscourse as such: Engagement markers are devices that explicitly address readers, either to focus their attention or include them as discourse participants. So in addition to creating an impression of authority,, integrity and credibility through choices of hedges, boosters, self mention and attitude, writers are able to either highlight or downplay the presence of their readers in the text. Because affective devices can also have relational implications, attitude and engagement markers are often difficult to distinguish in practice.

But how much ‘reflexive’ and ‘explicit’ should a metadiscursive item be? Put differently and more concretely, must engagement items be always marked, so that we can realise they are ‘language about language’ and facilitators of communication? Can engagement be non-reflexive/non-metadiscursive? Because reflexivity



Chapter 1.  Networking engagement in professional practices 17

(at least its perception) seems to be gradable and intimately related to markedness/ explicitness, item size, cognition, authorial intention, and literacy. For example, engagement items in the form of visual and multimodal insertions (e.g. animations, voiceovers, music), hypertexts, shifts in the gaze, rhythm, frame, angle, light, colour modulation and saturation, tone and hue, the perspective of images, and narrative asides without any introductory cues may not be perceived as metadiscourse by all addressees, unless conversant with genre, register and mode conventions, and the interactive routines of the specific community of practice. In much later work, Hyland (2017, 17) acknowledges that indirect metadiscursive signals, such as presuppositions and violations of cooperative maxims, have been neglected in research. Consequently, his initial 2005 definition calls for an update – a broader scope that does not leave out the implicitness that stems from discourse hybridisations and private interests and is made possible through media affordances. Rather than a dichotomous concept divided between the textual and the interpersonal, metadiscourse unfolds as a set of communicative options (rhetorical, verbal and paraverbal) along a continuum (Hyland 2017, 19–20). Engagement slides along a particularly rich cline that not only graduates textual and interpersonal foci and responsibility (i.e. writer- and reader – orientation, as worded by Ädel 2006 and Hyland 2004b), but also explicitness, disclosure, empathy and deference to the addressee, personal involvement, and metaphoricity. In relation to the latter, let us not forget that the “virtual dialogue” (Hyland 2009b, 111) in which senders and addressees metaphorically engage becomes real in the digital media; for example in synchronous forums, (video)chats and videocalls. Finally, engagement is somehow paradoxical because, as Crawford Camiciottoli’s chapter has shown us in the earnings calls genre, McCabe and Alonso Belmonte’s in news reporting, or Arinas Pellón’s in patents, it may be achieved through intentional disengagement. In novice academic writing, on the contrary, misalignments with the reader are frequently caused by misconceptions concerning reader-considerateness or to L1 and culture interferences. On examining final year reports written by Hong Kong senior undergraduates, Hyland (2012) found that this genre yielded very low percentages of engagement features. It turned out that students avoided them in the belief that their effect would be too intrusive, pretentious, or controlling, but to project credibility and authority and so persuade examiners of their academic argument, they tended to over-boost their propositions. Other studies on inexperienced academic writing have brought to the fore learner difficulties in appealing to shared knowledge (Breeze 2012), especially in dealing with intertextuality, taking up authorial roles and meeting the audience’s expectations. Paradox may also crop up in the use of engagement features as ‘compensatory devices’ to make up for the lack of stance. This fact has been indicated by Sancho Guinda’s (2012b) research on the graph commentaries by second-year engineering students and by Aull et al.’s (2017)

18

Carmen Sancho Guinda

study on stancetaking by first-year college writers, who enlist dogmatic generalisation markers (e.g. ‘never’, ‘always’, ‘no’, ‘all’, ‘every’) to appeal to shared knowledge and thus demonstrate stance. 3. Broadening the notion: Engagement envisaged as (di)stance Engagement is a matter of stance and distance, whether metaphorical or actual. The term (di)stance conveys this idea and brings to mind both the conceptual interweave of stance and engagement (‘engagement’ as a ‘stance’ on the audience and the interaction) and the adjustment of mental and/or physical nearness between communication participants. Certainly, engagement is an interpersonal regulator of distance: several scholars refer to stancetaking and audience awareness as ‘positionality’ (Jaffe 2009), ‘positioning’ (Hyland 2005a; 2005b; 2008a; 2009b; 2011a; 2011b; 2012; 2014; Hyland and Jiang 2016, to cite some instances), or ‘point of view’ (Simpson 1993). As regards the relationship with specific professional collectivities, Gunnarsson (2009) speaks of ‘separation’ and of ‘in-group’ and ‘out-group’ to explain how professional identities are acquired, Hyland has coined the term ‘proximity’ (2010; 2012, 22, 43) to label the rhetorical interaction between self and disciplinary community, and Molino (2010, 87) uses the metaphor ‘interpersonality’ in Academic Writing to denote the interaction of objectivity and subjectivity, which depends on from how far one describes or reports entities and facts – that is to say, on where one is positioned. Harré and van Langenhove’s (1999) Positioning Theory is applied to a broad social framework that spreads across several sites of identity (e.g. autobiography, science, technology, nation and culture) from personhood to interpersonal and intergroup relationships. It maintains that the stances we take are not static but fluid: we shift roles to position ourselves through our discursive acts. Scientists, for instance, are abandoning the established “exercise of depersonalization” reported on by Knorr-Cetina (1981) and expected from science dissemination and taking on the roles of journalists, teachers, and entertainers in a more democratic vision of science, as the studies of Engberg and Maier, Zhang and Fryer reveal in this volume. Metadiscursive engagement is but one vehicle for undertaking those roles and heading towards that positioning. Within the heteroglossic side of engagement in the Appraisal Model (Martin and White 2005, 111–117), ‘distance’ and ‘acknowledge’ are the two subcategories of attribution, through which external voices are introduced in the text and relationships of nearness or separation, (dis)alignment, rapport, solidarity credibility (or lack thereof ) may be established between addresser and addressee. Distance and acknowledge are most typically realised by means of a choice of reporting devices,



Chapter 1.  Networking engagement in professional practices 19

such as the semantics and tense of reporting verbs, citation formulas or scare quotes, and are fundamental elements of dialogic expansion, with which a more proximal or distal positioning is achieved. All of these deploys might be related to the concept of ‘proximisation’ (Cap 2013), which exists out of the Appraisal System and designates the symbolic construal of deictic centres and their peripheries through lexico-grammatical choices in the discursive space. Proximisation Theory is of pivotal interest in Cognitive Linguistics, Pragmatics and Critical Discourse Analysis, and has been consistently used to study the legitimisation of persuasive discourses, mostly promotional and political. But as this book proves, the symbolic and actual shortening or enlargement of distances is practised in every field of human activity, and not only on the discourse plane but also at context level. A broader conception of engagement could integrate the Appraisal and Hylandian perspectives, Multimodality and Proximisation as positioning components in the service of (di)stance. In the chapters by Zhang, Fryer, and Engberg and Maier, for example, we can see that still and motion pictures reduce the distance between sender and addressee and between them and the object of discussion. In those of Fogarty-Bourget et al., Querol-Julián and Arteaga-Martínez, and Bernad-Mechó and Fortanet-Gómez, silence, gaze and gesture bring the community together by inviting the participation of its members. Another professional arena not portrayed here but that significantly relies on the regulation of psychological distance is Risk Communication. It builds proximal deictic centres to bring the hazard close to the individual (Zwickle and Wilson 2014) and thus raise awareness and elicit the desired response: ‘then’ becomes ‘now’, ‘there’ becomes ‘here’, the ‘other’, the ‘out-group’ and the ‘dissimilar’ become the ‘self ’, the ‘in-group’ and the ‘similar’, and the hypothetical or unlikely becomes likely to happen. The divulgative genres6 issued yearly online by the US National Transportation Safety Board, a pioneering institution in the field, enhance this kind of linguistic proximisation with a myriad of strategies and multimodal devices. Some of them are direct-speech testimonies that may contain other direct-speech embeddings, novel-like openings and climactic rhetorical structures, glosses of expert technical information, the profusion of narrative detail, and sporadic 3D animations that render the catastrophe and sometimes include snippets of cabin voice recordings from the black box. Curiously, several of these devices are on the verge of violating the cooperative maxim of quantity and the politeness maxim of sympathy towards the families of deceased crew members and other victims (Sancho Guinda 2017). In such a particular context, the zeal for disclosure motivated by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to ensure institutional transparency turns engagement into a double-edged sword. This is another case of paradox. 6. These ‘lay’ genres are air-accident dockets, press releases, report abstracts and executive summaries, and complementary slideshows.

20 Carmen Sancho Guinda

My point, in short, is that from an addresser-oriented view, engagement is a tool for projecting (di)stance, a proximisation/detachment device subservient to role-taking and, in the end, positioning (i.e. stancetaking). The proximal or distal effect achieved will be the result of adapting to “vertical” and “horizontal” distances (Leech 2014, 103), the first agglutinating influences like status, power, role, interest, or seniority, and the second factors like intimacy, familiarity, or acquaintance. Along this axis, interactants adjust the levels of deference anddisclosure, whose combination makes up engagement, the whole of what we may understand by ‘addresser’s involvement’. Deference consists in the acknowledgement of the addressee’s presence and the guidance offered to him/her through the lines of reasoning. Disclosure has to do with topic choice, the amount of detail revealed, and the degree of explicitness as to logical relationships, background information, and the interpretation of indirect speech acts. While in Hyland’s five-item taxonomy all categories are multifunctional and acknowledge the addressee’s presence, personal asides are primarily oriented towards disclosure, which may be indirectly fulfilled also by questions and directives: as discourse organisers, questions act as implicit cognitive directives informing addressees of the successive stages in the argument (see Sala’s chapter), and directives themselves summon the addressee’s presence to give him/her access to sites of disclosure (paratext, figures and tables, etc.). Interestingly, shared knowledge appeals are deferential to experts because they do not give them new information but merely indicate a starting point and/or establish common ground, whereas for non-experts they disclose valuable information that they should acquire to approach the specialised community and aspire to membership. We may suppose that proximal and high-expertise environments favour disclosure and that distal low-expertise ones discourage it, but that is not always the case. Just like proximity and positioning “work in tandem but not always in concord” (Hyland 2012, 123), deference, disclosure and distance similarly go hand in hand. Table 1 summarises a combinatory of possible communicative situations with some genres from this volume. Table 1.  Interplay of deference, disclosure and distance in some professional genres Disclosure

Vertical distance

Horizontal distance

Deference

Example

High

Low

Variable-low

Medium-high

Low

High Variable High

Variable-high High High

High Low High

Tourism website Video article Dr./patient clinical interview Patents Earnings calls



Chapter 1.  Networking engagement in professional practices 21

Time will tell whether the migration of certain genres to other modes will eventually change their present engagement features. Big challenges in this respect may be posed in a near future by online clinical interactions between healthcare personnel and patients, or by applications for patents in the Web, perhaps with the inventor’s explanations videotaped, as in video research articles, and displaying diagrams and legal claims. Two other genres that may undergo substantial changes are news reporting (with the incorporation of debate forums, chats, or hyperlinks leading to additional information and TV archives) and political party websites. 4. Closing reflections This introductory chapter has contextualised research on metadiscursive engagement and paved the way for the specialised studies following, which recount the engagement practices of specific professional communities. After detailing the theoretical frameworks, methodologies and genres covered in this book, it has elaborated on the interpersonal and discursive assumptions and challenges associated with engagement. It has also attempted to widen up the definition of the concept as a device of proximisation or detachment/distance, aimed at (and reflecting) stancetaking and consisting in acts of deference and disclosure. Engagement has been depicted as an open notion (Hyland 2008b, 40–41) that allows for the expansion of its current taxonomies. Potentially new categories deserving exploration are the use of tenses, the placement of image and sound, narrative focalisation and reporting (i.e. direct, indirect or summarised speech), deixis, tropes, repetition, humour, rhetorical organisation, titles and headings, implicatures and presuppositions, punctuation (especially interjections, exclamations and scare quotes), and emojis. Fertile research avenues may be inspired by new variables and features produced by changes in the professional domain, the community genres, the media, and the interests, roles and bonds of individuals with other members of the community and outsiders. Through (dis)engagement language users position themselves and their interlocutors in the world of discourse and the context of interaction, congregate and segregate social groups, and at the same time save face as senders and addressees. So then, in addition to informing about the engagement deployments in a collection of under-researched professional genres from a number of communities of practice, the following chapters disclose the engagement constructs held by members of the community of applied linguists and their strategic realisations in written discourse, as well as their plural stances towards the readers of this book.

22

Carmen Sancho Guinda

References Ädel, Annelie. 2006. Metadiscourse in L1 and L2 English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.24 Ädel, Annelie. 2010. “Just to Give You Kind of a Map of Where We Are Going: A Taxonomy of Metadiscourse in Spoken and Written Academic English”. Nordic Journal of English Studies 9 (2): 69–97. Ädel, Annelie, and Anna Mauranen. 2010. “Metadiscourse: Diverse and Divided Perspective.” Nordic Journal of English Studies 9 (2): 1–40. Artemeva, Natasha, and Aviva Freedman, eds. 2006. Rhetorical Genre Studies and Beyond. ­Winnipeg, MB, Canada: Inkshed Publications. Aull, Laura L., Dineth Bandarage, and Meredith R. Miller 2017. “Generality in Student and Expert Epistemic Stance: A Corpus Analysis of First-Year, Upper Level, and Published Academic Writing.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 26: 29–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2017.01.005 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson, and Michael Holquist. Ed. by Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bamford, Julia, and Marina Bondi, eds. 2006. Managing Interaction in Professional Discourse: Intercultural and Interdiscoursal Perspectives. Rome: Officina Edizioni. Bhatia, Vijay K. 1993. Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings. London: Longman. Bhatia, Vijay K. 1994. “Generic Integrity in Professional Discourse.” In Text and Talk in Professional Contexts, ed. by Britt-Louise Gunnarsson, Per Linell, and Bengt Nordberg, 61–76. Uppsala, Sweden: ASLA, Skriftserie 6. Bhatia, Vijay K. 1995. “Genre Mixing in Professional Communication: The case of ‘private intentions’ v. ‘socially recognised purposes’.” In Explorations in English for Professional Communication, ed. by Paul Bruthiaux, Tim Boswood, and Bertha Du-Babcock, 1–19. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong. Bhatia, Vijay K. 1997. “Genre-mixing in Academic Introductions.” English for Specific Purposes 16 (3): 181–196.  https://doi.org/10.1016/S0889-4906(96)00039-7 Bhatia, Vijay K. 2004. Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-Based View. London: Continuum. Biber, Douglas, and Bethany Gray. 2016. Grammatical Complexity in Academic English: Linguistic Change in Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511920776 Breeze, Ruth. 2012. Rethinking Academic Writinf Pedagogy for the European University. ­Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Cap, Piotr. 2013. Proximization: The Pragmatics of Symbolic Distance. Amsterdam: John ­Benjamins.  https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.232 Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2014. “Political Style.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, ed. by Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley, 536–557. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139237031.040 Cockcroft, Robert, Susan Cockcroft, Craig Hamilton, and Laura Hidalgo Downing. 2014 [1995]. Persuading People: An Introduction to Rhetoric. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Edmonds, Ernest, Lizzie Miller, and Matthew Connell. 2006. “On Creative Engagement.” Visual Communication 5 (3): 307–322.  https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357206068461



Chapter 1.  Networking engagement in professional practices 23

Engberg, Jan. 2012. “Specialized Communication and Culture, Practice, Competence, and Knowledge: Implications and Derived Insights.” In Applied Linguistics Today: Research and Perspectives. Angewandte Linguistik heute: Forschung und Perspektiven, ed. by Leonard Pon, Vladimir Karabalic, and Sanja Cimer, 109–130. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang. Fairclough, Norman. 1993. “Critical Discourse Analysis and the Marketization of Public Discourse: The Universities. Discourse and Society 4 (2): 133–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926593004002002 Gambetti, Rossella, and Guendalina Graffigna. 2010. “The Concept of Engagement: A Systematic Analysis of the Ongoing Marketing Debate.” International Journal of Market Research 52 (6): 801–826.  https://doi.org/10.2501/S147078531020166 Gotti, Maurizio. 2008. Investigating Specialized Discourse. Bern: Peter Lang. Green, Andrew. 2007. “Are Viewers ‘engaged’ with advertising? Does It Matter?” WARC Media FAQs, March 2007. https://www.warc.com/Search/advertising%20measurement/­advertising%20 measurement.warc?q=advertising+measurement&Area=Articles&Sort=(Default)&Page=50 Last accessed June 2015. Gunnarsson, Britt-Louise. 2009. Professional Discourse. London: Continuum. Harré, Rom, and van Langenhove, Luk. 1999. Positioning Theory: Moral Contexts of Intentional Action. Oxford: Blackwell. Hairston, Maxine, and Michael Keene. 2003 [1981]. Successful Writing. 5th edn. New York/ London: W. W. Norton. Heath, Robert. 2007. “How Do We Predict Advertising Attention and Engagement?” University of Bath School of Management Working Paper Series. Paper 09. Heylighen, Francis, and Jean-Marc Dewaele. 1999. Formality of Language: Definition, Measurement and Behavioral Determinants. Internal Report. Center “Leo Apostel”, Free University of Brussels. http://www.bath.ac.uk/management/research/pdf/2007-09.pdf Hinds, John. 1987. “Reader versus Writer Responsibility: A New Typology.” In Writing across Languages: Analysis of L2 Text, ed. by Ulla Connor and Robert B. Kaplan, 141–152. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Hyland, Ken. 2001. “Bringing in the Reader: Addressee Features in Academic Articles.” Written Communication 18: 549–574.  https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088301018004005 Hyland, Ken. 2003. Second Language Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511667251 Hyland, Ken. 2004a [2000]. Disciplinary Discourse: Social Interactions in Academic Writing. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Hyland, Ken. 2004b. “Disciplinary Interactions: Metadiscourse in L2 Postgraduate Writing.” Journal of Second Language Writing 13: 133–151.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2004.02.001 Hyland, Ken. 2005a. Metadiscourse: Exploring Interaction in Writing. London: Continuum. Hyland, Ken. 2005b. “Stance and Engagement: A Model of Interaction in Academic Discourse.” Discourse Studies 7: 173–192.  https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445605050365 Hyland, Ken. 2008a. “Different Strokes for Different Folks: Disciplinary Variation in Academic Writing.” In Language and Discipline perspectives on Academic Discourse, ed. by Kjersti Fløttum, 89–108. Newcsatle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Hyland, Ken. 2008b. “Constraint versus Creativity: Identity and Disciplinarity in Academic Writing.” In Commonality and Individuality in Academic Discourse, ed. by Maurizio Gotti, 25–52. Bern: Peter Lang. Hyland, Ken. 2009a. Academic Discourse: English in a Global Context. London: Continuum.

24

Carmen Sancho Guinda

Hyland, Ken. 2009b. “Corpus Informed Discourse Analysis: The Case of Academic Engagement.” In Academic Writing. At the Interface of Corpus and Discourse, ed. by Maggie Charles, Diane Pecorari, and Susan Hunston, 110–128. London: Continuum. Hyland, Ken. 2010. “Constructing Proximity: Relating to Readers in Popular and Professional Science.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 9: 116–127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2010.02.003 Hyland, Ken. 2011a. “Projecting an Academic Identity in Some reflective Genres.” Ibérica 21 (Spring): 9–30. Hyland, Ken. 2011b. “Disciplines and Discourses: Social Interactions in the Construction of Knowledge. In Writing in the Knowledge Society, ed. by Doreen Starke-Meyerring, Anthony Paré, Natasha Artemeva, Miriam Horne, and Larissa Yousoubova, 193–214. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press Hyland, Ken. 2012. “Undergraduate Understandings: Stance and Voice in Final Year Reports.” In Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres, ed. by Ken Hyland and Carmen Sancho Guinda, 134–150. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137030825_9 Hyland, Ken. 2014. “Dialogue, Community and Persuasion in Research Writing.” In Dialogicity in Written Specialised Genres, ed. by Luz Gil-Salom and Carmen Soler-Monreal, 1–20. ­Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  https://doi.org/10.1075/ds.23.02hyl Hyland, Ken. 2017. “Metadiscourse: What Is It and Where Is It Going?”. Journal of Pragmatics 113: 16–29.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2017.03.007 Hyland, Ken. 2018. The Essential Hyland. Studies in Applied Linguistics. London: Bloomsbury. Hyland, Ken, and Polly Tse. 2004. “Metadiscourse in Academic Writing: A Reappraisal.” Applied Linguistics 25 (2): 156–177.  https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/25.2.156 Hyland, Ken, and Feng (Kevin) Jiang. 2016. “’We Must Conclude that’…: A Diachronic Study of Academic Engagement.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 24: 29–42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2016.09.003 Hyland, Ken, and Feng (Kevin) Jiang. 2017. “Is Academic Writing Becoming More Informal?” English for Specific Purposes 40–51.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2016.09.001 Jaffe, Alexandra. 2009. Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195331646.001.0001 Jones, Rodney. 2014. “Advertising Culture.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, ed. by Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley, 520–535. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139237031.039 Kastberg, Peter. 2007. “Knowledge Communication: “The Emergence of a Third Order Discipline.” In Kommunikation in Bewegung: Multimedialer und Multilingualer Wissenstransfer in der Experten-Laien-Kommunikation, ed. by Claudia Villiger, and Heidrun GerzymischArbogast, 7–24. Berlin: Peter Lang. Knorr-Cetina, Karin D. 1981. The Manufacture of Knowledge. An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2006 [1996]. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. 2nd ed. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Lane, Janet, and Lange, Ellen 1999. Writing Clearly. An Editing Guide. 2nd edn. Boston: Heinle and Heinle. Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511815355 Leech, Geoffrey. 2014. The Pragmatics of Politeness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195341386.001.0001



Chapter 1.  Networking engagement in professional practices 25

Lorenzoni, Irene, Sophie Nicholson-Cole, and Lorraine Whitmarsh. 2007. “Barriers Perceived to Engaging with Climate Change among the UK Public and Their Policy Implications.” Global Environmental Change 17.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2007.01.004 Machin, David. 2007. Introduction to Multimodal Analysis. London: Hodder Arnold. Martin, James R., and Peter R. R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.  https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230511910 Mauranen, Anna. 1993. Cultural Differences in Academic Rhetoric. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Mauranen, Anna. 2010. “Discourse Reflexivity – A Discourse Universal? The Case of ELF” Nordic Journal of English Studies 9 (2): 13–40. Molino, Alessandra. 2010. “Personal and Impersonal Authorial References: A Contrastive Study of English and Italian in Linguistics Research Articles.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 9: 86–101.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2010.02.007 Norris, Sigrid. 2004. Analyzing Multimodal Interaction. A Methodological Framework. New York: Routledge.  https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203379493 O’Toole, Michael. 1994. The Language of Displayed Art. London, UK: Continuum. Pérez-Llantada, Carmen. 2010. “The Discourse Functions of Metadiscourse in Published Academic Writing: Issues of Culture and Language.” Nordic Journal of English Studies 9 (2): 41–68. Pérez-Llantada, Carmen. 2012. Scientific Discourse and the Rhetoric of Globalization: The Impact of Culture and Language. London: Bloomsbury. Pinker, Steven. 2014. The Sense of Style. London: Penguin. Ross-Larson, Bruce. 1999. Stunning Sentences. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Sales, Hazel E. 2006. Professional Communication in Engineering. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.  https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230625143 Sancho Guinda, Carmen. 2012a. “Flexibility Features in Patent Writing.” Ibérica 24: 185–210. Sancho Guinda, Carmen. 2012b. “Proximal Positioning in Students’ Graph Commentaries.” In Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres, ed. by Ken Hyland and Carmen Sancho Guinda, 166–183. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137030825_11 Sancho Guinda, Carmen. 2014. “Engagement in NTSB Decisions on Aviation Case Appeals.” In Interpersonality in Legal Genres, ed. by Ruth Breeze, Maurizio Gotti, and Carmen Sancho Guinda, 181–211. Bern: Peter Lang.  https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-0351-0725-8 Sancho Guinda, Carmen. 2015. “Genres on the Move: Currency and Erosion of the Genre Moves Construct.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 19: 73–87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2015.07.001 Sancho Guinda, Carmen. 2016. “Semiotic Shortcuts: The Graphical Abstract Strategies of Engineering Students.” Hermes 55: 61–90. https://tidsskrift.dk/her/article/view/24289/21288 Sancho Guinda, Carmen. 2017. “Transmitting Authority in Risk Communication: An Exploration of US Air-Accident Dockets Online.” In Power, Persuasion and Manipulation in Specialised Genres, ed. by María Ángeles Orts, Ruth Breeze, and Maurizio Gotti, 211–336. Bern: Peter Lang. Sancho Guinda, Carmen, and Ken Hyland. 2012. “Introduction: A Context-Sensitive Approach to Stance and Voice.” In Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres, ed. by Ken ­Hyland and Carmen Sancho Guinda, 1–11. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave ­Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137030825 Simpson, Paul. 1993. Language, Ideology and Point of View. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203312612

26

Carmen Sancho Guinda

Strunk, William, Jr., and E. B. White. 1972 [1959]. The Elements of Style. 4th edn. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. Swales, John M. 2004. Research Genres: Explorations and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139524827 Swales, John M., and Christine B. Feak 1994. Academic Writing for Graduate Students. A Course for Non-native Speakers of English. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Sword, Helen. 2012. Stylish Academic Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tichy, Henrietta J. (With Silvia Fourdrinier). 1988. Effective Writing for Engineers, Managers, Scientists. 2nd edn. New York: Wiley. Thompson, Geoff. 2014. “Affect and Emotion, Target-Value Mismatches and Russian Dolls.” In Evaluation in Context, ed. by Geoff Thompson and Laura Alba-Juez, 47–66. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.242.03tho Trimble, John R. 2000 [1975]. Writing with Style. Conversations on the Art of Writing. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Turk, Christopher, and John Kirkman. 1996 [1982]. Effective Writing. Improving Scientific, Technical and Business Communication. London: E & FN Spon. Vassileva, Irena. 2001. “Commitment and Detachment in English and Bulgarian Academic Writing.” English for Specific Purposes 20 (1): 83–102. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0889-4906(99)00029-0 Wallwork, Adrian. 2014a. Presentations, Demos, and Training Sessions. New York/Heidelberg/ Dordrecht/London: Springer.  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0644-4 Wallwork, Adrian. 2014b. User Guides, Manuals and Technical Writing. New York/Heidelberg/ Dordrecht/London: Springer.  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0641-3 Wallwork, Adrian. 2016. English for Writing Research Papers. 2nd edn. New York/Heidelberg/ Dordrecht/London: Springer.  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26094-5 Wang, Alex. 2006. “Advertising Engagement: A Driver of Message Involvement in on Message Effects.” Journal of Advertising Research 46 (4): 355–368. https://doi.org/10.2501/S0021849906060429 Wenger, Etienne. 1998. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511803932 Yus, Francisco. 2014. “Interactions with Readers through Online Specialised Genres. Specificity or Adaptability?” In Dialogicity in Written Specialised Genres, ed. by Luz Gil Salom and Carmen Soler-Monreal, 189–208. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/ds.23.09yus Zinsser, William. 2006 [1976]. On Writing Well. New York: Collins. Zwickle, Adam, and Robyn S. Wilson. 2014. “Construing Risk Implications for Risk Communication.” In Effective Risk Communication, ed. by Joseph Árvai and Louie Rivers, III, 190–203. New York/London: Routledge-Earthscan.

Section I

Monomodal genres

Chapter 2

Positioning and proximity of reader engagement Authorial identity in professional and apprentice academic genres Feng (Kevin) Jiang and Xiaohao Ma

School of Foreign Language Education, Jilin University, China / Centre for Applied English Studies, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

In this chapter we look at engagement by exploring how writers involve readers while expressing authorial identity in professional and apprentice genres. Based on a modified model of engagement features (Hyland 2005c; Hyland and Jiang 2016), this paper examines a 1.2 million-word corpus of 30 published research articles and 20 PhD confirmation reports in educational studies. We further relate the engagement features to the rhetorical strategies of proximity and positioning in the construction of authorial identity (Hyland 2012). Results show that journal articles include far more engagement devices than doctoral confirmation reports, while PhD writers express a higher degree of proximity than professional experts. Thus different authorial identities impact the patterns and strategies of reader engagement in academic persuasion. Keywords: professional academic genres, reader engagement, PhD confirmation reports, rhetorical interaction, arguments

1. Introduction The traditional assumption of academic writing as an individual act simply to report what research has been done and what results have been obtained has been largely superseded by a more constructivist view, which argues it is a joint endeavour between writers and readers, co-constructed through writers’ active understanding of rhetorical situations and the likely responses of readers (Hyland 2001; 2005c; Koutsantoni 2004; Lafuente-Millán 2014; Lancaster 2014). Successful academic texts are built not simply on writers’ plausible representation of external reality, but perhaps more importantly on their ability to project readers into texts, negotiate knowledge and claim solidarity with them (Hyland and Sancho Guinda https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.301.02jia © 2019 John Benjamins Publishing Company

30

Feng (Kevin) Jiang and Xiaohao Ma

2012; Ivanič 1998; McGrath and Kuteeva 2012). The rhetorical ability to achieve this social interaction is now acknowledged to be both a key feature of research writing and an important aspect of advanced academic literacy (Bitchener and Basturkmen 2006; Hyland 2005b; Hyland and Jiang 2016; Swales and Feak 2012). Prior studies on writer-reader interaction, however, have been principally concerned with writer-oriented features of disciplinary identities, such as stance (Lancaster 2016), theme selection (Ryshina-Pankova 2011) or metadiscourse (Hyland 2004b; Lee and Deakin 2016), or the ways that writers construct a credible authorial voice (Ivanič and Camps 2001). Although all these aspects suggest something of writers’ presence and identity in discourse, not much is known about the ‘language use that reflects the ability to imagine a potential readership and appeal to it through specific linguistic means’ (Ryshina-Pankova 2011, 244). In this study, we elaborate the flipside of the interactional coin by exploring how writers engage readers and express authorial identity in professional and apprentice genres. To do this, drawing on a modified Hyland’s model of engagement features (Hyland 2005c; Hyland and Jiang 2016), this study examines a 1.2 million-word corpus of published research articles and research reports for doctoral candidature confirmation in educational studies. We further relate the engagement features to the rhetorical strategies of proximity and positioning in the construction of disciplinary identities (Hyland 2012). We begin by describing the two professional and apprentice academic genres and then discuss engagement and disciplinary identities in academic writing. 2. Professional and apprentice academic genres As the pre-eminent professional academic genre, research articles play a key role as a “principal site of disciplinary knowledge-making” and “restructuring the processes of thought and research it describes to establish a discourse for scientific fact creation” (Hyland 2015, 113–114). Scientific fact is created in a disciplinary dialogue between the author and members of the discourse community to which it is directed and this textual interaction needs to be “cunningly engineered by rhetorical machining” to achieve a consensus (Swales 1990, 112). Thus authors are inspired to step into texts and involve disciplinary peers as discourse participants in the joint construction of academic prose. Because of the gatekeeping function research articles serve, the authors need to manifest deference to and solidarity with their readers and disciplinary community, but to a large extent they interact on an equal footing. Additionally, as the prestigious currency of knowledge manufacturing in the disciplines, research articles reveal something of the disciplinary epistemologies and social practices



Chapter 2.  Positioning and proximity of reader engagement 31

in constructing knowledge as well as characteristics of the discursive convention (Hyland and Sancho Guinda 2012; McGrath and Kuteeva 2012; Swales 1990). The report for PhD candidature confirmation (or confirmation report), on the other hand, is an apprentice academic genre required for doctoral students in universities that follow the British system of doctoral education (e.g., in the UK, Hong Kong). In structure, a confirmation report lies between a research proposal and a dissertation, typically between 8000 and 30,000 words long composed by chapters of introduction, literature review, research methodology, findings on a pilot study, discussion and a schedule for followed work (Paltridge and Starfield 2007). As candidacy assessment, it is typically evaluated by a panel of examiners composed by experienced faculty members of a specific department. Therefore, to succeed, PhD students must convince examiners of their subject knowledge, academic credentials and significance and feasibility of their research projects in a stimulating and readable manner (Paltridge and Starfield 2007; Thompson 1999). In addition, due to the disparity in writer-reader relationships, namely, PhD neophytes writing to faculty experts, students need pragmatic consideration of how to envisage and interact with the readers. This consideration seems even more impactful when students are aware of who their readers/examiners are. Different from research articles which are written for a more general readership in the academy, readers of a confirmation report are normally those who students may personally know, e.g., professors whose courses students may have attended or whom they have encountered in the department. Thus PhD students may quite acutely perceive the differences in rank and expertise from the professorial readers when composing the confirmation reports. In brief, in contrast to the ostensibly egalitarian writer-reader relationships in research papers, candidature confirmation reports carry heavy elements of assessment and involve PhD students recognising readers’ greater status and disciplinary knowledge. As academic apprentices, therefore, students need to consider how much they are expected to overtly establish the presence of their readers in the texts, direct them to decode the message, and persuade them in an involving manner, as well as decide how much to summon from the knowledge shared by both parties and how strong the tone should be set in making arguments. All of these institutional constraints and pragmatic considerations relate to acceptable ways of engaging and interacting with readers.

32

Feng (Kevin) Jiang and Xiaohao Ma

3. Engagement and disciplinary identities in academic writing Academic writing is increasingly acknowledged as a socially-mediated persuasive endeavour of writers to anticipate readers’ possible reactions and engage them in appropriate ways (Hyland 2005c; Lafuente-Millán 2014; Lee and Deakin 2016). This dialogic nature of persuasion in academic argument suggests that writers not only present themselves as competent insiders, projecting an authorial stance or community recognised personality, but perhaps more importantly pull readers along in the joint construction of disciplinary discourse in acceptable ways. Thus effective communication incorporates the active and constitutive role of readers and relies much on ‘the writer’s projection of the perceptions, interests and needs of a potential audience’ (Hyland 2001, 550). Typically, writers construct an audience by drawing on their understandings of a rhetorical context and genre conventions, predicting readers’ reaction to a textual conversation among members of a disciplinary community. This means that writers must employ recognised ways to express arguments and initiate social engagement, which readers find familiar, appealing and persuasive. A writer’s dialogic awareness of textual interaction is most manifested possibly when he or she explicitly addresses readers, asking questions, making suggestions and guiding them directly. Hyland (2001; 2005c) has shown that there are five main ways that academic authors overtly intrude into their texts to connect with readers directly. At certain points writers acknowledge an active audience using the following: – Reader mentions bring readers into a discourse, normally through second person pronouns, particularly inclusive we which identifies the reader as someone who shares similar ways of seeing to the writer.

(1) From the example, we can see that during the sharing process, students not only explain the solutions but also highlight the key point of the problem solving process.  (PCR)1

– Questions invite direct collusion because they address the reader as someone with interest in the issue the question raises and the good sense to follow the writer’s response to it.

(2) Across these theoretical shifts remains a set of underlying dilemmas: Is learning simply internal to the individual or shaped by participation in practices? (RA)

1. Annotating examples, we use PCR as short for PhD Confirmation Report, while substituting RA for Research Articles.



Chapter 2.  Positioning and proximity of reader engagement 33

– Appeals to shared knowledge are explicit signals asking readers to recognise something as familiar, apparent or accepted. (3) Obviously, the heavy teaching load of career masters and teachers is one of the major causes of the problem.  (PCR)

– Directives are instructions to the reader, mainly expressed through imperatives (such as consider, note), obligation modals (such as need to, should), and predicative adjectives (such as it is important to understand…), which direct readers (a) to another part of the text or to another text, (b) to carry out some action in the real world, or (c) to interpret an argument in certain ways.

(4) Several aspects need to be considered when designing teacher learning environment.  (RA)

– Personal asides briefly interrupt the argument to offer a note on what has been said, adding more to the writer-reader relationship than to propositional development.

(5) Preliminary data analysis was conducted with both interview data from both key and general informants and text data (where available) from one focal case.  (PCR)

As we can see in the engagement features and the quoted examples from our corpora, such appeals serve the need to acknowledge the need to adequately meet readers’ expectations of inclusion and disciplinary solidarity while responding to possible objections and alternative interpretations and thus managing their impression of the writer. While inclusion of readers might sometimes be based on tacit assumptions and expressed implicitly (Lancaster 2014), these features help to concretise the ways that writers intervene to ‘engage actively or position readers, focusing their attention, recognizing their uncertainties, including them as discourse participants and guiding them to interpretations’ (Hyland 2001, 552). Furthermore, central to this social engagement is the shaping of authorial identity in academic argument through both the proximity writers display to disciplinary readers and the positioning they take towards the audience and material (Hyland 2012). For one thing, writers solicit alliance and solidarity with readers. This collective proximity can be achieved through reader mention and personal asides as in Examples (1) and (5) in which by calling we and offering processing support the writers shorten the distance with readers. For another, writers manage and instruct readers to think about what is said in a certain way. We consider questions, knowledge appeals and directives as effective means to perform this interactional positioning. As seen in Examples (2) to (4), by giving question and signal, the writers direct readers to query with a shared interest or understand issues from an agreed perspective.

34

Feng (Kevin) Jiang and Xiaohao Ma

In this study, we explore how writers engage readers and express authorial identity in professional and apprentice genres, comparing the rhetorical use of the engagement features in research articles and PhD confirmation reports. In what follows we briefly outline the model and our methods and then go on to discuss our findings. 4. Data and analysis The study is based on a corpus of 10 confirmation reports collected from the Faculty of Education at a university in Hong Kong (all are data-supported empirical reports and each contains around 30,000 words) contrasted with a comparable one of 30 educational journal articles (each is around 8000 words long). Both bodies of texts consist of full scientific narrative sections of introduction, literature review, methods, results and conclusion. The journals were familiar to students and faculty alike, being regular items in reading lists from PhD supervisors. Particularly in the institutional context of the confirmation reports we collected, it is a common practice of supervisors to advise PhD students to adapt confirmation reports for journal article submission and learn from the comments given by journal referees. Thus the comparison of professional and apprentice academic genres could pedagogically inform students and supervisors of the different language use and rhetorical contexts of the two genres. The two corpora were part-of-speech tagged and then searched for engagement features using AntConc (Anthony 2014). When analysing engagement features in both corpora, we drew on the modified model of academic engagement (Hyland 2005c; Hyland and Jiang 2016) and distinguished three knowledge references, recognising: – Logical reasoning – concerned with the coherence of the argument, such as obviously, and of course. (6) Of course taking career education as a mean to life planning, the opportunities are not limited to educational and occupational ones but also for leisure, community and family.  (PCR)

– Routine conditions – concerned with usual circumstances or behaviour of real world objects, such as normally and regularly.

(7) We took the advantage that levelling was relevantly more flexible, and normally it would take less time than traversing when measuring a point. (RA)

– Familiarity with tradition – concerned with usual community practices and beliefs, such as common and traditionally.

Chapter 2.  Positioning and proximity of reader engagement 35





(8) Using reading input as source texts for writing has been a common practice in academic settings and has often been emphasized as critical to academic success.  (RA)

Totally we examined over 100 items, and manually examined and counted each concordance to establish that the feature was addressing readers directly. The two authors worked independently to code a 10% sample, gradually refining our agreement through successive passes to achieve an inter-rater reliability of 96%. To complement the text analysis and survey students’ understandings of the patterns of engagement strategy, discourse-based interviews were conducted with five student contributors of the confirmation reports who agreed to participate. Referred to under the pseudonyms of Jun, Ying, Han, Wei, Chang, they were invited to discuss their experience of academic writing, their perspectives of the purpose, audience, and general features of PhD confirmation reports, and their views of specific engagement features used in the reports. 5. Patterns of engagement: An overview in professional and apprentice genres Overall, we identified 1452 engagement features, 957 items in the research articles on an average of 38.6 cases per 10,000 words and 495 engagement features in the PhD confirmation reports, averaging 23.1 cases per 10,000 words (Table 1). The frequency counts reveal the extent of dialogic interactions in the two corpora, showing that both PhDs and professional writers recognise the need to bring readers in, galvanise support and build solidarity in discourse. Despite their awareness that academic writing is not altogether impersonal, the engagement features used by PhD students are significantly less than those in research articles (log Likelihood = 86.21, p