Karin Aijmer and Diana Lewis (eds), Contrastive Analysis of Discourse-pragmatic Aspects of Linguistic Genres

KARIN AIJMER AND DIANA LEWIS (EDS), CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF DISCOURSE-PRAGMATIC ASPECTS OF LINGUISTIC GENRES Berlin: Springer International Publishing, 2017. ISBN 978-3-319-54556-1 (eBook) Contrastive Analysis of Discourse-pragmatic Aspects of Linguistic Genres, edited by Karin Aijmer and Diana Lewis, is one of the volumes of the Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics. This volume makes language research more interdisciplinary and rigorous by using parallel corpora and/or comparable corpora for the purpose of undertaking contrastive analysis of linguistic features of seven European languages. The analyses help reveal the discourse-pragmatic characteristics of different genres, such as fiction, news, comedy, textbooks and research articles. Based on different types of contrastive analysis, this volume is organized into adetailed introduction and three parts. In the introduction, the editors briefly present new approaches of contrastive analysis, the notion of genre, parallel corpora and comparable corpora, as well as an overview of the research articles. Part Iconsists of four articles which make contrastive analysis by means of parallel corpora. Karin Aijmer highlights the differences in the distribution of obligation markers, modal auxiliaries “must/måste” in particular, in fiction and non-fiction of English and Swedish. With both quantitative and qualitative analysis, Lieven Buysse has identified seven functions of mutual translation of English “so” and Dutch “dus” from the perspective of metafunctions in systemic functional linguistics. Genres involved in this study include fictional and non-fictional literature, journalistic texts, instructive texts, administrative texts, and external communication. Martinková and Janebová investigate the translated English equivalents of the Czech particle “prý” in three registers, i.e. fiction, journalistic texts and spoken language, as well as their distinctive functions in each register. They find that the uses of “prý” are contextdependent. The study by Magdalena Szczyrbak examines the use of modal adverbs of certainty in both the English and Polish versions of Opinions of Advocates General. The modal adverbs are found to be polysemous and can be used to express users’ stances and viewpoints. Apart from parallel corpus, comparable corpus is acommon and indispensable tool in contrastive analysis of linguistic data. The data of the two articles in Part II were extracted from comparable corpora and both focus on two languages. In the first article, Hilden Hasselgård explores the relationship between the placement of adverbial clauses and its syntactic realization, semantic type, information structure and iconic order in English and Norwegian fiction and news. Being concentrated on only one register, namely political speeches, Diana Lewis in the second article analyzes discourse markers, especially the role of additive coherence relation markers in English and French, with acase study of the various functions of “en effet” and its English equivalent “indeed”. It is found that French political speeches tend to employ more discourse markers compared to English ones. Revolving around only one language, Part III covers three articles about English contrastive analysis in one or two particular genres. The study by Catherine Chauvin Zhenzhen Yang 124 LINGUISTICA PRAGENSIA 1/2019 and the one coauthored by Hidalgo-Downing and Hanawi both center on one genre. They respectively address the types of cohesive devices of callbacks in stand-up comedy and the different stance styles between Bush’s and Obama’s addresses to the Arab world by adopting Halliday’s model of stance. Tereza Guziurová compares the occurrence and use of engagement markers in two academic genres (i.e. undergraduate textbooks and research articles), discovering the different uses of inclusive “we” as the most frequent engagement marker in the two genres. Guziurová uses an integrative approach in discussing the role of metadiscourse in genre analysis. Contrastive analysis refers to the study of differences and similarities of the linguistic features of two different languages. In the 1960s and early 1970s, it was widely used in second language acquisition to predict the difficulties that second language learners may come across (Péry-Woodley 1990). Later, linguists find that it also throws light on the nature and functions of texts, helping construct cultural and linguistic specificity. In recent years, an increasing number of scholars have shown afavorable attitude towards the contrastive analysis of languages in real use by comparing frequencies and distributions, as well as structures. This trend, termed as contrastive pragmatics, is concerned with the speech acts and their realizations in different languages and contexts. It is worth mentioning that the data analyzed in most contrastive pragmatic research are generally from spoken discourse, with little attention to written texts since the participation of speakers is quite limited in such context. This book takes into account written communication of various genres and informs readers of the possibility of contrastive studies in this respect. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has served as afeasible theory for genre studies, language for specific purposes (e.g. English for Specific Purposes) in particular. While those studies emphasize the discourse features of specific genres, SFL, as an analytical tool used by most studies in this volume, helps describe genres in terms of functions (Halliday 2004). By showing how SFL inspires and develops genre studies, this book provides speakers/writers with anew perspective in making use of languages according to their functions and genres. Moreover, the corpus-based approach offers ascientifically rigorous methodology and it has become apositive trend in linguistic research. The development of corpus linguistics helps boost contrastive studies and gives contrastive linguists amore solid empirical basis than before (Granger 2003). All in all, the rich materials in this volume will further promote contrastive research involving more diverse languages, distinct genres and types of corpora. It would be better for this volume to extend to more languages and more genres. Languages discussed in the volume are European languages only, which results in alack of contrastive study of languages from distinctive language families. Moreover, the genres discussed in the book are not categorized and more typical genres need to be explored. Since the research articles are all based on either parallel corpora or comparable corpora, the drawbacks (e.g. high standard of translation quality and comparability of texts) may have anegative impact on the preciseness and objectivity of the studies. The gaps, however, do not weaken this volume as ahigh-quality source of reference. ZHENZHEN YANG 125 REFERENCES Granger, S. (2003) The corpus approach: acommon way forward for Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies. In: Corpus-based Approaches to Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies, 17–29. Education. Retrieved from https://sites. uclouvain.be/cecl/archives/Contr_Ling_&_ TranslationRodopi1.pdf Halliday, M.A.K. (2004) An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3rd ed. Revised by Matthiessen, C.M.I.M.London: Hodder Arnold. Péry-Woodley, M. (1990) Contrasting discourses: contrastive analysis and adiscourse approach to writing. Language Teaching 23(3), 143–151. Zhenzhen Yang School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University No. 800, Dongchuan Road. Minhang District, Shanghai, China ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5594-4047 [email protected]