Reading :: Academic and professional discourse genres in Spanish

 Academic and Professional Discourse Genres in Spanish

Edited by Giovanni Parodi

Parodi’s work was recently recommended to me by the editors of a collection for which I am coauthoring a chapter. I had been dimly aware of his work, but reading this 2010 book got me up to speed in a hurry. Although it’s technically a collection, each chapter was authored by Parodi either solo or with coauthors. Analyzing the PUCV-2006 corpus, a 60-million-word Spanish-language corpus, the authors perform a sociocognitive genre analysis with a multi-dimensional perspective: social, linguistic, and cognitive.

As a work of applied linguistics, this book is not in the genre tradition in which I operate. I’m in the genre-as-social-action tradition of Miller, Bazerman, Russell, and others, tracing back to Bakhtin and Voloshinov. In this tradition, we tend to see genre in sociological or sociocultural terms, as regularized actions in complex social systems, and thus we tend to examine genre use in situ through observations, or how people interpret genres via interviews. Parodi is in the sociocognitivist tradition, with Swales, Hyland, and Bhatia, examining genres as “communicative instruments” that ultimately are constructed in individuals’ minds (p.21) — “genre knowledge, which is both socially and individually constructed, is stored in the form of cognitive representations” (p.22). This tradition emphasizes corpus linguistics. 

From Parodi’s view, Bakhtin’s concept of genre is “exclusively contextualist” and yields “theoretical and methodological reductionism” (p.22). In contrast, he says, his sociocognitive approach takes account of the dialectical interrelationships among linguistic structures, cognitive representations, and psycholinguistic processing (p.24). 

With this background in mind, Parodi defines genre as “a constellation of potential discourse conventions, sustained by previous knowledge of the speakers/writers and listeners/readers (stored in the memory of each subject), based on contextual, social, linguistic, and cognitive possibilities and/or constraints. This sociocognitively constructed knowledge is operationally codified using highly dynamic mental representations. … genres are not static entities but are in fact highly dynamic …. These groups of linguistic-textual features may be identified by means of a corpus description” (p.25). He later summarizes: “Most essentially, genres are cognitive constructs” (p.35).

With this background, Parodi considers the corpus. To identify discourse genres, he and his collaborators use criteria and variables such as relation between participants, modalities, communicative macro-purpose, discourse organization mode, and context of circulation (p.42). These criteria and variables yield to genre classifications that are (for the lack of a better word) lumpier than what I would expect, with some exceedingly broad categories (“law,” “lecture,” “report”) next to narrower ones (“medical order,” “bidding specification”) (pp.47-57). Parodi ends up taxonomizing the genres in the corpus.

Overall, the results were really interesting, but they also reaffirmed to me that I am in the genre-as-social-action camp — I really want to see how people use, interpret, and live ecologically with the genres they produce and interpret. Still, Parodi’s approach unlocks other insights. If you’re interested in genre and/or corpus linguistics, certainly take a look.