Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending a plenary by linguist Ken Hyland. It was well worth the negotiation of daddy away-time. One of the more fascinating and idiosyncratic projects he presented was corpus analyses of the oeuvres of two well known academics in linguistics, John Swales and Debbie Cameron. Hyland's study is published in Written Communication under the title Community and Individuality: Performing Identity in Applied Linguistics. Swales and Cameron are both known for writing accessable, compelling books. Or so I am told since I have not read Cameron's stuff myself, while Swales I know fairly well.
It is apparent from Hyland's study they have very contrasting writer personas to go with their real-life personas. Hyland puts a finger on how they construct their writer identities in words by looking at the frequency of key words and 'bundles' of words (phrases) in their texts. Hyland is able to demonstrate how Swales creates a cautious, self-effacing, writer identity which draws his readers into a common intellectual project, while Cameron projects a much more assertive, uncompomising style of public intellectual who is willing to ruffle the feathers of her readers. I lifted a few examples from Hyland's presentation. Debbie Cameron uses the verb to be, e.g., What has not changed is my conviction that.., and more particularly the pattern it is + adjective + to infinitive, e.g., It is important to distinguish betweem ideological representations of gender...The effect of this device is to draw a line in the sand: reader cross over at your own peril. In contract, Swales uses the first person (I and my being in his top 10 key words) frequently, and often in conjuction with verbs like think, believe, hope, suspect, tried, and guess, which all to a greater or lesser extent leave some space for disagreement.
What struck me while listening to Hyland's presentation is how neither Swales nor Cameron fit any conventional molds (yes, I am hiding behind those words) of good academic writing. How often I complain to my students about sentences with it and to be as the key ingrediants. Still, I suppose you have to earn the right to be quirky as a writer, and it should be remembered this is a corpus of their books, not their articles which are presumably more in line with the style constraints of journals. An additional take-away for me from this is that you can get at identity through analysis of a corpus! It is sort of a relief that frequency tables give you more to say than something is...well frequent. Moreover, in this day and age just about anyone could create a corpus of a favourite writer (or yourself if you are the type who likes to stare in a mirror) and quickly grip hold of the words and bundles out of which emerges a distinctive (or bland) identity.
No comments:
Post a Comment