Polishing Papers for
Procrustean Beds?1
Publication:
Palimpsests
or
John McKenny
University of Nottingham, Ningbo
China
Karen Bennett
Centre for Comparative Studies
University of Lisbon
Portugal
Abstract
Portuguese academic discourse of the humanities is notoriously difficult to render into
English, given the prevalence of rhetorical and discourse features that are largely alien
to English academic style. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that some of
those features might find their way into the English texts produced by Portuguese
scholars through a process of pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic transfer. If so, this
would have important practical and ideological implications, not only for the academics
concerned, but also for editors, revisers, teachers of EAP, translators, writers of
academic style manuals and all the other gatekeepers of the globalized culture.
The study involved a corpus of some 113,000 running words of English academic prose
written by established Portuguese academics in the Humanities, which had been
presented to a native speaker of English (professional translator and specialist in
academic discourse) for revision prior to submission for publication. After correction of
superficial grammatical and spelling errors, the texts were made into a corpus, which
was tagged for Part of Speech (CLAWS7) and discourse markers (USAS) using
WMatrix2 (Rayson 2003). The annotated corpus was then interrogated for the presence
of certain discourse features using Wmatrix2 and Wordsmith 5 (Scott 2006), and the
findings compared with those of a control corpus, Controlit, of published articles written
by L1 academics in the same or comparable journals.
The results reveal significant overuse of certain features by Portuguese academics, and a
corresponding underuse of others, suggesting marked differences in the value attributed
to those features by the two cultures.
Keywords: academic discourse, humanities, Portuguese, English, research articles corpus
1
This is a postprint of an article published in English Text Construction, 2.2. 2009. 228-245. Reproduced
with the kind permission of John Benjamins Publishing. The complete article may be accessed at:
http://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/etc.2.2.06mck/details
Introduction
English academic discourse, which emerged in the 17th century as a vehicle for the new
rationalist/scientific paradigm (Halliday & Martin, 1993:2-21, 54-68; Martin, 1998), now
holds hegemonic status on the world stage, and mastery of it is essential for any scholar
wishing to pursue an international career (Tardy 2004). However, it may not be taken for
granted that all cultures construe knowledge in the same way (Canagarajah 2002:1-5). In
Portugal, which did not experience a Scientific Revolution as such, an older humanitiesbased tradition was perpetuated by an education system grounded on Scholastic and
Rhetorical principles. As a result, Portuguese academic discourse in the humanities
contains features that are markedly different from the hegemonic English style - so much
so, in fact, that they may even reflect a whole different underlying epistemology
(Bennett, 2006, 2007a, b). The extent to which these features intrude upon the English
writing produced by Portuguese academics wishing to publish abroad constitutes the
main aim of this paper.
The possibility that there may exist cultural differences in discursive or expository
writing patterns was first raised by Robert B. Kaplan in a seminal paper first published in
1966. In it, he suggested that many of the errors of text organisation and cohesion made
by foreign students in their academic writing may be due to different cultural conventions
and indeed ‘thought patterns’ encoded in their mother tongues.
Logic (in the popular, rather than the logician’s sense of the word), which is
the basis of rhetoric, is evolved out of a culture; it is not universal. Rhetoric,
then, is not universal either, but varies from culture to culture and even from
time to time within a given culture. It is affected by canons of taste within a
given culture at a given time. (Kaplan, 1980:400)
He went on to assert that the typical linear development of the expository English
paragraph may in fact be quite alien to other cultures, and even suggested a series of
diagrammatic representations of how a paragraph might develop according to Semitic,
Oriental, Romance and Russian styles (Idem:403-411).
Although this initial approach was overly simplistic, Kaplan’s work gave rise to a
multitude of similar studies that explored discourse differences from a variety of cultural
perspectives (eg. Smith, 1987; Ventola & Mauranen, 1996; Duszak, 1997), eventually
culminating in the formal constitution of the discipline that is today known as Contrastive
Rhetoric (Connor, 1996). Thus, English academic writing has been compared to
‘teutonic, gallic and nipponic’ styles (Galtung, 1981), German (Clyne, 1987a, 1987b,
1988), Indian languages (Kachru, 1987); Czech (Cmejrková, 1996, 1997), Finnish
(Mauranen,
1993),
Polish
(Duszak,
1994),
Norwegian
(Dahl,
2004)
and
Russian/Ukrainian (Yakhontova, 2002, 2006) to name but a few.
Unfortunately, Portuguese academic discourse has been somewhat neglected
amidst this plethora of contrastive rhetorical studies. There has been some investigation
into other Romance languages, particular Spanish, which has a certain relevance: for
example, Kaplan (1980:408), in his initial article, observed that 'there is much greater
freedom to digress or to introduce extraneous material in French, or in Spanish, than
English’, while Grabe & Kaplan (1996:194), summarizing the work of several different
researchers, report that Spanish writers prefer a more ‘elaborated’ style of writing, use
longer sentences and have a penchant for subordination. More recently, Martín Martín
(2003) has investigated rhetorical variation between social science abstracts in Spanish
and English; Moreno (1997) has looked at the use of causal metatext (or text about text)
in the same two languages, and Mur Dueñas (2007b) has examined pronoun use and selfmention. Salager-Meyer (2003) also explores the differences between Spanish, English
and French in her work on medical discourse, while, within pragmatics, Cuenca (2003)
examines reformulation markers in English, Spanish and Catalan. As regards Portuguese
in particular, McKenny (2005) examines epistemic stance and dogmatism in the
argumentative writing of Portuguese advanced learners using Porticle, the Portuguese
subcorpus of ICLE, the International Corpus of Learner English, and, in a later work
(2007) discusses the implications of differing rhetorical conventions and traditions for the
teaching of EAP writing.
Bennett’s work on Portuguese academic writing (2006, 2007a, b) differs from the
Contrastive Rhetoric studies described above in that it is not oriented towards the
teaching (EAP) profession. Instead, it took place within the sphere of Translation Studies
(TS) and involved the systematic analysis of a corpus of Portuguese academic texts that
had been submitted for translation. The aim was to determine some of the problems
raised by differences between source text features and target culture expectations,
extending beyond the merely technical to take in the ethical and ideological implications
of 'domestication' (i.e. the systematic refashioning of the source text to bring it into line
with target culture norms) (Venuti, 1995). The present paper to some extent represents a
continuation of that project, in that it deals with a parallel corpus of texts also written by
Portuguese academics, though this time in English, as they were submitted for revision
rather than translation. Revision is thus considered here as paratranslational activity, and
the language reviser is perceived as one of the many 'literacy brokers' that typically
intervene in a text in order to prepare it for publication in the English-speaking world
(Lillis & Curry, 2006).
Much Portuguese academic writing in the humanities displays characteristics that
are diametrically opposed to those valued by English Academic Discourse writing
manuals (Bennett, 2009). It is characterised by a taste for ‘copiousness’ (manifested by a
general ‘wordiness’ and redundancy); a preference for a high-flown erudite register over
the demotic (evident in both syntactical structure and lexical choices), and a tendency
towards abstraction and figurative language. Cohesion is frequently achieved through
elaborate synonyms and cataphora, rather than by ellipsis or anaphoric pronouns as might
be preferred in English (Halliday & Hasan, 1976; Mateus et al. 1989: 146); and there are
also important differences as regards textual organization: a propensity for indirectness
means that the main idea is often embedded, adorned or deferred at all ranks. Some of
these features are illustrated in the extract of Portuguese academic prose presented
below2:
2
Clarity of exposition and logical reasoning are clearly not objectives here, for the text revels in ambiguity,
deliberately setting up paradoxes and analogical relations and using language in a non-referential way. The
syntax is incredibly complex, with a meandering main clause that is constantly being interrupted by
circumstantial information; and there is also a high degree of abstraction that is scarcely digestible by the
English language (eg. ‘tragicity’, ‘Portugalness’; ‘messianity’). There are also very few of the material
O ensaísmo trágico de Lourenço, [sic] parece em parte decorrer da sua própria tragicidade de
ensaísta, malgré lui,
Lourenço’s tragic essayism seems in part to arise out of his own tragicity as an essayest,
‘malgré lui’,
como se esta posição de metaxu do pensamento português, entre o mythos e logos, projectada
no papel do crítico
as if this position of ‘metaxu’ of Portuguese thought, between ‘mythos’ and ‘logos’, projected
onto the role of critic
que tragicamente parece assumir, entre o sistema impossível e a poiesis estéril, o guindasse
para um lugar / não lugar
which he tragically seems to assume, between the impossible system and the sterile ‘poiesis’,
hoists him to a place / non-place
de indecibilidade trágica, ao mesmo tempo que, inserido no fechamento de um pensar
saudoso, na clausura
of tragic undecidability, at the same time as, inserted into the closure of a yearning thought,
in the confinement
de uma historicidade filomitista, mais do que logocêntrica, se debate na paradoxia de uma
portugalidade sem mito,
of a philomitist historicity, more than logocentric, struggles in the paradoxalness of a
Portugalness without myth,
atada à pós-história de si mesmo, simultaneamente dentro e fora dela.
bound to the post-history of itself, simultaneously inside and outside it.
Fig. 1: Varela, M.H. 2000. ‘Rasura e reinvenção do trágico no pensamento português e brasileiro. Do ensaísmo
lúdico ao ensaísmo trágico’ in Revista Portuguesa de Humanidades, Vol.4 (UCP, Braga)
Hence, this study is designed to test the hypothesis that some of the discourse
features typical of Portuguese writing in the humanities may manifest themselves in the
English-language texts produced by Portuguese scholars, over and above the kind of
cross-linguistic transfer that is expected on the level of grammar and lexis (Odlin 1989).
Certain epistemological issues had to be taken into consideration from the outset
of this experiment. If the researcher has strong intuitions as to why a group of writers
write in a certain way based on long experience of teaching EAP, translating and
polishing papers, should these intuitions be brought to bear a priori on the corpus
analysis? Such a method seems to run counter to the position of Sinclair (2004) and
Tognini-Bonelli (2001) who each recommend approaching the data without
processes that are so predominant in English academic prose, and instead most are relational or existential.
See Bennett (2006) for a more detailed analysis of this passage.
presuppositions and going where the data lead. As researchers, however, we did not feel
impelled to choose between corpus-based or corpus-driven linguistics (Ooi 1998). When
we uploaded our two corpora to Wmatrix2 (Rayson 2003) information about distinctive
features of the corpora was registered automatically by the software. The resultant data
did not necessarily accord with our predictions or perceptions. At this stage, the phase of
POS and semantic tagging and automatic corpora comparison, our investigation was
corpus-driven. When we brought our intuitions to bear on the resultant data, in order to
sort out features worth investigating further, we were doing a corpus-based analysis of
our corpora. At different stages we were doing different kinds of corpus linguistics. We
assume that scholars are capable of periods of epoché when their most firmly held beliefs
are suspended, questioned or submitted to empirical tests. Indeed, one of the suggestions
made in this paper is that corpus-based critical discourse analysis is a potentially fruitful
approach to the study of intercultural rhetoric.
Corpus and Methods
The research was based on the comparison of two corpora each of around 113,000 words.
The corpus under investigation, dubbed Portac, consists of a sample of articles from the
area of the Humanities or Arts written by a group of senior Portuguese academics aiming
to publish their work in English-language journals. The control corpus (Controlit) was a
collection of articles already published by L1 academics in the same or comparable
journals.
The Portac corpus was basically opportunistic or self-selecting, as it consisted of
draft papers intended for publication and written by individual academics willing to allow
their texts to be used as data for linguistic investigation. This data resulted from the work
of one of the authors as a language reviser, that is to say, a professional translator and
specialist in academic discourse who undertakes to revise a manuscript prior to its
submission for publication.
When the agreement of the Portac authors had been obtained, we set out to
compile a control corpus of comparable overall size made up of texts with similar
communicative purposes. A list was drawn up of the English language journals in which
the Portuguese authors wished to be or had been published. This list was subsequently
narrowed down to four journals, chosen because articles published in them were available
electronically from university library databases, and a census was made of the articles
published in these four journals between 2005 and 2008. Two filters were applied in
selecting articles as candidates for inclusion in Controlit. Firstly, only those articles
written by single authors were retained. Secondly, an attempt was made to ensure that we
selected only articles written by native speakers of English. Using surnames as a guide,
only the texts of authors with Anglo-Celtic names were considered (e.g. Richardson,
Saunders, Newlyn, Groves, Neill, Ricks) and a further check was made on first names.
Admittedly this method is far from infallible but it at least minimizes the likelihood of
including L2 writers in the Controlit corpus, which was designed to represent L1 writing.
The result of this filtering left a set of articles which we chose from according to
theme: those articles which dealt with subjects of interest to our Portac writers, broadly
considered, were selected to make up the Controlit corpus.
Two software suites were used for this study in a complimentary fashion.
Wmatrix21 (Rayson 2003), available to scholars online, enables the investigator to
compare two corpora and continually shift focus as trends become apparent; that is to
say, researchers may quickly compare lexical and grammatical dimensions from the
perspective of one or other of the corpora. Wordsmith Tools 5 (Scott 1999) was used to
carry out searches which are not available on Wmatrix2 such as the creation of
frequency counts of word clusters, or word or N-gram searches using a wild card (for
example, for polysyllabic noun forms, a frequency list of all words ending in *ion).
Results of corpus comparison in Wmatrix2 and in Wordsmith Tools are expressed in
terms of Log Likelihood2 (henceforth LL), which measures the likelihood that a
difference between the observed frequency of an item and its expected frequency is not
random. The higher the LL value, the more significant is the difference between two
frequency scores. An LL value of 3.8 or higher is significant at the level of p < 0.05 and
an LL of 6.6 or higher is significant at p < 0.01.
Results
Probably the most significant finding was the high degree of nominalization present in
the writing of Portuguese academics compared to the control corpus. This was manifested
in a number of ways. At the level of individual words, there was an overuse of nouns,
both singular (LL 25.17) and plural (LL 69.81), and, as might be expected in such a
context, a greater use of indefinite and definite articles (LL 43.81 and LL 36.13
respectively). Concomitant with this, there was also a massive underuse of pronouns in
Portac, 6,154 (6.11% of all text) vs. 8,671 in Controlit (8.49%), giving an astonishing
Log Likelihood of 394.98. This may represent a straightforward consequence of
nominalization; for, as Biber et al. (1999:92) conclude, from analyzing various written
corpora totalling 40 million words, ‘a high frequency of nouns/…/corresponds to a low
density of pronouns’. However, the Portac writers also seem to be selective about the
pronouns they avoid: he (LL -232), she (LL -104), him (LL 96), I (LL -39), me (LL -37),
it (LL -25.74) were all underused, while we (39.41) and us (16.85) were overused. This
overuse of the plural pronouns in Portac cannot be attributed to multiple authorship as all
the articles in Portac and also in Controlit were written by a single author. There seems
to be some other mechanism at work, as we discuss below.
Of the nouns employed, Portuguese authors appear to have a penchant for
polysyllabic abstract nouns of Latinate origin. Using Wordsmith 5 to search on *ion,
2,184 instances of this suffix were obtained in Portac compared to only 1,458 in
Controlit (the Log Likelihood of such a difference is 163), while the results for –icity, ization and –ation gave LL7.07, LL14.16 and LL50.71 respectively. Hofland and
Johansson (1982:22) suggest that the high frequency of the indefinite article an found in
written informative prose indicated a high proportion of Latinate vocabulary. The
Portuguese writers’ overuse of an (LL 18.65) may thus be a direct consequence of their
greater use of Latinate word tokens consonant with their mother tongue’s close filiation
with Latin. Adjectives were also more prevalent in Portac (46.58), which once again
indicates a heavy concentration of semantic content in the noun phrase.
Perhaps also related to the tendency for nominalization was a truly startling
overuse of the genitive, both singular and plural (’s and s’) (LL 211.64), and also the
alternative construction using of to express the same relationship (LL 34.03). In some
cases, this may simply reflect the difficulty that non-native speakers have with English
compound nouns (examples from Portac include the world’s population, where a native
speaker might prefer the world population or Luanda’s slums instead of the Luanda
slums). Elsewhere, however, it seems to derive directly from the tendency to overnominalize as in the following example, the genitive in the noun phrase: a comment on
the possibilities of the play’s staging was reconstrued by the reviser using a clausal form
(i.e. a comment upon how the play might be staged).
Wmatrix was used on the POS tagged versions of the corpora to search for
subordinating conjunctions (e.g. if, because, unless, so, for, although, while) and coordinating conjunctions (and, or, nor). The Portac writers, at first glance, appeared to
underuse subordination (LL -8.16) and greatly overuse coordination (LL 26.17) in
comparison with the writers in Controlit. Although this automated measure of
subordination seems to suggest that the Portuguese academics use fewer subordinate
clauses, it needs to be remembered that the POS tag, CS, which stands for subordinating
conjunction, does not include occurrences of that used as a relative pronoun. Clearly,
relative clauses are subordinate clauses par excellence. A non-computerized search was
needed to distinguish the uses of that as a relative pronoun in the two corpora. The
greater frequency of that relatives in Portac produced a Log Likelihood of 10.15, so this
kind of subordination, at least, was more frequent in the English academic discourse of
the Portuguese writers.
The second most frequent use of that in the two corpora was to introduce clauses
embedded in matrix structures. This structure allows a writer to thematize attitudinal
meanings and offers an explicit statement of evaluation by presenting the ‘evaluative
that’ clause embedded within a matrix clause:
I should say from the start that my aim here is not to address the problem of translation
itself - although obviously, in this context, some issues relating to it have to be
considered. (from Portac)
It has long been recognised that Shakespeare read and borrowed from the Geneva
translation of the Bible (from Controlit).
As mentioned in the introduction, there is a rich mosaic of contrastive work done by
scholars on different aspects of academic discourse, a good deal of which focuses closely
on one particular syntactic or rhetorical feature. One such investigation is that of Hyland
and Tse (2005) who looked at the frequency and function of ‘evaluative that’ clauses in
academic abstracts. Drawing on this work, every example of that in both our corpora was
examined to eliminate all cases where that was used to perform other grammatical
functions, such as where it acted as demonstrative or relative pronoun. The result of this
non-computerized search is given in Table 1. It is clear that this type of subordination is
used more frequently by the Portac authors.
Portac
Controlit
Log Likelihood
753
662
5.7
Table 1 Evaluative that
Closer inspection of evaluative that clauses showed that Portac writers make greater use
of certain kinds of embedding or matrix structures (such as We can see that…; It should
be pointed out that...) particularly to carry epistemic stance. Table 2 shows the results of
concordance searches using Wordsmith Tools on four variable structures. The choice of
these sentence initial frames was guided by the intuitions of the authors.
Search words with wild cards (*)
Portac
Controlit
It * * that
42
28
It is * * that
27
22
We*that
17
4
We** that
15
3
TOTAL
101
57
Table 2 Frequency of use of some embedding clauses
Another suggestive work from which we could obtain ‘intuitions’ to test empirically was
the research done by Cuenca (2003). Cuenca carried out a contrastive analysis of the
usage of reformulation markers in academic English compared to similar writing in
Spanish and Catalan. We suspected that the usage of reformulation markers in the Portac
corpus might resemble that found by Cuenca in the two cognate Romance languages. A
comparison of our two corpora revealed a higher occurrence of reformulation markers in
the writing of the Portuguese academics (LL. 67.76). To the list of such markers provided
by Wmatrix, namely, i.e., e.g., was added two other parenthetical connectives analyzed
by Cuenca (2003), that is, and in other words. The reformulation marker or was found to
have the same distribution in the two corpora and was not studied further. Wordsmith
Tools Concord was used to calculate the frequency of occurrence of each reformulation
marker in the two corpora. This overuse of reformulation markers is examined further in
the Discussion section below.
Reformulation marker
Portac
Controlit
namely
32
1
that is
22
9
i.e.
20
2
in other words
15
12
e.g.
10
-
Total
99
24
Table 3 Occurrences of reformulation markers in the corpora
In the initial Wmatrix contrast of the two corpora significant overuse of
prepositions by the Portac writers was apparent (LL 46.32). As noted above, of was a
main contributor to this overuse (LL 31.31). A closer scrutiny revealed that multi-word
prepositions (Granger, S. and Meunier, F. 2008) also contributed to this difference
between the two corpora (LL 13.19).
Multi-word preposition
No.
of
occurrences in
Controlit
with_regard_to
No.
of
occurrence
s in Portac
23
by_means_of
11
1
with_reference_to
8
1
in_spite_of
8
4
in_view_ of
7
in_connection_with
5
1
by_way_of
5
1
in_front_of
4
1
in_conjunction_with
3
3
1
in_common_with
Table 4 Comparison of most frequently used multi-word prepositions
The multi-word prepositions overused by the Portuguese authors and listed in Table 3
bear a fairly close resemblance to compound prepositions frequently used in Portuguese.
One question worth examining is whether there are two kinds of transfer: (1) crosslinguistic transfer, which seems likely in relations to these multi-word prepositions. This
takes place at the lexical level; and (2) the transfer of discourse conventions, which might
be the more likely explanation of the variation in use of the reformulation markers
recorded in Table 2.
This initial glimpse of the supra-lexical patterns in the multiword prepositions and
the multiword expressions led us to believe that in a further exploration of our two
corpora we should do a comparative study of the phraseology of our two groups of
writers. Table 5 shows the results of the automated contrast between the two groups of
writers in their use of multiword expressions (MWEs), as measured by the semantic
tagger of Wmatrix. It should be noted that all MWEs in Table 5 have LL values higher
than 6.6 and are therefore significant at p < 0.01. Also, in this list of the twenty highest
log likelihoods there are positive and negative LL values. + means that the Portuguese
academics are using the expression more frequently while
-
indicates that the L1
authors in Controlit are using the expression in question more. It is noteworthy that, of
the first five MWEs overused by Portac writers, three (with regard to; according to; as
regards) perform a textual function in the sense of Halliday and Hasan (1989: 29): i.e.
they are not so much used to express ideas or interpersonal relations but rather as a means
of ensuring that what is written is relevant and relates to its context. The prepositional
phrase, in fact, which is the MWE most frequently used by Portac writers did not feature
in the discussion of reformulation markers on the previous page and tabulated in Figure
3. Nevertheless the important role that this discourse marker of reformulation plays in
realizing epistemic stance would repay further study.
Although Table 5 shows only the 20 MWEs most frequently used by Porticle
writers, very interesting results were obtained when all of the frequencies of the more
than 3,000 MWE types detected in both corpora were compared. Portac had 5,756 tokens
of MWEs as opposed to 4,772 in Controlit. The Log Likelihood of LL 92.10 obtained for
this comparison suggests that there are significant differences in the balance between
novel and formulaic language in the two groups of writers. The provision for customizing
the USAS semantic tagger in Wmatrix by extending the dictionaries means that De
Cock’s (2000) pioneering work on formulaicity in EFL speech and writing can now be
applied more easily in cross-cultural rhetoric studies.
MWE
Portac
Controlit
Log Likelihood
in_fact
87
14
+
55.40
with_regard_to
23
0
+
30.83
according_to
44
11
+
19.70
as_much_as
22
2
+
18.59
as_regards
13
0
+
17.43
in_the_picture
11
0
+
14.75
carried_out
10
0
+
13.41
his_own
22
51
-
13.23
in_question
17
2
+
12.87
due_to
14
1
+
12.85
out_of
10
30
-
11.41
brought_about
7
0
+
9.38
in_view_of
7
0
+
9.38
made_up
7
0
+
9.38
still_life
7
0
+
9.38
white_man
7
0
+
9.38
by_means_of
11
1
+
9.29
in_order_to
44
19
+
9.08
her_own
6
20
-
8.62
in_the_end
10
1
+
8.14
Table
5
Comparison
of
the
most
expressions (MWEs) extracted automatically by Wmatrix
frequently
used
multi-word
Table 6 below contains a summary of the main findings of the analysis of the two corpora
using Wmatrix supplemented by Concord in Wordsmith Tools when searching for word
clusters. All the Log Likelihood values refer to overuse or underuse of expressions by
the writers in Portac. The positive values of LL refer to overuse of such of expressions
while the negative values register underuse by the same writers.
overuse of nouns, articles, adjectives in Portac
underuse of pronouns in Portac LL -394.98.
underuse:
he (LL -232), she (LL -104), him (LL -96), I (LL -39), me (LL -37), it (LL -25.74)
overuse:
we (39.41) and us (16.85)
words ending *ion in Portac (LL 163)
–icity (LL7.07)
–ization (LL14.16)
–ation (LL50.71)
overuse of an (LL 18.65)
overuse of the genitive, singular and plural (’s and s’) (LL 211.64),
Of to express the same relationship (LL 34.03).
underuse of subordinating conjunctions (LL -8.16)
overuse of coordination (LL 26.17)
that as a relative pronoun in Portac (LL 10.15)
Evaluative that clauses (LL5.7)
Overuse of reformulation markers (LL. 67.76)
Table 6 Summary of main findings
Discussion
All these features together make the English prose of Portuguese academics seem very
dense and abstract in relation to that of their native speaker counterparts, and this may
ultimately affect their chances of getting their work published. However, before looking
at solutions to this problem, let us first discuss possible reasons for these differences.
Although nominalization has been a central feature of English academic discourse
since the emergence of scientific writing in the 17th century (see Halliday and Martin
1993; Martin & Veel 1998), there is evidence to suggest that the ‘historic drift towards
thinginess' (Halliday 1998:211) may have gone into reverse in recent years. Certainly,
public English generally seems to be becoming more 'conversational' and informal
(Fairclough 1994, 1997), and one of the ways in which this is manifested is by a new
preference for clausal structures above nominalizations (see Leech et al. 2001:294). It
could be the case that Portuguese academic writers are somewhat lagging behind in this
respect, reluctant to accompany such innovation or less able to respond to the trend.
If this were all there were to it, then the problem would seem to be easily solvable
through effective teaching, designed to raise L2 writers’ awareness of nominalization and
encourage a more clausal-based style. If, however, there are cultural reasons for the
markedly different style employed by Portuguese authors, as we suspect, the issue
becomes ideologically more complex.
It is reasonable to assume that many of the differences between Portac and
Controlit may be accounted for by a tendency on the part of Portuguese academics to
transfer stylistic and rhetorical features that are valued in their own culture into their
English writing. For example, the habit in Portuguese of using synonyms rather than
anaphoric pronouns to achieve textual cohesion (Mateus et al. 1989: 146) may contribute
to the generally low pronoun count in Portac. However, further analysis is needed to
substantiate these intuitions. To our knowledge, the relative frequencies of different
cohesive devices have not yet been systematically counted in either English or
Portuguese academic discourse. A corpus investigation of this area would provide a very
useful contribution to research in Contrastive Rhetoric and Translation Studies.
A similar process of L1 transfer may account for the frequent use of reformulation
markers. Cuenca (2003) concludes that academic writing in Spanish and Catalan displays
much more frequent use of reformulation markers than is found in English, and the
Portuguese approach to reformulation is likely to be much closer to Spanish and Catalan
than to English. Clearly, then, contrastive rhetoric research carried out on other Romance
languages might provide the student of Portuguese L1 and L2 writing with clues as to
which linguistic features to investigate.
Although it has not been possible to test for the presence in Portac of all the
differentiating discourse features identified by Bennett (2006, 2007a, 2007b), the findings
listed above would seem to point to the persistence of some Portuguese academic writing
conventions in these English texts. For example, the heavy nominalization not only
makes the prose sound more ‘learned’ and ‘literary’, it also has the effect of turning
contingent observations into abstractions, a quality that is reinforced by the prevalence of
polysyllabic Latinate words and lexical abstractions (i.e. nouns ending in -ion, -icity, ization). The long sentences and embedding structures reproduce the copiousness and
indirectness of Portuguese prose, while the proliferation of adjectives and appositional
structures also serve to ‘pad out’ the discourse, creating an impression of abundance.
Finally, the overuse of the first-person plural pronoun may be a direct transposition of the
Portuguese authorial ‘we’, used systematically even when the text has been penned by a
single author (as was the case with all the Portac texts) in the belief that this creates an
effect of modesty by implying collective rather than individual thought (Estrela et al.
2006:47; Eco, 1997:168)
Conclusion
If the differences between Portac and Controlit can indeed be explained by the intrusion
of Portuguese discourse features into the English prose produced by Portuguese
academics, this raises important questions of both a practical and an ideological nature.
Firstly, to what extent does this transfer jeopardize the chances of Portuguese academics
being published in international journals? We know that verbosity, unnecessary
complexity, abstraction and ‘pomposity’ are generally eschewed by arbitrators of style in
English academic prose; but are editors and referees aware that other cultures may value
these qualities differently? Would such an awareness alter their perception of the quality
of the work submitted and therefore affect the international status of the authors in
question?
Secondly, to what extent should texts like these be domesticated in order to bring
them into line with the Procrustean norms imposed by the hegemonic culture? Are
revisers, editors and proofreaders at liberty to erase or alter discourse features that
transmit value and are therefore profoundly bound up with questions of identity? Or
might this constitute a form of cultural imperialism, or even ‘epistemicide’ (Santos, 2005;
Bennett, 2007b), all the more insidious because it undermines the very conceptual
framework upon which the author’s worldview is based? And what of the alternative, the
‘palimpsest’, that allows the thought patterns of the original version to be glimpsed
beneath the surface structure? Can we guarantee that this will find a readership, even if it
gets past the editors and referees? It is, after all, so much more tiring for readers to
process sentences that do not fall in the way that one expects them to.
Corpus Linguistics may have a useful role to play in this debate. Communication
is now understood to be far more complex than theoretical notions of ‘standard English’
would have us believe, and there have already been moves towards adopting more
realistic language models within corpus-enabled learning environments. By raising
awareness of some of the differences existing between the discourses produced at the
centre and margins of the system (Kachru, 1988; Canagarajah, 2002), Corpus Linguistics
can make a useful contribution to work currently being pursued in fields such as Critical
Discourse Analysis and Ethnomethodology, where issues of value and power take centre
stage. Corpus tools may also be used by EAP teachers in the preparation of didactic
materials and by learners who wish to orient their own progress autonomously.
Hopefully, this will not only empower those on the periphery that wish to make their
voice heard, but also encourage the conservatives at the centre to question the basic
premises upon which the whole concept of Western knowledge is based.
In this paper, the reader may detect the tension between a top-down, theory-led
approach and a bottom-up, data-driven approach to discourse. The work began as an
attempt to see whether two different paradigms of linguistics could converge fruitfully on
the same issues. On the way, we were sometimes reminded of the Hedgehog and the Fox
(Berlin 1953). We leave it to the reader to decide who is who.
Endnotes
Available online at < http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix2.html>
2
Log Likelihood information and calculator available online at
< http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/llwizard.html>
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John McKenny
John McKenny teaches at the Division of English Studies at the University of
Nottingham, Ningbo China and is Head of the Centre for Research in Applied
Linguistics, Ningbo. He previously worked as a Professor Adjunto at Viseu Polytechnic
(Portugal) for twelve years and as Senior Lecturer at Northumbria University for five
years.
His Ph.D. thesis at Leeds University was entitled A corpus-based investigation of the
phraseology in various genres of written English with applications to the teaching of
English for academic purposes. He is currently co-editing with Tometro Hopkins a
volume entitled Englishes of the British Isles to be published this year by Continuum
International. This book is the first of a 15-volume series on World Englishes.
Karen Bennett
Karen Bennett is a member of the Centre for Comparative Studies, University of Lisbon,
where she researches in Translation Studies. Her PhD in English Academic Discourse: its
hegemonic status and implications for translation (University of Lisbon) was based upon
her extensive experience as translator and teacher of Academic Discourse with the
Catholic University of Portugal, University of Coimbra, and elsewhere. She has
published a number of articles on this subject and others, including ‘Galileo’s revenge:
Ways of construing knowledge and translation strategies in the era of globalization’ in
Social Semiotics, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2007), and ‘Epistemicide! The tale of a predatory
discourse’ in The Translator, Vol. 13, No. 2, (2007).