Professional Discourse

"Using a wide range of examples such as research papers, business reports, performance commentaries, professional guidebooks and legal documents, this book examines the discourse of professional writing. Employing a number of analytic paradigms including systemic functional linguistics, pragmatics, text analysis and sociological and anthropological linguistics, the author explores a wide range of professional genres. He argues that while professions use different sets of practices, their use of language displays many universals, and demonstrates this through examples and data from a broad cross section of professional settings such as medicine, law, business, mass media, and engineering. This examination of professional discourse, and its important role in society, will be of interest to researchers in linguistics, applied linguists, and those working on the teaching of English for specific purposes"--