- Email: [email protected]
Writ in water: Aspects of the scientific journal article
272
Reviews
not usually involved with systematic investigation of the problems in their teaching practice, some chapters report on experiments that can be replicated without necessarily entailing great resources of cost, people and, probably time (e.g., Ward Goodbody on students’ self-assessment: Grundy on the role of English in academic success). To these EFL teachers, such investigations can bring an opportunity to reflect upon central issues in their practice in a more explicit and systematic way. As Lynch and Anderson (1991: 88) point out, one can think of (at least) two kinds of conference papers. “One presents a finelyhoned outcome of long established work. Another summarises work so far and is intended as the basis for discussion.” Both compilations of the 1991 and the 1989 BALEAP conference papers belong to the second sort due to the constant concern of writers to deal with their on-going classroom problems in a simple and synthetic way. Also, both editions show ESL teachers’ concern towards overseas students’ difficulties in coping with differences between the British academic setting and their own in terms of cultural expectancies of behavior in communicative events. Language, Learning and Success confirms the applied linguistics perspective of EAP, that is, an approach to the classroom as the realm of research, where problems are detected and investigated. From this observation, solutions are proposed which may be applied by other professionals in the field, so that advances in the discipline are made. REFERENCES Lynch, T., & Anderson, K., (1991). Do you mind if I come in here?: A comparison of EAP seminar/discussion materials and the characteristics of real academic interaction. In P. Adams, B. Heaton, & P. Howarth (Eds.), Socio-cultural issues in English forAcademic Purposes (BALEAP 1989 Conference Papers). London: Macmillan Publishers Limited. D&i&e Motta Roth is Assistant Professor of English at the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Brazil. Her current research focuses on the teaching of EFL academic writing. 0889-4906(94)E0007-Y
WRIT IN WATER: ASPECTS OF THE SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL ARTICLE. David Banks. [Brest Cedex, France]: E.R.L.A. (Universitk de Bretagne Occidentale), 1994, 134 pp. Reviewed by Bjiirn Melander
In the introduction to Writ in Water: Aspects of the Scientific Journal Article, David Banks points to the rapid development of the study of scientific writing in English: during the last decades, new and important ways of analyzing scientific text have been developed by researchers working with discourse analysis, or more recently, genre analysis. But, as he puts it, the fact that this
Reviews
273
work may be fascinating does not necessarily mean that more traditional text analysis work is obsolete or uninteresting: “It is not because new and interesting areas of enquiry are being opened up that areas which have not been fully explored should be abandoned” (p. 6). Indeed, despite work such as Huddleston (1971), one has to agree with Banks when he writes that many of the questions posed as early as 1962 by Barber regarding, for example, “grammatical choice . . . distribution of tenses, and incidence of passive and modal forms, and non-finite verb forms, as well as consideration of lexis . . . have never been fully answered” (p. 6). Banks’ well-written little book shows that his claims are basically true: we can still get fresh insights into the way scientific text is written by using what the author himself (p. 7) calls a “somewhat old-fashioned” approach to text analysis with regard to, for example, passives and modals or even hedges and metaphors. The text corpus investigated consists of 11 oceanographic articles in English, drawn from the journal Ocean&g& Ada. Two very reasonable exclusions from the corpus are made: the captions of figures and tables and the abstracts that precede the articles. Given the good argument the author provides for the exclusion of the abstracts, namely, that “it seems reasonable to suppose that the concision required in an abstract calls for a different set of linguistic features from those used in the extended text of an article” (p. 12), it is a bit surprising to later find out that the acknowledgments that follow the articles are included in the corpus. The reason for excluding the abstracts appears to me to be almost equally applicable to the acknowledgments. In the analyses that follow, it is also sometimes noticeable that the acknowledgments have traits of their own (e.g., regarding the use of personal pronouns). Although it certainly does not seem reasonable to assume that the overall picture presented has been skewed in any important way by the inclusion of the acknowledgments, it is hard to rid oneself of the suspicion that it would have been better to exclude them. In the first three chapters following the introduction, Banks discusses various aspects of passives. As is well known, passives are endemic to scientific writing, despite many recommendations (in more popular manuals, at any rate) of eradicating them or at least reducing their use. The question is, then, why this is so. In an interesting discussion of the nature of English passives, the author suggests, in my eyes quite convincingly, that the reason is that passives are best understood in terms of “copula + complement” instead of the more traditional analysis where a distinction is made between adjectival and verbal passives. As is pointed out, this “means that passive sentences are all basically relational [in the sense of the traditional representation of transitivity and theme networks of the systemic model]” (p, 311, and since scientific “enquiry is devoted to discovering the nature of material reality, that is, those things which are linked by relational processes . . . the passive naturally becomes a favoured construction for the expression of scientific endeavour” (p. 31). Most passive sentences have no expressed agent. It is therefore interesting to analyze why in some cases the authors do choose to include an agent. As is
274
Reviews
clearly shown in chapter 3, this is in no way randomly done, but instead the use is governed by well-defined semantic properties. In chapter 4, the remaining sentences without an expressed agent are analyzed with respect to the “putative agents” that Banks, in opposition to, inter alia, Huddleston (1971), argues all agentless passives possess. Clear patterns are discernible here also: the vast majority of the putative agents are human (mostly referring to the author or the group to which he or she belongs). This means, of course, that the authors on many occasions avoid mentioning themselves. But what about the few times they actually do just that? The use of we, I, and so forth, is investigated in chapter 5, and it is shown that the overwhelming majority of instances occur together with verbs of “mental process” (reason, suggest, check, etc.). Chapter 6 addresses the question of transitivity and modality. A rather detailed analysis shows that “there is a series of relationships between processes (transitivity) and modality” (p. 89); the most obvious one being “some sort of collocation between mental process and passive voice” (p. 118). Hence, Banks concludes, transitivity is “a significant parameter in the analysis of modality in scientific writing” (p. 89). Metaphor, here understood as inanimate subjects occurring with verbs that normally require human agency (most frequently, show, suggest, and indicate), is the next aspect that is scrutinized. This seems to a large extent to be a way of eliminating human agents, especially the authors (to say that “the figures suggest . . . ” is, of course, a way to avoid saying “I think that . . . “). Hence, since both textual features fulfill similar functions, it is fairly natural that this type of metaphor occurs in inverse proportion to passive clauses. In the final chapter, lexical hedging is discussed. In the present corpus, the most common method of hedging is through the use of verbs such as suggest, indicate, and appear, but adverbs like probably and generally are also used this way. Hedging occurs most frequently in the Results, Discussion, and Conclusion of the articles. Since those are the parts of the text where the author is most likely to put forward controversial ideas or interpretations, this seems to be a fairly straightforward reflection of the main function of hedges: to be face-saving features. However, Banks also finds evidence of less functional hedging, namely, hedging that mainly appears to be a way of following an expected stylistic pattern, and where “the hedging power” is largely reduced by other textual features. In summary, Writ in Water presents a careful, insightful, and detailed discussion of important features of scientific writing. Banks obviously is well-read within the area and puts his results in the context of relevant literature. Though the corpus he has investigated is comparatively small, the results seem extendible to other scientific writing, especially since oceanography, as the author himself points out, is a hybrid science with close connections to physics, chemistry, biology, biochemistry, and paleontology. The results presented hardly revolutionize our picture of the language used in scientific journals, but still provide further information regarding some of the central issues a writer must be able to handle in order to follow the expected norm. It is therefore
Reviews
275
easy to agree with the concluding claim that this study should be seen as not only “providing insight into the way scientific English is written, but as providing results which can be used in the development of training materials for scientists and science students” (p. 119). Another positive aspect is that Banks’ work with the Oceanologica Acta corpus, which has been carried out over a period of time and parts of which have appeared earlier in various publications, here is drawn together along with unpublished findings into a coherent whole. Therefore, the publication of this book will hopefully make the results more accessible and their use in pedagogical or other applied settings more likely. (It is therefore a pity that the book from a bibliographical point of view is incomplete, lacking both a date and a place of publication. ) However, the use of the results in a more applied context, for example, in the teaching of scientific writing in English, is not all that straightforward, and the author makes almost no comments on such matters (it is obvious that this book is primarily intended not for teachers of ESP but for linguists approaching the issues from a more theoretical point of view). After having read the book, it is therefore hard not to ask oneself - despite the obvious truth in the initial claim that old questions should not be left unanswered just because exciting new ones appear - if we do not need to go on to newer ways (such as genre and discourse analysis) of approaching texts if we are to be really successful in understanding and teaching scientific writing. In the beginning of this book, Banks cites Swales (1985) who writes that “it often seems more important in LSP to be doing something new rather than to be doing something well”. It is obvious that Banks has had the converse ambition and that he has been successful in his enterprise. By this quote, he also clearly points to both the major weaknesses and strengths of his work. REFERENCES Barber, C. L. (1962). Some measurable characteristics of modem scientific prose. In F. Behre (Ed.), Contributions to English syntax and philology (pp. 21-43). Stockholm: Almqvist & Wicksell. Huddleston, R. D. (1971). The sentence in written English. A syntactic study based on an analysis of scientific texts. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Swales, J. (1985). ESP comes of age? - 21 years after “Some measurable characteristics of modem scientific prose.” In M. Per-r-in (Ed.), Pratiques d’aujourd’hui et besoins de demain, Actes de 4dme Symposium Europe’en SW les Zangues de spkialitk (pp. l-19). Bordeaux, France: Universite de Bor-
deaux II. Bjiirn Melander is a lecturer in the Department of Scandinavian Languages at Uppsala University and a member of the Research Group for Studies of Texts for General and Specific Purposes in the same department. 0889-4906(94)ooo17-4
Reviews
not usually involved with systematic investigation of the problems in their teaching practice, some chapters report on experiments that can be replicated without necessarily entailing great resources of cost, people and, probably time (e.g., Ward Goodbody on students’ self-assessment: Grundy on the role of English in academic success). To these EFL teachers, such investigations can bring an opportunity to reflect upon central issues in their practice in a more explicit and systematic way. As Lynch and Anderson (1991: 88) point out, one can think of (at least) two kinds of conference papers. “One presents a finelyhoned outcome of long established work. Another summarises work so far and is intended as the basis for discussion.” Both compilations of the 1991 and the 1989 BALEAP conference papers belong to the second sort due to the constant concern of writers to deal with their on-going classroom problems in a simple and synthetic way. Also, both editions show ESL teachers’ concern towards overseas students’ difficulties in coping with differences between the British academic setting and their own in terms of cultural expectancies of behavior in communicative events. Language, Learning and Success confirms the applied linguistics perspective of EAP, that is, an approach to the classroom as the realm of research, where problems are detected and investigated. From this observation, solutions are proposed which may be applied by other professionals in the field, so that advances in the discipline are made. REFERENCES Lynch, T., & Anderson, K., (1991). Do you mind if I come in here?: A comparison of EAP seminar/discussion materials and the characteristics of real academic interaction. In P. Adams, B. Heaton, & P. Howarth (Eds.), Socio-cultural issues in English forAcademic Purposes (BALEAP 1989 Conference Papers). London: Macmillan Publishers Limited. D&i&e Motta Roth is Assistant Professor of English at the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Brazil. Her current research focuses on the teaching of EFL academic writing. 0889-4906(94)E0007-Y
WRIT IN WATER: ASPECTS OF THE SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL ARTICLE. David Banks. [Brest Cedex, France]: E.R.L.A. (Universitk de Bretagne Occidentale), 1994, 134 pp. Reviewed by Bjiirn Melander
In the introduction to Writ in Water: Aspects of the Scientific Journal Article, David Banks points to the rapid development of the study of scientific writing in English: during the last decades, new and important ways of analyzing scientific text have been developed by researchers working with discourse analysis, or more recently, genre analysis. But, as he puts it, the fact that this
Reviews
273
work may be fascinating does not necessarily mean that more traditional text analysis work is obsolete or uninteresting: “It is not because new and interesting areas of enquiry are being opened up that areas which have not been fully explored should be abandoned” (p. 6). Indeed, despite work such as Huddleston (1971), one has to agree with Banks when he writes that many of the questions posed as early as 1962 by Barber regarding, for example, “grammatical choice . . . distribution of tenses, and incidence of passive and modal forms, and non-finite verb forms, as well as consideration of lexis . . . have never been fully answered” (p. 6). Banks’ well-written little book shows that his claims are basically true: we can still get fresh insights into the way scientific text is written by using what the author himself (p. 7) calls a “somewhat old-fashioned” approach to text analysis with regard to, for example, passives and modals or even hedges and metaphors. The text corpus investigated consists of 11 oceanographic articles in English, drawn from the journal Ocean&g& Ada. Two very reasonable exclusions from the corpus are made: the captions of figures and tables and the abstracts that precede the articles. Given the good argument the author provides for the exclusion of the abstracts, namely, that “it seems reasonable to suppose that the concision required in an abstract calls for a different set of linguistic features from those used in the extended text of an article” (p. 12), it is a bit surprising to later find out that the acknowledgments that follow the articles are included in the corpus. The reason for excluding the abstracts appears to me to be almost equally applicable to the acknowledgments. In the analyses that follow, it is also sometimes noticeable that the acknowledgments have traits of their own (e.g., regarding the use of personal pronouns). Although it certainly does not seem reasonable to assume that the overall picture presented has been skewed in any important way by the inclusion of the acknowledgments, it is hard to rid oneself of the suspicion that it would have been better to exclude them. In the first three chapters following the introduction, Banks discusses various aspects of passives. As is well known, passives are endemic to scientific writing, despite many recommendations (in more popular manuals, at any rate) of eradicating them or at least reducing their use. The question is, then, why this is so. In an interesting discussion of the nature of English passives, the author suggests, in my eyes quite convincingly, that the reason is that passives are best understood in terms of “copula + complement” instead of the more traditional analysis where a distinction is made between adjectival and verbal passives. As is pointed out, this “means that passive sentences are all basically relational [in the sense of the traditional representation of transitivity and theme networks of the systemic model]” (p, 311, and since scientific “enquiry is devoted to discovering the nature of material reality, that is, those things which are linked by relational processes . . . the passive naturally becomes a favoured construction for the expression of scientific endeavour” (p. 31). Most passive sentences have no expressed agent. It is therefore interesting to analyze why in some cases the authors do choose to include an agent. As is
274
Reviews
clearly shown in chapter 3, this is in no way randomly done, but instead the use is governed by well-defined semantic properties. In chapter 4, the remaining sentences without an expressed agent are analyzed with respect to the “putative agents” that Banks, in opposition to, inter alia, Huddleston (1971), argues all agentless passives possess. Clear patterns are discernible here also: the vast majority of the putative agents are human (mostly referring to the author or the group to which he or she belongs). This means, of course, that the authors on many occasions avoid mentioning themselves. But what about the few times they actually do just that? The use of we, I, and so forth, is investigated in chapter 5, and it is shown that the overwhelming majority of instances occur together with verbs of “mental process” (reason, suggest, check, etc.). Chapter 6 addresses the question of transitivity and modality. A rather detailed analysis shows that “there is a series of relationships between processes (transitivity) and modality” (p. 89); the most obvious one being “some sort of collocation between mental process and passive voice” (p. 118). Hence, Banks concludes, transitivity is “a significant parameter in the analysis of modality in scientific writing” (p. 89). Metaphor, here understood as inanimate subjects occurring with verbs that normally require human agency (most frequently, show, suggest, and indicate), is the next aspect that is scrutinized. This seems to a large extent to be a way of eliminating human agents, especially the authors (to say that “the figures suggest . . . ” is, of course, a way to avoid saying “I think that . . . “). Hence, since both textual features fulfill similar functions, it is fairly natural that this type of metaphor occurs in inverse proportion to passive clauses. In the final chapter, lexical hedging is discussed. In the present corpus, the most common method of hedging is through the use of verbs such as suggest, indicate, and appear, but adverbs like probably and generally are also used this way. Hedging occurs most frequently in the Results, Discussion, and Conclusion of the articles. Since those are the parts of the text where the author is most likely to put forward controversial ideas or interpretations, this seems to be a fairly straightforward reflection of the main function of hedges: to be face-saving features. However, Banks also finds evidence of less functional hedging, namely, hedging that mainly appears to be a way of following an expected stylistic pattern, and where “the hedging power” is largely reduced by other textual features. In summary, Writ in Water presents a careful, insightful, and detailed discussion of important features of scientific writing. Banks obviously is well-read within the area and puts his results in the context of relevant literature. Though the corpus he has investigated is comparatively small, the results seem extendible to other scientific writing, especially since oceanography, as the author himself points out, is a hybrid science with close connections to physics, chemistry, biology, biochemistry, and paleontology. The results presented hardly revolutionize our picture of the language used in scientific journals, but still provide further information regarding some of the central issues a writer must be able to handle in order to follow the expected norm. It is therefore
Reviews
275
easy to agree with the concluding claim that this study should be seen as not only “providing insight into the way scientific English is written, but as providing results which can be used in the development of training materials for scientists and science students” (p. 119). Another positive aspect is that Banks’ work with the Oceanologica Acta corpus, which has been carried out over a period of time and parts of which have appeared earlier in various publications, here is drawn together along with unpublished findings into a coherent whole. Therefore, the publication of this book will hopefully make the results more accessible and their use in pedagogical or other applied settings more likely. (It is therefore a pity that the book from a bibliographical point of view is incomplete, lacking both a date and a place of publication. ) However, the use of the results in a more applied context, for example, in the teaching of scientific writing in English, is not all that straightforward, and the author makes almost no comments on such matters (it is obvious that this book is primarily intended not for teachers of ESP but for linguists approaching the issues from a more theoretical point of view). After having read the book, it is therefore hard not to ask oneself - despite the obvious truth in the initial claim that old questions should not be left unanswered just because exciting new ones appear - if we do not need to go on to newer ways (such as genre and discourse analysis) of approaching texts if we are to be really successful in understanding and teaching scientific writing. In the beginning of this book, Banks cites Swales (1985) who writes that “it often seems more important in LSP to be doing something new rather than to be doing something well”. It is obvious that Banks has had the converse ambition and that he has been successful in his enterprise. By this quote, he also clearly points to both the major weaknesses and strengths of his work. REFERENCES Barber, C. L. (1962). Some measurable characteristics of modem scientific prose. In F. Behre (Ed.), Contributions to English syntax and philology (pp. 21-43). Stockholm: Almqvist & Wicksell. Huddleston, R. D. (1971). The sentence in written English. A syntactic study based on an analysis of scientific texts. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Swales, J. (1985). ESP comes of age? - 21 years after “Some measurable characteristics of modem scientific prose.” In M. Per-r-in (Ed.), Pratiques d’aujourd’hui et besoins de demain, Actes de 4dme Symposium Europe’en SW les Zangues de spkialitk (pp. l-19). Bordeaux, France: Universite de Bor-
deaux II. Bjiirn Melander is a lecturer in the Department of Scandinavian Languages at Uppsala University and a member of the Research Group for Studies of Texts for General and Specific Purposes in the same department. 0889-4906(94)ooo17-4