Professional Discourse

Using a wide range of professional genres such as research papers, business reports, performance commentaries, guidebooks and legal documents, this study focuses on the discourse of professional writing, employing analytic paradigms from systemic-functional linguistics, pragmatics, text analysis, sociology and anthropological linguistics. Kenneth Kong argues that while professions use different sets of practices, their use of language displays many universals. This is demonstrated through the analysis of 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 applied linguistics, to professionals who want to understand the role of language in their work, and to teachers of English for specific purposes.

1. Introduction; Part I. Conceptual Issues: 2. Profession as a symbolic community; Part II. Linguistic Realizations: 3. Ideology in professional discourse; 4. Communicative competence in the professional workplace; 5. A model of interpersonal negotiation in professional discourse; Part III. Functions and Global Patterns: 6. Speech functions; 7. Intertextuality; 8. Genre and textual patterning; 9. Multimodality; 10. Conclusion.

Professor Kenneth Kong, Acting Head of Centre for English and Additional Languages, Lingnan University, Hong Kong.