Tension and change in English domain-specific genres

MINISTERO DELL'UNIVERSITÀ E DELLA RICERCA - DIREZIONE GENERALE PER IL COORDINAMENTO E LO SVILUPPO DELLA RICERCA

PROGRAMMI DI RICERCA SCIENTIFICA DI RILEVANTE INTERESSE NAZIONALE - RICHIESTA DI COFINANZIAMENTO (DM n. 1175 del 18 settembre 2007) 

PROGETTO DI RICERCA - MODELLO A - Anno 2007 - prot. 2007JCY9Y9 

Scientific Coordinator of the Research Project: Prof. GOTTI MAURIZIO  

Research Units:

• Unit I: Università degli Studi di BERGAMO, Prof. GOTTI Maurizio  

• Unit II: Università degli Studi di MILANO, Prof. GARZONE Giuliana Elena  

• Unit III: Università degli Studi di TORINO, Prof. CORTESE Giuseppina  

• Unit IV: Università degli Studi di NAPOLI "Federico II", Prof. DI MARTINO Gabriella  

• Unit V: Istituto Universitario di Scienze Motorie di ROMA, Prof. EVANGELISTI ALLORI Paola 

Objectives of the Research Project

Our study will focus on the evolving aspects of English professional and disciplinary discourses. It aims to record the transformations undergone by domain-specific genres, not least in response to the increasing globalisation of communicative practices and the impact of information technology, with special attention for such phenomena as genre creation, migration and hybridisation. Sources of tension within and across texts will be researched by observing the ‘genre sets’ available to a range of communities of practice, to be identified and investigated also with the aid of ethnographic data from specialist informants.

The range and distribution of specific genres within such sets will then be explored by means of corpora representative of documents produced by each parent discourse community. The research units will subsequently identify and evaluate tensions within (established, emerging or declining) genres, in terms of reconfiguration, cross-fertilisation, labelling, communicative purposes, etc., through an approach capable of balancing an in-depth knowledge of the intellectual/interactional process instrumental to the textualisations of a given genre with a microlinguistic analysis of the rhetorical and microlinguistic features encoded in its products. 

Finally, the results yielded by such analyses will be used to reconstruct the discoursal links between professional practices in the field, on the one hand, and current generic tensions, on the other hand. This common research framework will be applied by each unit to the domain chosen for analysis, within the boundaries and perspectives associated with a specific field of discourse (i.e. legal, economic, academic, institutional and socio-political).

Our approach will combine a theoretical interest in the selection of suitable tools for describing genre dynamics and a focus on the effectiveness of such tools for recording the range and distribution of genres targeted in this project. The analyses conducted by the five units should add to our understanding of the causes of textual change and tension in genre sets which share certain features across domains but may differ as to their origin, content and purpose.