Discourse in the Professions

Book excerpt: This book explores the structure and use of academic and professional discourse through the lens of corpus linguistics. The goal of this book is to show how insights from corpus linguistic analyses can help us better understand how we use academic and professional language and help us find ways to better train newcomers to the genres used in various professional contexts. The contributions to this book show that specialized corpora of specific genres from a variety of fields allow us to make more relevant observations about the function and use of language for particular purposes. The specialized corpora examined include written and spoken academic genres, written and spoken business and legal genres, and written philanthropic genres. The book showcases a variety of approaches to analyzing the discourse of specialized corpora, and each chapter concludes with a reflection on the practical and pedagogical implications of the analysis.