Polishing Papers for Publication: Palimpsests or Procrustean Beds?1

John McKenny University of Nottingham, NingboChina

Karen BennettCentre for Comparative StudiesUniversity of LisbonPortugal

Abstract

Portuguese academic discourse of the humanities is notoriously difficult to render into English, given the prevalence of rhetorical and discourse features that are largely alien to English academic style. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that some of those features might find their way into the English texts produced by Portuguese scholars through a process of pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic transfer. If so, this would have important practical and ideological implications, not only for the academics concerned, but also for editors, revisers, teachers of EAP, translators, writers of academic style manuals and all the other gatekeepers of the globalized culture. The study involved a corpus of some 113,000 running words of English academic prose written by established Portuguese academics in the Humanities, which had been presented to a native speaker of English (professional translator and specialist in academic discourse) for revision prior to submission for publication. After correction of superficial grammatical and spelling errors, the texts were made into a corpus, which was tagged for Part of Speech (CLAWS7) and discourse markers (USAS) using WMatrix2 (Rayson 2003). The annotated corpus was then interrogated for the presence of certain discourse features using Wmatrix2 and Wordsmith 5 (Scott 2006), and the findings compared with those of a control corpus, Controlit, of published articles written by L1 academics in the same or comparable journals.

The results reveal significant overuse of certain features by Portuguese academics, and a corresponding underuse of others, suggesting marked differences in the value attributed to those features by the two cultures. Keywords: academic discourse, humanities, Portuguese, English, research articles corpus

1 This is a postprint of an article published in English Text Construction, 2.2. 2009. 228-245. Reproduced with the kind permission of John Benjamins Publishing. The complete article may be accessed at: http://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/etc.2.2.06mck/details

Introduction

English academic discourse, which emerged in the 17 th century as a vehicle for the new

rationalist/scientific paradigm (Halliday & Martin, 1993:2-21, 54-68; Martin, 1998), now

holds hegemonic status on the world stage, and mastery of it is essential for any scholar

wishing to pursue an international career (Tardy 2004). However, it may not be taken for

granted that all cultures construe knowledge in the same way (Canagarajah 2002:1-5). In

Portugal, which did not experience a Scientific Revolution as such, an older humanities-

based tradition was perpetuated by an education system grounded on Scholastic and

Rhetorical principles. As a result, Portuguese academic discourse in the humanities

contains features that are markedly different from the hegemonic English style - so much

so, in fact, that they may even reflect a whole different underlying epistemology

(Bennett, 2006, 2007a, b). The extent to which these features intrude upon the English

writing produced by Portuguese academics wishing to publish abroad constitutes the

main aim of this paper.

The possibility that there may exist cultural differences in discursive or expository

writing patterns was first raised by Robert B. Kaplan in a seminal paper first published in

1966. In it, he suggested that many of the errors of text organisation and cohesion made

by foreign students in their academic writing may be due to different cultural conventions

and indeed ‘thought patterns’ encoded in their mother tongues.

Logic (in the popular, rather than the logician’s sense of the word), which is the basis of rhetoric, is evolved out of a culture; it is not universal. Rhetoric, then, is not universal either, but varies from culture to culture and even from time to time within a given culture. It is affected by canons of taste within a given culture at a given time. (Kaplan, 1980:400)

He went on to assert that the typical linear development of the expository English

paragraph may in fact be quite alien to other cultures, and even suggested a series of

diagrammatic representations of how a paragraph might develop according to Semitic,

Oriental, Romance and Russian styles (Idem:403-411).

Although this initial approach was overly simplistic, Kaplan’s work gave rise to a

multitude of similar studies that explored discourse differences from a variety of cultural

perspectives (eg. Smith, 1987; Ventola & Mauranen, 1996; Duszak, 1997), eventually

culminating in the formal constitution of the discipline that is today known as Contrastive

Rhetoric (Connor, 1996). Thus, English academic writing has been compared to

‘teutonic, gallic and nipponic’ styles (Galtung, 1981), German (Clyne, 1987a, 1987b,

1988), Indian languages (Kachru, 1987); Czech (Cmejrková, 1996, 1997), Finnish

(Mauranen, 1993), Polish (Duszak, 1994), Norwegian (Dahl, 2004) and

Russian/Ukrainian (Yakhontova, 2002, 2006) to name but a few.

Unfortunately, Portuguese academic discourse has been somewhat neglected

amidst this plethora of contrastive rhetorical studies. There has been some investigation

into other Romance languages, particular Spanish, which has a certain relevance: for

example, Kaplan (1980:408), in his initial article, observed that 'there is much greater

freedom to digress or to introduce extraneous material in French, or in Spanish, than

English’, while Grabe & Kaplan (1996:194), summarizing the work of several different

researchers, report that Spanish writers prefer a more ‘elaborated’ style of writing, use

longer sentences and have a penchant for subordination. More recently, Martín Martín

(2003) has investigated rhetorical variation between social science abstracts in Spanish

and English; Moreno (1997) has looked at the use of causal metatext (or text about text)

in the same two languages, and Mur Dueñas (2007b) has examined pronoun use and self-

mention. Salager-Meyer (2003) also explores the differences between Spanish, English

and French in her work on medical discourse, while, within pragmatics, Cuenca (2003)

examines reformulation markers in English, Spanish and Catalan. As regards Portuguese

in particular, McKenny (2005) examines epistemic stance and dogmatism in the

argumentative writing of Portuguese advanced learners using Porticle, the Portuguese

subcorpus of ICLE, the International Corpus of Learner English, and, in a later work

(2007) discusses the implications of differing rhetorical conventions and traditions for the

teaching of EAP writing.

Bennett’s work on Portuguese academic writing (2006, 2007a, b) differs from the

Contrastive Rhetoric studies described above in that it is not oriented towards the

teaching (EAP) profession. Instead, it took place within the sphere of Translation Studies

(TS) and involved the systematic analysis of a corpus of Portuguese academic texts that

had been submitted for translation. The aim was to determine some of the problems

raised by differences between source text features and target culture expectations,

extending beyond the merely technical to take in the ethical and ideological implications

of 'domestication' (i.e. the systematic refashioning of the source text to bring it into line

with target culture norms) (Venuti, 1995). The present paper to some extent represents a

continuation of that project, in that it deals with a parallel corpus of texts also written by

Portuguese academics, though this time in English, as they were submitted for revision

rather than translation. Revision is thus considered here as paratranslational activity, and

the language reviser is perceived as one of the many 'literacy brokers' that typically

intervene in a text in order to prepare it for publication in the English-speaking world

(Lillis & Curry, 2006).

Much Portuguese academic writing in the humanities displays characteristics that

are diametrically opposed to those valued by English Academic Discourse writing

manuals (Bennett, 2009). It is characterised by a taste for ‘copiousness’ (manifested by a

general ‘wordiness’ and redundancy); a preference for a high-flown erudite register over

the demotic (evident in both syntactical structure and lexical choices), and a tendency

towards abstraction and figurative language. Cohesion is frequently achieved through

elaborate synonyms and cataphora, rather than by ellipsis or anaphoric pronouns as might

be preferred in English (Halliday & Hasan, 1976; Mateus et al. 1989: 146); and there are

also important differences as regards textual organization: a propensity for indirectness

means that the main idea is often embedded, adorned or deferred at all ranks. Some of

these features are illustrated in the extract of Portuguese academic prose presented

below2:

O ensaísmo trágico de Lourenço, [sic] parece em parte decorrer da sua própria tragicidade de ensaísta, malgré lui,

2 Clarity of exposition and logical reasoning are clearly not objectives here, for the text revels in ambiguity, deliberately setting up paradoxes and analogical relations and using language in a non-referential way. The syntax is incredibly complex, with a meandering main clause that is constantly being interrupted by circumstantial information; and there is also a high degree of abstraction that is scarcely digestible by the English language (eg. ‘tragicity’, ‘Portugalness’; ‘messianity’). There are also very few of the material processes that are so predominant in English academic prose, and instead most are relational or existential. See Bennett (2006) for a more detailed analysis of this passage.

Lourenço’s tragic essayism seems in part to arise out of his own tragicity as an essayest, ‘malgré lui’, como se esta posição de metaxu do pensamento português, entre o mythos e logos, projectada no papel do críticoas if this position of ‘metaxu’ of Portuguese thought, between ‘mythos’ and ‘logos’, projected onto the role of critic

que tragicamente parece assumir, entre o sistema impossível e a poiesis estéril, o guindasse para um lugar / não lugarwhich he tragically seems to assume, between the impossible system and the sterile ‘poiesis’, hoists him to a place / non-place

de indecibilidade trágica, ao mesmo tempo que, inserido no fechamento de um pensar saudoso, na clausura of tragic undecidability, at the same time as, inserted into the closure of a yearning thought, in the confinement

de uma historicidade filomitista, mais do que logocêntrica, se debate na paradoxia de uma portugalidade sem mito, of a philomitist historicity, more than logocentric, struggles in the paradoxalness of a Portugalness without myth,

atada à pós-história de si mesmo, simultaneamente dentro e fora dela.bound to the post-history of itself, simultaneously inside and outside it. Fig. 1: Varela, M.H. 2000. ‘Rasura e reinvenção do trágico no pensamento português e brasileiro. Do ensaísmo lúdico ao ensaísmo trágico’ in Revista Portuguesa de Humanidades, Vol.4 (UCP, Braga)

Hence, this study is designed to test the hypothesis that some of the discourse

features typical of Portuguese writing in the humanities may manifest themselves in the

English-language texts produced by Portuguese scholars, over and above the kind of

cross-linguistic transfer that is expected on the level of grammar and lexis (Odlin 1989).

Certain epistemological issues had to be taken into consideration from the outset

of this experiment. If the researcher has strong intuitions as to why a group of writers

write in a certain way based on long experience of teaching EAP, translating and

polishing papers, should these intuitions be brought to bear a priori on the corpus

analysis? Such a method seems to run counter to the position of Sinclair (2004) and

Tognini-Bonelli (2001) who each recommend approaching the data without

presuppositions and going where the data lead. As researchers, however, we did not feel

impelled to choose between corpus-based or corpus-driven linguistics (Ooi 1998). When

we uploaded our two corpora to Wmatrix2 (Rayson 2003) information about distinctive

features of the corpora was registered automatically by the software. The resultant data

did not necessarily accord with our predictions or perceptions. At this stage, the phase of

POS and semantic tagging and automatic corpora comparison, our investigation was

corpus-driven. When we brought our intuitions to bear on the resultant data, in order to

sort out features worth investigating further, we were doing a corpus-based analysis of

our corpora. At different stages we were doing different kinds of corpus linguistics. We

assume that scholars are capable of periods of epoché when their most firmly held beliefs

are suspended, questioned or submitted to empirical tests. Indeed, one of the suggestions

made in this paper is that corpus-based critical discourse analysis is a potentially fruitful

approach to the study of intercultural rhetoric.

Corpus and MethodsThe research was based on the comparison of two corpora each of around 113,000 words.

The corpus under investigation, dubbed Portac, consists of a sample of articles from the

area of the Humanities or Arts written by a group of senior Portuguese academics aiming

to publish their work in English-language journals. The control corpus (Controlit) was a

collection of articles already published by L1 academics in the same or comparable

journals.

The Portac corpus was basically opportunistic or self-selecting, as it consisted of

draft papers intended for publication and written by individual academics willing to allow

their texts to be used as data for linguistic investigation. This data resulted from the work

of one of the authors as a language reviser, that is to say, a professional translator and

specialist in academic discourse who undertakes to revise a manuscript prior to its

submission for publication.

When the agreement of the Portac authors had been obtained, we set out to

compile a control corpus of comparable overall size made up of texts with similar

communicative purposes. A list was drawn up of the English language journals in which

the Portuguese authors wished to be or had been published. This list was subsequently

narrowed down to four journals, chosen because articles published in them were available

electronically from university library databases, and a census was made of the articles

published in these four journals between 2005 and 2008. Two filters were applied in

selecting articles as candidates for inclusion in Controlit. Firstly, only those articles

written by single authors were retained. Secondly, an attempt was made to ensure that we

selected only articles written by native speakers of English. Using surnames as a guide,

only the texts of authors with Anglo-Celtic names were considered (e.g. Richardson,

Saunders, Newlyn, Groves, Neill, Ricks) and a further check was made on first names.

Admittedly this method is far from infallible but it at least minimizes the likelihood of

including L2 writers in the Controlit corpus, which was designed to represent L1 writing.

The result of this filtering left a set of articles which we chose from according to

theme: those articles which dealt with subjects of interest to our Portac writers, broadly

considered, were selected to make up the Controlit corpus.

Two software suites were used for this study in a complimentary fashion.

Wmatrix21 (Rayson 2003), available to scholars online, enables the investigator to

compare two corpora and continually shift focus as trends become apparent; that is to

say, researchers may quickly compare lexical and grammatical dimensions from the

perspective of one or other of the corpora. Wordsmith Tools 5 (Scott 1999) was used to

carry out searches which are not available on Wmatrix2 such as the creation of

frequency counts of word clusters, or word or N-gram searches using a wild card (for

example, for polysyllabic noun forms, a frequency list of all words ending in *ion).

Results of corpus comparison in Wmatrix2 and in Wordsmith Tools are expressed in

terms of Log Likelihood2 (henceforth LL), which measures the likelihood that a

difference between the observed frequency of an item and its expected frequency is not

random. The higher the LL value, the more significant is the difference between two

frequency scores. An LL value of 3.8 or higher is significant at the level of p < 0.05 and

an LL of 6.6 or higher is significant at p < 0.01.

ResultsProbably the most significant finding was the high degree of nominalization present in

the writing of Portuguese academics compared to the control corpus. This was manifested

in a number of ways. At the level of individual words, there was an overuse of nouns,

both singular (LL 25.17) and plural (LL 69.81), and, as might be expected in such a

context, a greater use of indefinite and definite articles (LL 43.81 and LL 36.13

respectively). Concomitant with this, there was also a massive underuse of pronouns in

Portac, 6,154 (6.11% of all text) vs. 8,671 in Controlit (8.49%), giving an astonishing

Log Likelihood of 394.98. This may represent a straightforward consequence of

nominalization; for, as Biber et al. (1999:92) conclude, from analyzing various written

corpora totalling 40 million words, ‘a high frequency of nouns/…/corresponds to a low

density of pronouns’. However, the Portac writers also seem to be selective about the

pronouns they avoid: he (LL -232), she (LL -104), him (LL 96), I (LL -39), me (LL -37),

it (LL -25.74) were all underused, while we (39.41) and us (16.85) were overused. This

overuse of the plural pronouns in Portac cannot be attributed to multiple authorship as all

the articles in Portac and also in Controlit were written by a single author. There seems

to be some other mechanism at work, as we discuss below.

Of the nouns employed, Portuguese authors appear to have a penchant for

polysyllabic abstract nouns of Latinate origin. Using Wordsmith 5 to search on *ion,

2,184 instances of this suffix were obtained in Portac compared to only 1,458 in

Controlit (the Log Likelihood of such a difference is 163), while the results for –icity, -

ization and –ation gave LL7.07, LL14.16 and LL50.71 respectively. Hofland and

Johansson (1982:22) suggest that the high frequency of the indefinite article an found in

written informative prose indicated a high proportion of Latinate vocabulary. The

Portuguese writers’ overuse of an (LL 18.65) may thus be a direct consequence of their

greater use of Latinate word tokens consonant with their mother tongue’s close filiation

with Latin. Adjectives were also more prevalent in Portac (46.58), which once again

indicates a heavy concentration of semantic content in the noun phrase.

Perhaps also related to the tendency for nominalization was a truly startling

overuse of the genitive, both singular and plural (’s and s’) (LL 211.64), and also the

alternative construction using of to express the same relationship (LL 34.03). In some

cases, this may simply reflect the difficulty that non-native speakers have with English

compound nouns (examples from Portac include the world’s population, where a native

speaker might prefer the world population or Luanda’s slums instead of the Luanda

slums). Elsewhere, however, it seems to derive directly from the tendency to over-

nominalize as in the following example, the genitive in the noun phrase: a comment on

the possibilities of the play’s staging was reconstrued by the reviser using a clausal form

(i.e. a comment upon how the play might be staged).

Wmatrix was used on the POS tagged versions of the corpora to search for

subordinating conjunctions (e.g. if, because, unless, so, for, although, while) and co-

ordinating conjunctions (and, or, nor). The Portac writers, at first glance, appeared to

underuse subordination (LL -8.16) and greatly overuse coordination (LL 26.17) in

comparison with the writers in Controlit. Although this automated measure of

subordination seems to suggest that the Portuguese academics use fewer subordinate

clauses, it needs to be remembered that the POS tag, CS, which stands for subordinating

conjunction, does not include occurrences of that used as a relative pronoun. Clearly,

relative clauses are subordinate clauses par excellence. A non-computerized search was

needed to distinguish the uses of that as a relative pronoun in the two corpora. The

greater frequency of that relatives in Portac produced a Log Likelihood of 10.15, so this

kind of subordination, at least, was more frequent in the English academic discourse of

the Portuguese writers.

The second most frequent use of that in the two corpora was to introduce clauses

embedded in matrix structures. This structure allows a writer to thematize attitudinal

meanings and offers an explicit statement of evaluation by presenting the ‘evaluative

that’ clause embedded within a matrix clause: I should say from the start that my aim here is not to address the problem of translation itself - although obviously, in this context, some issues relating to it have to be considered. (from Portac)

It has long been recognised that Shakespeare read and borrowed from the Geneva translation of the Bible (from Controlit).

As mentioned in the introduction, there is a rich mosaic of contrastive work done by

scholars on different aspects of academic discourse, a good deal of which focuses closely

on one particular syntactic or rhetorical feature. One such investigation is that of Hyland

and Tse (2005) who looked at the frequency and function of ‘evaluative that’ clauses in

academic abstracts. Drawing on this work, every example of that in both our corpora was

examined to eliminate all cases where that was used to perform other grammatical

functions, such as where it acted as demonstrative or relative pronoun. The result of this

non-computerized search is given in Table 1. It is clear that this type of subordination is

used more frequently by the Portac authors.

Portac Controlit Log Likelihood

753 662 5.7

Table 1 Evaluative that

Closer inspection of evaluative that clauses showed that Portac writers make greater use

of certain kinds of embedding or matrix structures (such as We can see that…; It should

be pointed out that...) particularly to carry epistemic stance. Table 2 shows the results of

concordance searches using Wordsmith Tools on four variable structures. The choice of

these sentence initial frames was guided by the intuitions of the authors.

Search words with wild cards (*) Portac Controlit

It * * that 42 28

It is * * that 27 22

We*that 17 4

We** that 15 3

TOTAL 101 57

Table 2 Frequency of use of some embedding clauses

Another suggestive work from which we could obtain ‘intuitions’ to test empirically was

the research done by Cuenca (2003). Cuenca carried out a contrastive analysis of the

usage of reformulation markers in academic English compared to similar writing in

Spanish and Catalan. We suspected that the usage of reformulation markers in the Portac

corpus might resemble that found by Cuenca in the two cognate Romance languages. A

comparison of our two corpora revealed a higher occurrence of reformulation markers in

the writing of the Portuguese academics (LL. 67.76). To the list of such markers provided

by Wmatrix, namely, i.e., e.g., was added two other parenthetical connectives analyzed

by Cuenca (2003), that is, and in other words. The reformulation marker or was found to

have the same distribution in the two corpora and was not studied further. Wordsmith

Tools Concord was used to calculate the frequency of occurrence of each reformulation

marker in the two corpora. This overuse of reformulation markers is examined further in

the Discussion section below.

Reformulation marker Portac Controlit

namely 32 1

that is 22 9

i.e. 20 2

in other words 15 12

e.g. 10 -

Total 99 24

Table 3 Occurrences of reformulation markers in the corpora

In the initial Wmatrix contrast of the two corpora significant overuse of

prepositions by the Portac writers was apparent (LL 46.32). As noted above, of was a

main contributor to this overuse (LL 31.31). A closer scrutiny revealed that multi-word

prepositions (Granger, S. and Meunier, F. 2008) also contributed to this difference

between the two corpora (LL 13.19).

Multi-word preposition No. of occurrences in Portac

No. of occurrences in Controlit

with_regard_to 23 by_means_of 11 1with_reference_to 8 1in_spite_of 8 4in_view_ of 7 in_connection_with 5 1

by_way_of 5 1in_front_of 4 1in_conjunction_with 3 in_common_with 3 1

Table 4 Comparison of most frequently used multi-word prepositions

The multi-word prepositions overused by the Portuguese authors and listed in Table 3

bear a fairly close resemblance to compound prepositions frequently used in Portuguese.

One question worth examining is whether there are two kinds of transfer: (1) cross-

linguistic transfer, which seems likely in relations to these multi-word prepositions. This

takes place at the lexical level; and (2) the transfer of discourse conventions, which might

be the more likely explanation of the variation in use of the reformulation markers

recorded in Table 2.

This initial glimpse of the supra-lexical patterns in the multiword prepositions and

the multiword expressions led us to believe that in a further exploration of our two

corpora we should do a comparative study of the phraseology of our two groups of

writers. Table 5 shows the results of the automated contrast between the two groups of

writers in their use of multiword expressions (MWEs), as measured by the semantic

tagger of Wmatrix. It should be noted that all MWEs in Table 5 have LL values higher

than 6.6 and are therefore significant at p < 0.01. Also, in this list of the twenty highest

log likelihoods there are positive and negative LL values. + means that the Portuguese

academics are using the expression more frequently while - indicates that the L1

authors in Controlit are using the expression in question more. It is noteworthy that, of

the first five MWEs overused by Portac writers, three (with regard to; according to; as

regards) perform a textual function in the sense of Halliday and Hasan (1989: 29): i.e.

they are not so much used to express ideas or interpersonal relations but rather as a means

of ensuring that what is written is relevant and relates to its context. The prepositional

phrase, in fact, which is the MWE most frequently used by Portac writers did not feature

in the discussion of reformulation markers on the previous page and tabulated in Figure

3. Nevertheless the important role that this discourse marker of reformulation plays in

realizing epistemic stance would repay further study.

Although Table 5 shows only the 20 MWEs most frequently used by Porticle

writers, very interesting results were obtained when all of the frequencies of the more

than 3,000 MWE types detected in both corpora were compared. Portac had 5,756 tokens

of MWEs as opposed to 4,772 in Controlit. The Log Likelihood of LL 92.10 obtained for

this comparison suggests that there are significant differences in the balance between

novel and formulaic language in the two groups of writers. The provision for customizing

the USAS semantic tagger in Wmatrix by extending the dictionaries means that De

Cock’s (2000) pioneering work on formulaicity in EFL speech and writing can now be

applied more easily in cross-cultural rhetoric studies.

MWE Portac Controlit Log Likelihoodin_fact  87 14 +       55.40  with_regard_to   

23 0 +       30.83  

according_to      

44 11 +       19.70  

as_much_as       22 2 +       18.59  as_regards        13 0 +       17.43  in_the_picture   11 0 +       14.75  carried_out      10 0 +       13.41  his_own           22 51 -       13.23  in_question     17 2 +       12.87  due_to            14 1 +       12.85  out_of             10 30 -       11.41  brought_about   7 0 +       9.38   in_view_of 7 0 +       9.38   made_up          7 0 +       9.38   still_life              7 0 +       9.38   white_man        7 0 +       9.38   by_means_of   11 1 +       9.29   in_order_to     44 19 +       9.08   her_own          6 20 -       8.62   in_the_end      10 1 +       8.14   

Table 5 Comparison of the most frequently used multi-wordexpressions (MWEs) extracted automatically by Wmatrix

Table 6 below contains a summary of the main findings of the analysis of the two corpora

using Wmatrix supplemented by Concord in Wordsmith Tools when searching for word

clusters. All the Log Likelihood values refer to overuse or underuse of expressions by

the writers in Portac. The positive values of LL refer to overuse of such of expressions

while the negative values register underuse by the same writers.

overuse of nouns, articles, adjectives in Portac underuse of pronouns in Portac LL -394.98.underuse: he (LL -232), she (LL -104), him (LL -96), I (LL -39), me (LL -37), it (LL -25.74) overuse: we (39.41) and us (16.85) words ending *ion in Portac (LL 163) –icity (LL7.07)–ization (LL14.16)–ation (LL50.71) overuse of an (LL 18.65) overuse of the genitive, singular and plural (’s and s’) (LL 211.64), Of to express the same relationship (LL 34.03).underuse of subordinating conjunctions (LL -8.16) overuse of coordination (LL 26.17) that as a relative pronoun in Portac (LL 10.15)Evaluative that clauses (LL5.7)Overuse of reformulation markers (LL. 67.76)Table 6 Summary of main findings

DiscussionAll these features together make the English prose of Portuguese academics seem very

dense and abstract in relation to that of their native speaker counterparts, and this may

ultimately affect their chances of getting their work published. However, before looking

at solutions to this problem, let us first discuss possible reasons for these differences.

Although nominalization has been a central feature of English academic discourse

since the emergence of scientific writing in the 17 th century (see Halliday and Martin

1993; Martin & Veel 1998), there is evidence to suggest that the ‘historic drift towards

thinginess' (Halliday 1998:211) may have gone into reverse in recent years. Certainly,

public English generally seems to be becoming more 'conversational' and informal

(Fairclough 1994, 1997), and one of the ways in which this is manifested is by a new

preference for clausal structures above nominalizations (see Leech et al. 2001:294). It

could be the case that Portuguese academic writers are somewhat lagging behind in this

respect, reluctant to accompany such innovation or less able to respond to the trend.

If this were all there were to it, then the problem would seem to be easily solvable

through effective teaching, designed to raise L2 writers’ awareness of nominalization and

encourage a more clausal-based style. If, however, there are cultural reasons for the

markedly different style employed by Portuguese authors, as we suspect, the issue

becomes ideologically more complex.

It is reasonable to assume that many of the differences between Portac and

Controlit may be accounted for by a tendency on the part of Portuguese academics to

transfer stylistic and rhetorical features that are valued in their own culture into their

English writing. For example, the habit in Portuguese of using synonyms rather than

anaphoric pronouns to achieve textual cohesion (Mateus et al. 1989: 146) may contribute

to the generally low pronoun count in Portac. However, further analysis is needed to

substantiate these intuitions. To our knowledge, the relative frequencies of different

cohesive devices have not yet been systematically counted in either English or

Portuguese academic discourse. A corpus investigation of this area would provide a very

useful contribution to research in Contrastive Rhetoric and Translation Studies.

A similar process of L1 transfer may account for the frequent use of reformulation

markers. Cuenca (2003) concludes that academic writing in Spanish and Catalan displays

much more frequent use of reformulation markers than is found in English, and the

Portuguese approach to reformulation is likely to be much closer to Spanish and Catalan

than to English. Clearly, then, contrastive rhetoric research carried out on other Romance

languages might provide the student of Portuguese L1 and L2 writing with clues as to

which linguistic features to investigate.

Although it has not been possible to test for the presence in Portac of all the

differentiating discourse features identified by Bennett (2006, 2007a, 2007b), the findings

listed above would seem to point to the persistence of some Portuguese academic writing

conventions in these English texts. For example, the heavy nominalization not only

makes the prose sound more ‘learned’ and ‘literary’, it also has the effect of turning

contingent observations into abstractions, a quality that is reinforced by the prevalence of

polysyllabic Latinate words and lexical abstractions (i.e. nouns ending in -ion, -icity, -

ization). The long sentences and embedding structures reproduce the copiousness and

indirectness of Portuguese prose, while the proliferation of adjectives and appositional

structures also serve to ‘pad out’ the discourse, creating an impression of abundance.

Finally, the overuse of the first-person plural pronoun may be a direct transposition of the

Portuguese authorial ‘we’, used systematically even when the text has been penned by a

single author (as was the case with all the Portac texts) in the belief that this creates an

effect of modesty by implying collective rather than individual thought (Estrela et al.

2006:47; Eco, 1997:168)

ConclusionIf the differences between Portac and Controlit can indeed be explained by the intrusion

of Portuguese discourse features into the English prose produced by Portuguese

academics, this raises important questions of both a practical and an ideological nature.

Firstly, to what extent does this transfer jeopardize the chances of Portuguese academics

being published in international journals? We know that verbosity, unnecessary

complexity, abstraction and ‘pomposity’ are generally eschewed by arbitrators of style in

English academic prose; but are editors and referees aware that other cultures may value

these qualities differently? Would such an awareness alter their perception of the quality

of the work submitted and therefore affect the international status of the authors in

question?

Secondly, to what extent should texts like these be domesticated in order to bring

them into line with the Procrustean norms imposed by the hegemonic culture? Are

revisers, editors and proofreaders at liberty to erase or alter discourse features that

transmit value and are therefore profoundly bound up with questions of identity? Or

might this constitute a form of cultural imperialism, or even ‘epistemicide’ (Santos, 2005;

Bennett, 2007b), all the more insidious because it undermines the very conceptual

framework upon which the author’s worldview is based? And what of the alternative, the

‘palimpsest’, that allows the thought patterns of the original version to be glimpsed

beneath the surface structure? Can we guarantee that this will find a readership, even if it

gets past the editors and referees? It is, after all, so much more tiring for readers to

process sentences that do not fall in the way that one expects them to.

Corpus Linguistics may have a useful role to play in this debate. Communication

is now understood to be far more complex than theoretical notions of ‘standard English’

would have us believe, and there have already been moves towards adopting more

realistic language models within corpus-enabled learning environments. By raising

awareness of some of the differences existing between the discourses produced at the

centre and margins of the system (Kachru, 1988; Canagarajah, 2002), Corpus Linguistics

can make a useful contribution to work currently being pursued in fields such as Critical

Discourse Analysis and Ethnomethodology, where issues of value and power take centre

stage. Corpus tools may also be used by EAP teachers in the preparation of didactic

materials and by learners who wish to orient their own progress autonomously.

Hopefully, this will not only empower those on the periphery that wish to make their

voice heard, but also encourage the conservatives at the centre to question the basic

premises upon which the whole concept of Western knowledge is based.

In this paper, the reader may detect the tension between a top-down, theory-led

approach and a bottom-up, data-driven approach to discourse. The work began as an

attempt to see whether two different paradigms of linguistics could converge fruitfully on

the same issues. On the way, we were sometimes reminded of the Hedgehog and the Fox

(Berlin 1953). We leave it to the reader to decide who is who.

Endnotes

Available online at < http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix2.html>

1

2

2 Log Likelihood information and calculator available online at < http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/llwizard.html>

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John McKenny

John McKenny teaches at the Division of English Studies at the University of Nottingham, Ningbo China and is Head of the Centre for Research in Applied Linguistics, Ningbo. He previously worked as a Professor Adjunto at Viseu Polytechnic (Portugal) for twelve years and as Senior Lecturer at Northumbria University for five years.

His Ph.D. thesis at Leeds University was entitled A corpus-based investigation of the phraseology in various genres of written English with applications to the teaching of English for academic purposes. He is currently co-editing with Tometro Hopkins a volume entitled Englishes of the British Isles to be published this year by Continuum International. This book is the first of a 15-volume series on World Englishes.

Karen BennettKaren Bennett is a member of the Centre for Comparative Studies, University of Lisbon, where she researches in Translation Studies. Her PhD in English Academic Discourse: its hegemonic status and implications for translation (University of Lisbon) was based upon her extensive experience as translator and teacher of Academic Discourse with the Catholic University of Portugal, University of Coimbra, and elsewhere. She has published a number of articles on this subject and others, including ‘Galileo’s revenge: Ways of construing knowledge and translation strategies in the era of globalization’ in Social Semiotics, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2007), and ‘Epistemicide! The tale of a predatory discourse’ in The Translator, Vol. 13, No. 2, (2007).