IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION, VOL. 48, NO.
3, SEPTEMBER 2005 337
Maurizio Gotti
Specialized Discourse: Linguistic Features and Changing
Conventions
Book Review
—Reviewed by
RAMESH K. MISHRA
Index Terms—Genre, linguistic analysis, specialized discourse.
S pecialized discourses have been the focus of
serious linguistic studies for over a century because
of their unique lexico-semantic, pragmatic, and
sociolinguistic identity. In a fast-moving world
of commerce and economics that has also seen
rapid increases in communication technologies,
discourse patterns between any two communicators
are becoming increasingly specialized. They are
specialized from a theoretical point of view because
they have to be diagnosed and their inner structures
examined with available theories. But theoretical
consensus among scholars on their true nature has
not been reached yet; therefore, there are many
controversies.
Gotti’s Specialized Discourse: Linguistic Features and
Changing Convention is an introduction to the various
theoretical aspects of different types of specialized
discourse with an attempt to bring clarity to the
subject’s basic tenets. The target audiences may be
academics and professionals involved in the study of
specialized discourse who want a concise introduction
to all major concepts. Additional audiences include
students in cultural studies or linguistics. The book’s
simple language and wide coverage of fascinating
topics make it an approachable text on the subject.
The author has based the analysis on several types
of specialized corpora collected, thus making easy
theoretical comparisons for the reader. There are 15
chapters in the book divided into several units; the
book also includes an appendix, references, and an
index.
The introductory chapter explains the various
features of specialized discourse. What makes any
type of specialized discourse important for any serious
Manuscript received May 11, 2005; revised May 15, 2005.
The reviewer is with the Department of Speech Pathology,
All India Institute of Speech and Hearing,
Mysore-6, Karnataka, India (email: rkm_du@yahoo.co.in).
IEEE DOI 10.1109/TPC.2005.853946
Book Publisher: Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2003, 351 pp.
with index.
0361-1434/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE
analysis is its theoretical importance and linguistic
uniqueness. Sociolinguistic frameworks have been
used mostly to examine the sociological layers of
a particular technical domain and its discourse.
The controversy regarding the true definition of a
specialized discourse compared to mere varieties of a
particular speech type is a complex business. Still,
there is no set of rules that is helpful in determining
that a particular type of discourse is specialized
in nature. Gotti clarifies this issue, taking the
position in support of a more rigid and linguistically
oriented methodology, partly dominated by the
ideas of the Hallidayan School. According to him,
such terminology as “restricted languages,” “special
languages,” or “micro languages” do not adequately
explain specialized discourses in light of evidence
emerging from recent empirical corpus-based
research. These issues are clarified by the author to
achieve constancy in operational terms. The great
amount of heterogeneity in the textual construction
of specialized discourse makes it difficult to arrive at
any single analysis. Matters are further complicated
by differences in discourse topics and numbers of
participants. Gotti offers a detailed account of general
features of specialized discourses and fits them in his
overall analysis framework.
Chapter 2 then focuses on the various components of
lexical features found in specialized discourse. Gotti
first reviews earlier studies and then discusses each
notion with examples. Lexical systems of specialized
discourses are more diversified and more complex
than regular language, a point that Gotti illustrates
with suitable examples.
The issue of syntactic features of several types
of specialized discourse is taken up in chapter
3. Syntax has been the most prominent level of
linguistic analysis in the transformational-generative
framework. And this level contributes significantly
toward the overall textual uniqueness of any
discourse. The author believes that an in-depth
analysis of the various syntactic components in a text
will increase our understanding. The author explains
338 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION, VOL. 48, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2005
ten different types of syntactic phenomena that are
specific to different types of specialized discourses.
He argues that these features can help identify a
particular pattern of discourse. These syntactic
features are all found in ordinary everyday language.
But in the case of specialized discourse corpora from
different genres, their individual presence differs. This
chapter is very clear in focus and highly readable.
Chapter 4, on textual features, has a similar structure
as the previous two chapters. Gotti explains all ten
textual features clearly and, most importantly, by
using excerpts from suitable texts. The author shows
great skill in making argumentative comparisons
between any two types of discourse pieces to make
things transparent.
After this extensive coverage of the fundamentals
of specialized discourse as an important area of
serious inquiry, the author discusses the historical
background in the next section. Individual chapters
look into the development of specialized discourse
in the seventeenth century, specialized terms
in “hard word” dictionaries, lexical choices in a
Galilean translation, and specialized neologisms in
the chemist Boyle’s writings. These chapters are
independent in their organization, but the author has
skillfully organized them to maintain overall thematic
symmetry. An excellent use of historical records and
anecdotes makes these chapters a pleasure to read.
The historico-analytical method used to investigate
the past of specialized discourse gives the reader
specific insight for further reading.
The origins of historical essays are the subject matter
of chapter 9. The author briefly writes of Francis
Bacon as the first practitioner of the experimental
essay form in fifteenth-century Britain before
explaining the many theoretical components of any
modern experimental written text. The next chapter
is on Malthus and the textual aspects of language
used by economists, followed by another chapter
on rhetoric and the language of economics. Here
McCloskey’s rhetorical categories are reviewed. This
is a small chapter that could have been joined with
the earlier one. The following three chapters elaborate
on the formation of lexis as used in computer science,
focusing on the special language SEASPEAK and the
language of popularization. The last chapter is the
conclusion.
In all of these, Gotti painstakingly covers a very wide
range of important theoretical concepts related to
specialized discourse and is successful in making the
reading easy and pleasurable. This book gives a very
clear idea of the subject matter, making it suitable for
use in the classroom. In addition, the independent
structure of each chapter means that the chapters
can be read in a nonsequential manner. All in all,
Specialized Discourse is a very helpful addition to the
literature on that topic.