Discourse communities

One of the most popular notions of community in professional writing is ‘discourse community’ as developed by Swales (Reference Swales1990). As the expansion of its conceptual predecessor, ‘speech community’, developed by Hymes (Reference Hymes, Gumperz and Hymes1972), it differs, Swales argues, in at least three aspects. First, a community is not constructed by oral speech only but by a whole range of semiotic resources, including of course written language. Second, a discourse community is sociorhetorical instead of sociolinguistic – that is, the functional aspect of language in binding a group of people. In other words, people come together because of certain shared goals, forming some specific patterns that characterize this particular community, whereas a speech community is a reversed pattern. People who share certain linguistic features tend to associate themselves with a particular community. The last major difference is that a discourse community is centrifugal – that is, it classifies people into groups – whereas speech communities are centripetal and therefore ‘tend to absorb people into the general fabric’ (Swales Reference Swales1990: 24). After all, a speech community has been conceptualized as ‘a community sharing rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech, and rules for the conduct and interpretation of at least one speech variety’ (Hymes Reference Hymes, Gumperz and Hymes1972: 54, my italics). Examples of discourse communities include membership by ‘persuasion, training or a relevant qualification’ whereas speech communities include members by ‘birth, accident or adoption’ (Swales Reference Swales1990: 24). In other words, a speech community is ‘rule-based’ and a discourse community is ‘persuasion-based’. Swales is certainly right in pointing out this distinction, which could be said to be the most important argument for a community. People are symbol-loving animals who like to claim membership of a community. The traditional ‘rule-based’ idea of speech communities is too narrow to be useful to the postmodern society, which is increasingly reliant on recognition of individual rights and membership.

Swales continued to define a discourse community in terms of six characteristics:

1. A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.

2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.

3. A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.

4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.

5. In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis.

6. A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise.

While Swales is certainly correct in identifying some salient features of a profession-oriented grouping for teaching or pedagogical purposes, he overlooks many important insights that are central to the function of a community. One of the most important criticisms is levelled against its broad-brush or oversimplistic assumption of integration and harmony in a community. As Canagarajah (Reference Canagarajah2002) notes, discourse communities ‘don’t consider sources of internal tension in the community … [and] have a bias toward a post-hoc orientation, perceiving the communities after they have been formed rather than considering the processes by which they come to be constituted’ (64). Originally intended for English for Specific Purposes practitioners whose targets are mainly second or foreign learners of English, the concept of discourse community does have attractive appeal because of its post-hoc explanation of language features to a novice who wants to get into a profession. But an over-emphasis on harmony within the group and between different communities can be said to be a fatal weakness of this concept.

The distinction between novice and expert is obscurely found in his definition of genre: ‘[communicative] purposes are recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse communities’ (Swales Reference Swales1990: 58). First, who can be regarded as experts? Someone who is an expert in a field may be an outsider in terms of language use. Take the example of a French scientist who does not speak English or have any knowledge of publishing in English scientific journals. Second, how to draw the line between novice and expert? Years of experience or purely academic qualifications? Obviously these are not a concern at all to Swales because he is only interested in showing a complete novice how to get into a discourse community which is assumed to be a ‘homogenous’ English-speaking community.

Profession’s struggle for hegemony

The danger of an over-positive tone evoked by the word ‘community’ was raised as early as the 1970s by Williams (Reference Williams1976: 66):

It is hence dangerous to assume community members are static and homogenous and even more so to assume communities exist in isolation from one another. In this book, the word ‘community’ is only used in a metaphorical sense to refer to a group of people who are coming together for a particular issue or interest (cf. Gee Reference Gee2012) and who can have as many differences as similarities. Likewise, Eubanks (Reference Eubanks2011) precisely notes the metaphorical nature of community and other terms used in analysis of professional written discourse: ‘Scholars in writing studies have vigorously endorsed such metaphors as discourse community, contact zones, and rhetorical spaces … [but they have] not based those evaluations on a systematic examination of the broad constellation of figures that shape people’s ideas about writing or the rhetorical patterns that guide their use’ (2–3). He goes on to argue that those terms, inherent from the concept of ‘conduit metaphor’ (language as an unproblematic and transparent vehicle of human thoughts), have their problems and limitations.

In this book, with its emphasis on interrelationship between professional discourses, the issue of struggle between communities for hegemony is obviously more relevant to our discussion. Since community is a post-hoc construct, it is too easy to fall into the trap of misinterpreting inter-community behaviour as separate and unrelated, without enough understanding of the ‘historical life of communities – that is how they are formed, build up, break, and diversify’ (Canagarajah Reference Canagarajah2002: 65). This is in line with Bourdieu’s (Reference Bourdieu1989) argument of profession as a space of competition. The classification of any profession is based on some forms or rules of abstraction and generalization, resulting in neutralization of potential differences. In his words, ‘The category of profession refers to realities that are, in a sense, “too real” to be true, since it grasps at once a mental category and a social category, socially produced only by superseding or obliterating all kinds of economic, social and ethnic differences and contradictions which make the “profession” … a space of competition and struggle’ (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1989: 37–8). Analysis of any profession and its writing should hence be situated in terms of this struggle for hegemony or ‘the social work of construction of the category must be undone and analyzed’ (38).

Professional competition for hegemony is best seen in the maintenance and expansion of disciplinary knowledge. Most disciplines will develop ideas and concepts in which other disciplines will find validity and usefulness. The dilemma is that professions desire their own knowledge to be reproduced, but at the same time they claim originality and power of interpretation so that their disciplinary status can be maintained, or, as Canagarajah (Reference Canagarajah2002) puts it, they ‘desire that new discourses be constructed only according to their own terms and conditions’ (67). Foucault (Reference Foucault1972, as cited in Canagarajah Reference Canagarajah2002: 225) highlights this dilemma well by calling this knowledge paradox ‘fraternities of discourse’ whose ‘function is to preserve or to reproduce discourse, but in order that it should circulate within a closed community, according to strict regulations, without those in possession being dispossessed by this very distribution’ .

Defined as ‘spaces of dissention’ (Foucault Reference Foucault1972: 152), professional discourse is full of contradictions and disharmony, as Foucault argues that ‘discursive formation is not, therefore, an ideal, continuous, smooth text that runs beneath the multiplicity of contradictions … [It] is rather a space of multiple dissension’ (155). This underscores the reason for Bourdieu to define a profession as a ‘field’ which is ‘a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions objectively defined in their existence and in the determinations they impose upon their occupants, agents or institutions’ (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1989: 39). The advantage of this approach is that it can examine professional discourse as a result of the relational negotiation of knowledge of different disciplines. According to Bourdieu, the analysis of a field has to apply the following steps:

In the eyes of Bourdieu, the relational play of power and the resulting dispositions to act accordingly should be factored in any analysis of any profession because professions or professional discourses are the result of how individuals react to power relations and how they take stances. As he argues,

The emphasis by Bourdieu on stances and dispositions to act in position-taking is interesting, complementing well the idea of professions as spaces of dissention. The contested nature of knowledge and disharmony in professions is best illustrated by a new profession that has to draw on existing knowledge of other established professions. A good example can be found in a relatively new profession called philosophical counselling or philosophical practice, which developed as a discipline from philosophy partly as a reaction against the dominance of psychology in the counselling field. According to the preamble of the National Philosophical Counseling Association (NPCA)’s Standards of Practice, ‘a philosophical practitioner helps clients to clarify, articulate, explore and comprehend philosophical aspects of their belief systems or world views … Clients may consult philosophical practitioners for help in exploring philosophical problems related to such matters as mid-life crises, career changes, stress, emotions, assertiveness, physical illness, death and dying, aging, meaning of life, and morality’ (ASPCP 2012). The profession started to evolve into its current form when the American Philosophical Practitioners Association was founded by Lou Marinoff in 1998.

Based on the Socratic belief and method, a philosophical counsellor engages in activities such as:

From the list, it appears that the activities conducted by a philosophical counsellor are not very different from the usual practices of psychotherapists or counsellors with training in psychology, although the focus is more on the use of clients’ own reasoning and use of ‘philosophical theories’. The new profession is aware of this and hence continues in its Standards of Practice to claim that although philosophical counselling shares many of the concerns of other helping professions, it is defined by ‘the performance of distinctively philosophical activities for which philosophical practitioners have uniquely been educated and trained’ (ASPCP 2012). Someone may doubt if the use of distinct activities alone is justification for calling it a new profession, which is exactly the concern of psychotherapy, a profession with a much longer history and, more importantly, with a much stronger back-up because of its conceptual and theoretical alignments with the scientific sovereignty of psychiatry and psychology. In 2007, with the initiative of the British government, the Health Professions Council (HPC) made proposals to regulate the use of titles such as ‘counsellor’ and ‘psychotherapist’ in order to ‘protect’ the interests of the general public. According to the proposal, no one could carry or use the title unless the he or she had a psychology qualification. This initiative resulted in a heated debate and of course the resentment of philosophical counsellors, who insisted on the generic use of the term ‘counselling’ and that no profession could claim its specific use: ‘counseling is an activity rather than a profession’ (Brown Reference Brown2010: 549). By using semantic analysis of the term ‘counselling’, Brown could show that the term does not have a unique connotation with psychology and argued that ‘the interpretation of the term rests on a confusion of sense and reference, a widespread misunderstanding, a failure to acknowledge the limits of an occupational dialect, biased heuristics, and ignorance of linguistic modifiers’ (564). Because of strong resentment from some interested parties, the proposal for regulation of the title has not yet been successful.

Although Brown (Reference Brown2010) successfully made his case, his analysis also undercuts the authority of philosophical counselling as a professional discipline that distinguishes itself from others. If philosophical counselling is not based on any specific techniques that make it unique, how does it stand out compared with other forms of counselling? In fact, as pointed out earlier, philosophical counsellors justify, in their Standards of Practice, their uniqueness by their predominantly philosophical activities. Nevertheless, if one looks at how they do counselling, one would not be able to find any ‘unique’ philosophical activities. The following is an email to a philosophical counsellor and his response:

After reading the response to the puzzled client, one may wonder what makes philosophical counselling unique apart from quoting from a well-known philosopher. Is the use of philosophical quotes or principles alone sufficient to claim the emergence of a new profession? In fact, the Socratic method (‘keep challenging someone’s reasoning’), as advocated by philosophical counselling, has long been practised by law schools in the United States and has been recently criticized for being too biased from the perspective of the challenger (the law profession or philosophical counsellor) and for ignoring the interactional aspects of problem-solving (Gee Reference Gee2012). Another example of the contested practice of philosophical counselling is found in their case reports in which a client’s case is described and argued. Basically a philosophical counsellor follows a rather rigid format in reporting his or her cases (Mehuron Reference Mehuron2009: 492):

1. Relevant history;

2. Nature of problem or process;

3. Method (if any) and heuristic for selection;

4. Philosophical idea(s) that were helpful;

5. Main philosophical issue;

6. How the main issue was managed or resolved;

7. Other relevant issues or observations;

8. Relations to theory or case literature extant.

The following shows how a philosophical counsellor describes his client in the section called ‘Nature of problem or process’:

While this genre of report can delineate a case in a very systematic way, it is also constrained by its structural limitations to report a case in a narrowly defined way, which is exactly the basis on which philosophical counselling is critical of other mainstream counselling activities based on psychology. The philosophical counselling reports are very similar to the reports written by psychology-trained counsellors, clinical psychologists or even psychiatrists. This is an interesting issue as there are many ways of ‘doing’ philosophy, such as aphorisms, dialogues, or even poems (Peters Reference Peters2009). Why is the rigidly structured report format finally chosen as the best way of representing a client’s problem and the solutions to solve it? This is to a large extent related to the prestige of symbolic forms that have acquired certain status through prolonged use, resulting in what has been described by Foucault (Reference Foucault1972) as spaces of dissention or, to be more precise, ‘symbols of dissention’. According to Foucault, a one-sided report is a kind of ‘doctrinal adherence’, which ‘involves both speaker and the spoken, the one through the other … by the rules of exclusion and the rejection mechanism’ (226). While philosophical counselling challenges the social scientific paradigm of pathologizing human behaviour, for Foucault the problem with many philosophical writings is that their discourse cannot avoid the trap of ‘proposing an ideal truth as a law of discourse, and an immanent rationality as the principle of their behaviour’ (227).

Shared functions instead of shared goals

Another problem with the notion of discourse community is its reliance on recognition of a ‘broadly agreed set of common public goals’ as one of the criteria. Although this is mitigated by some pre-modifiers – ‘broadly agreed’ and ‘common’ – it is still difficult to identify the common goals of a group of people who may be working towards different goals. Goals are, after all, ‘mental representations of speech participants’ (van Dijk Reference van Dijk1998: 218) and cannot be easily identified for a group of people. As we argued above, a community is always marked by struggle for hegemony. In fact, this struggle can also characterize what happens within a community – the struggle for power and dominance among community members themselves. Although we can identify some ‘broadly agreed goals’ of a professional community, they are at most ideal ways of doing and seeing things and they shed little light on what participants are actually doing in their job. Instead it is perhaps more appropriate to replace goals with functions which are social instead of mental representations: as van Dijk argues, ‘social actors as group members may of course have ideological representations of the functions of their discursive practices. Thus journalists may see their newswriting as serving as a watchdog of society, professors their research as establishing the truth, and judges their judgments as doing justice’ (Reference van Dijk1998: 216).

In proposing an alternative model of community known as ‘community of practice’, Wenger (Reference Wenger1998) argues there are three key constituting components of a community: mutual engagement, shared enterprise and a shared repertoire. Mutual engagement is that people come together to engage in some activities. Shared enterprise is the source of a community’s coherence. Lastly, shared repertoire is a collection of symbols and practices that creates the coherence. In conceptualizing the concept, Wenger is aware of the pitfalls of relying on goals as the criterion of identifying a community. He begins with ‘mutual engagement’ as a starting point and highlights the fact that people come to form a community not necessarily out of a shared goal but out of a shared need to perform some jobs or activities. This is more in line with the current view of our identity as the result of social practice (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1989). Instead of using such ambiguous notions such as ‘goal’, Wenger (Reference Wenger1998: 77–8) proposes ‘joint enterprise’ which has the following characteristics:

1. It is the result of a collective process of negotiation that reflects the full complexity of mutual agreement.

2. It is defined by the participants in the very process of pursuing it. It is their negotiated response to their situation and thus belongs to them in a profound sense, in spite of all the forces and influences that are beyond their control.

3. It is not just a stated goal, but also creates among participants relations of mutual accountability that become an integral part of the practice.

In fact, Wenger argues that any publicly shared goals are not useful if they are not shared by members themselves. This argument is certainly valid and requires more ethnographic analysis of how participants make sense of themselves and of what they are doing in the process. Gee (Reference Gee2007), nevertheless, argues that the three components of community of practice (mutual engagement, shared enterprise and a shared repertoire) are not equally important, but that mutual engagement is the most important. Mutual engagement, as Gee goes on to argue, is any social location where people interact in a particular environment, and hence is better rephrased as ‘affinity space’ which can be simply a virtual setting. In ‘affinity space’, people come together because of a shared interest instead of a vaguely defined goal. Gee emphasizes that shared goals or even negotiated ones are too ambiguous in the analysis of a community and should be replaced by an emphasis on what people are doing instead of the previous focus on membership of community. Gee also argues that portals should be added to the understanding of any community and are defined as ‘anything that gives access to the content and to ways of interacting with that content by oneself or with other people’ (Reference Gee2007: 94). This is particularly the case in our networked society in which the more portals you have, the more powerful you are in disseminating information and hence in recruiting members to your community.

In brief, the reliance on goals as an identification criterion of community membership, regardless of whether the goals are shared or negotiated, can be problematic. Perhaps a more reliable approach would be to come up with a set of shared functions of a professional community which are basically the recognized roles attached to a certain professional group in a society; however, emphasis should be placed on the activities and ideologies that a professional is pursuing, and this point will be discussed below.

Community as defined by activities instead of language conventions

The main argument of Swales (Reference Swales1990) is that a shared goal of a community will somehow affect how a community develops language forms and conventions, which in the long run will affect how the participants in a community see themselves and perform their activities in pursuing their goals. This argument, though convincing on the surface, oversimplifies the complex interactions of activities, individual goals and language. First, the relationship is too linear and ignores the interrelationship between language and identity. Second, language forms are given a static role, ignoring the dynamic functions of language in shaping and negotiating reality. For example, one language form can be used to perform different language functions or activities. Third, as argued above, goals are problematic and are nothing more than mental representations of individuals in pursuing certain actions. Can we simply claim that a profession or an institution is the sum of all individuals working there? Who should be counted and how?

As argued by writing scholars inspired by the various practice theorists (e.g., Vygostoky and Bourdieu), a community is not organized by the writings that members produce but by the activities in which they are involved. In fact, activity plays a very important role in the sociocultural view of literacy, influenced by ideas from social thinkers such as Vygotsky and Luria. Activity in sociocultural theory is encapsulated as follows: ‘Motives are only realized in specific actions that are goal directed (hence, intentional and meaningful) and carried out under particular spatial and temporal conditions (or what has been referred to as operations) and through appropriate meditational means’ (Lantolf Reference Lantolf and Lantolf2000: 8). In brief, an activity consists of motives, actions, conditions and means. In this perspective, identities we want to create and negotiate will be the motives realized by some specific actions through linguistic and non-linguistic means. In other words, this sociocultural view of action puts language as the means to an end instead of the traditional view that we acquire language as the ultimate goal. This makes more sense since we do not acquire language for the sake of acquiring it.

Two important implications are raised. First, the dichotomy of language and functions is misleading because language as a meditational means is not just used to serve a specific function such as requesting or making a statement, but is also used to perform an activity such as negotiating a deal with a client or constructing or negotiating a particular identity to support this deal. In other words, one can make a command in a certain situation because one is endowed with the authority to do so. A command uttered by someone not in power would backfire because it does not fulfil certain felicitous conditions (Austin Reference Austin1975). In other words, the traditional focus on language as the realization of functions should instead be thought of as the realization of activities and identities. Language functions such as requesting or complaining are just micro-realizations of the broader activities and should not be treated as the ultimate goals of language learning. Second, any learning should focus on simulating and cultivating the conditions of the desired working environment as closely as possible. The conditions that Vygosky (Reference Vygostky2012) mainly refers to are material operations such as venue and time and should be extended to include mental operations such as attitudinal and dispositional elements, or what Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1992) calls the ‘habitus’, which refers to some values, dispositions and expectations that someone is expected to possess in a particular community. These values and dispositions can only be acquired through participation in the relevant activities involved in a community and cannot be effectively taught through direct teaching. Activity hence would be the key of practice-based learning instead of the traditional focus on language functions. Language would not have any role to play if it is not situated in a concrete activity (including mental ones).

In a study of workplace communication, it was found that genres and other traditional resources were used to enact the power dynamics of a community (Levina and Orlikowski Reference Levina and Orlikowski2008). For example, not everyone in a group can call for a brainstorming meeting, the initiating action of which signals the power status of a decision maker, underscoring the fact that any language or symbolic resources are just means of getting something done rather than the ultimate goals. However, of course they are not natural means but are endowed with power and ideologies. By using those resources, someone also automatically accepts those values and even acquires them as a way of being. In sum, a community is not defined by some rigid language conventions as argued by Swales (Reference Swales1990), but by the common, recurrent activities of a group. By engaging themselves in those activities, members rely on the use of meditational means including language, and through those means also develop some disposition and attitudes towards a group.

Role of knowledge in professions

Besides taking an oversimplified view of members’ intentions, Swales’ (Reference Swales1990) notion of discourse communities does not take any knowledge (personal, social or professional) into consideration and presupposes the prominent role of language conventions as if people were just dupes doing what others are doing, unless they are expert members. It is argued that everyone, regardless of his or her background and experience, will bring along some knowledge when they are participating in any activity. Of course, all knowledge is subject to change and negotiation. Also, the knowledge of an experienced member will be different from that of a novice and is exactly what we want to study and simulate for training purposes. This is another reason why many professional communities, especially academic ones, are specialized in the production of knowledge; hence knowledge is an important component that cannot be ignored in the conceptualization of any professional community.

Van Dijk (Reference van Dijk2003) argues that there are five properties of knowledge, or what he calls the typology of knowledge:

1. Kind: declarative versus procedural knowledge;

2. Scope: personal versus social knowledge;

3. Ontology: abstract versus concrete;

4. Reference: general versus specific(or specialized) knowledge;

5. Strength: beliefs versus knowledge.

The taxonomy is not intended to be a system of discrete items. Declarative knowledge – that is, ‘knowing that’ – tends to be more abstract and decontextualized, whereas procedural knowledge – that is, ‘knowing how’ – tends to be more concrete and contextualized. Also, the two poles in each category are not absolute and are marked by their continuum in a scale. A novice may rely more on his or her general knowledge accessible to the lay public before specific knowledge of a profession can be acquired. Professional knowledge can also become general knowledge after it has entered the knowledge base of the general public. Some properties can be further divided. For example, social knowledge can be subdivided into interpersonal, group and common group knowledge.

What concerns us most here is obviously the specific knowledge that helps professionals to make sense of what is going on in their activities – that is, how specific knowledge is produced and reproduced. As already mentioned, some professional communities such as academia are also aimed at producing specific knowledge. Van Dijk (Reference van Dijk2003) argues that all kinds of specialized knowledge have the following universal characteristics or representations:

1. Structures or composition (x is composed of y);

2. Form (x has the form of y);

3. Composition (x is made of y);

4. Function (x has the function of x, y, z);

5. Naming (x is called y);

6. Knowledge about abbreviations (x is abbreviated as y);

7. Conceptual hierarchies and simplifications (x is simply y).

Current research of professional discourse with a predominant focus on its social dimensions seems to overlook the role of professional knowledge in shaping discourse, as well as the role of language in shaping such knowledge in professional discourse. Some notable recent exceptions are the studies of technical definitions in authentic discourse (Flowerdew Reference Flowerdew1992; Pearson Reference Pearson1998). For example, Flowerdew (Reference Flowerdew1992) identifies the syntactic structure of formal definitions (NOUN + copula + NOUN with relative clause) and semi-formal definitions (NOUN + copula + NOUN without relative clauses). By the same token, MacDonald (Reference MacDonald2002) argues that different forms of professional discourse in medicine (e.g., research articles, textbooks and doctor–patient interviews) tend to be shaped by different verbal process types. These linguistic features are generic symbolic resources open to use and reproduction, conferring a range of status and values across different professions instead of features owned by certain professions.

In summary the concept of discourse community is too restricted and problematic because many communities are not defined by their conventions or by the language alone. What define a community are usually the activities, membership, assumptions and, above all, the symbolic ways of using language to signal all these.

A symbolic community is defined as a meaningful group or social network with shared membership, knowledge, ideology, values, interpersonal positions, activities and resources. These are constructed or mediated by symbolic resources including language, which can be used to identify and socialize a person as a member of the group. It is called ‘symbolic’ for two reasons: first, the term ‘community’ is used just symbolically to refer to a social group because there are both centripetal and centrifugal forces within any social group. In other words, neither harmony nor confrontation describes a community adequately. Second, a community, from ideology to activity, is constructed through language and other symbolic means. It is grounded on the assumption that language itself is a symbolic device. For example, a certain qualification or experience allows someone to carry a professional title. Taken from another angle, the use of such a professional title can signify and establish someone’s identity or membership of the profession. All these arguments are of course further grounded on the inherently symbolic nature of language: its indeterminacy, arbitrariness and free-floatingness. This is what we mean by symbolic relationship.

The following is a checklist of questions one has to address when identifying and analysing a profession as a symbolic community (see Figure 2.1):

1. Ideological dimensions:

   1. What are the basic assumptions (or ideologies) that ground the profession?

1. Social dimensions:

   1. What qualifies as membership of this profession? What are the mechanisms of socialization?

   2. What kinds of attributes (e.g., expertise, years of experience, ranking, trust, interpersonal skills, personal attributes) are important for communicating in this profession?

   3. What kind of power positions and connections describe the relationship between (1) the professionals themselves, (2) the professionals and other professionals, and (3) the professionals and the public?

1. Cognitive dimensions:

   1. What kind of knowledge is important in the profession? How is knowledge obtained – through learning or acquisition or both? What is the role of discourse in acquiring and representing professional knowledge? What is the role of knowledge in shaping the discourse?

1. Logistic dimensions:

   1. What are the key activities of the profession in question?

   2. What are the resources and portals of the profession?

Figure 2.1 Different dimensions of professional discourse

These questions will reappear in different forms in the following chapters but they also constitute a useful initial checklist for researchers wishing to analyse the contextual dimensions of any profession. It should be also noted that the checklist can be used to examine any communities, not necessarily professional communities alone.

Conclusion

Identification of the key contextual dimensions is indispensable to any analysis of any situated discourse. By criticizing a number of the current notions of profession as a closed system, this chapter has also delineated not only the ideological and social dimensions but also the cognitive and logistic dimensions of language in shaping a profession. An alternative notion – symbolic community – is proposed. The most problematic aspect of the existing notions of community is that they take the relationship between language and community as something transparent. For example, the notion of discourse community is too narrow and constrained by the over-emphasis on the role of language conventions on shaping a community and membership. The fact is, there is no inherent relationship between language and its membership, as Corder argued decades ago about language and context: ‘there is no one-to-one relation between a class of speech acts and the grammatical form of an utterance, and … it appears that almost any utterance can have almost any function in some context and situation’ (Reference Corder1973: 42). Any attempt at linking language to a particular community will fail because language is used only symbolically or indexically to signal membership and a community does not own a linguistic feature per se. Any linguistic features are in flux and can be borrowed, rejected and reshaped. This chapter has argued for the need to expand the current focus of professional discourse as a unique rendering of certain linguistic features, in order to consider the wider role of language and discourse in shaping and reproducing professional knowledge and ideology. Many linguistic features are shared across professions instead of being owned by any of them. The generic features of professional discourse and their symbolic roles should be returned to the spotlight after many attempts over the years to identify the unique features of professional registers. In the following chapters, the symbolic functions of language are highlighted in different ways. For example, in Chapter 3, which deals with the ideology of two professions, law and medicine, the ways of mentioning participants (both animate and non-animate) are taken as the symbolic resources of representing professional ideologies. Chapter 4 deals with the importance of an often-ignored aspect of competence in professional communication, symbolic competence – that is, the ability to use language in relation to its association with the underlying values, modalities and identities. In Chapter 5, a model of indexical meaning will be proposed, dealing with the subtle connections between language and identities. In Chapter 8, the notion of genre will be revisited by situating genre in the narrative activity chain of professional discourse and seeing language symbolically as episodes of narration. Other chapters also examine symbolic uses of language, though in a more indirect manner.