DEFINING THE NOTION OF
SPECIALIZED DISCOURSE
1920s-1930s Prague school
gives attention to functional
style, which characterizes
scientific and technical
discourse. At first the
approach was c
CH.1
Defining the Notion of ‘Specialized Discourse’ Interest in specialized discourse dates
back to the early decades of linguistic investigation.1 In the 1920s-1930s, scholars
belonging to the Prague school turned their attention to the so-called ‘functional style’
which characterises scientific and technical discourse (cf. Fried 1972). At first, their
approach was conservative, since it tended to classify such discourse at a lower level,
totally separate from the language of everyday use. Scholars sought above all to
produce clear-cut defini- tions of the differences between specialized and general
discourse: Differences between current English and technical English can be found at
all linguistic levels and they manifest themselves in a different way both qualita- tively
and quantitatively. (Bares 1972:129) Yet the specific features of word morphology
(foreign words retaining their original plural suffix, obsolete forms of verbs and
adjectives) and formation (the use of typically classical prefixes, certain types of
nominal premodification) pointed out in those studies are not limited to scientific or
technical discourse, though they certainly occur more frequently and regularly in such
varieties. Research into the concept of ‘register’ published after the Second World War
attempted to identify the morphosyntactic, lexical and stylistic features that
characterise specialized discourse. Studies on register analysis were part of a wider
enquiry into language varie- ties – an enquiry inspired by a new perspective on
linguistic phenome- na. The transition from an uncontextualised view of language,
typical of the Chomskyan tradition, to its perception as a highly flexible means of
communication employed in...
CH. 2
Lexical Features of Specialized Discourse This chapter analyses the main lexical
features of specialized dis- course. In particular, it first reviews the findings of leading
