Specialized discourse – Chapter One
Interest towards “specialized discourse” has its roots in the first decade of linguistic exploration,
that is when Prague’s students, between the 20s and 30s, started to explore the question of the
“functional style”, that is the one characterizing scientific and technical essays.
At first they tended to classify those discourse in another level from the language of everyday use,
trying to make as clear definition as possible between those type of essays and the generic
conversations: differences between specialized English and generic English can be traced in each
level of the language, both in quantity and quality.
However, those features in morphology and formation aren’t foreclosed in specialized discourse,
here we can just find them more frequently.
After WWII, many researches on “register” started and they aim to clarify specialized discourse’s
features.
Those studies, besides, were part of something bigger, based on a new way of intend languages; in
those years, in fact, there’s the transition from Chomsky’s point of view of a decontextualized
language, to an innovative idea that watch at the language as a flexible instrument capable of
being adapted to every context. Specialized discourse, so, is implied into the situational-contextual
variety.
This insight dropped many taxonomies and typologies, trying to isolate each feature of every
situational variety; most of all, studies have focused their attention on the correlation between
the receiver and the kind of communication or social relationship established, while synchronic
varieties are shaped on geographical, social and situational factors; also, some sub-codes seem to
be at work.
British studies upon register focus primarily on specialized discourse, to better describe each
feature to diverge from generic language; particular attention is paid on the lexical analysis, of
course the feature best marked because of the nature of lexemes who, at times, are enough to
describe alone the register.
However, specialized discourse’s root is more than just a linear distinction, the mere identification
of such features isn’t enough as to reveal their background and it isn’t enough also to explain the
rationale under which they shaped.
Register analysis, though, helped the perspective change, from a statistical and quantitative
approach to a new qualitative one, I mean to identify a specialized text peculiarity across the
context it is surrounded by.
Over the past few years many books and articles tried to highlight the different disciplinary fields
in each one of the linguistic analysis, even if sometimes those classifications aren’t truthful; for
example, the research into specialized discourse phonetic, has been misguided due to the fact that
some speaker’s wrong pronunciation and comprehension of lexemes from classic or foreign texts
are caused by the low competences of those speakers.
Other times, instead, a determinate register analysis is based on other parameters, different from
those we are investigating; for example, the mistake done at the moment of define the legal
language status through non-linguistic terms such as the number of users and its acquisition
modalities.
It also happens that to specialized discourses are assigned some features not characterizing them
as subsystems but as varieties coming from others factors inside its socio-linguistic scenario, such
as, for example, the omission of contracted forms in English specialized discourse, due to its
formal variety implied in written texts.
However, different varieties can coexist in the same text, the most important thing is not to create
misleading.
