Critical Discourse Studies

ISSN: 1740-5904 (Print) 1740-5912 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcds20

Critical genre analysis: investigating

interdiscursive performance in professional
practice

Hongwei Zhan & Sihong Huang

To cite this article: Hongwei Zhan & Sihong Huang (2018) Critical genre analysis: investigating
interdiscursive performance in professional practice, Critical Discourse Studies, 15:2, 206-209, DOI:
10.1080/17405904.2017.1405052

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2017.1405052

Published online: 20 Nov 2017.

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206 BOOK REVIEWS

The Discourse of Neoliberalism is a timely and thoughtful text, arriving at a political moment
when resistance to the violence of neoliberalization is as relevant as ever.

Note
1. In the first chapter, Springer rolls these two views into one (24). In the next chapter, he expli-
cates them separately, but in very similar terms (38).

Patrick McGowan
University of Washington
[email protected]
© 2017 Patrick McGowan
https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2017.1418400

Critical genre analysis: investigating interdiscursive performance in professional

practice, by Vijay K. Bhatia, London and New York, Routledge, 2017, 220 pp., 12 illus.,
$105.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-138-91529-9

Language use is the interaction between text and context, and discourse analysis is the under-
taking of grounding the textual patterns within the context. Various approaches of discourse
analysis differ in terms of what they constitute as context and how far they go into context
along the interface of text and context. Critical Genre Analysis: Investigating interdiscursive per-
formance in professional practice, is the latest contribution to genre analysis and as the title
suggests, it aims at demystifying border-crossing discourses by bridging the gap between aca-
demics and professionals, with a focus on discursive performances in professions.
This book is a further development of the author’s previous work and maintains his central
view that ‘communication is not simply a matter of putting words together in a grammatically
correct and rhetorically coherent textual form, … it is a matter of understanding “why
members of a specific disciplinary community communicate the way they do”’ (Bhatia, 1993,
2004; cited in Bhatia, 2017, p. 4). This view explains the crucial role of context in the analyses
in this book.
The book consists of four parts, the first two of which are devoted to theoretical framework
of genre analysis, while the second half attends to practical applications of the theory.
The author frames the issue of professional communication by pointing out that in conven-
tional genre analysis, very little attention is ‘paid to the ultimate outcomes of the genre-based
discursive activities, which centrally contribute to academic, institutional, organizational, and
professional activities or practices that are invariably non-discursive’ (p. 21). In other words, dis-
courses are the means to achieve the non-discursive purposes.
The theoretical framework is mainly drawn from Bhatia (2004), and is worked into three
chapters (Chapters 2, 3, and 4), each dedicated to a key concept in genre theory: criticality,
interdiscursivity, and multiperspective-multidimensional analysis.
The author extends criticality to ‘a rigorous intellectual analysis to demystify social and insti-
tutional actions’ (p. 23), after reviewing the development of critical theory, which is associated
with various schools of thoughts: Frankfurt School of Sociology, critical social theory, herme-
neutics, literary criticism and CDA. Using the term ‘demystifying’ instead of ‘critical analysis’
 CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDIES 207

might cause confusion among the readership who have critical notions of CDA in mind. Critical
analysis has meant ideological deconstruction and critique in CDA hence such readership
might expect to see similar understandings when encountering a title such as ‘critical genre
analysis’.
The author elaborates on the notion of interdiscursivity by identifying two fields of semiotic
resources: text-internal and text-external. While intertextuality focuses on the interrelationship
between and across texts, appropriating text-internal resources and constraints, interdiscursiv-
ity refers to ‘more innovative attempts to create various forms of hybrid and relatively novel
constructs by appropriating or exploiting established convention or resources associated
with other genres and professional practices’ (p. 35). In short, generic hybridity (e.g advertorial
as the blending of advertisement and editorial) results from appropriating various semiotic
resources, especially text-external ones.
Text-external semiotic resources, as the name suggests, are out of the text and more deeply
connected with the context. Three types of text-external semiotic resources are identified:
1. Discursive practices, 2. Professional practices, and 3. Professional cultures (cf. Bhatia, 2004).
Each category subsumes some specific constraints as detailed on page 38.
Bhatia’s genre analysis is a multi-purposed, multidimensional and multiperspective
approach. In Chapter 4 the author argues that it accommodates a large variety of approaches
to discourse, including register and genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, discursive psy-
chology, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication,
stylistics, mediated discourse analysis, corpus-based analysis, narrative analysis, multimodal
discourse analysis, rhetorical-grammatical analysis, argumentation analysis and many others.
Chapter 4 presents a three-space model for the analysis of professional communication
(adapted from Bhatia, 2004).
In the second half of the book (Part III & IV), the framework of Bhatia’s genre theory is applied
in the case studies and language teaching. Generic hybridity, as the result of appropriation of
generic resources, takes three forms, genre-mixing, genre-embedding, genre bending.
Corporate disclosure practices, such as annual reports, are investigated in Chapter 5 to show
genre-mixing resulted from the appropriation of interdiscursive resources across professional
genres. Specifically, generic norms are bended by mixing four different kinds of discourses,
those of accounting, finance, public relations and law.
Chapter 6 exemplifies the appropriation of interdiscursive resources across professional
practices in arbitration. The colonization of arbitration practice by litigation, i.e. overwhelming
influence of litigation over arbitration, gives rise to the hybrid discourses of ‘arbitigation’ in
Bhatia’s coinage. This study highlights the strong and marked contestations in professional, dis-
ciplinary, jurisdictional, and individual identities.
Discursive practice of fundraising is investigated in Chapter 7 to illustrate the appropriation
of interdiscursive resources across professional cultures. Specifically, discursive practice of fun-
draising, is heavily influenced by marketing culture, though the culture of philanthropic fun-
draising seems to be in conflict to that of marketing. Philanthropic fundraising differs from
commercial advertising in that the former is essentially viewed as a form of moral action,
whereas corporate advertising is seen as a business proposition. However, the similarity
between philanthropic fundraising genres and commercial advertising genres outweighs
their difference. Both discourses are promotional in nature, and display remarkably similar
surface-level rhetorical characteristics, discoursal strategies, and linguistic resources.
The complexity and comprehensiveness of interdiscursivity is further illustrated by a range
of discursive practices in real life, including legislative drafting, advertising, and other public
discourses in new media (Chapter 8). In legislative drafting, the simplification and ‘easification’
208 BOOK REVIEWS

of legislative provisions illustrates how legal draftsmen manage the complexity of the partici-
pant management system embedded in legislative drafting practice. As a generic hybrid in
advertising, ‘advertorial’ has a ‘socially accepted communicative purpose’ of reviewing a
product or service, with the ‘private intentions’ embedded in it. The example is taken from
South China Morning Post, dated 7th of February 2011. New media, such as BBC online
news magazines, abounds with similar examples of multimodal discourses, generic hybridity,
and mixing of several different private and public genres. When off-stage performance (i.e.
‘private discourse’) becomes an on-stage act in public space (such as letters to editors, Face-
book, and Twitter), the dynamic mode of communication makes it possible to push the bound-
aries imposed by conventional communication modes, and to incorporate multiparty issues to
encourage multi-party dialogue in a virtual space.
The final chapter argues for extending the traditional boundaries of applied linguistics to
include areas such as translation, document and information design, study of disciplinary, insti-
tutional, corporate and organizational discourses, as well as practices (p. 190). It applies the
view of Critical Genre Analysis as interdiscursive performance in professional communication
to language teaching. The author points out that ESP fails to bridge the gap between what
is taught in the academy and what is required by the profession, and proposes English for pro-
fessional communication (EPC) as a remedy. EPC is the ‘teaching and learning of English in
specific contexts to legitimise participation in the affairs of specialist communities of practice
(Lave & Wenger, 1991) both in academic and professional contexts’ (p. 198).
The genre approach in this book is closely related to others approaches in the literature.
However, the literature review of this book seems to fail to acknowledge the important
works of Sydney School in systemic functional linguistics. The very idea of profession culture
as a component of context can be considered as an extension from M.A.K. Halliday’s two-
layered characterization of context into: situational context and cultural context. In fact,
Diagram 1.1 Levels of discourse realization (on p. 5) looks quite similar to Halliday’s model
(2004, p. 26) and can be considered as the adaptation of the latter.
As the author indicates (p. 57), the theoretical framework is mainly drawn from Bhatia (2004).
For readers who have no prior knowledge of Bhatia’s theory, the presentation in this book
could be puzzling. The first chapters abound with a large number of new terms, many of
which are theory-specific. Similarly, while the basic argument is that appropriation of semiotic
resources results in generic hybridity, the concept of semiotic resources is quite complex. More-
over, it remains rather unclear how these interact with each other and influence discursive
performances.
The book has extended the boundaries of genre analysis by bridging the gap between text-
internal and text-external factors. It also provided a powerful theoretical framework for the
analysis of new and complex genres in professional settings. This volume is particularly
useful to discourse and genre-oriented academics and practitioners, including students from
applied linguistics and lecturers for teaching English for specific purposes.

References
Bhatia, V. K. (1993). Analysing genre-language use in professional settings. London: Longman.
Bhatia, V. K. (2004). Worlds of written discourse: A genre-based view. London: Continuum.
Bhatia, V. K. (2017). Critical genre analysis: Investigating interdiscursive performance in professional practice.
Abingdon: Routledge.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2004). An introduction to functional grammar (3rd ed.). London: Arnold
Publishing.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
 CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDIES 209

Hongwei Zhan
School of Foreign Languages, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0880-6810

Sihong Huang
School of Foreign Languages, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China
[email protected]
© 2017 Sihong Huang
https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2017.1405052