XXVIII Congreso Internacional de AESLA
Analysing data > Describing variation

Special Thematic Section

The term genre was first used in an ESP context by Tarone et al. (1981). That article established the principle that within the conventions of the genre studied it was the writer's communicative purpose that governs choice at the grammatical and lexical levels. The view of genre adopted in ESP is much influenced by the definitions given by Miller (1984) and Martin (1989). The assumption is that a genre is a means of achieving a communicative goal that has evolved in response to particular rhetorical needs and that a genre will change and evolve in response to changes in those needs. The emphasis is thus on the means by which a text realizes its communicative purpose rather than on establishing a system for the classification of genres. In ESP we are interested, often for pedagogical reasons, in exploring established but not necessarily codified conventions in academic and professional written and spoken genres and also in all the myriad rhetorical factors that affect ESP communication.

A selection of papers from this special thematic session will be published in a volume by an International Publisher

Topics may include:

  • Prototypes, intertextuality, inheritance
  • Cognitive factors in ESP: metaphor, metonymy, conceptual blending.
  • Discourse markers
  • Genre analysis in fact files, information reports, instruction manuals, catalogues and descriptive leaflets, etc.
  • Information structure, topic and focus
  • Context in dynamic interpretation
  • CARS model in ESP disciplines and variations in the patterns found
  • Discourse coherence in ESP texts
  • Detailed analysis of specific features of language as used in particular genres such as hedging; citation practices; epistemic modality; reporting verbs, implicature, presupposition, speech acts, reference, deixis, anaphora
  • Pragmatics-Syntax Interface
  • Pragmatics and Language Acquisition in ESP
  • Pragmatics and Cognition in ESP
  • Relevance theory, Pragmatic Aspects of Grammatical Constructions in particular genres
  • The Pragmatics of Polarity in ESP
  • Gender studies in ESP