Book Review: Functional Approach to Professional Discourse Exploration in Linguistics by Elena N. Malyuga (Ed.)

Issues related to professional discourse are becoming increasingly salient, and scholars’ growing interest in such issues is reflected in the large numbers of studies in the area of professional communication (e.g., Bhatia, 2010; John et al., 2019). Most of these studies involve functional analysis because the functional paradigm is essential in professional communication, which highlights the importance of the Functional Approach to Professional Discourse Exploration in Linguistics. The collection, edited by Elena N. Malyuga, probes different areas of professional discourse using interdisciplinary functional approaches. It aims to “offer cutting edge findings on professional discourse of different types, analyze professional language phenomena in the functional linguistic perspective and disclose issues of speech impacts on recipients and feedback in communication” (p.18), providing a comprehensive discussion of professional discourse study.

This collection comprises 10 chapters. Chapter 1 is an overview, presenting the historical development of professional discourse analysis, and explains the book’s organization, which groups chapters according to the type of professional discourse they discuss. In Chapter 2, Chesnokova et al. explain different approaches to the definition of professional discourse, including as a “communicative event,” a “synonym of business communication,” and “communication in the sphere of a particular profession” (p. 23). Specifically, it examines the phenomenon of professional communication from the perspective of academic discourse, using the terminology systems of English and Russian academic communication as examples and presenting a thorough systemic view of the terminological systems in the two languages.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are devoted to economic discourse communication. In Chapter 3, special attention is given to advertising discourse. Aleksandrova et al. distinguish three groups of advertising texts in terms of their size, content, and design. They find that the texts with a large volume are the most saturated in terms of expressive syntactic means that greatly enhance the texts’ expressiveness, dynamics, and emotional appeal. Chapter 4 focuses on the growing informalization tendency in economic discourse and explores humorous narration in this area. Results suggest that humor is “the softest technique that helps people question the sustained social practices” (pp. 126–127). And Chapter 5 centers on precedent texts—language manifestations of compressed knowledge (e.g., cultural concepts and professional jargons) that become common for a particular linguocultural community. Sibul et al. explore how precedent texts or precedent names are used to achieve pragmatic objectives in economic discourse. They find that the most common functions are creating impressive headlines, establishing logical connections within the text, conveying the author’s emotion to the readers, and motivating the readers to take action.

Chapters 6 and 7 center on political discourse. Chapter 6 highlights the role of argumentative strategies. Abrahamyan et al. focus on the political discourse speeches of American and British politicians, presenting the dichotomy of “we-they (us-them)” (p. 166) as the core argumentative strategy in political discourse. This strategy can be interpreted as presenting a positive representation of the self and a negative representation of the other. Chapter 7 continues the focus on this dichotomy with a more intensive study of “they” (i.e., others). This chapter presents the linguosemiotic and linguopragmatic strategies within the discursive construction of “others” in British political communication. Kulikova et al. further develop a linguocommunicative model of the discursive construction of “others,” offering us a new direction for understanding political communication within a specific context.

Chapter 8 takes a cognitive analytic perspective in focusing on medicine discourse—a special cognitive phenomenon with “extensive use of conceptual metaphors and professional slang” (p. 233). The conclusion that the medical discourse is conceptualized through cognitive patterns will surely provide insights for researchers investigating mental structures within other types of discourse. Chapter 9 studies specific discourse situations. Chekulai et al. chose the novels by Arthur Hailey, a well-known American author writing on professional subjects, as examples. They outline six basic professional discourse situations in Hailey’s novels: conflict, deal, crisis, instruction, interview, and relaxation. Finally, Chapter 10 turns to word-building processes, highlighting conversion. Ovchinnikova et al. sample professional terminology in the French fashion sphere to investigate the status and efficiency of conversion in the word-building system. Their analysis procedure can also be applied to other expression structures, which is insightful for further research.

Undoubtedly, this comprehensive collection significantly contributes to the extant literature on professional discourse and communication. Covering a wide range of professional settings, including education, advertising, business, politics, finance, and medicine, its contributions provide useful frameworks for approaching and addressing critical issues in professional communication by highlighting functional analysis and shedding light on discourse communicative efficiency. By foregrounding these theories, methodologies, and practices, the collection is able to “study professional discourse from the angle of its qualifying markers and other characteristics related to discourse communicative efficiency” (p. 2). Those insights have advanced our understanding of professional discourse and communication. In addition, the collection points out some promising directions for future research, such as strategic-planning processes for discourse (Chapter 2), professional communities (Chapter 4), contrast analysis (Chapter 5), and cross-cultural communication analysis (Chapter 9). Generally, considering its clear merits and aim to give readers an overview of today’s professional communication analytical modes, the book has much to offer for practitioners, scholars, and students who are interested in this field.

Despite all its merits, the collection, like all other works, has some limitations. First, the contributions in this collection mainly focus on written and spoken texts, with only Chapter 7 considering the visual mode by taking a cartoon from The Guardian as an example. More attention should also have been paid to other semiotics. Multimodal discourse analysis highlights the importance of using multiple semiotic resources in today’s communication processes and allows us to integrate all the possible communicative modes (Norris, 2004). And empirical studies based on large-scale data could further improve the generalization of findings from relevant contributions and bring new insights into professional discourse and communication. Over recent decades, corpus-based analysis has had a considerable impact on linguistic analysis (Douglas & Randi, 2015) because it allows researchers to explore and exploit large-scale natural texts using statistical methods and integrate traditional qualitative analyses with quantitative methods. Applying such approaches to professional discourse studies would surely advance the field with well-supported and generalized findings.