Abstract
In contrast with the numerous corpus-based investigations into disciplinary variation in academic writing, there have been relatively few studies of interdisciplinary academic writing. This monograph is the first book-length treatment devoted to this subject. Through linguistic analyses of both monodisciplinary and interdisciplinary journals, it endeavours to determine what characterizes interdisciplinary research discourse and what helps to make it successful. It is an insightful and inspiring reference for audiences with interests in interdisciplinary research, corpus linguistics and the teaching of writing.
The book is organized into three main parts. Part I is the lead-in. Chapter 1 outlines the general background and main themes of the book. Chapter 2 reviews two fuzzy concepts discipline and interdisciplinarity, and defines ‘interdisciplinary’ as intended for audiences from different disciplinary backgrounds and drawing on broad-ranging research literatures. Chapter 3 describes the details of the main corpus used in the book, the BEE4 corpus (a Birmingham-Elsevier Environment corpus comprising articles from four journals during the period 2001 to 2010, with 19,202,639 tokens in total), and explains how the four journals in BEE4 are identified as monodisciplinary or interdisciplinary based on citation profiles.
Part II, using traditional corpus and discourse analytical methods, investigates the characteristics of, and differences between, the four journals in BEE4, especially between the two monodisciplinary journals and the two interdisciplinary journals. Chapter 4 assesses the degree of variation in article organization within each journal by looking at the patterns and linguistic features of first-level headings. The diverse roles that headings play in each journal are also explored. Chapter 5 analyses the structures of, and the strategies in, a selection of introductions from the journal articles. Two individual words, we and inadequate, with their special roles identified in some introductions, are then examined in greater detail through corpus investigations. Chapter 6 is concerned with the use of three significant words in the four journals, environment, science and important. Concerning environment, the focus is on its collocates and meaning; concerning science, the emphasis is on the comparative frequency and phraseology of the word-groups; and concerning important, the focus is on the comparative frequency of, and semantic sequences around, the phraseologies of the word. Chapter 7 deals with markers of epistemic status by investigating the comparative frequency of various such markers in the four journals and then focusing on the phraseology and use of six individual lemmas. Chapter 8 examines in other words as an explanatory code gloss. Its distribution in the four journals is surveyed, and its various functions are identified through case studies.
Part III uses primarily computational approaches to data analysis. Chapter 9 employs an adapted Multidimensional Analysis model first used in Thompson et al. (2017) to explore variation between and within the journals. For inter-journal variation, the dimension score profiles for each journal are analysed. For intra-journal variation, texts in each journal are grouped into ‘constellations’ according to their dimension scores, and the ‘constellations’ are observed and interpreted. Chapter 10 uses the Topic Modeling method to characterize the content focus of each journal, map the relationships between journals, compare pairs of journals in terms of the degree of internal variation and unpack changes in the frequency of topics over time. Chapter 11 ends the book by drawing conclusions and looking toward the future.
An outstanding feature of the book is the uniquely diversified approaches adopted, as manifest in the following two respects:
In terms of content, it investigates the journals from a wide range of discourse perspectives, from lexical and grammatical patterns, through rhetorical features and structures, to genre and topic. This range of discourse perspectives stands in contrast to preceding investigations into the linguistic features of interdisciplinary research discourse, which have been restricted to one or two individual perspectives only.
Methodology-wise, it both adheres to the traditional methods, such as close reading of texts, interpretation of concordance lines and frequency comparison, and departs from these methods by introducing innovation, specifically the experimentation with Multidimensional Analysis and Topic Modelling. The traditional methods are ‘top down’, intended to test predictable hypotheses; the innovative methods are ‘bottom up’, intended to generate new hypotheses. The combination of the two has created a productive tension between being meaningful and fruitful and being open-ended and heuristic.
Another laudable feature of the book is its instructiveness in a practical sense. As noted in the conclusions, there is no infallible recipe that can be offered for interdisciplinary writing, but proposals with specific examples have been put forward in the concluding chapter with regard to how the findings of the book can be utilized to help train the writers to accommodate to an interdisciplinary readership.
The contribution of the book is threefold. On a theoretical level, it casts new light on the nature of interdisciplinary research discourse. On a methodological level, it may serve as a valuable precedent for future work in the areas of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. On a practical level, it provides important findings that can be incorporated in the teaching and learning of academic writing.
While the book is commendable in many ways, further improvements are possible. First, its innovative applications of Multidimensional Analysis and Topic Modelling are open to refinement, as acknowledged by the authors themselves. Second, the interplay between the mono-/inter-disciplinary parameter and two other parameters discussed briefly in the book, the natural/social science parameter and the proximal/distal disciplines parameter, deserve more elaboration. One of the major findings of the book, the heterogeneity of interdisciplinary journals, has been shown to be at least partly attributable to the natural science–social science divide and the proximal–distal divide in several studies reported in the book. A generalized interpretation of this interplay in the concluding chapter would have provided the readers with a greater insight into the heterogeneous nature of interdisciplinary research discourse and a better knowledge about how to address the intended readership specifically.