## Magnar Brekke, Øivin Andersen, Trine Dahl and Johan Myking: Applications  and  Implications  of  Current  LSP  Research. Bergen: University of Bergen, 1994

These two volumes are the proceedings of the 9th European Symposium on Languages for Special Purposes held in Bergen in 1993. The editors chose not to issue a 'slim volume' of selected highlights, but to publish most of the papers to give a broad overview of the various fields of LSP. The result is two thick volumes presenting more than a hundred papers.

Hence not all of the papers can be discussed. In fact the book's status as non-selective  conference  proceedings  means  that  the  volumes  contain  a number of immature articles. Reading the volumes through is like attending a conference where it is mercifully possible to escape when one has chosen the wrong session. Most papers are in English, a few in German, and one or two in French and Spanish. While there are a few misprints, one article has all its tables  omitted,  and  there  are  occasional  patches  of  bad  English,  the  editors have fundamentally done a wonderful job in getting all this material readable, clearly printed, and firmly bound (all 969 pages!)

A broad overview should give one a sense of the nature of the field, and many of the papers do give introductions or surveys of subfields, so that a review allows one to consider what LSP studies were in 1993.

The collection covers both 'applications' and 'implications' of LSP studies; it recognises the origins of LSP studies in an up-valuation of the 'useful arts' in relation to the 'liberal' (Kalverkämper 1992), and covers a wide range from the loftily 'liberal' implications to the 'useful' applications. However even the 'pure' work is a mixed bag characterised by the object of study rather than the method.  This  object  is  communication  in  'specialist'  domains,  where  'specialist' has something to do with having a body of knowledge which is not 'general knowledge'. Within this remit, it concentrates on (Western) languages and domains which have economic influence or importance. While anthropological  linguistics  looks  out  from  well-known  and  described  languages  on more obscure and marginal ones, in LSP studies as represented here speakers of some fifteen well-known languages look in on language practices in a few of the best-described (predominantly English and German in this North European  environment,  also  French  and  Russian,  with  some  Spanish,  Italian, Swedish, and a few others).

The traditional interests of academics predominated in the conference and perhaps still do in academic LSP studies. So, although there are several papers on  business  and  legal  communication  and  several  on  spoken  genres  and registers, the domain most frequently discussed is science/technology and the medium is writing. To judge from these papers the applications of European LSP are in foreign language teaching, translation, terminology, lexicography, and its implications in studies of ideology and the history of ideas. Only two papers deal with technical writing and none with mother-tongue communication training or industrial language - language training of immigrants, etc., for the workplace; there are connections to be made here that would probably be valuable for both sides.

The volume is introduced by a series of plenary papers. A good one to start with is that by Laurén, which traces the development of LSP traditions since the nineteenth century: Wörter und Sachen studies in Scandinavian dialectology  and  in Wirtschaftslinguistik as  the  ancestors  of  linguistically-oriented studies  of  contrastive  culture  and  of  professional  practices;  philosophical aspects, and Wüster's formulation, of terminology; the history of learning the parallel development of vernacular technolects and science in the Renaissance, for example; similarly Fachprosaforschung, investigating the academic literature of the Middle Ages; the Prague structuralists' interest in the structuring and adaptation of language to particular (intellectual) functions; the shift from concern with specialist language to concern with specialist texts; and the corresponding application of computer-based corpora in the investigation of parole.  Laurén  sees  teaching  method  as  one  area  of  application  of  these theoretical studies but scarcely mentions others; he is mainly concerned with the cultural and philosophical implications of LSP studies viewed as an intellectual endeavour reaching back to Aristotle, carried on mainly in Central and Eastern  Europe,  and  by  no  means  always  putting  itself  at  the  disposal  of economic gain.

A paper emphasising diversity like Laurén's raise the question of what sort of discipline LSP is. Citkina's plenary unconvincingly places it in the early stages of Kuhn-style schemata for the development of sciences but usefully identifies interlingual comparison as a key activity and stresses the 'application-oriented' nature of much LSP work - the 'pure' researcher usually has a use in mind. Her principles for comparative LSP research underline the importance of inclusiveness and making use of all the investigatory tools linguistics (and discourse analysis, etc.) make available.

The issue of the nature of LSP is illuminated by some historical papers on linguistic aspects of discipline formation. Gunnarson and her group organised a workshop on their impressive project on the development of academic Swedish at a variety of cognitive-linguistic levels. Gunnarson's own article deals qualitatively with the development of economics writing from an eighteenthcentury 'pre-stage' through an 'establishing stage' around 1900 to its present 'specialised stage'. The progression is marked by, among other things, increasing reference to other specialists' work, and to discipline-internal concepts, accompanied by decreasing reference to the real world (as a source of analogies for example) and the elimination of 'preaching'. The interesting point is that  medical  and  technical  articles  were  already  in  the  'establishing'  stage when economics was still in the 'pre-stage'.

This view, is however, in need of balance from an alternative, non-teleological, perspective. What Gunnarson calls 'specialisation' (and Citkina's teleology)  needs  interpretation  in  terms  of  Becher's  four  dimensions  (Becher 1989): 'pure-applied' (physics vs. engineering); 'hard-soft' (cumulative knowledge like physics vs. changing perspectives like literary studies); convergentdivergent (convergent subjects have single models and aims and tend towards orthodoxy, divergent ones have multiple models and aims and resemble loose federations, so physics is convergent and geography divergent), and 'urbanrural' (in urban subjects the number of research topics is small relative to the number of researchers, in 'rural' it is large, so physics is urban and biology is rural). Her linguistic findings from economics represent its 'urbanisation' and development towards greater 'purity' and 'hardness' rather than progress towards a necessary goal; the absence of many of these markers from literary studies represents divergency and rurality rather than lack of specialisation or a primitive evolutionary position.

Analysing  LSP  studies  in  Becher's  terms,  we  have  to  separate  'pure' investigations  from  their  application.  and  assign  the  applications  to  other disciplines. Even though the same people are doing the research and applying it, they are using linguistic (etc.) methods and principles in research and quite different ones in application. The remaining 'pure' field is highly divergent; like geography it is a loose federation of interests without a methodology or a philosophy in common. The field is, fortunately, quite 'rural'; there are plenty of different topics to discuss and no great competition to come up with the answer before other workers. Areas of it are reasonably 'hard': we know quite a lot more about text structure and register than we used to, and applications like lexicography for example, seem to make definite progress. There would be more cumulation if LSP scholars were better at reading one another's work and adopting standard analytic categories

Furthermore, if one is working in the 'hard' quantitative end of LSP one should be consistent. The other two articles from Gunnarson's project, reporting actual numbers, are interesting but share with several other quantitative papers in the volume a surprising weakness: by not applying a standard of statistical significance they throw away half the content of their data. Use of such a measure would enable researchers to say that while features X and Y are different between their two samples, Z is essentially the same. It is a pity to exclude the possibility of saying that Z, contrary to a natural assumption, is not indexical  of  anything;  this  seems  as  important  as  finding  that  X  and  Y  are indeed indexical.

LSP's  commitment  to  the  useful  arts  is  underlined  by  another  historical paper, remote though such studies may seem from the daily lives of practitioners dragging unwilling bilingual secretaries and civil engineers through the rudiments of business or technical language. McKinnon looks at Sprat's early eighteenth-century History of the Royal Society and shows how the Society's programme was already characterised by LSP values: utilitarianism, a demand for  terminological  precision,  and  the  marriage  of  science  and  commerce. Gläser looks at the application of this programme, comparing medical articles from the first Encyclopaedia Britannica with their counterparts in the most recent edition She is able to show linguistic indices of increased impersonality, of professionalisation, and of paradigm shifts. It is particularly interesting that she  finds  eighteenth-century  medicine  using  forrns  of  appeal  to  other  specialists' work which emphasise the authority of known individuals rather than the value of documented results despite the Royal Society's rejection of this kind of authority.

Many papers deal with LSP as a 'liberal' rather than a 'useful' art and focus on its implications for the philosophy of science, sociology, etc. rather than any possible application . The most ambitious is de Beaugrande's plenary, which demonstrates a critical analysis of the D(discourse)SP of Piaget. The analysis is 'post-classical' in the sense that it aims at avoiding reductionism (a simple model with a complex relation to its domain) and producing a complex model simply related to its domain. The result is a methodology so full of metaphor and  complexity  that  it  is  difficult  to  follow  without  oneself  reducing  it. However de Beaugrande produces many interesting observations including the notions of controlling concepts, manifested throughout the vocabulary of the text and thus driving it forward to its conclusion, and that of 'putting pressure on the text' to draw out the ideology. This either results in increasing coherence (perceiving an overall control system with an integrated set of central terms, so that each claim matches the agenda even if it seemed odd to start with) or decreasing it - revealing that a perfectly consistent claim is rejected just because made by a rival, etc.

The  highly  metaphorical  nature  of  de  Beaugrande's  language  raises  the theme  of  metaphor  in  specialist  language,  perhaps  quite  fashionable  in  the wake of the cognitive linguists, which appears in papers in several sections. (The contrast between the Royal Society's Enlightenment suspicion of figurative  language  and  this  'post-classical'  trend  is  significant).  Lorenz  and Lorenz look at the way metaphors were used to humanise computers, and how the computer has become a metaphor for humans in its turn; Corbisier evaluates  the  communicative  effectiveness  of  explanatory  analogies  in  computer manuals (and finds it very variable); Kocourek similarly develops criteria for evaluating the appropriacy of metaphors which become terminologised, an important issue in view of the power of the metaphor to shape thinking on the topic though the resulting list is difficult to interpret; and Stålhammar draws conclusions about ideology from personifications of the market in Swedish and English newspapers. All these articles, like others in the volumes, would have benefited  from  a  little  more  of  the  Royal  Society  spirit  of  'founding' knowledge not only on 'thoughts and words' but also on 'works', in this case empirical analysis of the reception of metaphors by readers.

As Stålhammer shows, the form of discourse is related to the underlying ideology. Several papers look at the way journalistic writing reveals its ideological bias. One of the most interesting is Ledin's on changes in the types of polyphony  in  the  turn-of-the-century  socialist  press  in  Sweden.  His  genre model allows a focus on 'voice' which links with studies in other fields. However the most fruitful approach is Benke's, studying the nature of the news agency reports which underlie newspaper articles and the way that their biases are  amplified  by  the  editing  process.  The  process  by  which  ideologicallyloaded texts are created is of more interest really than the fact that texts are ideologically-loaded,  particularly  if  one  wants  to  understand  how  bias  becomes naturalised for the journalists. On the other hand, calling newspaper language LSP seems to stretch the category almost to breaking point: 'specialist communication' addressed to a mass public seems a contradiction.

Among the 'hardest' work in the conference in the sense of being part of a cumulation  of  knowledge,  there  is  a  large  group  of  papers  which,  without ignoring ideological implications, report characteristics of important types of texts and make the knowledge accessible for application in teaching or translation. Of those dealing with academic, often research, writing, Hunston's is one of the most interesting. It identifies various formal features related to modality  or  truth-value,  suggests  characteristic  speech-act  roles  for  them,  and shows how, because of the uses of these roles in advancing claims, the forms tend to appear in particular positions in research articles. The result enables the reader of a research report to evoke a 'mesh of knowledge' from familiar forms whose  roles  are  necessarily  related  to  the  formation  of  scientific  understanding. The paper is qualitative so we do not know what proportion of actual papers  conform  to  the  pattern  in  her  extended  example  from  a  Discussion section, but its approach is illuminating and the findings immediately applicable. Banks' work on hedging, Schramm's on tense and aspect, and Lindberg's on the conventions of conclusions in finance, management and marketing research are of similar quality and similarly cumulative. Kourilova's article on modality in biomedical research reporting is less well integrated with the literature but makes nice points with wide implications; for example text- books make causal connections explicit while research articles leave them to be inferred from disciplinary knowledge.

Examining  legal  German,  Engberg  applies  this  type  of  analysis  to  the complex relations of levels which characterise text. Again, linguistic forms do not signal speech acts, and these are not in one-to-one relation with text parts, but the necessary repetitiveness of specialised activities results in regular associations. Thus Engberg finds zur Uberzeugung der Kammer/des Gerichts in 11 of his 30 judgements, and this is exactly the kind of frequency one expects where writers are not bound by formulae but influenced by previous texts in the same tradition.

A recent special issue of English for Special Purposes (St. John 1996) refers to the explosion of interest in business LSP in the 1990s, but, though teaching is  well represented, as usual, (Yli-Jokipii 1996) there is limited evidence of research in this conference. Fløttum et al give a cross-linguistic comparison of the style and genre conventions of 'Chairman's statements' in public company reports (five each in English, French, and German); without giving figures, they find, for example, much more paratext in the German examples than in the French, and more direct openings and less appeal to the reader in French than in German and English. Three papers deal with aspects of oral negotiation in a second language on the basis of transcripts. Neumann finds a number of differences between Germans and Norwegians in the use of German metadiscoursal phrases. Ö berg looks at miscommunication in English-language negotiations among a variety of nationalities and finds that semantic and discourselevel breakdown is recognised and repaired, while miscommunication on the level of culture and presupposition requires thematisation and discussion if it is  to  be  overcome, and this is quite often not achieved. The third paper, by Wilkinson  et  al  discusses  the  optimisation  of  redundancy  in  intercultural discussion  (ways,  that  is,  to  minimise  both  miscommunication  and  longwindedness)  and  sets  out  a  programme  of  research  to  identify  and  teach important characteristics.

Empirical reports of the development of new LSPs or new aspects of LSP are an important function of a collection like this, alerting practitioners to new training or translation needs. The most revealing here is Johnson's straightforward account of the problems arising from the multiple ambiguity and richly figurative language of radio communication among Kent policemen and the consequent development of a reduced subset of English - Policespeak - for use in  the  Channel  Tunnel.  In  an  inspired  piece  of  observation,  Naylor  describes the way that teleconferencing in English demands that a speaker in one town 'point' to a picture in another, and so favours those who are able to develop a new type of 'deictic' emphasis in their speech. Tveit describes the language  of  subtitling  and  the  particular  translation/adaptation  processes  in- volved. In a similar spirit, Jarvi, Draskau, Picht and Budin provide varying typologies and terms for including nonverbal representations in the scope of LSP, given their central role in technical communication. Draskau's point that we should therefore speak of 'specialist communication' rather than LSP is well taken.

The terminology papers make a bridge between 'pure' research and the applications. Picht's exciting overview of terminology in 1993 sees the field as divided into 'pure' theory (with implications for the philosophy of science, and semiotics) and applications, increasingly involving electronic media: he lists translation  and  technical  writing,  terminology  planning,  constantly  updated term  banks  for  terminography,  knowledge  engineering,  information  science and information management, etc. Callewaert and Markey exemplify one of these applications with their report on a computer-based multilingual thesaurus of  business  communication.  Good  introductions  are  provided  by  Grinev's plenary on the basic principles and classification of (Russian) terminology, and Rogers and Ahmad's paper, which presents terminological principles for translators (and then their programme for computer-assisted bilingual terminography) . Jemudd's plenary sets these in a context of application by showing that one external factor which interacts with terminology in application is politics: francization in Quebec; the conflict between spontaneous 'uneducated' terminologies  (of  motor  maintenance  in  Mexico,  for  example)  and  prescriptive 'academic'  ones;  conflicts  between  international  terminological  agreements and the perceived political significance of their terms. A variety of other factors emerge; Jernudd cites examples from the practice of the Swedish Center for Technical Terminology, many of them legal: what counts as a facade? what does diagonal mean?

Other  papers  give  information  about  the  structure  of  technical  language which is useful in many applications: Nuopponnen classifies types of causality in 'multidisciplinary' fields; Puuronen develops a framework for discussing technical verbs (rather than nouns); and, most illuminatingly, van der Staak analyses the speech act EXPLAIN in technical writing. Van der Staak identifies the possible types of explanation in terms of method/strategy, (with a list of  illocutionary  indicators),  type  (representative  vs.  declarative),  degree  of explicitness, perspective (word-focus, referent-focus), and order of ideas.

Two keynote talks dealt with applications to LSP teaching. Huckin called for a 'narrow-angle' approach finely tuned to particular situations, seeing this as part of a development in a variety of fields towards particularity and embedding of description in the context. This can be related to the anti-reductionism of de Beaugrande's presentation; it also suggests that these and other text-analytic insights will be useful to the dedicated ESP teacher rather as models of analysis and hints as to what will be found than as direct input to teaching materials. Huckin regrets that ESP teaching has not developed a theoretical base or its own set of methodological principles, but this is a reflection of an odd  stance  that  LSP  teaching  is  somehow  a  different  field  from  languageteaching;  in  fact  the  rich  toolbox  of  communicative  techniques  has  by  no means been fully exploited, and pedagogy is to do with psychology rather than technical-communication  studies.  Most  LSP  researchers  are  also  teachers, translators, or lexicographers, but in this second role they have to draw on two disciplines:  the  LSP  branches  of  linguistics,  and  the  relevant  branches  of pedagogy, translation studies, etc. Failure in the parent discipline leads to problems in the application; one can relate Puuronen's observation that terminologists have ignored verbs to Stephenson's report of her students' ignorance of the verbs that go with the nouns they have been carefully taught.

Salager-Meyer's plenary on LSP teaching in higher education in the third world raises the political issues around LSP's concentration on powerful postimperial languages, which are otherwise to little discussed. How, she asks, can LSP in these circumstances help overcome domination? The practice of teaching large groups of first-year Spanish-speaking students English (usually) for academic purposes before they need it is politically questionable and usually highly inefficient. It would be better to concentrate on graduates and staff with definable needs and mature attitudes. Actually the whole issue of specialisation is to do with exclusion (a Fach is according to Kalverkämper surrounded by a fence of Fachwerk!) and issues of popularisation and inclusion should be on the LSP agenda.

McGinity et al on Spain, Oladejo on New Guinea and Love and Stephenson on Zimbabwe similarly reflect the depressing task of the teacher of EAP to demotivated students whether English is the medium of instruction (and hence students believe they know it), or English is a compulsory extra (and students don't believe they need it). However Love's incisive analysis of geomorphological  discourse  and  corresponding  development  of  classroom  activities  to guide interactive  reading  shows  that  Huckin's  particularity  is  indeed  a  way forward.  This  paper  also  represents  the  ideal  movement  of  LSP:  from  the sociolinguistic environment, to text analysis, to classroom procedures. Huckin's other theme of methodological innovation is brilliantly illustrated in the poor conditions of first-year EVP teaching for classes of 150 by RamonSales. She had her classes of Spanish students of medicine, librarianship, and business write weekly letters to one another. Every medic and librarian enquired  about  materials  from  a  business  student,  got  a  reply,  ordered,  got  a delivery note, complained, and got an apology. The students knew they would have to do this in real life (and, as often happens, were anyway more interested in each others' specialities than their own). If students have real current needs, that is, one must respond to them precisely; if their needs are in an indistinct future, face validity and communicative liveliness are more important.

The opposite pole from large-class, low-tech, low-motivation LSP is represented by several reports of technical innovations, most of them relevant to any type of language teaching. Sanne provides a useful description of software for enabling self-access use of videodisks. Baten describes and evaluates two vocabulary programmes. His conclusion that encouraging students to use the potential  of  the  systems  requires  immense  clarity  in  the  hypertext  environment, careful training, staging of program complexity, and frequent monitoring needs to be borne in mind by all designers; clever program design like that of Buhl and Johnsen's 'LSP Student's Workbench' is unfortunately only the first stage.

As with the text-descriptions, there are so many pedagogic articles giving useful  information  that  they  cannot  all  be  discussed.  Lillie  deals  with  the problems of introducing case studies and semi-independent study in a course in  language  for  business.  Despite  the  independent-study  ideology  of  the teachers, what the students really perceived as useful was unprepared interpreting practice. Lillie envisages a cautious route forward, educating the learners in the ideology of independence without ignoring their perceptions. SolerSeaone provides a model for the rarely-taught topic of language for mathematics. Jonathan Shaw's approach to teaching the research literature review is another  fine  example  of  descriptive  research  incorporated  into  innovative pedagogy. Markey's questionnaire for the evaluation of business letters offers a framework for escaping from marking grammar errors, though her examples show how much subjectivity must enter into judgements of more important but less concrete mistakes in 'appropriacy', etc. There is an urgent need for detailed corpus-based descriptions of what does occur, so that questionnaires like this  can  be  based  on  saying  '99%  of  French  business  letters  don't  do  this' rather than 'I feel this is wrong'. Finally Sanctobin and. Slootmaekers' paper on learners' written and oral description of graphs, the only study of LSP acquisition in the book, reports that training in specific language items continues to confer an advantage even as task difficulty increases; it is not merely decoration  to  be  abandoned  as  things  get  harder.  LSP  acquisition  is  a  field  worth developing.

Bilingual lexicography is represented by a few interesting papers. Duvå, Laursen, and Maidahl show that dictionaries on an alphabetical (semasiological) basis leave out quite a lot of important words in fields like accounting, and anyway fail to account for polysemy and homonymy, especially where it is the same in both languages (the reader cannot know whether it is or not). So the most useful form of LSP bilingual dictionary, they argue, would be onomasiological/ terminological, organised by area, with related terms together, and an alphabetical index. This would guarantee completeness and would give translators a chance to see what a particular term was doing i.e. what it was in contrast  with.  Agirre  et  al  describe  a  computer-based  intelligent  dictionary help system (French-Basque), one not based on word-for word equivalence but on the system's 'knowledge' of the semantic structure of the two languages.

Like Salager-Meyer's plenary, the third lexicographical paper brings us up against the problems concealed by LSP's focus on cold rich countries and big languages. Schaarschmidt compares German-Sorbian dictionaries from 1920 and 1989. Sorbian is in the position of Scots Gaelic or Vlach; all speakers are bilingual and the language is dying. The only LSP issue raised is how far one should coin minority-language words for things like 'cold rolling mill' that the speakers will undoubtedly use the majority term for; the wider issue is how exclusively resources in teaching and research are directed to the economically or at least politically important languages and not, for example, to the preservation of diversity.

A final area of application is translation, which is rather under-represented in this collection. Anyone using the section to get an overview of activity in translation studies would do well to start with Kvam's clear exposition of the issues surrounding equivalence, adequacy, relevance, etc. Accepting the primacy of preserving the skopos, he uses the term Loyalität for the 'primary text relation' between source and target text, involving first of all Kompatibilität to ensure that the target text is indeed a translation, and then some degree of Korrespondenz, as required by the commission. The other papers in this section range from very 'soft' to very 'hard' - from atheoretical examples of problems in particular cases to technical discussion of machine translation. In the middle is Halverson's qualitative analysis of translations of some types of Norwegian clause into English, using a panel of American students to judge the acceptability of the results. She found very different 'styles' with respect to word-level equivalence among translators, and some differences among source structures  in  their  susceptibility  to  rank-shifted  translation.  The  'hardest' papers deal with machine translation: O'Brien lists the differences between two sorts of text as a prerequisite for MT. Thunes provides an introductory comparison  of  two  machine  translation  strategies -  transfer which  goes directly from L1 to L2, and interlingua, which makes use of a language-neutral interlingual code - and describes systems being developed in Norway.

On first reading these proceedings, one has a sense of varied quality, with rather few highlights, and of a conference full of people with varied interests and concerns talking past one another. But if one views the field as the editors do,  with  a  central  core  of  register/text/discourse  analysis  reaching  out  to philosophy and critical theory in its implications and supplying a variety of practical fields with information in its applications, the papers begin to illuminate one another, so that developments in one area suggests possibilities in another. The terminological papers suggest the need for more research on the structure  of  learner's  LSP  vocabularies;  the  teaching  ones  raise  questions about the sociolinguistics (the power relations) in LSP, and the whole volume shows how much the applied disciplines need the 'pure' researchers to carry out rigorous analysis in comparable terms of a wider variety of specialist communication in a wider variety of languages.

## References

- Becher, T. (1989): Academic Tribes and Territories. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
- Kalverkamper (1992): Die kulturanthropologische Dimension von 'Fachlichkeit' im Handeln und Sprechen. Fachsprache und Terminologie in Geschichte und Gegenwart. J. Albrect and R. Baum. Tuebingen: Gunter Narr: 3-57.
- St.John (1996): Business is booming: business English in the 1990s. In: English for Specific Purposes 15(1): 3-18.
- Yli-Jokipii, H. ( 1996): An approach to contrasting languages and cultures in the corporate context: Finnish, British, and American business letters and telefax messages. In: Multilingua 15(3): 305-327.