This article offers a personal view of some developments in science and technology studies that may be important to researchers on writing and to writing teachers. The field has emerged from laboratory studies to engagement with broader issues of power and change. Frameworks developed in the sociology of scientific knowledge have been applied to the analysis of things (not just people and facts), of social boundaries (not just specialist disciplines), and of organizations (not just individual writers). The article draws on approaches from critical discourse analysis to show how we might read noun phrases, clause structure, discourse representation, and discourse practices in terms of this new perspective on texts. Throughout the article, the implications are illustrated with the example of a news article reporting the temporary shutdown of a nuclear power plant.

Preface - new! improved!! not tested on animals!!! introduction - the air in your Aero 7 shades whiter beanz meanz Heinz - what makes slogans stick? it is. are you? - sentence types and sentence structure players pleas - puns, associations, and meanings you in the shocking pink shellsuit - pronouns and address bread wi' nowt taken owt - languages and varieties as signs do we have time for a coffee? - conversations and everyday life shall I compare thee to a pint of bitter? - metaphor see above, see above, see above...words and pictures concentrated Persil supports trees - green ads and agency AIDS, ads and them vs. us audiences, effects and REG.

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The widespread use of irony in academic writing raises issues not considered in most psychological, linguistic, or literary approaches to irony: How is irony signalled in a written text? What are the constraints of politeness within academic discourse that govern the use and interpretation of irony? This essay considers the interpretation of one kind of irony—ironic quotation—in a controversy between linguists and artificial intelligence researchers. Irony in these published exchanges is then compared to irony in conference discussions and unpublished papers in linguistics and to irony in other disciplines. Although the analysis follows psychological and linguistic accounts of irony as echoic mention in which the same words can be reused with a different intention, it begins with the rhetorical relation of the quoting writer, the quoted writer, and the reader as members of disciplinary communities. The instances of irony that are considered both define these relations and assume them as a basis for interpretation. This analysis suggests that the study of irony can serve as a means of understanding disciplines and of examining our own taken-for-granted assumptions as academic writers.

This book constitutes an interesting guide to recent developments in vocabulary studies. As will be made clear below, this review addresses researchers and others interested in issues concerning computational morphology and lexicography in a Machine Translation (MT) environment. For this reason we focus more on relevant chapters of the book than on those which concern pure language teaching and language learning issues. The book is divided into three parts. Part one contains four chapters devoted to the analysis of lexis with a particular emphasis on its role in discourse contexts. Part two consists of three chapters dealing mostly with issues related to language learning, language teaching and lexicography. Part three includes two case studies in lexical stylistics based on informant analyses. Chapter 1 explores the notion of word. A definition based on orthographic criteria (i.e. a word viewed as a sequence of letters bound on either side by a space or a punctuation mark) is taken into consideration. Nevertheless, it is observed that such a definition is violated by the existence of a great number of multi- word units (e.g. instead of, post box, etc.). On the other hand, the phonological criterion for defining a word as a string of phonemes containing only one stress is also not felicitous, firstly because it only concerns spoken language and secondly because a stress can be used as a demarcator of strings for emphatic purposes. Other problems relate to the existence of several forms for only one lexical meaning (e.g. verbal allomorphs of the same inflectional paradigm: bring, brings, brought, bringing), as well as to the appearance of the same form for different meanings (e.g. the different meanings of the word/a/r). The case of idioms (e.g. to kick the bucket) involving more than one text word which, semantically, can be substituted by a single word is also problematic. In attempting to provide a good criterion for defining a word, Carter uses the valuable concept of lexeme which helps to override most of the problems mentioned above (e.g. the existence of different form variants for the same word). He correctly observes that are the basic contrasting units of vocabulary in a language. When we look up in a dictionary we are looking up lexemes rather than words (p. 7).

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Case studies of two proposals for research funding serve as examples of how scientific texts are the products of a community of researchers. Comparisons of successive versions of the proposals show that the two biologists, in revisions of their texts, alter their personae and their relations to the literature of their fields. In writing and rewriting, they both respond to and develop a disciplinary consensus.