My background

I was born in a country that doesn’t exist any more. The country’s name was USSR – a rightly dreaded and detested one, I must say. Anyway, the good thing (the only good thing!) about that country was it gave good education.

I started to learn English about 20 years ago, when I started to live in another country without moving from my flat. Now my country was called ‘The Republic of Armenia’, and it was claimed to be independent and democratic. It still does, in a way.

But the ‘independent’ Armenia preserved the only good thing there was in the USSR, the educational system. Now it’s experiencing radical changes (they call it the Bologna treaty, I reckon), but I was lucky to be educated in the good old times when there were no credits and no modules, and everything was quite simple – either you do your homework or you bribe the teacher and get your marks.

I managed to survive in that environment without giving a single bribe to anyone, which means I was one of the best students at the faculty. I get somewhat nostalgic when I talk about my student life because things have become more complicated since then. I am certainly not one of the best students of the PhD programme at the University of La Laguna, what a blow to my self-appraisal!

Those were happy times when I thought linguistics consisted of Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Lexicology and Stylistics, and there were a couple of related disciplines such as the Theory of Translation and History of English-Speaking Cultures. I could easily fit any subject that we did into this scheme, thus, the History of English language was a diachronic study of all these layers, but especially Phonology and Morphology, and partly Lexicology, whereas Literature stood apart as a gigantic monolith related to language just because it actually made use of it. Then I found out (that was my last year at the University, I think) that there was such a thing as Dialectology which I never studied. This made me feel sad and sort of incomplete, and I decided to read as many books as possible on Dialectology… some day. That’s where my habit of procrastination comes, I gather, the bloody Dialectology is to blame for everything!

But there were more blows coming up. I wrote a brilliant (as everybody insisted) diploma paper on Phraseology involving some sort of comparative study and received my MA degree, after which I had to confront the biggest shock in my life.

After wasting my time merrily during some four or five months in Yerevan (attending all the jazz concerts and all the live music clubs and occasionally teaching English at a university), I came to Spain to do a PhD programme. And there it happened – I discovered that what I had been studying at my university was in fact a rudimentary and insignificant part of the whole science about Language. Moreover, it turned out that my writing, speaking and research skills are useless in the big World of Academic English. My innocent knowledge of the existence of five main styles in any modern language and their perfect handling was ruined by the unquestionable fact that there were… err… about 50 times more styles according to the most ascetic calculations. Furthermore, I became aware of the existence of such mysterious things as Sociolinguistics, Descriptive Linguistics, EAP, Genre Analysis etc.

I must say, though, that this sort of very rigidly structured and limited syllabus does have certain advantages. First, it doesn’t saturate the students with information which they will fail to assimilate. Second, it gives you criteria for critical thinking and analysis of data which are very useful if you don’t want to get drowned in the ocean of current academic thought. Third, it teaches you to associate and relate phenomena in order to memorise and categorise them more efficiently. Finally, it is a powerful research instrument, though not very good for pragmatic reasons indeed. And it doesn’t teach you anything except the approved syllabus on those five levels of language (layers we used to call them), nothing about Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, EAP or Applied linguistics.

Not that I hadn’t ever heard of them, just the contrary – I had precisely heard of them and never known what they really are. I’m still not sure I do know what they are.

Back at the University, we were taught that there was no other linguistics except Saussurean linguistics, that Ferdinand de Saussure was the father and founder and progenitor of modern language studies, and that Port-Royal was the Mecca and Medina of Linguistics. I discovered, to my utter horror, that at the University of La Laguna (and other European Universities) they were falling into an interminable range of heresies, and everyone was free to choose their own as long as they cited a sufficient number of authors to support themselves. I reckon they call it democracy. I saw no possibility of converting any of the heretics, so I fell into a heresy myself. The heresy that I liked best of all is called Genre Analysis and is based on the work of John M. Swales who is (sorry for this subjectiveness) about 10.000 times cooler than Saussure!

A major influence for me was the director of my thesis and an amazing person, Sally Burgess, who has done a great amount of work in this area and also has been extremely patient with my constantly erring and faltering self. Thank you, Sally, you’re by far the best tutor in the world!

Now, thanks to Sally and other professors of the Faculty, I can claim to be at least familiar with contemporary tendencies in linguistics and (as some of them claim) able to write a PhD thesis on Genre Analysis. They are very optimistic, aren’t they? Anyway, there’s no other option available for me – I’ve spent too much time on this beautiful island to go back to my country without a PhD diploma.

Even though I think I’m familiar with some of the recent work in Linguistics, I still come across a lot of incognita which I’ll be discussing in this blog.

Non-Epic Fail

In an attempt to enrich my corpus I went last Friday to a lecture on translating the Greek mythological thinking. Enjoyed it a lot (no irony meant!), but – alas! – the lecture was in Portuguese! Obviously there was no difficulty for me as a fluent speaker of Spanish in understanding the lecture, but I can’t possibly transcribe it or use for the purposes of my investigation.

As I said to Sally, I’m afraid our corpus is becoming uncontrollably diverse.

Anyway, just a couple of notes because I think such an outstanding experience as being exposed to academic discourse in a language you (think you) don’t know and understanding it deserves being mentioned, if not in the investigation itself, at least in the blog.

The lecturer was very formally dressed up, while the audience (mostly students) were looking quite casual.

There was very little talking per se: the lecturer had prepared a 10-page handout which he simply read out to us, thanks to which we understood it very well. Very articulate indeed, I guess it had taken him several weeks to prepare a text so impeccably academic and, at the same time, so easy to understand for speakers of a kindred but still different language.

Of course in such a situation there is very little room for humour or interactive elements which could, if they occurred, obstruct the communication.

A phrase to be engraved in every translation textbook:

EL COMENTARIO ES LA DERROTA DEL TRADUCTOR.

Which means:

A footnote is the defeat of the translator.

By way of introduction

So let me tell you why I am doing all this and what I expect to be the outcome of this activity.

I’m a PhD student at the University of La Laguna, Spain, and I’m currently doing a research project on spoken academic discourse. As, I suppose, any PhD student (or, indeed, any student taken in the broadest sense of the word), I come across various difficulties, puzzles and problems in my so-called work. There are several reasons why I say ‘so-called’, but I hope to be able to explain them later. At the moment I’m interested in talking about those problems in a public place (such as a blog) and try to present solutions, as well as find out what others think of this or that problem. I suppose most of the EAP/ESP professionals, Applied linguists and Genre theorists have stumbled (are stumbling) upon similar problems, and they might like to be able to exchange ideas.

Especially that there is, as far as I'm aware, no such public place on the web where we applied linguists and linguists in general, can get together and discuss whatever we are interested in.

My initial idea was to set up a forum (not a very difficult task indeed) and send out invitations to register and talk, but then I remembered that a similar idea had failed a couple of years ago when the organisers of the PPRIISEAL conference invited everyone to come to the forum and discuss issues related to the conference (the conference itself was a great success). In fact, no one came except a few enthusiasts, and these were too few to keep the forum going. Now I thought I could start with something less effort-taking than a forum and see if we can become an organised and consistent web-community.

To tell the truth, I'm envious of Physicists and folk like them, who have vast virtual spaces dedicated to them alone, where they conduct discussions and have a lot of fun, too, and even - only think of it! - publish their papers ABSOLUTELY FREE OF CHARGE, so that their colleagues don't have to spend loads of money on keeping themselves up to date. There's a trick to it so that they don't violate any copyright issue: they publish one of the final drafts, but not the very final one, so that there are minor divergences between the hard copy and the internet-version, but this is still a great help to those who are interested in what's going on in the field. Afterwards, if they feel like it, they can go to the library and read the full paper, or buy the book, or borrow it, but they are aware of the new research that goes on in their field, even if they don't belong to any academic community which is powerful enough to provide its members with an access to the treasures of intellectual property. We linguists – again, as far as I'm aware – have no such possibility, and it makes me desperate!

So this is one reason I want to speak about what I'm interested in. Another reason is purely pragmatic: with the help of this blog I hope to gain sufficient proficiency in writing in English and make it easier for me to write academic texts. It might be redundant to mention that I'm not a native speaker (writer) of English, and sometimes I feel awkward and extremely self-conscious about my language, both oral and written. I find myself archaic and sounding funny and sort of out-of-place. Maybe I could manage to adopt some discourse practices from discussions in this blog. In fact, it takes me ages to write a single sentence in English, and each register and variety is problematic in its own way. I can't sound colloquial since I've never lived in any English-speaking country, I can't sound formal since my formal register tends to get more and more pompous and pathetic, and I can only pretend to sound academic, while the true 'academism' is something to be gained together with professionalism which is still nowhere near me.

I also hope, with the help of this blog, to resolve my doubts regarding my work and enrich my personal and professional background. My experience may be of use to other PhD students or professional linguists, and I think it’s worth sharing anyway.

I’ll divide the blog into several sections, such as ‘Current readings’, ‘Tasks’, ‘Dubia’, ‘Thoughts and reflections’, ‘Book review’ ‘Red tape’, ‘Do-it-some-day’, ‘Other projects’, etc. I’m currently involved in 5 large projects (all related to different aspects of my professional life), and there might be more coming up. Truly, I don’t know how I’m going to manage them all, but I’m very keen on each of them, and so something must be done to carry them out!

I hope this blog will be useful and/or interesting to linguists and linguistics students.