Search

LEXICAL AND STRUCTURAL CHARACTERISTICS OF TECHNICAL STANDARDS IN ENGINEERING DISCOURSE // Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin. 2019. Issue 9 (206). P. 78-83

Introduction. The study of discourse typology is one of the advanced research lines in communicative linguistics. Engineering communication is becoming a subject of increased focus for linguists due to its rapid development driven by dynamic changes in technology, society and industry, which is resulted in continuous exchange of information between the members of the engineering society. Despite the significant number of discourse studies in different social institutions, engineering discourse remains an understudied area as Russian researchers traditionally consider it as a part of the scientific or scientific and technical discourse. In view of the fact that discourse is translated into certain genres, and genres, in turn, are always included into a certain discourse field, authors propose the idea that the engineering discourse provides a series of particular core genres which reflect the values, strategy and information of engineering communication and make it distinct from the scientific discourse. The paper addresses the distinguishing characteristics in lexical organization of the technical standard to reveal the fact that the genre of standard meets the goals of engineering communication. Material and methods. As the empiric material of the research 184 pages of running Russian standards for the engineering technology and equipment were used. The texts of the standards were exploited as the subject matter for discourse analysis. Content analysis as a general research technique provided the identification of the quantitative aspect in the lexical structure of technical standards. The efficiency of this technique was proven by international schools of discourse analysis and by national researchers as well. Results and discussion. The analysis of the lexical structure of standards revealed the key discursive aspects of the studied genre, which identified the standard as a core genre of engineering discourse. Conclusion. As to performed analysis, the technical standard genre meets the primary goal of professional communication in the engineering field. The peculiar characteristics of the genre studied are determined by the demands of discourse and communicative situation as well.

Keywords: engineering discourse, institutional discourse, LSP, speech genres

DISCOURSIVE SPECIFICITY OF ENGINEERING COMMUNICATION IN THE RUSSIAN SOCIO-CULTURAL SPACE // Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin. 2020. Issue 2 (208). P. 92-102

The article discusses the communication specifics of engineering society in relation to the scientific discourse. It also studies the special features of the agent in the engineering communication as one of the key areas of modern life which provides the technological progress of industry as well as the research potential for education. The rise of the engineering professional society was due to the introduction and development of industry as a social force. 19th century introduced the position of the engineer which was strengthened in 20th century in the same way as the corporate societies of other specialists had been developed before. However, the corporate engineering society has not been studied yet either with the reflection of the professional image nor in the communication aspect. There are just few studies which consider the engineering communication as the texts of scientific and technical style but not as an independent object to be studied. The studies in the cognitive and discursive linguistics made the methodological basis of this paper including discourse analysis, scientific discourse studies, the research in functional linguistics and genre studies, the professional language and communication and the concept structure as well. The results were obtained by techniques of discourse analysis, textual, definition and component analysis as well as the qualitative evaluation of the associative dictionary data, the corpora analysis and the analysis of the search engine data. The materials included the encyclopaedia data, dictionaries, Russian National corpora, a body of technical standards. The paper solves the following issues: the boundaries of engineering communication as a certain discourse area, the description of key institutional parameters, the boundaries of engineering discourse against the scientific discourse: purpose, participants, the genre structure. Also, the key agent of the engineering communication was defined: the boundaries of the engineer concept, at which core the image of a specialist with a university degree is. The engineering definition is updated due to the complication and recent development of the engineering activity. The professional communication in engineering sphere traditionally regarded by Russian linguists as a part of the scientific discourse was identified as a separate institutional discourse based on certain compositionally crucial parameters.

Keywords: professional communication, engineering discourse, scientific discourse, genre, communication agent, engineer, engineering, concept structure