The characterization of the discursive practices of religious communities has remained limited, despite the role played by religion in socio-political spheres. The present paper discusses how drawing upon Swales’ (2016) notion of discourse community (DC) could provide a fruitful insight into this specialized domain. Focusing on the United Methodist Church (UMC) in the United States, it aims to assess the extent to which this religious community may be considered to be forming a DC. A specialized corpus is built and examined by conducting textometric analyses. The study infers that while the UMC can be described as a discourse community, the interplay between shared discourse and individual action needs further investigation.
Oral arguments in the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) are a specialized and complex dialogue between justices and lawyers, and represent a key moment in the American judicial process. Like any verbal interaction, these debates are constructed collectively by their participants – in terms of content and interpersonal relationships – according to modalities and discursive strategies that evolve as the conversation unfolds. To account for these mechanisms in linguistic terms, studying transcripts of interactions at SCOTUS is not enough; researchers must supplement this approach by immersing themselves in the specialized domain and its discourse communities to comprehend all its dimensions, notably through interviews with practitioners. The ethnographic approach, although increasingly common in ESP, is rare in legal English studies. In this article, I therefore report on how interviews conducted with Supreme Court Bar attorneys enabled me to refine my understanding of the specialized discourse communities of SCOTUS and to provide a more in-depth analysis of the discursive mechanisms at play during oral arguments.
This brief note sets out to show that John Swales’ interests went far beyond his well-known work on genre. It covers ancient cuneiform text, off-print requests, submission letters, and descriptions of paintings. It also considers his method for estimating the first language status of authors, and his remarks on the history and future direction of ESP studies. Just as Thomas More was “a man for all seasons”, John Swales was “a man for all genres”.
