Baltic Journal of English Language, Literature and Culture Vol.
5, 2015: 75–89
[Link]
INTERTEXTUALITY AND INTERDISCURSIVITY
IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES
ORGANISATIONAL DISCOURSE
JANA KUZMINA
University of Latvia, Latvia
Abstract. The paper reflects the results of the cross-sectional empirical
research exploring the network of written genres in information technologies
organisations. The theoretical basis for this research has been grounded in
the English for Specific Purposes and the New Rhetoric genre schools. The
empirical research method is a case study, discourse and frequency analysis.
Firstly, semi-structured interviews with IT professionals from Latvia, Estonia,
Belarus and Western Russia aimed to identify the recurrent genres pertinent
to the domain were conducted. Secondly, the analysis of constitutive and
manifest intertextual relations in the documents in question was performed. The
obtained results highlight the significance of the social context and professional
practice for conducting discourse analysis in the domain in order to uncover
constitutive intertextual relations. They reveal that the genres in the network
have hierarchical interdiscursive relations, with the system architecture being
the dominating one. The linguistic means of manifest intertextual relations do
not show high variation and indicate to the genres precedent or antecedent in
the chronological chain.
Key words: information technologies organisational discourse, discourse
analysis, intertextuality, interdiscursivity
INTRODUCTION
Communication models in organisational discourse have become complex,
dynamic and highly dependent on situational context. The linguists of English
for Specific Purposes (ESP) and New Rhetoric Schools claim that applied genre
analysis is the study of textual artifacts, undertaken inseparably from the social
practices of a discourse community.
With the advancement of genre as a social action in the New Rhetoric
tradition, genre research moved from the analysis of single genres proposed by
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (Paltridge 1996; Martin, 1997) and the
ESP researchers (Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1993) to groups of connected genres
(Swales, 2004) and the relationships among them within activity systems. This
shift facilitated recontextualisation of the concepts of uptake and intertextuality,
the consideration of interdiscursive processes and the concept of meta-genre,
research in organisational communication to explore genre within their local
and wider social context (e.g. in tax accounting (Devitt, 1991), healthcare
76 INTERTEXTUALITY AND INTERDISCURSIVITY IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES ..
(Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995), software development (Spinuzzi, 2004),
enabling scholars to uncover complex social and intertextual relations within
their professional communication models, building an organic and dynamic
genre ecology (Spinuzzi, 2004) or system (Swales, 2004) based on social
discursive processes.
The abovementioned considerations have determined the aim of the present
research, i.e. to investigate the recurrently encountered genres characteristic
of the IT institutional domain as a system and determine genre intertextual
relations. In the present research, professional genres are viewed as a social
action, a reflection and mediation of the activities performed by the discourse
community, creating a shared knowledge base (Miller, 1984; Freeman and
Medway, 1994; Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995; Bazerman et al., 2009), with
textual regularities being socially constructed (Bawarshi and Reiff, 2010).
Moreover, the need for communication and genre communicative aims are
emphasised (Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 2004).
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
1 ORGANISATIONAL DISCOURSE
Organisational discourse is a complex and all-embracing concept which can
be investigated cross-sectionally involving linguistics, communication and
business studies. In the present article, it is attributed to written communication
occurring within organisations, i.e. an interrelated network of genres to reflect
the professional discursive practices, activities and procedures.
Grant, Hardy, Oswick and Putnam (2004: 3) described organisational
discourse as the interrelated and structured collections of texts
embodied in the practices of talking and writing (as well as a wide
variety of visual representations and cultural artifacts) that bring
organisationally related objects into being as these texts are produced,
disseminated and consumed. They signify collections of interactions,
media of communication (i.e., oral, print, electronic), or assemblages
of oral and written forms.
The scholars (ibid.) also defined the organisational discourse as context-
sensitive language use exposed to plurivocality, i.e. multiple phenomena unveiled
for the analysis at a time. They considered that the field of organisational discourse
has borrowed extensively from the wider discourse analytical literature and
directed the debates pertaining to the exploration of organisational discourse to
the negotiation of meaning, intertextuality, cognitive approaches and reflexivity.
Mumby and Clair (1997) claimed that organisations are created by the
members of discourse community through discourse, which is the means to
create a coherent social reality.
Jana Kuzmina 77
The scholars also asserted that ‘discourse is a facet of organisational life;
a communicative practice that can be empirically examined to determine its
meaning and purpose, viewed in functional terms’ (ibid: 181). Heracleous and
Barrett (2001) defined organisational discourse ‘as a body of communicative
actions that [serve as] tools at actors’ disposal, emphasising the purposive
and instrumental use of such communicative actions for the facilitation of
managerially relevant processes and outcomes’ (2001: 756).
Iedema (2003) differentiated between two disciplines majoring in
organisational discourse, i.e. organisational discourse studies and organisational
discourse analysis, the former grounded in organisational management, the
latter in linguistics. Intertextual and interdiscursive nature of organisational
communication is explored deriving from purposive and instrumental language
use in organisational documentation.
2 INTERTEXTUALITY AND INTERDISCURSIVITY
Intertextuality was introduced from critical literary theory to linguistics in the
1980s and advanced extensive research in various branches to show the relations
between texts (Text Linguistics and SFL) and genres (ESP, New Rhetoric
Studies) and provided means to explain genre modification and transformation
(ESP, New Rhetoric Studies, Critical Discourse Analysis), evolving into
interdiscursivity.
The term intertextuality was proposed by Kristeva (1980). She referred to
texts in terms of two axes: a horizontal axis connecting the author and the reader
of a text, and vertical, which connects the text to other texts through contexts
(ibid: 36). She argued that rather than confining our attention to the structure
of a text we should study its ‘structuration’ (how the structure came into being).
This involves locating it ‘within the totality of previous or synchronic texts’ of
which it was a ‘transformation’ (ibid.). For the present research the vertical axis,
i.e. the relation of organisational genres within professional communication, have
been considered.
According to Kornetzki (2012), intertextuality as a concept and term was
transferred from critical literary theory to linguistics by Zimmermann (1978),
who investigated it at the level of content and text types. Beaugrande and Dressler
(1981) developed it further within text linguistics postulates and located it among
seven other standards of textuality along with cohesion, coherence, intentionality,
acceptability, informativity and situationality.
Beaugrande and Dresser (1981: 188) distinguished syntagmatic (referential)
and paradigmatic (typological) intertextual relations, the former being overt
intertextual relations expressed through references and citations, the latter being
the relations of text patterning. The theoretical framework gave rise to further
investigations of intertextuality within text linguistics, discourse studies, critical
discourse analysis in particular and genre studies. The obtained results reveal
syntagmatic intertextuality searching for its overt manifestation among genres/
78 INTERTEXTUALITY AND INTERDISCURSIVITY IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES ..
documents in question as well as paradigmatic intertextuality uncovering
intertextual relation based on the professional discursive processes.
Lemke (2005:6) considered the SFL postulates of language being context-
dependent and governed by three metafunctions (ideational, interpersonal and
textual) and proposed to apply them to investigate intertextual relations. Namely,
the texts, belonging to a similar topic, are connected ideationally, possessing
a similar stance of the author interpersonally, having similar textual patterns
textually. If the connections are present at all three metafunctional levels, though
of a different degree, the texts are considered as intertexts to each other. Hence,
the scholar (ibid.) distinguished three types of intertextuality, i.e. co-thematic,
co-orientating and co-generic respectively. The obtained results illustrate the
co-thematic intertextuality type since the genres in the repertoire are grouped
according to the theme as well as co-generic as the transformation of the same
technical solution (idea) is observed in various genres, which results in similar
rhetorical moves and textual patterns.
Defining intertextuality (Kristeva, 1980; Beaugrande and Dressler, 1981;
Bhatia 1995, 1998) and interdiscursivity (Fairclough, 1995; Bhatia, 2010), it
should be noted that intertextuality refers to the phenomenon that other texts
are overtly drawn upon within a text, which is typically expressed through
explicit surface textual features such as references, quotations and citations.
Interdiscursivity (Fairclough, 1995; Bhatia, 2010), however, operates on a
different dimension in that it refers to how a text is constituted by a combination
of other language conventions (genres, discourses, discursive practices). Thus,
the difference between these two concepts lies in the fact that intertextuality
refers to actual surface forms in a text, borrowed from other prior texts, whereas
interdiscursivity involves the whole language system referred to in a text. In this
sense, interdiscursivity is a more complex phenomenon since it is concerned
with the implicit relations between discursive formations rather than the explicit
relations between texts and, as a result, accounts for the attempts to create hybrid,
relatively novel, embedded constructs by appropriating the existing genres and
discursive practices.
Some scholars (e.g. Xin, 2000: 191) have used the term generic intertextuality
to cover what interdiscursivity actually refers to. However, these two notions do
not always have the same connotation in the sense that interdiscursivity does not
always refer to the mixing of different genres. In some cases, it is the articulation
of discourses, discursive practices or styles that makes sense in the formation of
interdiscursive relations.
The distinction between the concepts of interdiscursivity and intertextuality
derives from Fairclough’s (1992) dichotomy of constitutive and manifest
intertextuality when he accounted for the more overarching concept of
intertextuality. He claimed (ibid.) that manifest intertextuality refers to the
explicit presence of one text in another. Constitutive intertextuality, in its turn,
is attributed to the mixing configuration of discourse conventions such as genres,
activity types, and styles associated with different types of discourse; thus, it is
Jana Kuzmina 79
not overtly present in the textual artifact but is to be retrieved from the social
context (ibid.).
Bhatia (2010) schematically showed the constituents of interdiscursivity
linking directly the analysis of organisational genres with organisational
discursive practices through the appropriation of generic resources. He claimed
that professional practices and genres are mutually interrelated in the sense that
discursive practices are reflected in the textual artifact, yet a genre may determine
discursive behavior and influence the creation of other genres within the network
or outside it, which has been consistently investigated by the New Rhetoric Genre
School researchers.
The obtained results illustrate the interrelation of professional genres and
professional practices and its manifestation, excluding professional culture
since the investigation is of applied descriptive rather than critical nature. Both
syntagmatic and paradigmatic intertextual relations have been explored, the latter
being harder to uncover because of the dependence on professional discursive
processes.
METHODS AND DESIGN OF THE STUDY
In order to reach the goal of the paper, i.e. to investigate the recurrently
encountered genres characteristic of the IT institutional domain as a system
and determine genre intertextual relations, qualitative cross-sectional research
with quantitative research elements at data representation level, has been
employed. The multiple and collective instrumental case study (Stake, 1995,
2005) served to explore the data collected during questionnaires (Appendix 1),
interviews (Appendix 2), and as well as discourse and genre analysis of technical
documentation produced and consumed by the members of the discourse
community in a professional setting.
136 participants are technical specialists or managers employed by IT
companies, involved in IT product design and service provision, excluding
sales, in Latvia and abroad with at least one year working expertise in the
field, with one of the responsibilities encompassing technical documentation
production, consumption or both. They are non-native English language users
with language proficiency of B2 and above representing all levels of professional
expertise (trainee, junior, common, lead and/or senior specialists) and at least
low and middle level management aiming at maximum variation. The sample
of the present research may be characterised as homogeneous, in terms of the
professional domain, yet heterogeneous in terms of the level of expertise and the
nature of positions (technical, managerial or both).
Iterative chain sampling was implemented since the initial spread of
questionnaires and conducting interviews (87 participants) resulted in obtaining
additional 49 contacts. Therefore, it was decided to run the procedure in an
iterative way to ensure the saturation of the sample.
80 INTERTEXTUALITY AND INTERDISCURSIVITY IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES ..
Based on the results of the interviews and questionnaires, a text database
of organisational documentation of 307,849 tokens representing naturally
occurring language was compiled, marked-up and annotated for discourse and
genre analysis. Where applicable, Oxford Wordsmith Tools 6.0 software was used
to do the frequency analysis.
Once the results of the interviews and the questionnaires were processed and
the genres were organised into an intertextual network, the sample documents
underwent frequency analysis in order to indentify the linguistic manifestation of
intertextual relations.
DISCUSSION AND RESULTS
1 DESCRIBING GENRE INTERDISCURSIVE RELATIONS
Addressing the research questions of the study, the recurrently encountered
genres in IT written professional communication were identified analysing the
results of questionnaires and interviews (Kuzmina, 2014). Their communicative
aims and underlying discursive practices enabled us to organise the
documentation into a network. Table 1 below illustrates the allocation of the
genres in the sample into a repertoire.
Table 1 Genre interdiscursive relations
Project Management Technical Operational
business case description system architecture
business requirements
systems requirements
functional and non-functional specifications
a project plan project plan
(project scope, project schedule,
test strategy
change management plan,
resource, financial, quality, test cases
risk and acceptance plans)
problem/bug report or change request
status reports configuration management plan
repositories configuration
a closure report reports on fixes
an acceptance act/note manuals
Jana Kuzmina 81
The repertoire takes the perspective of the discourse community. The
networks of genres model action as communication, possessing performative
character; hence, the model of action is communicative/performative as the
reader is induced to action. The relationships are initiated by the discourse
community, thus, being asymmetrical. The table reflects the discursive processes
in the organisational setting, thus, the genres in the columns are organised
chronologically into chains, the relations being sequential, and hierarchies, the
relations being dominant. The overlapping relations or relations between the
domains are marked with arrows and are of a transformational character, namely,
the source genre is reconceptualised and modified into a target genre. The system
as a genre repertoire is considered to be stabilised for now.
Having explored constitutive (paradigmatic) intertextual relations
further, genre communicative aims were determined enabling us to organise
the documentation into colonies. The results reveal that colonisation in
IT may occur across discursively related domains. Table 2 (Appendix 3)
exemplifies a broadening of genre investigation into the mapping of generic
activity characteristic across the domains and sub-domains according to their
communicative aim. The distinguished colonies of the genres in the domains
in question are the colonies of regulatory, informative, reporting and evaluative
genres.
2 GENRE INTERTEXTUAL RELATIONS
In order to identify the manifest intertextual relations Oxford Wordsmith Tools 6.0
software was applied and frequency analysis was conducted. As it can be seen in
Table 3, the scarce use of manifest (syntagmatic) intertextual references might be
explained by the fact that the communicative aim of the document is to outline
systems components and their views focusing on clarity since it will be further
readdressed in the process of other genre creation (recontextualisation), in
systems requirements, functional and non-functional specifications. Hence, these
genres were identified.
Table 3 Intertextual relations in system architecture
N Word Frequency Per cent
1124 SPECIFICATIONS 2 0.01
1269 REQUIREMENTS 2 0.01
In functional and non-functional requirements as specified in Table 4, the
report signals not only intertextual, but also interdiscursive relations between
project management and technical operational domain since the report belongs
to the former. Other intertextual links relate to the preceding genres in the chain
and the figures are also scarce.
82 INTERTEXTUALITY AND INTERDISCURSIVITY IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES ..
Table 4 Intertextual relations in functional and non-functional specifications
N Word Frequency Per cent
7 REPORT 794 1.80
452 REQUIREMENTS 13 0.03
802 ARCHITECTURE 5 0.01
The frequency analysis of the configuration management and test
management documentation did not disclose any manifest intertextual relations.
However, manual documentation examination revealed that the companies
use intranet and intertextual relations are presented as hypertext links to other
documents in the database.
CONCLUSIONS
The data obtained in the present research revealed that genres of IT technical
operational documentation constitute a wide network in predominantly written
mode, the key being a system architecture, functional and non-functional
requirements, manuals and test strategy. The genres in the network possess
hierarchical structure with the system architecture and system requirements
being the dominating ones. Manifest and constitutive intertextual relations
and genres chronological chain are identified on the basis of exploring the
situational context and revealing the discursive practices behind. Interdiscursive
embedding of technical operational documentation and project management
documentation is also consistent with the professional practices as well as
mapping the communicative aims across IT operational and project management
domains which results in regulatory, informative, reporting and evaluative
genres. Frequency analysis results to investigate manifest intertextuality do not
demonstrate high variation, and the precedent and antecedent genres in the chain
were mentioned. The manifestation of intertextual relations in configuration and
testing documentation was through hypertextual links to the documents in the
intranet database.
The limitation of this study lies in the difficulty to compile a corpus due to
non-disclosure organisational policies. A similar research procedure may be
undertaken to analyse other genres in the domain after signing non-disclosure
agreements with the stakeholders to make corpus more representative. Further
research activities might also comprise a detailed analysis of lexico-grammatical
features of each move and step to demonstrate their connection with the
manifestation of language metafunctions or follow the longitudinal perspective,
focusing on genre integrity, genre dynamism and co-generic intertextuality.
Jana Kuzmina 83
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APPENDIX 1
QUESTIONNAIRE
Thank you very much for agreeing to complete this questionnaire on written
genres used in IT for professional communication. It should take you about 10–
15 minutes.
For the purposes of the present study written genres are broadly defined
as any document created for corporate communication at a workplace
and used internally, communicating with your colleagues and externally,
communicating with clients, partners and other stakeholders. The aim of the
research is to investigate the institutional situational context in which English
written communication for IT occurs; to determine recurrently used genres
in IT written discourse; to systematise the network of genres used for written
professional communication in the IT domain, state their communicative
aims and organization and typical language. The information will help me to
describe the peculiarities of written professional communication and identify
the requirements for writing successful professional documentation in the
workplace.
Jana Kuzmina 85
Participant (Addressor/addressee)
1. Company ____________________________________________
2. Location ____________________________________________
3. Age (tick the appropriate box)
18–25 26–35 36–50 over 50
4. Work experience in IT (tick the appropriate box)
Less than 1 year 1–2 years 2–5years 6–10 years more than 10 years
5. Native language _________________________________________
Purposive domain
6. In which business domain and sub-domains do you work? (e.g. software
development, user interface development)
7. What is your position?
_______________________________________________________
8. What responsibilities (activities, actions and operations) that require
documentation compilation and processing do you perform?
Activity, action and operation Document(s)
Instrumentality
9. How is the documentation stored and retrieved in your company?
Repository issue tracking team collabora Other (please
(please specify system, e.g. tion software, specify)
file format) JIRA e.g. Confluence
Tick all that
apply
Notes
Could you specify the most appropriate time for you for the interview?
Thank you for completing this questionnaire! I highly appreciate your
contribution to this research.
86 INTERTEXTUALITY AND INTERDISCURSIVITY IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES ..
APPENDIX 2
INTERVIEW PROTOCOL FOR THE IN-PERSON SEMI-
STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS
The aim of my research is to collect information about the written documentation
used in IT companies for professional communication. The results will enable
me to organise the documents used at a workplace into interrelated networks
and further describe their rhetorical (organisational) and linguistic features. The
research results may be applicable for personnel trainings, materials design and
further documentation flow optimisation. By document I understand any formal
written unit generated individually or collectively that has an addressee or a
target audience, is recognised by them, has a typical organisational structure, and
is devised in response to some professional activity. The interview will take you
approximately 15–20 minutes.
QUESTIONS FOR THE IN-PERSON SEMI-STRUCTURED
INTERVIEWS
Communicative event and setting
1. What documents do you draw up? What documents do you review?
2. How frequently do you do that?
3. Who is the addressee?
4. Is s/he located externally or internally? If externally, in what countries?
5. Can there be multiple addressees?
6. What professional activity does it describe? What product or service is it
related to?
7. Is the creation of the document determined by the company operations or by
client requirements?
8. What activities precede its creation? What activities follow its creation?
Genres
9. What documents are created before it? What documents are created after it?
10. Which documents dominate in the set?
11. What are their aims?
12. Are there documents with similar aims?
13. What sections does it consist of?
14. Are there usually any graphs, charts, diagrams or flowcharts?
Jana Kuzmina 87
Texts Analysed (available from companies internal database) [assessed from
15 June to 1 July, 2013]:
Genre No of No of Source
documents words
operational architecture 4 19,584 companies A, B, C, E
systems requirements 4 15,840 companies A, B, C, E
functional non-functional 8 98,112 companies A, B, C, E
specifications
test strategy 4 23,304 companies A, B, C, E
test cases 20 12,840 companies A, B, C, E
problem/bug report or change 20 4,874 companies A, B, C, E
request
configuration management plan 4 8,421 companies A, B, C, E
repositories configuration 4 8,015 companies A, B, C, E
reports on fixes 20 2,011 companies A, B, C, E
Sub-total 88 193,001
business case description 4 16,213 companies A, B, C, E
business requirements 4 14,224 companies A, B, C, E
project plan (project scope, project 4 59,215 companies A, B, C, E
schedule, change management plan,
resource, financial, quality, risk and
acceptance plans)
status reports 20 21,660 companies A, B, C, E
closure report 4 2,272 companies A, B, C, E
acceptance act/note 4 1,264 companies A, B, C, E
Sub-total 40 114,848
Total 128 307,849
88 INTERTEXTUALITY AND INTERDISCURSIVITY IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES ..
APPENDIX 3
Table 2 Genre Colonies
General Genre Specific communicative aim Domain/
communicative sub‑domain
aim
To regulate project plan to outline project milestones, project
and guide the (change mana deliverables, dates, resources management
professional gement plan, involved, risks and acceptance
activity resource, criteria
financial, risk
and acceptance
plans)
configuration to outline software technical
management configuration activities operational/
plan software
configuration
test strategy to outline software testing technical
activities operational/
software testing
To report progress report on fixes to inform about changes made technical
of a professional to an application operational
activity status report to inform about a status of a project
task management
closure report to inform about completed project
a project and submission of management
deliverables
To inform about system to describe design goals; technical
a professional architecture to provide a general overview operational/
activity, system, of the system architecture, software design
product, system interaction patterns
application, etc. with other applications and
data flow;
to outline partitioning
of functionality and
responsibilities of the system
were partitioned and then
assigned to subsystems or
components
system to describe the data design technical
requirements related to the system, operational/
interaction, interface and software design
operational scenarios
Jana Kuzmina 89
General Genre Specific communicative aim Domain/
communicative sub‑domain
aim
Manuals to describe the operational technical
circumstances to ensure proper operational/
system, software application or software
functionality use development,
testing,
configuration or
use
functional and to exhibit the functional technical
non-functional capabilities of the system/ operational/
specifications application; software
to outline non-functional development
constraints to the solution,
e.g. performance, safety,
reliability, environment and
other criteria
test cases to outline the purpose of technical
testing, input data, steps to operational/
reproduce, expected results, software testing
pass and fail criteria
repositories to outline criteria for technical
configuration data storage repositories operational/
adjustment software
development
business case to outline a business process project
description that requires a software management
business to outline criteria for a project
requirements business process and describe management
the instances of use
project scope to outline project deliverables project
management
project schedule to outline project milestones project
and time frames for management
deliverables
To verify/ evaluate acceptance act/ to inform about the acceptance project
the compliance note of deliverables management
a professional
activity, system,
product,
application etc.
with certain
requirements
Jana Kuzmina (Dr. philol., Lecturer) is currently working at the University of Latvia
and Riga Technical College. Her research interests include written organisational
discourse, genre analysis, intertextuality. Email: [Link]@[Link]