Any Questions? Identity Construction in Academic Conference Discussions.

This book describes some interactional and linguistic practices of a particular kind of discourse community, which is also a community of social practice. Its members are academic researchers from the humanities, that is, people working in linguistics, literature, culture and translation studies, most of them teaching and/or researching at universities or similar institutions. The term discourse community indicates that its members share a common discourse, in other words, certain forms of linguistic behaviour; the second term - community of social practice - underlines the fact that social activities are at the centre of interest. Following Swales (1990: 24-27), discourse communities are defined as groups consisting of members who share a common set of goals, dispose of established ways of communicating with each other, engage in exchanging information and feedback relating to their goals, are characterised by the use of certain genres and a certain vocabulary, and are made up of both newcomers and more experienced members. In a broader sense, this study is also about a community of social practice, a term coined by the learning theory researchers Lave and Wenger (1991 ) and Wenger (1999), and defined as "[a] group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly" (Wenger 2006). ISBN 9781614510222