Reading Science: Critical and Functional Perspectives on Discourses of Science by J. R. Martin and Robert Veel, eds.

This twelve-chapter book on scientific discourse is based on an invitational workshop in July 1994 when Charles Bazerman and Jay Lemke were visiting Michael Halliday, J. R. Martin, and their colleagues at the University of Sydney in Australia. It is billed as a recontextualization of Halliday and Martin's functional linguistic perspective with respect to the work in rhetoric and critical theory. I was disappointed to find that Halliday dominates the discussion and there is relatively little intellectual cross-fertilization from Bazerman and Lemke; whereas all but one of the authors (Cranny-Francis) refer to Halliday, only about halfrefer to each ofBazerman or Lemke. In fact, this onesidedness is seen even among the "big three," for Halliday does not refer to Bazerman and Bazerman does not refer to Lemke. Although this book should be of interest to anyone interested in scientific discourse, its greatest strength and its greatest weakness is the fact that it is submerged in the work of Halliday. Like its companion volume, Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power (1993), it is a "must read" for anyone whose language training is based on the functional linguistics work of Halliday and Martin, for this is an excellent and rich extension of the Hallidayan analyses to a wide range of scientific discourses (including the language of school textbooks, popularizations, science fiction, and the language of technology and industry) and represents the perspectives of a variety of authors. However, for a reader with a more mainstream training in linguistics, such as myself, the idiosyncratic and sometimes inconsistent use of standard technical terms like grammar, metaphor, and semantics can become a serious obstruction and source of frustration. Since most readers are familiar with the work of the "big guns," I will begin, rather, with the eight chapters by less well-known scholars of the Australian community.