In this genre analysis research paper, we compare U.S. patents, contracts, and regulations on technical matters with a focus upon the relation between vagueness and communicative purposes and subpurposes of these three genres. Our main interest is the investigation of intergeneric conventions across the three genres, based on the software analysis of three corpora (one for each genre, 1 million words per c o r p u s ) . Th e r e s u l t o f t h e investigation is that intergeneric conventions are found at the level of types of expressed linguistic vagueness, but that intergeneric conventions at the level of actual formulations are rare. The conclusion is that at this latter level the influence from the situation type underlying the individual genre is more important than the overarching legal character of the genres, when we talk about introducing explicit vagueness in the text. KEYWORDS:Genre analysis, corpus linguistics, generic integrity, vagueness, legal discourse, intergeneric conventions, disciplinary genres. RESUMENEl propósito de este artículo es comparar mediante herramientas de lingüística de corpus el uso de la vaguedad en contratos, legislación y patentes de los EE.UU. La comparación se centra en valorar hasta qué punto estos tres géneros comparten las mismas estrategias de vaguedad lingüística para lograr sus objetivos y sub-objetivos comunicativos. Los tres corpus compilados para este estudio comparten una combinación, tanto de lenguaje legal, como tecnológico y cada uno de ellos consta de algo más de un millón de tokens. El resultado de nuestra investigación apunta a que estos tres géneros comparten convenciones en el uso deliberado de tipos de vaguedad lingüística, pero la fraseología concreta de la vaguedad aplicada no es normalmente la misma. La conclusión es que, en este último nivel fraseológico, la situación subyacente en cada género es más importante que el común carácter legal de los géneros cuando se trata de introducir la vaguedad de forma explícita en el texto.

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This paper examines the import of figurative language (specifically of conceptual and grammatical metaphors) in the discourse of engineering patents, a genre hardly researched for stylistic and pedagogical purposes and traditionally regarded as highly impersonal. To that end, a corpus of over 300 US electro-mechanical patents has been analysed with the aid of a concordancing tool and applying a threefold convergent framework that gathers the metafunctions of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1978, 1985), the Applied Linguistic Approach to Metaphor (Low, 2008) and the Metadiscursive Approach (Hyland, 2000, 2005). Findings reveal a complex network of metaphorical schemata, most non-deliberate, which constitute a tripartite choice dependent on the legal culture, the discipline and, to a lesser extent, on the authorial voice. It also binds patent writers into a community of practice (Wenger, 1998) sharing a phraseological repertoire basically acquired by imitation and whose creative and confident use requires explicit instruction.

Despite their ostensibly aseptic nature, technical texts involve a multifaceted net of institutional, social and pragmatic functions. Patents, in particular, are characterized by a multi-layered rhetorical exercise in which information is provided, and hidden, in light of patent disclosure lawsDrawing on the Cooperative Patent Classification scheme, a corpus of patents related to environmental issues has been compiled. The objective is to investigate the main keywords emerging in the corpus and to analyse their semantic context in this patent type. More specifically, the analysis focuses on the patents’ semantic preference and semantic prosody in order to pinpoint and examine the semantic complexities emerging in this genre and to identify the strategies employed (such as the use of linguistic vagueness) in order to provide the necessary information while not disclosing precious data. Patents represent a complex, hybrid and cross-disciplinary genre and a finer understanding of their discursive features may contribute to spreading awareness of the importance that semantics plays within the rhetorical pattern of the text. Therefore, they may be fruitfully employed in Technical Communication courses in order to improved reading comprehension and analytical skills.