The Internet revolution and English for Specific Purposes: a diachronic study of promotional rhetorical strategies in three genres from the field of architecture ; La révolution Internet et l'anglais de spécialité : étude diachronique des stratégies rhétoriques promotionnelles dans trois genres du domaine de l'architecture

In this thesis, we intend to characterise the specialised and professional community of architects and the language of architecture. We focus on the genre repertoire used by architects in the English-speaking world to carry out their work, and more specifically on three specialized genres : project descriptions (that feature in brochures and on the firms' Web page), architectural reviews (that feature in specialised magazines and on the Web page of these magazines) and online architects' blog posts, that all contribute, directly or indirectly, to the promotion of architects and architecture firms. This is where the narrative of architecture projects unfolds. The aim of this thesis is to determine to what extent the « birth » or the « migration » of these genres on the Web has had an impact on rhetorical strategies and on the way the story of the projects is told. To this end, we designed several corpora: a first diachronic corpus of project descriptions published in architecture brochures (1970-1995) and then online (1996-2020), a second diachronic corpus of architectural review published in magazines (1970-1995) or online (1996-2020) and lastly a synchronic corpus of architects' blog posts online (1996-2020). The underlying assumption here is that specialised genres « are born », « evolve » and « die » and that any evolutionary process of these genres involves replication, selection and change. We aim to characterise change in these genres in terms of production and reception context and also rhetorical structure, multimodality and language. Several complementary methods are used such as ethnography, moves and steps analysis, multimodal analysis and corpus linguistics. We observe how project descriptions, moving online, become longer, use fewer technical terms, feature more business-driven jargon, and develop visual, linguistic and structural strategies to offer a very complete description of the project and indirectly an elaborate tale of what the practice is capable of doing. We then describe how architecture ...