Discourse Studies Reader

Essential Excerpts

Ken Hyland

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781441154972
• eBook ISBN: 9781441172693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistic Semantics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Since 2005, the Continuum Discourse series, under the editorship of Professor Ken Hyland, has published some of the most cutting-edge work in the field of discourse analysis.This edited collection offers a showcase of the work produced by its authors and reads as fully-functional book in its own right. The work of Paul Baker, Frances Christie and Greg Myers features, amongst others. With an introduction by Professor Hyland, the chapters are organized thematically to provide a look a research methods, examine at the various types of institutional discourses covered by the series, and finally, a look to arguably the future of the field - electronic discourses in an electronic medium, for example Twitter, SMS and Blogs. This is an essential purchase for those involved in discourse analysis in any capacity.

1

Introduction

Ken Hyland

Discourse and discourse analysis

Discourse is one of the most significant concepts of modern thinking in a range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. Applied linguists originally took an interest in the idea to study language beyond the sentence, extending their traditional concerns with the constraints on morphemes, words and syntax to look for the patterns which seemed to distinguish texts from random collections of sentences. Today, however, discourse analysis is used to understand language in the world. It is the principle means to explore how language functions in potentially all aspects of human life; how it works to create and sustain social relationships among individuals, and so shape our identities and our interactions with society. So while the analysis of discourse begins with linguistic study, it takes us far beyond texts, helping us to understand how language is used to construct ourselves, our communities and our political and cultural formations. It has, in other words, become an inescapably important concept for understanding all aspects of society and human responses to it.

The study of discourse is therefore the study of language in action: how language works in relation to particular social contexts. The fact that language is connected to almost everything that goes on in the world, means that discourse analysis has become central to those disciplines which study humans and society scientifically, such as anthropology, sociology, philosophy, psychology and so on. Thus, sociologists attempt to find principles of social organization in conversational interaction and communication theorists look for, among other things, the ways we persuade each other to buy products or buy into ideas. ‘Discourse’ is therefore something of an overloaded term, covering a range of meanings and with several distinct uses in play, and its complexities do not allow it to be carved up neatly between disciplines.

People who study discourse might therefore focus on the analysis of speech and writing to bring out the dynamics and conventions of social situations, or take a more theoretical and critical point of view to consider the institutionalized ways of thinking which define our social lives. Discourse analysis, to take some liberties with simplification, can be seen to spread between two poles, giving more-or-less emphasis to concrete texts or to institutional practices, to either particular cases or talk or to how social structures are formed by it.

There is, for example, a long tradition of treating discourse in linguistic terms, informed by both pragmatics and a maturing, activity-centred linguistic perspective on language. This take on discourse recognizes ‘language-in-use’ as a legitimate object of analysis and sets out to discover grammatical and structural features of language operating at levels higher than the sentence. Many different frameworks have been developed for this purpose, crossing a number of disciplines and drawing on a broad variety of assumptions and analytical methods. Halliday’s (1994) Systemic Functional Linguistics is perhaps the most elaborated and sophisticated of these models, but they all regard linguistic signalling and organization patterns as potential resources for interpreting text meanings and as contributing to our understanding of how texts are produced and used.

Many social scientists, however, particularly those influenced by Foucault (1972), pay very little attention to textual features. Instead they focus on the ‘socially constructive effects’ of discourse, or on the ways it functions to create social, cultural and institutional developments and to influence how we understand the world. This is what we might describe as discourse as form-of-life: the stuff of our everyday world of activities and institutions which is created by our routine uses of language, together with other aspects of social practices. It is through discourses, for example, that we build meanings for things in the world such as lectures, meetings and celebrity; it is the ways that we construct identities for ourselves and relationships with others; it is how we distribute prestige and value to ideas and behaviours and it is the ways we make connections to the past and to the future.

This difference is neatly encapsulated in Gee’s (1999) distinction between ‘big D’ and ‘little d’ discourse. Gee defines discourse (with a little ‘d’) as ‘language-in-use’, that is, language as we use it to enact our identities as teachers, discourse analysts, taxi drivers or particle physicists and how we get things done in the world. Discourse (with a big ‘D’), on the other hand, is a wider concept involving both language and other elements. It highlights the fact that our displays of who we are and what we are doing when we act as members of particular groups, always involves more than just language. As Gee observes:

It involves acting-interacting-thinking-valuing-talking in the ‘appropriate way’ with the ‘appropriate’ props at the ‘appropriate’ times in the ‘appropriate’ places. Such socially accepted associations among ways of using language, of thinking, valuing, acting, and interacting in the ‘right’ places and at the ‘right’ times with the ‘right’ objects (associations that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or ‘social network’), I will refer to as ‘Discourses’ with a capital ‘D’. (1999: 17)

Discourse, then, is a way of being. It is the institutions, activities and values which we constantly recreate through discourse as members of social groups.

Fairclough (2003), like Gee, is just one among many analysts who see no opposition between the two views of discourse and its analysis. He observes that:

Text analysis is an essential part of discourse analysis, but discourse analysis is not merely the linguistic analysis of texts. I see discourses analysis as ‘oscillating’ between a focus on specific texts and a focus on what I shall call the ‘orders of discourse’, the relatively durable social structuring of language which is itself one element of the relatively durable structuring and networking of social practices. (2003: 3)

For Fairclough, then, this ‘oscillation’ between texts and the structures which support them is needed to understand how language is used to conduct interactions and how it is embedded in social and cultural practices.

The point here is that we do not only use discourse to express our attitudes, ideas and understandings, but that these are themselves shaped by discourse. Authorized and valued ways of using language make certain possibilities available to us and exclude others, thereby constraining what can be said and how it can be said. The topics we discuss, how we approach them and the ways we see the world are all influenced by the language we have available to us.

Domains and methods

These different aspects of discourse and discourse analysis are illustrated in the pages of this book, which is composed of chapters compiled from my Bloomsbury Discourse. This is something of an innovative publishing move, a sampler which is more often found in music genres or Penguin fiction, but it is one which has more than a simple marketing motive. The chapters were selected to offer a broad and accessible flavour of current issues in discourse, exemplifying some of the ways it is studied, the areas that are studied and the findings that such studies produce. Together they not only offer a taste of the series, but also stand alone in their own right to offer a wide-ranging and structured introduction to discourse issues for students, researchers, teachers and others interested in language use and how communication is accomplished.

The volume is divided into three broad sections dealing, respectively, with some key methodological approaches, with the analysis of central institutional and social domains and with emergent electronic discourses. The first deals with three of the main approaches to researching discourse which inform the analyses conducted in the book together with a broad introduction to research issues. The second section illustrates a range of analytical approaches to discourse studies and some central areas of interest, focusing on the ways language is used in education, the media and the professions. The final section looks at the characteristics of emergent electronic genres, showing both the challenges to discourse analysis these present and its potential to describe these genres.

The collection suggests some of the varied ways that discourse analysis has been helpful in addressing a range of questions to do with language use, offering new ways of understanding domains such as language learning, language change and language variation. They also exemplify some of the ways that discourse studies have opened up new ways of exploring areas which have traditionally been associated with fields that focus on human life and communication, where research has provided insights into such issues as solidarity and oppression, identity and community. More specifically, these studies offer concrete examples of Gee’s assertion that language functions in every aspect of human endeavour, ‘scaffolding the performance of social activities and social affiliations within culture, groups and institutions’ (Gee, 1999: 1). The study of discourse thus reaches into every corner of social life, telling us more about gender and ethnicity, media and politics, aging and disability and persuasion and ideology, while contributing to our understanding of how we argue and inform, tell jokes and sell things.

The chapters included here therefore introduce some of the questions that discourse analysts ask and which they help answer. These are questions such as: What role does grammar play in constructing meaning (Chapter 2 and 5)? How does the discourse used in a particular domain differ over time (Chapter 7)? How do individuals enact social relations in a range of different contexts (Chapters 3, 6, 8 and 12)? How do images and text interact in presenting an argument (Chapter 5 and 9)? How do learners acquire different genres (Chapters 2, 5 and 8)? How does language work to construct identities for users in different contexts (Chapter 10 and 11)? And how does language do many of these things in the confined spaces of new electronic genres (Chapters 10, 11 and 12)? The chapters also illustrate some of the different ways that analysts approach these questions. Chapter 4, for example, speaks to students and novice researchers to raise issues that need to be considered when planning and conducting a discourse analysis project, while Chapters 1, 2 and 3 provide accessible introductions to a number of central contemporary methodologies for analyzing discourse: Corpus analysis, Systemic Linguistics and Metadiscourse.

Corpus analysis, using collections of electronically encoded text, draws on frequency information about the occurrence and co-occurrence of particular linguistic items to draw inferences about how particular groups use language. Corpora of various kinds are employed in many of the chapters (particularly 6, 8, 11 and 12) but corpus techniques are most explicitly discussed in Chapter 2. Here Paul Baker uses a small corpus of holiday leaflets written for young adults to explore some basic principles of corpus analysis and how its procedures can be carried out on texts. By showing how lists of frequently occurring words and measures such as dispersion and type-token ratios help to give an account of the meaning and complexity of a text, he illustrates some of the ways corpus analyses can be valuable to discourse analysts and inform their work. Another key approach is Systemic Functional Linguistics, adopted in the analyses in Chapter 5 and 9 and discussed more fully in Chapter 3. This model seeks to offer a comprehensive account of how language users create meanings in discourse by drawing on Halliday’s multifunctional model of language (e.g. Halliday and Mathiessen, 2004) . Other approaches discussed are that of Metadiscourse, which attempts to map the interactional resources of language (Chapter 4), and the sociohistorical perspective, illustrated in Chapter 7, which shows how discourse is temporally situated and changes over time.

Although it cannot claim to be comprehensive, the collection offers some interesting analyses and fascinating insights into the ways language is used in a variety of different contexts.

Threads and themes

In addition to revealing aspects of these genres and exemplify methods of analysis, these chapters have been selected as they embody a number of key principles of discourse analysis.

The first is that they all see discourse as contextualized activities rather than simply as objects of study. While dealing with linguistic materials, taking words as raw data, they are words which are recognized as coming from a wider set in a particular situation and which help to construct that situation. The underlying assumption in all these chapters is therefore that the study of language should be the study of society; it is part of a wider landscape of approaches to appreciating the workings of everyday life, whether it is initiating young children into the ways of understanding and talking about the natural world through school science texts (Chapter 5), the communicative functions of images in the presentation of news stories (Chapter 9) or how colleagues use small talk to oil the wheels of the transactionally oriented workplace (Chapter 6). In all these cases, what counts for authors is the ways that words act as semiotic resources to get things done in particular contexts and circumstances and how they are seen as meaningful by those who use them.

A sensitivity to context means showing how discourses are socially situated in institutional and social environments and, often, taking seriously the constructionist idea that things are only true for a particular group at a particular time. This is perhaps most obvious in the ‘new discourses’ of the electronic age such as blogs and wikis (Chapter 10), electronic texts (Chapter 11) and microblogging on Twitter (Chapter 12). In these contexts, actors redefine demarcations between the personal and the public to forge social bonds and construct new communities using a variety of rhetorical and technical resources (respellings, abbreviations, multimedia links, etc.) not previously possible on the same scale or in the same way. In Chapter 7, Britt-Louise Gunnarsson demonstrates quite starkly the importance of situating cultural practices in their wider social contexts by showing how writers have used language to construct a world of medical research facts at different periods of history. Studies such as this reveal the historical circumstance in which current discourses emerge and become relatively stabilized in certain periods, showing how the writing conventions familiar to us today are not timeless and self-evident means of establishing knowledge but have been consciously developed over time in response to particular social situations.

The second theme which emerges from these chapters is the fact that discourse matters to people. Discourse is firmly anchored in our daily lives as we go about our business in the workplace, in the classroom and in the mall, and in how we keep in touch with our non-present friends and members of our communities. This is perhaps best illustrated in the ways that colleagues use humour to facilitate cooperation and shared ways of doing things in the workplace (Chapter 6) and how microbloggers both express meanings and create a community through the particular features of tweets (Chapter 12). It is, however, also apparent in the care that bloggers take to construct an argument which can effectively interact with an audience and convey the complexity, interest and novelty of the views they are expressing (Chapter 10) and in the at lectures, seminars and undergraduate textbooks students encounter and engage with new knowledge and was of acquiring it in Higher Educati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• 1 Introduction
• PART ONE   Discourse research methods
• PART TWO   Analyses of institutional discourses
• PART THREE   Electronic discourses
• References