Discourse Analysis

The Questions Discourse Analysts Ask and How They Answer Them

Hansun Zhang Waring

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138657441
• eBook ISBN: 9781317219668
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Discourse Analysis: The Questions Discourse Analysts Ask and How They Answer Them is the first introductory text organized around the kinds of questions discourse analysts ask and how they are systematically addressed by analysts of different empirical persuasions, thereby cultivating a principled understanding of the interdisciplinary field of discourse analysis. The text promotes synthesis, integration, and a multidimensional understanding of the core issues that preoccupy discourse analysts. (1) How is discourse structured? (2) How are social actions accomplished in discourse? (3) How are identities negotiated in discourse? (4) How are ideologies constructed in discourse? The answer to each question is illustrated with transcripts and analyses of actual discourse as exemplified in key studies in the field. With a range of other features such as boxed definitions, study questions, and analytical tasks, this guide to the complex world of discourse is an ideal resource for courses on discourse analysis.

Part I
Introduction

1
Overview of Discourse Analysis

Introduction

As an applied linguist who does discourse analytic work, I introduce myself sometimes as an applied linguist and sometimes as a discourse analyst. Like many of my colleagues across the globe, we are discourse analysts in linguistics, applied linguistics, education, sociology, anthropology, psychology, gender studies, culture studies, communication studies, English language and literature, and other disciplines. We are housed in a vastly diverse array of academic programs or departments, most of which don’t have “discourse analysis” in their titles. As the British linguist Michael Stubbs (1983) wrote more than 30 years ago:

No one is in the position to write a comprehensive account of discourse analysis. The subject is at once too vast, and too lacking in focus and consensus.… Anything at all that is written on discourse analysis is partial and controversial.

(p. 12)

Decades later, the vastness and disparity remain but have in some ways been cast in a more positive light. In their second edition of the Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Schiffrin, Tannen, and Hamilton (2015) wrote:

Our own experiences in the field have led us to the conviction that the vastness and diversity of discourse analysis is a strength rather than a weakness. Far from its being a liability to be lamented because of the lack of a single coherent theory, we find the theoretical and methodological diversity of discourse analysis to be an asset.

(p. 5)

Aim of the Book

Appreciating the vastness and diversity of discourse analysis is one thing, and attempting to introduce that vastness and diversity to beginning students of discourse is quite another. In this book, I make this attempt by organizing such vastness and diversity around the kinds of questions discourse analysts ask and how they answer them. By placing the questions that drive discourse analysts at the center stage, I hope to provide a spine that brings together what may otherwise appear to be a disparate set of facts about discourse, thereby alleviating the difficulty students often have in efficiently developing and articulating a coherent understanding of the subject. Considering how each broad question is systematically approached by analysts of different empirical persuasions also affords the possibilities for synthesis, integration, and a multidimensional understanding of the core issues that preoccupy discourse analysts. As such, it sidesteps the potential pitfall of a method-driven orientation that may at times constrain rather than inspire. Without considering the question each method is addressed to, for example, discussions on its strengths and weaknesses are ultimately unproductive. As students of discourse are sometimes observed to grapple with “Am I using the method correctly?” or “Is X allowed in this method?” rather than “Am I answering the question adequately?”, this book is written in part to set the priorities straight.

Origins of Discourse Analysis

Before we proceed, one clarification is in order. In this book, I use discourse analysis as a general label that encompasses various approaches to discourse such as conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, and critical discourse analysis (e.g., Cameron, 2001; Schiffrin, 1994). It is important to acknowledge, however, that the term “discourse analysis” is sometimes reserved for more specific traditions or approaches. In sociology and social psychology, for example, discourse analysis originated in the sociology of scientific knowledge associated with the work of Nigel Gilbert and Michael Mulkay (Wooffitt, 2005). By collecting various kinds of qualitative data including recorded interviews, Gilbert and Mulkay (1984) were trying to discover the processes through which scientists resolve a scientific dispute. Although they set out to provide a coherent account of how scientific knowledge was produced, what they found was the variability in accounts. There is, in other words, no such thing as “what really happened.” They proposed, as a result, discourse analysis as a method to study the nature of that variability. This method of discourse analysis was later crystallized in Potter and Wetherell’s (1987) classic volume Discourse and Social Psychology (also see discursive psychology in Edwards & Potter, 1992).

In linguistics, the enterprise of discourse came about as an attempt by linguists to go beyond the sentence level in the study of language. The belief was that just as sentences were built from identifiable elements and rules, so should be discourse. Scholars would take this search for structures beyond the sentence level in several directions: some discovered structures and rules for stories and narratives (Kintsch & Dijk, 1978; Labov & Waletzky, 1967), some proposed mapping rules and sequencing rules for conversation (Labov & Fanshel, 1977), and some identified IRF (initiation-response-feedback) as a distinct feature of classroom discourse (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975). As the terms used to characterize language at or below the sentence level are no longer adequate for describing discourse, some have turned to concepts such as topic, “staging,” information structure and the like, and efforts were made to understand the nature of reference and other cohesive ties in building text coherence (Brown & Yule, 1983; Halliday & Hasan, 1976). Because of the preoccupation with units and rules, linguistically oriented discourse analysis is often tied to the practice of imposing predetermined categories onto natural or even invented data, and in this regard, stands in stark contrast with other approaches such as conversation analysis, which features “unmotivated looking” into naturally occurring talk (Psathas, 1995). Levinson (1983), for example, made the distinction between conversation analysis and discourse analysis.

Returning to our consideration of discourse analysis as a superordinate category then, in this chapter, I provide a preview of the four broad questions that preoccupy discourse analysts—questions that provide some much-needed but ever-elusive coherence to the field. I also offer an initial sampling of how these four broad questions ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Discourse and Structure
• PART III Discourse and Social Action
• PART IV Discourse and Identity
• PART V Discourse and Ideology
• Index