An Introduction to Discourse Analysis

Malcolm Coulthard, C. N. Condlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780582553798
• eBook ISBN: 9781317869207
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The central concern of this book is the analysis of verbal interaction or discourse. This first six chapters report and evaluate major theoretical advances in the description of discourse. The final chapters demonstrate how the findings of discourse analysis can be used to investigate second-language teaching and first-language acquisition and to analyse literary texts.

1 Introduction

Although it is now many years since J. R. Firth urged linguists to study conversation, for there ‘we shall find the key to a better understanding of what language is and how it works’ (1935), the serious study of spoken discourse is only just beginning and currently much of the work is being undertaken not by linguists but by sociologists, anthropologists and philosophers. The explanation is not hard to find. While all linguists would agree that human communication must be described in terms of at least three levels — meaning, form and substance, or discourse, lexico-grammar and phonology — there are disagreements over the boundaries of linguistics.

Firth (1951) asserted that ‘the main concern of descriptive linguistics is to make statements of meaning’. Part of the meaning of an utterance is the result of contrasts in the levels of phonology and syntax, and Firth accepted that in order to isolate meaningful contrasts in these levels ‘we make regular use of nonsense in phonetics and grammar’, but, he argued, language is fundamentally ‘a way of behaving and making others behave’ and therefore ultimately the linguist must concern himself with the ‘verbal process in the context of situation’. For Firth language was only meaningful in its context of situation; he asserted that the descriptive process must begin with the collection of a set of contextually defined homogeneous texts and the aim of description is to explain how the sentences or utterances are meaningful in their contexts.

Firth himself did not in fact explore the relation between form and meaning and his exhortations to others were ignored, because Bloom-field led linguistics away from any consideration of meaning to a concentration on form and substance, by observing that linguists ‘cannot define meanings, but must appeal for this to students of other sciences or to common knowledge’ (1933). The utterance ‘I’m hungry’ could be used by a starving beggar to request food or by a petulant child to delay going to bed; Bloomfield argued that linguistics is only concerned with those phonological, lexical and syntactic features which the utterances share — he felt it was no concern of linguistics to explain how identical utterances can have different functions in different situations, nor how listeners correctly decode the intended message.

For a generation American linguists concentrated massively and highly successfully on problems within phonology and morphology — on the existence of the phoneme and the validity of unique phonemic descriptions; on discovery procedures for isolating phonemes and morphemes in languages not previously described; on the mechanical identification of morpheme boundaries and word classes. When Chomsky redirected linguistics towards the study of sentence structure, the concerns were still pre-eminently with the formal features of language: ‘the fundamental aim in the linguistic analysis of a language L is to separate the grammatical sequences which are sentences of L from the ungrammatical sequences which are not sentences of L and to study the structure of the grammatical sequences’ (1957). In arguing the independence of grammaticality from meaningfulness Chomsky produced the most famous example of ‘nonsense’ in linguistics — ‘colourless green ideas sleep furiously’.

Earlier linguists, while concentrating on formal aspects of language, had used collections of speech or writing as a source of examples. Chomsky suggested that not only was a corpus unnecessary, it was actually counterproductive. No corpus, however large, can be adequate because it will never contain examples of all possible structures and will actually contain misleading data, performance errors, caused by ‘such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest and errors (random or characteristic) in applying knowledge of the language in actual performance’. The prime concern of linguistic theory, Chomsky argued, is with the underlying knowledge, the competence of the ideal speaker-hearer. The underlying competence is the same for all native speakers and therefore can be studied in the productions of any one individual, usually the linguist himself, who proceeds by introspection, checking potential sentences for grammaticality against his intuitions.

The insights achieved by transformational grammarians were enormous, but as time passed the problems became more serious. It became evident that there was not in fact a uniform native speaker competence; it became necessary to talk of degrees of grammaticality or acceptability; crucial examples were attacked as ungrammatical and defended as ‘acceptable in my idiolect’. Meanwhile the timebomb meaning was ticking away: in the late 1960s Ross, McCawley and G. Lakoff began arguing that one cannot in fact describe grammar in isolation from meaning, that powerful syntactic generalizations can be achieved by making lexical insertions at an early stage in the generation of a sentence. By 1972 Robin Lakoff was arguing that ‘in order to predict correctly the applicability of many rules one must be able to refer to assumptions about the social context of an utterance, as well as to other implicit assumptions made by the participants in a discourse’. Thus the results of empirical investigation have forced many transformational linguists to recognize the importance of context and to join a series of disciplines converging on the study of situated speech.

There is as yet, however, no single discipline which concerns itself with the study of interaction; in writing an introduction to discourse analysis I am not, paradoxically, describing only the work of researchers who consider themselves discourse analysts — many of those mentioned here would be bemused or annoyed by the label. Rather, what I have tried to do is draw together in the first six chapters research from many disciplines — philosophy, psychology, sociology, sociolin-guistics, conversational analysis, anthropology, ethnography of speaking, phonetics and linguistics — which is useful to anyone interested in the analysis of situated speech or spoken discourse. Labels are always difficult; I have chosen to maintain a distinction between spoken discourse and written text, but this is by no means a universally accepted distinction; many German writers use ‘text’ to refer to speech as well, while Hoey (1983) and Widdowson (passim) use ‘discourse’ to refer to writing, and to complicate matters further ‘pragmatics’ as defined by Leech (1983) and Levinson (1983) overlaps substantially with discourse analysis as I conceive it.

Early attempts at discourse analysis

Although Firth urged linguists to study the total verbal process in its context of situation he did not do so himself, choosing rather to concentrate on phonology. In the period up to the late 60s there were only two isolated attempts to study suprasentential structure, one by Harris (1952), the other by Mitchell (1957).

Harris’s article, although it has the promising title ‘Discourse Analysis’, is in fact disappointing. Working within the Bloomfieldian tradition he sets out to produce a formal method ‘for the analysis of connected speech or writing’ which ‘does not depend on the analyst’s knowledge of the particular meaning of each morpheme’. He observes that in grammar it is possible to set up word classes distributionally and produce a class of adjectives A which occur before a class of nouns N; such a statement captures a powerful generalization, even though it is possible to show that a particular member of the class A, ‘voluntary’, may never occur before a particular member of the class N, ‘subjugation’.

Harris suggests that a distributional analysis can be successfully applied to a whole text to discover structuring above the rank of sentence. As an example he creates a text containing the following four sentences:

The trees turn here about the middle of autumn.

The trees turn here about the end of October.

The first frost comes after the middle of autumn.

We start ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Author’s preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Speech acts and conversational maxims
• 3 The ethnography of speaking
• 4 Conversational analysis
• 5 Intonation
• 6 A linguistic approach
• 7 Discourse analysis and language teaching
• 8 The acquisition of discourse
• 9 The analysis of literary discourse
• Further reading
• Bibliography
• Index