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1
TEXTS AS GATEWAYS TO DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
1.1 Introduction
Language - squiggles on paper or disturbances of the airwaves - can move us, a remarkable idea captured by the Portuguese writer JosƩ Saramago in his novel Blindness:
The doctor's wife has nerves of steel, and yet the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories ā¦
The idea that grammar has such magical properties may come as a surprise to some, but it is an idea that has been around for a long time. Historically, the word āglamourā is a variant of the word āgrammarā, with the current meaning reallocating the magical powers of grammar to the enchantment that comes with style and physical beauty. Times and tastes may change, but one goal of this book is to convince you that grammar is still magical and glamorous!
As well as casting emotive spells, language can be used to achieve more concrete goals, as when a priest or government official pronounces a couple man and wife, or when a judge sentences a prisoner to ten years' hard labour. The power to reduce someone to tears and the power to sentence someone to jail are both pretty impressive attributes - but can we say, in either case, that the words used are in themselves powerful? Would they have achieved the same effect if they had been uttered by someone else? Or to someone else? Or in a different setting?
Utterances such as āI pronounce you man and wifeā were labelled performatives by the philosopher J. L. Austin (1962) because the very act of saying the words performs the social act they describe - but only under certain conditions. Austin called these felicity conditions, in contrast to the truth conditions that determine if an utterance can be considered to be factually correct or not. Austin argued that it might be possible to determine the factual truth of utterances such as āThe King of France is Baldā (though philosophers found this a trickier problem than you might have imagined!), but that it does not make sense to say that āI pronounce you man and wifeā is either true or false. Rather, it makes sense to discuss the conditions necessary in order for this utterance to perform the act the speaker claims to be performing. In this instance, the speaker must have the officially sanctioned authority (either religious or secular) to marry couples and the couple must both want and be eligible to be married (to each other!). A more complicated case would be that of promises: does saying āI promise to do itā count as a promise, with no conditions attached? What if the speaker had their fingers crossed behind their back? What if they are not in a position to carry out the promise? And what if the hearer doesn't want the action to be carried out? And what about the exact wording: what if they had just said āI will do thatā? Does that count as a promise? Children seem to have different rules from their parents on this point.
And what of the emotive power of language? Would everyone have been moved in the same way by the words heard by Saramago's doctor's wife? Well, for a start, they would have to speak the same language (though the sound of language can often be enough to arouse emotions, as with Jamie Lee Curtis's amorous response to John Cleese's Russian in A Fish Called Wanda). This may seem a bit obvious, so consider instead the question of the appropriate style of language and, for example, the different effect of colloquial or official language in getting an audience on your side. Which one is more effective will depend on a variety of factors and, in particular, the nature of the audience. The point I am making here is that all language use is performative (Baumann and Briggs 1990), and that the effect of the performance does not reside in the language used alone but is the result of a range of social and cultural factors with which the language used makes connections. In other words, it is perhaps better to think of power as being realised through language rather than as residing in language. This means that we need to look at more than language itself in order to discuss its powerful effects, to consider what it is that is being performed and whether the performance is successful (powerful) or not. However, as linguists our starting point is the language used, and in this book I will set out various means for analysing and describing language in such a way as to open it up to wider questions about the social and cultural factors that influence the effect it can have. Just what was it about that particular adverb that might have moved the doctor's wife? And why might a personal pronoun produce such an effect? Most likely, none of the words would have had much effect on their own, but the way they were woven together in a particular context did. When words (spoken or written) are woven together in meaningful ways we refer to texts - which has the same roots as the word ātextileā, from the Latin word for āto weaveā. Words gather meaning from the company they keep and the patterns they enter into, and the meanings they accumulate relate to their speakers and their hearers in different ways. But we cannot tell from the texts alone how they will be received any more than we can tell whether āI pronounce you man and wifeā is a legally binding utterance without knowing more about the conditions in which the utterance was produced. Conversely, we would not be able to talk about that particular context without an understanding of the words that are spoken, their meanings and their histories, their āsocial lifeā. Taking language and context together we talk about discourse,1 and the study of situated language use is called discourse analysis. Texts are the records of spoken or written language and are, from the linguist's point of view, a gateways into discourse analysis.
As you can see from the above passages, I am generating as many questions as answers, and this will be the pattern for the remainder of the book. However, as the subtitle of the book is āa practical guideā, asking questions without suggesting how they can be answered - or at least approached - would be more than a little unfair; so, in the chapters that follow, I will set out fairly concrete methods for a detailed analysis of text as text and for opening up gateways to discourse analysis. At the heart of the descriptive method I'll set out in the book is a theory of grammar known as Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). There are several reasons for this, the most important of which is that SFL has been developed as an āappliable linguisticsā. You'll most likely have to add the word āappliableā to your spell-checker, or your computer will keep changing it to āapplicableā when you're not looking. This is because the term āappliable linguisticsā was coined by Michael Halliday, the originator of SFL, to make a distinction between a general theory of linguistic description that can be applied within a huge variety of situations - that is, an appliable theory - and a method of description that is applicable to, or suitable in, certain restricted cases. In other words, SFL has been specifically developed as a means of describing language as a system for making social meanings, a social semiotic, so that linguistic, or textual, description based on it should be able to open texts up to discourse analysis. So, from the perspective of this book, while I will set out one particular approach to discourse analysis, the descriptive skills you develop can be applied within a wide range of discourse analytical traditions, each with their own goals and agendas. For the texts that we will look at in detail in the chapters that follow I will at times provide analyses from my own fieldwork where I have gone beyond the text to try and answer the wider questions it provokes; at others I can only suggest the sort of questions that are brought to light by a detailed analysis of the text, questions that you as researchers would be expected to tackle in order to make sense of the text as the trace of discourse.
1.2 Grammar, text, context and discourse
In the opening paragraph of this chapter I gushed at the magical properties of language as āsquiggles on paper or disturbances of the airwavesā, as if that was all there was to language. While acoustic and graphic patterns are language in its most physical form, what they are doing is providing the platform for the more abstract properties of language. The quote from Saramago captures the next level, the āgrammatical categoriesā that the squiggles and waves represent. I would add ālexical categoriesā here, as grammar and lexis work together at this level, as lexicogrammar (words in bold italics appear in the glossary on pages 184ā190 of this book). In technical terms we can say that acoustic or graphic signals realise lexicogrammatical categories. But, of course, Saramago is being a little disingenuous: it is not these categories that move the doctor's wife to tears (except in the classroom, perhaps), but the meanings they make when spoken or written, the semantics. This provides us with the next level of abstraction, the meaning lexicogrammatical categories make when they are strung together in utterances. In technical terms, the lexicogrammar realises the semantics of an utterance. And, at the risk of moving you to tears, there is one further level of linguistic abstraction: the ...
