Advances in Discourse Studies

Vijay Bhatia, John Flowerdew, Rodney H. Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415398091
• eBook ISBN: 9781134151301
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Methods of approaching the study of discourse have developed rapidly in the last ten years, influenced by a growing interdisciplinary spirit among linguistics and anthropology, sociology, cognitive and cultural psychology and cultural studies, as well as among established sub-fields within linguistics itself. Among the more recent developments are an increasing 'critical' turn in discourse analysis, a growing interest in historical, ethnographic and corpus-based approaches to discourse, more concern with the social contexts in which discourse occurs, the social actions that it is used to take and the identities that are constructed through it, as well as a revaluation of what counts as 'discourse' to include multi-modal texts and interaction.

Advances in Discourse Studies brings together contributions from leading scholars in the field, investigating the historical and theoretical relationships between new advances in discourse studies and pointing towards new directions for the future of the discipline. Featuring discussion questions, classroom projects and recommended readings at the end of each section, as well as case studies illustrating each approach discussed, this is an invaluable resource for students of interdisciplinary discourse analysis.

1 Approaches to discourse analysis

Vijay K. Bhatia, John Flowerdew and Rodney H. Jones

In recent decades the social sciences have undergone a ‘discursive turn’ and become increasingly interested in the part played by language in the creation of the reality that surrounds us. This interest has been accompanied by the development of new theories and methods for the study of language use and its role in human society. Discourse analysis, though often seen as located within the discipline of linguistics, is in fact an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. With a history of less than 50 years it has acquired the status, stability, significance and integrity of a well-established discipline, extending the conventional boundaries of linguistics. Dating back to the 1960s, it has been defined as the analysis of linguistic behaviour, written and spoken, beyond the limits of individual sentences, focusing primarily on the meaning constructed and interpreted as language is used in particular social contexts.

This definition really contains two main ingredients: the idea that language can be analysed not just on the level of the phoneme/morpheme, the word, the clause or the sentence, but also on the level of the text, and the idea that language ought to be analysed not as an abstract set or rules, but as a tool for social action. Although early conceptualizations of discourse analysis were seen as an offshoot of linguistic analysis, focusing more on the ‘language as text’ side of the equation and drawing on the work of early text analysts like Propp (1958) and Jakobson (1937), in its present form it has moved to more of a focus on ‘language in use’, drawing on insights from sociology, psychology, semiotics, communication studies, rhetoric, as well as disciplines such as business and marketing, accountancy, organizational studies, law and information technology, to name only a few. In this regard, it has evolved as a fruitful way of understanding the use of language in a variety of institutional, academic, workplace and professional settings.

Another interesting aspect of the development of discourse analysis has been that it has attracted the attention not only of linguists and applied linguists, but also socio-political theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, computer experts, business and legal specialists, communication experts and organizational theorists. In this context, it is hardly surprising that discourse analysis has, in the last four decades developed into a variety of schools using different approaches, frameworks, procedures and methodologies and focusing on different kinds of semiotic data, with the aim of deriving insights for a variety of purposes.

The focus of most contemporary approaches to discourse on ‘language in use’ has its roots in a number of larger developments in the twentieth century in the fields of philosophy, anthropology, sociology and linguistics itself. The roots of this view of language are perhaps best traced to the work of Wittgenstein (1951/1972), who saw language as a series of ‘games’ through which people construct what he calls ‘forms of life’, particular ways of being in relation to others and their surroundings. Less than two decades later, with the publication of Austin’s 1962 classic How to Do Things with Words, the notion that the study of language should involve more than just its structure but also the way it is used and the way social standards and practices shape and give rise to it became more prominent, at least in philosophical circles. Later, thinkers like Foucault and Derrida, though diverging considerably from the tradition of Austin, also made language, and in particular ‘discourse’, central to their understanding of social practice.

Just as the notion of language as social practice began to take hold among philosophers of language, social scientific disciplines particularly concerned with social practice began to recognize the centrality of language in much of what they were studying. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson and psychiatrist Jürgen Ruesch (Ruesch and Bateson 1951) argued that social and psychological phenomena cannot be separated from the ‘matrix of communication’ in which they occur. They were followed by a host of social and behavioural scientists, among them Goffman (1959) and Garfinkel (1967), who focused on the role of language in social behaviour and social formations. By the 1970s psychology, sociology, and anthropology had all taken a decidedly ‘discursive turn’, influenced not just by the structuralist linguistics of de Saussure, but also by a new breed of linguists who at around the same time were becoming more and more concerned with the relationship of language to social actions and to the socio-cultural worlds of those who use it.

In America this concern had given rise to the work in the early part of the twentieth century of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf as well as others in the Boasian tradition of anthropological linguistics. In Europe this new concern for language in use was later exemplified by the work of Michael Halliday. Departing from structuralist and cognitive paradigms in grammar which saw language systems as autonomous and independent of language use, Halliday insisted that ‘language is as it is because of its function in the social structure’ (1973: 65) and called for the development of a ‘sociological linguistics’, a discipline which will allow us to see language on two levels, a macro-sociological level in which language ‘serves to transmit the social structure, the values, the systems of knowledge, all the deepest and most pervasive patterns of the culture’ (1973: 45), and a micro-sociological level in which meanings are seen as specific to particular contexts and situations. Halliday’s systemic functional grammar (SFG) has had a profound influence on many contemporary schools of discourse analysis, including critical discourse analysis, mediated discourse analysis and multimodal discourse analysis. Although they were primarily developed at the level of the clause, the analytical tools of Halliday’s grammar have been found to be well adapted to tracking participants, logical relations, processes, qualities, and evaluations of these by speakers and writers as they develop throughout a given text or across a group of texts (see e.g. Martin and Rose 2003).

The discourse analytical approaches that have grown out of these interdisciplinary developments are many, including register and genre analyses, critical discourse analysis, discursive psychology, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, the ethnography of communication, stylistics, mediated discourse analysis, corpus-based analysis, narrative analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, rhetorical-grammatical analysis, argumentation analysis, and many others, and no book on discourse could hope to cover all of them. Our intention in this volume is to explore seven major approaches to the study of discourse that we believe represent a range of directions which the intellectual traditions we described above have taken. Although all of them, to varying degrees, represent a concern for language use in the social world, they focus on widely varying aspects of its use and often define the social world in widely varying ways, from the immediate conversational context to the larger political, social or economic context. They are corpus-based approaches to discourse, genre analysis, conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, mediated discourse analysis and ethnographic approaches to discourse. Some of them, like genre analysis and conversation analysis, are decades old, while others, like mediated discourse analysis and multimodal discourse analysis, are more recent to the scene.

As the title of this book suggests, we are not as interested in describing the type of work that has been done using these various approaches as we are in showing how those working in these areas are charting new courses, which often involve borrowing from other fields and other schools of discourse analysis. In doing this we hope to understand not just what is unique about each of these approaches, but also where future possibilities for convergence and interdisciplinarity are opening up.

In order to do this, however, it is first necessary to understand the main questions upon which these approaches diverge and the different roads they have taken from common intellectual roots. As will become clear in our discussion, despite a common commitment to the study of texts and their use in social contexts, those working in the different approaches diverge on two of the most basic issues in this formulation: the question of what a text is, and the question of what counts as the social context in which that text is used. In a sense these differences can be seen as the result of the influence of multiple disciplines on the development of discourse analysis. Sociology and anthropology have encouraged analysts to view the use of language as a function of the context in which language is used, whereas linguistics has constrained discourse analysts to focus primarily on text, with context in the background. In recent years another factor has entered the equation, that is, the role of semiotic modes, other than written or spoken text, which has opened up the possibilities of looking at nonlinear extra-linguistic forms of communication such as pictures, diagrams, gestures, colours, differing fonts and their sizes, to name only a few. Finally, discourse analysts are faced with a variety of new media of communication including computer-mediated communication, SMS messaging and other new communication technologies.

In what follows, we would like to look briefly at where these different approaches ‘have been’ in terms of their historical and intellectual development in relation to the other approaches. We will also examine where these approaches stand on these fundamental questions of text and context, in preparation for, in the remainder of this volume, considering where they might be going and how their trajectories might converge.

Conversation analysis

Conversation analysis (CA) was developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson (Sacks 1974; Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974; Schegloff and Sacks 1973). It has its roots in ethnomethodology, a branch of sociology developed by Harold Garfinkel (1967) which, like the ‘ethnography of communication’ of Gumperz and Hymes, chiefly concerns itself with the basic competences and interpretative processes members of a culture use to interact and interpret their experience. The central goal of conversational analysis, as Atkinson and Heritage (1984:1) emphasize, is ‘the description and explication of the competences that ordinary speakers use and rely on in participating in intelligible, socially organized interaction’.

In contrast to earlier social scientific traditions, sociologists like Goffman (1981) and Garfinkel (1967) were adamant that people’s lives should be studied only on their own terms without reference to theoretical preconceptions. Rather than starting with a theory and analysing people’s behaviour through it, those in this tradition advocate intentionally setting aside theory to try to get at what’s actually going on based on close analysis of people’s (often mundane) speech and actions.

By analysing the properties of conversation, conversation analysts attempt to understand the patterns in social life. The assumption is that such patterns can be used to develop procedural rules governing talk-in-interaction. Echoing Austin and Steele, conversation analysts regard discourse as a kind of social action – we are always ‘doing things with our words’. What is unique about their approach is their concern with the sequential organization of actions, and, in particular the mechanics of turn-taking. CA’s guiding analytical principle, as Nevile reminds us in his chapter, is asking of each utterance in a conversation the question, ‘Why that now?’ Utterances are seen as ‘paired actions’ (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974), always dependent on what has come before and what will come after. The most basic expression of this fundamental idea is the concept of the adjacency pair, a pair of utterances that are not just linguistically related but ‘socially’ related because they accomplish particular social actions. The ways utterances (and the actions they accomplish) are put together sequentially follow rules of conditional relevance, each utterance displaying a particular understanding of the previous utterance and creating the conditions for subsequent utterances.

In contrast with the ethnographer’s data, which consists of interviews, field notes, lived experiences or narratives of participants, conversational analysts work on naturally occurring and closely transcribed conversational data. They regard observational data as prone to manipulation by researchers or the subjects themselves. As Atkinson and Heritage (1984) point out, observational data is often based on preconceived notions of what is probable or important. Although like ethnographers, conversation analysts also work on a selection of data, their data is conversational and not observational, consisting of very detailed transcriptions of natural talk.

The most dramatic difference between linguistic ethnographers and conversation analysis is on the issue of context. Whereas, for ethnographers, the wider social context is used to inform their understanding of why language is used the way it is, conversation analysts view context as constructed moment by moment through conversational moves, and argue that those aspects of context not conversationally attended to by participants should not be part of the analysis. That is not to say that conversation analysts do not concern themselves with larger issues of social identity and power (such as gender and institutional communication). Rather, they believe that the way to understand these issues is through a close analysis of the mechanics of interaction rather than with reference to larger social structures or ideologies.

Ethnographic approaches to discourse analysis

Although there are several ethnographic approaches to discourse analysis, most of them draw their inspirations from anthropology and social psychology and regard social context as the central aspect of communication. Present ethnographic approaches to discourse owe much to an American anthropological linguistic tradition that gave rise to the work of scholars like Gumperz and Hymes (1986), whose ‘ethnography of communication’ aims to provide a description of how members of a particular community are expected to perform linguistically in order to be considered ‘competent’ members. Communicative compe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Approaches to Discourse Analysis
• Part I: Conversation Analysis
• Part II: Ethnographic-Based Discourse Analysis
• Part III: Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis
• Part IV: Multimodal Discourse Analysis
• Part V: Genre Analysis
• Part VI: Critical Discourse Analysis
• Part VII: Mediated Discourse Analysis