Working with Spoken Discourse

Deborah Cameron

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780761957737, 9780761957720
• eBook ISBN: 9781446224052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

"An exemplary textbook. Making even the most complex ideas fully accessible, it is grounded in an extensive literature, filled with engaging examples, and offers ample suggestions for independent research. It's been a key text in my classes for over a decade and, as fresh and relevant as ever, will continue to buttress my graduate seminars and undergraduate courses alike."

- Professor Crispin Thurlow, University of Washington

 

Comprehensive, practical, lively and accessible, Working with Spoken Discourse is the much-loved benchmark for learning to do discourse analysis. It combines theory and practice to give students the grounding they need in practical techniques of analyzing talk and how to apply them to real data.

• Begins with the 'why' and 'how' of doing discourse analysis
• Packs examples into every chapter to help explain complex concepts
• Uses exercises and activities to reinforce what you've learned
• Leads you through the practicalities of designing your own project

Exceptionally clear, and perfect for undergraduates starting a project, this is the essential guide to spoken discourse.

II	Approaches

4	Approaches to discourse analysis: an initial orientation

Each of the chapters in Part II deals with one approach to the analysis of talk. Chapter 5 deals with the ethnography of speaking, Chapter 6 with pragmatics, Chapter 7 with conversation analysis or ‘CA’ as it is often called for short, Chapter 8 with interactional sociolinguistics and Chapter 9 with critical discourse analysis (sometimes abbreviated to CDA). It might be asked why I have chosen just these approaches, and put them in just this order. More generally, readers may feel the need for an overall map of the terrain, locating different approaches in relation to one another. In fact, it is difficult to draw a detailed map without getting bogged down in arguments and excursions into intellectual history which are peripheral to this book’s purpose (readers who want this sort of detail should look at some of Chapter 1’s suggested further readings). But I do want to offer readers, if not a map, then some sort of initial orientation to help them find their way around the territory of discourse analysis, and that is the purpose of this short chapter.

I will take as my starting point the interdisciplinary nature of discourse analysis. It now has an academic life of its own – there are, for instance, scholarly journals specifically devoted to it – but if we look back at its history, it is clear that many of its questions and conceptual frameworks were borrowed in the first place from longer-established academic disciplines, such as anthropology, philosophy, sociology and linguistics. The influence of these intellectual traditions is still discernible, not least in the way teachers and textbook writers (myself included) divide up the field when they present it to students. It may be helpful to the reader, therefore, to make some observations about what, broadly speaking, discourse analysis has taken from the various disciplines that helped to form it.

From anthropology, discourse analysis takes a concern with the embedding of language and language-use in a wider sociocultural context. Anthropologists study the diversity of human cultures, often using the method of participant observation (observing a community while participating as much as possible in its activities oneself) to produce a kind of description that is known as ethnography. A researcher undertaking ethnographic work in any community must try to understand that community’s culture – its ways of acting in the world and making sense of the world – in the way community members understand it themselves. Speaking is both a way of acting in the world and a means for making sense of it, and language has thus been one of the aspects of culture that anthropologists have paid attention to.

Ethnography of speaking is an approach to talk informed by the principles and practices of anthropology. It focuses specifically and systematically on language-using as a cultural practice, one which is intricately related to other cultural practices and beliefs within a particular society. It has a strong interest, also, in how the cultural practice of language-using may be done differently, and understood differently, in different societies.

From philosophy, discourse analysis takes a concern with the way language acquires meaning when it is used. The so-called ‘problem of meaning’ has been a traditional concern for the philosophy of language, and discourse analysis has drawn in particular on the tradition known as ‘ordinary language’ philosophy (the philosophical study of ordinary language as opposed to symbolic ‘languages’ such as formal logic). Ordinary language philosophers such as J.L. Austin, John Searle and H. Paul Grice drew attention to a feature that seems to be characteristic of human linguistic communication, that we can ‘mean more than we say’ (or less than we say, or something different from what we say). To interpret utterances in discourse, we have to be able to do more than just decode the meaning of the words: we have to work out how the speaker intends us to take the utterance. If someone utters, for instance, ‘I’m addicted to soap operas’, is this an idle remark, a confession, or a hint that someone should switch on the TV? All these are possibilities: in any given circumstances our decision on which of the alternatives it is intended to be will depend not only on what is said and how, but on all sorts of contextual factors as well.

The approach to discourse analysis that has developed from the tradition of ordinary language philosophy is known as pragmatics. (This use of the term pragmatics is commonest in English-speaking academic communities. In Europe, the term is often used generically for all kinds of discourse analysis, and sometimes it also encompasses what elsewhere would be called ‘sociolinguistics’. Here I use the term in the ‘English’ way.) Pragmatics concerns itself with the principles language-users employ to determine the meaning behind words – how we get from what is said to what is meant. Many pragmaticists are interested in the possibility that certain principles of utterance interpretation are universal, not specific to a particular culture but characteristic of all linguistic communication. The question of what, if anything, is universal and what is culturally particular has generated some debate between the more ‘philosophical’ pragmaticists and the more ‘anthropological’ ethnographers, as we will see.

From sociology, discourse analysis takes a concern to account for the orderliness of social interaction. The question of how social order in general is produced and reproduced is traditionally a central concern of sociology. One particular approach to this general sociological question – the approach known as ethnomethodology, and associated in particular with the theorist Harold Garfinkel – gave rise to the way of analysing talk that is now known as Conversation Analysis (CA). The central idea of ethnomethodology is that social actors are not just ‘dopes’ following externally imposed rules, but are always actively creating order through their own behaviour. Some researchers became particularly interested in conversation as an example of the kind of mundane, everyday behaviour in which participants jointly create order. We are not conscious of having particular procedures for conducting conversations, but our conversations rarely degenerate into the kind of chaos that might be expected if we did not have procedures of any kind. CA is, among other things, an enquiry into the nature of the procedures conversationalists follow to produce the orderliness of ordinary talk.

From linguistics, discourse analysis takes a concern with the structure of language and the distribution of linguistic forms (i.e. where particular bits of language are and are not found). Linguists studying phonology (sound patterns) or syntax (sentence structure) look for formal regularities and patterns which can be described in general statements like ‘In English the sound [h] only appears at the beginning of a syllable’, or ‘the normal order of grammatical constituents in English is SVO (subject, verb, object)’. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, in the 1950s the linguist Zellig Harris proposed to extend this kind of analysis to language ‘above the sentence’. Interest in the formal and structural properties of spoken interaction remains prominent in some traditions of discourse analysis. For instance, in the 1970s a group of linguists studying classroom interaction elaborated a model of ‘exchange structure’, pointing out that when teachers ask questions in the classroom, the resulting exchanges typically have a three-part structure which the analysts termed ‘elicitation–response–feedback’. The teacher asks a question, a pupil produces a response, and the teacher takes another turn in which s/he makes clear whether the pupil’s response is acceptable (see Sinclair and Coulthard 1975). This contrasts with what happens in ordinary conversation, where asking a question typically initiates a two-part exchange, ‘question–answer’.

A rather different example of a ‘structural’ approach to discourse is found in the work of the sociolinguist William Labov, best known for his pioneering work on language variation and change. Labov has also made important contributions to discourse analysis, proposing an influential model of the structure of spoken narrative (Labov and Waletzsky 1967) and co-writing a study of therapeutic discourse in which the analysis sets out to discover structural regularities beneath the (sometimes chaotic-looking) surface of talk between therapists and their clients (Labov and Fanshel 1977). An observation once made by Labov provides a good summary of this version of the ‘structural’ approach: ‘the fundamental problem of discourse analysis’, he asserted, ‘is to show how one utterance follows another in a rational, rule-governed manner’ (Labov 1972a: 299).

Regularities are not only found, however, in the way utterances are put together. They are also observed in the choices speakers make between different ways of doing a particular interactional job, such as addressing someone respectfully, or marking something as a question rather than a statement, or indicating which bit of an utterance is particularly important and which is just background information, or showing that they are highly engaged with what someone else is saying. If we consider the last of these functions, for example – demonstrating engagement with another speaker – one person might do it by gazing at the speaker in rapt silence, while another might do it by talking along with the speaker, making approving comments or even finishing the speaker’s utterance for them. The existence of variation in matters like this is somewhat reminiscent of the variation we find in the pronunciation of particular sounds (e.g. the final nasal consonant in a word like talking, which is sometimes pronounced talkin’). This sort of phonological variation has been studied under the rubric of sociolinguistics, which has found that it is not just random but ‘socially conditioned’ (it correlates in a regular fashion with the speaker’s social position and with aspects of the situation in which s/he is speaking). Variation in the performance of interactional tasks is the province of interactional sociolinguistics. Interactional sociolinguists do not usually use the same (statistical) methods as sociolinguists who study phonological variation, but they do make a similar assumption, that variation is socially/contextually conditioned rather than random. Interactional sociolinguistics, then, can be viewed as another kind of ‘structural’ approach with roots in linguistics, because it is concerned with the distribution of particular features in talk (where in talk you find them, and whose talk you find which ones in). At the same time the approach has roots in anthropology too: people’s different ways of doing things interactionally may be analysed in relation to their cultural beliefs, assumptions and values.

There is also an approach to discourse analysis, known as Critical Discourse Analysis, which borrows its conceptual and analytic apparatus from both structural linguistics and the intellectual enterprise sometimes known as critical theory. Critical theory is not an academic discipline in the same sense as anthropology or sociology. It is better thought of as a set of interests and theoretical commitments that have influenced groups of academics in a number of disciplines. The disciplines where critical theory has had or is now acquiring a degree of influence are a diverse collection, ranging across the humanities (e.g. literary studies, philosophy) and social sciences (e.g. geography, sociology and psychology). Important reference points for critical theory across disciplines include the work of literary/cultural theorists such as Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes and Edward Said, psychoanalysts like Jacques Lacan, philosophers like Jacques Derrida, historians of ideas like Michel Foucault, and feminist or ‘queer’ theorists like Judith Butler.

As readers may be aware, the critical theorists just listed are often characterized as ‘post-structuralists’ or ‘postmodernists’. I will not detour here into the complicated and much argued-about question of what those terms ‘really mean’, but what they imply at the most general level is a critical attitude to traditional ways of thinking and talking about reality, subjectivity (that is, the condition of being a person or ‘subject’) and knowledge. Does what we call ‘reality’ have any independent existence apart from our perceptions and representations of it? Do people have stable, fixed identities (e.g. as men or women), and is there such a thing as ‘human nature’? Can knowledge be completely objective, disinterested and ‘true’? Post-structuralist/postmodernist theory answers these questions in the negative. Theorists who adopt a critical perspective are sometimes caricatured as denying that there is ‘any such thing as truth’ or ‘any such thing as gender/race/sexuality’, but it would be more accurate to say that they regard such phenomena as constructed rather than ‘natural’. Here it should be remembered that something which is constructed is nevertheless part of reality rather than merely an illusion we could dispense with at will. The building I work in and the amount I get paid at the end of the month are clearly not the results of any natural process, but that does not mean I can change them simply by choosing to think about them in a different way!

Critical theory is the source of the usage of the word discourse which I discussed in the latter part of Chapter 1. One thing that critical theorists (or post-structuralists/postmodernists) have in common is the idea I introduced during that earlier discussion, that reality (including such aspects of it as power and gender relations) is constructed in and through discourse – through acts and practices of speaking and writing. Critical discourse analysis is an approach that focuses on how this is done by analysing actual examples closely, and, importantly, by paying attention not only to their content but also to their form. CDA makes use of the insight derived from traditional, structure-oriented linguistics and sociolinguistics, that meaning is about contrast. When someone expresses an idea in form X (using these particular words and this particular grammatical structure), it is significant that they are not expressing the idea in form Y or Z, though Y and Z would also have been possibilities. CDA looks for the ideological significance of the choices speakers and writers make, and for significant patterns in the distribution of their choices.

The account I have given of discourse analysis and its relation to various academic disciplines is oversimplified in certain ways. It would be inaccurate, for instance, to say that anthropology has contributed nothing to the discussion of meaning, that sociologists have paid no attention to culture, that questions of structure have only been addressed by linguists, or that philosophically oriented pragmaticists have no interest in power. The themes I have picked out in my account – culture, meaning, order, structure, power – are likely to crop up in all the approaches I will describe in this section. What distinguishes the approaches from each other is the balance of differing concerns, and the analytic procedures that follow from taking any particular concern as central. For example, if your main concern is with what participants in a conversation are doing to produce the orderliness of their talk (a typical question in CA), you will focus on the talk itself and be less concerned to describe the whole social or cultural milieu in which that talk is taking place. If, by contrast, you are mainly concerned with the way a certain speech event fits into a whole network of cultural beliefs and practices (a typical concern for ethnographers of speaking), you will spend more time describing things that are external to the talk itself: who the speakers are, where they are, what beliefs and customs are important in their lives.

It would also be inaccurate to suppose that anyone who uses an ethnography of speaking approach must be an anthropologist, that anyone who does pragmatics is a philosopher, and so on. These approaches have his...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I Preliminaries
• II Approaches
• III Applications
• Bibliography
• Index