Discourse Studies

A Multidisciplinary Introduction

Teun A Van Dijk

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781848606494, 9781848606487
• eBook ISBN: 9781446242223
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

"A landmark in the oeuvre of one of the founding fathers of discourse analysis. Van Dijk has managed to edit a volume of lasting significance, and some of the chapters in this book belong to the most widely read in the field. In its totality, Discourse Studies offers us a 360 degree tour of the field... Nothing in this volume is dated, everything remains mandatory reading for every student and advanced practicioner."
- Jan Blommaert, Tilburg University

"This very welcome updated second edition will allow Teun van Dijk?s very popular Discourse Studies to consolidate its already strong and central position in the area. Featuring chapters written by so many of the leading scholars it will continue to be a stimulating and wide-ranging introduction to the discipline of discourse studies for new generations of students."
- Malcolm Coulthard, University of Birmingham

This book is the largest, most complete, most diverse and only multidisciplinary introduction to the field.

A combined Second Edition of two seminal texts in the field (the 1997 titles Discourse as Social Interaction and Discourse as Structure and Process) this essential handbook:

• Is fully updated from start to finish to cover contemporary debates and research literature.
• Covers everything from grammar, narrative, argumentation, cognition and pragmatics to social, political and critical approaches.
• Adds two new chapters on ideology and identity.
• Puts the student at the centre, offering brand new features such as worked examples, sample analyses and recommended further reading.

Written and edited by world-class scholars in their fields, it is the essential, one-stop companion for any student of discourse analysis and discourse studies.

ONE

Introduction: The Study of Discourse

Teun A. van Dijk

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CROSS-DISCIPLINE OF DISCOURSE STUDIES

Although the roots of the cross-discipline of Discourse Studies go back to classical rhetoric as the study of ‘speaking well’ (bene dicendi) in public discourse, its contemporary emergence must be sought in remarkably parallel developments in the humanities and social sciences between 1964 and 1974.

• After its structural studies of folktales, anthropology extended its ethnographic research to include the study of communicative events in general.
• Similarly, sociology turned towards the detailed analysis of interaction, in general, and to everyday conversation, in particular, and thus aimed to reconstruct the basis of a social order that hitherto had been accounted for in terms of the abstract structure of groups, organizations and institutions.
• Scholars in linguistics, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics recognized that the study of actual language use should not be limited to the grammatical analysis of isolated sentences, and advocated a focus on the structures, strategies and processes of the cognitively and socially situated text and talk of real language users.
• Cognitive psychology, just having liberated itself from its behaviourist shackles, rediscovered the mind and memory, and hence the role of knowledge and other mental representations in its study of the processes of language production and comprehension, at the same time amplifying the scope from sentences to cover discourse.
• Somewhat later, in the 1980s, at least some scholars in social psychology emphasized that instead of laboratory studies of ‘behaviour,’ attitudes or attribution, among many other phenomena, psychologists should focus on discourse and interaction and the way these ‘construe’ reality as well as the mind.
• Finally, the study of communication has always been interested in the analysis of ‘messages’ – for instance, in the mass media, political communication, interpersonal communication and health communication, as well as in their production and ‘effects’ on recipients and society as a whole. Earlier approaches, such as Content Analysis, have gradually been complemented with more detailed qualitative, discourse analytical and conversational analytical analyses.

Today, these originally separate and largely independent developments towards the study of the structures and strategies of real language use by real language users are increasingly overlapping and merging, at the same time influenced by, and also influencing, their respective mother-disciplines. Research into discourse today thus combines the study of language use, verbal interaction, conversation, texts, multimodal messages and communicative events. Methodologically, it may range from formal analyses of abstract sentence, conversation or argumentation structures, on the one hand, to laboratory studies of cognitive processes or mental representations, as well as ethnographic observations of socially situated talk and interaction (among many other methods) on the other hand.

RELATED CROSS-DISCIPLINES

These parallel developments did not emerge on their own. The 1960s had also witnessed the cross-disciplinary emergence of semiotics, especially in the humanities, which introduced the integrated analysis of narrative, pictures, film, gestures and paintings and other forms of non-verbal ‘texts’ and communication that went beyond traditional literary studies or art history. Semiotics at the same time influenced the sister cross-disciplines of Discourse Studies and Communication Studies by emphasizing that text and talk, especially in the age of the internet, were more than just written or spoken language, but should be studied in their entire multimodal complexity.

Whereas virtually all disciplines studying language until the 1970s limited their analysis to include expressions (sounds, syntax, lexicon) and – later – to meaning, the philosophy of language paralleled sociology by stressing the fundamental relevance of a third major dimension of human communication: action. Speech acts, conversational postulates, politeness, indexicality and related phenomena thus became the seemingly heterogeneous objects of research in what was soon to be called pragmatics. This new, context-oriented, cross-discipline of the humanities and the social sciences is now increasingly overlapping and even merging with discourse studies, conversation analysis and sociolinguistics.

At the other end of the broad range of discourse studies, the more formal analysis of discourse in linguistics, logic, philosophy and computer science joined cognitive psychology and, more generally, cognitive science within the study of Artificial Intelligence, for instance in the design of programs of automatic translation, human–machine interaction, expert systems, and other developments that require the explicit formulation of rules as well as implementation of the fundamental role of knowledge in discourse production and comprehension. Contemporary interest in corpus linguistics and its application in the study of discourse may be fruitfully integrated into this development of the automated analysis or simulation of text or talk.

Finally, the last decade has also broadened and deepened the empirical study of the mental representations and processes involved in discourse production and comprehension by exploring their neural infrastructures in the brain in the new cross-discipline of neuroscience. Although still in its infancy, and as yet far removed from a sophisticated neurological account of the details of discourse processing, it is hoped that at least some of the mysteries of the relations between socially situated discourse, knowledge and interaction may in the future be resolved with its help.

After nearly half a century, the cross-disciplinary study of discourse has come of age and has also established itself as a vibrant cross-discipline in virtually all areas of the humanities and social sciences, as well as in history, literature and – surprisingly quite modestly as yet – in political science. Thousands of articles, hundreds of monographs, dozens of handbooks and introductions, half a dozen specialized journals, annual national and international congresses and new university programmes bear witness to its academic success and embeddedness.

Today, also in the original mother-disciplines, the study of language use is no longer limited to an analysis of abstract structures of words, clauses, sentences or propositions, but is part of an integrated account of a socially and culturally situated and cognitively based multimodal discourse as interaction and human communication. Not surprisingly, this development also emphasizes that whereas various forms of communication are widespread among other species, the uniquely human forms of the use of natural languages take the shape of coherent and contextually appropriate text and talk.

PROPERTIES OF DISCOURSE

The various chapters in this book provide a systematic introduction to the structural, cognitive and social properties of discourse. By way of an introduction to these introductions, the novice may especially need a brief summary of the fundamental properties of text and talk. Although definitions of such complex notions as society, culture, mind and language are usually a rather pointless enterprise, and while whole disciplines have developed to provide insight into such phenomena, teachers of Discourse Studies are regularly confronted with requests regarding a definition of the very notion of discourse. In order to partially comply with such requests, we must at least enumerate the following major properties that have been highlighted within decades of research in various areas of the field:

1. Discourse as social interaction Perhaps most fundamentally, discourse is defined as a form of social interaction among human participants (by extension, including human–machine interaction). Besides speaking (writing or signing) and meaning, language users engaged in talk or text will accomplish social acts of many kinds and will do so by jointly and mutually coordinating their action, as a meaningful and socially appropriate interaction. It is this fundamental interactional dimension of discourse that defines the basis of the social order of human societies. This dimension is especially focused on pragmatics and (various kinds of) Conversation Analysis.
2. Discourse as power and domination As one of the fundamental aspects of the social order construed and reproduced by discourse, power and power abuse (domination) may be defined in terms of a preferential access to, and control over, public discourse by social groups or organizations. This property of public discourse as a scarce symbolic power resource is especially focused on more critical, sociopolitical approaches to discourse, for instance in the study of domination based on gender, class, ethnicity or sexuality. By a complex process of controlling the minds (knowledge, attitudes, ideologies, norms, values, intentions) of language users, and indirectly the actions based on these mental representations, discourse may on the one hand be an important condition of social inequality, and on the other a prominent tool of resistance and dissent as forms of counter-power. Here we are dealing with the crucial role of discourse in the political order of society.
3. Discourse as communication One of the many goals of interaction by text and talk is the expression and communication of beliefs among language users. It is in this way that we come to know about the knowledge, intentions, goals, opinions and emotions of others, about how we acquire and update socially shared and distributed knowledge and thus the very conditions of coordinated interaction. This dimension defines the no less fundamental cognitive order of human societies. Interaction and cognition mutually presuppose each other, and no account of discourse is complete without a theoretical and empirical study of both dimensions. Unfortunately, in most current research, the cleft between cognition and interaction remains one of the major divisions of the field. This aspect of discourse is especially studied in cognitive psychology and in the cognitive sciences more generally, as well as in the field of communication studies, dealing with the effects and influences of messages on the minds of audiences.
4. Discourse as contextually situated Discourse as interaction and communication does not occur in a vacuum, but is instead part of a social situation in people’s everyday lives, and as an experience among others. Participants represent the for-them-relevant parameters of this situation (such as Setting, Participant Identities and Relations, Goals, Current Action and Knowledge) in a subjective mental model that defines the context and allows language users to engage in text or talk that is appropriate to the current communicative situation. The conditions and rules for such contextually-based appropriateness are especially studied in pragmatics, whereas the influence of social class, gender, age and ethnicity are specifically examined in sociolinguistics, and the contextual variation of expressions (e.g., formal vs. informal language use) in stylistics. Since contexts will typically vary across cultures, such an account also provides the basis for a (cross) cultural study of discourse in linguistic anthropology. A special case of contextual situatedness is the intertextual relation with other text and talk in the same or other situations. If these are situations of previous ages, such intertextual analysis also provides a basis for a historical approach to discourse.
5. Discourse as social semiosis Text and talk are not limited to the use of natural human languages but more broadly implement other semiotic systems of sounds, visuals, gestures and other embodied meaningful social activity within multimodal discourse – advocated especially in what today is called social semiotics, after earlier semiotic studies of literature, film, dance and other forms of symbolic expression, interaction and communication.
6. Discourse as natural language use Despite the emphasis placed, in the research of previous decades, on the interactional, cognitive, situated and semiotic properties, conditions and consequences of discourse, its core property is undoubtedly the use of natural language as the unique humane ability to produce and understand well-formed, meaningful and appropriate combinations of words, sentences or other units of rule-based language use. Hence the central relevance of linguistics and its sister-disciplines for the study of discourse.
7. Discourse as complex, layered construct Discourse analysis defines discourse as a complex, layered, multidimensional object or phenomenon integrating the three major dimensions of natural languages: Form or Expression (sounds, visuals, words, phrases, etc.), Meaning and Action. Each of these levels or dimensions is then further analysed in terms of more specific phonological, semiotic, syntactic, lexical, semantic, schematic, pragmatic and interactional theories. Beyond the local structures (sequences) of sentences, turns or moves, discourse analysis also pays attention to more global structures, such as the organizational schemata (superstructures) of conversations, news reports or scholarly articles. Similarly, meaning and action are not only described at the local level of propositions or actions expressed or performed by the utterance of sentences, but also in terms of global meanings (macrostructures, topics, gist) and global actions, for instance in discourse grammars and Conversation Analysis. Finally, across these levels, rhetoric – among other things – examines the special structures or operations (such as repetitions, hyperboles and euphemisms) that emphasize or de-emphasize the local meanings of discourse. What is important here is that the different levels or dimensions are not studied in isolation, but precisely as mutually related: well-formed discourse expressions are interpreted as meaningful and performed as appropriate social actions.
8. Sequences and hierarchies One of the crucial structural properties of text and talk is their sequentiality. At each of the levels mentioned above, discourse features structures consisting of sequences of sounds, words, sentences, propositions, moves or actions, according to the temporal order of discourse production and comprehension. This means that, in general, units at each level are conditioned by or interpreted with respect to previous ones, and as preparing next ones, thus defining the formal cohesion and semantic and pragmatic coherence of text and talk. At the same time, as we have seen, local sequences may be combined to form higher level units in complex hierarchical structures (e.g., sentences into paragraphs into sections, chapters, etc. in written texts, or sequences of turns at talk into the introduction or conclusion of a lecture). Finally, in addition to these ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ axes of discourse structures, we may distinguish a third one, characterized by such notions as foregrounding, emphasis, focus, highlighting, etc. as against backgrounding, mitigation, and so on. These three major orientations in the study of discourse structure may be metaphorically visualized and conceived of as forming a cube: Left vs. Right, Top vs. Bottom and Front vs. Back, respectively. Sequentiality, hierarchy and grounding are properties of text and talk that are examined in virtually all areas of the study of discourse, especially in discourse grammar and Conversation Analysis, as well as narrative and argumentation studies.
9. Abstract structures vs. dynamic strategies Discourse may alternatively or complementarily be studied as an object consisting of abstract structures, or as a dynamic, changing sequence of events, or as the strategically oriented mental operations or moves of social action. Thus, syntactic structures or overall schematic formats will tend to be analysed in terms of abstract structures, whereas conversations or more generally talk in interaction will be examined in more dynamic terms, as an ongoing performance or accomplishment – as is also the case for cognitive approaches to discourse production and comprehension.
10. Types or genres Discourse comes in various types, sorts or genres, such as everyday conversations, parliamentary debates, news reports in the press, scholarly articles or advertisements, among many others. These different genres may be partly characterized by the set of their typical structures, or register, such as by the inclusion of passive verbs, first person pronouns and narrative schemas in everyday storytelling, or by argumentative schemas in editorials or scholarly articles. However, when characterized as types of activities, as i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributor Biographies
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: The Study of Discourse
• 2 Discourse, Grammar and Interaction
• 3 Discourse Semantics
• 4 Narrative in Everyday Life
• 5 Argumentation
• 6 Discourse Semiotics
• 7 Discourse and Cognition
• 8 Discourse Pragmatics
• 9 Conversation Analysis: An Approach to the Analysis of Social Interaction
• 10 Dialogue in Institutional Interactions
• 11 Gender and Power in Discourse
• 12 Discourse, Ethnicity and Racism
• 13 Discourse and Identity
• 14 Organizational Discourse
• 15 Discourse and Politics
• 16 Discourse and Culture
• 17 Critical Discourse Analysis
• 18 Discourse and Ideology
• Index