Discourse Analysis for University Students

Laura Alba Juez

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS FOR UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Dpto. Filologías Extranjeras y sus Lingüísticas Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

For my two SONS, SUNS of my life, Joaquín and Julian

UNIT 1: INTRODUCING TEXT LINGUISTICS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT……………………………………………… 1.1. Defining text and discourse.

What is Text Linguistics? What is Discourse

Analysis? .................................................................................................................. 1.2. Origins and brief history of Text Linguistics and Discourse Analysis………. 1.3. Approaches to the phenomenon of discourse………………………………… 1.4. What do discourse analysts do? ……………………………………………… SUMMING UP…………………………………………………………………… TASKS FOR UNIT 1 ……………………………………………………………. FURTHER READING…………………………………………………………… USEFUL WEBSITES ……………………………………………………………

UNIT 2: THE DATA MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT ……………………………………………. 2.1. Data collection ………………………………………………………………… 2.2. Transcribing the data ……………………………………………………. 2.2.1. Transcription conventions used by some discourse analysts ……………….. 2.2.1.1. Notation used in the London Lund Corpus (Svartvik & Quirk, 1980)……. 2.2.1.2. Notation used by D. Schiffrin …………………………………………….. 2.2.1.3. Other symbols used by other authors ……………………………………… 2.3. Ethics of data collection …………………………………………………… 2.4. Corpus Linguistics: The use of corpora for DA …………………………… 2.4.1. Computer corpora and concordance programs …………………………….. 2.4.2. A possible classification of corpora ……………………………………… SUMMING UP…………………………………………………………………… TASKS FOR UNIT 2 ……………………………………………………………. FURTHER READING…………………………………………………………… USEFUL WEBSITES …………………………………………………………… UNIT 3: PRAGMATICS MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT ………………………………………….. 3.1. Definition. What is the scope of Pragmatics? ……………………………… 3

3.2. Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Theory of Implicature ………………….. 3.2.1. Examples and analysis ……………………………………………………… 3.3. Speech Acts …………………………………………………………………… 3.3.1. Examples and analysis ……………………………………………………… 3.4. Reference ……………………………………………………………………… 3.4.1. Examples and analysis ……………………………………………………… 3.5. Deixis …………………………………………………………………………. 3.5.1. More examples and analysis ……………………………………………….. 3.6. Presupposition ………………………………………………………………… 3.6.1. Examples and analysis …………………………………………………….. SUMMING UP…………………………………………………………………… TASKS FOR UNIT 3 ……………………………………………………………. FURTHER READING…………………………………………………………… USEFUL WEBSITES ……………………………………………………………

UNIT 4: INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT …………………………………………. 4.1. Main concepts and methods ………………………………………………… 4.1.1. John Gumperz’s contribution to Interactional Sociolinguistics ………….. 4.1.1.1. Example and analysis of contextualization cues ………………………. 4.1.2. Erving Goffman’s contribution to Interactional Sociolinguistics ……….. 4.1.2.1. Example and analysis …………………………………………………. 4.1.3. Similarities in Gumperz’s and Goffman’s approaches and their integration into an interactional sociolinguistic approach to discourse analysis ……… 4.2. Politeness…………………………………………………………………….. 4.2.1. Approaches to the phenomenon of politeness …………………………….. 4.2.1.1. The conversational-maxim view …………………………………………. 4.2.1.1.1. Leech’s approach to politeness ………………………………………… 4.2.1.1.2. Robin Lakoff’s approach to politeness …………………………………… 4.2.1.2.

The face-saving view: Brown & Levinson’s Theory of Politeness ………

4.2.1.2.1. Summary and examples ……………………………………………….. 4.2.1.2.2. Example of analysis …………………………………………………… 4.2.1.2.3. Criticisms to Brown & Levinson’s model of politeness …………… SUMMING UP…………………………………………………………………… 4

TASKS FOR UNIT 4 ……………………………………………………………. FURTHER READING…………………………………………………………… USEFUL WEBSITES ……………………………………………………………

UNIT 5: CONVERSATION ANALYSIS MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT …………………………………………. 5.1. Conversation Analysis: an approach to DA ……………………………….. 5.2. Methods and central concepts of CA ………………………………………. 5.2.1. Linear sequences: turn-taking and adjacency pairs ……………………… 5.2.1.1. Preference organization ………………………………………………. 5.2.2. Other sequences: Repair, pre-sequences, insertion sequences and overall organization ……………………………………………………………… 5.2.2.1. Repair …………………………………………………………………... 5.2.2.2. Pre-sequences ………………………………………………………….. 5.2.2.3. Insertion sequences ……………………………………………………. 5.2.2.4. Overall organization …………………………………………………… 5.3. Example of analysis ………………………………………………………. SUMMING UP…………………………………………………………………… TASKS FOR UNIT 5 ……………………………………………………………. FURTHER READING…………………………………………………………… USEFUL WEBSITES …………………………………………………………… UNIT 6: THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF COMMUNICATION MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT ………………………………………… 6.1. An anthropological approach to DA ………………………………………. 6.2. The concept of Communicative Competence ……………………………… 6.3. Main concepts and notions in ethnographic research ……………………… 6.4. The SPEAKING grid ………………………………………………………. 6.5. Method of analysis …………………………………………………………. 6.6. Further remarks on the Ethnography of Communication ………………….. 6.7. Sample analysis of data SUMMING UP…………………………………………………………………… TASKS FOR UNIT 6 ……………………………………………………………. FURTHER READING…………………………………………………………… 5

USEFUL WEBSITES …………………………………………………………… UNIT 7: VARIATION ANALYSIS MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT ………………………………………….. 7.1. Defining Variation Analysis: The problem of linguistic change …………… 7.2. Labov and his framework for the analysis of narrative …………………….. 7.3. The vernacular ……………………………………………………………… 7.4. Information structures ……………………………………………………… 7.5. Sample analysis of data ……………………………………………………. 7.6. Final remarks on the Variational Approach ……………………………….. 7.6.1. Steps to follow when doing Variation Analysis ………………………….. SUMMING UP…………………………………………………………………… TASKS FOR UNIT 7 ……………………………………………………………. FURTHER READING…………………………………………………………… USEFUL WEBSITES …………………………………………………………… UNIT 8: FUNCTIONAL SENTENCE PERSPECTIVE: THEMATIC AND INFORMATION STRUCTURES MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT ………………………………………… 8.1. Functionalism ………………………………………………………………… 8.1.1. Functional Sentence Perspective ………………………………………….. 8.1.1.1. Thematic Structure: Theme vs. Rheme …………………………………. 8.1.1.1.1. Multiple themes ……………………………………………………….. 8.1.1.1.2. Thematic clauses ………………………………………………………. 8.1.1.1.3. Theme, subject and topic ……………………………………………….. 8.1.1.1.4. Marked and unmarked themes ………………………………………… 8.1.1.1.5. Thematization/ staging …………………………………………………. 8.1.1.2. Information Structure: Given vs. New …………………………………… 8.1.1.2.1. Marked and unmarked focus ………………………………………… 8.1.1.2.1.1. But how do we identify the focus? ………………………………… 8.2. Information structure and thematic structure: Given + New and Theme + Rheme ………………………………………………………………………… 8.3. Some considerations related to Halliday’s information structure analysis…… 8.4. Sample analysis of data …………………………………………………….

8.4.1. Thematic structure ……………………………………………………….. 8.4.2. Information structure ……………………………………………………. SUMMING UP…………………………………………………………………… TASKS FOR UNIT 8 ……………………………………………………………. FURTHER READING…………………………………………………………… USEFUL WEBSITES ……………………………………………………………

UNIT 9: POST-STRUCTURALIST THEORY AND SOCIAL THEORY MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT ………………………………………… 9.1. Post-structuralism …………………………………………………………. 9.1.1. Major weakness of post-structuralist discourse theory…………………… 9.2. Social Theory ………………………………………………………………. 9.3. Michel Foucault …………………………………………………………… 9.3.1. Applying Foucauldian theory to the analysis of actual discourse: guidelines and example……………………………………………………………….. 9.4. Pierre Bordeau ………………………………………………………………. 9.5. Mikhail Bakhtin ………………………………………………………………. 9.5.1. A sample of heteroglossic analysis……………………………………….. 9.6. Final remarks on Post-structural and Social Theories……………………… SUMMING UP…………………………………………………………………… TASKS FOR UNIT 9 ……………………………………………………………. FURTHER READING…………………………………………………………… USEFUL WEBSITES ……………………………………………………………

UNIT 10: CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT ………………………………………… 10.1.The scope of Critical Discourse Analysis……………………………….. 10.2. Discourse and power……………………………………………………… 10.2.1. ‘Powerful’ discourse structures…………………………………………. 10.2.1.1. Example and analysis…………………………………………………. 10.2.2. Some other interesting studies on the issue of discourse and power…. 10.3. Ideology, social cognition and discourse…………………………………. 10.3.1. Ideological analysis: An example……………………………………….. 10.4. Steps to follow when doing CDA…………………………………………. 7

10.5. Major criticisms levelled at CDA………………………………………….. SUMMING UP…………………………………………………………………… TASKS FOR UNIT 10 ……………………………………………………………. FURTHER READING…………………………………………………………… USEFUL WEBSITES ……………………………………………………………

UNIT 11: MEDIATED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT ………………………………………… 11.1. What is Mediated Discourse Analysis? ………………………………….. 11.2. Central concepts in MDA ……………………………………………….. 11.3. MDA as a theory of social action ………………………………………. 11.4. Methods in MDA ………………………………………………………. 11.5. Mediated social interaction …………………………………………….. 11.6. Interdisciplinarity ………………………………………………………. 11.7. How does MDA analyze discourse? ……………………………………. 11.8. Geosemiotics ……………………………………………………………. 11.8.1. Indexicality ……………………………………………………………. 11.8.2. Central elements in Geosemiotics …………………………………….. 11.9. Example of analysis …………………………………………………… SUMMING UP…………………………………………………………………… TASKS FOR UNIT 10 ……………………………………………………………. FURTHER READING…………………………………………………………… USEFUL WEBSITES ……………………………………………………………

UNIT 12: FURTHER ISSUES IN DISCOURSE ANALYSIS MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT ………………………………………… 12.1. Some important issues of concern for all discourse analysts…………….. 12.1.1. Unit(s) of analysis ……………………………………………………….. 12.1.2. Discourse types/ genres…………………………………………………. 12.1.2.1. Political discourse………………………………………………………. 12.1.2.2. Medical discourse………………………………………………………… 12.1.2.3. Computer-mediated discourse………………………………………………. 12.1.3. Cohesion and coherence……………………………………………………….. 12.1.3.1. Cohesion……………………………………………………………………. 8

12.1.3.2. Coherence…………………………………………………………………….. 12.1.3.3. Discourse markers as an example of a means to achieve cohesion and coherence…………………………………………………………………… 12.1.4. Discourse strategies and functions…………………………………………… 12.2. So… is this all there is to say about DA?............................................................ SUMMING UP…………………………………………………………………… TASKS FOR UNIT 12 …………………………………………………………… FURTHER READING…………………………………………………………… USEFUL WEBSITES ……………………………………………………………

REFERENCES ANSWERS TO TASKS CONCEPTUAL INDEX _____________________________________________________________________

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS No present book on Discourse Analysis can boast of not having drawn on previous works on the subject. In that respect, I owe a special debt to all the authors cited in this book. In particular, my personal consultation with some of the researchers whose work I cite was of the greatest value and assistance. Thus my thanks go to: 1) Bruce Fraser, for generously sharing his work on discourse markers with me and for sending me his unpublished manuscripts. 2) Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, Robin Lakoff, Heidi Hamilton, William Labov, Wallace Chafe and John Gumperz for clarifying many of my doubts about their approaches to discourse (and about so many other topics!) while I was a Visiting Researcher in the Linguistics Department at Georgetown University (U.S.A.). 3) Angela Downing, for being such a good teacher, and for generously giving and discussing with me some of her articles on coherence, thematic progression, topicality and discourse markers. 4) JoAnne Neff, for her usual openness and her willingness in sending me her articles on political discourse, as well as for shedding light on my understanding of Critical Discourse Analysis during our conversations and discussions. 5) Teun van Dijk, for bearing with me and my questions after one of his talks here at the UNED. 6) Irene Madfes, for sending me her articles on medical discourse. I am especially grateful to my friend Gretchen Dobrott, for her thorough, detailed and invaluable work in proof-reading the manuscript. The Head of our Department, María Teresa Gibert, also read the manuscript and I profoundly appreciate her kindness and the time she took in doing it, as well as her wise and valuable comments and suggestions. Also, this book owes much to the artwork (photography and drawings) of my art and computer wizard, Joaquín Armijo. I would also like to thank CNN International, for granting me permission to reprint two fragments of the transcripts of one Larry King Live show. Likewise, I’m grateful to Lourdes Nafá, for giving me permission to reprint a fragment of her annotated corpus. Mónica Aragonés and Maribel Medrano gave me permission to reproduce the dialogues in Chapters 8 and 18 of their Lengua Inglesa course. My gratitude goes to them too. I also owe Mónica a debt of gratitude for her constant support and friendship. Every effort has been made to contact the authors of the different fragments of discourse that are used for analysis in this book, and I would be glad to make any

suitable arrangements with any copyright holders whom it has been impossible to contact. Finally, but not less importantly, I would like to thank my husband, Gustavo, and my sons, Joaquín and Julian, for their understanding and unending help and support. My father, brothers, and sister deserve a good share of these thanks as well, especially for their encouragement. Needless to say, all deficiencies, mistakes and omissions are my own responsibility.

INTRODUCTION

1. Aims of this book The main aim of this book is to provide the students of 5th year of the Filología Inglesa program at the UNED with the necessary study material for the course entitled Análisis del Discurso y Lingüística del Texto en Lengua Inglesa. However, it could also be used in any general (university) course on Discourse Analysis, since it contains basic theoretical and empirical knowledge on the subject. The following are the general objectives that the student is expected to reach after reading and studying the material in the book: • •

•

Identification of the different theories and approaches to analysis included in the course. Analysis of different types of text and discourse, taking into account the different approaches, units of analysis, strategies and functions studied in the course. Practical application of such analyses, with specification of their positive contribution within the field of linguistic and humanistic studies.

There are also specific objectives, which are indicated at the beginning of each unit. 2. Content of this book It would be unwise to think that this work presents a complete picture of all possible aspects of, and approaches to Discourse Analysis. The discipline is a broad one, and consequently it would be impossible to review all related studies in a work of limited scope like the present book. Nor would it be possible to do justice even to the approaches I discuss. Nevertheless, I have chosen several perspectives that are especially relevant (because of their remarkable influence), and have tried to present and discuss them in a pedagogical way, considering the main aim of the book. I have to acknowledge that I am very much influenced by the American and some of the European schools of Discourse Analysis, and consequently my views on the subject, as well as my choice of approaches reflect this fact. The course is divided into 12 units. Units 1 (INTRODUCING DISCOURSE ANALYSIS) and 2 ( THE DATA) are general units which describe and explain the

basic tenets of Text Linguistics and Discourse Analysis. They also contain some introductory considerations about corpus linguistics, and the most common techniques for data collection and annotation, taking into account the necessary ethics for the job. Units 3-11 cover the different approaches to be studied and compared, which are the following: UNIT 3: PRAGMATICS UNIT 4: INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS UNIT 5: CONVERSATION ANALYSIS UNIT 6: THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF COMMUNICATION UNIT 7: VARIATION ANALYSIS UNIT 8: FUNCTIONAL SENTENCE PERSPECTIVE: THEMATIC AND INFORMATION STRUCTURES UNIT 9: POST-STRUCTURALIST THEORY AND SOCIAL THEORY UNIT 10: CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS UNIT 11: MEDIATED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Unit 12 (FURTHER ISSUES IN DISCOURSE ANALYSIS) covers some further issues, key concepts and aspects to be considered within discourse studies, such as the problem of choosing a unit of analysis, the identification and characterization of different genres or types of discourse, the analysis of cohesion and coherence, and the use of discourse markers. At the end of the units we find an extensive bibliography (REFERENCES), containing all the works cited. The last section of the book contains the key (ANSWERS TO TASKS) to the tasks given in each of the chapters. The students/readers are advised to do the tasks first, and then check their answers in this section. The solutions given are by no means the only possible ones, considering the wide scope of Discourse Analysis and the multiple perspectives from which discourse can be approached. These answers are thus to be used as a guide, but by no means should they be viewed as complete and final solutions to the problems presented. 3. Chapter organization Each chapter contains both a theoretical and an empirical part. All units are introduced by presenting their specific objectives (MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT), followed by the theoretical development of the topic (main ideas and concepts) in question. A sample of analysis is always provided in order to clarify the ideas and 13

concepts explained. Lastly, all the units have the following sections: •

SUMMING UP (containing a summary of the points studied in the unit).

•

TASKS (containing both open and semi-open activities whose main intention is to provide the student/reader with opportunities to put all the theoretical knowledge into practice. The answers to the semi-open tasks can be found at the end of the book).

•

FURTHER READING (containing further –non-compulsory– references for the student/reader interested in studying the topics presented in the unit in more detail).

•

USEFUL WEBSITES (containing websites which might prove useful for doing further research on the subject of the unit).

4. Final remark

I finally want to remark that this book does not claim originality in its content, in the sense that no new theory of Discourse Analysis is presented or outlined. The main aim in this respect has been to present a state-of-the-art description of some of the already existing approaches to the discipline. Notwithstanding, the general organization of ideas and approaches, as well as the pedagogical orientation and the tasks presented, intend to conform an original –albeit very modest– contribution to the study of discourse.

INTRODUCING TEXT LINGUISTICS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

“Anyone who thinks we are close to final answers, or that we know how to find them, must surely be mistaken.” Wallace Chafe, Discourse, Consciousness and Time.

MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT: •

To define the terms text and discourse.

•

To define Text Linguistics and Discourse Analysis.

•

To trace the evolution of these two disciplines through time.

•

To identify the different approaches to Discourse Analysis.

1.1. Defining text and discourse. What is Text Linguistics? What is Discourse Analysis? To define and describe the scope of study of Text Linguistics and Discourse Analysis and to establish the differences between them both is not an easy task. Suffice it to say that the terms text and discourse are used in a variety of ways by different linguists and researchers: there is a considerable number of theoretical approaches to both Text Linguistics and Discourse Analysis and many of them belong to very different research traditions, even when they share similar basic tenets. In everyday popular use it might be said that the term text is restricted to written language, while discourse is restricted to spoken language. However, modern Linguistics has introduced a concept of text that includes every type of utterance; therefore a text may be a magazine article, a television interview, a conversation or a cooking recipe, just to give a few examples. Crystal (1997) defines Text Linguistics as “the formal account of the linguistic principles governing the structure of texts.” De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) present a broader view; they define text as a communicative event that must satisfy the following seven criteria:

Cohesion, which has to do with the relationship between text and syntax. Phenomena such as conjunction, ellipsis, anaphora, cataphora or recurrence are basic for cohesion.

Coherence, which has to do with the meaning of the text. Here we may refer to elements of knowledge or to cognitive structures that do not have a linguistic realization but are implied by the language used, and thus influence the reception of the message by the interlocutor.

Intentionality, which relates to the attitude and purpose of the speaker or writer.

Acceptability, which concerns the preparation of the hearer or reader to assess the relevance or usefulness of a given text.

Informativity, which refers to the quantity and quality of new or expected information.

Situationality, which points to the fact that the situation in which the text is

produced plays a crucial role in the production and reception of the message. 7)

Intertextuality, which refers to two main facts: a) a text is always related to some preceding or simultaneous discourse; b) texts are always linked and grouped in particular text varieties or genres (e.g.: narrative, argumentative, descriptive, etc.) by formal criteria.

In spite of the considerable overlap between Text Linguistics and Discourse Analysis (both of them are concerned with the notion of cohesion, for instance) the above criteria may help us make a distinction between them. Tischer et al. (2000) explain that the first two criteria (cohesion and coherence) may be defined as text- internal, whereas the remaining criteria are text-external. Those approaches oriented towards ‘pure’ Text Linguistics give more importance to textinternal criteria, while the tradition in Discourse Analysis has always been to give more importance to the external factors, for they are believed to play an essential role in communication. Some authors, such as Halliday, believe that text is everything that is meaningful in a particular situation: “By text, then, we understand a continuous process of semantic choice” (1978:137). In the “purely” text-linguistic approaches, such as the cognitive theories of text, texts are viewed as “more or less explicit epi-phenomena of cognitive processes” (Tischer et al., 2000: 29), and the context plays a subordinate role. It could be said that the text-internal elements constitute the text, while the textexternal ones constitute the context. Schiffrin points out that all approaches within Discourse Analysis view text and context as the two kinds of information that contribute to the communicative content of an utterance, and she defines these terms as follows: I will use the term “text” to differentiate linguistic material (e.g. what is said, assuming a verbal channel) from the environment in which “sayings” (or other linguistic productions) occur (context). In terms of utterances, then, “text” is the linguistic content: the stable semantic meanings of words, expressions, and sentences, but not the inferences available to hearers depending upon the contexts in which words, expressions, and sentences are used. […] Context is thus a world filled with people producing utterances: people who have social, cultural, and personal identities, knowledge, beliefs, goals and wants, and who interact with one another in various socially and culturally defined situations. (1994: 363)

Thus,

according

Schiffrin,

Discourse

Analysis involves the study of both text and context.

One might

conclude, then, that Text Linguistics only studies the

text,

while

Discourse Analysis is more complete because it studies both text and context. However, as has been shown, there are definitions of text (like de Beaugrande’s) that are very broad and include both elements, and that is why it would be very risky to talk about clear-cut differences between the two disciplines.

Beaugrande’s (2002) definition of Text Linguistics (herinafter TL) as “the study of real language in use” does not differ from many of the definitions of Discourse Analysis (herinafter DA) presented by Schiffrin within its functional approach, some of which are the following: “The study of discourse is the study of any aspect of language use” (Fasold, 1990: 65).

“The analysis of discourse is, necessarily, the analysis of language in use. As such, it cannot be restricted to the description of linguistic forms independent of the purposes or functions which these forms are designed to serve in human affairs” (Brown & Yule, 1983: 1).

“Discourse… refers to language in use, as a process which is socially situated” (Candlin, 1997: ix).

Thus, we see that the terms text and discourse are sometimes used to mean the same and therefore one might conclude that TL and DA are the same, too. It can be said, nevertheless, that the tendency in TL has been to present a more formal and experimental approach, while DA tends more towards a functional approach. Formalists are apt to see language as a mental phenomenon, while functionalists see it as a predominantly social one. As has been shown, authors like Schiffrin integrate both

the formal and the functional approaches within DA, and consequently, DA is viewed as an all-embracing term which would include TL studies as one approach among others. Slembrouck notices the ambiguity of the term discourse analysis and provides another broad definition: “The term discourse analysis is very ambiguous. I will use it in this book to refer mainly to the linguistic analysis of naturally occurring connected speech or written discourse. Roughly speaking, it refers to attempts to study the organisation of language above the sentence or above the clause, and therefore to study larger linguistic units, such as conversational exchanges or written texts. It follows that discourse analysis is also concerned with language use in social contexts, and in particular with interaction or dialogue between speakers”. (2005:1)

Another important characteristic of discourse studies is that they are essentially multidisciplinary, and therefore it can be said that they cross the Linguistics border into different and varied domains, as van Dijk notes in the following passage: “…discourse analysis for me is essentially multidisciplinary, and involves linguistics, poetics, semiotics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, and communication research. What I find crucial though is that precisely because of its multi-faceted nature, this multidisciplinary research should be integrated. We should devise theories that are complex and account both for the textual, the cognitive, the social, the political and the historical dimension of discourse.” (2002: 10)

Thus, when analyzing discourse, researchers are not only concerned with ‘purely’ linguistic facts; they pay equal or more attention to language use in relation to social, political and cultural aspects. For that reason, discourse is not only within the interests of linguists; it is a field that is also studied by communication scientists, literary critics, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, social psychologists, political scientists and many others. As noted above, not all researchers use and believe in the same definition of text and discourse. In this course, we are going to adopt the general definition of DA as the study of language in use, and we shall follow Schiffrin in including both text and context as parts of discourse, in which case we will consider the term text in its narrow sense, not in the broad sense that could place it on a par with the term discourse.

1.2. Origins and brief history of Text Linguistics and Discourse Analysis

Parallel to the Chomskyan Generative School (whose starting point is considered to be the publication of Syntactic Structures in 1957), other schools emerged in different parts of the world that supported different and even opposing ideas to those of Chomsky’s. All these new schools believed that a good linguistic description should go beyond the sentence, and pointed to the fact that there are certain meanings and aspects of language that cannot be understood or embraced if its study is limited to the syntactic analysis of sentences. Thus, in the twentieth century, the following new disciplines emerged within the field of Linguistics: •

Functionalism (functional grammars)

•

Cognitive Linguistics

•

Sociolinguistics

•

Pragmatics

•

Text Linguistics

•

Discourse Analysis

All these new disciplines are interrelated, and sometimes it is very difficult to distinguish one from the other, due to the fact that all of them have common denominators. Bernárdez (1999: 342) explains the basic tenets of these disciplines, which are here summarized as follows: a) Language only exists in use and communication. It always fulfils certain functions in human interaction. b) Language use is necessarily social. c) Language is not autonomous. It shares some characteristics with other social and cognitive phenomena. d) The description of language must account for the real facts of language. It should not postulate hidden entities only motivated by the needs of the formal system utilized. e) Linguistic structures should be closely linked to the conditions of language use. f) Language is natural and necessarily vague and inaccurate; therefore any prediction can only be probabilistic.

When doing DA, then, researchers may also engage themselves in Functional Grammar, Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics or Cognitivism, because all these fields are interrelated and have common tenets. As regards TL and DA, we may speak of an “integration” of both disciplines, for, if we observe the evolution of language research through time, it will be noticed that many scholars have moved from TL into DA as part of the natural flow of their beliefs and ideas, as is the case with van Dijk, who, in his biographical article of 2002, explains how his research evolved from Text Grammar to Critical Discourse Analysis 1. This author points out that the main aim of his studies in the 70’s was to give an explicit description of the grammatical structure of texts, and the most obvious way of doing so was by accounting for the relationship among sentences. A very important concept for Text Grammar at that time was the introduction of the notion of macrostructure (van Dijk, 1980). Another fundamental notion was that of coherence and the idea that texts are organized at more global descriptive levels than that of the sentence. Later on, and under the influence of the cognitive theories, the notion of strategic understanding was developed, which attempted to account for what the users of a language really do when they understand a given text. Van Dijk also notes how several other new concepts were introduced in TL studies, such as sociocultural knowledge and mental models (Johnson-Laird, 1983), as well all the ideas and concepts coming from the field of Pragmatics. In his particular case, he took interest in the study of power and ideology, which places him within the DA stream-of-thought known as Critical Discourse Analysis 2. Thus, after the early and uniform stage of “Text Grammar”, TL went through a series of more open and diversified stages. The ‘textuality’ stage emphasized the global aspects of texts and saw the text as a functional unit, larger than the sentence. This stage led into the ‘textualization’ or ‘discourse processing’ stage, where analysts “set about developing process models of the activities of discourse participants in interactive settings and in ‘real time’” (de Beaugrande, 1997: 61-62). The current aim now in DA is to describe language where it was originally found, i.e. in the context of human interaction. In order to achieve this aim, different researchers have taken different approaches. We now turn to them.

Another example can be found in de Beaugrande (1997: 68) when he comments on how his concepts of text and discourse evolved over a series of studies and expanded beyond the linguistic focus he first encountered. 2 This approach is presented and studied in Unit 10 of this course.

1.3. Approaches to the phenomenon of discourse

Current research in DA, then, flows from different academic fields. This is one of the reasons why the terms discourse and discourse analysis are used to mean different things by different researchers. Schiffrin et al. note that all the definitions fall into three main categories:

1) Anything beyond the sentence 2) Language use 3) A broader range of social practice that includes non-linguistic and nonspecific instances of language. (2001: 1)

Authors such as Leech (1983) and Schiffrin (1994) distinguish between two main approaches: 1) the formal approach, where discourse is defined as a unit of language beyond the sentence, and 2) the functional approach, which defines discourse as language use. Z. Harris (1951, 1952) was the first linguist that used the term discourse analysis and he was a formalist: he viewed discourse as the next level in a hierarchy of morphemes, clauses and sentences. This view has been criticized due to the results shown by researchers like Chafe (1980, 1987, 1992), who created awareness upon the fact that the units used by people in their speech can not always be categorized as sentences. People generally produce units that have a semantic and an intonational closure, but not necessarily a syntactic one. Functionalists give much importance to the purposes and functions of language, sometimes to the extreme of arguing that language and society are part of each other and cannot be thought of as independent (Fairclough, 1989; Focault, 1980). Functional analyses include all uses of language because they focus on the way in which people use language to achieve certain communicative goals. Discourse is not regarded as one more of the levels in a hierarchy; it is an all-embracing concept which includes not only the propositional content, but also the social, cultural and contextual contents. As explained above, Schiffrin (1994) proposes a more balanced approach to discourse, in which both the formal and the functional paradigms are integrated. She views discourse as “utterances”, i.e. “units of linguistic production (whether spoken or written) which are inherently contextualized” (1994: 41). From this perspective, the aims for DA are not only sequential or syntactic, but also semantic and pragmatic. 22

Within the category of discourse we may include not only the ‘purely’ linguistic content, but also sign language, dramatization, or the so-called ‘bodily hexis’ (Bordieu, 1990), i.e. the speaker’s disposition or the way s/he stands, talks, walks or laughs, which has to do with a given political mythology. It can thus be concluded that discourse is multimodal because it uses more than one semiotic system and performs several functions at the same time. Wetherell et al. (2001) present four possible approaches to DA, which are summarized as follows: 1) The model that views language as a system and therefore it is important for the researchers to find patterns. 2) The model that is based on the activity of language use, more than on language in itself. Language is viewed as a process and not as a product; thus researchers focus on interaction. 3) The model that searches for language patterns associated with a given topic or activity (e.g. legal discourse, psychotherapeutic discourse, etc.). 4) The model that looks for patterns within broader contexts, such as ‘society’ or ‘culture’. Here, language is viewed as part of major processes and activities, so that the interest goes beyond language (e.g. the study of racism or sexism through the analysis of discourse).

In spite of these categorizations, it would not be unreasonable to say that there are as many approaches to discourse as there are researchers devoted to the field, for each of them proposes new forms of analysis or new concepts that somehow transform or broaden previous modes of analysis. However, it would also be true to say that all streams of research within the field are related to one another, and sometimes it is difficult to distinguish among them. Precisely with the aim of systematizing the study of discourse and distinguishing among different ways of solving problems within the 23

discipline, different traditions or schools have been identified. It would be impossible to embrace them all in a university course, and for that reason, in this book we are only going to concentrate on the main ideas and practices within some of the best-known schools, which are the following:

1. Pragmatics (Unit 3) 2. Interactional Sociolinguistics (Unit 4) 3. Conversation Analysis (Unit 5) 4. The Ethnography of Communication (Unit 6) 5. Variation Analysis (Unit 7) 6. Functional Sentence Perspective (Unit 8) 7. Post-structuralist Theory and Social Theory (Unit 9) 8. Critical Discourse Analysis (Unit 10) 9. Mediated Discourse Analysis (Unit 11)

1.4. What do discourse analysts do?

Broadly speaking, discourse analysts investigate the use of language in context, thus they are interested in what speakers/writers do and not so much in the formal relationships between sentences or propositions. Even when a discipline is hard to delimit, as is the case of DA, we can learn a great deal about its field of concern by observing what practitioners do. If we look at what discourse analysts do, we will find they investigate matters such as: •

Turn-taking in telephone conversations

•

The language of humour

•

Power relationships in doctor/patient interviews

•

Dialogue in chat rooms

•

The discourse of the archives, records or files of psychoanalysts

•

The conversation at a dinner table

•

The scripts of a given television programme

•

The discourse of politicians

•

The study of racism through the use of discourse

•

How power relations and sexism are manifested in the conversation between men and women

•

Openings and closings in different types of conversations

•

The structure of narrative

•

Representations of black/white people (or any race) in the written media (magazines, newspapers, etc.)

•

The strategies used by speakers/writers in order to fulfil a given discourse function

•

The use of irony or metaphor for certain communicative aims

•

The use of linguistic politeness

•

The discourse of E-mail messages

•

Legal discourse used in trials

•

And a long etcetera…

These are just a few examples reflecting the interests of discourse analysts, but they are enough to demonstrate that researchers in DA are certainly concerned with the study of language in use. As students/readers progress through the different units of this book, they will encounter several other examples of possible DA areas of interest. In order to carry out their analyses, discourse analysts need to work with texts. Texts constitute the corpus of any given study, which may consist of the transcripts of a recorded conversation, a written document, a computerized corpus of a given language, etc. The use of corpora has become a very widespread practice among discourse researchers, and for that reason it is necessary for any discourse analyst to acquire some basic knowledge of how to handle the data and how to work with corpora. Unit 2 is devoted to this enterprise.

1. The terms text and discourse have been –and still are- used ambiguously, and they are defined in different ways by different researchers. In this course, we are going to use the term text to refer to the ‘purely’ linguistic material, and we are going to consider discourse in a broader sense, defining it as language in use, composed of

text and context. 2. Text Linguistics and Discourse Analysis share some basic tenets and, while some authors make a distinction between them both, others use both terms to mean the same. However, it may be said that ‘purely’ Text Linguistic studies are more concerned with the text-internal factors (i.e. cohesion and coherence) while Discourse Analysis focuses its attention more on the text-external factors, without disregarding the text-internal ones. The history of these disciplines shows that research has evolved, in many cases, from the narrower scope of Text Grammar (and later, Text Linguistics) into the broader discipline of Discourse Analysis, and therefore both disciplines have merged. For this reason and for clarifying and practical purposes, in this course we shall consider DA as a macro-discipline that includes several sub-approaches, among which the ‘purely’ text-linguistic ones can also be found. 3. In this course we are going to study the main theoretical and practical tenets of the following traditions identified within discourse studies: Pragmatics, Conversational Analysis, Interactional Sociolinguistics, Ethnography of Communication, Variation Analysis, Functional Sentence Perspective, Post-structural and Social Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis and Mediated Discourse Analysis. 4. In order to learn about a given discipline, it is very useful to look at what practitioners do. Discourse analysts look into the language of face-to-face conversations, telephone conversations, e-mail messages, etc., and they may study power relations, the structure of turn-taking, politeness strategies, the linguistic manifestation of racism or sexism, and many, many other aspects of language in use. The sky is the limit. 5. Discourse analysts are interested in the actual patterns of use in naturally-occurring texts. These natural texts are known as the corpus, which constitutes the basis for analysis. Thus, discourse analysts necessarily take a corpus-based approach to their research.

A) READING: After reading the content of this unit, CHOOSE ONE of the following chapters from Discourse Analysis books and READ it: 26

• • •

• •

Chapter 2 (“Definitions of discourse”) and chapter 10 (“Text and context”) in Deborah Schiffrin’s Approaches to Discourse, 1994. Introduction (“What is Discourse Analysis?”) in D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen & H. Hamilton’s The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 2001. Chapter II (“Toward a science of text and discourse”) in R. de Beaugrande’s New Foundations for a Science of Text and Discourse: Cognition, Communication, and the Freedom of Access to Knowledge and Society, 1997. Chapter 2 (“What is a text?”) in S. Titscher et al.’s Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis, 2000. Introduction (“Perspectives on Discourse Analysis”) in A. Jaworski and N. Coupland’s The Discourse Reader, 1999 3.

B) SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION: MAKE A WRITTEN SUMMARY of the chapter you read, hand it in to your tutor and then discuss the main points with him/her. C) DISCUSSION: DISCUSS the meaning of the terms text and context with five other students in person or in a computer conference (if possible). Send only one message or written document to your tutor with the conclusions of your discussion, specifying the names of the students who participated.

•

Van Dijk, T. (2004)

•

Brown, G. & Yule (1983), Chapter 1: Introduction.

•

Fish, S. (1980).

•

Van Dijk, T. (1977)

•

Van Dijk (1985).

“Introduction: discourse as a new cross-discipline”.

Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Volume 1: Disciplines of Discourse. •

Fairclough, N. (1992). Chapter 1: “Approaches to Discourse Analysis”.

The complete references to these articles, as well as those of the books or articles included in the Further Reading section can be found in the bibliography (“References”) at the back of this book.

- Criticism.Com – Essays in Discourse Analysis: www.criticism.com - LSA Fields of Linguistics – Discourse Analysis: www.Isadc.org/web2/discourse/html - Stef Slembrouck page: “What is meant by discourse analysis”: http://bank.rug.ac.be/da/da.htm

And many, many more! Search for them!

THE DATA

“…no methodological preferences are reached in a vacuum: they are all the product of more general beliefs in what constitutes data and what counts as evidence and ‘proof’.” Deborah Schiffrin, Approaches to Discourse.

MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT: •

To learn some techniques of data collection and annotation.

•

To examine some of the issues involved in the ethics of data collection.

•

To define the term corpus and examine the different types of corpora.

•

To understand the importance of the use of corpora for Discourse Analysis.

•

To learn about the tools available for corpus querying.

2.1. Data collection

One of the first problems we encounter when facing discourse analytic research concerns the data to be used. Some questions arise, such as: What type of discourse are we going to analyze? How are we going to collect the data we need? And, in the case of spoken discourse, how are we going to transcribe and annotate the data in such a way that we can show the features of both text and context as faithfully as possible? The answer to the first question depends completely on the objectives the researcher has in mind, which, in turn, depend on the research question. S/he may want, for example, to analyze spoken or written language, or both, or s/he may want to focus on a given genre or register: there are innumerable possibilities here. But once we know the type of discourse we want to analyze, we have to figure out some way of collecting the data; i.e. we need to decide upon the best possible way of getting a linguistic corpus which will provide the basis for our research. As Taylor remarks, “one of the processes by which material becomes data is selection” (2001: 24), and there may be several different criteria for selecting a sample. As noted above, these criteria depend on the goals of research. Schiffrin explains how the different approaches to Discourse Analysis (DA) take different perspectives and have different beliefs about methods for collecting and analyzing data: For example, some approaches focus intensively on a few fragments of talk (e.g. interactional sociolinguistics), others focus on distributions of discourse items across a wide range if texts (e.g. variationists). Some require a great deal of social, cultural, and personal information about interlocutors and may use interlocutors as informants in analysis of their own talk (e.g. ethnography of communication); others assume an idealized speaker/hearer whose specific social, cultural, or personal characteristics do not enter into participant strategies for building text at all (e.g. pragmatics). Methodological differences such as these are due, partially, to different theoretical assumptions –assumptions that are based in the different origins noted above (1994: 13).

Thus, when it comes to data collection, our goals will guide us in the selection process and they may lead us to choose different procedures, such as recording and transcribing spoken discourse, keying texts in, scanning, using texts which are stored in machinereadable form, downloading material from the internet, etc.

2.2. Transcribing the data

A very important aspect of data collection in research involving talk or spoken discourse is transcription. By means of the process of transcription the researcher turns the spoken discourse in question into a document called transcript. Doing transcription is not an easy task and it is very time-consuming. If the researcher aims at some degree of objectivity (another difficult –if not impossible- task), s/he should try to use a system of transcription that shows, as faithfully as possible, all the variables that intervene in the studied phenomenon. There is no such thing as a totally neutral transcription, and, to the present, it has not been possible to create a system so perfect as to represent all variables and aspects, but discourse analysts have always made attempts to contrive annotation systems that best suit the aims of their research, and that allow them to obtain reliable results to a reasonable extent. For instance, for a conversation analyst who views talk as interaction, the data will include not only the words, but also other aspects of the conversation, such as the sequential organization of the utterances of the different participants, as well as the interruptions and pauses. Another important requirement would be to work with a sample of ‘naturally occurring’ 4 talk, rather than with data collected by means of research interviews 5.

Some analysts include

information about the text, such as genre, date and place of publication, etc. Some others include information about the pronunciation and intonation patterns, or about the speakers (sex, age, occupation, social class, etc.).

They can also assign labelled

brackets to each constituent of a sentence (parsing) or signal some features of spoken language such as laughter, interruptions or hesitations. For the purpose of illustration, we will now examine the attempts made by a few authors to annotate their data.

Artist

University Professor

Taylor explains that, in the most idealized form, naturally occurring talk “would probably refer to informal conversation not beingMiddle observedClass or recorded, and Upper Class which would have occurred even if it was Upper which was unaffected by the presence of the observer and/or recording equipment” (2001: 27). 5 Research interviews are supposed to be a more conventional method of data collection, by means of Female Female which the researcher initiates talk ‘about’ something and conducts an interview for the specific purpose of the research. The interviewer usually works with a prepared questionnaire or list of topics.

43 31

Some important information about the speakers, necessary for analyzing their discourse.

2.2.1. Transcription conventions used by some discourse analysts

2.2.1.1. Notation used in the London Lund Corpus (Svartvik & Quirk, 1980):

This is a computerized corpus of spoken English, and it has been –and still is– widely used by linguists and discourse analysts. It consists of 87 texts which are arranged in text groups (face-to-face conversation, telephone conversation, etc.) and, apart from the symbols used in their annotation, in some of the texts the authors provide the possible users of the corpus with some extra information about the speakers, concerning their age and occupation. Let us now examine a fragment of one of the texts in this corpus with respect to its notation conventions: Text S.11.1 Public, unprepared commentary, demonstration, oration. A trial (legal discourse)

11 1 1 10 1 1 a 11 ^Mr P=otter# 11 1 1 20 1 1 a 11 ^did y/ou# - 11 1 1 30 1 1 a 11 ar^r\/ive#

/ / / 32

11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 3

40 1 1 a 50 1 1 a 60 1 1 a 70 1 1 b 80 1 1 a 90 1 1 a 100 1 1 b 110 1 1 a 120 1 1 b 130 1 1 a 140 1 1 a 150 1 1 b 160 1 1 b 170 1 1 a 180 1 1 b 190 1 1 b 200 1 1 b 210 1 1 b 220 2 1 b 230 1 1 a 220 1 1(b 240 1 1 a 250 1 1 a 260 1 1 b 270 1 1 b 280 1 1 b 290 1 1 a 300 1 1 a 310 1 1 b 320 1 1 b 330 1 1 b 340 1 1 a 350 1 1 b 360 1 1 b 370 1 1 a 380 1 1 a 390 1 1 a 400 1 1 b

11 a^bout !two o`cl\ock# / 11 ôn [dhi] . !S\unday# . / 11 the ^date the 'will was . s\igned# . / 11 ^y/es# - / 11 and . did ^you . g\/o# / 11 and ^see your 'mother :straight aw/ay# / 11 ^y\es I _did# / 11 ^what was she 'then d\oing# . / 11 she was ^having her l\unch# - - / 11 ^what a'bout the :br\andy 'bottle# / 11 ^where was th\at# - / 11 Î 'don`t kn\ow# / 12 Î 'didn`t [s] . ![lu?] Î 'didn`t !s\ee# / 11 you ^didn`t s\/ee _it# / 11 ^w\ell# . / 11 ^n\o {I ^d\idn`t#}# / 14 Î Î Î âll I kn/ow# / 11 was ^my !mother was :having her !l\unch# . / 21 when *I* / 20 *((and))* / 11 ar^r\ived# / 11 ^how did she !s\eem {^th\en#}# / 11 ((at)) ^two o`cl\ock# / 11 ^w/ell# . / 11 she ^seemed 'all r/ight# / 11 I ^think she was a :little t\/ired# - - / 11 and ^how 'long did it :t\ake# / 11 ^for her to com'plete her l\unch# - - / 11 oh Î would !th=ink# - - / 11 ^pr=obably# . / 11 ^f/ifteen 'minutes# / 12 ^was it /any a ^meal of any s/ubstance# . / 11 she ^had [@:m] . :ch\icken# / 11 she ^didn`t 'eat very :m\uch of it# - - / 11 ^did !you s\/it with 'her# / 11 ^wh=ilst# . / 11 she com^pleted the m\/eal# / 11 I was în the r=oom# /

11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1 11 1

3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4

410 1 1 b 420 1 1 b 430 1 2 a 430 1 1 a 440 1 1 b 450 1 1 a 460 1 1 b 470 1 1 a 480 1 1 b 490 1 1 b 510 1 1 a 520 1 1 a 500 1 1 b 530 1 1 b 540 1 1 b 550 1 1 b 560 1 1 a 570 1 2 a 570 1 1 a 580 1 1 b 590 1 1 b 600 1 1 b 610 1 1 b 620 1 1 b

11 11 12 12 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 21 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11

^while she was :h\/aving _it# / ^y\es# . / and ^then [@] ( . coughs) - did she ^have it on a / tr/ay# - . / ^y/es# / ^somebody took the !tr\ay out . {pre^s\umably#}# . / [@:] ^my !w\ife 'took it 'out# / and [?] . ^that`s . 'then a'bout 'two fift\een# - -/ [@] ^y/es# / [i?] ^y/es# / were ^y/ou 'then# . / a^lone w/ith 'her# - / it ^w\ould be# . / [@m] I was a^lone with m/other# / ^y\es# / âfter . my :wife left - - *[@m]* / ^*what* !took pl\ace# / âfter your :wife 'left with the tr\ay . {be^tween / 'you and your m\other#}# . / well my ^mother \asked 'me# / ^when I "!g\ot th/ere# . / îf 'I had br\ought# / [@] this ^draft of her ":w\ill# . / and I ^said I h\ad# - /

Transcription conventions:

A) PROSODY:

# End of Tone Group

^Yes Beginning of Tone Group

Tones

Y\es

FALL

Y\/es

FALL-RISE

Y/es

RISE

Y/\es

RISE-FALL

Y=es

LEVEL

Pitch

:Yes

Higher than the previous syllable

!Yes

High

!!Yes

Very High

“Yes

Strong

Stress

‘Yes

Normal

Pauses Yes - -

Each dash is a unit pause of one stress unit or “foot”

Yes +

Brief pause

B) SPEAKERS

Speaker identity

(A)

Speaker continues where he left off

A, B

A and B

VAR

Various speakers

Speaker identity unknown

(low case letter) Non-surreptitious speaker

As can be seen, the specification of the notation used helps us learn many details, not only about the text, but also about the context of this fragment of discourse. For instance, we learn that both a and b are non-surreptitious speakers, which tells us that they knew they were being recorded. As regards the text, by looking at the tones, pitch, stress, and other prosodic features used by the speakers, we may, among other things, infer information having to do with their attitude (e.g. if they are upset, or trying to be ironic, etc.).

2.2.1.2. Notation used by D. Schiffrin

The following data have been taken from D. Schiffrin and R. Lakoff’s Data Packet for their “Discourse” class at Berkeley and Georgetown University (Spring 1998). As will be noticed, this notation has its peculiarities and is different from the one used in the London Lund Corpus above. For example, this author uses square brackets ([]) to

signal speech overlap, and a dot (.) to represent a falling intonation followed by a pause.

Debby: D

Zelda: Z

D: (1) What does your uh daughter in law call you? Z: (2) Well, that’s a sore spot. D: hhhh Z: (3) My older daughter in law does call me Mom.= D: Uh huh. Z: (4) My younger daughter in law right now is up to nothing. (5) She [had saidD: [Oh Z: (6) We had quite a discussion about it. (7) We did bring it out in the open. (8) She said that um…that she- just- right now, she’s:- it’ll take her time. (9) Now they’re marrie:d, it’s gonna be uh… I think eh…five years,= D: Um hmm. Z: (10) that they’ll be married. (11) and she said that eh it was very hard t’s:-call someone else Mom beside her mother. (12) so I had said to her, “That’s Okay!” (13) I said, “If you- if you can’t say Mom, just call me by my [first name! D: [Umhm Z: (14) So, we had quite a discussion about it. (15) It was a little heated, at one time.= D: Yeh Z: (16) She said, “All right”, she’ll call me Zelda. (17) But she still can’t bring herself to say Zelda. (18) so she calls me nothing! (19) She do- but we’re very cl- we’re on very good terms,= D: Yeh. Transcription conventions

Falling intonation followed by noticeable pause (as at end of declarative sentence)

…

Noticeable pause or break in rhythm without falling intonation.

Self interruption with glottal stop

CAPS Very emphatic stress

[ =

]

Speech overlap Continuity of previous line of text (when lack of space prevents continuous speech from being presented on a single line of text)

When speech from B follows speech from A without perceptible pause, then Z links the end of A with the beginning of B

When speech from B occurs during what can be heard as a brief silence from A, then B’s speech is under A’s silence:

A: I can’t wait to go to the party! B:

It’ll be fun. Oh yeh!

2.2.1.3. Other symbols used by other authors

The examples in 2.1.1.1 and 2.1.1.2 show only two possible ways of annotating corpora. Other authors have chosen different symbols or have taken into account some other, additional, variables. For instance, Jefferson (1979) marks the gaze of the speaker with a line above the utterance and the gaze of the addressee with a line below it. The line indicates that the interlocutor marked is gazing toward the other, while the lack of a line indicates the absence of gaze. Commas are used to indicate the dropping of gaze. Besides, some movements like head nodding are marked when they occur:

Ann: ____________________________________ Karen has this new hou:se. en it’s got all this

Beth: ______________________ ,,,

((Nod))

Jefferson also marks applause by using strings of X’s with lower- (for quiet applause) and uppercase (for loud applause) letters. In the following example, the amplitude of the applause increases at the end:

Audience: xxxxxxxxxXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Tannen uses left arrows to highlight key lines, as in the following lines taken and 37

adapted from her well-known book You Just Don’t Understand. Women and Men in Conversation (1990: 197):

STEVE: I think it’s basically done damage to children. That what good it’s done is outweighed by the damage. DEBORAH: Did you two grow up with television?

The examples of notation conventions given herein display only a few of the available possibilities. Each analyst may choose their own conventions depending on their needs and objectives, provided they are explained and made clear to the reader.

2.5. Ethics of data collection

Another important aspect to be considered when doing discourse analysis is the ethics of the research, which necessarily affect the process of data collection. Even though in an ideal world all participants in a project should have equal rights and power, it is a fact that, in general, the researcher has more power than the other participants in an experiment. This power may come, as Taylor notes, “from holding the status associated with being an academic and, supposedly, an expert” (2001: 20). In addition, the researcher has more information about the experiment than the subjects, a fact which also contributes to her power. Thus, for example, the discourse analyst will know that the publication of a given conversation might bring some negative consequences to the participants of the conversation if their identities are revealed, and therefore s/he should never publish the real names of the participants without their consent 6. Researchers ought not to abuse their power. It is an ethical requirement that the researcher obtain the consent of the participants, not only to be involved in the study but also to use the data they provide. As a general rule, researchers have the obligation to a) protect all participants, b) not harm them in any way, and c) always observe their legal rights.

However, the principle of anonymity is not observed in DA when the intention of the analyst is to denounce and/or condemn the speech or writing of, for example, a given politician or institution. We find numerous instances of this type of analysis within the approach called Critical Discourse Analysis (Unit 10 ).

2.6. Corpus Linguistics: The use of corpora for DA

Corpus is defined by Crystal as “a collection of LINGUISTIC DATA, either written texts or a TRANSCRIPTION of recorded speech, which can be used as a starting-point of linguistic description or as a means of verifying hypotheses about a LANGUAGE (corpus linguistics)” (1997: 95). Corpus linguistics, thus, has to do with the practice and the principles of using corpora in language study. Biber et al. note that the essential characteristics of corpus-based analysis are: •

Empiricism (it analyzes the actual patterns of use in natural texts);

•

Utilization of a large and principled collection of natural texts, known as a “corpus”, as the basis for analysis;

•

Extensive use of computers for analysis, using both automatic and interactive techniques;

•

Use of both quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques. (1998: 4)

Corpora are excellent tools for discourse analysts, for they facilitate the investigation of language in use. Studies of language use require empirical analyses of large databases of authentic texts, a requirement that has been possible to meet, obviously, thanks to the aid of corpus linguistics. Using corpora allows researchers to analyze patterns of use, i.e. how some linguistic features are used in association with other linguistic and non-linguistic features. Linguistic and non-linguistic association patterns interact; they are not independent (Biber et al., 1998). For instance, if we consider the lexical associations for thin, skinny and slim, we can also consider their distribution across different registers. Thus, corpus-based studies aim at characterizing registers, dialects, etc. in terms of their linguistic association patterns. Although some scholars (especially generative grammarians) have pointed to the limitations of corpus-based analysis (e.g. that it is limited to samples of performance only, or that no corpus can contain information about all areas of language), it cannot be denied that it has allowed researchers to deal with larger and more varied texts, bringing about a reliability of analysis never reached before. These advantages have to do mainly with the use of computers, which allow the storage and analysis of a much greater number of natural language texts than would be possible if we had to do it by hand.

2.4.1. Computer corpora and concordance programs

Ever since the 1980’s, increasingly large corpora have been compiled (especially of English) and are used in different fields, such as the development of natural language processing software and in applications such as lexicography, machine translation, speech recognition, etc. Three examples of modern corpora are The British National Corpus (BNC), The International Corpus of English (ICE) and The Bank of English. Some online corpora can be found, such as the Experimental BNC Website (which offers a BNC online service allowing everyone with access to the Internet to register for an account on the BNC server) or the Shakespeare Online Corpus. In addition, researchers can now benefit from concordance programs, i.e. programs which turn the electronic texts into databases which can be searched.

Some examples of these

programs are the Word Cruncher (which you get, for example, when you buy the ICAME corpora of modern and medieval English), TACT (a well-known, freeware program), SARA (specifically written for searches of the BNC) and WordSmith Tools (a program widely used by linguists, lexicographers and discourse analysts nowadays. It offers several possibilities, such as querying, searching for word combinations within a specified range of words, looking up substrings or parts of words, or getting collocate and frequency lists).

2.6.2. A possible classification of corpora

Once we have decided to use a computer corpus, we should decide what type of corpora will best suit our aims. We will not use the same corpus if we want, for example, to analyze spoken language as if we want to analyze written language (unless the corpus we choose is mixed and has samples of both). Reich (1998) offers the following taxonomy, which classifies corpora according to medium, national varieties, historical variation,

geographical/dialectal

variation,

age,

genre,

open-endedness

and

availability: •

Medium: spoken corpora (eg. London-Lund corpus) vs. written corpora (e.g. Lancaster Oslo/Bergen corpus (LOB)) vs. mixed corpora (British National Corpus (BNC) or Bank of English) 40

•

National varieties: British corpora (e.g. Lancaster Oslo/Bergen corpus) vs. American corpora (e.g. Brown corpus) vs. an international corpus of English.

•

Historical variation: diachronic corpora (Helsinki corpus, cf. the ICAME home page) vs. synchronic corpora (Brown, LOB, BNC) vs. corpora which cover only one stage of language history (corpus of Old or Middle English, Shakespeare corpora)

•

Geographical variation/dialectal variation: corpus of dialect samples (e.g. Scots) vs. mixed corpora (The BNC spoken component includes samples of speakers from all over Britain)

•

Age: corpora of adult English vs. corpora of child English (English components of CHILDES)

•

Genre: corpora of literary texts vs. corpora of technical English vs. corpora of non-fiction (e.g. news texts) vs. mixed corpora covering all genres

•

Open-endedness: closed, unalterable corpora (e.g. LOB, Brown) vs. monitor corpora (Bank of English)

•

Availability: commercial vs. non-commercial research corpora, online corpora vs. corpora on ftp servers vs. corpora available on floppy disks or CD-ROMs

This taxonomy takes into account most of the types of corpora which are currently available, but it is not entirely comprehensive. Other variables might be considered depending on the aims of research, which might bring about new types.

1. The selection of the data for any given discourse analytic research depends completely on the objectives the project, which, in turn, depend on the research question. 2. The different approaches to DA take different perspectives and have different beliefs about methods for collecting and analyzing data. 3. When discourse analysts use samples of the spoken language as their data, they generally turn the spoken discourse into a document called transcript by means of the process of transcription. There is no such thing as a totally neutral transcription, but researchers try to make their transcriptions as faithful as possible by using different systems of annotation depending on their goals of research. 41

4. The ethics of data collection require that researchers protect all participants by not doing them any harm and by observing their legal rights. 5. Corpus linguistics has to do with the practice and the principles of using corpora in language study. A corpus is a collection of linguistic data used as the basis for linguistic description and analysis. 6. The use of computers has allowed for the storage and analysis of a much greater number of natural language texts than was ever possible. Computer corpora and concordance programs, which turn the electronic texts into databases which can be searched, are very widely used in linguistic research nowadays. 7. Corpora can be classified according to medium, national varieties, historical variation,

geographical/dialectal

variation,

age,

genre,

open-endedness,

availability, etc.

A) SEARCHING THE WWW: THINK of a type of discourse (genre) you would like to analyze and SEARCH the World Wide Web to get samples of such a type.

B) COLLECTING SAMPLES OF SPOKEN DISCOURSE:

a) COLLECTING DATA: TAPE-RECORD a short conversation among your family members or friends (it can be in Spanish or any language you understand, but of course, English is preferred), or TAPERECORD an interview or discussion panel on the radio or television (if you have satellite T.V., you have plenty of material in English). b) ANNOTATING THE DATA: USE conventions for annotating the recorded data with the features you consider important for your future research (e.g. information about the text (genre, date of publication, place of publication), information about intonation patterns or pronunciation; information about the speakers (sex, age, occupation, social and geographical origin); parsing (i.e. assigning labelled brackets to each constituent of a sentence); discourse information of spoken material (laughing, interruptions, hesitations, 42

etc).

Reading “Appendix 2: Transcription Conventions” of D.

Schiffrin’s Approaches to Discourse (see References) may help you in this enterprise. c) DISCUSSION: SEND or GIVE the sample data to your tutor and discuss the procedures and annotation used. Justify your decisions.

•

Johansson, S. & Stenström, Anna-Brita (eds.) (1991).

English Computer

Corpora: Selected and Research Guide. •

Mc Enery, T. & Wilson, A. (1996). Corpus Linguistics.

•

Stubbs, Michael (1996). Text and Corpus Analysis.

The British National Corpus site: http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ Introduction to Corpus Linguistics: http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/clmt/w3c/corpus_ling/content/introduction.html Useful sites for Corpus Linguistics: http://www.rc.kyushu-u.ac.jp/~higuchi/text7/corpus.html

PRAGMATICS

A ‘Beefeater’ giving a guided tour at the Tower of London.

“…within the history of linguistics, pragmatics is a remedial discipline born, or re-born, of the starkly limited scope of Chomskyan linguistics (while in philosophy, the interest in language use can in part be attributed to ‘language reformism’). Pragmatics prior to 1957, it could be argued, was practised […] without being preached.” Stephen Levinson, Pragmatics. MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT •

To define and delimit the scope of Pragmatics.

•

To familiarize with Speech Act Theory and Grice’s Theory of Implicature.

•

To identify and analyze cases of reference, deixis and presupposition in a text.

3.1. Definition. What is the scope of Pragmatics?

Pragmatics is an indispensable source for discourse analysis. It is impossible to analyze any discourse without having a solid basic knowledge of pragmatic phenomena and the ways in which they work and interact. To define Pragmatics and to delimit its scope is no easier task than to define Discourse Analysis or Text Linguistics. One thing we know for sure: when working within the field of Pragmatics we are dealing with MEANING. But, then, what is the difference between Semantics and Pragmatics? In a very simplified way, it could be said that if we think of Semantics as the area of study covering the truth-conditional meaning of utterances, then Pragmatics deals with all the other kinds of meaning. But this would be a very broad definition, similar to the one given by Morris in 1938, considered to be the first modern definition of the term. As Levinson notes, Morris’s definition of Pragmatics as “dealing with all the psychological, biological and sociological phenomena which occur in the functioning of signs” (1983: 108) is very much wider than the scope of the work that is currently labelled as pragmatic. Levinson explains that the term Pragmatics was subject to a successive narrowing of scope and the definitions which were finally influential were those making reference to the users of the language. Many authors have defined Pragmatics in different ways and in those definitions it can be seen that elements such as context, meaning beyond literal meaning, speech acts, deixis, understatement or implicature. are considered important components of this discipline. Levinson argues that “the notion that pragmatics might be the study of aspects of meaning not covered in semantics certainly has some cogency” (1983: 15). Leech explains that both Semantics and Pragmatics are concerned with meaning, but the difference between them lies in two different uses of the verb to mean (1983: 6): [1] What does X mean?

[2] What did you mean by X?

Semantics would deal with [1], and Pragmatics with [2]. Therefore, semantic meaning is dyadic and has to do with words or expressions in a given language regardless of particular situations, speakers or hearers, while pragmatic meaning is triadic and is defined relative to a speaker or user of the language. Georgia Green’s definition of Pragmatics is, like Morris’s, a broad one:

Linguistic pragmatics as defined here is at the intersection of a number of fields within and outside of cognitive science: not only linguistics, cognitive psychology, cultural anthropology, and philosophy (logic, semantics, action theory), but also sociology (interpersonal dynamics and social convention) and rhetoric contribute to its domain. (1989: 2)

As can be seen, Green’s definition is very similar to some of the definitions of Discourse Analysis that we examined in Unit 1. In addition, one of Levinson’s (1983) definitions of Pragmatics as “the study of utterance meaning” equates it to Schiffrin’s definition of DA (see Unit 1, 3). But, are Pragmatics and DA the same? Schiffrin notes that the scope of pragmatics is wide and “faces definitional dilemmas similar to those faced by discourse analysis” (1994: 190). Consequently, in this book we are going to consider Pragmatics as one of the sources and approaches to DA, and therefore we shall see DA as a broader discipline that draws from the principles of pragmatics but includes other approaches within its scope. We are going to consider Pragmatics, then, in a narrower sense. We shall certainly be concerned about the relationship of discourse to the users of the language (an essential aspect of the discipline) and we shall touch upon aspects of the speech situation which are typically regarded as pragmatic, such as speech acts, deixis, reference, presupposition, implicature and politeness phenomena, but we shall not place Pragmatics on a par with DA. Although Pragmatics is a field of study that can be the subject matter of a complete linguistic course, in this book we are only going to cover the essentials and touch upon its basic tenets. We shall consider Gricean Pragmatics as one of the main contributions to this field, for H. P. Grice’s (1975) ideas about speaker meaning and the cooperative principle have been and still are most influential in the world of linguistics.

3.2. Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Theory of Implicature

One of the central concepts in Gricean Pragmatics is speaker meaning. Grice makes a distinction between natural meaning, which is devoid of human intentionality7, and nonnatural meaning (meaning –nn), which has to do with intentional communication. There is a second intention which is implicit in the definition of meaning -nn, i.e. the recognition, on the part of the addressee, of the speaker’s communicative intention. Thus, for instance, if a child says “I like that toy” to her mother, the meaning –nn 7

As in, for example, Those dark clouds mean rain.

would be that she wants her mother to buy that toy for her (and therefore she expects her mother to recognize her “hidden” intention or wish of having that toy). Another central concept is the notion of conversational implicature, which is considered to be one of the single most important ideas in Pragmatics. This notion has provided linguistic analysts with an explicit account of how it is possible to mean more than what is actually “said”. Conversational implicatures are a kind of inference that can be derived from an utterance and they are related to what Grice called the Cooperative Principle and its Maxims. Given the fact that our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks (and would not be rational if they did), the remarks are characteristically cooperative efforts and each participant recognizes in them a mutually accepted direction (1975: 45). Speakers are assumed to be cooperative and follow the maxims, which are reproduced herein: A) THE COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE: Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. 1)THE MAXIM OF QUANTITY i)

Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).

ii)

Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

2)THE MAXIM OF QUALITY Try to make your contribution one that is true, specifically: i)

Do not say what you believe to be false.

ii)

Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

3)THE MAXIM OF RELATION Be relevant. 4)THE MAXIM OF MANNER Be perspicuous, and specifically: i)

Avoid obscurity of expression.

ii)

Avoid ambiguity.

iii)

Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).

iv)

Be orderly. (Grice, 1975:45-6)

Grice explains that people do not always follow these guidelines to the letter, and here is where conversational implicatures play their part.

When a speaker violates or

“flouts” one of the maxims, the hearer assumes that the speaker is nevertheless trying to 47

be cooperative and looks for the meaning at some deeper level. In doing so s/he makes an inference, namely a conversational implicature. One area in which conversational implicatures are fully at work is in the use of verbal irony. For example, if, after having a terrible argument with a friend, a woman tells this friend: You’re a fine friend indeed! the friend will readily understand that the woman is trying to get across a meaning which is different from the one conveyed by her proposition. She is in fact violating the Quality Maxim, for her friend should reach the conclusion, by means of implicature, that the woman does not think she is a fine friend but, on the contrary, a bad/ disloyal/ selfish friend. According to Grice, in order to work out the presence of a conversational implicature, the hearer will draw on: •

The conventional meaning of the words used, together with the identity of any references that may be involved.

•

The Cooperative Principle and its maxims.

•

The context, linguistic or otherwise, of the utterance.

•

Other items of background knowledge.

•

The fact (or supposed fact) that all relevant items falling under the previous headings are available to both participants and both participants know or assume this to be the case (1975: 50).

There are, however, cases in which the conventional meaning of the words used will determine what is implicated. Thus, if we say, for instance, She is a woman and therefore she is not a good driver, we commit ourselves to it being the case that the fact of driving badly is a consequence of the fact of being a woman. This is what Grice has called a conventional implicature. One of the main characteristics of conversational implicatures, as opposed to conventional implicatures, is that they are cancellable, a feature that Grice explains in the following manner: To the form of words of the utterance of which putatively implicates that p, it is admissible to add “but not p”, or “I do not mean to imply that p”, and that it is contextually cancellable if one can find situations in which the utterance of the form of the words would simply not carry the implicature (1978: 115-16).

The fact that all implicatures can be cancelled gives them a certain “slippery” condition, however, they constitute a crucial part of both speaker and hearer communicative competence -being able to work out implicatures, among other things, makes a speaker 48

proficient and capable of interacting successfully in a given language. It is an important part of the pragmatic knowledge necessary to communicate efficiently.

3.2.1. Examples and analysis

In the above section (3.2.) we saw an example of an implicature that was worked out after the violation of the Quality Maxim (You’re a fine friend indeed!). The following examples show the violation of the other three maxims and the implicatures this violation triggers. 1) Maxim of relation:

A: Could you pass me my jacket, please? B: It’s not cold.

In this example, speaker B flouts the maxim of relation by not giving the expected affirmative answer and simply passing A the jacket. Instead, B says something which does not seem to be relevant to the question asked, but on the assumption that B continues to observe the Cooperative Principle, it must be assumed that she intends to be relevant. Thus A has to infer that B implies that she does not need to wear her jacket.

2) Maxim of Quantity:

A: I’ll call all my friends to come to my party next weekend. B: Mark and Paula will be in town next weekend. A: Great, I’ll call Paula.

In this example, speaker A flouts the maxim of quantity because his response attends only to part of the topic initiated by A. Consequently, the deliberate omission can be said to imply that A is not going to invite Mark to his party, and even more, that he probably does not like Mark and that is why he does not want to invite him.

3) Maxim of Manner:

A: I don’t think you’ve met Sally on the fourth floor. B: No, what’s she like? A: Well, she’s not of the kindest variety.

Here, speaker A is being ambiguous and a bit obscure (and therefore she is flouting the Manner Maxim) in order to avoid a direct criticism, for she is not clearly saying that Sally is unkind, although this would be the implicature triggered by the violation.

Having touched upon Grice’s central ideas, which are, in turn, central to Pragmatics, we now turn to other aspects of the speech situation which are considered to be essential within Pragmatic studies.

3.3. Speech Acts

The basic belief that language

used

perform actions led John Austin and John Searle to develop a theory of Speech Acts. In lectures

the famous that

were

posthumously published Cheers! – The speech act of making a toast.

as How to Do Things

with Words, Austin (1962) set about demolishing the view that truth conditions should be considered as central to language understanding. He developed a general theory of illocutionary acts, which, in turn, became a central concern of general pragmatic theory. In saying something, Austin observes, we are also doing something, and, hence, three kinds of acts are simultaneously performed:

Locutionary act: the utterance of a sentence with determinate sense and reference.

Illocutionary act: the making of a statement, offer, promise, etc. in uttering a sentence, by virtue of the conventional force associated with it.

Perlocutionary act: the bringing about of effects on the audience by means of uttering a sentence, such effects being special to the circumstances of utterance (Austin, 1962: 101-02).

The term speech act has come to refer exclusively to the second kind, i.e. the illocutionary act, since this is the one that seems to present the richest developments and interpretations within pragmatic theory. In English (as well as in other languages), sometimes sentences contain linguistic expressions that serve to indicate the 50

illocutionary force of the sentence. Consider the following examples:

1) I promise I will not do that again. 2) I order you to stop talking.

Only certain verbs (which Austin called performatives), like order or promise, have the property of allowing the speaker to do the action the verb names by using the verb in a certain way. Other verbs cannot be used in this way, and thus, for instance, saying “I nag you to pick up your clothes” is not nagging (Green, 1989: 67). Searle’s (1969) later systematization of Austin’s work, in which he proposes a typology of speech acts based on felicity conditions (the social and cultural criteria that have to be met for the act to have the desired effect), became very influential. Austin and Searle’s position can be formulated by saying that all utterances not only serve to express propositions, but also to perform actions. The illocutionary act, or, more simply, the speech act, is at a privileged level within these actions. Searle’s typology of speech acts is rooted in the range of illocutionary verbs that occur in a given language. According to this author, then, there are five basic kinds of action that a speaker can perform by means of the following five types of utterance:

Representatives: Acts which commit the speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition (e.g.: concluding, asserting).

Directives: Attempts by the speaker to get the addressee to do something (e.g.: questioning, requesting, ordering).

Commissives: Acts which commit the speaker to some future course of action (e.g.: promising, threatening, offering).

Expressives: Acts which express a psychological state (e.g.: apologizing, welcoming, thanking).

Declaratives: Acts which bring about immediate changes in the institutional state of affairs and thus tend to rely on extra-linguistic institutions (e.g.: christening, declaring war, excommunicating).

Another contribution of Searle (1975) is the development of a theory of indirect speech acts. He based his theory on the observation uttering,

that for

instance,

what appears to be a question (e.g.: Don’t you think The declarative act of christening

that

dress

beautiful?) a speaker may

be indirectly performing another type of illocutionary act, such as a request (e.g.: Please, buy me that dress!). In order to interpret indirect speech acts, hearers rely upon their knowledge of speech acts, as well as on the general principles of cooperative conversation, mutually shared factual information and a general ability to draw inferences (Schiffrin, 1994). All these facts led Searle to observe that we often do more than one thing at once in the same utterance, and this is part of the important issue of indirect speech acts. For instance, the sentence I won’t give you the candy unless you behave, uttered by a father to his son, may be interpreted as both an assertion (Representative), which would be the “literal” act, and a threat (commissive), which would be the “primary” act. Even more, it could also be interpreted as a request or an order (directive) from the father to the child. In spite of the undeniable merits of speech act theory (which lie in advancing a view of language use as action), some authors have criticized the universalistic claims of Searle’s version of the theory. For example, linguistic anthropologists such as Du Bois (1993) or Duranti (1993) have shown its limited applicability to non-Western modes of communication.

3.3.1. Examples and analysis

Examine the speech acts performed by the writer of the following letter to the “We hear you” column in the Oprah Magazine (December 2002 issue):

(1) Thank you for publishing the article on antibiotic-resistant bacteria [”The Microbe that Roared”, September]. (2) My 77-year-old father just finished a six.week course of vancomycin to treat a bout of Staphylococcus aureus. This painful infection was initially misdiagnosed as arthritis. (3) The guidelines you provided for protecting ourselves and our loved ones were also particularly helpful. You have passed on information that may help save many lives. BTF, Boulder, Colorado The above letter can be mainly divided in three discourse sequences containing three different types of speech acts: (1) Expressive (Thanking): Thank you for publishing….. (2) Representatives (Asserting: giving information about facts): My 77-year-old father just finished… This painful infection was…. (3) Representatives (Asserting: complimenting): The guidelines you provided for protecting ourselves… You have passed on information that may help save many lives.

(2) and (3) belong to the same broad category, i.e. Representatives but the speech acts in the former fulfil the function of giving information, while those in the latter contain assertions whose main aim is to compliment. We therefore see that the letter contains three clear speech act sequences: the first part aims at expressing gratitude for previously publishing the article in the magazine, the second part aims at informing about certain facts which somehow explain the writer’s gratitude, and the third and last part is devoted to complimenting the editors for including such good articles in their magazine.

3.4. Reference

Many terms or expressions used in discourse have a referring function. They refer to an entity within either the text or the context of utterance. Referents are often introduced into discourse by using terms that are indefinite and explicit (e.g. a man I met yesterday) and continued with terms that are definite and inexplicit (e.g.: he). Definiteness has to do with the speaker’s assumption that the hearer will be able to identify a single, specific entity to which the speaker intends to refer. Explicitness has to do with the presentation of information that actually enables H to correctly identify a referent 53

(Schiffrin, 1994). As Schiffrin notes, “scholars often view the process of referring to entities in the universe of discourse as pragmatic –simply because it is a process involving speakers, their intentions, actions, and knowledge” (1994: 197). In effect, some types of reference depend on mutual knowledge. Referring to an entity with the expectation that the hearer will be able to make a similar identification depends upon mutual knowledge, beliefs and suppositions. Thus, the process

referring

which

expressions

refer to an entity is not strictly

semantic

truth-conditional; it is also pragmatic.

For

example, if I want to refer Discussing technical facts based on mutual knowledge.

Monica,

my I

may

friend use

definite or indefinite expressions like: Monica, a workmate of mine, a woman I work with, Dr. Aragonés, someone I met three years ago, Professor Aragonés, etc. and the use of one or other expression will depend on my intentions and assumptions about the hearer’s knowledge of my friend.

3.4.1. Examples and analysis

Referring terms or expressions convey different types and different quantities of information which are somehow relevant to ongoing discourse. When reference is analyzed as a discourse process, not only referring terms and expressions but also referring sequences may become important, i.e. it is relevant to analyze how reference is initiated and continued in a given discourse such as a narrative or a letter, just to name but two possibilities. Examine the use of referents in the following recipe:

MUSHROOM TART 6 ozs shortcrust pastry 8 ozs mushrooms 1 ½ ozs butter ¼ pt double cream One eight pt single cream 2 eggs and 1 egg yolk 2 ozs grated Parmesan cheese Coarse salt Freshly ground black pepper Cayenne Line an 8 inch flan ring with the pastry. Fry the chopped mushrooms very lightly in the butter.

Beat the cream with the eggs and the extra egg yolk.

Stir in the

mushrooms and cheese. Season with salt, pepper and a tiny pinch of cayenne. Pour into the pastry case. Sprinkle with a little extra cheese. Bake in a moderate oven (375º Gas Nº 5) for about 40 mins, until the filling is set and the top delicately browned.

(From: Betchworth Village Recipes, U.K., 1978 [my underlining])

Most of the referents in this recipe are introduced in bold type, as a list of ingredients. The use of referents is then continued by using full noun phrases or zero pronouns which may constitute evoked, new, familiar or inferable referents. For instance, the referents an 8 inch flan ring and a moderate oven have not been evoked previously in the text and thus the noun phrase used is indefinite and explicit. However, they are both familiar referents for any person who has a bit of experience in cooking.

Those

referents which have been previously evoked are definite and non-explicit to a certain degree (the chopped mushrooms, the butter, the cream, the eggs, the extra egg yolk, the mushrooms and cheese, the pastry case, the filling). There is one referent that was not previously evoked but is nevertheless definite, i.e. the top. This is due to the fact that it is an inferable item.

The reader of the recipe has the necessary knowledge to

understand that the writer is referring to the top of the mushroom tart. Inferable items can also be omitted, as can be seen in the sentences: Season Ø with salt, pepper and a tiny pinch of cayenne

Pour Ø into the pastry case Sprinkle Ø with a little extra cheese

In all three cases, it is not necessary to add the pronoun “it”, which would refer to the mixed ingredients at a given stage. We speak here of a “zero pronoun”, which would be the direct object of the verbs season, pour and sprinkle but which is omitted because it can easily be inferred, considering it is a recent thematic product. Deictic words or expressions constitute a type of referent. We now turn to them.

3.5. Deixis

The relationship between language and context is clearly observed through the phenomenon of deixis. Linguistic items such as demonstratives, pronouns, tense, place and time adverbs such as now and here, some verbs like bring and take, as well as other grammatical features which are tied directly to the context of utterance, are prototypically deictic. These items have also been called indexical expressions (BarHillel, 1954), because they indicate or point to other entities within the text or context of utterance, or shifters, because their referential meaning shifts with every new speaker or occasion of use. As Levinson states: Essentially, deixis concerns the ways in which languages encode or grammaticalize features of the context of utterance or speech event, and thus also concerns ways in which the interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis of that context of utterance. Thus the pronoun this does not name or refer to any particular entity on all occasions of use; rather it is a variable or place-holder for some particular entity given by the context (e.g. by a gesture) (1983: 54).

In effect, utterances of sentences like the following cannot be fully understood or interpreted if there is no further indication of, for instance, when the sentence was uttered (1 and 2), where it was uttered (2), who did it (1, 2 and 3) and who the interlocutor was (1, 2 and 3):

1) I’ll call you tomorrow. 2) (You) Come here, now! 3) I don’t like you at all.

Traditionally, deixis has been divided into three main categories: a) person, b) place and 3) time (Levinson, 1983): 56

Person deixis concerns the encoding of the role of participants in the speech event in which the utterance in question is delivered. This role is normally encoded in the first, second and third person pronouns. Place deixis concerns the encoding of spatial locations relative to the location of the participants in the speech event. Demonstratives (like the English this or that) and deictic adverbs of place (like here or there in English) are the prototypical linguistic realizations of this type of deixis. This and here are examples of proximal (or close to the speaker) place deixis, while that and there constitute instances of distal (or nonproximal to speaker) place deixis. Time deixis concerns the encoding of temporal points and spans relative to the time at which an utterance is spoken. This time is considered to be the coding time (Fillmore, 1971), which may be distinct from the receiving time. In English, time deixis is primarily encoded in tense and in some adverbs of time like now and then, yesterday, tomorrow or last year. Apart from these traditional categories, we also have to consider discourse (or text) deixis and social deixis: Discourse deixis refers to the use of expressions in an utterance which are used to refer to some portion of the discourse that contains the utterance. Both time and place deictic terms (such as: the aforementioned, in the examples below, this (used to refer to a forthcoming portion of the discourse) or that (used to refer to a preceding portion)) can be said to be discourse-deictic.

Here, it is necessary to make the

distinction between discourse deixis and anaphora: Anaphora usually has to do with the use of a pronoun to refer to the same referent at some prior term, as in:

A woman opened the door. She was beautiful.

where A woman and She are said to be co-referential because they share the same referent. Discourse deixis usually involves a pronoun or expression which refers to a linguistic expression (or segment of discourse) itself, as in:

A: Believe me, I love you. B: That’s the biggest lie I’ve ever heard!

where That refers to A’s whole utterance. 57

Discourse connectors or pragmatic markers (in Fraser’s (2004) terms), such as however, besides, moreover, well, anyway, when used in utterance-initial position, are also considered to be discourse-deictic, for they refer to or show a relationship with other segments of the ongoing discourse. Social deixis concerns “those aspects of language structure that encode the social identities of participants (properly, incumbents of participant-roles) or the social relationship between them, or between one of them and persons and entities referred to” (Levinson, 1983: 89). The use of honorifics (such as the T/V pronouns –tu/vous in French or tú/usted in Spanish) is a prototypical example of social deixis, where a social relation concerning rank or respect is encoded in the grammar of the language. It is interesting to note that deixis is generally organized egocentrically. In this way, the points constituting the deictic center are normally assumed to be as follows: The central person is the speaker, the central place is the speaker’s location at utterance time, the central time is the time at which the speaker produces the utterance, the discourse center is the point which the speaker is currently at during the production of his utterance, and the social center is the speaker’s social status and rank, to which the status or rank of addressees or referents is relative (Levinson, 1983: 63-64). Levinson states that it is essential to distinguish different kinds of usage of deictic expression. Most deictic expressions also have non-deictic usages. In addition, we should distinguish between gestural usage and symbolic usage. These usages are illustrated in the following examples:

1) You, you and you, but not you, have to do the exercise. (Gestural –it can only be understood if the speaker is pointing at the different “yous”). 2) What are you doing? (Symbolic –no gesture required, only knowledge of the basic parameters of the speech event) 3) You never know what to expect these days. (Non-deictic (general, non-specific use of the pronoun)) 4) I want to put this desk there. (Gestural) 5) Hi there, what’s up? (Symbolic) 6) There you go! (Non-deictic)

As Slembrouck (2005) notes, the phenomenon of deixis challenges the view of 58

language as a self-contained, autonomous system given the fact that it ties up an utterance with contextually variable factors to such an extent that it can affect the meaning of other lexical items in the co-textual vicinity.

We now turn to the analysis of some more examples of the different types and usages of deixis.

3.5.1. More examples and analysis

Consider the use of the pronouns I and you and the demonstratives this and that in the following Agnes comic strip:

All the pronouns I and you in the strip are examples of the symbolic usage of personal deixis. Neither of the characters needs to point to the other to know who I is and who you is in a given discourse moment. As regards the use of this and that in the first exchange (“I think this would be a good quote to base my life on” and “Who said that?”) it can be said that, even when both are cases of discourse deixis (both this and that refer to a chunk of the ongoing discourse 8), we can also speak of symbolic place deixis. Agnes uses this because she the quote seems proximal to her, since she has read it in the book and now she can recite it by heart. Her interlocutor feels the same quote is distal, for he has not read the book and the quote is both physically and psychologically non-proximal to him. In the second exchange, when Agnes says “I forgot to memorize that part”, the distal place deictic (that) is used, due to the fact that, since she does not

In the case of this, the reference is cataphoric; in the case of that, it is anaphoric.

remember the author, this part or piece of information is not familiar and therefore nonproximal to her. The use of that by the man in the third exchange (“I like that one better) constitutes a similar example of symbolic, distal place deixis. Another deictic element in this strip is the adverb soon (“It comes soon enough”) which constitutes an example of time deixis, relative to the time of the speaker’s utterance or to some psychological time that she has chosen as her deictic center. The use of their in Agnes’ last intervention is an example of symbolic personal deixis (there are enough elements in both text and context for her interlocutor and the reader to know that their refers to the “creepy idiots” without her need to make any gesture.

3.6. Presupposition Like implicatures 9, presuppositions are a kind of linguistic inference. But while implicatures cannot be said to be semantic (because they are based on contextual assumptions rather than being built into the linguistic structure of the sentences that trigger them), presuppositions are based more closely on the actual linguistic structure of sentences. However, they cannot be thought of as semantic in the narrow sense, considering that they are very sensitive to certain contextual factors (Levinson, 1983). Presuppositions seem to be tied to particular words or aspects of surface structure in general, as shown in the following examples:

1) I was not able to see the Side Show. (Presupposition: There exists a Side Show) 2) She didn’t realize she had a big stain on her dress. (Presupposition: She had a big stain on her dress) 3) Julia stopped smoking. (Presupposition: Julia used to smoke)

The definite description the Side Show in 1), the factive verb realize in 2) and the change of state verb stop in 3) are the linguistic expressions that trigger the presuppositions, and for that reason they are called presupposition triggers. Green (1989: 71-74) presents a taxonomy of those phenomena that have so far been labeled as presuppositions and she finds there are three main kinds:

See 3.2. in this Unit.

•

Existence presuppositions: This is the most representative case. It concerns the existence of definite descriptions. For example, the sentence I met Susan’s daughter at the market yesterday, presupposes that Susan has a daughter and that there is a market in the area I was at yesterday. Susan’s daughter and the market are the presupposition triggers.

•

Factive presuppositions: There are several sorts of factive presuppositions. For example, the subject complements of mean, be obvious or prove, as well as the object complements of epistemic factives such as know or realize are considered to be presupposed true. So are the complements of emotive factive verbs such as be glad, amaze or be surprised.

Another example can be found in the

conterfactive verb pretend, whose use presupposes that the complement is not true (e.g. Peter pretended that he was rich → Peter was not rich). •

Connotations: The restrictions of use of some lexical items have been claimed to be or reflect presuppositions about the situation in which they are used. A typical example of a connotation is found in the verb assassinate, which carries the implicit presupposition that the killing was intended -it would make no sense to say: He accidentally assassinated his wife.

The phenomenon of presupposition is very complex indeed, and is still only partially understood. In this book, we are not going to analyze it in depth. Some authors (Karttunen & Peters, 1975, 1979) put it on a par with the phenomenon of conventional implicature 10 (Grice, 1975). For our purposes, suffice it to say that it constitutes an important ground for the study of some aspects of the interaction between semantics and pragmatics, and that the study of the use or presuppositions may be of great help when doing discourse analysis. Some more examples are considered in the following section.

3.6.1. Examples and analysis

Examine some of the presuppositions in the following text: Joanne, 47, had worked her way through college (1) as a bank teller, and by age 34 was a manager at the Bankers Trust Company in Manhattan (2). After her first (3) child was

See 3.2. above.

born, she continued (4) to commute three hours a day from her (5) Rahway, New Jersey, home. But when she was told (6) she had to travel repeatedly to Asia, she negotiated a severance package. […] Her career counselor (7) inspired Joanne to think about how her skills could translate outside the banking industry –and Joanne started (8) to imagine becoming an outplacement expert herself. When she was no longer (9) a client, the outplacement firm, Lee Hecht Harrison, hired her as a part-time consultant. From: “Recipe for Resilience”, The Oprah Magazine, October 2002

The expressions in bold type are all presupposition triggers, and the triggered presuppositions are the following:

(1) Joanne once went to college (connotation). (2) There exists a Bankers Trust Company in Manhattan (existence presupposition). (3) Joanne has more than one child (connotation). (4) Joanne had been commuting before (connotation). (5) Joanne has a house in Rahway, New Jersey (existence presupposition). (6) Someone told Joanne she had to travel repeatedly to Asia (factive presupposition). (7) Joanne had a career counselor (existence presupposition). (8) Joanne hadn’t imagined becoming an outplacement expert before (connotation). (9) Joanne was once a client of the outplacement firm (connotation).

1. Pragmatics is an indispensable source for discourse analysis. Many authors have defined pragmatics in different ways, but in most definitions it can be seen that elements such as context, meaning beyond literal meaning, speech acts, deixis, understatement, implicature, etc. are considered important components of this discipline. 2. Gricean Pragmatics is seen as one of the main contributions to the field of pragmatics, for H. P. Grice’s (1975) ideas about speaker meaning and the cooperative principle have been and still are extremelly influential. A central concept in Gricean Pragmatics is the notion of conversational implicature. Conversational implicatures are a kind of inference that can be derived from an utterance, and they are related to what Grice called the Cooperative Principle and 62

its Maxims. 3. Speech acts, or illocutionary acts (i.e. the making of a statement, offer, promise, etc. in uttering a sentence, by virtue of the conventional force associated with it) are central to pragmatic theory and discourse analysis. 4. Searle (1969) systematized Austin’s work and developed a typology of speech acts.

According to this author there are five basic kinds of speech acts: i)

Representatives, ii) Directives, iii) Commissives, iv) Expressives and v) Declaratives. Searle (1975) also developed a theory of indirect speech acts. 5. Many terms or expressions used in discourse have a referring function. Some types of reference depend on mutual knowledge; thus, the process by which referring expressions refer to an entity is not strictly semantic or truth-conditional; it is also pragmatic. 6. The relationship between language and context is clearly observed through the phenomenon of deixis. Linguistic items such as demonstratives, pronouns, tense, place and time adverbs such as now and here, some verbs like bring and take, as well as other grammatical features which are tied directly to the context of utterance, are prototypically deictic. Traditionally, deixis has been divided into three main categories: a) person, b) place and 3) time. But two more types are considered: Discourse and social deixis. There are also three main kinds of deictic usage: gestural, symbolic and non-deictic. 7. Presuppositions are a kind of linguistic inference which is based more closely on the actual linguistic structure of sentences than on implicatures. Presuppositions seem to be tied to particular words or aspects of surface structure in general, and these particular words or expressions are the presupposition triggers.

A) READING: READ Chapter 6 in D. Schiffrin’s Approaches to Discourse and MAKE A SUMMARY of it. Send it or hand it in to your tutor.

B) ANALYSIS: a) IDENTIFY AND ANALYZE the referents in the following recipe. Do you find any reference sequences? If so, EXPLAIN them. 63

SUPER FISH DISH FILLETS OF LEMON SOLE PRAWNS HARD-BOILED EGGS MUSHROOMS TOMATOES CHEESE SAUCE GRATED CHEESE Roll up the fillets of sole, enclosing a few prawns in each roll, and season. Lay them neatly in a fireproof dish. Slice the hard-boiled eggs and mushrooms and (or) tomatoes, and scatter them over the fish. Cover with cheese sauce and sprinkle liberally with grated cheese. Bake in oven 375 (Gas Nº 5) for about 25-30 minutes and until golden brown. Serve hot.

b) IDENTIFY AND ANALYZE the deictic terms or expressions in the following comic strip. SPECIFY the kind of deixis and the type of usage (symbolic, gestural or non-deictic) in each case.

c) IDENTIFY AND ANALYZE the speech acts in the following two fragments of a television interview (CNN’s Larry King Live. Interview with Bill Maher, July 22nd, 2004). Can you find any pattern in the speech act sequences of the two fragments?

1) 1

KING: Toquerville, Utah, hello.

CALLER: Gentlemen, the honor is mine. Thank you for the call. Bill, what do you think

about the administration's Homeland Security Department's little plan B to study to stop

the election under threat of terrorist attack? Does that remind you of our 2000 Florida

deal?

MAHER: You mean you're talking about on election day?

KING: Yes, in case there's some big occurrence.

MAHER: Well, they've been pulling that card for how many...

KING: Wait a minute, you had some sort of disaster you don't want to hold an election if

you've got bombs dropping?

MAHER: That's true. And I agree with that. If there's really a problem on election day.

But, again, this is an administration that has always said, OK, we're operating under this

premise. You can't criticize the administration during a time of war. Oh, and by the way,

we're always at war. The war is ongoing.

So I mean, I don't trust them. Let me put it that way. I don't trust them, or they haven't

earned my trust.

1 KING: Carbondale, Illinois. 2 CALLER: How do we get southern voters voting Democrat again? Thank you, 3

Bill. Thank you, Larry.

KING: Will the South ever vote Democratic?

MAHER: You know, that's a sore point with me, the south. The way that they

have the stranglehold over the electorate. Because, excuse me, and I love

playing to red states, because when I play the red states my stand-up act I get

all the people 40 don't usually have someone like me come to their state. So

there's a great bonding. And I feel for them, because there's a lot of smart

10 people in the south. But in general, it is the dumbest part of the country. Excuse 11 me. It is. And also, they're the super patriots. The one part of the country that 12 ever actually seceded. The one part of the country that ever actually committed 13 treason. And they seem to lead in how we are supposed to think. Because 14 they're more religious, they're more patriotic and I think it's just a disservice to 16 our... 17 KING: You think in modern-day America you could still claim a whole region is 18 dumber than another region?

19 MAHER: They lead the region in dumbness, yes, they do. Because there's just 20 too many people who think that every problem can be solved by either 21 moreguns or more Jesus. And like I said, I'm with the people who are following 22 the compass. Not the people who are reading the entrails of the chicken. 23 They're the people who are reading the entrails of the chicken. d)

IDENTIFY at least seven presupposition triggers in the two fragments of discourse in c) above and SPECIFY the presuppositions they entail as well as their type (existence, factive or connotation).

Leech (1983), chapters 1, 4, 8, and 9. Green (1989), chapter 5.

What is Pragmatics?: www.sfsu.edu/kbach/semprag IPrA website : www.uia.ac.be/ipra/contents The Semantics-Pragmatics distinction : http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~kbach/semprag.html Journal of Pragmatics: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/505593/description

INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS

“… language and context co-constitute one another: language contextualizes and is contextualized, such that language does not just function ‘in’ context, language also forms and provides context. One particular context is social interaction. Language, culture, and society are grounded in interaction: they stand in a reflexive relationship with the self, the other, and the self-other relationship, and it is out of these mutually constitutive relationships that discourse is created.” D. Schiffrin, Approaches to Discourse.

MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT: •

To study the main concepts and methods in Interactional Sociologuistics.

•

To be able to analyze a given discourse by using some of the techniques of the methodology used by Interactional Sociolinguists.

•

To understand the main concepts and principles of the Theory of Politeness.

•

To study the different approaches and perspectives on Politeness.

•

To be able to analyze a given discourse by identifying the different politeness strategies used by the speakers mainly as presented by Brown & Levinson (1987).

4.1. Main concepts and methods

The interactional sociolinguistic approach to discourse analysis is multidisciplinary: it concerns the study of the relationships between language, culture and society and has its roots in Anthropology, Sociology and Linguistics.

In spite of the diversity of

disciplines upon which this approach is based, there is a consensus as to the basic beliefs about language, context and the interaction of self and other. Interactional sociolinguists view discourse as a social interaction in which the emergent construction and negotiation of meaning is facilitated by the use of language, thus, they always resort to naturally occurring interactions as a source for data. They consider situated behavior to be the site where societal and interactive forces merge and they focus on how such interaction depends on culturally-informed but situated inferential processes, which play a role in the speakers’ interpretative constructions of the kind of activity they are engaged in. One of the main concerns of this approach is the study of the practices of contextualization, a concept based on a reflexive notion of context: “context is not just given as such in interaction, but it is something which is made available in the course of interaction and its construal depends on inferential practices in accordance with conventions which speakers may or may not share” (Slembrouk, 2005: 14). Two scholars have been the main contributors to the development of the interactional sociolinguistic approach: anthropologist John Gumperz and sociologist Erving Goffman. Their ideas and points of view have been extensively used and applied in the field of linguistics by different authors, such as Brown & Levinson (1987), Schiffrin (1987) or Tannen (1989).

4.1.1. John Gumperz’s contribution to Interactional Sociolinguistics

In his essays entitled Discourse Strategies, John Gumperz (1982) develops an interpretative sociolinguistic approach to the analysis of real time processes in face-toface interactions. Gumperz emphasizes the fact that cognition and language are affected by social and cultural forces. What we thus need to understand and analyze the effects of society and culture on language is a “general theory of verbal communication which integrates what we know about grammar, culture and interactive conventions into a single overall framework of concepts and analytical procedures” (1982: 4). 68

A crucial concept in Interactional Sociolinguistics is that of contextualization cue, which Gumperz defines as: any verbal sign which when processed in co-occurrence with symbolic grammatical and lexical signs serves to construct the contextual ground for situated interpretations, and thereby affects how constituent messages are understood. (1999: 461)

Examples of contextualization cues are intonation or any prosodic choices, conversational code-switching, lexical or syntactic choices, style switching and facial and gestural signs. Gumperz notes that contextualization cues function indexically, i.e. they are deictic and thus share many of the characteristics of shifters; however, they are not necessarily lexically based: e.g. prosody or facial and body gestures sometimes signal relational values independently of the propositional content of utterances. Thus, human communication is seen as “channelled and constrained by a multilevel system of learned, automatically produced and closely coordinated verbal and non-verbal signals” (Gumperz, 1982: 141). As Schiffrin (1994) notes, since contextualization cues are learned through long periods of close, face-to-face contact, many people in modern, culturally diverse societies are likely to interact without benefit of shared cues. And this is precisely one of the major strengths of Interactional Sociolinguistics: its insistence on the occurrence of asymmetries in the communicative background of speakers. Speakers and hearers do not always share the same inferential procedures, i.e. they do not contextualize cues in the same manner. This fact may cause misunderstandings which may have damaging social consequences for certain members of society, especially those belonging to minority groups. In plain words, the main idea behind Gumperz’s sociolinguistics of interpersonal communication is that speakers are members of social and cultural groups, and as such, they way they use language not only reflects their group identity but also provides indices of who they are, what they want to communicate, and how skillful they are in doing so. It is a great part of our communicative competence to be able to understand and produce these indexical processes as they occur in local contexts.

4.1.1.1. Example and analysis of contextualization cues

The following example (taken from Gumperz), illustrates how conversational code-

switching (a typical contextualization cue) can lead to a misunderstanding:

The graduate student has been sent to interview a black housewife in a low income, inner city neighborhood. The contact has been made over the phone by someone in the office. The student arrives, rings the bell, and is met by the husband, who opens the door, smiles, and steps towards him: Husband: So y’re gonna check out ma ol lady, hah? Interviewer: Ah, no. I only came to get some information. They called from the office. (Husband, dropping his smile, disappears without a word and calls his wife.) (1982:

133) Gumperz tells the readers that the student reported that the interview that followed was stiff and quite unsatisfactory. Being black himself, the student realized that he had “blown it” by failing to recognize the significance of the husband’s speech style in this particular case. He should have responded with a typically black response like “Yea, I’ma git some info” so as to show familiarity with local values and etiquette. The student’s use of Standard English was interpreted by the husband as a sign that he did not belong to his group, and therefore he was not to be trusted.

4.1.2. Erving Goffman’s contribution to Interactional Sociolinguistics

Goffman has undoubtedly been one of the most influential authors in the study of spoken interaction. His sociology centers on physical co-presence rather than on social groups, and thus he focuses on aspects of interaction order such as: a) Particular settings (e.g. entering an elevator and how it affects talk). b) Forms of self-maintaining behavior such as the display of focused interaction and of civil inattention. c) Conduct in public situations involving embarrassment, face-saving behavior and/or public displays of competence (e.g. response cries such as Oops). d) The role of temporal and spatial activity boundaries which result in inclusion and exclusion from talk in interaction. Although Goffman takes talk as the basic medium of encounters, he also gives utmost importance to the state of co-presence, which draws attention to the body, its disposition and display. As Schiffrin (1994) notes, Goffman argues that the self is a 70

social construction, and one way of viewing the self as a social, interactive construction is through the notion of face, i.e. “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact” (Goffman, 1967: 5). One of the conditions of interaction is the maintenance of face. Interactants are expected to behave in a manner that is consistent with this image in order to be in face or to maintain face. Interpersonal rituals (both avoidance and presentational) contribute to the maintenance of face. The material resources available through social institutions also contribute to the mainenance of face, for they can not only be used to symbolize certain favored aspects of self but can also facilitate the division of self into a public character and a private performer (Goffman, 1959). In Goffman’s view, the study of interaction is not a study of motives but of rules: “to study face-saving is to study the traffic rules of social interaction” (Goffman, 1959: 13). As we shall see later in this chapter, Brown & Levinson’s (1987) study of politeness takes Goffman’s notion of face as one of its main tenets. Another important concept in Goffman’s analysis of interaction is that of frame. Goffman studies the way in which social actors organize their experience in terms of recognizable activities (e.g. a business meeting, a lecture, a game of chess) which are the frames through which people structure experience.

Thus, the organization of

framing activity is socially situated. Goffman’s frame analysis shows how people can handle multiple, interdependent realities and therefore it reveals the complexity of mundane social activities. The concept of footing is tightly related to that of frame. Footing stands for a speaker’s shifting alignments in relation to the events at hand. This concept brings out the need to distinguish between different speaker roles. Goffman (1981) speaks of four roles or participation statuses: animator (the participant that produces talk), author (the one who creates talk), figure (the one who is portrayed by talk) and principal (the one who is responsible for talk). All these roles may be played by different people, but a single participant can also fill different position slots.

4.1.2.1. Example and analysis

The following example and analysis have been taken from Schiffrin (1994).

The

analysis is here summarized for the purposes of interpretation and understanding of Goffman’s main ideas and concepts:

(1) Henry:

(a) Y’want a piece of candy?

Irene:

(b)

No. Z

Zelda:

(c)

Debby:

(d)

Irene:

(e) (f)

Zelda:

(g)

Irene: Debby:

(h)

Zelda:

She’s on a diet. Z Who’s not on [a diet. [I’m onI’m on a diet. and my mother [buys-= [You’re not!

= my [mother buys these mints. = [Oh yes I amhhh! / /_ Oh yeh.

Schiffrin focuses here on Zelda’s remark and its alteration of the participation framework of talk. Zelda is “speaking for another”, and one key feature of speaking for another is that it involves three participant roles. In Goffman’s terms, the spokesperson (who produces a message whose content is the responsibility of another) would be the animator for another person who is in the principal role. So when Zelda says “She’s on a diet”, she is an animator for Irene’s principal. The remark “She is on a diet” alters the participation framework of ongoing talk and the way in which it is altered is tied to the social relationship among participants, the social acts being performed and the gender identities of participants (Schiffrin, 1994: 108). Normally, “speaking for” is a way of speaking that may be used with a person with whom one has a particular relationship (Zelda and Irene are friends). It is implicit in the interactional sociolinguistic approach that it is the social contextualization of an utterance that motivates and explains its use. Context, then, provides situated inferences about the meaning of an interactional move. Schiffrin also notes that one way that gender is realized and reflected in talk is through the differential construction of participation framework, so she suggests that Zelda’s 72

“She’s on a diet” proposes an interactional alignment that is more typical of stances taken by women than those taken by men (gender identity). In short, Schiffrin situates the meaning of the single utterance “She’s on a diet” in several different ways: as a participation framework within the microstructure of an interaction (one person “speaks for” another), as a socially motivated account within a sequence of acts (an offer issued through a question is rejected), as a gender-based involvement strategy, and as a means of building sequential coherence by taking the role of the other.

4.1.3. Similarities in Gumperz’s and Goffman’s approaches and their integration into an interactional sociolinguistic approach to discourse analysis.

In spite of the obvious differences, there are enough similarities between both Gumperz’s and Goffman’s approaches to consider them both as representatives of the Interactional Sociolinguistic approach to discourse analysis. Both scholars focus upon situated meaning. Two central issues that they share in common are the study of the interaction between self and other, and the study of context. Both authors see language as indexical to the social world: Gumperz conceives of language as an index to the cultural background knowledge which provides information as to how to make inferences and what is meant through an utterance. Goffman views language as an index to the social identities and relationships which are constructed during interaction. Goffman’s and Gumperz’s work complement each other: Goffman tries to describe and understand the form and meaning of the social and interpersonal contexts from a sociological perspective; for Gumperz language is a socially and culturally constructed symbol system that reflects, but at the same time creates, macro-level social meaning and micro-level interpersonal meanings.

To conclude, let us reflect upon the following segment from Goffman’s essay on face-work: “Throughout this paper, it has been implied that underneath their differences in culture, people everywhere are the same. If persons have a universal human nature, they themselves are not to be looked to for an explanation of it. One must look rather to the fact that societies everywhere, if they are to be societies, must mobilise their members as self-regulating participants in social encounters. One way of mobilising the

individual for this purpose is through ritual: he is taught to be perceptive, to have feeling attached to self and a self expressed through face, to have pride, honour, and dignity, to have considerateness, to have tact and a certain amount of poise. These are some of the elements of behaviour which must be built into the person if practical use is to be made of him as an interactant, and it is these elements that are referred to in part when one speaks of universal human nature.” (1967: 44-5)

The ideas expressed in this quote were taken by Brown and Levinson (1987) as the general and fundamental tenets of their Theory of Politeness. The next sections in this unit are devoted to the different perspectives taken for the study of the phenomenon of politeness (but, in particular, to Brown & Levinson’s perspective, for it is considered to be the most influential so far) as a line of analysis emerging from the interactional sociolinguistic approach.

4.2. Politeness

As many other concepts in pragmatics and discourse analysis, the concept of politeness is not easy to define. There is a surprising amount of disagreement as to the criteria used to define it.

Nevertheless, it has become an essential part of the necessary

knowledge to analyze discourse.

Watts (2003) notes that, when people are asked what they imagine polite behavior to be, their usual way out of the dilemma is to resort to giving examples of behavior which they, personally, would consider “polite”, such as “He always shows a lot of respect towards his superiors” or “She’s always very helpful and obliging.” Watts also remarks that “there are even people who classify polite behaviour negatively, characterising it with such terms as ‘standoffish’, ‘haughty’,‘insincere’, etc.” (2003:1). Politeness as a linguistic phenomenon has been researched by looking at it from wider perspectives than those attached to the everyday use of the term, but there is not a uniform criterion to define and identify politeness phenomena. Georgia Green explains that when we talk about politeness within pragmatic studies we refer to strategies for maintaining or changing interpersonal relations (1989: 141). The goals of the speakers when using these strategies may be ends in themselves (purely social conversation or “small talk”) or they may be a link in a chain of goals whose ultimate end is to influence someone’s behavior or attitude.

Bruce Fraser (1990) analyzes the

different points of view through which the phenomenon of politeness has been researched and studied in Linguistics, and he finds four main perspectives, to which we now turn.

4.2.1. Approaches to the phenomenon of politeness

In his famous article “Perspectives on politeness”, Bruce Fraser (1990a) points to the fact that there is not a common understanding of the concept of politeness and he reviews four of the best-known approaches to the phenomenon: 1) the social-norm view; 2) the conversational-maxim view; 3) the face-saving view; and 4) the conversational-contract view. Let us now present an overview of the four of them:

The social-norm view reflects the understanding of politeness embraced mainly by the English-speaking world in a general way. It assumes that each society has certain rules and norms that prescribe a particular behavior or way of thinking in a context. This sense of politeness is associated with what constitutes “good manners” as well as with a certain speech style, whereby a higher degree of formality implies greater politeness. Among the authors holding this view, Fraser cites Jespersen (1965) and Quirk (1985). This view does not have many 75

adherents among current researchers. 2)

The conversational-maxim view is principally based on Grice’s work in his paper “Logic and Conversation” (1967, published 1975), in which he proposes his general Cooperative Principle (CP) and maxims. As we saw in Chapter 3, Grice assumes that the CP is always observed and that any real or apparent violation of the maxims signals conversational implicatures, i.e., non-explicit messages intended by the speaker to be inferred by the hearer. R. Lakoff (1973) and Leech (1983) are among the authors that follow this approach.

The face-saving view is the best known of the approaches to politeness. Its principles and tenets are found in Brown & Levinson’s Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use (1987). This approach will be dealt with in more detail later in this study unit (4.2.1.2.), but for the purposes of this summary of perspectives, suffice it to say that Brown & Levinson assume the general correctness of Grice’s view of conversational interaction, explicitly adopting a view that holds that there is a working assumption by conversationalists of the rational and efficient nature of talk. If there are deviations from this behavior, the recipient will find in considerations of politeness the reason for the speaker’s apparent irrationality or inefficiency. As was noted in 4.1.3, these authors base much of their theory on Goffman’s (1967) concept of face (the individual’s self-esteem), which can be lost, maintained, enhanced or threatened. The fact that some acts can threaten face and thus require some kind of softening is the organizing principle of their theory.

The conversational-contract view, an approach presented by Fraser (1975, 1990a) and Fraser & Nolen (1981), also adopts Grice’s notion of a Cooperative Principle and recognizes the importance of Goffman’s notion of face, but it differs in certain important ways from Brown & Levinson’s view. Within this perspective, all the participants in an interaction enter into a conversation and continue within it with the understanding of a current Conversational Contract at every turn. “Being polite constitutes operating within the then-current terms and conditions of the Conversational Contract” (Fraser, 1990a: 233). 76

Views 2 (conversational-maxim) and 3 (face-saving) have had the most adherents among researchers. By and large, the most influential of all views has been Brown & Levinson’s face-saving approach to politeness. We now turn to a more detailed account of these two approaches.

4.2.1.1. The conversational-maxim view

Before the year 1960 all semantic theories focused primarily on truth conditions. These theories were employed by logicians like Frege and Kripke, who assigned recursively to each sentence the conditions under which it would be true.

The subsequent

observations by linguists and philosophers of apparent differences in meaning between certain natural language words and their logical counterparts were the basis for the development of pragmatic reflection and studies, of which Grice’s lectures at Harvard on the topic Logic and Conversation (1967) were considered to be crucial. Grice’s construct of Conversational principles 11 has been adopted by some authors in an effort to account for politeness phenomena. Robin Lakoff (1973) and Geoffrey Leech (1983) are among these authors.

4.2.1.1.1. Leech’s approach to politeness

According to Leech (1983), the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle do not operate in isolation.

They often create a tension within a speaker who must

determine, for a given speech context, what message to convey and how to do it. The role of the Politeness Principle is “to maintain the social equilibrium and the friendly relations which enable us to assume that our interlocutors are being cooperative in the first place” (Leech, 1983: 82).

Leech explains that politeness concerns a relationship

between two participants, but speakers also show politeness to third parties who may or may not be present in the speech situation. In order to show politeness, the participants in a speech situation observe the following Maxims (Leech, 1983: 132):

For a detailed explanation of Grice’s Theory of Implicature and Cooperative Principle, see Unit 3, 3.2.

1) TACT MAXIM (in impositives and commissives): (a) Minimize cost to other [(b) Maximize benefit to other] 2) GENEROSITY MAXIM (in impositives and commissives): (a) Minimize benefit to self [(b) Maximize cost to self] 3) APROBATION MAXIM (in expressives and assertives): (a) Minimize dispraise of other [(b) Maximize praise of other] 4) MODESTY MAXIM (in expressives and assertives): (a) Minimize praise of self

[(b) Maximize dispraise of self]

5) AGREEMENT MAXIM (in assertives): (a) Minimize disagreement between self and other

[(b) Maximize agreement

between self and other] 6) SYMPATHY MAXIM (in assertives): (a) Minimize antipathy between self and other

[(b) Maximize sympathy between

self and other]

Fraser summarizes Leech’s (1983) Principle of Politeness as follows: “Other things being equal, minimize the expression of beliefs which are unfavorable to the hearer and at the same time (but less important) maximize the expression of beliefs which are favorable to the hearer.” (1990: 225)

Leech distinguishes between “Relative Politeness” and “Absolute Politeness.” The former refers to politeness vis-á-vis a specific situation, and the latter to the degree of politeness inherently associated with specific speaker actions.

Therefore, some

illocutions (like orders, for instance) are inherently impolite and others (like offers) are inherently polite. In Leech’s view, Negative Politeness consists in minimizing the impoliteness of impolite illocutions, and Positive Politeness consists in maximizing the politeness of polite illocutions. Some possible examples are: Negative Politeness: “If it would not trouble you too much, could you lend me your car?” Positive Politeness: “I am delighted to inform you that you are the winner of the award” Fraser (1990: 227) observes that Leech’s conclusions seem too strong, for he

asserts, for example, that to order is inherently conflictive, reduces comity and requires negative politeness on the part of the speaker, but that, on occasions, this is not the case, as, for example, if a teacher ordered a student to put her prize-winning solution on the board for the class (in which case to order would not be conflictive at all and would not require negative politeness). Another author who views Politeness from the conversational-maxim perspective is Robin Lakoff. Her approach is the subject of the next section.

4.2.1.1.2. Robin Lakoff’s approach to politeness

Lakoff defines Politeness as “a device used in order to reduce friction in personal interaction” (1979: 64) and proposes two Rules of Pragmatic Competence (1973: 296): 1) Be clear (this rule is in agreement with Grice’s rules or Maxims of conversation (1967)) 2) Be polite

She explains that these two rules are at times reinforcing and at other times in conflict with each other. In general, when clarity is in conflict with politeness, politeness supersedes: it is considered more important in a conversation to avoid offense than to achieve clarity. In addition, she posits three Rules of Politeness (1973: 300):

1) Don’t Impose (used when Formal/Impersonal Politeness is required) 2) Give Options (used when Informal Politeness is required) 3) Make A Feel Good – Be Friendly (used when Intimate Politeness is required)

These three rules are applicable depending on the type of politeness required as understood by the speaker.

For instance, if a participant assesses the situation as

requiring Formal Politeness (Don’t Impose), he could ask the hearer about his personal life by saying:

Would you mind if I ask you a personal question?

If the speaker were in a situation requiring Informal Politeness, s/he might ask the 79

personal question without asking for permission, but s/he would probably use hedges and/or an indirect question to mitigate the act as in:

I guess you have a boy-friend, don’t you?

If the speaker wants the hearer to feel good, to feel like a friend, Intimate Politeness is needed, and therefore he might say:

Come on, tell me about your boy-friend

One of the criticisms made of Lakoff’s politeness framework is the fact that “the reader is never told how the speaker or hearer is to assess what level of politeness is required” (Fraser, 1990a: 224). Lakoff herself summarizes her contribution to this topic in the following points: 1. “…we follow pragmatic rules in speaking, just as we follow semantic and syntactic rules, and all must be a part of our linguistic rules. 2. … there are rules of politeness and rules of clarity (conversation), the latter a subcase of the former: rules of conversation are a subtype of R1 [Be clear]. 3. …the rules of politeness may differ dialectally in applicability, but their basic form remains the same universally. 4. …these are not merely linguistic, but applicable to all cooperative human transactions. “ (1973: 305)

4.2.1.2. The face-saving view: Brown & Levinson’s Theory of Politeness

Undoubtedly, the most influential study on politeness phenomena so far is that of Brown & Levinson (1978 and 1987 12) in their book Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, which is based on a particular interpretation of the work of E. Goffman (1967, 1971) about the role of face in social interaction. With respect to this concept, Brown & Levinson (herinafter B & L) explain that: “Central to their model is a highly abstract notion of “face” which consists of two specific kinds of desires (‘face-wants’) attributed by interactants to one another: the desire to be unimpeded in one’s actions (negative face), and the desire (in some respects) to be approved of (positive face). This is the bare bones of a notion of face which (they argue) is universal.” (1987: 13)

All references in this book are made to the later edition, i.e. that of 1987.

B & L argue that there is a direct relationship between the face of the speaker and certain variables which they call Sociolinguistic Variables. These variables are: 1) The “social distance” (D) of S [speaker] and H [hearer] (a symmetric relation). 2) The relative “power” (P) of S and H (an asymmetric relation). 3) The absolute ranking (R) of impositions in the particular culture. (1987: 74)

According to B & L, all the speakers of a language have both a positive and a negative face. There are acts that intrinsically threaten the interlocutor’s face, which these authors call Face Threatening Acts (hereinafter FTAs). In general, speakers try to minimize the face threat of these acts by using a series of strategies summarized and illustrated in the following figure (1987: 60):

Circumstances determining choice of strategy Lesser 1. without redressive action, baldly on record Do the FTA

2. positive politeness with redressive action

4. off record

3. negative politeness

5. Don’t do the FTA

Greater

The more an act threatens S’s or H’s face, the more S will want to choose a highernumbered strategy, given the fact that these strategies afford payoffs of increasingly minimized risk. This means that, if what the speaker has to say could in some way be offensive or impolite to the hearer, it is very likely that the speaker will use an off record strategy, characterized by the use of mitigating elements which convey certain meanings in an indirect way. If, on the contrary, S wants his/her utterance to be effective (because, for example, there is an urgency or the situation is task-oriented), it is most likely that S will use an on record strategy. When going on record, S may do it

baldly or by using positive or negative politeness. Positive politeness strategies are oriented towards the positive face of H; they show S’s desire for or approval of H’s wants. Negative politeness strategies aim at H’s negative face, i.e. his/her basic desire to maintain his/her terrain and self-determination.

4.2.1.2.1. Summary and examples:

To summarize and illustrate:  If S uses an on record strategy, there is only one interpretation of his/her intention and there is no room for ambiguity. Bald on record strategies are considered to be in conformity with Grice’s Maxims and they are used when maximum efficiency is required. Consider these examples: •

Help!! (Urgent, desperate situation. Compare to the non-urgent and nondesperate Could you help me with the washing-up, please? )

•

Don’t move!! ( If S sees a Boa Constrictor approaching H)

•

Hands up!! (When the police find a criminal)

 If the situation is not desperate, does not call for urgency or does not require maximum efficiency, S can still go on record but with either positive or negative politeness. Here are some examples: •

What a beautiful hat you’re wearing! (On-record with positive politeness)

•

Can you pass the salt? (On record with negative politeness – conventionally indirect request).

 If S wants to do an FTA, but for some reason wants to avoid the responsibility for doing it, s/he will most probably go off record and leave the interpretation to the addressee. By going off record S will always be flouting one or more of the Gricean Maxims, as can be seen in the following examples:

•

What a beautiful dress! = Please, buy me that dress. (Off record strategy: Give Hints, which violates Relevance Maxim).

•

John is a bit silly = John is very silly. (Off record strategy: Understate, which violates Quantity Maxim).

•

John is a real genius = John is stupid. (Off record strategy: Be ironic, which violates the Quality Maxim).

•

I’m going you-know-where = I’m going to the bathroom. (Off record strategy:

Be vague, use euphemisms, which violates the Manner

Maxim).

4.2.1.2.2. Example of analysis

Alba Juez (2002) analyzes the humorous FTAs in some episodes of two television comedy series, taking Brown & Levinson’s (1987) model of politeness as a point of departure. The use of politeness strategies and the interrelation of the sociological variables P (power), D (Distance) and R (Ranking of imposition of the particular culture) are shown in different fragments of the episodes. Consider the following example (Alba Juez, 2002: 17-18): Blanche: I’ve decided I can handle this relationship. I’m going out with Dirk Saturday night. Dorothy: Was it ever in doubt? Blanche: Momentarily. This is strictly off the record, but Dirk is nearly five years younger than I am. Dorothy: In what, Blanche? Dog years??

The Golden Girls, 1991: 65. This example is presented as another instance showing Dorothy’s aggressiveness towards Blanche by being sarcastic and implying that Blanche is a liar. Dorothy flouts the Quantity Maxim by using an off record strategy (Overstate) when uttering her remark (In what, Blanche? Dog years??), which in turn triggers the implicature that Dirk is certainly much younger than Blanche asserts he is. Instead of going on record, Dorothy chooses irony to tell her friend that she cannot fool her and that she should not fool herself, because it is obvious that Dorothy thinks that a relationship with so young a man is not likely to last long or end happily. Dorothy generally places herself as a

realistic, down-to-earth woman, and she is the most educated of the four girls (she is a High School teacher and the other three girls look up to her as the most intelligent in the group), so she feels she is in a position of power to make fun of her roomates and, in particular, of Blanche. Thus, the P value for Dorothy is high, while the D value is low, taking into account that the girls are friends and live in the same house, as a family. The R value for the realization of Dorothy’s FTA in this example is rated high, considering the fact that in the American culture, as well as in many other western cultures, people look at women who date or marry a younger man with a critical eye. It could be said, thus, that the male-dominant culture imposes its values upon Blanche’s behavior and gives Dorothy the right to criticize and mock her friend. Alba Juez provides the formula for this particular example (2002: 17):

hP (S, H) + lD + hR , where:

hP (S,H) = High power of speaker with respect to hearer lD = Low distance value between speakers hR: High ranking of imposition of the culture as to doing or not doing the FTA.

By providing the formula for this and other examples, Alba Juez concludes that the context-dependency of the value of B & L’s sociological variables is evident, for no single formula or combination of the variables seems to be the formula in cases of humorous FTAs, and, thus, other variables, such as age, gender or level of education should be considered when assessing the weightiness of an FTA. The example above displays just one of the many instances in which scholars have used B & L’s theory of politeness as a basis for discourse analysis. But, in spite of its wide use and even though it is the best-known of politeness theories, it has also been criticized. We now turn to this issue.

4.2.1.2.3. Criticisms to Brown & Levinson’s model of politeness

In spite of the fact that this theory has many followers and has been the most influential theory of Politeness up to now, B & L have been criticized, among other things, for claiming that their theory has a universal value, for being ethnocentric and

for assuming an individualistic concept of face. The works of many scholars, such as Matsumoto (1988), Gu (1990), Nwoye (1992), Werkhoffer (1992), Watts (1992, 2003), Mao (1994), O’Driscoll (1996), Bravo (1999) and Lee Wong (1999) point to these facts. Lavandera (1988) criticizes other aspects as well: she views politeness as a continuum and not as a dichotomy, in agreement with Fraser & Nolen’s (1981) view, and she supplements the notion of illocutionary force (Searle, 1969) with that of politeness force, ‘emphasizing thereby the latter’s obligatory nature’ (1988: 1196). Also she also supports Fraser & Nolen’s (1981) posits by emphasizing the conditions under which the expressions are used, i.e. the situation, and not the expressions themselves, for these conditions are crucial to determine the judgement of politeness (1988: 1196). Politeness, therefore, is a property of utterances and not of sentences. In her review of B & L’s theory of politeness, she directs the reader’s attention to what she describes as its weaknesses, which, in her opinion, are basically the following: 1) Brown and Levinson fail to see that politeness is a permanent component of all speech acts and thus they do not take into account any strategies aimed at impoliteness; 2) It is impossible to account for the fact that there can be an accumulation of similar strategies in the same speech act if we ascribe the degree of politeness to a strategy (as B & L do) and not to the entire speech act within which it occurs; 3) a distinction should be made between strategies like “Be pessimistic”, which are purely pragmatic, and other strategies which contain a specific linguistic description such as “Employ a diminutive”. Thus, in her view, even though B & L achieve some valuable and important aims, they do not succeed in providing a complete account of the phenomenon of politeness.

1. The

interactional

sociolinguistic

approach

discourse

analysis

multidisciplinary: it concerns the study of the relationships between language, culture and society and has its roots in Anthropology, Sociology and Linguistics. 2. Interactional Sociolinguistics focuses upon situated meaning. Two central issues are the study of the interaction between self and other and the study of context. 3. One of the main concerns of this approach is the study of the practices of contextualization, a concept based on a reflexive notion of context. 4. John Gumperz and Erving Goffman have been the main contributors to the development of the interactional sociolinguistic approach: their ideas and points of 85

view have been extensively used and applied in the field of linguistics by different authors, such as Brown & Levinson (1987), Schiffrin (1987) or Tannen (1989). 5. A crucial concept in Interactional Sociolinguistics is the concept of contextualization cue.

Examples of contextualization cues are intonation,

conversational code-switching, gestural signs, etc. 6. Goffman’s sociology centers on physical co-presence rather than on social groups, and thus he focuses on aspects of interaction order. Key concepts in Goffman’s interactional analysis are the concepts of face, frame and footing. Brown & Levinson’s (1987) Theory of Politeness is based on a particular interpretation of the work of Goffman and the concept of face. 7. There is not a uniform criterion to define and identify politeness phenomena. From all perspectives on politeness, Brown & Levinson’s face-saving view has undoubtedly been the most influential so far. 8. Brown & Levinson have been criticized, among other things, for claiming that their theory has a universal value, for being ethnocentric and for assuming an individualistic concept of face.

A) ANALYSIS: ANALYZE, from the interactional sociolinguistic perspective (combining both Gumperz’s and Goffman’s ideas and perspectives), the following segment from Larry King Live, which was examined in Unit 3 for the study of speech acts and presuppositions. Consider these aspects: a) The type and framework of interaction is an interview. Do you see any signs of behavior (e.g. hostility) which do not fit within this frame? Or, on the contrary, do you see any signs of sociability that fit within the frame? Are there any contextualization cues signaling shifts in participation structure? How and when are the participants being hostile/ cooperating/ speaking for another? b) Can you identify the participant roles? c) Do you find any contextual presuppositions that are necessary to make sense out of the interaction? d) How is face maintained?

KING: Toquerville, Utah, hello.

CALLER: Gentlemen, the honor is mine. Thank you for the call. Bill, what do you think

about the administration's Homeland Security Department's little plan B to study to stop

the election under threat of terrorist attack? Does that remind you of our 2000 Florida

deal?

MAHER: You mean you're talking about on election day?

KING: Yes, in case there's some big occurrence.

MAHER: Well, they've been pulling that card for how many...

KING: Wait a minute, you had some sort of disaster you don't want to hold an election if

you've got bombs dropping?

MAHER: That's true. And I agree with that. If there's really a problem on election day.

But, again, this is an administration that has always said, OK, we're operating under this

premise. You can't criticize the administration during a time of war. Oh, and by the way,

we're always at war. The war is ongoing.

So I mean, I don't trust them. Let me put it that way. I don't trust them, or they haven't

earned my trust.

B) ANALYSIS: ANALYZE the following scene from the movie Bicentennial Man and THINK about the interpretation Andrew gives to the girl’s comment “I think it sucks”, as well as about the interpretation he makes of Mr. Martin’s comment “We’re fine, Andrew”. Bear in mind that Andrew is a robot and his mind is a computer. SCENE 1: Mr. Martin shows Andrew (the robot) into the basement of the house.

Mr. Martin: Well, you’ll be staying down here. Got anything you need? Andrew: One only requires access to a power outlet. (pause) Mr. Martin: Good Night, Andrew. Andrew: It certainly is, sir. Mr. Martin: No, no Andrew, the correct response to “Good night” is “Good night”. Andrew: Good night. Mr. Martin: Yes. Andrew: But the correct response to “Good night” is “Good night”. Mr. Martin: Good night, Andrew. Andrew: Good night, sir. Mr. Martin: You only need to say it once, Andrew. Andrew: Or one should be saying it forever, sir, in an infinite verbal loop. Mr. Martin: Exactly.

Andrew: Thank you, sir. Mr. Martin: Good! Andrew: Night! (Mr. Martin gazes at Andrew)

Sorry, sir.

SCENE 2: The Martin family is having dinner. Andrew has served the dinner he prepared.

Mr. Martin: Mmmmm, Andrew, this is very good! Andrew: Thank you, sir. Mr. Martin: (addressing his daughter Grace (“Miss”)) Don’t you think… Grace: I think it sucks! Andrew: Sucks? How? Chickens do not have lips! (Amanda, the “Little Miss”, laughs) Mrs. Martin: She’s being rude (unclear comment to Grace) (pause) Mr. Martin: We’re fine, Andrew. Andrew: Indeed you are, sir. Mr. Martin: The kitchen! Andrew: It’s fine too, sir. Mr. Martin: No, GO to the kitchen, now.

Try to find the answer to the questions in (1), and do (2): (1) In what ways does Andrew lack “pragmatic knowledge”? i. Is he being cooperative? ii. Does he flout any of the Maxims of the Cooperative Principle? iii. Can he make implicatures the same way humans do? iv. Is Andrew polite? v. Can he use all the rules of Politeness as described by B and L (1987)? vi. Can Andrew go off record? Why? Why not?

(2) WRITE a short essay with your answers to the questions in (1), making your point and JUSTIFYING your analysis of Andrew’s talk and linguistic behavior in general.

•

Goffman, (1967, 1974). 88

•

Gumperz (1981).

•

Schiffrin (1994), Chapter 4.

•

Tannen (1984), “Introduction to Linguists” and Chapter 1.

•

Brown & Levinson, (1987), pp. 59-84, Chapters 4 & 5.

Interactional Sociolinguistics: Useful links: http://personal.cityu.edu.hk Deborah Tannen’s website: http://www.georgetown.edu/tannen/ John Gumperz’s biography: http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/fghij/gumperz_john.html Ervin Goffman’s biography: http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/goffmanbio.html Bibliography on politeness: http://www.linguisticpoliteness.eclipse.co.uk/LingPolbib.htm

CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

“Conversation analysts use different approaches in developing analyses; there is no one right way. This presents a challenge in teaching others to do analyses since there are many paths to the final destination”. A. Pomerantz and B. J. Fehr, Conversation Analysis. MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT: •

To define the scope and main tenets of Conversation Analysis (CA).

•

To define the central concepts in CA (turn-taking, adjacency pairs, preference organization, overall organization, etc.) and study the way they are materialized in actual conversations.

•

To analyze a given conversation making use of the concepts and main techniques of Conversation Analysis.

5.1. Conversation Analysis: an approach to DA

Conversation Analysis (hereinafter CA) originated within Sociology as an approach to the study of the social organization of everyday conduct. It began with the work of Harold Garfinkel (1967, 1974) and his approach known as Ethnomethodology (which had in turn been influenced by the Phenomenology of Alfred Schutz), and then it was applied to conversation by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. Ethnomethodological research suggests that knowledge is neither autonomous nor decontextualized; the actions of people produce and reproduce the knowledge through which individual conduct and social circumstance are intelligible.

Thus,

ethnomethodology avoids idealizations and argues that what speakers produce are categories that are continuously adjusted according to whether the anticipation of an actor is confirmed by another’s actions or not. These categories are called typifications. Language (and action through language), as any other typification in social conduct, is a situated product of rules and systems. The meaning of any given utterance is indexical to a specific context and purpose.

As Schiffrin remarks, “the focus of CA on

conversation, for example, arises out of the ethnomethodological distrust of idealizations as a basis for either social science or ordinary human action” (1994: 234). CA has many things in common with other DA approaches, but it provides a particular way of analyzing and looking at talk. Schiffrin expresses this idea in the following passage: “CA is like interactional sociolinguistics in its concern with the problem of social order, and how language both creates and is created by social context. It is also similar to the ethnography of communication in its concern with human knowledge […] and its belief that no detail of conversation (or interaction) can be neglected a priori as unimportant. All three approaches also focus on detailed analysis of particular sequences of utterances that have actually occurred. But CA is also quite different from any of the approaches discussed thus far: CA provides its own assumptions, its own methodology (including its own terminology), and its own way of theorizing.” (1994:

232) CA is mainly differenciated from other approaches to DA in its particular approach to certain analytic issues. For instance, conversation analysts attempt to explicate the relevances of the parties to an interaction while they reject the use of investigatorstipulated theoretical and conceptual definitions of research questions. Sacks (1984)

argues against too many idealizations in social science on the grounds that they produce general concepts that have only a vague relationship with a real set of events, and that is the reason why he chose to work on conversation: his intention was to deal with the details of actual events in order to remedy the idealizations of sociologists. Conversational analysts normally use tape-recorded conversation (which occurs without researcher prompting) as data, for they consider it to be objective data which can be available for many analysts and subjected to many analyses. Thus, CA avoids premature generalization and focuses on action as the locus of knowledge. All analyses must develop from the empirical conduct of speakers, considered to be the central resource for analysts. In spite of the fact that CA is concerned with the contextual relevance that utterances always have for one another, some aspects of context are not assumed to have so much relevance. For instance, it can be noticed that CA transcripts of talk do not pay much attention to social relations or aspects of the social context such as setting, personal attributes or the occupation of a given participant. Thus, as Schiffrin notes, “although CA is an approach to discourse that emphasizes context, the relevance of context is grounded in text” (1994: 236).

5.2. Methods and central concepts of CA

One of the main assumptions of CA is that interaction is structurally organized (Heritage, 1984). Consequently, conversational analysts search for recurrent patterns, distributions, and forms of organization in large corpora of talk. Heritage lists two more assumptions: 1) contributions to interaction are contextually oriented, and 2) no order of detail in interaction can be dismissed a priori as disorderly, accidental or irrelevant. The following are to be considered central criteria for CA: •

The data must be fully observable.

•

Replicated analysis should look essentially the same.

•

If data do not explain themselves, then more empirical data should be captured.

The core of CA is the exploration of sequential structures of social action. Sequential analysis can be made at different levels: move, turn, exchange, transaction and interaction.

Sequential analysis is not interested in single utterances, but in how 92

utterances are designed to tie with or fit to prior utterances, or in how an utterance has significant implications for what kinds of utterances should come next (Wetherell et. al, 2001). One of the central structures of interaction (and a central concept in CA) is the adjacency pair, which is closely connected to that of turn-taking. We now turn to them.

5.2.1. Linear sequences: turn-taking and adjacency pairs

Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson argue that “the organization of taking turns to talk is fundamental to conversation” (1974: 696). Turn-taking is used for talking in different speech exchange systems such as interviews, meetings, debates or ceremonies. These authors, and conversational analysts in general, support the idea that there is a basic set of rules governing turn construction, providing for the allocation of a next turn to one party, and coordinating transfer so as to minimize gap and overlap, which are deduced from the following facts about about turn-taking: •

Speaker change recurs, or at least occurs

•

One party talks at a time

•

Occurrences of more than one speaker at a time are common, but brief

•

Transitions with no gap and no overlap are common. Together with transitions characterized by slight gap or slight overlap, they make up the vast majority of transitions

•

Turn order is not fixed, but varies

•

Turn size is not fixed, but varies

•

Length of conversation is not specified in advance

•

What parties say is not specified in advance

•

Relative distribution of turns is not specified in advance

•

Number of parties can vary

•

Talk can be continuous or discontinuous

•

Turn-allocation techniques are obviously used. A current speaker may select a next speaker (as he addresses a question to another party); or parties may self-select in starting to talk

•

Various turn-constructional units are employed (words, sentences,

etc.) •

Repair mechanisms exist for dealing with turn-taking errors and violations. (Sacks et al, 1974: 700-01).

Turn-taking

form of social action and,

therefore,

operates

it in

accordance with a local

management

system. This system is

conventionally

known by members of a social group, and it is essentially a set of conventions for getting turns, keeping them or giving them away. A Transition Relevance Place, or TRP refers to any possible change of turn. The most obvious markers of a TRP are the end of a structural unit (a phrase or clause) and a pause (Yule, 1996). Speakers may hold the floor for extended periods of time. Within an extended turn, they normally expect their interlocutors to indicate that they are listening. This they do by means of head nods, smiles or other facial expressions, but they can also show attentiveness by using certain common vocal indications such as uh-uh, yeah, mmm, etc. These vocal indications are called backchannels and they are important because they provide feedback to the speaker regarding the positive reception of his/her message. Consequently, the absence of backchannels may be very frequently interpreted negatively, as lack of interest on the part of the interlocutor or as a way of withholding agreement. Thus, speakers having a conversation are viewed as taking turns at holding the floor, a fact that may be considered a common feature of all cultures and languages; however, the manner and frequence with which the floor is held and the turns are allocated may vary substantially from one social group to another. Another central concept in CA is that of adjacency pair. An adjancency pair is a sequence of two utterances which are adjacent and produced by different speakers. 94

These two utterances are ordered as a first part and a second part and they are generally typed, so that a first part normally expects and requires a given second part or range of second parts (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973).

Prototypical examples of adjacency pairs

would be the following:

1) greeting-greeting: A: Hello B: Hello

2) offer-acceptance: A: Would you care for more tea? B: Yes, please.

3) apology-minimization: A: I’m sorry B: Oh, don’t worry. That’s O.K.

As Schiffrin notes, “adjacency pairs are organized patterns of stable, recurrent actions that provide for, and reflect, order within conversation” (1994: 236). As such, they provide a sequence for the specification of expectations about form and meaning across utterances. Levinson states the rule that governs the use of adjacency pairs as follows: “Having produced a first part of some pair, current speaker must stop speaking, and next speaker must produce at that point a second part to the same pair” (1983: 304). But this rule is not always followed to the letter in conversation. Frequently, insertion sequences occur (Schegloff, 1972) in which, for example, a question-answer pair is embedded within another, as seen in the following example:

Child: Mom, can I play Nintendo now? (Question 1) Mother: Have you cleaned up the playroom? (Question 2) Child: No. (Answer 2) Mother: No! (Answer 1)

Thus, we may speak of nested adjacency pairs, and in fact numerous levels of embedding are not infrequent, where, for instance, a question and its answer may be many utterances apart. In addition, and again considering the question-answer pair, there are a great 95

many responses other than answers which nevertheless count as acceptable seconds, such as “re-routes” (e.g.: Better ask your father), refusals to answer or challenges to the presuppositions or sincerity of the question (e.g.: You’ve got to be kidding). This fact, according to Levinson (1983: 307), seems “to undermine the structural significance of the concept of an adjacency pair”. However, the importance of the concept is reassured by the equally important concept of preference organization, which will be analyzed and described in the next section.

5.2.1.1. Preference organization

The concept of preference organization underlies the idea that there is a hierarchy operating over the potential second parts of an adjacency pair. Thus, there is at least one preferred and one dispreferred category of response to first parts. This concept is a structural notion that corresponds closely to the linguistic concept of markedness (Levinson, 1983: 307), in such a way that preferred seconds are unmarked and dispreferred seconds are marked. For instance, the unmarked, preferred response to a request is a granting and not a rejection; the rejection being the dispreferred, marked second part, as shown in the following examples:

1) Unmarked, preferred second:

A: Hey Jack, can I borrow your car this afternoon?

(First part: request)

J: Sure!

(Second part: granting)

2) Marked, dispreferred second:

A: Dad, could I borrow your car tonight for the prom?

(First part: request)

B: Well…, I don’t trust your driving skills yet. So maybe we’ll leave it for another occasion in the future. (Second part: rejection) Levinson explains that dispreferred seconds exhibit one or more of the following features: a) Delays: (i) by pause before delivery, (ii) by the use of a preface […] (iii)

by displacement over a number of turns via use of repair initiators or insertion sequences.

b) Prefaces: (i) the use of markers or announcers of dispreferreds like Uh and

Well,

(ii)

the

production

token

agreements

before

disagreements, (iii) the use of appreciations if relevant (for offers, invitations, suggestions, advice), (iv) the use of apologies if relevant (for requests, invitations, etc.), (v) the use of qualifiers (e.g. I don’t know for sure, but…), (vi) hesitation in various forms, including self-editing.

c) Accounts: carefully formulated explanations for why the (dispreferred) act is being done.

d) Declination component: of a form suited to the nature of the first part of the pair, but characteristically indirect or mitigated.

(1983: 334)

As the reader will observe, the example of a dispreferred second above has the four features described by Levinson, for the speaker uses the marker Well (preface) followed by a pause (delay), and at the same time he gives an explanation for his rejection (account: “I don’t trust your driving skills yet”) and provides a mitigated negative answer (declination component: “So maybe we’ll leave it for another occasion in the future”).

5.2.2. Other sequences: Repair, pre-sequences, insertion sequences and overall organization Apart from the local organization operating in conversation by means of turn-taking and adjacency pairs, there are other orders of organization, such as certain recurrent kinds of sequence which can be only defined over three or four or more turns. We refer to repair, pre-sequences and overall organizations.

5.2.2.1. Repair

A central conversational device which shows how preference organization operates within and across turns is the organization of repair.

Repair is a device for the 97

correction of misunderstandings, mishearings or non-hearings which has certain properties. Self-initiated repair is differentiated from other-initiated repair. Selfrepair within a turn may be signalled by phenomena such as glottal stops, lengthened vowels, etc. Repair initiated by a participant other than the speaker may be achieved by the use of echo-questions, repetitions of problematic items with stress on problem syllables, or by using expressions such as What?, Excuse me?, etc. The repair system is set up in such a way that there is a tendency for selfinitiated self-repair, the preference ranking being as follows:

Preference 1 is for self-initiated self-repair in opportunity 1 (own turn) Preference 2 is for self-initiated self-repair in opportunity 2 (transition space) Preference 3 is for other-initiation, by NTRI (next turn repair initiator) in opportunity 3 (next turn), or self-repair (in the turn after that) Preference 4 is for other-initiated other-repair in oportunity 3 (next turn) (Levinson, 1983: 341) Here are some examples: 1) Self-initiated self-repair in opportunity 1: A: She came to visit last month, I mean last week, you know. B: Oh.

2) Self-initiated self-repair in opportunity 2: A: I simply don’t want to go to the cinema with him= = Well, I mean, I don’t like that movie, you know. I have nothing against him. B: I see.

3) Other-initiated other-repair in opportunity 3: A: Look at the bees! (pause) B: Wasps, I would say.

4) Other-initiation of self-repair in opportunity 3: A: What are your plans for tonight? B: Pardon? A: What are your plans for tomorrow? 98

5) Self-repair in opportunity 4, following other-initiation by NTRI A: How about meeting at “Chez Pierre”? B: Where? A: “Chez Pierre”. It’s a French restaurant.

5.2.2.2. Pre-sequences

Some sequences prefigure a turn which contains a reason for the sequence.

For

example, a summons prefigures a turn which contains the reason for the summons (Levinson, 1983), as in:

A: Jim!

(Summons)

J: Yes?

(Answer)

A: Could you come here to help me with the washing up? (Reason for summons)

Thus, summonses are generalized pre-sequences. Most pre-sequences can be said to prefigure the specific kind of action that they potentially precede. Other clear examples of pre-sequences are pre-closings, pre-invitations, pre-requests, pre-arrangements, preanouncements, etc., which we illustrate in the following examples:

1) Pre-invitation: A: Do you have any plans for tomorrow evening? B: No, why? A: How about going to the theater?

2) Pre-closing: A: …and so this is what I wanted to tell you B: O.K. See you tomorrow, then A: See you. And remember to bring your camera! B: Don’t worry, I will. 3) Pre-request: A: Will you be home tomorrow? B: Yes, in the morning. 99

A: So… would you mind if I come round and talk to you for a minute?

4) Pre-announcement: A: You won’t guess the news. B: No. What is it? B: I’ve been appointed Head of the Department.

5) Pre-arrangement: A: What are your free hours in the afternoon? B: From 2:00 to 5:00 on Thursdays and Fridays. A: Let’s meet on Friday at 2:00 pm, then. B: O.K. Great.

5.2.2.3. Insertion sequences

At times, the distribution of the characteristic action is not exactly over the paradigmatic four-turn sequence, and we may find insertion sequences which may be concerned with, for instance, repair, or establishing a temporary hold. The following is an example of an insertion sequence establishing a temporary hold:

(In a telephone conversation) T1 T2 T3 T4 T5 T6

Telephone rings (Summons) A: Hello (Answer to summons) B: Hello I’d like to speak to Mr. Freeborn, please. (Request) A: Could you hold on for a minute, please? (T4 & T5: Insertion sequence) B: Yes. (pause) A: I’m afraid he’s not in yet, Sir. Would you like to leave a message? (Answer to Request & Offer) B: No, thanks. I’ll call later. (Answer to offer)

As can be seen, in this telephone conversation there is a two-turn insertion sequence which separates the request (T3) from its answer (T6), and shows, at the same time, that the first and second parts of adjacent pairs do not necessarily have to be adjacent turns. 100

5.2.2.4. Overall organization

There is what conversational analysts call overall organization, due to the fact that it organizes the totality of the exchange within some specific kind of conversation. Thus, we may speak of classes of verbal interchanges (e.g. telephone calls, a talk over the garden fence, etc.) that have some special features, for example, in their opening or closing sections. The openings of telephone (and other related) conversations typically contain a summons-answer adjacency pair. This is normally followed by the first topic slot, which contains an announcement by the caller of the reason for the call. Then other topics are fitted to prior ones, until we finally get to the closing section of the overall organization of the call.

Prototypical closings may include the making of

arrangements, the giving of regards to family members, the use of markers such as Okay, All right, So, etc. organized in one or more pairs of passing turns and a final exchange of terminal elements (e.g. Bye, Cheers, Take care, etc.) Consequently, we may say that telephone conversations exhibit the following overall organization:

Opening section

Main body: Topic slot 1, Topic slot 2, Topic slot 3...

Closing section

The first topic slot is normally the most important one, for it is the topic which caused the caller to make the call. Then there may be a succession of other topics which, according to Sacks (1971), in their preferred organization, should be related to one another. A high frequency of marked topic shifts, are signs of a ‘lousy’ conversation (Levinson, 1983: 313).

5.3. Example of analysis We shall now go back to one of the fragments from The Larry King Show analyzed in Unit 3, in which an outside caller has a short conversation with Bill Maher: T1

(spectator call)

101

T2 2

KING: Toquerville, Utah, hello.

T3 2

CALLER: Gentlemen, the honor is mine. Thank you for the call. Bill, what do you think

about the administration's Homeland Security Department's little plan B to study to stop

the election under threat of terrorist attack? Does that remind you of our 2000 Florida

deal?

T4 6

MAHER: You mean you're talking about on election day?

T5 7

KING: Yes, in case there's some big occurrence.

T6 8

MAHER: Well, they've been pulling that card for how many...

T7 9

KING: Wait a minute, you had some sort of disaster you don't want to hold an election if

you've

got

bombs

dropping?

T8 11 MAHER: That's true. And I agree with that. If there's really a problem on election day. 12

But, again, this is an administration that has always said, OK, we're operating under this

premise. You can't criticize the administration during a time of war. Oh, and by the way,

we're always at war. The war is ongoing.

So I mean, I don't trust them. Let me put it that way. I don't trust them, or they haven't

earned my trust.

This televised telephone conversation consists of eight turns. The first two constitute the typical summons-answer adjacency pair of the opening of a telephone conversation. We do not actually hear the telephone ringing, but it is assumed that somebody behind the camera has notified Larry King that there is a caller from Toquerville, Utah, and therefore he answers the call by naming the place and greeting. In terms of overall organization, these two first turns constitute the opening of the telephone conversation. Then the caller responds to the greeting and thanks them for accepting his call, but quickly introduces the first topic slot (reason for the call- T3), which is the first part of a question-answer adjacency pair which in fact is not physically adjacent because there is an insertion sequence in between (T6 and 7). This insertion sequence is concerned with the clarification of the question. The answer to the question and second part of the pair started in T3 is found in T6, but before it is completed, it is interrupted by another insertion turn (T7) which contains another question related to the topic. Finally, in T8, Maher answers the initial question as well as the previous question inserted in T7. The telephone conversations in this television program are peculiar because they normally do not have a closing due to time constraints. The callers only get the answer to their questions but they are not granted the possibility of continuing the talk until a normal end. It is very clear that it is always 102

Larry King who is in control of the floor. Even when Maher asks a question to the caller (T4), Larry King feels entitled to answer the question on behalf of the caller without passing the floor on to him (T5). In this short analysis we can see how CA sheds light on the structure of conversation, which in turn may help the analyst answer questions such as: Who is in control of the floor, and therefore, who orients the conditional relevance of, for instance an answer after a question? What type of conversation structure and sequences do we find in conversations where one of the participants clearly exerts his/her power?How can the observations about conversation structure provide insight into particular instances of talk, such as, for example, pauses or silence? In the fragment analyzed here, it is obvious that it is Larry King who controls the floor and who exerts his power over the other participants by interrupting and inserting sequences in between adjacency pairs or by re-orienting the course of a question. In spite of the fact that CA gives importance to context and participants, no further speculations can be made here as to, for instance, the speakers personality or what they “really meant beyond their words”. The analyst has to stick to what is there, to the actual conversation, and describe it in terms of its structure and overall organization, drawing conclusions based only on these elements and not on any other far-fetched assumptions.

1. CA originated within Sociology with the work of Harold Garfinkel (1967, 1974) and his approach known as Ethnomethodology, and then it was applied to conversation by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. 2. Ethnomethodological research suggests that knowledge is neither autonomous nor decontextualized; it avoids idealizations and argues that what speakers produce are categories that are continuously adjusted according to whether the anticipation of an actor is confirmed by another’s actions or not. These categories are called typifications. Language is one of the typifications of social conduct. 3. One of the main assumptions of CA is that interaction is structurally organized. 4. The core of CA is the exploration of sequential structures of social action. 5. One of the central structures of interaction (and a central concept in CA) is the adjacency pair, which is closely connected to that of turn-taking. 103

6. Turn-taking is a form of social action which operates in accordance with a local management system. This system is essentially a set of conventions for getting turns, keeping them or giving them away. 7. Preference organization is a key concept in CA. It presupposes that there is a hierarchy operating over the potential second parts of an adjacency pair. Thus, there is at least one preferred and one dispreferred category of response to first parts. 8. There are other orders of organization, such as repair, pre-sequences or overall organizations, which can be defined only over three or four or more turns.

A) ANALYSIS: ANALYZE the following transcript of a fragment from the Hannity & Colmes show (Fox News, August 4th, 2004) with the CA perspective in mind. T1 1 HANNITY: All right. Let’s start with one. First of all, you start with, in your 2 book, page 193, you talk about “communism is the control of business by 3 government, fascism is the control of government by business”. My American 4 Heritage dictionary defines fascism as a system of government that exercises 5 dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of the state 6 and business leadership together with belligerent nationalism. Sound 7 familiar? (pause) 8 Are you accusing this president of being, and this administration of being, fascist like, 9 Nazi-like? T2 10 ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: The point is that if you read that in context, is 11 that Americans have to understand that there’s a huge difference between free 12 market capitalism, which is great for a democracy, which democratizes our 13 country, that brings efficiencies, and the corporate crony capitalism that has 14 been embraced by this administration, which is as antithetical to democracy in 15 America as it is in Nigeria. Today, you have polluters running the agencies 16 that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution. The second in 17 command at EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist. The head of the air division at the 18 EPA is a utility lobbyist… T3 19 HANNITY: I… T4 20 KENNEDY: Let me finish. T5 21 HANNITY: Go ahead. Go ahead. T6 22 KENNEDY: …who for his lifetime has been defending the worst polluters in America. 23 The head of the public lands now, Sean, is a mining industry lobbyist. The head of 24 forest service a timber industry lobbyist and on and on and on. T7 25 HANNITY: I understand your point. T8

104

26 KENNEDY: These people did not enter government for public service. They entered 27 to undermine and subvert the very laws that they ‘re charged with enforcing. T9 28 HANNITY: This is fundamental. Because I say the left today, your leadership, 29 including your uncle Ted Kennedy, has said irresponsible things about our president 30 and about our country. And I find it here. (pause) 31 Now I’m going to read a very long paragraph for the sake of our audience because I 32 don’t want to take it out of context and I want to make sure I get the full context in 33 here. OK? This is from your book. T10 34 KENNEDY: Sure. T11 35 HANNITY: You said, “these elected governments use the provocation of terrorist 36 attacks, continued wars”- You’re talking about Nazism and Fascism on page 193, 37 OK? T12 38 KENNEDY: No, no, no. Now you’re… T13 39 HANNITY: Wait a minute. Right here I have it in the book, 193 and 194, and you talk 40 about Spain, Germany and Italy reacting to the economic crises. T14 41 KENNEDY: Sure.

The following questions and suggestions will guide you through the analysis:

a) LOOK FOR the turn-transition-places or turn-relevance-places (TRPs) relying on the linguistic cues that make them identifiable. They may be indicated by some of the following linguistic qualities or devices:

syntactic (sentence, clause, or phrase completion)

ii)

intonational (final rise or fall), “trailing off”, elongation and/or pause.

iii)

semantic (complete proposition –a verb and its argument(s)?)

iv)

pragmatic (complete speech act or larger “speaking” unit)

b) FIND, if possible, examples where all four of these linguistic cues converge, as well as examples where, even though these cues are partially or completely absent, a next speaker begins anyway. c) IDENTIFY the adjacency pairs in the fragment and LOOK FOR any possible insertion sequences. d) Do you find any instances of repair? If so, what type? 105

B) COLLECTING ANALYSIS:

DATA:

TAPE-RECORDING

CONVERSATION

FOR

a) TAPE-RECORD a conversational exchange in a face-to-face interaction (if you find difficulty in tape-recording a conversation in English, do it with a conversation in Spanish). b) IDENTIFY the overall organization of the conversation (opening, closing, etc.) as well as the preferred organization of its adjacency pairs, indicating when the second parts are marked or unmarked. c) DISCUSS and JUSTIFY your analysis with your tutor or with some of your course mates.

•

Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson (1974)

•

Schiffrin (1984), Chapter 7

•

Levinson (1983), Chapter 6

•

Woofit, in Whetherell, Taylor & Yates (eds.) (2001), Chapter 2.

Conversation Analysis. Net: www.conversation-analysis.net Information on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis : www.pscw.uva.nl/emca International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation: www.iiemca.org Methodological Issues in Conversation Analysis: www.ai.univ-paris8.fr/corpus/papers/tenHave/mica

106

THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF COMMUNICATION

“There are rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless. Just as rules of syntax can control aspects of phonology, and just as semantic rules perhaps control aspects of syntax, so rules of speeech acts enter as a controlling factor for linguistic form as a whole.” Dell Hymes, On Communicative Competence.

MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT: •

To define and study the main ideas and concepts of the ethnographic approach to DA.

•

To appreciate the importance, consequences and further influence of Hymes’s concept of Communicative Competence.

•

To be able to analyze a given speech event from the ethnographic perspective.

107

6.1. An anthropological approach to DA The ethnographic approach to DA is based on Anthropology and Linguistics. Even though these two disciplines have different goals and methods, they share a common interest in communication. The way human beings communicate is part of the cultural repertoire for making sense of –and interacting– with the world. Culture can be said to be a system of ideas that underlies and gives meaning to behavior in society (Schiffrin, 1994: 138). Duranti (1997) explains that Ethnography is mainly a method which offers a set of valuable techniques which allow researchers to connect linguistic forms with cultural practices. The starting points for all analysis are involved participation and distanced observation. Dell Hymes is the key figure in the development of ethnographic studies. The main tenets of this approach are found in a series of papers written in the 1960s and 1970s, many of which are collected in his 1974 Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. However, the origins of this perspective to DA can be traced back to Sapir (1933) and the Prague School of Linguistics, which emphasized the penetration of language structure by function. Hymes characterizes Ethnography as an interactive-adaptive method of enquiry: “It [Ethnography] is a mode of enquiry that carries with it a substantial content. Whatever one’s focus of inquiry, as a matter of course, one takes into account the local form of general properties of social life – patterns of role and status, rights and duties, differential command of resources, transmitted values, environmental constraints. It locates the local situation in space, time and kind, and discovers its particular forms and center of gravity, as it were, for the maintenance of social order and the satisfaction of expressive impulse.” (1980: 100)

Ethnography, thus, encourages a participant-oriented rather than a narrowly text-oriented approach to meaning. This fact contrasts with many European traditions in DA in that the latter show a tendency to isolate texts as ‘objects’ for analysis. On the contrary,

the

ethnographic

Environmental constraints: time, location, resources, etc.

108

approach values the treatment of context -which is in itself an epistemological problememphasizing the idea that it is impossible to separate speech data from the history under which they were obtained.

6.2. The concept of Communicative Competence

Hymes (1970) argues that, since the speakers of a language form part of a given community or culture, in order to function in that language, they possess an ability that goes further than grammatical competence. He notes that up to that time linguists (such as Chomsky 1957, 1965) had ignored the study of the communicative patterns and systems of language use. Hymes insists that scholars focus on communicative competence, which not only involves the knowledge of abstract linguistic rules, but also the ability to use language in concrete situations of everyday life, such as the ability to check in at a hotel, argue, pray, and even use silence appropriately. His definition of the term takes into account four elements: •

whether and to what degree something is grammatical,

•

whether and to what degree something is socially appropriate,

•

whether and to what degree something is feasible (psycholinguistic limitations),

•

whether and to what degree something is done (actual language use).

Thus, Hymes’s main concern was not the structure of isolated sentences, but the rules of speaking within a community. Hymes’s concept of communicative competence has had a far-reaching influence in the world of Linguistics, Applied Linguistics and most discourse analytic traditions (especially in Interactional Sociolinguistics 13), to such an extent that no present-day scholar would deny its relevance, as it constitutes one of the single most important concepts in discourse research.

6.3. Main concepts and notions in ethnographic research

Hymes presents a descriptive orientation for the accumulation of data on the nature of ways of speaking within speech communities. He lists the fundamental notions and

See Unit 4 in this book.

109

concepts within an adequate descriptive theory for sociolinguistic enquiry, which are essentially the following: •

Speech community: a primary concept defined as “a community sharing rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech, and rules for the interpretation of at least one linguistic variety” (Hymes, 1972: 54).

•

Speech situation: an activity which is bounded or integral in some recognizable way. It may have verbal or nonverbal components and it may enter as context into statements

rules

speaking, albeit not in itself governed by such rules. It refers to the social occasion in which speech may occur, e.g. a family reunion. •

Speech event: this concept is restricted to activities which are directly governed by rules or norms for the use of speech, e.g. a conversation during the family reunion.

•

Speech act: this is the smallest unit and the most fundamental level for the management of discourse. E.g. a joke within the conversation at the family reunion.

•

Ways of speaking: This is the most general term, based on the premise that a community’s communicative conduct entails determinate patterns of speech activity. The communicative competence of people presupposes knowledge regarding such patterns.

•

Fluent speaker: a relative term, underlying the notion that different communities can hold distinct ideals of speaking for different statuses, roles and situations. It draws attention to differences in ability. Therefore, the expectations for a speaker to be considered fluent in one community may be different from the expectations in another community.

•

Rules of speaking: these rules focus on the observation that shifts in any of the

110

components of speaking (See 6.4. below) may mark the presence of a rule and should be taken into consideration. For instance, a shift from standard English to slang, or from normal tone to whisper, may mark important strategies or norms of use of a given sociolinguistic system. •

Functions of speech: these are determined by the relationships among components such as choices of code, topic or message form. The Ethnography of communication falls within the functionalist paradigm of research, which is concerned with the stylistic and social functions of language. Not all functions apply equally to all languages and all speech communities. Diversity is assumed and the differences between communities are explored.

6.4. The SPEAKING grid

Hymes (1972) proposed a classificatory grid as a descriptive framework for the Ethnography of Communication, which is known as the SPEAKING grid, where each letter is the starting letter for one of the different components of communication:

SITUATION  physical, temporal circumstances defining the speech event. PARTICIPANTS ENDS

 goals, purposes

ACT SEQUENCE KEY

 speaker, sender, addressee

 message form and content

 tone or manner of speaking (e.g. serious, ironic, etc.)

INSTRUMENTALITIES

 channels (verbal, written, etc.) forms of speech (dialects, registers, etc.)

NORMS OF INTERACTION AND INTERPRETATION

 properties attached to

speaking (e.g. organization of turntaking) and norms within cultural belief system GENRE  textual categories (e.g. business, poems, casual speech, etc.) This grid is a tool researchers have at their disposal for discovering the culturally 111

relative taxonomies of the three communicative units described in 6.3. above (speech situation, speech event and speech act). The larger units in the set embed the smaller, e.g., a speech act, such as insulting, may be included in the speech event of a debate, which is in turn embedded in the speech situation of a television program.

6.5. Method of analysis

As noted in 6.1., doing ethnographical research involves mainly field work (observing, participating in group activities, asking questions, checking the validity of the researcher’s perceptions by learning about native-speaker intuitions, etc.). Researchers have to get rid of their own cultural prejudices and be open to new modes of thought and behavior. However, Ethnography is not restricted to the study of “other” cultures. The researcher’s own community may be studied as well, but s/he has to be conscious of the fact that such a study may present problems regarding objectivity. A positive outcome of the study of one’s own community and of its assessment with respect to other communicative practices is the inevitable revelation that what is assumed to be ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ in one’s own community may be regarded as totally foreign or abnormal in another community. This idea leads to a deeper understanding of cultural relativism, which constitutes an essential feature of all ehnographic studies.

6.6. Further remarks on the Ethnography of Communication

The ethnographic approach to DA has shed light on the fact that the uses of language and speech in different societies have patterns of their own which are worthy of description and which are comparable and related to other patterns in social organization and other cultural domains. The particularistic focus of this approach is directed at the description and understanding of communicative behavior in specific cultural settings; the generalizing focus is directed toward the formulation of concepts and theories upon which to build a global metatheory of human communication (Saville-Troike, 2002). All that has been said in this chapter can lead us to the central research question of the Ethnography of Communication, which could be worded as follows: What knowledge does a speaker need to have in order to communicate appropriately in a particular speech community and what skills does he need to acquire in order to make 112

use of this knowledge? This question takes for granted that language form cannot be separated from how and why it is used. Understanding the patterns of use is essential for the recognition and understanding of linguistic form. In this respect, it seems timely to quote Saville-Troike: While recognizing the necessity to analyze the code itself and the cognitive processes of its speakers and hearers, the ethnography of communication takes language first and foremost as a socially situated cultural form, which is indeed constitutive of much of culture itself. To accept a lesser scope for linguistic description is to risk reducing it to triviality, and to deny any possibility of understanding how language lives in the minds and on the tongues of its users. (2002: 3).

Finally, some remarks about the significance of this approach, which goes

Socially situated cultural form: gathering at Picadilly Circus

beyond a simple taxonomy of communicative facts and behaviors. The Ethnography of Communication has been significant for different fields of research. For Anthropology, it has helped understanding the relationship between language, social organization, values, beliefs and other aspects of the socialization process. For psycholinguistics, ethnographic research has contributed to studies of language acquisition, in understanding that we must not only recognize the innate capacity of children for language, but also must account for the particular ways of speaking of particular societies and how these are developed in the process of social interaction. In addition, the Ethnography of Communication can contribute to the study of both form and use 113

universals, as well as to the formulation of an adequate theory of language and linguistic competence.

6.7. Sample analysis of data

The following conversation is an example of a service encounter conversation between a bookshop assistant and a customer. The speech situation can be classified thus, as a service encounter. The speech event could be defined as a shopping/bargaining for books exchange or conversation. 1 M: Good morning. Can I help you? 2 W: Oh, good morning. Yes, I hope so… I’m looking for a copy of Somerset Maugham’s The 3

Razor’s Edge.

4 M: Well, I think I may be able to help. Bear with me for a minute or two, will you…yes… let 5

me see… blast! Confounded machine… Now what’s it doing?

6 W: Computers! You know what they say… to err is human… but to really foul things up you 7

need a computer.

8 M: Oh very good… yes… I must remember that one… now oh… here she comes… yes… 9

oh… no that’s sold…well it looks like I’ve got… oh yes… what luck… a signed first edition.

Signed first edition!

11 W: Oh, well… er…how much would that be…? 12 M: Urm… let me… let me… that’s £110. 13 W: Oh… I see… well really I didn’t want anything quite… so… first edition did you say? 14 M: Yes, and signed by the author. 15 W: Oh, by Somerset Maugham himself? 16 M: That’s right. 17 W: Well of course that’s splendid but £110 did you say? 18 M: That’s right… I could I could er… make that a £105 I suppose… 19 W: Well that’s very good of you but really… you see I just wanted the book to read not as a 20

collector’s item if you see what I mean…

21 M: Well, I imagine it is still in print perhaps your local, er, bookstore might oblige with a, 22

ahem, paperback edition. Perhaps with, er, footnotes and a learned introduction by a

Cambridge don.

24 W: Yes, still, I mean it would be nice… it’s a present you see for my nephew… 25 M: Well really madam what could make a more wonderful gift for the young man! A first 26

edition signed by the great man himself. Food for the mind AND a splendid investmet.

27 W: An investment you say? 28 M: Oh undoubtedly madam. Undoubtedly. Such a volume can only increase in value.

114

29 W: Ooh well if you put it like that. But all the same I mean £105 -it’s a lot of money, I mean, 30

it’s more money than I had planned to pay you see.

31 M: Madam, had I known that the work was intended as a birthday gift for a young man… … I 32

could certainly make it a round £100.

33 W: 70. 34 M: I beg your pardon? 35 W: 70. I’ll give you £70. 36 M: £70? No really madam… I’m afraid I simply couldn’t part with it for less than… for less 37

than shall we say £90?

38 W: 80. 39 M: 85 cash. 40 W: Done. £85. Here we are… 60…80… and a fiver makes £85. 41 M: Thank you madam and many happy returns to the young gentleman.

(M. Aragonés & I. Medrano (2003), Lengua Inglesa I, dialogue Chapter 18)

In order to identify this event as a certain kind of discourse occurrence and to discover the communicative features and qualities that underlie our knowledge about service encounters, we are going to use Hymes’s SPEAKING grid. It is important to take into account the fact that bargaining is a key part of many service encounters, and therefore it will be useful to pay attention to the structure of speech events in which this communicative practice is used. Shopping/bargaining for a book

SETTING PARTICIPANTS

Bookshop

ENDS

Buying/selling. W wants to buy a present/ M wants to sell at best possible price

ACT SEQUENCE

M: greeting/offer W: greeting/response to offer/request M: positive response to request/complaint (about computer) W: Comment (about computer) M: provides information (about book) W: request for information (about price) M: provides information W: requests clarification

M: Bookshop assistant/owner W: customer

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M: provides clarification W: requests clarification M: provides clarification W: requests clarification M: provides clarification/offers lower price W: rejects offer M: accepts rejection/suggestion W: provides further information (about present) M: provides further information (about book) W: requests clarification M: provides clarification W: bargains (still rejecting last offer) M: offers (a lower price) W: bargains/requests (an even lower price) M: bargains/offers (lower price than last offer but higher than previous request) W: bargains/requests (lower than last offer but higher than previous request) M: bargains/offers (higher than previous request but lower than last offer) W: Accepts final offer/makes payment M: greeting.

KEY INSTRUMENTALITIES NORMS

Serious/ironic when bargaining

GENRE

Business exchange, narrow range (the talk is mainly directed at the main and specific goal of buying and selling)

Verbal, everyday British English Interaction based on needs for buying and selling

As can be noted in the table, the range of ACTS, the KEY, and the GENRE are all relatively narrow, because both participants direct their conversation toward the specific 116

goal (END) of buying and selling, which is mutually known by M and W. This is one example of the way in which the different components of communication are related. Regarding the sequence of acts, it can be noticed that, apart from the normal greetings at the opening and closing of the exchange, we find sequences of acts requesting and giving information mainly at the initial stages of the encounter. These sequences lead on to the core sequence of requests and offers, which form part of the real negotiation and bargaining for the assistant to sell the book and for the customer to buy it. The acts at this stage of the exchange may be interpreted and used in different ways, according to participant. In this analysis, the customer’s proposal to pay less has been interpreted as a request (she requests a lowering of the price) and the assistant’s lowering of the price has been interpreted as an offer (he offers the book at a lower price). However, the customer’s proposals could also be interpreted as offers, depending on the viewpoint taken (she offers to pay less than requested), which the assistant may accept or reject. An interesting thing that the analysis of act sequences in this service encounter sheds light on, thus, is on the essence of bargaining: somehow the participants are striving for power, and hence make their requests sound like offers in a more or less lengthy negotiation until they come to an agreement. In this particular case, we find a sequence of six acts of request/offer within the broader act of bargaining before making the final deal. This lengthy sequence can be said to be related to the NORMS of this type of encounter. A bargain would not be a bargain if there were no such sequence of acts during the service encounter. The KEY is also connected with the sequence of ACTS, the GENRE and the SETTING: the participants expect this type of exchange to be serious, but a bit of irony and/or deviation from the truth is expected in the bargaining (the customer knows the first price given is higher than the actual price and the assistant knows that the first price requested by the customer is lower than what she will eventually agree to pay).

The INSTRUMENTALITIES always have a

relationship with the other elements: the goals (ENDS) and SETTING, as well as the other elements of communication, determine whether it is a verbal or a written exchange, as well as the type of English (in this case) to be used.

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1. The ethnographic approach to DA is based on Anthropology and Linguistics. 2. The starting points for all ethnographic analyses are involved participation and distanced observation. 3. Dell Hymes is the key figure in the development of ethnographic studies. 4. Hymes insists that scholars focus on communicative competence, which not only involves the knowledge of abstract linguistic rules, but also the ability to use language in concrete situations of everyday life. 5. Fundamental concepts within the Ethnography of Communication are the concepts of Speech Community, Speech Situation, Speech Event and Speech Act. 6. Hymes (1972) proposed a classificatory grid as a descriptive framework for the Ethnography of Communication, which is known as the SPEAKING grid, where each letter is the first letter of one of the different components of communication (Situation, Participants, Ends, Act sequence, Key, Instrumentalities, Norms of interaction and interpretation and Genre). 7. An essential feature of all ethnographic studies is the profound conviction and belief in cultural relativism. 8. The central research question of the Ethnography of Communication, could be worded as follows: What knowledge does a speaker need to have in order to communicate appropriately in a particular speech community and what skills does he need to acquire in order to make use of this knowledge? 9. The findings of the Ethnography of Communication have been significant for different fields of research, such as Anthropology, Psycholinguistics, Applied Linguistics or Theoretical Linguistics.

A) ANALYSIS: •

ANALYZE the following television interview through an ethnographic perspective.

1 2 3

W: Hello, good evening and welcome to tonight’s edition of Lifestyle. On tonight’s program we have Edwin Lewis, the poet and novelist… Mr Lewis… E: Edwin… please call me Edwin.

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W: Edwin.. here we are on the Island of Mull. A beautiful, lonely island off the North

West coast of Scotland. We’re looking out across the bay… the mountains behind

us… the sea gulls cawing and wheeling in the sky… the waves rolling in and

breaking on the beach below. Why? Why have you come to such a remote spot to

live?

E: Well… I feel… I feel that… that when you set out on adulthood… when you leave

home and finish full-time education whether it’s school or university… that’s when

you first accept responsibility for the whole of the rest of your life… and that’s when

you have to ask yourself some pretty basic questions.

13 W: What sort of questions? 14 E: Well ‘what’, ‘who’ and ‘where’ questions for example… questions like: what do I want 15

to do; who do I want to be with; and where do I want to be?

16 W: You mean what work do you want to do, who do you want to share your life with, 17

and where do you want to live?

18 E: That’s right. I’d say those were sort of the three basic questions… And of course 19

you’ve got to put them in some sort of order…give them some sort of you know

priority…

21 W: Yes? 22 E: Yes… I mean decide which is the most important… if I’d been madly in love perhaps 23

I’d… perhaps I’d have given priority to the ‘who’ question… and that would have

overridden everything else…

25 W: But that wasn’t the case. 26 E: No, that wasn’t the case… and quite suddenly one day… I was on the tube… waiting 27

for a train at Piccadilly Circus… I just knew… it came to me in a flash… with utter

certainty I knew that for me the most important thing was where… that I had to be in

the right place…

30 W: Here? 31 E: That’s right. Here. I feel right here… this is the place for me… It’s here that I can 32

think my thoughts all the way to the end –bigger thoughts than I ever had in London.

I look out at the Atlantic… the waves… have you ever read Unamuno’s book “Cómo

se hace una novela”?

35 W: No, Im afraid… 36 E: Well, there’s a book… read that… read about the waves… “paciencia y barajar”… 37 W: And… you’ve stayed here ever since? 38 E: Basically, yes… I do travel… I travel a lot but this is home… my place. 39 W: and when you travel? 40 E: Yes, I like to go to Spain. Do you know the gardens of the Alcazar in Seville? That’s another place… another special place for me… whenever I’m there I always feel I’m in

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the right place… (M. Aragonés & I. Medrano (2003), Lengua Inglesa I, dialogue Chapter 8)

•

SPECIFY the different communicative components of the interview (SPEAKING grid)

•

FIND the relations between the different components (ends, participants, acts). Are any of the components influenced by any of the others?

•

EXAMINE the act sequence of the interview. Do you find any pattern that could characterize this type of interview?

B) DISCUSS your analysis with your tutor.

•

Schiffrin (1994), Chapter 4.

•

Hymes 1962, 1964 a & b, 1970.

•

Saville-Troike (2002).

Ethnography of Communication: http://print.google.com/print?id=lxpuT_s8AkEC&pg=119&lpg=119&prev=http://print. google.com/print%3Fq%3Dthe%2Bethnography%2Bof%2Bcommunication%26ie%3D UTF8%26lr%3D%26sa%3DN%26start%3D20&sig=Ob3pRKZlIp62KByAYOoD6qdXT6g Bibliography on Anthropology: http://print.google.com/print?id=io94HFih5FQC&pg=23&lpg=23&prev=http://print.go ogle.com/print%3Fq%3Dthe%2Bethnography%2Bof%2Bcommunication%26ie%3DU TF8%26lr%3D%26sa%3DN%26start%3D50&sig=Ma182tNdZmewuDpeJOq97JOVxM0 What is Ethnography of Communication?: http://print.google.com/print?id=2gBFDyxTQM4C&pg=1&lpg=1&prev=http://print.go ogle.com/print%3Flr%3D%26ie%3DUTF8%26q%3DWhat%2Bis%2Bthe%2Bethnography%2Bof%2Bcommunication%253F%2 6btnG%3DSearch&sig=UHjp0-M2CLBGUTtU2MqhJyLe3yY 120

VARIATION ANALYSIS

“In 1987, I had another opportunity to test the usefulness of linguistics on a matter that was vital to a single person. A number of bomb threats were made in repeated telephone calls to the Pan American counter at the Los Angeles airport. Paul Prinzivalli, a cargo handler who was thought by Pan American to be a “disgruntled employee,” was accused of the crime, and he was jailed. The evidence was that his voice sounded like the tape recordings of the bomb threat caller. The defense sent me the tapes because Prinzivalli was a New Yorker, and they thought I might be able to distinguish two different kinds of New York City accents. The moment I heard the recordings I was sure that he was innocent; the man who made the bomb threats plainly did not come from New York at all, but from the Boston area of Eastern New England. […] It was almost as if my entire career had been shaped to make the most effective testimony on this one case. The next day, the judge asked the prosecuting attorney if he really wanted to continue. He refused to hear further statements from the defense. He found the defendant not guilty on the basis of the linguistic evidence, which he found ‘objective’ and ‘powerful’.” William Labov, How I got into linguistics, and what I got out of it. MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT: •

To study and understand the phenomenon of linguistic change.

•

To familiarize with Labov’s framework for the analysis of narrative.

•

To learn the techniques of data collection and analysis within the Variation Analysis approach to discourse. 121

7.1. Defining Variation Analysis: The problem of linguistic change

Although the origins of the variationist approach are solely within the field of Linguistics, this approach differs from traditional Linguistics in many ways. The basic assumption of variationists is that there are patterns of language which vary according to the social environment and therefore such patterns can only be identified by studying a given speech community. Variation Analysis, thus, is concerned with the variation and changes observed in language along different speech communities. Originally, prototypical variation analyses were limited to the study of semantically equivalent variants, i.e., to the different words used to refer to the same thing according to geographical location or social level. However, such analyses have been extended to texts. The variationist approach has developed “in the search for text structure, the analysis of text-level variants and of how text constrains other forms” (Schiffrin, 1994: 282). The most prominent figure within this approach is William Labov, who developed the initial methodology and theory. Data collection and field work play an important role in Variation Analysis. Labov (1996) argues in favor of the inadequacy of intuition as a source of information about language structure as well as of the importance of the vernacular language (Labov 1972a) of a speech community as the variety showing the most systematic grammar of a dialect. Thus, Labov holds a materialistic conception of language, which views language as “a property of the speech community, an instrument of social communication that evolves gradually and continuously throughout human history, in response to a variety of human needs and activities” (2004: 1). The materialist approach starts by observing the variability which is characteristic of speech production and then applies formalisms based on probability theory to this variation. Multivariate analyses are then applied to the data in order to find out how each element of the environment contributes to the application of a rule. An adequate description of language should contain a dynamic and evolutionary perspective, and that is the reason why much of the research within this perspective has to do with the study of linguistic change. Labov demonstrated how language changes spread through society. He showed that linguistic changes are normally carried out by certain social groups, and that dialect variation is by no means free or haphazard. On the contrary, it is governed by ‘orderly 122

heterogeneity’ or structured variation (Weinreich, Labov and Herzog, 1968). One of Labov’s most important projects is the Telsur/Atlas project, which deals with the linguistic changes in progress in North-American English. It defines the major dialects of North-American English on the basis of some phonological characteristics and contains regional maps where the phonological features of these dialects can be examined in detail. The interpretation of the data is based on the acoustic analysis of hundreds of linguistic interviews with speakers of the different North-American regions. Variationists focus upon different units of analysis, as Labov remarks: “It is common for a language to have many alternate ways of saying “the same” thing. Some words like car and automobile seem to have the same referents; others have two pronunciations, like working and workin’. There are syntactic options such as Who is he talking to? vs. To whom is he talking? Or It’s easy for him to talk vs. For him to talk is easy.” (1972b: 188)

Thus, as noted above, variation or linguistic change can not only be studied at the level of semantically equivalent words, but also at other levels, like the phonological, the syntactic or even the textual level, as Labov himself has demonstrated through his analysis of narrative. Labov explains that the study of narrative is a priviledged area of discourse, because it is the closest to the vernacular (personal communication, 1998), and that is the reason why he has devoted a great part of his research to the study of narrative syntax. We now turn to this topic in more detail.

7.2. Labov and his framework for the analysis of narrative Labov’s concern with ‘verbal deprivation’ was the trigger for his interest in narrative. He argued against the generalized idea that black children were verbally deprived and consequently genetically inferior. He fought to eradicate the prejudices against Black English Vernacular (the dialect of English used by black people in America) in favor of “a more adequate notion of the relations between standard and nonstandard dialects” (Labov, 1972a: 201-02). By studying the verbal behavior of black people in narratives of personal experience, Labov was able to demonstrate that, far from being verbally deprived, some black people used Black English Vernacular in a very talented and effective way. Labov & Waletsky (1967) and Labov (1972a) provided a framework for the 123

analysis of oral narrative which illustrates the variationist approach to discourse units in a systematic way. These authors define a narrative as a particular unit in discourse which contains smaller units having particular syntactic and semantic properties. As Schiffrin notes, “narratives are a discourse unit with a fairly regular structure that is largely independent of how they are embedded in surrounding talk.” (1994: 284). The different sections of a narrative present different kinds of information which fulfil different functions within the story.

Labov defines narrative as “one method of

recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which (it is inferred) actually occurred” (1972b: 359-60). The skeleton of a narrative, then, consists of a series of temporally ordered clauses which Labov calls narrative clauses.

Kindergarteners listening to a narrative.

Broadly speaking, narratives contain a beginning, a middle and an end, but if we study them in detail, we shall find all or some of the following elements (Labov, 1972b, 1997b): 1. Abstract (one or two clauses summarizing the whole story) 2. Orientation (identification of the time, place, persons, their activity or the situation) 3. Complicating action (clauses describing different events) 4. Evaluation (the means used by the narrator to indicate the point of the narrative: why it was told, and what the narrator is aiming at) 5. Result or resolution (the set of complicating actions that follow the most reportable event) 6. Coda (a free clause at the end which signals that the narrative is finished) 124

Not all narratives contain all six elements; the basic characteristic of narratives is their temporal sequence, which is an important defining property proceeding from its referential function. However, as Labov explains, not all recapitulation of experience is a narrative.

In order for a recapitulation of experience to be a narrative it must

recapitulate experience in the same order as the original events (Labov, 1997c: 13). Examine the different components of narrative in the following example, taken from Labov (1997c: 10): 1 (Did you ever have a feeling, or a premonition, that 2 something was gonna happen, and it did?) 3 Yes, I did. (Tell me about it) 4 I was goin’ with a girl, one time; we were 5 layin’ on a bed –we weren’t doing anything, we 6 were talkin’ –and, I don’t know, I looked into her 7 face, and I saw, like, horns coming out of her 8 head. You know. You know – like– I said, 9 “You look like the devil!” 10 She said, “What do you mean, I look like 11 the devil?” 12 Don’t kid around.” I said. “I’m not kiddin’. 13 I saw horns comin’ out of your head.” 14 And the girl got very angry and walked 15 out. But, we got together, and we went together 16 for about four months. 17 And, like, this girl tried to put me in a 18 couple of tricks. Like she tried to get some boys 19 to hurt me. You know. And she was a devil. 20 So, now, anything I see I believe it’s going 21 to happen.

This narrative presents all the elements described above except for the abstract, which is in some way given by the interviewer’s question (Did you ever have a feeling…?). The other five elements appear in the following order:

Lines 4-6: Orientation Lines 6-16: Complicating action Lines 17-19: Result or resolution Line 19 (“She was a devil”): Evaluation Lines 20-21: Coda The analysis of narrative shows how variationists extend beliefs about language structure to the analysis of texts. Social context influences the construction of speech actions and rules and thus it becomes an important part of the study of discourse units:

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the display of linguistic competence is affected by the setting where a story is told.

7.3. The vernacular The linguistic analysis made by variationists is not based on linguists’ intuitions of grammatically correct sentences, but mainly upon what people actually say. Therefore, it is of utmost importance for researchers to get samples of authentic speech data. However, when people know that their language is being recorded or observed, they may alter their register and use different forms, structures or strategies than when not being observed. This fact made variationists seek the mode of speech called the vernacular. The vernacular is the variety acquired in pre-adolescent years and which is used by speakers of a given language when they pay minimum attention to speech (Labov, 1984: 29). In order to collect samples of the vernacular, variationists resort to sociolinguistic interviews, which allow them to discover the regular rules of language and the social distribution of variants. As Schiffrin explains: “Sociolinguistic interviews are a mixed genre of talk […]. One way in which they differ from other interviews is that they encourage topic shifting and group interactions among people present. Another difference is that respondents are encouraged to tell narratives of personal experience. This is not only because narratives reveal community norms and styles of personal interaction, but also because speakers regularly shift toward the vernacular when telling a story (Labov 1984: 32).” (1994: 289-90)

7.4. Information structures

One of the main concerns of variationists is to search for the information structures that prevail in discourse, considering that syntactic and semantic differences among linguistic items are sensitive to text structure. Such differences may be analyzed within one text type or across text types. Therefore, differences among text types can be discovered by examining how certain linguistic forms fit a given distributional pattern. As noted in 7.2, temporal structure is a central criterion to the definition of narrative. The linear presentation of event clauses in a narrative is crucial for the assignment of reference time.

However, in a different type of text, the temporal

structure may be of no importance or may fulfil a completely different function. Schiffrin (1994), for instance, compares the temporal structures of narratives and lists,

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and concludes that, whereas the temporal structure of a narrative is central to its identity as a discourse unit and to its semantic interpretation, it has little relevance to the structure of lists. Descriptive structures can also form part of narratives, but they are not central to them, since description in narratives is typically assigned to a background orientation function (Labov 1972b). Narrative descriptive orientation may preface the narrative action itself, or it may be embedded within the complicating action. A speaker might, for example, interrupt the narration of sequential events in order to describe the physical and/or spiritual features of a given character in the story. Schiffrin notes that, since stories are often said to be constructions of an experience rather than representations of a reality, narrators may impose their own subjectivity on what happens at a variety of levels (1994: 306). A lot of subjectivity is involved in the process of making a point when telling a story, and the point of a story is indicated by means of some sort of evaluation.

Evaluative structures are then

important in the construction of narratives. Whereas evaluation is normally necessary and required in stories, it may be optional and less important in other types of text, like, for example, recipes. The different information structures of texts display the arrangements of units in recurrent patterns. These units are related to one another so as to make texts coherent. Thus, an interesting and key task for variationists is the comparison and contrast of the use of the different information structures across text types, as well as within a given text type.

This type of analysis leads to a more systematic study of the

characteristics of different texts and their functions, which in turn leads to the basic assumption in Variation Analysis that equivalence (or difference) in syntactic form does not always imply functional equivalence (or difference). Likewise, equivalence (or difference) in function does not always presuppose equivalence (or difference) in form. To put it in a simpler way, there is not a biunivocal relationship between form and function in linguistics: a given form may fulfil different functions, and a given function may be realized by different forms.

7.5. Sample analysis of data Examine the following narrative, in which a High School student tells what happened to his English teacher one of the times he was at gunpoint. 127

A: Did you ever meet a real brave person? B: Oh, yeah. That’s my English teacher. You know, he’s the one that’s uh… been four times at gunpoint. One time there was this guy who uh, wanted him to get out of his property, so uh…he got out his rifle and threatened to shoot him. My teacher just got pissed, went up to him and put his hand on the barrel. The guy was drunk and didn’t even know what he was doing so he fired the rifle. But then when he actually saw a bullet come out, he was surprised ‘cause he thought the gun wasn’t loaded. The bullet went through my teacher’s hand and left a terrible wound. If you look now, uh… you can see he has quite a scar there. (Personal communication with a student at the American School of Madrid, January 2005)

Albeit not very long, this story contains many of the elements and devices of narratives. It has an abstract (You know, he’s the one that’s uh… been four times at gunpoint.) which summarizes the point the student wants to make (that his teacher is brave because he was at gunpoint four times and faced the events). The abstract is followed by a succession of events related to one of the times he was at gunpoint, which constitute the complicating action. The result or resolution is expressed by means of the clause The bullet went through my teacher’s hand and left a terrible wound, and the final clause functions as a coda, showing how the effect of the actions described in the narrative has been extended to the present moment (If you look now, uh…you can see he has quite a scar there). If we do some variation analysis within the same type of text (narratives) and compare this narrative to that of Labov’s reproduced in 7.2, we shall see that they do not have exactly the same elements. The one element all narratives have in common is their sequential structure, manifested in the complicating action and the resolution, because that is the characteristic that defines a narrative. The other elements may vary, as they do between these two particular narratives. Labov’s story in 7.2. does not have an abstract, but it does have some clauses fulfilling the function of orientation as well as that of evaluation. The narrative presented in this section has a coda, while Labov’s in 7.2. does not. This type of discourse analysis, if taken further and done in more detail, can lead the researcher to draw conclusions as to the different types of narratives there are, as well as to the different devices used in each type. If the analysis were to be complete and faithful to Variation Analysis proper (following all the steps, as we shall see in 7.7.), we would need a more extensive corpus (containing numerous narrations) and we should go through the process of quantitifying the occurrences of the variants and dealing with statistical tests, a procedure we shall not follow in this book because it 128

goes beyond the scope of the objectives set for this unit.

7.6. Final remarks on the Variational Approach Variation Analysis combines both qualitative and quantitative techniques. Quantitative analyses are basic within this approach, and they require the definition of the variants (or different realizations of a type), a classification of the conditions under which those variants may be found, and frequencies of occurrence of the different variants in relation to some factors of the environment. In addition, certain assumptions have to be made as to the relationship between text and context which necessarily limit the interpretation of such analyses. Therefore, even when quantitative studies of variants are of crucial importance, they also present some limitations, such as, for example the lack of attention given to particular cases that might be of interest, because variationists generally focus on general trends or patterns. In general, variationists avoid making statements about typical patterns unless they are based on frequency of occurrence and evaluated by statistical tests. An important notion in Variation Analysis is that of constraint. Thus, for example, it is assumed that the overall information structure of a text imposes certain constraints on its parts, and so we see that the overall temporal structure of a narrative places constraints on its composing elements and even on the syntactic forms used to form those elements. Another example can be found in recipes: recipes normally have to contain a list of ingredients, and therefore they always present constraints on the referring terms of the list, which necessarily have to be terms related to food. At the same time, their overall structure is normally constrained to the use of both descriptive structure (lists) and narrative structure (the steps followed for making the dish, which are generally presented in temporal order).

7.6.1. Steps to follow when doing variation analysis

According to Patrick, a typical sequence for variationists would be the following: 1) Establish which forms alternate with one another –i.e., which are “the same”. 2) Delimit the environments in which this alternation-with-sameness occurs, and classify the factors within those environments exhaustively. 3) Propose hypotheses for contextual factors which might constrain the variation.

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4) Compile a data set that allows for investigation and (dis-)confirmation of the alternations and co-occurrences predicted by hypotheses in (3). 5) Compare the frequencies/probabilities with which the different variants co-occur with the different (environmental) factors. 6) Typically, place primary emphasis on internal linguistic factors, and only secondary importance on external social explanations. 7) Typically, consider analysis primarily exploratory rather than confirmatory (due to lack of precisely predictive sociolinguistic theories) (2004:3).

1. The origins of the variationist approach are solely within the field of Linguistics. 2. Variation Analysis is concerned with the variation and changes observed in language along different speech communities. 3. The most prominent figure within this approach is William Labov. 4. Labov holds a materialistic conception of language. 5. The materialist approach starts by observing the variability which is characteristic of speech production and then applies formalisms based on probability theory to this variation. 6. Variationists focus upon different units of analysis: phonological, syntactic, semantic and textual. 7. Labov considers that the study of narrative is a priviledged area of discourse, because it is the closest to the vernacular. 8. The vernacular is the variety acquired in pre-adolescent years and which is used by speakers of a given language when they pay minimum attention to speech (Labov, 1984: 29). 9. The skeleton of a narrative consists of a series of temporally ordered clauses which Labov calls narrative clauses. 10. The elements (Labov, 1972b, 1997b) that are normally found in the structure of a narrative are: Abstract, Orientation, Complicating action, Evaluation, Result or resolution and Coda. 11. Differences among text types can be discovered by examining how certain linguistic forms fit a given distributional pattern. 12. The different information structures of texts display the arrangements of units in

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recurrent patterns. These units are related to one another so as to make texts coherent. 13. An important notion in Variation Analysis is that of constraint. A given text type, for example, poses constraints upon the syntactic units used in the text.

A) ANALYSIS: Many jokes adjust to the structure of narratives. ANALYZE the following jokes (a and b) and compare their structure following Labov’s main lines for narrative analysis. How does it vary from one joke to the other?

Don't Leave 'Em Hanging

Ralph and Edna were both patients in a mental hospital. One day while they were walking past the hospital swimming pool, Ralph suddenly jumped into the deep end. He sank to the bottom of the pool and stayed there. Edna promptly jumped in to save him. She swam to the bottom and pulled Ralph out. When the Head Nurse became aware of Edna's heroic act she immediately ordered her to be discharged from the hospital, as she now considered her to be mentally stable. When she went to tell Edna the news she said, "Edna, I have good news and bad news. The good news is you're being discharged; since you were able to rationally respond to a crisis by jumping in and saving the life of another patient, I have concluded that your act displays sound mindedness. The bad news is, Ralph, the patient you saved, hung himself right after you saved him with his bathrobe belt in the bathroom. I am so sorry, but he's dead." Edna replied "He didn't hang himself. I put him there to dry. How soon can I go home?"

b) Take Off My Clothes My wife came home the other night and told me to take off her blouse. Then she told me to take off her skirt. Then she told me never to wear her clothes again.

B) ANALYSIS: The jokes presented in A are clear examples of narratives. However, not all jokes adjust to the structure of narratives. EXAMINE the structure of the following joke and COMPARE it to that in A. How do their structures differ?

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White House Visitors A: What do you call someone in the White House who is honest, ethical, intellectual, law-abiding, and truthful? B: A tourist.

•

Labov (1972b).

•

Schiffrin (1994), Chapter 5.

•

Labov (1972a), (1981), (1984), (1997b & c), (2004).

•

Labov & Waletzky (1967).

•

Schiffrin (1981) & (1996).

Variation Analysis: http://www.orlapubs.com/AL/L32.html http://www.orlapubs.com/AL/L59.html http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~patrickp/TDbiblio.html

Narrative Analysis (Labov, Univ. of Pennsylvania): http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/sfs.html http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/specialarticles/jcn_8_674.pdf http://www.clarku.edu/~mbamberg/LabovWaletzky.htm

William Labov’s home page: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/home.html

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FUNCTIONAL SENTENCE PERSPECTIVE: THEMATIC AND INFORMATION STRUCTURES

The city of Prague, native town of functionalism.

“A scientist in the true sense needs to be in love with a rich store of data. As one who sought to understand language and the mind, I would aim to find out all I could about as many languages as I could, not just by reading grammars and hearing what others said about languages, but especially by coming in contact with diverse languages themselves. I would also continue to observe more and more about my own language. I would want to pay particular attention to what people really do when they use language, my own or another, in order to sensitize myself to the distinction between natural and artificial data. I would carefully observe not just linguistic form, but also function.” William Chafe, Discourse, Consciousness and Time. MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT: •

To study the main tenets of Functionalism.

•

To study Functional Sentence Perspective as a theory of linguistic discourse analysis.

•

To understand the concept of communicative dynamism.

•

To analyze the thematic and information structures of a given fragment of discourse. 133

8.1. Functionalism Functionalism was one of the great linguistic paradigms of the 20th century, still in force in the 21st century, which grew as an alternative to the abstract, formalized view of language presented by Transformational Grammar which, according to functionalists, could not explain certain linguistic facts. Functionalism relies, contrary to Formalism, on a pragmatic view of language as social interaction, and therefore the approach focuses on the rules which govern verbal interaction. These rules are seen as a form of co-operative activity, and their study helps the researcher describe the linguistic structures of language in relation to the context in which they occur. Meaning, rather than form, is taken into account, and both the extra-linguistic context and the purpose of communication play a crucial role in this approach. The origins of functionalism can be traced back to the Linguistic School of Prague, in the work of scholars such as Vilèm Mathesius, Frantisek Danes or Jan Firbas. These scholars emphasized the functional aspects of the organization of information. Danes (1974) developed the concept of Communicative Dynamism and Firbas (1964, 1986) developed the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective, which studies the distribution of information, organized in more or less dynamic elements called theme and rheme.

8.1.1. Functional Sentence Perspective

Functional Sentence Perspective is a theory of linguistic analysis which refers to an analysis of utterances or texts in terms of the information they contain. The role of each part of a given utterance is evaluated for its semantic contribution to the whole. The notion of communicative dynamism is a key concept in this theory, for it attempts to rate the different levels of contribution within a structure, in particular those related to the concepts of theme and rheme. Firbas defines communicative dynamism as “the relative extent to which a linguistic element contributes towards the further development of the communication” (1992:8). He also explains: “It is an inherent quality of communication and manifests itself in constant development towards the attainment of a communicative goal; in other words, towards the fulfillment of a communicative purpose. Participating in this development, a linguistic element assumes some position in it and in accordance with this position displays a degree of communicative dynamism.” (1992: 7)

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Thus, communicative dynamism assumes that when speakers say something, they have a communicative purpose and that the elements of their language contribute to that purpose. It is important to note that, even when functional sentence perspective relies on introspections regarding the goals of communicative acts, they avoid any broader social or cognitive commitments. Functional Sentence Perspective provides a functional explanation for word order: all other things being equal, the order of words in a sentence corresponds to an increase in communicative dynamism.

There are four factors which determine

communicative dynamism: 1) linear modification, 2) the contextual factor, 3) the semantic factor and 4) prosodic prominence (in spoken language) (Chafe, 1994: 162). Linear modification 14 is a term used by Firbas to capture the relation between word order and communicative dynamism, as illustrated in the following example:

A: Any news about your mom? B: Yes, she has travelled to Brussels. B’s response might have different purposes, but the most obvious seems to be “to state the destination of B’s mom’s trip”. In B’s reply, then, the word she contributes the lowest degree of communicative dynamism; has travelled contributes an intermediate degree, and to Brussels the highest degree, since it serves the purpose of the response (destination). The contextual factor has to do with the concepts of “retrievability and irretrievability from the immediately relevant context” (Firbas 1992: 21), which have created the opposition context-dependent versus context-independent. The semantic factor deals with the so-called dynamic functions. The notions of theme and rheme are crucial here. The theme is considered to be the part of a sentence which adds least to the advancing process of communication, having the lowest degree of communicative dynamism. By contrast, the rheme carries the highest degree of communicative dynamism. We shall deal with these two concepts in more detail in section 8.1.1.1. Prosodic prominence is a factor which can be studied only in spoken language and it integrates functional sentence perspective with intonation studies. It deals, for 14

The term linear modification was first used by Dwight Bolinger (1952: 1125) to explain a somewhat

different phenomenon from that explained by Firbas under the same term.

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example, with the function that certain tones or other prosodic features (such as pitch prominence) fulfill in discourse.

8.1.1.1. Thematic Structure: Theme vs. Rheme

The thematic structure of a clause contains two main elements: theme and rheme. Following Halliday (1967: 212), we shall say that the theme of a clause is what speakers/writers use as the ‘point of departure’. The rest of the message constitutes the other element of the thematic structure, namely, the rheme. Different elements can be chosen as the point of departure or initial constituent of a clause, as illustrated in the following examples: THEME

RHEME

a) Peter

doesn’t like that car

b) That car

Peter doesn’t like

c) What Peter doesn’t like

is that car

d) It’s the car

Peter doesn’t like

The four clauses in the examples above have the same propositional content; however, the choice of theme made by the speaker or writer in each case changes its meaning to a certain extent, because it shows the angle from which the speaker projects his/her message. From the point of view of discourse analysis, the possibility of making these choices is proof of the fact that a speaker producing one or other choices will be making different assumptions about the stage of knowledge of his/her hearer. It is clearly the case that all four clauses could not be the answer to the same question, and therefore each of them assumes different presuppositions on the part of the interlocutor. For example, d seems to presuppose the shared belief of both interlocutors that Peter does not like something, and c restricts what Peter does not like among other things the hearer might have in his/her mind or might consider ‘not likeable’. Apart from the clausal themes, we may find what Downing and Locke (1992) call discourse themes, which consist of items such as conjuncts, disjuncts, vocatives, or other pragmatic markers (such as Well, Ah, etc.) that have a continuative function in the discourse, as shown in examples e, f , g and h:

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a) She is sick. Consequently, she won’t go to work today. Discourse theme –conjunct

b) Frankly, I don’t understand your point. Discourse theme –disjunct

c) Peter, please, tell me what you want. Discourse theme –vocative

d) Well, let’s see what we have today… Discourse theme –continuative

8.1.1.1.1. Multiple themes In terms of the metafunctions 15 associated to them, we may speak of three main kinds of theme:

a) Topical themes (ideational function: e.g. subject, complement or circumstancial adjunct.

These are items which represent some function in the semantic

structure of the clause). b) Textual themes (continuative, structural –conjunctive or wh- relative-). c) Interpersonal themes (vocatives, modal (adjunct), finite verb or whinterrogative).

The theme always contains an ideational element. This element is some entity which functions as subject, complement or circumstantial adjunct. Halliday (1985: 54) refers to this entity as the Topical Theme (due to the fact that it generally corresponds to the element identified as topic in topic-comment analysis). The ideational function represents our experience of the world, namely, processes, actions, events, processes of consciousness and relations. The other two themes (textual and interpersonal) may cooccur with the ideational one, although they are not essential. In such cases we may talk of multiple themes. When the three of them appear together, the typical sequence of these elements is textual/ interpersonal/ ideational, although the interpersonal theme 15

By metafunction Halliday means the three kinds of meaning (ideational, textual and interpersonal) that are embodied in human language as a whole, forming the basis of the semantic organization of all natural languages (1985: 53).

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may be marked (see 8.1.1.1.4 below) in certain circumstances and thus may appear before the textual theme. But the ideational or topical theme always has to be the final one. Consider the following examples of multiple themes:

Well

then

you little brat

what

continuative

conjunctive

vocative

object

Textual theme

Interpersonal

(Ideational)

theme

Topical theme

THEME

RHEME

Unfortunately

though

she

Modal

conjunctive

subject

Textual theme

Topical theme

Interpersonal theme

do you want?

rejected my offer

RHEME

THEME

8.1.1.1.2. Thematic clauses When two or more clauses are joined together in a complex clause, the clause that is placed first is said to be thematic with respect to the whole complex clause. This applies for cases of coordination as well as for cases of subordination.

Examine these

examples: 1) Coordination Tommy hit his sister

and she burst out in tears

THEME

RHEME

2) Subordination When I saw him

I realized he had been crying

THEME

RHEME

Clauses related by coordination are said to be paratactically 16 related. Clauses related by subordination are said to be hypotactically 17 related. Paratactically related clauses are typically placed in the chronological order in which the events described occur. In example 1, the event described in the rheme clause (Tommy’s sister bursting out in 16

A paratactic relationship is that holding between clauses of equal status.

A hypotactic relationship is that holding between clauses of unequal status.

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tears) is understood to have occurred after the event described in the theme clause (Tommy hitting his sister). In hypotactically related clauses, however, the speaker/writer does not necessarily have to maintain chronological order, thus in example 2 both the main and the subordinate clauses could be used as the starting point of the message (or theme). Therefore, I realized he had been crying when I saw him is equally possible, the only difference being the intention, on the part of the speaker/writer, to place what he considers to be new and important information at the end and as part of the rheme in each case. The thematic organization of the different clauses in a text is of great importance to the discourse analyst, because it reveals the method of development of the text: “…by analyzing the thematic structure of a text clause by clause, we can gain an insight into its texture and understand how the writer made clear to us the nature of his underlying concerns” (Halliday, 1985: 67).

8.1.1.1.3. Theme, subject and topic It is important to note that theme is a different category from syntactic Subject and from Topic, even though “these three tend to coincide in one wording” (Downing & Locke, 1992: 222). Whereas theme is the starting point of the message, subject is a syntactic element of clause structure (the other elements being Predicator, Complements, Objects and Adjunct) and Topic refers to what the text is about (it may refer to the whole or only to a given part of the text). The following examples illustrate the fact that the three elements may coincide (a) or, contrariwise, may not (b):

a) The new president has been strongly criticized for his foreign policy. Subject Theme Topic

b) In Europe, the people criticized the new president for his foreign policy. Theme subject topic As can be seen in b, the theme does not coincide with the syntactic subject. Instead, the theme is, syntactically, an adjunct (circumstance) which is realized by a prepositional

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phrase (In Europe). The topic does not coincide with the subject either: when turning a into its active counterpart in b, the agent that was not named in a appears as the subject of the clause and the topic is now the direct object (the new president). However, clauses may have more than one type of topic. Topics which are introduced into the discourse for the first time are called new topics. These topics may become old or known topics as the discourse proceeds, or they may be abandoned completely. In b, for example, the people could be taken as an old topic and the new president as the new topic. We may also speak of superordinate, basic level and subordinate topics (Downing & Locke, 1992: 224). Superordinate topics refer to the topic of a whole text; basic level topics refer to individual participants within the scene, and subordinate topics to aspects or parts of basic level topics.

8.1.1.1.4. Marked and unmarked themes

Depending on the purposes of communication, certain types of information may be foregrounded or thematized. When the theme does not coincide with the expected first constituent of each mood structure, 18 we speak of a marked theme. If, on the contrary, the theme coincides with such a constituent, it is an unmarked theme. For example, the expected first constituent of a declarative clause is the subject, so if in such a clause the subject appears as the first constituent, the theme will coincide with the subject - as is the case in example a in 8.1.1.1.3. - and we shall say that the theme is unmarked. Contrariwise, in example b the adjunct In Europe has been thematized or foregrounded, and thus we say that the theme is marked. Here are two more examples:

1) Sally

will never pass that exam.

UNMARKED THEME

RHEME

Never

will Sally pass that exam.

The different mood structures with their corresponding (normal or expected) first constituents are a) Declarative  subject (e.g. Tommy fell off his bike), b) Polar interrogative  Finite + subject (e.g. Do you believe in ghosts?), c) Wh- interrogative  Wh- element (e.g. Who told you such a thing?) and d) Imperative  Predicator or let + Subject (e.g. Do it now!/ Let’s do it now!). For a more detailed description of this topic see Downing and Locke (1992).

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MARKED THEME

RHEME

2) He

popped the question.

UNMARKED THEME

RHEME

The question

he popped.

MARKED THEME

RHEME

In example 1, the adjunct never is fronted and thus thematized; in example 2, it is the direct object (the question) that is thematized, both fronted elements thereby turning into marked themes.

8.1.1.1.5. Thematization/ staging As has been suggested so far, the order in which words are put into sentences is of capital importance for the organization of the information. The same applies for the order in which sentences are put into texts, because this order will influence the hearer’s or reader’s interpretation of the whole discourse in question. The speaker/writer always has to choose a beginning point: what s/he puts first will influence the interpretation of the text which follows it. This process, which has to do with the linear organization of sentences and texts, has been called thematization. A more inclusive and more general term than thematization is staging, 19 which, in Grimes’s terms, refers to the fact that “Every clause, sentence, paragraph, episode, and discourse is organised around a particular element that is taken as its point of departure” (1975: 323). It is interesting to note how the linear organization can be manipulated to bring certain items or events into greater prominence than others by means of the process of thematization or staging. The title of an article in a newspaper, or the title of a book can be considered to be a powerful thematization device used by the author or the article or book. Thematization creates certain expectations in the readers or hearers in that the thematized elements provide a starting point which constrains their interpretation of the discourse that follows. Brown & Yule illustrate this fact by presenting the results of an 19

Although some authors, like Brown & Yule (1983), use both terms (thematization and staging) to mean the same.

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exercise they conducted using the following text: A Prisoner Plans His Escape Rocky slowly got up from the mat, planning his escape. He hesitated a moment and thought. Things were not going well. What bothered him most was being held, especially since the charge against him had been weak. He considered his present situation. The lock that held him was strong, but he thought he could break it (1983: 139).

Brown & Yule used this text to conduct an exercise in which they asked their subjects several questions about it, and they found that “there was a general interpretation that Rocky was alone, that he had been arrested by the police and that he disliked being in prison” (1983: 139). Another group of subjects were given the same text to read but with a different title, namely, A Wrestler in a Tight Corner. This group gave quite different answers to the questions: they said Rocky was a wrestler who was being held in some kind of wrestling ‘hold’ and was planning to get out of it. They also thought that Rocky was not alone and that that he had had nothing to do with the police. This experiment shows how by providing different themes or starting points in the thematized elements of the two different titles, the authors constrained the ways in which the texts were interpreted by the subjects.

8.1.1.2. Information Structure: Given vs. New

Michael Halliday is one of the most prominent functional linguists of our time. In his search for correspondences between linguistic elements and their functions, he has found that the tone group, apart from being a phonological constituent, “functions as the realization of something else, namely, a quantum or unit of information in the discourse” (Halliday, 1985: 274). Halliday explains that spoken discourse takes the form of a sequence of information units, and he uses the term information to mean “a process of interaction between what is already known or predictable and what is new or unpredictable” (1985: 274-75). The information unit, thus, is a structure made up of two functions: the New and the Given. From the structural point of view, it can be said that all information units have an obligatory new element and an optional given element. The latter is concerned with information which is presented by the speaker as ‘recoverable’ (either from the linguistic co-text, from what has been said before, or from the situational or cultural context).

The former (the new element) is concerned with 142

whatever information the speaker presents as not recoverable by the hearer. We say that the Given is optional from the structural point of view because, by its own nature, this element is referential or ‘phoric’ (i.e. it refers to something already present in the verbal or non-verbal context), and reference is often achieved through ellipsis. Ellipsis is a grammatical form in which certain features are not realized in the structure. The Given typically precedes the New, and the New is always marked by tonic prominence. The element which has this prominence is said to be carrying information focus. Consider this example, in which the syllable in capitals represents the intonation nucleus of the tone unit:

A: Where have you guys been? B: Well, I went to the GROcery store, and Tim was in the LIbrary. GIVEN NEW GIVEN NEW In A’s utterance, you guys is a deictic expression that refers to B (I) and to Tim, so by the time of B’s reply, I and Tim are a Given, and the New elements are found towards the end of each coordinate clause. As noted above, on many occasions the Given is ellipted, and therefore the clause structure consists only of the New element, as in the following example: A: What are you writing? B: (I am writing) (Ellipted Given)

An essay for my English class. NEW

Here the first part of B’s response has been ellipted, since it would involve a repetition of part of A’s clause, and therefore would be redundant and unnecessary. Thus, the whole of B’s response can be said to be New.

8.1.1.2.1. Marked and unmarked focus

Regarding the information focus in normal, unemphatic discourse, the unmarked distribution starts with the Given and progresses towards the New. Downing & Locke (1992: 244) explain that this is often called the principle of end-focus. The focus

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normally marks where the New element ends (because it typically falls on the last lexical item in the clause) but it is not always clear where it begins, or where the boundary between Given and New would be. The distinction of such a boundary is highly dependent on other elements of the text or context, which are not always available to the analyst. If, for example, we take an utterance out of context, we will be able to tell that it culminates with the new, but will not be able to tell whether there is a Given element first. Suppose you overhear the following statement: All the people were running for their Lives.  NEW  Here we know that for their lives is New, because the prominence falls on that element, but we would not be able to tell whether the New extends also to were running and all the people. The whole statement would be New if it were the answer to the following question: What happened immediately after the 9/11 attacks in New York? However, if the questions changed as shown in Table 1, the New would also vary:

Table 1 What were all the people doing immediately

(All the people) were running for their lives

after the 9/11 attacks in New York? What

were

all

the

people

running

NEW for

(All the people were running for) their lives NEW

immediately after the 9/11 attacks in New York? Who

were

running

for

their

lives

All the people (were running for their lives…)

immediately…

NEW

Where were all the people running for their

(All the people were running for their lives…)

lives?

in New York NEW

When were all the people running for their

(All the people were running for their lives…)

lives in New York?

immediately after the 9/11 attacks NEW

The principle of end-focus allows us to say that the unmarked option for the focus is to fall on the last lexical item of the clause. The focus would be marked, therefore, when it does not fall on the last lexical item. The third example in Table 1 (All the people) illustrates an instance of marked focus, placed at the beginning of the clause. A focus is marked when the speaker wants to contrast or correct something 144

which has been said or implied in the previous discourse or in the situational context. It can also be marked for emotive purposes. Consider example 1, which has unmarked focus, in contrast with examples 2, 3 and 4, which contain marked foci for contrastive purposes:

1. Sarah took her car to the gaRAGE. 2. Sarah took her CAR to the garage. (not her motorbike) 3. Sarah TOOK her car to the garage. (not “brought it from there”) 4. SArah took her car to the garage. (not Susan)

Table 2 displays examples of foci marked for emotive purposes.

Table 2

UNMARKED FOCUS

MARKED FOCUS

It sounds ODD.

It DOES sound odd.

She is SHY.

She IS shy.

You will see me in the FUture.

You WILL see me in the future.

8.1.1.2.1.1. But how do we identify the focus?

It was explained in 8.1.1.2. that speakers divide their messages into segments of information, namely, information units. These are features of the spoken language, for they are not realized by any given grammatical unit but by a phonological unit called tone unit. Tone units always contain one syllable which is more prominent. This syllable contains the intonation nucleus of the unit and constitutes the focus of information. Prominence can be given by means of pitch movement, increased duration and tonic stress. Pitch movement corresponds to the different tones of intonation, which may be falling, rising or level. The information focus represents the peak or highest point of the unit, and its correct placement is of utmost importance in English, due to the fact that it constitutes 145

the main strategy used by speakers for communicating contrast and emphasis in the spoken language. It must be emphasized that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the tone unit and any grammatical unit. As Downing & Locke remark, “A tone unit can be smaller or larger than a clause. If a speaker wishes to make his message highly informative and emphatic, he can even make each word become an information unit, with as many intonation nuclei as there are words… “(1992: 238)

These authors also pinpoint the fact that speakers may lengthen or shorten their tone units according to their communicative needs, and that variations in the length of tone units also depend on other factors, such as speed of utterance, the syntactic structures and/or the lexical items chosen, familiarity with the content of the message and the consequent relative need to plan ahead, acoustic conditions, self-confidence, etc. Considering all these factors, it is not surprising to realize that the identification of the information focus is not always as easy and clear-cut a task as one would wish it to be.

Several authors have pointed this out, and have therefore proposed new

alternatives to the analysis of the phenomenon of information structure (see 8.3. below).

8.2. Information structure and thematic structure: Given + New, and Theme + Rheme Information and thematic structures are closely related from the semantic point of view. Under normal conditions, the speaker/writer will choose the Theme from within what is Given and will locate the New within the Rheme. However, neither Given and Theme nor New and Rheme are the same. To put it in Halliday’s words: “The Theme is what I, the speaker, choose to take as my point of departure. The Given is what you, the listener, already know about or have accessible to you. Theme + Rheme is speaker-oriented, while Given + New is listener-oriented.” (1985: 278)

Thus,

the

speaker

can

use

thematic

and

information structure to produce a wide variety of

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rhetorical effects; s/he can play with the two systems by using different strategies which will bring about different results in the interpretation of the message on the part of the hearer. Example 1 shows a prototypical case, where the Given information is found within the Theme and the New within the Rheme. Example 2, on the contrary, shows an example in which B plays with the two systems in order to produce a contrastive effect, and in some way contradict or correct his/her interlocutor’s statement.

A: What does Mary think of John? B: She Theme Given

can’t STAND him. Rheme New

A: Bill likes tennis B: GOLF is what he really likes. Theme Rheme New Given In these examples it is clear that the New has not been mentioned before and

therefore did not appear in the previous structure of discourse. However, it is important to note that it is not the structure of discourse which determines whether information is treated as New or Given. On the contrary, the factor determining this choice is the speaker’s moment-to-moment assessment of the relationship between what he wants to say and his/her hearer’s informational requirements. For instance, and as Brown & Yule state, “it is not the case that if a speaker has just mentioned a referent he must necessarily repeat it low in pitch, treating it as a given” (1983: 168). Consider example 3: 3) (A mother is upset when she sees her little son bothering her older son and eventually fighting with him)

Mother: Please, don’t fight with your BROther any more. Your BROther, dear Tommy, Theme

Rheme

Theme

Given

New

is one of the most important people in your life. Your BROther, will always love and

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Rheme

Theme

Rheme

Given

New

Given

protect you, even when dad and I are not here any more.

Rheme Given This example shows how, if the speaker so judges it, she can treat information that has already been mentioned in the discourse as New by giving it phonological prominence. In this case the mother wants to stress the fact that it is Tommy’s older brother (and nobody else) the one who will always care for and love him, especially when she and their father eventually die. Thus she gives the highest prominence to the word brother in all the clauses of her discourse in order to signal, in each case, a new aspect of the importance of brotherhood as it affects Tommy. Even when the information in the Rheme portion of her clauses might be considered partially new, it is more important for the mother to single out Tommy’s brother as a key person in his life, and therefore treat him as the New information in each case.

8.3. Some considerations related to Halliday’s information structure analysis Brown & Yule (1983) note that Halliday makes the simplifying assumption that the sole function of pitch prominence is to mark the focus of new information within the tone group. Indeed, if we examine pitch prominence carefully, we shall see that it may have several other discourse/pragmatic functions, such as marking the beginning of a speaker’s turn or the beginning of a new topic. Brown & Yule very graphically explain that phonological prominence has “a general watch this! function” (1983: 164), that is, it is used by speakers to mark any kind of information that requires being paid attention to, but by no means does it only and exclusively mark the information focus. In addition, some scholars have found that it is very difficult to find such perfect tone groups as the ones Halliday describes (constituted around a tonic syllable). It is, on the contrary, common to find tightly rhythmically bound structures with several peaks of prominence. Experiments such as those made by Brown, Currie & Kenworthy (1980) have shown that the phonetic cues which were traditionally thought to mark the tonic syllable rarely cumulate on one word in spontaneous speech. Contrariwise, they tend to be distributed separately or paired over words which introduce new information. 148

Therefore, many scholars who do research on conversational speech do not believe that the information unit should contain only one focus and that it should then be realized with only one tonic. Even more, some authors, such as Ward & Birner (2001) have noted that the term focus means different things to different people, and that a two-way division of information into Given and New is inadequate. Prince (1992), for instance, classifies information by means of a pair of cross-cutting dichotomies: on the one hand information may be discourse-old or discourse-new, and, on the other hand, it can be either hearer-old or hearer-new. Such a distinction sheds light on the fact that what is new to the discourse need not be new to the hearer. Consider this example:

Yesterday the sun was shining, so I invited a neighbor to go to the pool.

Here, the sun represents information that is discourse-new but hearer-old, while a neighbor refers to information that is both discourse-new and hearer-new. In very general terms, however, Halliday’s approach is accepted by most information structure analysts: it can be said that the information that is felt or judged to be new is going to be prominent, while the given information will be produced without prominence. However, it seems reasonable to suggest that information structure is not only realized by the phonological system, but also by the syntactic system (e.g. by word order and thematic organization) and the textual system (e.g. the organization of the different paragraphs in a given text). All in all, the analysis of discourse is not an easy task, and the approach studied in this Unit, as well as all other approaches, is but one more attempt to describe and understand the different ways human beings organize their linguistic messages. No approach is perfect or all-embracing, but each and all of them contribute with different and useful tools for linguistic analysis. It is up to the analysts to choose a given approach or certain elements from different approaches in order to best suit the needs of their research. 8.4. Sample analysis of data 8.4.1. Thematic structure

From the information given in 8.1.1.1., we can infer that the analysis of the thematic structure of a text helps us draw conclusions as to the way the writer or speaker has 149

organized the information s/he wants to convey. Likewise, thematic analysis can help us identify the topic area as well as the discourse type of the text in question. It can be used to establish the relative coherence of a text and to show how paragraphs can be organized across sentence boundaries by means of patterns of theme and rheme development. Consider the thematic structure of the following letter in a financial advice column of a very well-known American magazine: After 12 years of marriage, I have just begun divorce proceedings. We have three children ranging from 1 to 10, and I’ve been a stay-at-home mom for the entire marriage. My physician husband has a substantial income, and our expenses are high because of our large mortgage. I know that we will have to sell our beautiful house. My attorney says that, taking into account child support and alimony, I should be able to stay home until the baby is in kindergarten or first grade. My question is this: How, after never having taken care of myself, do I plan for my future? I don’t want to end up as my mom did after my father died –living on a $500 Social Security check. (The O Magazine, January 2005, p. 30)

Several interesting conclusions can be taken from the thematic analysis of this letter. Firstly, if it were presented in isolation (without a title, introduction or context), by merely looking at the themes (which are underlined), the reader/analyst could easily identify this text as coming from an advice column. The first themes (After 12 years of marriage, We, My physician husband, our expenses, My attorney) clearly show that the writer is talking about herself, narrating some aspect of her personal experience. The last themes (My question, How, I) pinpoint the fact that she is asking a question which is centered on her particular problem (described at the beginning of the letter), and consequently needs some advice. Secondly, if we look at the themes of this text, we will observe that most of them are related to the writer or with some aspect of her life, which gives this letter the characteristics of a narrative of personal experience: narratives of personal experience tend to thematize the teller or narrator. Thirdly and consequently, we may say that most of the themes in this letter have an interactional nature. McCarthy & Carter explain that “a theme is interactional if it contains words or phrases which specifically refer to the sender or receiver(s)” (1994: 71). The fact that most of the themes are interactional also tells us something about the features of this text: we can infer that the writer’s intention is to interact with someone who will read the letter and somehow try to help her. The way in which the interactant is going to help can be inferred from the last themes, which show that the writer is asking for some type of advice. The two types of theme found in this letter lead us to reach the conclusion that

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we are facing a case of ‘mixed register’ (Fairclough, 1989), i.e., it contains the characteristics of a narrative of personal experience but at the same time it communicates with the recipient of the letter on a different plane, asking for advice, which also makes it a multifunctional and multivalent discourse.

8.4.2. Information structure

The following fragment has been taken from Nafá (2005) and is an accurate phonological transcription of a part of a lecture given at the European Parliament. We shall examine how the speaker treats the New and Given information by assigning prominence to certain words and not to others. The bold type indicates the focus in each information unit. DO4 // [p] ´how ímportant // [p] is the Ńew Delhi Ćonference? // [p] Now, // [o] the Ćommissioner is ´writing ´down: // [hk] [p] “´very // [r] ímportant”. // [p] But of ćourse, // [p+] the ánswer // [p] to the ´question // [r] I ´then asked: // [p] if it is ´very important, // [r] ´why is she ´here?. // (2005, Chapter 6).

As can be observed, the speaker wants to give rhetorical importance to the adjectival phrase very important, and therefore, in all cases, the focus is placed either on the word important or on the word very. In the first clause (How important is the New Delhi Conference?) we may clearly speak of a marked focus because it is placed at the beginning and not at the end: the word important is stressed and treated as New, while the New Delhi Conference is treated as Given information. In the successive clauses, very important and then very are treated as New, even when both words were mentioned before, due to the fact that the speaker uses her rhetorical skills in order to give a final ironic effect. She uses a final rhetorical question in relation to the Commissioner’s comment on the New Delhi’s Conference being ‘very important’, thus signalling the Commissioner’s inconsistency in being present at the parliamentary discussion instead of at the ‘very important’ Delhi Conference. The analysis of this example sheds light on the fact that speakers may play with information structure (i.e. the organization of the Given and the New in discourse) in order to produce certain effects, such as irony in this particular case.

1. Functionalism relies, contrary to Formalism, on a pragmatic view of language as 151

social interaction, and therefore the approach focuses on the rules which govern verbal interaction.

Both the extra-linguistic context and the purpose of

communication play a crucial role in this approach. 2. The origins of functionalism can be traced back to the Linguistic School of Prague. 3. Danes (1974) developed the concept of Communicative Dynamism (the relative extent to which a linguistic element contributes towards the further development of the communication) and Firbas (1964, 1986) developed the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective, which studies the distribution of information, organized in more or less dynamic elements called Theme and Rheme. 4. The Theme of a clause is what speakers/writers use as the ‘point of departure’. The rest of the message constitutes the Rheme. 5. In terms of the metafunctions associated to them, we find three types of theme: 1. Topical, 2. Textual and 3. Interpersonal.

When textual and/or interpersonal

themes co-occur with the obligatory topical theme, we speak of multiple themes. 6. Depending on the purposes of communication, certain types of information may be foregrounded or thematized. When the theme does not coincide with the expected first constituent of each mood structure, we speak of a marked theme. If, on the contrary, the theme coincides with such a constituent, it is an unmarked theme. 7. Spoken discourse takes the form of a sequence of information units.

The

information unit is a structure made up of two functions: the New and the Given. 8. The New is always marked by tonic prominence. The element which has this prominence is said to be carrying information focus. The focus is unmarked when it falls on the last lexical item of the clause. The focus would be marked, therefore, when it does not fall on the last lexical item. 9. Information structure is closely related to thematic structure from the semantic point of view. A speaker can play with the organization of the thematic and the information structures in order to produce a wide variety of rhetorical effects, bringing about different results in the interpretation of the message on the part of the hearer.

A) ANALYSIS: The following is a fragment of a Joint Debate on Pharmaceutical Products at the European Parliament, which is part of the anotated corpus found in Nafá’s (2005) study. ANALYZE the thematic structure of the fragment, as well as its 152

organization structure (Given-New) and explain how both structures (Theme-Rheme & Given-New) are used to cause certain rhetorical effects. Pay attention to tonic prominence (see notation conventions below) in the text.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

/// [HK] [p+] President, Í have ádmiration // [p] for the áccomplishment // [p+] of ´scientific research // [p] in developing ´medicines // [p] which have ´proved // [r] of ´great ´benefit. // [hk] [p+] Yet álso, // [r] I have a ´healthy ´scepticism // [r] ´both of our ´pharmaceutical industry // [o] and óur… // [p] of our éxaggerated ćonfidence // [p] in ´some of its ´products, // [o] ´many of which ćause // [hk] [r] a ´great deal more ´harm // [r] than the íllegal // [hk] [r] ´recreational drugs // [lk] [p] which áttract // [p] the ´bulk of ´public áttention. // [p+] And for ´that reason, // [hk] [p] it would be ´wrong // [p] to place ´more únnecessary burdens // [r] and ´regulations // ´[o] upon // ´[p] food ´supplements // [p] and the ´health-´food shops // [lk] [r] that ´sell them. // ´[o] Many ´believe // [p] these ´products // [r] to be ´beneficial, // [r] and at ´least // [p] they ´don´t cause ´harm. // [p] I ´regard ´homeopathic ´medicines // [p] in the ´same ´way. [LT] ///

14 /// [HK] ´[r+] Today // [p] we have ´more ´patients // [o] who ´are // ´[r] 15

better ´informed // [r] than ´ever ´before // [lk] [p] –and ´that´s a ´good

thing. // [p] I ´want

´information // [p] about ´medicines // [p] and ´YAB18 about ´treatment.

// [p] But ´that´s quite ´different // [p] from ´opening the ´door // [p] to

the ´direct ´advertising // [lk] [p] of ´medicines. // [p] The ´result, // [r+] I

´fear, // [r] will ´not be

public ´confusion, // [o] ´stimulated // [r] by the ´marketing techniques //

[p] of a ´used-´car salesman. [LT] ///

people // [r+] to

better

have ´access to // [r] ´objective

public ´information,

// [r] but ´greater

Notation conventions: [HK] Initial High pitch

[lk] Internal Low pitch

[MK] Initial Medium pitch

[p] Falling tone

[LK]

Initial Low pitch

[r] Falling-rising tone

[HT]

Final High pitch

[p+] Rising-falling tone

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[MT] Final Medium pitch

[r+] Rising tone

[LT]

Final Low pitch

[o] Level tone.

[hk]

Internal High pitch

B) DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: LOOK FOR an article in any newspaper in English (or search the web for newspaper sites), CHOOSE a fragment of the article (no less than three paragraphs) and ANALYZE the thematic structure of the text.

C) DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: RECORD (directly from a lecture, a television or radio program, etc.) a fragment of oral discourse.

ANNOTATE the

fragment in order to mark information units and tonic prominence and ANALYZE its organization structure (Given and New information).

•

Chafe, 1994 (Chapter 14).

•

Downing, 1991, 1996, 1992.

•

Firbas, 1992.

•

Halliday, 1985.

•

Ward & Birner, 2001.

Functionalism: http://papyr.com/hypertextbooks/engl_126/style1.htm Theme/Rheme // Given/New: http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/ellibst/lsl15.html http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Theme_and_rheme And many more…

POST-STRUCTURALIST THEORY AND SOCIAL THEORY 154

“Linguistic exchange – a relation of communication between a sender and a receiver, based on enciphering and deciphering, and therefore on the implementation of a code or a generative competence – is also an economic exchange which is established within a particular symbolic relation of power between a producer, endowed with a certain linguistic capital, and a consumer (or a market), and which is capable of procuring a certain material or symbolic profit. In other words, utterances are not only (save in exceptional circumstances) signs to be understood and deciphered; they are also signs of wealth, intended to be evaluated and appreciated, and signs of authority, intended to be believed and obeyed.” Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power

MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT: •

To get acquainted with the main ideas and concepts of Post-structuralist Theory and Social Theory.

•

To study the most important contributions made by these theories to DA.

•

To see these theories in perspective as containing some of the basic ideas and tenets of Critical Discourse Analysis (Unit 10) and Mediated Discourse.

9.1. Post-structuralism

A number of structural theories of human existence which were in vogue around the mid 20th century intended to explain and describe different aspects of human knowledge. These theories, belonging to the so-called structuralist movement, were 155

based in France and synthesized the ideas of Marx, Freud and Saussure. Marxists argued that the truth of human existence could be understood by an analysis of economic structures.

Whithin the field of psychology, psychoanalysts (following

Freud) tried to describe the structure of the psyche in terms of the unconscious. As far as the study of language was concerned, the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure suggested that meaning was not to be found in the analysis of individual words but rather within the structure of a whole language. Post-structuralism, as the term suggests, was subsequent to Structuralism, and even though it shared some ideas with it, Post-structuralism originated as a reaction against the ‘absolutism’ and totalizing concepts of Structuralism. The French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, originally labelled a structuralist, came to be regarded as the most important representative of the poststructuralist movement. He had views in common with the structuralists, for he believed that language and society were shaped by rule-governed systems. However, he disagreed with them in that he did not think that there were definite underlying structures that could explain the human condition, and also in that he thought it was impossible to survey and study discourse from an objective point of view. Post-structuralism conceives of the social space (organizations, institutions, identities and relationships, etc.) and the world of material objects as discursive in nature. Thus, although post-structuralist thinkers believe that there is nothing outside the text, this does not entail a denial of the material world. Laclau & Mouffe clarify this aspect in the following excerpt: “The fact that every object is constituted as an object of discourse has nothing to do with whether there is a world external to thought, or with the realism/idealism opposition. An earthquake or the falling of a brick is an event that certainly exists, in the sense that it occurs here and now, independently of my will. But whether their specificity as objects is constructed in terms of ‘natural phenomena’ or ‘expressions of the wrath of God’ depends upon the structuring of a discursive field. What is denied is not that such objects exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertion that they could constitute themselves as objects outside any discursive conditions of emergence. “ (1985: 108)

Another basic tenet of the post-structuralist theory of discourse is that the process of meaning-making in relation to people and objects is never finally fixed; on the contrary, it is viewed as an unstable flux. This view challenges the ‘closure’ of the structuralist linguistic model, which reduces all elements to the internal moments of the system. 156

Thus we see that post-structuralism is against any kind of totalizing concept. There is an underlying relativism in all post-structuralist ideas, which suggests that no signifying system is completely stable and/or unproblematic. Post-structuralists see reality as much more fragmented, diverse and culture-specific than does structuralism; consequently, they give greater attention to specific histories and to the local contextualizations of concrete instances. Besides, there is a greater emphasis on the body, which is seen as the actual insertion of the human into the texture of time and history. Greater attention is also given to the specifics of cultural working, the arenas of discourse and cultural practice, and to the role of language and textuality in our construction of reality and identity. In sum, there is a deep sense that we live in a linguistic universe, which implies the rejection of the phenomenalist assumption that language is a transparent medium. ‘Reality’ in a linguistic universe is only mediated reality, which is governed by things such as the structure of ideology, the world of discourse, the various cultural codes, etc. We live in a world of language, discourse and ideology. None of these elements is transparent, and all of them structure our sense of being and meaning. All meaning is textual and intertextual. Meaning circulates in economies of discourse, for every text exists only in relation to other texts. It seems appropriate herein to quote Slembrouck’s words on the achievements of post-structuralism: “One of the achievements of post-structuralism is the radical way in which it has placed discourse analysis at the heart of the social-scientific endeavour. Its consequences for disciplines as diverse as anthropology, history, law, social psychology, sociology, etc. have been enormous. For instance, a post-structuralist logic advocates the view that “historic facts” or “legal facts” are discursive constructions. As a consequence, scientific historic writing falls within the scope of, say, narrative analysis, while judicial decisions can be viewed as outcomes of discursive practices which are socio-historically contingent (in this respect, post–structuralism shares a number of characteristics with conversation analysis and ethnomethodology –despite obvious differences in the underlying assumptions). Needless to add, a “truth/rationality”-crisis has been one of the effects.” (2004: 18)

The works of Michel Foucault (1973, 1980, 1984), Jacques Derrida (1967, 1981) and Jacques Lacan (1977) have been conventionally associated with post-structuralist theory. Also, the work of M. M. Bakhtin (1986) became very influential through the post-structuralist movement (from the late 1960s onwards), although he cannot be considered a post-structuralist in the strict sense of the term, because his writings date from the first half of the 20th century (but they were not published until the 1970s). 157

Bakhtin’s critique of Saussurean linguistics, based on his dialogic view on language use, is of great importance.

9.1.1. Major weakness of post-structuralist discourse theory

In spite of its achievements, it is undeniable that post-structuralist discourse theory has its weakenesses, the main one being its failure to present an explicit method of analysis of actual instances of text or social interaction-in-context. However, some authors, like Howarth (2000) or Carabine (2001) have attempted to apply some aspects of this theory to the analysis of real discourse in action. Howarth (2000) proposes a method based on an elaboration of Michel Foucault’s genealogical method, 20 which focuses on the deconstruction of power/knowledge complexes (Derrida 21). Carabine (2001) proposes a practical method of analysis (also based on Foucault’s genealogical theory) consisting of eleven stepts to be followed succesively. Carabine’s guidelines to analysis are presented in 9.3.1 below.

9.2. Social Theory

Social Theory is used as a generic term to describe the attempt to theorize the modern social world in any of its spheres (cultural, legal, political, etc.). It is a discipline considered to be outside the mainstream of sociology (where the theory is ‘correctly’ tested), for it does not follow the scientific method. Indeed, it is essential to the enterprise of "social theory" to challenge the hegemony of a scientific method. Sharing its core commitment to truth, the social theorist points to the radical difference in phenomena between the subject matter of physics and that of sociology. Thus the social theorist is suspicious of ‘objectivity’. Social theory is different from sociology in that the sociologist looks for neat, predetermined problems to which s/he can apply equally neat methodologies, while the social theorist places emphasis on the less objective and brute fact of human suffering. However, some social theorists, such as Pierre Bordieu (see 9.4. below), have shown 20

See 9.3. below. Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) developed deconstruction as a technique for uncovering the multiple interpretation of texts. He suggests that every text contains ambiguity and therefore the possibility of a final and complete interpretation is impossible.

158

that Social Theory can be very empirical, as long as there are true stories to be told and as long as we believe that listening can be a profoundly empirical act. Social Theory has been affected by recent developments in feminism, critical race theory, multiculturalism and other movements associated with oppressed groups. As has been suggested, some social theorists and/or post-structuralist thinkers, such as Foucault or Bordieu, have made important contributions to the study of language and discourse. We now turn to them.

9.3. Michel Foucault The popularization of the concept of discourse and of discourse analysis as a method can partly be attributed to Foucault’s great influence upon the social sciences and humanities. A philosopher, social theorist, historian and literary critic, Foucault is also included within the post-structural school of thought. His main interest is in the origins of the modern sciences (e.g. medicine, sexology, psychiatry), their affiliated institutions (the clinic, the asylum, etc.) and how the production of truth is governed by discursive power regimes (Slembrouck, 2004). Foucault’s important contribution to the theory of discourse is mainly found in such areas as the relationship of discourse and power, the discursive construction of social subjects and knowledge, and the functioning of discourse in social change. Foucault’s work is divided in three main stages, each showing a shift of emphasis with respect to the previous one: 1) Archeological work, 2) Genealogical studies, and 3) Ethics. His early archaelogical work (1972) includes a constitutive view of discourse, a view that conceives of discourse as actively constituting or constructing society on various dimensional planes. Thus, discourse constitutes social subjects and forms of self, social relationships and conceptual frameworks, as well as the objects of knowledge. Special emphasis is placed on the interdependency of the discourse practices of a society or institution. There is always influence of historically prior texts upon new texts, and any given type of discourse practice is created out of the combination of other types and is defined in terms of its relationship to others. Foucault’s insistence on the fact that the subject has to conform to the conditions of the statement before s/he can become the speaker of it (a reversal of the subject-statement 159

relationship) is particularly relevant to discourse analysis. This view, then, insists on the prevailance of discourse structures over human agency, and has the following implications (adapted from Slembrouck, 2004: 20): •

Meaning is governed by the formative rules of discourse, therefore it does not originate in the speaking subject. Speaking is, thus, “de-centered”.

•

Social identity is “dispersed”. The “whole”, “unique”, social subject is replaced by a “fragmented” subject that is constituted in the unstable role identities enabled by discoursive formations.

•

The acquisition of social identities is a process of immersion into discursive practice and submission to discursive practice. For instance, the process of becoming a teacher is a process in which a novice gradually adopts and subjects him/herself to the multiple modes of speaking and writing which are available in the teaching profession. 22

All these implications are of major significance, for discourse is seen in an active relationship to reality. Language signifies reality in the sense that it construct meanings for it; it does not merely refer to objects which are taken to be given in reality. In the second stage of Foucault’s work, the stage of his genealogical studies, discourse is put on a secondary plane. He now shifts his focus to truth/power regimes and how they affect the bodily disposition. Indeed, an interesting and primary concern of genealogical analysis is how the techniques of power work upon bodies, habits or movements. Focault argues that the modern technology of discipline is geared toward producing “docile bodies”, i.e., bodies which are adapted to the demands of modern forms of economic production: “The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the processes of history’s destruction of the body.” (1984: 83)

However, as Slembrouck (2004) and McNay (1994) point out, it is probably not correct to ascribe such a view on the socializing capacities of language use to Foucault himself.

160

Thus, analyzes

Foucault

two

major

‘technologies’

power: discipline and confession.

Discipline

is manifest in diverse forms,

such

the

architecture of schools, prisons

factories

(designed to allocate a given space to each

The prison of Le Château d’If, off the coast of Marseille, France.

inmate), the division of the educational or working day into strictly demarcated parts, and so on. Discipline (whose main technique is examination) is a technology for handling massses of people, which, according to Foucault, ‘objectifies’ the subject, thereby transforming the indivicual into a describable, analyzable object and producing the manipulation of records to arrive at generalizations about populations, averages, norms, etc. Confession is a ritual of discourse, and it is, on the contrary, a technique that subjectifies people. The need to talk about oneself (e.g. one’s sexuality) seems to be a liberating resistance to the objectifying bio-power. However, Foucault believes that this is an illusion, for confession draws the person more into the domain of power. In his third stage, Foucault shifts his focus to the ethics of the postmodern subject, and he develops an ethical orientation for the postmodern era which is based on the idea that an analysis of the techniques of domination can be counterbalanced by an analysis of the techniques of the self (Slembrouck, 2004). Foucault’s ideas may seem very abstract at first sight, but they brought significant contributions for DA as a discipline.

Let us summarize them in the

following points: •

Foucault did not focus on language, but on discourse as a system of representation, i.e. the rules and practices that produce meaningful statements and regulated discourse in different historical periods.

•

Discourse is a way of representing the knowledge about a particular topic at a particular historical moment.

•

All practices have a discursive aspect. Discourse constitutes the social (objects 161

and subjects), thereby its constitutive nature. •

Since we can only have a knowledge of things if they have a meaning, it is discourse, not the things in themselves, which produces knowledge.

•

All discursive practices are defined in terms of their relations to others, and depend upon others in complex ways.

•

The practices and techniques of modern ‘biopower’ (such as examination and confession) are discursive to a significant degree.

•

Discourse has a political nature: the exertion of power occurs both in and over discourse.

•

Social change is discursive in nature: changing discursive structures are a sign of social change.

9.3.1. Applying Foucauldian theory to the analysis of actual discourse: guidelines and example.

In spite of all his theoretical findings, Foucault’s analysis of discourse does not include discursive and linguistic analyses of real texts, a major weakness of his work that has been attempted to be resolved by other scholars, such as Carabine (2001). This author proposes the following steps to apply genealogy to the analysis of real texts, in order to explore and trace the power/knowledge networks which are evident in social policy:

Guide to doing Foucauldian genealogical discourse analysis 1. Select your topic – Identify possible sources of data. If you were undertaking a social policy analysis then sources might include policy documents, discussion papers, parliamentary papers, speeches, cartoons, photographs, parliamentary debates, newspapers, other media sources, political tracts, and pamphlets from

162

local and national government, quangos, and political parties. You might also wish to include an analysis of counter-discourses and resistances; here you might use material from campaigning and lobbying groups, activists and welfare rights organizations, etc. 2. Know your data – read and re-read. Familiarity aids analysis and interpretation. 3. Identify themes – categories and objects of discourse. 4. Look for evidence of an inter-relationship between discourses. 5. Identify the discursive strategies and techniques that are employed. 6. Look for absences and silences. 7. Look for resistances and counter-discourses. 8. Identify the effects of the discourse. 9. Context 1 – outline the background to the issue. 10. Context 2 – contextualize the material in the power/knowledge networks of the period. 11. Be aware of the limitations of the research, your data and sources. (2001: 281)

At the same time, Carabine uses this guide to illustrate the steps she took when doing her research about the representations of sexuality in social policy material, for which she chose the Commissioners’ Reports of the Poor Laws 23 as data. Some excerpts of this document are reproduced here, which show how the Commissioners refer to unmarried mothers:

[1] … the female in the very many cases becomes the corruptor.

[2] …continued illicit intercourse has, in almost all cases, originated with the females.

[3] …the women, …feel no disgrace, either in their own eyes, or in the eyes of others, at becoming mothers of bastards, have still less resuctance in allowing the claims of a husband to anticipate the marriage ceremony, in fact they are almost always with child when they come to the church.

The complete reference of the document is: Reports of His Majesty’s Commissioners on the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws and Assistant Commissioners’ Reports 1834 with Appendices, Parts I, II & III Reports from the Assistant Commissioners (1834(44) vol. xxvii-xxxviii), and the version used by Carabine was the 1971 British Parliamentary Papers Series (vols. 8-18), published by the Irish University Press.

163

[4] I met with a striking instance, which proves that the female in these cases is generally the party most to blame; and that any remedy, to be effectual, must act chiefly with reference to her. (2001: 289-90)

It is obvious from these excerpts that the Commissioners’ report showed a negative bias towards women. Here is a brief summary of Carabine’s genealogical analysis (2001: 281-285) of the document:

Select your topic: Carabine explains that there is no single starting point for doing genealogical discourse analysis, and that she chose to begin her project about sexuality and social policy by visiting the local university and city libraries. There she read different parliamentary papers, reports and legal statutes until she finally selected the Commissioners’ Reports of the Poor Laws. She focused on this document for a number of reasons, primarily because the 1834 Poor Law is considered to have had a considerable impact on the form of welfare provision provided in the U.K. over a hundred year span.

Know your data: The next step for Carabine was to spend several months reading and examining a range of secondary and original sources on the Poor Laws and eighteenth and nineteenth century sexuality, gender relations, working class and family life, marriage, and other related topics. This step was necessary in order to get a ‘sense’ of what the documentation was about as well as to establish where sexuality entered the discussion and to identify the objects of discourse.

Identify themes, categories and ‘objects’ of discourse: Here the author tells us that she found out that, in her data, sexuality was ‘spoken of’ in a number of ways, such as fears about population growth, marriage, the need for celibacy, bastardy, unmarried mothers and female immorality, among others.

She subsequently decided to focus on the

sections known as the Bastardy Clauses and proceded to analyze the ways in which bastardy was spoken of. Thus she identified different themes (e.g. morality, sexuality or class) categories (e.g. men, women or illegitimate children), representations in, and objects of, the discourse. An interesting finding developed from the fact that the Commissioners initially indicated that their concern was with the support of illegitimate

164

children, the relief afforded to mothers, and the attempts to obtain payment from fathers. The Commissioners’ concerns about these three topics were expressed through a discourse of bastardy, which focused mainly on unmarried mothers and their lack of sexual morality (neglecting the illegitimate child and absolving the father of any moral, sexual or financial liability or responsibility for his actions), thereby contradicting their initial claim of concern about the children and the relief of the mothers.

Absences and silences: As an example, Carabine notes that in the Poor Laws the concern of the Commissioners was mainly with increased levels of illegitimacy, while there were three important omissions: 1) the bastard child was rarely mentioned, 2) illegitimacy amongst the middle or upper classes was not discussed, 3) while female sexuality was discussed, male sexuality was neither discussed nor judged. These are evident examples of significant absences or silences.

Inter-relationship between discourses: Categories and themes were interrelated in the Poor Laws. There was a process of cross-referencing. One key influence was Thomas Malthus’ ideas about population.

Context: Carabine explains that in order to know the context for the document she was studying, she established the background to the policy or issue in question and analized the key influences, a process that was partly developed in the sections Know your data and Identifying themes and categories. For that reason, she points out as a final remark, that it is difficult to identify the different stages as though following a recipe, because in practice some processes occur simultaneously or at a different stage than expected, so we have to consider discourse analysis as a dynamic process of interpretation and reinterpretation. We shall now turn our attention to Pierre Bourdieu, another social theorist whose findings, like Foucault’s, have had a remarkable influence upon discourse studies.

9.4. Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu is considered to be an intellectual who challenged French social thinking. A philosopher, social theorist and teacher, he is the author of more than 25 influential books. From a language studies perspective, he is mostly associated with the 165

following key concepts: A) The metaphor of symbolic capital, which makes an analogy between financial capital and symbolic resources (such as the access to discourse situations and the ability to mobilize sets of linguistic conventions), for he argues that they are both unequally divided over groups within a given population. Symbolic capital, like financial capital, is subject to laws of supply and demand. Certain groups in society possess more symbolic capital than others, and the more capital one possesses, the easier it becomes to invest it profitably. B) The notion of habitus, which refers to individual differences in practical linguistic competence. Speakers are considered to be strategic players who have the ability to put language resources to practical use, as well as to anticipate the reception of their words. The formation of a habitus is permanently modified and sanctioned by the relative successes or failures in the market of linguistic exchanges. The concept of habitus presupposes a theory of linguistic practice rather than a theory of the linguistic system, for Bourdieu is against any abstraction that is detached from social action. Habitus is a social construct that motivates and arranges social practices and whose evidence is shown through language use and forms within organizations, cultures and communities. C) The notion of bodily hexis, which associates linguistic practices with deeprooted bodily dispositions. Bourdieu explains that language is a body technique and that linguistic competence is “a dimension of bodily hexis in which one’s whole relation to the social world, and one’s whole socially informed relation to the world, are expressed” (1999: 510). Thus, for example, members of the upper-social classes will have a different bodily disposition 24 associated to their use of language than members of the lower classes.

This bodily disposition has to do with the way of articulating the different sounds of the language, as well as to the way they move or the bodily postures they adopt.

166

Different bodily dispositions associated with language.

An interesting point made by Bourdieu is the following: “A speaker’s linguistic strategies (tension or relaxation, vigilance or condescension, etc.) are oriented (except in rare cases) not so much by chances of being understood or misunderstood (communicative efficiency or the chances of communicating), but rather by the chances of being listened to, believed, obeyed, even at the cost of misunderstanding (political efficiency or the chances of domination and profit).” (1976: 654)

From Bourdieu’s words we conclude that, in his view, communicative efficiency is subsidiary to political efficiency and the desire to dominate and get profit, and thus comprehension is not the primary goal of communication. As can be infered, this view

167

is opposed to that of other linguists and/or philosophers, such as Grice 25, whose Cooperative Principle is based on the assumption that speakers’ efforts are always geared towards achieving understanding. Another important conclusion to be made from Bourdieu’s theory is the idea that authority and credibility in a particular situation does not necessarily imply an impeccable use of a standard language.

In other words, a good command of the

standard language does not guarantee success in the market of symbolic exchanges. There are other ‘ingredients’ which, mixed with an inclination towards standard use, characterize a successful habitus in influential social domains. The value of any given utterance depends highly on the ability and the capacity of speakers to impose their criteria, and this capacity can not be said to be determined only in linguistic terms: “the whole social structure is present in each interaction (and thereby in the discourse uttered)” (Bourdieu, 1999: 503). We also infer from Bourdieu’s proposals that linguistic capital is a field-specific form of capital which can be transformed into other forms. For example, a certain linguistic disposition will result in the acquisition of certain educational qualifications which will eventually give the subject access to a given prestigious job and to a valuable social position. Thus it can be said that the processes of control over the value of symbolic resources (which in turn regulate access to other social, cultural and economic assets) are very important from a sociolinguistic perspective. To summarize and conclude, we may say that Bourdieu’s sociological critique of linguistics entails a threeway displacement of concepts (1976: 646): 1. He replaces the concept of grammaticalness by the notion of acceptability (or, it can also be said that “the” language (Saussure’s langue) is replaced by the notion of legitimate language). 2. He speaks of relations of symbolic power, rather than of relations of communication, thereby replacing the question of the meaning of speech by the question of value and power of speech. 3. Instead of linguistic competence, he uses the term symbolic capital, which is inseparable from the speaker’s position in the social structure.

See Unit 3.

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Bourdieu’s social critique and concepts have been widely used by discourse analysts, especially within the approach known as Critical Discourse Analysis, to which a whole unit is devoted in this book. Hence, the student is referred to Unit 10 in order to study how these ideas have been put into practice in actual analysis.

9.5. Mikhail Bakhtin

Bakhtin was a theorist writing in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era. Although his books on language, literature and psychoanalysis date from the 1920s and 1930s, Bakhtinian posits only became influencial and achieved recognition after the 1960s, when his works were published in the Western world. Although Bakhtin cannot exactly be considered a Marxist (he had problems with the regime and was exiled), he shares with Marxist theorists an interest in the historical and social world, in how human being act and think as well as an interest in language as the means in which ideologies are articulated (Klages, 2001). Bakhtin’s view of language clearly opposes Saussurean structuralist linguistics. He argues that language should be studied not as an abstract system, but as a concrete lived reality, for language is “essentially social and rooted in the struggle and ambiguities of everyday life” (Maybin, 2001: 64). Some of the basic ideas in Bakhtin’s work are: •

Language is dialogic, which entails the consideration of the utterance as the basic unit of language, as well as the fact that there is always one other respondent voice implicit in any utterance. In his conception, utterances can never be isolated from the sequence in which they occur and they always hold a dialogic relationship with previous utterances which have been voiced or which are presupposed. A dialogic view of language opposes the Saussurean idea that language is an autonomous system describable in terms of relationships between internal signs, and it gives priority to texts which are ‘impure’ (i.e. texts which contain traces of various voices that have been involved in their production, be they clearly reported voices or voices that are taken on as if they were the author’s own).

•

Discursive practice is essentially heteroglossic, which entails that language is

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normally patterned into speech genres 26 (which are associated with particular kinds of contextual features and social purposes) and that two or more genres normally co-exist in a given discourse practice. “Heteroglossia might be defined as the collection of all the forms of social speech, or rhetorical modes, that people use in the course of their daily lives” (Klages, 2001: 3). Texts often contain the various voices that have been involved in their production (reported voices or voices that are taken on as if they were the author’s own). But not all texts have the same level of heteroglossia; some are more heteroglossic than others (Maybin 2001). For example, a film text normally includes the voice of the screenplay writer, the director and all the people involved in its realization and production, while a kitchen recipe may only contain the voice of its creator (although, again, it depends on the historic and contextual conditions of the particular discourse practice in question). •

There is an internal struggle in language which is conceptualized in terms of a conflict between centripetal and centrifugal forces. Centripetal forces are associated with political centralization and a unified cultural canon.

They

produce authoritative and inflexive discourses such as those of scientific truth, religious dogma, fathers, teachers, etc. Centrifugal forces, on the other hand, allude to the stratification and diversification of language into varieties associated with different genres, professions, age groups and so on, and are more associated with everyday informal conversations and people’s inner dialogue or reflections upon their own experience than centripetal forces. •

The essentially dialogic and heteroglossic nature of language ensures that our views and understanding of the world, as well as our relations with others and our sense of our own identity, are always evaluative and ideological (Bakhtin, 1981).

•

Genres are viewed as the drive belts between the history of language and the history of society (Fairclough, 1992b), and thus any shift or transformation in genre conventions contributes to, and therefore indicates, social change. Therefore, social changes are first perceived at genre level, and languages change through the transformations of genre conventions.

Bakhtin defines speech genres in the following way: “Each separate utterance is individual, of course, but each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these utterances. These we may call speech genres” (1986: 60).

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The theoretical ideas expressed by Bakhtin in his writings have exerted a considerable influence upon literary analysis, as well as upon some European forms of discourse analysis and the Northern American approaches covered under the term “linguistic anthropology” 27. Many authors have applied the concept of heteroglossia in their linguistic analysis of texts (e.g. Fairclough, 1992b; Keith Swayer, 1995; Baynham & Slembrouck, 1999; Iedema et al, 2004), an analysis which has proved useful at explaining why people appeal to other voices and what functions are fulfilled by the different voices in a text. We now turn to one of these studies, in order to illustrate how Bakhtin’s theoretical findings can be used as tools for analyzing actual discourse.

9.5.1. A sample of heteroglossic analysis

In order to illustrate how Bakhtinian analysis can be made, we shall borrow the following situation and analysis from Baynhan & Slembrouck (1999). A social worker is interviewed by a senior colleague about a particular instance when a baby was diagnosed as being underweight for its age. The interview is part of a policy review in the domain of child care: “[…] it turned out that there was a further four weeks before the child was taken to hospital for an appointment on being taken there erm (1) the hospital felt that this was a clear picture of failure to thrive (2) the child was as I recall off the top of my head I think it was two and a half kilos underweight was very dehydrated and in fact had the situation been left for longer the child would have died the child was admitted and what then happened was that the mother […]” (1999: 439-40)

Baynhan & Slembrouck explain that there are two strings (1 & 2) of speech representation in this fragment of discourse, which are rhetorically implicated in a structured display of evidence. String (1) gives the conclusion: a clear picture of failure to thrive, while string (2) presents the detailed observations which lead to this particular conclusion: The child was (…) was two and a half kilos underweight (…). Thus, the reported speech counts as a rhetorical device which must help persuade the listener that the institutional intervention was appropriate, but at the same time it shifts the responsibility away from the social worker (speaker). 27

Linguistic anthropology is a cover term for mainly Northern-American approaches which contextualize language use in socio-cultural terms (See Unit 6).

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The diagnosis a clear picture of a failure to thrive is attributed to a voice of medicine, referred to collectively as the hospital, and by introducing the medical voice, an interprofessional working relationship (with a division of responsibilities in the domain of child care and corresponding institutional action) is evoked. Thus we have the voice of medical diagnosis versus that of the assessment of the social circumstances, which, within the context of the policy interview, help justify the statement referring to the child as being potentially at risk. Also, it is interesting to note how the specific way in which the reported medical voice is projected contributes to its credibility, which is made clear in the second string of speech representation, where social work voice and medical voice become one (the worker attributes clear medical facts to his own memory: As I recall off the top of my head…). Finally, Baynham & Slembrouck argue that, while grammatical/stylistic studies of reported speech tend to be mostly concerned with the classification of the speech representation strings as belonging to a particular category type (direct/indirect speech, etc.), such taxonomies may say very little about why people appeal to to other voices or about the functions which such reporting fulfils in a particular context of use. In contrast, they observe that by doing heteroglossic analyisis, we may learn that whenever one represents what someone else has said or written down, a network of social relationships comes into play. In this particular case, the relationship was between social work and medical work, as well as between the social worker/reporter and the interviewer/reportee.

9.6. Final remarks on Post-structural and Social Theories

Post-structural and social theories have not been accepted by some linguists and discourse analysts (e.g. Schegloff 28) as a model to follow on the grounds that these theories are politically-oriented and biased. However, it cannot be denied that they have had a considerable influence upon other and subsequent schools or approaches to discourse, such as Critical Discourse Analysis and Mediated Discourse Analysis. For this reason, in this book, Post-structuralism and Social Theory have been included prior to Critical Discourse Analysis and Mediated Discourse Analysis so that the

See answer for TASK B in this unit (at the back of the book), as well as 10.5 in Unit 10.

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student/reader will be able to understand the reach of Post-structuralism and how its ideas have been used and developed by other researchers for the analysis and further understanding of the complex phenomenon of discourse. We will consider these last two approaches in the next Units (10 & 11).

1. The structuralist movement, which was based in France, synthesized the ideas of Marx, Freud and Saussure. Post-structuralism shares some ideas with Structuralism, but it stands against its ‘absolutism’ and its totalizing concepts. 2. Post-structuralist thinkers view the social space and the world of material objects as discursive in nature, based on their belief that there is nothing outside the text. All meaning is textual and intertextual. Meaning circulates in economies of discourse, for every text exists only in relation to other texts. 3. Post-structuralists see reality as much more fragmented, diverse and culture-specific than does structuralism; consequently, they give greater attention to specific histories and to the local contextualizations of concrete instances. Some poststructuralist thinkers and/or social theorists, such as Foucault, Bordieu and Bakhtin, have made important contributions to the study of language and discourse. 4. Foucault’s contribution to the theory of discourse is mainly found in such areas as the relationship of discourse and power, the discursive construction of social subjects and knowledge, and the functioning of discourse in social change. 5.

Bourdieu is mostly associated with such key concepts as symbolic capital (an analogy between financial capital and symbolic resources), habitus (which refers to individual differences in practical linguistic competence and presupposes a theory of linguistic practice, rather than a theory of the linguistic system), and bodily hexis (which associates linguistic practices with deep-rooted bodily dispositions).

6. Bakhtin’s view of language clearly opposes Saussurean structuralist linguistics, arguing that language should be studied not as an abstract system, but as a concrete lived reality. Bakhtin argues that language is dialogic and that discursive practice is essentially heteroglossic, which entails that language is normally patterned into speech genres.

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A) SUMMARY: CHOOSE any of the articles or books in the FURTHER READING section below and make a summary of it. Hand it in to your tutor. B) REFLECTION AND COMPARISON: COMPARE the methods and concepts used by post-structuralists and social theorists to those of conversation analysts (Unit 5). In what ways do they differ?

Do you find any similarities between them?

EXAMINE each approach in terms of the following elements: a) The context: which aspects are considered relevant or not? b) The relationship of discourse with the real world, the objective truth and the results of its generalization c) The position of analysts with respect to the topic: Are they politically engaged? C) CHATROOM AND DISCUSSION: DISCUSS the results of the comparison made in B with two or three of your classmates over the Internet in a synchronic mode. D) ANALYSIS: In the following narrative, a joke that circulated on the web among friends who wanted to entertain one another, we can identify more than one ‘voice’. From a Bakhtinian perspective, IDENTIFY these voices and briefly COMMENT on the reason why these voices are included in the narrative, as well as on the function they fulfil in the total context of the occurrence of the narrative:

A Spanish teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish, unlike English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine. ''House'' for instance, is feminine: ''la casa.'' “Pencil,'' however, is masculine: "el lápiz.'' A student asked, ''What gender is 'computer'?'' Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two groups, male and female, and asked them to decide for themselves whether ''computer'' should be a masculine or a feminine noun. Each group was asked to give four reasons for its recommendation. The men's group decided that ''computer'' should definitely be of the feminine gender (''la computer''), because:

1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic; 2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else; 3. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for possible later

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retrieval; and 4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

(No chuckling... this gets better!)

The women's group, however, concluded that computer should be masculine (''el computer''), because:

1. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on; 2. They have a lot of data but still can't think for themselves; 3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they ARE the problem; and 4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have gotten a newer and better model.

The women won!

•

Bakhtin, 1986

•

Baynham & Slembrouck, 1999

•

Bourdieu, 1976; 1999

•

Carabine, 2001

•

Fairclough, 1992; 1999

•

Foucault, 1980

•

Laclau & Mouffe, 1985

•

Maybin 2001

Generalities about Post-structuralism: www.philosopher.org.uk/poststr.htm www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/poststruct.html

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Social Theory: www.marxists.org/reference/ archive/marcuse/works/reason/marcuse2.htm www.cas.usf.edu/socialtheory Michel Foucault : www.csun.edu/~hfspc002/foucault.home.html www.qut.edu.au/edu/cpol/foucault www.synaptic.bc.ca/ejournal/foucault.htm Pierre Bourdieu: www.iwp.uni-linz.ac.at/ lxe/sektktf/bb/HyperBourdieu.html www.massey.ac.nz/~nzsrda/bourdieu/home.htm www.analitica.com/bitblioteca/ bourdieu/neoliberalism.asp Mikhail Bakhtin http://bank.rug.ac.be/da/Bakhtin.htm www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/bakhtin.html

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CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

“If powerful speakers or groups enact or otherwise ‘exhibit’ their power in discourse, we need to know exactly how this is done. And if they thus are able to persuade or otherwise influence their audiences, we also want to know which discursive structures and strategies are involved in that process. Hence, the discursive reproduction of dominance, which we have taken as the main object of critical analysis, has two major dimensions, namely that of production and reception. That is, we distinguish between the enactment, expression or legitimization of dominance in the (production of the) various structures of text and talk, on the one hand, and the functions, consequences or results of such structures for the (social) minds of recipients, on the other. Discursive (re)production of power results from social cognitions of the powerful, whereas the situated discourse structures result in social cognitions. That is, in both cases we eventually have to deal with relations between discourse and cognition, and in both cases discourse structures form the crucial mediating role. They are truly the means of the ‘symbolic’ reproduction of dominance.” Teun van Dijk, Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis

MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT: •

To define the scope of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

•

To study the main concepts of CDA

•

To learn some of the techniques and methods of CDA

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10.1. The scope of Critical Discourse Analysis Critical Discourse Analysis (herinafter CDA) is an approach to discourse whose origins are found at the end of the 1970s, in the ‘critical linguistics’ that emerged (mainly in the UK and Australia) as a reaction against the dominant formal paradigms of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, critical linguists (e.g. Fowler et al 1979) focused on the analysis of language as text or discourse (rather than as decontextualized sets of possible sentences in the Chomskyan fashion), and they based their analytical approach mainly on Halliday’s (1978, 1985) systemic/functional grammar 29.

Critical Linguistic studies

were based on the premise that grammar is an ideological instrument for the categorization and classification of things that happen in the world, a premise which owed much to the theory of linguistic determinism known as the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis (Thornborrow, 2002). This hypothesis assumes that the language we use influences the way we think and that no two linguistic systems have the same way of categorizing the world. From a broader perspective, it can be said that the general lines of CDA are traced back to Aristotle, to the philosophers of the Enlightenment, to Marx, and more recently to the philosophers of the Frankfurt School (Agger 1992, Rasmussen 1996). Likewise, another line of influence goes back to Althusser (1971), Foucault (1980) 30 and Pêcheux (1982), as well as to the feminist approaches to language and communication. Teun van Dijk is one of the current key researchers in CDA. He defines the discipline as follows: “Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context. With such dissident research, critical discourse analysts take explicit position, and thus want to understand, expose, and ultimately resist social inequality.” (2001: 352)

Having previously worked on text grammars and psychological theories, van Dijk (2004) explains that one of the reasons why he turned to CDA was because he realized

See Chapter 8 for a detailed account of Functionalism.

See Unit 9.

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that these grammars and theories had very little to do with the real problems of this world. One of these problems, for instance, is racism; an issue that, from van Dijk’s view, has to be studied in relation to discourse due to the fact that it is normally expressed, reproduced or legitimated through text and talk. The work of Norman Fairclough (1989, 1992a & b, 1995) presents a comprehensive and programmatic attempt to develop a theory of CDA which links discourse, power and social structure. Fairclough examines the role of social institutions in shaping discourse practices, and argues that language is always shaped by the material and social conditions in which it is produced. From Fairclough’s perspective, discourse is a three-dimensional concept which involves 1) texts (the objects of linguistic analysis), 2) discourse practices (the production, distribution and consumption of texts) and 3) social practices (the power relations, ideologies and hegemonic struggles that discourses reproduce, challenge or restructure). Society and criticism are key terms in the critical approaches to the study of language. Ruth Wodak (1989) is another author within this perspective, who defines her approach (which she calls critical linguistics) as an interdisciplinary approach to language study with a critical point of view which intends to study language behavior in natural speech situations of social relevance. From an analytical point of view which attempts to expose social inequality and injustice, Wodak places special emphasis on the use of multiple methods and the importance of the historical and social aspects. Wetherell et al. (2001) present CDA as an approach which is based on a view of semiosis as an irreducible part of material social processes, semiosis including all forms of meaning-making: visual images, body language and verbal language. Social life is seen as interconnected networks of social practices, every practice having a semiotic element (see 9.4.).

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From all its premises, it can be deduced that CDA is essentially

multidisciplinary.

Rather than being a direction or a new school, it aims to offer a different mode of analysis by finding a more or less critical pespective in different areas such as rhetoric, stylistics,

Conversation between teachers at an annual Prom.

sociolinguistics, pragmatics, ethnography, conversation analysis, etc. Consequently, CDA does not have a unitary theoretical framework. It can be said that there are many types of CDA, which can be theoretically and analytically quite diverse. However, all will have a common perspective: they will ask and try to answer questions about the way certain discourse structures are deployed in the reproduction of social dominance, thus featuring such notions as power, dominance, hegemony, ideology, gender, race, and discrimination, among others. It is an underlying assumption of CDA that in most interactions, speakers bring with them different dispositions with respect to language which are directly related to their social positionings. The explicit awareness of their role in society is crucial for critical discourse analysts, for they strongly argue that both science and scholarly discourse are an inherent part of the social structure, and are consequently influenced by it as well. Thus, CDA tries to explain discourse structures in terms of the properties of social interaction and social structure, rather than merely to describe them. In particular, CDA pays special attention to the ways discourse structures enact or reproduce relations of power and dominance in society. We reproduce here the main tenets of CDA as summarized by Fairclough & Wodak (1997: 271-80):

1. CDA addresses social problems 2. Power relations are discursive 3. Discourse constitutes society and culture 4. Discourse does ideological work 5. Discourse is historical 6. The link between text and society is mediated 180

7. Discourse analysis is interpretative and explanatory 8. Discourse is a form of social action

Since CDA believes that discourse is a form of social action, it follows that CDA uses the analysis of discourse as a means to make people aware of several important social and political issues. CDA intends to bridge the gap between micro and macro levels of social order. Power and dominance, for example, are terms that belong to the macrolevel of analysis; discourse, verbal interaction or communication, belong to the microlevel. Van Dijk (2001) explains that a racist speech in parliament, for instance, is a discourse at the microlevel of social interaction in the specific situation of a debate, but at the same time and at the macrolevel, it may enact or be a constituent part of legislation or the reproduction of racism.

A violent argument resulting from racism.

Critical discourse analysts argue that most of the studies in critical linguistics and DA neglect social cognition (i.e. the social representations in the minds of social actors), an omission which –in their opinion- has been one of the major theoretical shortcomings of discourse research. Consequently, CDA places emphasis on social cognition as the necessary theoretical and empirical ‘missing link’ between discourse and dominance, by attempting to show the nature of its relationship with discourse and society. Ideology is also a key term in CDA. It is the belief of critical discourse analysts 181

that language never appears by itself; on the contrary, it always appears as the representative of an ideological system. Most discourse studies within the CDA approach deal with different aspects of power, domination and social inequality. In particular, we may find research on topics such as professional power, institutional power, gender inequality, racism, ethnocentrism, the enactment of power through media discourse or through political discourse, among others. We shall now proceed to discuss the central topic of power in more detail.

10.2. Discourse and power

In a common-sense, non-theoretical description, we may say that power is multi-faceted and can take different forms. We generally speak of power as measurable in terms of the amount of political power, military power, physical power, etc. that some person or group has. For instance, we regard the President of a nation as one of the most powerful persons in that nation. Also, in many contexts, men are regarded as having more power than women, and white people more than black people. Power is also associated with rank and status, and thus hierarchies are built around relative positions of political, social or professional power. In a less commonsense and more academic environment, discourse has been regarded by many scholars as an important site for both constructing and maintaining power relations. CDA views power as already belonging to some participants and not to others, and as a condition which is determined by their institutional role and/or their socio-economic status, ethnic identity or gender. Thus, power (and, in particular, the social power of groups or institutions) is a central concern in most critical work on discourse. Social power -van Dijk (2001) remarks- is defined in terms of control. Therefore, the members of a given social group will have power if they are able to control the acts and minds of members of other groups. This ability to control other people’s minds and acts presupposes a priviledged access to certain social resources such as force, money, status, fame, knowledge, information, etc., which are not easily available to all human beings. Different types of power are identified, depending on the various resources employed to exercise such power. The power of the miltary, for example, is based on force; the power of the rich is based on their money, and so on. But, fortunately, as van 182

Dijk states, “…power is seldom absolute. Groups may more or less control other groups, or only control them in specific situations or social domains. Moreover, dominated groups may more or less resist, accept, condone, comply with, or legitimate such power, and even find it ‘natural’” (2001: 355). And precisely because sometimes the enactment of power is acceptable, the power of dominant groups is integrated in laws, rules or habits, in such a way that sometimes power is taken for granted, as can be observed in many racist or sexist discourses which form part of our everyday experience. It is not uncommon to find examples, especially in our modern world, of very effective power enacted by means of persuasion or manipulation, as a strategic way to change the mind of others in the interest of a particular group. From here the particular interest of critical discourse analysts in focusing on the discursive strategies that legitimate control, thereby legitimating relations of inequality. Althusser (1971) was one of the first theorists to describe power as a discursive phenomenon and his work has been highly influential in much of the early work in CDA. He also viewed power as an ideological phenomenon, and claimed that it operates through discourse by constructing particular subject positions for people to occupy, which are sometimes accepted as natural and unchangeable even though they may not be in the best interest of the powerless. As regards the relationship between power and discourse, then, critical discourse analysts take the following statements as axiomatic: •

Access to specific forms of discourse, such as the discourses of politics, the media or science, is itself a power resource.

•

If we are able to influence people’s minds by exercising our power, we will indirectly control their actions.

•

Thus those groups who control most influential discourse also have more chances to control the minds and actions of others.

Hence van Dijk splits up the issue of discursive power into two basic questions for CDA research: I. How do (more) powerful groups control public discourse? II. How does such discourse control mind and action of (less) powerful groups, and what are the social consequences of such control, such as social inequality? (2001: 355)

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Through this special kind of research, CDA intends to show results that will distinguish power abuse from legitimate and acceptable forms of power. When a given group abuses their power and other groups accept this abuse by acting in the interest of the powerful, critical discourse analysts use the term hegemony (Gramsci, 1971). The hegemonic groups constitute the power elites, and they have special access to discourse, since they are the groups who have most to say, in contrast to those (powerless) groups who are allowed to say little or nothing. Thus, CDA defines elites in terms of their symbolic power, a term borrowed from Bordieu’s (1982) 31 metaphor of the symbolic capital. The symbolic power of a given group is then measured by the extent of its members’ discursive and communicative scope and resources (van Dijk, 1993).

10.2.1. ‘Powerful’ discourse structures

So… can discourse be powerful? It certainly can, and in order to analyze the power of discourse, we need to consider not only how speakers say what they say, but also what it is that they say. The belief in the existence of more or less powerful ways of speaking, for example, underlies much of the early work in sociolinguistic studies of language and gender. Also, one of the ways in which the elites enact their power is by controlling the context of discourse, i.e. they control the communicative event in all its components: time, place, setting, presence or absence of the participants, etc. Thus, for instance, it is normally the C.E.O. 32 of a company (and not the employees) who calls for a meeting at the time, place and in the circumstances which are convenient to her/him, or it is the professor who makes an appointment with the student and not viceversa. CDA is specially concerned with those forms of context control which are legally or morally unacceptable, such as the exclusion of women by men (in any given event), the restrictions put on black people to have access to the press or any powerful institution, or any other kinds of communicative discrimination and marginalization. These modes of context control and discrimination are also manifested at the level of discourse structures. Hence some opinions are censored or not heard, some

See Unit 9.

Chief Executive Officer

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points of view are completely ignored: “The discourse itself becomes a ‘segregated’ structure” (van Dijk, 1993). As a consequence, the less powerful are less quoted, less heard, and less spoken about; their ‘voices’ are blocked. At the micro-level of text and talk, we find a more or less consciously controlled and less direct influence of power. Very subtle manifestations of dominance may be found at the syntactic, morphological or phonological level, as could be the case of the use of a given intonation, the use of some rhetorical figures, and, at a broad semantic (pragmatic) level, the turn-taking or the politeness strategies used by speakers, which may overtly or covertly impose the power of the ‘speaking’ groups over the ‘nonspeaking’ powerless groups. Indeed, the use of (im)politeness strategies may be very telling about which of the interlocutors is expressing dominance. It is a well-known linguistic fact that those people who are in power feel entitled to be impolite towards their subordinates (Culpeper, 1996); hence the insolent and impolite tone used by members of higher ranks in the military towards the powerless soldiers of a lower rank. This impoliteness (and consequent use of power) may be materialized in a given type of intonation, in the use of ironic discourse, or in the use of certain ‘impoliteness markers’ (Alba Juez, 2005), to name a few possibilities. Other linguistic strategies which are commonly used to express power directly or indirectly are the use of hedges, hesitations, interruptions, pauses, laughter, certain specific forms of address, etc. Also, the choice of topics and topic change is crucial for all discourse. The group who decides the topic to be dealt with and when it should be changed is the group in power, as when men control the topics when in conversation with women, or when teachers decide what will be the content of their syllabi without consulting their students. Controlling the topic generally results in mind control, for topics may influence people’s views about what is important information of text or talk. This is one of the reasons why CDA focuses on how discourse structures influence mental representations: since topics influence what people see as most important, these may eventually influence how a given item is defined in terms of a preferred mental model. Thus, for instance, immigration may be restricted if it is presupposed in a parliamentary debate that all refugees are “illegal” (Wodak & van Dijk 2000). All these strategies may, depending on the circumstances, result in more or less aggressive forms of sexism, racism or other forms of dominance.

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10.2.1.1. Example and analysis

Example 1 (taken from Culpeper, 1996), exhibits a case of the use of impoliteness in the context of army recruit training (Private Alves is being humiliated by the Sergeant), where there is a rigid hierarchical power structure and recruits are at the bottom: 1) Alves is denied speaking rights. This is clear at the beginning of the interview: S1: you’re going to mess up one of my squad leaders PA:

S1: [indistinct] any way you can how about it= PA:

=don’t =I=

S1: bullshit me now Alves you want to jump you want to PA:

S1: jump on somebody= PA:

=JUMP ON ME then… =no=

S1:

who

shut up Alves you’re the one who is

PA: said that sergeant

S1: running your little mouth again you’re the one PA:

S1: intimidating and threatening my squad leaders… PA:

S1:

bullshit tell that god damn lie to someone

PA: I didn’t sergeant

S1: that believes your ass private you’ve already been PA:

S1: proven to be a damn habitual liar PA: (1996: 360)

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The sergeant here feels in power and in total control of Private Alves, a fact that is shown through different mechanisms and strategies: he uses taboo insulting words or expressions, he yells at the recruit (JUMP ON ME…), he interrupts Alves every time he tries to say a word (and therefore he is in control of the turn-taking structure), he gives direct orders by using imperatives (shut up Alves…) and he accuses the recruit of being a liar (among other things) without letting him speak in his own defense. This is a clear case of hegemony, where the power elite (the sergeants) have access to discourse (while the powerless recruits do not) and where the powerless group (the recruits) accept the ‘abuse’ and act in the interest of the powerful by remaining silent or by accepting humiliation. Thus, and obviously, the group having the symbolic power here is the group of the sergeants. However, it is difficult to judge if their behavior can be labelled as “abusive”, for the kind of discourse used by this dominant group is considered to be part of what they consider their job. As Culpeper explains, within the context of an army training camp, it is assumed that recruits should obey orders without hesitation, and the best way to achieve this goal is to “destroy the recruits’ individuality and self-esteem, and then rebuild it in the desired mould” (1996: 359). Therefore, the limits for what is to be considered abusive in this environment will be different from those in another context, although this fact does not exclude the possibility of serious abuse or harassment, which many times is caused precisely by the great degree of power that is given to and assumed from the higher positions in the hierarchy.

10.2.2. Some other interesting studies on the issue of discourse and power In order to clarify the type of research that a critical view to discourse analysis can produce on the topic of power, we shall list and discuss briefly some interesting studies which may be taken as representative, even though not all the authors mentioned place themselves within CDA:  Harris (1984) examines the function of certain types of question formats as a powerful means of controlling discourse in British magistrates’ courts examinations. She concludes that, in this particular context, the propositional content of the questions and their syntactic form resulted in a highly conducive 187

form of questioning by the examining magistrate, who uses this type of questioning in order to accuse. Such questioning (which mainly gave rise to short yes/no or minimal answers) provided a powerful means of controlling the interaction, for they did not allow the defendants to introduce their own topics or shape the content of what was discussed, and generally when the defendants started to produce minimal responses they were interrupted by the magistrate.  Goodwin (1992) shows that African-American girls engage in powerful forms of talk, in an activity known as ‘instigating’, in which they bring about public confrontations between one of the girls (who is accused of having offended another) and another (the offended party). According to Goodwin, power is evident in the activity of instigating, for it creates a situation where confrontation and negotiation are worked out between the participants.

addition, she observes that the level of complexity found in this activity was never found among the boys in her study, and concludes that, in order to study power in female speech, a good starting point would be to see how females use language to orchestrate the important political events in their lives.  In an analysis of the reconstruction of sexual consent in a sexual harassment disciplinary tribunal, Ehrlich (1998) argues that the tribunal was conducted on the basis of a typically male view of what is considered to be reasonable resistance to sexual aggression.

The tribunal qualified the complainant’s

expressions of resistance with adjectives such as “deficient” or “inactive”, which, in Goodwin’s view, is a sign of a lenient treatment of the defendant, based on a masculine view of how resistence to sexual aggression should be, thus displaying power abuse on the part of the members of the tribunal, who were all male.  Edelsky (1981) studied the asymmetical distribution of social power between men and women by examining the differential between women and men regarding the amount of talk and access to the ‘floor’ in conversation. This study is based on a model of power in interaction which assigns more power to those participants who take the most turns.  Analyzing the participation of men and women in an academic discussion list on the internet, Herring, Johnson & DiBenedetto (1996) found out that there was a notable gender difference in spite of the supposedly democratic attitude of the World Wide Web. Moreover, the male participants expressed their discontent 188

when there were more women than men contributing to a particular topic.  Diamond (1996) argues that the currency of conversation consists of ideas or statements, rather than turns, and is in favor of a view of power as political and consensual in discursive interaction. She studies power and status in the talk between trainers and traineees in a Swiss institute of psychotherapy from the politeness perspective, and concludes that high-rank members use strategies related to ‘solidarity’ politeness, while low-rank members use strategies associated with ‘defence’ politeness (Scollon & Scollon, 1981).  Fishman’s (1983) study of white, heterosexual, professional couples talking at home reveals that, while the women worked harder than the men at maintaining conversations, they were however less successful at getting their topics introduced into the talk.  An interesting study made by Gal (1992) shows that remaining silent in discursive interaction may also be a powerful strategy. Silence, she explains, can be a resource for the institutionally more powerful participants in certain settings such as interviews, police examinations or religious confession. It can also be used as a form of resistance and protest (as, for instance, the case of seventeenth-century English Quakers, who refused to speak when they were expected to verbally show their ideological commitment). Other authors, such as Kurzon (1992), Gray (1992), Akman (1994), McCarthy & Carter (1994) and Alba Juez (2001) have also found that silence may be used to gain control of a situation or to express dominance of some sort.

10.3. Ideology, social cognition and discourse Ideology is a key notion in CDA, for it is considered to be the notion that establishes the link between discourse and society (van Dijk 1997, 2004). Within CDA, it is Teun van Dijk who has developed and is still developing a theory which intends to specify the internal structures and contents of ideologies, and consequently the ideas regarding the subject in this section will be based on this author’s contributions. Van Dijk explains that “ideologies are developed by dominant groups in order to reproduce and legitimate their domination” (1997: 25). Discourse is the medium by which ideologies are communicated in society, thereby reproducing the power and domination of certain groups. 189

Ideologies resemble natural languages in that they are essentially social: they are shared by the members of a group and they are used to solve the social problem of successful communicative interaction.

However, while groups use languages for

communication among their own members, ideologies serve not only for internal coordination, but also (and more importantly) to coordinate social interaction with members of other groups. Members of a group, thus, develop a basic framework that allows them to act as members of such a group: they share a given identity, aims, values, etc., and take it as the general basis which will let them know how to act in normal situations as well as in situations of conflict. In his study on ideology, van Dijk combines his earlier notions from the cognitive study of discourse (van Dijk & Kintsh, 1983) with later ideas on social cognition, power, racism and the reproduction of power through discourse. In his academic autobiography, he summarizes his view as follows: “The crucial concept of ideology I proposed is defined in terms of the fundamental cognitive beliefs that are at the basis of the social representations shared by the members of a group. Thus, people may have ideological racist or sexist beliefs (e.g., about inequality) that are at the basis of racist and sexist prejudices shared by the members in their group, and that condition their discourse and other social practices. We thus at the same time are able to link ideologies with discourse, and hence with the ways they are (discursively) reproduced, as well as the ways members of a group represent and reproduce their social position and conditions in their social cognitions and discourse […] That is, ideologies control social representations of groups, and thus the social practices and discourses of their members. This happens through the ideological control of mental models which in turn, […] control the meaning and the functions of discourses, interaction and communication. And conversely, ideologies may be ‘learned’ (and taught) through the generalization of mental models, that is, the personal experiences of social members.” (2004: 26-7)

In short, ideologies are both social systems and mental representations. This means that they not only have a social function but also cognitive functions of belief organization. Ideologies are the mental representations that form the basis of social cognition, and by social cognition van Dijk means “the shared knowledge and attitudes of a group” (1997: 29). This social cognition in turn influences the specific beliefs of the members of a group, which finally form the basis of discourse.

10.3.1. Ideological analysis: An example.

In order to illustrate how practitioners of CDA analyze discourse in terms of ideology, 190

we here reproduce and summarize the analysis that van Dijk (1997) makes of the following fragment of a politician’s (Mr Rohrabacher’s) speech: We need economic growth, business expansion, not more civil rights legislation that is redundant and useless… We care about these people living in horrible situations, whatever their race, and they come in all colors… [Their horrible situation] Rarely is this a result of bigotry… They were listening to so-called liberal leaders who were telling them that they should not try [to get jobs] because they did not have a chance rather than listening to conservatives who were telling them to go for it… This first step is to recognize that racial discrimination plays only a minor role in the economic tragedy befalling our inner cities. We need to talk about our economy moving, creating new jobs and personal economic advancement of our citizens… Let us defeat this legislation. It is going to hurt those it claims to help. (1997: 32)

Van Dijk argues that this and other fragments of Mr Rohrabacher’s speech express ideological polarization by making reference to different groups (liberals and conservatives) and their different social views of minorities. All discursive structures aim at putting emphasis on our good things, as opposed to their bad things. This principle of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation finds its expression at different levels of discourse description such as:

Topic selection (e.g., ‘We tell them to go for it’ vs ‘They tell them they should not try’).

Schematic organization (the overall argument against civil rights legislation: we oppose a redundant law, and instead propose better job opportunities).

Local meanings, coherence, implications and presuppositions (e.g., ‘a welfare system that provides the wrong incentives to people who need an inspiration to change, not pressure to remain the same’ implies that the jobless don’t want to work, and that their position is caused by welfare and not by employers who refuse to hire them); we also find disclaimers and denials of racism (‘Rarely is this a result of bigotry’).

Lexicalization implying our positive and their negative properties (‘we care about these people’ vs ‘obtrusive civil rights bill’)

Style (e.g., imitation of popular oral argumentative style: ‘The less fortunate of our fellow citizens. That is who will not be helped’)

Rhetorical devices, such as contrasts (‘It [the bill] is going to hurt those it claims to help’), metaphors (‘The job explosion experienced throughout America 191

during the Reagan years’), hyperboles and euphemisms (‘less fortunate of our fellow citizens’). (1997: 33)

This analysis is but one example of CDA which shows that ideologies may be encoded at all levels and in all the structural properties of discourse and context, a type of analysis which eventually should enable us to fully understand the complex relation between discourse and society.

10.4. Steps to follow when doing CDA

Wetherell et al (2001) propose an analytical framework for doing CDA which is modelled upon Bhaskar’s (1986) concept of explanatory critique. We reproduce it here as a useful guide for the student or reader who wants to ‘embark’ upon CDA: An Analytical framework for CDA

Stage 1: Focus upon a social problem that has a semiotic aspect. Beginning with a social problem rather than the more conventional ‘research question’ accords with the critical intent of this approach –the production of knowledge which can lead to emancipatory change.

Stage 2: Identify obstacles to the social problem being tackled. You can do this through analysis of: b) the network of practices it is located within c) the relationship of semiosis to other elements within the particular practice(s) concerned d) the discourse (the semiosis itself) by means of -

structural analysis: the order of discourse

interactional analysis

interdiscourse analysis

linguistic and semiotic analysis

The objective here is to understand how the problem arises and how it is rooted in the way social life is organized, by focusing on the obstacles to its resolution –on what makes it more or less intractable.

Stage 3: Consider whether the social order (network of practices) ‘needs’ the problem. The point here is to ask whether those who benefit most from the way social life is now organized have an interest in the problem not being resolved.

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Stage 4: Identify possible ways past the obstacles. This stage in the framework is a crucial complement to Stage 2 – it looks for hitherto unrealized possibilities for change in the way social life is currently organized.

Stage 5: Reflect critically on the analysis (Stages 1-4). This is not strictly part of Bhaskar’s explanatory critique but it is an important addition, requiring the analyst to reflect on where s/he is coming from, and her/his own social positioning. (2001: 236)

10.5. Major criticisms levelled at CDA

CDA has been the target of a critique made by Schegloff (1997), which originated a complex debate (Wetherell 1998, Schegloff 1998, Billig 1999a, 1999b and 1999c, Schegloff 1999a and 1999b) carried out mainly between CDA and CA (Conversation Analysis). Schegloff argues that the type of research carried out by CDA does not include a detailed and systematic analysis of discourse as is the case with CA. He holds the idea that the work of critical discourse analysts should be grounded in the technical discipline of conversation analysis, and that if this were so, the results of such a technical analysis might turn out to be quite different from what they primarily assumed. Moreover, Schegloff’s main point in this argument is that CDA should not merely presuppose contextualization (i.e. it should not presuppose that, for example, being black or being a woman will be evident from the way people write or talk); on the contrary, it should prove it by examining what social members actually say and do. If this is not done –Schegloff remarks- contextualization is pointless and has no discursive relevance. Thus CA is offered by Schegloff as a corrective to the ‘grandiosity’ of CDA, a grandiosity which is evident, in his opinion, when critical analysts impose their own frames of reference on a world which is already interpreted and constructed by the participants of discourse. This imposition, Schegloff argues, is an act of intellectual hegemony, which seems ironic, considering that it is precisely hegemony that critical discourse analysists want to denounce when doing their job. Thus, reading between the lines, Schegloff suggests that CDA is not as objective a method of analysis as CA is. Other authors (e.g. Cunningham, 2004) have accused CDA of being ‘left-leaning’ 193

and thus politically-oriented, which, in their opinion, disqualifies it as scholarship. In an attempt to make opposing positions meet, van Dijk (1999b) notes that the debate between CDA and CA does not imply that these fields are in conflict or that they are imcompatible. On the contrary, he argues that there is valuable CA-oriented research that has a critical perspective and that CDA shares many basic criteria and aims with CA.

1. The origins of CDA may be traced back to the end of the 1970s, in the ‘critical linguistics’ that emerged (mainly in the UK and Australia) as a reaction against the dominant formal paradigms of the 1960s and 1970s. 2. CDA can be defined as “a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominace, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context” (van Dijk 2001). 3. CDA is essentially multidisciplinary. Rather than being a direction or a new school, it aims to offer a different mode of analysis by finding a more or less critical pespective in different areas such as rhetoric, stylistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, ethnography, conversation analysis, etc. 4. In particular, CDA pays special attention to the ways discourse structures enact or reproduce relations of power and dominance in society. Thus, it uses the analysis of discourse as a means to make people aware of several important social and political issues. 5. Ideology is also a key term in CDA. Ideologies are both social systems and mental representations. They are the mental representations that form the basis of social cognition.

Language/discourse always appears as the representative of an

ideological system. 6. CDA views power as already belonging to some participants and not to others, and as a condition which is determined by their institutional role and/or their socioeconomic status, ethnic identity or gender. 7. The power elites have special access to discourse. Thus, CDA defines elites in terms of their symbolic power (Bordieu, 1982). The symbolic power of a given group is measured by the extent of its discursive and communicative scope and 194

resources. 8. Power is enacted in discourse at its different macro and micro-levels. It is manifested through both text and context.

A) ANALYSIS: Here are two jokes that I heard someone tell when I was living in the United States of America. ANALIZE them from the CDA perspective, looking for any specific type of ideology they might be favoring or satirizing. LOOK FOR the discourse structures that are used to express the ideologies in question. [1] The Secretary of the Mormon Church in Utah approaches the President of the Church and the following exchange takes place:

A: ‘I have good news and bad news to tell you, Mr. President. I’ll start with the good news: God is in town. B: Wonderful. But… what’s the bad news? A: She is black.

[2] A

favorite

uncle

visiting

his

family

when

has

heart

attack.

They rush him to the hospital. Later the doctors come out with long faces. "It

seems

his

brain

dead

but

his

heart

still

beating",

they

say.

A gasp arises from the family members. "We've never had a liberal in the family before!"

B) ANNOTATING DISCOURSE: SEARCH for any kind of discourse on the Internet (TV interviews, chat rooms, radio programs, etc.) which you suspect might show a certain ideology and thus might expose the hegemony of a given social group. ANNOTATE A FRAGMENT of such discourse for the purposes of analysis (following the guidelines in Chapter 2). C) ANALYSIS: ANALYZE the fragment using Wetherell’s analytical framework, and focusing on any discourse feature (topics, turn-taking, silence, prosodic features, etc.) that you consider relevant in the particular text and context of your data for a critical analyisis.

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Fairclough, 1992 Fairclough, 2001 Martín Rojo, L., Pardo, M. L. & R. Whittaker, 1998 Neff, 1997 Thornborrow, 2002 van Dijk, 1997 van Dijk, 1999a van Dijk, 2001 van Dijk, 2004 Wetherell, 1998 Wodak & van Dijk, 2000

Critical Discourse Analysis: http://www.kon.org/archives/forum/15-1/mcgregorcda.html http://users.utu.fi/bredelli/cda.html http://www.writinginstructor.com/essays/christiansen1.html Criticisms of CDA: http://clublet.com/c/c/why?CriticalDiscourseAnalysis Teun Van Dijk’s website: www.discourse-in-society.org And many more… Search for them!

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MEDIATED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

“Everywhere about us in our day-to-day world we see the discourses which shape, manage, entice, and control our actions. Instrumental to the process of shaping those discourses are the objects by which we index our own positions and identities in the world. The traffic light at a busy intersection not only narrowly manages the flow of automobiles through the intersection, it also indexes the municipal regulatory powers and apparatus that have placed the traffic light and which maintain its functioning. Furthermore, as we approach the light and make our choices about stopping or driving right through it, we index ourselves in respect to those regulatory powers and that municipal power apparatus. Mostly, of course, we index ourselves as law-abiding citizens by stopping when instructed to do so.” Scollon & Scollon, Discourses in Place. Language in the Material World

MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT: • •

To study the main theoretical principles and methods of Mediated Discourse Analysis. To study the central concepts within this approach.

•

To be able to analyze social action from this perspective.

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11.1. What is Mediated Discourse Analysis? Mediated Discourse Analysis (herinafter MDA) is an approach to the study of discourse which focuses more upon human social action than upon texts or discourses. This approach considers technology as mediational means within social actions. Language is not considered the only mediational means; non-verbal communication and physical objects used by an agent in taking an action are mediational means as well. Discourse and human action in social change is its main concern, and mediated action is used as the basic unit of analysis. As Norris & Jones (2005) point out, the spoken or written texts we produce may have significant social consequences. MDA explores the actions individuals take with texts, as well as the consequences of those actions. As other approaches to DA, MDA is theoretically interdisciplinary. It developed out of linguistics and it integrates concepts from mediated action theory, sociocultural psychology, interactional sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, anthropological linguistics and intercultural communication. Mediated discourse analysts work with the underlying assumption that social problems in our contemporary world are inextricably linked to texts. Scollon (2001: 1) explains that MDA is a framework for looking at social actions with the following two questions in mind: 1) What is the action going on here? 2) How does discourse figure into these actions? He also points out that “MDA seeks to develop a theoretical remedy for discourse analysis that operates without reference to social actions on the one hand, and social analysis that operates without reference to discourse on the other” (2001: 1). For example, the action of going out with a friend for a cup of coffee is seen by Scollon as a very complex set of actions which involves many complex discourses “with rampant intertextualities and interdiscursivities” (2001: 1), such as family talk, service encounter talk, international neo-capitalist marketing of coffee, etc. 33. MDA intends to show all this complexity without presupposing which discourses and actions are the relevant ones in a given particular case.

11.2. Central concepts in MDA 33

See 11.7. in this Unit.

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The following are five central concepts in MDA (Scollon, 2001): 1)

Mediated action: the unit of analysis in MDA. Analysts focus on the acting of social actors, because the discourses in question are not merely material objects: “they are instantiated in the social world as social action” (Scollon, 2001: 3). According to Scollon, it is unproductive to work with “pure” abstractions. There is no social action without discourse, and there is no discourse without concrete, material actions. Site of engagement: the social space where mediated action occurs. The interpretation of a mediated action is located within the social practices which are related in that unique place and moment. Thus the focus is on real-time, irreversible actions rather than on objectivized analyses of discourses Mediational means: the material means (e.g. the body, dress and movements of the material actors) through which mediated action is carried out, which are in dialectical interaction with structures of the habitus. Mediational means are multiple in a single action, and they are inherently polyvocal, intertextual and interdiscursive. They inevitably carry histories and social structures with them. Practice: MDA takes as a premise that mediated action is only interpretatable within practices. Thus, having lunch at a restaurant, for instance, is interpreted as a different action than having lunch at home, the difference lying both in the practice (for example, who prepares the coffee) and in the mediational means (the decoration of the room, the type of kitchen, etc.). Nexus of practice: The different types of practices (discursive and non-discursive) are interrelated and linked to form nexus of practice. So, for instance, an Italian restaurant nexus of practice would include different things such as ordering practices (e.g. we have to be able to distinguish between different types of pizza and pasta), eating practices (e.g. alone or with friends), discursive practices (e.g. being able to pronounce and understand some italian terms), physical spacing practices (e.g. there is a place for the customers and a place for the restaurant staff), and so on. The concept of the nexus of practice is unbounded and as such it is always unfinalized. The constellation of practices is what makes for the uniqueness of the site of engagement

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and the identities thus produced. 11.3. MDA as a theory of social action Scollon (2001) emphasizes the fact that social problems in our contemporary world are inextricably linked to texts. Much of what we say is accompanied by action and, conversely, most of our actions are accompanied by language. MDA shares the goals of CDA 34. However, MDA reformulates the object of study by focusing not on the discourses of social issues but on social action as the grounds of discourse and language. Thus the single most important principle in MDA theory is the principle of social action, for discourse is not conceived as a system of representation, thought or values, but as a matter of social actions. The ecological unit of analysis, i.e. mediated action (the person or persons in the moment of taking an action along with the mediational means which are used by them), is a corollary to this principle. All social action is based in tacit, normally unconscious actions which form the different practices. An individual’s accumulated experience of social actions is what we call the habitus35 (Bourdieu 1977, 1990) or the historical-body (Nishida, 1958). The starting point for mediated discourse analysts, therefore, is the study of social action, and the analysis of language or discourse only takes place when language is understood to be a significant mediational means for the actions under analysis. Thus, the methodological problem faced by a mediated discourse analyst is not how to accomplish the analysis of a text, but how to accomplish the analysis of a socialmediated-action. 11.4. Methods in MDA MDA includes multiple methods, from ethnographic participant-observation, interviews and questionnaire surveys to focus groups or the collection of texts and images. The main aim is the identification and analysis of key mediated actions. Data production activities are organized in three main groups (Scollon, 2005): 1) Ethnography of communication surveys of key situations and participants: These surveys differ from the original surveys in the Ethnography of communication in that they are more concerned with problems of social change and thus focus on social issues. The aim of mediated discourse analysts is to 34

See Unit 10.

See also Unit 9.

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enter into the lifeworlds of the group in order to learn which mediated actions in which sites of engagement are crucial in producing social identities and social changes for that group. Therefore the survey intends to obtain information about the participants, the mediational means, the scenes or situations, and the events and actions. 2) Issue-based surveys of public discourse: These provide an independent analysis of the significance of topics, mediational means, and mediated actions to cross check against the ethnography of communication surveys. The dialectal link between public discourse and personal action is central to MDA. 3) Public opinion and focus group surveys of issues and situations: These provide MDA with a means of determining the sociopolitical issues that are central across the public at large. In a later stage they are compared with the analyses of public discourses and those of specific concrete mediated actions taken in specific sites of engagement. Each type of data can be seen from four different perspectives (S. Scollon, 1998): 1) Members’ generalizations: These are generally expressed in simple statements such as “We usually do X or Y,” and may also be contrasted with generalizations about other groups of people: “Those Xs do P or Q”. Members’ generalizations are a very important source of data in MDA. 2) Individual experience: Members of a social group typically make sweeping generalizations about their group but, if given the chance, they make a disclaimer about these generalizations by stating that they do not do everything their group does because they are different. MDA understands that, even in rather homologous groups, the habitus of individuals may vary widely, and thus it is important to study the range delimited by both individual and group actions. 3) ‘Neutral’/ ‘objective’ data: MDA is generally skeptical of objectivized data which eliminates the particularistic characteristics of individual actions. However, introducing a third point of view –that of a distant observer- provides important information for the analysis. For this reason, MDA includes an examination of the position of the analyst and takes recording devices such as cameras, tape recorders and the like as examples of mediational means which can help to complete the information provided by the other two types of group-

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internal data (member’s generalizations and individual experience). 4) Playback responses: A method used in interactional sociolinguistics and other fields by means of which close attention is paid to the linguistic details of social interactions. It can also be used to check transcriptions for accuracy. Playback provides the original participants in a scene with an ‘objective’ record of their actions, as well as with the analysis developed by an external observer. 11.5. Mediated social interaction R. Scollon (1998) argues that the sender-receiver model of communication is misleading, because it makes us think that the social interaction occurring in texts is between the author or producer and the reader or audience. Taking the case of news discourse as an example, this author thus argues that the primary social interactions are among the news producers (e.g.: journalists, photographers, editors) and not between the producers and the audience. News producers prepare a ‘spectacle’ among themselves which is the primary social interaction. Then MDA sees this spectacle not so much as a communication to an audience but as a communication in front of an audience. Likewise, the relationship between producers (authors) and spectators is seen differently. The primary social interaction, from the spectators’ point of view, is among the audience, for they may argue against, comment on or assess what they are viewing, but by no means can they be said to be engaged in what they are viewing or hearing. Thus, from the MDA perspective, all discourse is mediated and all mediations are discursive. The difference between this approach and any other approach to discourse lies in the focus of attention, which for MDA is placed on “the actions of social actors in using the texts of communication” (Scollon, 2005). 11.6. Interdisciplinarity As noted in 11.1., MDA is an interdisciplinary approach to discourse. Its origins can be found in a Boasian type of Linguistics rather than in a Saussurian approach because, like Boas and Sapir, mediated discourse analysts ground their analysis of language in the sociocultural worlds of the people who use language. They are not so much interested in the abstract or structural characteristics of a language, which were the main concern of de Saussure or Bloomfield’s studies. The integration of many disciplines, however, brings about crucial problems which, according to Scollon (2005), are the following:

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a) Representation and action: There is a tension between the study of abstract systems of representation and the study of social actors living in real time. MDA uses concepts and theoretical assumptions from neoVigotskian sociocultural psychology (such as mediated action or activity theory) in order to solve this issue. Thus mediated discourse analysts consider that the habitus of social actors carries with it the life history of the person. Embedded in the mediational means are the histories and the social structures of the world in which they were created. Mediated action: a guided tour of The Globe b) Linguistic relativity: There Theater in London. is a tension between the Saussurian assertion about the total arbitrariness of the symbol and the Boasian assertion that symbolic systems embed the histories of mental categorizations of their users. Here MDA turns to the Ethnography of Communication for help, by placing all studies of practice within a broader study of the place of the practice in the whole ecology of the social actor or the social group. c) Units of analysis: Mediated action (i.e. the social actor acting in real time using some mediational means) is taken as the unit of analysis. But using this unit brings about certain problems such as the question of whether language is a unique mediational means or whether there are other innate cognitive structures underlying other semiotic systems, as well as the issue related to the fact that “all or some mediational means are actually used in very parcial representations as social actors take action” (Scollon, 2005). d) Methodology: As we saw in 11.4., the nature of MDA calls for methods which are most commonly found in Interactional Sociolinguistics (such as taperecording, transcription, playback, etc.). However, this methodology focuses more on linguistic data than on the mediated action and the social actors, which, according to mediated discourse analysts, may lead to errors of interpretation or analysis. The solution to this problem is then found in ethnographic studies and

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thus the mediated actions are positioned within a larger sphere of social activity. e) The psychology of the social actor: Mediated discourse analysts believe that much of what we do as social actors has no connection to our capacity to articulate our intentions or goals in acting. Thus the analyst faces the problem of not having a well-grounded analytical basis for attributing a given action to a particular social actor. As Scollon (2005) notes, the question for MDA to resolve at this point is to what extent it is necessary to enter into the psychology of the social actor to produce a mediated discourse analysis. 11.7. How does MDA analyze discourse? In order to illustrate how social actions are analyzed in MDA, we shall summarize Scollon’s (2001) analysis of the social action of having a cup of coffee with friends. This author does not see this situation as the simple action of drinking a coffee, but as a very complex and nested set of actions (lining up, ordering, paying, looking for a table, etc.). Likewise, the discourse of the conversation among friends is not the only discourse in the action; there are other discourses implied, such as the discourse of service encounters, or the discourse of the international marketing of coffee (he places his actors at a Starbucks® café). He then focuses on the coffee cup, which he considers to be the primary mediational means because, among other things, without the cup there is no such action of ‘having a cup of coffee’. Scollon points out that “the cup itself (with its protective sleeve) is an impressive semiotic complex” (2001:2) where at least seven different discourses (Gee 1999) can be found: 1) The discourse of commercial branding (a recognizable logo appears twice on the cup and once on the sleeve). 2) Legal discourse (the logo is marked as a registered property ® and the sleeve has a copyright © mark). 3) E-commerce discourse (the website of the company is indicated). 4) Consumer correctness discourse (a text indicates that the company cares for those who grow its coffee and gives a telephone number where consumers can call and make a donation to them). 5) Environmental correctness discourse (there is indication about the sleeve being made of 60% recycled fiber). 6) Service information discourse (there is a printed list of possibilities, such as Decaf, Shots, Milk, etc., and a handwritten ‘L’ (for latte)). 7) Manufacturing information discourse (there is also information about the cup itself, such as size or product labelling and number).

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Scollon remarks that, in this particular case, MDA should try to work out a way to understand the relationships among the actions and the different discourses involved in drinking a cup of coffee. He then points out (2001: 3): “Ethnographic observation leads us to believe that, on the whole, except for the odd linguist, the coffee is drunk without much attention being focused on this impressive discursive array on the cup. Correspondingly, the literature has many analyses of such Discourses in public places, from the products of the news industry through the broader popular culture industry, which make scant reference at all to the actual social situations in which these Discourses are engaged in social action. Mediated Discourse Analysis is an attempt to theorize a way in which we can link the Discourse of commercial branding, for example, with the practice of drinking a cup of coffee in conversation without giving undue weight either to the action without reference to the Discourse or to the Discourse without reference to the actions within which it is appropriated.”

As can be seen, mediated discourse analysts give great importance to the material place where social actions occur. This is the main concern of Geosemiotics, with which we shall deal in the next section. 11.8. Geosemiotics Mediated discourse analysts have developed a broad and systematic analysis of how language appears in the material world. This broad analytical position has been called Geosemiotics and it holds the assumption that a very important aspect of the meaning of all language (whether in a conversation, in a book or on a public traffic sign) is based on the material, concrete, physical placement of that language in the world. The scholars supporting this position argue that “all instances of language in the world occur in semiotic aggregates –very complex systems of the interaction of multiple semiotic systems” (Scollon & Scollon, 2003: xii). From this perspective, “any human action is a process of selection among many semiotic systems which are always in a kind of dialectical dialogicality with each other” (Scollon & Scollon, 2003: xii). The key to the analysis of any human action is indexicality, i.e., the meaning of signs based on their material location. Thus, all language takes a major part of its meaning from how and where it is placed. All of the signs and symbols index a larger discourse (e.g. the discourse of public transport regulation, the discourse of academia and so on). Geosemiotics entails a broad analysis of discourse, and therefore it not only applies to signs or other symbols posted in different places, but also to signs and messages such as those sent off by our bodies, and whose meaning depends very much on where they are and what they are doing ‘in place’.

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11.8.1. Indexicality In order to understand the meaning of any (linguistic) sign we need to ask the following questions (Scollon & Scollon, 2003): a) b) c) d)

Who has uttered this? Who is the viewer? What is the social situation? Is that part of the material world relevant to such a sign?

These questions can be posed thanks to the property of language called indexicality. Indexicality is a universal characteristic of language and it is defined as “the property of the context-dependency of signs, especially language; hence the study of those aspects of meaning which depend on the placement of the sign in the material world” (Scollon & Scollon, 2003: 3). In Unit 3, 36 we learned how language indexes the world in many ways (e.g. by means of personal pronouns or demonstratives). The indexicality of language allows us to understand, for instance, a sentence like The examples below illustrate the point in question. In order to understand such a sentence we must rely upon a semiotics of written language which tells us that ‘below’ must index or refer to a text which is written within the same document (not in another document or on a piece of paper), or that it does not literally mean “below” as if it were an object below another object. But the primary interest of MDA is not so much the indexicality in language as the indexable world, i.e. the ways in which the sign system of language indexes the other semiotic systems in the world around language. We signal our meanings by means of icons (signs that resemble the objects being signalled), indexes (signs which point to or are attached to the object) and symbols (signs which are arbitrarily or conventionally associated with the object). For example, the picture of a woman or a man beside or on a door at a public place is an icon that normally indicates that the door leads you into the women’s or the men’s restrooms (respectively). An arrow is an index (in public life signs) which indicates direction. The signs of written language are the most common symbols in our daily life. However, even when the symbols used in language are used arbitrarily, some of them also have iconic meanings; in fact all of them were originally iconic (but their history has been forgotten). These three types of sign may co-occur, and thus we may have a sign that contains both an icon and an index (e.g. the women’s restroom icon together with an arrow indexing the direction to be followed in order to find the 36

See 3.5. (Deixis).

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restroom), or one that contains all three types (e.g. the picture of a man and a woman, the arrow and the word ‘restrooms’). 11.8.2. Central elements in Geosemiotics According to Scollon & Scollon (2003), there are four central elements to be taken into account when doing geosemiotic analysis: 1) Social actor: A person who moves and acts in the physical world, and who ‘gives off’ different signals (such as race, sex, age, etc.). 2) Interaction order: The set of social relationships we take up and try to maintain with the other people who are in our presence. 3) Visual semiotics: The ‘visual frame’ of the social action. It deals with aspects such as how the interaction order is represented visually and how placement of visual symbols affects their interpretation. 4) Place semiotics: Any human action takes place somewhere in the physical universe. Semiotic spaces (i.e. those spaces which facilitate pictures, discourses, or actions) are taken into account as well as non-semiotic spaces (i.e. spaces where signs are forbidden). Thus, from the point of view of Geosemiotics, everything surrounding us may influence our taking particular actions: from our location in a city or on a farm, close to the ocean or to the mountains, to the people with whom we interact or the signs that form part of the whole picture of our social interactions. As can be seen, MDA takes a holistic approach to the analysis of discourse, by considering every element related to and interconnected with the discourse situation and the social action being carried out. 11.9. Example of analysis We shall use the following picture in order to analyze the social action taking place, by considering the different discourses involved in the action as well as the information regarding its place and time (geosemiotics).

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As pointed out in 11.1., the first questions that mediated discourse analysts raise are: 1) What is the action going on here? 2) How does discourse figure into the action? Regarding question 1, the action going on is that of a Kinder III class at an American school (site of engagement). The teacher (one of the social actors) is pointing to some written symbols (mediational means) on the board and most of the students are listening to and looking at the teacher. The body language (another type of mediational means) of one of them (the boy on the left), however, shows that he is temporarily not paying attention to the teacher because he is probably more interested in someone or something occurring to the right of the picture. We can identify different discourses which form part of the action and which are interrelated: 1- Oral discourse (exchange between the teacher and the students): This is one of the last days of the academic course, and so the teacher is asking the students about their favorite part of the course. They all respond to the question, showing different opinions which the teacher tries to summarize by making a diagram on the board. 2- Written discourse: There are different types of written discourse on the different boards and walls of the class: a) Diagramatic discourse: The oral discourse is intertwined with the written discourse on the board, which the teacher has organized in the form of a diagram and which intends to summarize the main points made by the students. We read that some of the favorite activities were the garden hat parade, the museum field trip, the 100th day of school, Pilgrim and Native American day, St. Patrick’s day,

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celebration of learning day and the San Isidro Parade. This list of favorite activities not only signals the preferences of the students but also gives off a considerable amount of information about the type of school where the action is taking place. Many aspects could be analyzed in this respect, but for the purposes of illustration, we may say that it is evindently an American school (the language used is English and they celebrate –and therefore show respect for- Native Americans), but there is one point that gives us a clue that the action may not be taking place in America: the fact that one of the favorite activities of the students was the “San Isidro Parade”. In effect, this is an American school in Spain, and thus we see that it is a policy of the school to celebrate and show respect not only for American festivities and celebrations, but also for those of the country where the school is located. b) Discourse of rules or regulations: We see a sign on the wall (entitled “K-III Rules”) that constantly reminds the students of the rules to be followed in class and during interaction with teacher and classmates, which are three (1. We do not talk when someone else is talking, 2. We are kind to our friends, and 3. We follow directions). This sign is in turn related to a bigger sign posted on the entrance wall of the classroom (but does not appear in the picture) which reads: “It’s all about respect.” c) Poetic discourse: We also see a poster with a poem (“With silver bells and cockleshells…”) on the white board behind the teacher, which does not appear to be very related to the action going on at the moment but which nevertheless provides the analyst with some historical information about other actions or activities carried out throughout the school year, which form part of the habitus of the actors in the picture and therefore also contribute to the overall meaning of the social action in question. d) Language-learning discourse: On the whiteboard we can partially see a sentence that forms part of a language exercise for completion (…because_____). This exercise (as well as the poem) does not seem to be of great importance at the moment but provides us with some information about previous actions carried out in the class. Both the discursive and non-discursive practices are interconnected and they constitute the nexus of practice of the social action in question. Among the practices observed in the social action taking place in the picture we may mention turn-taking practices (the students raise their hands to participate in the conversation), physical spacing practices (the students are sitting on the floor, the teacher is sitting on a chair in front of the class), teaching-learning practices and so on.

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It is interesting to observe here that both the teacher and the students are wearing pijamas, which is not a normal or daily practice in school environments. However, this fact is one more clue for the interpretation of the particular action taking place: the picture was taken on “Pizza and pyjama day”, and therefore the practice of wearing pyjamas and slippers has to be judged as appropriate and also as explanatory of the relaxed atmosphere that can be observed in the class as a whole. It is also worth noting that all of the signs analyzed are indexes of a larger discourse. For example, the rules posted on the wall index the larger discourse of school policy, or the language used by the teacher indexes the larger discourse of politically correct institutional language. As we see, discourse and action are equally important for the interpretation of the situation under analysis. Both the oral and written discourses, as well as the body language of all the participants, are indexes of the action and practices going on. For instance, the teacher’s body language shows that she is developing an activity with her students (she’s pointing to the board, and her posture indicates that she is ‘in charge’). Thus it can be observed here, as in all social actions, that the different mediational means (body language, texts, way of dressing, oral discourse and the rest) found in this action are polyvocal (there is more than one ‘voice’), intertextual (different kinds of text are interrelated) and interdiscursive (different discourses intertwine).

1. MDA is an approach to the study of discourse which focuses upon social action. 2. Language, as well as non-verbal communication and physical objects used by an agent in carrying out an action are considered to be mediational means. 3. Discourse and human action in social change are its main concern, and mediated action is used as the basic unit of analysis. 4. All social action is based on tacit, normally unconscious actions which form the different practices. An individual’s accumulated experience of social actions is what we call the habitus or the historical-body. 5. There are both discursive and non-discursive practices, which are interconnected and which together constitute the nexus of practice of a given social action. 6. MDA includes multiple methods, from ethnographic participant-observation, interviews and questionnaire surveys, to focus groups or the collection of texts and images. The main aim is the identification and analysis of key mediated actions. 7. From the point of view of MDA, all discourse is mediated and all mediations are discursive. 8. MDA is an interdisciplinary approach to discourse.

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9. Geosemiotics is a broad analytical position taken by MDA, which holds the assumption that a very important aspect of the meaning of all language (whether in a conversation, in a book or on a public traffic sign) is based on the material, concrete, physical placement of that language in the world. 10. The key to the analysis of any human action is indexicality, i.e., the meaning of signs based on their material location. 11. We signal our meanings by means of icons, indexes and symbols. These three types of signs may co-occur. 12. Scollon & Scollon (2003) identify four central elements to be taken into account when doing geosemiotic analysis: social actor, interaction order, visual semiotics and place semiotics

A) ANALYSIS: ANALYZE the type(s) of discourse found in the different signs on this road in France. IDENTIFY the icons, indexes and symbols, and indicate if there are cases of co-occurrence of two or the three types of sign.

B) ANALYSIS: IDENTIFY the different discourses found on this inscription in a street of London. ANALYZE the visual and place semiotics of the symbols.

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C) ANALYSIS: TAKE PICTURES of people in public places and choose one for analysis. IDENTIFY the social actors, the mediational means and the different practices constituting the nexus of practice. Also, INDICATE the different discourses and how they interrelate.

Norris & Jones, 2005. Scollon, 1998. Scollon, 2001. Scollon & Scollon, 2003. Scollon & Scollon, 2004.

Mediated Discourse Analysis (R. Scollon): http://www.aptalaska.net/~ron/FOOD%2005/mda/index.htm Ron Scollon: http://www.rolsi.ucsb.edu/Pages/Ed_Member_Pages/R_Scollon.html Aplication of MDA in a U.S. Air Force study: http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj03/fal03/disler.html

FURTHER ISSUES IN DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 212

“The moment one starts to think of language as discourse, the entire landscape changes, usually, for ever.” M. McCarthy & R. Carter, Language as Discourse “Discourse is used for communication: people use utterances to convey information and to lead each other toward an interpretation of meanings and intentions. This role greatly increases the scope of discourse analysis, simply because one has to address how the language of utterances is related to aspects of the communication process (such as knowledge or intentions) that bear an indirect (and controversial) relationship to language per se.” D. Schiffrin, Approaches to Discourse

MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THIS UNIT: • • • • •

To identify different units of analysis with reference to the approaches studied. To identify different discourse types and be able to analyze them from any of the perspectives studied in this course. To understand and study the concepts of cohesion and coherence as seen by different perspectives/ authors. To study discourse markers and their contribution to cohesion and coherence. To synthesize all the knowledge acquired and the research done in this course in order to understand the functions of discourse, and the strategies used by speakers to fulfil these functions.

12.1. Some important issues of concern for all discourse analysts

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As the reader may have noticed, in spite of the noticeable differences existing among the various approaches studied in this course, all of them have, however, common concerns. Considering their importance, we shall try to elucidate some of these in this unit. I refer to the following: • • • •

Unit(s) of analysis Discourse types Cohesion and coherence Discourse strategies and functions

12.1.1. Unit(s) of analysis Discourse analysts have always been on the search for a unit of analysis that will allow them to describe and explain linguistic phenomena. One of their initial research questions might be simply formulated as: What are my units of analysis going to be? Shall I think in terms of… • sentences? •

propositions?

•

utterances?

•

turns?

•

speech acts?

•

theme/ rheme structures?

•

social action?

•

strategies?

•

functions?

As may be inferred from previous chapters, there is not a single or unique unit that can be used for all types of discourse analysis. In general, we may say that scholars have rejected the sentence as a unit, because their studies intend to go precisely ‘beyond the sentence’, and thus one of the initial (formal) definitions given referred to a unit of language larger than the clause or sentence (Lakoff, 1998). But the phenomenon of discourse is more embedded into a functional definition of language (‘language in use’) than into a formal one, and a functional definition does not say anything about the size of the units. How big, then, can a feature of discourse be? Depending on the level on which they focus, researchers may deal with larger or smaller units. Different approaches work with different units, but the same analyst may handle different units at 214

the same time if s/he considers it appropriate for the purposes of his/her study. Thus, for instance, we have seen that, whereas for an interactional sociolinguist the main unit of analysis may be the utterance or the (politeness) strategy, for a mediated discourse analyst this will be mediated action (a much broader and larger unit than an utterance or a strategy). The term discourse is generally applied to dyadic interactions which may be very long, medium-length, or very short: a simple “Hi!” (in a given context and situation) may constitute data for analysis. Lakoff’s (1998) definition of discourse takes this fact into account. By defining discourse as “A term used to cover all linguistic interactions that follow predictable patterns known implicitly or explicitly to participants and that have a discernible function,” she supports the view of discourse as linguistic interaction covering any length (all linguistic interactions). And if discourse can cover any length, then the units chosen for analysis will also be greater or smaller depending, among other things, on the type of discourse used as data. Thus, the type of discourse we choose for analysis will bear a close connection to the type(s) of unit(s) used, and hence the choice of a given discourse type is another of the important concerns of discourse analysts. We now turn to this issue. 12.1.2. Discourse types/ genres As pointed out in 12.1.1., discourse is intrinsically dyadic, but being dyadic does not imply that it is always reciprocal. For example, in a therapy session, the therapist is entitled to ask her patients about their private life but the patients are not entitled to do the same with the therapist. Thus we could say that non-reciprocality is a characteristic of the type of discourse called Psychotherapeutic discourse. Depending on the analyst’s perspective or on the variables taken into account, we may divide the universe of discourse into numerous different types, such as legal discourse, medical discourse, scientific discourse, computer-mediated discourse or family discourse, to name a few. Lakoff (1998) provides the following taxonomy in terms of the relationship we see between the forms used and the particular discourse. Discourse may thus be: 

Formal/ informal.



Reciprocal/ non-reciprocal.



Spontaneous/ non-spontaneous.



Face-to-face/ telephone conversation.



Public/ private.

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

Task-oriented (discourse oriented towards a particular purpose, e.g. Psycotherapy).



Literate (includes all modes of linguistic communication in writing).



Memorable (intended to last, to go on, to be recorded for the future).



Empathic (we can see what each participant is feeling, e.g.: face-to-face normal conversation, dialogue).



Monologic (one party tends to do most of the talking)



Truthful (designed for the purpose of fact-finding,

e.g.

psychotherapy, legal court discourse) vs. fictional discourse (Searle, 1979b). 

Spoken/ visual (gestures, movements, etc.) (Fairclough, 1989).



Dyadic/ triadic/ group (Various parts can take a role. Writing is generally non-dyadic, but letters are) (Simmel, 1950).

As noted in Unit 9, Bakhtin uses the term genre to refer to the different discourse types, and applies it to the whole range of human linguistic production. He notes that each sphere has its own patterns and that therefore genres are context-based, stable and diverse. However, it should be noted that no discourse belongs to a unique and exclusive type. There are no absolute distinctions among all the different discourse types, and thus we may more properly speak of a continuum of discourse types rather than of separate and distinct categories. For example, a conversation between a professor and a student at the end of the class may be situated at some point between the formal/informal range: there is some level of formality because of the distance and differences in power between the student and her professor, but at the same time the particular situation does not require high levels of formality, thus the analyst will surely find certain features of informal speech in their conversation as well. Consequently, different categories may be found in the same linguistic event. For example, the speech of a political candidate in a public place may belong to all of the following discourse types: public/ formal/ non-spontaneous/ memorable/ spoken and visual (at the same time)/ group/ political/ non-reciprocal. Hodge & Kress (2001: 295) point out that “genres only exist in so far as a social group declares and enforces the rules that constitute them.” Thus, a given social group may establish, recognize and name a particular kind of social occasion and the actions of the participants on this occasion are governed by the specific set of practices 216

delineated for it. The texts which are created in the process have a form which codes this set of practices, and this form consolidates as a semiotic category and is therefore recognized as a particular genre. For the purpose of illustration, in the following sections we shall try to explain, briefly, some of the characteristics of three types of discourse (political, medical and computer-mediated discourse), as well as the way certain scholars have approached the study of these types. 12.1.2.1. Political discourse As Wilson (2001) notes, the study of political discourse covers a broad range of subject matter and draws on a wide range of analytic methods. The primary goal of political discourse analysis is to discover and point to the ways in which language is manipulated for specific political purposes. Orwell (1969) analyzes different manners in which language is used to manipulate the thoughts of an audience. For instance, he shows how politicians manipulate the minds of people by using the term “pacification” to refer to the bombing of defenceless villages. Orwell accuses politicians of being responsible for a general decline in the use of the English language, by distorting it and constructing what the British call “political gobbledygook,” i.e. complicated language that is difficult to understand. An example of this gobbledygook can be found in President Nixon’s Press Secretary’s use of the noun-phrase “biosphere overload” to refer to overpopulation, or in the title “The Urban Conservation and Environmental Awareness Work Party” given to an anti-vandalism committee of a British District Council (Neaman & Silver, 1990). Edleman’s (1971, 1977, 1988) work also points to the symbolic manipulation of reality for the achievement of political goals. Likewise, Pêcheux (1978, 1982) notes that the meaning of words is transformed in terms of who uses them, so words in a given “discourse formation” (Foucault, 1972) may be interpreted differently within another formation. For example, the interpretation of the phrase “Social Security reform bill” within a liberal environment in the U.S. may differ radically from its interpretation within a conservative environment. This issue is related to Fairclough’s general point about not looking at isolated sentences or words, because in most cases it is the context, and not the words themselves, which carry the political message. Language may be manipulated for political purposes at different levels. Thus, as was shown above, certain words or expressions (lexical level) may be strategically placed and used with certain political aims in mind. Likewise, certain syntactic forms of a given political discourse may be used differently depending on the ideological goals of the text. An example of manipulation at the syntactic level is found in Stubbs’

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(1996) study on the distribution of ergative 37 forms within two school geography textbooks. The book in which causation and agency were expressed more frequently was found to be the book whose author adopted an explicit political role. Interestingly enough, “research on accent clearly indicates that selected phonological variables can carry political loading” (Wilson, 2001: 410). In effect, discourse can also be manipulated at the phonological level in order to achieve certain political objectives. For example, while Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of Britain, it was perceived that she modified her speech in very particular ways with the intention of making herself more attractive to voters (Wilson, 2001). Also, in a study by Wilson & Gunn (1983), it was revealed that speakers can be perceived as either more Catholic/ Irish/ Republican or more Protestant/ British/ Unionist, by adopting certain alternative phonological forms. It is clear that all linguistic levels, from lexis to pragmatics, are involved in characterizing political discourse. Most authors within the Social Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis 38 approaches tend to carry out studies of pragmatic aspects within political discourse, such as the use of implicatures, speech acts or metaphors, or the use and abuse of power. Other authors also take a critical stance on political discourse but do not belong to either Social Theory or CDA proper. Such is the case of Robin Lakoff (1990, 2000, 2001), who delves into power and other interesting pragmatic issues. Lakoff (2002), for example, analyzes the vagueness, breeziness and informality of the language used by President Bush to talk about the tragedy of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S., as well as his use of ‘cowboy-isms’ for certain political purposes, among other things. As was suggested in Units 9 and 10, it is now a growing trend in political discourse to combine social theory with linguistic theory, a trend that can be identified in Fairclough’s (e.g. 1992a), van Dijk’s (e.g. 1989) or Wodak’s (e.g. 1995) work. Thus we are led into the reflection that the discourse used by those who analyze political discourse is also political. In effect, Wilson (2001) points out that some analyses may become as much political as linguistic, and that political discourse is made up of and must allow for both. Moreover, some authors define political discourse in such broad terms that almost any discourse may be considered political. Much more could be written and said about political discourse, but it would overstep the boundaries of this unit. Thus it is now time for us to turn to another genre

Ergatives are verbs which can be transitive or intransitive, and which allow the same nominal group and the same object group in transitive clauses and as subject in intransitive clauses. E.g. Several firms have closed their factories, Factories have been closed, Factories have closed (Stubbs, 1996: 133). Thus ergatives have agentive and nonagentive uses, a fact that allows the speaker/writer to use them differentially for different ideological goals. 38

See Units 9 and 10.

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which has been widely studied by discourse analysts: medical discourse. 12.1.2.2. Medical discourse There are a considerable number of studies about the discourse of medical encounters. These studies take different approaches or theories (e.g. interactional sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, politeness theory) as a point of departure for their analyses. A great part of the research on the topic has been directed towards the analysis of power relationships between doctor and patient. Madfes (2002, 2003), for example, finds there are two types of medical discourse practice: a) the traditional (Western) practice, characterized by intrusion and a parallel discourse, in which the doctor always controls the floor of the conversation and often displays power by being uncooperative with respect to the patient’s inquiries, and b) the alternative-medicine practice, whose main features are reinforcement and convergence, in which the doctors interact at a more egalitarian level with their patients, trying to maintain face and showing a more open and understanding attitude, not only in their talk but also at the level of body language. Most studies on medical encounters have been conducted within the world of Western traditional medicine. Helman (1984) describes these encounters as “ritualized” (in an analogy to religious rituals) in the sense that there is a sequence of phases that normally occurs in them. Ten Have (1989), for instance, presents medical encounters as organized into a sequence of six phases: 1) Opening, 2) Complaint, 3) Examination or test, 4) Diagnosis, 5) Treatment of advice, and 6) Closing. Likewise, using Byrne & Long’s (1976) model, Heath (1992: 37) proposes the following sequence: I) Relating to the patient, II) Discovering the reason for attendance; III) Conducting a verbal or physical examination or both, IV) Consideration of the patient’s condition, V) Detailing treatment or further investigation; and VI) Terminating. Notwithstanding the ritualized condition of medical encounters, we also find features of conversational discourse in them, because they also have some degree of unpredictability. Indeed, several major analyses (e.g. Frankel 1979, Heritage 1989, Maynard 1991, Ainsworth-Vaughn 1998a) deal with the question of genre, i.e. of whether medical encounters are fundamentally conversational or interview-like. Ferrara (1994) compares conversation with psychotherapy sessions (a type of medical encounter) and he finds differences with respect to the following seven aspects 1. Parity,

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2. Reciprocality, 3) Routine recurrence, 4) Bounded time, 5) Restricted topic, 6) Remuneration, and 7) Regulatory responsibility. The first two (parity and reciprocality) are more a feature of conversation than of medical encounters. The other five features, on the contrary, characterize medical discourse rather than normal conversation. As Ainsworth-Vaughn suggests, medical encounters exist on a continuum between interrogation and friendly conversation, “with a small amount of time devoted to satisfying medical goals” (2001: 458). The analysis of frames (Tannen 1993, Tannen & Wallat, 1987) has been of most interest to analysts of medical encounters. The interactive behavior of participants constitutes the frame. So by situating a given interaction within a frame, a speaker attempts to constitute the self. Thus if the doctor-patient encounter is framed as part of the medical institution, participants are constituted as doctors, nurses or patients. Storytelling and the use of narrative have been linked with framing in medical discourse. Ainsworth-Vaughn (1998b) suggests that patient’s storytelling functions not only to frame but also to mitigate discussion of a serious illness (e.g. cancer), introduce a candidate diagnosis, or validate the patient’s experience. Many studies have shown that questions in medical encounters demonstrate both power-claiming and power-sharing, although most of them argue in favor of a clear predominance of the former over the latter, describing these encounters as highly asymmetrical interviews, with only one person having the right to question (West 1984, Hein & Wodak 1987, Weijts 1993). Another aspect that has been studied within the discourse of medical encounters is gender, albeit not sufficiently, as Ainsworth-Vaughn (2001) points out.

The few

studies that focus on this variable tend to conclude that women are more likely to be cooperative in discourse, while men are more likely to be competitive. All the studies named above concentrate in the area of doctor-patient communication, and therefore their focus is on spoken discourse. The other area on which the medical language literature has tended to concentrate is the area of the language of particular genres of medical discourse, whose focus is mainly written discourse. The written genre that has been given the most attention is the case history 39. Other interesting studies have focused on the lexicon, the syntax and the semantics of medicine. Johnson & Murray (1985) for example, explore the role of euphemisms in

For a detailed description of the characteristics of this genre see Fleischman (2001).

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medical language, which are used in many cultures, especially when the diagnosis is “bad”. Staiano (1986) delves into the grammar of illness and disease and sheds light on the contrast between the construction “I am” (e.g. I am a diabetic) and “I have” (e.g. I have or I suffer from diabetes). The former expression displays an identification of the speaker with the pathology, while the latter (genitive construction) identifies the illness as an external object. Ross (1989) explores the use of metaphors in medical discourse and argues that the fact that disease is viewed as an outrage lays the groundwork for the undoubtedly dominant metaphor of biomedicine, i.e. “Medicine is war” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980).

12.1.2.3. Computer-mediated discourse Interpersonal communication via computer networks is a recent phenomenon in the history of humanity, and consequently the analysis of the language used in such type of communication is also recent. This communication type has been called Computermediated discourse (henceforth CMD), and is defined by Herring as follows: “Computer-mediated discourse is the communication produced when human beings interact with one another by transmitting messages via networked computers. The study of computer-mediated discourse […] is a specialization within the broader interdisciplinary study of computer-mediated communication (CMC), distinguished by its focus on language and language use in computer networked environments, and by its use of methods of discourse analysis to address that focus.” (2001: 612)

According to medium, computermediated communication is classified in two main modes: A) Synchronous: a mode that requires that both sender and addressee(s) be logged on simultaneously

(e.g.

chat,

MUDs and MOOs 40, etc.).

MUD stands for Multi-User Domain, which was originally designed as a form of the Dungeons and Dragons game, developed for multi-users on the Internet. MOO stands for MUD, Object-Oriented. MUDs and MOOs have proliferated and found a comfortable home in education.

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B) Asynchronous: a mode that does not require that users be logged on at the same time (e.g. e-mail, usenet newsgroups, listserv discussion lists, etc.).

CMD is considered distinct from writing and speaking due to a number of reasons, among which are: 1) CMD exchanges are normally faster than written exchanges (e.g. letters), but slower than spoken exchanges. 2) CMD allows multiple participants to communicate simultaneously in a manner that is unknown and impossible to attain through other media. 3) It is a ‘private’ and public medium at the same time, since it creates the impression of direct and even private exchange of messages, but it also may involve the distribution to an unseen (and frequently unknown) audience. 4) Information is available through the visual channel, and it is typically limited to typed text. Modern systems of communication, however, allow the chats to be accompanied by video-images and sound, in which case it becomes very close to face-to-face communication. These and other reasons have led participants to think of CMD as a blend of both speaking and writing, albeit still having its own and distinctive features, constraints and potentialities. Precisely this blending of speaking and writing is what causes CMD to be perceived as less correct, complex and coherent than standard written language. In effect, CMD often contains non-standard features which are generally deliberate choices made by the users to economize on typing effort or to mimic spoken language in a creative way (Herring, 2001). Thus, Murray (1990) observes that computer science professionals using CMD delete subject pronouns, determiners and auxiliaries, avoid mixed case (e.g. by not using capital letters), and use abbreviations very frequently. In this respect, some of the main strategies adopted by CMD users are: • • • •

Use of a ‘mixed’ style (formal/informal – written/spoken). Use of acronyms and abbreviations (e.g.: ASAP, fyi, btw, etc.). Use of the so-called electronic utterance (Sotillo, 2000), i.e. a single clause with complements and adjuncts. Use of symbols or emoticons to compensate for the lack 222

• •

of facial expressions, sound, or body language (e.g.: , $$, capital letters to mimic shouting or a higher pitch of the voice: GREAT!!!). Use of abridged, concise language. Use of Netiquette rules 41: Politeness on the web.

Some authors have described CMD as an interactionally incoherent type of discourse, considering the limitations of computer messaging systems of turn-taking. Herring (2001: 618) explains that the two properties of the computer medium that create obstacles to interaction management are: “1) disrupted turn adjacency caused by the fact that messages are posted in the order received by the system, without regard for what they are responding to, and 2) lack of simultaneous feedback caused by reduced audiovisual cues.” In spite of the above-mentioned common characteristics of CMD, we cannot say that it is a uniform medium of communication. Language can vary widely in computermediated environments depending on different factors, such as situational context or participant demographics (e.g. variables such as gender, age, social class, geographical location, etc.). This variation leads us to the conclusion that, despite being mediated by impersonal machines, CMD reflects the social and personal circumstances and realities of its users. As Herring (2001) points out, CMD constitutes social practice in and of itself: participants negotiate, intimidate, joke, flirt (and even have sex or get married!) on the Internet. Scholars studying CMD have focused on different aspects of this type of discourse, such as power asymmetries (e.g. the dominance of the United States as the leading source of computer network technology (Yates, 1996)), gender asymmetries (e.g. female participants in discussion groups are disproportionately disfavored (Herring 1996, 1998, 1999)) or the dominance of the English language on the Internet (Mattelart 1996, Yates 1996). All in all, the discursive negotiation and expression of social relations in cyberspace provides an extremely rich source of data for the study of discourse and social practice. As has already been suggested, different electronic interactions may vary greatly in pragmatic aspects such as level of formality, use of speech acts, discourse topic and topical coherence. This last aspect, coherence, is another of the important issues that –together with cohesion– has been widely studied by discourse analysts. The next section in this Unit touches on this topic. 41

Netiquette is network etiquette, i.e. the do’s and don'ts of online communication. It covers both common courtesy online and the informal "rules of the road" of cyberspace. An example of these rules can be found at: http://www.albion.com/netiquette/

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12.1.3. Cohesion and coherence We saw in Unit 1 that both cohesion and coherence form part of the seven criteria which are necessary to satisfy the definition of text (de Beaugrande & Dressler, 1981). Cohesion has to do with the relationships between text and syntax, and coherence has to do with the knowledge or cognitive structures that are implied by the language used and that contribute to the overall meaning of a given discourse. Cohesion and coherence are semantic concepts and they are both part of the system of a language. Seidlhofer & Widdowson (1999) associate cohesion to the concept of text, and coherence to that of discourse. These authors make a clear distinction between the concepts of text and discourse -as opposed to other authors (e.g. Halliday 1992, Chafe, 1992), who use both terms indistinctly. 42 Text is defined by Seidlhofer & Widdowson as “the linguistic product of a discourse process,” whereas discourse is “the process of conceptual formulation whereby we draw on our linguistic resources to make sense of reality” (1999: 206). Thus, cohesion for these authors is a textual property and has to do with the textualization of contextual connections. Coherence, on the other hand, is the discourse function of realizing those connections, and is a discoursive property. A text can therefore have no cohesion but derive a coherent discourse. Conversely, a given text may be cohesive but discourse-incoherent. Examples a and b illustrate this point in a very simple manner: a) I went to Paris last week. And my grandma is a radio hostess. b) Great! Oh, no!! Example a is an instance of a cohesive text. We find cohesive devices such as reference (I) and conjunction (And), but it is difficult to make a connection between the first clause and the second, and consequently most hearers would catalogue the whole utterance as incoherent (it is hard to find a connection between the fact that the speaker went to Paris and the fact that his grandmother is a radio hostess). Thus, the speaker would most probably be judged as lacking some mental capacities or simply as speaking non-sensically. 43 Contrary to example a, example b shows no signs of cohesion (there is no apparent use of reference, substitution or any other cohesive devices), but derives a coherent discourse if we think of the situation in which the two

See Unit 1 for a more detailed account of the use of the terms text and discourse in DA literature. However, as the spirit of this book has tried to show, we can never analyze utterances out of context, and the same utterance may mean different things depending on the conditions in which it occurs, so we could always find a situation or context where a) could be judged as coherent.

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exclamations occurred: A 10-year-old child sees her mother approaching with a bag in her hands and feels happy because she thinks the bag contains the present she has been waiting for, (and so she says “Great!”), but immediately after she realizes that the bag holds the books for her to do the homework (and therefore she expresses her disappointment by exclaiming “Oh, no!!”). 44 Let us now examine the concepts of cohesion and coherence in more detail. 12.1.3.1. Cohesion Halliday & Hasan define cohesion as “the set of semantic resources for linking a SENTENCE with what has gone before” (1976:10). Cohesion occurs when one element in the discourse is presupposed by another, i.e., when one element cannot be effectively decoded except by recourse to another element in the same discourse. Some forms of cohesion are realized through the grammar and others through vocabulary. Consequently, Halliday & Hasan (1976) consider two main types of cohesion: 1) grammatical cohesion and 2) lexical cohesion, which in turn are divided into five subtypes: 1) Reference (grammatical), which has to do with the resources for referring to an element which is recoverable 45 (e.g.: pronouns, comparatives, adverbs here, then, now). 2) Substitution (grammatical), which refers to a set of place holders that are used to signal an omission (e.g. do for verbal groups or so for clauses). 3) Ellipsis (grammatical), which refers to resources for omitting a clause or part of a clause when it can be assumed (e.g.: She will go but I won’t, where go is omitted in the second clause because it is assumed). 4) Conjunction (both grammatical and lexical), which refers to the large inventory of connectors which link clauses in discourse (e.g. In addition, however, thus, etc.). 46 5) Lexical cohesion (lexical), the complement of grammatical cohesion, involving the repetition of lexical items, synonymy, hyponymy and collocation. Halliday & Hasan note that, in spoken English, some types of grammatical cohesion are 44

Notice, however, that this example is used in a very simple way to try to illustrate the point these authors want to make, but it could be argued that the cohesion here is given by the intonation or the pragmatic marker used (Oh, no!!). 45 See 3.4. in this book. 46 Halliday & Hasan (1976, Chapter 5) consider four main types of conjunctive relations: 1) Additive, 2) Adversative, 3) Causal, and 4) Temporal.

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also expressed through the intonation system. As an example, they explain that in: Did I hurt your feelings? I didn’t mean to. “the second sentence coheres not only by ellipsis, with I didn’t mean to presupposing hurt your feelings, but also by conjunction, the adversative meaning ‘but’ being expressed by the tone” (1976: 6). The relationship between a cohesive item and the item it presupposes in a text is what we call a cohesive tie. As Martin (2001) notes, the interpretation of patterns of cohesive ties generally depends on the register, because both the register and the cohesive ties define a text. Halliday & Hasan anticipated this fact in their definition of text: “The concept of cohesion can therefore be usefully supplemented by that of register, since the two together effectively define a text. A text is a passage of discourse which is coherent in these two regards: it is coherent with respect to the context of situation, and therefore consistent in register; and it is coherent with respect to itself, and therefore cohesive.” (1976: 23)

Thus we can conclude that the different discourse types, genres or registers 47 can be identified and distinguished in terms of their cohesive devices, and this is one of the reasons why cohesion is an important issue and focus of attention for discourse analysts. Later studies on cohesion, such as Martin’s (1992), reformulated the notion of cohesion as “a set of discourse semantic systems at a more abstract level than lexicogrammar” (Martin, 2001: 37). These semantic systems are the following (summarized from Martin, 2001: 37-38): •

• • •

Identification, concerned with resources for tracking participants in discourse. It considers the ways in which participants are both introduced into a text and kept track of once introduced. Negotiation, concerned with resources for exchange of information and of goods and services in dialogue. Conjunction, concerned with resources for connecting messages, via addition, comparison, temporality and causality. Ideation, concerned with the semantics of lexical relations as they are deployed to construe institutional activity.

In Martin’s model, the study of texture amounts to the study of patterns of interaction

See 12.1.2. above.

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among discourse semantics, lexicogrammar and phonology/graphology in realization. Thus this author aligns the above systems with metafunctions, in the following manner (2001: 39): • • • •

Identification  Negotiation  Conjunction  Ideation 

textual meaning interpersonal meaning logical meaning experiential meaning

All the authors studying the phenomenon of cohesion speak of a set of more or less similar cohesive devices or systems. To conclude, we shall say that, in very general terms, a given text is cohesive when one or more of these devices or systems (such as ellipsis, conjunction, negotiation, etc.) can be identified, together with their presupposed cohesive ties. 12.1.3.2. Coherence There are different approaches to the study of coherence. Downing (2004) notes that one view sees coherence as a property of what emerges in two collaborating minds during speech production and comprehension (Gernsbacher & Givón, 1995; Linell & Korolija, 1997; Bublitz, 1999). Another view (Schegloff, 1990; Edwards, 1997) sees coherence “as deriving from the notion of discourse as a social event, as action in its own right” (Downing, 2004: 15). The former reflects a cognitive approach to the phenomenon of coherence and the latter, a social one. De Beaugrande & Dressler note that “there is a continuity of senses among the knowledge activated by the expressions of the text” (1981: 84). This continuity of senses is considered to be the foundation of coherence. Thus, we speak of an ‘incoherent’ or ‘non-sensical’ text when we can not find a continuity of sense with it. But the world contains more than the sense of the expressions in the surface text. Elements such as cognitive processes, or the knowledge derived from the participants’ experience of the world contribute an important amount of commonsense to the discourse situation or event. There are certain global patterns (de Beaugrande & Dressler, 1981) of knowledge and experience (such as frames (Minsky, 1975), schemas (Bartlett, 1932; Kintsch 1977), plans or scripts (Schank & Abelson 1977)), which we all store and activate, and which are crucial when producing or receiving texts. For instance, frames are activated when trying to develop a topic, and schemas when thinking of how an event sequence will progress. Plans have to do with how text users or characters in textual worlds will pursue their goals, and scripts with how situations

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are set up so that certain texts can be presented at the right moment. Green (1989) sees coherence through the prism of Grice’s Cooperative Principle and she states that this principle (and the Relevant Maxim in particular) provides the basis for a natural account of the problem of the coherence of texts. As a consequence of this principle, everything a person says or writes is intended to be necessary, true and relevant to accomplishing some objective in which both producer and receiver are mutually interested. Thus coherence depends on “the extent to which effort is required to construct a reasonable plan to attribute to the text producer in producing the text” (Green, 1989: 103), which in turn depends on the extent to which each sentence can be interpreted as representing a true, necessary, and relevant contribution to the plan. In this way, Green, like many other authors, shows that coherence is not only a matter of the properties of the text alone, but also of the probability that the receiver(s) will be able to make the necessary inferences to relate the content of the individual sentences or parts of such a text. Therefore, coherence is described as a function of the textproducer’s estimate of his audience’s beliefs and inferencing capacity, as well as of his acting appropriately on that estimate. Van Dijk defines coherence in terms of mental models (Johnson-Laird, 1983): “…if people are able to construe a possible or plausible model for a sequence or a whole text, then the text is subjectively coherent” (Van Dijk, 2004: 9). This definition, van Dijk remarks, resolves the problem of ‘extralinguistic’ reference in discourse analysis, because it alludes to the fact that people do not refer so much to the ‘real world’ but to the “(inter)subjective (re)construction of the world, or a situation in the world in terms of their mental models” (2004: 9). Models let us see that people represent not only what they know about an event, but also what they think and feel in relation with such an event. Thus, it can be concluded that implicit information and inferences in discourse processing are represented in mental models. Interestingly enough, we are also led to infer that what people remember of a text is not precisely its meaning, but the subjective model they have created about the particular event in question. According to van Dijk (2000), there are two main kinds of coherence: 1) Extensional or referential: when analyzing the coherence of a text, we examine the relations between its propositions and find a mental model through which it makes sense. 2) Intensional: a form of coherence based on meaning, propositions and their functional relations. Both types of coherence are based not only on conceptual knowledge (e.g. the fact that a cat is an animal), but also on broader world knowledge (e.g. what type of an animal a

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cat is, where it can be found, what it looks like, etc.). In spite of the numerous studies on the phenomenon of coherence, the concept is still not fully understood and continues to be a matter of debate. Oftentimes it has been regarded as a fuzzy, vague, and even mystical notion. However, the concept of coherence is a key concept in discourse analysis, and it is precisely the analysis and clarification of this fuzziness what pushes scholars to research the phenomenon in more depth. In fact, it can be said that coherence is an intrinsically indeterminate notion, due to the fact that it depends on the way which language users ascribe their understanding to what they hear (or read). Coherence can not be found in a text isolated from an interpretation: it is not the texts, but rather the people that cohere. Hence, as Bublitz points out, “coherence is not a state but a process, helped along by a host of interacting factors situated on all levels of communication (from prosodic variation to textual organization, from topic progression to knowledge alignment)” (1999: 2). Participants of a discursive situation can make it coherent by resorting to different means or strategies. One way of achieving coherence (and cohesion as well) is through discourse markers. We now turn to them.

12.1.3.3. Discourse markers as an example of a means to achieve cohesion and coherence Discourse markers (herinafter DMs) have been studied by numerous authors and from different discourse perspectives. All these authors, however, have not arrived at a consensus regarding what a DM is. For some, DMs are a kind of pragmatic marker (a larger concept) that establishes a conjunctive relation between two sentences (e.g.: Fraser, 1996, forthcoming). For others (e.g. Schiffrin 1987, 2001), the concept of DM is a much broader one, and it includes other pragmatic markers which express not only conjunctive, but other types of relations as well. Earlier works, like Halliday & Hasan’s (1976), present a semantic perspective on DMs. 48 As we saw in 12.2.1., for Halliday & Hasan (1976) conjunction is a kind of both lexical and grammatical cohesive device which refers to a range of expressions which convey conjunctive relations. These expressions “express certain meanings which presuppose the presence of other components in the discourse” (1976: 236), and in this sense it can be argued that they also have a deictic nature (as Schiffrin (1987) later argued). For Halliday & Hasan conjunctive expressions convey four main kinds of meaning:

Although they do not speak directly of DMs, their analysis of cohesion includes words and expressions (e.g. By the way, to sum up, then, thus, etc.) that have since been called markers by subsequent authors.

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1) Additive (e.g.: And, furthermore, in addition, besides, in the same way, etc.) 2) Adversative (e.g.: But, yet, though, on the contrary, however, etc.) 3) Causal (e.g. So, then, therefore, consequently, for this purpose, etc.) 4) Temporal (e.g. Then, next, after that, finally, to sum up, in short, etc.) In spite of the fact that certain expressions are assigned to each of the types of meaning, Halliday & Hasan acknowledge that the meaning of the expressions may vary according to other conditions, different from the semantics of the word or expression in itself. For example, and normally has an additive meaning, but it can also convey an adversative relation if it prefaces a proposition whose meaning contrasts with that of a prior proposition, as in: She said she wouldn’t go. And she finally went! where And can be said to have an adversative meaning equivalent to that of But. Fraser (1990b, 1996, 1998, forthcoming) places DMs within the broader set of pragmatic markers (herinafter PMs). His view differs from Halliday & Hasan’s in that it is concerned not so much with the cohesion of text but rather with the meaning of sentences. In Fraser’s framework, PMs are expressions that occur as part of a discourse segment but are not part of the propositional content of the message conveyed. There are four types of PMs: 1. BASIC MARKERS (E.g.: performative expressions such as: I promise, please, etc.) 2. COMMENTARY MARKERS (E.g.: manner-of-speaking markers such as: Frankly, Bluntly speaking, etc.) 3. PARALLEL MARKERS (E.g.: conversational management markers such as: Well, O.K., Now, etc.) 4. DISCOURSE MARKERS As the above taxonomy shows, DMs, in Fraser’s view, are a type of PM and they function as segment connectives which belong to any of the following semantic categories: 1. 2. 3. 4.

CONTRASTIVE (E.g.: But, although, in contrast [this/that], etc.) ELABORATIVE (E.g.: And, above all, likewise, on top of it all, etc.) IMPLICATIVE (E.g.: So, after all, for this reason, then, therefore, etc.) TEMPORAL (E.g.: Then, as soon as, finally, first, meanwhile, etc.)

Thus, Fraser’s DMs are roughly equivalent to Halliday & Hasan’s conjunctive expressions, but they cannot be said to be on a par with Schiffrin’s DMs. Schiffrin’s conception of DMs is a rather different one, which reflects her view of discourse as a 230

process of social interaction. She defines discourse markers as sequentially dependent elements that bracket units of talk (1987: 31) and her analysis shows that markers work “at different levels of discourse to connect utterances on either a single plane or across different planes” (2001: 57). She illustrates this fact with the following examples (2001: 57): (1) a. Yeh, let’s get back, because she’ll never get home. (1) b. And they holler Henry!!! Cause they really don’t know!

Whereas in (1) a because connects actions, in (1) b it connects ideas. In (1) a because connects a request with the justification for the request, but in (1) b ‘Cause connects two idea units or representations of events. (2) Jack: [The rabbis preach, [“Don’t intermarry” Freda: [But I did-

[But I did say

those intermarriages

that we wave in this country are healthy.

Schiffrin explains that (2) has four functions that locate an utterance at the intersection of four planes of talk, because Freda’s but 1) prefaces an idea unit (that intermarriages are healthy), 2) displays a participation framework (non-aligned with Jack), 3) realizes an action (a rebuttal during an argument) and 4) seeks to establish Freda as a current speaker in an exchange (open a turn at talk). Schiffrin includes in her repertoire of markers some expressions which are not considered DMs in Fraser’s taxonomy, such as y’know or well. For Fraser, these markers belong to other categories within PMs, but they are not DMs proper. Schiffrin (1987, 2001) makes three more important points: • • •

DMs not only display local relationships between adjacent utterances, but also more global relationships across wider spans of discourse. DMs are discourse deictic. Although DMs have a primary function, their use is multifunctional. This multifunctionality on different planes of discourse helps to create coherence.

Thus we see that DMs are important elements in the creation of cohesive and coherent discourse. For the purposes of illustration, let us analyze the following dyad: Fred: Taylor is a woman. However, she is good at interpreting maps. Tom: Really?

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On the one hand, in this example we find cohesion devices such as reference (she refers to Taylor) or conjunction (however) in Fred’s utterance, as well as in Tom’s (ellipsis: Tom’s reply could be paraphrased as Is it real/ true that Taylor is good at interpreting maps in spite of the fact that she is a woman?). On the other hand, it can be observed that the DM however also plays an important part in giving coherence to the whole discoursive situation: the inference coming out of this adversative marker is that women in general are not good at interpreting maps. Tom’s reply (Really?) can also be taken as a marker which signals both men’s mental model, which depicts women as hopeless map users. Thus, we find a continuity of senses in this exchange, given by the participant’s capacity to make the necessary inferences related to a given mental model, which in turn leads to the assessment of this particular fragment of discourse as coherent. The functions of DMs are broad. Their use does not only tell us about their linguistic properties, but also about the cognitive, social and expressive competence of their users. Hence DMs are also seen by researchers as means to study different discourse strategies which in turn are used to fulfill different and important discourse functions. Herein we face another of the concerns of discourse analysts. 12.1.4. Discourse strategies and functions A final note on strategies and functions of discourse: The reader will have noticed all throughout this book that much of what discourse analysts do is to search for different strategies which are used to realize different functions of discourse. Strategy is a key concept in Discourse Analysis, and it may be defined as “an attempt on the part of the speaker to reach (by means of various linguistic procedures) a given communicative aim” (Alba Juez, 1995: 22). This aim obviously has to do with the function that the stragegy is intended to accomplish. The functions of speech and discourse in general have been studied profusely by many authors from different discourse perspectives. One of the traditional and bestknown approaches to the “functions of speech” is Jakobson’s (1960), which associates these functions with the six basic components of the communicative event, thus resulting in the following functions:

1. REFERENTIAL (focused on the referential content of the message). 2. EMOTIVE (focused on the speaker’s state). 3. CONATIVE (related to the speaker’s wishes that the addressee do or

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think such and such, and used in order to achieve some practical effect). 4. METALINGUISTIC (dealing with the code being used). 5. PHATIC (focused on the channel or on the establishment of bonds of personal union between people). 6. POETIC (concerning the way in which the message is encoded or the artistic and creative use of language in general). Halliday’s (1976, 1978) more abstract scheme consists of three main functions: 1. EXPERIENTIAL (concerning language as a vehicle to conceptualize and describe our experience). 2. INTERPERSONAL (concerning the relationships among participants and the illocutionary acts used by them). 3. TEXTUAL (concerning messages as organized units of information). Brown & Yule (1983) point out that the attempts to provide taxonomies of language functions have been vague and confusing, and thus they only describe two very general functions of language: 1. TRANSACTIONAL, which serves in the expression of content. 2. INTERACTIONAL, which serves in expressing social relations and personal attitudes. The examples of taxonomies of functions shown above suffice to lead us to the conclusion that there is scant agreement on what kinds of functions are involved in human language and on which levels they operate. Most authors find consensus, however, in arguing that it is unlikely that utterances fulfill only one function at a time. The fact is that normally an utterance fulfills several functions simultaneously, and thus it seems reasonable to speak of tendencies (e.g. we may say that a given utterance has a primarily referential function) rather than of absolute categories that exist to the exclusion of all others. For the purposes of illustration, consider example (a): (a) Husband: Why are you so tense? Wife: Tense? Oh, no. I’m not supposed to be tense. I’m just your wife. I’m not likely to have feelings of any kind. The wife’s ironic reply in (a) may be said to be primarily interactional (in Brown & Yule’s terms), but at the same time –and at a lower level of abstraction– it is also fulfilling the function of verbal attack, which in turn intends to function as a reproach. 233

This example also illustrates the fact that a given strategy (in this case the strategy of being ironic) may realize different functions 49. Conversely, a given function may be realized by different strategies (e.g. the function of verbal attack may be realized not only by the strategy of being ironic, but also by insulting or simply ignoring the interlocutor’s turn in conversation). As with all the topics covered in this course, much more could be said about the topic of strategies and functions of discourse. However, we need to establish some boundaries, and this is what has been judged as sufficient for the purposes of the present work.

12.2. So… is this all there is to say about DA? We are finally reaching the end of the course and you might wonder if all the approaches to, and aspects of, DA covered in this book are enough. On the one hand, my answer would be that nothing is enough in a discipline like DA, for, as was pointed out in Unit 1, in a broad sense we could say that there are as many approaches as authors who analyze discourse. On the other hand, it is impossible to cover all the spectrum of knowledge of a discipline (which is in turn multidisciplinary) in a university course. The reader might have noticed that this book started with two questions (What is Text Linguistics? What is Discourse Analysis? ) and ends with another question (So… is this all there is to say about D.A.?), a fact that is symbolic of the essence of this discipline as well as of any other of the disciplines of human knowledge: we could continue posing questions ad infinitum, because, as Chafe’s quote at the beginning of Unit 1 suggests, we are definitely not close to final answers. Thus the intention in this course has been to cover the essentials and to provide the student/reader with the necessary elements for a good start in the fascinating (or so I believe) enterprise of analyzing discourse. The rest is now in your hands. The possibilities are infinite.

1. There is not a single or unique unit that can be used for all types of discourse analysis. Different approaches work with different units. Thus, for instance, for an interactional sociolinguist the main unit of analysis may be the utterance or the (politeness) strategy and for a mediated discourse analyst this will be mediated

For a detailed description of the strategies and functions of ironic discourse, see Alba Juez (2001).

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action. But the same analyst may handle different units at the same time if s/he considers it appropriate for the purposes of his/her study. Depending on the analyst’s perspective or on the variables taken into account, we may divide the universe of discourse into numerous different types, such as legal discourse, medical discourse, computer-mediated discourse, etc. However, no discourse belongs to a unique and exclusive type, and thus we may speak of a continuum of discourse types rather than of separate and distinct categories. When analyzing political discourse, the researchers’ primary goal has been to discover the ways in which language is manipulated for specific political purposes. A great part of the research on medical discourse has been directed towards the analysis of power relationships between doctor and patient. Other studies deal with the question of genre, the analysis of frames, the analysis of gender, and with the lexicon, the syntax and the semantics of medical discourse. The study of computer-mediated discourse (CMD) is of recent development, and is considered to be a specialization within the broader interdisciplinary study of computer-mediated communication. This type of discourse has certain particular characteristics, such as the use of a mixed style (spoken/written, formal/informal), use of emoticons, use of abbreviated, concise language, etc. Scholars studying CMD have focused on aspects such as power asymmetries, gender asymmetries, or the dominance of the English language on the Internet. An important concern of discourse analysts has always been to study how a given text or discourse practice achieves cohesion and coherence. Cohesion and coherence are semantic concepts: Cohesion has to do with the relationships between text and syntax, and coherence has to do with the knowledge or cognitive structures that are implied by the language used and that contribute to the overall meaning of a given discourse. Discourse markers are an important topic in DA, and they have been profusely studied for their importance as a means to achieve cohesion and coherence, among other reasons. Much of what discourse analysts do is to search for different strategies which are used to realize different functions of discourse. Both strategy and function are key concepts in DA, because they help the analyst understand the essential motives of linguistic communication.

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A) ANALYSIS: ANALYZE the following E-mail message by answering questions a-d : From :

John Smith

Sent :

Thursday, April 10, 2005 3:03 PM

To :

"Lauren Dawn"

CC : Subject :

Re: Hi there

Lauren:

I wrote you the day after I returned to say thanks and let you know I'd arrived safely. It apparently didn't go through. So, again, thanks for everything. Let me know when you are coming over this way. And regards to the family. You've got two very bright and nice sons. You're lucky.

Best regards, John

a) What would be (a) possible unit(s) of analysis? Justify your answer. b) What type(s) of discourse do we find in this fragment? What is the predominant one? c) Do you find any discourse markers? If so, how do they contribute to the cohesion and coherence of the discourse in question? d) What other means are used to achieve cohesion and coherence? e) What strategies does the writer of the message use to fulfill what functions?

B) ANALYSIS: CHOOSE a message, conversation, passage or any kind of text that you might be interested in, and DO THE SAME KIND OF ANALYSIS (answering the same questions) as in Task A.

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Lakoff, 1990a, 1990b Bakhtin, 1986 Wilson, 2001 Madfes, 2002, 2003 Tannen, 1993 Herring, 2001 Halliday & Hasan, 1976 Downing, 2004 Bublitz, Lenk & Ventola, 1999 Alba Juez, 2001, Chapters 8 & 9

Discourse types: Study of psychoanalytic discourse : “ A Wittgensteinian Approach to Discourse Analysis”: www.criticism.com/da/lw_da.html

Legal discourse data/ Trial transcripts: Transcripts of the Salem Witch Trials: www.salemwitchtrials.com/transcripts.html USA vs. Usama bin Laden Trial Transcripts: http://cryptome.org/usa-v-ubl-dk3.txt

Medical discourse: http://www.pantaneto.co.uk/issue2/shachar.htm http://escholarship.bc.edu/dissertations/AAI3122097/ http://bod.sagepub.com/cgi/content/short/10/4/87 http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1473-4192.00039/abs/ And many more…

Data on any type of discourse: You can obtain it from electronic corpora, like: The British National Corpus: http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

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The American National Corpus: http://americannationalcorpus.org/ International Corpus of English: www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/ice.htm COBUILD corpus: http://titania.cobuild.collins.co.uk/boe-info.html

Cohesion and coherence: http://mnemosyne.csl.psyc.memphis.edu/mad-researchlab/references/LouwerseCohesionCoherence.pdf http://www.cambridgeesol.org/teach/fce/writing/activities/cohesion.cfm

M. A. K. Halliday’s works: http://www2.ocn.ne.jp/~yamanobo/latest_news/halliday_collected_works.html http://www.cass.net.cn/chinese/s18_yys/dangdai/Halliday's%20Articles.htm http://www.text-semiotics.org/Halliday.html

B. Fraser’s publications and home page: www.bu.edu/linguistics/APPLIED/FACULTY/bruce.html

Research on discourse strategies used at the workplace: www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/lwp/research.htm

Discourse functions/ Computer Mediated Discourse: http://llt.msu.edu/vol4num1/sotillo/default.html

General resources for Discourse Analysis: This is a website (Teun van Dijk’s) where you can find all kinds of information and links to any aspect of discourse analysis: bibliographies, web-sites and discussion lists, societies and organizations for the study of discourse, journals, university programs, research institutes, upcoming conferences and other events, personal web-sites of discourse analysts. Take note! http://www.discourse-in-society.org/

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Partners.

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UNIT 1

A) Open task B) Open task C) Open task UNIT 2

A) Open task B) a) Open task b) Open task c) Open task

UNIT 3 A) Open task B) a) The first referent in the recipe (SUPER FISH DISH) is presented in bold type and capital letters. This is a discourse strategy used to give prominence to 257

it, since it is the main referent of the recipe, i.e. the name of the dish. Most of the other referents in the recipe are introduced in capital letters, as the list of ingredients. The use of referents is then continued by using full noun phrases, pronouns and zero pronouns which refer to evoked, familiar or inferable entities, as shown in the following table:

REFERENT

TYPE AND EXPLANATIONS

the fillets of sole

Previously evoked, thus definite and not very explicit, though there is some level of expliciteness (specifying they are fillets of sole)

a few prawns

Though previously evoked, the quantity was not specified, and therefore it is somehow introduced for the first time. Thus the referent is indefinite and now explicit as to the quantity needed

them

Previously evoked, thus now referred to by means of a pronoun, which makes it inferable and familiar as well.

a fireproof dish

Not previously evoked, thus indefinite, but familiar for any person who can relate to cooking.

the hardboiled eggs

Previously evoked, thus definite.

mushrooms and (or) tomatoes

Though previously evoked, still indefinite (perhaps because the quantity is not specified). Can also be labeled as familiar referents.

them

Pronoun. Previously evoked referent, and therefore, inferable.

the fish

Previously evoked, familiar, definite and inexplicit.

cheese sauce

Though previously evoked, still indefinite (perhaps because the quantity is not specified). Can also be labeled as a familiar referent.

grated cheese

Though previously evoked, still indefinite (perhaps because the quantity is

258

not specified). Can also be labeled as a familiar referent.

Inferable items that have been omitted by using the Ø pronoun: ii)

the pronoun it in:

Cover Ø with cheese sauce and sprinkle Ø liberally with grated cheese. Bake Ø in oven 375 (Gas nº5) for about 25-30 minutes and until Ø (is) golden brown. Serve Ø hot.

iii)

the pronoun them in:

Roll up the fillets of sole, enclosing a few prawns in each roll, and season Ø.

b) Personal deixis: The use of the possessive pronoun your in the first exchange between Agnes and her mother is a case of the normal, non-gestural use of the pronoun (it clearly refers to Agnes’ bed). The use of we in “All we are is dust in the wind” constitutes a case of the generic, symbolic use of the deictic first person singular. The use of it in “It seems so pointless…” is an instance of the non-deictic use of the pronoun.

Place deixis: The demontratives this (proximal) and that (distal) obviously occur in their gestural usage in the second exchange between Agnes and her mother.

Time deixis: The use of the word now constitutes a case of proximal time deixis, which also looks as gestural, considering the mother is putting emphasis on all she says.

Social deixis: The use of her in “It’s frightening how her dust in the wind…” is an

259

example of social deixis indicating rank or respect, as it is used ironically and in analogy to expressions like “Her Royal Highness”.

c) 1) Line 1: Expressive act (greeting: Larry King greets the caller on the phone). Line 2: Assertive act but can also be considered as an expressive, expressing a psychological state (complimenting: “Gentlemen, the honor is mine”). Expressive act (Thanking). Lines 2 to 5: Directive acts (questions). Line 6: Directive (question). Line 7: Assertive (answer). Line 8: Assertive. Lines 9-10: Directive (interrupting, somehow “ordering” Maher to stop:

“Wait a

minute,…”. Directive (question: You had some sort of disaster…?). Lines 11 to 16: Representative, assertive acts.

2) Line 1: Expressive act (greeting: Larry King greets the second caller on the phone). Lines 2 and 3: Directive (question). Expressive (Thanking). Line 4: Directive (question). Lines 5 to 10: Representative, assertive acts. Lines 10-11: Expressive (apologizing: “Excuse me. It is.”). Lines 11 to 16: Representative, assertive acts. Lines 17-18: Directive (question). Lines 19 to 23: Assertive acts (answers).

There seems to be a pattern in the sequence of speech acts for receiving calls from the audience that could be broadly summarized as follows:

TV Host: Expressive act (Greeting). Caller: Expressives (Thanking, complimenting) and directives (question(s)). Guest: Assertives, directives and expressives (all these may form part of the answers to the caller’s questions). 260

d) In fragment 1: PRESUPPOSITION TRIGGERS

PRESUPPOSITION

little plan B (line 3)

There exists a little plan B which has to do with the administration’s Homeland Security Department.

Homeland Security Department (line 3)

There exists Department.

to stop (line 3)

There is an ongoing election process

Our 2000 Florida deal (lines 4-5)

There existed a deal in Florida in 2000

Homeland

Security

etc… All four examples above are existence presupposition triggers. In fragment 2: PRESUPPOSITION TRIGGERS

PRESUPPOSITION

Carbondale, Illinois (line 1)

There is a caller from Carbondale, Illinois (existence)

again (line 2)

Southern voters had voted for the Democrats before (connotation)

my (line 7)

Maher has a stand-up act on TV (existence)

dumbest (line10)

There exist a part of the country which is the smartest (existence)

Reading (line 23)

The people are literate, they can read (factive)

etc…

UNIT 4 A)

261

a-d) First of all, it is necessary to situate the microstructure of this call within the macrostructure of a TV television interview, and in particular, Larry King’s interviews. It is customary on the Larry King Show to receive calls from viewers some time towards the end of the show. These viewers are expected to make questions to the guest, but they are not normally allowed to participate in the discussion, apparently due to time constraints. At first sight, Larry King’s greeting (Toquerville, Utah, hello) constitutes a relatively straightforward interactional ritual which opens a period of interpersonal access, but this access is very soon restricted to Mr. King and Mr. Maher; the caller is left aside and, even more, very soon in the exchange Mr. King “speaks for another”, who in this case is the caller. This “speaking for another” occurs after Mr. Maher asks the caller “You mean you’re talking about on election day?” and Larry King immediately answers (without letting the caller intervene) “Yes, in case there’s some big occurrence”. This remark alters the participation framework of the talk, something that Mr. King can do because he is the host of the show and therefore he is normally the participant with the most power. Thus King is here being the spokesman who produces a message whose content is the responsibility of another, i.e. the animator for the caller, who is in the principal role. At the same time, the fact that Mr. King is speaking for the caller provides some contextualization cue as to his and the other interactants’ roles and positions within the interchange.

Mr. King’s roles as both animator and author

(producer and creator of talk) shows he has power and he is in charge, and therefore the caller must keep silent even when she’s been asked a question. When Bill Maher speaks, he fills the slots of both author and principal (responsible for talk). In his last intervention he, like King, uses the strategy of “speaking for another” in an ironic way, when he mocks the administration (This is an administration that has always said, OK, we’re operating under this premise. You can’t criticize the administration during a time of war. Oh, and by the way, we’re always at war. The war is ongoing), in which case he also takes the role of figure (the participant that is portrayed by talk). Another example of Mr. King’s use of the power the situational context grants him is when, again, his remark “Wait a minute, you had some sort of disaster you don’t want to hold an election if you’ve got bombs dropping?” alters the participation framework of the talk (he interrupts Bill Maher). These disruptions could be considered hostile by some viewers, for in general TV hosts are expected to respect the turns of both guests and callers; however, King’s status as a very well-known television interviewer can act as a contextualization cue that entitles him to be occasionally 262

impolite. Both callers and viewers normally accept this type of superiority on King’s part, so they respond in a positive way and thus face is maintained.

B) (1) i), ii), iii), iv), v) & vi) Andrew’s reactions and answers to Mr Martin’s (his master) and the family’s comments show, among other things, that he interprets everyone’s utterances in their literal meaning and from a logical point of view, he lacks a great deal of the pragmatic knowledge which is necessary to judge that, for example, Grace’s comment “I think it sucks” is a rude one (Scene 2). This is not only a funny scene but also one that makes the reader/watcher aware of all the mechanisms human beings have at their disposal in order to judge social events and adjust their discourse accordingly. The robot lacks these mechanisms and therefore does not know of any social customs that would let him understand that when a servant’s master says that “he is fine” in a situation like the one depicted in the scene (Andrew has served the meal and now all the members of the family are eating), he must leave the room and return to the kitchen. Mr Martin has to make this intention explicit at the end of the exchange and cannot take Andrew’s knowledge for granted. If we look at Andrew’s interpretation of Mr. Martin’s comment “We are fine Andrew”, it can be said that, since Andrew took it literally and could not grasp the meaning beyond the words, it is clear that he could not work the implicature telling him that Mr. Martin wanted him to go to the kitchen. Mr Martin was flouting both the Quantity and the Manner Maxims, for he was not being as informative as required and he was being obscure, and therefore a normal, human interlocutor would have interpreted “We are fine” as a way of asking his interlocutor to leave, considering the context and the relationship between Mr. Martin and Andrew, which is an asymmetrical one. When analyzing Andrew’s discourse in the light of Grice’s Cooperative principle, a question arises as to whether it can be considered to be cooperative, and we come to the conclusion that, even though Andrew always tries to be helpful in many ways, on several occasions he is not cooperative from the pragmatic point of view, as can be seen in Scene 1. When Mr. Martin says “Good night”, Andrew is not being cooperative by saying “It certainly is, sir”, even though he may sound nice and respectful. He lacks the communicative competence necessary to make him give the 263

right answer:

In this particular case, he does not know that “Good night” is the

appropriate and socially accepted answer to “Good night” and that both utterances constitute an adjacency pair in which “Good night” is considered to be the preferred second (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974. See chapter 5). The same can be said of Andrew’s reply in Scene 2, when Mr. Martin indirectly requests him to go to the kitchen (“We are fine, Andrew”), he again interprets the utterance literally, and therefore is not being cooperative by saying “Indeed you are sir”. As was anticipated above, Andrew fails to make the necessary implicature which would lead him to the conclusion that his master wants him to leave the room. With regard to whether Andrew is capable of flouting the Maxims of Grice’s Cooperative Principle in the same fashion human beings do, it is interesting to note that, if we analyze Andrew’s discourse superficially, we would conclude that he never flouts any of the maxims, for he always tells the truth (Quality), he is generally very accurate and does not speak more than required (Quantity), he intends to make relevant contributions and he generally makes his contribution in a brief and orderly way (Relevance and Manner). But the fact that he cannot flout the Maxims paradoxically shows that he cannot always be cooperative, because, as Grice (1975) himself acknowledged, flouting the Maxims is sometimes a requirement to be cooperative. Besides, if we analyze the general principle as put by Grice (1975: 45): Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged, we will clearly see that in most cases Andrew precisely lacks the necessary criteria to determine whether his contribution is “such as is required”, “by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which he is engaged”. Therefore, he also flouts the Maxims but in a different way from that of a normal human being. Since Andrew cannot make implicatures, he does not have the capacity to understand off record FTAs (B & L, 1987) like “We are fine, Andrew” (Scene 2). To use an everyday language expression, we could say that Andrew cannot “read between the lines”.

The human brain makes a great number of complex and intricate

connections and inferences that Andrew’s computer brain cannot make at his stage of development. But, can we say that Andrew is “polite”? If we think of politeness in terms of the social-norm view (Fraser, 1990), we will probably be able to say that Andrew is polite. He generally follows the social norms of accepted behavior: he always wants to 264

help (“One is glad to be of service”), he uses “Thank you” and “Please” when expected and always tries to please the family he works for. In fact, he is a robot and he’s been programmed to that effect. But if we think of politeness from the face-saving perspective, that is, from the view that being polite entails being able to use a set of on record and off record strategies (B & L, 1987), we will clearly see that Andrew’s politeness is restricted to bald on record and on record with positive and negative politeness strategies. Andrew finds it very difficult to go off record and to understand people when they do so. His use of language is restricted to truth conditional logic (remember he is a robot and his mind is a computer) and consequently he has no ability to flout the Maxims intentionally, nor can he understand or interpret the messages intended by other people when they flout the Maxims. But Andrew can handle some politeness strategies; for instance, he goes on record with negative politeness when he addressess Mr. Martin, which makes him sound respectful and non-imposing. But even when going on record, Andrew lacks, at least partially, the necessary information every normal speaker of English has. A clear example of this fact is found in Scene 1, where his response to “Good night” (“It certainly is, sir”) shows us that he does not know the socially accepted rule that tells us that the correct response to “Good night” is “Good night”. He then flouts the maxim of quantity (saying more than necessary) unintentionally by falling into what he himself calls “an infinite verbal loop” by answering “Good night” again and again, following his master’s instruction to the letter.

(2) Open task.

UNIT 5 A) a) and b) The fragment from Hannity & Colmes contains 14 turns and 13 TRPs. Some of these transition places can be identified by all the linguistic qualities or devices provided in the guidelines for analysis, but others can not. For instance, it can be said that the transition from T1 to T2 displays all of the devices: syntactic (there is sentence completion), intonational (although we only have the transcript here, the turn ends with

265

a yes/no question having a rising intonation), semantic (the question contains a complete proposition) and pragmatic (there is more than one speech act in the turn, the final one being a question that gives the floor to the interviewee, and therefore it can be said that there is pragmatic unity in the whole turn). However, we do not find these characteristics in the transitions from T2 to T3, T3 to T4 and T12 to T13 because in all three cases we find one of the interlocutors interrupting the other and consequently the sentences, intonation, propositions and speech acts involved are broken.

c) T1 and T2 constitute a question/answer adjacency pair whose second part contains an insertion sequence having an interruption followed by a request/granting of the request adjacency pair (Let me finish/ Go ahead. Go ahead.). The answer to the question in T1 continues in T6, and T7 can be said to be a backchannelling turn (I understand your point) which serves the purpose of letting the speaker know that his interlocutor is hearing and that he understands his answer, which continues in T8. T9 and T10, as well as T11 and T12, are again question/answer adjacency pairs, but the second part of the second pair (T12) is not complete because Hannity interrupts (T13) and starts another adjacency pair which is not exactly question/answer but works in the same manner, T14 being its response and second part.

d) There are no examples of self-repair in this text, although T12 could be considered a case of other-initiated repair of what Hannity says in T11; however, the repair is not about Hannity’s mistake in talking but about Hannity’s thoughts and beliefs, which are completely opposite to Kennedy’s.

B) Open task

UNIT 6 A) Television interview

S ETTING

Television studios 266

PARTICIPANTS

W: T.V. program host (female) E: Poet and novelist Edwin Lewis

E NDS

Entertainment W elicits information about Edwin Lewis E provides information for W and the audience

A CT SEQUENCE

W: Greeting/welcome/introduction guest E: Clarification/ request W: Description of setting/question E: Answer W: Question E: Answer W: Question (requests clarification) E: Answer (provides clarification) W: Question E: Answer W: Anticipation of information E: Giving additional information W: Question E: Answer/question W: Answer E: Giving additional information W: Question E: Answer W: Question

E: Answer

K EY I NSTRUMENTALITIES N ORMS

Serious but relaxed, entertaining

G ENRE

Journalistic, normal Relatively wide range.

Verbal. British English Interaction based on need of entertaining the audience by providing information about guest conversation.

In this dialogue we find, as well as in the dialogue analysed in 6.7., that the ACTS, ENDS, KEY and GENRE are all related to one another. The range is wider here, but

267

still relatively narrow, because the aim of the interview (ENDS) allows for a greater variety of topics to be covered, albeit always within the range of the interviewee’s life and personal opinions. The sequence of acts is long but restricted almost exclusively to questions and answers (asking for and giving information), which is to be expected, considering the Speech Event (a television interview). Interviews always consist of questions and answers because the main aim of this type of interview is to make the interviewee known to the audience so they can learn more about his professional and personal life. This sequence of questions and answers is also related to the NORMS of this type of conversational exchange, which have to do with entertaining and providing the audience with information about the guest (interviewee). The KEY is also in agreement with the type of communication exchange: it is serious but a t the same time serves the purspose of entertaining, and therefore it does not have to be solemn, but relaxed and amusing. Obviously, the INSTRUMENTALITIES go hand in hand with the KEY and the other elements of communication: television interviews are normally verbal, oral types of exchange; in this case the varity is British English and the GENRE used is journalistic English mixed with normal, everyday standard British English.

C) Open task

UNIT 7

A) Joke a (Don’t Leave’Em Hanging) is a narrative which starts with an orientation, i.e. a clause or clauses whose function is the identification of the time, place, persons, their activity or the situation. In this case the orientation gives us information about the main characters of the story (Ralph and Edna) and their status as patients in a mental hospital (place). There is no abstract in this narration. The orientation is followed by the complicating action (i.e. the clauses describing the different events of the story). The events of the complicating action are followed by Edna’s final reply (He didn’t hang himself. I put him there to dry…) which constitutes the result or resolution of the narrative. This joke does not contain the six elements or parts identified in narratives (see 268

7.2. in this book), but it has the essential characteristic of this type of discourse: its temporal sequence.

The joke recapitulates experience in the same order as the

supposedly original events. However, we know the events did not occur in real life precisely because of the fact that it is a joke, so in this respect the narrative in jokes differs from the narratives of personal experience that Labov describes in many of his papers. Joke b (Take Off My Clothes) is much shorter than joke a. It only contains three clauses. The first two constitute the complication of events. The last one can be said to be the resolution (Then she told me never to wear her clothes again) because it is the witty clause which constitutes the key to the understanding of the previous events, and it is precisely the clause that makes the narration a joke. Thus, while joke a has three of the elements found in narratives (orientation, complicating action and resolution), joke b has only two of them (complicating action and resolution). However, both have the prototypical temporal structure of narratives. There is very little descriptive structure in these two jokes. As was explained in 7.4., descriptions play a background function in narratives.

Since neither of the jokes

contains evaluation clauses, it can be said that there is no evaluation structure. Perhaps this could be considered as one of the differences between jokes and narratives of personal experience: there is no intention of evaluation in jokes, for their main target is not to judge, but to entertain. But in order to draw firm conclusions on the topic, we would have to follow all the steps of variational analysis, including quantitative analysis, a task which goes beyond the aims of this book.

B) As can be seen, the joke in B (White House Visitors) has a different structure from the two jokes in A above. We can not classify this one as narrative because it lacks the fundamental feature of narratives: its sequential structure. The structure of this joke is mainly descriptive (the description of a tourist in the White House) and there is no sequence of events.

This joke consists only of an Adjacency Pair of the type

Question/Answer, in which the question mainly describes the subject named in the answer (tourist) in such a way that makes it inferable to the hearer that the rest of the people who inhabit the White House are not honest, ethical, intellectual, law abiding or truthful (which constitutes the essence of the joke). Therefore, from the variationist point of view, we cannot say that all jokes have 269

the same structure or even belong to the same discourse type.

UNIT 8

A) 1 President, ´I

have ´admiration for the ´accomplishment of ´scientific research in

Multiple theme

Rheme

Given

New

2 developing ´medicines which have ´proved of ´great ´benefit. Yet ´also, I have a Rheme

Multiple theme

New

Given

3 ´healthy ´scepticism ´both of our ´pharmaceutical industry and óur… of our Rheme New 4 éxaggerated ćonfidence in ´some of its ´products, ´many of which ćause a ´great Rheme New 5 deal more ´harm than the íllegal ´recreational drugs which áttract the ´bulk of Rheme New 6 ´public áttention. And for ´that reason, it would be ´wrong to place ´more Multiple Theme

Rheme

New

Given

´unnecessary burdens and ´regulations upon food ´supplements and the ´healthRheme

270

New 8 ´food shops that ´sell them. Many ´believe these ´products to be ´beneficial, and at Theme

Rheme

Given

New

9 ´least they ´don´t cause ´harm. I ´regard ´homeopathic ´medicines in the ´same Theme Rheme Given

New

10 ´way. Today we have ´more ´patients who áre better ínformed than éver ´before Theme

Rheme

New

Given

11 and ´that´s a ´good thing. I ´want people to have ´access to ´objective Theme

Rheme

Theme

Rheme

Given

New

Given

New

12 ´information about ´medicines and ´about ´treatment. But ´that’s Rheme

M. Theme

New

Given

13 quite ´different from ópening the ´door to the ´direct ádvertising of Rheme New 14 ´medicines. The ´result, I ´fear, will ńot be better public ínformation, but Theme

Rheme

New

Given

15 ´greater public ´confusion, ´stimulated by the ´marketing techniques of a 271

Rheme New 16 ´used-´car salesman.

The thematic and information structures have been only broadly marked herein, in the knowledge that in fact the structure is much more complex than what the general Theme-Rheme and Given-New labels can show. These labels have been assigned here to the main clauses, without considering those in the dependent clauses.

Another

important thing to remark before the analysis is the fact that, as was noted in 8.4. in this book, the analysis of information units as consisting of only one tonic prominence is idealistic and simplistic. As can be observed in the text included in this exercise, tone groups have more than one prominence in most cases. Having said this, we can proceed to provide some general guidelines as to the interpretation of this particular text. As regards the thematic structure of this lecture, we find instances of multiple themes, such as President, I (vocative + topical theme), Yet also, I (conjunctive + conjunctive + topical theme) or But that (conjunctive + topical theme). There are cases of thematization, as is the case of the adjunct For that reason (line 6) which is fronted in order to set the scene circumstancially for the upcoming information. This fact makes the speaker treat this information as New by giving tonic prominence to it. Also, the adjunct Today is fronted (line 10) in order to set up a framework of time. In line 14 we observe that the subject of the subordinate clause has been thematized (The result); the unmarked main clause being I fear that the result will not be… It is observed here that there is great variation in the length of tone units, a fact that depends on factors such as speed of utterance, familiarity with the content of the message, the syntactic structures and lexical items chosen or other situational and/or personal factors such as self-confidence. Thus, within the information marked as New, we find in fact (and in most cases) more than one tonic prominence. We may interpret this as several intonation units or as an information unit with several intonation nuclei. Pitch prominence and pitch movement (intonation) are given in general to those words that are considered to carry the heaviest information load, or those implying a given contrast, such as that (referring to the fact of having information about medicines) in line 12; an element that is contrasted with direct advertising, which is also given special

272

prominence. Most of the themes of the main clauses in this text coincide with the Given. However, in the final and concluding clause, the speaker plays with both the thematic and information structures in order to present a criticizing and ironic comment: as noted above, the subject of the subordinate clause is fronted, emphasizing the phrase The result, in order to show the displeasure of the speaker with the results of the previously criticized policy of the direct advertising of medicines. As we can see, the next and final focus is placed on the words greater, confusion and used car salesman (within the subordinate clause), which directly and sarcastically refer to the thematized phrase The result in the main clause. Consequently, the organization of the thematic and information structures of this text helps us realize the communicative intentions of the speaker, i.e. to criticize a given policy in favor of another. Many more aspects of the given text could be analyzed here with respect to the thematic and information structures, which I invite the student to reflect upon. (See TASK A in Unit 8 for the completely annotated corpus. Here it has been simplified in order to make the general thematic structure clear).

B) Open task

C) Open task

UNIT 9

A) Open task

B) The main points that could be made regarding the comparison between CA and Poststructural Theory are the following: a) The context: which aspects are considered relevant or not? A post-structuralist or critical analyst would focus on the history of the social practices around his/her topic of research, as well as in all the political and sociological aspects related to the discourse in question. A conversation analyist, on the contrary would require very little background information about the broader social context, for it 273

is not considered necessary for a successful analysis. Schegloff (1991) claims that the only context we need to understand discourse is what is evident and relevant to the participants as revealed by their talk, so by no means a conversation analyst would resort to, for example, so much historical information as a post-structural analyst would. b) The relationship of discourse with the real world, the objective truth and the results of its generalization Foucaldian analysis claims that discourse constitutes reality becaise it studies the material and the cultural together; a claim which is part of the constructionist theory of meaning.

For post-structuralists and post-modernists there are no absolute truths.

Truth is always relative to the discourse or language game of the moment. The set of knowledge/power relations which produces the truths of one historical period will inevitably change and be replaced by other truths in another period.

Thus, post-

structuralists (and all critical perspectives in general) are against universal truths or absolute ethical positions. A conversation analyst, on the contrary, would be more in favor of a belief in social scientific investigation as a truth –seeking process, on the grounds that good scientific practice should be objective and should discover real patterns, not invented patterns which can not be replicated or found again by another researcher. More precisely, conversation analysts (and ethnomethodologists) would claim to take an even-handed and non-judgemental perspective. They are not interested in evaluating the truth or falsity of what people say, but in the organization of their talk.

c) The position of analysts with respect to the topic: Are they politically engaged? All discourse analysis perspectives that are critical necessary take a politicallyengaged stance. A critical or politically engaged stance of some kind is probably the most common position among discourse analysts, especially Foucauldians, critical sociolinguists, ethnographers of communication and Bakhtinian-influenced scholars.. However, conversation analysts reject the view that critique should be built into the analytic process. Schegloff (1997) argues that a critical stance in discourse research is not just bad scholarship but also bad politics.

From Schegloff perspective, post-

structuralism and critical analysts in general, conduct a type of research that is biased and at the same time prevents them from seeing clearly what their object of analysis is. Conversation analysts view DA as a technical discipline, and thus consider science as a different kind of activity from politics. Academics, in their view, are researchers, not 274

politicians.

C) Open task

D) Basically, we may speak of two main voices in this narrative: the voice of women and the voice of men. The reasons for saying that a computer should be a masculine or a feminine noun are used to express both male and female ideas (and criticisms) about the opposite sex. The voice of the narrator is also important, because, even when it seems to be the compromising voice at the beginning, at the end s/he acknowledges that the women’s arguments won. The reader/hearer/analyst might argue, then, that the narrator has to be a woman (and that, therefore, this is a piece of discourse where the ideologies of women are defended), but this argument could be counterargued, because it could very well come from a man who wants to show his empathy with women. A more rigurous research should be made of the origins of the narration, in which other voices should be examined and other questions should be asked, such as: Who is the real, original narrator? Who sent this joke as an e-mail message? What intentions might the sender have had in sending the message to a particular friend? What might have motivated the sender to send the message in the first place? What does this joke/narration mean in the whole context of asynchronic computer-mediated communication? Thus, in order to give a proper post-structuralist bakhtinian treatment to the analysis, we should do further research about the total historical discourse practice in question, which I invite the students to engage in, in case of having a particular interest in the topic.

UNIT 10

A) [1] In order to analyze and interpret this joke, we need to have a minimal knowledge about the Mormon Church, as well as some historical knowledge of its beliefs/ traditions. As many critical discourse analysts have remarked, in order to do CDA we need to have a 275

historical perspective of certain social practices. In this case, the average American who hears this joke will have the social cognition about the fact that in a not very distant past, the Mormon Church did not admit black people as possible members, and that it authorized male poligamy.

Thus, the members of this group may be regarded as

representatives of a racist and chauvinistic ideology, which deserves to be satirized in a joke. In order to make this fact evident and, at the same time present an opposition to that ideology, the joke teller uses satire, which is manifested at the discourse structural level in several ways. The examination of thematic and organization structure (combined with a critical approach) proves useful for the analysis of this joke. If we look at the two pieces of news delivered by the Secretary of the Church, we shall see that he uses God as the theme of both utterances, but he plays with the thematic and organization structures in a fashion that reveals his ideology and at the same time makes the joke funny. The structures of both utterances are the following: God

is in town

Theme

Rheme

Hearer-Given/ Discourse New

New

She

is black

Theme

Rheme

I 1) Hearer and discourse-Given

New

I 2) Hearer and discourse-New

In the first piece of news the theme deals with both given and new information: God is ‘hearer-given’ (the hearer has the concept of God in his/her mind) but ‘discourse new’(it is introduced here for the first time). The rheme, as expected, contains new information (that God is in town). In the second piece of news –the one that makes the joke funny and at the same time critical of the ideology represented by the Mormon Church- there is an evident play with the expected and the unexpected. The theme refers to God as well, so here we may say that the theme is both hearer and discourse-given, but instead of the expected “he”, we hear a “she”, which makes the theme become new information in some respect, even when God was named before. So we could divide the information structure analysis into two parts, which correspond to the two different kinds of information being delivered: on the one hand (I 1) She refers to God, which is hearer 276

given and discourse given (because the Secretary talked about God before), but on the other hand (I 2) the fact that God is a “she” is shocking, and therefore constitutes both hearer and discourse-new information. The information in the rheme is also new (as might be expected) and also contributes to the implied criticism and joke (it is bad news for a Mormon to say that God is a woman and, moreover, that she is black). Thus both the theme and the rheme of the second utterance contain new information which in turn expresses an ideology that is to be criticized or at least regarded as not ‘politically correct’.

[2]

This joke also reflects the ideology of the person who tells it, and in this respect it differs from joke [1] because the reflected ideology is not criticized but supported, for this kind of joke is more likely to be told by a Republican, that is, the party which in the USA opposes the liberals, who are the group that is ridiculed and criticized here. The analysis of implicature, together with a critical perspective, can be used to explain how the ideology is expressed: Although not said explicitly, the last utterance of the joke (“We’ve never had a liberal in the family before!”) carries the implicature that liberals are people whose brain is dead in spite of the fact that their hearts are still beating. The speaker is here violating both the Quantity (by not saying explicitly that liberals have no brains) and the Manner (by being ambiguous) Maxims of the Cooperative Principle, and in doing so the listener has to think that s/he is doing it for some reason, which triggers the above-mentioned implicature. Thus, the violation of the Maxims proves that this joke expresses a biased view of a political party, thereby implying that the opposing party is better and, on the contrary, has brains. The manipulation of some discourse strategies allows the person telling the joke to present a negative image of the Democrats (liberals) and a positive image of the Republicans, which will eventually – from a CDA perspective- bring about the manipulation of the hearers’ minds.

B) Open task

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D) Open task

UNIT 11

A) All the signs in the picture show the discourse of public transport regulation, which in turn also includes the discourse of the municipal authority of that particular place in France. The meaning of these signs depends upon different forms of indexicality, which locate language and discourse in the physical world. We find the three different types of signs: •

Icons the plane which signals the way to the airport, the drawing of a port, which accompanies the words “Le port Monaco”

•

Indexes all the arrows in the different signs

•

Symbols all the words and numbers

The three types of sign co-occur in the big blue sign which indicates the direction to Nice, Cote d’Azur and Le Port Monaco. The white sign combines symbols and indexes. The round speed limit signs are accompanied by a triangular sign with an index on top. It is important to remember here that, as noted in 11.8.1, signs are rarely ‘pure’, and consequently most of them have chareateristics of the other two types (e.g. the symbols used for written language are frequently iconic as well). Reading and understanding these signs is a practice which forms part of the nexus of practice of drivers not only in France but in the rest of the world.

B) We find the following types of discourse on the inscription: •

Historical information discourse (designer, time and circumstances under which it was built).

•

Architectural discourse (there is also information about how it was constructed and about its structure).

•

Discourse related to general information about The Monument given to visitors (opening and closing hours, admission fees).

278

•

Discourse of street directions (directions are given as to how to get to St. Magnus the Martyr).

Visual semiotics: the inscription is placed on The Monument, and therefore the reader understands that the information given refers to it.

The fact that this

inscription is in this particular place of London (The City) also adds extra information to the whole image, which would be understood differently if it were in a different location. The inscription has a sober type of letter –no colors and no icons-, which gives it a ‘formal’ and serious appearance, in accordance to the seriousness of the monument and the respect expected to be felt for it and for its history.

Place semiotics: The inscription is placed at the base of The Monument, and the rest of the monument speaks for itself, without the need for any other symbols or signs. The architectural style of The Monument is in fact a sign which gives off a lot of meaning, together with the place where it is located (The City of London, where the Great Fire occurred in 1666. The Monument was built to commemorate this fire). Also, the inscription is placed at a height which is accessible to the human eye, this fact being a sign that there is an intention and expectation of interaction with all visitors and passers by.

C) Open task

UNIT 12

A) a) Depending on the approach taken, we could work with different units of analysis. We could say that the E-mail message is a large unit in itself, which, as we saw in Unit 12, has certain characteristics (mixed style (formal/informal; spoken/written, etc.). Email messages usually have two main kinds of information: 1) the information provided at the heading (addresser, date and time of the message, addressee, subject, etc.) and 2) the message itself.

The relationship between these two parts contributes to the

coherence of the whole message in that the former provides the addressee with 279

information that will help her make sense of the information in the latter. However, if the researcher wants to analyze further, it will be useful to choose a smaller unit. S/he could choose, for instance, the speech act and thus s/he will reach the conclusion that the main speech acts in this message are:

Excusing oneself (Lauren had told John in her previous message that she was surprised to not have received any news from him after he left, so that is why he excuses himself by saying that he had written a message but it didn’t go through). Thanking Offering (By saying “Let me know when you are coming over this way” he implies that he intends to return Lauren’s hospitality when she visits him). Sending regards Complimenting Greeting

The message also has coherence in so far as we connect it with a previous one sent by Lauren, which can be inferred from the fact that in the subject section of the message we see that John’s is a reply to Lauren’s message entitled “Hi there”. Thus the whole message can be considered a speech act, i.e. that of replying. Another possible approach to analyze this message could take the politeness strategy as a unit of analysis, and thus we could say that John’s first statement apparently looks like a direct, on record statement, but in fact it shows the use of an indirect, off record strategy in order to apologize for the fact that he didn’t write before (e.g. the adverb apparently may be considered to be a hedge to elude certain responsibility for the previous absence of response). The rest of the message can be said to contain instances of the use of on record with positive politeness strategies, i.e., strategies aiming at the positive face of the addressee (e.g. complimenting: “You’ve got two very bright and nice sons”, “You’re lucky”). We could take other perspectives, and so, for example, we could analyze this discourse as a social practice within the Mediated Discourse Analysis approach and consider mediated action as the unit of analysis. But I leave this and other possibilities in the hands of the creative student or reader of this book.

b) We may say that the discourse under analysis is primarily Computer-mediated 280

discourse (See 12.1.2.3.), but of course it has features of other types of discourse, such as written, epistolary discourse, or oral, informal, everyday conversation.

c) We find three discourse markers in this message:

1) So: Causative conjunction 2) Again: Elaborative, additive conjunction 3) And: Elaborative, additive conjunction

The three conjunctions contribute to the cohesion of the message by linking clauses and ideas. Additionally, they also contribute to the coherence of the whole situation by relating (in the case of so and again) the ideas in this message to those expressed by Lauren in her previous (inferred) message, and thus help to make sense of the whole situation. d) With respect to cohesion, we find examples of reference (e.g. use of pronouns (I, you, it), substitution (everything, referring to Lauren’s hospitality), ellipsis (e.g. And (give my) regards to the family), etc. With respect to coherence, we may say that both addresser and addressee share certain mental frames and knowledge of the world (e.g. about situations when it is deemed appropriate to express gratitude or to ask for excuses) which makes the whole message a coherent piece. Much more could be said about coherence and cohesion, but for the purposes of this exercise, the above remarks should suffice. We leave other considerations open to the reader’s judgement.

e) We give here just a few examples:

STRATEGIES

DISCOURSE FUNCTIONS

Be indirect, excuse yourself

Opening the message

Express gratitude

Topic closure

Offer future hospitality

Topic change

281

C) Open task

Absolute politeness 4.2.1.1.1. Abstract (of a narrative) 7.2. Acceptability 1.1. Accounts 5.2.1.1. Act sequence 6.4 Action 11.6. Adjunct 8.1.1.1.1., 8.1.1.1.3. Adjacency pair 5.2., 5.2.1., 5.3. Anaphora 3.5. Anthropology 4.1., 6.1., 6.6. Anthropological Linguistics 11.1. Applied Linguistics 6.2. Archaeology (Foucault) 9.3. Backchannels 5.2.1. Black English Vernacular 7.2. Bodily hexis 1.3., 9.4. Body gestures 4.1.1. Bold on record (politeness strategies) 4.2.1.2., 4.2.1.2.1. Chomskyan Generative School 1.2. Civil inatention 4.1.2. Closings 5.2.2.4., 5.3. Coda (of a narrative) 7.2. 282

Coherence 1.1., 7.4., 12.1., 12.1.2.3., 12.1.3., 12.1.3.2., 12.1.3.3. Cohesion 1.1., 12.1., 12.1.3., 12.1.3.3. Cohesive tie 12.1.3.1. Cognition 10.3. Cognitive approach 12.1.3.2. Cognitive Linguistics 1.2. Cognitivism 1.2. Commercial branding discourse 11.7. Commissives 3.3. Communication 6.1., 10.1. Communicative dynamism 8.1., 8.1.1. Communicative event 1.1. Communicative competence 6.2. Competence 4.1.2., 6.6. Complement 8.1.1.1.1., 8.1.1.1.3. Complicating action (of a narrative) 7.2. Computer corpora 2.4.1. Computer-mediated discourse 12.1.2., 12.1.2.3. Conative function 12.1.4. Concordance programs 2.4.1. Conjunction 12.1.3., 12.1.3.1., 12.1.3.3. Conjuncts 8.1.1.1., 8.1.1.1.1. Connotation 3.6. Constraint 7.6. Consumer correctness discourse 11.7. Context 1.1., 8.1. Context of utterance 3.5. Contextual factors 3.6., 8.1.1. Contextualization 4.1. Contextualization cues 4.1.1. Conversation Analysis 1.3., Unit 4, 10.1., 10.5. Conventional implicature 3.2., 3.6. Conversational implicature 3.2. Cooperative Principle 3.2., 9.4. 283

Coordination 8.1.1.1.2.. Corpus /corpora 1.4., 2.4. Corpus linguistics 2.4. Corpora classification 2.4.2. Critical Discourse Analysis 1.2., 9.4., 9.7., Unit 10, 11.1., 12.1.2.1. Critical Linguistics 10.1. Cultural content 1.3. Cultural relativism 6.5 Culture 4.1., 6.1. Data Unit 2 Data collection 2.1. Data transcription 2.2. Declaratives 3.3. Declination component 5.2.1.1. Deconstruction 9.1.1. Deictic center 3.5. Deictic usage (gestural, symbolic, non-deictic) 3.5. Deixis 3.1., 3.5. Delays 5.2.1.1. Descriptive structure (of narratives) 7.4. Diagramatic discourse 11.9. Directives 3.3. Discourse 1.1. (definition), 9.3. Discourse (or text) deixis 3.5., 12.1.3.3. Discourse functions 12.1. Discourse markers 12.1.3.2., 12.1.3.3. Discourse themes 8.1.1.1. Discourse-new/ discourse-old (information) 8.3. Discourse practices 9.3., 10.1. Discourse strategies 12.1. Discourse types 12.1., 12.1.2. Discrimination 10.1. Disjuncts 8.1.1.1. Dispreferred seconds 5.2.1.1. 284

Distanced observation 6.1. Dominance 10.1. E-commerce discourse 11.7. Electronic utterance 12.1.2.3. Ellipsis 12.1.3.1. Emotive function 12.1.4. End(s) 6.4 End focus 8.1.1.2.1. Environmental constraints 6.1. Environmental correctness discourse 11.7. Ergative forms 12.1.2.1. Ethics (of data collection) 2.3. Ethnography of Communication 1.3., Unit 6, 10.1., 11.4., 11.7 Ethnography of Communication surveys 11.4. Ethnomethodology 5.1. Evaluation (of a narrative) 7.2. Evaluative structure (of narratives) 7.4. Exchange 5.2. Existing presuppositions 3.6. Experiential function 12.1.4. Expressives 3.3., 3.3.1. Extensional coherence 12.1.3.2. Face 4.1.2., 4.2.1.2. Face-threatening act 4.2.1.2. Face-saving behavior 4.1.2. Face-work 4.1.3. Factive presuppositons 3.6. Felicity conditions 3.3. Feminist approaches (to languag)e 10.1. First topic slot 5.2.2.4 Floor 5.3. Fluent speaker 6.3 Focus (of information) 8.1.1.2.1.1, 8.3. Focused interaction 4.1.2. 285

Focus group surveys 11.4. Footing 4.1.2. Form 7.4., 8.1. Formal approach (to D.A.) 1.1. Formalism 8.1. Frame 4.1.2., 12.1.2.2., 12.1.3.2. Function 7.4., 8.1.1.2., 8.3., 12.1.3.3., 12.1.4. Functions of speech 6.3. Functional approach (to D.A.) 1.1. Functional equivalence 7.4. Functional Sentence Perspective 1.3., Unit 8, Functionalism 1.1., 8.1. Gender 10.1., 12.1.2.2. Gender asymmetries 12.1.2.3. Genealogical method (Foucault) 9.1.1., 9.3. Genre(s) 1.1., 6.4., 9.5., 12.1.2., 12.1.2.2. Geosemiotics 11.7., 11.8., 11.8.2., 11.9. Gestural signs 4.1.1. Given (information) 8.1.1.2., 8.1.1.2.1.., 8.2. Global patterns 12.1.3.2. Grammar 4.1. Grammatical cohesion 12.1.3.1. Habitus 9.4., 11.3., 11.6. Hearer-new/ hearer-old (information) 8.3. Hegemony 10.1. Heteroglossia 9.5. Heteroglossic analysis 9.5.1. Historical body 11.3. Hypotactic relationship 8.1.1.1.2. Icons 11.8.1. Ideation 12.1.3.1. Ideational function 8.1.1.1.1. Identification 12.1.3.1. Ideological analysis 10.3.1. 286

Ideology 10.1., 10.3. Illocutionary act 3.3. Illocutionary force 4.2.1.2.3. Implicature 3.1., 3.2. , 3.6. Impoliteness 4.2.1.2.3., 10.2.1. Impoliteness markers 10.2.1. Indexes 11.8.1. Indexical expressions 3.5. Indexicality 11.8., 11.8.1. Inference 12.1.3.3. Information focus 8.1.1.2. Information structure 7.4. (Lavob), Unit 8 Information units 8.1.1.2., 8.1.1.2.1.1 Informativity 1.1. Insertion sequences 5.2.1., 5.2.2., 5.2.2.3., 5.3. Instrumentalities 6.4 Intensional coherence 12.1.3.2. Intentionality 1.1. Interaction 1.3., 5.2. Interaction order 11.8.2. Interactional function

12.1.4.

Interactional Sociolinguistics 1.3., Unit 4, 6.2., 11.1. Intercultural communication 11.1. Interdisciplinarity 11.1., 11.6. Interpersonal function 12.1.4. Interpersonal meaning 4.1.2. Interpersonal relations 4.2. Interpersonal themes 8.1.1.1.1. Intertextuality 1.1. Intonation 10.2.1. Intonation nucleus 8.1.1.2.1.1 Intonation system 12.1.3.1. Intonational closure 1.1. Involved participation 6.1. 287

Ironic discourse 10.2.1. Irony 4.2.1.2.2. Key 6.4. Knowledge 3.4. , 5.1., 6.6., 9.3., 12.1.3.2. Language learning discourse 11.9. Legal discourse 11.7. Lexical cohesion 12.1.3.1. Linear modification 8.1.1. Linear sequence 5.2.1. Linguistics 4.1., 4.2., 6.1., 6.2., 7.1., 11.1. Linguistic relativity 11.6. Linguistic School of Prague 8.1. Linguistic universe 9.1. Literal meaning 3.1. Locutionary act 3.3. Macrostructure 1.2. Manufacturing information discourse 11.7 Marked/ unmarked 5.2.1.1. Marked and unmarked focus 8.1.1.2.1. Marked and unmarked themes 8.1.1.1.4. Maxims (of the Cooperative Principle) 3.2., 3.2.1., 4.2.1.2.2. Meaning 3.1., 8.1., 9.3., 12.1.3.1. Meaning -nn 3.2. Mediated Discourse Analysis 9.7., Unit 11 Mediated action 11.1., 11.2. Mediated action Theory 11.1. Mediated reality 9.1. Mediated social interaction 11.5. Mediational means 11.2. Medical discourse 12.1.2., 12.1.2.2. Mental models 1.2., 12.1.3.3. Mental representations 10.3. Metalinguistic function 12.1.4. Mixed register 8.4. 288

Mood structures 8.1.1.1.4. Move 5.2. Multidisciplinarity 10.1. Multiple themes 8.1.1.1.1. Multivariate analysis 7.1. Mutual knowledge 3.4. Narrative 7.2., 8.4.1. Narrative analysis 7.2., 7.2. Narrative clauses 7.2.. Narrative structure 7.2., 7.5. Negative face 4.2.1.2. Negative politeness 4.2.1.1.1., 4.2.1.2., 4.2.1.2.1. Negotiation 12.1.3.1. Nested adjacency pairs 5.2.1. Netiquette (rules) 12.1.2.3. New (information) 8.1.1.2., 8.1.1.2.1., 8.2. Nexus of practice 11.2., 11.9. Non-verbal communication 11.1. Non-verbal signals 4.1.1. Norms of interaction and interpretation 6.4. Notation 2.2.1.1., 2.2.1.2., 2.2.1.3. Objects (of a clause) 8.1.1.1.3. On record (FTAs/ strategies) 4.2.1.2. Off record (FTAs/ strategies) 4.2.1.2., 4.2.1.2.1. Openings 5.2.2.4. Oral discourse 11.9. Orientation (of a narrative) 7.2. Other-initiated repair 5.2.2.1. Overall organization 5.2.2., 5.2.2.4., 5.3. Paratactic relationship 8.1.1.1.2. Participants 6.4 Performance 2.4. Performatives 3.3. Perlocutionary act 3.3. 289

Person deixis 3.5. Phatic function 12.1.4. Phonological variables 12.1.2.1. Pitch movement 8.1.1.2.1.1 Place deixis 3.5. Proximal place deixis 3.5. Distal place deixis 3.5. Place Semiotics 11.8.2. Plans 12.1.3.2. Poetic discourse 11.9. Poetic function 12.1.4. Politeness 3.1., 4.1.2., 4.1.3., 4.2., 10.2.1. Politeness maxims (Leech) 4.2.1.1.1. Politeness perspectives 4.2.1. Political discourse 12.1.2., 12.1.2.1. Positive face 4.2.1.2. Positive politeness 4.2.1.1.1., 4.2.1.2., 4.2.1.2.1. Post-structuralism 9.1. Post-structuralist Theory Unit 9 Power 9.3., 10.1., 10.2., 10.2.2., 10.3. Power asymmetries 12.1.2.3. Power elites 10.2. Practice(s) 11.2., 11.3. Pragmatics 1.2., 1.3., Unit 3, 10.1. Pragmatic markers 8.1.1.1., 12.1.3.3. Pre-announcements 5.2.2.2. Pre-arrangements 5.2.2. Pre-closings 5.2.2.2 Predicator 8.1.1.1.3. Prefaces 5.2.1.1. Preference organization 5.2.1., 5.2.1.1. Preferred seconds 5.2.1.1. Pre-requests 5.2.2.2. Pre-sequences 5.2.2., 5.2.2.2. 290

Presupposition 3.1., 3.6., 8.1.1.1. Presupposition triggers 3.6. Probability theory 7.1. Proposition 1.1. Propositional content 1.1. Prosodic prominence 8.1.1. Prosody 4.1.1. Psycholinguistics 6.6. Public discourse surveys 11.4. Public opinion surveys 11.4. Qualitative analysis 7.6. Quantitative analysis 7.6. Racist discourse 10.1., 10.3. Relative politeness 4.2.1.1.1. Reference 3.1., 3.4., 12.1.3., 12.1.3.1., 12.1.3.3. Referential coherence 12.1.3.2. Referential function 12.1.4. Referring sequences 3.4. Repair 5.2.1., 5.2.2., 5.2.2.1. Representation 11.6. Representatives 3.3., 3.3.1. Research interviews 2.1.1. Result or Resolution (of a narrative) 7.2. Rheme 8.1., 8.1.1., 8.1.1.1., 8.2. Rhetoric 10.1. Rhetorical effects 8.2. Rules/regulations discourse 11.9. Rules of speaking 6.3. Sapir/Whorf hypothesis 10.1. Sarcasm 4.2.1.2.2. Schemas 12.1.3.2. Scripts 12.1.3.2. Self-initiated repair 5.2.2.1. Semantics 3.1., 3.6. 291

Semantic factor 8.1.1. Semantic structure (of the clause) 8.1.1.1.1. Semiotics 11.8. Semiotic systems 11.8. Service information discourse 11.7. Shifters 3.5., 4.1.1. Site of engagement 11.2. Situated meaning 4.1.3. Situation 6.4 Situationality 1.1. Small talk 4.2. Social action 11.3. Social actor 11.6., 11.8.2. Social change 9.5. Social cognition 10.1., 10.3. Social content 1.3. Social context 5.1. Social deixis 3.5. Social identity 9.3. Social inequality 10.1. Social meaning 4.1.3. Social practice 10.1. Social Theory Unit 9, 12.1.2.1. Sociocultural knowledge 1.2. Sociocultural Psychology 11.1. Sociolinguistics 1.2., 10.1. Sociolinguistic interview 7.3. Sociolinguistic variables 4.2.1.2. Sociological variables 4.2.1.2.2. Sociology 4.1., 5.1 Speaker meaning 3.2. Speaking grid 6.4, 6.7. Speech acts 3.1., 3.3., 6.3, 12.1.2.3. Speech community 6.3. 292

Speech event 3.5., 6.3. Speech genres 9.5. Speech situation 6.3 Staging 8.1.1.1.5. Strategic understanding 1.1. Strategy 12.1.2.3., 12.1.3.3., 12.1.4. Structuralism/ structuralist movement 9.1. Stylistics 10.1. Subject 8.1.1.1.1., 8.1.1.1.3. Subordinate topics 8.1.1.1.3. Subordination 8.1.1.1.2. Substitution 12.1.3.1. Superordinate topics 8.1.1.1.3. Surveys 11.4. Symbolic capital (metaphor of) 9.4. Symbolic power 9.4., 10.2. Symbols 11.8.1. Synchronous/ asynchronous computer-mediated communication 12.1.2.3. Syntactic closure 1.1. Temporal sequence (of narratives ) 7.2. Temporal structure (of narratives) 7.4. Text 1.1., 7.4., 9.1., 10.1., 11.1. Text functions 7.4. Text grammar 1.2. Text linguistics 1.1., 3.1. Textual function 12.1.4. Textual themes 8.1.1.1.1. Textuality 1.2. Theme 8.1., 8.1.1., 8.1.1.1., 8.2. Thematic clauses 8.1.1.1.2. Thematic structures Unit 8 Thematization 8.1.1.1.5. Time deixis 3.5. Tone(s) 8.1.1.2.1.1 293

Tone group 8.1.1.2 Tone unit 8.1.1.2.1.1 Tonic syllable 8.3. Topic 8.1.1.1.3., 10.2.1., 12.1.2.3. Topic change 10.2.1. Topical coherence 12.1.2.3. Topical themes 8.1.1.1.1. Transaction 5.2. Transactional function 12.1.4. Transcription (of data) 2.2. Transcription conventions 2.2.1., Transformational grammar 8.1. Transition Relevance Place (TRP) 5.2.1. Turn 5.2. Turn-taking 5.2., 5.2.1., 12.1.2.3. Typification 5.1. Understatement 3.1. Unit(s) of analysis 7.1., 11.6., 12.1., 12.1.1. Universals (of language) 6.6. Utterance 1.3., 3.3., 4.2.1.2.3., 9.5. Utterance meaning 3.1. Variation Analysis 1.3., Unit 7 Verbal communication 4.1. Verbal interaction (rules) 8.1., 10.1. Vernacular (language) 7.1., 7.3. Visual semiotics 11.8.2. Vocatives 8.1.1.1., 8.1.1.1.1. Ways of speaking 6.3 Written discourse 11.9.

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Discourse Analysis for University Students - PDFCOFFEE.COM (2025)

References