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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Introducing Linguistics
- Sprache: Englisch
A new edition of the bestselling textbook on discourse analysis, ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in linguistics and the broader humanities and social sciences Discourse Analysis explains how to collect and analyze spoken, written, and multimodal language. Now in its fourth edition, this popular textbook encourages students to think systematically and critically about different sources of discourse to better understand why spoken utterances and written texts have the meanings and uses they do. Throughout the book, the authors offer real-life examples of what discourse analysis can reveal about language, individuals, groups, and society. Student-friendly chapters describe discourse analysis with a goal of helping students master the fundamental concepts of this important area of linguistic research. Each chapter contains discussion questions that encourage students to relate the material to their own experiences, perform their own analyses, and consider important issues in research design and research ethics. The new edition of Discourse Analysis includes new discussion questions and ideas for research projects, up-to-date supplementary readings, and expanded discussions of corpus analysis methods, rhetorical legitimation, and social identities. This textbook: * Teaches students to apply discourse analysis to answer research questions in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences * Explains the complex relationships between discourse and various aspects of context, such as linguistic structure, participants, and prior discourse * Provides instructors with the flexibility to re-order chapters to meet the needs of their students * Features exercises that incorporate extensive data from a variety of languages and situations, including discourse in electronic media * Contains discussion questions, activities, research projects suggestions, further readings, chapter summaries, and other pedagogical features Discourse Analysis, Fourth Edition, remains the ideal primary text for undergraduate and graduate courses in language and linguistics, language pedagogy, rhetoric and composition, and linguistic ethnography.
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Introducing Linguistics
This outstanding series is an indispensable resource for students and teachers – a concise and engaging introduction to the central subjects of contemporary linguistics.
Presupposing no prior knowledge on the part of the reader, each volume sets out the fundamental skills and knowledge of the field, and so provides the ideal educational platform for further study in linguistics.
Andrew Spencer Phonology
John I. Saeed Semantics, Fourth Edition
Barbara Johnstone and Jennifer Andrus Discourse Analysis, Fourth Edition
Andrew Carnie Syntax, Third Edition
Anne Baker and Kees Hengeveld Linguistics
Li Wei, editor Applied Linguistics
Discourse Analysis
Barbara Johnstone
Carnegie Mellon UniversityPittsburgh, USA
Jennifer Andrus
University of UtahSalt Lake City, USA
Fourth Edition
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Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Johnstone, Barbara, author. | Andrus, Jennifer, author.
Title: Discourse analysis / Barbara Johnstone, Carnegie Mellon University,
Jennifer Andrus, University of Utah.
Description: Fourth edition. | Hoboken, New Jersey : John Wiley & Sons,
2024. | Series: Introducing linguistics | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023045922 (print) | LCCN 2023045923 (ebook) | ISBN
9781394185160 (paperback) | ISBN 9781394185184 (pdf) | ISBN
9781394185177 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Discourse analysis.
Classification: LCC P302 .J64 2024 (print) | LCC P302 (ebook) | DDC
401/.41--dc23/eng/20231016
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023045922
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023045923
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To our teachers
Contents
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
List of Figures
List of Tables
Preface
1 Introduction
1.1 What Is Discourse Analysis?
1.1.1 “Discourse”
1.1.2 “Analysis”
1.2 Some Uses of Discourse Analysis
1.2.1 Discourse Analysis in Linguistic Research
1.2.2 Discourse Analysis in Other Disciplines
1.2.3 From Text Outward
1.3 Facets of Discourse Analysis
1.3.1 A Heuristic for Analysis
1.3.2 Texts and Interpretations of Texts are Shaped by the World, and They Shape the World
1.3.3 Discourse Is Shaped by Purpose and Discourse Shapes Possible Purposes
1.3.4 Discourse Is Shaped by the Possibilities and Limitations of Language, and Discourse Shapes Language
1.3.5 Discourse Is Shaped by Interpersonal Relations, and Discourse Helps to Shape Interpersonal Relations
1.3.6 Discourse Is Shaped by Expectations Created by Familiar Discourse, and New Instances of Discourse Help to Shape Our Expectations about What Future Discourse Will Be Like and How It Should Be Interpreted
1.3.7 Discourse Is Shaped by the Limitations and Possibilities of Its Media, and the Possibilities of Communications Media are Shaped by Their Uses in Discourse
1.4 Texts, Transcripts, and Corpora: Data for Discourse Analysis
1.4.1 Corpus Analysis
1.4.2 Transcription: Representing Speech in Writing
1.4.3 “Descriptive” and “Critical” Goals
1.5 Locations of Meaning
1.6 Discourse as Strategy, Discourse as Adaptation
1.7 Language and Languaging
1.8 Particularity, Theory, and Method
1.9 Chapter Summary
Further Reading
2 Discourse and World
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Linguistic Categories and Worldviews
2.3 Discourse, Culture, and Ideology
2.3.1 Metaphor and Conceptual Frames
2.3.2 Poetics, Grammar, and Culture: Parallelism and Text Metricality
2.3.3 Critical Discourse Analysis
2.3.3.1 Representing Actions, Actors, and Events
2.3.3.2 Evaluating: Affect, Judgment, Appreciation, Graduation
2.3.3.3 Representing Knowledge Status: Evidentiality
2.3.3.4 Naming and Wording
2.3.3.5 Representing Other Voices: Heteroglossia and Appropriation
2.3.3.6 Collocation and Semantic Preference: Cumulative Effects of Text-level Choices
2.3.4 Legitimation and Truth
2.4 Language Ideology
2.5 Silence
2.6 Chapter Summary
Further Reading
3 Intention and Interpretation
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Speech Acts, Conversational Implicature, and Relevance Theory
3.3 Contextualization Cues and Discourse Marking
3.4 Rhetorical Aims, Strategies, and Styles
3.5 Verbal Art and Performance
3.6 Chapter Summary
Further Reading
4 Discourse Structure: Parts and Sequences
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Words and Lines
4.3 Old and New Information and the Organization of Sentences
4.4 Cohesion
4.5 Paragraphs and Episodes
4.6 Discourse Schemata and the Structure of Narrative
4.7 The Emergent Organization of Conversation
4.8 Structures and Rules
4.9 Chapter Summary
Further Reading
5 Participants in Discourse: Relationships, Roles, Identities
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Audience, Politeness, and Accommodation
5.3 Power and Solidarity
5.4 Indexicality
5.5 Social Roles and Participant Frameworks
5.6 Performances of Identity
5.6.1 Gender and Sexual Identity in Discourse
5.6.2 Race and Racialization in Discourse
5.6.3 Performing Place Identity
5.7 Stance and Style
5.8 Personal Identity: Discourse and the Self
5.9 The Linguistic Individual in Discourse
5.10 Chapter Summary
Further Reading
6 Prior Texts, Prior Discourses
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Intertextuality and Interdiscursivity
6.3 Repetition in Conversation
6.4 Situational Registers
6.5 Enregisterment
6.6 Genre: Recurrent Forms in Recurrent Actions
6.7 Frames, Plots, and Coherence
6.8 Chapter Summary
Further Reading
7 Discourse and Medium
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Writing and Speaking
7.2.1 Early Research About “Orality and Literacy”
7.2.2 Literacy and Literacies
7.3 Mediation: Communication and Technology
7.3.1 Medium and Discourse Form
7.3.2 Medium and Discourse Processing: Fixity, Fluidity, And Coherence
7.3.3 Medium and Interpersonal Relations
7.3.4 Medium, Expertise, and Knowledge-making
7.4 Analyzing Multimodal Discourse
7.4.1 Speech and the Body
7.4.2 Writing and Seeing
7.4.2.1 What Writing Looks Like
7.4.2.2 Reading Images
7.4.2.3 Words and Images
7.5 Chapter Summary
Further Reading
Glossary
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
CHAPTER 04
Table 4.1 Units of discourse.
Table 4.2 A model of conversational...
CHAPTER 07
Table 7.1 Some features of planned...
Table 7.2 Analyzing visual...
List of Illustrations
CHAPTER 01
Figure 1.1 How discourse is...
Figure 1.2 Two magazine advertisements...
Figure 1.3 Structure of a...
CHAPTER 02
Figure 2.1 Some other areas...
CHAPTER 03
Figure 3.1 Conventions for...
Figure 3.2 Functions of...
Figure 3.3 Ways of keying...
CHAPTER 04
Figure 4.1 Lexical cohesion.
CHAPTER 06
Figure 6.1 Excerpt Adapted...
Figure 6.2 Situational...
Figure 6.3 Pittsburghese...
CHAPTER 07
Figure 7.1 Features of...
Figure 7.2 Dimensions of...
Figure 7.3 “Laminating”...
Figure 7.4 Pennsylvania Dutch...
Figure 7.5 Barbershop.Source:...
Guide
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Preface
Begin Reading
Glossary
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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List of Figures
Figure 1.1 How discourse is shaped by its context, and how discourse shapes its context.
Figure 1.2 Two magazine advertisements for “Splendors of Ancient Egypt”
Figure 1.3 Structure of a “Splendors” artifact label.
Figure 2.1 Some other areas of choice.
Figure 3.1 Conventions for conversational implicature. Source: Adapted from Grice, 1975.
Figure 3.2 Functions of discourse. Source: Adapted from Jakobson, 1960: 353, 357
Figure 3.3 Ways of keying verbal performance. Source: Adapted from Bauman, 1977: 16.
Figure 4.1 Lexical cohesion.
Figure 6.1 Excerpt from Su (2016).
Figure 6.2 Situational parameters of variation. Source: Adapted from Biber, 1994: 40–1.
Figure 6.3 Pittsburghese mug. Source: Barbara Johnstone (Book Author).
Figure 7.1 Features of orally transmitted knowledge. Source: Adapted from Ong, 1982.
Figure 7.2 Dimensions of textual variation. Source: Adapted from Biber, 1988
Figure 7.3 “Laminating” gesture. Source: Robert J. Moore. 2008 / Reproduced from Cambridge University Press.
Figure 7.4 Pennsylvania Dutch question intonation. Source: Adapted from Fasold, 1980.
Figure 7.5 Barbershop. Source: nuno_lopes/Pixabay.
List of Tables
Table 4.1 Units of discourse.
Table 4.2 A model of conversational turn-taking.
Table 7.1 Some features of planned and unplanned discourse. Source: Adapted from Ochs, 1979b; Chafe, 1982; Tannen, 1982a.
Table 7.2 Analyzing visual discourse. Source: Adapted from Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996.
Preface
This book is intended to be a first-level text for undergraduates and beginning graduate students taking their first (or only) course about discourse analysis. The subject matter of discourse analysis is vast – “language in use,” as Brown and Yule (1983) put it, “utterances,” according to Schiffrin (1994), “verbal communication” for Renkema (2004) – and most discourse analysts would be hard-pressed to describe what, if anything, makes discourse analysis a discipline. Yet, discourse analysis is implicitly treated as if it were a discipline in texts that are organized as a series of overviews of research topics (institutional discourse, discourse and gender, narrative, media discourse, and so on) or theories (pragmatics, conversation analysis, politeness theory, and so on). The approach we take in this book is different. We treat discourse analysis not as a discipline (or as a subdiscipline of linguistics) but as a systematic, rigorous way of suggesting answers to research questions posed in and across disciplines throughout the humanities and social sciences and beyond. In other words, we see discourse analysis as a research method that can be (and is being) used by scholars with a variety of academic and nonacademic affiliations, coming from a variety of disciplines, to answer a variety of questions.
For this reason, this book is meant to encourage students not to think of discourse analysis as a collection of facts or canonical studies or as a body of theory. As we will see, discourse analysts set out to answer many kinds of questions about language, about speakers, and about society and culture. However, they all approach their tasks by paying close and systematic attention to particular situations and particular texts or utterances or sets of texts or utterances. This book attempts to separate the techniques of discourse analysis clearly from its results, trying to make sure that students understand and practice the former before concentrating on the latter. This will, we hope, help alleviate a problem we have had again and again in teaching discourse analysis – that of ending up with students who are fascinated by the results of sensitive analyses of discourse but unable themselves to perform analyses that go much beyond paraphrase. Discourse analysis, as we approach it here, is an open-ended heuristic, a research method consisting of a set of topics to consider in connection with any instance of discourse. This heuristic can help ensure that discourse analysts are systematically paying attention to every possible element of the potential meaning of a stretch of talk, writing, or multimodal text: every kind of context, every resource for creativity, and every source of limitation and constraint on creativity. Our focus is thus less on providing detailed descriptions of the results of discourse analysts’ work than on asking students to think systematically about a variety of sources of constraint on and creativity in discourse, a variety of reasons why spoken utterances and visual texts have the meanings and uses they do. Discussion questions which, in many cases, ask readers to think about what they and other people in their field do or might do with discourse analysis, as well as ideas for small research projects using discourse analysis, are interspersed throughout the chapters.
Except for the first, the chapters in this book are self-contained, so they could be handled in any order. The order we have selected reflects a combination of what we have found students’ interests and expectations to be. People often come to language study because their attention has been captured by the ways in which language, culture, and the world seem to be intertwined. (This can happen, for example, when one studies a foreign language or interacts with people in a foreign place.) This is why we have put the chapter about discourse and world directly after the introduction. It is followed by a chapter that raises the important issue of the role of intentions in discourse processing. People expect language study to be about structures and rules, so the chapter about discourse and structure is also close to the beginning. No textbook author can expect to control how their book is used. We would like, however, to urge that readers of this book to touch on every chapter in it. To pick and choose among the ways in which discourse is multiply constrained and enabled would be contrary to the overall purpose of the book, because it would encourage the kind of one-dimensional approach to explaining texts against which this book constitutes an argument.
Each chapter ends with a set of suggested supplementary readings. These are not intended as comprehensive bibliographies. Particularly in the areas in which most work is being done at the moment, it would be impossible to have included all the most recent sources, and such literature reviews would, in any case, have been outdated by the time the book was published. Instead, we have tried to make suggestions for one or two things a person might profitably read in connection with each section of the chapter. Some are particularly influential studies, often ones done relatively early on. Others are overviews and literature reviews. Instructors could use these lists to choose supplementary readings for the course, and students could use them as a way to get started with background reading in the areas they decide to focus on.
Although some are trained in departments of linguistics, most discourse analysts, at least in the United States, do not teach in linguistics departments, but rather in departments of English, anthropology, communication, education, or foreign languages, among others. This means that most students in courses about discourse analysis are not linguistics majors or graduate students in linguistics. We have made every effort in designing this book not to lose sight of this fact. We have tried to avoid the temptation to write at such an advanced level and in such a discipline-specific way that students’ frequent suspicions that linguistics is difficult and irrelevant to their other interests are simply confirmed. A course in discourse analysis is an ideal place to encourage interdisciplinary exploration, since discourse is a focus of study in most of the humanities and social sciences. Discourse analysis is practiced in one way or another by at least some people in most of the academic disciplines in which human life is the focus: anthropologists analyze discourse, as do communications scholars, rhetoricians, literary and cultural critics, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, geographers, and medical, legal, and educational researchers, among others. Nonlinguists can be drawn into the study of language through discourse analysis, and linguists can be drawn into interdisciplinary work. We have written this book specifically with a nonspecialist, interdisciplinary audience in mind. Although readers might benefit from having had a general introduction to linguistics first (particularly if the introduction was not limited to formal theories of semantics, syntax, and phonology), we assume that many readers will be newcomers to the field. In the text, we try to explain concepts from linguistics when they first arise. There is a glossary at the end of the book in which terms that may be unfamiliar, as well as specialized uses of familiar words, are briefly defined.
In order to make it possible for instructors to adapt the book to more specialized audiences, some of the discussion questions are geared to teachers and students in one field or another. For example, some discussion questions require students to produce translations or do detailed grammatical analysis. These will obviously not work for students who do not know foreign languages or who are unfamiliar with basic grammatical concepts and terms. Other discussion questions are on topics that will particularly interest people in one field or another: some deal with literary discourse, for example, others with technical genres; some deal with writing and some with spoken language. It is not intended, nor would it be possible, for a class to do all the discussion questions. Students and instructors are meant to develop a system for choosing among them.
Since many of the texts around which the questions revolve were selected and/or collected by our students, there is an inevitable North American bias. We have tried to counteract this to a certain extent in the body of the text by discussing and drawing examples from research done elsewhere. Unfortunately, it has simply not been practical to include anything approaching a representative sampling of work about languages other than English. Good discourse analysis usually cannot be done in translation (although good translation requires careful discourse analysis), and English is the only language readers of this book will, more or less, share.
Instructors who have used previous editions of this book will find that this edition preserves the overall structure of the third edition. In addition to reordering some parts of the chapters in the service of clarity and updating the lists of further reading, we have sharpened the focus on corpus linguistics in Chapter 1 and elsewhere. Chapter 2 includes a new section on legitimation. In Chapter 5, there is an expanded discussion of performances of identity and new sections on gender and sexual identity, race and racialization, and place identity. Throughout, we have supplemented discussions of key studies with references to newer research, much of it based on online data. We have made sure that at least one Discussion Question in each chapter helps introduce students to the research design process.
As will be obvious to anyone who knows his work, A. L. Becker was a major influence on our approach to discourse analysis. At the University of Michigan, Barbara Johnstone learned from him to think of discourse analysis in heuristic terms, as the systematic consideration of a set of broad analytical topoi. Becker talked about the sources of constraint on discourse in a variety of ways, and the set of topics around which this book is based is not exactly the same as any of his. Although we hope it is, at least in a general way, the sort of book he would have written if he had written a textbook, he, of course, bears no responsibility for its failings, nor do we claim to be speaking for him. We are also grateful to everyone else whose work we have cited or discussed. We have learned from all of them and hope not to have misrepresented any of them.
Barbara Johnstone also learned from people she worked with at Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne, Georgetown, Texas A&M, and Carnegie Mellon. Figuring out how to articulate her interests and skills with those of colleagues and students in anthropology, linguistics, literary and cultural studies, and rhetoric in four very different settings encouraged her to learn to think and talk about the ways in which discourse analysis can be an interdisciplinary resource. Students at all four of these places contributed to this book, both by letting her try out ideas on them in class and by contributing much of the data on which the discussion questions are based. Many students have contributed suggestions and corrections, for which we thank them. Johnstone is particularly grateful to Denise Wittkofski for suggesting terms for the first draft of the glossary, to Maeve Conrick for pointing her to sources about the feminization of professional titles in Canadian French, to Andreas Stæhr for detailed comments and suggestions about discourse and medium, and to John Oddo for sharing his material on appraisal. Arty Johnstone provided the sketches for figure 7.3.
Jennifer Andrus was trained as a discourse analyst during graduate school at Carnegie Mellon by Johnstone, to whom she is grateful for mentorship and friendship. Andrus is a professor at the University of Utah in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies, where she teaches discourse analysis and legal discourse analysis (among other classes) to graduate and undergraduate students. Discussions with those students have greatly impacted both her approach to teaching discourse analysis and even more importantly the ways that she does discourse analysis in her own research. Student questions and insights have certainly affected her approach to this edition of this textbook. Andrus appreciates the students with whom she has been able to grow her understanding and uses of discourse analysis. She also owes a debt of gratitude to Johnstone for being included as co-author of this edition of the book.
We are also very grateful to the anonymous reviewers of the original proposal for this book and, later, the first, second, and third editions, and to the editors with whom we have worked at Wiley.
1 Introduction
1.1 What Is Discourse Analysis?
People in a variety of academic departments and disciplines use the term “discourse analysis” for what they do, how they do it, or both. Many of these people, though by no means all, have some training in general linguistics, and some would identify themselves primarily as linguists. Others, however, would identify themselves primarily with other fields of study, such as anthropology, communication, cultural studies, psychology, or education, to list just a few of the possibilities, and some situate their work in the interdisciplinary endeavor of discourse studies. Discourse analysts pose many different questions and propose many different sorts of answers. In one journal issue devoted to discourse analysis (Basham, Fiksdal, and Rounds, 1999), for example, there are papers by eleven people who all think of what they do as discourse analysis. One of these authors talks about the descriptive terms used of the African-American defendant in the media coverage of a murder trial. One talks about differences between English and Japanese. One describes newspaper coverage of a prison scandal in England. Another discusses metaphor, and another analyzes expressions of identity in Athabaskan (Native American) student writing. One talks about a poem, and there is a paper about the epitaph of the spiritual master of a sect of Muslims and one about whether the pronoun I should appear in formal writing. One paper is about the connection between personal pronouns and the human experience of selfhood, one is about political debate, one is about using case studies as a way of studying sociolinguistic variation. The papers make points such as these: media coverage of the murder trial was racist; the Japanese word jinkaku, used in Japan’s new post–World War II constitution as an equivalent for the English expression individual dignity, both represented and shaped a particularly Japanese way of thinking and talking about the public person; female US college students describing seminars used metaphors of sharing whereas male students used metaphors of competing; poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins operate on numerous levels at once; a Bektashi Muslim community in the United States manages to maintain a sense of cultural continuity despite massive cultural and geographical changes and in several radically different languages; students need a voice with which to write in academia.
It might appear that the only thing all these projects have in common is that, in one way or another, they all involve studying language and its effects. Is discourse analysis, then, simply the study of language and its effects? It has been described that way. It has been suggested, for example, that “the name for the field ‘discourse analysis’ … says nothing more or other than the term ‘linguistics’: the study of language” (Tannen, 1989: 6). In a way, this is exactly correct: discourse analysis is the study of language, in the everyday sense in which most people use the term. What most people mean when they say “language” is talk, communication, discourse. (In formal language study, both descriptive and prescriptive, the term “language” is often used differently, to refer to structures or rules that are thought to underlie talk.) Even if discourse analysis is, basically, “the study of language,” however, it is useful to try to specify what makes discourse analysis different from other approaches to language study. One way to do this is by asking ourselves what we can learn by thinking about what “discourse” is and what “analysis” is.
1.1.1 “Discourse”
To discourse analysts, “discourse” usually means actual instances of communicative action in the medium of language, although some define the term more broadly as “meaningful symbolic behavior” in any mode (Blommaert, 2005: 2). “Discourse” in this sense is usually a mass noun. Discourse analysts typically speak of discourse rather than discourses, the way we speak of other things for which we often use mass nouns, such as music (“some music” or “three pieces of music” rather than “three musics”) or information (“the flow of information,” “a great deal of information,” rather than “thousands of informations”). Communication can, of course, involve other media besides language. Media such as photography, clothing, music, architecture, and dance can be meaningful, too, and discourse analysts often need to think about the connections between language and other such modes of semiosis, or meaning-making.
Not all linguistic communication is spoken or written: there are manual languages, such as American Sign Language, whose speakers use gesture rather than sound or graphic signs. (It is conventional to use the word “speaker” as a cover term for people who are writing or gesturally signing in addition to those who employ the aural–oral mode. Doing this is convenient, but it also can make it seem as if spoken language is more natural, neutral, or normal than signing or writing are. We will return to this issue when we discuss media of communication in more detail in Chapter 7.)
Calling what we do “discourse analysis” rather than “language analysis” underscores the fact that we are not centrally focused on language as an abstract system. We tend, instead, to be interested in what happens when people draw on the knowledge they have about language, knowledge based on their memories of things they have said, heard, seen, or written before, to do things in the world: exchange information, express feelings, make things happen, create beauty, entertain themselves and others, and so on. This knowledge – a set of generalizations, which can sometimes be stated as rules, about what words generally mean, about what goes where in a sentence, and so on – is what is often referred to as “language,” when language is thought of as an abstract system of rules or structural relationships. Discourse is both the source of this knowledge (people’s generalizations about language are made on the basis of the discourse they participate in) and the result of it (people apply what they already know in creating and interpreting new discourse).
Scholars influenced by Foucault (1972, 1980) sometimes use “discourse” in a related but somewhat different sense, as a count noun. “Discourses” in this sense can be enumerated and referred to in the plural. They are conventional ways of talking that both create and are created by conventional ways of thinking. These linked ways of talking and thinking constitute ideologies (sets of interrelated ideas) and serve to circulate power in society. In other words, “discourses” in this sense involve patterns of belief and habitual action as well as patterns of language. Discourses are ideas as well as ways of talking that influence and are influenced by the ideas. Discourses, in their linguistic aspect, are conventionalized sets of choices for discourse, or talk. As we will see throughout this book (particularly in Chapter 2), the two senses of the word “discourse,” as a mass noun (“discourse”) and as a count noun (“discourses”), are crucially connected.
1.1.2 “Analysis”
Why discourse analysis rather than “discourseology,” on the analogy of “phonology,” “discourseography,” on the analogy of “ethnography,” or “discourse criticism,” on the analogy of “literary criticism” or “rhetorical criticism”? The answer has to do with the fact that discourse analysis typically focuses on the analytical process in a relatively explicit way. It is useful to think of discourse analysis as analogous to chemical analysis. Like chemical analysis, discourse analysis is a set of methods that can be used in answering many kinds of questions. As we have already seen, discourse analysts start out with a variety of research questions, and these research questions are often not questions that only discourse analysts ask. Instead, they are often questions that discourse analysts share with other people, both in linguistics and in other fields. Some discourse analysts ask questions that are traditionally asked in linguistics: questions about linguistic structure, about language change, about meaning, about language acquisition. Other discourse analysts ask questions that are more interdisciplinary: questions about such things as social roles and relations, power and inequality, communication and identity. What distinguishes discourse analysis from other sorts of study that bear on human language and communication lies not in the questions discourse analysts ask but in the ways they try to answer them: by analyzing discourse – that is, by examining aspects of the structure and function of language as it is actually used in interaction.
Perhaps the most familiar use of the word “analysis” is for processes, mental or mechanical, for taking things apart. Chemical analysis, for example, involves using a variety of mechanical techniques for separating compounds into their elemental parts. Mental analysis is also involved, as the chemist thinks in advance about what the compound’s parts are likely to be. Linguistic analysis is also sometimes a process of taking apart. Discourse analysts often find it useful to divide longer stretches of discourse into parts according to various criteria and then look at the particular characteristics of each part. Divisions can be made according to who is talking, for example, where the paragraph boundaries are, when a new topic arises, or where the subject ends and the predicate begins. Are grammatical patterns different when social superiors are talking than when their subordinates are? Does new information tend to come in the first sentence of a paragraph? Are topic changes signaled by special markers? Do sentence subjects tend to be slots in which events or actions or feelings can be presented as things? Discourse can be taken apart into individual words and phrases, and concordances of these – sets of statistics about where a particular word is likely to occur, how frequent it is, what words tend to be close to it – can be used to support claims about how grammar works or what words are used to mean.
But analysis can also involve taking apart less literally. One way of analyzing something is by looking at it in a variety of ways. An analysis in this sense might involve systematically asking a number of questions, systematically taking several theoretical perspectives, or systematically performing a variety of tests. Such an analysis could include a breaking-down into parts. It could also include a breaking down into functions (What is persuasive discourse like? What is narrative like?), or according to participants (How do men talk in all-male groups? How do psychotherapists talk? What is journalists’ writing like?), or settings (What goes on in classrooms? On social media platforms? In workplaces?), or processes (How do children learn to take part in conversation? How do people create social categories like “girl” or “foreigner” or “old person” as they talk to and about each other?).
Discussion
1.1
One good way to begin to think about what discourse analysis involves is by thinking about, or, if you can, practicing translation. If you know another language well enough, try translating each of the following into it:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. (The US Declaration of Independence)
“That’s water under the bridge.”
“Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.” (traditional proverbs)
May the Force be with you. (“Star Wars” movies)
To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ‘tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them … (William Shakespeare, Hamlet)
W rizz (TikTok). (Or, since this expression is likely to be out of date by the time you read it here, choose another phrase that is currently popular on social media.)
What decisions have to be made as you do this? Is this phrase translatable to other contexts and languages? What cultural resonances are lost as these sentences are taken out of the English (and, in the case of (a), United States) context? What resonances are added as they are articulated with another language and culture? Are there grammatical possibilities in English that do not exist in another of your languages, and vice versa? What other kinds of texts or utterances does each text echo or draw on, in English and in other languages? Who would say things like these, to whom, in what circumstances, in each language? Why would these things be said? Are they usually said in writing, or orally, or in other media? Discuss whether it is ever possible to say the same thing in a different language, in a different style, in a different medium, or in a different situation.
1.2
In what other contexts have you analyzed written texts or conversations, systematically or unsystematically? Is the analysis of discourse ever involved in the study of literature? In history? In medicine or the law? What kinds of informal discourse analysis go on in homes and workplaces, when people try to figure out what written texts mean, how best to write or speak, what is going on in a conversation? What kinds of questions do people ask themselves and others as they do such analyses?
1.2 Some Uses of Discourse Analysis
1.2.1 Discourse Analysis in Linguistic Research
As we have seen, discourse analysis has been used in answering many different kinds of questions. Some of these questions have to do with language. What is involved in “knowing a language”? How do words, sentences, and utterances get associated with meanings? How does language change? How do children learn to talk and how do people learn new languages? Linguists have long been interested in the structure of words (morphology) and sentences (syntax). Discourse analysts have moved the description of structure up a level, looking at actual stretches of connected text or transcripts of talk and providing descriptions of the structure of paragraphs, stories, and conversations. Language scholars also ask questions about meaning (semantics), and in a natural progression from work in semantics and syntax, discourse analysts have asked about what goes where in stretches of talk longer than words or phrases. Discourse analysis has shed light on how meaning can be created via the arrangement of chunks of information across a series of sentences or via the details of how a conversationalist takes up and responds to what has just been said. Discourse analysis sheds light on how speakers indicate their semantic intentions, how hearers interpret what they hear, and the cognitive abilities that underlie human symbol use. In the field of pragmatics, discourse analysts looking at corpora of actual talk have helped to describe the culturally shaped interpretive principles on which understanding is based and how people (and sometimes other entities) are thought to perform actions by means of utterances. Work on cohesion examines the meanings of utterances in their linguistic contexts.
Discourse analysts have also contributed to the study of linguistic variation and language change. Looking at records of discourse over time, discourse analysts have described mechanisms of language change having to do with what happens in interaction. For example, forms that regularly serve useful functions in suggesting how speakers intend their words to be taken at a particular moment are sometimes “grammaticalized,” changing over time into required elements of a language’s grammar (Hopper and Traugott, 2003). Discourse analysts have also described larger-scale social and material influences that effect changes in patterns of language use, influences such as economic change, geographic mobility, and power relations, and they have studied patterns of variation in how people do things with talk such as making lists, constructing arguments, and telling stories.
Discourse analysts have also contributed to research on language acquisition. They have helped describe how speakers acquire new competence and what it is they are acquiring. In first-language acquisition research, discourse analysis has a long history, dating back at least to important work by Ferguson (1977) and others about the special simplified ways in which some people display the regularities of grammar as they talk to children. This research called into question the claim that innate linguistic knowledge was required for language learning to be possible. Work by discourse analysts on “foreigner talk” and “teacher talk” followed. Among the many discourse analysts who have added to our understanding of what language learners acquire are students of “contrastive rhetoric” and “contrastive pragmatics.” They have shown that knowing a language means not just knowing its grammar and vocabulary but also knowing how to structure paragraphs and arguments and participate in conversations the way speakers of the language do. It also means understanding which sentence types can accomplish which purposes in social interaction: what might work as an apology, for example, or how to decline an invitation.
1.2.2 Discourse Analysis in Other Disciplines
Discourse analysts also help answer questions about the roles of language in human cognition, art, and social life which have been asked for centuries. Students of literary style are discourse analysts (though they may not call themselves that) and they, along with folklorists and ethnographers of communication, have been exploring artistic uses of language, and the role of aesthetics and “performance” in all language use, for many years. Rhetorical study has always involved discourse analysis, explicit or not, as rhetoricians have analyzed relatively self-conscious, public, strategically designed talk and writing to see what makes it work. Discourse analysts have helped us understand why people tell stories, what the functions of “small talk” are, how people adapt language to specialized situations like teaching and psychotherapy, what persuasion is and how it works, and how people negotiate the multiple roles and identities they may be called on to adopt.
Discourse analysis continues to be useful in answering questions that are posed in many fields that traditionally focus on human life and communication, such as anthropology, psychology, communication, and sociology, as well as in fields in which the details of discourse have not always been thought relevant, such as geography, psychology, political science, computer science, medicine, law, public policy, and business. Anyone who wants to understand or emulate human beings has to understand discourse, so the potential uses of discourse analysis are almost innumerable. Discourse analysts help answer questions about social relations, such as dominance and oppression or solidarity. Discourse analysis is useful in the study of personal identity and social identification, as illustrated by work on discourse and gender or discourse and ethnicity. Discourse analysis has been used in the study of how people define and create lifespan processes such as aging and disability as they talk, how decisions are made, resources allocated, and social adaptation or conflict accomplished in public and private life. To the extent that discourse and discourses – meaning-making in linguistic and other modes, and ways of acting, being, and envisioning self and environment – are at the center of human experience and activity, discourse analysis can help in answering any question that could be asked about humans in society.
1.2.3 From Text Outward
When you study a text or a transcript, you are always, in some sense, trying to understand it. But to understand a text completely would be to arrive at its true meaning, and, since meaning is always particular and situational (in other words, what a text means depends on who is uttering it, why, when, who is listening, and so on), this is impossible. Analyses of discourse are always partial and provisional. Any particular utterance presupposes an entire world, an entire set of psychologies, an entire linguistic history, and more. If discourse analysis is always partial, how much is enough? If we could, in theory and given enough time, spend a lifetime on a phrase and still not have finished describing the world, where do we stop? When analyzing a piece of discourse, how far outward from the text do we need to go?
The answer depends, obviously, on our goals in doing the analysis. If the question is “Do English-speakers typically encode agents as grammatical subjects?” then all that is needed is to see whether or not, in a corpus of utterances, the semantic agent usually appears as the grammatical subject. But if the question is “Why do English speakers encode agents as subjects?” or “How do conventions about representing agency in texts reflect dominant epistemologies?” or “How does a social institution constitute itself via representations of itself as agent?” then the task has to be larger. Some discourse analysts, often linguists who are primarily interested in linguistic structure and language change, ask questions of the former kind. Many others, linguists but also other people whose research questions are about the connections between language and social life rather than about language per se, ask questions of the latter kind. Such people often find it necessary to work far outward from texts into their cognitive and sociocultural contexts, and they often find that the way to do this is to combine discourse analysis with the methods of ethnography or statistical analysis, with the conceptual frameworks of rhetorical or social theory, with research findings from psychology, history, or language acquisition, and so on.
People who study discourse ask many different kinds of questions, and they need many different theoretical and methodological tools to answer them. What we describe in this book is a set of tools that have been useful, or are potentially useful, in disciplinary and interdisciplinary inquiry of many sorts. Discourse analysis, as we describe it here, is rigorous to the extent that it is grounded empirically in the closest possible attention to linguistic and contextual detail. Discourse analysis starts in linguistic analysis, and many of the people who developed the ways of working we describe have been linguists. Linguists are skilled and practiced at attending to the details of language form and function, and we have these skills to offer to people from other research traditions who wonder about the role of discourse in human life. Discourse analysis is systematic to the extent that it encourages analysts to develop multiple explanations before they argue for one. Interdisciplinarity is thus not just an attractive feature of discourse analysis but a central fact about it. Discourse analysts have often drawn on disciplines other than linguistics for possible ways of explaining things, and we should continue to search for new theories, and methods as widely as we can.
1.3 Facets of Discourse Analysis
To introduce some of the kinds of questions discourse analysis can raise and help answer, and to lay out the analytical heuristic around which this book is organized, we begin with a set of brief examples. These exploratory analyses of small bits of text all deal with aspects of a familiar genre of discourse, the discourse directed to the public by an institution – in this case, an art museum. Our purpose in presenting these mini-analyses is not to make any general point about the discourse and discourses of museums, or about how institutions construct and manipulate their publics, or about how ancient civilizations are commodified, exoticized, or made to seem threatening through the ways we talk about them, or about how condescending educational discourse can be – although all these angles are suggested in this analysis and would be worth pursuing further. Our goal is simply to illustrate a few ways in which a systematic analysis of discourse can help illuminate facets of the communication process that are important but not immediately apparent.
The discourse to be analyzed here consists of what might be called popular Egyptology, in the form of advertising for, and informational material about, a museum exhibit called “Splendors of Ancient Egypt.” (By “popular Egyptology” we mean nonacademic talk, writing, and other representations of ideas about ancient Egypt, ranging from serious books about Egypt for general audiences to humorous uses of imagery involving mummies, hieroglyphic writing, body poses taken from Egyptian bas-reliefs and statuary, and so on.) The “Splendors of Ancient Egypt” exhibit traveled to several US museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas (MFAH). The exhibit consisted of over 200 artifacts from all phases of ancient Egyptian history, including coffins and mummy masks, statues, scrolls, and relief carvings in stone. The objects were on loan from the Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim, Germany, and the exhibit was jointly designed and mounted by Hildesheim curators and Houston ones. The material we will discuss comes from the Houston show, as well as from descriptions of, and advertisements for, the show and for related events.
The MFAH presented this exhibit as a “blockbuster,” advertising it heavily and using it as a tool for raising museum attendance and increasing membership. This effort, and the show itself, gave rise to many texts, including magazine advertisements for the exhibit; articles about it in the bimonthly magazine sent to museum members, MFA Today; wall placards and labels in the exhibit; and some material that was available at the special “Splendors” gift shop outside the exhibit. (Because the exhibit took place in 1996–7, before the widespread use of the internet, there was no online advertising or educational material.) We present brief analyses of bits of this material to illustrate the approach to discourse analysis that will be taken in the chapters to follow. Let us stress again that the point of what we are doing here is illustrative. We are not presenting a complete or coherent analysis of this popular-Egyptology data, just a few examples.
1.3.1 A Heuristic for Analysis
Before we start looking at our data, though, we need to consider our methodology. How are we going to proceed with these analyses? What questions should we ask, and how should we go about answering them? Discourse analysts work with material of many kinds, including transcripts of audio- or video-recorded interactions, written documents, texts transmitted via oral tradition such as proverbs, and online communication of various sorts. Their material sometimes consists of spoken words alone and sometimes includes pictures, typography, gestures, gaze, and other modalities. But no matter what sort of discourse we consider – we discuss the “data” of discourse analysis later in the chapter – the basic questions a discourse analyst asks are “Why is this stretch of discourse the way it is? Why is it no other way? Why these particular words in this particular order?”
To answer these questions, we obviously need to think about what our “text” is about, since clearly what a person is talking about has a bearing on what is said and how it is said. We also need to think about who said it, or who wrote it or signed it, who, in its particular sociocultural context, is thought to be responsible for what it says, who the intended audience was and who the actual hearers or readers were, because who the participants in a situation are and how their roles are defined clearly influences what gets said and how. We need to think about what motivated the text, about how it fits into the set of things people in its context conventionally do with discourse, and about what its medium (or media) of production and reception has to do with what it is like. We need to think about the language the text is produced in: what that language encourages speakers and writers to do, and what it is relatively difficult to do in that language. We need to think about the text’s structure, and how it fits into larger structures of sets of texts and interactions.
We can divide the questions that need to be asked about a text into six broad categories. Each of these categories corresponds to one way in which contexts shape texts and texts shape contexts. Each of these aspects of text-building is both a source of constraint – a reason why texts are typically some ways and not others – and a resource for creativity, as speakers, signers, and writers express themselves by manipulating the patterns that have become conventional. As we explore pieces of the “Splendors of Ancient Egypt” exhibit we will touch briefly on each of these facets of discourse in turn. We will consider each aspect in more detail in the chapters to follow.
Figure 1.1 lists these six aspects of the shaping of texts. These constitute a heuristic for systematically exploring what is potentially interesting and important about a text or a set of texts. A heuristic is a set of discovery procedures for systematic application or a set of topics for systematic consideration. Unlike the procedures in a set of instructions, the procedures of a heuristic do not need to be followed in any particular order, and there is no fixed way of following them. A heuristic is not a mechanical set of steps, and there is no guarantee that using it will result in a single definitive explanation. A heuristic can be compared to a set of exercises that constitute a whole-body physical workout, or to a set of tools for thinking with. A good heuristic draws on multiple theories rather than just one. The heuristic we use here forces us to think, for example, about how discourse is shaped by ideologies that circulate power in society, but it also forces us to think about how discourse is shaped by people’s memories of previous discourse, along with other sources of creativity and constraint. We may end up deciding, in a particular project, that the most useful approach will be one that gives us ways of identifying how ideology circulates through discourse, or that the most useful approach will be one that helps us describe “intertextuality,” or that the most useful approach will be one that helps uncover the relationships between the text and its medium, the language it is in, or its producers’ goals or social relationships. The heuristic is a first step in analysis which may help you see what sorts of theory you need in order to connect the observations about discourse you make as you use the heuristic with general statements about language, human life, or society. It is a way to ground discourse analysis in discourse, rather than starting with a pre-chosen theory and using your texts to test or illustrate the theory.
Figure 1.1 How discourse is shaped by its context, and how discourse shapes its context.
1.3.2 Texts and Interpretations of Texts are Shaped by the World, and They Shape the World
Discourse arises out of the world or worlds that are presumed to exist outside of discourse, the worlds of the creators and interpreters of texts. Whether or not discourse is thought to be about something is relevant to how it is interpreted. Discourse that is thought not to refer to anything may be seen as nonsensical or crazy; it may be the result of a linguistic experiment like Dadaism in poetry; it may be required in ritual. The Western tradition of thought about language has tended to privilege referential discourse and to imagine that discourse (at least ideally) reflects the preexisting world. But as twentieth-century philosophers (Foucault, 1980), rhetoricians (Burke, [1945]1969), and linguists (Sapir, 1921; Whorf, 1941) showed us again and again, the converse is also true, or perhaps truer: human worlds are shaped by discourse.
For example, advertisements for “The Splendors of Ancient Egypt” which the MFAH placed in the Texas Monthly, a general circulation magazine, involved choices about how to describe the ancient Egyptian world which had the effect of creating a particular image of this world. The ancient Egyptian world is seen through the lens of Western “orientalism” (Said, 1978), or habitual Western ways of talking about the East which create the Eastern world of our imagination. Figure 1.2 shows the written parts of two of these advertisements. (The advertisements also include pictures of some of the artifacts in the show, and a discourse analysis could also consider their visual design, which highlights the most exotic and anthropomorphic of the artifacts and makes strategic use of layout and typography.)
Figure 1.2 Two magazine advertisements for “Splendors of Ancient Egypt.”
Egyptians are depicted in these advertisements as “full of mystery,” “superstitious,” “obsessed with living forever,” “preoccupied with death.” Ancient Egyptians needed “spells” and “curses” and “incantations” to “protect them from harm.” The expressions the ancient Egyptians, awe-inspiring, gilded mummy coffins, and this once in a lifetime exhibit appear in both ads. The effect of all this is (perhaps exactly as intended) to foreground the “otherness” of the ancient Egyptians, the ways in which they were different from us and both more primitive (their superstitions) and more splendid (their elaborate jewelry and golden sarcophagi). Only a systematically critical reader would be likely to wonder whether some of the advertisements’ copy is not, in fact, equally descriptive of twenty-first-century Westerners. For example, “For a civilization obsessed with living forever, they sure [have] a peculiar preoccupation with death” could, in another context, be taken as an accurate description of the contemporary United States. In fact, even if not every society is interested in immortality, most human societies have rituals connected with death. In the context of the world that has been created in the advertisements, however, this sounds like a description of an exotic and unusual group of people.
In addition to being shaped by what is said, the worlds evoked and created in discourse also are shaped by silence: by what cannot be said or is not said. One source of silence in the “Splendors” exhibit was the silence of the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. Egyptian writing appeared on a great many of the artifacts in the show. But there were almost no translations in any of the descriptive placards: the Egyptian writing was treated as decoration rather than as language. What the ancient Egyptians said in the many inscriptions was treated as irrelevant.
Another interesting silence was evident in many of the informational wall placards, in phrases like these:
One assumes that …
It is apparent, therefore, that …
His corpulence is to be regarded as …
Such … works of art are termed “models” …
