Reference:
Review Excerpts 'The goals of this book are to describe and compare several different
approaches to the linguistic analysis of discourse: speech act theory,
interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, pragmatics,
conversation analysis, and variation analysis. My aim is not to reduce the
vastness of discourse analysis: I believe that at relatively early stages of an
endeavor, reduction just for the sake of simplification can too drastically limit the
range of interesting questions that can and should be asked' (5).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | act | analysis |
communication |
conversation |
discourse |
pragmatics |
range |
reduction |
sociolinguistics |
theory |
variation |
'Two philosophers, John Austin and John Searle, developed speech act
theory from the basic insight that language is used not just to describe the world,
but to perform a range of other actions that can be indicated in the performance
of the utterance itself' (6).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | act | language |
range |
theory |
utterance |
world |
'Although speech act theory was not first developed as a means of analyzing
discourse, particular issues in speech act theory ... lead to discourse analysis.
Speech act theory also provides a means by which to segment texts, and thus a
framework for defining units that could then be combined into larger structures'
(7).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | act | analysis |
discourse |
framework |
theory |
'Some interactional approaches ... focus on how people from different
cultures may share grammatical knowledge of a language, but differently
contextualize what is said such that very different messages are produces. Other
interactional approaches ... focus on how language is situated in particular
circumstances of social life, and on how it adds (or reflects) different types of
meaning ... and structure ... to those circumstances' (7).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | focus | knowledge |
language |
meaning |
structure |
In the ethnography of communication approach, Dell Hymes proposed 'that
scholarship focus on communicative competence: the tacit social, psychological,
cultural, and linguistic knowledge governing appropriate use of language
(including, but not limited to, grammar). Communicative competence includes
knowledge of how to engage in everyday conversation as well as other culturally
constructed speech events' (8).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | communication |
competence |
conversation |
focus |
grammar |
knowledge |
language |
'"Communication" cannot be assumed to be constant across cultures.
Cultural conceptions of communication are deeply intertwined with conceptions of
person, cultural values, and world knowledge -- such that instances of
communication behavior are never free of the cultural belief and action systems
in which they occur' (8).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | action | communication |
knowledge |
world |
'Grice proposed distinctions between different types of meaning and argued
that general maxims of cooperation provide inferential routes to a speaker's
communicative intention. Pragmatics is most concerned with analyzing speaker
meaning at the level of utterances and this often amounts to a sentence, rather
than text, sized unit of language use. But since an utterance is, by definition,
situated in a context (including a linguistic context, i.e. a text), pragmatics often
ends up including discourse analyses and providing means of analyzing
discourse along the way' (9).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | context | definition |
discourse |
intention |
language |
level |
meaning |
pragmatics |
sentence |
speaker |
text |
utterance |
'What hearers do is supplement the literal meaning of utterances with an
assumption of human rationality and cooperation' (9).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | assumption |
literal |
meaning |
'Conversational analysis ... differs from other branches of sociology because
rather than analyzing social order per se, it seeks to discover the methods by
which members of a society produce an sense of social order' (10).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | analysis | sociology |
'A variationist approach to discourse ... stems from studies of linguistic
variation and change....Fundamental assumptions of variationist studies are that
linguistic variation ... is patterned both socially and linguistically, and that such
patterns can be discovered only through systematic investigation of a speech
community' (10-1).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | community | discourse |
investigation |
variation |
'The examples in this section revealed some important features of the
approaches to be discussed in this book: what count as data, what problems and
questions motivate analysis, how to address or resolve a problem'
(11-2).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | analysis | data |
problem |
'The origin of an approach provides different theoretical and metatheoretical
premises that continue to influence assumptions, concepts, and methods. For
example, different origins may be responsible for different assumptions and
beliefs about language -- assumptions about the stability of linguistic meaning,
the role of speaker intentionality, the degree to which language is designed for
communicative purposes, and the contribution of linguistic meaning to interactive
meaning' (13).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | influence | intentionality |
language |
meaning |
role |
speaker |
'I believe that the best way to learn about something is to see how it works'
(14).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | 'To enhance the comparative value of my descriptions of the approaches, I
have decided to orient my sample analysis around two phenomena: (a) questions
(and the sequences they initiated) to be analyzed in terms of speech act theory,
interactional sociolinguistics, and ethnography of communication; (b) referring
expressions (in referring sequences) to be analyzed in terms of pragmatics,
conversation analysis, and variation analysis. We see not only that the different
approaches provide different answers to some of the same questions, but that
they highlight different facets of both questions and referring expressions'
(15).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | act | analysis |
communication |
conversation |
pragmatics |
sociolinguistics |
theory |
value |
variation |
'All approaches take a stand (albeit often implicitly) on the relationship
between structure and function, text and context, and discourse and
communication, simply because these conceptual distinctions are all variants of
the dichotomy between what is considered part of language and what is not'
(18).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | communication |
context |
dichotomy |
discourse |
function |
language |
structure |
text |
'As I will make clear in chapter 12, the order of chapters, and thus the type of
inquiry for each area of empirical focus, is not random: they reflect a transition ...
from a focus upon the individual (whether the actions, knowledge, or intentions of
a self) to a focus upon interaction (how self and other together construct what is
said, meant, and done) to a focus upon the semiotic systems shared and used
by self and other during their interaction (language, society, and culture). An
ability to build such transitions ... into one's theory, and to allow and account for
them in one's practice, is a crucial part of a discourse analysis that seeks to
integrate what speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of
communication, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and variation analysis can
offer, both individually and together, to the analysis of utterances' (19).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | act | analysis |
communication |
construct |
conversation |
culture |
discourse |
empirical |
focus |
interaction |
knowledge |
language |
pragmatics |
semiotic |
sociolinguistics |
theory |
variation |
'I began this chapter with a brief description of two different paradigms
underlying our conception of language.... After comparing two different definitions
of discourse stemming from these two paradigms -- discourse as language
above the sentence or clause, ... discourse as language use ... -- I proposed a
third definition that sits at the intersection of structure and function -- discourse as
utterances ...Actual analyses of discourse reveal an interdependence between
structure and function ... The distinction between structure and function also bears
on two other issues that I discuss later. One is the relationship between text and
context: structural definitions focus upon text and functional definitions upon
context ... Another is the way linguists view communication: structural definitions
take a narrower view of communication than do functional definitions, and place
a higher priority on the role of the code (cf. text) in communication'
(41-2).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | clause | code |
communication |
conception |
context |
definition |
description |
discourse |
distinction |
focus |
function |
language |
role |
sentence |
structure |
text |
'The essential insight of speech act theory is that language performs
communicative acts. ... Speech act theory, then, is basically concerned with what
people "do" with language -- with the functions of language. ... The conditions
underlying and defining speech acts are central to speech act theory: they are the
basis for the way we recognize and classify speech acts ... and for the way a
single utterance can have more than one function ... In sum, by focusing upon the
meaning of utterances as acts, speech act theory offers an approach to
discourse analysis in which what is said is chunked (or segmented) into units that
have communicative functions that can be identifies and labelled. Although we
can describe such acts in different ways ... the import of such acts for discourse
is that they both initiate and respond to other acts' (90-1).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | act | analysis |
basis |
discourse |
function |
language |
meaning |
theory |
utterance |
'Interactional sociolinguistics views discourse as a social interaction in which
the emergent construction and negotiation of meaning is facilitated by the use of
language. Although the interactional approach is basically a functional approach
to language, its focus on function is balanced in important ways. The work of
Goffman forces structural attention to the contexts in which language is used:
situations, occasions, encounters, participation frameworks, and so on, have
forms and meanings that are partially created and/or sustained by language.
Similarly, language is patterned in ways that reflect those contexts of use. Put
another way, 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' (134).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | construction |
context |
culture |
discourse |
emergent |
focus |
function |
interaction |
language |
meaning |
sociolinguistics |
Last Modified:
July-12-96 10:28:22
Reply to randy_radney@sil.org[A Lexicon of the Humanities |
SIL Home Page | Contributions]