The Discourse Reader

Introduction

Adam Jaworski and Nikolas Coupland, The Discourse Reader (3rd Edition; Taylor & Francis Lt, 2014). This volume collects the most important and influential readings in Discourse Analysis. It aims to:

up-to-date, integrated and structured collection of original writings
represents the range of interdisciplinary concerns with discourse
focuses on the linguistic, interactional, textual, social, cultural and ideological issues that have motivated discourse analysis
intended as a beginners/intermediate degree-level teaching text or on its own or as a secondary sourcebook
covers both discussion of key methods and approaches and contemporary work in which discourse analysis is applied

The third edition added materials on the global market in late capitalism, multimodality and new media, and advances in a approaches to identity and identification.

There is no clear boundary between discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, for which the editors offer a parallel volume, The New Sociolinguistics Reader (Palgrave Macmillan: 2009).

Summary

"Discourse constitutes the social. Three dimensions of the social are distinguished -- knowledge, social relations, and social identity -- and these correspond respectively to three major functions of language... Discourse is shaped by relations of power, and invested with ideologies." (Fairclough 1992: 8)

Discourse is simultaneously language in use, increasingly understood relative to social, political and cultural formation: language reflecting social order as well as shaping social order and interaction with society.

This reflects a recent falling off of intellectual security in what we know to how we know. Interest has grown from describing sentences to the structure of conversations, stories, subtleties of implied meanings, and even how written and non-written 'texts' interact.

Discourse analysis is a committedly qualitative orientation to linguistic and social understanding, with the implications of qualitative research: difficult to justify what is studied and what is not or to what extent. Generalisations that can be made tend to be about process but not about distribution.

Outline

As of April 2023, this only covers the first portion of the book (the foundational documents). If this is useful, additional portions may be included for future Reading Groups.

Discourse: meaning, function and context

Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics"
J.L. Austin, "How to Do Things with Words"
H.P. Grice, "Logic and Conversation"
M.M. Bakhtin, "The Problem of Speech Genres"
Norman Fairclough, "Text Relationships"
Ron Scollon, "Modes and Modality: The Multimodal Shaping of Reality in Public Discourse"

Summaries

Jakobson and the six basic functions

Jakobson defined the six basic functions of verbal communication, built on a model of communication in which:

An ADDRESSER sends a MESSAGE to an ADDRESSEE. To be operative, the message requires a CONTEXT referred to, seizable by the addressee. There must be a CODE, either verbalised or capable of being verbalised, that is common to addresser and addressee. There must be some physical channel and psychological connection, a CONTACT, between addresser and addressee to enable them to enter into and stay in communication.

These become the basis for his six basic functions:

referential based on the CONTEXT (denotative, cognitive function: the leading task of many messages)
emotive based on the ADDRESSER (expressive: a direct expression of the speaker's attitude)
conative based on the ADDRESSEE (at its purest in the vocative and imperative)
phatic based on CONTACT (primarily serving to establish, prolong or discontinue communication, e.g. "Hello? Do you hear me?")
metalingual based on the CODE (discussing code, e.g. "I don't follow. What do you mean?")
poetic based on the MESSAGE (focuses on the message for its own sake; dominant in poetry but present even if subsidiary in all verbal activities)

Jakobson's famous formulation:

The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.

That is, the principle of equivalence (or balance, making it sound good) always motivates selection (items chosen in isolation), but in more poetic texts, it also motivates combination (additional items chosen). One syllable calls for a balancing syllable, one word stress for a balancing word stress, one image for a balancing image. He therefore claims that poetry requires a kind of repetition or equivalence relation that provides phonological cohesion not necessarily connected to any logical or thematic cohesion.

J.L. Austin and Speech Acts

"The function of an utterance is partly constituted by the social circumstances in which it is uttered." Only when the circumstances are felicitous is the function fulfilled, and "the utterance meaning lies in the interplay between social circumstances and utterances themselves."

The words or text of an utterance are subordinated to the larger idea of a speech act, which the words serve. The words are the locution, intended to perform an act, the illocution. Speech acts tend to have consequential effects on the addressee, whether intended or not; this is the perlocution. This response characteristically can be achieved additionally or entirely without words, e.g. intimidating may be achieved by pointing a gun alone.

Once we realise that what we have to study is not the sentence but the issuing of an utterance in a speech situation, there can hardly be any longer a possibility of not seeing that stating is performing an act.

H.P. Grice and Conversational Implicatures

Grice made implicatures a commonplace in linguistic discussion, distinguishing between conversational implicatures (intuitive understanding derived from the conversation >> playground assumptions) and conventional implicatures (generalised intuitive understanding >> common ground assumptions).

Conversational implicatures derive from the following principles (or maxims) of conversational cooperation. First is cooperation with regard to Quantity:

Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

With regard to Quality:

Do not say what you believe to be false.
Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

With regard to Relation:

Be relevant.

With regard to Manner:

Avoid obscurity of expression.
Avoid ambiguity.
Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
Be orderly.

Participants interact with these maxims in the following ways:

They may follow them ("I told you!")
They may violate them (thus misleading)
They may opt out ("I cannot say more; my lips are sealed")
They may face a clash ("I have a feeling, but I don't know for sure...")
They may flout a maxim, thereby exploiting it (intentionally misleading)

Examples:

Irony flouts the maxim of quality ("You're a fine friend") leading to the conclusion that the opposite was intended.
Metaphor involves categorical impossibility ("you're the cream in my coffee"), prompting the hearer to conclude a figurative meaning.
Meiosis (understatement) prompts the hearer to assume an opposite meaning (e.g., "I didn't do so well" after a crushing defeat).

Critiques

Grice's maxims have been criticised for being culture-bound to the middle class. This tends to prove the power of his argument: that there are discoverable principles that govern people's assumptions.

M.M. Bakhtin and Genre

Thematic content, style and compositional structure are inseparably linked to the whole of an utterance and are equally determined by the specific nature of the particular sphere of communication. Each separate utterance is individual, of course, but each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these utterances: speech genres.

Some genres lend themselves to personal style (esp. artistic genres); others don't (e.g. business letters).

It is especially harmful to separate style from genre when elaborating historical problems. Historical changes in language styles are inseparably linked to changes in speech genres.... Utterances and their types, that is, speech genres, are the drive belts from the history of society to the history of language. There is not a single new phenomenon (phonetic, lexical or grammatical) that can enter the system of language without having traversed the long and complicated path of generic-stylistic testing and modification.

The fiction of the passive listener:

The fact is that when the listener perceives and understands the meaning (the language meaning) of speech, he simultaneously takes an active, responsive attitude toward it. He either agrees or disagrees with it (completely or partially), augments it, applies it, prepares for its execution, and so on. And the listener adopts this responsive attitude for the entire duration of the process of listening and understanding, from the very beginning -- sometimes literally from the speaker's first word.

The speaker's speech will is manifested primarily in the choice of a particular speech genre. People speak only in definite speech genres, that is, all utterances have definite and relatively stable typical forms of construction of the whole, regardless of any recognition of these speech genres.

Any word exists for a person in three aspects:

a neutral word of a language, belonging to nobody,
as others' word, belonging to another and filled with echoes of those utterances,
as my word, already imbued with my expression.

The latter two are filled with expressive content which derives not from the word itself but from the memory of utterances using the word.

Every utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related. Every utterance may be understood as a response to preceding utterances: refuting, affirming, supplementing, relying on others, presupposing them to be known and somehow taking them into account. Speech is therefore inherently dialogical, as an implied discussion with all speech that went before.

Norman Fairclough and The Social

Discourse constitutes the social:

Social structures = languages (defines potential & possibilities and excludes other possibilities)
Social practices = orders of discourse (network of social practices in its language aspect, e.g. discourses, genres and styles)
Social events = texts

Three major types of meaning:

Action (closest to Halliday's interpersonal function)
Representation (closest to Halliday's ideational function)
Identification

In the sentence 'The culture in successful businesses is different from in failing businesses':

Representation = a relation between two entities, 'x is different from y'
Action = the sentence is an action, implying a social relation: the manager is giving the interviewee information, telling him something, implying social relations between someone who knows and someone who doesn't know (cf. informing, advising, promising, warning)
Identification = the sentence is an undertaking, a commitment, a judgement: in saying 'is different' rather than 'is perhaps different' or 'may be different', the manager is strongly committing himself.

Focusing analysis of texts on the interplay of Action, Representation and Identification brings a social perspective into the heart and fine detail of the text.

Intertextuality vs assumptions: the former broadly opens up difference by bringing other 'voices' into a text, whereas the latter broadly reduces difference by assuming common ground.

Ron Scollon, Modes & Modality

Ron considers there to be two axes to be considered when analysing discourse: an Agency axis (from fatalistic to agentive) and a Knowledge axis (from oracular to agnostic):

References

Andrus, Jennifer. Review of 2nd edition

Discourse Reader