Linguistic discourse analysis

Linguistic discourse analysis

The New Critical tradition had served to highlight language as the concrete vehicle of literary communication. Semiology, similarly, had focused scholarly attention on the formal properties of discourse. Together, these two schools drove home the point that language is not

a transparent means of access to reality, and that linguistic details have important implications for the communicative functions of texts. Both semiology and the New Criticism, however, tended to concentrate

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on monologic, aesthetically complex texts, leaving aside the uses of language in daily conversation and a multitude of other everyday practices.

Linguistic discourse analysis, in charting this extremely complex area of inquiry, has identified three main levels of analysis. First, the most fundamental elements of discourse are utterances or statements of various types, what are referred to as speech acts (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969). Each statement is defined literally as an instance of linguistic action. Language does not simply, or even primarily, work as a descriptive representation; through language, people perform a variety of everyday acts. Among the obvious examples are rituals (a marriage ceremony) and other institutionalized procedures (a sentence pronounced in a court of law), where the very pronouncement accomplishes a socially binding act. In addition, by uttering promises, questions and answers, and arguments, people also perform speech acts. Even statements which may appear purely descriptive will in most cases be performative in the sense that they are designed to produce a specific effect in the recipient(s). The typologies of language as action are still being worked out, but by relating language and social action, speech-act theory has offered one of the most important reformulations of humanistic theory since Wittgenstein (1958), specifying his dictum on language that meaning is use. “Language as action” also hints at methodologies which might bridge the gap between a social-scientific and a humanistic approach to meaning production.

At a second level, language serves to establish a mode of interaction between communicators, most clearly in the case of interpersonal communication, such as interviewing. Both parties introduce and develop particular themes while closing off other aspects of the discursive universe. In negotiating a form of common understanding with the interviewer, respondents can be seen to build semantic networks that are indicative of their worldviews. Also observational studies establish complex forms of interaction which lend themselves to linguistic analysis. For both observational and interview studies, mass communication research may draw on linguistic research about everyday conversation and classroom interaction (see the examples in Antaki, 1988, and Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975).

It should be added here that the interactive dimension of language has several practical implications for the conduct of qualitative research. For one thing, linguistic analysis of an interview transcript,

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for example, can suggest how conceptual distinctions and interrelations are established during the interaction. Such an analysis may also assess the extent to which studies fulfill the promise of qualitative researchers to generally “ground” their theoretical categories in the respondents’ lifeworld (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). Conducted by another researcher, this evaluation of interviewer performance can help to address the intersubjectivity of qualitative findings. Thus, discourse analysis, in complementing traditional measures of reliability and validity in the administration and coding of interviews, may reopen the field for discussion of the criteria for producing valid knowledge. For another thing, an understanding of the interactive dimension of qualitative methodologies may help in the planning of specific designs and the training of interviewers or field-workers. For better or worse, qualitative researchers emphatically interact with their object of inquiry.

Third, it is at the level of discourse that the various linguistic categories can be seen to come together as a coherent structure, a text with a message to be interpreted. Both respondents and historical sources tell stories and develop arguments in forms which are comparable, in many ways, to literary or rhetorical genres. Whereas some aspects of discursive coherence are attributable to formal features (Halliday and Hasan, 1976), other aspects derive from the functional interrelations between the speech acts and interactive turns of a specific discourse. Such interrelations must normally be interpreted with reference to the discursive context and the context of use (see Jensen, 1986: Ch. 10; also van Dijk, 1977, and his Ch. 5 in this volume). Other components of discursive coherence are presuppositions and implicit premises, which refer to what is taken for granted and not otherwise elaborated in a discourse (Culler, 1981; Leech, 1974).

Because humans seem to be constantly telling stories or arguing about something, whether in formal scientific discourse, daily conversation , or public debate, any typology of discourse is of necessity complex. Bruner (1986) has suggested that one may distinguish two modes of experience and discourse: the narrative mode and the paradigmatic or argumentative mode. To be sure, further differentiation of the theories and models of everyday discourses is required; narratives work as arguments and arguments develop into narratives. Still, discourse analysis does suggest that stories and arguments draw on a relatively fixed repertoire of linguistic strategies combining premises and conclusions, assertions and substantiations,

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scenes, actors, and themes, even if the uses of the repertoire in different social contexts may be quite diverse (Coulthard and Montgomery, 1981). Linguistic discourse analysis on everyday and literary discourses, in sum, offers a promising avenue for developing and applying humanistic methodology to the study of mass communication (see especially its development in Potter and Wetherell, 1987).