Researching Discourse

A Student Guide

Christopher Hart, Christopher Hart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000030037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book offers a 'how-to' guide to conducting research in discourse analysis. Organised around different approaches to discourse analysis and working with different types of discourse data, the book will help students answer questions such as: Which approach should I take? What kind of data should I analyse and how do I set about collecting it? What consideration should I give to ethics? How do I make my analyses systematic and rigorous? How do I report my findings?

Both qualitative and quantitative (corpus-based and experimental) methods are covered. Illustrated with far-ranging, detailed, and original case-studies, each chapter follows a consistent format that takes readers step by step through the research process, from design to implementation and presentation. Chapters can be read independently of one another.

This is the ideal companion for any student undertaking research in discourse analysis within English language, linguistics, applied linguistics, and communication studies programmes.

1 Introduction to discourse

Definitions, debates, and decisions

Alison Sealey

Introduction

The chapters in this book will help readers to understand how a wide range of researchers have analysed discourse in different ways, and how you, as a student of discourse analysis, might plan a research project of your own investigating some particular aspect or area of discourse. The authors introduce various approaches to, and methods of, researching discourse. This opening chapter is therefore aimed at setting the scene by providing an overview of what is generally involved in the analysis of discourse. I begin with a brief survey of some of the ways in which the term ‘discourse’ is used within the study of language and linguistics, before presenting four elements which are core to the enterprise of discourse analysis: (i) the data that comprise discourse; (ii) the producers of discourse; (iii) the reception of discourse; and (iv) the perspective of the analyst.

Definitions

The conventional way to get a handle on what a term means is to consult a dictionary, and one trusted authority, the Oxford English Dictionary, informs us that ‘discourse’, like many words, has changed its meaning over time. (It also indicates that ‘discourse’ can be used as a verb, as in ‘The early writers discoursed at some length …’, but that’s not so relevant for us here.)

Among earlier definitions of ‘discourse’ as a noun are senses such as these: ‘reasoned argument or thought’; ‘the thread of an argument’; and ‘a narrative or account of a particular subject’. More recently, ‘discourse’ has meant:

The action or process of communicating thought by means of the spoken word; interchange of words; conversation, talk. Also: the words exchanged by this means; speech. In later use also: the written representation of this; communication in written form.

The most current definitions are, in general contexts, (a):

The body of statements, analysis, opinions, etc., relating to a particular domain of intellectual or social activity, esp. as characterized by recurring themes, concepts, or values; (also) the set of shared beliefs, values, etc., implied or expressed by this. Frequently with of or modifying word.

And in a more specifically linguistic sense, (b):

A connected series of utterances by which meaning is communicated, esp. one forming a unit for analysis; spoken or written communication regarded as consisting of such utterances.

Since you are reading this book, you are probably already familiar with the concepts summarised by (a) and (b) above, but it is worth pointing out that the broad academic enterprise of discourse analysis may involve placing different degrees of emphasis on the different perspectives suggested by (a) and (b). Notice particularly the coda in (a): ‘Frequently with of or modifying word’. This extra information indicates that ‘discourse’ often occurs in formulations such as these:

• the discourse of multiculturalism
• discourses of masculinity
• the discourse of colonialism
• political discourse
• feminist discourse
• dominant discourse

Now, these phrases would seem to relate more readily to definition (a) – i.e. to ‘particular domain[s] of … social activity’ and their ‘shared beliefs [and] values’ – than to definition (b), which is more formal, concerned with ‘series of utterances’ or sentences and the way these are ‘connected’ linguistically. Yet many discourse analysts, including those who have contributed to this book, do research that bridges both senses of the term ‘discourse’. That is, their linguistic training enables them to analyse the many ways in which the components of language (words, phrases, sentences, utterances) are linked together to form larger units, such as whole texts (written or spoken) and conversations. At the same time, they are interested in what these discursive choices indicate about individuals’ thought processes, attitudes, and values, and also about broader social conventions, norms, and priorities. One analyst who draws attention explicitly to the link between these two senses of ‘discourse’ is James Paul Gee, who coined the use of ‘little d’ versus ‘big D’ discourse to distinguish between, on the one hand, the way language is used to enact activities and identities, and, on the other hand, the way other non-linguistic ‘stuff’, such as gestures, material artefacts, values, and attitudes, are melded with language in situated communication practices (Gee, 2005).

You will notice different perspectives in the chapters that follow as well as in your wider reading about discourse analysis. I shall say a bit more about this later. For now, however, let us conclude this section with some definitions of ‘discourse’ sourced from the academic literature.

1. Discourse analysis examines how stretches of language, considered in their full textual, social, and psychological context, become meaningful and unified for their users (Cook, 1989: ix).
2. People in a variety of academic departments and disciplines use the term ‘discourse analysis’ for what they do, how they do it, or both … Discourse analysts pose many different questions and propose many different sorts of answers (Johnstone, 2002: 1).
3. So abundant are definitions of discourse that many linguistics books on the subject now open with a survey of definitions … They all, however, fall into … three main categories … (1) anything beyond the sentence, (2) language use, and (3) a broader range of social practice that includes non-linguistic and nonspecific instances of language (Tannen, Hamilton, and Schiffrin, 2015: 1).

As you read the chapters in this book, and in your wider reading, try to identify where the author(s) position themselves in relation to these definitions, and consider too where you would position yourself as a budding discourse analyst.

Discourse data

How many words do you think you have spoken this week? How many have you heard spoken? (And how do you define a word – do ‘um’/‘erm’ count?) How many words have you read this week? (Including those you may have read inadvertently, like labels and signs you encounter in passing.) How much have you written? (Including online/on your mobile phone.) Now imagine multiplying all the linguistic communication you have been involved in during this one week by all the weeks of your life so far, and then by all the people alive now, and then by all the human beings who have ever left any records – written, recorded as audio signals, or in any digital form. If we assume that most of this communication could be classified as ‘discourse’, we get some idea of the ‘universe’ of data that might potentially be available to discourse analysts – and that is before we extend the range to include non-linguistic signs, such as photographs, soundtracks, emojis, and so on (see Chapters 8 and 9, this volume, which take stock of the ‘multimodal turn’ that discourse analysis has undergone in recent years to account for the wider range of semiotic modes used in contemporary communication and the interactions between these).

So, when you set out to design a research project around ‘discourse’, an early stage in the process will necessarily involve narrowing down your focus, and there are various ways that you might do this. Each chapter in this book takes a different approach to discourse analysis, and this often includes making different decisions about what kind of data to investigate. However, while such differences sometimes reflect contrasting perceptions about the very nature of discourse, in other cases the differences are more a matter of emphasis.

One way to set some boundaries around which data to collect is to identify some type or genre of communicative event or activity as your starting point. This could be, for example, informal conversations among friends, workplace meetings, political interviews or classroom interactions (e.g. Chapter 2, this volume), or it could be the virtual social gatherings enabled by digital media (e.g. Fester and Cowley, 2018). Data will then likely be restricted to detailed records of these interactions, in the form of recordings and transcripts of talk, or archives of messages exchanged, etc. More broadly, the starting point may not so much be a type of event, but rather a social setting, such as a school, small business, nursery, or community centre (e.g. Chapter 3, this volume), or even more formal institutional settings such as the Convention on the Future of Europe (Krzyżanowski and Oberhuber, 2007). In this kind of approach, the data may comprise a range of materials, including written texts, images, interviews with the people in the setting, field notes, and so on.

Some discourse analysts are particularly interested in the ways that different modes of communication influence the way it occurs. I know of several researchers who choose to explore exclusively written texts because of the challenges posed by working with speech. These include, for example, taking into account all the paralinguistic and prosodic features of spoken language which are very difficult to capture in transcriptions (see e.g. Cook, 1990). On the other hand, for some researchers, this is exactly what interests them – how the different components of face-to-face communication interact with one another. So if your interest lies primarily in one or more modes of communication, this could entail contrasting two kinds of data, such as, for example, both authentic informal conversation and scripted talk that aims to simulate casual interactions. Alternatively, your interest in a specific mode might lead you to restrict your data to one kind of mode, such as telephone conversations/emails/formal letters/Facebook posts/tweets: these are all examples of how a focus on the mode of communication leads to the selection of particular types of discourse from the vast range of potential data available for a discourse analysis project.

An aspect of discourse that intrigues some researchers is how it comes to take the forms it does. For some analysts, this line of research entails collecting very large quantities of data in order to reveal patterns in the way words and phrases behave, including as they co-occur with one another (see Chapter 7, this volume). This is particularly interesting because users of language themselves are often not aware of these patterns. Other analysts look from the other end of the telescope, so to speak, zooming in on the internal processes that must be happening within the minds of language users to account for the formation of particular concepts (see Chapter 6, in this volume). As Hart explains, such ‘cognitive’ approaches tend to use as data texts that at least have the appearance of being ‘monologic’ (i.e. having been produced by one voice) rather than conversations, which are inherently ‘dialogic’ (i.e. produced in more interactional settings). I return to the issue of the production of data in the next section. Some analysts claim that these ‘two ends of the telescope’ are inevitably at odds with one another, but others believe that they need not be. For example, Hoey (2005) seeks to account for a central phenomenon associated with corpus analysis, namely ‘the recurrent co-occurrence of words’, and argues that it is a psychological concept, ‘priming’, that explains this. So his claim is that ‘the mind has a mental concordance of every word it has encountered’ which ‘can be processed in much the same way that a computer concordance is’ (2005: 11; see also Gries, 2005, 2006). These examples begin to point to another of the issues explored in this book: how much data is needed for different kinds of analysis, and does the analyst measure phenomena (quantitative analysis) or interpret them (qualitative analysis), or does the research, as is often the case, involve a combination of both?

Yet another point of departure in deciding on the kind of data to collect is the identification of a social problem, such as racism or gender inequality, which discourse plays a part in creating and sustaining. Again, this perspective and those summarised above are not mutually exclusive. The point is just that the primary motivations of the analysts may be different. That is, while one researcher investigates, say, casual conversations among friends in order to better understand turn-taking procedures in their own right, another may analyse the same data with a view to exploring gender dynamics and the way some speakers assert dominance over others. One form of discourse analysis directly concerned with issues of power and inequality is critical discourse analysis (CDA), a leading proponent of which is Norman Fairclough. Fairclough, and others working in this tradition, take care to point out that CDA is not a particular method or subdiscipline of discourse analysis, since a critical perspective is possible in any approach to discourse analysis. The relevance to us here is that CDA is discourse analysis that ‘explicitly defines and defends its own sociopolitical position’ (Van Dijk, 2001: 96). So, in this tradition, the starting point is a perceived social problem and the selection of data is guided by a concern to highlight and address ‘the role of discourse in the production and reproduction of power abuse or domination’ (Fairclough, 2001: 96). For this reason, many CDA projects select as data the discourse that is produced by ‘elite’ social actors, agencies, and institutions, such as politicians or the press, whose discourse, arguably, exerts the most influence over society. For many researchers in CDA the ultimate goal is to resist power and inequality as they are expressed in, and enacted through, discourse (see below for further discussion of what it means to take a critical stance).

Finally, for now, it is worth recognising that there has been a ‘discursive turn’ across the social sciences, and with this an increasing degree of collaboration between discourse analysts and researchers in other disciplines. For example, I gained access to a data set of transcriptions of parliamentary discourse (nearly 1000 sessions of Prime Minister’s Questions) through a collaboration with a political scientist. His interests are primarily in political processes and how these are enacted in these events, and our joint analyses have focused sometimes more on these issues (Holden Bates and Sealey, 2019) and sometimes more on the pragmatics of the interactions (Sealey an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Editor’s introduction
• 1. Introduction to discourse: definitions, debates, and decisions
• 2. Conversation analysis
• 3. Discourse analysis and ethnography
• 4. Discourse analysis and systemic functional linguistics
• 5. Analysing metaphor in discourse
• 6. Cognitive linguistic critical discourse analysis
• 7. Corpus-assisted discourse analysis
• 8. Multimodal discourse analysis
• 9. Digitally mediated discourse analysis
• 10. Experimental methods in discourse analysis
• Index