Discourse in Action

Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis

Rodney H Jones, Sigrid Norris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134258123
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

From emails relating to adoption over the Internet to discussions in the airline cockpit, the spoken or written texts we produce can have significant social consequences. The area of Mediated Discourse Analysis considers texts in their social and cultural contexts to explore the actions individuals take with texts - and the consequences of those actions.

Discourse in Action:

• brings together leading scholars from around the world in the area of Mediated Discourse Analysis
• reveals ways in which its theory and methodology can be used in research into contemporary social situations
• explores real situations and draws on real data in each chapter
• shows how analysis of texts in their social contexts broadens our understanding of the real world.Taken together, the chapters provide a comprehensive overview to the field andpresent a range of current studies that address some of the most important questions facing students and researchers in linguistics, education, communication studies and other fields.

1 Discourse as action/ discourse in action

Rodney H. Jones and Sigrid Norris

In a park in China, a man stands behind a tree holding a stack of AIDS prevention pamphlets. Another man passes, briefly looks at the first man and then continues on his way, Then a third man comes by, this time allowing his gaze to linger a little longer, at which point the first man smiles, takes a few steps forward and offers one of the pamphlets.

(Jones, 2001b, 2002b)

In a living room in Germany a divorced woman kneels on the floor among scattered pieces of computer equipment and wires and squints at a sheet of written instructions trying to match the physical objects with the drawings and descriptions on the sheet. Suddenly she looks up and remarks to her friend sitting across the room: ‘He never let me do anything like this.’

(Norris, 2002a, this volume)

In a coffee shop in San Diego two linguists settle down with their drinks to take a break from the intellectual rigor of an academic conference. After a few minutes of casual conversation, the discussion turns to the writing on the paper cups they are drinking from, which leads to an exchange of ideas about discourse analysis which find their way into a paper one of the linguists will present at a future conference.

(R. Scollon, 2001a)

What these three seemingly disparate strips of social interaction have in common is that they are all mediated through some kind of written text: an AIDS prevention pamphlet, an instruction sheet, the writing on a paper cup. In each instance these texts are used as tools to take one or more social action(s) and to claim and impute certain social identities. Their use goes far beyond the discourse that they contain, beyond the purposes of giving someone information about AIDS prevention, teaching someone how to set up a personal computer or advertising the environmentally friendly policies of a retail coffee shop. These texts connect their users to each other in a complex nexus of practices, connecting these moments to policies and discourses of public health and personal attraction, gender politics and family politics, corporate capitalism and the discourse of academia.

Were we to analyze just the discourse, the written texts: the dos and don’ts of condom use; the location of the USB port; the fact that the cup is made from 100 percent recycled paper; or the spoken words – the offers, the reminiscences, the debates – we would in fact understand very little about what is going on in these social situations, nor would we understand what these pieces of discourse actually mean. The reason is that the ‘meaning’ does not so much reside in the discourse itself, but rather resides in the actions that people take with it.

This book is about the relationship between discourse and action, taking mediated discourse analysis (MDA) as its theoretical and methodological framework.

Mediated discourse analysis was developed as an alternative to approaches to discourse that see social action as secondary, and approaches to social analysis that see discourse as secondary (R. Scollon, 2001a). By not privileging discourse or social action but, rather, seeing discourse as one of many available tools with which people take action, either along with discourse or separate from it, MDA strives to preserve the complexity of the social situation. It provides a way of understanding how all of the objects and all of the language and all of the actions taken with these various mediational means intersect at a nexus of multiple social practices and the trajectories of multiple histories and storylines that reproduce social identities and social groups.

The principles of mediated discourse theory were first laid out by Scollon in the late 1990s (R. Scollon, 1997, 1998) and have subsequently been developed by a number of discourse analysts in a constellation of separate research projects and collaborations over the past ten years in Asia, North America and Europe (see, for example, Al Zidjaly, 2002, 2004; Boswood, 2000; de Saint-Georges and Norris, 1999; Johnson, 2002; Jones, 1999, 2001a, 2001b, 2002a, 2002b; Jones and Candlin, 2003; Jones et al., 1997; Norris, 2002a, 2002b, 2004a, 2004b; Randolph, 2000; R. Scollon, 1997, 1998, 2001a, 2001b; R. Scollon et al., 1999; S. Scollon, 2001, 2003; Scollon and Scollon, 2003, 2004). It has been applied to understanding such diverse issues as AIDS prevention, national identity, childhood literacy practices, gender identity and buying a cup of coffee.

The focus of mediated discourse analysis is not discourse per se, but the whole intersection of social practices of which discourse is a part. It explores, among other things, how, at that nexus, discourse becomes a tool for claims and imputations of social identity. At the same time, it does not see the tree in the park, the scattered computer components or the decor of the coffee shop in the examples given above as ‘context,’ nor does it see the written and spoken discourse as ‘texts’ in a more traditional sense. Instead, it turns its focus to the actions that are being taken with these tools – whether they be trees, computer components or written texts. MDA takes as its unit of analysis the action, more specifically, the mediated action, which is the real time moment when mediational means, social actors and the sociocultural environment intersect.

This focus on the mediated action as the unit of analysis comes primarily from the work of American psychologist James Wertsch and his colleagues (Penuel and Wertsch, 1995; Wertsch, 1991, 1994, 1995, 1997, 1998; Wertsch et al., 1995) who themselves take it from the work of Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978, 1987).

Wertsch and his colleagues call their perspective ‘the sociocultural approach to mind’ (see also Bruner, 1990; Cole, 1990; Lantolf, 2000). It emphasizes that all actions are mediated through ‘cultural tools’ (Wertsch, 1998): objects, technologies, practices, identities, social institutions, communities, and also language and other semiotic systems. All of these tools come with histories that have shaped the kinds of things that can be done with them and the kinds of things that cannot: that is, they embody certain affordances and constraints. These affordances and constraints, however, are not deterministic of what social actors do with them but, rather, create a tension as actors appropriate them into their habitus (Bourdieu, 1977) and deploy them purposefully in social situations.

Understanding social life involves not just understanding the tools available for mediated actions nor the intentions, goals, plans or habits of social actors, but also, and more importantly, involves understanding the ‘tension between the mediational means as provided in the sociocultural setting and the unique contextualized use of these means in carrying out particular concrete actions’ (Wertsch 1994: 205).

Chief among these mediational means are what Wertsch calls voices: the words, phrases, narratives and ‘ways of speaking’ (Gumperz and Hymes, 1986) that we borrow from the sociocultural environment to interact with others and construct our accounts of these interactions. For Wertsch, nearly all actions are mediated through voices, even apparently silent actions, as even private thought involves language (Vygotsky, 1987) and private behavior, prior social learning.

Wertsch derives the concept of voices from the work of the Soviet literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1981a, 1986), who insists that we never speak in a voice that is purely our own, but instead ‘borrow’ and ‘ventriloquate’ the voices of others: we ‘rent’ meaning and then give it back to the community according to the protocols it establishes (Clark and Holquist, 1984). Every utterance is heteroglossic, in that it may contain many different voices at once, and dialogic, as each voice exists in response to, or in ‘dialogue’ with, other voices.

While every word we speak, every practice we perform and every identity we claim is always ‘half someone else’s’ (Bakhtin, 1981a: 293), these words, practices and identities are also ‘half our own.’ When we borrow them, we change them, populating them with our own semantic and expressive intentions, speaking them in our own ‘accents.’ Thus, not only is the way we take action transformed by the tools we use, but these tools themselves are transformed by the actions they are appropriated to perform.

While sociocultural practice theory provides the broad outlines of a perspective on the relationship between discourse and action, it stops short of developing a coherent theory of discourse and a clear way to analyze it as it is deployed within complex semiotic aggregates (Scollon and Scollon, 2003) with other non-linguistic mediational means. In developing the tools to do this, MDA has drawn upon and integrated a number of traditions in linguistics, some of which have in the past been regarded as more contradictory than complementary, but all of which share with MDA the same question: How can we make the study of discourse account for its complex role in situated social action?

Discourse as action

The response to this question from many traditions in North American and European linguistics has been to point out that discourse is action, that saying something or writing something is a form of doing something, and mediated discourse analysis, in many ways, shares this ‘discourse as action’ perspective. Perhaps the most important development in modern linguistics, at least from the point of view of MDA, has been the increased focus in the last fifty years on language not as an abstract code but as a set of tools through which people realize particular social functions, and of discourse not as a matter of words, sentences or texts, but as a matter of social action.

One of the most famous articulations of such a perspective comes from Wittgenstein (1972), who sees language as a series of ‘games’ through which people construct what he calls ‘forms of life,’ particular ways of being in relation to others and their surroundings. For Wittgenstein, speaking or writing is always a creative performance, determined on the one hand by the ‘rules’ of the particular language game being played and, on the other, by the unique strategies of individual players in particular situations. Like Wertsch after him, Wittgenstein uses the metaphor of the ‘tool kit’ to illustrate this dynamic:

Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, nails and screws. The function of words is as diverse as the functions of these objects. (And in both cases there are similarities.) Of course, what confuses us is the uniform appearance of words when we hear them spoken or meet them in script and print. For their application is not presented to us so clearly.

(Wittgenstein, 1972: 6)

Another major advance in seeing discourse as a kind of social action came from Austin (1962) and Searle (1969). In speech act theory, utterances are analyzed in terms of the material effect they are intended to bring about on the world. They carry ‘force,’ which is interpreted according to various conditions present in the context.

This focus on how the meaning of discourse derives from its use is also a prominent feature of contemporary approaches to grammar, in particular the systemic functional grammar of Halliday (1973, 1978), who insists that ‘language is as it is because of its function in the social structure’ (Halliday, 1973: 65). Halliday’s approach is an attempt to link the micro-sociological level of language use to the macro-sociological level, or, as he puts it, to link language to ‘the social structure, the values, the systems of knowledge, all the deepest and most pervasive patterns of the culture’ (Halliday, 1973: 45).

This emphasis on action can also be seen in anthropological perspectives on linguistics, particularly the ethnography of communication (Hymes, 1986; Saville-Troike, 1989), which focuses on discourse as part of a constellation of con-textualizedbehaviors which members of cultures use to demonstrate that they are legitimate members. The notion of ‘communicative competence’ makes the words one says inseparable from the actions one takes, the place where these actions occur, and a whole host of other factors.

At what is often viewed as the opposite methodological pole, action has also been a concern of ethnomethodologists (Garfinkle, 1967) and conversation analysts (Goodwin, 1981; Heritage, 1989; Sacks et al., 1974; ten Have, 1999) who have sought to understand how social actors construct the ‘doings’ and ‘beings’ of everyday life through language. According to ten Have (1999: 6), such approaches re-conceive the problem of social order as ‘a practical problem of social action.’

Interactional sociolinguists (Davies and Harré, 1990; Gumperz, 1982b; Schiffrin, 1994; Tannen, 1984) have also contributed both theoretically and methodologically to this focus on language as a matter of social action. By examining the ways people manage their identities in the course of interaction making use of the ‘expressive equipment’ (Goffman, 1959) provided by their culture, they highlight the contingent and context-specific nature of discourse in relation to social action. The primary concern of interactional sociolinguistics, as R. Scollon (2001a: 163) puts it, is how ‘social actors who are acting in real time are able to strategize their own actions within a negotiative process with other social actors to achieve their desired social meanings, including their identities, footings, alignments with others and their positionings of themselves and others.’ All of these issues are also central to MDA.

Another tradition whose view of discourse in relation to social action has influenced MDA is what has come to be known as the new literacy studies (Barton and Hamilton, 1998; Gee, 1996; Heath, 1983; Scollon and Scollon, 1981; Street, 1984). Scholars in this area share a view of literacy as a mediational means through which people take actions in the world by which they show their identity and their membership in particular groups. Literacy is not a matter of an individual cognitive skill, but rather a matter of performing certain kinds of social actions, and thus reproducing the social practices and power relations around which these actions are organized.

One of the most ambitious attempts in linguistics to explicate the link between discourse and social action can be seen in critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999; Fairclough, 1989, 1992, 1995; Fairclough and Wodak, 1997; van Dijk, 1993; Wodak, 1996), which takes as one of its central precepts that discourse is a form of social action. According to Fairclough (1992), the project of CDA is to explore how discourse is implicated in social practice by examining the ways texts simultaneously represent reality, enact social relations of power and establish social identities. Discourse is seen as ‘joint action’ (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999; Shotter, 1993) which draws upon conventions that naturalize particular forms of knowledge and ideologies. Particularly important in CDA is a focus on the ‘hybridity’ characteristic of all social uses of discourse and the analysis of how, through ‘conjunctures’ (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999: 38) of text types and ways of speaking, speakers and writers perform strategic acts of domination and resistance.

Discourse in action

While MDA borrows insights and analytical tools from all of the above traditions, the framework it proposes differs from them in a number of important ways, ways that can perhaps best be summed up by transforming the slogan discourse as action into discourse in action.

Before saying what we mean by that, it is important to be clear what we do not mean. We do not mean ‘taking into consideration the context’ in which discourse occurs simply as a way of understanding the ‘text’ better. To treat the actions, environments and circumstances in which discourse occurs as ‘context’ very much misses the point of mediated discourse analysis (Filliettaz this volume; Jones 2004a), for it draws attention to different aspects of the social situation based on the analyst’s interests rather than on the terms of the situation itself.

We also do not mean to suggest that discourse is simply an ingredient in action – that discourse is in action in the same way carrots are in a pot of stew. This view obscures the complex ways actions are taken through discourse and the ways discourse works its way into actions – sometimes through being ‘resemiotized’ (Iedema, 2001, 2003) as social practices, or ‘frozen’ (Norris, 2002b, 2004b) in objects and other cultural tools.

We suggest that the relationship between discourse and action is dynamic and contingent, located at a nexus of social practices, social identities and social goals. This relationship is manifested in the tension between the kinds of actions that discourse and other cultura...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction: Discourse in action
• 1 Discourse as action/discourse in action
• Part I Mediated action
• Part II Mediational means/cultural tools
• Part III Practice
• Part IV Sites of engagement
• Part V Agency
• References