Pragmatics of Discourse

Klaus P. Schneider, Anne Barron, Klaus P. Schneider, Anne Barron

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783110375022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Discourse is language as it occurs, in any form or context, beyond the speech act. It may be written or spoken, monological or dialogical, but there is always a communicative aim or purpose. The present volume provides systematic orientation in the vast field of studying discourse from a pragmatic perspective. It first gives an overview of a range of approaches developed for the analysis of discourse, including, among others, conversation analysis, systemic-functional analysis, genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus-driven approaches and multimodal analysis. The focus is furthermore on functional units in discourse, such as discourse markers, moves, speech act sequences, discourse phases and silence. The final section of the volume examines discourse types and domains, providing a taxonomy of discourse types and focusing on a range of discourse domains, e.g. classroom discourse, medical discourse, legal discourse, electronic discourse.

Each article surveys the current state of the art of the respective topic area while also presenting new research findings.

1. Discourse pragmatics: signposting a vast field

Anne Barron and Klaus P. Schneider

1. The focus of the present volume and the underlying notion of discourse

The present handbook is one of nine volumes in the series Handbooks of Pragmatics. This series, the most comprehensive of the series of handbooks of pragmatics to date, is thematically organised and includes contributions exclusively written for this series. Each handbook is a stand-alone volume with its own specific place in the series. A certain degree of overlap between volumes is also explicitly endeavoured. This third volume belongs to the set of the first three handbooks which cover the most fundamental areas in pragmatics as it is defined for this handbook series (cf. the series editors’ preface at the beginning of this volume). Volume one deals with the historical, theoretical and methodological foundations of the entire field of pragmatics (Bublitz and Norrick 2011). Following this, the next two volumes deal with two central areas, namely speech actions (the topic of volume two, Sbisà and Turner 2013), and discourse, the topic of the present third volume. Needless to say, this distinction between speech actions and discourse is purely analytical, and also reflects the beginnings of pragmatics in language studies, and specifically the impact of speech act theory on linguistics. In the conception of the series, the study of discourse, and especially of the pragmatics of discourse, is conceived not as outside the scope of pragmatics as a discipline, but rather as an integral part of it. Thus, the pragmatics of discourse and the pragmatics of utterances are two complementary levels of analysis, respectively highlighting more global and more local aspects of human communication. The latter perspective involves investigating speech acts, defined by Searle (1969: 16) as the basic unit of communication, whereas the former involves investigating, among several other phenomena, how speech acts combine into larger units such as speech act sequences (cf., e.g., Félix-Brasdefer, this volume) or complete speech events. These two complementary levels of pragmatic analysis, which can be labelled the actional and the interactional levels respectively (cf. Schneider and Barron 2008: 20), have also been termed micropragmatics and macropragmatics (cf. Schneider 2003: 63–69; for a detailed discussion of these two terms, cf. Cap 2011).

The term “discourse” (and accordingly discourse analysis) can be understood in a broad or narrow sense, depending on the research tradition in which this term is used and also the underlying conceptualisation. Discourse in a narrow sense is restricted to spoken language alone, i.e. to talk. In this understanding, discourse is the opposite of text, text being viewed as a unit of written language only (corresponding to a folk notion or everyday understanding of “text”) (cf., e.g., Titscher et al. 2000). In another, more technical use, discourse refers to the totality of a social interaction, and text, by contrast, only to its linguistic components (cf., e.g., Fairclough 2003). Often, however, the two terms, discourse and text, are used interchangeably. Further conceptualisations include discourse as a unit of language use (in the sense of Saus-surean “parole”, or Chomskyan “performance”; Saussure 1916/1974, Chomsky 1965),¹ which contrasts with text as a unit of the language system (in the sense of “langue”, or “competence”). In this view, text is at the same level of abstraction as sentence, morpheme and phoneme, while discourse would be at the same concrete and material level as utterance, morph and phone (a more detailed discussion of the specific conceptualisations of discourse in different research traditions is found in Fetzer, this volume). In the present volume, discourse is generally understood as a unit of language use. This reading is consistent with the definition of pragmatics as the study of language use in action and interaction, i.e. the definition which is adopted in this handbook series and based on the literal meaning of the term “pragmatics” (derived from the Greek word for “act” or “action”). Furthermore, the term “discourse” is employed as a cover term for “talk” and “text”, i.e. for spoken as well as written discourse (cf. also, e.g., Johnstone 2008), and hence, both areas are covered in the present volume, and additionally multimodal discourse (cf. especially O’Halloran, Tan and E, this volume; also Locher, this volume; and Simon-Vandenbergen, this volume). Needless to say, in the contributions to this handbook, the use of the term “discourse” may differ from the general understanding outlined here, varying in accordance with the tradition of the respective approach adopted.

Discourse analysis, like the term “discourse”, can be interpreted in a number of different ways and can consequently also be carried out in various fashions. It is truly an interdisciplinary field. Indeed, recently, in an effort to highlight the fact that the field is not only concerned with “analysis” but also with a broad range of theories and applications, the term “discourse studies” has been put forward to replace “discourse analysis” as the superordinate term for the field (cf., e.g., Flowerdew 2013: 1–2). At the same time, although overall discourse studies is an interdisciplinary field, it may sometimes be useful or necessary to adopt a more disciplinary perspective and concentrate on discourse linguistics or discourse psychology for particular purposes. In the present handbook, special attention is paid to linguistic aspects, given in particular the division of labour between the volumes in this handbook series, with cognitive issues dealt with in volume four (Schmid 2012), societal issues dealt with in volume five (Andersen and Aijmer 2011), and interpersonal pragmatics dealt with in volume six (Locher and Graham 2010).

Generally speaking, discourse as a complex linguistic phenomenon can be analysed from a range of different angles. The focus may be on grammatical features, which are dealt with in discourse grammar, or it may be on aspects of semantic meaning, dealt with in discourse semantics. If, however, the focus is on interactional issues, then this is the realm of discourse pragmatics. Therefore, cohesion and coherence, for example, are not among the phenomena with which the contributions to this handbook are primarily concerned. What they concentrate on first and foremost are communicative functions, linguistic action and participant practices in social situations.

The contributions to the present volume cover major approaches, central concepts, and representative topics in discourse pragmatics. Some chapters highlight in particular its roots and origins, and historical developments in specific areas. Other chapters examine recent trends and their potential for future research. It is to an overview of the organisation of this volume and to an outline of the individual chapters to which we turn below (cf. sections 2 and 3).

2. The overall organisation of this volume

The present handbook comprises a total of twenty-one chapters. The present introduction is followed by a second chapter of general concern which provides a detailed discussion of a range of competing, overlapping or contrasting definitions of the term “discourse” in different fields of inquiry and also of the respective conceptualisations underlying these definitions. These two introductory chapters preface the three central parts of the handbook, labelled “Approaches to discourse”, “Discourse structures”, and “Discourse types and domains” respectively. Parts II and III, “Discourse structures” and “Discourse types and domains”, each consist of six chapters; Part I, “Approaches to discourse”, comprises seven chapters.

The chapters in Part I, “Approaches to discourse”, examine the role of pragmatics in major approaches to discourse studies and also discuss cross-fertilisation of concepts and approaches between these individual fields and discourse pragmatics. Specifically, these chapters cover linguistic discourse analysis, conversation analysis, systemic-functional approaches, genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus-linguistic approaches, and the analysis of multimodality in discourse. The discussions show that these different approaches, each providing a specific view of language use and social practices, do not develop in isolation, but complement and influence each other.

Part II, entitled “Discourse structures”, does not deal with structures in any narrow grammatical sense of this term, but with a variety of phenomena of differing complexity and status which can be characterised as functional features or elements, each structuring discourse in a specific way. In particular, these phenomena are discourse markers, stance, speech act sequences, phases in discourse, move structure and silence. This heterogeneous collection of phenomena has been studied in a range of different approaches and research traditions, with some phenomena more closely associated with a particular approach than others. Move structure, for instance, has been investigated especially in genre analysis, while discourse markers have been investigated in several approaches.

Finally, Part III, “Discourse types and domains”, highlights the involvement of discourse in the lives of individuals, in their encounters with the world and in their interactions with others. It begins with an overview of classifications and taxonomies of discourse types. This chapter demonstrates that the term “discourse type” sometimes refers to abstract subdivisions of a very general kind based, e.g., on Bühler’s three or Jakobson’s six language functions (Bühler 1934; Jakobson 1960). In other frameworks, however, this term may be used for much more concrete subdivisions, which are referred to as “genres” in yet other traditions. While discourse types are generally defined through functional and structural features, discourse domains, on the other hand, are typically defined through general content features and contextual features, such as discourse community. In this view, that is also adopted in the present volume, a discourse domain includes all discourse types or genres used in a given discourse community (cf. also Jucker and Taavitsainen 2012: 302, and Jucker and Taavitsainen 2010: Part VII). Four such domains are dealt with in Part III of this handbook, namely the domains of classroom, medical, legal and electronic discourse. The final chapter in Part III focuses on press releases as an example of a discourse type situated at the interface of two domains, namely media discourse and professional discourse. These chapters on individual domains also illustrate some of the approaches to discourse discussed in Part I at work.

In the design of all parts of this handbook, it was necessary to be selective. This applies in particular to Part III. Needless to say, several further domains can be distinguished, and the number of discourse types and genres is high, or even extremely high, depending on the level of specificity. Further examples of discourse domains include political discourse and workplace discourse, both of which are, however, dealt with in volume 6 of this handbook series, albeit from a different perspective (cf. Blas Arroyo 2010 on political discourse, Vine 2010 on workplace discourse). Also, further discourse features and phenomena could be added to those examined in Part II. Possible candidates could include humour or politeness. Both are examined elsewhere in this handbook series (on humour, cf. Schnurr 2010; on politeness, cf. Nevala 2010, Culpeper 2011, and Locher and Graham 2010). Finally, while the dominant approaches to discourse are covered in Part I, additional approaches could be considered, including, for instance, the ethnography of speaking or interactional linguistics, itself related to conversation analysis. For a broader picture, the reader is referred to handbooks of discourse analysis which may have made different choices, e.g. regarding discourse types and domains, and/or which may be broader in scope due either to not being focused specifically on discourse pragmatics or not being part of a handbook series with its characteristic division of labour (cf. especially Schiffrin, Tannen and Hamilton 2003; Gee and Handford 2012; and Hyland and Paltridge 2013). Also, the reader is referred to Zienkowski, Östman and Verschueren (2011), volume 8 of the ten-volume series Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights, itself based on the alphabetically organised encyclopaedia Handbook of Pragmatics, published and continually updated by Benjamins since 1995.

3. The contributions

As mentioned in section 2, the present handbook volume comprises a total of twenty-one chapters. These include the present introduction and twenty articles authored by experts from eleven countries. Each article gives an overview of the area and then provides illustrative examples of current empirical research in this area. These articles are summarised in the following.

In her article entitled “Conceptualising discourse”, Anita Fetzer surveys different interpretations and uses of the term “d...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Preface to the handbook series
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• 1. Discourse pragmatics: signposting a vast field
• 2. Conceptualising discourse
• Part I: Approaches to discourse
• Part II: Discourse structures
• Part III: Discourse types and domains
• About the authors
• Author index
• Subject index