Discourse

A Concept for Information and Communication Sciences

Jean-Paul Metzger

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781786303073
• eBook ISBN: 9781119629467
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

Discourse is not just a means of expressing thought; it is also an autonomous body, an act through which we aim to achieve a certain effect. Modern linguistics proposes a broader definition of discourse, as a discrete and unique enunciative process, where the speaker or author makes language concrete through speech (in the Saussurian sense), and describes the various acts (oral, illocutionary, perlocutionary) that discourse performs. This book examines discourse, an object of analysis and criticism, from a wide range of perspectives. Among the concepts explored are the contributions of rhetoric in the art of discourse, the evolution of multiple approaches and the main methods of discourse analysis conducted by a variety of researchers. The book deepens our knowledge and understanding of discourse, a concept on which any research related to information and communication can be based.

PART 1

Epistemological Foundations

Introduction to Part 1

It is through rhetoric and argumentation that we will begin to explore the concept of discourse. Rhetoric is the art of persuading through speech. It is about convincing the listener or audience of what is true and what is false. The means at its disposal are based on reason or involve affect. Persuasion creates a kind of emotional climate that can lead to adherence. This climate increases the acceptability of arguments by enhancing the psychic receptivity of the listeners. Rhetoric is demiurgic insofar as it is the means by which we build and hold power over this world. It has shaped Western civilization from the 5^th Century BC to the present day. Everything that people imagine and socially create is related to speech and its capacity for persuasion which influences belief, order and obedience.

In a kind of dialectical inversion, rhetoric becomes the instrument for understanding and interpreting the discourse of others. The hermeneutic method is based on rhetoric. It interprets the intentions of texts and allows the exegesis of political, religious, or other discourse. Learning to speak is also learning to think. Rhetoric supports judgment and imagines solutions because it opens to us the knowledge necessary for our world view. It develops ideas, structures thought and provides an organizational model. Learning to talk is also learning to live in, society through the ability to speak well and be understood. Without the words to express them, our ideas are sterile, inconsistent or even non-existent.

While rhetoric is an important dimension of a theoretical approach to discourse, it is through the multiple variants of discourse analysis and interpretation that discourse achieves its status as a scientific object in its own right. The emergence of an autonomous field of research on the theme of discourse is part of the evolution of language sciences and more broadly that of the human and social sciences, starting in the 1950s. Discourse analysis maintains complex relationships with these sciences, in constant redefinition. It is more of a scientific movement which is at a crossroads than a clearly defined discipline forming a homogeneous block, with its purpose, methodology and concepts. Despite the variety of approaches to discourse analysis, and of the concepts and theories used in it, all approaches agree, despite some reluctance, on a single definition of its purpose established by Madeleine Grawitz (1990) who observes that all research in this field:

“[…] nevertheless assumes that statements are not presented as sentences or sequences of sentences but as texts. However, a text is a specific mode of organization that must be studied as such by relating it to the conditions in which it is produced”.

To consider a text by linking it closely to its production conditions is to consider it as a discourse. Without claiming to be exhaustive, we thus review several major approaches to the analysis and interpretation of discourse originating in linguistics: the enunciative approach, the communicative approach, the conversational approach, the sociolinguistic approach, the pragmatic approach and the semiological approach. Each of these is part of a specific theoretical framework and induces a particular conception of discourse as an object.

In contrast to these approaches, two authors were only indirectly interested in discourse, although each made an essential contribution to the way in which we think about it and, subsequently, to its analysis. These are the philosophers Mikhaïl Bakhtin and Michel Foucault, one Russian, the other French. While unaware of each other, they both defend the view that any verbal or textual sequence is only a fragment of a larger whole: the discourse, which many authors nowadays call interdiscourse.

Then, drawing inspiration from the work of the philosopher Paul Ricœur, we will ask ourselves how discourse allows intersubjective communication. Paul Ricœur notes that:

“A theory of discourse, unlike the theory of language without a speaker, must involve factors that must be called psychological: belief, desire, commitment, etc., factors that can be introduced on the basis of the non-psychological elements of discourse”.

The essential meaning of message, sender, receiver is based on an order of intentions which is only revealed by transcendental reflection (in the sense of Husserl and phenomenology; descriptive psychology becomes transcendental phenomenology).

Starting with the logical core of the discourse, we will directly access the foundation of communicability: what is first communicated by a speech is its logical character, which brings it out of itself and opens it up to another speaker. The logical theory of statements allows us to admit that a message is made communicable by the process of universalization involved in it. Nevertheless, logical theory is not the only element to consider in analyzing the communicability of speech; what is communicated in a speech is not only its logical (or propositional) sense but also its strength, in John Langshaw Austin’s sense: a statement has the value of an assertion, or of an order, or of a promise. Sending a message is the delivery of a discourse with sense and strength. Finally, in reaching the last level, that of intention, communicability extends beyond sense and forces to include what the speaker communicates of themselves. This one transmits an intention of recognition.

1
The Art of Discourse: Rhetoric

1.1. Thinking, speaking out, persuading

In antiquity, taught by certain sages called sophists to their clients, the art of rhetoric later found its way into the educational curriculum to such an extent that it became the main subject. Rhetoric was perceived, until the 19th Century, as an education for the elite that allowed them to have the privilege of speech. Language, as a science reserved for leaders, has always made it possible to exclude those who are not able to speak.

For Marc Fumaroli (2016) or Joëlle Gardes-Tamine (2011), who have studied the different forms of rhetoric over the centuries, it can be linked to two philosophical traditions:

• – the sophistic tradition, according to which rhetoric must persuade. Although introduced by sophists such as Gorgias of Leontinoi, this conception, put forward by Aristotle, defines it as “the ability to consider, for each issue, what may be appropriate in order to persuade”;
• – the stoic tradition that maintains that rhetoric is the art of good discourse. For this tradition, this art requires good morality and is therefore equivalent to the art of wisdom. Its representatives are Quintilian (2001) and Cicero (2003).

This double heritage has led the authors to propose multiple definitions of the art of rhetoric. Rhetoric is a form of Aide-Mémoire for Roland Barthes (1970), while for Arthur Schopenhauer (1999) or John Stuart Mill (1987) it is the technique of public speech. For Antelme Édouard Chaignet (2012), its aim is to persuade and convince; a goal that is systematically associated with it in current awareness and in the teaching of the French language. According to the English philosopher Francis Bacon, it is “the art of applying reason to imagination for the better moving of will”; and, for the American Richard Weaver, it is an art of emphasis.

Despite all these definitions, which are often clearly divergent, the term rhetorical art refers first and foremost, and historically, to the rhetorical system, which is the different techniques used to construct and organize one’s discourse, in order to convince and persuade the listener. On this basis, Michel Meyer states that three historical and competing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART 1: Epistemological Foundations
• PART 2: Discourse Analyses Developed in the Information and Communication Sciences
• Conclusion
• References
• Index of Names
• Index of Common Terms
• End User License Agreement