Linguocognitive and Linguosemiotic

Features of Discourse
Lecture 1. “Discourse as a science.
Functioning of the term
"discourse" in scientific
literature”
 Discourse
Latin
dis-
away Latin Latin Old French

discurrere discursus discours

running to
Latin and fro discourse
currere late Middle
to run English

French
discourir
«discourse»
«Discursus»
‘conversation’ or ‘speech’

Etymon
"Discursus" - reasoning, argument
 ANTHROPOLOGY
Dell Hymes in the early 1960s
ethnographic study of
communicative events (beyond the
traditional study of myths/ folklore)
‘ethnography of speaking’

‘ethnography of communication’
(Bauman & Sherzer 1974, M.Saville-Troike 1982)

Linguistic anthropology (A. Duranti, 2001)

 Sociolinguistics
at the end
of 1960s

Susan Ervin Tripp

Bill Labov child discourse
storytelling about everyday experiences
the verbal play by African–American adolescents
 Pragmatics John Searle
“Speech acts”
1969

Logic and
conversation
1967
1962
 Semiotics ,

”The Absent Structure”

1968

1975

1968
 Conversation Analysis
In sociology, the interest in discourse emerged within
the broader framework of ‘ethnomethodology’, a
direction in microsociology focusing on the ways
people understand and manage their everyday life.
’’The Presentation of
Self in Everyday Life’’
1956/1959

Harold Garfinkel Erving Goffman

1967
 Harvey Sacks, Emanuel
Schegloff, Gail Jefferson
” Language “, 1974

creators of the field of Conversation Analysis

Whereas discourse grammars studied
sequences of sentences, Conversation
Analysis (CA) closely analyzed
interactional sequences and phenomena
such as turn taking, interruptions, pauses,
laughter, opening and closing
conversations, and many other properties
and strategic moves of spontaneous talk
now being accessible due to meticulous
transcriptions of audio and video
recordings.
 Linguistics
Zellig Harris,1952
János Petöfi , 1971 Teun A. van Dijk ,1972
Wolfgang Dressler ,1972
Joseph Grimes, 1975
Functional Systemic Grammar, by Michael Halliday,
1976
Tom Givón ,1979
Martin, 1992
Sandra Thompson and Bill Mann,1999
Rhetorical Structure Theory
In the ‘article is called ‘Discourse Analysis’
Harris sets out to produce a formal method 'for the
analysis of connected speech or writing' which 'does
not depend on the analyst's knowledge of the
particular meaning of each morpheme.
- Harris suggests that a distributional analysis can
be successfully done above the rank of sentence
He observes that:
-“Stretches longer than one utterance are not
usually considered in current descriptive
linguistics.[…] the linguist usually
considers the interrelations of elements only
within one utterance at a time.
This yields a possible description of the
material, since the interrelations of elements
within each utterance (or utterance type) are
worked out, and any longer discourse is
describable as succession of utterances, i.e. a
succession of elements having the stated
interrelations. This restriction means that
nothing is generally said about the
interrelations among whole utterances within
a sequence.”
The Application of Harris Approach
As an example he creates a text containing the following
four sentences:
The trees turn here about the middle of autumn.
The trees turn here about the end of October.
The first frost comes after the middle of autumn.
We start heating after the end of October.
The aim of the analysis is to isolate units of text which are
distributionally equivalent though not necessarily similar
in meaning; that is equivalences which have validity for
that text alone.
Grenoble (2000), explaining Harris’s definition of
discourse, states that:
“Harris is of the view that linguistic research focuses on
the elements within an utterance; discourse can be
considered as a sequence of utterance.
Harris argues that the study of the interrelations between
utterances within a discourse; the scope of a discourse
analysis required much more information than the
theoretical apparatus of that time could handle. While this
held true for 1950s and 1960s, roughly, but 1970s saw an
emerging body of different approaches including
pragmatics, conversation analysis, textual linguistics, and
relevance theory.”
 Laclau and Mouffe’s Theory of
Discourse

Eрнéсто Лаклó Шанта́ль Муфф

1935 - 2014 1943 17
2

1.«Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.

Towards a Radical Democratic Politics»
(1985)

2.«Post-Marxism without apologies»

(1990)

18
3

SOCIAL WORLD IS FORMED

BY DISCOURSE
WITH THE HELP OF THE
MEANINGS.

19
4

WHOLE SOCIAL FIELD IS

UNDERSTOOD
AS A WEB OF PROCESSES
IN WHICH MEANING IS
CREATED.

20
 Laclau and Mouffe’s concept of
34.

‘discourse’ encompasses not only

language but all social phenomena..

21
 The same logic applies to the whole
34.

social field: we act as if the ‘reality’

around us has a stable and
unambiguous structure; as if society,
the groups we belong to, and our
identity, are objectively given facts.
But just as the structure of language is
never totally fixed, so are society and
identity flexible and changeable entities
that can never be completely fixed. 22
 The aim of discourse analysis is,
35.

therefore, not to uncover the

objective reality, for example, to
find out what groups society
‘really’ consists of, but to explore
how we create this reality so that
it appears objective and natural.
23
 37.The starting point of Laclau and
Mouffe’s discourse theory is that we
construct objectivity through the
discursive production of meaning.

24
Discourse in the works of Michel
Pêcheux; (1938 — 1983)
He is best known for his theoretical,
experimental and practical
contributions to the field of discourse
analysis, starting in the late 1960s.
G.Leech (1983) and D.Schiffrin (1994)
distinguish between two main
approaches:
1) the formal approach,
where discourse is defined as a unit
of language beyond the sentence,
2) the functional approach, which
defines discourse as language use.
 Deborah Schiffrin
(1951- 2017)
views discourse as
“utterances”, with utterances
considered as “units of language
production (whether spoken
or written) which are
inherently contextualized.”
 D.Schiffrin “Approaches to Discourse”, 1994
singled out 6 approaches to Discourse :
1. speech act theory
2. interactional sociolinguistics
3. the ethnography of communication
4.pragmatics
5.conversation analysis
6.variation analysis
 The Speech Act Approach:
It is focused on interpretation rather than the
production of utterances in discourse. Based on this
theory, every utterance can be analyzed as the
realization of the speaker’s intent (illocutionary force)
to achieve a particular purpose. The focus of the
analysis is speech act (SA) or illocutionary
force (IF).
Although speech act theory was not first developed as
a means of analyzing discourse, particular issues in
speech act theory (indirect speech acts, multiple
functions of utterances) led to discourse analysis
 Interactional sociolinguistics
(combination of three disciplines:
anthropology, sociology, and
linguistics)
It is concerned with the importance of
context in the production and
interpretation of discourse. It focuses
on analysis of grammatical and
prosodic features in interactions.
 The Ethnography of Communication
understanding the social context of linguistic
interactions: ‘who says what to whom, when, where,
why and how’. The prime unit of analysis is speech
event. Speech event refers to ‘activities that are
directly governed by rules or norms for the use of
speech’ (Hymes). Speech event comprises
components. Analysis of these components of a speech
event is central to what became known
as ethnography of communication with the
ethnographer’s aim being to discover rules of
appropriateness in speech events.
 Pragmatics
P. Grice: the cooperative principle and
conversational maxims.
At the base of pragmatic approach is Gricean’s co-
operative principle(CP). This principle seeks to
account for not only how participants decide what to
DO next in conversation, but also how interlocutors
go about interpreting what the previous speaker has
just done. This principle is broken down into specific
maxims: Quantity (say only as much as necessary),
Quality (try to make your contribution one that is
true), Relation (be relevant), and Manner (be brief
and avoid ambiguity).
 Conversation analysis
There are two grossly apparent facts: a) only one
person speaks at a time,
b) speakers change recurs.
Thus conversation is a ‘turn taking’ activity.
Speakers recognize points of potential speaker
change – turn constructional unit (TCU).
Conversational analysis is particularly
interested in the sequencing of utterances,
i.e. not in what people say but in how they say
it.
Prominent representatives of conversation
analysis are initially its founders Harvey
Sacks , Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson ;
in English-speaking countries, Charles
Goodwin , John Heritage , Anita
Pomerantz or Christian Heath may also be
included. In the German-speaking area, Peter
Auer , Jörg Bergmann and Lorenza
Mondada should be mentioned, as well
as Werner Kallmeyer and Fritz Schütze , who
made conversation analysis known in the
German-speaking area.
 Variation Analysis
Labov, Waletzky(1967) argue that fundamental
narrative structures are evident in spoken
narratives of personal experience. The overall
structure of fully formed narrative of personal
experience involves six stages:
1) Abstract, 2) Orientation, 3) Complication, 4)
Evaluation, 5) Resolution, 6) Coda, (where
1. and 6. are optional)
The strength is its clarity and applicability
1) Abstract: general purpose of telling the story
(2) Orientation: who, what, when, where
(3) Complicating Action: the event that breaks
"stasis" (стан спокою) and therefore initiates the
plot of the story
(from Greek στάσις "standing still")
(4) Resolution: closure of the plot and return to
stasis
(5) Evaluation: interpretation of the plot; the
narrative's meaning (sometimes also
called Reflection)
(6) Coda: indication that nothing else important to
this story or its meaning happened late
William Labov: “A fully-formed oral narrative”
follows six stages:
1. Abstract: What is the story about?
2. Orientation: Who, when where, how?
3. Complicating action: Then what happened?
4. Evaluation: How or why is this interesting?
5. Result / Resolution/Reflection: What finally
happened?
6. Coda: indication that nothing else important to
this story or its meaning happened late