Showing papers on "Discourse analysis published in 1990"

Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings

Abstract: In recent years the concept of 'register' has been increasingly replaced by emphasis on the analysis of genre, which relates work in sociolinguistics, text linguistics and discourse analysis to the study of specialist areas of language. This book is a clear, authoritative guide to this complex area. He provides a survey of approaches to varieties of language, and considers these in relation to communication and task-based language learning. Swales outlines an approach to the analysis of genre, and then proceeds to consider examples of different genres and how they can be made accessible through genre analysis. This is important reading for all those working in teaching English for academic purposes and also of interest to those working in post-secondary writing and composition due to relevant issues in writing across the curriculum.

Language and the Politics of Emotion

Abstract: List of contributors Preface 1. Introduction: emotion, discourse, and the politics of everyday life Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine A. Lutz 2. Shifting politics in Bedouin love poetry Lila Abu-Lughod 3. Moral discourse and the rhetoric of emotions Geoffrey M. White 4. Engendered emotion: gender, power, and the rhetoric of emotional control in American discourse Catherine A. Lutz 5. Topographies of the self: praise and emotion in Hindu India Arjun Appadurai 6. Shared and solidarity sentiments: the discourse of friendship, play, and anger in Bhatgaon Donald Brenneis 7. Registering affect: heteroglossia in the linguistic expression of emotion Judith T. Irvine 8. Language in the discourse of the emotions Daniel V. Rosenberg 9. Untouchability and the fear of death in a Tamil song Margaret Trawick Index.

The organization of repair in classroom talk

Abstract: This article is a conversation-analytic investigation of the forms of organization that allow specific items of classroom discourse – words, phrases, up to whole turns at talk – to be altered by subsequent items. Central to the article is an analytic distinction between self-correction and other-correction, that is, between repair sequences in which the speaker of the initial item (the “trouble source”) makes the correction and instances in which this is performed by one of her or his interlocutors (cf. Jefferson 1974; Schegloff et al. 1977). The classroom case is analytically interesting both for its own sake and also on account of research speculations that other-correction should be more frequent in adult-child talk than in other genres of conversation. However, in order to provide an analysis of the problem sensitive to the particularities of the classroom, it is necessary to look not merely at corrections, but at the larger repair trajectories in which they occur. These trajectories consist of corrections plus their prior initiations, the latter being means by which speakers mark out some item as requiring correction. Once the social identities of teacher and student are mapped against self-and other-forms of initiation and correction, it is possible to discern some of the structural preferences of classroom discourse along the general axis of repair. The materials are taken from geography lessons in Australian high school classrooms. (Repair and correction, question and answer, clue-giving, expansion sequences, modulation, classroom discourse, everyday language use, Australian English, conversation analysis, sociology of education).

Discourse: Noun, Verb or Social Practice?

Abstract: This chapter comments on some of the different senses of the notion of discourse in the various relevant literatures and then overviews the basic features of a coherent discourse analytic programme in Psychology. Parker’s approach is criticized for (a) its tendency to reify discourses as objects, (b) its undeveloped notion of analytic practice and (c) its vulnerability to common sense assumptions. It ends by exploring the virtues of ‘interpretative repertoires’ over ‘discourses’ as an analytic/theoretical notion.

Pickle fights: Gendered talk in preschool disputes

Abstract: This paper examines the effect of gender on how young children construct the texts that embody their everyday social interactions with peers. The analysis focuses on conflict talk among 3‐year‐old friends playing in same‐sex triads at their day‐care center. The gendered aspects of two disputes are made visible by interpreting them in terms of two models. Maltz and Borker's anthropological linguistic model characterizes feminine language style as affiliative and masculine style as adversarial. Gilligan's psychological framework, describing gender differences in reasoning about moral conflicts, characterizes the feminine orientation as focusing on the relationship and the masculine as focusing on the self. The two dispute sequences studied are also consistent with predictions made by Miller, Danaher, and Forbes (1986) and Leaper (1988), that boys’ conflict process is more heavy‐handed and their discourse strategies more controlling, whereas girls’ conflict is more mitigated and their discourse strategies mo...

Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract: The label Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used by a significant number of scholars with a diverse set of concerns in a number of disciplines. It is well-exemplified by the editorial statement of the journal Discourse and Society, which defines its envisaged domain of enquiry as follows: “the reproduction of sexism and racism through discourse; the legitimation of power; the manufacture of consent; the role of politics, education and the media; the discursive reproduction of dominance relation between groups; the imbalances in international communication and information.” While some practitioners of Critical Discourse Analysis might want to amend this list here or there, the set of concerns sketched here well describes the field of CDA. The only comment I would make, a comment crucial for many practitioners of CDA, is to insist that these phenomena are to be found in the most unremarkable and everyday of texts—and not only in texts which declare their special status in some way. This scope, and the overtly political agenda, serves to set CDA off on the one hand from other kinds of discourse analysis, and from textlinguistics (as well as from pragmatics and sociolinguistics) on the other.

Computer Conferences and Learning: Authority, Resistance, and Internally Persuasive Discourse

Abstract: Our profession's recent focus on the social construction of knowledge and the roles that discourse and community play in this construction have made some of us aware of disturbing characteristics in our classrooms. We now notice, for instance, that the traditional forums comprising these classrooms-group discussions, lectures, teacher-student conferences, written assignments-generally support a traditional hegemony in which teachers determine appropriate and inappropriate discourse. We notice, further, that this political arrangement encourages intellectual accommodation in students, discourages intellectual resistance, and hence may seriously limit students' understanding of, and effective use of, language. As a result, we have begun to recognize the need for non-traditional forums for academic exchange, forums that allow interaction patterns disruptive of a teacher-centered hegemony. These forums should encourage students to use language to resist as well as to accommodate and should enable individuals to create internally persuasive discourse as well as to adopt discourse validated by external authority. In creating such non-traditional forums to supplement the work now going on in our classrooms, we tacitly argue for the importance of discourse in learning, the importance of students talking and writing to one another as well as to the teacher as they attempt to come to terms with the theories and concepts raised in their courses. This particular kind of learning does not take place often enough within the forums characteristic of our traditional classrooms, where interaction-at least the approved kind of interaction-is all too often dyadic, emphasizing the role of the all-knowing teacher discussing a topic with quiet, attentive students who may respond to the teacher but not directly to one another. Socrates tells Phaedrus that this is the ideal learning situation: "lucidity and completeness and serious importance belong only to those lessons on justice and honor and goodness

Discourse: Definitions and contradictions

Abstract: With the question ‘What is “discourse”?’ as the starting point, this chapter addresses ways of identifying particular discourses, and attends to how these discourses should be distinguished from texts. The emergence of discourse analysis within psychology, and the continuing influence of linguistic and post-structuralist ideas on practitioners, provide the basis on which discourse-analytic research can be developed fruitfully. This chapter discusses the descriptive, analytic and educative functions of discourse analysis, and addresses the cultural and political questions which arise when discourse analysts reflect on their activity. Suggestions for an adequate definition of discourse are proposed and supported by seven criteria which should be adopted to identify discourses, and which attend to contradictions between and within them. Three additional criteria are then suggested to relate discourse analysis to wider political issues.

Nigel Lawson's tent: Discourse analysis, attribution theory and the social psychology of fact

Abstract: The general aim of this paper is to show some of the limitations of the attribution theory approach to ordinary reasoning when compared to a discourse analytic alternative. Three central shortcomings with attribution theory are documented, each stemming from the method of presenting subjects with factual vignettes from which they are required to draw inferences: (a) its asocial and unexplicated notion of information; (b) its realist view of linguistic description; (c) its constrained account of participants' activity. These paws are illustrated in practice through a discourse analytic study of the management of factual versions in a political dispute (over a controversial briefing between a British politician, Nigel Lawson, and a group of journalists). Specifically, it focuses on ‘consensus information’, examining the way notions of consensus are used when warranting and undermining versions. Two features of consensus accounts are examined: (a) consensus across a group of observers of an event; (b) corroboration between independent individuals. In each case, the rhetorical organization of factual accounts is documented by analysing both the way the consensus is constructed and the way it is undermined or discounted. The analysis explores how the ‘facts of the matter’, rather than existing as criteria for the resolution of disputation, were themselves part and parcel of the disputation itself: In attribution theory terms, the clear distinction between ‘consensus information’ and the attributions which flow from it becomes unworkable. It is suggested that the analysis provides an exemplar for a discourse orientated social psychology of fact.

Sociology of Science a Sociological Pilgrimage

Abstract: Questions of method two conflicting conclusions concerning methodology action and belief or scientist's discourse? - textual fragments on science, social science and literature conventional analysis - revealing the social world of science structure and process in a physics department three models of scientific development norms and ideology consensus knowledge and utility discourse analysis - showing how scientists construct their social worlds putting philosophy to work theory choice replication and mere replication new literary forms - exploring the many worlds of textuality noblesse oblige measuring the quality of life looking backward.

Relevance Relations in Discourse: A Study with Special Reference to Sissala

Abstract: This book uses Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory to show that connectivity in discourse is a pragmatic rather than a semantic matter: it results from relevance relations between text and context rather than from relations linguistically encoded in the text. In two introductory chapters, Regina Blass argues that relevance theory offers a more explanatory account of discourse connectivity than do alternative approaches based on notions of cohesion, coherence and topic. In subsequent chapters, she introduces data from the language Sissala and shows how relevance theory can play an important role in guiding and constraining semantic and pragmatic analyses of these data. This approach reveals unexpected results - for example the detection of an interpretive use marker in Sissala, with implications for the analysis of so-called 'hearsay phenomena' in other languages - and leads to an alternative basis for particle typology.

Multiple Goals in Discourse: An Overview of Issues

Abstract: Understanding communicative action requires bridging two worlds: the world of social actors with the purposes, concerns, and 'goals' that motivate their actions, and the world of discourse in which everyday actors' goals are expressed and inferred. This paper overviews two distinct approaches to building that bridge, discourse studies and communicative goal studies, highlighting the strengths and limitations of each approach. In addition, we overview each of the papers in the volume showing how each contributes to and extends one approach while raising challenges to the other.

The Discourse of Computer‐Assisted Language Learning: Toward a Context for Descriptive Research

Abstract: Understanding how the speed, power, and flexibility of computers can facilitate second language acquisition is an intriguing challenge faced by instructors, researchers, and theorists. Progress in this area, however, does not appear to be forthcoming from current research on computer-assisted language learning (CALL), which suffers from the same limitations as early research on classroom instruction: Little detail is provided to describe the interaction among participants during instruction (Long, 1980). Moreover, descriptions of CALL activities included in reported research are not empirically based: They fail to describe what subjects actually do while working with CALL. A third problem is that the terms used to describe CALL activities have been developed specifically for that purpose, and are therefore not comparable to those used for classroom activities. At the same time, these descriptors are not sufficiently uniform and formally stated to allow specific comparisons among CALL activities. Toward a solution to these problems, this paper proposes a discourse analysis of student-computer interaction enabled by viewing the student and the computer as two participants in a dialogue. It argues that the discourse analysis system of classroom interaction developed by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) provides the necessary elements and structures to describe CALL discourse, analyze data from student-computer interaction, and compare CALL activities with other (classroom) activities.

who gets ahead? cognitive responses to heteroglossia in American political culture

Abstract: Theories of social practice too often ignore the mediating role of cognitive schemas. This is especially the case in studies of blue-collar workers, whose discourse, taken out of context, seems so inconsistent as to suggest the absence of organized beliefs. This article analyzes the discourse of some Rhode Island workingmen and proposes that they internalize conflicting social ideologies in one of three ways. These three forms of cognitive organization, obscured by superficially similar discourse, mediate behavior differently and respond differently under pressure to change. This model challenges traditional theories of belief. [ideology, cognitive schemas, discourse analysis, working-class consciousness, American political culture]

The rhetoric of expertise: E. O. Wilson and sociobiology

Abstract: In contrast to the “structural account” of scientific expertise, which ties the expert's discourse closely to disciplinary constraints, this essay develops a “rhetorical account,” showing how experts can move fluidly among disciplinary criteria and use paradigms more as strategies than constraints. Wilson, the exemplar here, projects his sociobiology into several discourse frames, each presuming a different audience, purpose, and persona for himself as expert. This shifting of frames has not only enabled Wilson to exert a great deal of influence on the social sciences and public discourse, it has also enabled him to elude disciplinary standards of evaluation.

Conversational or Communicative Skill? A Reassessment of Two-Year-Olds' Behaviour in Miscommunication Episodes.

Abstract: Young children's competence in using and responding to clarification requests may reflect their desire to achieve goals through the direction of others rather than knowledge that messages must be understood by another mind. This possibility was addressed by examining miscommunication episodes between children aged 2; 6 and their parents in videotaped free play sessions. Although the children generally responded appropriately in form to parental clarification requests, they responded more often to and resolved successfully more of those following their own requests than those following their assertions. Thus, the results support the idea that young children are frequently motivated to repair their utterances when they have not achieved some overt behaviour desired from others. These findings are discussed in the light of the conversational experience two-year-olds bring to clarification situations.

Cleft constructions in discourse.

Abstract: This thesis presents an analysis of the structure and function of deft constructions in discourse. Drawing on a corpus of naturally-occurring spoken and written data, we present a multi-layered explanation of how it-clefts, wh-clefts, and reverse wh-clefts are different from non-clefts, and from one another. After a review of previous research on clefts in discourse, we explore the aspects of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics relevant to the structure and function of all three types of deft. The discussion falls into three main parts: " An analysis of the three deft types, within the framework of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (cf. Gazdar et aL [19851), in which particular attention is paid to the variety of constituents that can appear in particular positions in each type. The output of the grammar rules is compared to the examples that occur in the corpus of data. "A treatment of deft presupposition in terms of an analogy (suggested by van der Sandt [1988)) between presupposition and the treatment of pronominal anaphora in Kamp's [19811 Discourse Representation Theory. " An examination of the range of accentual patterns, presuppositional relations, and information structures typically appearing in clefts of all three kinds. We show that marked distinctions exist between the three cleft types in terms of all these factors, and suggest ways in which this helps to differentiate the range of discourse contexts in which clefts in general, and each cleft type in particular, are appropriate. At the end of the thesis we point to an analogy between the formal model for clefts presented and a psychological model of sentence processing. We also suggest how the conclusions regarding both the structure and function of clefts as a class of construction and the distinction between the three types of cleft could be synthesised in a decision procedure for syntactic choice. Finally, we suggest some related areas for further research.

Discourse Analysis and Written Discourse Conventions

Abstract: The institutionalized, or conventionalized, properties of human language, somewhat neglected as objects of study in contermporary linguistics, have lately been looked upon with renewed interest. Tannen (1987), for example, synthesizing earlier work by Bakhtin (1981), Becker (1979), and Boliner (1976), has argued for a view of discourse as relatively prepatterned across linguistic domains. Similarly, the notion of “emergent grammer” (i.e., of grammer as “set of …recurrent partials, whose status is constantly being renegotiated in speech”; Hopper 1988:118) has been advanced in opposition to more widely-accepted models of grammatical knowledge. Recent research of this type, as well as a number of older studies, indicates a serious interest among certain linguists in formulating a theoretical basis for the study of conventionalized language.

Reading Texts, Literacy, and Textual Authority.

Abstract: Each of the references above makes language central to the ways in which power constructs and produces not only meanings and cultural texts but also the subject positions that readers assume in engaging texts as well as the larger world. In Foucaulťs work, discourse is connected to broader institutional and social practices and the power relations which inform them. In this case, discourse is studied in terms of institutional apparatuses that produce it along with the interests and social practices it legitimates. In the second quote, discourse is seen by Gonzalez as not only enmeshed in relations of power but central to the production of complex and often contradictory forms of subjectivity, that is, the subject positions from which one's sense of self, identity, and subjectivity is constructed. Implicit in this view is the postmodernist notion that subjectivity is not a coherent, unitary,

Constructing the Child Viewer: A History of the American Discourse on Television and Children, 1950-1980

Abstract: Preface Introduction Discourse Analysis: A History of Knowledge Production 1917-1953: Children and Cinema, Radio, and Comics 1948-1959: The Televiewing Child 1960-1969: Constructing the Behavioral Subject 1970-1979: Constructing the Cognitive Subject The Discourse on Television and Children References Indexes

Real things: Discourse, context and practice

Abstract: Discourse (language organized into sets of texts) and discourses (systems of statements within and through those sets) have a power. To say this is not to attribute agency to a system, but simply to acknowledge constraining and productive forces. There are forces of institutional disadvantage and division, for example, which do not flow from individual intentions, and the phenomena of power and ideology need not be traced to conspiratorial machinations. It would be dangerous to attempt to do so, and the unpleasant consequences particularly difficult to challenge if such investigation proceeded under cover of objective science. Discourse analysis unravels the conceptual elisions and confusions by which language enjoys its power. It is implicit ideology-critique. But there is more than language, and discourse analysis needs attend to the conditions which make the meanings of texts, and the research project which takes them seriously, possible.

The context of discourse: Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater

Abstract: An examination of Ian Parker’s definitions of discourse reveals them to be non-distinctive and of limited utility. It is argued that discourse analysis should be integrated with, rather than set against, social psychology. Discourse analysts should attend to the issues of the representativeness and generality of their evidence, should be wary of attributing causality to discourse, and should consider the advantages of systematically investigating, rather than asserting, the social consequences of the use of different discourses.

Discourse Analysis In Language Testing

Abstract: Language testing is concerned with the measurement of language. Language is the trait, and how we go about measuring it is the method. Trait involves the what, and method the how of testing. This paper will focus on the interaction between the what and the how, where the perspective of the what is the domain of discourse analysis. The paper will also review studies and tests that illustrate the degree to which the domain of discourse analysis has contributed to the theory, research, and development of language testing.

The future of the field: Discourse analysis in the 1990s

Abstract: Reviews are a common component of several academic discourse genres. Many scholarly publications, such as research papers, monographs, introductory texts or handbooks, thus present their readers with a reasoned overview of the major results of a discipline or research area. This may either be to introduce or assess the standard paradigm of the field, or to challenge it and to propose new approaches. In both cases, however, reviews essentially look back. They are histories, if not stories, of a discipline, highlighting its past successes or failures. The same is true for the young cross-discipline of discourse analysis and for many of the papers that have appeared in this journal during its nine years of existence. On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of TEXT, however, this issue takes another perspective. Its authors, members of the new boards of TEXT, as well as prominent scholars in the respective domains of discourse studies, have been invited to look ahead, and to speculate about the future of the field. However, none of us is specialized in the art of prediction. Whereas reviewing the past is based on hard facts, we have little evidence that tells us about the future, and some authors in this issue say so explicitly. Programmatic papers are not always seen as serious research, and their value is usually recognized only after the fact, that is, when their predictions or plans happen to have been realized. Predicting the future course of academic scholarship is risky business, and often more difficult than predicting the weather or economic developments. Indeed, such predictions will rather be associated with wishful thinking, if not with such obscure activities as 'reading' cards, stars, hands or entrails, for which we need no scholars but oracles, seers, diviners, prophets, fortunetellers or other visionaries. And yet, future scholarship is not an uncontrollable natural event, but the result of our own present practices. Also academic developments have some degree of regularity, and the sociology of science tells us that the

Discourse analysis in professional contexts

Abstract: This bibliographic essay will only consider work published after 1986 in the belief that Volume VII of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (ARAL VII, Language in Professional Contexts, 1987) adequately covers earlier material. Professions will be understood in a non-elitist sense which includes service and other occupations )(c.f., Coleman 1989) as well as the more prototypical categories of medicine, law, etc. This essay will also cover those areas of academic discourse that can be reasonably viewed as professional; for example, the publishing of research papers (Myers 1990), the giving of research presentations (Dubois 1987), or the providing of instruction (Briggs, et al. 1990).