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A Rhetorical Discourse Perspective

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A Rhetorical Discourse Perspective PRELIMINARIES • There are 3 parts to my title: the first part draws attention to two key concepts – institutions and professions – in relation to the role of texts (the 2nd TEXTS AS INSTITUTIONALLY part). The 3rd part concerns the analytical approach to MEDIATED PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE: text (Rhetorical Discourse Analysis). a rhetorical discourse perspective • Texts/Writing as social practice in institutional and SRIKANT SARANGI professional spheres – beyond education and academia in health and social care, law, engineering, CARDIFF UNIVERSITY business, finance, journalism and other professions. NTNU, TRONDHEIM LUND, 07 June 2010 PRELIMINARIES PRELIMINARIES • As an approach to study language in professional settings, the Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) • Writing/textual practices are aspects of both paradigm is limited in its linguistic focus. professional socialisation and expertise, with lifeworld consequences and educational/research • Towards an Applied Linguistics of Professions implications. (Sarangi 2005) • This transition can be characterised as a shift in focus • Generally, texts are socially mediated, but more from ‘professional discourse as a language system’ importantly, texts mediate social life. to ‘professional discourse as an expert system’ with its attendant context-specific tacit knowledge sources. • Such a shift in focus is not just a territorial gain but brings with it theoretical, analytical and practical challenges. PRELIMINARIES INSTITUTIONAL ORDER & PROFESSIONAL ORDER • We need to expand the circumference of our text- • In much text/discourse research, the two key concepts – analytical practices – going beyond pattern-seeking at the institution and profession – are used interchangeably, but level of textual features. these need to kept separate, conceptually and analytically (Sarangi and Roberts 1999). • The part-whole dilemma: What are the challenges if texts • While the institutional order is concerned with the ‘why’ are to be analysed holistically, not as a pretext to find (the rationality dimension), the professional order deals motivated linguistic/stylistic features? with the ‘how’ (everyday practice) . • The inherent problems of under-interpretation and over- • We can talk about education as institution and education interpretation in text/discourse studies (Sarangi 2007). as profession; medicine as institution and medicine as • Should text analysis be always seen as distinctive from profession etc. talk/interaction analysis, each accompanied by a different • Professional practice (text/talk) is mediated by the metalanguage? Can these analytic modes share a toolbox? institutional order. Professionals write case records, but • To what extent rhetorical discourse analysis can meet this what constitutes a case record is determined and regulated by a given institutional order. challenge? 1 WRITING/TEXT IN WRITING/TEXT IN HEALTHCARE SETTINGS INSTITUTIONAL/PROFESSIONAL SETTINGS IN THE CLINIC ACADEMIC INTERFACE BETWEEN LITERACIES TALK & AND TEXT (student-focused) (PATIENT RECORDS, FAMILY PEDIGREE) R T E E C X O T N INSTITUTIONAL U ACADEMIC T A PATIENT INFORMATION E DOCUMENTS L PROFESSIONAL RECRUITMENT FOR X TEXTUAL PRACTICESP LEAFLETS; MEDCATION TEXTUAL PRACTICES T (e.g. forms, leaflets, R GENRES CONTROLLOED TRIALS, U A LABELS; DRUG ADVERTS (research articles) A INFORMED CONSENT, standardised letters, C L T (DTCA) POLICY DOCUMENTS I guidelines) I S C I E N S G PROFESSIONAL HEALTHCARE WEBSITES, DISCOURSE STUDIES INTERNET CHAT ROOMS, (e.g. health and social care, ONLINE ADVICE, legal: patient records, REPRESENTATIONS Witness statements) IN THE MEDIA, MAGAZINES RESPECIFYING THE CONSTRUCTIONIST VIEW THE CONSTRUCTIONIST VIEW OF LANGUAGE & REALITY OF LANGUAGE & REALITY • Texts do categorisation work – but whose • Language (in the sense of text and talk) “does not categorisation counts? simply symbolise a situation or object which is already there in advance; it makes possible the existence.” • W. I. Thomas: ‘If men define situations as real, they (George Herbert Mead 1947:78) are real in their consequences.’ • This is echoed in Berger and Luckmann ’s (1967) • George Herbert Mead: ‘If a thing is not recognised as treatise on social construction of reality. true, then it does not function as true in the community.’ • “Language [is] a classificatory instrument… categories are not objective, ready-made, inherent properties of • Following Foucault (1980), the complex text- the external world but are subject to processes of mediated relations are themselves an organisation of perception and interpretation.” (Lee 1992:16) power, which characterises the institutional and professional spheres. • The role of personal (tacit) knowledge (Polanyi 1958) SOCIAL ORGANISATION OF KNOWLEDGE DOCUMENTARY METHOD OF INTERPRETATION & THE MEDIATING ROLE OF TEXT • Dorothy Smith (1990, 1999): • Following Schutz, Garfinkel (1967:78) outlines the “documentary method of interpretation”: • Focuses on the social organisation of knowledge (how knowledge comes to exist independent of the • “The method consists of treating an actual knowing subject), which is a shift from traditional appearance as “the document of”, as “pointing to”, sociology of knowledg e (which focuses on social as “standing on behalf of” a presupposed underlying determinants of knowledge, limitations of the pattern. Not only is the underlying pattern derived knowing subject). from its individual documentary evidences, but the individual documentary evidences, in their turn, are • The mediating role of the text in the production and interpreted on the basis of “what is known” about the reception of ‘factual’ accounts. underlying pattern. Each is used to elaborate the other”. • the actual and the virtual: ‘what happened/what is’: the text as stand-in for what happened. 2 DOCUMENTARY METHOD OF INTERPRETATION DIFFERENT MODES OF KNOWING & TEXTUAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY •The ‘documentary method of interpretation’ •In ‘K is mentally ill’, Dorothy Smith (1978) draws draws attention to a number of tensions such as attention to how categories are assigned by way of type-token relationships, manifest and tacit contrast structures. The following statement made by knowledge systems, shared meaning making, Angela about K illustrates this: brought along and brought about contexts etc. i. We would go to the beach or pool on a hot day, ii. I would sort of dip in and just lie in the sun • As an example of the documentary method of iii. while K insisted that she had to swim 30 laps interpretation, Garfinkel (1967:186-207) shows how medical records are treated as accounts that do not • “She killed herself”/”She committed suicide” (Smith 1990) just report facts, but make available displays of justifiable medical work for later inquiries. • Lost vs. stolen (Sarangi and Slembrouck 1996) CONTESTED VERSIONS OF TEXTUAL ACCOUNTS PROFESSIONAL VISION • PROFESSIONAL VISION consists of ‘socially organised • An example of two texts concerning a confrontation ways of seeing and understanding events that are between the police and street people in Berkeley, answerable to the distinctive interests of a particular social California in 1968 (the eye witness account published group’. as a letter in the underground newspaper and the mayor’s account made more widely accessible) • Professional vision is constituted in three practices: • CODING, which transforms phenomena observed in • “Between the two accounts , there is little a specific se tting in to the obj ec ts o f know le ddge tha t disagreement on the particulars of the story. But the animate the discourse of a profession; official version reconstructs the witnessed events as moments in extended sequences of institutional • HIGHLIGHTING, which makes specific phenomena action, locating them in textual time, dependent on in a complex perceptual field salient by marking textual realities already institutionally accomplished. them in some fashion; and What the witness saw and thought was going on is • PRODUCING AND ARTICULATING MATERIAL shown to be only a partial and imperfect knowledge REPRESENTATIONS. of proper police work.” (Smith 1990:65) (Goodwin 1994:606) DISCOURSE & DISCOURSE ANALYSIS • Discourse is both a resource and a topic of investigation in social and human sciences (Sarangi and Coulthard 2000, Sarangi, in press). • Gee (2005:27) suggests a distinction between big ‘D’ RHETORICAL DISCOURSE and little ‘d’ – ‘D/discourse’: ANALYSIS • “The Discourses we enact existed before each of us came on the scene and most of them will exist long after we have left the scene. Discourses, through our words and deeds, have talked to each other through history, and, in doing so, form human history”. 3 DISCOURSE & DISCOURSE ANALYSIS DISCOURSE & DISCOURSE ANALYSIS • Towards an inclusive definition… • At a micro-level, Schiffrin (1990:98) summarises the two- fold focus of discourse – structure and function: “Discourse is a level or component of language use, • “Discourse itself has often been viewed as both structure, related to but distinct from grammar. It can be oral or i.e. a unit of language that is larger than the sentence, written and can be approached in textual or and as the realisation of functions, i.e. as the use of sociocultural or sociointeractional terms. And it can be language for social, expressive, and referential brief like a greeting and thus smaller than a single purposes...These two different definitions of discourse can sentence or lengthy like a novel or narration of lead to radically different descriptions and analyses of the same
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