Key Terms in Discourse Analysis Also available from Continuum Key Terms in Semiotics, Bronwen Martin and Felizitas Ringham Key Terms in Second Language Acquisition, Bill VanPatten and Alessandro G. Benati Key Terms in Linguistics, Howard Jackson Key Terms in Translation Studies, Giuseppe Palumbo Key Terms in Phonology, Nancy C. Kula and Wyn Johnson Key Terms in Semantics, M. Lynne Murphy and Anu Koskela Key Terms in Discourse Analysis, Paul Baker and Sibonile Ellece Key Terms in Stylistics, Nina Nørgaard, Beatrix Busse and Rocío Montoro Key Terms in Pragmatics, Nicholas Allott Key Terms in Systemic Functional Linguistics, Christian Matthiessen, Marvin Lam and Kazuhiro Teruya Key Terms in Syntax and Syntactic Theory, Silvia Luraghi and Claudia Parodi Key Terms in Discourse Analysis Paul Baker and Sibonile Ellece Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Paul Baker and Sibonile Ellece 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. The Authors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-8470-6320-5 (hardcover) ISBN: 978-1-8470-6321-2 (paperback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Baker, Paul, 1972- Key terms in discourse analysis / Paul Baker and Sibonile Ellece. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84706-320-5 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-84706-321-2 (pbk.) 1. Discourse analysis. 2. Discourse analysis–Terminology. 3. Linguistics–Terminology. I. Ellece, Sibonile. II. Title. P302.B285 2010 401’.41–dc22 2010012771 Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt Ltd Contents Notes on Examples vi The Key Terms 1 The Key Thinkers 160 The Key Texts 186 References 203 Index 227 Notes on Examples Rather than always inventing examples to illustrate points, we have tried to take them from real life uses of language. To achieve this, we have used corpora – large collections of naturally occurring texts that have been collected and electronically transcribed for the purposes of linguistic analysis. The corpora we have used are The British National Corpus (BNC), consisting of approximately 100 million words of written (90%) and spoken (10%) British English mainly pro- duced in the early 1990s. The British English 2006 (BE06) Corpus, consisting of 1 million words of standard British English, collected from 15 written genres and published circa 2006. Where we have included examples from corpora, we have also included file reference numbers. The Key Terms absence An absence is something that could be present in language use or discourse, but is not, possibly for ideological reasons (see van Leeuwen 1996, 1997). For example, Hollway (1995: 60) notes that ‘there is no currently available way of conceptualizing women’s pleasure and active sexual desire . in heterosexual sex which is regarded as consistent with principles of women’s liberation’. Absences can be difficult for discourse analysts to identify because the text itself is unlikely to reveal what is absent, so the analyst is required to refer to additional sources. One method of identifying absence in a particular TEXT is to carry out some sort of comparison, for example, by comparing two similar texts against each other or by comparing a single text against a much large set of ‘reference texts’ via CORPUS LINGUISTICS techniques. Another technique would involve asking multiple analysts to examine the same text in order to gain a range of possible perspectives on what could have been present but is not. See also BACKGROUNDING, ERASURE, EXCLUSION, SILENCE. access Access, in relation to CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS, is concerned with who has access to certain types of discourse or roles and who gets to control the access of other people – therefore access is strongly related to POWER. Van Dijk (1996: 86) points out that in some discourse situations certain roles afford more access than others – so in education, teachers have more control over educational discourse than students, while in health settings, doctors have more control over the discourse – such as what can be discussed or the setting or timing of an interaction. Access (or lack of it) therefore plays an important role in reinforcing existing power relations. While many westernized societies 2 accounts stress concepts like ‘free speech’ or ‘equal opportunities’, at times patterns of access in those societies may not reflect these ideals. For example, Fairclough (1989: 62–68) discusses a number of ways in which access to discourse is unequally distributed across societies. Literacy plays an important role in determining access – people who have poor literacy (the vast majority who are working class in the United Kingdom) are unlikely to have access to higher education. Fairclough (1989: 65) argues that ‘the educational system reproduces . the existing social division of labour, and the existing system of class relations’. In addition, formality represents another way that access is constrained – many contexts which involve the exercise of power (such as politics, law, education, medicine or the media) tend to require people to participate in formal situations. Therefore, special knowledge and skills normally need to be acquired in order for people to gain access to those situations. Particular forms of jargon or POLITENESS strategies need to be learnt. As some people do not have access to ways of learning how to participate in these formal situ- ations, they will therefore never be able to be participants in them (see also CAPITAL). accounts Scott and Lyman (1968: 46) define accounts as the social process of how people present themselves, particularly when engaged in lapses of conven- tionality. Such people are likely to use an ‘account . a statement . to explain unanticipated or untoward behavior’. Scott and Lyman categorize excuses and justifications as types of accounts. The examination of accounts is a key aspect of DISCURSIVE PSYCHOLOGY (e.g. Potter and Wetherell 1987), which has shown that people attempt to construct cohesive accounts of their beha- viour and attitudes that may actually be contradictory when subjected to qualitative analysis. adjacency pair In CONVERSATION ANALYSIS, an adjacency pair consists of two functionally related turns, each made by a different speaker (Schegloff and Sacks 1973). The first adjective 3 turn of the pair requires a relevant response (the second turn). Pairs can take various forms, for example, invitation – acceptance (or rejection) request – acceptance (or denial) greeting – greeting assessment – agreement (or disagreement) blame – denial (or admission) question – answer The response in the second part of the turn can be categorized as preferred or dispreferred. Generally, the preferred second is the shorter, less compli- cated response, while the dispreferred second tends to be longer and requires more conversational work. In example 1 below from Atkinson and Drew (1979: 58), the second part of the adjacency pair is a preferred response, while example 2 shows a typical dispreferred second which contains a delay: ‘hehh’; a marker: ‘well’; an appreciation of the offer: ‘that’s awfully sweet of you’; a declination: ‘I don’t think I can make it this morning’; a further delay: ‘hh uhm’; and an ACCOUNT: ‘I’m running an ad . and I have to stay near the phone’. (See also TURN-TAKING.) Example 1 A: Why don’t you come up and see me some time? B: I would like to. Example 2 A: Uh, if you’d care to come and visit a little while this morning, I’ll give you a cup of coffee. B: Hehh, well, that’s awfully sweet of you. I don’t think I can make it this morning, hh uhm, I’m running an ad in the paper and uh I have to stay near the phone. adjective An adjective is a word which describes something, usually being used to give additional information about a noun or pronoun. Many adjectives can be evaluative and are thus important in discursive representation as they reveal 4 agency author stance: ‘The waiter was a portly middle-aged man, deferential but dignified’ (BNC, ASN). Leech (1966: 151) notes that adjectives tend to be extremely common in advertising discourse. Some adjectives can be gradable, happy, happier, happiest, although others are not, dead. Another distinction can be made between attributive and predicative adjectives, which can have consequences for discourse representation. An attributive adjective directly modifies a noun (the gay man), whereas predicat- ive adjectives are often used with copula (he is gay). In the former, the adjective appears as one descriptive component of a person’s IDENTITY, potentially allowing for other representations, whereas in the latter, the adjectival trait becomes foregrounded, with the referent appearing to be the sum of the adjective and nothing more. Another strategy, where adjectives are trans- formed into nouns (he’s a gay), even further represents a person as embodying a single, essential trait. agency Agency is an important aspect of the REPRESENTATION of SOCIAL ACTORS. A grammatical agent is a participant in a situation who carries out an action. Linguistic agency refers to how characters or objects are represented in relation to each other. In example 1, the policeman is the agent, while the woman is the patient. Example 1 The policeman attacked the woman. The term agent is sometimes confused with the term SUBJECT – and in some cases, an agent and a subject are the same things, as in example 1.