Discourse Analysis

Discourse Analysis
Traditional linguists and philosophers of language, as well as literary students of style and stylistics, have typically focused their analyses on isolated units of language the sentence, or even single words, phrases, and figures in abstraction from the specific circumstances of an utterance. Discourse analysis, on the other hand, as inaugurated in the 1970s, concerns itself with the use of language in a running discourse, continued over a sequence of sentences, and involving the interaction of speaker (or writer) and auditor (or reader) in a specific situational context, and within a framework of social and cultural conventions. Emphasis on discourse as occurring within specific cultural conditions and under particular circumstances derives from a number of investigators and areas of research, including the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer in hermeneutics, the concern of Michel Foucault with the institutional conditions and power- structures that serve to make given statements accepted as authoritative or true, and the work of Clifford Geertz and other cultural anthropologists on the rootedness of linguistic and other meanings in the social forms and practices specific to a cultural community. (See the above writers, under interpretation and hermeneutics and new historicism.) The current use of discourse analysis in literary studies was given special impetus by the speech-act philosopher H. P. Grice, who in 1975 coined the term implicature to account for indirection in discourse; for example, to explain how we are able to identify the illocutionary force of an utterance that lacks an explicit indicator of its illocutionary intention. Thus, how can we account for the fact that the utterance, "Can you pass the salt?" although it is in the syntactical form of a question, can be used by the speaker, and correctly understood by the hearer, as a polite form of request? (H. P. Grice, "Logic and Conversation," 1975, reprinted in his Studies in the Way of Words, 1989.) Grice proposed that users of a language share a set of implicit expectations which he calls the "communicative presumption"—for example, that an utterance is intended by a speaker to be true, clear, and above all relevant. If an utterance seems purposely to violate these expectations, we seek to make sense of it by transferring it to a context in which it is clearly appropriate. Other language theorists have continued Grice's analysis of the collective assumptions that help to make utterances meaningful and intelligible, and serve also to make a sustained dis- course a coherent development of signification instead of a mere collocation of independent sentences. One such assumption is that the hearer shares with the speaker (or the reader shares with the writer) a large body of nonlinguistic knowledge and experience; another is that the speaker is using language in a way that is intentional, purposive, and in accordance with linguistic and cultural conventions; a third is that there is a shared knowledge of the complex ways in which the meaning of a locution varies with the particular situation, as well as with the type of discourse, in which it is uttered.