Brown Gillian, Yule George. Discourse Analysis

Cambridge University Press, 1988. — 298 p. — (Cambridge Textbooks in Lingustics). — ISBN: 521241448 (hard covers); ISBN: 521284759 (paperback).The term ‘discourse analysis’ has come to be used with a wide range of meanings which cover a wide range of activities. It is used to describe activities at the intersection of disciplines as diverse as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, philosophical linguistics and computational linguistics. Scholars working centrally in these different disciplines tend to concentrate on different aspects of discourse. Sociolinguists are particularly concerned with the structure of social interaction manifested in conversation, and their descriptions emphasise features of social context which are particularly amenable to sociological classification. They are concerned with generalising across ‘real’ instances of language in use, and typically work with transcribed spoken data. Psycholinguists are particularly concerned with issues related to language comprehension. They typically employ a tight methodology derived from experimental psychology, which investigates problems of comprehension in short constructed texts or sequences of written sentences. Philosophical linguists, and formal linguists, are particularly concerned with semantic relationships between constructed pairs of sentences and with their syntactic realisations. They are concerned, too, with relationships between sentences and the world in terms of whether or not sentences are used to make statements which can be assigned truth-values. They typically investigate such relationships between constructed sentences attributed to archetypal speakers addressing archetypal hearers in (minimally specified) archetypal contexts. Computational linguists working in this field are particularly concerned with producing models of discourse processing and are constrained, by their methodology, to working with short texts constructed in highly limited contexts. It must be obvious that, at this relatively early stage in the evolution of discourse analysis, there is often rather little in common between the various approaches except the discipline which they all, to varying degrees, call upon: linguistics.In this book we take a primarily linguistic approach to the analysis of discourse. We examine how humans use language to communicate and, in particular, how addressers construct linguitic messages for addressees and how addressees work on linguistic messages in order to interpret them. We call on insights from all of the inter-disciplinary areas we have mentioned, and survey influential work done in all these fields, but our primary interest is the traditional concern of the descriptive linguist, to give an account of how forms of language are used in communication.Since the study of discourse opens up uncircumscribed areas, interpenetrating with other disciplines, we have necessarily had to impose constraints on our discussion. We deal, for example, only with English discourse, in order to be able to make direct appeal to the reader’s ability to interpret the texts we present, as well as to well-described and relatively well-understood features of English syntax and phonology. Many of the issues we raise are necessarily only briefly discussed here and we have to refer the reader to standard works for a full account. Even within English we have chosen only to deal with a few aspects of discourse processing and have ignored other tempting, and certainly profitable, approaches to the investigation (tense, aspect, modality etc.). We try to show that, within discourse analysis, there are contributions to be made by those who are primarily linguists, who bring to bear a methodology derived from descriptive linguistics. We have assumed a fairly basic, introductory knowledge of linguistics and, where possible, tried to avoid details of formal argumentation, preferring to outline the questions addressed by formalisms in generally accessible terms.