In Teun van Dijk (ed.), Introduction to Discourse Analysis. London: Sage, 1996, 35-62.

The Story of Discourse Analysis

Robert de Beaugrande

In the mid-1990s, providing a ‘user-friendly’ introductory survey of the research trends which have contributed to discourse analysis is a tough problem. My solution is to ‘tell a story‘ highlighting the main ideas that have helped or hindered discourse analysis, crediting projects or researchers only for illustration. Many citations and references are found elsewhere.¹

A. ‘Science’ as map-making

In the popular ‘story of science’, scientists observe things in the real world and then describe or explain them accurately, steadily piling up more facts and marching on toward the final truth. A more accurate, though less dramatic, story would tell of scientists drawing a series of maps for a rugged and periodically shifting terrain that is not located in the ‘real world’ of ordinary experience yet is connected to it in ways the scientists determine. This terrain requires specialised methods for observing, describing, or explaining. Each map fits the vision of its makers and the intentions of its users, putting some features or places into sharp perspective and ignoring others, just as ordinary maps look different if they show roads, climates, altitudes, or mineral deposits. No scientific map is ever final or complete, just as no ordinary map ever becomes identical with the terrain.

Again like an ordinary map, a scientific map gets tested by seeing how well it helps people find things. The natural sciences make maps of a sparse terrain — one that can be disconnected from the rich and messy world of ordinary reality. Looking at the world around us and the society we live in, we do not see the forces and particles of physics, or the compounds and polymers of chemistry, or even the cells and neurons of biology. But these sciences give us reliable maps revealing these things in the underlying order of reality, and give special instruments for observing, such as microscopes and particle accelerators. Some instruments can even intervene in those orders, e.g., by splitting atoms, synthesising compounds, or removing unhealthy cells.

The human sciences, in contrast, face a rich terrain closely connected to human activities. Here, observing ordinary experience is much easier than deciding what ‘underlying order’ to look for and what instruments to use for observing, let alone for intervening, e.g., to render humans more co-operative (Part F).

The human sciences have drawn two kinds of maps. Outside maps try to record what people are actually observed to do, e.g., how people within a culture and society behave in the roles of chiefs, priests, warriors, hunters, farmers, and so on. Inside maps try to infer from observations and introspections what people think and believe and how they organise their knowledge of the world and of their society. Drawing both kinds of maps together might be worthwhile, using the one kind to better understand the other and trying to show the whole big picture of human life. But until recently, most scientists and philosophers have recommended drawing only one kind or the other to suit the changing fashions of science. The recent struggle to regain the big picture was major motive for discourse analysis, as we shall see.

B. Disconnecting the ‘science of language’ from discourse

This general ‘story of science’ sets the scene for our more specific ‘story of language science’. Surely, science should investigate the capacities of human beings for using the natural languages developed by a culture or society for communication in everyday life. But language is immensely rich — vastly connected to many things in many ways. How can science tackle it or keep it from spilling into the terrain of other human sciences, like history, anthropology, sociology, and psychology?

The ‘language science’ of the 20th century, known as modern linguistics, resolved to disconnect language and study it by itself.² But in the world of human beings, you won’t find a language by itself — the Dutch language strolling by the canals, or the English language having a nice cup of tea, or the German language racing madly along the Autobahn. You only find discourse, that is, real communicative events. So ever since, linguists have been trying to reconstruct language disconnected from discourse, believing that it should be done to create a proper ‘science’ and not seriously question whether it actually could be done.

Let’s watch what happened in the ‘story of language science’ during the first half of the 20th century. Language got divided up into various ‘domains’ to be studied separately, starting with the ones that are easier to disconnect from discourse. Linguistics made a fine start by describing the simplest language sounds in the domain of phonology. A grand vision of ‘underlying order’: beneath all the practical sound-units that speakers of a language actually produce or recognise lies an ideal system of theoretical sound-units called phonemes we can precisely describe. In physical terms, for pronouncing the sound of ‘d’ in an English word like ‘daunting’, the front teeth stop the flow of air and the vocal chords vibrate; just try it. If the vocal chords didn’t vibrate, you’d get ‘t’ in ‘taunting’. So we can classify the sound of ‘d’ as the ‘voiced dental stop’ in the system of ‘English phonemes’. The system nicely connects back to the real world and yields a convincing ‘map’ of the anatomy of the mouth, nose, and vocal tract with the locations and events for producing ‘phonemes’. In mental terms, each ‘phoneme’ must allow us to tell the difference between words that are also different in meaning, say ‘daunting’ versus ‘taunting’. So we get both an outside map of how sounds are pronounced, and an inside map of what sounds speakers tell apart in words. Moreover, our ‘phonemes’ match the letters in the alphabet, which was tidied up and enlarged to make the international phonetic alphabet for recording the ‘phonemes’ of any language.

The next domain of language to study was the simplest meaningful forms, called morphemes, described by morphology — for good luck, the two names rhymed with ‘phonemes’ and ‘phonology’. These theoretical units correspond to word-parts as practical units. You find ‘morphemes’ by writing down language samples and ‘segmenting’ them into the smallest pieces that still seem to mean something. For example, the utterance ‘the labels were blurred and unreadable’ would have 6 words but 11 morphemes:

[1] the+label+s+seem+ed+blur+ed+and+un+read+able

Written this way, little ‘maps’ show language data as a left-to-right series of smallest meaningful units in the same order they are spoken or written. Again, the connected to reality seems clear through the visual image of the segments. But wait — a visual image is far less ‘real’ and permanent than the human vocal tract; and written segments can mislead. If we had ‘ineffable’ or ‘impossible’, not ‘unreadable’, in sample [1], where are the morphemes? English has no verbs ‘to eff’ or ‘to poss’; a native speaker may not know that the stems were borrowed from Latin via French. Do we count them anyway?

Other problems soon arise. How do we make the whole big map of all the ‘morphemes’ in a language, like the phonologists’ map of all the phonemes? Listing all word-parts plus all undividable words is an enormous job. Andidentifying the ‘morphemes’ by segmenting transcribed utterances doesn’t tell us just how to classifying the pieces? In [1], we already see different types of meanings. Some units like ‘‑ed’ have sparse meanings (e.g. ‘past tense’), while others like ‘read’ have rich meanings (e.g. ‘inspect and understand writing’). Thesparse ones come in little sets, such as the set of present and past endings on verbs, whereas the rich ones come in big sets, such as the set of verbs like ‘blur’ and ‘read’. Not surprisingly, the sparse little ones were picked to be the main ‘morphemes’, while the big rich sets were called lexemes, the theoretical units corresponding to words as practical units, and handed over to the domain of lexicology.

We readily recognise the pattern in the science of language called ‘modern linguistics’. The resounding success in describing sounds established the idea that you can indeed disconnect language from real discourse and discover an underlying order. After that, language science had some standard ‘rules’:

(1) Study one domain of language at a time.

(2) Describe each domain as asystem of theoretical units corresponding to the practical units in the data.

(3) Describe each unit by the features that clearly identify it from the rest (e.g.,, being a ‘voiced dental stop’ or being ‘past tense’).

(4) Investigate by carefully transcribing the native speaker’s utterances, segmenting them into units, and classifying the units.

These ‘rules’ worked well in ‘phonology’ and got transferred into ‘morphology’, where they worked under more special conditions. In ‘lexicology’, they started to break down because the number of units is so vast and many have no features to clearly identify them. So lexicology was often left along the margins of linguistics or assigned to ‘lexicographers’, who explore how to make dictionaries.

The next domain had an old name waiting for it: syntax, a name for ‘tying things together’. The units to be tied would presumably be ‘morphemes’ and ‘lexemes’. But what does the tying’? We can only inspect the pieces; we have toinfer the ties. And the usual tactics of segmenting data and then classifying the pieces involvesuntying the pieces, which doesn’t help much.

To be consistent, the theoretical units would be syntagmemes,³ corresponding tophrases andclauses as practical units. But how many units would the whole system have, and how should we find and classify them? Compare sample alternative wordings [1a-1d]: do we give each sentence its own separate description or do we try to show how they are all related?

[1a] the labels were blurred and unreadable

[1b] the labels were blurred and unread

[1c] the labels were too blurred to be readable

[1d] the blurred labels weren’t readable

Linguists decided to the show the relations among similar sentences. The ‘outside maps’ of the units as we find them ‘in’ language data were traded for ‘inside maps’ of underlying patterns and rules that explain how units get tied together to produce the data we find.

This shift raised another important issue for our story: not which data you study butwhere you go searching for your data. The project of studying ‘language by itself’ doesn’t say where because language isn’t found by itself. The search methods that most firmly established linguistics as a science were developed by fieldwork linguistics You draw outside maps by going out to ‘work’ in the ‘field’ of cultural and social activities and carefully recording what native speakers of previously undescribed languages are actually observed to say. Your work is difficult and obliges you to live for extended periods in remote areas. In exchange, you have the privilege of working at the cutting edge of your science and describing a language that was unknown to other scientists.

Also, you have the huge practical advantage of meeting authentic data of natural language in actual contexts of situation, instead oflanguage by itself. Gradually, you join the social practices of interaction and conversation, which supply continual tests: if your conclusions are wrong, you’ll get corrected, misunderstood, teased, or ignored. So you have constant opportunities to check your results before you present them as a ‘map’, And you can justly claim to have made the map the hard way, without relying on personal intuitions the way you could do for your own native language.

The other search method has no special name, so I invented the term homework linguistics. You draw inside maps of language by staying at home or in your office and using introspection and intuition to determine what native speakers know about their language. Being a native speaker yourself, you might decide that fieldwork and authentic data aren’t necessary for doing linguistics. You can do your homework with your own invented data and state the ‘rules’ you were presumably following.

At this point in our story the main definition of a ‘language’ also got shifted: not a set of systems of theoretical units corresponding to the practical units you find in the data, but rather a system of underlying patterns and rules that arrange and transform the data. Looking back at samples [1a], [1b], [1c], and [1d], this system would explain a complicated pattern by transforming it into simpler patterns, e.g., changing [1a] into [1e].

[1a] the labels were blurred and unreadable

[1e] something blurred the labels + someone couldn’t read the labels

The system did not have to explainwhy the more complicated pattern might be actually uttered. So linguistics could continue officially studying ‘language by itself’, represented by handfuls of invented sentences and still disconnected from ordinary discourse.

But here our story begins to look bleak. After three decades of research on syntax, no such system of underlying patterns and rules has yet been produced for any natural language. All we have is a pile of fragments such a system might contain, but no idea how they fit together and how we can supply the rest. The problem is simple and, I am convinced, unsolvable: the arrangement of words in phrases and sentences is decided only partly by syntax, and partly by speakers’ knowledge of the world and of their society. To explain the arrangement, we must reconnect language with that knowledge and shelve the project of describing language by itself. And we must quit working with invented data and start working with authentic data. These prospects are precisely what discourse analysis intends to achieve.

C. Reconnecting the ‘science of language’ to discourse: Large-corpus linguistics

My story so far was naturally too simple. Many distinguished linguists never proposed to disconnect language from discourse, such as American tagmemics, the Prague school, and British systemic functional linguistics, whose projects are reviewed in Part E. And fieldwork linguists, as I said, maintained the connection in practice regardless of their official theories.

Nonetheless, the majority view in linguistics has usually been that discourse is too rich and diversified, too intimately tied to the ordinary world of human activities, such as casual conversations among friends or family, to be a proper object for science. In the vision of one leading discourse analyst, Joseph Grimes (1975: 2), ‘linguists’ might feel ‘like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike’, fearfully imagining ‘the whole wild sea out there’ — ‘business letters, conversations, restaurant menus, novels, laws’, ‘movie scripts, editorials, without end’. So we can appreciate why ‘discourse analysis’ has, until recently, rarely been a title for academic courses, or for chapters in introductory textbooks, or for sections in congresses of linguistics

Today, the scientific trend carrying the label of discourse analysis is increasingly conceived to be a programmatic counter-current to the self-conscious ‘disconnection programme’ sketched in part B. We emphatically define language as a system integrated with speakers’ knowledge of the world and society. This system should be described inlinguistic, cognitive, and social terms, along with the conditions under which speakers use it. Our precepts might seem to make the job of describing language messier and less disciplined than the old programme. In fact, I shall claim just the opposite.

For the old programme language, was a uniform and stable system defined in its own terms — it had one ideal underlying order beneath the mass of particular data. If this idea were correct, then linguistics should plainly reveal three kinds of success:

(1) the coverage of a language should keep getting wider;

(2) the various descriptions should converge; and

(3) linguists or linguistic schools should reach a firm consensus about how to proceed.

But we actually see a mixed picture: very high success in phonology and fairly high in morphology, middling in lexicology, and low in syntax. In my story, the mix has to happen because these domains are not equally easy to disconnect from real discourse, especially after you’ve booted out fieldwork with authentic data in favour of homework with invented data. To make real headway on coverage, convergence; and consensus, we must regard language as a diverse and dynamic system designed to provide the means for human communication. The system does not have or need one underlying theoretical order because it is constantly creating multiple modes of practical order wherever discourse takes place. When you try to disconnect the system from discourse, those modes of order dissolve, and you start imagining all sorts of complicated rules for ‘assigning structures’, ‘disambiguating meanings’, and so on — for solving the very problems you’ve created by disconnecting. But if you insist on connections between language discourse, these problems don’t arise.

To see my point, let’s examine one recent linguistic approach, which has by far the most real data ever assembled. Large-corpus linguistics, as pioneered by John McHardy Sinclair and his team, exploits the advanced technology of powerful computers with spacious memories to gain ‘access to a quality of evidence that has not been available before’ (Sinclair 1991: 4). Intriguingly, the Sinclair team, whose ‘functional linguistics’ I cited at the start of Part C, were among the earliest linguists to call their research ‘discourse analysis’ (e.g. Sinclair & Coulthard 1975; see Part E). Today, Sinclair compares his computer to the instruments and technologies that enabled swift advances in other sciences, such as the microscopes and particle accelerators I mentioned way back in Part A. Of course, the computer differs by displaying evidence that was easy to observe before, but too plentiful and diverse to manage. The computer enables us to see patterns that don’t emerge either from modest sets of samples or from the introspection and intuition — a very different ‘underlying order’ than sets of ‘theoretical units’ and ‘syntactic rules’. Instead of just making general statements about ‘the English language’, we can use the data base to explore how general or specific our statements ought to be.

My data here were taken from the ‘Bank of English’ corpus at the University of Birmingham, storing around 200 million words of authentic spoken and written English discourse from books, newspapers, radio broadcasts, telephone conversations, letter-box mailings, radio broadcasts, and so on. The primary data display consists of the key words we pick to search for, plus their collocations, i.e., the ‘company they usually keep’.⁴ For the English verb ‘warrant’ as key word, some of the corpus data I found are shown here:⁵

< their circumstances simply do not warrant charitable assistance. <t> For >

< bark disease. Degenerating trees warrant specialist attention. Felling or >

< Costa Rica’s economic conditions warrant the cut in aid, which the country >

< insists there is enough evidence to warrant an investigation / One suggestion >

< the national objectives at stake warrant the deaths of U.S. troops / Oil, >

< these old homes are chilly enough to warrant guests wearing thermal long johns >

< revelations of an affair did not warrant my leaving the Government. <t> I >

Before looking at the data, I had no clear idea of the meaning and uses of the verb ‘warrant’, and I hardly use it myself. Now, I can define the meaning as: ‘provide an occasion where a reaction would be appropriate or expected’. I can also tell which people are likely to utter such data: one who might be expected to react, or somebody reporting what they said. The contexts imply public exposure, where the discourse would raise large issues like ‘economic conditions’ or ‘national objectives’. So the typical speaker represents some institution or authority, and the data also tell what kind: government, judiciary, military, sports, business, science, and medicine. To use the word is to engage in a subtle gesture of power — maybe why I don’t use it.

The data also showed me something else my intuition couldn’t supply: the occasions doing the ‘warranting’ are usually bad ones, so that the reaction would control the ill effects or punish the persons responsible. The most common collocation was whether ‘evidence warrants an investigation’ or a ‘trial’, recalling the legal discourse with the noun ‘warrant’ in collocations like ‘search warrant’ or ‘warrant for arrest’. So if we read ‘there wasn’t a single incident to warrant any action from me’ we can assume it was a bad ‘incident’ calling for retaliatory ‘action’. Often, the situation is even more specific: when something bad happens or gets discovered, excuses are made why the expected reaction won’t happen, as when the ‘revelations of an affair did not warrant my leaving the Government’, or when somebody else’s ‘circumstances simply do not warrant charitable assistance’ from me. Such uses are gestures for showing power while denying responsibility.

Authentic discourse samples also show that infrequent data may be no harder to manage than frequent data. We easily tell what is meant when ‘degenerating trees warrant specialist attention’ or when ‘old homes are chilly enough to warrant thermal long johns’. Even odd or vague data appear simple, e.g.:

[2] < shampoos are effective enough to warrant only one shampoo per wash.>

[3] < the White House says these air leaks do not warrant military interception >

[2] was probably intended to praise a commodity, the shampoos’ (substances) that ‘warrant only one shampoo’ (one act of use). In military discourse like [3], an ‘air leak’ can have the unusual meaning of aeroplanes or missiles rather than air passing through.

As you see, describing authentic language data does not get messier and less disciplined when we retain the connections to human knowledge of world and society. On the contrary, the data only get that way when we try to disconnect them by segmenting them into theoretical units or writing ‘underlying rules’ or ‘features’.

Large corpuses offer valuable support for the project of discourse analysis to return to authentic data. This support is all the more vital now that the label has caught on, and many studies claim to be ‘discourse analysis’ while still writing abstract ‘rules’ for invented data, rather like a textbook called ‘modern astronomy’ but still teaching astrology.

Large-corpus linguistics also promises unprecedented advances in coverage as big teams of linguists with sophisticated software collaborate in the description of corpus data. Descriptions would tend to converge, thanks to maintaining rich connections. And we should reach a consensus because we are using our shared linguistic, cognitive, and social skills, which are also shared by the people who produced the data in the fist place.

Now, Joe Grimes was right about that ‘whole wild sea’ that a science of discourse must confront, as quoted near the start of Part C. But having so much data has the advantage of forcing us to consider and explain the human relevance that justifies us doing one project in discourse analysis rather than some other. Even my brief demonstration with ‘warrant’ raised the issues of power and responsibility you soon encounter when you quit segmenting or analysing ‘sentence structures’ and start asking who says what and why.

D. Language and discourse, science and power

The popular ‘story of science’ (invoked at the very beginning) observing things in the ‘real world’ and describing or explaining them accurately handily conceals the prospect that science has power — power to say what the ‘truths’ shall be, who gets to state them and decide what they mean, and who gets to learn them and where. Even better concealed is the prospect that science also has responsibility — to consider and influence how its results will be used to make life better or worse, safer or riskier, more humane or inhumane. This responsibility is greatest when the object of investigation happens to be discourse: the main human channel for organising life and deciding who knows or does what — whether knowledge and power will be shared or hoarded, whether people accept or deny responsibility for what they do or say, and so forth.

Now, if a science of discourse analysis neglects its responsibility, we are not just being cynical or lazy; we are also bypassing the most humanly relevant issues within our own domain. If participating in discourse carries social responsibility, participating in a science discourse carries far more, as we get a steadily clearer and larger picture of how some people are much better than others at using discourse to reach their goals.

To prevent misunderstandings, we must stress the contrast between our programme versus the campaign of traditional grammar. Since ancient times, language guardians have been rallying to ‘preserve good language’ and ‘rescue it from destruction by vulgar speech’. They invoked such lofty ideals as ‘logic’ and ‘purity’, but their real motive was to legitimise the language variety of powerful people as the only ‘correct’ or ‘proper usage’. In this way, other people could be disempowered by excluding them from public discourse or else forcing them to participate with feelings of anxiety or humiliation. So most of the ‘incorrect’ or ‘improper’ usages were picked out from the normal language of the social groups who were to be disempowered.

We must understand that the issues of usage over which the campaign was usually fought were unrelated to successful communication, and why. They were technical or finicky fine-points worked out or just made up by the ‘language guardians’, typically schoolmasters or clerics who were naturally self-conscious about their speech and keen to supplement their meagre incomes by giving lessons or writing books and treatises about ‘correct usage’. Having no scientific methods of gathering and sorting data, the guardians just followed their own intuitions and wishful thinking.

Over the years, long disorganised lists have been compiled and passed along, in handbooks or schoolbooks, of all the things you should or should not say. In school, pupils are regaled with bales of confusing and impractical advice purporting to ‘improve’ their language. Most of the pupils who prosper come from social backgrounds whose language varieties already resemble the ‘proper’ variety. A few others succeed in switching to the ‘proper variety’ though great diligence, but risk sounding a bit awkward in ‘proper society’ and very awkward among friends and family. The rest just leave school convinced they still don’t speak or write ‘good English’, now regarded as a mysterious game whose rules change from teacher to teacher and never get clearly explained. Indeed, it’s a game everybody is told to play if they want a good life, but the rules are made so confusing and complicated that people need special lessons at exclusive places fittingly called ‘grammar schools’.

In this game, prissy and irrelevant rules have a good market value to mystify ordinary people If you proclaim it ‘wrong’ to ‘put a preposition at the end of sentence’, people struggle to say fussy thing things like [4] and hesitate to say things like [5] and [6], where the alternatives are plain awful.

[4] to whom did you give it? [not: whom did you give it to?]

[5] what did she look like? [awful: like what did she look?]

[6] he’s worth listening to [awful: to him is worth listening]

Such ‘rules’ are in effect unworkable solutions for imaginary problems, and reveal an insensitivity for English grammar: an expression such as ‘look like’, ‘listen to’, or ‘pay for’ is not verb + preposition but rather a phrasal verb that can no more be taken apart than can ‘resemble’ or ‘hear’.

I am not suggesting some grand conspiracy among teachers of English; many have sincerely aspired to improve the English language and to help ordinary people. Instead, educational practices have evolved and survived to suit the fundamental contradiction in the ideology of Western societies between inclusive theory versus exclusive practice (Beaugrande 1996). In theory, all citizens have the same basic human rights to free speech, public education, scientific training, and so on; in practice, the great majority are systematically excluded. We can find this contradiction in all our democratic institutions, above all in our public schools, which in theory offer everyone equal chances to succeed by merit and in practice programme many young people for a lifetime of failure and poverty (Lemke 1990). Applied to language, the same contradiction favours approaches that in theory teach everyone to speak ‘properly’ and in practice select pupils from privileged backgrounds — quite apart from what the teachers might intend.

The first organised resistance against the campaign of language guardians was mounted when ‘modern linguistics’ declared its resolve to describe actual usage: what people do say and not what language guardians think they should say. ‘The non-standard speaker’ was sensibly counselled to ‘take pride in simplicity of speech and view it as an advantage’ (Bloomfield 1933: 499). But this resolve was stunted by the project, sketched in Part B, of orienting the description toward some ideal underlying order of ‘units’ and ‘rules’, which was too near the old ideals of ‘logic’ and ‘purity’ invoked by grammarians. Providing accurate registers of the ‘phonemes’ and ‘morphemes’ of many languages and language varieties does not yet account for the effective discourse strategies genuinely essential to successful communication. Nor does it supply practical alternatives for language teachers who would gladly relinquish the old campaign against ‘incorrect grammar’. So the prospects for concerted interaction between English teachers and linguists have not moved very far beyond the programmatic stage of hopeful talk about a ‘revolution in teaching’ (Postman & Weingartner 1966).

I raise these issues because we can expect the programme of discourse analysis for supporting effective communication to be both accidentally misunderstood and deliberately misrepresented in contexts of institutional power, where language is currently a major pretext for denying human rights (Phillipson & Skuttnabb-Kangas [eds.] in press). Language guardians will resent us for demystifying their campaign not to ‘improve language’ but to protect privilege and legitimise social and ethnic discrimination. Homework linguists with fancy ‘theories of syntax’ will call us ‘unscientific’ and absurdly lump us together with the language guardians. Both of our opponents parties are high in power and low in responsibility, and bent on maintaining the status quo.

Yet another danger looms, as Teun van Dijk (19__) has foreseen. If we do discover and describe the strategies for effective communication, our results can be co-opted by the same manipulators, indoctrinators, and exploiters who have long been using discourse to seize and secure their power — politicians, demagogues, bureaucrats, profiteers, and advertisers. We cannot prevent them, but we can help ordinary people use discourse to resist their schemes and scams, provided we can make our results widely available in plain language and in readable (or listenable) sources. Either we take our own advice and communicate effectively — or we don’t deserve to be believed any more than our opponents, the snobbish guardians and glib homeworkers.

E. The programme of discourse analysis: Looking back

So far, I have told you why discourse analysis was resisted so long (Part B) and why I think its time has come (Part C). I have also suggested why large-scale projects for helping people to participate in discourse more effectively run counter to powerful interests in society and science (Part D). Next, we can look back the resources and outlooks for a programme of discourse analysis along the lines I have been pursuing.

It’s essential to consider which disciplines might be contributors. One obvious candidate we have already met in Part B: the linguists who developed methods for fieldwork on previously undescribed languages. Instead of ‘language by itself’, you analyse discourse encountered in human interaction, a principle emphasised by American tagmemics (e.g. Pike 1967). Also, you benefit from being ‘defamiliarised’ away from your own culture and meeting ‘strange’ ways of saying and doing things. Evelyn Pike told a story about one culture whose language she was studying, where locations are expressed by the points of the compass rather than the sides of the body. At the approach of a poisonous snake, somebody yelled ‘jump to the east!’

Fieldwork also reveals differing notions about what a language needs to express. For example, Mumiye, a Niger-Congo language, has special forms to indicate when an action is ‘progressive’ (is continuing) or ‘durative’ (goes on for a longer time), such as ‘-yi’ in [7-8] and ‘naa’ in [9] (data reported by Danjuma Gambo, in Longacre et al. 1990: 151f). The piece-by-piece translations indicate what the morphemes contribute, while the idiomatic translations suggest what an English speaker might say:

[7] kpanti nwang kn sha-yi

chief sat food eating-durative

‘the chief sat eating and eating’

[8] sombo da-yi di ya bii ka jaa gbaa

squirrel go-durative go take focus child hoe

‘the squirrel was going to go take a small hoe’

[9] kura gbãa yuu naa

tortoise returning road progressive

‘the tortoise was returning on the road’

English has no special form for ‘durative’; and its ‘progressive’ form with ‘‑ing’ need not indicate that something went on for long time. Often, it indicates an action going on when something else happened (e.g., ‘the tortoise was returning when he met the squirrel’). For some actions, we can use repetition (e.g., ‘eating and eating’) but for others it would sound odd (e.g., ‘returning and returning’ might suggest several different returns rather than one long one). Yet we can rely on our world-knowledge, e.g., that tortoises take a long time to travel — just as the world-knowledge of Mumiye speakers grasps a small hoe as a ‘child hoe’ although nobody saw hoes bear children.

Studying discourse data from unfamiliar languages makes you more sensitive to data from familiar ones. People’s sensitivities to a language like English have long been dulled and distorted by unreliable schoolroom ‘grammars’ (Part D). Moreover, English has been dominated by written culture, encouraging the belief that the order of language only emerges when written down in neat sentences — a belief shared by many homework linguists (Part B). So we have not properly appreciated the different and highly elaborate order of everyday spoken language, as uncovered by ‘conversational analysis’ (see below).

In contrast, the more remote languages of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and South America have been centred on oral cultures. They have been spared from campaigns against ‘incorrect’ usage, and from the bookish equation of orderly language with written language — some never devised writing systems at all. High values were placed on speaking skills in communal activities such as story-telling, which vitally supported cultural traditions against the ravages and dislocations of slavery and colonialism. Whole systems of spoken discourse signals were developed to organise the story-line with its individual events and their participants, as discovered by Longacre and his group (1990) in some 40 languages of East and West Africa. In Gimira, an Omotic language of Ethiopia (data reported by Mary Breeze, in Longacre et al. 1990: 27f), a ‘switch reference marker’ (shown as S/R) is used at the high point of a story when the main characters alternate major actions. We see the marker in the nasal sound ‘-n/m’ affixed to verb-forms in the story [10] about a man named Gartn who was up in a tree collecting honey when he was spotted by a hungry leopard (FUT = future; LOC = location; SUB = subject; STAT = static verb-forms indicating the setting):⁶

[10] panc’i yi tok’an yisti ič gapmk’an wognsi hammsagyis maki

leopard-SUB his foot-LOC being tree branch-LOC having-sat go-FUT-STAT-he saying

bak’u. Taci peški hami šidni iču Gartn nasi esa myac’a kabnsi

waited thinking not-to-go refused Gartn man-SUB honey bees having-wrapped

yi apm hazn m’msi myac’am dusti woc’i koškan wot’i

his face-LOC throwing-S/R having-eaten by-bees being-stung running valley

šičamm yiam gurt’i yisti dodn wornti hank’u.

leaving-descending-S/R by-it trembling being ground-LOC descending went

‘The leopard being at the foot of the tree, he had been sitting on the tree branch and waiting, saying and thinking it would go. It refused to go. Gartn wrapped the honey and the bees and threw them in its face. The bees stung it and it ran away down into the valley. After it had gone, trembling he descended to the ground and left.’

Both the piece-by-piece translation and the more idiomatic one show rapid switches of the agent (the one who does the action) between ‘leopard’ and ‘Gartn’, who are named only once each. We can use world-knowledge to infer from context who is meant, though I have cleared up the English translation by switching between the pronouns ‘he’ versus ‘it’. The switch reference marker only appears for the two decisive actions of Gartn’s ‘throwing’ (‘haz-n’) and the leopard’s finally ‘leaving and descending’ (‘iam-m’) from the valley, and not for less decisive actions like ‘sitting’ and ‘thinking’. We see here how forms and patterns relate to the total discourse and are not merely ‘morphemes’ or ‘sentence structures’ to segment and classify.

We can still find a few discourse signals in traditional English stories. In an 1878 rendering of the familiar folktale ‘Tom Tit Tot’⁷ (a demonic cousin of Rumpelstiltskin), ‘well’ systematically appears at important turning points in the story, often with a shift of time:

[11] Well, once there were a woman and she baked five pies [through a misunderstanding, the king proposes marriages to her daughter if she will spin for him] Well, so they was married [king orders her to spin or die] Well, she were that frightened [she bargains with a demon to do the spinning; she must guess his name or be ‘his’] Well, the next day her husband took her into the room and there were the flax [demon appears and spins] Well, when her husband he come in: there was the five skeins [a cycle of spinning and name-guessing begins] Well, every day the flax and the vittles was brought [king unwittingly reveals name] Well, when the gal heerd this, she fared as if she could have jumped outer her skin for joy [she tells the demon his name] Well, when that heerd her, that shrieked awful and away that flew into the dark

We hardly notice such uses of ‘well’ because the word has many other functions, e.g., as a conversational signal indicating you are about to give a spontaneous opinion.⁸ Also, these functions do not figure in traditional grammar-books; and ‘well’ is not deemed ‘proper’ for written English.

Data like those from Mumiye and Gimira indicate why fieldwork naturally leads into discourse analysis. But only around the mid-1970s did such work adopt the term ‘discourse analysis’ (led by Grimes 1975; Longacre 1976; Grimes [ed.] 1978). By then, linguistics was turning away from the project to disconnect language from discourse and favouring alternative projects

The most important alternative was functional linguistics, which has had several branches. A Czechoslovakian branch, sometimes called the ‘Prague School’ and founded by Vilém Mathesius and his pupils, exploited their knowledge of Slavic languages like Czech and Slovak, where the order of words in a sentence is more flexible than in English and depends crucially on degrees of ‘knownness’ and ‘focus’. In comparison to the more ordinary version [12], the English order [12a] is emphatically focuses on the ‘problems’ by fronting the expression ahead of the sentence subject. In contrast, the Czech version in [12b] (REFL PRON = reflexive pronoun) is not emphatic, showing that ‘what is regarded as unusual in one language need not appear so in another’ (Firbas 1992: 125f).

[12] a computer could take in its stride most of these problems

[12a] most of these problems a computer could take in its stride

[12b] většinou problémů by si počítač hravě poradil.

with most problems it-would REFL PRON computer with-great-ease it-cope

The functional sentence perspective, as this approach has been called (bibliography in Firbas & Golková 1976), revealed previously unnoticed ways for text and context to influence the arrangement of English sentences. In Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘At the Bay’ [13] (analysed by Firbas 1992: 26ff, 74ff), the setting is made the opening theme for Linda Burnell’s appearance on the scene. As in many discourse beginnings, the communicative dynamism — how ‘informative’ the content is — starts out high for the opening sentence [13.1] presenting first the ‘setting’ and then the main person in the story as the subject of the sentence and her ‘dreaming’ action as the main verb. Putting the setting in a long phrase ahead of the subject suggests that the story will highlight the setting.

[13.1] In a steamer chair under a manuka tree that grew in the middle of the front grass patch, Linda Burnell dreamed the morning away. [13.2] She did nothing. [13.3] She looked up at the dark, close, dry leaves

Though we cannot anticipate a ‘steamer chair’ or an exotic ‘manuka tree’, it is normal for a chair to be placed ‘under a tree’ and for a tree to ‘grow’ in a ‘grass patch’; in such a pastoral setting, ‘dreaming’ is a typical action too. In contrast, the dynamism of [13.2] is uniformly low: the pronoun subject ‘she’ is already identified, and the activity of ‘doing nothing’ is expected from a ‘dreaming’ person. [13.3] is a bit higher, with the same pronoun subject ‘she’; and someone in a reclining chair under a tree easily looks up and sees ‘leaves’, though we might not anticipate them being ‘dark’ or ‘close’.

Starting the story line for the whole discourse thus way indicates that the main character is Linda Burnell and that we’ll learn what she ‘dreams’ about. Also, prominently placing the setting at the start suggests that the dream will be associated with the tree; a lengthy reverie about ‘flowers’ indeed ensues, and about Linda ‘feeling like a leaf’. As a British writer, Mansfield probably hoped the ‘manuka’ species of tree would make the story more informative than a typical British tree. In the Gimira story [10], in contrast, the ‘tree’ setting remains unspecified, the ‘thematic’ focus of attention being the plight of a man who, if ‘dreaming’ about anything, then about being safe at home away from leopards.

The British branch of functionalism, led by linguists like J.R. Firth, Michael Halliday, and John Sinclair, also rejected the disconnection of ‘language by itself’ and studied what speakers actually say. Sinclair’s group pioneered ‘discourse analysis’ through fieldwork on classroom discourse. Instead of ‘linguistic units’ and ‘rules’, the main terms highlighted discourse moves like initiation, nomination, andfollow-up by the teacher, and bid and response by a learner, e.g. in [14]:⁹

[14] Initiation T Give me a sentence using an animal’s name as food, please.

Response L1 We shall have a beef for supper tonight.

Follow-up T Good. That’s almost right, but ‘beef’ is uncountable so it’s ‘we shall have beef’, not ‘we shall have a beef’.

Initiation Try again, someone else.

Bid L2 Sir

Nomination T Yes Freddie

Response L2 We shall have a plate of sheep for supper tonight.

Follow-up T No, we don’t eat ‘sheep’, we eat ‘mutton’, or ‘lamb’.

Initiation Say it correctly.

Response L2 We shall have a plate of mutton for supper tonight.

Follow-up T Good. We shall have mutton for supper. Don’t use ‘a plate’ when there’s more than one of you.

Such discourse plainly occurs only in classrooms, pursuing the old campaign for ‘correct’ usage (Part D). The pupils are not to tell what they like to eat and why, or how to cook it. The task is far more artificial: saying ‘an animal’s name as food’, which easily traps pupils with the tricky English usage of French loan-words for the foods (e.g. ‘mutton’, ‘beef’, ‘veal’) instead of the animals’ usual names. Communication is subordinated to fine points of usage that the teacher illustrates without giving useful explanations.

Several British functionalists were guided by knowing Oriental languages like Chinese, rather than Slavic ones; and they too brought new insights into English. They developed a view of language being a network of options that are assigned their functions when language is used in discourse. Instead of ‘correctness’, the key criterion is markedness, e.g., to emphasise ‘these problems’ in [12a]. This ‘network’ view carries the British brand name of systemic functional linguistics’ and assumes that the organisation of a language is expressly designed to support its use.

One classic demonstration, also a model for stylistics, was given by Halliday for William Golding’s The Inheritors. To evoke a ‘Neanderthal tribe’s point of view’, Golding uses clause patterns whose ‘subjects are not people’ but ‘parts of the body or inanimate objects’; the effect is ‘an atmosphere of ineffectual activity’ and ‘helplessness’, and a ‘reluctance to envisage the “whole man”’ ‘participating in a process’ (1973: 123, 125). When the Neanderthal Lok watches a person from a more advanced tribe shooting an arrow at him, the event is expressed as a series of natural processes performed by a ‘stick’ and a ‘twig’:

[15] The bushes twitched again [...] The man turned sideways in the bushes and looked at Lok along his shoulder. A stick rose upright and there was a lump of bone in the middle [...] The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot out to full length again. The dead tree by Lok’s ear acquired a voice. ‘Clop!’ His ear twitched and he turned to the tree. By his face there had grown a twig. (Golding 1955: 106f)

These choices deliberately omit the connection between ‘stick’ and ‘twig’ in a single weapon of bow and arrow, plus the causes and effects involved, e.g., bending and releasing the bow, seen head-on as a stick ‘growing shorter at both ends’ and then ‘shooting out to full length’ and propelling the ‘lump of bone’ and its shaft to ‘the tree by his face’. Lok’s notion of a ‘dead tree’ suddenly ‘growing a twig’ symbolises the Neanderthals’ archaic and mystified world-view, dooming them to a destruction they can neither understand nor resist, at the hands of a more evolved people.

Another contributor to discourse analysis would be the discipline of sociolinguistics, which reconnects language with society by studying the language varieties corresponding to differences in social, regional, and economic status. These varieties differ not just in sound patterns, but also in discourse patterns, depending especially on whether the participants come from a more ‘written’ or more ‘oral’ culture. When shown a series of pictures and asked to tell the story, middle-class children from written cultures specified nouns for things like ‘boys’ and ‘window’ in [16], whereas the working-class children from oral cultures, assuming anybody can see what’s meant, used pronouns like ‘they’ and ‘he’ and pointing expressions like ‘there’, e.g. [16a].¹⁰

[16] three boys are playing football and one boy kicks the ball and it goes through the window

[16a] they’re playing football and he kicks it and it goes through there

In Basil Bernstein’s (1964) unwisely-named ‘deficit hypothesis’, working-class people with a more ‘restricted code’ are also more limited in their mental capacities than middle-class people with a more ‘elaborated code’. This hypothesis triggered a storm of controversy because both common sense and science wrongly assume that ‘intelligence’ is a fixed and innate capacity, which would lead to the offensive hypothesis that the working class is genetically inferior; Bernstein was claiming instead that social conditions create disparities in mental capacities, including ones for using language. The idea that intelligence is a social construct is repugnant to many Western scientists and educators, because it demystifies our fundamental contradiction between inclusive theory versus exclusive practice (Part D), and the alibi of education that failure is caused by the biological and psychological limitations of individuals. Moreover, Bernstein’s work suggested that the ‘remedial programmes’ tacked onto ordinary schooling to bring pupils’ language varieties into line with the ‘standard’ would be ineffective — as we now know. Improvement demands transforming the social conditions under which intelligence and discourse competence are constructed, away from producing and legitimising inequalities over toward supporting equality in practice as well as in theory (see Part F).

The most detailed picture of real talk in society has been supplied by the analysis of conversation in ethnomethodology. Its home discipline was sociology, which developed its own methods to study language rather than borrowing them from linguistics. Harold Garfinkel (1974) reported coining the term ethnomethodology after such terms as ‘ethnoscience’ or ‘ethnomedicine’ for people’s commonsense knowledge of what ‘science’ or ‘medicine’ do. His method proposed studying real conversational data and uncovering the participants’ commonsense ‘methodology’ for ordinary social interactions.

This method focused for more on real speakers than linguistics, and upon oral culture, this time in familiar languages like English (Part B). Conversation is usually managed by its participants quite tightly and fluently, with few conspicuous breaks or disturbances. The significance of utterances is clearly a function of the ongoing interaction as a whole rather than just the meanings or words or phrases, witness this bit of taped conversation collected by Emmanuel Schegloff (1987: 208f) (small capitals show emphasis; brackets show overlap; colons indicate lengthened sounds):

[17.1] B. Well, honey? I’ll probl’y see yuh one a’ these days

[17.2] A. Oh::: God yeah

[17.3] B: éUhh huh!

[17.4] A: ëWe—

[17.5] A: But I c— I jis’ écouldn’ git down éthere

[17.6] B: ëOh— ëOh I know I’m not askin

éyuh tuh écome down

[17.7] A: ëJesus ëI mean I just didn’t have five minutes yesterday

Two middle-aged sisters who haven’t visited each other for some time are conversing on the telephone. Sister B probably intends to signal a closing with the usual reference to a future seeing [17.1], as in English ‘see ya’, French ‘au revoir’, German ‘Auf Wiedersehen’, etc. But sister A understands a complaint about not having visited, and makes excuses for why she ‘jis’ couldn’ git down there’ [17.5]. Sister B displays that she appreciates A’s problems and signals that she was not pressing her claims to a visit, overlapping with A’s excuse of ‘not having five minutes yesterday’ [17.6-7].

Ethnomethodologists like Schegloff emphasise that the conversational analysis can document its own interpretations with those made by the actual participants, in this case, A’s misunderstanding and B’s venture to amend it. The theory thus stays far closer to the practice than in ‘homework linguistics’ (Part B). Though ‘often unnoticed or underappreciated in casual observation or even effortful recollection of how talk goes’, the ‘detailed practices and features of the conduct of talk — hesitations, anticipations, apparent disfluencies, or inconsequential choices’ — ‘are strikingly accessible to empirical inquiry’ (Schegloff 1992). This lesson should be noted by linguists and philosophers.

The empirical lesson came more easily to the discipline called text linguistics (early survey in Dressler 1972). Predictably, some early ‘text linguists’ tried constructing a disconnected theoretical unit of ‘language by itself’ called (what else?) the ‘texteme’ and represented by complicated and impenetrable formulas. But a text disconnected from context resembles a miscellaneous array like a pattern on wallpaper.

Most text linguists gradually reconnected texts to discourse participants’ knowledge of world and society. We developed the concept of textuality: not just a set of ‘theoretical units’ or ‘rules’, but a human achievement in making connections wherever communicative events occur (cf. Beaugrande & Dressler 1981). The connections among linguistic forms like words or word-endings make up Cohesion, and those among the ‘meanings’ or ‘concepts’ make up Coherence; Intentionality covers what speakers intend, and Acceptability what hearers engage to do; Informativity concerns how new or unexpected the content is; Situationality concerns ongoing circumstances of the interaction; and Intertextuality covers relations with other texts, particularly ones from the same or a similar ‘text type’.

We can demonstrate these seven principles with a short ‘Classified’ advert from Psychology Today (August 1983, p. 82) under the heading ‘Parapsychology’.

[18] Harness witchcraft’s powers! Gavin and Yvonne Frost, world’s foremost witches, now accepting students. Box 1502P, Newbern, NC 28560.

Here, general Intertextuality specified the text type ‘classified advert’. Intention and Acceptance are typical: the writers publicise an offer for the readers to take up. The ‘text type’ shapes the modest Cohesion, showing just one ordinary sentence, a command with the imperative (‘harness!’), and one incomplete phrase resembling a sentence (like ‘are now accepting students’). No command is given to ‘contact us’, ‘write us’, or ‘dispatch us your raven or your flying broom with a parchment of inquiry’ — just the address. These choices are strategic, especially the opening commands implying that the action can be successfully performed — precisely what readers need to be convinced of here.

Coherence centres on the topic of ‘witchcraft’, which common sense holds to be the activities of ‘witches’ and to grant extraordinary ‘powers’. This central topic is combined somewhat picturesquely with the ‘student’ topic of enrolling in courses and (not mentioned here!) paying fees. The concept ‘foremost’ helps connect the two topics, since stories of ‘witches’ often tell of superlatives, and students should be attracted to the ‘foremost’ authorities in a field. In return, a submerged contradiction impends between claiming to be able to ‘harness’ such ‘foremost powers’ versus being obliged to seek fee-paying ‘students’ instead of just using your ‘powers’ to conjure up spirits who reveal buried treasure.

The Informativity (or ‘communicative dynamism’ in ‘functional sentence perspective’) starts out high, not merely by claiming that witchcraft’ has real ‘powers’ in today’s world but also by inviting ordinary readers to ‘harness’ them. Also quite high is the extravagant, untestable claim to being the ‘world’s foremost’, although such inflated claims are so commonly made in U.S. advertising that American readers may not be surprised. Perhaps the offer to ‘accept students’ has some surprise value too (shouldn’t witches have ‘apprentices’?), though less so in a classified column offering paid services.

The Situationality seems the most significant principle of textuality here. The Frosts¹¹ evidently expect some readers to believe the advert and to become ‘students’. This prospect must be viewed in the social context of rising superstition, especially in areas like the American Southeast (in this case North Carolina’) as a desperate response to a ‘modernism’ too complicated and interconnected for many people to comprehend or control (Beaugrande 1996). The feeling of powerlessness creates a vacuum some people try to fill by ‘harnessing powers’ of any imaginable kind.

This social point can be supported by specific Intertextuality by noticing how other ads in the same magazine offer to solve your problems:

[19] Master the power of suggestion for $49.95.

[20] How to Reprogram Your Subconscious Fast! New Secret Technique (Microshifting).

[21] Discover How Mind Power Breakthrough Works! Latest Subliminal and Hypnosis/Sleep-Learning tapes.

[22] New subliminal time compression ‘audio’ technique crystallises perception, resolves problems, energises creativity. Free scientific report.

[23] Erase debts with little-known law — Create wealth!

Despite some diversity, the shared discourses strategies are obvious. To explain why these marvellous plans or devices are not famous already, they are called ‘new’, ‘secret’, ‘little-known’, etc. Calling them also ‘fast’ and easy panders to the readers’ presumed inability and impatience to solve their own problems. How much you must pay is rarely mentioned, as in [19] (for Americans, $49.95 is much less than $50), versus ‘free’ information, as in [22]. Powerless people are probably short on cash, and might think you’ll be safe from bill-collectors once you have magic powers for turning them into hoptoads. These quasi-‘scientific’ ‘parapsychological’ aids may contrast starkly with ‘witchcraft’, but nothing prevents a desperate person from combining ‘subliminal’ and ‘hypnotic’ tactics with magical incantations in order to leave nothing untried. In the words of a well-known social psychologist, ‘the United States sometimes seems to be a huge carnival of disorder and self-help, with shamans and prophets seeking new converts and rallying followers, all promising comfort, solace, and a better life’ (Erchak 1992: 117).

Reconnecting language to knowledge of the world has also been the main issue in the discipline of artificial intelligence. Computer programs that can interact more ‘intelligently’ with humans must understand discourse in ‘natural language’, not just the artificial programming languages invented for computers. This work shows how much rich world-knowledge is involved just in participating in simple conversations or accepting a brief story and answering questions about it, e.g., for a prosaic news item like [24].¹²

[24] A New Jersey man was killed Friday evening when a car swerved off Route 69 and struck a tree. David Hall, 27, was pronounced dead at Milford Hospital. The driver, Frank Miller, was treated and released. No charges were filed, according to investigating officer Robert Onofrio.

The program can apply a ‘schema’ or ‘script’ for ‘vehicle accidents’, specifying relevant data about what caused the accident, who was killed or injured, and whether charges were filed. This prior knowledge supports the swift comprehension of the news item along with appropriate inferences, e.g.,, that the ‘driver’ lost control rather than deliberately heading for the tree with the intent to knock it down and cart it home for firewood.

But how much world-knowledge and how many inferences are likely to be humanly relevant? In principle, North American readers should know that the ‘tree’ was a large Northern outdoor tree rather than a dwarf bonsai on a window sill or a Christmas tree in a shopping mall; that Hall was taken to ‘hospital’ by an ambulance and not by Miller’s car or by canoe, rickshaw, or skateboard; that Miller was ‘treated’ by dressing his injuries and not by giving him a fancy dinner; that he was ‘released’ by being allowed to leave the hospital rather than being unlocked from the chains into which the irate police had clapped him; that Onofrio is an ‘officer’ in the highway patrol and not on a ship or in a bank; and so on. Yet it seems unreasonable to demand that all this be could be stored in human memory. Such things would more likely be constructed only if the context required it.

This conclusion has in fact been reached in the discipline of discourse processing. This field crystallised in the late 1970s and early 1980s to support research in ‘the many disciplines that deal with discourse — sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, linguistics proper, sociology of language, ethnoscience, educational psychology (e.g. classroom interaction), clinical psychology (e.g. the clinical interview), computational linguistics, and so forth’ (Freedle 1977: xvi). As Freedle’s wide vision suggests, the field is a ‘transdiscipline’ strategically situated to address issues or problems from multiple angles.

The central issue had not received adequate attention elsewhere: how do people actually process a discourse during real communication? For centuries, various disciplines have discussed ‘using language’ and ‘interpreting texts’ without really explaining how language can operate so quickly and easily. Philosophers and grammarians had assumed some ideal logical system, perhaps instilled by God or innately transmitted among humans; linguists had assumed some underlying orderly system of units and rules. But nobody felt responsible for drawing detailed inside maps of the system at work.

Discourse processing finally took the issue seriously, and what they found was a big surprise. Instead of holding a complete system ready with great batches of rules, processing designs its own series of systems on line. The key evidence came from robust experimental findings on ‘priming’ in human text reception during reading (Kintsch 1988). An item such as a word is primed when it’s active in memory, as if standing at attention and waiting to be called. Primed items are consistently recognised and responded to more rapidly than others, e.g., by pressing a key to signal that it either is or is not an English word (a ‘lexical decision task’). Surprisingly, the experiments indicated that when a word is recognised, all its meanings are initially ‘activated’, not just the relevant one for the context. Yet very soon the irrelevant ones are ‘deactivated’, while the relevant ones raise their activation and spread it out. Suppose you are a speaker of American English reading a text on a moving computer display containing this passage:

[25] The townspeople were amazed to find that all the buildings had collapsed except the mint.

The text suddenly halts at ‘mint’, and the display gives you a target item to decide if it’s a real word. For a brief interval of roughly half a second, your response would show priming for both the relevant ‘money’ and the irrelevant ‘candy’, but not for the inferable ‘earthquake’ (what made the ‘buildings collapse’). Thereafter, the irrelevant item would lose its activation while the relevant and the inferable items would gain. Evidently, the context ‘self-organises’ during this tiny interval without running complicated rules.

Several important conclusions follow that may profoundly change our views of language and discourse. One of them I have anticipated: language works so well by connecting with world-knowledge, e.g. about buildings collapsing. Another one seems more disturbing: what people use in communicating is not ‘the language’ but one small version of it that ‘self-organises expressly to support the discourse. Drawing maps of how that is done goes far beyond our accepted theories, which would make it resemble a tremendous miracle. But in real life, it’s not miraculous, it’s ordinary, in fact easy. How can that be?

Reconnecting language to knowledge of society has been a main issue in the disciplines of social psychology (e.g. Billig 1986; Potter & Wetherell 1987), social cognition (e.g. Fiske & Taylor 1984), and rhetorical psychology (e.g. Billig 1991).¹³ An ideology is popularly held to consist of fixed ideas, e.g., that communism is the root of all evil, including violence at rugby matches (you didn’t know? stay tuned!). In discourse, however, an ideology can easily produce inconsistencies, typically linked to the basic contradiction between favouring human rights (inclusive theory) while restricting who should have them (exclusive practice). We can thus observe the same concept being used in discourse for opposite images of different social groups, e.g., the concept of ‘violence’ among New Zealanders talking about rioting at a rugby match against the South African Springboks in April 1981. For the police, interviewees explained the violence as an understandable ‘human’ response to ‘provocation’ [26-27]. But for the protesters, the violence was either a pleasurable goal for ‘trouble-makers’ who had no ‘moral’ positions on the ‘issue’ of apartheid [28] or else ‘well-meaning’ people ‘stirred up’ by ‘extremists’ [29] and ‘communists’ [30].¹⁴

[26] policemen are only ordinary people / they must have had a lot of provocation and I don’t blame them if at the last they were a bit rough

[27] I think the police acted very well / they’re only human if they lashed out and cracked a skull occasionally, it was / hah / only a very human action

[28] I feel very strongly that it gave trouble-makers who weren’t interested in the basic moral of it an opportunity to get in and cause trouble to beat up people / to smash property

[29] it was mainly extreme groups which took over / um and stirred people up

[30] what really angered me that a certain small group of New Zealanders [..] who are communists I believe / led a lot of well-meaning New Zealanders who abhor apartheid and organised them you know / to jump up and down and infringe the rights of other New Zealanders

These discursive constructs make it possible to ignore or excuse the ‘infringement of rights’ both by ‘skull-cracking’ police and by the South African government. The violence on one side was a ‘human’ reaction to wilful and malicious ‘troublemakers’ who did not favour human rights but ‘infringed’ them. The adaptive value of such accounts is obvious in a country that has long infringed the rights of the Maoris, a black minority who are not even immigrants but the original inhabitants of New Zealand.

Ideology can also harness language for inverting things into their opposites. In modern times, the scariest example is how preparations for war get transformed into means to ‘keep the peace’ because, as with the bugbear of ‘communism’, huge sums of money can be made in the defence industry that makes such ‘generous contributions’ to political parties. How this transformation affects language and discourse was described by George Orwell in 1946 with an uncanny prescience of the future (say, Americans in Vietnam in the 1970s or South Africa’s mercenaries in Angola and Mozambique in the 1980s):

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of atom bombs on Japan can indeed be defended but only by arguments that are too brutal for most people to face [...] political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.

Yet such glaring abuses should not distract us from the subtler ‘politicising’ of public discourse at large and increasingly also the discourse of the home, the school, and the workplace, where delicate hierarchies of power are played off to block or undermine solidarity (cf. Apple 1986; Wilden 1987). As the material crisis worsens the competition for diminishing world resources, cultural differences are made into grounds for confrontation. The de facto multiculturalism of most ‘modern’ societies is fiercely attacked by a militant right-wing monoculturalism that mystifies claims to cultural supremacy for middle and upper class native white males behind an allegiance to the values of ‘law and order’, ‘patriotism’, ‘family’, and ‘Christian morals’ (cf. Fish 1992). Few people would object to such values, or if they do, right-wing discourse has a gallery of buzzwords ready to hurl at them: ‘soft on crime’, ‘unpatriotic’, ‘Satanic’, and (of course) ‘communist’.

Predictably, the chief targets of right-wing monocultural discourse are ethnic minorities and immigrants (cf. van Dijk 1987, 1991; Essed 1991), where old feelings of racism and colonialism can handily be re-awakened (if they ever were asleep). A leading discourse strategy is to transform the victims into victimisers¹⁵ by hatching ‘conspiracy theories’ and making the minorities and their defenders into scapegoats for the economic and political problems actually caused by the greed, waste, and corruption of the ruling white males. Consider¹⁶:

[31] Our traditions of fairness and tolerance are being exploited by every terrorist, crook, screwball, and scrounger who wants a free ride at our expense [Mail, 28 Nov. 1990]

[32] Nobody is less able to face the truth than the hysterical ‘anti-racist brigade’. Their intolerance is such that they try to silence or sack anyone who doesn’t toe their party line [Sun, 23 Oct. 1990]

[33] liberal academics [have] abandoned scholarly objectivity to create academic disciplines that were in actuality political movements; [...] ethnic studies, women’s studies etc. have one intent only, that is: undermining the American education system through the transformation of scholarship and teaching into blatant politics [Florida Review 12 Oct. 1990]

Such discourse betrays a characteristic motivation gap: making victims into victimisers requires accusing them of seizing the initiative to do things for which they could have no reasonable motivation, e.g., ‘academics’ striving to ‘undermine the educational system’ that gives them a livelihood. The discourse either doesn’t mention the real initiative coming from the right wing or else portrays it only as ‘fighting back’. Historical parallels to the anti-Semitic discourse of the Hitler era are all too patent.

Discourse analysis must not just describe and demystify the discourse of cultural confrontation and victimisation. If we make angry counter-attacks on racists, we get drawn into their own mode of confrontational discourse. Developing alternative strategies for cultural integration and co-operation is much harder, and certainly will not be achieved without concerted projects and explicit models, to which I now turn.

F. The programme of discourse analysis: Looking ahead

Our highest and hardest goal will be to achieve the wholeness of a transdisciplinary perspective where we can make connections among the vast panorama of issues crowding onto our agenda, and can draw both ‘inside maps’ and ‘outside maps’ in co-ordination with each other. Such an expansive programme poses daunting tasks indeed, but is urgently justified by the geopolitical situation today. The close of the 20th century is pervaded by a sense of impending crisis, even among the dwindling portion of the world’s population whose fortunes are still secured. Some of the causes are widely known, especially the material crisis of resources brought on by the wasteful exploitation of the environment for immediate profit and by the voracious consumption of surplus commodities by small elites. Far less attention has been devoted to the twin knowledge crisis and communication crisis. The ‘modern’ world as a whole possesses an exploding body of specialised knowledge that is locked up in discourse accessible to only a few people concentrated in centres of wealth and power, and not to many persons who need it for controlling their own lives and careers. They desperately struggle on to cope with life in a ‘modernised’ world where everything seems connected but almost nobody understands how. So people fail to make connections, especially their responsibilities to family, neighbourhood, society, and future generations, and subsist on selfishness, confrontation, and exploitation. Alienation and anxiety abound, punctuated by senseless violence.

The failure to connect is clearly reflected in regressive strategies that are short-term in rushing toward immediate goals, confrontational in asserting your goals by denying other people’s, and destructive of resources. Progressive strategies are long-term in weighing your goals against future conditions, co-operative in integrating your goals with other people’s, and constructive of new resources. Clearly, progressive strategiescan be supported through discourse but are unlikely to be unless we can provide explicit models showing how.

So discourse analysis increasingly raises the prospect of not merely describing discursive practices but transforming them into more progressive practices. Our framework would be the ideology of ecologism, wherein theory and practice are reconciled through human co-operation in consciously sustaining a life-style in harmony with our social and ecological environment, and in programmatic opposition to the dominant ideology of consumerism. It is unfortunately no exaggeration to say that the survival of the planet over the next century or so hinges on developing more progressive strategies of discourse for sharing and accessing crucial knowledge and for communicating about our problems and conflicts.

For such a challenge, we can pursue concurrent transdisciplinary programmes. Our cultural programme would assess how discourse can help consolidate cultural groups and encourage mutual respect, and can demonstrate how multiculturalism is the highest opportunity for realising the whole spectrum of human potential. Our social programme would address the relations between discourse and the processes of socialisation in such arenas as the home, the school, and the workplace. Ourcognitive programme would address the access and use of knowledge through discourse in an age of rising specialisation. Finally, ourlinguistic programme would address the strategies for using language resources in progressive modes.

Could our own ‘story’ ever come to some happy end? If we take the question literally, no. Our vast programme can have ‘no end’, much as utopia is always in front of us (Freire 1980) — ours is a ‘never-ending story’. But we can be more than ‘happy‘ if we manage to provide a relevant and useful description of the processes and practices of discourse in service of ecologically sound coexistence.

Notes

¹ Sources include Koch (ed.) (1972); Dressler & Schmidt (eds.) (1973); Beaugrande (1980, 1983, 1984, 1996); Cicourel (1980); Beaugrande & Dressler (1981); Kalverkämper (1981); Brown & Yule (1983); Benson & Greaves (eds.) (1985); Coulthard (1985); Macdonnell (1986); Heinemann & Viehweger (1991); Coulthard (ed.) (1992); Mann & Thompson (eds.) (1992).

² For a detailed discourse analysis of linguistic works, see Beaugrande (1991).

³ From Pike (1967), but less popular than other ‘-emes’.

⁴ Firth (1968 [1952-1957]: 106ff, 113, 182).

⁵ See Beaugrande (1995) for a fuller analysis with more samples.

⁶ I have made the idiomatic translation a bit more readable.

⁷ On this story, see Beaugrande (1980).

⁸ See Schriffrin (1987) on ‘discourse markers’ in English.

⁹ Sinclair and Brazil (1982: 45) offer this as ‘an example of the kind of follow-up that is familiar to teachers’ without saying if is from a native or a foreign language classroom.

¹⁰ From Hawkins (1969): not actual data but clusters of tendencies he found.

¹¹ Could this be a pseudonym associated with the poems ‘Two Witches’ by Robert Frost?

¹² Data adapted from Cullingford (1978: 4ff, 130-72)^. A problem with AI research is the invented quality of English texts made easier for the computer. I have rewritten Cullingford’s text into a version more typical for radio or newspaper.

¹³ On problems in these intermediary fields for balancing social with cognitive or psychological when representing beliefs or attitudes, see van Dijk (1987), esp. Chapter 5.

¹⁴ Data from Potter & Wetherell (1987: 122ff).

¹⁵ My translation of Ruth Wodak’s term ‘Opfer-Täter-Umkehr’.

¹⁶ I am indebted to Teun van Dijk for [31] and [32]; compare van Dijk (1991); Essed (1991).

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