Discourse: A Critical Introduction (original) (raw)
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Blommaert cogently argues throughout the book for a broad-based approach to language in society. Taking globalization seriously means we have to rid ourselves of assumptions about sharedness, community, functionality in speaking and make those things questions for analysis. Blommaert admits that his discussion moves far away from what is typically understood as “discourse analysis” but that is his point, and that is why I like this book so much. I find Blommaert’s book an exciting and timely publication taking vital arguments to Europe, where all too often I encounter colleagues who dismiss my attention to language use as “linguistics,” that is, not relevant to social anthropology. I can only hope that this addition to Cambridge’s catalogue will convince social scientists everywhere that sociolinguistics is more than the correlation of accent with social class and ethnicity. Understanding language use in the round is critical to understanding any and all meaningful human activity.
Βοοk Review: Discourse Analysis: Review of Barbara Johnstone, Blackwell Publishers, Massachusetts and Oxford, 2002, xv+269 pp., ISBN 0-631-20877-1, 2003
Book review Advances in Discourse Studies
(Eds.), Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Press, 2008. ISBN 13 978 0 415 39809 1 (Hardback), ISBN 13 978 0 415 39810 7 (Paperback). ix + 262 pp. The term discourse analysis first entered general use in a series of papers published by Harris (1952). During the past 10 years, the study of discourse analysis has turned into a growth industry in linguistics. An extensive body of pragmatic and linguistic research deals with functional utterances or written texts in human interaction. Studies of discourse have been carried out within a variety of traditions that investigate the relations between language, structure and agency. Up to now discourse analysis has been taken up in a variety of social science disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, sociology, cognitive psychology, sociology, international relations and communication studies, etc., each of which is subject to its own assumptions, dimensions of analysis, and methodologies. Advances in Discourse Studies brings together contributions from leading scholars in the field, investigating the historical and theoretical development of discourse studies and pointing towards new directions for the future of the discipline. Among the more recent developments are an increasing 'critical' turn in discourse analysis, a growing interest in historical, ethnographic and corpus-based approaches to discourse, more concern with the social contexts in which discourse occurs, the social actions that are employed and the identities that are constructed through it, as well as a revaluation of what counts as 'discourse' to include multimodal texts and interaction. With respect to discourse analysis a lot of approaches have tackled this issue and the editors bring together some of the most prominent scholars of discourse analysis to survey the field in light of their new development, reflecting the perspective of the editors. As the name of the book suggests, the present volume is not interested in describing the type of work that has been done using these various approaches as the editors are showing how those working areas are changing certain parameters, which often involves borrowing from other fields and other schools of discourse analysis. The volume opens with a general remark, which serves as an introduction to the book; the editors provide an overview of the key concepts and issues that have been raised by the new discursive turn of language in use in particular and a brief synopsis of the different approaches to discourse analysis. Their comprehensive review of literature on the treatment of discourse in use is one of the strengths of the volume. Following the general introduction, the book is divided into seven parts to discuss some of the specific topics. The main discussion, divided into subsections, is preceded with an overview in this particular field and followed with suggestions for further work, which enables researchers to expand knowledge on topics in which they are interested. The topics dealt with in this volume include the following areas: conversation analysis, ethnographic-based discourse analysis, corpus-based discourse analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, genre analysis, critical discourse analysis and mediated discourse analysis respectively. This is an invaluable resource for researchers of interdisciplinary discourse analysis. The book closes with a four page index of authors and concepts, facilitating easy access to specific issues. The following is a detailed introduction to each part. Part One mainly discusses topics on conversation analysis. Conversation Analysis (CA), a research tradition that grew out of ethnomethodology, bears some unique methodological features. The central goal of conversation analytic research is the description and explication of the competences that ordinary speakers use and rely on in participating in intelligible, socially organized interaction. Of the two articles presented in this chapter, Drew and Curl's paper Conversation analysis: overview and new directions (22–35) reviews the background and progress of CA and points out the gap in previous research by enlarging the research scope to investigating the organizations of and interconnections between four underlying characteristics
A Social Cultural Approach to Discourse Analysis
Discourse analysis as a research method can be found in two major families, linguistic-based analysis (such as conversation) and culturally or socially based discursive practices. From the angle of method, discourse analysis can be divided into five categories, that is, structural analysis, cognitive analysis, social cultural analysis, critical analysis and synthetic analysis. In the paper, Social cultural analysis is chosen to be discussed as it regards discourse as interactional activities and emphasizes the social function of language. Language interaction involves all sorts of social cultural contexts; the author tries his best to make an exploration in discourse analysis from the social cultural approach so as to contribute something to the research.