The social organization of conversational narrative : a methodological contribution to linguistic discourse analysis via conversational analysis (original) (raw)
This thesis examines stories bold in natural conversation with an interest in discovering and describing social features of conversational discourse. Sociology has begun to develop a strong interest in narrative structures, and this interest parallels the current interest in discourse and seeks to make the sociological enterprise of conversational analysis relevant to discourse analysis, particularly in relation to narrative. The data for this study were collected over a period of four years (1979-83). Approximately 19 hours of tape-recorded conversations recorded in a variety of situations were collected. After a lengthy period of listening to the tapes, instances where stories are told were isolated and transcribed, and structural features of prefacings, tellings, and responses were subjected to formal analysis. The analytical techniques used in this study were first developed by Harvey Sacks and his students. The contribution of this study is to provide the discourse analyst with a set of well-defined discovery procedures for describing ethnographic features which influence discourse. The ethnographic interest has two distinctive features; (1) it is oriented to members' practices, and (2) it is 'micro' in character, oriented to a close reading of interactions in context. ii In the analytical chapters (3-6), the thesis explores how characters may be formulated in the narratives and what kinds of interactional work gets done (Chapter 3), the interactional importance of collateral information in narrative telling sequences (Chapter 4), how narratives get generated from prior ongoing talk (Chapter 5), and narrative response types and preferences (Chapter 6). Throughout the thesis an interest is maintained in relating the findings of the study with current findings in discourse analysis. The thesis concludes with a chapter summarising its original contribution and relating the methodology and findings of the study to recent methodologies and findings in discourse analysis.
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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
Discourse analysis as theory and method
2002
Contents Preface vii 1. The field of discourse analysis 1 2. Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory 24 3. Critical discourse analysis 60 4. Discursive psychology 96 5. Across the approaches 138 6. Critical social constructionist research 175 References 213 Index 223
Discourse analysis means doing analysis: A critique of six analytic shortcomings
2003
A number of ways of treating talk and textual data are identified which fall short of discourse analysis. They are:(1) under-analysis through summary;(2) under-analysis through taking sides;(3) under-analysis through over-quotation or through isolated quotation;(4) the circular identification of discourses and mental constructs;(5) false survey; and (6) analysis that consists in simply spotting features. We show, by applying each of these to an extract from a recorded interview, that none of them actually analyse the data. We hope that illustrating ...
Advances in Discourse Studies brings together contributions from top scholars in the fi eld, investigating the historical and theoretical relationships between new advances in discourse studies and pointing towards new directions for the future of the discipline. Covering areas such as conversation analysis, corpus-based discourse analysis and genre analysis, this book provides a unique survey of the most recent advances in methodology and approach to discourse analysis.
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Βοοk Review: Discourse Analysis: Review of Barbara Johnstone, Blackwell Publishers, Massachusetts and Oxford, 2002, xv+269 pp., ISBN 0-631-20877-1, 2003