A brief survey of discourse analysis

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The term ‘discourse analysis’ has become really current only recently. But its concerns and methods have been pursued for considerably longer. So to understand what discourse analysis is all about, we might review some directions of study that could contribute their resources and outlooks to a programme of discourse analysis.

1. Fieldwork linguistics

One obvious contributor is the fieldwork linguistics that developed methods for describing previously undescribed languages. There, you ‘analyse discourse’ as it is encountered in human interaction, a principle emphasised by American tagmemics. 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!’ For a Westerner, not a big help!

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 [1-2] and ‘naa’ in [3] (data reported by Danjuma Gambo). The piece-by-piece translations indicate what the morphemes contribute, while the idiomatic translations suggest what an English speaker might say:

[1] kpanti nwang kn sha-yi

chief sat food eating-durative

‘the chief sat eating and eating’

[2] sombo da-yi diya bii ka jaa gbaa

squirrel go-durative go take focus child hoe

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

[3] 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.

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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’. Moreover, common notions of the ‘English language’ have been has been dominated by written culture, encouraging the belief that the order of language only emerges when written down in neat sentences. 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 Robert E. Longacre and his group in some 40 languages of East and West Africa.

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:

[4] 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 your spontaneous opinion about the current topic [5], or to add a qualifier or express surprise [6].

[5] ‘I tell you he's a great fighter’,’ said Hughie, ‘if we should ever get near that bear.’ ‘Oh, pshaw! said Don, he may fight dogs well enough, but when it comes to a bear, it's a different thing. Every dog is scared of a bear the first time he sees him.’ ‘Well, I bet you Fido won't run from anything’, said Hughie, confidently. (Glengarry Days)

[6] ‘It's a--a friend of mine. Well, not exactly a friend, maybe, but an acquaintance from out of town. He came last evenin’. He's up in the spare bedroom.’ ‘Well, I never! Come unexpected, didn't he?’

Also, these functions do not figure in traditional grammar-books; and ‘well’ in these uses is not deemed ‘proper’ for written English.

Although fieldwork is effect a mode of discourse analysis, its leaders, such as Bob Longacre and Joe Grimes, only adopted the term ‘discourse analysis’ around the mid-1970s. Most of what goes under the term nowadays does not involve fieldwork, which I think is something of a pity.

2. Functional linguistics

Another contributor could 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 [7], the English order [7a] is emphatically focuses on the ‘problems’ by fronting the expression ahead of the sentence subject. In contrast, the Czech version in [7b] (REFL PRON = reflexive pronoun) is not emphatic, showing that ‘what is regarded as unusual in one language need not appear so in another’ (data from Jan Firbas).

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

[7a] most of these problems a computer could take in its stride

[7b] 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 (revealed previously unnoticed ways for text and context to influence the arrangement of English sentences. In Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘At the Bay’ [8], 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 [8.1] 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.

[8.1] In a steamer chair under a manuka tree that grew in the middle of the front grass patch, Linda Burnell dreamed the morning away. [8.2] She did nothing. [8.3] 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 [8.2] is uniformly low: the pronoun subject ‘she’ is already identified, and the activity of ‘doing nothing’ is expected from a ‘dreaming’ person. [8.3] 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.

The British branch of functionalism, led by linguists like J.R. Firth, Michael Halliday, and John Sinclair, expressly insisted on the importance of studying real language. Sinclair’s group pioneered ‘discourse analysis’ through fieldwork on classroom discourse. There, the main terms were for discourse moves like initiation, nomination, andfollow-up by the teacher, and bid and response by a learner, e.g. in [9]:

[9] 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.

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Such discourse plainly occurs only in classrooms, pursuing the old campaign for ‘correct’ usage. 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 trips pupils up 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 pertinent 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 [7a]. 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’.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’:

[10] 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.

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.

3. Sociolinguistics

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 [11], 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. [11a].

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

[11a] they’re playing football and he kicks it and it goes through there

In Basil Bernstein’s 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, 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.

4. Conversational analysis

The most detailed picture of real talk in society has been supplied by the conversational analysis of in the field of ethnomethodology. Its home discipline was sociology, which developed its own methods to study language rather than borrowing them from linguistics. Harold Garfinkel coined the term ethnomethodology after such terms as ‘ethnoscience’ or ‘ethnomedicine’ for people’s commonsense knowledge of what ‘science’ or ‘medicine’ do. His method proposed recording and transcribing real conversations 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. 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 (small capitals show emphasis; brackets show overlap; colons indicate lengthened sounds):

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

[12.2] A. Oh::: God yeah

[12.3] B: Uhh huh!

[12.4] A: We—

[12.5] A: But I c— I jis’ couldn’ git down there

[12.6] B: Oh— Oh I know I’m not askin

yuh tuh come down

[12.7] A: Jesus I mean I just didn’t have five minutes yesterday

[O M I D]

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 [12.1], 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’ [12.5]. 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’ [12.6-7].

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. 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).

Compared to other modes of communication, ordinary conversation looks rather incomplete when it has been transcribed in writing. The maoin reason is that the talk so often refers to waht is right there being done, looked at, handled, and so on, as in [13], data from the British National Corpus.

[13] A: Actually in honesty they have taken quite a bit out of there, ‘cos there was an awful lot of stuff in there, you could hardly get in at one stage now

B: what are you gonna do with these bike things, are you gonna chuck them?

A: Oh yeah I think so, I don't think that I can make anything of it, I'll take that box to school because they might be doing a

B: might be able to rescue that lot

A; Anyway, I'll see what I can get in the car

B: Right well I'll, I'll open up mine and we can see what we can get in mine

A: Ooh it's a load of rubbish isn't it?

B: I think if I take this lot to the tip now, I'll come back

A: Alright

B: then perhaps we can dispose of

A: Yes, there won't be a lot left

B: the rest of the stuff

A: That's right

These two are cleaning the ‘stuff’ out a room and wondering what to do with it — ‘chuck’ it out or ‘take it to school’. The latter choice leads the conversation toward what they ‘can get in the cars’, which probably won’t hold it all. The problem is solved by one car taking away one 'lot‘ to the 'tip' (i.e. the garbage dump) before trying to ‘dispose of’ the rest’. The talk comes to an optimistic finish of agreeing that ‘there won't be a lot left’, though in fact there obviously will be.

I have underlined all the expressions referring to concrete things either right there or nearby and obviously identified. We notice that many of them do not express much definite meaning, either Pronouns like ‘the’ and ‘it’, or general Nouns like ‘things’, ‘lot’, and ‘stuff’. Also, we notice some interruptions and overlaps, but the talker probably didn’t notice them.

5. Text linguistics

The field of text linguistics began with a narrower scope inside linguistics proper, but soon began to develop toward the concerns of discourse analysis. A key concept in this development was of textuality as a human achievement in making connections wherever communicative events occur. 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’, a field dealing with dubious phenomena like reading minds or seeing into the future.

[14] 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 Frosts 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. The feeling of powerlessness creates a vacuum some people try to fill by ‘harnessing powers’ of any imaginable kind.

[O M I D]

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

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

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

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

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

[19] 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 only rarely mentioned, as in [14] (for Americans, $49.95 must sound like much less than $50), versus ‘free’ information, as in [18]. When you’re confused and short on cash, and you might like to think you’ll be safe from bill-collectors once you have magic powers for turning them into toads. 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 Gerald Erchak, 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’.

6. Artificial intelligence

In the field of artificial intelligence discourse attracted attention as an prime arena of intelligent operations. Computer programs would be far more user-friendly if they could interact with humans by understanding discourse in ‘natural language’, not just the artificial programming languages specially invented for computers. This work showed how much 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 [20].

[20] 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 could be stored in human memory. Such things would more likely be constructed only if the context required it.

7. Discourse processing

The field of discourse processing 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’ (Roy Freedle). 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. 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:

[21] 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.

8. Critical linguistics

The field of critical linguistics began as a programme to overcome the neglect of the social and politic aspects of language, and eventually evolved into critical discourse analysis as its scope expanded. Language and discourse have many ways or conveying an ideology, that is, a viewpoint or position held to be more natural, normal, or proper than some other. However, a ‘critical’ study of discourse typically finds ideology producing inconsistencies 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’ [22-23]. But for the protesters, the violence was either a pleasurable goal for ‘trouble-makers’ who had no ‘moral’ positions on the ‘issue’ of apartheid [24], or else ‘well-meaning’ people ‘stirred up’ by ‘extremists’ [25] and ‘communists’ [26] — this last being exquisitely absurd, since violent fans are well-known fascists at the very opposite end of the political spectrum. (The / indicates a pause in speaking.)

[22] 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

[23] 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

[24] 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

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

[26] 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

[O M I D]

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 but installing more and more nuclear weapons get transformed into means to ‘keep the peace’ [27]. In close parallel, concerned citizens in the ‘peace movement such as the ‘Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’ (CND), are slandered as ‘communist subversives’ [28].

[27] Deterrence — the knowledge that a strike by one side would provoke a devastating retaliatory strike by the other — was and still is the surest way to keep the peace in a dangerous world. (Economist)

[28] According to Cathy Massiter [former employee of MI5, the British secret police], […] she had the task of investigating ‘Communist and other forms of subversive influence and activity in the peace movement, including in particular the CND’. […] CND was classified as subversive because it was a ‘Communist dominated organisation’. (Freedom under Thatcher)

How radically this ideological transformation affects language and discourse was described by George Orwell in 1946 with an uncanny prescience of the future (say white mercenaries in Zimbabwe, Angola, and Mozambique, or the Serbian army in Bosnia, or the Indonesian army in East Timor):

[29] 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’.

Surely the most horrendous such abuse of language in our own day is the coinage ‘ethnic cleansing’ .(from the Serbian ‘etnicko ciscenja’) to designate what can, in honesty, only be called ethnic defilement [30-32] (data from British National Corpus).

[30] The UN Security Council is to set up an 11-judge international court at The Hague to try people accused of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, including murder, rape, ethnic cleansing, torture and other atrocities. (Belfast Telegraph)

[31] We have seen over the summer the impact that pictures, in particular, can have — scenes of prison camps in the former Yugoslavia, of ‘ethnic cleansing’, of the random bombardment of bread queues or of people burying their dead. (Tony Hall)

[32] Whether rape has been singled out by military commanders as a weapon of war remains open to question, but victims' testimony suggests the abuse is part of a wider pattern of warfare and ‘ethnic cleansing’. (East Anglian Daily Times)

Yet such astounding transformations 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. 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’. 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 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 victimisers 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. Consider:

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

[34] 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]

[35] 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.

Critical linguistics and critical 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.

Looking ahead

In my view, the highest and hardest goal of discourse analysis in the future will be to achieve an integrative transdisciplinary perspective to make connections among the vast panorama of issues crowding onto our agenda. 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 still seem 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 strategies can 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. 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.