Preface

This book is intended to be a first-level text for undergraduates and beginning graduate students taking their first (or only) course about discourse analysis. The subject matter of discourse analysis is vast - "language in use," as Brown and Yule (1983) put it, "utterances," according to Schiffrin (1994), "verbal communication" for Renkema (2004) - and most discourse analysts would be hard-pressed to describe what, if anything, makes discourse analysis a discipline. Yet, discourse analysis is implicitly treated as if it were a discipline in texts that are organized as a series of overviews of research topics (institutional discourse, discourse and gender, narrative, media discourse, and so on) or theories (pragmatics, conversation analysis, politeness theory, and so on). The approach we take in this book is different. We treat discourse analysis not as a discipline (or as a subdiscipline of linguistics) but as a systematic, rigorous way of suggesting answers to research questions posed in and across disciplines throughout the humanities and social sciences and beyond. In other words, we see discourse analysis as a research method that can be (and is being) used by scholars with a variety of academic and nonacademic affiliations, coming from a variety of disciplines, to answer a variety of questions.

For this reason, this book is meant to encourage students not to think of discourse analysis as a collection of facts or canonical studies or as a body of theory. As we will see, discourse analysts set out to answer many kinds of questions about language, about speakers, and about society and culture. However, they all approach their tasks by paying close and systematic attention to particular situations and particular texts or utterances or sets of texts or utterances. This book attempts to separate the techniques of discourse analysis clearly from its results, trying to make sure that students understand and practice the former before concentrating on the latter. This will, we hope, help alleviate a problem we have had again and again in teaching discourse analysis - that of ending up with students who are fascinated by the results of sensitive analyses of discourse but unable themselves to perform analyses that go much beyond paraphrase. Discourse analysis, as we approach it here, is an open-ended heuristic, a research method consisting of a set of topics to consider in connection with any instance of discourse. This heuristic can help ensure that discourse analysts are systematically paying attention to every possible element of the potential meaning of a stretch of talk, writing, or multimodal text: every kind of context, every resource for creativity, and every source of limitation and constraint on creativity. Our focus is thus less on providing detailed descriptions of the results of discourse analysts' work than on asking students to think systematically about a variety of sources of constraint on and creativity in discourse, a variety of reasons why spoken utterances and visual texts have the meanings and uses they do. Discussion questions which, in many cases, ask readers to think about what they and other people in their field do or might do with discourse analysis, as well as ideas for small research projects using discourse analysis, are interspersed throughout the chapters.

Except for the first, the chapters in this book are self-contained, so they could be handled in any order. The order we have selected reflects a combination of what we have found students' interests and expectations to be. People often come to language study because their attention has been captured by the ways in which language, culture, and the world seem to be intertwined. (This can happen, for example, when one studies a foreign language or interacts with people in a foreign place.) This is why we have put the chapter about discourse and world directly after the introduction. It is followed by a chapter that raises the important issue of the role of intentions in discourse processing. People expect language study to be about structures and rules, so the chapter about discourse and structure is also close to the beginning. No textbook author can expect to control how their book is used. We would like, however, to urge that readers of this book to touch on every chapter in it. To pick and choose among the ways in which discourse is multiply constrained and enabled would be contrary to the overall purpose of the book, because it would encourage the kind of one-dimensional approach to explaining texts against which this book constitutes an argument.

Each chapter ends with a set of suggested supplementary readings. These are not intended as comprehensive bibliographies. Particularly in the areas in which most work is being done at the moment, it would be impossible to have included all the most recent sources, and such literature reviews would, in any case, have been outdated by the time the book was published. Instead, we have tried to make suggestions for one or two things a person might profitably read in connection with each section of the chapter. Some are particularly influential studies, often ones done relatively early on. Others are overviews and literature reviews. Instructors could use these lists to choose supplementary readings for the course, and students could use them as a way to get started with background reading in the areas they decide to focus on.

Although some are trained in departments of linguistics, most discourse analysts, at least in the United States, do not teach in linguistics departments, but rather in departments of English, anthropology, communication, education, or foreign languages, among others. This means that most students in courses about discourse analysis are not linguistics majors or graduate students in linguistics. We have made every effort in designing this book not to lose sight of this fact. We have tried to avoid the temptation to write at such an advanced level and in such a discipline-specific way that students' frequent suspicions that linguistics is difficult and irrelevant to their other interests are simply confirmed. A course in discourse analysis is an ideal place to encourage interdisciplinary exploration, since discourse is a focus of study in most of the humanities and social sciences. Discourse analysis is practiced in one way or another by at least some people in most of the academic disciplines in which human life is the focus: anthropologists analyze discourse, as do communications scholars, rhetoricians, literary and cultural critics, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, geographers, and medical, legal, and educational researchers, among others. Nonlinguists can be drawn into the study of language through discourse analysis, and linguists can be drawn into interdisciplinary work. We have written this book specifically with a nonspecialist, interdisciplinary audience in mind. Although readers might benefit from having had a general introduction to linguistics first (particularly if the introduction was not limited to formal theories of semantics, syntax, and phonology), we assume that many readers will be newcomers to the field. In the text, we try to explain concepts from linguistics when they first arise. There is a glossary at the end of the book in which terms that may be unfamiliar, as well as specialized uses of familiar words, are briefly defined.

In order to make it possible for instructors to adapt the book to more specialized audiences, some of the discussion questions are geared to teachers and students in one field or another. For example, some discussion questions require students to produce translations or do detailed grammatical analysis. These will obviously not work for students who do not know foreign languages or who are unfamiliar with basic grammatical concepts and terms. Other discussion questions are on topics that will particularly interest people in one field or another: some deal with literary discourse, for example, others with technical genres; some deal with writing and some with spoken language. It is not intended, nor would it be possible, for a class to do all the discussion questions. Students and instructors are meant to develop a system for choosing among them.

Since many of the texts around which the questions revolve were selected and/or collected by our students, there is an inevitable North American bias. We have tried to counteract this to a certain extent in the body of the text by discussing and drawing examples from research done elsewhere. Unfortunately, it has simply not been practical to include anything approaching a representative sampling of work about languages other than English. Good discourse analysis usually cannot be done in translation (although good translation requires careful discourse analysis), and English is the only language readers of this book will, more or less, share.

Instructors who have used previous editions of this book will find that this edition preserves the overall structure of the third edition. In addition to reordering some parts of the chapters in the service of clarity and updating the lists of further reading, we have sharpened the focus on corpus linguistics in Chapter 1 and elsewhere. Chapter 2 includes a new section on legitimation. In Chapter 5, there is an expanded discussion of performances of identity and new sections on gender and sexual identity, race and racialization, and place identity. Throughout, we have supplemented discussions of key studies with references to newer research, much of it based on online data. We have made sure that at least one Discussion Question in each chapter helps introduce students to the research design process.

As will...