National College Of Business Administration and Economics

Topic: Short history of discourse and its major contributions

Name: Romaisa Qadir

Semester: 6th (BS English)

Subject: Discourse studies

Submitted to: Mam Sumyyiah Qazi

Submission date: 19th Oct, 2020

DISCOURSE
The word ‘discourse’ dates back to the 14th century. It is taken from the Latin word ‘discursus’
which means a ‘conversation’. In its current usage, this term conveys a number of significations
for a variety of purposes, but in all cases it relates to language, and it describes it in some way.
To start with, discourse is literally defined as ‘a serious speech or piece of writing on a particular
subject’.

It incorporates both the spoken and written modes although, at times, it is confined to speech
being designated as ‘a serious conversation between people’.

DISCOUSRE ANALYSIS
Discourse analysis is sometimes defined as the analysis of language 'beyond the sentence'. This
contrasts with types of analysis more typical of modern linguistics, which are chiefly concerned
with the study of grammar: the study of smaller bits of language, such as sounds (phonetics and
phonology), parts of words (morphology), meaning (semantics), and the order of words in
sentences (syntax). Discourse analysts study larger chunks of language as they flow together.

Discourse analysis is a research method for studying written or spoken language in relation to
its social context. It aims to understand how language is used in real life situations.

When you do discourse analysis, you might focus on:

 The purposes and effects of different types of language

 Cultural rules and conventions in communication
 How values, beliefs and assumptions are communicated
 How language use relates to its social, political and historical context

SHORT HISTORY

Discourse analysis is both an old and a new discipline. Its origins can be traced back to the study
of language, public speech, and literature more than 2000 years ago. One major historical
source is undoubtedly classical rhetoric, the art of good speaking. Whereas the grammatica, the
historical antecedent of linguistics, was concerned with the normative rules of correct language
use, its sister discipline of rhetorica dealt with the precepts for the planning, organization,
specific operations, and performance of public speech in political and legal settings.

After some important revivals in the middle Ages and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
however, rhetoric lost much of its importance in the curricula of schools and in academic
research. The emergence of historical and comparative linguistics at the beginning of the
nineteenth century and the birth of structural analysis of language at the beginning of the
twentieth century replaced rhetoric as the primary discipline of the humanities. Fragments of
rhetoric survived only in school textbooks of speech and communication.
Parallel to this decline of rhetoric as an independent academic discipline, new developments in
several fields of the humanities and the handbook social sciences took place that would
eventually lead to the emergence of discourse analysis.

THE EMERGENCE OF DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AS A NEW DISCIPLINE (1972-1974)

The 1960s had brought various scattered attempts to apply semiotic or linguistic methods to the
study of texts and communicative events, the early 1970s saw the publication of the first
monographs and collections wholly and explicitly dealing with systematic discourse analysis as
an independent orientation of research within and across several disciplines.

Sociolinguistics, which had also begun to take shape in the late 1960s, emphasized that the
theoretical distinction between competence and performance, as it had been reintroduced by
Chomsky (after Saussure's distinction between langue and parole). Apart from variations in
phonology, morphology, and syntax, and the dependence of stylistic variation on social factors,
this reorientation also soon began to pay specific attention to discourse; another important
development in the early 1970s was the discovery in linguistics of the philosophical work by
Austin, Grice, and Searle about speech acts. Whereas sociolinguistics stressed the role of
language variation and the social context, this approach considered verbal utterances not only as
sentences, but also as specific forms of social action. That is, sentences when used in some
specific context also should be assigned some additional meaning or function, an illocutionary
one, to be defined in terms of speaker intentions, beliefs, or evaluations, or relations between
speaker and hearer. In this way, not only could systematic properties of the context be
accounted for, but also the relation between utterances as abstract linguistic objects and
utterances taken as a form of social interaction could be explained. This new dimension added a
pragmatic orientation to the usual theoretical components of language. This development of
linguistics toward a study of language use also appeared in published form between 1972 and
1974 although the integration of speech act theory and discourse analysis was to be paid
attention to only some years later.

At the same time psychology and the new field of artificial intelligence rediscovered discourse.

MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Michael Pêcheux was a French Marxist social psychologist, psycholinguist, and philosopher.
He was one of the main representatives of a critical and productive episode in French discourse
analysis, from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. He shared with more famous contemporaries
such as Michel focault a background in epistemology and "post-structuralism" and an interest in
theories of discourse, but his most important contribution to discourse analysis consisted in the
development of tools for conducting empirical studies of discourses.

In an attempt to break away from the "spontaneous ideology" of content analysis, Pecheux
developed a formal, potentially automatic instrument, which he called Automatic Discourse
Analysis. This instrument could generate a theoretical description of a discourse by identifying
and describing relations of selection and substitution of syntactic elements in a corpus of texts
representing that discourse. When dealing with criticisms of this approach and attempting to
overcome its limitations, Pecheux moved away from structuralism and developed a more
reflective theory of "inter-discourse" in which he tried to account for the ideological struggle and
dynamic inequality between discourses.

Another major contribution of discourse analysis was developed by Labov (1972). Labov and
waletzky argue that fundamental narrative structures are evident in spoken narratives of
personal experience. He argued that the overall structure of a fully formed narrative of
personal experience involves 6 stages:

1. Abstract (summary of story, with its point)

2. Orientation (in respect of place, time & situation)
3. Complication (temporal sequence of events)
4. Evaluation (narrator’s attitude towards narrative)
5. Resolution (protagonist’s approach to crisis)
6. Coda (point about narrative as a whole

According to Austin (1962) speech act theory focuses on communicative acts, which are
performed through speech. The speech act theory is applicable to discourse analysis. It
provides a framework in which to identify the conditions underlying the productions and
understanding of an utterance as a particular linguistically realized action.

Hymes (1974) has proposed a methodology used to discover communicative events and acts
to classify the components. Then discover the patterns formed by interrelationships among
components. The classificatory grid he proposed is known as the SPEAKING grid which can be
used to discover a local or culturally relative taxonomy of communicative units.

Hymes’s SPEAKING {S: (Setting, Scene), P: (Participants), E: (Ends) A: (Act Sequence), K:

(Key) , I: (Instrumentalities), N: (Norms), G: (Genre) }

According to Fasold (1993) pragmatics is a study of the use of context to make inferences
about meaning. It is another broad approach to discourse. Nowadays pragmatics has a broader
discussion, for example ethnography of communication, some psycholinguistics aspects,
moreover discourse analysis included also.

Based on the concept of Grice, speaker meaning is what the speaker intending to
communicate needs not be related to conventional meaning at all. It means that speaker
meaning may be inferred through a process quite different from the encoding and decoding
and processes assumed by code mode of communication.

Michael focault defined discourse as ways of constituting knowledge, together with the
social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledge and
relations between them. Discourses are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning.
They constitute the 'nature' of the body, unconscious and conscious mind and emotional life of
the subjects they seek to govern

... A form of power that circulates in the social field and can attach to strategies of domination
as well as those of resistance
In Foucault's view, there is no fixed and definitive structuring of either social (or personal)
identity or practices, as there is in a socially determined view in which the subject is completely
socialized. Rather, both the formation of identities and practices are related to, or are a function
of, historically specific discourses. An understanding of how these and other discursive
constructions are formed may open the way for change and contestation.

Foucault developed the concept of the 'discursive field' as part of his attempt to understand the
relationship between language, social institutions, subjectivity and power. Discursive fields,
such as the law or the family, contain a number of competing and contradictory discourses with
varying degrees of power to give meaning to and organize social institutions and processes. They
also 'offer' a range of modes of subjectivity.

Foucault argues though, in The Order of Discourse, that the 'will to truth' is the major system of
exclusion that forges discourse and which 'tends to exert a sort of pressure and something like a
power of constraint on other discourses', and goes on further to ask the question 'what is at stake
in the will to truth, in the will to utter this 'true' discourse, if not desire and power?