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Discourse. A Critical Introduction - By Jan Blommaert

Article  in  International Journal of Applied Linguistics · March 2007

DOI: 10.1111/j.1473-4192.2007.00141.x

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146 w Alan
Andy Fortune;
Kirkpatrick
Theresa Lillis

two stools in being neither a comprehensive course in SLA nor one about
SLA research methods, I am confident it will be of great assistance to many
potential readers. Obviously it will be invaluable for novice researchers
trying to get to grips with learner language data for the first time. It can also
act as a supplement to more traditional SLA courses at both postgraduate
and advanced undergraduate level.

References

Barkhuizen, G. (1998) Discovering learners’ perceptions of ESL classroom teaching/

learning activities in a South African context. TESOL Quarterly 32: 85–108.
Ellis, R. (1994) The study of second language acquisition. Oxford University Press.
— (2002) A metaphor analysis of learner beliefs. In P. Burmeister, T. Piske and A. Rohde
(eds.), An integrated view of language development: papers in honor of Henning Wode.
Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag.
Long, M. (1996) The role of the linguistic environment in second language acquisition.
In W. Richie and T. Bhatia (eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition. San Diego,
CA: Academic Press.
Norton, B. (ed.) (2000) Identity and language learning: gender, ethnicity and educational
change. Harlow: Longman.
Oliver, R. (1998) Negotiation of meaning in child interactions. Modern Language
Journal 82: 372– 86.
Pica, T. (1984) Methods of morpheme quantification: their effect on the interpretation
of second language data. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 11: 63–90.
Sinclair, J. and M. Coulthard (1975) Towards an analysis of discourse. Oxford University
Press.
Storch, N. (2002) Patterns of interaction in ESL pair work. Language Learning 52: 119–
58.

e-mail: alan.fortune@kcl.ac.uk [Received Nov. 20, 2006]

Jan Blommaert, 2005, Discourse. A Critical Introduction. Cambridge University

Press, 299 pages, ISBN 0 521 53531

Reviewed by Theresa Lillis The Open University

“Exciting” is not a word often used to describe an academic book, but

Discourse: A Critical Introduction by Jan Blommaert is just that. It is exciting
on a number of counts, and here are just a few: (1) it brings globalisation to
the centre of language and literacy study at the level of practice as well as
theory; (2) it not only explicitly engages in ‘conversations’ that have been
bubbling around critical discourse analysis for considerable time but offers
imaginative and grounded ways out of what are often presented as CDA
‘conundrums’; (3) it provides a plethora of conceptual tools that will be
valuable to the study of many ‘real world’ language problems; (4) data

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examples are drawn from ‘peripheral’ as well as ‘centre’ contexts, reflecting

Blommaert’s academic work as an ‘Africanist’; (5) it is beautifully written by
a multilingual scholar who clearly revels in English-medium academic prose.
I will illustrate some of these five exciting aspects below. I read the book
(the first time) in one sitting – that is, punctuated only by work, family
commitments and a night’s sleep.
The book consists of seven chapters plus an introduction and conclusion,
and the headings to the chapters give the reader some immediate indication
of the kind of approach to discourse this book offers: “Critical Discourse
Analysis”, “Text and context”, “Language and inequality”, “Choice and
determination”, “History and process”, “Ideology”, and “Identity”. Blommaert
presents his definition of discourse at the outset: “Discourse to me comprises
all forms of meaningful semiotic human activity seen in connection with
social, cultural, and historical patterns and developments of use” (p. 3). And
he makes no apology for including in his notion of discourse some non-
linguistic elements which would “not be considered legitimate objects of
inquiry” by most linguists (p. 3). By ‘non-linguistic’ he is signalling the object
of analysis – most obviously he argues throughout the book for the need for
scholars of language and literacy to look not only at texts but also at the
material and historical conditions in which texts are produced. Perhaps more
controversially, however, he is arguing for the need to inject some additional
and complicating dimensions into some ‘givens’ underpinning ‘linguistic’
studies of language. One example is the need to problematise the notion of
‘function’ theoretically and empirically: theoretically, function needs to be
soaked in another notion, that of ‘value’ (p. 70ff); and empirically, he argues,
functions per se have yet to be established – “functions have been taken for
granted by linguists, while they should be one of the foci of empirical
investigation” (p. 71).
Let me return to the first exciting element listed above: globalisation as
practice. Moving beyond the more familiar dichotomous positioning on
majority/minority, dominant/dominated sets of relations between languages
and globalisation, Blommaert focuses on processes, indexicalites and identities.
Thus, for example, challenging mono-directional critiques of the hegemonic
position of English, he charts what different kinds of Englishes index (a key
notion throughout this book and one of the useful conceptual tools I return
to below) in any specific context and interaction. Whilst a specific feature of
the Tanzanian variety of English may index non-standard (inferior) language
and peripheral identity to an Anglophone ‘centre’ audience and context, in
Tanzania it may index prestige and world knowledge. Audiences in the latter
context seeing Sliming food (in an advertisement for a health shop) and fund
rising (on a banner in central Dar es Salaam) focus on the “value of the English
display rather than its normative correctness” (p. 213). Formal differences
between specific uses may in fact be tiny, yet their significance is often amplified
according to the specific geo-historical interactional context in which they
occur. Whole systems of evaluation are underpinned by such amplifications:

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Many Belgians would exhaust themselves trying to acquire what they

perceive as American accents of English. Nobody makes any effort at acquir-
ing, say, Nigerian or Indian English. And when an American addresses a
Belgian, the Belgian will have the impression that his own Belgian
English is ‘bad’. But when a Nigerian addresses a Belgian, the Belgian will
have the impression that the Nigerian speaks ‘bad’ English. (p. 223)

The forms are not as significant as the values through which these are
refracted. And value is central to Blommaert’s concern throughout the book
with inequality: “we are dealing with systems that organise inequality via the
attribution of different indexical meanings to language forms” (p. 73).
The second exciting aspect of this book is its contribution to and extension
of key strands in ongoing conversations with Critical Discourse Analysis
(CDA). In Chapter 2, amongst other things, Blommaert sets out to explicitly
outline the CDA programme and to respond to what he sees as two different
types of critique: the first are critical comments on its methodology and
analytical approaches, and the second are comments which emphasize “the
potential offered by CDA for becoming a critical study of language” (p. 31).
I think the former can largely be described as criticism from ‘outsiders’, if not
to CDA then to the Norman Fairclough school; the latter are critical comments
from ‘insiders’, so to speak, including those like Blommaert himself who are
fundamentally sympathetic to the CDA project but see severe limitations in
some of its foundational theories (such as systemic functional linguistics)
and its recent scholarly direction. Criticism from outsiders often relates to
issues of methodology and epistemology and the vexed relationship between
interpretation and explanation (e.g. Widdowson 1996); this includes accusations
by, amongst others, Billig and Schegloff (1999) that CD analysts project “their
own political biases and prejudices onto their data” (p. 32). Criticisms from
Blommaert himself are more fundamental and likely to challenge not only
CDA but some core ‘givens’ within applied linguistics. These include: (1) the
‘linguistic bias’ of CDA – one comment here is that given this bias, CDA only
considers discourse that is available and has no capacity for dealing with
‘absent’ discourses (p. 35); (2) CDA is ‘closed’ to particular kinds of societies
in that major writers have focused their analytic endeavours on their countries
of origin, ‘centre’ countries (p. 36); (3) CDA’s “closure to a particular time
frame” (p. 37), that is, a tendency to adopt an ahistorical approach to discourse
because of its central emphasis on ‘text as artefact’. A key conceptual tool that
Blommaert provides in contrast to ‘text as artefact’ is ‘text trajectory’ – which
I return to briefly below.
A particularly useful contribution by Blommaert in his discussion of
CDA is the way he deals with determinism and relativism. One of the key
criticisms made by both insiders and outsiders to the CDA programme/
tradition is its tendency to be overly deterministic and, by some, to represent
a strong version of the Whorfian hypothesis on the relationship between
language and thought (e.g. Stubbs 1997). CDA writers often contest this

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criticism by calling upon the notion of dialectic. However, both the challenge
and the response tend to stay within Whorf’s ‘first relativity’, where structure
and cognition assume stable (even rigid) characteristics. In his theory of
‘voice’ (Chapter 4), Blommaert reminds (or introduces) readers of Hymes’
lesser known notion of ‘second linguistic relativity’ which brings to the
debate the importance of function, variation and context. It is worth
requoting Hymes from Blommaert here:

This second type of linguistic relativity, concerned with the functions of

language has more than a critical, cautionary import. As a sociolinguistic
approach, it calls attention to the organisation of linguistic features in
social interaction. Work has begun to show that description of fashions of
speaking can reveal basic cultural values and orientations. The worlds so
revealed are not the ontological and epistemological worlds of physical
relationships, of concern to Whorf, but worlds of social relationships.
(Hymes 1996: 44–45 and Hymes 1980: 38, quoted by Blommaert p. 70)

What Blommaert achieves by foregrounding this second layer of relativity,

and through his anthropological stance in general in the book, is a response
which opens up possibilities for future directions in the critical study of
language. In contrast to both advocates and critics of CDA, he retreats neither
to the safe haven of text nor of theory (this latter seems most evident in the
disappointing move towards ever greater abstraction in Chouliaraki and
Fairclough’s Discourse and late modernity (1999), and I speak as someone
whose faith in the possibility of a socially oriented study of language was
restored by the work of Fairclough) but moves into the complex and untidy
world of actual practice. By arguing for the need for ever more ethnography
(Chapter 4), Blommaert here makes a move which I think amounts to an
intellectual coup within critical studies of language in use.
Let’s turn to the third contribution – a plethora of tools for the study of
real world language problems. A core empirical–conceptual tool is that of
‘text trajectory’ which, whilst gaining currency in different areas of language-
based research (notably through the influence of Silverstein and Urban’s 1996
notion of ‘natural histories’), is fully elucidated in Blommaert’s book. In
Chapter 3 he introduces and illustrates this notion, which represents an
attempt to recognise and introduce historical dynamism into text analysis
and to counteract the emphasis within applied linguistics on ‘text as artefact’.
In order to track how texts come into being, other notions are called on:
entextualisation and recontextualisation (as well as re-entextualisation). A
lesser-known term may be ‘pretextuality’ (discussed in Chapter 4), which is
used to signal the significance of resources available to people in any given
setting before a text even comes into being: “people enter communication
events with pretextually marked resources – such pretextualities will condition
what they can accomplish” (p. 77). Trajectories of asylum applications – a
central interest in Blommaert’s research – are examples of text trajectories

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where the availability (or not) of specific resources has high-stakes consequences:
“every step in the trajectory involves inequalities in resources” (p. 64),
including what gets to be counted as appropriate resources.
A further essential tool in Blommaert’s kit is indexicality/-isation.
Throughout the book Blommaert argues that much more attention needs to
be placed on the phenomenon of indexicality, rather than on denotational
or referential notions of language. He sets out clearly in Chapter 3 how
indexicality is the conceptual tool for exploring the relationship between
texts and contexts. Given that “context is potentially everything and con-
textualistaion is potentially infinite” (p. 40), Blommaert draws on Gumperz
(1992) to emphasize that indexicality is the means through which people take
and create what is relevant from context.
Some of the aforementioned notions are, of course, well used in
sociolinguistic research – but usually in relation to spoken interaction. What
Blommaert does is to make clear how they can be extended to the study of
literacy practices which, whilst not the only focus of his work, is a primary
concern. And in relation to literacy Blommaert offers a further notion:
‘heterography’. In Chapter 5 he makes a clear distinction between ‘looking
at’ and ‘reading’ texts, and relates these practices to different evaluations
about texts. What may constitute a coherent text or document in one context
– and might therefore be viewed as otho-graphic – may be read as a bundle
of unrelated, incoherent bits of text in another – hetero-graphic. Whether
heterographic texts are viewed positively – as creative and innovative uses
of resources (Fabian 1990) – or negatively – as evidence of incoherence and
even ‘lies’ – depends on the geo-historical and political contexts in which
they are being produced and read/looked at.
As well as providing tools to engage empirically with actual practices,
Blommaert offers conceptual tools to connect local micro-practices with
global macro-processes. Easily accessible notions are his Bourdieu-informed
market metaphors of literacy, for example “economy of symbols” (p. 61) and
“two different economies of literacy: one guiding the production of the
documents; another one guiding its uptake” (p. 121). More densely packed
notions – and ones which I am still grappling with – are the notions of ‘scales’
and ‘synchronisation’ which are explored through Chapters 6, 7 and 8 to
theorise the dynamic processes and practices relating the local with the
global, the centre with the periphery, building on conceptual tools of world
systems theory (Wallerstein 2000). Blommaert has been developing such
notions with colleagues in recent years as ways of getting to grips with space,
place and time (see e.g. Blommaert, Collins and Slembrouck 2005).
Throughout the book Blommaert uses a range of data, from both ‘centre’
and ‘periphery’ contexts. These include: long email messages relating to the
invasion of Iraq in 2003; organisational documents and historical documents
relating to the 1944 Warsaw uprising for an academic seminar on discourse;
a South African radio reggae show; documentary and ethnographic data relating
to asylum applications; political speeches by the Belgian Flemish socialist party.

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This is an exciting book, as I said at the outset, which is made all the
more enjoyable through the author’s use of metaphor to capture complex
ideas. Here are just a few of my favourites: “indexical meaning is what
anchors language usage firmly into social and cultural patterns” (p. 12);
“ideology is the gate through which we are forced to leave the strictly
linguistic analysis and move into an interdisciplinary field” (p. 19); “CDA
overlooks sociolinguistics” (p. 36); “the state is a switchboard between
various scales” (p. 219).
But should it be viewed as an introduction, albeit a ‘critical introduction’
as the subheading to the main title of the book indicates? The chapters are
carefully structured and organised around useful subheadings (not always
the case in academic texts); each chapter concludes with not only a list of
further reading but Blommaert’s own commentary on the usefulness of such
texts; a glossary is included of key terms; the author includes personal
anecdotes on occasion which should serve to draw in readers who may be
struggling with some of the more densely theoretical sections, e.g. the
misunderstanding between himself and a female researcher to illustrate
the significance of ‘contextualisation cues’ (p. 42). Blommaert’s enthusiastic
tone, set from the outset – “it is a wonderful opportunity to be able to
produce a synthesis of work which in the present economy of publishing is
dispersed over too many fragmented little bits” (Preface) – should encourage
the more novice reader to step into a world where some aspects will certainly
be unfamiliar, whether these are theories, concepts or methodologies. But in
seriously considering whether this book constitutes an introduction, we are
immediately confronted with the questions: Introduction to what? For
whom? Where? I felt that the range of coverage and the overarching
commitment to broad intellectual inquiry – ‘a critical science of language’ –
signalled a tradition that might perhaps feel less familiar to students (and
scholars) emerging from the empiricist-oriented ‘centre’ Anglophone world
yet might map more closely onto the expectations of European and African
readers. However, wherever our geo-historical scholarly location, those of us
wanting to engage with issues of language use in a globalised world have to
accept the need to grapple with difficult notions across and within
disciplinary boundaries and traditions. Blommaert himself says he is “a
‘discourse analyst’ among historians, an ‘anthropologist’ among linguists,
and a ‘linguist’ among anthropologists” (p. 207). This book introduces
readers to some of the rich thinking that has inspired – and been inspired by
– Jan Blommaert’s boundary-crossing in pursuit of the study of real-world
language problems in a global context.

References

Billig, M. and E. Schegloff (1999) Critical discourse analysis and conversation analysis:
an exchange between Michael Billig and Emmanual A. Schegloff. Discourse and
Society 1.4: 543 – 82.

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Blommaert, J., J. Collins and S. Slembrouck (2005) Spaces of multilingualism. Language

and Communication 25: 197–216.
Chouliaraki, L. and N. Fairclough (1999) Discourse and late modernity-rethinking Critical
Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh University Press.
Fabian, J. (1990) History from below. The ‘Vocabulary of Elisabethville’ by Andre Yav, texts,
translation and interpretive essay. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Gumperz, J. (1992) Contextualisation revisited. In P. Auer and A. DiLuzio (eds.), The
contextualisation of language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 39–53.
Silverstein, M. and G. Urban (1996) The natural history of discourse. In M. Silverstein
and G. Urban (eds.), Natural histories of discourse. University of Chicago Press.
1–17.
Stubbs, M. (1997) Whorf’s children: critical comments on CDA. In A. Ryan and
A. Wray (eds.), Evolving models of language. Milton Keynes: Multilingual Matters.
100–16.
Wallerstein, I. (2000) The essential Wallerstein. New York Press.
Widdowson, H. (1996) Reply to Fairclough. Discourse and interpretation: conjectures
and refutations. Language and Literature 5: 57–69.

e-mail: t.m.lillis@open.ac.uk [Received Nov. 22, 2006]

© The Authors
Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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