The origins of discourse analysis

It is not accurate to regard it as something totally new. The 1^st known students of language in the Western tradition, the scholars of Greece & Rome divided grammar from rhetoric. Grammar is concerned with the rules of language as an isolated object & rhetoric deals with how to do things with words to achieve effects, communicate successfully with people in particular contexts. Nowadays some schools of DA employ terms from classical rhetoric. In 20^th-century linguistics alongside sentence linguistics, there have also been approaches which studied language as part of society & the world. In Britain this tradition developed in the work of some scholars, who saw language, not as autonomous system, but as part of a culture, which is in turn is responsive to the environment. Ironically it was a sentence linguist who both coined the term “DA” & initiated a search for language rules which would explain how sentences were connected within a text by a kind of extended grammar (Zellig Harris “Discourse Analysis” 1952). He analyzed the article about hair-tonic. He worked out a set of rules, explaining why one sentence followed another.

Pioneers in the field of da (Labov, Grice, Sinclair)

These scholars set out a number of questions which DA had & has to answer.

1. What is the basic unit of interaction? How can it be characterized & labeled?

2. What are communicative functions of discourse units? How many functions are there?

3. How are these functions realized lexico-gramatically?

4. What structures do the basic units combine to form?

5. What are the relations between the discourse & the speakers & the hearers?

Up to the late 60s there were very few books on DA. It took some time & effort to understand that discourse cannot be described in terms of formal grammatical units, discourse is different because it presupposes on-line processing of a verbally presented message as a constituent part of a speech event.

Up to the 70s all linguistic units were described as arranged on a rank scale. That is small units combine to form larger ones.

Phoneme – morpheme – word – phrase – sentence – paragraph.

On the level of the paragraph this approach cannot be applied, because though there are cohesive links between sentences a paragraph depends on content & stylistic decisions, not grammatical ones. In a conversation there are no grammatical constraints on the choice of answer. That is why Sinclair proposed the term discourse as a new level with its own rank scale of units & its own type of relations among these units.

Text (product)/discourse (process) is the largest unit of verbal communication.

Differences between text & discourse

Text can defined in different ways:

It’s any utterance which consists of one or more sentences & which is complete in terms of meaning ….. (Moskalskaya)

Text is a written result of some creative process which consists of a title & a number of paragraphs united by all kinds of lexical, grammatical, logical & stylistic links. (Galperin)

It is a more or less complete fragment of verbal interaction which is structured according to certain rules & which manifests the cognitive, psychological & social aspects of communication… it has a structure & gives information. (Kolshansky)

It is a means of transmitting & getting information which is presented by the speaker in some form providing for its adequate understanding. (Cognitive linguists)