Barbara Johnstone - Discourse Analysis

1. Chapter 04
2. Chapter 07

1. Chapter 01
2. Chapter 02
3. Chapter 03
4. Chapter 04
5. Chapter 06
6. Chapter 07

This outstanding series is an indispensable resource for students and teachers a concise and engaging introduction to the central subjects of contemporary linguistics.

Presupposing no prior knowledge on the part of the reader, each volume sets out the fundamental skills and knowledge of the field, and so provides the ideal educational platform for further study in linguistics.

1. Andrew Spencer Phonology
2. John I. Saeed Semantics, Fourth Edition
3. Barbara Johnstone Discourse Analysis, Third Edition
4. Andrew Carnie Syntax, Third Edition
5. Anne Baker and Kees Hengeveld Linguistics
6. Li Wei, editor Applied Linguistics

Barbara Johnstone

Third Edition

This third edition first published 2018
2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Edition History
Blackwell Publishers Ltd (1e, 2002); WileyBlackwell (2e, 2007)

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Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Names: Johnstone, Barbara, author.
Title: Discourse analysis / by Barbara Johnstone.
Description: Third edition. | Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017026920 (print) | LCCN 2017029090 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119257707 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119257714 (epub) | ISBN 9781119257691 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Discourse analysis.
Classification: LCC P302 (ebook) | LCC P302 .J64 2017 (print) | DDC 401/.41dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026920

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To my teachers

This book is intended to be a firstlevel 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 I take in this book is different. I 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, I 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 utterances or sets of 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, I hope, help alleviate a problem I 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 I approach it here, is an openended heuristic, a research method consisting of a set of topics to consider in connection with any instance of discourse. This heuristic can help insure that discourse analysts are systematically paying attention to every possible element of the potential meaning of a stretch of talk or writing: every kind of context, every resource for creativity, and every source of limitation and constraint on creativity. My 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 written 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.