March 10, 2007
Tales of Discourse Analysis
Two time periods, two texts on discourse theory, two distinct approaches to analyzing discourse.
James Kinneavy's A Theory of Discourse was first published in 1971. In his preface, Kinneavy identifies the state of the composition field in that time: freshman comp as a stepchild of English, not a legitimate study for grad students, not recognized as a subdivision by MLA, etc. (What a difference 35 years does—and doesn’t—make). His book attempted to bring together several theories about teaching composition into one overall framework in a text that would be suitable for teaching a course about teaching composition, and as a beginning for further research.
Kinneavy is careful to situate his effort in the midst of competing interests. He defines discourse as full texts in oral or written situations, and offer four referends: "rhetoric, composition, communication, and discourse” (3). He summarizes his project thusly:
A theory of discourse then will comprise an intelligible framework of different types of discourse with a treatment of the nature of each type, the underlying logic(s), the organizational structure of this type, and the stylistic characteristics of such discourse (4-5).
From Kinneavy's perspective, rhetoric had left the English department with the speech folks, and logic fled to philosophy (and mathematics) so that "discourse education," formerly the "locus of traditional liberal arts education" effectively ceased. Like other scholars of that period, Kinneavy's work is aimed at re-centering discourse education, to re-establish the importance and centrality of learning about language, its uses and its effects.
The communication triangle that came to be known in later scholarship as the "Kinneavy triangle" is cited by Kinneavy as emerging from classical rhetoric. He demonstrates how the triangle, the “interrelationships of expressor, receptor, and language signs referring to reality," pervades Aristotle's Rhetoric (18). The components of the triangle get different names in different areas of study, but the structure is the same, which gives the grounds for a more unified theory.
Kinneavy draws for other fields of language study to enhance his explanations of discourse. For example, he is careful to establish his disource theory as being "constituted by 'text'" (22), rather than the compenent parts of the speech act:
Discourse, therefore, is characterized by individuals acting in a special time and place (Gardiner, t, 71); it has a beginning, a middle, a closure, and a purpose (cf. Pike 1, I, 9, 39, 44, 64 ff.); it is a language process, not a system, and it has an ‘undivided and absolute integrity,’ (Hjelmslev, p, 36-39, 12); it establishes a verbal context and it has a situational context and a cultural context (Slama-Cazacu, 1, 215-16)….In each case there is a stress on the whole, not just the isolated linguistic part (22).
He also notes the multiple levels of context for the text, including the immediate situation, and the cultural context (ref. Sapir).
This text includes a great chart that breaks the triangle down into multiple levels of study. At level A, the field of English gets broken down into three components: syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics (the study of discourse). Level B breaks down each of those parts, and finally, Level C breaks down the divisions of pragmatics (arts, or signs of discourse, and media, or channels of discourse, modes, aims). These categories for these are:
Arts of Discourse: speaking, writing, listening, reading
Media of Discourse: the channels of the signals under arts (with distinctions for the number of decoders: monologual, small group, large group, mass).
Modes of Discourse: Narration, Description, Evaluation, Classification
Aims: Reference, Persuasion, Literature, Expression
It's interesting to me that the modes portion is so oft repeated in composition texts and the aims portion is not nearly so prevalent. Kinneavy's title emphasizes the Aims. What happened to them after this book? My interest is squarely in the Aims. To me that is the piece that puts discourse education, or rhetorical education, at the center of the liberal arts (including the sciences). Kinneavy shows part of this potential:
emphasis on the encoder or decoder gives person discourse, emphasis on reality to which reference is made gives reference discourse, and emphasis on the discourse product itself gives product discourse. Since person discourse can focus on either the encoder or the decoder, there are two kinds of person discourse; expressive, emphasizing the encoder, and persuasive, emphasizing the decoder. And reference discourse must be further subdivided into scientific, informative, and exploratory (60).
The balance of the book goes on to discuss the aims in detail. I'll follow that part up another time, along with the reception of those ideas in later scholarship.
Meanwhile, in a recent book, James Gee offered a highly efficient little text on discourse theory and method that is long on practicality, if short on detail and explanations. Gee's book is built on lists, beginning with what he calls the "Seven Building tasks" (seven areas or things we use language to build). These include significance, activities, identities, relationships, politics, connections, sign systems and knowledge. The analyst looks at each of these areas and asks how language is being used to enact or build these tasks. His explanation of politics is not just the public realm of legislative arena, but what he calls "the distribution of social goods." The analyst here is looking for the perspective on social goods, which includes values and notions of "right" or "good," that are being communicated. The analysis of sign systems includes recognizing which systems are privileged over what others, as well as what ways of knowing are privileged (11-13).
Gee makes a distinction for what he calls "Capital D Discourse," which is "ways of combining and integrating language, actions, interactions, ways of thinking, believing, valuing, and using various symbols, tools, and objects ot enact a particular sort of socially recognizable identity" (21). The tools of discourse analysis are focused on language-in-use and its effects. "Conversations," which we might think of as the buzz going on across particular communities about different issues, themes, or beliefs, shape the way language is interpreted as always present but not explicit influences. Like Kinneavy, Gee recognizes the social situatedness of discourse, including not only the text but also identity and activities. He says, "Big D Discourses are always language plus 'other stuff'" (26), where "Situated means 'grounded in actual practices and experiences'" (53).
Gee's work synthesizes into a list of 26 questions we ask to analyze discourse. These include identifying the grammars, the social languages, the situated identities and activities, the Discourse(s) involved, the relationships among discourses, the relevant Conversations in play, the role of Intertextuality, the situated meaning of word(s) or phrases both from the point of view of the user (speaker, author) and that of the hearer (interpreter).
Validy for the analysis comes from four criteria: Convergence (the more the answers to all the questions converge, the more reliable the analysis); Agreement (of the speakers with the analysis); Coverage (the more the analysis can be transferred to other data, the more reliable); and Linguistic details (the more tied to details, the more valid).
I don't see Gee's work as a huge departure from Kinneavy's, but rather a succinct and practical set of tools to use in carrying out analysis within the broad framework Kinneavy worked to establish. I still have to work through what came between these two texts, which is a future project, but these make a nicely balanced pair of theory and application.
Works Cited:
Gee, James Paul. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis Theory and Method, 2nd ed.New York: Routledge, 2005.
Kinneavy, James. A Theory of Discourse: The Aims of Discourse. New York: Norton Publishers, 1980.
Posted by cageyer at 11:17 AM | Comments (0)
January 17, 2007
On (Written) Argument
Berrill, Deborah P. editor. Perspectives on Written Argument. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, Inc., 1996.
Edited collections abound in this discipline, which is nice for exam preparation since I don't have to do a lot of journal searching for articles because there are so many authors involved in these collections.
I think my favorite essay of this collection is Berrill's own on "Reframing Argument from the Metaphor of War." For all the feminist scholarship aimed at inclusiveness and opening up the tradition, this seems to me to take on the core of the male-dominant nature of the history. Argument is not war, but Berrill does a nice job (as do other scholars in other places, to be fair) picking up on Lakoff and Johnson's work in Metaphors we Live By, highlighting how often the descriptions of verbal interaction include metaphors such as "destroy," "smash," and "demolish."
The point of this collection is to ask "what is argument?" and then "formulate what the question means" (2). It is not new information to me that the combative, debate-style version of argument isn't all that argument is. Since my goal was to be a lawyer, I learned that argument is case-building. In my years of biblical research, it might be termed "precept upon precept, line upon line." Story-telling is argument, it's a proposal to see the world in a certain way, to believe certain things are true about that world, and to life according to that view. So in the introduction to the volume, this comment stands out:
These different voices necessarily carry different beliefs about what constitutes validity, about what sorts of evidence are acceptable or even must be include, about what difference is all about and hence, what argument is all about. (5)
Basically, as Berrill says in her introduction, this collection taken as a whole points out that "the essential aspect of argument is the voicing of differences" (6). Some of the essays focus on the way children make arguments - narratives and stories and examples from which they expect others to behave or respond in a certain way. Other authors in the series talk about how people in other cultures (Japan, African Americans, other Pacific cultures) view argument. All these point to the decentering of Eurocentric theory of argument as logical and rational (only).
I'm not sure who the audience for this collection is. The series editor's preface specified "writing in the human world" and that the series "presents scholarly work on written language in its various contexts" (vii). As a CCR student, little in this text was new, though several of the essays were enjoyable to read.
Posted by cageyer at 06:46 PM | Comments (0)
January 16, 2007
The project I'm not doing
Geisler, Cheryl. Analyzing Streams of Lanuage: Twelve Steps to the Systematic Coding of Text, Talk, and Other Verbal Data. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004.
This book would be a great text for anyone who was engaged in a coding project (which I am not). When I took M.H.'s 691 methods course a couple years ago, we visited this method (coding) in brief. The whole project of identifying "basic units of language" in a text - the words, "t-units." clauses, etc. seem much more detailed and minute than I am interested in. It's useful to me for clarifying what my project is not, which is why I think LWP recommended it for me. I'm interested in a different level of analysis - something more general, more big picture. But I can see that in rhetorical analysis, the tendency to pick out words and argue for what those words suggest about the text, could easily border on this kind of coding project. Knowing this, I'll be careful to be specific in defining my method.
Now, having said all that, if I ever needed to do this kind of analysis, I would definitely want this text next to me.
Posted by cageyer at 09:18 PM | Comments (0)