Discourse Analysis in Communication
the process
through which individuals as well as institutions exchange information; it is
the name for the everyday activity in which people build, but sometimes blast
apart, their intimate, work, and public rela- tionships; it is a routinely
offered solution to the problems engendered in societies in which people need
to live and work with others who differ from themselves; it is a compelling
intellectual issue of interest to scholars from diverse academic disciplines;
and it is the name of the particular academic discipline I call home. In this
chapter I offer my take on the field of Communication's take on discourse
analysis, I conclude by identifying the intellectual- features that give
discourse studies conducted by communication scholars a family resemblace.
As communication professionals then
thought of themselves, broke away to form their own departments to give oral
practices such as public speaking and debate the attention that, in English
departments, were given only to written literary texts. In the ensuing decades
the communication field under- went multiple transformations: becoming
research-oriented, rather than primarily teaching, changing the name of its
professional associations from "speech" to com- munication, expanding
the oral practices it studied from public speaking and debate to group
discussion, communication in deyeloping relationships and among intim- ates,
interaction in work and institutional settings, and mediated communications of
all forms .
One distinctive feature of
Communication is its recognition, even embracing, of the value of multiple
perspectives on issues. Communication has an openness to other fields’ ideas
and models of inquiry rarely found in other academic disciplines. On the negative
side, this openness can make it difficult to figure out how a piece of communication
research is distinct from one in a neighboring discipline. For intance depending
on one's place in the field, communication researchers might be asked how their
research is different from social psychology, business and industrial.
relations, anthropology, political
science, sociology, pragmatic studies within lin- guistics, and so on. Yet as I
will argue at this review's end, the discourse analytic work carried out by
communication scholars reflects a shared disciplinary pe;spective. Although the
distinctiveness of the perspective has not always been well understood, even by
its practitioners, the perspective embodies a set of intellectual commitments
that can enliven and enrich the multidisciplinary conversation about discourse.
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Telephone
talk (Hopper)
Hopper traces the historical
evolution of the telephone and the ways that face-to-face talk differ from
telephone talk, and then introduces conversation analysis and argues why it is
a particularly helpful approach for understanding communica- tion on the phone.
explication of telephone talk in
terms of its interactional processes. Drawing upon his own work, as well as
related conversation analytic work, Hopper describes the canonical form for
telephone openings, considers sum- mons and answers, and how identification and
recognition work, examines how switchboards and call answering shape telephone
exchanges, and investigates the influences of relationships between callers and
national culture
The study of accounts has been an
area of lively intellectual activity in communication.
Buttny highlights the problematic
nature of studying accounts in this way and argues for an alternative
methodological approach, what he labels conversation analytic constructionism.
analysis of accounting episodes in
couples therapy, a Zen class, and welfare and news interviews (see also Buttny
1996; Buttny and Cohen 1991). Also explored are the relationships among
accountiig and emotion talk.
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Straight
talk (Katriel)
Katriel traces the socially rich
roots of dugri that led to its becoming an especially valued way of talk among
Israelis of European descent. Dugri, a term originally from Arabic that is now
part of colloquial Hebrew, is used both to describe the act of speaking
straight to the point, and as a label for an honest person who speaks in this
way. Katriel illuminates how dugri takes its meaning from its being embedded in
Zionist socialism, a system committed to making Zionist Jews everything that
the Diaspora Jew was not.
To the degree that an ethnography
of communication study is evidenced through analysis of recorded and
transcribed talk, it will be. Hybrid discourse analytic/ethnographic studies
are increasingly common. From a disciplinary perspective, then, some of the
studies noted above would more readily be judged ethnographies than discourse
analysis. However, because discourse analysis in its larger interdisciplinary
context.
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Controlling
others' conversational understandings (Sanders)
Most people, at least some of the
time, experience communication as problematic. The reason for this, Sanders
(1987) argues, is that people have other purposes when they communicate than
just expressing what they are thinking or feeling: "On at least some
occasions, people communicate to affect others - to exercise control over the
understandings others form of the communicator, the situation, their
interpersonal relationships, the task at hand, etc., thereby to make different
actions and reactions more or less likely
The key challenge in a theory of
meaning-making, as Sanders sees it, is to identify how relatively stable
aspects of meaning are acted upon by the shaping and changing power of context
(especially prior utterances), A set of forecasting principles which
communicators use to make decisions abbbt what to say next is identified.
Sanders draws upon a range of procedures to assess his theory
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Academic
colloquium (Tracy)
Using tape-recorded presentations
and discussions from weekly colloquia in program, and interviews with graduate
students and faculty participants, Colloquium explores the host of dilemmas
that confront participants in their institutional and interactional roles. As
presenters, for instance, faculty mem- bers and graduate students needed to
make decisions about how closely to position themselves in relation to the
ideas about which they talked
Close positioning - done through
mention of tangible by-products of intellectual work such as articles or
grants, or time references that made apparent lengthy project involvement -
acted as a claim to high intellectual ability and therein licensed difficult
questions and challenges. More distant positioning made a presenter's making of
errors and inability to handle certain intellectual issues more reasonable, but
became increasingly problematic the higher me's institutional rank (beginning
versus advanced graduate student, assist- ant versus full professor.
In investigating academic colloquia
I developed a hybrid type of discourse analysis that I named
action-implicatived iscourse analysis (Tracy 1995)
A discourse-grounded dilemmatic
approach to communicative problems is seen in studies of other institutional
contexts as well. Naughton (19961, for instance, describes the strategies
hospice team members use to manage the dilemma of displaying pa- tient
acceptance and making medically and professionally informed evaluations;
Pomerantz et al.
Key Fe method that is to be
distinguished from ethnographic field ap- proaches (informant interviewing and
participant observation) on the one hand, and laboratory and field-based coding
studies on the other. Discourse analysis is situated within an interpretive
social science metatheory that conceives of meanings as socially constructed,
and needing to be studied in ways that take that belief seriously.
(1) empirical work, to be distinguished from philosophical essays about
discourse
(2) social scientific in world view
and hence distinguishable from humanistic approaches to textual analysis hetorical
criticism studies that analyze language and argument strategies in political
speeches) atures of a Communication Take on Discourse Analysis
In the final section are described
intellectual commitments, habits of mind if you will, common among
communication researchers? None of the commitments is unique to communication
scholarship. Yet taken as a set, these intellectual practices and preferences
create a perspective on discourse that is identifiably
"comrnun~cative." A communication perspective, I argue, brings issues
into focus that are invisible or backgrounded in other disciplinary viewpoints.
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A
preference for talk over written texts
That discourse analysts within
communication privilege oral over written texts is not surprising given the
history of the field. This does not mean there is no interest in written texts but
it does mean that analyses of written discourse are the exception rather than
the rule
Typically, fields define themselves
more broadly than they actually practice. In Communication, for instance,
although there are no good intellectual reasons, dis- course analysts typically
focus on adults rather than children.
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Audience
design and strategy as key notions
In addition to the notion that talk
is directed to an audience, there is a related assumption that people are
crafting their talk to accomplish their aims given the other and the character
of the situation, Commul~icators are choice-making, planning actors confronting
uncertain situations and seeking to shape what happens in ways that advance
their concerns. Questions to which communication researchers repeatedly return
include: (1) "What identity, task, or relationship functions are served
for a speaker by talking in this way rather than that?" and (2) "What
are the advantages and disadvantages of selecting one strategy versus
another?"
A rhetorical approach to discourse
is not unique to communication. The sociologist Silverman (1994), for instance,
implicitly adopts this stance in his study of patients telling counselors why
they have come in for HIV testing. A group of British social psychologists.
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"Problematic"
situations as most interesting
others reveal considerable
individual differences (O'Keefe 1991). It is situations that social actors
experience as problematic, where individuals respond differently - for example,
accounting for a problem, reacting to someone else's, giving advice - that are most
interesting for communication researchers . Commun- ication scholars' interest
in the problematic is displayed in the attention given to conflict and
persuasion situations, as well as their visible concern about multiple-goal and
dilemmatic occasions.
That is, it is not only an interest
in how people are locally making sense and acting but how they could be that is
a particularly Communication impluse
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An
explicitly argumentative writing style
A descriptive style is expected
when members of a com- munity understand the significance of an action, issue,
or person similarly. There is no surer way to mark oneself as a novice or
outsider to a community than to argue for what is regarded as obvious
Similarly, to provide no evidence
for assertions a com- munity regards as contentious is a sign of ignorance of
some type. An argumentative stance is expected when one is dealing with issues
that members of a targeted group regard as debatable. Stated a bit differently,
an argumentative style legitimates other views of the world - it frames an
issue as something others may see differently. Effective scholarly writing
requires weaving descriptive and argumentative moves together. But the
characteristic way this is done - the relative frequency of descriptive and
argumentative devices - tends to differ according to scholarly disciplines
(Bazerman 1988). In a study I did (Tracy 1988) comparing journal articles from
four intellectual traditions (discourse processing, conversation analysis,
interactional socio- linguistics, and communication), the communication report
used the most explicitly argumentative style. The use of a relatively explicit
argumentative style is a marker of Communication work. practical level, the
argumentative style can be attributed to the intellectual diversity w~thin
Communication. There are few things that everyone in the discipline would give
assent to. Because of this diversity it is necessary to use a more explicitly
argumentative style than is displayed in other disciplines. However, the
argument- ative writing style is not merely a practical necessity, it is the
embodiment of a dis- ciplinary attitude toward people.
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Viewing
talk as practical and moral action
Talk is not just a phenomenon to be
scientifically described and explained, it is moral and practical action taken
by one person toward others. Talk not only can be evalu- ated, but should be.
Just as people in their everyday lives are inescapably evaluating their own and
others' actions, so, too, do scholars have a responsibility to take the moral
and practical dimensions of talk seriously
Craig's view of Communication as a
practical discipline also regards problems as the starting point for research.
But what distinguishes Craig's model from Gunnarsson's description of applied
linguistic work is practical theory's assumption that problems are not
self-evident things
Social approaches imply that
communication research has an active role to play in cultivating better
communicative practices in society. The responsibility of such roles follows
from the reflexivity inherent in our research practices. . . . Communication is
not a set of objective facts just simply "out there" to be described
and explained. Ideas about communication disseminated by researchers, teachers,
and other intel- lectuals circulate through society and participate in social
processes that continually influence and reshape communication practices.
