Discourse Analysis in Communication references

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.

• ·         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

• ·         Accounting (Bu ttny)

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.

• ·         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.

• ·         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

• ·         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.

• ·         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.

• ·         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.

• ·         "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

• ·         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.

• ·         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.