Дискурсологія. Конспект лекцій

There are many ways to classify discourse:

•Written/spoken discourse.

•Classification of discourse according to the register (level of formality).

•Classification of discourse according to genre (communicative purpose, style, audience).

•Monologic (one speaker/writer produces an entire discourse)/ dialogic/ multiparty (two/more participants interact/ construct discourse together)

“A person possessing speech ability should simultaneously possess a set of discourse types acceptable for this structure as there exist a particular variant of communicative behaviors for each of them” (G.G. Pocheptsov).

G.G.Pocheptsov has defined a wide range of discourse:

TV and radio discourse; Newspaper discourse; Theatre discourse; Film discourse; Literary discourse;

PR discourse; Advertisement discourse; Political discourse; Religious discourse;

Sociolinguistic typologies

Authoritative discourse vs democratic discourse.

Authoritative: narrative and instructive types (eg. news articles without comment section, political speeches and TV interviews in which there is no interactivity; one-way communication);

Democratic: descriptive, explanatory and argumentative types (eg. a politician’s blog open for comments or TV discussions in which the reporter is knowledgeable; the participants build the discourse instead of only asking and answering; two-way communication).

Institutional discourse vs non-institutional (existential) discourse (V.Karasik).

References:

1.Jakobson R. Language in Relation to Other Communication Systems / Roman Jakobson // Selected Writings. – The Hague : Mouton Publishers, 1971. – Vol. 2. – P. 570–579.

2.Бацевич Ф. С. Нариси з комунікативної лінгвістики : монографія / Ф. С. Бацевич. – Львів : ВЦ ЛНУ ім. І. Франка, 2003. – 281 с.

3.Карасик В. И. О типах дискурса / В. И. Карасик // Языковая личность: институциональный и персональный дискурс : сб. науч. тр. – Волгоград : Перемена, 2000. – С. 5–20.

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4. Карасик В. И. Этнокультурные типы институционального дискурса / В. И. Карасик // Этнокультурная специфика речевой деятельности : сб. обзоров / РАН ИНИОН, Центр гуманит. науч.-информ. исслед., Отд. языкознания ; [редкол.: Трошина Н. Н. (отв. ред.) и др.]. – М.,2000. − С. 37– 63.

К. : ВЦ „Київський університет”, 1999. – 308 с.

LECTURE 7

TEXTUAL AND DISCOURSE CATEGORIES:

COHESION AND COHERENCE

The notion of discourse categories. Typology of discourse categories. Integrity and discreetness of discourse. Cohesion as a structural grammatical unity. Coherence as a content unity. Continuity of discourse. Space and time as subcategories of continuity.

Discourse categories

•If communication is the connection between the reality and cognition, textdiscourse categories are invariant features of this process in the variety of text forms.

•modelling of the general invariants of speech genres and variants of actualized texts in different communicative situations.

Two approaches to the text categories investigation (O.P. Vorobyova):

•the first assumes that a text, when formed, gains a definite feature, that is, a category,

•the second is based on the idea, that categories themselves form a text.

Main textual and discourse categories:

•integrity,

•informativeness,

•cohesion,

•continuity,

•referentiality,

•interactivity,

•intersemioticity,

•antropocentricity.

Cohesion and coherence

Halliday and Hasan (1976)

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Cohesion is linguistically explicit and signals underlying semantic relationships between text elements.

Coherence: underlying organiser which makes the words and sentences into a unified discourse that conforms to a consistent world picture. A coherent text is meaningful, unified, and gives the impression of "hanging together".

de Beaugrande & Dressler (1983)

Cohesion concerns the ways in which the components of the surface text, i.e. the actual words we hear or see, are mutually connected within a sequence.

Coherence concerns the ways in which the components of the textual world, i.e. the configuration of concepts and relations which underlie the surface text, are mutually accessible and relevant". Coherence is the outcome of cognitive processes among text users.

Categories of discourse cohesion

Reference

• Anaphoric reference: referring backwards E.g. I can see a bird. It is singing. (‘It’ refers backwards to ‘bird’.)

• Cataphoric reference: referring forward. E.g. When they arrived at the house, all the participants were very tired. (‘They’ refers forward to ‘participants’).

Signals of cohesion indicate how the part of the text with which they occur links up conceptually with some other part. It is common to speak of such signals as COHESIVE TIES.

The following list (10) is taken largely from a well-known treatment of cohesion by Halliday and Hasan (1976), as amplified by Brown and Yule (1983, Section 6.1):

COMMON TYPES OF COHESION:

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Descriptive expressions alluding to entities mentioned earlier

Identity

repetition (whole or partial) lexical replacement pronouns

other pro-forms substitution ellipsis

Lexical relations hyponymy (type of) part-whole collocation

Morphosyntactic patterns

consistency of inflectional categories (tense, aspect, etc.) echoic utterances

discourse-pragmatic structuring

Signals of relations between propositions

Intonation patterns

The category of coherence

Many coherence theorists set themselves two related goals:

(a)to provide a theory of comprehension, (how discourses are understood);

(b)to provide a theory of evaluation,(well-formedness, acceptability or appropriateness).

Goal is shared with reference theory, which aims to provide a theory of comprehension.

A text is said to be COHERENT if, for a certain hearer on a certain hearing/reading, he or she is able to fit its different elements into a single overall mental representation (Johnson-Laird 1983).

Relationship between cohesion and coherence

• Cohesion and coherence are related notions, but they are clearly distinct. There are two types of views concerning their relationship.

A) Cohesion is neither necessary nor sufficient to account for coherence. A: That's the telephone.

B: I'm in the bath. A: O.K. (Widdowson, 1978)

B) Cohesion is necessary, though not sufficient in the creation of coherent texts. In other words, cohesion is a crucial though not exclusive factor contributing

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to coherence, since it facilitates the comprehension of underlying semantic relations.

Continuity is one of the textual grammatical categories, produced by cohesion. Principle of continuity appears to describe an analogous preference in terms of perceiving visual phenomena.

Discourse continuity is considered to be space and time interaction of such states as production and comprehension. Discourse continuity is variable depending on the knowledge, experience, and motivation of the recipient. Despite the presence of this variability, the fact of human communication remains incontrovertible.

Text continuity shows the topical cohesion – centripetal power of the text. It is the synthesis of cohesion and discontinuity.

I.Halperin defines continuity as the non-segmented flow of motion in time and space, the determined sequence of facts, events unfolding in the text categories of time and space.

In terms of discourse, continuity possesses such categories:

-the sub-category of time;

-the sub-category of space.

Discourse time and space Can be segmented, discrete or non-segmented, on

condition of spontaneity of communication. Quite on the contrary, text time and space conform the chronotope of text continuity. Researchers differentiate between the discourse real (live) chronotope and intertextual chronotope.

The Russian philologist and literary philosopher M.Bakhtin used the term chronotope to designate the spatial-temporal matrix which governs the base condition of all narratives and other linguistic acts.

References:

1. Воробьëва О. П. Текстовые категории и фактор адресата / О. П. Воробьëва. – К. : Вища школа, 1993. – 200 с.

2.Селиванова Е. А. Основы лингвистической теории текста и коммуникации : монограф. учеб. пособие / Е. А. Селиванова. – К. : ЦУЛ : Фитосоциоцентр, 2002. – 336 с.

3.Campbell K.S. Coherence, continuity and cohesion: theoretical foundations for document desighn / K.S. Campbell. – Hillsdale, NJ: Publication Year, 1995.

LECTURE 8

TEXTUAL AND DISCOURSE CATEGORIES: INTENTIONALITY, INFORMATIVENESS, SITUATIONALITY AND ACCEPTABILITY

The informative space of discourse. The correlation of informativeness and semantic space of discourse. Factuality as subcategory of informativeness.

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Informativeness provides informational interaction of the addresser and addressee.

An informative discourse is well-formed if:

(a)all its propositions are conceived related to a discourse-topic proposition;

(b)marks any deviation from informativeness by an explicit marker, e.g. ‘by the way’, ‘after all‘ e.g.

• a. Peter: What time is it?

• b. Mary: You’ve dropped your wallet.

• a. Peter: What’s the time?

• b. Mary: By the way, you’ve dropped your wallet.

Intentionality has to do with the attitude or purpose on the part of a speaker.

Acceptability, which might also be called ‘appropriateness’ has to do with how a collection of words or sentences fits into what speakers and hearers or readers and writers deem useful or relevant in particular situations.

Situationality is probably the most relevant of de Beaugrande and Dressler’s categories for discourse analysts. Discourse is always in some way situated, and much of its meaning and its effect on the world is a consequence of how words and sentences interact with situations. ‘Discourse’ results from the connections that are formed between language and the various elements that make up social situations (people, places, actions, objects, times of day, etc.).

References:

коммуникации : монограф. Учеб. Пособие / Е. А. Селиванова. – К. : ЦУЛ : Фитосоциоцентр, 2002. – 336 с.

LECTURE 9

TEXTUAL AND DISCOURSE CATEGORIES: INTERTEXTUALITY, INTERSEMIOTICITY

Interaction of communicants and text modules with semiotic universe. Sign space of the text.

The category of intertextuality

•denotes the common quality of the texts to have a kind of connections or ties, due to which they can directly or indirectly refer to each other;

•typical of all verbal genres. And it is also presented not only in verbal texts, but also in texts formed by means of other semiotic systems. For example,

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intertextual relations can be found between pieces of art, architecture, music, theatre, cinema etc.

Intertext functions

•Expressive - author expresses his/her own cultural and semiotic guidelines: texts and the authors referred to can be prestige, fashionable.

•Appealing – references to the texts directed to certain receiver, a person which can easily recognize, identify intertextual reference, appreciate its choice and realize the intention;

•Poetical - basically entertaining function: recognition of intertextual references is a kind of puzzle with different levels of difficulty;

•Referential - giving information about external world: reference to the other text potentially invoke the information of the text referred to;

•Metatextual – a need to determine relevance with source-text for its deeper understanding.

Intertextual relations

represent simultaneously the construction “text in text”, and the construction “text about text”.

• Reader’s view:

«Між мудрими раз був чудак: Я мислю, - він писав, – відтак, Без сумніву, існую…»

(Є. Баратинський)

• Reference to (deeper understanding impossible without knowing the referred text to).

Types of intertextuality:

-Intertextuality – presence of several texts in one (quotation, plagiarism);

-Paratextuality – reference of text to its own title, afterword, epigraph;

-Metatextuality – critical reference to own text;

-Hypertextuality – drawing ridicule to the other text;

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- Architextuality – genre relation of texts.

The category of intersemioticity is realized on the basis of dialogic interaction of communicants and text modules with semiotic universe, represented in code of language, culture, science, literature, etc.

References:

1. Воробьëва О.П. Текстовые категории и фактор адресата / О. П. Воробьëва. – К. : Вища школа, 1993. – 200 с.

2.Селиванова Е.А. Основы лингвистической теории текста и коммуникации : монограф. учеб. пособие / Е. А. Селиванова. – К. : ЦУЛ : Фитосоциоцентр, 2002. – 336 с.

3.Лотман Ю.М. Текст у тексті / Ю. М. Лотман // Слово. Знак. Дискурс : Антологія світової літературно-критичної думки ХХ ст. / за ред. М. Зубрицької. – Львів : Літопис, 1996. – С. 428–441.

LECTURE 10

DISCOURSE AS A SEMIOSIS

The role of semiotics in modern interdisciplinary discourse studies. Functioning of language as a semiosis. Discourse as a sign. The main approaches to the study of discourse as a semiosis in various branches of linguistics and culture studies. French semiotic school. Modelling peculiarities of discourse as the basis of semiosis.

Semiotics is the study of signs and the processes of making meaning and in producing a meaningful world. It has the object of describing signs in operation as a system. It also has the object of describing and analysing the articulation of signs in practice. It therefore analyses the discourse practices and strategies available to people in given contexts by which they set into circulation the key images, ideas, and symbols through which identities and objects are created and reproduced.

Various philosophers and semioticians (Saussure; Pierce; Eco) refer to sign/signifier/representamen, its signified/referent/object, and its signification/meaning/interpretant by different terms and have represented this relationship as a triad:

sign/signifier/representamen

(e.g. word, gesture, object, picture)

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Meaning making in discourse involves three aspects of meaning related to the social action, the roles of people and the organizations of the sign or text respectively (Halliday, 1994). Lemke (1998) proposed the following three aspects of meanings constructed during discourse:

-Presentational: a presentation of events, actions, relations, processes;

-Orientational: an orientation towards and for the presentational concept and participants;

-Organizational: the organized and meaningful relations between elements of the discourse.

Semioticians classify signs or sign systems in relation to the way they are transmitted. This process of carrying meaning depends on the use of codes that may be the individual sounds or letters that humans use to form words, the body movements they make to show attitude or emotion, or even something as general as the clothes they wear. To coin a word to refer to a thing, the community must agree on a simple meaning (a denotative meaning) within their language. But that word can transmit that meaning only within the language's grammatical structures and codes. Codes also represent the values of the culture, and are able to add new shades of connotation to every aspect of life.

meaning from a source to a receiver. Hence, communication theorists construct models based on codes, media, and contexts to explain the biology, psychology, and mechanics involved. Both disciplines also recognize that the technical process cannot be separated from the fact that the receiver must decode the data, i.e., be able to distinguish the data as salient and make meaning out of it. This implies that there is a necessary overlap between semiotics and communication. Indeed, many of the concepts are shared, although in each field the emphasis is different. In Messages and Meanings: An Introduction to Semiotics, Marcel Danesi (1994) suggested that semioticians' priorities were to study signification first and communication second. A more extreme view is offered by Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1987; 1990), who, as a musicologist, considered the theoretical study of communication irrelevant to his application of semiotics.

Semiotics focuses mainly on units of meaning and the generalizable conditions for encoding across symbolic systems (linguistic, visual, auditory), and, in general, uses language as the modeling system for other "second order" systems that function according to systematic rules (e.g., visual art, music, literature, popular media, advertising, or any meaning system). We now have methods for merging the "generative" approach of linguistics with the "networks of meaning" approach in semiotics. The next step is to develop models for a "generative grammar" and "generative semiotics" of culture, describing the rules for producing new cultural forms from our established base of meaning and content systems (in language, images, music, digital mixed media, or any transmittable cultural genre).

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The models developed by Peirce and Bakhtin have allowed for new research on this central question.

References:

1.Barthes R. The semiotic challenge / Roland Barthes ; Translated by Richard Houard. – New York : Hill and Wang, 1988. – 293 p.

2.Chandler D. Semiotics for Beginners [Електронний ресурс] / Chandler D. – Режим доступу: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem08.html

3.Андрейчук Н.І. Дослідження дискурсу як семіозису/Н.І.Андрейчук//Науковий вісник Волинського національного університету імені Лесі Українки: Філологічні науки. Мовознавство. – Луцьк: Видавництво Волинського національного університету імені Лесі Українки. - №7. – 2010. – с.62-65.

4.Бенвенист Э. Общая лингвистика / Э. Бенвенист ; [ред., вступ. ст. и коммент. Ю. С. Степанова]. – М. : Прогресс, 1974. – 446 с.

5.Мальковская И. А. Знак коммуникации. Дискурсивные матрицы / Ирина Александровна Мальковская. – Изд. 2-е, испр. – М. : КомКнига, 2005. – 240 с.

Моррис У. Ч. Из книги „Значение и означивание”. Знаки и действия / У. Ч. Моррис // Семиотика : антология / сост. Ю. С. Степанов. – Изд. 2-е, испр. и доп. – М. : Академический проект ; Екатеринбург : Деловая книга, 2001а. – С. 129–143.

6.Никитина Е. С. Семиотика : курс лекций : учеб. пособие для вузов. – М. : Академический проект : Трикста, 2006. – 528 с.

7.Панов С. В. Письмо, семиозис и дискурс / С. В. Панов. – М. : Спутник +, 2010. – 107 с.

8.Степанов Ю. С. Семиотика /Ю.С.Степанов / М.: Наука, 1971 [Электронний ресурс] – Режим доступу: http://lib.vvsu/ru/books/semiotika1/

9.Шейгал Е. И. Семиотика политического дискурса / Е. И. Шейгал. – М. : Гнозис, 2004. – 326 с.

LECTURE 11

DISCOURSE AND SPEECH GENRES

M.M. Bakhtin’s theory of speech genres. The concept of genre in neorhetoric. Genres in text linguistics. Genres and cognitive linguistics. The concept of genre in applied linguistics.

The conventionalised forms of the occasions lead to the conventionalised forms of texts, to specific GENRES.

•Genres have specific forms and meanings, deriving from and encoding the functions, purposes and meanings of the social occasions.

•Genres therefore provide a precise index and catalogue of the relevant social occasions of a community at a given time.

Genres are the effects of the action of individual social agents acting both within the bounds of their history and the constraints of particular contexts, and with a knowledge of existing generic types (Kress, 1989).

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