The Discourse of Social Achievement 1

Transcription

1 1 The Discourse of Social Achievement 1 The relationship between discourse analysis and pragmatics has been questioned recently within various theoretical traditions (Saussure 2007, Wodak 2007). The disciplines may even converge for some authors (cf. Brown & Yule 1983, Blum-Kulka 1997, or Mey 2001: 316 about critical pragmatics ). It is obvious that both disciplines share methods and objects, and that the pragmatics of discourse is showing a tendency to shift from the status of a new methodology (see the focus-on issue of Journal of Pragmatics 36 (2004)) to that of a theoretical framework capable of taking into account quite a number of context data. The aim of this special issue is to test the pragmatics of discourse in real-world situations of social action and social demand. Discourse in action has been subject to debate in various researches (van Dijk 1997, Norris & Jones 2005, Fairclough 1992, Sarangi & Coulthard 2001, Filliettaz 2004, among others) that support an idea of discourse as a mediation tool for actions in the world. Here, we would like to go further and offer an overview of the pragmatic impact of discourse from a linguistic and a social point of view. We define discourse through its relations with the different domains of social activity within which it is produced, as a practice fixed in a social and historic context: a practice which has social goals. We go on to argue that linguistic practice not only reflects, but also constitutes social practice (cf. Gardin 1980: 8). On the one hand, discourse is a goal-oriented action (or activity, Sarangi 2004), on the other hand, action and speech acts are not separable. We consider discourse, then, to be a tool used to take one or more social action(s) (Jones & Norris 2005: 3). Language in the workplace and language in specialized interactions (education, healthcare, the area of legal evidence, and so on) are typical cases of social practice. As these professional and institutional practices have significant social consequences and imply very precise social roles and rules, they are a real pragmatic 1 We would like to warmly thank Prof. Jacob L. Mey for his precious comments and suggestions on this special issue.

2 2 laboratory for the analyst. Discourse as social (inter)action offers a wide range of research objects (cf. van Dijk 1997): actions; aims and consequences of actions; context; and discourse strategies (like preferences for a specific language or genre). The latter allow us to get back to the pragmatic purposes of discourse, and to clarify the connections between aim and consequences 2. Therefore, one of the objectives of the papers presented here is to examine the impact of discourse on society and social practice. In quite a number of pragmatic or sociolinguistic studies, the context is mainly seen as focused on the individuals directly participating in the communicative act. Yet the importance of context surpasses that of individual characteristics such as age, social status, and level of education: collective constraints and rules are still very strong, even in our so-called individualistic societies. Sometimes these constraints are implicit and come from a background of shared knowledge, but they may also be institutionalized. The study of discourses as constituent elements of institutions (media, social welfare, justice and law, etc.) takes into account more complex context data, in an attempt to define (non-isomorphic) sociodiscursive rules and principles. The notion of context should be expanded, so that it not only takes into account the conditions of production and the socio-institutional status of the speaker/writer, but also the way a discourse is used, either in direct reception or through mediation, including the way it may construct context elements (see Filliettaz 2005). Actually, in the case of legal evidence, the discourse may invalidate or, to be more precise, transform the status of the speaker. This is suggested by the well-known judicial phrase anything you say will be used against you, in which discourse becomes evidence potentially transforming the defendant into a convict. Social reports in the child services sector are all produced by enabled social workers, but the use of these discourses in court and their action on the world is the judge s 2 Such categories not only organize, so to speak, the execution of the action both in cognitive planning and control and in interpretation but also define the social function of a given action, by specifying for example the commitments, rights, and duties produced or changed by a particular action. (van Dijk 1977: 237)

3 3 prerogative. In vocational training schools, instructors may respond to requests for help by trainees with sarcasm or criticism, thereby voiding the original speech act of request and exploiting it for other pragmatic objectives. Explicit pragmatic aims are then ignored, and implicit or biased aims put forward; in this case, the interactants' goals and ends (Hymes 1974: 57) are almost necessarily disjointed or non-concordant. The meaning of the discourse has to be adjusted to the significance of the action. From the very beginning, discourse is already involved in a constructivist process. Indeed, the conditions of functioning of discourse are not exclusively a matter of context as an external setting: some of these conditions are produced by the discourse itself, through its construction of social objects and other-than-itself entities 3. For instance, the representations emerging from discourses play an important role in action interpretation (as an interpretive resource) and response/interaction. In such situations, the social actors are led to engage in a discourse analysis which, by their own accounts, often surpasses their professional competence. With increasing frequency, institutions solicit consulting, expertise, and diagnosis. This kind of demand compels Discourse Analysis to redefine its research object (What is a discourse at the reception point? Which constraints and communicative rules are involved?); to reconceptualize its tools and the configuration of its tools; and to rethink the theory of the relationship between discourse and what is external to it. Committed to taking social action, Discourse Analysis works then in a variety of settings in order to understand, transform, and improve the contexts and systems in which language use is crucial to human activity and development. One may also question the pragmatic value of the linguistic expertise itself, in terms of the functioning of its 'macro-speech acts'. The expertise of Discourse Analysis may be felicitous or infelicitous; in either case, it produces pragmatically oriented discourses that influence the world and have an impact on the functioning of the institutions and social areas 3 In a Foucauldian tradition: Words can mean more or something other than what they say. (Blum-Kulka 1997: 38).

4 4 involved. Discourse Analysis is no longer a mere witness; it becomes a full actor and acquires performative power. Accepting expertise means introducing a third position, a third social role, into the communicative act. Linear communication then becomes stratified and the discursive expertise is capable of accompanying, or even substituting for, the socio-discursive rules of communication. Moreover, discourse expertise may stipulate a renewal of discourse practices (changing linguistic aspects of the legal system, or modifying healthcare communication strategies, for instance), which immediately implies a renewal of the social practices themselves, inasmuch as action and speech acts are inseparable. To what extent should Discourse Analysis intervene in a pragmatic framework and in reality? Responding to a social demand involves ethical considerations and a pragmatic evaluation of the situation and of the discourses circulating in the targeted social area, as well as a discussion of the possible impact of the discourse of expertise. The methodological and theoretical aspects of the current issue rely upon a complex, double-sided definition of discourse: as a linguistic production having its own structure and rules, while at the same time being an activity and social practice. Rather than considering it just a mediation tool, we define discourse as a linguistic reality inasmuch as it develops a performative power/force. Even when discourses are mainly used as tools, as in the contexts of teaching (for instance, using narrative texts for word learning), they retain a meaning that goes beyond this situated pragmatic value. The meaning of a discourse does not reside solely in the actions that people use it for, as Jones & Norris (2005: 4) argue; it resides at least equally in the discourse structure and linguistic choices. At the macro-level, the notion of speech genre is a good test for this hypothesis. Bakhtin (1986) defines the speech genre in terms of spheres of human activity, and postulates that any speech project is accomplished first of all through the choice of a genre 4. At the micro-level, the co-construction of reference 4 Each separate utterance is individual, of course, but each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these utterances. These we may call speech genres. The wealth and diversity of speech genres are boundless because the

5 5 through nomination strategies in discourse negotiates a kind of social agreement on the world that is essential for acting. The study of linguistic forms and structures appears to be crucial to the connection between discourse and society. We argue that discourses are equipped with quite a number of linguistic markers and strategies able to supply semantic and pragmatic cues. Our approach posits complementarity in the scientific landscape. The papers collected in this issue borrow insights and analytical tools from Forensic Linguistics, Pragmatics, Critical Discourse Analysis (closest to CDA approaches like Chouliaraki & Fairclough s, 1999: 134ff. 5 ), Mediated Discourse Analysis, and Discourse Analysis in the French tradition. We propone a holistic approach, where cross-disciplinary analyses work together and bring out new pragmatic objects, such as naming strategies, word selection, genres, scenario, text type and structure, discussed jointly with speech acts and pragmatic acts. These objects may prove useful to discourse evaluation and/or renewal of discourse in response to social demand. The concern with discourse structure and linguistic forms, along with the conception of discourse as social action, distinguish this approach from Mediated Discourse Analysis (cf. Scollon 1998, 2001; Norris & Jones 2005); on the other hand, their commitment to action-on-the-world and their nexus-analysis connect their approach to ours. As mentioned above, the main objective of this special issue is to formulate interacting discursive and social-action rules. The corollary aim is to discuss the forms of action-on-the-world: discourse in a constructivist dimension, discourse in a pragmatic dimension, and discourse analysis in an expertise/pragmatic dimension. various possibilities of human activity are inexhaustible, and because each sphere of activity contains an entire repertoire of speech genres that differentiate and grow as the particular sphere develops and becomes more complex. (Bakhtin 1986: 60) 5 The authors emphasize three foundational directions for CDA: First, in a critical social scientific view of the social and of critique. Second, in the field of critical social research on late modernity. And third, in the theory and analysis of language and semiosis. (Chouliaraki & Fairclough 1999: 154)

6 6 All the contributions included in this volume describe experiences in which the linguistic research fits into a social fieldwork context. The linguist s work lies then in clarifying the interaction between the request guidelines, the social contextualization of discourse, the latter s generic quality, and its linguistic actualization. It should be emphasized that the present issue is diverse in scope. This diversity may be found in the spheres of social activity represented: law, vocational training and didactics, social work, healthcare, and the media; in the types of genres addressed: legal examinations, laws and bills, song lyrics used as legal evidence, exchanges between instructors and trainees, educational reports and even web sites and television shows; and, finally, in the categories of analysis implemented. Some articles, for instance, take into account the various levels of analysis of the utterance act (syntactic, semantic, rhetorical, pragmatic) or bring a multi-faceted enunciative analysis into play (utterance cues, modality, marks of lexical subjectivity), using notions like that of self-presentation and scenario (called scripts in some theoretical frameworks such as Schank & Abelson s, 1978). Others, in contrast, center around a category like naming or the act of requesting. In either case, the focus is on defining the ways in which the pragmatic dimension of discourse and its social effectiveness are manifest in their linguistic forms. The nomination of actants in an educational report, for example, plays a role in the social construction of reality and contributes to the persuasiveness of the text. Furthermore, the use of computing and statistical tools (logometry and textometry) allows some authors to back up a qualitative analysis of data with a quantitative one. Finally, it must be noted that the authors of this volume have differing objectives. While some were explicitly given a consulting role by the relevant social or political authority, others may find that the inner workings of language and discourse that are uncovered by their analyses justify meeting social actors in their field of study at a later date. Accordingly, the authors do not all have the same level of involvement in social institutions. Some, in their capacity as experts, explore the implications of the linguist's

7 7 role as the purveyor of a social service, on a methodological as well as an ethical level. Collectively, the authors address pragmatics and discourse by focusing on situations in which linguists play a role, or on discourses affected by social change. Each article develops a methodology and a specific theoretical framework that addresses discourse in terms of its pragmatic designs, while illustrating a particular social need and the linguistic expertise required to meet it. The first three articles deal with forensic linguistics, which is already a wellestablished field. They address a range of current issues and point out ways in which linguistic analysis can make improvements to legal systems. This aspect is central to the article by Malcolm Coulthard, who discusses several situations in which a linguist s fieldwork has brought about, or may have brought about, real transformation, and propones a Critical Discourse Analysis acting on the world in order to transform it. Dominique Lagorgette gives an account of the current situation in France, a country in which linguists remain observers with no official role as consultants. She discusses cases in which it is difficult to establish the injurious and defamatory character of the texts under consideration. Valelia Muni Toke addresses the thorny issue of the linguist-turned-expert who is faced with a conflict between a researcher s ethics and those of an ordinary citizen. In these first three articles, this dual role of scientist and citizen is shown to be fraught with tension, and as such characterizes the linguist s position. The next two articles deal with education and apprenticeship. Laurent Fillietaz looks into the field of vocational training in Switzerland. Using audio-visual data, he explores a speech act that is fundamental to learning by apprenticeship: asking for help. He shows that access to knowledge does not necessarily occur through a direct answer to the request, but may also take other forms. The article by Brent Strickland, Salamatu Barrie, and Rihana S. Williams deals with education in a traditional American school and compares the contributions of narrative and expositive discourses in the vocabulary acquisition process. The linguist s role then consists in

8 8 analyzing interactional and acquisitional processes with an eye to improving pupils performance. The two final papers place the practice of discourse analysis at the center of current social preoccupations. Donella Antelmi's article pertains to the doctor-patient relationship as targeted in health discussion forums in Italy. It focuses on an analysis of the dialogue which reveals two different scenarios of communication: one private and one social. Marie Veniard s article, which also deals with the social service sector, but this time in France, describes naming strategies used in children's services settings. The apparent neutrality of these strategies allows child welfare professionals to remain supportive of the family even as they evaluate it, based on social norms. In their diversity, these collected articles illustrate how Discourse Analysis, when faced with a social need that opens the discipline to language's actionoriented dimension, naturally focuses on the pragmatic value of discourse. References Bakhtin, Mikhail. M Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana Discourse pragmatics. In: Discourse as Social Interaction, van Dijk, T. (ed.), London: Sage. Brown, Gillian, Yule, George Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chouliaraki, Lilian, Fairclough, Norman Discourse in Late Modernity. Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Coulthard, Malcolm An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. New York: Longman. Fairclough, Norman Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Filipi, Anna, Wales, Roger Perspective-taking and perspective-shifting as socially situated and collaborative actions. Journal of Pragmatics 36, 10, Filliettaz, Laurent Le virage actionnel des modèles du discours à l épreuve des interactions de service. Langage & Société 107,

9 9 Filliettaz, Laurent Mediated actions, social practices, and contextualization: a case study from service encounters. In: Discourse in Action. Introducing mediated discourse analysis, Norris, S., Jones, R.H. (eds), London/New York: Routledge. Filliettaz, Laurent (ed.) Les modèles du discours face au concept d action. Cahiers de linguistique française 26 [Special Issue], Genève. Foucault, Michel L archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard. Gardin, Bernard Préface. In: Pratiques linguistiques, pratiques sociales, Gardin, B., Baggioni, D. & Guespin, L. (eds.), Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Habermas, Jürgen On the pragmatics of social interaction: preliminary studies in the theory of communicative action. Cambridge: Polity. Hymes, Dell Foundations of sociolinguistics: an ethnographic approach. Philadelphia: Philadelphia University Press. Jones, Rodney H., Norris, Sigrid Discourse as action/discourse in action. In: Discourse in Action. Introducing mediated discourse analysis, Norris, Sigrid, Jones, Rodney H. (eds), London/New York: Routledge. Mey, Jacob L [1993]. Pragmatics: An Introduction. Malden/Oxford: Blackwell. Norris, Sigrid, Jones, Rodney H. (eds) Discourse in Action. Introducing mediated discourse analysis. London/New York: Routledge. Sarangi, Srikant Language/activity: Observing and interpreting ritualistic institutional discourse. Cahiers de linguistique française 26, Sarangi, Srikant, Coulthard, Malcolm (eds) Discourse and Social Life. London: Pearson ESL. Saussure, Louis de Pragmatic Issues in Discourse Analysis. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines 1, 1, Scollon, Ron Mediated Discourse as Social Interaction. London: Longman. Scollon, Ron Action and Text: Toward an Integrated Understanding of the Place of Text in Social (Inter)action. In: Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, R. Wodak & M. Meyer (eds), London: Sage. van Dijk, Teun Text and context: explorations in the semantics and pragmatics of discourse. New York: Longman. van Dijk, Teun Discourse as Interaction in Society. In: Discourse as Social Interaction, van Dijk, T. (ed.), London: Sage. Wodak, Ruth Pragmatics and Critical Discourse Analysis. A cross-disciplinary inquiry. Pragmatics & Cognition 15, 1, Georgeta Cislaru, SYLED-CEDISCOR, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 About the author:

10 10 Georgeta Cislaru is Assistant Professor in Linguistics at Université Sorbonne nouvelle Paris 3. Her research focuses on semantic issues and Discourse Analysis. She is interested, on the one side, in the way various constraints (linguistic, social, cognitive) determine discourse production, and on the other side, on the way discourse acts on the world. She has coedited (with Frédéric Pugnière-Saavedra and Frédérique Sitri) a special issue of Les Carnets du Cediscor on Discourse Analysis facing social demand, and she is piloting an ANR-National Research Agency program aiming at analyzing social discourse in progress (qualitative and computerassisted study of drafts and computer word processing). Author s address: Georgeta Cislaru Centre de Linguistique française Université Sorbonne nouvelle Paris 3 13 rue Santeuil Paris, France georgeta.cislaru@univ-paris3.fr