Candidate of Science in Philology, Okolelova O.N.

Michurinsk State Agrarian University

Analysing Discourse:

Toward a Cognitive Linguistic Approach

The relationship between language, discourse and identity has always been a major area of cognitive linguistic investigation. In recent times, the field has been revolutionized as previous models – which assumed our identities to be based on stable relationships between linguistic and social variables – have been challenged by pioneering new approaches to the topic. Discourse is language-in-action, and investigating it requires attention both to language and to action There is a long tradition of treating discourse in linguistic terms, either as a complex of linguistic forms larger than the single sentence (a “text”) or as “language-in-use”, i.e. linguistic structures actually used by people – “real language”. This conception of discourse, broadly speaking, underlies the development of contemporary linguistic pragmatics. It has informed numerous studies in which, little by little, old and well-established concepts and viewpoints from linguistics were traded for more dynamic, flexible, and activity-centred concepts and viewpoints.

There is no such thing as a “non-social” use of discourse, just as there is no such thing as a “non-cultural” or “non-historical” use of it. But all of this is truistic; the full story is obviously far more complex and will require the remainder of this book to start being told. What concerns us here is how discourse can become a site of meaningful social differences, of conflict and struggle, and how this results in all kinds of social-structural effects. The fact is: it can, and does so all the time. The reason for this is that we have to use discourse to render meaningful every aspect of our social, cultural, political environment: an event becomes “a problem” as soon as it is being recognised as such by people, and discursive work is crucial to this; a mountain becomes a “beautiful” mountain as soon as someone singles it out, identifies it and comments on it to someone else. In short, discourse is what transforms our environment into a socially and culturally meaningful one.

In recent years, Critical Discourse Analysis has become a household name in the social sciences, and the term - abbreviated as CDA -has come to identify a “school” of scholarship led by people such as Norman Fairclough, Teun van Dijk, Paul Chilton, and others. Largely grounded in a European tradition of scholarship, CDA has become a popular and firmly established programmatic approach to language in society with some institutional muscle. CDA was groundbreaking in establishing the legitimacy of a linguistically oriented discourse analysis firmly anchored in social reality and with a deep interest in actual problems and forms of inequality in societies. It also broke ground in its proclaimed attempt at integrating social theory in the analysis of discourse.

In analysing language-in-society, the focus should be on what language use means to its users. We can, and must, start from the observation that language matters to people, that people make investments in language, and that this is a crucial part of what they believe language does for them and what they do with language. Consequently, we need to find out how language matters to people. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is undoubtedly the most visible “school” in the field under scrutiny in this book. At the same time, it would be a mistake to see CDA as the only possible critical perspective on language in society. This chapter offers a discussion of the emergence and development of the “school” of CDA, as well as a survey of its main areas of inquiry: political discourse, media, advertisement, ideology, racism, institutional discourse.

Critical trends in discourse analysis emphasise the connection between discourse and social structure. They locate the critical dimension of analysis in the interplay between discourse and society, and suggest ways in which features of social structure need to be treated as context in discourse analysis. For instance, in analysing doctor - patient interaction, the facts that one participant is a doctor and another is a patient, and that this interaction consequently develops in an institutional environment, are crucial elements in understanding the power balance in that interaction. There will be a particular power dynamic because one is a doctor and another is a patient, and because this turns the particular interaction into an instance of an institutionalized genre. Critical analysis is thus always and necessarily the analysis of situated, contextualised, language, and context itself becomes a crucial methodological and theoretical issue in the development of a critical study of language.

Context comes in various shapes and operates at various levels, from the infinitely small to the infinitely big. The infinitely small would be the fact that every sentence produced by people occurs in a unique environment of preceding and subsequent sentences, and consequently derives part of its meaning from these other sentences. The infinitely small can also pertain to one single sound becoming a very meaningful thing – “yes” pronounced with a falling intonation is declarative and affirmative; spoken with a rising intonation it becomes a question or an expression of amazement or disbelief. The infinitely big would be the level of universals of human communication and of human societies - the fact that humanity is divided into women and men, young and old people, and so on. In between both extremes lies a world of different phenomena, operating at all levels of society and across societies, from the level of the individual all the way up to the level of the world system. Context is potentially everything and contextualization is potentially infinite. But, remarkably, in actual practice it appears to be to some extent predictable. People seem to have rather clear (though not necessarily accurate) ideas about how they have to make language fit into activities and how they have to create meaning out of this blending.

In such cases, little of what we are familiar with on the basis of our own experiences as locally socialised communicating beings can be taken for granted. When we think of context, we need to think of different contexts in different environments, and of highly problematic processes of interpretation occurring as soon as text from one environment is transported to another one.

Literature

1. Chilton, P. Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. Routledge: London, 2005.

2. Fairclough, N. Language and Power. London: Longman, 1995.

3. van Dijk, T. Ideology: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Sage. London, 2002.