к.ф.н. Шингарева М.Ю., магистрант Тазабекова С.М.

Региональный социально-инновационный университет

Halliday’s Approach to Discourse Analysis

Three-part classification of language functions was proposed by Halliday (1966, 1967, 1968, 1970, 1973; Kress. 1976). He specifies three essential functions defined as follows: (a) Textual—the construction of situationally relevant connected stretches of discourse; (b) Interpersonal—the expression and regulation of social roles; and (c) Ideational—the development of referential meaning. At the linguistic level of clauses and sentences, these functions are linked to structural components of a specific theory of grammar. Although Halliday was interested primarily in analyzing the linguistic options for constructing clauses, he and Hasan also applied his model to the problem of cohesion in texts, that is, to the ways in which sentences are connected together (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). I shall be extending the model still further in an attempt to analyze the stretches of discourse constructed by two speakers.

Halliday’s approach has a number of advantages as a point of departure. First, the model is comprehensive and includes aspects of language that are usually separated and studied in isolation from each other as, for example, in work using the more traditional and well-known classification of semantics, syntax, and pragmatics as different domains of linguistic theory. Distinctions between a theory of grammar and a theory of meaning, between structure and content, and between linguistic competence and linguistic performance are familiar contrasting pairs in the latter approach. Since Halliday’s theory of grammar is addressed to the description and analysis of “language in use,’’ his model provides a placc for all of these aspects of language and directs our attention to the ways in which they are both differentiated from and related to each other.

Second, Halliday views language as a system of options with expressed language representing choices made by speakers among various sets and networks of available features. Serious attention is given to the significance of the choices made that are represented in the text itself. This is in accord with an interest in the function and significance of systematically different choices by different speakers, such as I have found in analyses of the talk of physicians and patients:

In extending and applying Halliday’s model, I will examine separately the ways in which the three functions are expressed and carried by particular features of discourse. Emphasis will be placed on differences between the types of interviews discussed earlier, those dominated by the voice of medicine and those in which the voice of the lifeworld receives more attention and achieves relatively greater prominence. The central question will be: What are the characteristics of such discourse and how do they differ from the “standard” medical interview? 1 will first analyze the Textual function, that is, the ways in which continuity and cohesion of discourse is maintained in different ways in the two different types of interviews. Second, I will turn to the Interpersonal function and the forms of relationship between physicians and patients as speakers. Finally, I will examine issues of references and meaning, Halliday’s Ideational function, and particularly the problem of the transformation of meaning.

For Halliday and Hasan (1976), cohesion refers to ways in which sentences are connected to each other that allow readers (or hearers) to recognize a stretch of language as text rather than nontext. They specify and elaborate subvariants of five types of cohesion. Four are grammatical: reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction; and the fifth is lexical. Each instance of a cohesive connection is referred to as a “tie.” For example, the use of a pronoun in a second sentence, standing for a noun or noun phrase in a first sentence, is a tie by substitution; an unexpanded answer to a Yes/No question is a tie by ellipsis in that the subject- predicate clause of the question is presupposed in the answer.

Although the “texts” in this study are transcripts of recorded exchanges between speakers, as compared to the written texts examined by Halliday and Hasan, the various types of cohesive ties are abundantly evident. The use of ellipsis in patient responses is mnipresent, as in the following example;

D Have you ever had rheumatism bone disease or syphilis?

P No.

Ties through reference are also prominent:

P Wel:l when I eat something wrong.

D How- How soon after you eat it.

Halliday and Hasan’s framework may be used heuristically to develop an approach to the study of cohesion in discourses constructed by two speakers. Nonetheless, a significant difference between their work and the problems of cohesion in natural discourse must be recognized. Their data consists of intuitively- understood examples of connected discourse; they either construct hypothetical examples to display a particular type of cohesion or select written passages that they “know” to be cohesive. A core assumption, that they do not reflectively examine or analyze, is that we as readers/hearers can recognize cohesive texts and distinguish them from noncohesive lists of sentences. This is similar to the assumption, in other theories of grammar, that the “gram- maticality” of a sentence is intuitively understood by native speakers; Halliday and Hasan have simply extrapolated this assumption to the level of discourse. The central task they pursued is the description and specification of various types of “ties” that are present in texts already known to be cohesive.

We face a different problem; the “cohesiveness” of discourse cannot be assumed but must be discovered. I have already demonstrated a lack of cohesion in medical interviews in the sense that meanings are not shared. The voices of the lifeworld and of medicine represent different provinces of meaning and different structures of logic, cognition, and relevance. Yet, as I have noted before, the interview continues and physicians and patients find ways to speak together despite the gap between them. The specific aim of this chapter is to discover how a discourse is developed and maintained that achieves some degree of “audibility” and understanding between the contending voices, and, therefore, to specify particular mechanisms of cohesion for such a discourse.

Although cohesion was not a central topic in earlier analyses, several features of medical interviews were described that appear to serve the function of constructing a cohesive “text.” These provide a preliminary list of discourse-cohesion processes.

First, there is the basic three-part structural unit of the standard medical interview: physician question-patient response-physician question. As was discussed earlier, this unit functions in two ways. Each exchange has a cohesive unity that comes from the demand quality of questions, the adjacency pair structure of questions and answers, and the second physician question that is a specific instance of the questioner’s “right to the floor.” Second, by linking one exchange cycle with another, the physician’s second question ties the separate exchanges together to form the extended discourse of the full interview.

While the form of these statements as questions and responses provides structural cohesion, the type of question asked and the topics of inquiry produce another type of cohesion, that of reference or meaning. Halliday and Hasan distinguish between cohesion through structure and cohesion through "register,” respectively, they are the linguistic and extralinguistic contexts of relevance that ground the meaning of each sentence and relate sentences meaningfully to each other (1976). The particular register of medical interviews is expressed in the overwhelming tendency of physicians to ask response-constraining questions of the Yes/ No or restricted Wh- type and to follow a logic of inquiry based on the biomedical model. As I showed earlier, this emphasizes abstract, objective, and decontextualized features of patients’ problems; this emphasis provides the recognizable quality of the standard register of medical interviews.

Finally, there is the cohesion produced by the dominance of the medical voice. Disruptions or breakdowns in the basic structure or deviations from medically appropriate topics are corrected or repaired so that the cohesion of the interview is maintained on the basis of the single register of the voice of medicine. These are particularly interesting devices since they appear on the surface of the discourse as examples of a lack of cohesion, yet cohesion in meaning is maintained at a deeper level. Among the various ways in which this cohesion of dominant register is maintained are the following: (a) lack of explicit acknowledgement of patients’ responses, particularly to aspects of the response falling outside the boundaries of the biomedical model; (b) lack of explicit transitional terms or phrases by physicians to introduce their next questions, again particularly evident when patients have introduced non-medically relevant content; and (c) physicians’ interruptions of patients’ statements, usually with a return to their own line of questioning as a way of indicating the relevance or nonrelevance of certain topics and contents.

Literature:

1. Halliday, M. A. K., and Ruqaiya Hasan. 1976.Cohesion in English. London: Longman.