Abstract
Shoshana Blum-Kulka was an influential scholar, who contributed to the establishment of discourse studies as an important scholarly field in both humanities and social sciences. Her pioneer contributions to the fields of translation, cross-cultural pragmatics, pragmatic development, interlanguage pragmatics, language education, family discourse, child peer discourse, political discourse and broadcast talk assisted in establishing the methodological and theoretical basis of discourse analysis. Throughout her diverse and productive career, she infused rigorous linguistic and textual analysis with social and ethnographic sensibilities, positioning the study of discourse as an inherently interdisciplinary project. The Discourse Pragmatic approach, developed in her theoretical and empirical studies, promoted an understanding of language use as contextualized social action and a process of joint meaning-making.
Born in 1936 in the city of Cluj, Shoshana escaped Nazi-occupied Hungary in 1944 on the ‘Golden train’, and later immigrated to Israel. She earned a BA in English Literature and Romance Languages at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a Masters in Education from Teachers College, Columbia University in New York, and a PhD in Hebrew Linguistics in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prior to pursuing a full-time career as an academic, Shoshana was head of the Intensive Hebrew Language Program for Overseas Students at the Hebrew University, and is credited for transforming the way L2 is being taught to date at university level in Israel. She began her academic career as a lecturer at the Center of Applied Linguistics at the Hebrew University in 1974 and was later invited to join the Department of Communication and Journalism and the School of Education at the same university, where she served as full professor until her retirement in 2004.
Shoshana’s impact on discourse studies can be traced in various areas of analysis; we shall underline three trajectories of her work of specific relevance to the readership of this journal: her work in pragmatics, her studies on media and political discourse, and her research on language socialization.
At the outset of the 1980s Shoshana headed (along with Gabriele Kasper and Juliane House) the well-known Cross Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP), which integrated linguistics, speech act theory and politeness theory. By demonstrating cross-cultural and situational variation in the performance of requests and apologies, the project was one of the first to promote an understanding of the context sensitivity of speech act and politeness phenomena. Among the major contributions related to this project was the finding that different cultures exhibit diverse scales for the perception of politeness, which led to Blum-Kulka’s critique of Brown and Levinson’s presumably universal equation of politeness with indirectness. Later, Shoshana turned her attention to naturally occurring language use (e.g. in works on misunderstandings, with Elda Weizman). By exploring pragmatic phenomena such as facework, speech acts and implicatures in their interactional contexts, she advanced a discourse approach to pragmatics.
A second major area of interest for Shoshana was media and political discourse. Her pioneer study of political interviews, published in 1983, was among the first to apply serious analysis of language use to televised interactions. In hindsight, this study can be seen as an early bird, preceding the ample scholarly attention to broadcast talk. Later, in her active participation in the Ross Priory Broadcast talk analysis group from its early days, and in her studies on talk shows, debates and media scandals (with Tamar Liebes), she helped define the interdisciplinary toolkit of media discourse analysis, as informed in part by pragmatics, conversation analysis, linguistics and a Goffmanian microsociology.
A third trajectory, which spans throughout Shoshana’s entire career, is language socialization: from her dissertation on linguistic simplification for language learners, through her book Dinner Talk, to a research project on the contribution of peer interactions to L2 acquisition by young immigrant children that she headed in recent years while battling cancer. These studies expanded our understanding of pragmatic development, by shedding light on previously unexplored arenas of language socialization: Dinner Talk devoted close attention to the many faceted contributions of multi-party, intergenerational talk, whereas other contemporary research tended to focus mainly on dyadic mother–child interaction. Shoshana’s innovative works on child peer talk (with Catherine Snow, among others) expanded the field even further. She inculcated a view of peer talk as a ‘double opportunity space’, functioning as an arena for the co-construction of children’s unique social world and peer culture, while at the same time affording opportunities for the development of pragmatic competences and discursive literacy. At the same time, these works produced significant contributions to the study of discourse at large: in Dinner Talk, Shoshana developed an influential three-dimensional model for the analysis of narrative (telling, tales and tellers); in her research on peer talk, she developed an integrative model for the analysis of generic variation in naturally occurring interactions.
Shoshana’s persistent interest in challenging disciplinary boundaries throughout her career culminated during the late 1990s and the 2000s, as she integrated pragmatics, conversation analysis and ethnography, consolidating Discourse Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary approach for the study of language use. Shoshana was not only a globally prominent scholar, but also an inspiring and influential teacher. She promoted a discursive approach to the teaching of language skills among immigrants and native speakers in the Israeli education system. Through teaching academic courses, supervising graduate students and developing academic curriculums, she established the field of discourse studies in Israel. She will be greatly missed by her many students, two of whom sign below.