Abstract
In the introduction to Discourse Analysis, Susan Strauss and Parastou Feiz argue that discourse is ‘the social and cognitive process of putting the world into words, of transforming our perceptions, experiences, emotions, understandings, and desires into a common medium for expression and communication, through language and other semiotic media’ (p. 1) and that ‘the study of discourse has become key to a range of disciplines across the social sciences, humanities, and sciences’ (p. 3). Thus, this book provides a collection of perspectives on analyzing discourse for students from multi-disciplinary backgrounds.
This book incorporates nine chapters and is divided into two main parts. Part I (Chapters 1 and 2) serves to contextualize the book by situating discourse as a social act using linguistic forms and meanings. Part II (Chapters 3–9) presents a number of analyses of different discourses and texts, where ‘micro-level instances of language and discourse combine to create, reflect, and shape the broader, macro-levels of meaning’ (p. 4).
Chapter 3 distinguishes the fuzzy notions of genre, modality, and register to explore types of different discourses. It applies genre to narrative discourse; modality to oral, written, and e-discourse; and register to institutional discourse. Chapter 4 describes three categories of meaning – reference, deixis, and stance – and clarifies how actual discourses realize them. The three terms connect through their respective referent but work on different levels of consciousness for speakers or writers. For instance, the authors show how the referents of some deictic expressions (e.g. ‘I’ and ‘you’) shift the reader’s perspective within the discursive context. Chapter 5 discusses information structure, cohesion, and intonation units. These approaches deal with units of meaning that are centrally involved with the flow of information in the context of discourse.
Chapter 6 deals with conversation analysis of naturally occurring situated interaction. The authors probe the intricate mechanisms underlying the theory behind conversation analysis. These mechanisms include the structure of turn-taking, turn construction unit, transition relevance, assessments, preference organization, and prosodic features indicated by both the speaker and the hearers in an interactional exchange. Chapter 7 moves to the pragmatic notion of discourse, highlighting the essential role that contextual knowledge plays in understanding implicit meaning. The authors illustrate with actual examples the concepts of inference, conversational implicature, speech acts, and politeness.
Chapter 8 explores pragmatic meanings from the perspective of indexicality, stance, identity, and agency as created and reified in social interaction. Chapter 9 sets forth an interdisciplinary methodological approach to discourse analysis, treating all discourse as social practice shaped and constricted by society (p. 313). By teasing out the core concepts, Chapter 9 overviews the three main strands of critical discourse analysis (CDA) this approach establishes.
This book presents diverse approaches and perspectives we can adopt to analyze discourse and can be recommended to those who are engaged in the study of discourse. The book’s strengths fall into three main areas: it offers a comprehensive coverage of analytic tools, easy accessibility to the approaches, and a range of examples.
First, this book assembles a number of concepts that linguists and discourse analysts have long used. The assorted perspectives offer distinctive insights into various types of meaning, including literal meaning, grammatical meaning, conceptual meaning, pragmatic meaning, collaborative meaning, and social meaning.
Second, the book is practical and reader-friendly, offering a quick resource for readers to locate subject matters widely discussed in discourse studies. Distinguished from other discourse analysis books that introduce concepts and theories in an abstract and top-down manner, this book proceeds from the bottom up, offering concrete explorations of topics based on specific examples. Because the authors use examples previously employed for teaching purposes, this book may provide other teachers with practical resources for the classroom.
Third, this book will be useful for people who work beyond the field of linguistics or discourse analysis. The samples of discourse range across a number of languages such as English, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese in both written and spoken form. The examples come from academic, professional, and social settings, including discourse from TV commercials, cooking recipes, web blogs, website excerpts, university communications, personal oral narratives, text messages, book excerpts, informal conversations, and institutional communication. The many examples demonstrate how linguistic tools might work in other disciplines such as media, journalism, sociology, psychology, semiotics, as well as cultural and literary studies.
However, a shortcoming of this book lies in its lack of cohesion between chapters. Some terms repeated in different chapters may be misunderstood in their new context. For instance, the term ‘stance’ occurs in both Chapters 4 and 8 and is applied to different contexts. In addition, ‘conversation analysis’ and ‘conversational implicature’ need to be clarified when they are presented in the different contexts of Chapter 6 and Chapter 7.
Nonetheless, the book Discourse Analysis: Putting Our Worlds into Words stands out among competing course books. It attempts to apply abstract theories to the practical data and elaborates on the theoretical concepts in an intelligible way. Therefore, it is a valuable book for both linguists and other social scientists.