Approaches to Discourse - Reading notes PDF

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Useful readings throughout the course...

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Television Discourse: Analysing language in the media – Nuria Lorenzo-dus 

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“There is one aspect of television discourse that makes its analysis distinctive vas-a-vis that of other, unmediated, spoken discourse contexts: its double articulation” *absent audience* (p.5) “Viewers are therefore presented with a strategically selected, arranged and articulated proportion of the entire filmed material for each episode” (p.6) “The double articulation of television talk also makes its analysis challenging within traditional speaker-hearer models of communication, such as the one proposed by French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure” *idea of the speaking circuit – transaction between A and B* (p.6) “For Goffman, the traditional notions of speaker and hearer were too simplistic. He replaced them respectively with those of the ‘production format’ and the (p.6) ‘participation framework’ (for the reception of talk). He divided the production format into three roles: ‘animator’, ‘author’ and ‘principal’. These respectively designate ‘the sounding box from which utterances come’, ‘the agent who puts together, composes, or scripts the lines that are uttered’ and ‘the party to whose position, stand, and belief the words attest’ (Goffman 1981: 226)” (p.7). *Chapter title: Storytelling … or the Entertaining Construction of Reality “As sociolinguist Deborah Schiffrin (1996: 199) puts it, stories are ‘a linguistic lens through which to discover people’s own (somewhat idealised) views of themselves as situated in a social structure’. The practice of storytelling is therefore inherently partisan and its outcome always an artifice: the result of selecting and constructing material, and of discarding a number of alternative constructions.” (p.15) *note: this can be applied to suggest everything that is said in the script, is a reflection of each speaker, NOT travellers themselves.* “Documentaries, for example, have since the 1990s undergone an explicit process of ‘narratisation’. Writing about BBC documentaries in this period, Born (2004: 431) observes that ‘the concept of “the story” became ubiquitous among producers to the point of obsession: “getting the story right” and “finding strong characters” were prime concerns’.” (p.15) “Television thus using storytelling to construct socially situated identities in enjoyable, cognitively simple ways.” (p.16) “Documentaries are in principle about truthfully recording the socio-historical world and are therefore sometimes structured as journalistic chronicles, written histories or legal case records, that is, as argumentative, factual texts (Kilborn and Izod 1997).” (p.18)

Mediations: Text and Discourse in Media Studies - Tolson 

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“In essence, an argument makes a proposition, or series of propositions about something, and attempts to persuade or convince the reader/viewer that the propositions are true.” (p.29) “There are four main types of proposition” (p.31): Factual – claims that something took place or exists Definitive – how an event or object etc might be defined/called Evaluative- good/bad, positive/negative Advocative – makes a case for what should be done about something.

Language – Bloomfield 

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“we can define the meaning of a speech-form accurately when this meaning has to do with some matter of which we possess scientific knowledge. […] but we have no precise way of defining words like love or hate, which concern situations that have not been accurately classified” (p.139) *can be applied to the word traveller* “The discrimination of elegant or ‘correct’ speech is a by-product of certain social conditions. […] The fact that speakers label a speech-form as ‘good’ or ‘correct’, or else as ‘bad’ or ‘incorrect’, is merely a part of the linguist’s data concerning this speech-form” (p.22) “other phases of social cohesion, such as economic, political, or cultural groupings, bear some relation to the grouping by speech-communities” (p.42) *the speech style of the travellers as different to the interviewers*.

Describing Discourse - Nicola Woods  

“Discourse is, at the very least, language plus context – by which I mean the context that we bring with us when we use language” (p. intro: x) *professional discourse* “It is clear that when a professional speaks to a non-professional, their use of language can be a barrier: there is an asymmetry between the knowledge, experience and understanding of the participants in the field” (p.xvi)...