Dar’ya Hidulyak
Discourse Analysis
The communicative
approach developed the traditional notion of discourse and thus it became the
subject of the cognitive linguistics. Cognitive linguistics enriched the
discourse analysis by taking into consideration the mental sphere of language personality. From the point of view of cognitive linguistics
discourse is a sum of mental operations processing language data and exrtalinguistic situation necessary to produce language [3;
69].
Discourse is not only
viewed as a dynamic process, it is a unit of linguistic research. This status
of discourse requires some clear delimitation between such notions as
“discourse” and “coherent text” and understanding the correlation between these
notions. In modern linguistics text is perceived as one of the forms (sides) of
discourse. In other words, text is an interim result of discourse: the
terminate goal of discourse is not the creation of the text but the creation of
the pragmatic effect.
The fact is, that an immanent coherent text may be perceived and
decoded by the reader as an incoherent one. At the same time the author’s
intention gives the mental task to the reader to interpret not only a part of
the discourse (text) but, what is more important, the whole discourse.
Thus, discourse is
considered to be the aggregate of speech and mental operations. It is closely
connected with speaker’s cognition, apprehension and world outlook and
apprehension of the speaker’s language picture of the world by the recipient.
The use of discourse analysis
creates unique knowledge about the production, interpretation, and acquisition
of written language in ways that other methods do not. In our investigation we
employ the synergy of the following three main approaches to the language
personality’s discourse analysis on the level of its expression of the author’s
discourse: (1) formal approach; (2) functional approach; (3) formal –functional
approach.
The underlying concept of formal
approach states that discourse is “the language beyond the sentence”. The
advocates of this approach, Tannen for one, treat
discourse as a category of natural speech being materialized in the form of
written or oral text, structurally and meaningfully coherent [4; 27].
B. Yule elaborates the
provisions for the functional approach to the discourse analysis claiming that
discourse is “any language use”. In the process of communication any
manifestation of language use (either written or formal) is considered to be
important [3; 37].
The formal – functional
approach defines discourse as an utterance. Such definition points to the fact
that discourse is not only a pattern of formal language units “above the
sentence level”. Moreover, it is a consistent pattern of functionally organized
speech units [2; 71].
T.A. van Dijk
suggests a cognitive definition of discourse as a main component of
socio-cultural communication and points out the main characteristic features of
discourse: interests and goals. According to this definition discourse
is a speech current, language in constant movement that reflects the diversity
of the historic epoch, individual and social peculiarities of the communicants
and the communicative situation. Discourse reflects mentality and national
culture of the society as a whole as well as a cultural background of the
individual language personality [5; 117].
V.Z. Demyankov
makes an attempt to generalize the basic approaches to discourse theory and
defined discourse as any text fragment consisting of more than one sentence or
an independent part of the sentence. The structure of the discourse is
represented as the consistency of elementary sentences connected by the logical
relations of conjunction or disjunction etc. The elements of the discourse are:
actions that take place and their participants, performative
information and non-actions – attending circumstances, background,
information that correlates discourse with the actions. [7; 27]
N.D. Arutunova
defines discourse as a coherent text combined with the extralinguistic, pragmatic,
socio-cultural, psychological and other factors [6; 43].
Notwithstanding
the fact that there are a lot of approaches to discourse this notion remains as
ambiguous as the notion of language itself. A steady development of the notion
testifies the fact that discourse is a complicated linguistic phenomenon
belonging to the group of so-called linguistic universals.
Literature:
1. Арутюнова Н. Д. Дискурс
// Лингвистичиский энциклопедический словарь. – М.,
1990. – 178c.
2. Демьянков В.З. Личность,
индивидуальность и субъективность в языке и речи // "Я",
"субъект", "индивид" в парадигмах современного языкознания.- М.: ИНИОН РАН, 1992. - С.9-34.
3.
Засекина Л.В. Дискурсивная психология в парадигме когнитивной науки //
Вісник Харківського нац. ун-ту.-
Харків, 2001.- № 520.- Сер. Філологія.- Вип.33.- С.69
– 73.
4.
Brown G., Yule G. Discourse Analysis.
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5.
Joshi A., Webber B., Sag I. Elements
of discourse understanding. -
6.
Shulman,
J. Paradigms and research programmes in the study of teaching: a contemporary
perspective. // M. C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of
Research in Teaching (3rd edn). -
7.