The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

1972). Conversational analysis poses
various questions – what are the constitutive
events in a conversation, how do we
recognize that it is our turn to speak, who
controls the topic of conversation – in an
effort to identify the regularities and constraints
at work in examples of actual
conversation (M. Coulthard, Introduction
to Discourse Analysis, 1977;
M. Coulthard and M. Montgomery,
Studies in Discourse Analysis, 1981). The
premiss of functional linguistics has been
usefully described by its principal exponent,
M. A. K. Halliday: ‘The particular
form taken by the grammatical system of
language is closely related to the social
and personal needs that language is
required to serve.’ Given that our
language allows us to make the same
proposition in different forms – ‘John
loved Mary’, ‘Mary was loved by John’ –
functional linguistics investigates what it
is that determines one realization over
another. The question of determination
here is complex: preference for one grammatical
form can be partly understood in
terms of the immediate speech context,
but implicated in that and surrounding it
are other contexts of power and politics.
Functional linguistics can alert us to the
operations of ideology in language,
whether it be in everyday usage or in
literature. For example, the use of nominalization
and personification – ‘The
stock market had a good day today’ – can
obscure the issue of who immediately
profits; compare as an alternative realization
‘Today a number of stock brokers
and speculators made a lot of money’.
Besides enriching our understanding
of the social context of communication,
functional linguistics, conversational
analysis and the ethnography of speaking
have opened up a critical potential for discourse
analysis because of their capacity
to illuminate language use as a process in
Discourse 59
which inequalities of power and
position are negotiated and contested
(M. A. K. Halliday, Language as Social
Semiotic, 1978; R. Fowler, R. Hodge,
G. Kress and T. Trew, Language and
Control, 1979).
The work described above had a
considerable effect on literary study. At
one level the refinement of the analysis of
spoken language contributed a new set of
techniques for the close reading of literary
language. Work done in the analysis
of conversation allowed a more discriminating
description of dialogue in drama
(D. Burton, Dialogue and Discourse,
1980). Speech act theory produced a
diversified if unstable set of categories
which can be used in the analysis of the
intentions and verbal actions encoded in
the rhetorical strategies of literature
(R. Ohmann, ‘Speech, action and style’,
in S. Chatman (ed.), Literary Style:
A Symposium, 1971). At another level discourse
analysis provided a global model
for literature itself, one which describes
literary works not as iconic objects set
apart from a world of intention and effect,
but as a socially determined communicative
practice between reader and writer,
and, as such, analogous to other forms of
communication (R. Fowler, Literature as
Social Discourse, 1981).
Working from a different perspective,
discourse is a key term in the writings of
the French philosopher and historian,
Michel Foucault. The place of discourse
in Foucault’s own work can be crudely
described through two intertwined concerns.
The first is with discourse as an
historical phenomenon, an emphasis that
has been marginal to the main body of
Anglo-American work. For Foucault
there is no general theory of discourse or
language, only the historically grounded
description of various discourses or
‘discursive practices’. These latter consist