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Igor Lakić: WHAT IS ACTUALLY DISCOURSE ANALYSIS?
Let us consider some aspects that are not strictly linguistic, but are crucial
for discourse. They are the disciplines that lie outside discourse (sometimes even
outside language) but largely contribute to its creation.
The study of the languages of North American Indians, carried out by Boas,
lead to the development of the prinicple of linguistic relativity, implying that every
language has its own structure and has to be studied separately (Graddol 1993:
12). This, in turn, led to the realisation of the importance of stuyding the connection
between language and culture, and this tradition was continued by Edward
Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. The cultural aspect in analysing discourse is of
crucial importance, where culture is taken in the widest possible sense.
Malinowski was also interested in the functions that language has in different
social contexts. He was the first to use the term context of situation. According
to him, “utterances are comprehensible only in the conext of the whole way of life
of which they form part” (Graddol 1993: 13). These were actually findings that
led to the development of sociolinguistics in the USA and the UK.
In the USA, Dell Hymes criticized Chomsky in the sixties for neglecting
the type of cultural knowledge that is necessary to speakers in order to speak in
a socially appropriate way. Hymes called this knowledge communicative competence,
while his approach is known as ethnography of speaking. The link between
etnography of speaking and earlier anthropological research was obvious, according
to Graddol (1993: 14) who quotes Hymes: „The ethnography of speaking
is concerned with the situations and uses, the patterns and functions, of speaking
as an activity in its own right”.
In the sixties and seventies, William Labov became a dominant figure. He
studied the relation between language and social context, concluding that seemingly
inconsistent patterns of behaviour become more orderly and predictable
when the identity of speakers and the social context are taken into account.
In the UK there were also developments that influenced discourse analysis,
starting with Firth who thought that language can have meaning only in an appropriate
context (i.e. that sentences and utterances get meaning only in a context).
His student Halliday created a formal model to show to what extent language and
context are linked in creating meaning. He focused on social functions of language
as well as on “thematic and informational structure of speech and writing”
(McCarthy 2008: 6). According to him, the same linguistic structure can have
different meanings when used in different social contexts, which I have discussed
to some extent earlier.
In this way, by promoting diversity and pluralism and studying dialects,
popular language forms and so on, sociolinguistics has been of crucial importance
for discourse analysis. On the other hand, structuralism and transforma-
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