Defining discourse

[Celso Alvarez Caccamo]

randall henry eggert wrote:

> In linguistic pragmatics, utterance is contrasted with sentence and
> proposition.  A proposition is ususally seen as a semantic entity, i.e. it
> represents logical or denotational meaning.

May I utter ;-) a minor qualification? A proposition is a "semantic
entity" only insofar as we understand "semantics" to mean
"propositional semantics" ;-), or "veritative semantics". It's
quite a circular argument.

> A sentence is defined
> morphosyntactically (I won't attempt a definition).

I differ, again. A sentence HAS semantics, but linguistic
semantics (that is, meaning = "reference" + "sense" (Hurford &
Heasley), including for example deixis and, in my book,
pressupositions. Notice that semantic pressupositions
escape propositional content, e.g. in "I cheated again in the
exam", the pressuposition contained in "again" ('I did it at
least once more earlier') is not a part of the propositional
content. The proposition only predicates about "I" (the
speaking subject) having "cheated" "once more", but
it does not predicate about my having cheated earlier.

Similarly, the utterances "I didn't do anything wrong" and
"I did nothing wrong" share an identical propositional content
but they are semantically different, as "nothing" and "not...
anything" are different linguistic elements/constructions.

Finally, three utterances such as "Read a lot!", "You read a lot"
and "Do you read a lot?" are enunciations of different sentences
with identical propositional content, as the three predicate
the same about your reading a lot. They differ, of course, on sentence
modality and illocutionary force, but that's not
propositional meaning.

> My sense
> is that there is no structural definition of utterance within pragmatics,
> which is to say that an utterance does not have a one to one
> correspondence to sentence; an utterance may be as short as a word (or
> a sound or gesture?) or as long as, well... who knows?

Well, the shortest (and simplest) definition of utterance I
know of is "Utterance is a sentence-context pair" (by Fillmore?,
I think). And I would point out that at least in Searle's
"expressability principle" an utterance is nothing but the
canonical production of a "sentence", and thus the study of
speech acts is (theoretically) nothing but the study of
(prototypical) sentences.

Here "sentence" must be understood, of course, as a "sentence-type"
which underlies the production of a (fragment of) speech. Thus,
"No!" as an utterance is the pairing of the sentence, e.g.
"I don't want to" with the context in which the utterance is
produced.

Of course, for ethnomethodologists nothing of this makes much
sense, and the basic unit of analysis is the "turn constructional
unit", which may correspond with one linguistic "sentence",
fragments of it, seven sentences, or even non-verbal tokens
such as "uh".

As for "discourse", just a couple of comments: if we define
discourse as "the social space" in which "texts", their producers
and their ideologies are located, as Mark Peterson very
clearly explains, we run the risk (as I think Sarah Mills
criticizes in her discussion of Foucault in _Discourse_)
of "de-agentizing" (excuse my French) subjects and agentizing
"discourse" or "texts" as the forces of ideological hegemony etc.
And when "discourse" subsumes "ideology", too, we are left with a
rather messy bunch of things. So, I like Foucault's own
definition (don't remember where, I think it was Foucault's!)
of a discourse as a "constellation of statements". This
emphasizes the situated, pragmatic nature of discourse
(statements) and veers away from "text", which has
structural-formal resonances.

Now, in my fragmented readings of Foucault I do find too
some of Sarah Mill's objections: "discourse" cannot be
understood as the overpowering force of social domination
or change, as agents are behind discourses, and it is these
agents who *make* discourses *circulate*. Discourses are
*located in* a social space (a "social field"), they transport
"ideologies" (whatever that is), but they are neither the social
space or the ideologies themselves. So, "archaeology" is the
enterprise of finding not only the meaning of artifacts (pottery
or discourses), but also the social conditions under which that
artifact and not others were produced. And, as with pottery,
a discourse does not exactly "reproduce itself", but it is
made to reproduce by social agents.

I may be an old and probably unversed foggy, but I see the
need of framing the issue in these socio-pragmatic terms.
Otherwise, we would be simply replacing the personified "Language"
with the personified "Discourse(s)".

Well, these are My Humble Opinions.

-celso

--
Celso Alvarez-Caccamo              Tel. +34 981 167000 ext. 1888
Linguistica Geral, Faculdade de Filologia     FAX +34 981 167151
Universidade da Corunha                          lxalvarz at udc.es
15071 A Corunha, Galiza (Espanha)   http://www.udc.es/dep/lx/cac