DA vs pragmatics

[Elizabeth Traugott]

	I agree with what Gisela Redeker says below, except on one important
point. The study of discourse markers, including connectives like
then, and, etc. is very much associated with DA, see the work
of Deborah Schiffrin, and more recently the large amount
of work on discourse markers and connectives in historical
discourse analysis/pragmatics (e.g. Laurel Brinton, Pragmatic
Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions,
Mouton, 1996, and several papers by myself).
	Elizabeth Traugott
>
> It depends on your interpretation of  'discourse analysis' and on
> the DA or Pragmatics researcher you're looking at -- there's
> tremendous variation here.
>
> The label 'discourse analysic' came into much (mis)use after Steve
> Levinson's influential textbook "Pragmatics" (Cambridge, 1983), where
> he described DA in contrast to CA -- there, DA was the more context
> (and psychologically) oriented of the two!
>
> "Discourse analysis" is now mostly used pretty much synonymously with
> "pragmatics", except that it excludes those parts of pragmatics that
> are mainly concerned with (pragmatic aspects of) language as a system
> (aimed at, e.g., the meaning of connectives or of other 'particles',
> speech act theory, etc.).
>
> One of the 'household names' in discourse analysis is of course Teun
> van Dijk. He for one can certainly not be said to ignore the social
> context of language use (he is very active in critical discourse
> analysis and he founded and is editing the journal "Discourse and
> Society"). You can find references, e.g. a  Bibliography of Discourse
> Analysis of News in the Media and a draft of a paper on Critical
> Discourse Analysis, on his home page:  http://www.hum.uva.nl/teun
> For other references and programs of study in the field, type
> "discourse analysis" or "Discourse studies" into your favorite Web
> search machine (e.g. Alta Vista).
>
> Let me end with a terminological point. Appling the term 'discourse
> analysis' to a field of study (as many do; you are in good company
> here) is strictly speaking a category error: 'DA' doesn't denote a
> field, but a method (of analysis). I much prefer the label "discourse
> studies" for the field. I use that label to include
> discourse-analytic research (incl. argumentation theory),
> experimental studies of discourse processes, studies of effects and
> effectiveness of communications, and the more sociologically-oriënted
> cultural studies / critical theory approaches.
>
> Greetings,
> Gisela Redeker
>
> Gisela Redeker, Professor of Communication
> Faculty of Arts, Groningen University
> P.O.Box 716, NL-9700 AS Groningen, The Netherlands
> tel: +31-50-3635973; fax: +31-50-3636855
>