DA vs pragmatics

[Gisela Redeker]

On  4 Mar 00 at 17:06, Elizabeth Traugott wrote:

> The study of discourse markers, including connectives like
> then, and, etc. is very much associated with DA

Absolutely. I didn't mean to imply that ALL work on connectives and
DM's is oriented toward the language system. And I certainly agree
that Deborah Schiffrin's work is DA work. But even she, as I have
argued a while back (in <it>Linguistics</it>, 1991, in a review of
her excellent and influential monograph on discourse markers)
occasionally shifts from a strictly functional (=discourse studies)
to a more lexically-oriented (pragmatic, pragmalingistic)
perspective.

What I mean by these two perspectives is the following: When
a discourse researcher (D) or a pragmalinguist (P) are looking at a
piece of discourse, they typically want to find out what kind of
"discourse work" (conveying of representational or interpersonal
information, co-ordinating (in H.H. Clark's, 1996, sense), signalling
coherence, contextualizing, etc. etc.) is done here and by what
means, and what else is going on in that stretch of discourse that
may condition the realizations of those discourse functions.

So far, D and P are pretty much the same. But then D goes on to
investigate that discourse function, e.g. by asking (and then
preferably testing in experiments) how the discourse representation
and/or the interaction is affected by this element, by what other,
functionally (more or less) equivalent means that particular kind of
discourse work could have been done in these or other circumstances
(as attested in corpora), or how the effects would have differed if
other means had been employed. That means that D defines the
phenomena in terms of discourse functions.

By contrast, pragmalinguists typically work from lexical items or
phrases and investigate the contexts and conditions of their uses
(for instance in large, systematic corpora), possibly with a
diachronic perspective (see Elizabeth Traugott's work). That kind of
pragmalinguistic research is certainly very relevant and very
important for discourse theory; but I would not subsume it under the
label of discourse research or discourse studies proper.

Of course the distinction is not as clear and strict as I have
sketched it here, and there is fortunately much research (e.g. in
cognitive linguistics) that straddles that divide. But that typical
pragmatics research and typical discourse research *tend to* differ
in this way is evident, for instance, from the contents of journals
like <it>Journal of Pragmatics</it> or <it>Pragmatics</it> versus
<it>Discourse Processes</it> or <it>Discourse Studies</it>.

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
home page: http://www.let.rug.nl/~redeker