16.2058, Review: Discourse Analysis: Young & Harrison (2004)

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Subject: 16.2058, Review: Discourse Analysis: Young & Harrison (2004)

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1)
Date: 01-Jul-2005
From: Salvio Menéndez < smenendez at fibertel.com.ar >
Subject: Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 02 Jul 2005 17:00:25
From: Salvio Menéndez < smenendez at fibertel.com.ar >
Subject: Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis 
 

EDITORS: Young, Lynne; Harrison, Claire 
TITLE: Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis 
SUBTITLE: Studies in Social Change
PUBLISHER: Continuum International Publishing Group, Ltd.
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-912.html


Salvio Martín Menéndez, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 
Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, CONICET

INTRODUCTION
This collection of papers focuses on social change in different settings 
and through a wide range of voices. It offers a view of both systemic 
functional linguistics (SFL) and critical discourse analysis (CDA), and 
looks at the relationship between these approaches to language. 

The book is divided into two parts; the theoretical section explores 
ways to study social, political, and economic transformations, whilst 
the applied section examines the effects of social change on national 
and institutional identities. 

SYNOPSIS 

The opening paper of the Theoretical Section is "Analysing Discursive 
Variation" by Ruqaiya Hasan. First, she proposes to identify the 
relevance which underlies the presence of consistency and variation 
found in language. She shows that there are many ways of using the 
term discourse. She proposes how it is used in SFL: "discourse is the 
process of language in some recognizable social context" (16). Then, 
she gives a characterization of variation in relation to consistency or 
normality. She argues "that variation is in fact a form of consistency" 
(17). Then she relates variant and norm to establish that both act 
inherently as shifters in Jakobson's sense of that term.  Variation must 
be seen, therefore, in a quite different way of Labov. She 
characterizes, following Halliday, the two main kind of variation by 
reference to the users of language (dialectal variation) or the uses of 
language (diatypic variation). She describes the diatypic varieties in 
relation to realization as a dialectical relationship that relates:
a) context of culture and context of situation and,
b) language and text. 

Then, she analyses variation and consistency in Diatypic Varieties 
affirming that the general nature of contextual configuration is realized 
as structure, and the more specific aspects in relation to an individual 
occasion for talk as texture. She shows how the forms of discursive 
variation arise from its structural potential and from the genre specific 
semantic potential analyzing representative texts. After that, she 
characterizes dialectal variation in which speaker identity is relative 
stable. She clearly points up: "Dominant sociolinguistics has inherited 
its methodology and its concept variation from classical dialectology, 
and its linguistics from an a-social structuralism; and its approach to 
the social remains superficial" (37). So, she states: "Meaning is what 
makes language perform the many social acts speakers engage in: it 
was, therefore, logical to believe that variation in speakers' social 
condition would bear some relationship to their meaning-making 
practices" (37). She criticizes dominant sociolinguistics (i.e. Labovian), 
because it does not account that 1) discursive variation includes 
dialectal variation and context are realizationally related to texts and, 
2) semantic styles are active in the perception of context so dialectal 
variation would be relevant. She then discusses semantic style and 
semantic orientation by analyzing clear examples.  Finally, she affirms 
that what produces discursive variation is the principle of co-genetic 
evolution in society, because language and society each act as a 
resource for the other.  She concludes:  " It has seemed to me for 
some time now that it is not system or structure that are static: what is 
static is our ways of looking at them, our mythologies about their 
nature (45).

In "Predication, Propagation and Mediation: SFL, CDA, and the 
Inculcation of Evaluative-Meaning System", Philip Graham argues that 
an understanding of mediation, i.e., the movement of meaning across 
space and time, is essential for an analysis of meaning.  Mediation 
has to be seen from a technological perspective where media, genres 
and modes are fundamental and interrelated aspects of meaning-
making process. Two different texts are analyzed from this 
perspective. One is an annual address to the United States Radio and 
Television Correspondents Association annual dinner by former US 
President Bill Clinton, and the other is a lecture to the University 
President's Forum by Mark Katz, the person who wrote Clinton's text.  
The analysis is clearly postulated and Mr. Graham clearly states that 
the main relationship between SFL and CDA are the "contextual" part 
of the former, and the "critical" part of the latter. Therefore, his 
conclusions are orientated in this direction where he thinks that SFL 
and CDA can help to understand new communication technologies 
and new institutional relations.

In "Mapping Distinction: Towards a Systemic Representation of Power 
in Language", Tom Bartlett attempts to refine the methodology of 
CDA.  He states that CDA has been criticized from different points of 
view (conversation analysis, applied linguistics). He also points that 
CDA is aware of the tension between micro- and macro-analysis. His 
paper "presents a methodology that attempts to quantify contextually 
sensitive samples of language as instantiations of social stance" (69). 
He proposes a qualitative-quantitative method to analyse the lexemic 
meaning potentials of the modals within speech acts. Following Whorf 
(1956: 158) and Hasan (1996: 148-149) "fashions of speaking ", he 
proposes to analyze the relationship between language and power 
through ways of speaking, i.e. "a means of depicting social difference, 
of mapping distinction" (72).  His data is taken from his own fieldwork 
in Guyana, South America, where he studied communication 
strategies between the Iwokrama International Rainforest 
Conservation Programme, a multinational non-governmental 
organization (NGO), and local Amerindian communities. He 
interviewed leader members of each group and then presents an 
analysis of modality as a linguistic means of constructing social 
relations, and transitivity as a means of construing social reality.  The 
results of his qualitative-quantitative analysis are given in order to 
prove that working with networks of ways of speaking proved to be a 
good method that clearly shows the options speakers make. 

In "Role Prescriptions, Social Practices, and Social Structures: A 
Sociological Basis for the Contextualization of Analysis in SFL and 
CDA", José Luis Meurer discusses Giddens "structuration theory" as a 
broad sociological foundation to account  for context in analysis of text 
and their impact, and to complement framework provided by SFL and 
CDA.  He proposes the term intercontextuality, in an analogy to 
intertextuality and interdiscursivity, "to refer to the various contexts 
that intermesh to influence or determine, and be influenced or 
determined by text, discourse and other social practices" (86). Then 
he describes the main dimensions of structuration theory: role 
prescription, social practices and social structures.   He analyses 
selected aspects of the text "On Bombing" by Noam Chomsky, that 
widely circulated on Internet on September 11th 2001, to explain how 
SFL, CDA and Structuration Theory have to interconnect in order to 
show in text analysis how context of culture effectively works in 
relation to language. He clearly concludes stating: "We cannot just say 
that language use is also related to the context of culture, which 
realizes genre and leave it at that. Thus I believe the framework I have 
introduced above may be the initial route between the broader context 
and language use (96).

"Critical Discourse Analysis in Researching Language in the New 
Capitalism: Overdetermination, Transdisciplinary and Textual 
Analysis" by Norman Fairclough opens the second part "Applied 
Section: National Identity". He starts by describing New Capitalism as 
a new way that Capitalism has to overcome crisis by transforming itself 
periodically. He states that the common idea of new capitalism implies 
that it is "discourse driven"; therefore language has a more important 
role in contemporary socioeconomic changes that it has had in the 
past. He gives as a punctual example of this transformations of the 
new capitalism a single text, the "Foreword" to the UK Department of 
Trade and Industry White Paper, "Our Competitve Future: Building the 
Knowledge Economy" by the Prime Minister Tony Blair. He presents a 
textual analysis taking SFL as the linguistic frame, but he also points 
that a critical perspective has to be adopted.  He clearly points the 
difference between text as a linguistic unit and discourse as "a 
representation of some area of social life from a particular 
perspective" (111). He understands that in CDA interdiscursive 
analysis of text is the way to integrating social and linguistic analysis, 
because social practices are networked. So, he distinguishes 
language as an element of the social at all levels where languages 
can be regarded as among the abstract social structures, orders of 
discourse as social practices and texts as social events. Orders of 
discourse are a key concept: they are the social organization and 
control of linguistic variation and their elements (discourses, genres, 
styles).  Language, he affirms following Althusser and Balibar (1979), 
is "overdetermined" by other social elements. So, he suggests to 
working transdisciplinary, i.e. doing text analysis and discourse 
analysis. Trandisciplinarity, then,  is one method of working in and 
interdisciplinary way which he clearly characterizes: "It is not simple a 
matter of adding concepts and categories from other disciplines and 
theories, but working on and elaborating one´s own theoretical and 
methodological resources so as to be able to address insights or 
problems captured in other theories or disciplines from the perspective 
of one's particular concern(...). Disciplinary specialization is 
simultaneously necessary and insufficient, desirable and dangerous" 
(116). His conclusions lead to see that SFL is a necessary condition 
but not a sufficient one to work from a CDA perspective.  He 
understands that "the interdiscursive analysis of text is a crucial 
mediating link between linguistic analysis and social analysis, a link 
which is needed (...) if one is to succeed in incorporating textual 
analysis more substantively within social research" (119).  The 
incorporation of this kind of analysis "places us in a stronger position 
to make a substantive contribution to social research" (120).

In "Prolegomena to a Discursive Model of Malaysian National Identity", 
Faiz Sathi Abdullah, uses SFL and CDA as tools to analyze the 
concepts of  "Malaysian", "nation" (bangsa) and "we" (kita) and 
establishes how they are represented in different discourses.  He 
departs from the concepts of "National Identity" as defined by Wodak 
et al. 1999) in order to discern what may be defined as "nationalist" 
and "national ideologies".  He proposes a discursive model of 
Malaysian national identity and analyses several texts as examples. 
He concludes saying that "to explore the experiential and relational 
values inherent in the language of Malaysian national/nationalist 
identity construction, a more principled analysis of a representative 
sample of discourse is imperative, taking into account other semiotic 
modalities for a comprehensive, critical assessment of discursive 
strategies, their linguistic realization, and underlying ideologies" (135).

In "Celebrating Singapore's Development: An Analysis of the 
Millenium Stamps", Chng Huang Hoon analyses critically the 
Millennium Collection, a set of 14, minted stamps that mark 'the 
milestones in Singapore's development. In his analysis, he focuses on 
aspects in the construction of the Singaporean history and identity 
from the perspective of CDA. He also analyses the texts from the 
perspective of SFL focusing in the nature of agency and clause 
structure. He presents a detailed analysis of the texts to conclude 
that "Clearly, the official construction is unambiguous about what one 
should be proud of (...) the milestones are all, unsurprisingly perhaps, 
People's Action Party milestones" (153).  The problem, he clearly 
poses, is why the individual does not feel identified with it. He said that 
this will be the subject of future papers.

In "The Representation of Social Actors in the Globe and Mail during 
the break-up of the Former Yugoslavia", Dragana Polovina-Vukovic 
shows how a segment of Canadian press portrays the different ethnic 
groups involved in the wars during the disintegration of Yugoslavia 
(1991 to 1999).  She takes the articles appeared on the front page of 
the Globe and Mail as her corpora to analyze how the paper identified 
the different ethnic groups either as "villains" or "victims". She makes a 
detailed description of the corpus and the selected data, a brief 
history of Yugoslavia and how they are represented in the press. She 
analyses mainly the different processes used by the newspaper in 
order to conclude that "the Globe and Mail discursively reproduced 
the ideological framework that echoed ethnic inequality among various 
groups from the Balkans. While Serb atrocities were widely 
condemned, Serb suffering was minimized, or worse, overlooked. In 
this simplified story about the struggle between good and evil, NATO 
played the role of rescuer of innocent victims" (167).  Her final 
paragraph is clear enough to see the scope of the matter discussed. 
She says: "What I have presented here is an academic discussion of 
media discourse had, in fact, consequences on the lives of people in 
the Balkans. Some of them received no humanitarian aid, some of 
them were bombed, some of them were not granted visas in different 
developed countries, and some of them are still waiting to return to 
their homes. Uncovering inequality in discourse has implications not 
only for media coverage, but also can lead to changes in non-
discursive practices, which affects the lives of those represented" (168).

The third part of the book is called "Applied Section: Institutional 
Identity". It is opened by Frances Christie's paper "Authority and Its 
role in the Pedagogic Relationship of Schooling". She argues the need 
to develop critical perspectives on a great deal of educational theory 
to articulate useful models of knowledge and the curriculum and, 
therefore, of the nature of the authority exercised by the teacher in 
the pedagogic relationship of schooling. She uses the model of 
classroom discourse analysis by Christie (2002) which uses SFL. Also, 
following Bernstein (1990, 2000), she argues that the presence of a 
teacher who is in authority is needed. In order to illustrate her point, 
she analyses an example of early childhood literacy learning. Her 
conclusions state that "using a method of classroom discourse 
analysis, I have sought to demonstrate how successful teacher 
authority is essential to the process of teaching and learning in 
school" (197).

In "The Principal's Book: Discursively Reconstructing a Culture of 
Teaching and Learning in an Umlazi High School, Ralph Adendorff 
provides a close study of situated discursive practice in an educational 
site, Thukeleni High School (a pseudonym) in South Africa. It is 
concerned with the effect of discourse (The Book) on identities (those 
of teachers and principal) in the context of post-apartheid South 
Africa. His data is drawn from 99 entries in four copies of The Book 
and interviews with the principal and members of his staff. His 
analytical framework is the Appraisal Framework within SFL. This 
approach is concerned with exploring the discursive semantics and 
lexis grammar of the language of evaluation, attitude and 
intersubjective positioning. It accounts of how language construes the 
interpersonal relationship of solidarity and power. He works, then, in 
the discourse of authority analyzing its formal and textual features, 
and also the discourse of exhortation. His conclusion clearly states: "In 
this particular "community of practice" (...). The Book defines 
simultaneously one struggle over membership identities (of the 
principal and his staff) and another over preferred practices, in ways 
that both reflect the troubled situation of the school, and perhaps 
contribute towards the maintenance of some of its troubled aspects" (212).

In "Representations of Rape in the Discourse of Legal Decisions", 
Débora de Carvalho Figueiredo analyses the vocabulary used in 
British reported appeal decisions on rape cases to depict sexual 
assaults. She investigates this issue from the perspective of CDA and 
Gender and Feminist Legal Studies. She analyses the legal view of 
rape where she defines, from the legal point of view, what it is defined 
as the real or prototypical rape. Then, she analyses cases of non-
typical rapes such as marital rape and ex-partner rape. Her 
conclusions point that there is a disparity between the way sexual 
violence is treated in theory and in practice. "Judicial discourse makes 
use of several prototypes to help categorize rape cases and their 
participants, such as 'real rape', the 'true victim', and the 'typical 
rapist'. The prototypical cases are seen as serious and as deserving 
severe punishment. Events and participants that shade away from 
these central, core examples, e.g. marital rape, date rape, and rape of 
sexually experienced woman, are viewed with disbelief and suspicion 
and, frequently, end up in acquittals or short sentences" (227).

In "Bureaucratic Discourse: Writing in the "Confort Zone", Claire 
Harrison and Lynne Young show "how one could go 
about "unpacking" bureaucratese through the Phasal Analysis of a e-
mail office memo issued within Health Canada (HC), a department of 
the Government of Canada" (232).  They give the context of 
Canada's public service in order to make a Phasal Analysis of the 
memos. This kind of analysis proposes of discovering the way in which 
speakers and writers structure and organize discourse. They propose 
to analyse the memo in four phases (I'm on the level; Show and Tell; 
Concealment and Arm's-length Commands) to conclude that: "The 
memo failed because of this: it did not make the employees feel heard, 
valued or respected. Bureaucratic discourse, long considered to be 
useful in maintaining institutional cohesion may, in fact, contribute to 
the very opposite of its desired effect by creating staff resentment and 
resistance to the hierarchical status quo reinforced by such discourse. 
It does not contribute towards the kind of systemic changes required 
to create a work environment that will make the government "an 
employer of choice" and attract the type of high-quality, skilled 
workers required in today's and tomorrow's workplace."(242).

In "Charismatic Business Leader Rhetoric: From Transaction to 
Transformation", Arlene Harvey examines the discourse interaction 
between two leadership styles: Transactional (that encompasses 
managerial and pragmatics processes) and Transformational 
leadership (that is associated with effectiveness). A short dialogue 
between a well-known transformational leader, Steve Jobs of Apple 
Computer and his employees is analyzed from SFL focusing on 
ideational patterning to show how he uses grammatical metaphors 
and negative material processes. A complementary analysis, 
interpersonally oriented, uses Appraisal Theory to show how the 
leader tries to inspire his employees to perform beyond expectations.

In "Ideological Resources in Biotechnology Press Releases: Patterns 
of Theme/Rheme and "Given/New", Ingrid Lassen centers on two 
biotechnology press releases (that represent conflicting interests) with 
the primary purpose of exploring one stylistic strategy that is available 
for naturalizing ideologies. She combines Fairclough's three 
dimensional CDA model (social practice, discourse practice and text) 
with SFL framework of Theme/Rheme and Given/New to present a 
detailed analysis of the data selected.  She concludes by saying 
that "The differences in style and communicative purposes of the two 
press releases corroborates (...) that it might not be possible to 
categorize press releases  as a uniform genre, but rather as a special 
mode or channel used for conveying news of interest to the general 
public" (273).

In "We  have the power -- Or do We: Pronouns of Power in an Union 
Context", Maurice Ward proposes to analyze the pronoun we in an 
union meeting text as an exponent of distance and solidarity between 
a group of workers in a factory in New Zealand and their 
democratically elected union officials. After making a very good 
analysis of the uses of we from a SFL framework, and showing how 
CDA can contribute to interpret the text chosen, he arrives to the 
following conclusion: "This paper avoids a simplistic conclusion that a 
clique of union officials is manipulating their membership for personal 
or political gain, and examines the systematic discoursal framing of a 
group fighting oppression by highlighting a chain of intertextuality and 
intermodality. It shows how detailed instantial analysis of the deictic we 
(...) can contribute to understanding systemic disempowerment and 
offer some small steps towards empowering workers within their 
union, affirming that linguists in concert with other activist do have the 
power to contribute to change." (294)

CONCLUSION 

This volume shows clearly the necessity of making explicit connections 
between a strong socially orientated linguistic theory as SFL, and 
principles of the broad CDA, to give an accurate analysis of social 
changes through different discursive practices.

The papers of this quite representative collection show the connection 
successfully.  The Theoretical Section is very important to focus the 
central problems that CDA has to face when it deals with text analysis. 
The Applied Section (on national and institutional identities) shows 
how FSL is the adequate tool to carry on CDA.

In the Introduction to the Second Edition of his "Introduction to 
Functional Grammar" (1984), M. A. K. Halliday strongly stated: "The 
current preoccupation is with discourse analysis, or "text linguistics"; 
and it is sometimes assumed that this can be carried on with grammar -
- or even that it is somehow an alternative to grammar. But this is an 
illusion. A discourse analysis that is not based on grammar is not an 
analysis at all, but simply a running commentary on a text" (Halliday 
1994: xvi). This important collection of papers proves that not only 
there is "no illusion", but that CDA does not deserve to be merely 
a "running commentary on a text" as well.

REFERENCES

Althusser, Louis & Etienne Balibar (1970).  Reading Capital. London, 
New Left Books.

Bernstein, Basil (1990). Class, Codes and Control: Volume 4: The 
Structuring of Pedagogical Discourse. London: Routledge.

Bernstein, Basil (2000) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity. 
Theory, Research, Critique. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield.

Christie, Frances. (2002). Classroom Discourse Analysis. A Functional 
Perspective. London: Continuum.

Hasan, Ruqaiya (1996). Ways of Saying and Ways of Meaning. 
Selected Papers of Ruqaiya Hasan, ed. by C. Cloran,  D. Butt and G. 
Williams. London, Casell.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1956). Language, Though and Reality: 
Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. by J.B. Caroll, 
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wodak, Ruth et al. (eds) (1999) The Discursive Construction of 
National Identity. Edimburgh:  Edimburgh University Press. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER 

Salvio Martín Menéndez is Professor of General Linguistics and Text  
Grammar at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras of the Universidad de 
Buenos Aires and of Linguistics I and II at the Facultad de 
Humanidades  of the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata 
(Argentina) and researcher of the Consejo Nacional de 
Investigaciones Científicas y Téncnicas (CONICET). He has worked 
on Pragmatic Discourse Analysis on different corpora such as Political 
Discourse, HIV Propaganda Discourse and High School Textbooks 
Discourse. Now he is working in the relationship among grammar 
resources, discursive strategies and genres in the Discourse of 
Spanish Grammars.





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