DA vs pragmatics

[Gisela Redeker]

On  3 Mar 00 at 19:18, Dominique de Voghel wrote:
> I'm interested in the relation between Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics. Today
> I was told by a pragmatician that Discourse Analysis lacks of context while
> Pragmatics is based on it; that is why Pragma is more inserted in reality, in
> life. I don't agree and I know it's not true but I'd like to read about it
> anyway.

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