DA Vs Pragmatics

[Thomas Bloor]

Dominique

Re Steve Levinson's 'Pragmatics'; it has often been suggested that he
presents a misleading distinction between discourse analysis and
pragmatics. Although I admire Levinson's book greatly, I fully endorse this
assessment. He sets very narrow limits for what he considers to be DA and,
if I remember correctly, seems to equate it almost exclusively and very
mistakenly with the Birmingham (Sinclair/Coulthard) model; also, I have
doubts about his internal evaluation of this model itself. Of course, it
was published 17 years ago and a lot has happened in DA since then, but I
think that even at the time, Steve got this wrong. (Read the book, though.
It is excellent on many issues.)

Tom



>  Hi Gisela (Redeker) and Elisabeth (Traugott),
>
>many thanks for your answer (Gisela) and reflexion (both of you) on the
>relation between Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics; as I'm just doing a
>Master's Degree in Applied Linguistics, I don't have as much knowledge as
>both of you about this topic, but I have a deep interest. I will keep
>these comments and reflexions in my PC files for further references.
>As Gisela suggested me, I could find an answer to my question in
>"Levinson, S. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
>Chapter 6".
>I'm also going to visit again Teun's home page and look for what you tell
>me, Gisela.
>
>
>Regards
>
>Dominique


Thomas Bloor
Language Studies Unit
Aston University
Birmingham, UK
B4 7ET

Phone:0121 359 3611 xt 4212/4236
Fax:0121 359 2725