new textbook for discourse analysis

[Barbara Johnstone]

Blackwell has just published my textbook, Discourse Analysis, in the
Introductions to Linguistics series.  Below is part of the preface, which
I'm posting to give people an idea of what the book is meant to do.  Once
people have had a chance to look at (and, I hope, use) the book, I'll be
eager to hear your comments and suggestions.

Barbara

Discourse Analysis
Barbara Johnstone, Carnegie Mellon University
Blackwell Publishers, 2002

This book is intended to be a first-level text for undergraduates and
beginning graduate students taking their first (or only) course about
discourse. The subject matter of discourse analysis is vast --  "language
in use," as Brown and Yule (1983) put it, "utterances," according to
Schiffrin (1994), "verbal communication" for Renkema (1993) -- and most
discourse analysts would be hard pressed to describe what, if anything,
makes discourse analysis a discipline.  Yet discourse analysis is
implicitly treated as if it were a discipline in texts that are organized
as a series of overviews of research topics (institutional discourse,
discourse and gender, narrative, media discourse, and so on) or theories
(pragmatics, Conversation Analysis, politeness theory, and so on).  The
approach I take in this book is different.  I  treat discourse analysis not
as a discipline (or as a subdiscipline of linguistics) but as a systematic,
rigorous way of suggesting answers to research questions posed in and
across disciplines throughout the humanities and social sciences and
beyond. In other words, I see discourse analysis as a research method that
can be (and is being) used by scholars with a variety of academic and
non-academic affiliations, coming from a variety of disciplines, to answer
a variety of questions.

	For this reason, this book is meant to encourage students not to think of
discourse analysis as a collection of facts or canonical studies or as a
body of theory.  As we will see, discourse analysts set out to answer many
kinds of questions about language, about speakers, and about society and
culture.  However, they all approach their tasks by paying close and
systematic attention to particular situations and particular utterances or
sets of utterances.  This book attempts to separate the techniques of
discourse analysis clearly from its results, trying to make sure that
students understand and practice the former before concentrating on the
latter.  This will, I hope, help alleviate the problem I have had again and
again in teaching discourse analysis, that of ending up with students who
are fascinated by the results of sensitive analyses of discourse but unable
themselves to perform analyses that go much beyond paraphrase.  Discourse
analysis, as I approach it here, is an open-ended heuristic, a research
method consisting of a set of topics to consider in connection with any
instance of discourse.  This heuristic can help insure that discourse
analysts are systematically paying attention to every possible element of
the potential meaning of a stretch of talk or writing, that we are paying
attention to every kind of context, every resource for creativity and every
source of limitation and constraint on creativity.  My focus is thus less
on providing detailed descriptions of the results of discourse analysts'
work than on asking students to think systematically about a variety of
sources of constraint on and creativity in discourse, a variety of reasons
why spoken utterances and written texts have the meanings and uses they do.
Discussion questions which in many cases ask readers to think about what
they and other people in their field do or might do with discourse
analysis, as well as ideas for small research projects using discourse
analysis, are interspersed throughout the chapters.

_________________________________
Barbara Johnstone
Professor, Department of English
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh PA  15213-3890