16.1220, Review: Discourse/Pragmatics: Renkema (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-1220. Mon Apr 18 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.1220, Review: Discourse/Pragmatics: Renkema (2004)

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1)
Date: 17-Apr-2005
From: Guowen Huang < huangg at stanford.edu >
Subject: Introduction to Discourse Studies 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2005 04:31:44
From: Guowen Huang < huangg at stanford.edu >
Subject: Introduction to Discourse Studies 
 

AUTHOR: Renkema, Jan
TITLE: Introduction to Discourse Studies
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2517.html


Guowen Huang, School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University, P.R. 
China

DESCRIPTION/SUMMARY

This book is based on the author's 1993 book: "Discourse Studies: An 
Introductory Textbook", but has incorporated new ideas in the field which 
had come into being in the past decade.  It aims to provide students of 
discourse studies with a "scientific toolkit" for introductory courses at 
university level and to serve as a stepping stone to the independent study 
of the discipline. The book is made up of an introductory chapter and four 
theme parts which are made up of 14 chapters.  This book provides more 
than 300 source references and explains about 500 basic concepts 
concerning discourse studies.  There are more than 100 questions following 
the 15 chapters, and a key to the questions is provided at the end of the 
book.

SYNOPSIS

Chapter 1: Introduction
The first chapter describes (1) the definition of discourse studies, (2) 
the aim and structure of the book, and (3) the presentation of the 
material used in the book.  The author states that "discourse studies is 
the discipline to the investigation of the relationship between form and 
function in verbal communication" and uses this definition as the point of 
departure for discussing discourse studies.  The aim of the book is to 
familiarize students with important concepts and major issues in discourse 
studies.  The author believes that knowledge of the basic concepts will 
serve as a "scientific toolkit" for students of discourse studies.  The 
organization of the following 14 chapters is based on the assumption that 
the prospective student of discourse studies will undertake a scientific 
journey along this line of ordering.  In terms of the material in the 
book, the author explains why special attention is paid to the origins of 
key concepts, to classic or impressive landmarks in discourse studies, and 
to approaches upon which contemporary developments are based. 

Part I. General orientation  
In this part there are two chapters which deal with "Communication as 
action" (Chapter 2) and "Discourse in communication" (Chapter 3) 
respectively, which together present a general orientation towards the 
field of discourse studies.  Chapter 2 aims to address questions such 
as "What is verbal communication?", "What are the principles governing the 
use of language?" and "What are the strategies that are brought to bear 
when people communicate?"  These questions are answered in sections which, 
respectively, discuss (1) Karl Bühler's Organon model (1934/1990), (2) 
speech act theory formulated from scholars such as John Austin, John 
Searle, and Jürgen Habermas (1981), (3) illocutions in discourse, (4) Paul 
Grice's cooperative principle, (5) the relevance theory of Dan Sperber and 
Deirdre Wilson, and (6) the politeness theory based on research by Erving 
Goffman, and Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson.  These sections are 
written with the aim to encourage the prospective student to think of what 
verbal communication is about.

Chapter 3 examines discourse situation in which communication takes 
places.  Different approaches to discourse studies are reviewed, with the 
pragmatic approach and the Hallidayan Systemic Functional approach (which 
is termed as "the socio-semiotic approach") being discussed in detail, and 
issues such as "rules for symbolic interaction", "messages between sender 
and receiver" and "the discourse situation also receive detailed 
treatment.  This chapters concludes with the discussion on the issue 
of "What makes discourse discourse?".  The author states that the 
Hallidayan approach seems to be the best candidate which offers a good 
general framework for analyzing all the different aspects of discourse.

Part II. Backpacking for a scientific journey
There are five chapters in this part, which are Chapter 4 (Discourse 
types), Chapter 5 (Structured content), Chapter 6 (Discourse connections), 
Chapter 7 (Contextual phenomena) and Chapter 8 (Style).  These chapters 
provide basic concepts necessary for studying discourse.  Chapter 4 begins 
with the discussion on the variety of functions and forms, reminding the 
reader of the Organon model introduced in Chapter 2 and then reviews Roman 
Jakobson's well-known identification of six functions and the various 
attempts to classify discourse types.  Then it distinguishes between 
written language and verbal interaction on the one hand and everyday 
language and literary language on the other. The idea of "genre" in 
discourse studies is also introduced by reviewing research conducted by 
John Swales and Vijay Bhatia.  This chapter presents two relatively new 
and very important concepts --- electronic discourse and multimodality, 
which seemed to be neglected by other similar discourse studies textbooks.

Chapter 5 focuses on approaches to discourse with respect to the 
structuring of the message content.  It first looks at the concept 
of "proposition" and the relations between propositions, which is followed 
by the discussion of "topics".  The author clearly distinguishes between 
discourse topics and sentence topics.  The chapter then moves from the 
microlevel of propositions to the macrolevel of the discourse, reviewing 
Teun van Dijk's concepts of macrostructure and superstructure.  In this 
chapter three levels of structure are distinguished: (1) the global 
structure (the discourse), (2) the mesostructure (the topics), and the 
local structure (propositions).

In Chapter 6 the focus is on (formal) ties that connect the elements in 
the discourse.  The Hallidayan idea of cohesion is first introduced with 
discussion on substitution, ellipsis, reference, conjunction and lexical 
cohesion.  This is followed by a review of discourse relations, semantic 
relations, pragmatic relations and rhetorical relations.  With the ideas 
of discourse relations presented, the author goes on to review the 
Rhetorical Structure Theory by William Mann and Sandra Thompson.  The 
chapter ends with a brief discussion of discourse relation research.

Chapter 7 looks at discourse elements in context from the perspectives of 
discourse production and perception.  It starts with the concepts 
of "deixis" and "staging" in the production and interpretation of 
information.  Then it goes on to discuss the ideas of perspectivization 
(which is concerned with the presentation of information in the discourse) 
under three headings: vision, focalization, and empathy.  This is followed 
by a review of the management of given-new information which is concerned 
with the knowledge on the addressee that is shared or assumed by the 
participants in the discourse.  This chapters ends with a brief discussion 
on "presupposition" and "inferences".

The last chapter in this part presents an overview of stylistic variation 
in discourse studies.  It clarifies basic concepts of "style" and treats 
style (1) as a possible form for a specific content, (2) as a choice of 
specific patterns and (3) as a deviation from expectations.  The chapter 
also looks at issues concerning register and summarizes the normative and 
the objective approaches to stylistic analysis.

Part III. Special modes of communication  
There are four chapters in this part, each of which deals with an 
important mode of communication: Conversation analysis (Chapter 9), 
Informative discourse (Chapter 10), Narratives (Chapter 11), and 
Argumentation and persuasion (Chapter 12).  Chapter 9 presents a 
sociological way of looking at discourse in communication.  As the 
analysis of verbal interaction requires a method of written representation 
(a transcription system), the chapter begins with the description of both 
the score notion developed by Jochem Rehbein (see Ehlich 1993) and the 
dramaturgical notation developed by Gail Jefferson.  This is followed by 
the review of the turn-taking model and the description of the sequential 
organization in verbal interaction.  The chapter ends with the section on 
the analysis of discourse markers.

The focus of Chapter 10 is on four important issues concerning informative 
discourse: the readability of information, the measure of understanding, 
judgment of discourse quality, and the improvement of documents.  The 
Flesch's readability formula, the cloze test and Diederich's judgment 
model are introduced and illustrated with examples.  In terms of the 
improvement of documents, the chapter introduces Britt-Louise Gunnarsson's 
(1984) study and other scholars' research, which are not yet known to the 
general audience.

Chapter 11 deals with approaches to the study of narratives.  It starts 
with a literary approach, developed by the Russian scholar Vladimir Propp 
(e.g. 1968), to the study of the structure of fairy tales, and this is 
followed by a review of a sociolinguistic approach by William Labov and 
Joshua Waletzky and then a psycholinguistic approach by John Mandler and 
Nancy Johnson and others.  The last section in this chapter is the 
description of another approach which is termed as the organizational 
approach.

Chapter 12, which is entitled argumentation and persuasion, first looks at 
the structure of argumentation and distinguishes between some basic 
concepts concerning the identification of data types and warrant types.  
Then it reviews and summarizes the pragma-dialectical approach developed 
by Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst (1994) and the social-
psychological approach developed by a number of studies in the field.  The 
last section of the chapter, based on a number of related studies, is 
concerned with the analysis of the quality of argumentation.

Part IV. Special interests
In this last part of the book, there are three chapters (Chapter 13: 
Discourse and cognition, Chapter 14: Discourse and institution, and 
Chapter 15: Discourse and culture) which deal with three important domains 
of discourse studies.  Chapter 13 attempts to answer the question of "what 
goes on in our minds in producing and understanding discourse" and it 
discusses both discourse production and perception.  It first reviews two 
models of discourse production, the knowledge-telling model (for the 
writing process of inexperienced writers) and the knowledge-transforming 
model (for the writing process of experienced writers), developed by Carl 
Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia (1987), and then the individuo-
environmental model for the writing process developed by J. R. Hayes 
(1996).  Then the focus shifts to the illustration of product and process 
analysis based on research conducted by Kellog Hunt (1970) and others. 
Following the discussion on production, it turns to discourse perception 
by reviewing Frederic Bartlett's research with a focus on the concept 
of "schema". And this is followed by the identification of four premises 
(prompted by results of experiments in the past decades) that are 
supported in different theories on discourse and cognition.  Then a 
detailed description of the model of discourse processing for reading 
elaborated by Walter Kintsch (1988) is summarized.  The chapter concludes 
with discussions concerning the question of "what does language reveal 
about how we see or understand something in reality".

Taking a sociological perspective, Chapter 14 covers issues concerning 
institutional discourse. Using the example of education, it first explains 
the concept of "institution" under three headings: role behavior, 
differentiation trends, and institutional power.  Then, with some key 
publications reviewed, the chapter turns to political discourse, legal 
discourse, media discourse and two less-known discourse types -- 
bureaucracy and health care.  In this chapter the importance of the role 
of situation in discourse is once again emphasized. 

The last chapter of this part, which is also the last chapter of the 
textbook, deals with issues in discourse studies from a societal 
perspective.  First, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is reviewed, then 
important studies in Critical Discourse Analysis are summarized.  This is 
followed by discussions on studies of differences between men and women in 
interaction, and the results of the studies are interpreted in terms of 
gender difference and dominance of men as a class over women.  The section 
following the discussion of gender in discourse is one that looks at 
racism manifested in discourse.  These last two issues are rarely looked 
at in discourse analysis textbooks.  The chapter ends with a section 
focusing on intercultural communication, in which two important studies 
are reviewed: (1) Geert Hofstede (2001) and Ronald and Suzanne Scollon 
(2001).
 
EVALUATION 

As the author states in Chapter 1, the aim of this book is to provide the 
prospective student of discourse studies with the most important concepts 
and the major issues in the field.  My overall impression is a very 
positive one. It is well-written and comprehensive.  This book is 
certainly a welcome and valuable addition to the current literature on 
discourse studies.  The book presents the concepts, reviews, summaries, 
and issues in a clear, concise way.  The coverage of topic is impressive 
in that topics such as electronic discourse and institutional discourse, 
which are not easily found in other textbooks in this field, are discussed 
in details in this book.  The exercises (questions and assignments) at the 
end of each chapter in particular are well presented with good hints and 
serve as reminders of important points discussed in each chapter.  I feel 
that the "Key to the questions" is very helpful for the textbook user.  
And the "Bibliographical information" at the end of each chapter and the 
references at the end of the book are particularly important and useful.  
Similarly, the index at the end of the book, containing about 500 entries, 
serves as a good basis for further discourse studies.  Apart from these 
merits, I have to mention two important points that are characteristic of 
this book: (1) Clear descriptions of origins of key concepts in discourse 
studies are presented where necessary, and (2) A number of important 
studies in the field conducted in Continental Europe are introduced and 
reviewed, which have gone unnoticed by scholars who are not able to read 
languages other than English.  I feel that this book really lives up to 
its aim of providing the prospective student with a scientific "toolkit" 
in his discourse studies.  I would certainly recommend this as the main 
textbook on discourse studies/analysis courses.

REFERENCES

Bereiter, C. & Scardamalia, M. (1987) The Psychology of Written 
Composition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Bühler, K. (1934/1990) Theory of Language: The Representational Function 
of Language. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Eemeren, F. van & Grootendorst, R. (1994) Studies in Pragma-dialectics. 
Amsterdam: Sic Sat.

Ehlich, K. (1993) HIAT: A transcription system for discourse data. In J. 
Edwards & M. Lampert, eds. Talking Data: Transcription and Coding in 
Discourse Research. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 123-148. 

Gunnarsson, B. L. (1984) Functional comprehensibility of legislative 
texts: Experiments with a Swedish act of parliament. Text, 4, 71-105.

Habermas, J. (1981) Theorie des Kommunikativen Handeln: Bd. 1. 
Handelungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung [The Theory 
of Communication Action: Vol. 1. Reason and the Rationalization of 
Society]. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Hayes, J. R. (1996) A new framework for understanding cognition and affect 
in writing. In C. M. Levy & S. Ransdell, eds. The Science of Writing: 
Theories, Methods, Individual Differences, and Applications. Mahwah, NJ: 
Erlbaum, 1-27.

Hofstede, G. (2001) Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, 
Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations. London: Sage.

Hunt, K. (1970) Syntactic maturity in school children and adults. 
Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 35, 1-67.

Kintsch, W. (1988) The role of knowledge in discourse comprehension: A 
construction-integration model. Psychological Review, 95, 163-182.

Propp, V. (1968) Morphology of the Folktale (2nd edition). Bloomington: 
Indiana University.

Renkema, J. (1993) Discourse Studies: An Introductory Textbook. Amsterdam: 
Benjamins.

Scollon, R. & Scollon, S. (2001) Intercultural Communication. Oxford: 
Blackwell. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dr. Guowen Huang is a professor of linguistics at the School of Foreign 
Languages, Sun Yat-sen University in China.  He is now a Fulbright 
visiting scholar attached to Stanford University.  His research interests 
include Systemic Functional Linguistics, discourse analysis, and 
translation studies.





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