As mentioned in Chapter One, discourse is a much used term with a number of meanings. In this sub-section, I aim to examine the ways in which it is used in text linguistics and to explain the rationale for using the terms discourse and text in the way they are in this thesis.
In the following sub-section, I will discuss theories from text linguistics of relevance to this study. Discourse, as conceptualised in the textlinguistic tradition, can be defined as ‘language in use’ (Brown and Yule, 1983: 1) or ‘language above the sentence or above the clause’
(Stubbs, 1983: 1). While these definitions appear adequate, they are problematic. The first can be criticised for being too broad, since it fails to give any indication of what aspects of
language use are implied. The second, although neatly encapsulating the way discourse is envisaged in text linguistics, has been criticised for being too narrow. Widdowson (2004: 6-7) questions the necessity for discourse to be defined as dealing only with supra-segmental units of language, since sub-clausal units can be meaningful in certain contexts. He gives as
examples the way in which we easily interpret the intended meanings of public notices bearing words such as open or closed or the letter P to indicate a place where parking is permitted (ibid.). This is a fair criticism in some respects and particularly pertinent to the current project, which is concerned with examining how meaning is negotiated between readers and writers. However, it overlooks the fact that Stubbs (1983) crafted this particular definition in the context of a work whose aim is to shed light on the macro-organisational features of texts. What he has in mind are the sorts of organisational features of extended
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stretches of interaction, whether spoken interaction, as described by conversation analysts (e.g. Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, 1974) and discourse analysts (e.g. Sinclair and
Coulthard, 1975), or written interaction, as described by discourse analysts concerned with the ways in which cohesion and coherence is achieved in texts (e.g. Halliday and Hasan, 1976;
Winter, 1977; Hoey, 1983; 1991; 1994; Tadros, 1985; Francis, 1986). It is discourse in this last sense which is of particular relevance in this project, which aims to discover how coherent and persuasive arguments are constructed in the JABS corpus.
A further problem with the way in which discourse is used in text linguistic literature concerns an unfortunate overlap with use of the word text. In some works (e.g. Hoey, 1983;
1991; Stubbs, 1996; 2002), little or no distinction is made between discourse and text. In others (e.g. van Dijk, 1997a; 1997b), discourse is used to refer to spoken language and text to written language, although this practice has now generally fallen out of use (Partington, Duguid and Taylor, 2013: 2). Elsewhere, text refers to actual instances of language use and discourse to ‘the situated use of text’ (Georgakopoulou and Goutsos, 1997: 4; Verschueren, 1999: 50). Stubbs (1996: 4) claims that there is often no good reason for drawing a distinction between discourse and text. But Widdowson (2004: 8) argues that it is crucial to make a clear distinction between text and discourse. Meaning arises in a social context and is activated through the interplay of context and the linguistic code. Discourse, he suggests, is ‘the pragmatic process of meaning negotiation’, text its ‘product’ (ibid.). Widdowson’s (ibid.) argument is persuasive and the distinction he draws between discourse and text is a useful one. Discourse in this thesis is therefore used to refer to the pragmatic aspects of
communication in context and to language use above the level of the clause or sentence. Text is used to refer to instances of language use.
62 3.3.2 The Foucauldian notion of discourse 3.3.2.1 Foucault’s definition of discourse
One of the questions this project aims to answer is whether, and how, strategic use is made of particular ‘discourses’ in the JABS. It is important to clarify precisely how discourse(s), in the Foucauldian sense, is understood for the purposes of this project, since one’s interpretation of it, in particular the way one views the relationship between discourse and society, directly affects the approach to analysis and the interpretation of the data. Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse has been particularly influential in cultural and critical theory in recent decades.
Unfortunately, his theories are open to diverse readings, not least on account of the fact that he uses the term inconsistently and his concept of discourse (and discourses) changes over the course of his writings (Martin Rojo and Galibondo Pujol, 2000: 2). As Foucault himself observes:
I wonder whether I have not changed direction on the way, […] whether, while analysing ‘objects’ or ‘concepts’, let alone ‘strategies’, I was in fact still speaking of ‘statements’ […] instead of gradually reducing the rather fluctuating meaning of the word ‘discourse’, I believe that I have in fact added to its meanings: treating it sometimes as the general domain of all statements, sometimes as an
individualizable group of statements, and sometimes as a regulated practice that accounts for a certain number of statements.
(Foucault, 2002: 90)
What Foucault refers to as ‘statements’ might more usefully be referred to as propositions.
Foucault uses discourse as an uncountable noun to refer to the expression of all or any propositions, in other words, to language use in general. But it is the ways in which he uses discourse as a countable noun which has had a profound influence on discourse studies of a critical nature. For Foucault, discourses are systems of propositions which consist of and construct objects of knowledge, concepts, social identities and social relations (Fairclough,
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1992: 39). He sees discourse as a form of social practice and discourses as ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’(Martin Rojo and Galibondo Pujol, 2000:
3-4). Discourses also construct areas of knowledge so that, to a certain extent, they correspond to disciplines (Foucault, 2000: 236), although disciplines and discourses are not reducible to each other since disciplines ‘constitute a system of control in the production of discourse, fixing its limits through the action of an identity taking the form of a permanent reactivation of the rules’ (Foucault, 2000: 237).
3.3.2.2 Interpretations of the Foucauldian notion of discourse
The sheer complexity of Foucault’s theories and the plurality of meanings he gives to
discourse(s) lead to a variety of interpretations of his ideas. His theories are often interpreted in radically post-modernist or contructionist ways (e.g. Potter, 1996; Wetherell, Taylor and Yates, 2001; Baxter, 2002), which privilege Foucault’s view that all aspects of social life are constructed by discourses, or constructivist-structuralist ways, ‘concerned with the
constraining role of social structures as well as with the active process of the production of social practices which can transform social structures’ (Martin Rojo and Galibondo Pujol, 2000). The constructivist-structuralist aspects of Foucault’s theories have been criticised for failing to attend to the concept of agency and for fostering an impoverished view of human conduct (Wooffitt, 2005: 179) and leaving an overall impression of ‘people being helplessly subjected to immovable systems of power’ (Fairclough, 1992: 57).
The idea that discourses construct social life is more persuasive and deserves closer attention.
There are indeed certain concepts which are socially constructed and which we encounter (and construct) through discourse. Teubert (2013) gives the example of a group of students
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discussing body image. He shows how meaning is negotiated and the concept discursively constructed as the students engage in interaction, supplying definitions (sometimes
intertextually linked) and explanations using terms they deem relevant (for example, self-esteem, self-confidence, self respect, attractive, internal feelings) and endorsing or rejecting each other’s suggestions. One can agree that a concept such as body image is culturally determined and thus socially constructed. However, he goes on to comment:
We do not know why participants said what they said, and why some items, but not others, were seconded. The discourse has put itself in charge22 of what should be added in terms of knowledge to what was already known about ‘body image’.
(Teubert, 2013: 293)
Thus discourse is represented as an autonomous object independent of the people who utter the words. This is a common notion among writers who accept a constructionist view of language. We see this in particular in studies which talk about competing (e.g. Lee, 1992;
Baxter, 2002) or conflicting discourses (e.g. Coupland and Williams, 2002), which construe conflict between groups or resistance to authority in terms of competition or conflict between discourses. But the habit of reifying discourses as ‘autonomous collusive actors’ (Wodak and Riesigl, 2001: 383) eliminates any real sense of social agency so that the social world ‘is seen as constructed by authorless discourses which themselves become agents’ (Sealey and Carter, 2004: 47). In some constructionist accounts, the idea that discourse constructs reality is even extended to physical objects. Teubert (2013: 276), for example, argues that concepts such as
‘cats’ or ‘gardens’ have no basis in reality. There is a strong argument for claiming that the categories we divide the world into are socially constructed, however, as Sealey (2014) points out, the taxonomies we construct often arise in response to our experience of the world and sometimes correspond to real-world phenomena. The claim that humans and chimpanzees are
22 My emphasis.
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‘cousins’ is metaphorical and says something about the way we categorise the world. But at the same time, in material terms,
Humans and other primates are scientifically classified as ‘related’ in two main ways: having relatively recently shared a common ancestor and continuing to share a high proportion of DNA.
(Sealey, 2014: 315)
There are phenomena, Sealey (ibid.: 311) argues, which ‘our empirical senses cannot perceive, but that are nevertheless real … and not reducible to the labels we invent in discourse’. The adoption of a radical interpretation of Foucault’s notion of discourse is therefore ultimately untenable. However, it is true to say that certain concepts are socially constructed, as Teubert’s (2013) example of self-esteem illustrates. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 47) argue, interpreted in its less radical form, the Foucauldian notion of discourse has useful things to say about the way particular linguistic choices can contribute to different forms of expression.
The notion of discourse (in its Foucauldian sense) adopted in this study is realist rather than constructionist. Discourse emerges from our interaction with the world: we draw on linguistic resources, using them creatively to name and categorise the phenomena we experience and to effect action in the world (Sealey, 2014). The argument for adopting a realist perspective rather than a constructionist one may seem purely academic, but it has implications for the ways in which I interpret what I see in the data and how I express my interpretations. Let us take, for example, a mother’s claim that her child has suffered vaccine damage (there are many such claims in the JABS corpus data). If one interprets such a claim from a
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constructionist perspective, one might state that the mother has ‘constructed’ her child as vaccine-damaged. From a realist perspective, on the other hand, one infers that the child probably displays symptoms of neurological impairment which probably have a pathological cause. One also infers that the alleged impairment may, or may not, have been caused by a vaccine. One therefore states that the mother has ‘expressed’ the belief (or the proposition) that her child is vaccine-damaged. The constructionist view does not allow for the fact that the condition which the mother reports might have a basis in fact. The realist view allows for the idea that the proposition expressed by the mother might be aligned with reality.
From the point of view of the aims of this thesis, it is useful to adopt a weak version of Foucault’s notion of discourse and to use his idea of discourses as corresponding to particular areas of knowledge or disciplines, or, more usefully, of particular ways of talking about certain phenomena. If it is the case that vaccine-critical groups often exploit ‘scientific discourse’ or particular ‘discourses of risk’ in their arguments, such discourses should be recognisable from the language used. Furthermore, although the notion of discourses as autonomous actors is rejected in this thesis, the notion of dominant discourses is nonetheless useful. Dominant discourses reflect dominant ideologies. Dominant ideologies are those which are associated with powerful social groups and which are ‘mediated through powerful political and social institutions like the government, the law and the medical profession’
(Simpson, 1993: 9). Medical-scientific discourse can thus be viewed as a dominant discourse.
We turn now to the question of how to define discourse so that we are clear how we might recognise a particular discourse.
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3.3.2.3 Towards a working definition of discourse(s)
As a result of the relative lack of clarity in Foucault’s writings as to the precise nature of discourse, it is not unusual for critical linguists who adopt Foucault’s concept of discourse to elaborate on his definitions in ways which draw on their understandings of how language works and how ideology and language intersect. It is important to this study to define discourse(s) in a way which makes clear how discourses are realised linguistically. Some scholars define discourse in a highly abstract way, focusing on language as a semiotic activity but giving little idea how discrete discourses might be identified.23 The following two
definitions, by contrast, are clearer in this respect:
…recurrent phrases and conventional ways of talking which circulate in the social world, and which form a constellation of repeated meanings.
(Stubbs, 1996: 158)
a set of meanings, metaphors, representations, images, stories, statements and so on that in some way together produce a particular version of events.
(Burr, 1995, cited in Baker and McEnery, 2005: 198)
We can therefore define discourses, for the purposes of this project, as sets of meanings which are realised through recurrent lexico-grammatical patterns, metaphors and other forms of representations (such as narratives), and which circulate in the discursive world. Discourses may be recognised through the repeated use of certain lexico-grammatical patterns or certain metaphor systems (Baker and McEnery, 2005).
23 Examples are definitions such as the following: ‘a general mode of semiosis, i.e. meaningful symbolic behaviour … language-in-action’ (Blommaert, 2005: 2); ‘… a complex bundle of simultaneous and sequential interrelated linguistic acts which manifest themselves within and across the social fields of action as thematically interrelated semiotic (oral or written) tokens that belong to specific semiotic types (genres)’
(Wodak and Riesigl, 2001: 383).
68 3.3.3 Intertextuality and interdiscursivity
One of the objectives of the thesis is to discover how intertextual and interdiscursive
resources are exploited in the JABS corpus for rhetorical effect. As explained in Chapter One, manifest intertextuality (or explicit intertextuality) is the phenomenon whereby a stretch of one text is incorporated in another (reported speech, for example), while interdiscursivity is the phenomenon whereby a text, or stretch of text, is made up of a mix of discourses or discourse conventions (Fairclough, 1992: 104). The sorts of manifest intertextuality
characteristic of internet-based newsgroup and discussion forum interaction were discussed in Chapter Two. To reiterate, these involve the inclusion of whole texts in a post, the inclusion of hypertextual links, and the repetition of parts of prior posts (Richardson, 2001). A reliance on mass media sources is another characteristic (ibid.).
Intertextual references of this kind can pose particular challenges when one adopts a corpus linguistic approach to analysis. The main challenge concerns the reliance in the JABS corpus data on mass media sources and the inclusion of whole texts in forum posts. A concordance line effectively divorces a stretch of text from its wider context. For example, when looking at a concordance line which represents reported speech and originates in a news article, it may be easy to see which reporting verb has been used but it is harder to access the nucleus of the article (the headline, sub-headings and opening paragraph) which frame the news story (White, 1997). With almost 2,000 forum threads represented in the JABS corpus data,
however, checking each thread manually would be labour-intensive and unfeasible, given the time constraints of the project. The repetition of parts of previous messages represents a challenge insofar as the concordance may obscure whether instances of repeated patterns are due to repetition of prior utterances in the thread or whether they represent instances of
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interdiscursivity. This can be overcome through close inspection of concordance lines. One could argue, of course, that it is immaterial as to why a particular stretch of text is repeated.
The very act of repetition indicates that the topic is considered particularly salient by the participants on the forum. Methods for addressing these particular challenges are discussed in Chapter Four.
Interdiscursivity is often approached in discourse analysis from the point of view of
discoursal hybridity or hybrid genres (Bakhtin, 1981). It is claimed that hybridity is a growing feature of discursive life in late modern society and is connected to the weakening of social boundaries (Fairclough, 1992; Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999). Hybridity, it is claimed, can be used strategically to ‘construct’ expertise (Candlin, 2005) or to make an argument more persuasive or appealing to an audience (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999). The problem with the notion of hybrid genres or discourses is that it presupposes the prior
existence of ‘pure’ genres or discourses. The notion of discoursal hybridity also presupposes the reification of discourses (Hasan, 2000). A more convincing argument is that speakers do not consciously merge one discourse with another, instead they move seamlessly between registers (ibid.). Either way, interdiscursivity involves the mixing of patterns of language typical of different domains of use. Comparison of two specialized corpora, by making it possible to identify the patterns of language typical of a particular domain, can help identify instances of interdiscursivity. However, it is important to compare any perceived similarities with norms in the language as a whole, in order to overcome the weakness of many
approaches to studying intertextuality and interdiscursivity. Widdowson (2004: 147-148), for example, questions the efficacy of the methods used in CDA for analysing intertextuality and interdiscursivity. He cites Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999), who define intertextuality as,
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the property texts have of being full of snatches of other texts, which may be explicitly demarcated and merged in and which the text may assimilate, contradict, ironically echo and so forth.
(Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999:199, cited in Widdowson, 2004: 147)
Widdowson (2004: 148) argues that, defined in this way, intertextuality is hard to trace.
Sometimes, he says, it is clear when the writer of one text draws on the words of another, but sometimes it is not clear. Since all texts are composed of regularly occurring patterns, as corpus analysis reveals, it can be difficult to distinguish between a ‘snatch’ of another text and an example of a pattern which occurs frequently in other texts simply because of the ways in which language is patterned.