苗兴伟：什么是话语分析？ | 语言学微课堂

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《语言学基础教程》（第二版）

苗兴伟主编，胡壮麟主审

北京大学出版社

书号9787301296585

苗兴伟  北京师范大学教授、博士生导师，北京师范大学外国语言文学学院院长，教育部新世纪优秀人才，中国生态语言学研究会副会长，中国英汉语篇分析研究会副会长，中国文体学研究会副会长，中国话语研究会副会长。主要著作包括《语言学基础教程》《英汉语篇语用学研究》等。

What is discourse analysis?

Discourse analysis is a relatively new area of study in linguistics. The term “discourse analysis” was first used by Zellig Harris in 1952. Increasingly in the humanities and social sciences there has been a “turn to discourse”, a new interest in the role played by language in social life and a new emphasis on meaning making. Schiffrin (1994: 5) points out that discourse analysis is “one of the most vast, but also one of the least defined, areas in linguistics”, because “our understanding of discourse is based on scholarship from academic disciplines that are very different from one another”. Accordingly, discourse analysis can be regarded as a “hybrid” field of enquiry.

The word “discourse” comes originally from Latin discursus, denoting “conversation” or “speech”. In modern linguistics, discourse is regarded as a unit of language in use, and it is usually larger than the unit of sentence or utterance. Sometimes a short utterance used in a given communicative situation like “Fire!” or “Help!” may be called a discourse, but generally a discourse is a continuous stretch of language which can be as short as a question-answer sequence or a paragraph, or as long as an entire article or novel.

There is no agreement among linguists as to the use of the term discourse. Consequently, a distinction has sometimes been made between discourse and text by some linguists who use the former to refer to oral production and the latter to written language. This has in turn led to the emergence of the two terms discourse analysis and text linguistics. However, many linguists do not make a distinction between discourse and text, and the two terms are very often used interchangeably in linguistic analysis.

Then what is meant by “discourse analysis”? A good starting point is the definition given by Stubbs (1983: 1), who refers to discourse analysis as “the linguistic analysis of naturally occurring connected speech or written discourse” or as “attempts to study the organization of language above the sentence or above the clause”. In other words, discourse analysis studies how sentences in spoken and written language form larger meaningful units such as paragraphs, conversations, interviews, etc.” (Richards et al., 2002). Discourse analysis not only describes linguistic forms, but also considers the relationship between language and the social and cultural contexts in which it is used, as well as the ways that the use of language presents different views of the world and different understandings (Paltridge, 2006: 2). To sum up, discourse analysis is concerned with (a) language use beyond the boundaries of a sentence or utterance, (b) the interrelationships between language and the social and cultural contexts, and (c) the interactive or dialogic properties of everyday communication. 

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