Vol 20, No 4 (2016): Discourse Analysis in the 21st Century: Theory and Practice (I)

This paper focuses on how the limits of pragmatics - as long as it is restricted to the analysis of one utterance at a time - are overcome by including the hearer not only as interpreter who tries to understand the speaker’s utterance but as an interlocutor who tries to come to an understanding with the speaker. The goal of the paper is not to describe and analyze the dialogue approach rather explain what inner developments in the pragmatics paradigm have made it necessary to move in a dialogic direction, specifically emphasizing the importance of evaluating speaker meaning from the perspective of the speaker rather than from the perspective of the hearer and the double role of the interlocutor (speaker-hearer).

The paper deals with approaches to discourse studies. The approaches may be regarded as discourse dimensions associated with models presented and substantiated by M.M. Bakhtin, J. Habermas, Yu.M. Lotman and M.A.K. Halliday. They comprise contents, participants, tonality, channel and communicative actions. The approaches described complement each other and make it possible to synthesize the results achieved in Text Linguistics, Pragmatics, Social Linguistics, and Discourse Studies. They are joined by and oriented towards the concept of Language Personality, i.e. persons who manifest themselves in various kinds of communicative situations. However, each discourse dimension corresponds to a certain type of discourse. A Topic Approach to discourse focuses upon its contents (its referential substance) and specifies the correlation between explicit and implicit meaning expression. A Subject Approach to discourse makes it possible to single out and describe two basic types of communication as presented in Personality bound and Status bound discourse, the former diverges into two subtypes - Habitual and Existential communication, whereas the latter is manifested in various kinds of Institutional discourse. A Tonality Approach to discourse highlights different types of stylistic and emotional modes of communication and correspondingly characterizes personality types who are engaged in such situations. A Regime Approach is concentrated on communication channel and technical peculiarities of behavior determined by those restrictions. An Action Approach to discourse gives us a broader understanding of a performative act, i.e. an action incorporated in culture and a situational behavioral interaction.

Being a component of socio-cultural interaction discourse constitutes a sophisticated cohesion of language form, meaning and performance, i.e. communicative event or act. Cohesion with event and performance let us treat discourse as a certain lifeform, appealing both to communicative interaction and pragmatic environment using the methodology of studies of E. Benveniste, M. Foucault, I. Kecskes, J.R. Searle et al. In linguistics and other fields of humanitarian knowledge the notion of discourse facilitates the integration of studies in humanities. Principles of integration, incorporation into broad humanitarian context reveal some topics of discourse-speech act-utterance interaction which leads to substantive solutions of a number of linguistic topics, in particular, that of an utterance. Logicians determine utterance through proposition; linguists - through sentence, while speech act theory does it by means of illocutionary act. Integrated in a discourse or its part, utterance makes up their integral constituents although not unique ones. In relation to speech acts, utterance happens to be the unique definitional domain synchronically modelling and denoting speech act by means of propositional content. The goal of the research is to show the conditions of interaction and correlation of discourse, speech act and utterance as linguistic constructions, reveal some similarities and differences of their characteristics and prove the importance of the constructive role of utterance as a minimal unit of speech production. Discourse-speech act-utterance correlation supports the utterance role of a discrete unit within syntactic continuum, facing both language and speech: still, it belongs exclusively neither to language nor speech, but specifies their interaction in course of speech activity exposing simultaneously its nature of an ‘atom of discourse’ and creating the definitional domain of a speech act.

This chapter has two principal focuses; firstly backwards in time, across some of the high points in the development of political discourse analysis, in order to assess the current state of the field. It also has a future focus, as it attempts to integrate insights from some emerging fields, such as Multimodality, with more consolidated approaches. It has been argued, in many accounts (e.g. Fairclough and Fairclough 2012), that persuasion is the most pervasive function of all political discourse, and most authors agree that the processes involved encompass both textual and non-textual features. An influential early attempt, for example, to describe some non-verbal aspects of persuasive rhetoric was Atkinson (1984), who identified features like the speaker’s voice quality, intonation, posture, body language, eye movements, and so on, as well as some other non-linguistic ‘tricks’. As influential as this work was, however, these features have tended to be omitted from many subsequent accounts of persuasion in political rhetoric, which have concentrated on features of argumentation operating at a strictly textual level.The overall aim of this work is to suggest pathways towards the ambitious goal of developing a usable, integrated model for analysing political discourse. Instead of analysing a single feature such as metaphor (Charteris-Black 2006), parliamentary insults (Ilie 2004), evaluative language or humour (Swain 1999, 2002), the model attempts to combine descriptions of textual and non-verbal/multimodal features of political discourse, in order to provide a practical tool for analytical purposes, and a coherent account of their possible pragmatic effects.

Destructiveness is among the fundamental discourse categories that play a significant role in the organization of communicative interaction and define the pragmatics of discourse; its study helps to understand some mechanisms and principles of communication, identify strategies and tactics used by a destructive communicative personality. The relevance of this study is determined by the increasing aggressiveness in various types of discourse, and, accordingly, by the need to extend the knowledge of destructive behavior of a communicative personality. The study is based on the theory of discourse-analysis and theory of destructiveness (Z. Harris, T. van Dijk, A. Buss, E. Fromm, D. Ponton, K. Hacker, R. Wodak. N. Arutyunova, V. Karasik, M. Makarov, E. Sheigal et al). Developing the theory of destructiveness and relying on Erich Fromm’s research (1973), we specify the concept of “destructiveness” in relation to the political discourse and compare it with the related concept of aggressiveness. The paper analyses the category of destructiveness in modern US political discourse, using excerpts from the speeches of the candidates for presidency of 2016. Particular attention is paid to the dominant destructive intention - to harm the reputation of the opponent and reduce his political chances, as well as to the functions of verbal aggression: on the one hand - to discredit the opponent, bring accusations, on the other hand - to poison the audience mind against him/her and arouse the feeling of danger posed by a political opponent. The analysis of verbal and nonverbal means of destructiveness in the US political discourse is carried out. The article concludes that abusive remarks of politicians do not result from spontaneous emotional outburst, but from an elaborated destructive strategy where the agonistic nature of political discourse stipulates the use of instrumental aggression (Buss, 1971) for the sake of the conquest of power, lowering the opponent’s status, deteriorating his/her public image.