Doing Discourse Analysis by Linda A. Wood Rolf O. Kroger

Author:Linda A. Wood, Rolf O. Kroger [Linda A. Wood, Rolf O. Kroger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education, Teaching Methods & Materials, Social Science, Language Arts & Disciplines, Linguistics, General, Research
ISBN: 9780803973510
Google: CxUEDpRPiFAC
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 1512273
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 2000-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

This excerpt is from a call to the British Airways flight information service (transcribed to show the differences in the pronunciation of the word Bordeaux). As Hutchby and Wooffitt point out, the caller displays no recognition of having mispronounced the word Bordeaux; it is the agent who must repair the error. But explicitly repairing another person’s utterance can be problematic; it draws attention to the error and might disrupt the smoothness of the exchange. But note that the agent does not simply correct the caller’s mispronunciation. She first pauses after the production of the “trouble source” (Line 5). This gives the caller the opportunity to recognize and correct his error and “displays the agent’s orientation to the preference [that is, the normative practice; see Appendix B] for self-repair over other-repair” (Hutchby & Wooffitt, p. 68). The agent also orients to the possibility that other- versus self-repair can be problematic in the way that the repair turn is constructed, that is, by repeating the details and using upward intonation. That is, she presents the information as a question to the caller for clarification.

In sum, what it means to ground an interpretation is to show that participants orient to the text in a way that supports that interpretation. As Schegloff (1992) has argued, we need to show not only that some particular features are relevant to the participants, but also that “they are procedurally consequential for the particular aspect of talk which is the focus of analysis” (p. 196). What this means is not just that participants notice or mark the feature in some way, but that it has consequences down the line. For example, in the study of responses to teases that we discussed in Chapter 3, participants not only showed that they recognized the tease but displayed an orientation to the tease as a problem, as can be seen in their subsequent serious response. We return to this issue in our discussion of context. But we want to note here that in using the term consequences, we are not talking about cause and effect in the usual Humean sense. Rather, the emphasis is simply on what follows in sequence. The utterances are connected by their appearance together and in some cases because they are connected by convention. For example, it is normative to follow a question with an answer—but the question does not “cause” the answer. We would say, rather, that a prior utterance sequentially implicates (Jefferson, 1978) or occasions a later one (see Nofsinger, 1991).

Before leaving the topic of grounding, we note two of the most common problems that arise in the novice’s analysis of excerpts. They are in some ways mirrors of each other, in that one involves underanalysis and the other a kind of overanalysis. Both result in weak (and often uninteresting) claims. First, discourse analysis is not simply a matter of restating the discourse. Restating is not only repetitive, but it also tends to reify literal content. Nor is it a matter of paraphrasing the discourse.

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