Analysing Discourse by Fairclough Norman

Author:Fairclough, Norman [Fairclough, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Language & Literature
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2007-03-19T23:00:00+00:00

available for producing distinct representations of the world. But it is perhaps the particular combination of different metaphors which differentiates discourses: the two metaphors I have identified here are common ways of representing companies which turn up in various discourses, and it is perhaps the combination of these and other metaphors which helps to differentiate this particular managerial discourse. The influential work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) on metaphors which are deeply embedded within cultures (e.g. the metaphorical representation of arguing as fighting) is also relevant here.

I referred above to semantic relations being presupposed. In fact, presuppositions and assumptions can more generally be seen as discourse-relative – the categories of assumption I distinguished in chapter 3 (existential assumptions, propositional assumptions, value assumptions) can all be seen as potentially tied to particular discourses, and as variable between discourses. Potentially, because there many assumptions which are more or less pervasively held throughout societies or social domains or organizations. I made the point in chapter 3, for example in discussing Example 4, that assumptions may be discourse-relative, so I shall not repeat the argument in detail here. I also suggested in Chapter 4, in discussing Argument as a genre, that arguments often rest upon assumptions which are discourse-specific and discourse-relative (see Gieve 2000).

I referred earlier to the two main discourses in example 4, the neo-liberal discourse, and the discourse of social cohesion. Despite the contrast between them, there is one thing they have in common: they represent real social processes and events in a highly abstract way. Although one can say that they are ultimately referencing concrete and particular events, if highly complex sets and series of such events, they represent the world in a way which abstracts away from anything remotely concrete. One corollary of this is that many of the elements of concrete events are excluded. Processes ('globalization', 'progress') and relations ('social cohesion') and even feelings ('hopes', 'aspirations') – I shall use 'processes' in a general sense to include all these – are represented, but the people involved are for the most part excluded ('people' in sentence 6 is an exception, but the representation here is again very general – in fact 'generic', see chapter 8), as are other elements of social events, such as objects, means, times, places. Processes are in fact 'nominalized', not worded with verbs as they most commonly are, but with noun-like entities called 'nominalizations' ('globalization', 'cohesion'), or what one might call 'process nouns', nouns with the verb-like quality of representing processes and relations and so forth ('progress', 'hope'). Syntactically, these process-expressions operate like nouns – so, for example, 'social cohesion' in (5) is the subject of a (passive) sentence. When processes are nominalized or worded as process nouns, their own subjects, objects and so forth tend to be excluded. Contrast Example 12 (Appendix, pages 248–9) with Example 4 (page 236). The sort of ethnographically oriented sociological discourse of the former represents events more concretely, and includes more elements of events (including the people involved in them)

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