Abstract
In both the breadth of its topical and thematic coverage and the geographic locations and backgrounds of its contributors, this handbook captures the diversity and richness of discourse analysis. Comprising the editors’ introduction and 46 chapters, the book addresses key approaches, prominent theoretical concepts and a variety of applications, especially those related to education. The chapters collectively elucidate discourse analysis as a multidisciplinary inquiry into how people use language – and other communicative means – in various contexts, both written and spoken, and for countless interactional purposes. The book should be of interest to graduate students, advanced undergraduates and scholars of discourse analysis who seek to broaden their knowledge of the field beyond their specialization.
Following Gee and Handford’s useful introduction, which includes a discussion of the complexities of exploring situated meaning-making and of defining analytic context(s), the book is organized into six parts. Part I, ‘Approaches to Discourse Analysis’ (Chapters 1–13), highlights some of the field’s most productive approaches and central questions, while also demonstrating its theoretical and methodological variety. In an engaging opening chapter, Norman Fairclough provides an overview of critical discourse analysis, explaining its orientation to social critique and real-world problem solving and introducing its methodological steps. Next, Mary J Schleppegrell presents an accessible introduction to Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics, also situating the perspective within contemporary research. Gunther Kress introduces multimodal discourse analysis, a framework that draws on social semiotics and emphasizes that language is but one means of communicating meaning. Joanna Thornborrow’s chapter on narrative analysis approaches narrative as a situated, co-constructed activity, while also presenting interesting examples from various institutional contexts (though reference to the work of Charles Goodwin (e.g. 1986) and Marjorie Harness Goodwin (e.g. 1997) would have been a welcome addition). Suzie Wong Scollon and Ingrid de Saint-Georges present mediated discourse analysis, an approach developed by Ron Scollon and colleagues that highlights connections between discourse and action. The authors’ sample analysis demonstrates the approach’s orientation to multimodality and social change. The chapter thus has clear links to Kress’s, as does Jay L Lemke’s chapter on discourse analysis of multimedia. Drawing on theorizing by Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Halliday (among others), Lemke demonstrates how multimedia analysis requires attention to the interweaving of multiple semiotic systems and modes.
Continuing Part I, Jennifer Coates discusses three primary ways of approaching gender and discourse, known as difference (gendered style differences as subcultural), dominance (gendered language use as reflecting societal inequalities) and social constructionist (gendered identities as created through talk). While this classification is expedient, it also suggests that these three approaches are mutually exclusive, whereas in fact they are intertwined (see e.g. Kendall and Tannen, 2001: 554). Jonathan Potter presents discursive psychology. In a particularly useful section, he outlines some contemporary discussions in discourse analysis to which the approach has especially contributed, such as the nature of ‘naturalistic’ data. Stephen E Clayman and Virginia Teas Gill provide an overview of conversation analysis, tracing its beginnings from Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson and describing its methods in specific terms. Jürgen Jaspers introduces interactional sociolinguistics, the approach pioneered by Gumperz to explore intercultural communication. Because neither developments by Tannen (e.g. 2005) nor the concept of ‘frame’ (Goffman, 1974) are mentioned – and both figure prominently in interactional sociolinguistics (see Gordon, 2011) – a limited view of the approach is presented. Two varieties of discourse-oriented ethnography are introduced by Graham Smart: Geertz’s interpretive ethnography and Hymes’s ethnography of communication. Justin B Richland discusses discourse analysis in/and linguistic anthropology more broadly, with a sample analysis of legal discourse that bridges these areas. Finally, Lynne Flowerdew gives an overview of corpus-based discourse analysis, a newer approach in the field.
Part II, ‘Register and Genre’ (Chapters 14–18), is very focused in content, and begins with Douglas Biber’s engaging chapter on register. David Rose introduces the Sydney School’s approach to genre, while Charles Bazerman provides a perspective on genre that highlights human agency and knowledge construction. Vijay Bhatia’s chapter on professional written genres adds richness to the discussion, especially in dialogue with the following chapter by Almut Koester and Michael Handford on spoken professional genres.
Part III is a much more diverse collection of chapters (19–25) on ‘Developments in Spoken Discourse’. In a chapter that is one of the handbook’s most difficult, Winnie Cheng and Phoenix Lam address the complexity of prosody in talk. Paula Buttery and Michael McCarthy productively combine quantitative and qualitative analysis in their discussion of the analysis of lexical items in discourse. Paul J Hopper introduces emergent grammar, a perspective that influences multiple contemporary discourse analytic approaches. Sarah Atkins and Ronald Carter provide an engaging, accessible discussion of creativity in spoken discourse, which will be particularly useful to undergraduate students. Mary M Juzwik’s chapter defines spoken narrative, discusses transcription and suggests how different disciplinary starting points – such as Labov’s sociolinguistic versus literary studies approaches – shape analysis. Lynne Cameron provides an overview of the prominence and power of metaphor in verbal communication, providing an example from focus groups of Muslim women and men in the UK talking about the effect of terrorism on their lives. Rounding out this section, Wallace Chafe explores the interconnections between thoughts and sounds, thereby linking cognitive phenomena and linguistic data, drawing on his well-known study of ‘the Pear Film’ narratives.
Part IV (Chapters 26–29) is entitled ‘Educational Applications’. James Paul Gee gives a clear and useful overview of ‘the New Literary Studies’. Amy BM Tsui discusses and reflects upon the ethnographic study of classroom discourse. Karen Thompson and Kenji Hakuta consider bilingualism in classrooms, including highly engaging data extracts. Ken Hyland’s chapter on English for academic purposes is also especially informative, with clear examples from key research studies in the area.
Part V (Chapters 30–36), ‘Institutional Applications’, considers discourse analysis of institutional encounters other than in education. Elisa Simões Lucas Freitas’s intriguing chapter on the discourse analysis of advertising is another that stands out as potentially very appealing to students. Anne O’Keeffe discusses discourse analysis of spoken and print media, while also demonstrating how corpus linguistics complements discourse analysis. Asian business discourse is the topic of Hiromasa Tanaka and Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini’s chapter, which usefully interweaves and explicates two themes addressed elsewhere in the handbook: professional discourse and culture and communication. Kevin Harvey and Svenja Adolphs provide an overview of discourse in healthcare, discussing an important subset of studies emerging from this ever-growing research area. Especially useful is their discussion of integrating multiple analytic methods. Edward Finegan addresses language of the law, providing data extracts from various legal contexts. In another chapter with clear practical implications, Janet Holmes and Julia de Bres explore forms and functions of humor in workplace discourse, with particular attention to how shared ethnicity plays a role. Conceptually related, in the last chapter of Part V, Louise Mullany discusses gender in professional communication.
Part VI (Chapters 37–46) presents a diverse collection of chapters on ‘Identity, Culture and Discourse’. In analyzing how political action occurs, Ruth Wodak summarizes the ‘discourse-historical approach’ she developed within critical discourse analysis. Yueguo Gu’s discussion of discourse geography reveals interconnections between time, space, discourse and human agency. William L Leap’s chapter provides an introduction to the relatively new, yet quickly blossoming, areas of queer linguistics and discourse and sexuality. Helen Spencer-Oatey, Hale Işik-Güler and Stefanie Stadler discuss intercultural discourse: providing interesting examples of problematic and successful communication, they also address the important issues of discursive rapport building and identity construction. Teun A van Dijk investigates the relationship between discourse and knowledge. He highlights the different ways knowledge is expressed in, constructed by and built into discourse, using as an example President Obama’s inaugural address. Next, David R Olson considers narrative as related to human cognition, specifically rationality. Adrian Blackledge’s chapter addresses power and various ways of approaching it, with a special focus on the concept of ‘voice’. Peter KW Tan discusses how literary discourse compares to other types, and how discourse analysis can be used to study literary texts (here, Tannen’s 2007 work would have been a positive addition). Shi-xu argues that approaches to discourse are culturally shaped and situated, advocating moving beyond Western perspectives. Last, and also in the spirit of recognizing globalization, Andy Kirkpatrick and James McLellan discuss world Englishes and English as a lingua franca.
As is generally the case with handbooks (and as acknowledged in the editors’ introduction), the chapters could have been differently organized. For instance, Coates’s ‘Gender and Discourse Analysis’ appears in Part I (‘Approaches to Discourse Analysis’), while Leap’s ‘Queer Linguistics, Sexuality and Discourse Analysis’ appears in Part VI (‘Identity, Culture and Discourse’); it is not unreasonable to think that these two chapters would comfortably appear in the same section, as both introduce topical areas that entail multiple approaches. Juzwik’s chapter ‘Spoken Narrative’ – with its extensive references to and description of multiple analytic perspectives – appears in ‘Developments in Discourse Analysis’ (Part III), but would seem perhaps more at home in ‘Approaches to Discourse Analysis’ (Part I), where Thornborrow’s ‘Narrative Analysis’ now appears. Therefore, as Gee and Handford note, the reader should ‘use the categorizations [of chapters] merely as a guide’ (p. 6).
The handbook’s emphasis on certain concepts and areas is valuable, but necessarily comes at the expense of others. For instance, Part II is entitled ‘Register and Genre’, yet genre also figures quite prominently in chapters in other sections. While this gives readers a rich understanding of this concept, other influential frameworks, such as Davies and Harré’s (1990) positioning theory and Schiffrin’s (1987) work on discourse markers, receive far less attention, despite their importance in the field. Similarly, the handbook is oriented toward education: Part IV is dedicated to this topic. Readers whose area of expertise is not education will find the material on education highly informative; however, other important and rapidly growing areas, such as healthcare and computer- mediated communication, are relatively underrepresented.
All of the mentioned shortcomings are minor, given the handbook’s thorough overview of discourse analysis as a collection of approaches that elucidate communicative phenomena within a wide variety of contexts. The book offers a view of diverse perspectives represented in the field, and includes chapters by an impressive roster of discourse analysts who are based in different academic departments, countries and disciplines. An especially useful feature is the list of suggested further readings included at the end of each chapter. A valuable theme is also realized across chapters: productive connections are to be found among the various perspectives that make up the field. This is an important message for students and experienced scholars alike. While the handbook’s chapters vary somewhat in their accessibility and level of detail, the book provides numerous exciting entry points into, and explanatory voyages across, discourse analysis. Experienced and novice scholars alike will be glad to have this book in their collections.