Jumat, 24 Desember 2010

Sample Literature Papers for Prof. A. Peever


Dr. A. Peever
Sample Literature Papers for Prof. A. Peever

The first two papers below, by Julie Matthews and Bret Steinbook, were handed in to fulfill the requirement for paper two in my World Literature class during Spring semester 1997 (given at the University of Miami). The third paper, Zylena's, was written during Spring semester 2000 for a course in science fiction in literature and film (given at Barry University). Bret told me that his paper is the result of two weeks' work, and that he'd never come across Paul Radin's work on the Winnebago Cycle before beginning research on this paper. Julie's paper represents a fine articulation of some recurring themes of our class discussions during that semester: the status of "literature" versus "history"; the interpretation of "symbols"; and the real-world applications of "literary criticism." On the subject of downloading, these pieces are the result of Bret's, Julie's, and Zylena's hard work, and they remain the students' own intellectual property. The authors gave me special permission to post their papers.


Brett Steinbook
Eng 201F
Prof. Peever
April 14, 1997
Hero Versus Hero: Oedipus and Sir Gawain in The Winnebago Hero Cycle
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Oedipus Rex, while not myths in Joseph Campbell's sense of the term, because they do not focus on a world conquering type of hero, nonetheless deal with mythological characters. If they are not traditional style myths then what are they? It is the purpose of this paper to argue that these stories are illustrations of a process in which one type of hero is replacing the old hero type. What are these different types of heroes and their significance? Perhaps this is most clearly illustrated in Dr. Paul Radin's Winnebago Hero Cycle derived from his study of the Winnebago Indians and their literature.
It is probably wisest to begin with an introduction to the Winnebago hero cycle itself. The cycle contains four hero cycles each relating to a different kind of hero-- the Trickster, the Hare, Red Horn, and the Twins. The Trickster begins as a fool on whom bad luck befalls and who is always the brunt of practical jokes. In the end the Trickster is the bully and plays practical jokes on others. Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, Coyote, and Bugs Bunny all represent different aspects of Trickster. In the Hare cycle the hero blunders and struggles but in the end he sacrifices himself for the good of mankind. Moses, Jesus Christ, and Prometheus are all Hare types. Red Horn goes out and conquers the evil in the world, coming back changed. Luke Skywalker, Theseus, and Orpheus are all similar to Red Horn. The last cycle is that of the Twins. The Twins take offwhere Red Horn stopped completing the conquering of the earth. They change usually by becoming one figure and stop only when their exploits threaten to topple the world. Perhaps the myth of Hercules was once a Twin cycle myth; Gilgamesh and Enkidu definitely represent this type. These four are listed in order because of the symbolic significance of that order. Dr. Radin explains that the mythic cycle " . . . represents our efforts to deal with the problem of growing up." Therefore the Trickster represents our earliest mental development and the Twins our last stage. A more complete explanation would divert this paper from its main objective.
The next point to be argued logically would be the validity of applying a foreign, Native American, construct to western mythic heroes. This point already has been belabored by Jung and Campbell without any serious opposition. Dr. Radin notes that in his day, "The vast majority of anthropological theorists and ethnologists . . . [began] with the assumption that the apparent sameness of the forms of thought found in widely separated religions . . . could best be explained by what they vaguely called the psychic unity of mankind. This psychic unity . . . expressed itself in a fairly limited number of forms. And it was in mythology that these forms expressed themselves with particular clearness." Suffice it to say, if most scholars in the field assume the validity of this treatment of cross-cultural comparison then it would not be unreasonable for this paper to assume so too.
In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Sir Gawain represents the forces of Hare while the Green Knight represents the Trickster. The Green Knight is described as being green, the color of nature. According to Radin, "He and all the objects in the world were brothers and understood each other's language"; this is how the Winnebago illustrate the same connection to nature of the Trickster (Radin 17). Not only is he a Trickster but he's at the end of his cycle. This is evidenced by his purposefulness, his starting the games (instead of being the brunt of them) and his near human appearance (Radin 21,22). According to Henderson, it is only, "At the end of his rogue's progress [that] he is beginning to take on the physical likeness of a grown man" (Henderson 104). Sir Gawain obviously represents Hare. He is a follower of Christ, who himself was a Hare figure. He starts on his adventure as a representative of the court of Camelot. He leaves Camelot knowing he might have his head chopped off for them and yet he goes anyway. This is the essence of the Hare figure: self sacrifice for the betterment of the people. In the Winnebago myth Hare challenges the gods for the Medicine Rites. In Greek myth Prometheus sacrifices himself to bring fire to man. And Christ lets himself be hung on the cross to absolve man's sins.
One can easily see this tale as the old hero coming to challenge the new young upstart. It is the Green Knight who comes and makes the challenge at the Court of Camelot whose members all claim the Hare virtue of defending the people. But who wins out in this confrontation? In the end, one may argue that Sir Gawain has lost to the Green Knight. The only way for Gawain to have won is if he had been virtuous to the last and the Green Knight had taken his head, thus sacrificing himself. But instead he wears the green girdle of protection to cheat at the beheading game and live. In the end the Green Knight only nicks him. By failing to get a serious wound he fails to be a serious healer. Jung says it well when he writes, it is "the mythological truth that the wounded wounder is the agent of healing, and that the sufferer takes away suffering" (Jung 136). The Green Knight could only have won if Gawain had given in and slept with the knight's wife, and then he would himself have become the Trickster through this sexual initiation.
Henderson says, "They brought forth symbols associated with a god-man of androgynous character who was supposed to have an intimate understanding of the animal or plant world and to be the master of initiation into their secrets. The religion contained orgiastic rites that implied the need for an initiate to abandon himself to his animal nature and thereby experience the full fertilizing power of the Earth Mother." One can see this in the Green Knight (as Bercilak) freely leaving Gawain to do what he willed with his wife. It is clear that by not giving in to his animal nature with Bercilak's wife, Sir Gawain has remained true to himself.
It may be called a draw since both leave in one piece. But this is just the end of the Trickster, his last laugh, his reminder to the world of the power of Trickster. The Green Knight fades away like an illusion into Bercilak by the magic of Morgan, a symbolic if not an actual death. On the other hand, it is just the beginning of Gawain's Hare cycle. It may be interesting to note here that in the end Gawain comes full circle, committing the self-sacrifice in his last battle at Arthur's side to save the king. This tale may also be about the author's reluctance to give up the Trickster myth in the face of a new upstart religion that only values the Hare cycle, as well as being a warning not to forget the old ways. As we know historically, Christianity came in and forced the Celts to give up their old religion.
In Oedipus Rex is a similar story between Oedipus and the plague. The plague and the Sphinx represent long-corrupted versions of the trickster. Jung notes this tendency to corrupt the image of the old hero when he writes, "Only when [mankind's] consciousness reached a higher level could he detach the earlier state from himself and objectify it, that is, say anything about it. So long as his consciousness was itself trickster-like, such a confrontation could obviously not take place . . . It was only to be expected that a good deal of mockery and contempt should mingle with this retrospect, thus casting an even thicker pall over man's memories of the past, which were pretty unedifying anyway. This phenomenon must have repeated itself innumerable times" (Jung 143). This is where the Sphinx enters. The Sphinx is sick and twisted in form, half- woman and half-beast. The plague is also a sickness. Both ask a single difficult question whose specific and general answers are the same. The Sphinx asks, "What walks on four legs in the morning, two in the after noon, and three in the evening?" (Bulfinch 124). The plague asks, "Who murdered King Laius?" (Sophocles 109-122). In general both questions can be answered, "Man." Specifically, both could honestly be answered, "Oedipus." Thus one can see both the plague and the Sphinx as the same trickster at work. In a twisted sense both are asking Oedipus to ponder, "Who am I?"
As already covered, the Hare is one who is willing to sacrifice himself for the betterment of the people he represents. Obviously, Oedipus is willing to do this as he states in his speech to his subjects and shows when he says good-bye to his daughters. Hare sleeps with his grandmother and in order to fool her about his identity he has taken his eye out. In the morning when he goes to retrieve it, he finds it has been gnawed away by mice. Like Hare, Oedipus also commits incest. Oedipus has slept with his mother and he too has his eyes scratched out for it. Oedipus and Hare are both raised by foster parents. Hare's virgin mother dies shortly after his birth and he is left in his grandmother's care. Oedipus is thrown away by his father and is taken by a peasant to be raised in another town. The parallels are too great not to see Oedipus as a Hare cycle hero.
Oedipus ends up physically blind and spiritually broken, crushed by the knowledge of his sins. But has he lost or failed? To say so would clearly illustrate our modern bias towards the Red Horn hero who wins by conquering. The action/adventure blockbuster movies that rake in so much money at the box office clearly demonstrate at least America's love of this hero type. What is significant in Oedipus Rex is that Oedipus does solve the riddle despite how cold the trail is and despite his wife's pleading for him to stop. He does leave Thebes according to Bulfinch; thus, according to the prophecy, he has removed the plague from Thebes. He has banished himself from the city, sacrificing his own desire to the good of the people. According to the Hare model he has succeeded in every possible way. Remember, "the mythological truth that the wounded wounder is the agent of healing, and that the sufferer takes away suffering." Oedipus is a much greater success in this light than Sir Gawain who escaped whole and was accepted back home by his friends.
While it is clear that most heroes must conquer evil and go on long questing journeys, this is not the only kind of hero. What happens when the importance of one hero dwindles and the importance of another rises? Or what happens in the gaps between the cycles? Perhaps, as this paper has shown, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Oedipus Rex one hero must test himself against the old hero. Who wins? Only time will tell. Perhaps one day a new myth will be written and a fifth cycle will be born.
Bibliography and Works Cited
Bulfinch, Thomas. Bulfinch's Mythology. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1979.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Henderson, Joseph. "Ancient Myths and Modern Man." Man and His Symbols. Ed. Carl G. Jung, et al. London: Aldus Books Limited, 1964.
Jung, R.F.C. Hull, trans. Four Archetypes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Radin, Paul. "Winnebago Hero Cycles: A Study in Aboriginal Literature." Supplement to International Journal of American Linguistics vol. 14, no. 3, July 1948 Indiana University Publications in Anthropology and Linguistics. Baltimore: Waverly Press, Inc, 1948.
"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. 2 vols. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992, vol.1.
Sophocles. "Oedipus Rex." The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. 2 vols. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992, vol. 1.

Teaching materials: using literature in the EFL/ ESL classroom


Teaching materials: using literature in the EFL/ ESL classroom
By Lindsay Clandfield

Literature has been a subject of study in many countries at a secondary or tertiary level, but until recently has not been given much emphasis in the EFL/ESL classroom. It has only been since the 1980s that this area has attracted more interest among EFL teachers. The purpose of this article is to look at some of the issues and ways in which literature can be exploited in the classroom. There are also links to classroom activities and lessons with literature that you can download and use straight away.
What is literature?

First of all, any method or approach towards using literature in the classroom must take as a starting point the question: What is literature? The Macmillan English Dictionary gives the following definition:
literature / noun
1. stories, poems, and plays, especially those that are considered to have value as art and not just entertainment
(c) Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2003
Many authors, critics and linguists have puzzled over what literature is. One broader explanation of literature says that literary texts are products that reflect different aspects of society. They are cultural documents which offer a deeper understanding of a country or countries (Basnet & Mounfold 1993). Other linguists say that there is no inherent quality to a literary text that makes a literary text, rather it is the interpretation that the reader gives to the text (Eagleton 1983). This brings us back to the above definition in the sense that literature is only literature if it is considered as art.
Before doing any study of a literary text with your learners, one idea would be to ask them what they think literature is. Attached below is a short discussion lesson you can do with your students on the subject “What is literature?”
Why use literature?

There are many good reasons for using literature in the classroom. Here are a few:
  • Literature is authentic material. It is good to expose learners to this source of unmodified language in the classroom because they skills they acquire in dealing with difficult or unknown language can be used outside the class.
  • Literature encourages interaction. Literary texts are often rich is multiple layers of meaning, and can be effectively mined for discussions and sharing feelings or opinions.
  • Literature expands language awareness. Asking learners to examine sophisticated or non standard examples of language (which can occur in literary texts) makes them more aware of the norms of language use (Widdowson, 1975 quoted by Lazar 1993).
  • Literature educates the whole person. By examining values in literary texts, teachers encourage learners to develop attitudes towards them. These values and attitudes relate to the world outside the classroom.
  • Literature is motivating. Literature holds high status in many cultures and countries. For this reason, students can feel a real sense of achievement at understanding a piece of highly respected literature. Also, literature is often more interesting than the texts found in coursebooks.
Different models of teaching literature in class

There have been different models suggested on the teaching of literature to ESL/EFL students (Carter & Long, Lazar). How the teacher will use a literary text depends on the model they choose.
The cultural model views a literary text as a product. This means that it is treated as a source of information about the target culture. It is the most traditional approach, often used in university courses on literature. The cultural model will examine the social, political and historical background to a text, literary movements and genres. There is no specific language work done on a text. This approach tends to be quite teacher-centred.
The language model aims to be more learner-centred. As learners proceed through a text, they pay attention to the way language is used. They come to grips with the meaning and increase their general awareness of English. Within this model of studying literature, the teacher can choose to focus on general grammar and vocabulary (in the same way that these are presented in coursebooks for example) or use stylistic analysis. Stylistic analysis involves the close study of the linguistic features of the text to enable students to make meaningful interpretations of the text – it aims to help learners read and study literature more competently.
The personal growth model is also a process-based approach and tries to be more learner-centred. This model encourages learners to draw on their own opinions, feelings and personal experiences. It aims for interaction between the text and the reader in English, helping make the language more memorable. Learners are encouraged to “make the text their own”. This model recognises the immense power that literature can have to move people and attempts to use that in the classroom.
Attached below are two lessons which draw on a combination of the language approach and the personal growth approach. Both are based on short texts: either extracts or poems.

Using literature over a longer period of time – the set novel or reader

The above lesson plans are all based on short extracts or poems and can therefore easily be used over one class period. However, there are very good reasons for encouraging learners to read books. Extensive reading is an excellent way of improving English, and it can be very motivating to finish an entire book in another language. In addition, many international exams have certain optional questions on them that pertain to set novels each year. One option that is now available to language teachers is the wide range of simplified and inexpensive versions of literary texts, called readers (see Onestop Shop for a list of readers for different levels). Setting up a class library of novels and readers, if you have the resources, is an excellent idea. Tim Bowen and Jonathan Marks, in their book Inside Teaching, recommend the following ideas for extensive reading of literature:
  • Hold brief classroom discussions on what learners have been reading (progress reports).
  • Ask learners to describe a book they like in such a way to make others want to read it.
  • Select a short novel which has been recently made into a film or TV series with which your learners are familiar.
In addition, there is a list of general questions about novels or readers attached at the bottom of the page that could be given for students to answer in written form (they are based on questions from the Cambridge First Certificate Exam).

DIY literature lesson plan

In our first Methodology article on Using Literature, there were two sample lesson plans based on an excerpt or a short story. Both followed a similar lesson plan format, outlined below. This sort of lesson plan works well for extracts from stories, poems or extracts from plays.
Stage one: warmer

There are two different possible routes you can take for this stage:
  • Devise a warmer that gets students thinking about the topic of the extract or poem. This could take several forms: a short discussion that students do in pairs, a whole class discussion, a guessing game between you and the class or a brainstorming of vocabulary around that topic.
  • Devise a warmer that looks at the source of the literature that will be studied. Find out what the students already know about the author or the times he/she was writing in. Give the students some background information to read (be careful not to make this too long or it will detract from the rest of the lesson; avoid text overload!). Explain in what way this piece of literature is well-known (maybe it is often quoted in modern films or by politicians). This sort of warmer fits more into the cultural model of teaching literature (see Literature in the Classroom 1)
Stage two: before reading

This stage could be optional, or it may be a part of the warmer. Preparing to read activities include:
  • Pre-teaching very difficult words (note: pre-teaching vocabulary should be approached with caution. Often teachers “kill” a text by spending too much time on the pre-teaching stage. Limit the amount of words you cover in this stage. If you have to teach more than seven or eight there is a good chance the text will be too difficult.)
  • Predicting. Give students some words from the extract and ask them to predict what happens next. If it is a play, give them a couple of lines of dialogue and ask them to make predictions about the play.
  • Giving students a “taste”. Read the first bit of the extract (with their books closed, or papers turned over) at normal speed, even quickly. Ask students to compare what they have understood in pairs. Then ask them to report back to you. Repeat the first bit again. Then ask them to open the book (or turn over the page) and read it for themselves.
Stage three: understanding the text, general comprehension

Often with extracts or poems, I like to read the whole thing to my students so that they can get more of a “feel” for the text. With very evocative pieces of literature or poetry this can be quite powerful. Then I let students read it to themselves. It is important to let students approach a piece of literature the first time without giving them any specific task other than to simply read it. One of the aims of teaching literature is to evoke interest and pleasure from the language. If students have to do a task at every stage of a literature lesson, the pleasure can be lost.
Once students have read it once, you can set comprehension questions or ask them to explain the significance of certain key words of the text. Another way of checking comprehension is to ask students to explain to each other (in pairs) what they have understood. This could be followed up by more subjective questions (e.g.. Why do you think X said this? How do you think the woman feels? What made him do this?)
Stage four: understanding the language
At this stage get to grips with the more difficult words in the text. See how many of the unfamiliar words students can get from context. Give them clues.
You could also look at certain elements of style that the author has used. Remember that there is some use in looking at non-standard forms of language to understand the standard.
If appropriate to the text, look at the connotation of words which the author has chosen. For example, if the text says “She had long skinny arms,” what does that say about the author’s impression of the woman? Would it be different if the author had written “She had long slender arms”?

Stage five: follow up activities

Once you have read and worked with your piece of literature it might naturally lead on to one or more follow up activities. Here are some ideas:
Using poems
  • have students read each other the poem aloud at the same time, checking for each other’s pronunciation and rhythm. Do a whole class choral reading at the end.
  • Ask students to rewrite the poem, changing the meaning but not the structure.
  • Ask students to write or discuss the possible story behind the poem. Who was it for? What led to the writing of this poem?
  • Have a discussion on issues the poem raised and how they relate to the students’ lives.
Using extracts from stories or short stories
  • Ask students to write what they think will happen next, or what they think happened just before.
  • Ask students to write a background character description of one of the characters which explains why they are the way they are.
  • Ask students to imagine they are working for a big Hollywood studio who wants to make a movie from the book. They must decide the location and casting of the movie.
  • Ask students to personalise the text by talking about if anything similar has happened to them.
  • Ask students to improvise a role play between two characters in the book.
Using extracts from plays

Most of the ideas from stories (above) could be applied here, but obviously, this medium gives plenty of opportunity for students to do some drama in the classroom. Here are some possibilities:
  • Ask students to act out a part of the scene in groups.
  • Ask students to make a radio play recording of the scene. They must record this onto cassette. Listen to the different recordings in the last five minutes of future classes. Who’s was the best?
  • Ask students to read out the dialogue but to give the characters special accents (very “foreign” or very “American” or “British”). This works on different aspects of pronunciation (individual sounds and sentence rhythm).
  • Ask students to write stage directions, including how to deliver lines (e.g. angrily, breathlessly etc) next to each character’s line of dialogue. Then they read it out loud.
  • Ask students to re-write the scene. They could either modernise it (this has been often done with Shakespeare), or imagine that it is set in a completely different location (in space for example). Then they read out the new version.
Potential problems

Problem 1: Where do I find material?
Of course you may have a novel or book of poetry that you have been dying to use with your students for a long time. But where can you get more material? Easy! The internet brings you instant access to many works of literature. Use a search engine. Usually it is enough to key in the name of the author or the book you are looking for. Older books and plays can sometimes be found entirely on-line.
The following sites are excellent for book excerpts and stories:
  • www.bookbrowse.com - a really great site which allows you to read an excerpt from a multitude of recently published books. You can search by author, book title or genre!
  • www.readersread.com - brings you the first chapter of many recently published books.
Literature doesn’t have to mean “books written by dead white English or American men”. Look for literature from other English speaking countries (there is lots and lots) to give your students a richer variety of work written in the English language. Bookbrowse.com (above) for instance has a whole section on Asian and Indian writers. You can also try the following link: www.blackliterature.com
Try the following two sites for poetry:
  • www.favoritepoem.org - a site collecting America’s favourite poems. You can also read comments about why people like them and hear them being read aloud.
  • www.emule.com/poetry - an archive of classical poetry, easy to browse through by poet. Has a top ten list of favourite poems (chosen by visitors to the site) which makes an interesting starting point.
Problem 2: How do I choose material?
Think about the following factors when you choose a piece of literature to use with learners:
  • Do you understand enough about the text to feel comfortable using it?
  • Is there enough time to work on the text in class?
  • Does it fit with the rest of your syllabus?
  • Is it something that could be relevant to the learners?
  • Will it be motivating for them?
  • How much cultural or literary background do the learners need to be able to deal with the tasks?
  • Is the level of language in the text too difficult (see below)
Problem 3: Is the text too difficult?
Obviously a teacher would not want to use a text that is completely beyond their learners. This would ultimately be frustrating for everyone involved. However, the immediate difficulty with vocabulary in a text might not be an obstacle to its comprehension. Learners can be trained to infer meaning of difficult words from context. The selection of a text must be given careful thought, but also the treatment of the text by the teacher (this means think about the tasks you set for a reading of a piece of literature, not just the text).

Further reading
Bowen, T & J Marks, Inside Teaching, Macmillan 1994
Carter, R & M Long, Teaching Literature, Longman 1991
Lazar, Gillian, Literature and Language Teaching, Cambridge 1993
Widdowson, H. Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature, Longman 1975




Critical Discourse Analysis: History, ideology, methodology


Critical Discourse Analysis: History, ideology, methodology

Robert de Beaugrande
Znanstveno-raziskovalno središče
Faculteta za humanistične študije
Univerza na Primorskem
Mark the musical confusion
Of hounds and echo in conjunction.
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seem all one mutual cry.
Midsummer Night's Dream

The diversity of the field of critical discourse analysis is a sign of vigorous interest and
growth, but also challenge to any such report as mine. As I write this, lively international
discussions, from Loughborough to Queensland to Sharjah, are under way in the site
‘Language in the New Capitalism’ (LNC) on such fundamental topics as ‘What is the point of
critical discourse analysis [hereafter CDA]?’, ‘CDA & Academia’, ‘Accessibility and
Democratisation in CDA’, and so on. Evidently, a need is widely felt for some renewed
comprehension and consolidation, or some review and preview, of our enterprise. These
very issues are central to own my latest book, where I have sought to situate the field within
a comprehensive framework of the ‘study of text and discourse’, supported upon 2,382 data
samples (Beaugrande 2004, posted on website). What follows is necessarily offered as a
personal perspective, focused on the three aspects named in my subtitle.

A. History
Among the most imposing developments on the academic scene in the latter decades of the
20th century have been the emergence and accreditation of fields that were interdisciplinary
from their very inception: systems theory, cognitive science, discourse processing, artificial
intelligence, artificial life... A refreshing contrast to the self-isolation of disciplines, such as
psychology and sociology each pretending the other didn’t merit attention (cf. Beaugrande
1996), but also to the ambitions of ‘unified science’ to force everything into the framework of
physics and formal logic — an arcane conflation of basic reality with hypothetical ‘worlds’
(Beaugrande 2004).
Meanwhile, ‘mainstream linguistics’ seems to me curiously retrograde in guarding its borders
by steadily narrowing its quest from ‘language studied in and for itself’, ‘standing apart from
everything else’ (Saussure 1966 [1916]: 13, 232) down to the ‘competence’ of ‘ideal
speaker-hearer in a completely homogeneous speech-community’ (Chomsky 1965:3),
logically terminating in ‘minimalism’ (see now Seuren 2004), whose very title defiantly
announces its intention to address and explain as little as possible.
This line of reasoning implicitly promoted a bizarre disequilibrium in the role of the
‘theoretical linguists’ themselves. Since ‘language’ is never encountered ‘in and for itself’, the
only way to address it was for the linguist to take on the fictional role of the ‘ideal speakerhearer’
and to proceed via ‘intuition’ and ‘introspection’, as if in a two-lane royal road to
language. Yet that same linguistics doubted whether speakers may be ‘aware of the rules’,
or even able to ‘become aware’; and whether their ‘statements about their intuitive
knowledge’ are ‘necessarily accurate’ (Chomsky 1965: 8). So linguists must be ‘superspeakers’
(Übersprecher) to whom is revealed what is hidden to ordinary speakers. Besides,
they were confined to the investigation of languages in which they themselves were already
fluent, which encouraged a ‘Eurocentric’ favouritism for familiar and historically related
languages like English, French, and German.
Meanwhile, the study of discourse languished in the guise of ‘speech facts’ constituting a
‘heterogeneous mass’ that ‘we cannot put’ ‘in any category of human facts, for we cannot
discover its unity’ (Saussure 1966 [1916]: 13), Half a century later, the received wisdom
ordained that the ‘observed use of language’ ‘surely cannot constitute the subject-matter of
linguistics, if this is to be a serious discipline’; ‘much of the actual speech observed consists
of fragments and deviant expressions of a variety of sorts’ (Chomsky 1965: 3f, 201).
A quite different turn emerged in pragmalinguistics, a field whose name signalled a
programmatic recentring of ‘linguistics’ on ‘pragmatics’ (Mey [ed.] 1979). Its capital
programme was to ‘consciously and explicitly reflect on (1) the role of the linguist as
producer and consumer of linguistics, as such delimiting (and limiting ) himself as well as his
object; (2) the role of the interactants in a linguistic situation’, who ‘create the true “meaning”
of that situation and its concomitant utterance(s) through the interplay with its (their) context
and co-text(s)’; moreover, ‘contexts are dynamic not, static’, and ‘creative, not passive’ (Mey
1979a: 12f). ‘We should be prepared to ask’ ‘how can a particular linguistic theory be
produced how can it be consumed?’ (Mey 1979a: 14; cf. Beaugrande 1991). ‘Whose ends
are served’, and ‘how can it be applied to practical conditions?’ Here, ‘production’ and
‘consumption’ are being framed within the Marxist account of capitalism, which is to assist in
getting at implications below ‘the surface’ of ‘ordinary talk’, such as the ‘current service
ideals of society’ as applied, say, to scientists’ as they navigate ‘behind the looking-glass of
science’ (1979a: 16).
This inquiry is pursued in the same volume by a paper written in German in 1974 (all quotes
here are in my translation), though its publication was delayed by domino collapses of
publishing houses until 1979, when ‘critical linguistics’, the direct parent of critical discourse
analysis, had emerged without realising it had been anticipated (Fowler et al., 1979). The
bibliography includes almost no linguists (beside Chomsky, who had fixed the game so you
had to cite him, whether for agreement or dissension). Instead, Marx and Engels appear
alongside Bernstein, Freire, Goffman, Horkheimer, and Adorno.
With this broad base, a parallel is drawn between ‘language activity’ (‘sprachliches Handeln’,
where the latter term carries the further connotation of ‘negotiation’) and ‘other areas of
human activities’ (Mey 1979b: 411). ‘Language technique’ can then be defined by two
aspects’, ‘controlling’ (‘technical production’) and ‘being controlled’ (‘psychic reaction’)
(whereby German ‘kontrollieren’ carries the further connotation of ‘monitoring’). ‘Language’
as an ‘organ of control’ is most clearly at work in language education, with its kaleidoscope
of trivial or arcane impulses toward ‘successful, “good" language activity’. ‘Especially in the
school, the activity of the teacher is consciously directed at suppressing certain language
activities in favour of others’ (1979b: 414).
Many researchers in CDA today will easily recognise the basic formulation of social
consequences:
If control is to be effective, it should not be recognised as such. Indeed, impenetrable
control in principle rules out conscious awareness. […] Language as defence against
manipulation can only be achieved insofar and the human being is conscious of the
totality of its conditions of production. Manipulated language is always the
consequence of an inadequate analysis of productive relations, [whereas] a successful
analysis is, potentially or actually, revolutionary (1979b: manipulation).
Early in the 20th century, the analysis of discourse was vital for ethnography as a key to
understanding a culture. Whereas, as we have seen, ‘theoretical linguistics’ insisted on a
dichotomy, this field insisted on unity:
Utterance and situation are bound up inextricably with each other and the context of
situation is indispensable for the under standing of the words. […] For each verbal
statement by a human being has the aim and function of expressing some thought or
feeling actual at that moment and in that situation, […] either to serve purposes of
common action, or to establish ties of purely social communion, or else to deliver the
speaker of violent feelings or passions. (Malinowski 1923)
Here is a sample in the language of the Trobriand Islands (today officially known as the
Kiriwina Islands), with a piece by-piece version and then a fluent English version:
‘We are rowing ourselves the front canoe; paddling in place, we, stop, turn, and see
our companion; he is rowing the rear canoe behind their inlet Pilolu.’
The speaker was boasting to an audience about having showing the superiority of his canoe
and rowing skills.
In this comprehensive exploratory spirit, the goal of ethnography was stated to be ‘to grasp
the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world’ (Malinowski
1961 [1922]: 25). However, like the ‘theoretical linguists’ as quoted above, the
ethnographers were accorded special status:
Savages […] have no knowledge of the total outline of any of their social structure. […]
The integration of all the details observed, the achievement of a sociological synthesis
of all the various, relevant symptoms, is the task of the Ethnographer (Malinowski 1961
[1922]: 83-84, his italics)
To my mind, Malinowski did not so much ‘anticipate the distinction between description and
analysis’ (Wikipedia) as sustain a distinction between ‘scientific’ and ‘savage’ understanding
of culture, which ought to impede ‘realising the native's vision of his world’.
The analysis of discourse was also vital since mid-century for American tagmemics (e.g.
Pike 1967), which exploited linguistics to develop methods for fieldwork on unfamiliar
languages. They worked for years outside academia proper in the ‘Summer Institute of
Linguistics’, which, according to its website (www.sil.org), ‘has completed work in over 400
languages, and current active programs now number over 1,000’. This work seems to have
inaugurated the analysis of ‘discourse’ in a sense close to its present uses (cf. Longacre
1968-69, 1983; Grimes 1975, [ed.] 1978).
Such fieldwork has revealed strikingly disparate notions about what a language can offer for
discourse to express. For example, Quechua of Peru, which normally places both Subject
and Object before the Verb, has a range of Infixes and Suffixes to indicate grammatical and
lexical categories, as demonstrated in this opening of a familiar folktale of the ‘Abductor
Bear’ (in Spanish, El Oso Raptor) with its unsurprising quota of Spanish loan-words (Weber
[ed.)] 1987; cf. Morote Best 1947-48). (3P: Third Person; CAUS: Causal; DIM: diminutive;
FEM: Feminine; LOC: Locative; NOM: Nominative; OBJ: Objective; PLUR: Plural; SIMPAST:
Simple Past)
In times past in Peña Blanca [White Cliff], it is said there were very big bears. One day,
a young and beautiful little maiden went out to the mountainside to care for her herd of
cows. Nearby with her cows she encountered a big, very furry bear. Poor little woman!
Her fate was not so grim as this opening suggests. The bear carries her off to his house up
in a big tree and tells her he will provide everything but she can never leave. Sure enough,
he brings here plentiful, choice foods, and she is content enough despite the singular
inconveniences attendant upon an arboreal residence, yet… Well, you can imagine a
rescuing hero in the offing.
Quechua is not a threatened language; with some 10 million speakers throughout the east of
South America, it is the most widely spoken of all Native American languages. But in most
countries, its speakers are socially marginalised, which points up the value of recording and
cultivating of its folklore by means of discourse analysis. All the greater is the value for
endangered Native American languages to the North such as Seneca, for which a
distinguished expert has been asked to prepare teaching materials from his turn his
fieldwork research (e.g. Chafe 1963, 1967; see now Chafe 1997 on ‘the importance of
Native American languages’).
Discourse has been analysed from rather different perspectives in functional linguistics,
which has grown in several branches. A Czechoslovakian branch, sometimes called the
Prague School founded by Vilém Mathesius and his pupils, exploited their knowledge of the
Slavic. All these languages can exploit word order in discourse to suggest degrees of
communicative dynamism (Firbas 1971): relative interest and informativity of elements within
an utterance or sentence. The logical strategy puts the Theme with lower dynamism early
and then places the Rheme with the higher dynamism later on, just as you would set the
stage before bringing on the main characters (survey of models in Beaugrande 1992). But
this strategy is less conducive to English, French, and German than to Czech and Slovak, as
illustrated by these parallel passages from the Gospel according to Luke (2:8-9) in the New
Testament (compare Firbas 1995):
[3a] And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch
over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory
of the Lord shone round about them.
[3b] Or il y avait dans la même contrée des bergers, qui couchaient dans les champs
et gardaient leurs troupeaux pendant les veilles de la nuit. Un ange du Seigneur se
présenta á eux; la gloire du Seigneur resplendit autour d’eux.
[3c] In der Gegend dort hielten sich Hirten auf. Sie waren in der Nacht auf dem Feld
und bewachteten ihre Herde. Da kam ein Engel des Herrn zu ihnen und die
Herrlichkeit des Herrn umstrahlte sie.
[3d] V té krajině nocovali pod širým nebem pastýři a střídali se na hlídce u svého
stáda. Najednou u nich stál anděl Páně a sláva Páně se kolem nich rozzářila.
[3e] V tom istom kraji boli pastieri, ktorí v noch bdeli a strážkili svoje stádo. Tu zastal
pri nich Pánoj anjel a ožiarila ich Pánova sláva.
In all five versions, the first Clause opens by specifying the Place (‘in the same country’),
which had been recently mentioned (‘Joseph went up from Galilee into Judaea’, 2:4), and
reserves the position of high dynamism for the shepherds, who are being mentioned for the
first time in the Gospel according to Luke (and, in a literal rather than figural sense, for the
first time in the New Testament). Their activity of keeping watch over their flock by night,
being highly predictable, can be relegated to a Participial Modifier (English) or a Relative
Clause (French). The English and French [3a-b] place both the angel and the glory at the
very start of their Clauses; the German does the same except for the brief obligatory
displacement with initial ‘da’ followed by Verb, then Subject. The Clauses end with Pronouns
of low dynamism (‘them, eux, ihnen – sie’). The Definite Article in the English text (‘the
angel’) might suggest this is the same angel Gabriel who announced the miracle to Mary
(Luke 1:26-38), but the French and German texts (as well as a modern English text I
consulted) all have the Indefinite Article. Czech and Slovak use no Articles at all, but
positioning the angel (‘anděl, anjel’) near the end of the Clauses could signal the same
function of Indefiniteness as well as high dynamism. The Slovak version [3e] gets the angel
the latest after the Lord (‘Pánoj anjel’ versus Czech ‘anděl Páně’), and is the only version to
put the glory (‘sláva’) at the very end of the next Clause, thus being more attentive to
dynamism than [3d]. The parallel effect would be marked in English, though not at all odd:
[3f] And, lo, there came upon them the angel of the Lord, and round about them shone
the glory of the Lord.
To my own ear in fact, this yields a more impressive cadence.
The term British functionalism is mainly applied to ethnography, anthropology, and even
psychology, but can apply to discourse analysis as well. One direction focused upon
fieldwork on classroom discourse. Instead of ‘linguistic units’ and ‘rules’ of more ‘theoretical’
investigations, the main terms highlighted discourse moves like initiation and follow-up by
the teacher (T), and bid and response by a learner (L), e.g. in [14] (cf. Sinclair and Brazil
1982: 45):
[4] Initiation T Give me a sentence using an animal’s name as food, please.
Response L1 We shall have a beef for supper tonight.
Follow-up T Good. That’s almost right, but ‘beef’ is uncountable so it’s ‘we
shall have beef’, not ‘we shall have a beef’.
Initiation T Try again, someone else.
Response L2 We shall have a plate of sheep for supper tonight.
Follow-up T No, we don’t eat ‘sheep’, we eat ‘mutton’, or ‘lamb’.
Initiation T Say it correctly.
Response L2 We shall have a plate of mutton for supper tonight.
Follow-up T Good. We shall have mutton for supper. Don’t use ‘a plate’ when
there’s more than one of you.
Such discourse plainly occurs only in classrooms, pursuing the timeworn crusade for
‘correct’ or ‘standard’ usage. The pupils are not to tell what they like to eat and why, or how
to cook it. The task is far more artificial: saying ‘an animal’s name as food’, which easily
traps pupils with the tricky English usage of French loan-words for the foods (e.g. ‘mutton’,
‘beef’, ‘veal’) instead of the animals’ usual names. Communication is subordinated to fine
points of usage that the teacher summarily illustrates without giving useable explanations.
Several British functionalists who adopted the brand name of systemic functional
linguistics, with some influence from the ethnography of Malinowski, also rejected the
orthodox dichotomy and insisted that language but text and discourse as well are systemic,
as are the relations between the two (Halliday 1992; see now Beaugrande 2006). They also
surmounted the dichotomy between ‘lexicon’ and ‘grammar’ by unifying the lexicogrammar
(cf. Halliday 1994).
One method to explore the transition of language-system to discourse-system is to analyse
data where the lexicogrammar is put to unconventional use, such as William Golding’s The
Inheritors. To evoke a ‘Neanderthal tribe’s point of view’, Golding uses clause patterns
whose ‘subjects are not people’ but ‘parts of the body or inanimate objects’; the effect is ‘an
atmosphere of ineffectual activity’ and ‘helplessness’, and a ‘reluctance to envisage the
‘whole man’ ‘participating in a process’ (Halliday 1973: 123, 125). When the Neanderthal Lok
watches a person from a more advanced tribe shooting an arrow at him, the event is
expressed as a series of natural processes performed by a ‘stick’ and a ‘twig’:
[5] The bushes twitched again [...] The man turned sideways in the bushes and
looked at Lok along his shoulder. A stick rose upright and there was a lump of
bone in the middle [...] The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot
out to full length again. The dead tree by Lok’s ear acquired a voice. ‘Clop!’ His
ear twitched and he turned to the tree. By his face there had grown a twig.
(Golding 1955: 106f)
These choices deliberately omit the connection between ‘stick’ and ‘twig’ in a single weapon
of bow and arrow, plus the causes and effects involved, e.g., bending and releasing the bow,
seen head-on as a stick ‘growing shorter at both ends’ and then ‘shooting out to full length’
and propelling the ‘lump of bone’ and its shaft to ‘the tree by his face’. Lok’s notion of a ‘dead
tree’ suddenly ‘growing a twig’ symbolises the Neanderthals’ archaic and mystified worldview,
dooming them to a destruction they can neither understand nor resist, at the hands of
a more evolved people.
Functional approaches across the board have recently received a substantial boost from
corpus linguistics, which works with enormous samplings of authentic discourse, moving
emphasis from the word or sentence to the pattern, which often tends to suggest cognitive or
social attitudes. For example, I find the passive colligation of pronoun + be + ‘to be’ + past
participle uniformly associated with pejorative attitude. In data from the British National
Corpus, the sinister inconveniences to which ‘I am’ (or ‘you are’, ‘he/she is’ etc.) ‘to be’
subjected include ‘hounded’, ‘demoted’, ‘despised’, ‘cut out’, ‘punished unfairly’,
‘investigated’, ‘arrested’, ‘prosecuted’, ‘convicted’, ‘incarcerated’, ‘imprisoned for life’,
‘chained hand and foot’, ‘hanged’. In data from my own English Prose Corpus of ‘classic’
discourses, I am to be ‘abandoned’, ‘humbled’, ‘persecuted’, ‘trampled upon’, ‘devoured’,
‘condemned’, and ‘hanged’ all over again — and, for bad measure, ‘boiled alive’, ‘burned at
the stake’, and ‘buried at sea’. Ouch.
A radically different perspective emerged from the field of artificial intelligence, which
analysed discourse to investigate how a computer programs might be said to ‘understand
natural language’ as opposed to artificial programming languages. This work became
entangled in the vast stores of world-knowledge even in simple tasks like processing a
prosaic news item like [6] (data adapted from Cullingford 1978: 4ff).
[6] A New Jersey man was killed Friday evening when a car swerved off Route 69
and struck a tree. David Hall, 27, was pronounced dead at Milford Hospital. The
driver, Frank Miller, was treated and released. No charges were filed, according to
investigating officer Robert Onofrio.
The program can apply a knowledge-array called schema or script for ‘vehicle accidents’,
specifying relevant data about what caused the accident, who was killed or injured, and
whether charges were filed. This prior knowledge supports the swift comprehension of the
news item along with appropriate inferences, e.g., that the ‘driver’ lost control rather than
deliberately heading for the tree with the intent to knock it down and cart it off home for his
wood-carving hobby.
Cognitive determinacies multiply if you reflect more deeply. North American readers should
know that the ‘tree’ was a sturdy Northern outdoor tree rather than a dwarf bonsai in a
manour-house conservatory, or a plastic Christmas tree in a trendy shopping mall; that the
late Mr Hall was taken to ‘hospital’ by an ambulance and not by mountain bike, skateboard,
or jet-ski; that Miller was ‘treated’ by dressing his injuries and not by honouring him with a
full-dress dinner; that he was ‘released’ by being allowed to leave the police hospital rather
than being unlocked from heavy Guantanamo-style manacles; and so on. Obviously,
probabilities must be built into the system (Halliday 1991); but these are cognitively
determinate despite being computationally evasive.
Yet another approach in discourse has been more devoted to live talk in society, and
supplied by the analysis of conversation in ethnomethodology, whose home discipline
was sociology rather than linguistics. Harold Garfinkel (1974) reported coining the term
ethnomethodology for the participants’ commonsense ‘methodology’ for ordinary social
interactions, patterned after such terms as ‘ethnoscience’ or ‘ethnomedicine’ for people’s
commonsense knowledge of what ‘science’ or ‘medicine’ do.
Conversation is usually managed by its participants quite tightly and fluently, with few
conspicuous breaks or disturbances. The significance of utterances is clearly a function of
the ongoing interaction as a whole rather than just the meanings of words or phrases,
witness this bit of taped conversation collected by Emmanuel Schegloff (1987: 208f)
(capitals show emphasis; colons indicate lengthened sounds, spacing approximate delays):
[7.1] B. WELL, honey? I’ll probl’y SEE yuh one a’ these days
[7.2] A. OH::: God YEAH
[7.3] B: Uhh huh!
[7.4] A: We—
[7.5] A: But I c— I jis’ couldn’ git down there
[7.6] B: Oh—Oh I know I’M not askin yuh tuh come down
[7.7] A: Jesus I mean I just didn’t have five minutes yesterday
Two middle-aged sisters who apparently haven’t visited each other for some time are
conversing on the telephone. Sister B probably intends to signal a closing with the usual
reference to a future seeing [6.1] (compare English ‘see ya’, French ‘au revoir’, German ‘auf
Wiedersehen’, Spanish ‘hasta la vista’ etc.). But sister A understands a complaint about not
having visited, and makes excuses for why she ‘jis’ couldn’ git down there’ [6.5]. Sister B
displays that she appreciates A’s problems and signals that she was not pressing her claims
to a visit, overlapping with A’s excuse of ‘not having five minutes yesterday’ [6.6-7].
Ethnomethodologists like Schegloff emphasise that the conversational analysis can
document its own interpretations with those made by the actual participants, in this case, A’s
misunderstanding and B’s venture to amend it. Though ‘often unnoticed or underappreciated
in casual observation or even effortful recollection of how talk goes’, the ‘detailed practices
and features of the conduct of talk — hesitations, anticipations, apparent disfluencies, or
inconsequential choices’ — ‘are strikingly accessible to empirical inquiry’ (Schegloff 1992).
My own major concern has been the field of text linguistics, which will partially provide the
framework later on in the section C on methodology. Its central conception is the seven
principles of textuality: a human achievement in making connections wherever
communicative events occur (cf. Beaugrande and Dressler 1981; Beaugrande 1997, 2004).
The connections among linguistic forms like words or word-endings make up Cohesion, and
those among the ‘meanings’ or ‘concepts’ make up Coherence; Intentionality covers what
speakers intend, and Acceptability what hearers engage to do; Informativity concerns how
new or unexpected the content is; Situationality concerns ongoing circumstances of the
interaction; and Intertextuality covers relations with other texts, particularly ones from the
same or a similar ‘text type’.
Here, I very briefly demonstrate these seven principles with a ‘Classified’ advert from
Psychology Today (August 1983, p. 82) under the heading ‘Parapsychology’.
[8] HARNESS WITCHCRAFT’S POWERS! Gavin and Yvonne Frost, world’s
foremost witches, now accepting students. Box 1502P, Newbern, NC 28560.
Here, Intertextuality is generally specified by the text type ‘classified advert’. Intention and
Acceptance are typical: the writers publicise an offer for the readers to take up. The ‘text
type’ shapes the modest Cohesion, showing just one command with the imperative
(‘harness!’) suggesting that you will indeed manage it, and one ordinary sentence, plus the
incomplete phrases typical of addresses. No command is given to ‘contact us’ or ‘dispatch
us your raven with a parchment of inquiry’ — just the address.
Coherence centres on the topic of ‘witchcraft’, which (un)common sense holds to be the
activities of ‘witches’ and to grant extraordinary ‘powers’. This central topic is combined
somewhat picturesquely with the ‘student’ topic of enrolling in courses and (not mentioned)
paying fees. The concept ‘foremost’ helps connect the two topics, since stories of ‘witches’
often tell of superlatives, and ‘students’ ought be attracted to the ‘foremost’ authorities in a
field. In return, a submerged contradiction impends when the Frosts themselves claim to
‘harness’ such ‘foremost powers’ themselves yet are obliged to seek fee-paying ‘students’
instead of just, say, using their ‘powers’ to conjure up spirits who can unearth buried treasure
and transform any foolhardy bill-collector into a changeable tree toad (Hyla versicolor).
The Informativity starts out high, not merely by claiming that witchcraft’ has real ‘powers’ in
today’s world but also by inviting ordinary readers to ‘harness’ them. Also quite high is the
inflat,euntestable claim to being the ‘world’s foremost’, although such claims are so
commonly made in U.S. advertising that American readers may not be surprised. Perhaps
the offer to ‘accept students’ has some surprise value too (shouldn’t witches have
‘apprentices’?), though less so in a classified column uniformly offering paid services.
The Situationality entails the supposition — correct, as shall see in a moment — that some
readers will indeed aspire to become ‘students’. This prospect must be viewed in the broader
social Situationality of resurgent superstition, especially in areas like the American Southeast
(in this case North Carolina) as a desperate response to a ‘modernism’ too complicated for
many people to comprehend or control (Beaugrande 1997). The sinking feeling of
powerlessness creates a vacuum some people try to fill by ‘harnessing powers’ of any
imaginable kind: ‘despairing of their own arms’ fortitude, to join with witches’ (Henry VI).
This Situational point can be supported with specific Intertextuality by noticing more recent
texts about Gavin and Yvonne in the Internet, where just their names yielded 1340 hits on
AltaVista in June 2006. Their website (www.wicca.org) advertises a ‘Church and School of
Wicca’ providentially moved to West Virginia (insert your own joke here), and avows that
‘more than 200,000 seekers have contacted them from every corner of the globe’. Among
the ‘courses’ of the ‘school I find ‘Astral Travel’, ‘Mystical Awareness’, and ‘Practical Sorcery’
(who needs Hogwarts and Harry Potter?). The Frosts ‘have a busy travel schedule, but an all
expenses paid vacation to Florida (including speaking at your festival) is not out of the
question’. Now: who will, ‘so grossly led, this juggling witchcraft with revenue cherish’? (King
John).
The several fields enumerated so far seem to have coincided during the late 1970s and early
1980s in the field of discourse processing. Its avowed goal was to support research in ‘the
many disciplines that deal with discourse — sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, linguistics
proper, sociology of language, ethnoscience, educational psychology (e.g. classroom
interaction), clinical psychology (e.g. the clinical interview), computational linguistics, and so
forth’ (Freedle 1977: xvi).
To do so, a daunting issue had to be addressed: how do people actually process a discourse
during real communication? Not surprisingly, vivid debates encircled the question of whether
people store a more or less ‘surface copy’ of the discourse they hear or read (as linguists
would credit), or else some ‘deeper representation’ (as psychologists would credit), and if the
latter, what kind. Some findings indicate a mix of strategies and results. Here is a very brief
sample from the opening of a text from a children’s reader (see Beaugrande 1980: VI.3 for
full discussion):
Critical Discourse Analysis
41
[9] A great black and yellow V-2 rocket 46 feet long stood in a New Mexico desert. For
fuel it carried eight tons of alcohol and liquid oxygen. […] Amid a great roar and burst
of the giant rocket rose slowly and then faster and faster.
College students who read the text and recalled it partially reproduced the text and partially
reconstructed it, apparently working with some deeper categories. Thus, the colours were
also reported as ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘blue’, ‘white’, and ‘silver’; the fuels as ‘hydrogen’, ‘gasoline’,
and ‘nitrogen’; and the location as ‘Mexico’, ‘Arizona’, and ‘Morocco’. Besides,, over a third
of our readers reported ‘take-off’, which is not in the text.
Discourse processing turned up at least one major surprise: immediate memory access for
discourse meanings is not parsimonious and perhaps not even selective (Kintsch 1988).
Precise experiments indicated that when a word is recognised, all its meanings are initially
‘activated’, not just the relevant one for the context. Yet very soon the irrelevant ones are
‘deactivated’, while the relevant ones raise their activation and spread it out. Suppose you
are a speaker of American English reading a text on a moving computer display containing
this passage:
[10] The townspeople were amazed to find that all the buildings had collapsed except
the mint.
The text suddenly halts at ‘mint’, and the display gives you a target item to decide if it’s a real
word. For a brief interval of roughly half a second, your response would show activation for
both the relevant ‘money’ and the irrelevant ‘candy’, but not for the inferable ‘earthquake’
(what made the ‘buildings collapse’). Thereafter, the irrelevant item would lose its activation
while the relevant and the inferable items would gain. Evidently, the context ‘self-organises’
during this tiny interval.
The most immediate fons et origo of critical discourse analysis were, I believe, ‘critical
linguistics’ (e.g. Mey 1979 [original 1974]; Fowler, Hodge, Kress, and Trew 1979). The
‘critical’ work was clearly distinguished by its resolve to accept ‘ideology’ (along with ‘power’,
‘domination’ etc.) as a legitimate object of investigation, calling to my mind the neglected
proposals of the persecuted Vološinov (1973 [orig. 1929]: 9), who envisioned a ‘Marxist
theory of ideologies’ as ‘the basis for studies of scientific knowledge’. Yet precisely because
‘linguistics’ was not conceptualised for any such task, the transition to ‘discourse analysis’
awaited the input of still more fields of recent provenance, such as social psychology (e.g.
Billig 1986; Potter and Wetherell 1987), social cognition (e.g. Fiske and Taylor 1984), and
rhetorical psychology (e.g. Billig 1991). A typical concern there might be concept of
‘violence’ among New Zealanders talking about rioting at a rugby match against the South
African Springboks in April 1981. For the police, interviewees explained the violence and
‘skull-cracking’ as understandable ‘human’ responses to ‘provocation’ [11-12]. But for the
protesters, the violence was either a pleasurable goal for ‘trouble-makers’ who had no
‘moral’ positions on the ‘issue’ of apartheid [13] or else (shudder) ‘communists’ [14] — the
perenniel pejorative buzzword brandished against anyone promoting human rights (cf. Potter
and Wetherell 1987: 122ff).
[11] policemen are only ordinary people / they must have had a lot of provocation and I
don’t blame them if at the last they were a bit rough
[12] I think [sic] the police acted very well / they’re only human if they lashed out and
cracked a skull occasionally, it was / hah / only a very human action
[13] I feel very strongly that it gave trouble-makers who weren’t interested in the basic
moral of it an opportunity to get in and cause trouble to beat up people / to smash
property
[14] what really angered me that a certain small group of New Zealanders [..] who are
communists I believe / led a lot of well-meaning New Zealanders who abhor apartheid
and organised them you know / to jump up and down and infringe the rights of other
New Zealanders
These discursive constructs make it possible to ignore or excuse the ‘infringement of rights’
both by ‘skull-cracking’ police and by the South African government. The adaptive value of
such accounts is obvious in a country that has long infringed the human rights of the Maoris,
a darker-skinned minority who are not immigrants at all but the original inhabitants of New
Zealand for at least 1,000 years. To crown the irony, ‘maori’ in their own language means
‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’. We Pakeha are the ones who look and act weird — an impression fully
confirmed by the frantic antics of the New Zealand All Blacks (their clothes, that is)
performing the maori ‘haka’ chant and dance before each rugby match, not to mention the
zealous New Zealand fans doing it at home before the telly, at imminent risk to the furniture.
These, then, are some of fields I would regard as bearing upon the history of discourse
analysis. Their diversity might well be a blessing in enhancing our prospects for dealing with
so broad a domain. Perhaps critical discourse analysis would be less disputatious today if it
were more mindful of its roots and evolution.

B. Ideology
In some quarters, the ‘ideology of critical discourse analysis’ may sound like an oxymoron.
This effect could be due to the largely pejorative interpretation of the term within science and
within our own field (cf. Geertz 1973; Zima 1981; Pêcheux 1982). A typical instance was
articulated by Talcott Parsons:
The essential criteria of an ideology [are its] deviations from scientific objectivity […]
The problem of ideology arises where there is a discrepancy between what is believed
and what can be [established as] scientifically correct.
By today’s standards, such pronouncements sound dated even on their own terms. For my
part, the analysis of discourse cannot be ‘objective’ insofar as the analyst is always already a
participant irrevocably implicated in the production of the discourse being analysed. I can
attempt to envision the intended, non-analytic participants, maybe even the dupe who flies
off on his broom to master ‘Practical Sorcery’ (course fee: US$ 190) at the ‘School of Wicca’.
But I am still quite different from them all, and this difference is the margin which can
empower my analysis — not to be ‘correct’, but, as a goal, to be non-trivial, insightful, and
socially relevant. I thus feel much in tune with Neisser’s (1976: 2) concept of ecological
validity, i.e., how far ‘a theory has something to say about what people do in real, culturally
significant situations’ and says it in ways that ‘make sense to the participants’.
Similarly, my own ideology differs from the ideology not merely of witchcraft devotees,
but of hard-line scientists who claim to be free of all ideology. The term itself deserves
a definition as neutral we find in our dictionaries, viz.: ‘a systematic body of concepts
especially about human life or culture’ (Webster’s Seventh Collegiate, p. 413); ‘a body
of doctrine or thought that guides an individual, social movement, institution, or group’
(Random House Webster’s, p. 668); or ‘a belief or set of beliefs, especially the political
beliefs, on which people, parties, or countries base their actions’ (Collins COBUILD, p.
718).
Meanwhile, the pejorative interpretation resurfaces in critical discourse analysis when we
read: ‘ideology is significations generated within power relations as a dimension of the
exercise of power and struggle over power’ (Fairclough 1992: 67); or even: ‘ideology
supports violence and is critically shaped by and in a context of violence’ and by ‘physical
pain and social dehumanisation’ (Lemke 1995: 12f, his italics). Convincing data are
increasingly open and ‘violent’ in public discourse, e.g., on immigration [10], racism [11], and
academic freedom [12]
[10] Our [British] traditions of fairness and tolerance are being exploited by every
terrorist, crook, screwball, and scrounger who wants a free ride at our expense (Daily
Mail, 28 Nov. 1990)
 [11] Nobody is less able to face the truth than the hysterical ‘anti-racist brigade’. Their
intolerance is such that they try to silence or sack anyone who doesn’t toe their party
line (Sun, 23 Oct. 1990)
[12] liberal academics [have] abandoned scholarly objectivity to create academic
disciplines that were in actuality political movements; [...] ethnic studies, women’s
studies etc. have one intent only, that is: undermining the American education system
through the transformation of scholarship and teaching into blatant politics (Florida
Review, 12 Oct. 1990)
Such discourse displays the strategy of making victims into victimisers (‘Opfer-Täter Umkehr’
in Ruth Wodak’s work) by absurdly accusing them of seizing the initiative in dark deeds for
which they could have no reasonable motivation, e.g., ‘academics’ striving to ‘undermine the
educational system’ that gives them a livelihood.
I would prefer to distinguish at least between left-wing ideology holding that human rights
are inclusive and equal in theory, even though social conditions create exclusions and
inequalities in practice, versus right-wing ideology holding that human rights must be
exclusive and unequal in both theory and practice in exact proportion to each individual’s
share of wealth and power, no matter how these were acquired. In such terms, critical
discourse analysis is not the foe or scourge of all ideology — which would effectively
foreclose our own ideological space — but rather the articulations of left-wing ideology
seeking to deconstruct right-wing ideologies by analysing their discourse. In effect, our
enterprise is interwoven with resistances and reversals: to inform the uninformed; to
empower the disempowered; to demystify the mystified; to clarify obscurity; and to raise
general consciousness for the potential of discourse for such an enterprise.
And a rather unique enterprise it is, given the already mentioned implication of the analyst in
the very processes we attempt to deconstruct. There is no zero degree of uninvolvement for
us to leap in prior to any understanding of the data, and no zero ideology as our starting
point where we can build a domain for what is ‘established as scientifically correct’. Even the
‘hard sciences’ are discursive constructs, modes of communication about what is ‘currently’
said to be ‘probably’ correct. High tech like linear accelerators, femtosecond lasers, and
space telescopes enable discoveries that would be useless if they were could not be
transposed into discourse; for non-specialists, it is discourse that ‘establishes’ them but also
‘disestablishes’ some prior discourse as ‘non-correct’.
Some discourse analysts compare the computer and the large corpus to the tools of science
like the microscope that energised great leaps forward. But our version of microscopes
partially reflect back our own eyes, and claims for discourse analysis to be a ‘science’ and
hence free of ideology are a window dressing that belies our own practice. Critical discourse
analysis has wisely learned its lesson, but its legion of critics have not and indeed cannot
even understand our strenuous work to get understanding itself into our sights and sites.
They remain trapped in the dualistic tautology between discourse and meaning and reproach
us for ‘obfuscating’ matters that must be simple because they seem to ‘non-critical’ outlooks.
But to judge from the rather random, disgruntled, and blinkered abuse heaped upon CDA,
such as I see posted on ‘Language and the New Capitalism’ even as I am writing this, CDA
needs to be more assertive and definitive about its own ideology. I have thus proposed and
substantially elaborated the ideology of ecologism, wherein the theory and practice of
society, including science and especially CDA, strive for a dialectical reconciliation of theory
and practise in a transdisciplinary pursuit of humane and democratic action, interaction, and
discourse (Beaugrande 1997, 2004). I would cite such encouraging trends as expounded in
the Gaia Atlas of Planet Management (Myers et al. 1993) and The Quark and the Jaguar
(Gell-Mann 1994). We are not alone.

C. Methodology
The motley critics of CDA have a point when they assert that the field looks to them like a
composite if not indeed a miscellany of methodologies. Given the history I have sketched in
section A, this appearance is hardly surprising, but it is problematic for introducing or
expounding the field to newcomers or outsiders.
My own methodology has all along been heavily data-driven, with a designed developed
from continuing active analysis of authentic discourse. This approach stands in
programmatic contrast to the heavily theory-driven methodologies we confront in books or
essays where hardly any discourse is analysed in any depth. Nor indeed can I remotely
imagine how any methodical analysis could be based on theorising in modes like this:
[14] We can clearly see [sic!] that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear
signifying links or archi-writing depending on the author, and this multireferential,
multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the
pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us
from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the
ontological binarism (Felix Guattari, in le Figaro, translated in Sokal and Bricmont
1999).
Nor, to be honest, can I imagine what socially relevant purpose can be served by such
mystifying, self-indulgent lucubrations. They merely supply fuel for strident criticism of CDA,
even if, as I would maintain, they are not a legitimate part of CDA at all.
My advocacy is that methodology should grow and be shaped by the methods that serve
analysis, while at the same time helping to determine what counts as ‘analysis’. In the
broadest sense, the latter is a relation between discourse and meta-discourse; it becomes a
critical relation when it consciously poses against discourse its own counter-discourse,
uncovering, resisting, or reversing the routine sense-making procedures that were expected
by the original producers of the discourse. This process is not ‘objective’, since none of its
components or concerns is an ‘object’. And it does not demarcate boundaries among
‘analysis’, ‘description’, and ‘commentary’.
So the primordial demand upon methodology is to organise methods for specific modes of
discursive work. Whatever is not serviceable — such as vociferations about ‘multidimensional
machinic catalysis’, whatever that may mean — can be safely consigned to the
dustbin of discursive history.
To my knowledge, the ‘seven standards of textuality’ (briefly illustrated above for commercial
witchery) were greeted by a considerable echo because they readily transfer to methods for
a range of discourses as diverse as tractor operation manuals and Gulf war news reports. In
my latest design, these standards have been overlaid by three interactive factors:
Lexicogrammar, Prosody, and Visuality (Beaugrande 2004). In the small space remaining
here, my best shot is to show the design at work — without quibbling over whether it fits
somebody’s definition of ‘analysis’. Some terms will display an intentional affinity to systemic
function linguistics, mediated by reworking the terminology (also in Beaugrande 1997).
My sample discourse comes from the domain of international advertising and undertakes to
sell nothing less than a whole country. It was published in Time magazine (Asian edition, 24
June 1994); my numbering is merely for handy reference:
[15.1] Shopping, once a chore for necessities and now an art form and major leisure
activity, is a great barometer of social change.[15.2] If you shopped in Indonesia
before the 1980s, your options were limited to traditional markets and neighbourhood
‘mom and pop’ stores. [15.3] Wealthy Indonesians were forced to go overseas if they
wanted to buy upmarket international brands [15.4] because these goods were
simply not for sale at home.
[15.5] Then came the retail revolution. [15.6] Now there are hundreds of supermarkets,
department stores, plazas, malls, and supermalls to rival the best in the west dotted
all over the archipelago; [15.7] a mega mall and a hyper mall are on the drawing
board. [15.8] Growing per capita income — now at US$ 750 per annum — [15.9] and
Indonesia’s massive population has [sic] spurred a retail frenzy [15.10] which began
in the capital Jakarta, the country’s headquarters for commerce, industry and its
burgeoning middle class — [15.11] Indonesia’s prime shoppers. […]
[15.12] Our steadily expanding economy is coupled with rapidly rising family incomes;
[15.13] the middle and upper-income groups who constitute our consumer base are
the groups exhibiting the most dramatic upward mobility. [15.14] The nation’s
growing middle class population, those with annual incomes over US$ 4,500, is
already estimated to total nearly 20 million.
[15.15] We saw shopping malls as another type of family recreation where you all go to
relax and have fun.
The discourse astutely interfaces a multiple Intentionality: to whet the public (or just private)
appetite for shopping; to boast about the spread of malls; to project a bullish air of economic
progress in ‘rising family incomes’; to extol the management of the Indonesian economy; and
to make the country attractive for investors, ‘upmarket’ tourists, and ‘wealthy Indonesians’
who (perish the thought) might otherwise shop, invest, or vacation ‘overseas’. These three
groups are reassured that Indonesia will treat their money well, whether by returning high
profits from investment or by furnishing ‘upmarket international brands’ to flaunt in the faces
of the languishing populace.
The Intention of extolling the Indonesian economy adduces ‘social change’ as the force
propelling the ‘rapidly rising family incomes’ [15.1, 12]. The ‘middle and upper-income
groups’ are asserted to ‘constitute our consumer base’ [15.13]; but elsewhere, only the
‘middle class’ are designated ‘Indonesia’s prime shoppers’ [15.11]. To be sure, blurring the
border between middle and upper incomes is an alluring notion for the vainglorious social
climbing latent in the euphemism ‘upward mobility’. But the ‘burgeoning middle class’ is the
key group leading the ‘retail frenzy’ in their drive to display their recent comparative wealth,
whereas the upper class languidly takes its long-standing superlative wealth in stride.
In an intriguing move of self-deconstruction, the discourse also plants clues that this ‘social
change’ has bypassed nearly all of the population, provided we dig deeper with the aid of
some arithmetic. If the whole population was roughly 190 million, and the population with
‘incomes over US$ 4,500’ came to ‘20 million’ [15.14], then 89% (170 million) must have
been in the lower class living on less than $4,500. If we multiply the whole population by a
‘per capita income’ of $750 [15.8] for each citizen, the total income of Indonesia was around
$142.5 billion. Multiplying $4500 by the 20 million citizens whose ‘incomes’ were at least that
much [15.14] gives a total of $90 billion. If we adjust our first total by subtracting the second
total, $52.5 billion was left over for the 170 million in the lower class, so their average income
for a year would be just $308.82 apiece — 85¢ a day — even if the rest did not earn any
more than US$4,500 — 15 times as much — but of course Suharto’s ravenous flock of
cronies and relatives did, as was amply disclosed after the ignominious downfall of his
horrifically corrupt regime in 1999, five years after this advert came out.
So a latent contradiction might be demystified at the epicentre of the Intentionality of our
discourse, yet all to animate Acceptability for investors. On the one hand, the statistics could
serve the intention of touting the progress of the ‘economy’ as a whole by camouflaging the
regressive poverty of 89% of the population behind an ‘income’ cooked to look at least twice
as high ($750 versus $308) — a pungently ironic conception of ‘growth’ [15.8]! On the other
hand, the same statistics could serve the intention of allowing interested readers to compute
the poverty, as I did. The contradiction thus fades into an intentional dualism engrained in
the current ‘global free market’: if you do business in Indonesia, the rich will buy your
products at top prices, whilst the poor will work your operations at bottom wages. A win-win
situation.
The poverty of the workers is irrelevant anyway insofar as they wouldn’t be ‘shopping’ in
your ‘malls’ even if the latter were not well shielded by the ‘security’ rent-a-cops near the
entrance. Entirely in the spirit of the ‘post-modern’ economy, Indonesia has shifted its
emphasis in marketing away from large volumes of low-priced commodities — the
‘necessities’ in ‘mom and pop stores’ — over to small volumes of high-priced commodities —
the ‘upmarket brands’ in ‘supermalls’ — purchased just because they are not ‘necessities’
and thus best advertise the buyers’ discretionary wealth and refined tastes. These brands
make each act of acquisition into an iconic public bid for invidious prestige by certifying over
and over the buyer’s surplus affluence. So the notion that ‘wealthy Indonesians’ simply must
be enabled to buy those ‘brands’ [15.3] is treated here as totally obvious.
To manage Cohesion and Coherence, thematic content is strategically placed near the front
of Clauses or Sentences, or of some other unit situated by itself. Thus, the Subject of the
first Sentence sets the theme to be ‘shopping’ [15.1], and other Subjects fall into a prominent
Thematic Sequence: ‘wealthy Indonesians’ [15.3]; ‘these goods’ [15.4]; ‘growing income’
[15.8]; ‘expanding economy’ [15.12]; ‘middle and upper-income groups’ [15.13]; and ‘middle
class population’ [15.14].
Other Thematic Sequences contribute as well, as when ‘shopping’ links up with ‘shopped –
for sale – retail – commerce – retail – shoppers’. An intimately related Thematic Sequence is
centred on money: ‘wealthy – upmarket – income – economy – incomes – middle and upperincome
– incomes’. More elaborately connected is a Sequence for growth: ‘hundreds –
growing – massive – burgeoning – expanding – rising – upward – growing’; expressions can
form iconic Morphemic Sequences to mimic the ‘growing’ process in the size of places to
shop, e.g. ‘markets => upmarket => supermarkets’; ‘stores => department stores’; ‘malls =>
supermalls => mega mall => hyper mall’. These Sequences could attract ‘dotted’ in [15.6],
which usually means ‘scattered’ but here could mean ‘found everywhere’; and could be
iconic for the ‘frenzy’ in [15.10]. I would even wonder whether ‘per capita’ and ‘capital’ [15.8,
10], though seemingly remote in meaning, might not trigger associations with the imported
capitalism that has distributed the wealth in this cynically skewed head count.
The vitality of attitudes in the Lexicogrammar, a special insight of corpus linguistics, as we
saw, is strategic here too. Some of the Items carry attitudes prefigured in ordinary usage,
e.g., pejorative for a ‘chore’ [15.1] being tedious, and ‘forced’ implying compulsion [15.4].
Other Items take on attitudes in context, as when ‘tradition’, usually ameliorative in
Southeast Asian cultures, appears pejorative here by association with backwardness and
‘limitations’ [15.1, 2, 4]. In return, ‘frenzy’ (typically collocated with people or sharks gone
bonkers) appears unexpectedly ameliorative as a manifestation of ‘growing income’ [15.8-9],
though in my reaction more of the sharkish meaning persists than was probably intended.
The sole Sequences of pejorative expressions decry the bleak situation ‘before the 1980s’:
‘chore – necessities – forced’; ‘limited – not for sale’; ‘traditional markets – neighbourhood
mom and pop stores’. As I noted, the common ameliorative value of ‘tradition’ is reset to
pejorative here to animate people into buying the very latest modern commodities, for which
they should run like the clappers to ‘mega-malls’. The use of ‘mom and pop’ as a patronising
Western term is pungently ironic in a culture where the traditional home life accords
profound respect to parents and grandparents. Still, the breakdown of family ties furthers the
interests of a market where selfish people spend all the more on surplus commodities to
pamper themselves. The modern ‘family’ now forms a collective of hedonists who flock to
‘shopping malls’ for ‘recreation’, ‘relaxation’, and ‘fun’ [15.15, 1] — to revel ostentatiously in
the ‘leisure’ based upon wealth not earned by (heaven forbid!) labour.
The Lexicogrammar is easily dominated by the Thematic Sequences enumerated above,
featuring expressions and collocations relating to marketing, wealth, and growth. Set off
against this background are a few choices that take on markedness and weight. The
collocation ‘shopping as an art form’ is formatted like an appositive or a simile to be
accepted as a sealed package, rather than a direct statement formatted as a clause, such as
‘shopping is an art form’, though the latter is, I’m sad to report, 10 times more frequent on
the Internet, notably for locales like Singapore and Hong Kong, where shopping seems to
the raison d‘etre if not the raison d‘etat (but I didn’t find Indonesia). Perhaps a sly inference
is intended, associating with the pricey ‘art objects’ and ‘collector’s items’ malls love to hawk.
Shoppers might feel more mocked to be swarmed as artists if they were less hungry for
status and for the certification of ‘refined taste’ supposedly certified by ‘upmarket’ purchases.
The collocation ‘rival the best in the west’ [15.6], in contrast, seems pointedly plain, like an
improvised cliché (11,153 hits were returned on the Internet with AltaVista). But it may be a
subtly marked choice in contexts where shopping malls and ‘international brands’ are the
essential symbols, indexes, and icons of the Westernisation so cordially wedded to
consumerism. The colourless collocation unobtrusively puts local shopping facilities on a par
not just with the ‘west’ but with the latter’s ‘best’.
The mixed lexicogrammatical styles of the discourse could address multiple audiences:
expressly informal style (e.g., ‘chore – mom and pop – at home – relax and have fun’)
alongside the more formal styles of the discourses of business (e.g., ‘goods – sale – retail –
drawing board – commerce – consumer base’), economics (e.g., ‘economy – per capita –
upper-income groups – estimated’), and sociology (e.g., ‘barometer of social change –
revolution – middle class – family incomes – upward mobility’). If the informal style suggests
easy-going friendliness, the formal styles flatter readers by attributing to them academic and
intellectual prowess, plus high fluency in English — itself no minor status symbol in
Southeast Asia. The same attribution may be implied by the Greek-based Morphemes
‘mega’ and ‘hyper’, which convey a pleasing if vague promise of superlative bigness
rounding off the enumeration of seven types of shopping places, as I have pointed out.
The stylistic weight of some lexical choices might be tested by contrasting them with
alternatives at lower weight: ‘chore’, not ‘task’; ‘barometer’, not ‘measure’; ‘revolution’, not
‘change’; ‘archipelago’, not ‘islands’; ‘massive’, not ‘large’; ‘spurred’, not ‘caused’; ‘frenzy’,
not ‘excitement’; ‘headquarters’, not ‘centre’; ‘burgeoning’, not ‘growing’; ‘prime’, not ‘main’;
‘coupled with’, not ‘along with; ‘constitute’, not ‘make up’; ‘exhibiting’, not ‘showing’;
‘dramatic’, not ‘great’; and of course ‘upmarket’, not ‘overpriced’, and ‘upward mobility’, not
‘piling up money’. Perhaps such choices are iconic upmarket words for a vocabulary seeking
its own upward mobility?

The lexical and stylistic shift in the last sentence [15.15] turns so plain as to acquire
paradoxical weight, where we might have expected something more like [15.15a].
[15.15] We saw shopping malls as another type of family recreation where you all go to
relax and have fun.
[15.15a] Our economic indicators projected shopping malls to proffer attractive familial
recreation and relaxation sites.
Instead, the formal styles of business, economics, and so on, abruptly yield to an informal
style of carefree life, as if the builders of malls just now remembered all they really want is to
supply ‘fun’ and ‘relaxation’ for your whole ‘family,’ purely out of community spirit — never
mind the submerged irony of converting the traditional family as a close-knit community of
love and respect into a dispersed collective of selfish, fun-seeking mall-freaks. The choice
‘you all go’ is exquisitely cheeky for a guarded exclusive showcase where 89% of all
Indonesians would probably be turned away by ‘security officers’.
In the Lexicogrammar, strategic choices can be noted for Transitivity in the sense of Halliday
(1994). The Active Verbs strategically collocate with their Direct Objects: ‘buy – brands’;
‘rival – best’; ‘spurred – frenzy’; ‘saw – malls’. Three Passives deal with restrictions on
shopping: ‘were limited – were not for sale – were forced’, the last of these connoting an
unjust compulsion upon the ‘wealthy’ (VIII.58); two more are for the abstractions typical of
academic discourse: ‘is coupled – is estimated’. The dominant Transitivity is rather the
Medial, though only a few Finite Verbs occur: ‘is a barometer – go overseas – are on the
drawing board – go to relax’. The one Existential Medial in ‘there are…supermalls’ [15.6]
avoids saying who built or owned them, as if they spontaneously sprang like the Indonesian
flower Rafflesia, the world’s largest (and smelliest) flower, from the foment of ‘the retail
revolution’; the latter’s Definite Article implies that this ‘revolution’ is a recognised reality.
Most of the Medial activities are expressed instead either as Nouns, e.g., ‘frenzy – mobility’;
or as Present Participles, e.g., ‘growing – burgeoning – expanding – rising – exhibiting –
happening’, invoking an effect of intense development and change like natural processes. I
find not a single genuine Agent plus Action Verb as Subject plus Predicate, such as
‘plutocratic foreigners built posh shopping malls’. In fact, the Subjects of the Clauses are
never an individual Agent, but only collectives like ‘population’ or abstractions like ‘economy’.
This distribution suggests we might examine the Agent Pronouns. The Second Person ‘you’
appears at the start as the unlucky pre-1980s shopper whose ‘options were limited’; and at
the happy end as the lucky 1994 shopper homing in on ‘relaxation’ and ‘fun’. The First
Person Plural appears in ‘our expanding economy’ and ‘our consumer base’ [15.12, 13].
Since these entities elsewhere appear with the Possessive Nouns ‘nation’s’ and ‘Indonesia’s’
[15.14, 11], the discourse can subtly purport to speak for the whole country. But the ‘we’ who
‘saw family fun’ in [15.15] would presumably be the creators of ‘shopping malls’, who would
love to identify their own interests with those of the nation, and maybe they managed to
conscience them that they did.
The Prosody of the discourse — shown here by for Strong Stress and for Weak Stress
(Beaugrande 2004) — serves to intensify sequenced Items like ‘forced – hun·dreds –
mas·sive – head·quar·ters – dra·mat·ic – best in the west’; or contrasts like ‘once
now ‘; ‘chore – art form ‘; or ‘meg·a mall – hy·per·mall’. Strong Stress for
strategic end weight would probably fall upon ‘¡social change’, ‘in·ter·na·tion·al
brands’, ‘re·tail fren·zy’, ‘prime shop·pers’, and ‘up·ward mo·bil·it·y’. Opportunities
for end weight can be multiplied by having short Tone Groups that are not Clauses, e.g., the
Appositives ‘ma·jor leis·ure ac·tiv·i·ty’ in [15.1] and ‘prime shop·pers’ in [15.11]. Also,
re·tail rev·o·lu·tion’ is a Subject which gets end weight by being displaced after its Verb;
compare the weaker effect of ‘Then the re·tail rev·o·lu·tion came’.
The Visuality of the sample is dominated by retouched photos of the inside and outside of a
Himalayan ‘supermall’. The interior shows the standard Visuality of a shopping mall, which
makes it the perfected symbol, index and icon, all at once, of the in-your-face ‘look what I
got!’ life-style that drives the manic pursuit of colossal wealth by fair means or (more often)
foul, and wins support for political leaders, however repugnant, who coddle the rich and shaft
the poor — Suharto and Marcos, Thatcher and Reagan, Poppy Bush and Son-of-a-Bush.
The soaring atrium with its honeycomb of escalators, the orgies of plate glass, marble, and
fake gold-and-silver, the tropical hothouse greenery, the fashion-model sales clerks, and the
trendily overdressed clientele, compose the ideal visual frame for the ‘international brands’
as the correspondingly overpriced commodities imported from prestigious far-away places
and pressed upon you by glossy adverts telling you what self-respecting muckety-mucks
must have even if they don’t know it.
At the centre of the interior photo stands a lone woman in an evening dress looking outward,
presumably waiting for an affluent male shopper — maybe you, sir.
Although more detailed than many studies of a brief discourse, my treatment certainly does
not purport to be complete; such is not a realistic aspiration of discourse analysis at large.
Still, I hope to have shown that the design is not nearly so simple as it would seem in an
ordinary reading. And I hope to have pursued the analysis (if such it be) at least to the point
of uncovering some non-trivial and socially relevant strategies and motivations which can
plausibly be attributed to selected choices and patterns, and which are not readily apparent
on the surface.
Nor again does my own analysis purport to be ‘correct’ or ‘objective’. I am obviously not the
intended reader who jets off to Indonesia in quest of ‘income’ or ‘fun’; and shopping malls
freak me out like a horror trip. On the contrary, I have worked out a programmatic counterdiscourse
to deconstruct the Intentionality of the actual writer(s) and the Acceptability of the
desired reader(s), taking sides with ecologism in order to frame the Situationality of
consumerism. If 11% of the population has (at the very least) 15 times more money than the
other 89% in abject poverty, and if that money is being showily squandered in ‘supermalls’,
then I for one decline to praise the country for ‘social change’; and I regard any such
‘consumer frenzy’ as a social disease and long-range bioplanetary menace, not at all as just
‘another type of family recreation’.

References
Beaugrande, Robert de (1980) Text, Discourse, and Process: Toward a Multidisciplinary
Science of Texts. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex
Beaugrande, Robert de (1991) Linguistic Theory: The Discourse of Fundamental Works.
London: Longman
Beaugrande, Robert de (1992) “The heritage of functional sentence perspective from the
standpoint of text linguistics.” Linguistica Pragiensa 34/1-2, pp 2-26 and 55-86
Beaugrande, Robert de (1996) “Psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics: Looking back and
ahead.” In Vladimir Patras, (ed.), Sociolingvisticke a Psycholingvisticke Aspekty
Jazykovej Komunikacie. Banská Bystríca: Univerzita Mateja Bela Fakulta
Humanitnych Vied, vol. 1, pp 15-26
Beaugrande, Robert de (1997) New Foundations for a Science of Text and Discourse.
Greenwich, CT: Ablex
Beaugrande, Robert de (2004) A New Introduction to the Study of Text and Discourse.
Published on the Internet at www.beaugrande.com, July
Beaugrande, Robert de (2006) “How ‘Systemic’ Is a Large Corpus of English?” Plenary
paper at the 18th Euro-International Systemic Functional Linguistics Conference,
20th-22nd July, Università di Trieste, Gorizia.
Beaugrande, Robert de, and Wolfgang Dressler (1981) Introduction to Text Linguistics.
London: Longman
Billig, Michael (1986) Social Psychology and Intergroup Relations. London: Academic
Billig, Michael. (1991) Ideology and Opinions: Studies in Rhetorical Psychology. London:
Sage
Chafe, Wallace L (1963) Handbook of the Seneca Language. Albany: University of the State
of New York
Chafe, Wallace L (1967) Seneca Morphology and Dictionary. Washington DC: Smithsonian
Press
Chafe, Wallace L (1997) The Importance of Native American Languages. Bloomington:
Indiana University Dept. of Anthropology
Chomsky, Noam (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press
Cullingford, Rick (1978) Script Application. New Haven: Yale University dissertation
Fairclough, Norman (1992) Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity
Firbas, Jan (1971) “On the concept of communicative dynamism in the theory of functional
sentence perspective”, Sborník prací Filosofické Fakulty Brněnské Univerzity A 19,
pp 135-144
Firbas, Jan (1995) “On the thematic and rhematic layers of a text.” In Brita Wårvik, Sanna-
Kaisa Tanskanen and Risto Hiltunen (eds.), Organisation in Discourse. Anglicana
Turkuensia 14, pp 59-71
Fiske, Susan E. and Shelley E. Taylor (1984) Social Cognition. Reading, MA: Addison-
Wesley
Fowler, Roger, Robert Hodge, Gunther Kress, and Anthony Trew (1979) Language and
Control. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
Freedle, Roy (ed.) (1977) Discourse Production and Comprehension. Norwood, NJ: Ablex
Garfinkel, Harold (1974) “The origins of the term ‘ethnomethodology’.” In E.M. Turner (ed.),
Ethnomethodology. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books
Gell-Mann, Murray (1994) The Quark and The Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the
Complex. London: Little, Brown
Golding, William (1955) The Inheritors. London: Faber and Faber
Grimes, Joseph (1975) The Thread of Discourse. The Hague: Mouton
Grimes, Joseph (ed.) (1978) Papers on Discourse. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics
Halliday, Michael (1973) Explorations in the Function of Language. London: Arnold
Halliday, Michael (1991) “Corpus studies and probabilistic grammar.” In K. and B. Alterberg
(eds.), English Corpus Linguistics. London: Longman, pp 30-43
Halliday, Michael (1992) “Language as system and language as instance: The corpus as a
theoretical construct.” In Jan Svartvik (ed.), Directions in Corpus Linguistics. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter, pp 61-77
Halliday, Michael (1994) An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Longmans
Kintsch, Walter (1988) “The role of knowledge in discourse comprehension: A ‘constructionintegration
model’”. Psychological Review 95/2, pp 163-182
Lemke, Jay (1995) Textual Politics. London: Longman
Longacre, Robert E (1968-69) Discourse, “Paragraph, and Sentence Structure in Selected
Philippine Languages.” Santa Ana, CA, Summer Institute of Linguistics
Longacre, Robert E (1983) The Grammar of Discourse. New York : Plenum Press
Malinowski, Bronislaw (1922/1961) Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: Dutton
Malinowski, Bronislaw (1923) “The problem of meaning in primitive languages.” In Charles
Ogden and Ivor Armstrong Richards, The Meaning of Meaning. London: Paul Trench
and Trubner, pp 296-336
Mey, Jakob (1979a) “Introduction.” In Jakob Mey (ed.), Pragmalinguistics: Theory and
Practice. The Hague: Mouton, pp 9-17
Mey, Jakob (1979b) “Zur kritischen Sprachtheorie.” In Jakob Mey (ed.), Pragmalinguistics:
Theory and Practice. The Hague: Mouton, pp 412-34
Mey, Jakob (ed.) (1979) Pragmalinguistics: Theory and Practice. The Hague: Mouton
Morote Best, Efrain (1947-48) “El Oso Raptor.” Archivos Venezolanos de Folklore VI-VII, pp
135-179
Myers, Norman, et al (1993) Gaia: An Atlas of Planet Management. NY: Doubleday
Neisser, Ulric (1976) Cognition and Reality. San Francisco: Freeman
Pêcheux, Michel (1982) Language, Semantics, and Ideology. London: Macmillan
Pike, Kenneth (1967) Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human
Behavior. The Hague: Mouton
Potter, Jonathan, and Margaret Wetherell (1987) Discourse and Social Psychology. London:
Sage
Saussure, Ferdinand de (1916/1966) Course in General Linguistics (transl. Wade Baskin).
New York: McGraw-Hill
Schegloff, Emmanuel (1987) “Some sources of misunderstanding in talk-in-interaction.”
Linguistics 25, pp 201-218
Schegloff, Emmanuel (1992) “To Searle on conversation: A note in return.” In Herman
Parrett and Jef Verschueren (eds.), On Searle on Conversation. Amsterdam:
Benjamins, pp 113-128
Seuren, Pieter A (2004) Chomsky's Minimalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Sinclair, John, and David Brazil (1982) Teacher Talk. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Sokal, Alan and Jean Bricmont (1999) Intellectual Impostures. London: Profile Books
Vološinov, Valentin Nikolaievich (1929/1973) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. NY:
Seminar
Weber, David J (ed.) (1987) Juan del Oso. Lima: Ministry of Education
Zima, Meter (1981) “Les mécanismes discursifs de l’idéologie,” Revue de l’Institut de
Sociologie 4

About the author
Throughout his career, Robert de Beaugrande has worked for a multi-disciplinary ‘science of text and
discourse’, of which ‘Language and Capitalism’ -- an unthinkable journal back when he began -- today
easily constitutes an welcome and indeed overdue domain for the application of a spiritedly ‘critical
analysis’. As he has explicitly argued in his recent books, ‘capitalism’ (money matters), as well as
‘socialism’ (society matters) are discursive constructs whose uncritical mass reception once split the
globe and now promises to shatter it altogether.