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’.
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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.
