assignment 5: Approaches to Discourse

·         Speech act  (Austin 1955, Searle 1969)

It focuses on interpretation rather than the production of utterances in discourse.

·         Interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1982, Goffman 1959-1981)

It centrally concerned with the importance of context in the production and interpretation of discourse. unit of analysis of interactional sociolinguistics  is the turn in conversation.

·         Ethnography of Communication (Dell Hymes (1972b, 1974)

Concerned with understanding the social context of linguistic interactions: ‘who says what to whom, when, where. Why, and how’. The unit of analysis is speech event.

·         Pragmatics (Grice 1975, Leech 1983, Levinson 1983)

At the base of pragmatic approach to conversation analysis is Gricean’s co-operative principle (CP) which seeks to account for not only how participants decide what to DO next in conversation, but also how interlocutors go about interpreting what the previous speaker has just done.

·         Conversation Analysis (CA)  (Harold Garfinkel 1960s-1970s)

CA is a branch of ethnomethodology. There are two grossly apparent facts: a) only one person speaks at a time, and b) speakers change recurs.

·         Variation Analysis (Labov 1972a, Labov and Waletzky1967)

Although typically focused on social and linguistic constraints on semantically equivalent variants, the approach has also been extended to texts.