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ANALYSING DISCOURSE
(Textual analysis for social research)
NORMAN FAIRCLOUGH
2. TEXTS, SOCIAL EVENTS AND SOCIAL PRACTICES
In this book texts are seen as parts of SOCIAL EVENTS which are influenced by (but also has an influence on) social structures and social practices. Infact one way in which people can act and interact in social events is to speak or to write, but it is not the only way because some social events have a highly textual character and others don’t. We can distinguish two casual “powers” which shape texts: SOCIAL STRUCTURES and SOCIAL PRACTICES and, on the other hand, SOCIAL AGENTS (the people involved in social events).
TEXTS AND SOCIAL AGENTS
Social agents are not “free” agents because they are socially constrained, but at the same time their actions aren’t totally socially determined. Social agents set up (assemblano, fondano) relations between elements of texts and there are structural constraints (limiti) on this process: for instance if the social event is an interview, there are genre conventions for how the talk should be organized. But this still leaves social agents with freedom in texturing texts.
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOCIAL EVENTS, SOCIAL
PRACTICES AND SOCIAL STRUCTURES
Social structures are abstract entities which define a set of possibilities. (examples of social structures are economic structure, language, class system…) The relationship between what is structurally possible and what
actually happens, between structures and events is very complex (annamo bene -.-) because there are intermediate organizational entities between them. We can call these entities “social pratices” (examples are practices of teaching and practices of management in educational institutions). We can say that social practices are ways of controlling certain structural possibilites and the exclusion of others in particular areas of social life.
LANGUAGE is an element of social at all levels. Between languages and texts
we have “orders of discourse” which are networks of social
practices in its language aspects. The elements of orders of discourse are not nouns and sentences but discourses, genres and styles. These elements select certain possibilities defined by languages and exclude others (as social practices do, as we said before). Schematically:
- Social structures: languages
- Social practices: orders of discourse
- Social events: texts
As we move from abstract structures towards concrete events, it becomes more difficult to separate language from other social elements.
SOCIAL PRACTICES
The important point about social practices from the perspective of this book is that they articulate discourse (language) together with other non discoursal social elements. We might see any social practice as an articulation of these elements:
- Action and interaction
- Social relations
- Persons (with beliefs, attitudes, histories…)
- The material world
and the values of participants (interpersonal) and connect parts of text together and texts with their situational contexts (textual).
Fairclough talks about 3 major types of text meaning rather than functions:
- Action
- Representation
- Identification
We can see Action, Representation and Identification simultaneously through whole texts and in small parts of texts. There is a correspondence between Action and genres, Representation and discourses, Identification and styles and they are elements of orders of discourse at the level of social practices. When we analyse specific texts as part of specific events we are doing two things.
- Looking at texts in terms of the 3 aspects of meaning. Action, Representation and Identification and how these are realized in the features of texts (vocabulary, grammar etc.)
- Making a connection between the concrete social events and more abstract social practices by asking which genres, discourses and styles are drawn and how are articulated in the text.
DIALECTICAL RELATIONS
The relation between the three aspects of meaning is a dialectical relation. Infact these aspects are not totally separate because they are dialectically related.
MEDIATION
Mediation according to Silverstone (1999) involves the “movement of meaning”, from one social practice to another, from one event to another, from
a text to another. Mediation doesn’t involve just individual texts or tyoes of texts, but “chains” (catene), “networks” of texts. Example -> a story in a newspaper. Journalists write newspaper articles using a variety of resources (written documents, interviews, speeches…) and the articles are read by those who buy the newspaper creating a “chain” of texts that includes different types of texts. The capacity to influence or control processes of mediation is an important aspect of power in contemporary societies. GENRE CHAINS are different genres which are regularly linked together. Genre chains contribute to the possibility of actions which trascend differences in space and time, linking together social events in different social practices, different countries, different times facilitating the capacity for “action at a distance”, a feature of contemporary globalization and the excercise of power.
Much action and interaction in modern societies is “mediated” : mediated interaction is “action at a distance”, action involving participants who are distant from one another in space and time which depends upon some communication technology (tv, internet…). The genres of governance are essentially mediated genres specialized for “action at a distance”. Change in genres is a change in how different genres are combined together and how new genres develop through combination of existing genres. A chain (catena) of events may involve a chain of different interconnected texts which express a chain of different genres.
In text analysis the “internal” (semantic, gramamtical, lexical ) relations of texts are connected with their “external” relations (to other elements of social events and to social practices and social structures) through the mediation of an “interdiscursive” analysis.
SUMMARY: MEANING RELATIONS BETWEEN SENTENCES AND CLAUSES
The major semantic relations between sentences and clauses are: Causal
including Reason, Consequence and Purpose, Consequence and
Purpose , Conditional, Temporal, Additive, Elaborative
(including Exemplification and Rewording) and Contrastive/concessive
and their realization is through Paratactic, Hypotactic and Embedding (one clause functions as an element of another clause, for example its subject or as an element of a phrase) grammatical relations. There are social research issues that focus on these semantic relations which are
- LEGITIMATION which involves 4 strategies: Authorization (legitimation by a reference to the authority of tradition, law, custom and insitutional authority); Rationalization (legitimation by reference to the utility of institutionalized actions and it is the most explicit form of legitimation); Moral Evaluation (legitimation by reference to value systems); Mythopoesis (legitimation expressed by narrative).
- HEGEMONY, EQUIVALENCE AND DIFFERENCE : Laclau and Mouffe (1995) theorized the political process and hegemony in terms of the simultaneous working of 2 different “logics”, a “logic of difference” which creates differences and divisions and a “logic of equivalence” which subverts existing differences and divisions. This is a general characterization of social processes of classification: people in all social practices are continuously dividing and combining, producting and subverting divisions and differences. This can be applied to the textual moment of social events because also texts are constantly combining some elements and dividing others.
- APPEARANCE AND REALITY
HIGHER-LEVEL SEMANTIC RELATIONS
