van Dijk on the Study of Discourse
Disentangling the discourse; dissecting the dialogue
I’ve been trying to round out my understanding of discourse and dialogue in the last few weeks, and I’ve come across the book Discourse as Structure and Process edited by Teun A. van Dijk through a friend’s recommendation. This blog post will summarize some big-picture thoughts van Dijk advances in an “introduction of introductions,” and hopefully may serve as a frame of reference for examinations of discourse—or for what folks might possibly mean when they use the term “discourse.”
van Dijk rightfully starts off the chapter by distinguishing between common-sense and everyday usage of “discourse” and the more scholarly and academic framings you may find in journals or other venues (this one?). van Dijk compares the task of defining “discourse” to that of defining things like “language,” “communication,” or “culture”—that they’re so amorous and complex they’re exceptionally difficult to define; yet, that doesn’t make the effort a waste of time. In fact, van Dijk points out that discourse studies is usually the field which attempts definitions of those broad and complex concepts.
As intimated in popular use, a distinction can be drawn between discourse as a form of language use and discourse as a descriptor or designator for the “ideas or philosophies” advanced by members of a certain community—for example, the discourse of critical pedagogy, or the discourse of automobile maintenance. Interestingly, van Dijk points out that discourse analysis of this type “may not pay attention to language use at all.” However, van Dijk emphasizes that scholarly work around discourse recognizes it as “a form of language use.”
Interestingly, van Dijk notes the functional aspects of discourse, and emphasizes the communicative event as essential for discourse studies. The communicative event involves the language itself as well as the who, how, why and when of the discourse examined. In this way, it may be illustrative to describe a communicative event as verbal interaction. Thus, we’ve landed at three main parts of discourse: (1) language, (2) communication, (3) and interaction. van Dijk helpfully observes here the intersection of several fields in the study of discourse—namely, linguistics, psychology and social science.
Finally, van Dijk addresses what he calls modes of discourse: text and talk. Primarily, usage of discourse notes talk, and this has been the case with much of discourse analysis to date. While it is relatively clear that talk is a type of interaction in the common sense (recall the interruptibility and spontaneity of dialogue I’ve written about here), text does not seem to have this interactive quality. However, to complicate this view, multimedia and new technologies have clearly generated what some may call “interactive texts,” and we can—when pressed—think of examples of “written interaction.”
Helpfully, van Dijk complicates these descriptions by noting that:
in the same way as ‘text’ is mostly used to refer to the product of writing, ‘talk’ is often studied as the product of speaking or as ongoing interaction, without paying much attention to the language users involved or the other aspects of the whole communicate event. Theoretically, it is however emphasized that discourse studies should deal both with the properties of text and talk and with what is usually called the context, that is, the other characteristics of the social situation or the communicative event that may systematically influence text or talk.
I’m finding van Dijk’s overview very helpful with disentangling talk, text, dialogue, dialectic, orality, literacy, and the like. I look forward to providing some further recaps and reflections here as I work through the text.
Reference: Van Dijk, T. A. (Ed.). (1997). Discourse as structure and process (Vol. 1). Sage.