Discourse interpretation : approaches and applications

245 Pages·2012·1.939 MB·English

by  Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova, Renata Povolna

Discourse Interpretation

Discourse Interpretation:
Approaches and Applications
Edited by
Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova and Renata Povolná
Discourse Interpretation: Approaches and Applications,
Edited by Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova and Renata Povolná
This book first published 2012
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2012 by Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova and Renata Povolná and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-3632-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3632-6
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Tables and Figures.........................................................................vii
Introduction................................................................................................ix
PART ONE:APPROACHES TO DISCOURSE INTERPRETATION
Chapter One.................................................................................................3
The Pretext of Interpretation
Henry Widdowson
Chapter Two..............................................................................................19
Linguistic Context, Pragmatic Context, Mental Context:
Meaning Construction and Interpretation via Contextualization
László Imre Komlósi
PART TWO:INTERPRETATION OF MEANING ACROSS DISCOURSES
Chapter Three............................................................................................41
The Strategic Structure of the English-language Compliment Discourse:
A Tentative Gender-sensitive Model
Oleg A. Alimuradov, Natalia S. Alimuradova and Maria A. Karatyshova
Chapter Four..............................................................................................55
Implicit Meanings and Racism in Political Advertising
Jan Chovanec
Chapter Five..............................................................................................79
Understanding and Believing: Interpreting Pragmatic Meanings
in Political Discourse
Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova
vi Table of Contents
Chapter Six..............................................................................................113
On Construction of High/Low Social Status in Crime Reports
Renata Jan(cid:254)a(cid:284)íková
Chapter Seven..........................................................................................131
Focusing as a Discourse Strategy of Information Presentation
Andrei Levitsky
Chapter Eight...........................................................................................149
Cooperation and Politeness in Literary Discourse: A Pragmatic
Stylistic Approach
Gabriela Miššíková
Chapter Nine............................................................................................163
The Use of the Epicene Pronoun in Written English:
Variation across Genres
Alejandro Parini
Chapter Ten.............................................................................................179
Enhancing Coherent Interpretation in Academic Written Discourse:
Cross-cultural Variation in the Use of Discourse Markers
Renata Povolná
Chapter Eleven........................................................................................209
Structural and Cognitive Stereotyping in Lifestyle Magazines
for Women
Renáta Tomášková
Contributors.............................................................................................223
Index........................................................................................................227
LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES
Tables
3-1 The distinctive features of “mental space 1” vs. “mental space 2”...43
4-1 Preferred and dispreferred meanings................................................72
10-1 Causal DMs in RAs by English and Czech expert writers..............191
10-2 Causal hypotactic and paratactic DMs in academic writing............192
10-3 Contrastive DMs in RAs by English and Czech expert writers.......195
10-4 Contrastive hypotactic and paratactic DMs in academic writing....199
10-5 Variation in the use of more frequent causal DMs in RAs by English
and Czech expert writers and in theses by Czech Ss..........................200
10-6 Variation in the use of more frequent contrastive DMs in RAs by
English and Czech expert writers and in theses by Czech Ss............202
Figures
3-1 The correlation of the mental space with linguistic phenomena.........43
3-2 The goals of the English-language compliment discourse..................48
3-3 The tactical structure of the appraisal strategy in compliment
discourse..............................................................................................49
3-4 The tactical structure of the cooperative strategy in compliment
discourse..............................................................................................50
3-5 The tactical structure of the manipulative strategy in compliment
discourse..............................................................................................51
4-1 A campaign poster from an election for the Senate of the Czech
Republic (Autumn 2010).....................................................................59
9-1 Frequencies of epicene pronouns in the Social Sciences corpus.......170
9-2 Distribution of epicene variants by type of antecedent in the Social
Sciences corpus..................................................................................171
9-3 Frequencies of epicene pronouns in the Newspaper corpus..............172
9-4 Distribution of epicene variants by type of antecedent in the
Newspaper Corpus.............................................................................172
9-5 Social Sciences and Newspaper corpora compared..........................174
11-1 Not just any doorsteps…1................................................................215
11-2 Not just any doorsteps…2................................................................216
11-3 Structural stereotype taxonomy.......................................................217

INTRODUCTION
OLGA DONTCHEVA-NAVRATILOVA
AND RENATA POVOLNÁ
Discourse interpretation is a key aspect of the process of human
communication in which interactants rely on established social practices in
a particular context while striving to achieve their communicative
intentions by the use of language. The complexity of meaning interpretation
in discourse stems from the fact that discourse processing is not based
only on what is written or said, but is a dynamic process, involving the
negotiation of meaning between the speaker and the hearer in the context
of utterance.
Before considering the issue of discourse interpretation in all its
complexity, it is necessary to define the term discourse itself. Within the
heterogeneous field of discourse analysis, there seem to be three broad
understandings of the term discourse: (1) language in use, (2) a stretch of
language beyond the sentence, and (3) a culturally, institutionally and
ideologically determined social practice (Schiffrin, Tannen and Hamilton
2001). While the first two are firmly rooted in linguistics, the last view of
discourse, which is emblematic of scholars associated with critical
discourse analysis, reflects an eclectic and multidisciplinary approach to
the analysis of social behaviour mediated by the use of language. This
variation in the understanding of discourse reflects the wide scope of
discourse analysis, which is considered to be “one of the most vast and
least defined areas in linguistics” (Schiffrin 1994: 406).
The authors of this volume approach discourse from a functional
viewpoint. Generally they share the view that language can be seen as
a system of meaning potential (Halliday 1978: 39) which is instantiated
through text in discourse. Within the interpretative process affected by the
background knowledge of and the mutual relationship between the
participants involved in communication, the meaning of a text is
negotiated and recreated by interactants (Mey 1991: 404) in a particular
context so as to reflect their communicative intentions. Thus discourse is
derived from a text in the process of purposeful interaction via verbal and
x Introduction
non-verbal means between a speaker/writer and a listener/reader which
takes place in a certain context (Seidlhofer and Widdowson 1999: 207).
This approach assumes the potential of discourse to (re)construct a
representation of reality which is affected by the point of view of the
interactants, i.e. in the process of a particular interpretative decoding the
hearer/reader creates his/her own discourse from the text by assigning it
intentionality (not necessarily the one intended by the speaker/writer) and
recreating its meaning. As a result, discourse interpretation cannot be seen
as definite and constant; it is rather viewed as being more or less
temporary and constantly open to reinterpretation in the light of the
intentions and purposes that interactants are striving to achieve in a
particular social, historical and situational context (cf. Widdowson 2004).
The research presented in this volume addresses discourse
interpretation from the perspectives of (critical) discourse analysis,
pragmatics, stylistics and sociolinguistics in an attempt to show that the
application of different approaches to the analysis of meaning in various
settings may contribute to a better understanding of the interpretative
process.
The book is organized into two parts: the first focuses on approaches to
discourse interpretation, while the second comprises essays by linguists
conducting research in the fields of pragmatics, discourse analysis and
stylistics who investigate various aspects of meaning interpretation in
different genres and types of discourse.
The first part, Approaches to discourse interpretation, comprises two
chapters which address methodological issues in discourse interpretation.
Widdowson challenges the assumption shared by many critical discourse
analysts that significance can be assigned to texts by means of an analysis
of their linguistic features. He argues that the assigning of meanings to
texts in isolation from particular contexts and pretexts is pragmatically
invalid and reflects a conceptual confusion between analysis and
interpretation on the one hand and signification and significance on the
other. The author views pretext as the prime factor regulating the
contextualization of meaning in discourse, thus arguing that the
interpretation of meaning derived by discourse participants is always
conditional and indeterminate.
Approaching discourse interpretation from a cognitive perspective,
Komlósi presents arguments for his claim that the conceptualizations of
situations versus those of contexts play a decisive role in natural language
processing and language use and that discourse analysts need to
acknowledge different types of ontologies in order to delineate linguistic
meaning, pragmatic meaning and context-sensitive meaning. In harmony