Pergamon Language & Communication, Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 71 74, 1997

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S P E C I A L I S S U E O N T H E I M P O R T A N C E OF T H E O R Y IN D I S C O U R S E A N A L Y S I S

ELAINE JONES* and GAlL BRENDEL VIECHNICKI

Introduction Our work on this journal began with a question which we had only rarely seen articulated in research on discourse and conversation. We asked, how does theory influence the ana- lysis of discourse and conversation? Our interest in this topic was piqued by the claim implicit in some current research that n o theoretical framework needs to be referred to. The data are said to 'speak for themselves', and, the claim goes, the results of the analysis are thereby purer, unsullied by complicating theory. We are reminded, however, of a quote by Milford Wolpoff:

The data do not speak for themselves. I have been in rooms with data and listened very carefully. They never said a word. (Milford Wolpoff, 1975).

All humor aside, we believe that discourse analysts who strive for completely 'theory- free' analyses are misguided. Various routine decisions that a researcher must make betray the place of theory in that analysis. For example, theory is implicated in what interactions a researcher chooses to look at, and the transcription conventions which are used to represent them. Also, the role that theory plays often goes unrecognized when decisions are made concerning the identity of units in talk. (See Deborah Schiffrin's paper, p. 75, this issue). Following Schiffrin, we believe that discourse or conversation analysis is bound up with theory in interesting and varied ways, regardless of a researcher's claim to the contrary, and it is important to at least acknowledge its influence.

For those analyses which do admit to being framed by a theory of discourse or con- versation, the role that theory plays is often quite murky. We believe that discourse ana- lysts working within any theoretical school could benefit from explicitly articulating, and even better, questioning, the theoretical assumptions that underlie their work. We know that theory informs analyses of discourse in various interesting and subtle ways, but it seems that too often researchers do not give that theory more than a passing mention. We believe that when we fail to evaluate our assumptions, we may fail to capture important aspects of the phenomena we are attempting to account for. And in some cases, failure to examine theoretical assumptions may even result in a highly misleading analysis.

We invited six authors actively working in discourse analysis to discuss this and related problems, starting with questions such as the following: How do the particular tools and assumptions discourse theories of impose structure on the data they attempt to explain?

*General correspondence relating to this issue should be addressd to Ms. Elaine Jones, University of Chicago, Depar tment of Linguistics, 1010 East 59th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637, U.S.A. E-mail: emjones@midway.u- chicago.edu. Correspondence relating to a specific paper should be addressed to the author.

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72 E. JONES and G. B. VIECHNICKI

And, how do the particular tools and assumptions of these theories influence the nature of the conclusions reached? Their papers represent a wide range of topics and points of view, but each addresses the overall theme in interesting and revealing ways. Some authors (Birner, Hopper, Schiffrin) show how recognizing the import of one's theoretical con- structs and making any necessary adjustments leads to a more accurate and informed analysis. Others (Schiffrin, Viechnicki) stress the importance of incorporating ideas from different theoretical viewpoints. One author (Yerian), whom we invited to respond to a specific review article, discusses why care must be taken to represent the theoretical posi- tions of others accurately. Finally, all of the authors (Birner, Duncan, Hopper, Schiffrin, Viechnicki, Yerian) demonstrate the value of stating one's assumptions explicitly so that both they themselves and their readers may clearly understand the significance of their work.

Deborah Schiffrin's paper, entitled 'Theory and method in discourse analysis: What context for what unit?', examines the consequences of some very basic assumptions about language, communication, and analytic methods which, although taken for granted in much work on discourse, can nevertheless be problematic. To illustrate these consequen- ces, she re-analyzes some excerpts from her previous work. For example, Schiffrin (1994) has shown that there clauses, such as because there's this guy Louie Gelman, reveal certain principles of information structure. However, in this current paper she argues that the process whereby she had identified there clauses (using certain syntactic and intonational cues) had led her to overlook other interesting analytical possibilities. Her re-analysis shows that employing different kinds of cues leads to a view of such clauses not just as units in themselves, but as part of a structured sequence within a larger unit of discourse (p. 75, this issue). Thus, her original analysis, which was based on routine and implicit theoretical assumptions about what kinds of features are relevant to the analysis of there clauses, was not wrong, but incomplete. With this and a number of other revealing examples, Schiffrin demonstrates the value of being aware of one's theoretical assump- tions from the start, and of looking at the same data in light of different kinds of assumptions at different levels of analysis.

Much like Schiffrin, Paul J. Hopper explores the consequences of an implicit theoretical assumption for discourse analysis. Hopper 's paper 'Discourse and the category "verb" in English' argues that the traditional notion of 'verb' as a simple word class is insufficient to characterize the full range of verbal expressions that speakers routinely use in discourse. In examining the use of verbal expressions in actual English narratives, Hopper shows that verbal properties are usually distributed discontinuously over a number of different constituents in a clause (e.g. keep on going, got a brief glimpse of, start to turn). Only in special discourse contexts are they contained within a single verb (Hopper, p. 93, this issue). Hence, using the traditional term 'verb' to talk about characteristics of actual English discourse can be highly misleading. He discusses some of the factors which have contributed to the traditional view of English verbs, and argues that this view can be maintained only if an analysis is limited to the isolated, decontextualized sentences of the sort constructed by linguists and philosophers. And because discourse analysts certainly cannot be limited to decontextualized sentences, Hopper 's work is a lesson to them: even something as seemingly 'theory-free' as the category 'verb' is actually a theoretical assumption worthy of reconsideration.

In her paper 'An empirical analysis of participant intentions: Discourse in a graduate seminar', Gail Brendel Viechnicki, like Schiffrin, demonstrates the value of combining different theoretical viewpoints in an analysis. But whereas Schiffrin focuses on the

SPECIAL ISSUE ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THEORY IN DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 73

importance of implicit assumptions, Viechnicki focuses on the explicit assumptions of two theoretical approaches which seem to conflict with each other. One approach is Conver- sation Analysis (CA), an empirically-based approach which formulates principles of dis- course using only observed physical and linguistic cues. In contrast to this is Erving Goffman's sociological approach, which relies on the notion of participant intentions - - mental states which must be inferred by the analyst - - to distinguish various speaker and hearer roles. Such mental constructs are explicitly rejected by proponents of CA. Despite this conflict in ideology, however, Viechnicki argues that to give a revealing account of her graduate seminar data, it is desirable to use theoretical tools from both approaches. Spe- cifically, she uses the physical and linguistic cues of CA, such as shifts in gaze, restarts, and hedges, to identify changes in participant roles. For example, she discusses the use of hedges (such as 'I just think' or ' I 'm just saying') in several of the students' utterances. Viechnicki interprets these as signaling the assumption of a special speaker role which she calls the 'intellectual figure'. Viechnicki then uses the concept of the 'intellectual figure' to show one way in which students resolve the duality of a graduate seminar, which is like an informal discussion among peers on the one hand, but on the other hand, like a tradi- tional formal classroom (Viechnicki, p. 103, this issue). Using many such examples from her seminar data, Viechnicki demonstrates how two conflicting theories may fruitfully be combined to produce a more complete and insightful analysis.

In her paper, 'The linguistic realization of inferrable information', Betty J. Birner examines the theoretical category which Prince (1981) calls 'inferrable information'. In the same way that Hopper challenges the implicit assumptions underlying the category 'verb' in English, Birner challenges the implicit assumptions which lead Prince (1981) to distin- guish between 'inferrable' and 'evoked' information. Birner focuses on four marked syn- tactic constructions in English and Farsi which have previously been shown to be relevant to information structure. She demonstrates that, with respect to syntax, so-called inferra- ble information behaves no differently than explicitly evoked information. However, she also argues that, with respect to intonation, the two categories must remain distinct. Most significantly, Birner points out that both 'inferrable' and 'evoked' information are in fact inferrable, which explains their identical syntactic behavior. However, the inferences involved in linking the current utterance to prior context are based on different kinds of relationships for 'inferrable' versus 'evoked' information, which explains their differences with respect to intonation (Birner, p. 133, this issue). Thus, in showing that the two cate- gories of information are distinct on a level different from that implied by the very terms 'inferrable' and 'evoked', Birner invites discourse analysts to reconsider what exactly they mean when they use these terms.

Starkey Duncan, Jr. presents a different sort of perspective on the theme of this issue in his paper entitled 'Early parent-child interaction grammar prior to language acquisition'. Duncan focuses not on what may be lost by taking certain assumptions for granted (as do Birner, Hopper, and Schiffrin) or by limiting oneself to a single theoretical approach (as discussed by Schiffrin and Viechnicki), but rather he shows what may be gained through detailed analyses which employ well-defined, explicit, and empirically-driven theoretical assumptions. Duncan presents his own approach to the structure of face-to-face interac- tion, poin.ting out that his aim of discovering the rules of interaction that interlocutors share (hence the term 'interaction grammar') is common to other contemporary approa- ches such as Conversation Analysis and Context Analysis. He then illustrates his approach by presenting several case studies of interaction structure in parent-child routines during the

74 E. JONES and G. B. V1ECHNICKI

child's first year. Duncan 's studies show that the orderliness in parent-child interactions may be described in terms of finite and structured sets of rules, which he presents in the form of flow charts. Although Duncan 's studies deal with the communication of pre-lin- guistic children, the structures posited in this paper may provide a basis for explaining later language acquisition, as Duncan himself suggests (Duncan, p. 149, this issue). Most significantly for this special issue, Duncan presents us with principles of communication

which bear on principles of adult discourse within particular languages. Keli Yerian's goal is different yet again from that of the other authors. Her paper,

entitled ' F r o m stereotypes of gender difference to stereotypes of theory' , examines the dangers of misinterpreting and misrepresenting someone else's theoretical assumptions. This invited response to Hayley Davis ' (1996) review of Deborah Tannen 's (1996) Gender

and Discourse argues that many of Davis ' criticisms exaggerate and distort Tannen's views. For example, on several occasions, Davis questions Tannen's reliance on determi- nate and decontextualized linguistic and social categories. With examples from Gender

and Discourse and other work by Tannen, Yerian shows that Tannen in fact vehemently argues against the view of intersubjectivity that is being ascribed to her. Yerian claims that by attacking extreme positions which Tannen does not actually hold, Davis fails to explore the important commonalit ies and subtle differences that do in fact exist between Tannen 's view, Davis ' view, and the views of other researchers of language and gender. While misrepresentations may be to some extent inevitable in any scholarly work, Yerian suggests that they are also to some extent avoidable. Yerian's discussion thus provides an important cautionary note to all of us who are concerned with examining theoretical issues in discourse analysis.

Though they represent differing interests and points of view, each of the articles in this special issue illustrates the importance of the role of theory in discourse analysis. The first step toward understanding its importance is, as Schiffrin writes in her conclusion, 'articulating both our assumptions and their consequences' (Schiffrin, p. 75, this issue). The articles in this issue do just that. We believe that all of you who read them will, like we did, come away with a better understanding of how and why discourse theory is so vital to discourse analysis.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank the regular editors of Language and Communication, Talbot Taylor and Roy Harris, for the opportunity to guest-edit this special issue. We also thank Professor Taylor for his invaluable advice and support during all stages of our work on this project.

R E F E R E N C E S Davis, H. (1996) Theorizing women's and men 's language. Language and Communication 16, 71-79.

Prince, E. (1981) Toward a taxonomy of given/new information. In Radical Pragmatics, ed. P. Cole, pp. 223-254. Academic Press, New York.

Schiffrin, D. (1994) Approaches to Discourse. Blackwell, Cambridge. Tannen, D. (1996) Gender and Discourse. Oxford University Press, New York.