Advances in Spoken Discourse Analysis

John Sinclair

From a linguistic perspective, the original discourse analysis work, revisited in Chapter 1, was motivated by a wish to make a description of spoken interaction, using the insights of the philosopher J.L. Austin (1962). Speech act theory offered a functional theory of meaning. It also gave a partial explanation of a class of descriptive problems in linguistics, namely those which expose an inconsistency between the meaning given by a straightforward description in terms of an established analytical framework, and a function in discourse that requires an unconventional description. Austin’s notion of ‘illocutionary force’ was a powerful agent in reconceptualizing the way language relates to the world.

It seemed, indeed, that the conventional meaning of an utterance was but a stage in its interpretation; a preliminary statement of the organization of the components drawn from general knowledge about language of this kind to be found in grammars and dictionaries. When the utterance was viewed in context, another set of criteria applied, building on the analysis-for-meaning, and exhibiting the illocutionary force. So a statement like ‘It’s getting late’ could acquire the status of a threat, a warning, a hint, a complaint, etc., depending on how it was said and in what context. Its conventional meaning was unaffected.

This argument suggested that there should be established a separate level of language description, which used the output from the grammar and the dictionary as input and which showed the relation between the utterances and their function when deployed in discourse. This level was called the level of discourse.

In suggesting a form of organization for the new level, the Hallidayan model of a taxonomic hierarchy was adopted (Halliday 1961) and the level of discourse was held to relate to the level of form as form did to the level of phonology. The building blocks of discourse were the sentences and clauses of the grammar, but they took on new values. In the same way that the phoneme /s/ differs from the morpheme {s}, the sentence ‘I see’ differs from the move ‘I see’.

The rank scale of act—move—exchange—(sequence)—transaction soon concentrated on the exchange, much as grammar was concentrating on the clause. Little was investigated above the exchange because it was recog-

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