Workshop "Introduction to discourse analysis of social and private speech"

This workshop is designed for participants with little or no background in discourse analysis. Its overall aim is to introduce participants to the basic concepts and the concrete practice of conversational analysis. Specifically, there are two main objectives: 1) to provide an overview and demonstration of discourse analysis, and 2) to provide an opportunity for participants to engage in hands-on exercises analyzing samples of speech data for themselves. At the completion of the workshop, participants are expected to be familiar with: a) the procedures for analyzing speech utterances; b) the practical experience of applying these procedures to speech data; c) the tools for classifying speech acts; and d) the practical experience of inferring speech acts from linguistic and paralinguistic evidence.

Part 1 : Participants will be introduced to the basic tools of discourse and speech-act analysis that were developed by John Dore (1977b; 1979). A sample of social speech discourse will be presented, and the technical procedures involved in analyzing this conversation on an utterance-by-utterance basis will be demonstrated. In particular, participants will be shown how to parse every utterance into two levels of communication: first, the “literal” or “textual” communication (i.e., the words and their meanings), and then the “figurative” or “contextual” meta-communication (i.e., the attitudes and intentions behind the words). The two major components of this analysis will be discussed in relation to Vygotsky’s concepts of “meaning” and “sense”. Also, the relationship between utterances in a dialogue will be discussed in terms of the relations between speech acts, and in terms of Bakhtin’s concept that utterances always “respond” to prior utterances. This part of the workshop will conclude with a brief discussion of the special considerations involved in adapting the discourse analysis of social speech to an individual’s private speech conversation.

Part 2 :  In the second half of the workshop, participants will be given an opportunity to actually practice applying the procedures they were shown in Part 1. A second sample of speech data will be provided for this purpose, along with the classification table of basic speech acts developed by Dore, as well as scoring sheets for participants to record their analytical decisions. Participants will practice parsing each utterance into its component parts and then inferring and classifying the basic speech acts. This exercise is intended to familiarize participants not only with the procedures and classification tools, but also with the activity of basing inferential judgments about a speaker’s intentions on concrete linguistic and paralinguistic evidence—rather than on intuition. A brief discussion of participants’ experiences with the hands-on exercise will follow. Finally, the workshop will conclude with a brief discussion of the practical limitations and constraints of discourse analysis, as well as its potential for revealing the internal structure of speech.

Bibliography and Recommended Readings:

Austin, J. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). Discourse in the novel. In M.M. Bakhtin, The dialogical imagination. (M. Silverstein, Trans.) (pp. 259-422). Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1986). The problem of speech genres. In M.M. Bakhtin, Speech genres and other late essays (pp. 60-102). Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.
Dore, J. (1977a). Children’s illocutionary acts. In R. Freedle (Ed.), Discourse production and comprehension, Vol. 1. Discourse processes: Advances in research and theory (pp. 227-244). New Jersey: Ablex.
Dore, J. (1977b). "Oh them sheriff": a pragmatic analysis of children's responses to questions. In S. Ervin-Tripp & C. Mitchell-Kernan (Eds.), Child discourse (pp. 139-163). New York: Academic Press.
Dore, J. (1979). Conversational acts and the acquisition of language. In E. Ochs & B.B. Shieffelin (Eds.), Developmental pragmatics (pp. 339-361. New York: Academic Press.
Feigenbaum, P. (2004, November). Empirical evidence of the many uses of private and inner speech. Paper presented at the First International Symposium on the Self-Regulatory Functions of Language, Madrid, Spain.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky: Volume 1. Problems of general psychology. (R. W. Rieber & A. S. Carton, Eds., N. Minick, Trans.). New York: Plenum Press. (Original work published 1934)