We have already
argued that the data used in discourse analysis will inevitably reflect the
analysis particular interests. Moreover, the piece of data chosen for study can
only be partially analysed. If the investigation is undertaken by someone
primarily intersted in intonation, for example, the data selected has to meet
certain requirements. It must be spoken, audible, and depending on the level of
investigation involved, clear enough to allow instrumental analysis, and
accompanied by additional information on the age, sex, and linguistic
background of the speaker. In practice, any single investigation will have much
stricter data requirement than this rather general list. Having selected the
data, the investigator will study features such as the pitch, rhythm and
loudness of syllables in the data, and spend relatively little or no time
studyng the lexis or the morphology. In its most extreme form, this narrowing
of the investigation in terms of data selected and the analysis undertaken can
lead to a constructed text being carefully read aloud in a phonetics laboratory
by speaker of standard Southern British English. The result of the
investigation may then be used to make empirical claims about the intonation of
English. Although this is an extreme example, it serves to illustrate the
selectiveness which character linguistic investigation generally, and which is
also present to a certain degree in most analysis of discourse.
The data studied in
discourse analysis is always a fragment of discourse and the discourse analyst
always has to decide where the fragment begins and ends. How does the analyst
decide what constitutes a satisfactory unit for analysis?
There do exist ways
of identifying the boundaries of stretches of discourse which set one chunk of
discourse off from the rest. Formulaic expressions such as “Once upon a
time......and they lived happily ever after” can be used explicitly to mark the
boundaries of a fragment. Other familiar markers are “Have you heard the one
about.......?” and various other forms which can be used to mark the beginning
of a joke or anecdote. These markers can help the analyst decide where the
beginning of a coherent fragment of discourse occurs. However, speakers often
do not provide such explicit guidlines to help the analyst select chunks of
discourse for study.
In order to divide
up a lengthy recording of conversational data into chucks which can be
investigated in detail, the analyst is often forced to depend on intuitive
noyions about where one part of a conversation ends and another begins. There are,
of course points where one speaker stops and another starts speaking, but every
speaker-change does not necessarily terminate a particular coherent fragment of
conversation. Which point of speaker-change, among the many, could be treated
as, the end of one chunk of the conversation? This type of decision is
typically made by appealing to an intuitive notion of topic. The
conversationalist stop talking about ‘money’ and move on to ‘sex’. A chunk of
conversational discourse, then can be treated as a unit of some kind because it
is on a particular topic. The notion of topic is clearly an intuitively
satisfactory way of describing ‘about’ something and the next stretch ‘about’
something else. For it is appealed to very frequently in the discourse analysis
literature.
Yet the basic for
the identification of topic is rarely made explicit. In fact, topic could be
described as the most frequently used, unexplained, term in the analysis of
discourse (Brown, Gillian and George Yule, 1983:68-70).
