Discourse Analysis: A New Trend in Linguistic Research?
by Linguistic researches have shifted from their micro analyses (sounds, words, sentences, paragraphs) to a wider perspective of language use (discourse), simply to justify that language is not merely a means of communication, but also of how power relation is shared among language users to position them appropriately or inappropriately.
In the past, linguists were busy analyzing differences and similarities between two languages (the mother tongue and the target language) on the assumption that differences between the mother tongue and the target language (to learn) would cause learning problems. Conversely, similarities between the two would facilitate learning process. Later on, such an assumption was filed as a history since it was found out that language learning problems were typically similar without regards to the students’ mother tongues. In other words, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Cambodian students would probably encounter similar problems in for example learning English as a foreign or second language.
Language students, I believe, were also busy parsing sentences into components (phrases and words) in their syntactic analyses employing Chomkian phrase structure rules, leading to drawing tree diagrams for sentences. It is not bad at all since the mastery of phrase structure rules would guarantee the students’ grammatical accuracy, as a very strong basis for later use, such as developing their writing skills. Likewise, students were also occupied by studying the structure of words (morphology) and the sound patterns of language (phonolgy) including the pronunciation of words (both in isolation and in connected speech) such as found in phonetics.
But now, things seem to have changed. Language researches have widened their perspectives into a higher language stratum–discourse. Even, a language student is not only supposed to master the linguistic comptetence and performance (as defined in Chomskian linguistics), but also discourse competence in order to be able to communicate in a diverse discursive practices.
Starting from this point, academic papers on linguistics and language learning are now flooded with analyses of language based on Systemic Functional Linguistics, which views the use of language as making meanings–simultaneously three domains of meanings, namely ideational meanings (attributed to the field of the discourse), interpersonal meanings ( to the tenor of the discourse) and textual meanings (to the mode of the discourse).
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In ideational meanings, a lingusitic student tries to analyse ‘transitivity‘ or the verb processes in order to come up with the ‘ideology’ adopted in a certain text. Meanwhile, in interpersonal meanings, it deals with ‘mood’ analysis, in order to come up with how power relation is shared between language users. Finally, the textual meanings are analysed in terms of thematic progression in order to find out a certain text belongs to spoken or written text.
In realizing meanings (for a certain communication purpose), a language user certainly considers the contexts in which the language is used, namely the context of situation (to generate registers) and the context of culture (to generate genre). This, in turn, gives further inputs to discourse analysts in their works to analyze language as it is used to make meanings for communicative achievements.
Discourse analysis, it can be tentatively concluded, which has also been expanded into Critical Discourse Analysis, attempts to find out the ideology of language users–what kind of stance is adopted in producing particular texts (spoken or written) in order to position themselves and others in logical and contextual power relations. Is it a new trend?
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