Central tools and techniques

Discourse analysis, whether within or across speech events, involves the systematic investigation of signs that participants use to accomplish social action. If signs had univocal functions, discourse analysis would be easy—the analyst could simply consult a key that identifies what each type of sign means. But, in fact, any sign could signal many different types of social action. Signs only come to have clear meanings as relevant context emerges, and this happens as indexi-cal signs come consistently to presuppose aspects of the context. Participants and analysts engage in a back-and-forth process of identifying the context that key signs index and adopting an interpretation of voicing, evaluation, positioning, and social action that fits with this relevant context. Across an interaction or a pathway, relevant context and an interpretation of social action come to fit together, such that participants and analysts can presuppose how participants are being positioned and what type of social action they are engaged in.

In Tyisha’s case, as we saw in the last chapter, teachers and students use various signs that contribute to socially identifying her. Early in the interaction, for example, Tyisha says, “my goal is to win in Nintendo.” At the moment of utterance, this could have meant several things: that Tyisha is trying to win an academic argument with the teacher by describing one of her activities, that she is just joking that video games are one of her primary interests, that she is interested in video games to the exclusion of other activities like schoolwork, or various other possibilities. Participants and analysts select from among these interpretations as other signs in the discursive interaction signal relevant context for interpreting the utterance about Nintendo. As described earlier, by the time the teacher says, “so you are like an animal,” it has become presupposed that Tyisha is more like her cat and less like other students who plan their activities systematically and pursue long-range goals. By the end of the interaction, it becomes clear that teachers and students have identified her as less diligent, as a disruptive and unpromising student. At this point, indexical signs and this account of social action have come to reinforce each other and support a clear interpretation of what is happening in the narrating event.

We can use discourse analysis to study various aspects of discursive interaction. Halliday (1978) describes three “metafunctions”—general types of social action that speakers accomplish. The “ideational” function communicates ideas. The “interpersonal” function establishes relationships. And the “textual” function creates coherence across segments of discursive interaction. Any stretch of discourse always accomplishes all three metafunctions. The metafunctions are also interdependent, with each one being accomplished in part through contributions from the others. Different approaches to discourse analysis focus on different metafunctions, however. Some study how signs communicate information, while others study how elements of discourse cohere into textual wholes. In this book, we focus on the interpersonal metafunction—how participants establish relationships with others, position themselves interactionally, perform social actions, and evaluate both others and the social world. Because participants accomplish the interpersonal functions of discourse in part through ideational and textual mechanisms, we provide some strategies for analyzing these metafunctions. For example, we show how the denotational content of narrated events (established through the ideational metafunction) serves as a resource for social action in the narrating event, and we show how indexical signs cohere into configurations (through the textual metafunction) that make robust interpretations of social action possible. But we study the ideational and textual metafunctions only for their contributions to the interpersonal functions of discourse, because our approach to discourse analysis aims to uncover the social actions accomplished through language use.