a "doc" chronicle

Following the trail presented in Ian Parker’s (2002) article, I came across Austin’s (1962) book, How to do things with words. Parker connects discourse analysis with Austin and then Foucault, a connection I have been looking for, a missing piece of my puzzle, the missing link in my chain that connected to Gee’s discourse analysis.

In his article Parker wrote about Austin the follwing, “[I]n this account, language does not simply represent the world, or float on top of it, but does things, brings about or changes sates of affairs” (Section 3.1, second paragraph). The idea of language ‘doing things’ captured my attention and I headed to the library to find Austin’s text. I thought it would help me in my analysis, one that I am about to start, but that I am afraid of, since I am not really a language expert (whatever that could mean – Well, up to a certain point, that I have no formal education in language studies, only general, required courses; and that I have limited knowledge of how language works).

Still, Austin gave me some peace of mind. Throughout his lectures (used instead of chapters), she sustained “to say something is to do something” (p. 12). This kept me looking for more, since in the discussion forum (related to my data set), I will look at the activities people engage in when solving a posed problem or when answering a question. She also looked at the different types of sayings (what purpose do they have) and named them as locutionary (saying something with meaning), illocutionary (saying something with force), and perlocutionary (saying something that produces an effect or consequences). Austing pointed out that

“the occasion of an utterance [saying something] matters seriously, and that the words used are to some extent to be ‘explained’ by the ‘context’ in which they are designed to be or have actually been spoken in a linguistic interchange” (p. 100)

Here it is important to note the inclusion of the context in which the words are said, what makes me think that literal interpretation would not be enough. Still “[r]eference depends on knowledge at the time of utterance” (p. 143) she stated, allowing the space for different interpretations at different times and from different researchers. Even more, a whole sentence is not the object of study, “but the issuing of an utterance in a speech situation” (p. 138), what Gee (2005) calls a line in a stanza that is “devoted to a single topic, event, image, perspective or theme” (p. 127). According to Austin, a utterance is a declaration or articulation, a set of words with meaning, force, and consequences.

Austin ended her lectures by classifying utterances into five groups: verdictives (an exercise of judgment), exercitive (assertion of influence or power), commissive (assumption of obligation and declaration of intention), behabitive (adaptation of an attitude), and expositve (clarification of reasons, arguments, and communications) (p. 162). Some of these will become part of my work very soon.

So now I am headed to Foucault’s (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language. With this I must have all I need to finish editing the section on discourse analysis and also have a better idea of how to conduct discourse analysis. Even if I don’t I should stop here. The search can be endless and I don’t want to get lost in it.

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Austin, J. A. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language. NY: Pantheon Books.

Gee, J. P. (2005). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and method. [2nd edition]. NY, NY: Routledge.

Parker, I. (2002). Discourse resources in the discourse unit. Discourse Analysis Online, 1 (1). Retrieved on July 17, 2006 from http://www.shu.ac.uk/daol/article3s/v1/n1/a2/parker2002001-paper.html

Other references about How to Do Things with Words include:

Crary, A. The happy truth: J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. Inquiry 45, pp. 59-80.

Clary goes on to present a summary of Austin’s book. From a philosophical perspective she wants to clarify misconceptions of Austin’s work. To a certain point, reading this article is reading Austin’s book again. Clary emphasized “Austin is discouraging philosophers from studying the workings of language by looking at isolated sentences” (p. 66). Again the emphasis of context, “the role the circumstances in which a statements is made” (p. 73), is present here; that is, that meaning is not located in literal interpretations of text.

Kinzer, G. Excuses and other nonsense: Joan Retallack’s “How to Do Things with Words.” Contemporary Literature, 47 (1), pp. 62-90.

In this article, Kinzer analyzed Retallack’s poem, a personal interpretation of Austin’s book. An interesting question presented by Kinzer here is “Is language to be thought of as a formal system of meanings, or as a set of acts and practices that connects us to the world?” (p. 64). This alludes to the idea presented by Austin all along his lectures; that is, “saying something is doing something”. This is also an interesting connection that can be traced to Gee’s (2005) activity building task – “What activity or activities in this piece of language [is] being used [here] to enact …” (p. 12).

Pålshaugen, Ø. (2004). How to Do Things with Words: Towards a linguistic turn in action research? Concepts and Transformations, 9 (2), pp. 181-203.

This article presents action research and its application to the managerial world. At first I thought it would not help me, but the title kept me going, something had to be related to Austin’s work. Some of the ideas included in this article follow: including the participants in the research process, general vs. local knowledge, the importance of dialogue and planning together: all of these related to action research; that there are “kinds of discourses oriented towards understanding something … [and] doing something” (p. 194), that “discourses are always somehow located in time and space” – related to Austin’s book and discourse in general. But, what came as a surprise in this article was the section on the researcher’s process of self-reflection, starting at the end of page 197. Pålshaugen wrote

“A researcher who makes no effort to understand the societal/institutional context of his/her personal experience can hardly be called a social researcher. More precisely, a contextualization as part of one’s scientific presentation is necessary also to situate one’s own experience, that is, to acknowledge the historical and social embeddedness of the particular kind of research one is devoted to/involved in” (p. 199).

I would say then, that the experiences of the researcher are embedded in the research he/she conducts, even if he/she wanted to be “completely objective” – whatever that would mean.