Michael Toolan

What is critical discourse analysis and why are people saying such terrible things about it?1

Increasingly, discourse makes and sustains the worlds we live in. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is one form of a justifiably reflective and suspicious inspection of how discourses shape and frame us; and it is explicitly intent on making a difference, and not merely describing extant conditions. Why, then, has it met with some resistance from language analysts? For CDA to make more of a difference, I argue it needs to critique some of its own theoretical distinctions (e.g. between description and interpretive explanation), it needs to be more critical and more demanding of the text linguistics it uses, it must strive for greater thoroughness and strength of evidence in its argumentation while pursuing simplicity of presentation, and it must not shrink from prescribing correction or reform of particular hegemonizing discourses.

Narrative progression in the short story : a corpus stylistic approach

One of our most valuable capacities is our ability partly to predict what will come next in a text. But linguistic understanding of this remains very limited, especially in genres such as the short story where there is a staging of the clash between predictability and unpredictability. This book proposes that a matrix of narrativity-furthering textual features is crucial to the reader’s forming of expectations about how a literary story will continue to its close. Toolan uses corpus linguistic software and methods, and stylistic and narratological theory, in the course of delineating the matrix of eight parameters that he sees as crucial to creating narrative progression and expectation. The book will be of interest to stylisticians, narratologists, corpus linguists, and short story scholars.

The Significations of Representing Dialect in Writing

This article reviews some of the constraints and implications involved in the reporting of speech in fiction and elsewhere, paying particular attention to some of the issues that attend the representation of dialect. A number of cases are discussed, but a specific focus is the apparent absence of rendering of urban black South African speech in the fiction of the pre-eminent contemporary white South African writers, J.M. Coetzee and N. Gordimer. This absence of ‘giving voice’ is interpreted as an avoidance strategy, seemingly necessary but certainly troubled, given the charged socio-political context, in which for these authors to represent the voices of those individuals could too easily be construed as appropriation. In this case; as in others discussed, questions of power, distance versus affinity, and rights of free expression and of silence are involved.

Narrative Progression in the Short Story: First Steps in a Corpus Stylistic Approach

I am interested in the putative textual signalings of narrative progression, and thereafter the reader expectations that these foster; I am trying to identify such signalings (or narrative prospection, as it is also called) with new research methods, namely those of corpus linguistics. Research of this kind, blending a literary interest with use of corpus tools, is coming to be known as corpus stylistics (or more narrowly, corpus narratology). For readers of this journal I assume that neither explaining nor justifying an interest in narrative progression is necessary, so I will discuss this relatively briefly. I will spend a little more time outlining what corpus stylistics entails and what its limitations are; and then I will share some ways in which I have tried to make it useful in the pursuit of my research interest, the textualization of narrative prospection. Narrative prospection is itself only a stage in the experiential sequence of interest to me. I assume that the texts prospections cumulatively and serially guide the reader to expect the story currently being read to continue and terminate in one way rather than others (at the least, the prospections will foster probabilistic expectations). The ways in which the subsequent narrative text confirms or flouts

An Integrational Linguistic View of Coming into Language

An ecology of language acquisition (or, as I prefer to term it, of coming into language) must take proper account of the environment that bears on the phenomenon, interacts with it, and shapes it. An ecology of anything has to be as holistic and inclusive an account of that thing as possible, rather than an account that must continually acknowledge post hoc the influence of factors previously denominated as ‘external’ or ‘contextual’ . For example, if contemporary media such as the Internet, computer games and mobile phones are changing what counts as language acquisition, these cannot be mentioned as mere afterthoughts—any more than we can pretend that coming into language proficiency in a society that places great store by literacy is no different from attaining language proficiency in an oral community. In ways which chime with the views of Leather and Van Dam (Introduction), and Fettes (Chapter 2), I propose that an ecological account of coming into language cannot begin by assuming that a language is a virtual object— an auto nomo us system of u n its and rules for t he i r com bin ation and then represent the child’s task as the ‘problem’ of figuring out what the main units and rules happen to be. An ecological account of coming into language must begin where all the observational evidence suggests that the child begins: with no sense of the world as divided into the linguistic and the non-linguistic; with indeed only a quite blurred and attenuated interest in the world at all the latter only gradually coming into fuller view as basic needs for food and warmth and attention are met in patterned ways from particular communicating caregivers.

Narrative: Linguistic and Structural Theories

This article surveys some of the most influential theory and commentary in the Western linguistic tradition on narrative as a genre or interactional activity. The fundamental domains of story and discourse, the structure and grammar of plot, and the complex narrative manipulations of temporal order and pace that characterize sophisticated literary narratives are all considered. The distinctive feature approach to character and effects of naming and of the dramatizing of setting are also outlined, before a fuller treatment is given of contrasting styles of narration (including narratorial unreliability) and of point of view (focalization).

A reply to Pilkington, MacMahon and Clark

Language and Literature Copyright © 1998 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol 7(1): 65-67 I am appreciative of the generous amount of space that Language and Literature in this issue has allocated to Richard Cureton’s review of my book, Rethinking Meter: A New Approach to the Verse Lille, and I am pleased by the very full and at times elegant summary of the book’s contents by Professor Cureton. Knowing something of the impressive amount of work he has done in the field, it means a good deal to me when he speaks of my ’review of the prosodic literature’ as constituting in itself ’a major contribution to prosodic study’. But in all honesty I

Engagement via Emotional Heightening in "Passion": On the Grammatical Texture of Emotionally-Immersive Passages in Short Fiction

as we find out in Alice Munro’s story, “Passion.” Grace descends upon them: an intelligent, frustrated young woman, with a touch of the young Alice Munro about her no doubt (just as the older Grace may echo the older Alice, who could herself get onto Highway 7 to visit the Ottawa Valley, driving from Clinton to Stratford, in under an hour). Maury courts her, and assumes they will marry, but really what attract Grace are the space and creativity and scope for fulfillment that the family—especially Mrs. Travers at its center—seems to nurture and ratify in her. The Traverses are helping her to “get across” the socioeconomic gulf that separates working stiffs (caning chairs) from a life of thinking, possibility, leisure, and pleasure: life with a taste to it (to rewrite the sentiments of her stand-in parents and her high-school principal, who sanction her going off to get “a taste of life”—but always on the assumption that thereafter of that apple she will eat no more). Into this familiar configuration, on Canadian Thanksgiving eve, swerves the restless and dangerous Dr. Neil, in his wine-colored convertible, and there is an immediate mutual attraction and some borrowing (his surname is Borrow): her from Maury, him from Mavis. Still nothing might have eventuated, but for a nice convergence of Darwinian random conditions, where the chief uncertainty concerns how far back to trace these. But for Thanksgiving, there would have been no expedition to buy cranberries; but for Wat being out in the boat, Maury would not have had to drive away to get said cranberries; but for the insistence of Janey and Dana, Grace would have

`What makes you think you exist?`: A speech move schematic and its application to Pinter's The Birthday Party

Abstract This paper presents and defends a basic scheme of four primary speech moves (Informs, Questions, Requests, and Undertakings) and a fifth secondary one (Acknowledgements), which it is claimed allow a rough parsing of typical interactions. The scheme is then put to work in the discourse analysis of one play-scene, the interrogation scene in Harold Pinters The Birthday Party. The discussion is focussed on the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the speech move scheme and the selectivity entailed in applying it in interpretation. The scheme is offered as one possible component, but one with general validity and ease of use, in the array of analytical resources that must be invoked to foster the detailed analyses of interaction — literary stylistic or otherwise — that we ultimately require.

Integrationist linguistics in the context of 20th century theories of language: some connections and projections

Abstract In this essay I propose to (1) offer some comments on areas of theoretical common cause shared by integrationists and other theorists, past and present, some of which have been explored more fully in other contributions to this volume; (2) propose some correctives to Joseph’s recent objections to the anti-surrogationalism of the integrational approach; and (3) conclude with some remarks on the importance of matching or calibrating new developments in technology with changes in linguistic practice and theory, so as to understand how language and technology are profoundly interdependent in their changing natures.