Aktobe Regional University named by K.Zhubanova
Abstract
On the topic: The main linguistic trends of the early XX century and text analysis.
Structuralism V. Ya. Propp. Complex whole A. M. Peshkovsky. Discourse
Analysis of 3. Harris.
Performed by: Tazhden Aruzhan
Checked by: Kushkarova G.K.
The term structuralism was used as a slogan and rallying cry by a number of different
schools of linguistics, and it is necessary to realize that it has somewhat
different implications according to the context in which it is employed. It is convenient
first to draw a broad distinction between European and American structuralism and then
to treat them separately.
In other words, structure in Propp's analysis comes before experience; it appears like a
prior form, which constitutes the genre of fairy-tales. He believed in a "common
structure," which could be expressed and formalised in a way similar to a chemical
formula. While for Propp structure was something to be identified within texts, for his
disciples structure becomes something illusory, even "absent" (as Umberto Eco posits) or
an "empty cell" (as in Lévi Strauss's introduction to M. Mauss's Sociology and
Anthropology), something that emerges a posteriori, after the experience, in a deferred
action of analysis. That is why structure is, for these later theorists, not a totality of
discourse, but rather a changeable effect of discourse. Lacan saw the analyst's aim in
deconstruction of the totality of discourse, which he calls symptom, and in the discovery
of the constant points of contact between the signifier and the real, which help
(re)construct the matter of the patient's phantasm.
Many articles have been written about Alexander Matveevich Peshkovsky (1878-1933),
an outstanding linguist and teacher, and his methodological experiments, carried out at
the dawn of the "linguistic age", have long become a philological tradition. Peshkovsky's
legacy, overgrown over the years with sometimes bizarre methods, "newspeak" and all
kinds of innovations, was not lost, but even more confirmed his name in the history of
Russian philology. Among the endless vacillations, searches and ideological battles of the
early 20th century, he was able to pave his way in science, contrary to the strained
"concepts" of some contemporaries and followers, focusing on the study of the
psychology of word perception, on the creation of a scientific base of linguistic
knowledge in the learning process. A conscious experiment gave birth to his theories. He
was equally good at a strict linguistic skill and at the same time subtly felt a completely
different facet of linguistic creativity - poetry and prose. The views of A. M. Peshkovsky,
which are, of course, somewhat outdated, but thereby showing the ultimate vulnerability
of any hypothesis, are being actively discussed; the ideas that he developed, as well as the
system of occupations created by him "from sound to meaning", "from meaning to form"
turned out to be in demand today.
The study of naturally occurring connected sentences, spoken or written, is one of the
most promising and rapidly developing areas of modern linguistics. Traditional
linguistics has concentrated on sentence-centred analysis. Now, linguists are much more
concerned with the way language is 'used' than what its components are. One may ask
how it is that language-users interpret what other language-users intend to convey. When
is carried this investigation further and asked how it is that people, as language-users,
make sense of what they read in texts, understand what speakers mean despite what they
say, recognize connected as opposed to jumbled or incoherent discourse, and successfully
take part in that complex activity called conversation, then one is undertaking what is
known as discourse analysis. The first linguist to refer to discourse analysis was Zellig
Harris. In 1952, he investigated the connectedness of sentences, naming his study
'discourse analysis.' Harris claimed explicitly that discourse is the next level in a
hierarchy of morphemes, clauses and sentences. He viewed discourse analysis
procedurally as a formal methodology, derived from structural methods of linguistic
analysis: such a methodology could break a text down into relationships (such as
equivalence, substitution) among its lower-level constituents. Structural was so central to
Harris's view of discourse that he also argued that what opposes discourse to a random
sequence of sentences is precisely the fact that it has structure: a pattern by which
segments of the discourse occur (and recur) relative to each other.
Michael Stubbs says, 'Any study which is not dealing with (a) single sentences, (b)
contrived by the linguist, (c) out of context, may be called discourse analysis.' (Stubbs
1983:131). In other words, there is a shift of focus from sentences in isolation to
utterances in context: to study language in use is to study it as discourse. This is a fact
that 'knowledge of a language is more than knowledge of individual sentences.' (Leech
2008:76) The true meaning of a sentence can't be assigned by its only linguistic
construction but it largely depends on reference (meaning in relation to exterior world),
sense (meaning in relation to linguistic system) and force (meaning in relation to
situational context). Let's take an example: I love you. Clearly the assigned meaning is
different in different situations if the speaker is one's lover or beloved as opposed to one's
parent or child. As Chomsky states, 'To understand a sentence we must know more than
the analysis of this sentence on each linguistic level. We must also know the reference
and meaning of the morphemes or words of which it is composed; naturally, grammar
cannot be expected to be of much help here.' (Chomsky 2002:103-04). Widdowson, also
criticizes the well familiar definition of discourse analysis that discourse is the study of
language patterns above the sentence and states;
If discourse analysis is defined as the study of language patterns above the sentence, this
would seem to imply that discourse is sentence writ large: quantitatively different but
qualitatively the same phenomenon. It would follow, too, of course, that you cannot have
discourse below the sentence. (Widdowson, 2004: 3)
In other words, the discourse information is crucial to a complete theory of language.
Smith and Kurthen also argue that 'the existence of arbitrary and language-specific
syntactic and referential options for conveying a proposition requires a level of linguistic
competence beyond sentential syntax and semantics' (Smith and Kurthen 2007:455).
Sentential models of linguistic competence are unequipped to explain the existence of
and the difference between multiple sentence forms with the same semantic
interpretation. Similarly, Prince argues, 'sentential grammars alone are not capable of
constraining the use of definite and indefinite NPs' (Prince 2004:119).
There are several additional reasons for assuming that linguistic competence must be
modeled beyond the level of the sentence. First, sentential grammars rely on the
artifactual boundaries of written language. In some respects, this is a (short-term)
advantage. The boundaries may be too small but they nonetheless provide a well-defined
range of linguistic phenomena for a model of language to explain. In fact, this approach
has been taken by generative grammarians for years with a great deal of success.
However, the long-term disadvantages are also obvious. When one starts with a particular
definition of language, any phenomena that do not fit into that definition will generally be
ignored. If that definition is too narrow, then crucial data may be lost.
Also, choosing to define language in terms of sentences in particular automatically
includes a bias towards the type of language that one has been trained to consider 'proper'
as opposed to what one knows through the initial process of first language acquisition.
This argument alone takes our views beyond sentential boundaries. Once we accept that a
language is not confined to sentence boundaries, we are free to explore broader
possibilities.
Second, the phenomenon of language requires at least a limited extension of sentential
grammars. For example, sentential grammars can not completely account for the
determination of pronoun co-reference, the scope of quantifiers, or the use of discourse
deixis. In addition, 'English null arguments provide more evidence that knowledge of a
language consists of more than a grammar for producing and interpreting sentences'
(Tracy 1995:215). It is obvious that null subjects play an active role in conversational
English, though they have received little attention in the past due to their rarity in written
or 'formal' English. It is also clear that the presence of implicit null objects in English
may not be distinguishable from truly intransitive constructions without an examination
of extra-sentential information.
While defining discourse, three definitions have been discussed – one derived from
formalist paradigm, other from functionalist paradigm and third that includes both
formalist and functionalist paradigms. Discourse analysis also deals with these
paradigms. Formalist or structural analysis of discourse describes '… discourse at several
levels or dimensions of analysis and in terms of many different units, categories,
schematic patterns or relations' (Dijk 1985:4). Structural analyses focus on the way
different units function in relation to each other but they disregard 'the functional
relations with the context of which discourse is a part' [Dijk 1985:4]. Structurally based
analysis of discourse find 'constituents' (smaller linguistic units that have particular
'relationship' with one another and that can occur in a restricted number of (often ruledgoverned) 'arrangements'. Structural views of discourse analysis accept that discourse is
comprised of 'units.' Harris's unit was the morpheme (and their combination into
sentences) while Linde, Labov and many other linguists identified clause as unit. Many
contemporary structural analysis of discourse view the sentence as the unit of which
discourse is comprised.
The structural view of discourse analysis places discourse in a hierarchy of language
structures, thus fostering the view that one can describe language in a unitary way that
continues unimpeded from morpheme to clause to sentence to discourse. But this kind of
analysis does not pay attention to the purposes and functions for which so called 'units'
are designed to serve in human affairs.
Discourse analysis is necessarily the analysis of language in use. The functionalist view
of discourse analysis asserts that 'the study of discourse is the study of any aspect of
language use' (Fasold 1990:65). Discourse analysis can not be restricted to the description
of linguistic forms independent of the purposes and functions which these forms perform.
Functional analyses of discourse rely less upon the strictly grammatical characteristics of
utterances as sentences, than upon the way utterances are situated in contexts.