Culture and Value, a collection of Ludwig Wittgenstein's aphorisms, contains a puzzling remark: 字串2
"In a conversation: one person throws a ball; the other does not know whether he is supposed to throw it back, or throw it to a third person, or leave it on the ground, or pick it up and put it in his pocket, etc."1 字串5
The remark is puzzling because in the vast majority of cases that take place under ordinary circumstances, it seems that any two people engaged in a conversation have little trouble interpreting and responding meaningfully to each other's utterances. Perhaps Wittgenstein intends the remark to illustrate that when two interlocutors engage inconversation, they are often forced to feel their way -- to try to determine as best they can the kind of the game that is being played, its rules and goals, its boundaries and players. Yet precisely how interpretation and response are carried out in the game of conversation remains a puzzle. The goal of discourse analysis, as broadly conceived, is to unravel this mystery: To describe the game, to illuminate its often obscure rules, to clearly mark out its boundaries and to identify its players, coaches and referees.
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Although discourse analysis has come to be seen as a subdiscipline of linguistics, the roots of several of the seven established approaches to discourse have grown out of philosophy, and at least two of them are based directly in the writings of prominent philosophers. The approach known as speech act theory was formulated by the philosopher John L. Austin and developed by John Searle. A second approach, often called pragmatics, has its foundations in the writings of H.P. Grice. Both approaches have been influenced, at least on the margins or in their maturation, by Wittgenstein's later writings, especially Philosophical Investigations. There are especially strong parallels between speech act theory and Wittgenstein's emphasis on usage and language-games.2
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This essay seeks to take Wittgenstein's influence on discourse analysis a step further by using his writings as the theoretical foundation for an approach to analyzing discourse that is distinct from speech act theory,
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which stems from the analytic tradition in philosophy, and to suggest that a Wittgenstein-inspired approach may actually be closer in spirit and content to that of an unlikely candidate whose views, in contrast to the analytic school, harbor a distinctly Continental flavor which has come to influence critical theory: Mikhail Bakhtin.
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The essay begins by attempting to outline in fairly broad strokes an approach to discourse analysis based on Wittgenstein's philosophy of language in Philosophical Investigations. The approach will appeal to the following Wittgensteinian views and constructs: a focus on ordinary language, meaning as use, the language-game and context, function, speech activities, the connection of language to life, the role of customs and rule- governed activities, the indeterminacy of meaning, an antipathy to reductionism, and a focus on moves in a game. As I develop a Wittgenstein-driven approach to discourse, I will point out in passing several ways in which it differs from a speech act approach. 中国论文网海外版-www.paperlw.net
As the essay progresses, I will increasingly turn toward analyzing a particular kind of discourse from a Wittgensteinian perspective: psychoanalytic conversation. Even though I do not realize this ambition here, it is my hope that, as an extension of Wittgenstein's views on the interpretation of an utterance's meaning in a particular context, a Wittgensteinian approach to discourse will provide the basis for analyzing the rhetoric that surfaces in psychoanalyst-patient dialogue. Toward this end, the essay will close by briefly testing the approach's explanatory yield by applying it to an early psychoanalytic conversation. 英文论文网
Points of Departure 中国论文网
Before beginning to outline a Wittgensteinian approach to discourse, it may prove useful to clarify some general objectives of discourse analysis, which coincide with at least two of Wittgenstein's philosophical concerns in Philosophical Investigations: the concepts of meaning and understanding. Even though discourse analysis and philosophy have common points of departure in their concern with meaning and understanding, discourse analysis moves in a slightly different direction as it begins to explore these concepts. Quite broadly, it strives "to give an account of how forms of language are used in communication."3 More specifically, it examines "how addressers construct linguistic messages for addressees and how addressees work on linguistic messages in order to interpret them."4 Discourse analysis, then, departs from the philosophy of language by taking an orientation that "on the one hand includes the study of linguistic forms and the regularities of their distribution and, on the other hand, involves a consideration of the general principles of interpretation by which people normally makes sense of what they hear and read."5 In stark contrast to the theorizing of philosophy, the investigation of these concerns often takes the form of empirical analysis. Yet discourse analysis finds itself in need of appealing to philosophy as well as its progenitor, linguistics, for its theoretical framework. Hence the attempt of this essay to construct from Wittgenstein's work the theoretical underpinnings of another approach to discourse analysis.6
