CURS AN I, SEMESTRUL II, zi (Forma scurta)

STRATEGIES OF EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION IN

ENGLISH
INTRODUCTION
Living in the present world means being confronted to a multitude of texts;
ephemeral as they may be, they are nevertheless invasive: advertising messages,
telephone books, posters, touristic guides, advertizing mails…all are texts that we
skim through, we quickly consult but we seldom read properly. Agreeing with
Maingueneau (2007: 14), for analyzing these common texts we need adequate
conceptual instruments. In this respect, a revolutionary turn has been the discursive
approach of all kinds of textual products.
Language will make the object of our analytic process, in terms of foundation
of specialized writing produced by professionals in the fields of public relations and
advertising. An advertisement, for instance, is not only studied as a textual structure,
or a component of a marketing strategy. It will be mainly approached as a discursive
activity in relation to a discursive genre: its social origin, the channel through which it
is conveyed (oral, written, broadcast), its type of circulation, etc. The discourse
analyst will associate genre to the specific space to which it belongs, and reversely,
will discuss a space in connection with its characteristic genres.
The course includes methods of analysis of oral, written and broadcast texts,
from the verbal point of view exclusively. An analytic grid will be applied for a
practical purpose: to differentiate types of texts and to enable students to create
communication products reflexively.
Mention should be made of the fact that we are not going to deal with
grammar, even if one of the course objective is to help students improve their
competence in English, studying language in the context that is suitable to their
future professions.
First, the course deals with the essential concept of context and its
contribution to the correct understanding of text meaning. Several theoretical
frameworks will be described and compared. Our students will have the opportunity
to do exercises on excerpts from public relations and advertising practices.
Secondly, the students will become familiar with the concepts of discourse,
text and talk and the relations that unite and distinguish them, all the more so as the
specialized literature is not unanimous about how to keep them apart.
 UNIT 1
CONTEXT AND TEXT

Maingueneau, Dominique. Texts of Communication (2007)

(1) According to Maingueneau (2007), context contains

three sources of information:
 on physical environment
 on co-text: verbal sequences placed
before or after the discourse unit to be
interpreted
 on the participants’ previous/shared
knowledge

(2) Verschueren (1999: 85-6) defines context in the following

way: “Whatever segment of the physical world, the social
world and the mental world is within the vision of either the
utterer (speaker) or the interpreter (hearer) in the course of
producing or interpreting a piece of communication may
serve as relevant context for understanding what is
happening. And so does any aspect of the linguistic context,
including properties of the channel of communication
itself.”
Teun van Dijk. Text and Context of parliamentary debates
(2004):
Attention should be paid to the many types of 'mental' aspects of the social
situation that are relevant for text or talk, such as purposes or aims, and especially
knowledge.

“FRAGMENTS OF A THEORY OF CONTEXT” (T. van Dijk 2004: 348-354)

“A fully-fledged theory of context is a complex, multidisciplinary theory of the

structure of social situations and communicative events and how their relevant
properties are related to the structures and strategies of text and talk (for early —
more formal, but rather reductive — formulations of this theory, see e.g., Van Dijk,
1972, 1977). I shall only highlight some of the dimensions of such a theory, and in
this paper largely ignore the earlier research done on context in linguistics,
anthropology, and social psychology as referred to above. Despite this earlier work,
we still lack a more or less explicit theory of context. Indeed, until today, there is
not a single monograph on context.”

Contexts as mental models

“The main thesis of my theory of context is that

contexts should not be defined in terms of some kind
of social situation in which discourse takes place, but
rather as a mental representation, or model,
constructed by the speech participants of or about
such a situation (for details, see Van Dijk 1999).
Participants construe mental models of a very special class of events, namely the
communicative event in which they are now taking part. These are also personal, and
unique for each partícipant — if only because of their different autobiographical
experiences as well as the different current perspective and interests — and at the
same time have a social dimension.
In other words, contexts are not 'out there, but ‘in here': They are mental
constructs of participants; they are individually variable interpretations of the
ongoing social situation. Thus, they may be biased, feature personal opinions,
and for these reasons also embody the opinions of the participants as
members of groups. Indeed, a feminist and male chauvinist in conversation are
likely to have rather different context models, as do a liberal and a conservative, a
professor and a student, and a doctor and a patient talking together. Indeed, biased
or incomplete context models are the source of profound communicative and
interactional conflicts.
In other words, just like mental models of events talked about, also context
models may be ideologically biased. Like event models, contexts represent
events, so — in a structural account — they most likely feature a schema consisting
such categories as Setting (Time, Location), Event/Action, Participants.

Participants as we know may have (assume or

construct) many different roles, and such roles may
affect the production and comprehension of
discourse. We assume that there are three basic types
of role that are contextually relevant:
 communicative roles, interactional
roles and social roles. Thus,
participants obviously need to
represent themselves and other
participants as speakers/writers or
recipients, as well as a complex range
of other communicative roles, such as
various production roles in
institutional situations (for instance
in the mass media: writers, editors,
actual speakers, etc.) and recipient
roles (reader, listener, overhearer,
etc.).
 Interactional roles need to be
represented in order to be able to
account for various situational
positions, such as friends and
 enemies, proponents and opponents
— as is the case for speakers in
parliament speaking in support of, or
against government proposals.
 Social roles account for group
membership, as defined for instance
by ethnicity, gender, age, political
affiliation or profession. Obviously
these various role types may be
combined: Someone taking part in a
parliamentary debate may (right
now) be speaker, take a stand as
opponent of the government, be an
MP, a woman, a conservative, and so
on — each role differentialy affecting
discourse structures.

The knowledge component is the very basis of a host of

semantic and pragmatic properties of discourse, such
as implications and presuppositions: The speaker must
know what the recipient already knows in order to be
able to decide what propositions of a mental model
or of the social representations are known to the
recipients. And recipients need to know the same
about the speaker or writer in order to establish what
is actually intended in implicit, indirect, ironic or other
non-explicit forms of talk. In other words, people
have mutual 'knowledge models' of each other's
knowledge, and these models crucially control many
of the discursive strategies of participants.

UNIT 2.1.

DISCOURSE and UTTERANCE; FEATURES OF DISCOURSE

At the beginning of the course, we agreed that we are not interested in the study of
language in terms of grammar. We are only interested in language defined as
discourse. The term of discourse may designate a certain hypostasis of language
such as “youth discourse” or “media discourse”. In the case of this usage, the term
discourse may be ambiguous, because it may designate both the system that
produces a category of texts, as well as the category itself: “communist discourse”
refers both to the totality of texts produced by communists, and to the political
system that led to their production (Maingueneau 2007: 59-60).
The notion of discourse is so much used because it reflects an essential
change of the way we conceive language. In its turn, the change was determined by
the various trends that have appeared within the realm of human studies; these
trends are currently labeled pragmatics. Being more than a doctrine, pragmatics
represents a particular way of perceiving verbal communication.

It is usually considered that an utterance has its own meaning. Actually, the very
definition of utterance is of the smallest unit of discourse endowed with meaning.
Meaning is established by the utterer/speaker/writer. If the hearer/receiver knows
the code (language, in our case), he can interpret the meaning of the utterance. To
interpret it correctly, lexical and grammatical competences are not sufficient.
Although these competences would help reduce the possible ambiguities, there are
still other competences that are involved in the correct “reading” of an utterance.
The receiver/addressee reconstructs the meaning of the utterance, starting from the
indices supplied by utterance/discourse, but there is no guarantee that it is the
meaning intended by the text producer. That is why Maingueneau (2007) considers
that any utterance is asymmetric, if we think of the information detained by the
main participants, speaker and hearer (or other positions depending on the channel).
Although the meaning is not given once for all, the main meaning information lies in
the utterance itself.
It is within the utterance meaning that we find information about the context within
which it was produced. And reversely, we cannot understand the utterance
meaning unless we know the context, that is to say, the purpose of the
communicative act in a given and unique situation.
Concerning the situation, the context of an utterance is not limited to spatial and
temporal data. In other words, context is not external to the utterance/discourse.

According to Maingueneau (2007), discourse has the following main

characteristics/features:

 Discourse supposes an organization/structure that surpasses the level

of the sentence (“phrase” in French)

This size does not mean that a series of words of a certain lengh will automatically
make up discourse. It refers to the fact that discourse refers to another level of
organization, different from the sentence. A prohibitive notice such as “No smoking”
is not a clause (grammar minimal unit), but it is discourse. As a trans-phrastic (or
better-said “under-phrastic”) unit, the notice is subject to organizational rules
produced and observed by a well-determined social group. A dialogue, an
argumentation are different types of texts, having different structures and lengths. In
this respect, a news story will differ from a dissertation.

 Discourse is oriented

Discourse is not only considered to be oriented because it is conceived in keeping

with the expectations of an audience. It is also oriented towards an end: unfolds in
time, following a direction in a linear way. The speaker/writer “guides” the
reader/hearer through discourse markers: the letter may anticipate what will happen
in discourse (“we will see that..; we will come back to that”), may amend the previous
text (“or rather”; “I should have mentioned that…”) or make digressions (“besides”;
“on the other hand”). These “discourse words” refer to the structure of the text. They
may also concern the order of the ideas exposed in the text (first, second, then,
consequently, etc.).
Besides orienting the audience, discourse (better said “meta-discourse”) may include
the author’s comments on her/his own speech content: “Paul finds himself, if we can
say so, in utter filthiness.” Or: “Rosalie (what a name!) loves Alfred.”
(Maingueneau’s examples 2007: 61).This linear development unfolds in different
conditions and depends on the existence of only one text producer, who controls
discourse from the beginning to the end (monologal discourse), or of the author’s
inclusion in interaction, where she/he could be interrupted or deviated by an
interlocutor (dialogal discourse). In oral interaction, it often happens that we cannot
“catch” some words, we ask for clarifications, in keeping with the other’s reactions.

 Discourse is a form of action

Speaking is a form of acting on the other. It is not only a way of representing the
world. The issues of “speech acts” started to be approached in the 1960’s by
philosophers such as J. L. Austin (“How to Do Things with Words”, 1962) and, later,
by J. R. Searle (“Speech Acts”, 1969). They showed that any utterance stands for an
act (to promise, to suggest, to state, to ask, etc.) that is aimed at changing a state of
fact. At a higher level, these elementary acts are integrated into discourse belonging
to a particular genre (a brochure, televised news programmes, etc.) that is intended
to produce a modification with the addressees.

 Discourse is interactive

Verbal activity is actually an inter-activity which involves at least two partners, whose
trace left in the utterance is the pronominal couple I – YOU of the verbal exchange.
The most obvious manifestation of interactivity is oral interaction, a conversation, in
which the two locators coordinate their utterances, communicate according to the
partner’s attitude and instantly perceive the effects that their words have on the
other. Besides conversations, there are numerous forms of oral communication that
do not seem “interactive”; it may be the case of someone who delivers a lecture or of
a radio anchor. This is also true in the case of the written text where the addressee is
not physically present. Some researchers would consider that it is only oral
exchanges that represent the “authentic” usage of language, while the other usages
would be degraded forms of speech. Maingueneau (2007: 63) suggests that we
should not take fundamental interactivity of discourse for oral interaction. Any
utterance, even produced in the absence of the addressee pertains to the
constitutive interactivity of language (dialogism); it is an explicit or implicit exchange
with other virtual or real interlocutors; it always supposes the presence of another
entity approached by the speaker/writer and in relation to which the letter constructs
her/his discourse. From this perspective, a conversation is not considered discourse
“par excellence”, but only one form of manifestation – even if the most important one
– of discourse interactivity.
If we agree that discourse is interactive and that it mobilizes two partners, it is
irrelevant to call an interlocutor “addressee”; it would mean that communication is
unidirectional and that it is the expression of the thinking of only one utterer who
speaks to a passive addressee. Consequently, following Antoine Culioli, we could
give up the term of “addressee”, in favor of the more suitable term “co-utterer (“co-
énonciateur” in French). The two partners of discourse will be designated by the
plural term “coutterers” (“coénonciateurs” in French).
  Discourse is contextualized

We cannot say that discourse “intervenes” in a context, as if context were a mere

framework, a setting; in fact, discourse can only be contextualized. It was already
emphasized in Unit 1, that an utterance cannot be assigned a (pragmatic) meaning
without a context. The same “literal” utterance, in two distinct contexts, will compose
two distinct discourses.
Moreover, discourse contributes to the configuration of its context that it may alter
during its unfolding. For instance, two partners may talk like friends (symmetrical
communication), and after a couple of minutes, they may engage in new relationship,
as one of them starts speaking like a doctor, while the other answers questions like a
patient (institutional discourse is characterized by asymmetrical communication).

 Discourse is taken in charge by a subject

There is no discourse without a subject, an I that becomes the

source of personal temporal and spatial reference and who
signals her/his attitude towards what s/he says and towards the
interlocutor (the phenomenon of “modalization”). The subject
mainly indicates who is responsible for what is said. An
elementary utterance such as “It’s raining” is stated as a fact by
the utterer who guarantees its truth.
But the subject could equally “modulate” the degree of adhesion to the truth value of
the statement: “It may be raining”.
The subject could make somebody else responsible for the utterance: “Paul says it’s
raining”.
S/he could comment on her/his words: “Frankly speaking, it’s raining”.
The subject could even show that s/he pretends to be in charge of the utterance, as
it is the case of ironic statements. (Examples supplied by Maingueneau 2007: 64)

 Discourse is regulated by norms

Verbal activity is inscribed in the vast institution of speech. Like any human
behaviour, it is guided by specific norms. Every speech act implies norms or
premises to be met before it is performed. A seemingly simple act, such as a
question is conditioned by the fact that the questioner should not know the answer to
the question. The questioner should be interested in the answer. S/he should believe
it is only her/his interlocutor who could supply it. Fundamentally, no speech act may
be performed without some justification of the way it is presented. This justification
pertains to the exercise of speech.
  Discourse is included in interdiscourse

Discourse acquires meaning within a universe formed by other discourses in relation

to which it is identified. In order to interpret the shortest utterance, it has to be related
to all kinds of discourses that we comment, parody or cite. Every discourse genre
has its own modality of treating the numberless interdiscursive relations: a
philosophy text book will not cite in the same way and the same sources as a sales
agent. The mere fact of including a discourse in a genre (lecture, news programme)
signifies it is associated to an infinite set of discourses belonging to the same genre.

2.2. DISCOURSE (UTTERANCE) AND TEXT

UTTERANCE (Maingueneau, D., Texts of Communication,

2007):

An utterance is the product of the act of uttering. It stands for the verbal trace
of the process of uttering. The size of the utterance is irrelevant: it may be
made up of a few words or a whole book.
Some linguists define the utterance as the elementary unit of verbal
communication, a series of words endowed with meaning and syntactically
independent. For instance, “Leon is ill”, “Oh!”, “What a girl!”, “Paul!” are
utterances of various types.
Other linguists oppose the utterance to the sentence/clause (“phrase” in
French) considering that a clause is taken out of context. There are numerous
utterances that result from the same clause when it is interpreted in context.
That is why, the example “No smoking!” is a sentence/clause in the absence of
a context and is an utterance if it is written with red capital letters in the
waiting room of a hospital. If the same clause is written in paint on the wall of a
house, it will have a different interpretation.
The term utterance is also used to designate a verbal sequence that stands for
a complete communication unit and belongs to a particular discourse genre.
An utterance is related to the communicative intention of its discourse genre.
A TV news programme as an utterance/discourse is conceived with the goal of
informing the audience on daily events, while an advertisement is conceived
with the goal of persuading consumers to buy.

2.3. DISCOURSE, TEXT AND TALK

We subject the following text to your attention. It makes a useful synthesis of

definitions and explanations of these terms in specialized literature:
Discourse “‘rules in’ certain ways of talking about a topic, defining an acceptable
and intelligible way to talk, write or conduct oneself” and also “‘rules out’,
limits and restricts other ways of talking, of conducting ourselves in relation to
the topic or constructing knowledge about it” (Hall, 2001: 72). In other words,
discourses “do not just describe things; they do things” (Potter & Wetherell, 1987: 6)
through the way they make sense of the world for its inhabitants, giving it meanings
that generate particular experiences and practices (Fairclough, 1992; van Dijk,
1997b).

Discourses, put simply, are structured collections of

meaningful texts (Parker, 1992). In using the term text,
we refer not just to written transcriptions but to “any
kind of symbolic expression requiring a physical
medium and permitting of permanent storage”
(Taylor & Van Every, 1993: 109). For a text to be
generated, it must be inscribed—spoken, written, or
depicted in some way—“thus taking on material
form and becoming accessible to others” (Taylor,
Cooren, Giroux, & Robichaud, 1996: 7). Talk is
therefore also a kind of text (Fairclough, 1995; van
Dijk, 1997a), and, in fact, the texts that make up
discourses may take a variety of forms, including
written documents, verbal reports, artwork, spoken
words, pictures, symbols, buildings, and other
artifacts (e.g., Fairclough, 1995; Grant, Keenoy, &
Oswick, 1998; Taylor et al., 1996; Wood & Kroger,
2000).
Discourses cannot be studied directly—they can only be explored by examining the
texts that constitute them (Fairclough, 1992; Parker, 1992). Accordingly, discourse
analysis involves the systematic study of texts—including their production,
dissemination, and consumption—in order to explore the relationship between
discourse and social reality. The centrality of the text provides a focal point for
data collection, one that is relatively easy to access and is amenable to systematic
analysis (Phillips & Hardy, 2002; van Dijk, 1997b). Discourse analysis does not,
however, simply focus on individual or isolated texts, because social reality does not
depend on individual texts but, rather, on bodies of texts. Discourse analysis
therefore involves analysis of collections of texts, the ways they are made
meaningful through their links to other texts, the ways in which they draw on
different discourses, how and to whom they are disseminated, the methods of
their production, and the manner in which they are received and consumed
(Fairclough, 1992; Phillips & Hardy, 2002; van Dijk, 1997a,b).
Discourse analysts have adopted a variety of approaches that range from “micro”
analyses, such as linguistics, conversation analysis, and narrative analysis, through
ethnographic and ethnomethodological approaches to the more “macro” study of
discourse associated with Foucault (for different categorizations of approaches to
discourse analysis, see Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000; Jaworski & Coupland, 1999;
Phillips & Hardy, 2002; Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001; Wetherell, 2001; Woodilla, 1998).
We assume that there is a mutually constitutive relationship among discourse,
text, and action: the meanings of discourses are shared and social,
emanating out of actors’ actions in producing texts; at the same
time, discourse gives meaning to these actions, thereby
constituting the social world (Phillips & Hardy, 2002).
As Taylor and Van Every point out, “A text that is not read, cited or used, is not
yet a text” (2000: 292). In other words, texts must be distributed and
interpreted by other actors if they are to have organizing properties and the
potential to affect discourse.
Sense making is a linguistic process—“sense is generated by words that are
combined into the sentences of conversation to convey something about our
ongoing experience” (Weick, 1995: 106)—and involves narratives (Brown,
2000), metaphors (Donnellon, Gray, & Bougon, 1986), and other symbolic
forms (Rhodes, 1997) that produce texts that leave traces.