Renowned Scholars’ Forum (No.102)

Topic: New Perspectives in Discourse Studies: A Heuristic Approach

Speaker: Professor Barbara Johnstone (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)

Time: 3:40 pm, May 20 (Wednesday), 2009

Venue: Room A209, Teaching Building VI, North Campus

Biography

Barbara Johnstone, editor-in-chief of the journal of Language in Society, is a professor of rhetoric and linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University, and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric and language study. Her major research interests include: discourse structure and function; Forms and functions of narrative; womens and mens narrative; functions of repetition in discourse and their implications for linguistic theory; cross-cultural study of rhetorical discourse; discourse style in the southern US; the individual in linguistic theory; social and individual resources for style in Texas womens public discourse; sociolinguistics; regional/social variation in discourse structure and strategy; interactional sociolinguistics; ethnography of communication; gender and regional variation in discourse style; methodology in qualitative sociolinguistics; current work on rhetorical functions of place-linked ways of speaking; representations of dialect; history and social correlates of Pittsburgh speech; rhetoric, history and theory; persuasive talk; cross-cultural study of persuasive styles in the U.S. and the Middle East; medieval Arab interpretations of Aristotle; linguistic stance and rhetorical ethos; style and stylistics; ramifications of literary theory for linguistics and vice-versa; ethnographic approaches to poetics; literary representations of regional dialect and discourse-level features of conversational style; Arabic linguistics; repetitive syntactic and morphological structures and discourse strategies; persuasive strategy and style. Barbara Johnstone has written numerous articles and books in the above areas.

abstract

I begin this lecture with an overview of what I call a heuristic approach to discourse analysis (Johnstone, 2008). A heuristic is a set of exploratory questions that can be asked of a text or an interaction in order to find as many reasons as possible for why the text or interaction takes the shape it does. The heuristic approach is an alternative to approaches that start with pre-conceived theories and look for evidence that the theories are correct. To illustrate the heuristic approach, I discuss recent work in discourse studies and sociolinguistics that exemplifies each element of the heuristic. The lecture will thus touch on recent work about discourse and politics, discourse structure, social identities and participation roles, genre and entextualization, discourse and new media, and micro-rhetoric.