Discourse analysis and functional styles

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 798.

In Unit 1 of this book we gave several approaches to the notion of discourse.In the most general terms discourse is defined as a complex communicative phenomenon, which includes, besides the text itself, other factors of interaction, such as shared knowledge, communicative goals, cognitive systems of participants, their cultural competence, etc. i.e. all that is necessary for successful production and adequate interpretation(comprehension and translation) of the text.

We also stressed that for translators it is important to remember is that text is a “macro sign” component of discourse and that discourse is materialized in speech on the basis of the relevant texts.

So the notion of discourse is closely linked to the language in use, to speech interaction or, as Larry Marks writes, to “the totality of codified linguistic usages attached to a given type of social practice (e.g. legal discourse, medical discourse, religious discourse, etc.) [Marks Larry 2001].

O.P. Vorobyova [Воробьева 1993: 31-32] writes about two basic approaches to the category of discourse but underlines that whatever approach may be, the basic aspect of discourse is a “connected sequence of sentences” that makes up a text.

O.O. Selivanova in her latest books [Selivanova 2004; 2006; 2011a, 2011б] gives a broad critical analysis of the category of discourse, discourse analysis and its place in the theory of speech communication, out of which we have chosen the definitions given in Unit 1 as such, which are most relevant for the purposes of text analysis in translation.

The term “discourse” (Fr. discours) began to be widely used in the early 70-s and started to be widely accepted with reference to the classical work of Patrick Seriot [Seriot 1985][1]. Initially it was used in the meaning close to what was named by Russian linguistics as a “functional style” of language and speech. The reason why two terms existed practically in parallel was conditioned by the peculiarities of the national linguistic schools. Thus, the Russian and Soviet schools, being guided by the ideas of V.V. Vinogradov and G.O. Vinokur, applied the term “functional style” to specific types of texts – spoken, official, newspaper, etc. and to the lexical and grammatical systems relevant to each type of text. The Anglo-Saxon linguistic school did not treat stylistics as a specific domain of linguistics and, correspondingly, did not apply the term “functional style” to text analysis at all [Степанов 1995: 35-36].

However in the Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet linguistic tradition the notion of “discourse” was not neglected. Thus, V.Z. Demyankov in his dictionary of English-Russian terms on applied linguistics and automatic text processing describes discourse as a text fragment, which focuses around certain concept. Discourse makes up a certain context, which describes relevant participants, objects, conditions, time, etc. The initial structure of discourse may be viewed as a sequence of propositions, connected by logical relations of conjunction and disjunction and its basic elements are events, participants of these events and performative information as well as conditions in which events take place, relevant background information, evaluative elements, etc. [Демьянков 1982: 7]. This approach treats discourse as a specific language (or, more broadly, semiotic) category having relevant texts as macro components of each particular discourse, therefore “we need a good description of discourse types, without which the theory of discourse cannot be developed” [Степанов 1995: 37].

In the second half of the 20^th century and in the 21^st century discourse analysis has been taken up in a variety of social science disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, anthropology, social work, cognitive psychology, international relations, communication and translation studies [Discourse analysis]. This gives us all grounds to apply discourse analysis to relevant texts in the process of translation rather then purely stylistic analysis as stylistics nowadays is mostly viewed as a discipline which links literary criticism and linguistics, but has no autonomous domain of its own [Stylistics (literature)].

Of course it does not mean that notions of traditional stylistics have to be totally neglected in such analysis. On the contrary, the task of any discourse analyst is to single out and describe the use of tropes [Trope] and figures of speech [Figure of speech] (stylistic devices and expressive means of languages according to traditional terminology) as fully as possible, however this description should focus on the relevance of these devices for the purposes of translator's analysis aimed at achieving the most equivalent and faithful translation option.