4. Dimensions of Discourse and Fields of Discourse Studies

The historical sketch – given above – of the emergence of discourse studies and its increasing integration with its sister disciplines, such as semiotics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics, already provides first insights into the various dimensions of discourse and the fields of the new cross-discipline. Let us now examine the configuration of the new discipline and its object of study more closely. Thus, for instance, we on the one hand have cognitive studies of the mental processes involved in the production or comprehension of discourse, and interactional studies of everyday conversation or institutional talk, on the other hand.

Besides these interdisciplinary approaches in discourse studies, the ‘core’ of the new discipline remains the systematic and explicit analysis of the various structures and strategies of different levels of text and talk. The vast field of discourse studies consists of various subdisciplines that have become more or less independent, as also was the case for, say, lexicology, phonology, syntax and semantics within linguistics. Let us briefly review these subdisciplines and pay more attention to discourse grammar.

Stylistics

Better explored, especially also in sociolinguistics and literary studies, has been the dimension of language and discourse ‘style’, for instance in what has come to be known as the subdiscipline of stylistics. Notoriously difficult to define exactly, also because it has so many non-linguistic meanings (such as the style of clothes, houses, people, etc.,), style may briefly be defined in terms of the variable expression of discourse as it is conditioned by aspects of context. The most obvious manifestations of style may be found, as we also know from sociolinguistics, in the various way people may pronounce sounds, thus producing more or less formal, more or less casual, more or less higher or lower class ‘styles’ of speech. Contrary to invóluntary ‘accents’, such sound variation is called part of the ‘style’ of a discourse if the speaker is able to control such variation of pronunciation, for instance to accommodate to the way the recipients speak, or to signal familiarity or a more formal relationship. Similarly, also lexical variation has traditionally been seen as one of the basic characteristics of discourse style, usually under the condition that the underlying meanings remain (more or less) the same. In other words, ‘saying the same thing in other words’ has often been the rather informal definition of style.

Rhétoric

Discourse studies is often defined as the contemporary discipline of what used to be called rhétoric since antiquity, that is, the practice and study of ‘good’ public speaking and writing, for instance in parliament, in court or in literature.

Also today, and especially in the USA, the ‘new’ rhétoric is sometimes defined as a special (sub) discipline in the humanities that overlaps with discourse studies. As is the case for stylistics, rhétoric is often associated with the study of literature, rather than with the study of discourse more generally.

In order to avoid collapsing rhétoric with discourse studies in general, we define rhétoric as the subdiscipline of discourse studies focusing on the use of special ‘rhetorical’ structures of text and talk, such as metaphors, comparisons, irony, hyperboles, euphemisms, etc., that is, the kind of structures that were traditionally called ‘figures of style’ in classical rhétoric. Unlike other structures of text and talk, these ‘rhetorical’ structures are optional, and used especially to convey or produce specific effects, for instance as part of strategies of persuasion.