Applied linguistics: no ‘bookish theoric’
THE NEW CRITIQUE OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS
Critical discourse analysis
The critique of applied linguistics most often associated with Marxism is that by Fairclough (1989), who has written extensively on critical discourse analysis (CDA). ‘Critical’ we can now see has to do with theorizing and so by ‘critical’ here is meant using discourse analysis techniques to provide a political critique of the social context– from a Marxist viewpoint. Feminist writings about applied linguistics take a similar approach but from a feminist position.
Fairclough defines what he calls critical language study thus:
Critical is used in the special sense of aiming to show up connections which may be hidden from people – such as the connections between language, power and ideology … critical language study analyses social interactions in a way which focuses upon their linguistic elements, and which sets out to show up their generally hidden determinants in the system of social relationships, as well as hidden effects they may have upon that system.
(Fairclough 1989: 5)
He is candid about his own starting-point and about his own political purpose:
I write as a socialist with a genuinely low opinion of the social relationships in my society and a commitment to the emancipation of the people who are oppressed by them. This does not, I hope, mean that I am writing political propaganda. The scientific investigation of social matters is perfectly compatible with committed and ‘opinionated’ investigators (there are no others!) and being committed does not excuse you from arguing rationally or producing evidence for your statements. (ibid: 5)
Stubbs (1997) is sharply critical of what he regards as the excess of politics and the lack of linguistics in approaches such as Fairclough’s:
A repeated criticism [of CDA] is that the textual interpretations of critical linguists are politically rather than linguistically motivated, and that analysts find what they expect to find, whether absences or presences. Sharrock and Anderson (1981) are ironic with reference to critical linguists such as Kress and Fowler: ‘One of the stock techniques employed by Kress and his colleagues is to look in the wrong place for something, then complain that they can’t find it, and suggest that it is being concealed from them (p. 291).’ (Stubbs 1997: 102)
Stubbs also points out that the approach of CDA has a long pedigree; it was developed by, among others, literary critics such as I. A. Richards (1929), Leavis (1938) and more recently Fish (1980), by phenomenologists such as Schutz (1970) and so on.
The extent of a text’s taken-for-grantedness confirms the overwhelming importance of context. It is this context dependence that is cleverly deployed by the hoax (Sokal 1996, Davies 2003b). Hoaxes are important in applied linguistics because the receivers’ willingness to suspend disbelief, their readiness to be unthinking dupes and to accept the fabrication at face value demonstrates just how powerful are the pragmatics of the taken-for-grantedness that we employ in our normal spoken and written interactions. Our dependence on the expected in conversation explains the reactions Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological students met in their well-known tic-tac-toe experiments which breach what Garfinkel calls ‘the properties of common understandings’ (Garfinkel 1967: 41). What Garfinkel takes advantage of in these experiments is the extent to which we rely on the unspoken assumptions of social life. This is what Firth meant in his discussion of the:
prescribed ritual of conversation. Once someone speaks to you, you are in a relatively determined context and you are not free just to say what you please … [M]uch of the give and-take of conversation in our everyday life is stereotyped and very narrowly conditioned by our particular type of culture. (Firth 1957: 28–32)
Goffman (1974) reminds us of the reflexivity of the successful hoax, successful because having been revealed as a fabrication, it has made its moral point, reminding us how much we take for granted in our primary frameworks of spoken and written interaction: those frameworks permit the intricate patterning on which we rely in our encounters and at the same time allow the vulnerability which the keyings (such as drama) and the fabrications (such as the hoax) expose. As always, it is in the limiting cases that the underlying system of our taking-for-grantedness is best observed.
