Paul Grice

In pragmatics, the major aim of communication is considered the exchange of information.

People usually cooperate to convey their intentions and implicit import of their utterances.
Therefore, all things being equal, conversations are cooperative attempts based on common
ground and pausing a shared purpose. Grice’s work on the cooperative principle led to the
development of ‘pragmatics’ as a separate discipline within lingistics.
Paul Grice, a British philosopher of language, formulated what is now called the cooperative
principle. “Make your conversation contribution as is required at the stage at which it occurs, by
the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged’ (1975, 45).
In his William James lectures at Harvard Oxford universities in 1967, Grice explicates the
cooperative principle and he pays attention to limit the use of it for describing talk exchanges
presenting the following features. “ The participants have some common immediate aim, the
contributions of the participants are dovetailed mutually dependent; there is some sort of
understanding that other things being equal, the transaction should continue inappropriate style
unless both parties are agreeable that it should terminate.” (Grice, 1989; 31)
Grice (1989, 29) considers that “ Our talk exchanges are characteristical, to some degree at least,
cooperative efforts and each participant recognize in them a common purpose or set of purposes,
or at least a mutually accepted direction.” This means both speaker and hearer should mutually
cooperate with each other. The theory that Paul Grice presented actually attempts to bridge the
gap between what participants in conversation say and what they mean.
According to Grice, the hearer concludes that the speaker must have been attempting to get
across some closely related proposition which does not violate the maxim of truthfulness; in the
case of irony, for example, it might be contradictory of the proposition uttered and in the case of
metaphor it might be a comparison so that a metaphor is reinterpreted as implicating a Simile.

Michel Foucault
Today the theoretical work of Michel FOUCAULT is widely regarded as being part of the
theoretical body of social sciences like sociology, social history, political sciences and social
psychology. But FOUCAULTian notions are also fundamental in other dynamic fields such as
cultural studies, gender studies and postcolonial studies. Discourse theory concepts and
arguments are no longer
restricted to linguistics or other sciences of language use. Today they are part of the social
sciences.3 One of the reasons for this spread beyond the purely linguistic is that FOUCAULT
conceived discourse as social structure and discursive practice as social practice. “Discourse” is
not simply dialogue or philosophical monologue. The term “discourse” was first used to signify
the grammatical structure of narratives (BARTHES, 1988). Here “discourse” was conceived as
the order overarching the level of the sentence. For a long time the various purely linguistic
approaches to discourse were dominant (VANDIJK, 1985, 1997a, 1997b). In socio-linguistic
approaches and conversation analysis (TEN HAVE, 1999) “discourse” means an interactional
order which emerges in social situations, so here “discourse” is an interactionist concept
(ANGERMÜLLER, 2001). In the different traditions of French structural is and (so called) post
structuralism the term discourse seems to be omnipresent.
In the structuralist era discourse was introduced as the underlying deep structure of the human
mind (LÉVI-STRAUSS) or the human psyche (LACAN). The FOUCAULTian use of this
concept is the first that combines a structuralist view with a phraseological interpretation of
discourse into an (at least) dualistic concept. FOUCAULTian discourse is conceived of as a super
individual reality; as a kind of practice that belongs to collectives rather than individuals; and as
located in social areas or fields. However, as the later work of FOUCAULT (1988, 1990, 2005)
and the work of Judith BUTLER (1990, 1993) have shown, discourses have an impact on
individuals as they are discursively constructed and constituted. So some researchers in the field
(JÄGER, 2004; KELLER, 2007; DIAZ-BONE, 2007) consider the FOUCAULTian concept of
discourse to belong more to a meso- or macro-level than to a micro level (as in conversation
analysis or ethnomethodology) although it influences socialized individuals and interactions in
social situations. However, others in the field see, from a post-structuralist angle, the subject as
constructed and constituted on the basis of a discursive matrix: several articles in this special
edition discuss the relationship between a discursive matrix and subject ovation /subjectification
(TATE, 2007, and, in the context of dispositif, see also BUHRMANN & SCHNEIDER, 2007).
They focus on the subject and the discursive constitution of the subject: in this way,
FOUCAULTian discourse analysis enters the micro-level.

John Langshaw
John Langshaw Austin, born on March 26th 1911 in Lancaster, England. He was trained
as a classicist at Balliol College Oxford. He fi rst came to philosophy by studying Aristotle, who
deeply inf l uenced his own philosophical method. He also worked on the philosophy of Leibniz
and translated Frege’s Grundlagen. Austin spent his whole academic life in Oxford, where he
was White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy from 1952 until his death in 1960. During the
Second World War Austin was commissioned in the Intelligence Corps, and played a leading role
in the organization of D-Day, leaving the British Army in 1945 with the rank of Lt. Colonel.
Austin published only seven articles.
According to Searle, Austin’s reluctance to publish was partly characteristic of his own
attitude, but also it was part of the culture of Oxford at the time: “Oxford had a long tradition of
not publishing during one’s lifetime, indeed it was regarded as slightly vulgar to publish” (Searle
2001, 227). Most of Austin’s work was thus published posthumously, and includes a collection of
papers (Austin 1961), and two series of lectures reconstructed by the editors on the basis of
Austin’s lecture notes: the lectures on perception, edited by Geoffrey Warnock (Austin 1962a),
and the William James Lectures held at Harvard in 1955, devoted to speech acts, and edited by
James O. Urmson (Austin 1962b) for the fi rst edition, and by Urmson and Marina Sbisa for the
second (Austin 1975). Austin’s most celebrated contribution to contemporary philosophy is his
theory of speech acts, presented in How to Do Things with Words (Austin 1975). While for
philosophers interested mainly in formal languages the main function of language is describing
reality, representing states of affairs and making assertions about the world, for Austin our
utterances have a variety of different uses. A similar point is made in Philosophical Investigations
by Wittgenstein, who underlines the “countless” uses we may put our sentences to (Wittgenstein
1953: § 23). Austin contrasts the “desperate ” Wittgensteinian image of the countless uses of
language with his accurate catalogue of the various speech acts we may perform – a taxonomy
similar to the one employed by an entomologist trying to classify the many (but not countless)
species of beetles.

Zellig Harris
The term discourse analysis fi rst entered general use in a series of papers published by
Zellig Harris beginning in 1952 and reporting on work from which he developed
transformational grammar in the late 1930s. Formal equivalence relations between sentences of a
coherent discourse are made obvious and explicit by using sentence transformations to
regularize the text to a canonical form. Words and sentences with equivalent information then
appear in the same column of a binary array (table). This work continued over the next four
decades (see references) into a science of sublanguage analysis (Kittredge & Lehrberger 1982),
culminating in demonstration of the information structures in texts of an immunology
sublanguage of science (Harris et al. 1989) and a fully articulated theory of linguistic information
content (Harris 1991). During this time, however, most linguists pursued a succession of
elaborate theories of sentence-level syntax and semantics.
Though Harris had mentioned the idea of analyzing whole discourses, he had not worked
out a comprehensive model as of January 1952. A linguist working for the American Bible
Society, James A. Poriot/Lauriault needed to fi nd answers to some fundamental errors in
translation of Quechua in the Cusco area of Peru. He took the idea, recorded all of the legends
and, after going over the meaning and placement of each word with a national; he was able to
form logical, mathematical rules that transcended the simple sentence structure. He then applied
the process to another dialect of Eastern Peru: Shipibo. He taught the theory at
Norman,Oklahoma in the summers of '56 and '57, and entered University of Pennsylvania in the
interim year. He tried to publish a paper Shipibo Paragraph Structure, but it was not published
until 1970 (Loriot & Hollenbach 1970). In the meantime, Dr. Kenneth L. Pike, a professor at
University of Michigan Ann Arbor, taught the theory. and one of his students Robert E. Longacre
was able to disseminate it in a disertation. Harris's methodology was developed into a system for
computer analysis of natural language by a team led by Naomi Sager at NYU which has been
applied to a number of sublanguage domains, most notably to medical informatics. The software
for the Medical Language Processor has been made publicly available on SourceForge.

NORMAN FAIRCLOUGH
 Fairclough’s approach (called ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’) assumes that there is a
dialectical relationship between language and other elements of social life. There are two main
kinds of discourse analysis: (a) Textually-Oriented Discourse Analysis (TODA) (b) non-TODA
(for example, Michel Foucault’s approach) Fairclough’s approach tries to combine these two.
The focus of his approach ‘oscillates’ between both:
(a) specific texts (linguistic analysis)
(b) orders of discourse (inter discursive analysis)
Order of discourse = ‘the relatively durable social structuring of language which is itself
one element of the relatively durable structuring and networking of social practices.’ Inter
discursive analysis = ‘seeing texts in terms of the different discourses, genres and styles [that]
they draw upon and articulate together’ NF’s approach to the linguistic analysis of text is part of
a broader project in social research. There is a ‘manifesto’ about this broader project in the
Conclusion chapter (p. 202). Fairclough’s approach draws on several older approaches. The new
point is that it is based on various new theories about society and the relation between language,
discourse and society. As for text analysis, NF’s approach is based on Systemic Functional
Linguistics (SFL). The leading scholar in SFL is Michael Halliday, and sometimes SFL is called
‘Hallidayan Linguistics’. SFL is suitable for CDA because it emphasizes the connections
between texts and (social) contexts But SFL is very linguistic-ish, with many specialized.
Fairclough’s philosophical point of view is a realist one.