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6.4 Core section four: Data analysis: thinking about the discursive context


Just as conversations proceed in ways that address the immediate social context (what the people present are saying), so published texts are written in ways that address the wider discursive context. In order to analyse a text, you need to consider its target audience (the people for whom it is written) and the wider discourse (to which it is contributing).

Any given text is published for a particular readership, and is about particular things. However large or small this readership might be, they are expected to know something, or perhaps have certain views, about the situation (otherwise, why would they be reading it?). In order to consider the form and function of a text, then, you need to think about how it is designed for the reader as part of a wider discursive context.

For example, the cigarette advert in section one was designed for people who were interested in smoking, understood that smoking was harmful, and wished to reduce the risk. It would have made little sense at a time when, or in a place where, smoking was not considered harmful (or, for some reason, people did not care). Similarly, the article on the study of psychic phenomena was designed for readers of a scientific journal (who might question the idea that such a study was not scientific). If it had been written for people who assumed that such investigations were scientific, it would not have been written in that way.

To illustrate how the form and function of a text is designed for a particular discursive context (i.e. how certain people discuss certain things), let us consider the extract from the paper by Wallwork and Dixon (2004), which appeared in section two. As you may remember, they were interested in the rhetoric of nationalism, and examined texts relating to a march in London, organized by the Countryside Alliance, as a protest against the proposed ban on fox-hunting.

Text 7: taken from The Field (a hunting and shooting journal):

‘If they do not come [the marchers], we will become like Holland, whose urban population has so distorted its society that it is not done to hunt, rear game, or shoot purpose-bred quarry species. Those that do are reviled, their children bullied. It is legal to smoke cannabis openly, prostitutes sit naked in shop windows. The way we are heading mirrors this’.

Now, imagine you were faced with a briefer extract:

It is possible to imagine some people reading this, and regarding it as not so undesirable. However, in order to understand the function of this description, we need to consider the discursive context in which it appears. It is written for readers of The Field, a magazine for those who hunt and shoot. If it were written for readers of, say, Sex and Drugs Monthly, it might have been read quite differently. Indeed, if it had been written for them, and the author had wished to portray an undesirable future, this would not have been the best example to use. In any case, there is no need to guess, since it should be clear from the wider discourse. In this case, it is clear in the initial extract that the smoking of cannabis and the open display of prostitutes are being described as part of a more general undesirable future. Similarly, any particular text needs to be analysed as part of a wider discursive context.