Towards an analysis of multi-party discourse

Halliday (1984) argues that the study of language as a uniied object can only be jus-tiied if linguists address language simultaneously as both a process and a system of relations. Birmingham-style Discourse Analysis (DA) is one model of discourse that has been developed to satisfy Halliday's challenge. However, DA has only been applied to two-party discourse, and would seem to fall short of accounting for the full range of linguistic communication. One attractive proposal for dealing with multi-party discourse in a very diierent theoretical framework is Clark and Carlson's (1992) Informative Hypothesis. They argue that speech acts are primarily directed at all potential hearers and only indirectly at individual addressees. In this paper, I will attempt to generalize this insight and argue that moves in discourse are directed at participant roles (i.e., addressee) rather than at individual participants. This separation of participants from roles will allow DA-type analysis to be applied to multi-party discourse without signiicant revision. 1 Theoretical preliminaries Researchers investigating the linguistic properties of discourse tend to take one of two approaches. One approach is to treat discourse analysis on a par with other branches of formal linguistics by applying standard structuralist or generative methods to larger and larger units of linguistic structure. This view is taken by, for example, McCawley (1988), who \takees] syntax to include principles constraining the combination of sentences and/or other units into larger units of discourse" (p. 10) and argues that some transformations apply across sentence boundaries. Others, such as Mann and Thompson (1987), recognize the principles governing discourse (or text) structure as a distinct`module' from those governing sentence internal structure, but approach it using conventional linguistic methodology. One way to think of these discourse structures and rules is as a part of the grammar of a language and thus that they constitute a speaker's `competence for use'.