http://das.sagepub.com/Discourse & Society

http://das.sagepub.com/content/22/4/503.citationThe online version of this article can be found at:

 DOI: 10.1177/09579265110220040807

2011 22: 503Discourse SocietyChen Weiying

Connectivity Theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. xi + 213 ppBook review: Jan Renkema, The Texture of Discourse: Towards an Outline of

  

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Book reviews 503

In ‘Small stories fight back: Narratives of Polish economic migration on an internet forum’, Aleksandra Galasińska concentrates on online personal narratives concerning recent Polish migration to the UK. Through identifying and analyzing prominent linguistic features of the personal stories, the author brings out the discursive conflict between these new narratives on migration in the period of transformation and the old historical grand narrative of Polish migration. Her research illuminates how personal discourses of migrants are created and deployed to negotiate and to resist decontextualized historically bounded narratives of migration. The final chapter of the section and the collection is by Dariusz Galasiński and explores narratives of the disenfranchized self in post-communist Poland. The author examines the intriguing relationship between system transformation and private discourses of the self. His semi-structured interviews with Poles of different genders and generations show that communism still provides the ideological framework within which the discourses of a new reality are created, constructed and assessed.

It is evident from these remarks that many of the contributions in this volume are springboards for stimulating further investigation into both the wider issues raised by social transformations in CEE contexts and the details of the discourse-historical approach to CDA studies in a range of public/private discourses.

Jan Renkema, The Texture of Discourse: Towards an Outline of Connectivity Theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. xi + 213 pp.

Reviewed by: Chen Weiying, School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, People’s Republic of China

The Texture of Discourse is far from being yet another to add to the seemingly endless list of books about discourse relations. It penetrates in depth, with eclecticism, a central question: what makes a sequence of utterances or sentences a discourse? It should be kept as a classic, a must-read and a handy reference, especially instructive for concrete discourse analysis. During the past decades, many attempts have been made to explore analytical tools for identifying discourse relations. However, these approaches differ greatly and contact between them is lacking. More disappointingly, ‘debates about dif-ferent frameworks or on how to encode corpora for discourse relations that encompass analysis possibilites for all the approaches are rare’ (p. 1).

The monograph is divided into 12 chapters, with a view to solving seven challenges formulated for a connectivity theory. The first two introductory chapters set the tone for the incoming construction of the theorectical framework. Two principles are first out-lined on which a connectivity theory can be based: the discursive and dialogic principle. Then in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, three procedures are respectively proposed for combining segments in discourse: (1) Conjunction, in which the focus is on combining clauses, the building blocks of discourse; (2) Adjunction, which deals with the content of these build-ing blocks, the information they contain and how information is connected; (3) Interjunction, on how the combined pieces of information function between addresser and addressee. In Chapter 6, the Connectivity Model – together with a complete taxon-omy of discourse relations – is presented as the base for solving problems in discourse

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504 Discourse & Society 22(4)

relation research. Altogether, 16 categories and their network on the level of Adjunction and Interjunction are depicted with examples, with distinctions of alternative labels provided as well. The construction of a taxonomy of discourse relations is claimed to be the cornerstone of this study, presenting the commonly distinguished discourse relations in a hopefully insightful framework that indicates their relative positions. The following two chapters provide comments on the characteristics of the Connectivity Model. In Chapter 7, arguments are given for the ‘junction’ triplet and the ordering of discourse relations. In Chapter 8, the model is compared with other models, including a discussion of coverage completeness and increasability. In comparing this model to other models, this section pictures a state-of-the-art overview of discourse relation analysis combined with detailed accounts of many examples. Chapters 9 and 10 focus on the problems of the representation of discourse structures and the interpretation of discourse relations. In the last two chapters, discourse analysis is begun and some pilot research is suggested on the formulation of form–function correspondences, predictions about occurrences of dis-course relations and evaluations of judgments on discourse relations. The corpora and experimental researches exemplify feasibility and sustainability as a starting point for future research.

Combining a theoretical orientation and a practical aim, Renkema handles the frame-work with facility and skill. ‘For the research analyst who wants to collect data on dis-course relations it would be unwise not to stand on the shoulders of other researchers’ (p. 174). This insightful new study can act as the ‘shoulders’, providing a base for research on discourse structures, production and competence, from perspectives of corpus, cognitive or experimental linguistics.

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