Priorities in discourse analysis 831975), but which profits from the exposure which the discourse model has
had over the years. In doing so I would like to deny any suggestion that
there is a ‘Birmingham School’ of discourse, in the sense of a group of
scholars working in a co-ordinated manner, increasing the dimensions of a
shared position. The original work was mostly valuable as a known position,
fairly clearly stated, which acted as a stimulus for further development.
That development was varied and extensive, and no attempt has been made
to meld it into a coherent whole. It should not, therefore, be assumed that
I have accepted and incorporated any of the post-1975 work except as set
out below and in other publications.
Discourse analysis prioritizes the interactive nature of language. In relation
to the spoken language, this means that the co-operation of more than one
individual is essential to its performance. But people are different in thought,
word and deed.
From this I note three consequences:
(a) The social intentions of participants may well not coincide in an interaction.
Therefore they strive to achieve their purposes by managing the future
direction of the discourse. This is possible because each utterance
provides a framework within which the next utterance is placed. Each
speaker in turn thus has an opportunity to steer the discourse in the
direction that best suits his or her purpose. This feature of discourse
is called prospection.
(b) The vast complexity of human communicative behaviour must be reducible
to a small number of simple activities. The simple management of
prospection, particularly in real-time conversation, argues that people
use a fairly simple model and elaborate it according to their needs and
skills.
(c) No matter how co-operative people strive to be, it cannot be assumed
that they correctly divine each others’ intentions. The structure of
conversations, as a consequence, provides a mechanism whereby they
can check and compare their understanding of the discourse they are
creating between them. In the exchange, this is realized by a move
called follow-up.
Let us now examine these points in more detail.
PROSPECTION
The first point concerns prospection, as one of the structural foundations of
the exchange. Each initiation prospects that the utterance following it will
be interpreted under the same set of presuppositions as the initiation itself.
If the putative response is not compatible with the prospections it will be
interpreted as a challenge, and therefore the beginning of a new exchange.
The prospections specific to an exchange are derivable largely from the
initiation. Hence the example above, ‘It’s red’, sets up a prospection that a