94 John Connolly
therefore, to mention briefly a selection of other areas which at least some
linguists would also consider to lie within the scope of discourse studies.
Firstly, during the last twenty years or more, there has been a good deal
of research into the relationship between language, power and ideology.
This area of work is often termed Critical Language Study or Critical Dis-
course Analysis; see, for instance, Fairclough (1989) or Fairclough and
Wodak (1997). Its central premise is that power is unevenly distributed in
human society, and that existing inequalities of power are maintained
partly with the aid of sets of supposedly common-sense assumptions,
known as ideologies. For example, the prescriptive linguistic ideology that
there is a correct way of speaking and writing English is still accepted
without question by many people in the UK, and its maintenance, with the
help of expressions like ‘bad grammar’, is something that tends to suit the
purposes of the establishment. Authors in the tradition of Systemic Func-
tional Grammar have made moves towards incorporating ideology, along
with genre, into their theoretical framework; see, for instance, Martin
(1992: 496). However, this has not become common practice within other
approaches.
Secondly, the work of Bakhtin has attracted a fair amount of interest;
see, for instance, Clark and Holquist (1984). In particular, we should men-
tion here his theory of Voice. To take an example, suppose that speaker S 1
makes some utterance U 1 , and that this event is subsequently recounted by
another speaker S 2 in the form of utterance U 2 , such that U 2 contains a
piece of reported speech, structured along the lines of ‘S 1 said U 1 ’. Utter-
ance U 1 , when thus embedded into utterance U 2 , has, in a sense, two
speakers: S 1 (its originator) and S 2 (its reporter), and their voices intermin-
gle into a polyphony. It is also possible to push this notion of voice further,
until it is no longer necessarily identifiable with a particular speaker, for
instance when someone is said to speak with the voice of a scientist. This
implies the recognition of a generic as well as an individual voice as being
a possible component within a polyphony.
Thirdly, Kress and Van Leeuwen’s semiotically based approach to dis-
course deserves to be taken into account here. Kress and Van Leeuwen
(1996: 39) remind us that text is in general multimodal. For example,
speech is typically accompanied by non-verbal communication (NVC),
such as gesture. Indeed, NVC can be used as a substitute for speech within
a dialogue; for instance, from the point of view of communication, a nod is
as effective as the word yes in response to a question (assuming a face-to-
face situation). Furthermore, written text has additional, non-linguistic but
nevertheless communicative dimensions, such as the layout of a document,