As they are given in the preface and introduction, the goals of the first edition of The discourse reader (1999) remain the same in the second edition (2006): to provide an introductory/intermediate reader that includes foundational texts and scholars, represents the range of interdisciplinary concerns with discourse, and covers both discussions of key methods and approaches and contemporary work in which discourse analysis is applied to the discourse produced in varying social situations. The additions made to this edition further develop a number of the issues that both editions suggest are important to the study of discourse: the global market in late capitalism, multimodality and new media, and advances in approaches to identity and identification. To make way for additions, we have lost selections by Aaron Cicourel, Allan Bell, and Anthony Giddens, though they remain cited in section introductions and other contributions.
The reader opens with key authors and texts from linguistics and linguistic philosophy because, according to the editors, “however concretely or abstractly the term [discourse] is used, there will at least be agreement that it has focally to do with language, meaning and context” (p. xi). Roland Barthes (chap. 7) has been added to this group of foundational thinkers. Barthes's semiotics has been influential on studies of discourse in many ways, one of which is the analysis of multimodal interaction and communication. The additions of Theo van Leeuwen (chap. 12), David Graddol (chap. 13), and the new selections by Norman Fairclough (chap. 9) and Gunther Kress & Theo van Leeuwen (chap. 26) all consider the ways the discursive and extra-discursive (hearing, visuals, global changes, etc.) are brought together in meaningful and powerful ways. Analyses of new media, such as that of Stuart Hall (chap. 27) also participate in this growing vein of scholarship.
Other selection changes emphasize the importance of the global market and the discourse produced where the global and local meet because, as the editors explain, “language takes on greater significance in the worlds of providing and consuming services” (4). Both Fairclough's new contribution on global capitalism and the added contribution by Nikolas Coupland & Virpi Ylänne (chap. 25) consider the effects of global movement on discursive interaction.
Other additions to this edition of the Reader mark recent extensions of foundational theory and recent directions in the study of the intersection between society and discourse. For example, Derek Edwards's contribution (chap. 15) problematizes William Labov's narrative categories, claiming that they do not adequately account for rhetorical flexibility. Judith Butler's contribution (chap. 34) problematizes speech act theory while emphasizing the material effects of discourse. In a second contribution by Deborah Cameron (chap. 30), representing a recent trend in sociolinguistics, the concept of style is employed to analyze the ways in which people create “self-identification with and self-differentiation from particular groups or group-orientations” (392).
In both editions, the editors have introduced the section on method by explaining that they “resist the idea that discourse analysis is ‘a research method’ in the conventional sense” (xi), and thus this section avoids readings that offer “set rules and procedures for discourse analysts to follow” (125). The new contributions that deal with method – Anita Pomerantz (chap. 17), van Leeuwen, Graddol, and Harvey Sacks (chap. 16) – maintain this approach to method while offering excellent models of careful analysis of discourse, communication, and interaction.
The changes made to this edition reveal the depth of the interdisciplinarity in the study of discourse and the range of arguments that can be made by analyzing the discourse that “[shapes] social order, and … individuals' interaction with society” (3).
