Theoretical and Methodological Challenges in Identifying Meaningful Absences in Discourse

Abstract

Identifying meaningful absences in discourse presents numerous theoretical and methodological challenges, some of which are addressed in this chapter. Section 8.1 focuses on how different types of discourse studies, namely Critical Discourse Analysis and French Discourse Analysis, approach absence. Among the numerous types of absence that researchers from these fields distinguish, this study concentrates on what does not need to be said because it is shared knowledge, on the one hand, and on what cannot be said because it would be socially unacceptable or make a text incoherent, on the other. In this perspective, the challenge for the analyst is not to find out what the speaker’s intentions nor the recipient’s expectations are, but to create the conditions in which he or she will be able to identify discursively relevant silences. Section 8.2 concentrates on analytical procedures for the detection of absences. Methodological tools developed by French Discourse Analysis are reviewed and completed by procedures capable of detecting absences that are not ‘signalled’ in discourse by any kind of specific ‘absence markers’. In a mapping, different analytical procedures are linked to various levels of ‘presences’ and ‘absences’ in discourse, which are in turn linked to different levels of consensus or disagreement on representations. This section also shows how analysing what is said and not said by means of the mapping helps to understand on-going social change. Finally, the methodology is illustrated by excerpts from studies on data sets in French, German and English from parenting guidebooks, intercultural parenting books and history textbooks.