Chapter 1: The notion of responsibility in discourse studies
Discourse and Responsibility in Professional Settings - Jan-Ola Östman
Anna Solin [+ ]
University of Helsinki
Jan-Ola Östman [+ ]
University of Helsinki
Description
The chapter introduces the volume Discourse and responsibility in professional settings and gives a general overview of different types of responsibility, and thus different manners in which responsibility can be approached: legal vs. moral; individual vs. collective; formal vs. substantive; and sociocultural vs. interpersonal vs. responsibility to self. The chapter further places the notion of responsibility at the heart of discourse studies and distinguishes responsibility from accountability and ethics. The central aim of the volume is to show the importance of analysing discourse from the point of view of discourse participants’ agency, accountability and responsibility and by so doing, add an important dimension to existing strands of research in discourse studies, in pragmatics, and in applied linguistics.