Abstract:It can be easy to look past the primary activity of professional helping, discourse, to account for what ‘really goes on’ in bringing about human change. Some of this is because the dominant view of h...It can be easy to look past the primary activity of professional helping, discourse, to account for what ‘really goes on’ in bringing about human change. Some of this is because the dominant view of human discourse (including conversation) has been based on a ‘conduit metaphor’ of information transmission and reception (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Things can get even more confusing when considering discourse in its noun and verb forms. As a noun, scholars and practitioners point to systematized differences in the meanings people use for making sense of and communicating their experiences. Others favour a pragmatic, verb-like sense of discourse, as things people do in and with their developing communications with each other (Levinson, 1981). For most discourse analysts, looking at language alone (the noun stuff) is not enough; one needs to see also how language is used, and what results from that use. At the heart of our considerations of professional helping is how discourse used for understanding (noun-like language) can at the same time be used for social influence (in verb-like dialogues).Read More
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-03-25
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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