Page 3 - Book Review Interactional Orderliness and Disorderliness

198 Southeast Asian Social Science Review Vol. 8, No. 1, 2023

used by MPs would make anyone want to crawl out of the august
house. David Yoong surmised from the period of his analysis that
the Speaker (the Chair of the House) is seen to be lenient to IOD
and given the official language is Bahasa Malaysia, there are oft
pidginized exchanges and outbursts. The field of discourse analysis as
applied in legal, judicial and political institutions is a lively emergent
field (cf. Vijay K. Bhatia, Maurizio Gotti, Azirah Hashim, Philip
Koh and Sundra Rajoo Eds; International Arbitration Discourse
and Practices in Asia (Routledge) (2018) and Teun A. van Dijk,
Society and Discourse: How Social Contexts Influence Text and Talk
(Cambridge) (2009). Vijay K Bhatai & Ors’ text published in a
Conference proceedings held in 2017, examined how commercial
dispute resolution and its contestations are resolved in an arbitral
context. More apposite to this review is Teun A. van Djik’s work as
he observed,’ ... that similar contextual conditions as in Samoa hold
for the context setting of the British parliament, where a well-known
distinction exists between frontbenchers and backbenchers, …, the
Prime Minister speaks first , then the Head of the Opposition , and
then the other MPs.” Teub A.van Djik surmised that what seems to
be the cultural specifics of contexts of discourse in Non-Western
Societies are not that different from the contexts in Western Societies.
David Yoong’s work can be enlarged by other researchers in this
field by examining how social and cultural contexts in the Malaysian
Parliament notwithstanding being modelled as Westminster differs
or are similar to British Parliament. Anchored within such discourse,
it is unfortunate that David Yoong’s has not cited Teub A.van Djik’s
work in his book.
Rhetorical studies were part of classical learning and it has re-
emerged as discourse analysis as a discipline worthy of interest not
only in the academic world but vital in dealing with institutional
issues within a deliberative democracy. More pertinently in wider
philosophical ruminations, Continental thinkers like Paul Ricoeur
and Jurgen Habermas demonstrated that language and analysis can
yield emancipatory thought.
David Yoong ‘s thesis does not negotiate such wider terrain
and his analysis of IOD is contented to place Malaysian Parliament