Heni Indriana
2201410036
Topics in Applied Linguistics
Discourse Analysis
Discourse can be defined as a stretch of language in use, of any length and in any
mode, which achieves meaning and coherence for those involved. Discourse analysis can be
defined as the use and development of theories and methods which elucidate how this
meaning and coherence is achieved.
It
has included pragmatics, schema theory, conversation analysis, ethnography,
semiotics, multimodal analysis, literary theory, rhetoric, genre analysis, and social theory.
It also has a problem of scope. AL DA embraces all aspects of language in use,
eclectically deploying insights from a variety of traditions to arrive at a rounded and rich
interpretation of language in use.
The study of ESP, EAP, institutions, medical communication, the media, and
classrooms all involve the practice of DA, while conversation analysis, corpus linguistics,
critical discourse analysis, linguistic ethnography, multimodal analysis, and stylistics are all
among its tools. Each such area of study is in its own field or in its own way concerned with
the achievement of meaning in actual communication, making each a constituent of DA as
much as of AL.
Early AL DA
In the 1950s DA was understood in theoretical structural linguistics as the potential
extension of language analysis beyond the level of single sentences to discover distributional
principles between sentences as well as within them (Harris 1952).
DA was and remains fundamental to the guiding principle of communicative language
teaching and its later developments such as task-based language teaching, namely that
successful language learning involves much more than acquiring a static formal knowledge of
the new language, but must also entail an ability to achieve meaning in communication. At
this point in its history, DA was fairly readily defined as an extension of formal linguistics, or
a refutation of it, depending on one’s point of view.
Text, context, and discourse
Context itself was further treated as having a series of components, with different approaches
to DA tending to emphasise the role of one or another. Thus, context variously included
consideration of such factors as:
the situation or immediate environment of communication;

the participants and their intentions, knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, affiliations and
feelings, as well as their roles, relations, and status;

the cultural and ideological norms and assumptions against which a given
communication occurs;

language which precedes or follows that under analysis, sometimes referred to as ‘cotext’ (Halliday et al. 1964);

other texts evoked for the participants and affecting their interpretation – sometimes
referred to as ‘intertext’ (Kristeva 1986);

non-linguistic meaningful communicative behaviour, i.e. paralanguage, such as voice
quality, gestures, and facial expressions (in face-to-face spoken interaction), and
choice of typeface and letter sizes (in writing);

use of other modes of communication accompanying the use of language, such as
music and pictures;

the physical medium of communication, such as speech, writing, print, telephone,
computer.
Early DA did, however, often work with this binary text/context distinction. This was
understandable. For the applied linguists of that time, trained as they were in more
traditional linguistics, DA was indeed experienced as the addition of a new dimension
(i.e. context) to their existing object of study (i.e. text).
Pragmatics
Pragmatics was put to good to use in discourse analysis of realworld extended
communication. In a landmark work analysing the discourse of primary school lessons,
Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) used the pragmatic notion of the act as a fundamental unit of
analysis, showing how acts combine to form higher units (which they called moves,
exchanges and transactions) in an attempt to formulate rules analogous to those in structural
grammars.
Schema theory
Schema theory is a powerful tool in DA as it can help to explain both high level aspects of
understanding such as coherence, and low level linguistic phenomena such as article choice.
Both pragmatics and schema theory have remained salient in many approaches to DA. But
their focus is very much on understanding as a product, explained after the event, rather than
a process.
Conversation analysis
CA made use of newly available recording technology to transcribe and closely analyse
actually occurring conversation, seeking to understand how participants ‘make sense of, find
their way about in, and act on the circumstances in which they find themselves’ (Heritage
1984: 4) and through this close analysis to understand the patterns of social life (Bhatia et al.
2008: 4) as realised in talk.
Ethnography, language ecology, linguistic ethnography
Ethnography is firmly committed to seeking significance in the details and apparent disorder
of everyday communication, and understanding participants’ own perspectives on the
meaning and dynamics of what is happening.
linguistic ethnographers draw upon a number of precedent influences, such as new literacy
studies, interactional sociolinguistics, and critical discourse analysis (see below), as well as
the mainstream applied linguistics language learning approach to DA.
linguistic ethnography seeks to relate language use to its physical and social environment,
and the affordances this environment provides. It sees language as a historically contingent
phenomenon negotiated in daily interactions, and pays particular attention to the dynamic
relation of language and cultural change, historical expansion, displacement (e.g. by
migration), continuity, and transformation.
Semiotics, paralanguage and multimodality
Despite their very different origins and approaches, the approaches described so far have
worked with brief invented dialogues or transcripts of recorded actually occurring talk. None,
however, makes more than a limited and unsystematic reference to communicative channels
other than language.
The exploitation of paralanguage in spoken communication is an instance of multimodality as
it involves visual, non-linguistic sound, and other sensory stimuli. Closely related to the
increased attention to paralanguage in discourse analysis of talk, therefore, are recent
advances in the analysis of multimodal communication in general, and the growing
awareness that language cannot for DA purposes be analysed in isolation from other
communicative elements.
Multimodal meaning, whether in speech or writing, should then be an essential element of
any DA, as it plays a major part in human linguistic communication. Multimodal elements in
communication, because they are graded rather than discrete signs, cannot be simply reduced
to linguistic terms as they were in early semiotics (Barthes 1977; Kress and van Leeuwen
1996).
Larger structures
Despite their differences, all of the approaches discussed so far have an important element in
common. Though they may aim for, and obtain, far reaching conclusions about
communication, culture and society, they take as a starting point a fine-grained analysis of
language in use, assembling evidence of what happens in instances of communication, before
making generalisations.
Genre analysis
One such approach is genre analysis, which seeks to understand any communicative event as
an instance of a genre, defined as ‘a class of communicative events which share some set of
communicative purposes’ (Swales 1990: 58). Examples of genres are such events as
academic articles, news bulletins, advertisements, prayers, operas, menus. Genre analysis
then seeks, through fine-grained analysis, to identify the conventions which characterise these
different genres.
Critical discourse analysis (CDA)
CDA is concerned with ideology, power relations and social injustices, and how these are
represented and reproduced through language. They may focus primarily upon discourse
practices and ideologies, or seek to link discourse and social structures, or to situate specific
discourses such as those of racism within a broader historical perspective.
Back to detail and forward to generalisation: corpus linguistics
The advent of corpus analysis, however (see Adolphs and Lin, this volume) has enabled DA
partially to redress these shortcomings, and to add a quantitative dimension to research. With
its power to place any particular instance of language in the context of its use across a wide
range of comparable texts or the language as a whole, corpus comparisons have enabled
discourse analysts to talk with confidence about the typicality of any text under consideration.
Corpus linguistics, like other forms of linguistic analysis before it, is an invaluable tool for
DA.
Final word
The question touched upon earlier, however remains, and becomes more acute as the
resources available multiply: whether discourse analysis still has any identity separate from
the many traditions on which it has drawn. While it may be commendable to draw
eclectically upon the strengths of many research traditions to gain a rich insight into
communication, there is a valid case for saying that there is no longer a single theory or
method of analysis which can be clearly labelled as discourse analysis.
Questions :
1. What is differences among text, context, and discourse?
2. Is discourse analysis used in teaching and learning process?