Tonight’s agenda
Moving from conversation to narrative
to discourse analysis
Highlights, discourse and cognition:
referents, formulaicity, and salience
Adult language acquisition
Late-life roles and discourse contexts
Multilingual contexts
Transition to photonovellas: questions?
Discourse, salience, and
formulaicity
edging toward metaphor and
figurative language
February 20, 2007
Slembrouck on discourse analysis
…discourse analysis foregrounds
language use as social action,
language use as situated performance,
language use as tied to social relations
and identities, power, inequality and
social struggle,
language use as essentially a matter of
"practices" rather than just "structures"
http://bank.rug.ac.be/da/da.htm
Focus of discourse analysis
discourse analysis is defined as
a) concerned with language use beyond
the boundaries of sentence/utterance,
b) concerned with the interrelationships
between language and society and
c) as concerned with the interactive or
dialogic properties of everyday
communication. (Stubbs 1983:1: cf
Slembrouck 2005)
Some ways discourse connects to
cognition: Alterman
Theory: Mental representations, planning,
situated activity, conversation analysis,
joint activity, distributed cognition
Method: Ethnography, discourse analysis,
marginal talk
**joint sense-making
**cockpit and air traffic control
**models of group interaction
**conceptual networks
WORDS: Aitchison, 1995. How adults
handle wimps (language acquisition)
“…there is a deep lack of information about
how adults increase vocabulary in their own
language, even though native speakers
continue to add words to their mental
lexicon throughout their lives”,
They must also know how a word normally
collocates: … Speakers must be able to use
a word at the appropriate social level:
….Speakers must know a word's relationship
to other words...
• wimp-words were learned via:
• (a) their frequent occurrence;
• (b) their co-occurrence with other words
Concordance, collocates (‘bread
and___’) and senses
were all running round you know going to this dance or
pboard romance but and ah was going to get married to this
clears throat ; what I 'm going to ask you now is a
it's a school photo of - I was going to show it to you
white apron and ah when she was going to cook or make butter
g white apron came out . and ah going to milk the cows she
there thinking now what are we going to have for dinner ?
“strings of specific lexical items... that cooccur with a mutual expectancy greater than
chance” (Nattinger and de Carrico 1992)
how do we store these? Retrieve them? In
chunks, in collocates, in ‘families’…
JOINT ACTION in discourse: taking
the perspective of the other
In joint action, as a speaker, I have to monitor for
what
• you signal you need to know (via
‘backchannels’)
• I infer you probably need to know, if you are to
follow and understand what I’m saying/about
to say, keyed to
• common ground that I assume we share
from recognizing referents
• the ‘newness’ of the information I will tell you
Impairments (i.e. AD) may interfere with our inferencing
Discourse referents: The speaker
activates referents in the mind of
the hearer.
Bada Bing. Because of current TV shows, I
think we have shared knowledge and
common ground about that expression
and that as soon as you hear me say
Bada, you can predict the –ing in Bing,
re-activate it before I finish saying the B,
and you can monitor your success
before the next word.
Are referents limited to being
single words only?
No. They can be schema
• See ring-composition in the Iliad,
Odyssey, or Beowulf
• See guidelines for proposals,
grants, theses….
They can be idioms, metaphors,
proverbs, multiword expressions or
formulaic language
how do you identify what the
referent is (or isn’t)?
It has to be shared directly or
indirectly by association [which is
where culture can sneak in: ‘lions
and tigers and bears – oh my!’ is a
Scout song and a line from Wizard
of Oz, but not universal knowledge
outside the US]
It has to be contextually salient
Discourse Tracking: the
conversation/story
Now it gets a little more complicated. How long
ago does the hearer have to have ‘heard’ the
referent to be able to pull it up fast and keep
tracking the conversation? What part or kind of
memory did the referent get stored in? How
much will it cost in terms of processing ‘cost’ to
access it and keep it going (active and given) or
re-activate it (semi-active and accessible)?
Or does the hearer have to construct it brand new
from implicature and inference? That is way
expensive and it might be way slow.
Hmm. Larger units/bigger blocks and parallel
processing might help fluency
Diane Van Lancker-Sidtis (2004) on fluency
“Paradoxically, true creativity in language
consists not in generating ever new sentences,
but in mixing old (formulaic and overlearned)
and new.
Each mode, propositional and non-propositional,
places different processing demands on speech
production and comprehension. Production of
propositional expressions requires lexical retrieval
and arrangement according to grammatical
rules; non-propositional production involves
activating and retrieving prepackaged units or
schemata. … Multiword formulaic expressions
are ‘‘‘ready to speak,’’ thus facilitating fluency’
(29)
vanLancker-Sidtis & Rallon 2004:
tracking formulae in everyday
speech. Yes, we use them.
The incidence of FEs in a screenplay, Some
Like It Hot, was examined, and found to
make up nearly 25% of the phrases in the
text.…. Sorhus (1977) reported about 20%
formulaic expressions in a Canadian sample
of spontaneous speech. Using computersearch criteria, Altenberg (1991, 1998)
estimated that London-Lund Corpus
(Greenbaum and Svartik, 1990) contained
80% recurrent word-combinations. …
Start with When novel sentences are not enough…toward a dual-process model
of language. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders
39, 1–44.
Kecskes (2003) SBU and formulaicity
situation-bound utterances (SBUs): SBUs are
highly conventionalized, prefabricated
units whose occurrence is tied to more or
less standardized communicative situations
(1999) –we’d call them formulaic
expressions (like ‘black sheep’)
While it used to be maintained that
sentences were freely generated, the
identification of SBUs confirms that many
prefabricated sentences and phrases, tied
to specific situations, belong to the lexicon.
Situation-Bound Utterances in L1 and L2 (2003): [See review by Cooren 2004,
Pragmatics and Cognition 12, 177 ff
Wray (2002): Formulaicity in L1 lexicon
Formulaic language and the lexicon. Cambridge U. Press
Kecskes explains (Giora’s)
Graded Salience Hypothesis
In terms of processing, stored information
is superior to unstored information such
as novel information or information
inferable from context (Giora, 2003: 15).
As a consequence, salient meanings of
lexical units (e.g. conventional,
frequent, familiar and prototypical) are
processed automatically, irrespective
of contextual information and strength
of bias.
The Graded Salience
Hypothesis assumes:
The GSH assumes that the modular,
lexical access mechanism is ordered:
more salient meanings – coded
meanings foremost on our mind due to
conventionality, familiarity or
frequency – are accessed faster than
and reach sufficient levels of activation
before less salient ones. (The salience
directs our attention and our limited
perceptual resources)
Discourse salience, contexts and
roles across the lifespan
Those contexts in which we learn new
words and new senses of words
throughout our lives are what we
are calling discourse contexts
New discourse contexts index new
discourse roles
New roles bring about new contexts
Power roles and power squeezes:
names & the sandwich generation
Family roles define power (text p 79), which
changes throughout the lifespan. Sandwich
power may be power squeeze
Traditional: those sandwiched between
aging parents who need care and/or help
and their own children. Discourse roles?
Club Sandwich: those in their 50s or 60s,
sandwiched between aging parents, adult
children and grandchildren. OR Those in
their 30s and 40s, with young children, aging
parents and grandparents. Discourse roles?
Adult relationships change
Having a sister is like having a best friend you can't
get rid of. You know whatever you do, they'll still
be there. ~Amy Li
Is solace anywhere more comforting than in the
arms of a sister? ~Alice Walker
Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life.
~Charles M. Schulz
It takes two men to make one brother. ~Israel
Zangwill
I don't believe an accident of birth makes people
sisters or brothers. It makes them siblings, gives
them mutuality of parentage. Sisterhood and
brotherhood is a condition people have to work
at. ~Maya Angelou
Example: We’re getting older;
NEJM 1994 was tip of iceberg
From 1960 to 1990, the number of
Americans 85 years of age or older
increased by 232 percent, whereas the
number 65 years of age or older
increased by 89 percent and the total
population grew by just 39 percent.
Currently [1994], 3.5 million U.S. citizens
are 85 or older. In this age group, known
as the oldest old, women outnumber men
by 2.6 to 1.
Language stereotypes for gender and aging, anyone?
Oldest old now use fewer nursing
homes: use community instead
Learning how to maintain
relationships becomes more crucial
What ‘small stories’ do you see in Frost’s poem?
The witch that came (the withered hag)
To wash the steps with pail and rag
Was once the beauty Abishag,
The picture pride of Hollywood.
***
No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard
Or keeps the end from being hard.
Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!
Story genres and positioning:
Brockmeier & Harre
…our local repertoire of narrative forms is
interwoven with a broader cultural set of
fundamental discursive orders that determine
who tells which story, when, where, and to
whom.
Stories are told from ‘positions’ … articulations of
particular narratives from particular points of
view and in particular voices
Those positions change over a lifetime, and so do our
particular choices of words. When do we add them?
When and how do we lose them?
An example: Burke and Shafto
2004
Experimental research and older adults’ reports of
their own experience suggest that the ability to
produce the spoken forms of familiar words
declines with aging. Older adults experience more
word-finding failures, such as tip-of-the tongue
states, than young adults do, and this and other
speech production failures appear to stem from
difficulties in retrieving the sounds of words.
Recent evidence has identified a parallel agerelated decline in retrieving the spelling of familiar
words. … We describe a model [transmission
deficit] wherein aging weakens connections
among linguistic representations, thereby
reducing the transmission of excitation from one
representation to another.
B&S: Node activation, ‘pylon’
Burke & Shafto: findings
‘Although older adults maintain or improve their
knowledge of words and word meanings, they
suffer deficits in the ability to produce the
spoken and written forms of words. The
transmission-deficit model provides a framework
for understanding this pattern of language
change during adulthood, and points to
important areas for future research. Inasmuch
as these production deficits are caused by
weak connections in the phonological and
orthographic systems, recent and frequent
word production should improve subsequent
performance.'
Current directions in psychological science 13
New directions: Source memory,
aging & culture
Chua, Chen and Park 2006
Review, de Bot & Makoni 2005: Language
& aging in multilingual contexts
…many older people, and especially those
speaking more than one language, are aging
out-of-place, dis-placed, cut off by new
caretaking venues and other-languaged
caregivers, from their own places, those sites
once indexed by their language (Lamb 2000;
Neilson 2003). As Arjun Appadurai comments in
an interview, “sites, in the sense of secure
locations for the practices of everyday life, may
have largely vanished” (Appadurai Interview by
Baldauf & Hoeller 1999). What we have
previously assumed about adult language, and
about language and aging processes, may also
need to change.