DISCOURSE ANALYSIS What is discourse? Three Approaches to Discourse Formal/Structural Discourse is language above the level of a clause or a sentence Functional Discourse is Discourse is a kind language in of social practice use/language in action Understanding the kinds How people use of rules and conventions language to do things that govern the ways we join clauses and sentences to form text Social The way we use language is connected to the way we form social identities and participate in groups and institutions What is Discourse? • “A series of connected utterances, such as • conversation, story, • lecture, or any other communication event.” (Levine, Rowe) • “Discourse: a continuous stretch of language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit such as a sermon, argument, joke, or narrative.” (Crystal) • “Novels, as well as short conversations or groans miight be equally rightfully named discourses” (Cook). What is discourse analysis? • The process of discovering the rules of a series of connected utterances, such as conversation, lecture or any other communication event. • Discourse analysts study the way sentences and utterances go together to make texts and interactions and how these texts and interactions fit into our social world. • A way of looking at language that focuses on how people use it in real life to do certain things and to show that they are certain kinds of people and belong to certain types of groups. Importance of Discourse Analysis • To communicate more effectively • Discourse analysis is not just a study of language. Written and Oral Discourse • Speech is more spontaneous • Speech is interactive • The speaker can adjust the register to suit the audience. • The speaker can use extralinguistic signals (gestures, expressions) • Slang and contracted forms of language are part of oral discourse. • The speaker can use rhythm,tone,intonation,speed. • The speaker can easily hide his mistakes when talking than when writing. Written and Oral Discourse The writer does not know his audience and therefore cannot adjust his writing for his audience. The writer has more time, which leads to more complex syntax and a well-planned output. The reader is not there to respond to the text while the writer is writing it, and the writer is not there to respond to the reader's questions when the reader is reading it. Written discourse can use charts, tables or formulas Writing has permanence. Writing tends to be more explicit than speech. What makes a text a text? What makes a text a text? Beaugreande's seven criteria: 1.cohesion 2. coherence 3. intertextuality 4. intentionality 5. acceptability 6. situalionality 7. informativeness What makes a text a text? meaning texture - the quality that makes a particular set of words or sentences a text rather than a random collection of linguistic items It's all about relationships: coherence, cohesion and intertextuality Cohesion • the quality in a text that forces you to look either backward or forward in the text in order to make sense of the things you read • two types: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion Grammatical Cohesion 1. Conjunction contrastive "The government was pleased that casualties from last week’s unusually heavy monsoon rains were kept to a minimum. The economic losses caused by the severe flooding in Metro Manila and its surrounding provinces, however, have been huge." -from "Economic Cost of Floods", The Philippine Daily Inquirer Grammatical Cohesion 1. Conjunction - use of connecting devices additives The student had to write a short story for class. In addition to this, she had to write a book report for the story that she made. Grammatical Cohesion 1. Conjunction causative The storm brought with it heavy rains and flooding. Because of this, classes were suspended. Grammatical Cohesion 1. Conjunction sequential First, research about your topic. Then, create an outline. After you have prepared the outline, you can finally write the first draft.. Grammatical Cohesion 2. Reference - use of pronouns anaphoric - using words that point back from Reader's Digest's "Laughter, The Best Medicine" Grammatical Cohesion 2. Reference - use of pronouns cataphoric - using words that point forward from Inquirer.net Grammatical Cohesion 2. Reference - use of pronouns exophoric- using words that refer to something not present in the text. If you want to come up with an output that exceeds expectations, you must put in more time and effort. Grammatical Cohesion 3. Substitution - using other words to refer to an antecedent The man wanted to enter the room without getting noticed, and he succeeded in doing so. Grammatical Cohesion 4. Ellipsis - omission of a noun, verb or phrase "There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking." - Virginia Woolf Lexical Cohesion For a lot of women, the go-to shoe has always been the stiletto heel for its built-in glamour. For me, changing into a pair of heels is all it takes to instantly dress up my outfit. But I guess it’s a sign of the times when fashionable women like First Lady Michelle Obama, Carla Bruni and Victoria Beckham can now be seen out and about in—gasp!—flats. -"Say Hello to Power Flats", Philippine Daily Inquirer Lexical chains Coherence - general overall interrelatedness in the text - parts of a text are conceptually and procedurally related; they appear in a logical and predictable sequence Analyzing cohesion and coherence #1: How is this text put together in a formal way?? #2: What are the authors trying to do using this text? #3 How does Starbucks portray itself as a company using this text? Genre Analysis -What makes a letter a letter, an essay an essay, a news article a news article and so on. -"A genre comprises a class of communicative events the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. ...Exemplars of a genre exhibit various patterns of similarity in terms of structure, style, content and intended audience. If all high probability expectations are realized, the exemplar will be viewed as prototypical by the parent discourse community." (Swales, 1980) Analyzing Spoken Discourse Pragmatics Conversation Analysis Openings,closings,turn-taking mechanisms, adjacency pairs, back-channeling More Approaches to Discourse • Textual analysis - how texts are structures beyond the level of the sentence • Genre Analysis - the structure and communicative purpose of different types of texts and the way these texts function in the groups of people who use them More Approaches to Discourse • Critical Discourse Analysis - uncovering ideology and power in discourse • Pragmatics - how people do things with words and how they interpret what other people or doing when they speak • Conversational Analysis - how people create order in their social interactions through the structure and procedural rules of conversation More Approaches to Discourse Analysis • Interactional Sociolinguistics - how people manage social identities and social activities as they interact • The ethnography of speaking - uncovering the knowledge speakers need in order to be competent participants in speech events within communities More Approaches to Discourse Analysis • Mediated Discourse Analysis - how concrete, real time social actions are mediated through discourse • Multimodal discourse analysis - how people deploy different semiotic modes in communication • Corpus-assisted discourse analysis - uses word frequency counts and other techniques in corpus linguistics to aid discourse analysis. References Discourse Analysis A resource Book for Students by Rodney H. Jones (from http://www.personal.cityu.edu.hk/~enrodney/Portfolio2/DI SCOURSE_ANALYSIS.pdf) http://www.routledge.com/cw/9780415610001jones/s1/section-a/ www.routledge.com/cw/9780415610001-jones/s1/sectionb/ www.routledge.com/cw/9780415610001-jones/s1/sectionc/
