Uli Fauziyah Miatin
2201410015
TAL 203-204
Discourse Analysis
Summary
Discourse is a part of language in use, of any length in any mode, which achieves meaning
and coherence. Discourse analysis is the use and development of theories and method which
explain meaning and coherence involved. Because of that, discourse analysis not only
concerns about the language itself, but also all about the elements and process which
contribute to communication.
AL DA embraces all aspects of language in use. This makes a criticism that DA is a
“study of everything” concerned with such a wide variety of phenomena that it has no distinct
identity of its own.
Early AL D
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).
There were a number of treatments of DA in relation to language teaching and
learning. 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. Thus, emerged the investigation of effective language teaching called as the
language learning approach to DA.
Text, context, and discourse
In applied linguistics, DA saw that text (the linguistic elements of communication) is
different from context (the non-linguistics elements) and discourse as the two in interaction
create meaning. Context itself was further treated as having a series of components, with
different approaches to DA tending to emphasize the role of one or another. Thus, context
variously included consideration of such factors as:
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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;
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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.
It makes problematic in seeing the binary opposition of text and context and itemization
of contextual components. If context and text are separate, then the status of text itself
becomes precarious. However, DA often worked with the binary distinction between text and
context. For applied linguistics, DA was experienced as the addition of a new dimension (i.e.
context) to their existing object of study (i.e. text).
DA has developed the variety of approaches to communication from outside
linguistics which includes pragmatics, schema theory, conversation analysis, ethnography,
language ecology, linguistics ethnography, semiotics, paralanguage, multimodality, larger
structures, genre analysis, and critical discourse analysis (CDA).
Pragmatics
The interest in the role of context and pragmatics give an attention to how discourse is
structured by what speakers are trying to do with their words, and how their intentions are
recognized by their interlocutors. Despite the limitation that early classic pragmatics which
deals only with brief invented examples without reference to many significant aspects of
context, pragmatics was put to good to use in discourse analysis of real world extended
communication. The approach, known as the Birmingham School of Discourse Analysis
(Birch 1982), can provided an important impetus to formulate rules analogous in structural
grammars but remained tightly focused upon language in isolation from other modes of
communication, and, working from transcriptions after the event, tended to treat discourse as
a product rather than a process.
Schema Theory
Schemata and scripts related notions on posited mental constructs of expected sequences of
events or combinations of elements which discourse participants use to interpret what is said
or written. 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. In the binary conception of discourse as text + context a schema can be classed
as context, as it is a kind of knowledge, derived from experience of the world, in whose light
each new text is interpreted. The relation of text and schema is, however, dynamic, with
schemata being deployed to interpret texts, but also being changed by them.
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
Developed in from the late 1960s, CA’s primary interest is in the social act (Seedhouse 2004:
3) and it ‘is only marginally interested in language as such’ (Hutchby and Wooffift 1998: 14).
CA made use of newly available recording technology to transcribe and closely
analyze 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 realized in talk.
Although initially concerned with conversation, later CA work has moved on to study
talk in a variety of contexts, for instance workplace interaction (e.g. Nevile 2008), classroom
interaction (Seedhouse 2004; see Tsui, this volume), and computer mediated interaction.
Ethnography, language ecology, linguistic ethnography
It 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. Its scope is much broader than CA or DA.
Ethnography seeks an understanding of culture through an analysis of all details of
everyday life in a given context, and does not therefore confine itself to spoken face-to-face
interaction as CA does, or to communication involving language as DA does.
One particular ethnographic notion from which DA can benefit is that of the
irreducibility of experience – that there are aspects of any act of communication that are
particular to it and cannot be generalized. Another is the ethnographer’s preoccupation with
the relationship between researcher and participants, and how findings may be skewed by the
former’s identity and preconceptions.
Linguistic ethnographers draw upon a number of precedent influences, such as new
literacy studies, interactional sociolinguistics, and critical discourse analysis as well as the
mainstream applied linguistics language learning approach to DA.
Language ecology often applying its insights to the field of language teaching and
learning, it 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
These approaches have worked with brief invented dialogues or transcripts of recorded
actually occurring talk. In talk, a host of paralinguistic phenomena not only carry meaning in
parallel to the words (as the term ‘paralanguage’ suggests), but can be essential to
understanding of the words, or even contradict them.
Every spoken utterance has a volume, speed, pitch and intonation in addition to its
linguistic form, propositional content and pragmatic force, and these paralinguistic elements
convey key information about the speaker’s identity, attitude, and commitment. When the
participants do see each other, there are in addition a host of paralinguistic visual phenomena
such as gesture, facial expressions, eye movements and contact (or lack of it) and a rich
semiotics of such factors as dress, proximity, position, and touch.
Multimodal analysis concerns itself largely with the multiple dimensions of meaning
made possible by modern printing, computer and mobile technologies, paying attention to the
significance of the presentation of the written words themselves, in different fonts, colors,
sizes, arrangements, animations, etc., and to the many communicative modes with which they
co-occur, such as still and moving pictures, music, diagrams, tables, etc. 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.
Larger structures
Other approaches of DA are beginning with larger structures and working top-down from
these – though they may also deploy detailed analysis to validate these posited structures.
Genre analysis
Genre analysis seeks to understand any communicative event as an instance of a genre. It is
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 finegrained analysis, to identify the conventions which characterize these different genres.
Genre analysis was developed by Swales and colleagues in connection with the
teaching of English for Specific Purposes and is thus closely linked to the language learning
approach to DA.
Critical discourse analysis (CDA)
It is like genre analysis, but begins with larger concepts and structures. 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 generalization: corpus linguistics
The advent of corpus analysis, however has enabled DA partially to redress these
shortcomings, and to add a quantitative dimension to research. Corpus analysis has thus given
a major boost to DA in recent years (Baker 2006), with some of the most impressive work
being done in corpus stylistics, i.e. in the discourse analysis of literary texts.
The greater attention to textual features enabled by corpus linguistics and the benefits
it has brought to DA should not, however, be taken to mean that a corpus analysis and a
discourse analysis are the same thing. 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.
Simpson, James. 2011. The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics. New York:
Routledge.
Questions:
1. What is the major difference among text, context, and discourse?
2. What is paralanguage and how to analyze it if two people are interact each other
indirectly (using telephone)?