Group members:
1. Amaliah Khairina
(2201410077)
2. Annis Luthfiana
(2201410051)
3. Shofia Desy R
(2201410073)
4. M. Rizqi Adhi P
(2201410007)
5. Junnilalita A.V
(2201410148)
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Introduction
The emergence of discourse analysis is an awareness of applied linguistics in responce to the
inability of formal linguistics examine how participants in a communication acheved meaning.
Discourse analysis is defined as a stretch of language in use, of any length, and in any mood
which achieves meaning and coherence among the participants. Besides, discourse analysis in
the study of it. It is the development theory on how the meaning and coherence in a
communication are achieved.
There many theory that examine and dalth with language in use but our concern is discourse
analysis in applied linguistics. The focus of this chapter is to determine the discourse analysis
among other approaches.
Early Discourse Analysis
In the 1950s DA was seen and understood as a theoretical and structural linguistics as the
potensial extension in language analysis beyond the level of single sentences to discover the
distributional principles between sentences as well as within them (Harris 1952).
Inresponce to theoretical stimuli, the 1970s and the 1980s saw a major works on DA emerging
from AL perspective. The concern of DA in language teaching is related to some treatments in
language teaching and learning.
Text, Context, and Discourse
Much early DA work in AL saw text (the linguistic element in communication) as essentially
distinct from context (the non linguistic elements) and discourse as the two in interaction to
create meaning. 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, referred to as ‘co-text’;

other texts evoked for the participants and affecting their interpretation – sometimes
referred to as ‘intertext’;

non-linguistic meaningful communicative behaviour, i.e. paralanguage, such as voice
quality, gestures, and facial expressions;

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, computer.
This binary opposition of text and context, however, and the itemisation of contextual
components, has come to be seen as problematic. If context and text are separate, then the status
of text itself becomes precarious. As lingustic forms, if text is separated with context for the
purposes of analysis, text ceases to have any actual existence, and seems at odds with the aim of
DA to deal with the realities of language in use rather than linguistic abstractions. There is no use
of language which does not also have a situation, participants, co-text, paralanguage, etc. Early
DA did, however, often work with this binary text/context distinction. This was understandable.
At that time, DA was indeed experienced as the addition of a new dimension (i.e. context) to
their existing object of study (i.e. text). And now, DA turned to a variety of approaches to
communication from outside linguistics.
Pragmatics
Interest in the role of context led initially to the classic texts of pragmatics and attention to how
discourse is structured by what speakers are trying to do with their words, and how their
intentions are recognised by their interlocutors. Pragmatics was put to good to use in discourse
analysis of real world extended communication. 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. The approach, known as the Birmingham
School of Discourse Analysis (Birch 1982), 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
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. Their representations of how communication works can seem removed from the actual
development of discourse as it appears for participants.
Conversation analysis
Working from the premise, consistently denied in Chomskyan linguistics, that talk in interaction,
including casual conversation, is fundamentally ordered, 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.
Ethnography, language ecology, linguistic ethnography
Another source of insight for DA has been ethnography (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007). Like
CA, it isfirmly 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. It too rejects the idealisations and generalisations of
formal linguistics.
Semiotics, Paralanguage, and Multimodality
Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols, what they mean and how they are used.
Paralinguistic phenomenon not only carries meaning in parallel to the words, but can be essential
to understanding of the words, or even contradict them. The example is the conversation taking
place via telephone. Although the speaker and the interlocutor cannot see each other, the
interlocutor is still able to understand what the speaker is talking about. When participants do see
each other, there are in addition there are a host of paralinguistic visual phenomena such as
gesture, facial expression, eye movement, and contact and a rich of semiotics of such factors as
dress, proximity, position, and touch. Discourse analyses have long shown awareness of the need
to incorporate such phenomena into their analyses, but aslo of the difficulty of doing so
systematically.
In exploitation of paralanguage in spoken communication is and instance of multimodality as it
involves visual, non-linguistics sound, and other sensor stimuli.
Genre analysis
Genre analysis 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 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)
CDA is concerned with ideology, power relations and social injustices, and how these are
represented and reproduced through language. Its political allegiances are explicit, and it claims
that discourse analysis cannot avoid taking a political stance. Within this overall framework
various approaches have different emphases. 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
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
(Stubbs 2002: 123–44, 2005; O’Halloran 2007a, 2007b; see Semino, this volume). 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. Yet in its quest for understanding of how participants in communication achieve
meaning, DA cannot limit itself to textual analysis alone, any more than it can limit itself to the
cultural and psychological context of language use without attention to actual text. In any act of
communication there is someone talking, someone they are talking to, and something they say –
sender, receiver and text – and a full discourse analysis must describe analyse and relate each
corner of this ‘triangle of communication’ (Widdowson 1975: 47–70, 91–99; Cook 2004: 4–5;
Widdowson 2004).
Final Words
There is a valid case for saying that there is no longer a single theory or method of analysis
which can be clearly labeled as discourse analysis. It has become a superordinate term for a
wide range of traditions for the analysis of language in use, so general and all-inclusive that it is
hardly worth using. Perhaps the term discourse analysis has had its day. It is now so built into the
fabric of applied linguistics that any analysis of language in use is discourse analysis of some
kind.
Source: James, Simpson. 2011. The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics. (pp. 431 – 440)