DISCOURSE ANALYSIS_1

Introduction
Discourse analysis is an approach to the analysis of language that looks at patterns of language
across texts as well as the social and cultural contexts in which the texts occur. Views of
discourse analysis range from more textually oriented which concentrate mostly on language
features of texts, to more socially oriented which consider what the text is doing in the social
and cultural setting in which it occurs. This leads to a discussion of the social constructionist
view of discourse; that is, the ways in which what we say as we speak contributes to the
construction of certain views of the world, of people and, in turn, ourselves. The relationship
between language and identity is therefore essential. This includes a discussion of the ways in
which, through our use of language, we not only ‘display’ who we are but also how we want
people to see us. This includes a discussion of the ways in which, through the use of spoken
and written discourse, people both ‘perform’ and ‘create’ particular social, and gendered,
identities.
The ways in which ‘texts rely on other texts’ are the ways in which we produce and
understand texts in relation to other texts that have come before them as well as other texts that
may follow them.
Discourse analysis examines patterns of language across texts and considers the relationship
between language and the social and cultural contexts in which it is used. Discourse analysis
also considers the ways that the use of language presents different views of the world and
different understandings. It examines how the use of language is influenced by relationships
between participants as well as the effects the use of language has upon social identities and
relations. It also considers how views of the world, and identities, are constructed through the
use of discourse. The term discourse analysis was first introduced by Zellig Harris (1952) as
a way of analysing connected speech and writing. Harris had two main interests: the
examination of language beyond the level of the sentence and the relationship between
linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour. He examined the first of these in most detail, aiming to
provide a way for describing how language features are distributed within texts and the ways
in which they are combined in particular kinds and styles of texts. An early, and important,
observation he made was that: “…connected discourse occurs within a particular situation –
whether of a person speaking, or of a conversation, or of someone sitting down occasionally
over the period of months to write a particular kind of book in a particular literary or scientific
tradition”. (3) There are, thus, typical ways of using language in particular situations. These
discourses, he argued, not only share particular meanings, they also have characteristic
linguistic features associated with them. What these meanings are and how they are realized in
language is of central interest to the area of discourse analysis.

The relationship between language and context

By ‘the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour’ Harris means how people
know, from the situation that they are in, how to interpret what someone says. If, for example,
an air traffic controller says to a pilot The runway is full at the moment, this most likely means
it is not possible to land the plane. This may seem obvious to a native speaker of English but a
non-native speaker pilot, of which there are many in the world, needs to understand the
relationship between what is said and what is meant in order to understand that he/she cannot
land the plane at that time. Harris’ point is that the expression The runway is full at the moment
has a particular meaning in a particular situation (in this case the landing of a plane) and may
mean something different in another situation. If I say The runway is full at the moment to a
friend who is waiting with me to pick someone up from the airport, this is now an explanation
of why the plane is late landing (however I may know this) and not an instruction to not land
the plane. The same discourse, thus, can be understood differently by different language users
as well as understood differently in different contexts.
Van Dijk provides two book length accounts of the notion of context. He argues that context
is a subjective construct that accounts not only for the uniqueness of each text but also for the
common ground and shared representations that language users draw on to communicate with
each other. Van Dijk argues, further, that the link between society and discourse is often
indirect and depends on how language users themselves define the genre or communicative
event in which they engaged. Thus, in his words, ‘[i]t is not the social situation that influences
(or is influenced by) discourse, but the way the participants define (original emphasis)’ the
situation in which the discourse occurs. In his view, contexts are not objective conditions but
rather (inter)subjective constructs that are constantly updated by participants in their
interactions with each other as members of groups or communities.
The relationship between language and context is fundamental to the work of J. R. Firth,
Michael Halliday and John Sinclair, each of whom has made important contributions to the
area of discourse analysis. Firth draws on the anthropologist Malinowski’s notions of context
of situation and context of culture to discuss this relationship, arguing that in order to
understand the meaning of what a person says or writes we need to know something about the
situational and cultural context in which it is located. That is, if you don’t know what the people
involved in a text are doing and don’t understand their culture ‘then you can’t make sense of
their text’.
Halliday takes the discussion further by linking context of situation with actual texts and
context of culture with potential texts and the range of possibilities that are open to language
users for the creation of texts. The actual choices a person makes from the options that are
available to them within the particular context of culture, thus, take place within a particular
context of situation, both of which influence the use of language in the text (see Hasan 2009 ,
Halliday 2009a , van Dijk 2011 for further discussion of the relationship between language
and context). The work of J. R. Firth has been similarly influential in the area of discourse
analysis. This is reflected in the concern by discourse analysts to study language within
authentic instances of use (as opposed to made-up examples) – a concern with the inseparability
of meaning and form and a focus on a contextual theory of meaning (Stubbs 1996 ). Sinclair
also argues that language should be studied in naturally occurring contexts and that the analysis
of meaning should be its key focus (Carter 2004).
Discourse analysis, then, is interested in ‘what happens when people draw on the knowledge
they have about language . . . to do things in the world’ (Johnstone 2 002: 3). It is, thus, the
analysis of language in use. Discourse analysis considers the relationship between language
and the contexts in which it is used and is concerned with the description and analysis of both
spoken and written interactions. Its primary purpose is to provide a deeper understanding and
appreciation of texts and how they become meaningful to their users.
The discourse structure of texts
Discourse analysts are also interested in how people organize what they say in the sense of
what they typically say first, and what they say next and so on in a conversation or in a piece
of writing. This is something that varies across cultures and is by no means the same across
languages. An email, for example, to me from a Japanese academic or a member of the
administrative staff at a Japanese university may start with reference to the weather saying
immediately after Dear Professor Paltridge something like Greetings! It’s such a beautiful
day today here in Kyoto. I, of course, may also say this in an email to an overseas colleague
but is it not a ritual requirement in English, as it is in Japanese. There are, thus, particular things
we say and particular ways of ordering what we say in particular spoken and written situations
and in particular languages and cultures.
Mitchell (1957) was one the first researchers to examine the discourse structure of texts. He
looked at the ways in which people order what they say in buying and selling interactions. He
looked at the overall structure of these kinds of texts, introducing the notion of stages into
discourse analysis; that is the steps that language users go through as they carry out particular
interactions. His interest was more in the ways in which interactions are organized at an overall
textual level than the ways in which language is used in each of the stages of a text. Mitchell
discusses how language is used as, what he calls, co-operative action and how the meaning of
language lies in the situational context in which it is used and in the context of the text as a
whole.
I f, then, I am walking along the street in Shanghai near a market and someone says to me
Hello Mister, DVD, I know from the situation that I am in that they want to sell me DVDs. If
I then go into a market and someone asks what seems to me to be a very high price for a shirt,
I know from my experience with this kind of interaction that the price they are telling me is
just a starting point in the buying and selling exchange and that I can quite easily end up buying
the shirt for at least half the original price. I know from my experience how the interaction will
typically start, what language will typically be used in the interaction and how the interaction
will typically end. I also start to learn other typical characteristics of the interaction. For
example, a person will normally only say Hello Mister, DVD (or Hello Mister, Louis Vuitton,
etc.) when I am between stalls, not when I am in a stall and have started a buying and selling
interaction with someone.
Capturing obligatory and optional stages that are typical of service encounters, a greeting
such as Hi, how are you? is not always obligatory at the start of a service encounter in English
when someone is buying something at the delicatessen counter in a busy supermarket.
However, a sales request such as Can I have . . . or Give me . . . etc. where you say what you
want to buy is. There are many possible ways in which the stages in a service encounter (and
indeed many genres) can be realized in terms of language. For example, a request for service
might be expressed as Could you show me . . . or Have you got . . . . The ways in which these
elements are expressed will vary, further, depending on where the service encounter is taking
place; that is whether it is in a supermarket, at the post office or at a travel agent etc. It will also
vary according to variables such as the age of the people involved in the interaction and whether
the service encounter is face-to-face or on the phone, etc. There is, thus, no neat one-to-one
correspondence between the structural elements of texts and the ways in which they are
expressed through language.
Researchers working in the area known as conversation analysis have looked at how people
open and close conversations and how people take turns and overlap their speech in
conversations, for example. They have looked at casual conversations, chat, as well as doctor–
patient consultations, psychiatric interviews and interactions in legal settings. Their interest, in
particular, is in fine-grained analyses of spoken interactions such as the use of overlap, pauses,
increased volume and pitch and what these reveal about how people relate to each other in what
they are saying and doing with language.

Cultural ways of speaking and writing

Different cultures often have different ways of doing things through language. This is
something that was explored by Hymes (1964 ) through the notion of the ethnography of
communication. Hymes’ work was a reaction to the neglect, at the time, of speech in linguistic
analyses and anthropological descriptions of cultures. His work was also a reaction to views of
language which took little or no account of the social and cultural contexts in which language
occurs. In particular, he considered aspects of speech events such as who is speaking to whom,
about what, for what purpose, where and when, and how these impact on how we say and do
things in culture-specific settings.
There are, for example, particular cultural ways of buying and selling things in different
cultures. How I buy my lunch at a takeaway shop in an English-speaking country is different,
for example, from how I might do this in Japan. In an English-speaking country there is greater
ritual use of Please and Thanks on the part of the customer in this kind of interaction than
there is in Japan. How I buy something in a supermarket in an English speaking country may
be more similar to how I might do this in Japan. The person at the cash register in Japan,
however, will typically say much more than the customer in this sort of situation, who may
indeed say nothing. This does not mean that by saying nothing the Japanese customer is being
rude. It simply means that there are culturally different ways of doing things with language in
different cultures. The sequence of events I go through may be the same in both cultures, but
the ways of using language in these events and other sorts of non-linguistic behaviour may
differ.
A further example of this can be seen when companies decide to set up a braches of their
business overseas. A number of years ago the Japanese department store Daimaru opened a
branch in Melbourne. Each year the store had a spring sale and sent out circulars to its
customers to let them know about it. It was interesting to see how differently the company
wrote their promotional materials for their Japanese-speaking and their English-speaking
customers. The Japanese texts commenced with ‘seasonal greetings’ (as in the emails above)
referring to the warm spring weather and the sight of fresh flowers in the gardens whereas the
English texts went straight to the point of the message, the sale that would be starting shortly.
In the Japanese texts it would have been impolite not to do this whereas in the English texts it
would have been unnecessary and, indeed, may have hidden the point of the text for the English
readers if they had done this.

Views of discourse analysis

There are in fact a number of differing views on what discourse analysis actually is. Social
science researchers, for example, might argue that all their work is concerned with the analysis
of discourse, yet often take up the term in their own, sometimes different, ways (Fairclough
2003). He contrasts what he calls ‘textually oriented discourse analysis’ with approaches to
discourse analysis that have more of a social theoretical orientation. He does not see these two
views as mutually exclusive, however, arguing for an analysis of discourse that is both
linguistic and social in its orientation. Cameron and Kulick ( 2003 ) present a similar view that
the instances of language in use that are studied under a textually oriented view of discourse
are still socially situated and need to be interpreted in terms of their social meanings and
functions.

David Crystal’s (2008) analysis of Barack Obama’s victory speech when he won the US
presidential election is an example of textually oriented discourse analysis. One of the features
Crystal notes in Obama’s speech is the use of parallelism, where he repeats certain
grammatical structures for rhetorical effect. In the following extract from the opening lines of
his speech Obama repeats ‘who clauses’ (highlighted below) lowering the processing load of
the speech so that listeners will focus on the content of each the clauses that follow. Crystal
also shows how Obama follows the rhetorical ‘rule of three’ in this section of his speech in a
way that mirrors the speeches of former political leaders such as Winston Churchill.

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who
still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our
democracy, tonight is your answer. (CNNPolitics.com 2008 )
Obama also uses lists of pairs in his speech to rhetorical effect, as in:

It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white,
Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled.

Higgins’ (2008) analysis of Obama’s speech is an example of more socially oriented discourse
analysis. Higgins traces Obama’s speech back to the oratory of the ancient Greeks and Romans
showing how the use of the ‘tricolon’ (series of threes), as in the example above, was one of
Cicero’s, as well as Julius Caesar’s, rhetorical techniques, as in Caesar’s ‘Veni, vidi, vici’ (I
came, I saw, I conquered). In doing this, Obama recalls both the politics and traditions of
ancient Athens where oratory was ‘the supreme political skill, on whose mastery power
depended’. Williams (2009) discusses Obama’s speech within the context of the political (and
economic) moment of his victory, highlighting the central message of optimism in his speech
captured in the repetition of the refrain ‘Yes, we can’. Higgins also discusses how this ‘Yes,
we can’ relates, intertextually, to the call-andresponse preaching of the American church and
the power that effective preachers have on their congregations. Obama’s reference in his speech
to previous leaders, thus, draws on the social stock of knowledge he shares with his audience
and their social and cultural histories.
We can see, then, that discourse analysis is a view of language at the level of text. Discourse
analysis is also a view of language in use; that is, how people achieve certain communicative
goals through the use of language, perform certain communicative acts, participate in certain
communicative events and present themselves to others. Discourse analysis considers how
people manage interactions with each other, how people communicate within particular groups
and societies as well as how they communicate with other groups, and with other cultures. It
also focuses on how people do things beyond language, and the ideas and beliefs that they
communicate as they use language.
Discourse as the social construction of reality
The view of discourse as the social construction of reality see texts as communicative units
which are embedded in social and cultural practices. The texts we write and speak both shape
and are shaped by these practices. Discourse, then, is both shaped by the world as well as
shaping the world. Discourse is shaped by language as well as shaping language. It is shaped
by the people who use the language as well as shaping the language that people use. Discourse
is shaped, as well, by the discourse that has preceded it and that which might follow it.
Discourse is also shaped by the medium in which it occurs as well as it shapes the possibilities
for that medium. The purpose of the text also influences the discourse. Discourse also shapes
the range of possible purposes of texts.
Wetherell’s ( 2001 ) analysis of the BBC Panorama interview with the late Diana, Princess
of Wales (BBC 1995) provides an example of the role of language in the construction (and
construal) of the social world. She shows how, through the use of language, Diana ‘construes’
her social world, presenting herself as a sharing person and Prince Charles as ‘a proud man
who felt low about the attention his wife was getting’. That is, as she speaks, the Princess
creates a view of herself and the world in which she lives in a way that she wishes people to
see. As Wetherell points out:

As Diana and others speak, on this and many other occasions, a formulation of the world comes into
being. The world as described comes into existence at that moment. In an important sense, the social
reality constructed in the Panorama interview and in other places of Diana’s happy marriage bucking
under media pressure did not exist before its emergence as discourse.

A further example of this social constructivist view of discourse can be seen in the text on the
cover of the December 2004 Asian edition of Business Week :

The three scariest words in U.S. industry: ‘The China Price’

The feature story in this issue discusses China’s ability to undercut production costs to the
extent that, unless US manufacturers are able to cut their prices, they can ‘kiss their customers
goodbye’. This special report states that for decades economists have insisted that the US wins
from globalization. Now they are not so sure. China, a former US trade representative says, ‘is
a tiger on steroids’. A labour economist from Harvard University says in this series of articles
that the wages of white collar workers in the United States ‘could get whacked’ as a result of
this shift and that white collar workers in the United States have a right to be scared that they
may lose their jobs as they are displaced by this ‘offshoring’. Ultimately, the report argues,
more than half the 130 million US workforce could feel the impact of this change in global
competition.
Harney ( 2009 ) in her book The China Price continues this discussion, showing how this
reality is changing with regional labour shortages and rising wages. While ‘the China Price’
has become a brand that means the lowest price possible, there are Chinese factories that have
had to close, have moved their business to other parts of China where labour costs are lower or
have sent their work outside of China because they have not been able to maintain their earlier
level of pricing. This outsourcing of work has led to increases in manufacturing in neighbouring
countries such as Malaysia where some regions have increased their productivities enormously.
Penang, for example, increased its manufacturing in 2010 by 465 per cent compared to 2009
because of this, due to what is now being called ‘the China effect’. For someone reading about
this for the first time, this becomes not just part of their social stock of knowledge but also part
of their social reality, a reality constructed (in part) through discourse.
The complete meaning of a word is always contextual’ (Firth 1935 : 37). These meanings,
however, change over time in relation to particular contexts of use and changes in the social,
cultural and ideological background/s to this use.

Discourse and socially situated identities

When we speak or write we use more than just language to display who we are, and how we
want people to see us. The way we dress, the gestures we use and the way/s we act and interact
also influence how we display social identity. Other factors which influence this include the
ways we think, the attitudes we display and the things we value, feel and believe. The ways we
make visible and recognizable who we are and what we are doing always involves more than
just language. It involves acting, interacting and thinking in certain ways. It also involves
valuing and talking (or reading and writing) in appropriate ways with appropriate ‘props’, at
appropriate times and in appropriate places.
The Princess of Wales, for example, knows in the Panorama interview not only how she is
expected to speak in the particular place and at the particular time but also how she should
dress, how she can use body language to achieve the effect that she wants as well as the values,
attitudes, beliefs and emotions it is appropriate for her to express (as well as those it is not
appropriate for her to express) in this situation. That is, she knows how to enact the discourse
of a Princess being interviewed about her private life in the open and public medium of
television. This discourse, of course, may be different from, but related to, the discourses she
participated in in her role as mother of her children, and the public and private roles and
identities she had as wife of the Prince of Wales. A given discourse, thus, can involve more
than just the one single identity.
Discourses, then, involve the socially situated identities that we enact and recognize in the
different settings that we interact in. They include culture-specific ways of performing and
culture-specific ways of recognizing identities and activities. Discourses also include the
different styles of language that we use to enact and recognize these identities; that is, different
social languages. Discourses also involve characteristic ways of acting, interacting and feeling,
and characteristic ways of showing emotion, gesturing, dressing and posturing. They also
involve particular ways of valuing, thinking, believing, knowing, speaking and listening,
reading and writing.

Discourse and performance

A discourse is a ‘dance’ that exists in the abstract as a coordinated pattern of words, deeds,
values, beliefs, symbols, tools, objects, times, and places in the here and now as a performance
that is recognizable as just such a coordination. Like a dance, the performance here and now is
never exactly the same. It all comes down, often, to what the ‘masters of the dance’ will allow
to be recognised or will be forced to recognize as a possible instantiation of the dance.

This notion of performance and, in particular, performativity , is taken up by many

contemporary scientists. Performativity derives from speech act theory and the work of the
linguistic philosopher Austin. It is based on the view that in saying something, we do it. That
is, we bring states of affairs into being as a result of what we say and what we do. Examples of
this are I promise and I now pronounce you husband and wife. Once I have said I promise I
have committed myself to doing something. Once a priest, or a marriage celebrant, says I now
pronounce you husband and wife , the couple have ‘become’ husband and wife. Performance,
thus, brings the social world into being.
Discourses, like the performance of gendered identities, are socially constructed, rather than
‘natural’. People ‘are who they are because of (among other things) the way they talk’ not
‘because of who they (already) are’ (Cameron 1999 : 144). We, thus, ‘are not who we are
because of some inner being but because of what we do’ (Pennycook 2007 : 70). It is, thus, ‘in
the doing that the identity is produced’.
Social identities, then, are not pre-given, but are formed in the use of language and the
various other ways we display who we are, what we think, value and feel, etc. The way, for
example, a rap singer uses language, what they rap about and how they present themselves as
they do this, all contributes to their performance and creation of themselves as a rap singer
(Pennycook 2007 ). They may do this in a particular way on the streets of New York, in another
way in a show in Quebec, and yet another way in a night club in Seoul. As they do being a rap
singer, they bring into existence, or repeat, their social persona as a rap singer.
Nor are we who we ARE because of how we (physically) look or where we were originally
born.

Discourse and intertextuality

All texts, whether they are spoken or written, make their meanings against the background of
other texts and things that have been said on other occasions. Texts may more or less implicitly
or explicitly cite other texts; they may refer to other texts, or they may allude to other past, or
future, texts. We thus ‘make sense of every word, every utterance, or act against the background
of (some) other words, utterances, acts of a similar kind’. All texts are, thus, in an intertextual
relationship with other texts. We create our texts out of the sea of former texts that surround
us, the sea of language we live in. And we understand the texts of others within that same sea.

Umberto Eco (1987) provides an interesting discussion of intertextuality in his chapter

‘Casablanca: Cult movies and intertextual collage’. Eco points out that the film Casablanca
was made on a very small budget and in a very short time. As a result its creators were forced
to improvize the plot, mixing a little of everything they knew worked in a movie as they went.
The result is what Eco describes as an ‘intertextual collage’. For Eco, Casablanca has been so
successful because it is not, in fact, an instance of a single kind of film genre but a mixing of
stereotyped situations that are drawn from a number of different kinds of film genres. As the
film proceeds, he argues, we recognize the film genres that they recall. We also recognize the
pleasures we have experienced when we have watched these kinds of films.
The study of newspaper commentaries in Chinese and English on the events of September
11 provides an example of how writers in different languages and cultural settings draw on
intertextual resources for the writing of their texts and how they position themselves in relation
to their sources. One of the most striking differences was that in the Chinese texts the writers
often drew their views from other sources but made it clear they were not the authors of the
texts. They did not attempt to endorse these views or take a stance towards them, thereby
keeping a distance from the views that they had presented. In the English language texts,
however, the writers took the points of view they were presenting as widely held within the
particular community and did not try to distance themselves from them. Many of the differences
can be traced back to the different sociocultural settings in which the texts occurred, and
especially the role of the media in the two different settings. Thus, while media discourses are
often global in nature, they are, at the same time, often very local and draw on other texts for
different purposes and often in rather different ways.

Discourse analysis, then, considers the relationship between language and the social and
cultural contexts in which it is used. It considers what people mean by what they say, how they
work out what people mean and the way language presents different views of the world and
different understandings. This includes an examination of how discourse is shaped by
relationships between participants, and the effects discourse has upon social identities and
relations.
Discourse analysis takes us into the ‘bigger picture’ of language description that is often left
out of more micro-level descriptions of language use. It takes us into the social and cultural
settings of language use to help us understand particular language choices. That is, it takes us
beyond description to explanation and helps us understand the ‘rules of the game’ that language
users draw on in their everyday spoken and written interactions. There are many ways in which
one could (and can) approach discourse analysis. What each of these ways reveals is, in part, a
result of the perspective taken in the analysis, and the questions that have been asked.