ENG 523 Handouts
ENG 523 Handouts
(ENG523)
Discourse analysis as a whole is the work of text grammarians, working mostly with
written language. Text grammarians see texts as language elements pass into together in
relationships with one another that can be defined. Linguists have made a significant impact in
this area. Its most important contribution has been to show the links between grammar and
discourse. Discourse analysis has grown into a wide-ranging and various disciplines which find
its unity in the description of language above the sentence and an interest in the contexts and
cultural influences which affect language in use. It is also now, increasingly, forming an
environment to research in Applied Linguistics, second language learning and teaching in
particular.
American discourse analysis has been dominated by work within the ethno methodological
tradition, which emphasizes the research method of close observation of groups of people
communicating in natural settings. It examines types of speech event such as storytelling,
greeting rituals and verbal duels in different cultural and social settings (e.g., Gumperz and
Hymes 1972). What is often called conversation analysis within the American tradition can also
be included under the general heading of discourse analysis. In conversational analysis, the
emphasis is not upon building structural models but on the close observation of the behavior of
participants in talk and on patterns which persist over a wide range of natural data. The work of
Goffman (1976; 1979), and Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) is important in the study of
conversational norms, turn taking, and other aspects of spoken interaction. Alongside the
conversation analysts, working within the sociolinguistic tradition, Labov's investigations of oral
storytelling have also contributed to a long history of interest in narrative discourse. The
American work has produced a large number of descriptions of discourse types, as well as
insights into the social constraints of politeness and face-preserving phenomena in talk,
overlapping with British work in pragmatics.
According McCarthy (1991), discourse analysis describes the language above the sentence: its
context and the cultural influence, which affect language in use. A discourse carries much more
than its form, it also carries its own particular function, which means that there is not necessarily
one-to-one relationship between a given supra-segmental choice and a meaning, hence form and
function might be analyzed separately in order to depict the real meaning of a discourse.
According to Halliday (1970), intonation plays a crucial role in conveying meaning. If the
intonation of a sentence is changed, its meaning will also be changed. Thus, the particular way
the sentences are produced and carry their individual meaning, and the analysis must go far
beyond sentences forms in order to be possible to depict the real meaning of the spoken
interaction.
The famous British comedy duo, Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, started one of their shows in
1973 with the following dialogue:
Ernie: Tell me about the show.
Eric (to the audience): Have we got a show for you might folks!
Have we got a show for you! (Aside to Ernie) Have we got a
Show for them?
This short dialogue raises a number of problems for anyone wishing to do a linguistic analysis of
it; not least is the question of why it is funny (the audience laughed at Eric's question to Ernie).
Most people would agree that it is funny because Eric is playing with a grammatical structure
that seems to be ambiguous: 'Have we got a show for you!' has an inverted verb and subject.
Inversion of the verb and its subject happens only under restricted conditions in English; the
most typical circumstances in which this happens is when questions are being asked, but it also
happens in exclamations (e.g. Wasn’t my face red!). So Eric's repeated grammatical form clearly
experiences a change in how it is interpreted by the audience between its second and third
occurrence in the dialogue. Eric's inverted grammatical form in its first two occurrences clearly
has the function of an exclamation, telling the audience something, not asking them anything,
until the humorous moment when he begins to doubt whether they do have a show to offer, at
which point he uses the same grammatical form to ask Ernie a genuine question. There seems,
then, to be a lack of one-to-one correspondence between grammatical form and communicative
function; the inverted form in itself does not inherently carry an exclamatory or a questioning
function. By the same token, in other situations, an' uninverted declarative form (subject before
verb), typically associated with 'statements', might be heard as a question requiring an answer.
Eric and Ernie's conversation is only one example (and a rather crazy one at that) of spoken
interaction; most of us in a typical week will observe or take part in a wide range of different
types of spoken interaction: phone calls, buying things in shops, perhaps an interview for a job,
or with a doctor, or with an employer, talking formally at meetings or in classrooms, informally
in cafes or on buses, or closely with our friends and loved ones. These situations will have their
own formulae and conventions which we follow; they will have different ways of opening and
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closing the encounter, different role relationships, different purposes and different settings.
Discourse analysis is interested in all these different factors and tries to account for them in a
difficult fashion with a separate set of descriptive labels from those used by conventional
grammarians. The first fundamental distinction we have noted is between language forms and
discourse functions; once we have made this distinction a lot of other conclusions can follow,
and the labels used to describe discourse need not clash at all with those we are all used to in
grammar. They will in fact complement and enrich each other. Chapters 2,3 and 4 of this book
will therefore be concerned with examining the relationships between language forms
(grammatical, lexical and phonological ones), and discourse functions, for it is language forms,
above all, which are the raw material of language teaching, while the overall aim is to enable
learners to use language functionally.
Reader Activity 1
Form and function
Can you create a context and suggest an intonation for the forms in the left-hand column so that
they would be heard as performing the functions in the right-hand column, without changing
their grammatical structure?
1. Did I make a fool of myself (a) question (b) exclamation?
2. You don't love me (a) question (b) statement
3. You eat it (a) statement (b) command
4. Switch the light on (a) command (b) question
Markers of various kinds, i.e., the linguistic signals of semantic and discourse functions
(e.g., in English the –ed on the verb is a marker of pastness), are very much concerned with the
surface of the text. Cohesive markers are no exception: they create links across sentence
boundaries and pair and chain together items that are related (e.g., by referring to the same
entity). But reading a text is far more complex than that: we have to interpret the ties and make
sense of them. Making sense of a text is an act of interpretation that depends as much on what we
as reader bring to a text as what the author puts into it. Interpretation can be seen as a set of
procedures and the approach to the analysis of texts that emphasizes the mental activities
involved in interpretation can be broadly called procedural. Procedural approaches emphasize the
role of the reader in actively building the world of the text, based on his/her experience of the
world and how states and events are characteristically manifested in it. The reader has to activate
such knowledge, make inferences and constantly access his/her interpretation in the light of the
situation and the aims and goals of the text as the reader perceives them. The work of De
Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) is central to this approach. If we rake a text which is cohesive in
the sense described
Above, we can see that a lot more mental work has to go on for the reader to make it coherent:
The parents of a seven-year-old Australian boy
woke me find a giant python crushing and trying
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to swallow him.
The incident occurred in Cairns, Queensland
and the boy's mother, Mrs. Kathy Dryden said:
'It was like a horror movie. It was a hot night
and Bartholomew was lying under a mosquito
net. He suddenly started screaming.
'We rushed to the bedroom to find a huge
snake trying to repress him. It was coiled
around his arms and neck and was going down
his body.
Mrs. Dryden and her husband, Peter, tried to
stab the creature with knives but the python bit
the boy several times before escaping.
This text requires us to activate our knowledge of pythons as dangerous creatures which may
threaten human life, which strangle their prey and to whose presence one must react with certain
urgency. More than this we make the cognitive link between ‘a hot night’ (this is implicit in the
text). The boy’s screaming must be taken to be a consequence of the python attacking him
(rather than, say, prior to the arrival of the python). The ‘creature’ must be taken to be the
Python rather than the boy (which ‘creature’ could well refer to in another text) since parents do
not normally stab their children in order to save their lives.
Another level of interpretation which we are involved in as we process texts is that of
recognizing textual pattern. Certain patterns in text reoccur time and time again and become
deeply embedded as part of our cultural knowledge. These patterns are manifested in regularly
occurring functional relationships between bits of the text. These bits may be phrases, clauses,
sentences or groups of sentences; we shall refer to them as textual segments to avoid confusion
with grammatical elements and syntactic relations within clauses and sentences. A segment may
sometimes be a clause, sometimes a sentence, sometimes a whole paragraph; what is important is
that segments can be isolated using a set of labels covering a finite set of functional relations that
can occur between any two bits of text.
An example of segments coinciding with sentences is these two sentences from a report on a
photographic exhibition:
The interpretation that makes most senses is that the relationship between the second sentence
and the first is that the second provides a reason for the first. The two segments are therefore in a
phenomenon reason relationship with one another.
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One influential approach to the study of spoken discourse is that it was developed at the
University of Birmingham, where research initially concerned itself with the structure of
discourse in school classrooms (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975). The Birmingham model is
certainly not the only valid approach to analyzing discourse, but it is a relatively simple and
powerful model which has connections with the study of speech acts. At the same time, it tries to
capture the larger structures, the 'wholes'.
This, together with a common cultural and personal background in the case of conversationalists
who know each other well, provides a rich contextual common ground allowing the speaker to
avoid having to verbalize a number of aspects of his or her message. Simultaneously, this
common ground enables the discourse participants to rely to a large extent on non-verbal
signaling, in side with and even, on occasion, in place of, the verbal textualization of a given
utterance. Planning time, as well as “understanding” time, is naturally minimal and at a premium
– and a great many features of spontaneous speech flow from this key factor. Moreover, both
speech and writing are normally designed by the user so as to be readily understood by the
addressee (cf. the notion of “recipient design”).
Indeed, according to Clark (1996) and other linguists, conversation and communication in
general is a fundamentally joint activity, involving the active participation of the interlocutors
and the coordination of their actions (verbal as well as non-verbal). What I have just (very
briefly) characterized is of course the prototypical instance of spoken interaction. There are
obviously other less prototypical types of spoken discourse: for example, speaking on the
telephone, where the participants share a time frame (adjusting for time zone differences when
the call is international), but not a spatial one, where only two participants are involved, and
where the communication is ‘ear-to-ear’ rather than face-to-face (no non-vocal gestures or visual
percepts are possible): see Drummond & Hopper (1991) for a discussion of miscommunication
over the telephone; and speaking in a formal situation (a speech, lecture and so forth) in front of
a group of people in circumstances where convention does not normally allow for verbal
exchange and interaction.
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Written discourse, on the other hand, there is by definition has no common spatiotemporal
ground between the writer and their reader(s). Since this is the case, and since inevitably there
will be little or no opportunity to use non-verbal signals, the text used will need to be relatively
explicit - since the textual input is confined to the verbal content, in conjunction with punctuation
and various graphic devices. The much greater availability, in principle, of planning time allows
the writer to review and to amend their written production.
The context of spoken discourse, the distinction between text and discourse, and their roles
in understanding
It is useful in analyzing spoken (as well as written) discourse understanding to draw a three-way
distinction between the dimensions of text, discourse and context.
Text, discourse and context Text: the connected sequence of verbal signs and non-verbal signals
in terms of which discourse is co-constructed by the participants in the act of communication.
Discourse: the hierarchically structured, situated sequence of indexical, propositional, utterance
and illocutionary acts carried out in pursuance of some communicative goal, as integrated within
a given context.
The context is subject to an ongoing process of construction and revision as the discourse
unfolds. It is through the invocation of a relevant context (which is partly determined by the
nature of the co-text at issue, as well as by its genre) that the hearer or reader is able to convert
the connected sequence of textual cues that is text into discourse. (Extract (slightly amended)
from Cornish, 2003:3).
The notion of text is close to what Gumperz (1992: 234) calls “contextualization cues”. The
discourse partners make use of this record (a dual-track one, according to Clark, 1996), in
conjunction with their invocation of a relevant context in cognitive terms, in order to create
discourse.
Discourse, on the other hand, refers to the hierarchically-structured, mentally represented product
of the sequences of utterance, propositional, illocutionary and indexical acts which the
participants are carrying out as the communication takes place. The crucial point about this
distinction is that discourse is a (re-)constructive, and therefore highly probabilistic enterprise:
from the addressee’s perspective, it is by no means a question of simply directly decoding the
text in order to arrive at the fully fledged message originally intended by the addressor. Indeed,
the addressee actively contributes both to the text and to the discourse via their phatic signals,
indications of (mis)understanding, and other reactions to the speaker’s moves. ‘Meaning’ does
not lie “in” the text, it has to be constructed by the addressee (and the speaker!) via the text and
an appropriate context (cf. Coupland et al., 1991: 5). In any case, the text is often, if not always,
both incomplete and indeterminate in relation to the discourse which may be derived from it in
conjunction with a context.
Written Discourse
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With written texts, some of the problems associated with spoken transcripts are absent:
we do not have to contend with people all speaking at once, the writer has usually had time to
think about what to say and how to say it, and the sentences are usually well formed in a way
that the utterances of natural, spontaneous talk are not. But the overall questions remain the
same: what norms or rules do people adhere to when creating written texts?
Are texts structured according to recurring principles, is there a hierarchy of units comparable to
acts, moves and exchanges, and are there conventional ways of opening and closing texts? As
with spoken discourse, if we do find such regularities, and if they can be shown as elements that
have different realizations in different languages, or that they may present problems for learners
in other ways, then the insights of written discourse analysis might be applicable, in specifiable
ways, to language teaching.
Later on, in the lesson of “discourse analysis and grammar”, we shall consider some grammatical
regularities observable in well-formed written texts, and how the structuring of sentences has
implications for units such as paragraphs, and for the progression of whole texts. We shall also
look at how the grammar of English offers a limited set of options for creating surface links
between the clauses and sentences of a text, otherwise known as cohesion. Basically, most texts
display links from sentence to sentence in terms of grammatical features such as
pronominalization, ellipsis (the omission of otherwise expected elements because they are
retrievable from the previous text or context) and conjunction of various kinds (see Halliday and
Hasan 1976).
The resources available for grammatical cohesion can be listed finitely and compared across
languages for translatability and distribution in real texts. Texts displaying such cohesive
features are easy to find, such as this one on telephones:
Activity
If you'd like to give someone a phone for Christmas, there are plenty to choose from. Whichever
you go for, if it's to be used on the BT [British Telecom] network, make sure it's approved - look
for the label with a green circle to confirm this. Phones labelled with a red triangle are
prohibited. (Which? December 1989: 599)
The italicized items are all interpretable in relation to items in previous sentences. Plenty is
assumed to mean 'plenty of phones'; you in the first and second sentence are interpreted as the
same 'you*; whichever is interpreted as 'whichever telephone'; it is understood as the telephone,
and this as 'the fact that it is approved'. These are features of grammatical cohesion, but there are
lexical clues too: go for is a synonym of choose, and there is lexical repetition of phone, and of
label.
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Notice that, when talking of cohesion in the telephone text, we spoke of interpreting items and
understanding them. This is important because the cohesive items are clues or signals as to how
the text should be read, they are not absolutes. The pronoun it only gives us the information that
a non-human entity is being referred to; it does not necessarily tell us which one.
It could potentially have referred to Christmas in the phone text, but that would have produced
an incoherent reading of the text. So, cohesion is only a guide to coherence, and coherence is
something created by the reader in the act of reading the text. Coherence is the feeling that a text
hangs together, that it makes sense, and is not just a jumble of sentences (see Neubauer 1983: 7).
The sentences 'Clare loves potatoes. She was born in Ireland.' are cohesive (Clarelshe), but are
only coherent, if one already shares the stereotype ethnic association between being Irish and
loving potatoes, or is prepared to assume a cause-effect relationship between the two sentences.
So cohesion is only pan of coherence in reading and writing, and indeed in spoken language too,
for the same processes operate there.
As McCarthy, M. (1991) summarized, when most linguists’ major concerns were still with
analyzing the structure of sentences, Zellig Harris published his paper entitled Discourse
Analysis in 1952, in which he showed interests in the linguistic element’s distribution in
extended texts. Although what he studied was different from the discourse analysis studied
today, more and more scholars, either of linguistics or of other disciplines, began to involve
themselves in relevant studies.
It was from all those studies in 1960s and 1970s, that that discourse analysis, which “is
concerned with the study of the relationship between language and the contexts in which it is
used” (McCarthy, M. 1991P5), developed into “a wide-ranging and heterogeneous discipline,
which finds its unity in the description of language above the sentence and an interest in the
contexts and cultural influences which affect language in use” (McCarthy, M.1991 P7).
In addition to M.A.K. Halliday’s functional approach to language, Sinclair and Coulthard at the
University of Birmingham were as important and influential to the development of Discourse
Analysis in Britain (McCarthy, M.1991). Michael Hoey also contributed his own understanding
of discourse. He roughly summarized discourse as any stretch of spoken or written language,
longer than one sentence, which is self-contained in a reasonable way. Therefore, Hoey argued
that “discourse analysis is the area of linguistics that concerns itself with the study of these multi-
utterance acts of communication.” (Hoey, M.1991)
The clause-relational approach to text also concerns itself with larger patterns which
regularly occur in texts. If we consider a simple text like the following, which is pretend for the
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sake of illustration, we can see a pattern emerging which is found in hundreds of texts in a wide
variety of subject areas and contexts:
Activity
Most people like to take a camera with them when they travel abroad. But all airports nowadays
have X-ray security screening and X rays can damage film. One solution to this problem is to
purchase a specially designed lead-lined pouch. These are cheap and can protect film from all but
the strongest X rays.
The first sentence presents us with a situation and the second sentence with some sort of
complication or problem. The third sentence describes a response to the problem and the final
sentence gives a positive evaluation of the response. Such a sequence of relations forms a
problem-solution pattern, and problem-solution patterns are extremely common in texts.
These larger patterns which may be found in texts (and indeed which may constitute the whole
text) are the objects of interpretation by the reader, just as the smaller clause-relation were, and
in the same way, are often signaled by the same sorts of grammatical and lexical devices such as
subordination and parallelism. In our concocted text, we have a conjunction (but) indicating an
adversative relation backward lexical reference to 'this problem' (damage caused by X rays)-land
a forward reference to the solution (lead-lined pouches k ) , Both reader and writers need to be
aware of these signaling devices and to be able to use them when necessary to process textual
relations that are immediately obvious and to compose text that assists the reader in the act of
interpretation. The larger patterns such as the problem-solution pattern are culturally ingrained,
but they are often realized in a sequence of textual segments which is not so straightforward as
our concocted text suggests.
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Lecture-02
Two Strands of Discourse Analysis
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SPOKEN LANGUAGE-I
Spoken language is a vast subject, and little is known in hard statistical terms of the
distribution of different types of speech in people's everyday lives. If we list at random a number
of different types of speech and consider how much of each day or week, we spend engaged in
each one, we can only roughly guess at some level of frequency ranking, other than to say that
casual conversation is almost certainly the most frequent for most people.
The rest will depend on our daily occupation and what sorts of contacts we have with others.
Some different types of speech might be:
Adjacency pairs
An adjacency pair is a unit of conversation that contains an exchange of one turn each by two
speakers. The turns are functionally related to each other in such a fashion that the first turn
requires a certain type or range of types of second turn.
Pairs of utterances in talk are often mutually dependent; a most obvious example is that a
question predicts an answer, and that an answer presupposes a question. It is possible to state the
requirements, in a normal conversational sequence, for many types of utterances, in terms of
what is expected as a response and what certain responses presuppose.
Some examples might be:
Utterance function Expected response
Greeting greeting
Congratulation thanks
Apology acceptance
Inform acknowledge
Leave-taking leave-taking
Pairs of utterances such as greeting-greeting and apology-acceptance are called adjacency pairs.
Adjacency pairs are of different types. Some ritualized first pair-parts may have an identical
second pair-part (hello - hello, happy New Year – happy New Year), while others expect a
different second pair-part (congratulations - thanks).
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Equally, a second pair-part such as thanks will presuppose quite a wide range of first pair-parts
(offers, apologies, informing moves, congratulations, commiserations, etc.). We can segment the
polite refusal of the invitation into appreciation ('thanks very much'), softener (I'm afraid'),
reason ('I'm booked up') and face-saver ('what about ... '). This pattern 'would typically be found
between adult friends, colleagues, etc. in informal but polite situations.
More friendly situations may well omit the 'softener'. Each of these elements will have several
possible realizations, and these can be practiced in language learning in a systematic way.
Different roles and settings will generate different structures for such adjacency pairs, and
discourse analysts try to observe in natural data just what patterns occur in particular settings.
Similarly, it seems that native speakers usually preface disagreement second pair-parts in
English with partial agreement ('yes, but...) and with softeners (Pearson 1986). This sort of
observation has direct implications for the design of role play and similar activities and what
linguistic elements need to be pre-taught, where learners are instructed to behave in ways
specified by the activity and where the goal is a simulation of 'real life' discourse.
The principle of adjacency pairs and how they are realized in natural speech point to the
importance of creating minimal contexts in the teaching of common communicative functions
and the limited value of teaching single utterances. We have seen once again that the structure
and elaboration of the adjacency pair is determined by role and setting, and that the functions of
its component utterances depend on the co-presence of both parts.
Exchanges
An exchange is a sequence of discourse moves by at least two speakers that forms a topical (or
sub topical unit). A minimal exchange comprises an initiating move plus a contribution by
another speaker.
There are two classes of exchanges; boundary exchanges and teaching exchanges (Sinclair and
Coulthard, 1992, pg.25). Boundary exchanges contain two moves, framing and focusing moves.
The only three principals of teaching exchanges described by Sinclair and Coulthard are
informing, directing, and eliciting exchanges (1992, pg.26-27). Sinclair and Coulthard state that,
“A typical exchange in the classroom consists of an initiation by the teacher, followed by a
response from the pupil, followed by feedback, to the pupil’s response from the teacher…”
(1992, pg.3).
Let us have a look the teaching exchanges separately to illustrate how each one is structured.
o Information Exchange
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Informing exchanges take place when the teacher needs to tell his/her students about new
information, facts, or just simply say something to them. The opening move will therefore begin
with an informative act but does not necessarily need to be followed by a reply by the students
(Sinclair and Coulthard, 1992, pg.26). For instance,
A group of people used symbols to do their writing. They used pictures Instead of, as we write,
in words. (Willis, 1992, pg.112)
Response from the student is optional, and therefore Sinclair and Coulthard label the structure of
this exchange as I(R), whereas the aspect in brackets is optional, meaning there is an option for a
response but not any feedback (1992, pg.26).
o Directing Exchange
A directing exchange is “…designed to get the pupils to do but not to say something” (Sinclair
and Coulthard, 1992, pg.26). Therefore, the response from the students is the ‘doing’ part, which
will most likely but not always be a non-verbal response. Even though it is non-verbal, the
students respond to the direction the teacher has given.
o Eliciting Exchange
The most common exchange in the classroom is an eliciting exchange (Willis, 1992, pg.113).
These exchanges begin with the teacher asking a question (usually one they already know the
answer to). An answer is then given by the student, and finally a follow-up evaluation by the
teacher. (Hellermann, 2003, pg.80). Here is an example from the study done by Sinclair and
Coulthard.
Teaching exchanges can be further divided into eleven sub-categories; six ‘free’ and five ‘bound’
exchanges (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975, p. 49). Bound exchanges are tied to previous free
exchanges, which they refer back to. These sub-categories can be defined below, which are
based on Raine (2010, p. 7).
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Turn-taking
A turn is the time when a speaker is talking and turn-taking is the skill of knowing when to
start and finish a turn in a conversation. It is an important organizational tool in
spoken discourse. One way that speakers signal a finished turn is to drop the pitch or volume of
their voice at the end of an utterance.
The rules regarding turn-taking in formal situations can differ markedly than between people
who are speaking casually together.
Etiquette calls interrupting someone else rude behavior and unfitting for people in refined
society. Emily Post's book of etiquette goes beyond this to describe the importance of listening
and responding to the correct topic as being part of good manners when participating in any form
of conversation. “By waiting your turn to speak and avoiding interrupting another person, you
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not only show your desire to work together with the other members of your society, you also
show respect for your fellow members.”
Responses such as mmmm and yeah are known as minimal responses. These are not
interruptions but rather are devices to show the listener is listening, and they assist the speaker to
continue. They are especially important in telephone conversations where the speaker cannot see
the listener's eyes and hence must rely on verbal cues to tell whether the listener is paying
attention.
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SPOKEN LANGUAGE-II
Transactions and topics
A transactional encounter is one where you're going through the motions to get the task
or the discourse done. Talk as transaction refers to situations where the focus is on what is
said or done. The message and making oneself understood clearly and accurately is the
central focus, rather than the participants and how they interact socially with each other.
In such transactions, Jones suggests, “Talk is associated with other activities. For example,
students may be engaged in hands-on activities (e.g., in a science lesson) to explore
concepts associated with floating and sinking. In this type of spoken language students and
teachers usually focus on meaning or on talking their way to understanding.” (Jones
1996:14)
Examples of talk as transaction are:
Classroom group discussions and problem-solving activities
A class activity during which students design a poster
Burns (1998) distinguishes between two different types of talk as transaction. The first type
involves situations where the focus is on giving and receiving information and where the
participants focus primarily on what is said or achieved (e.g., asking someone for
directions). Accuracy may not be a priority, as long as information is successfully
communicated or understood. The second type is transactions that focus on obtaining goods
or services, such as checking into a hotel or ordering food in a restaurant.
The main features of talk as transaction are:
It has a primarily information focus.
The main focus is on the message and not the participants.
Asking questions
Confirming information
Justifying an opinion
Making suggestions
Clarifying understanding
Making comparisons
In the linear model, the sender communicates to the receiver. It is a one-way channel. The
examples in the book are radio and television broadcasting. In the transactional model there
are two people communicating to one another simultaneously.
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Small talk and conversation are examples of interactional talk, which refers to communication
that primarily serves the purpose of social interaction. Small talk consists of short exchanges that
usually begin with a greeting, move to back-and-forth exchanges on non-controversial topics,
such as the weekend, the weather, work, school, etc. and then often conclude with a fixed
expression, such as See you later. Such interactions are at times almost formulaic and often do
not result in a real conversation. They serve to create a positive atmosphere and to create a
comfort zone between people who might be total strangers.
Using appropriate intonation and stress patterns to express meaning Learners need a wide
range of topics at their disposal in order to manage the flow of conversation, and
managing interaction and developing topic fluency is a priority in speaking classes.
Another important communication skill is the ability to use English to accomplish different kinds
of transactions. A transaction is an interaction that focuses on getting something done, rather
than maintaining social interaction. (In communicative language teaching, transactions are
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generally referred to as functions, and include such areas as requests, orders, offers, suggestions,
etc.) A transaction may consist of a sequence of different functions. Two different kinds of
transactions are often distinguished. One type refers to transactions that occur in situations where
the focus is on giving and receiving information, and where the participants focus primarily on
what is said or achieved (e.g. asking someone for directions or bargaining at a garage sale). The
second type refers to transactions that involve obtaining goods or services, such as checking into
a hotel or ordering food in a restaurant. Talk in these situations is often information- focused, is
associated with specific activities and often occurs in specific situations.
The following are examples of communication of this kind:
Ordering food in a restaurant.
Ordering a taxi.
Getting a haircut.
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The story consists of events (things that happen) and so-called existents the characters that makes
things happen or have things happen to them and the setting, meaning the place where things
happen. Events can be either brought about actively, in which case they are called actions (one
character kills another one), or they just happen (someone dies of a heart-attack).
There are several typical types of anecdotes and some are given below.
Humorous is an anecdote that adds humor to the topic at hand. Reminiscent a story that
remembers something general about the past or a specific event, expressed in ways such as “that
reminds me of…”, “when I used to…”, “I remember when…”, and so on. For example, a child
asks her grandmother for $2 to buy candy at the store, and the grandmother says, “You know
back in my day, all you needed was a penny to go to the candy shop! My grandmother would
give me a nickel and I’d be a happy clam!” Philosophical is an anecdote expressed in order to
make others think more deeply about the topic at hand. Inspirational is an anecdote that is told
in order to inspire hope or other positive emotions. They are often about not giving up, achieving
goals or dreams, making the impossible possible, and so on. Cautionary Stories are warning
others about the dangers or negative consequences surrounding the topic at hand.
At the End, anecdotes are valuable literary devices because of their diversity in style, tone, and
utility—they can be used by almost any person, in any situation, in any genre. Like any story
shared with others, anecdotes serve countless purposes and make situations more interesting for
both the characters and the audience. An anecdote is a timeless device that is used across
literature, film, television and theater, and has been benefiting storytellers for centuries.
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WRITTEN LANGUAGE-I
Text Types
The notion of text type is an abstract category designed to characterize the main structure
of a particular text or one of its parts according to its dominant properties. It is intended to
integrate common features of historically varying genres (novella, novel, short story, etc.) and
therefore to reduce the complexity of the many overlapping kinds of texts to distinct textual
phenomena. In virtue of narratology’s traditional focus on time, these phenomena are semantic
properties that constitute the temporal character of the text (passage). Consequently, the text type
‘narrative’ is defined by the property ‘change of state’ of concrete objects and the text type
‘description’, accordingly, by the property ‘is about states’ of concrete objects.
‘Text type’, could be restricted to the characterization of texts according to pragmatic properties
(e.g., the speaker’s purpose). Therefore, any text may be used to persuade somebody. The most
appropriate text type in this case (or the text type most often used in connection with the purpose
to persuade) may be the text type ‘argument’. The persuasive mode of discourse can be
instantiated by any text type, depending on pragmatic concerns. The notion ‘mode of discourse’
is thus context-sensitive; that of ‘text type’ is not.
Another category that is closely related to the notion of text type is ‘genre’. However, text type
and genre should be kept strictly apart from each other as well. Unlike the numerous historically
generated subclasses of genre (such as novel, sonnet, recipe, homepage) that have evolved by
chance, typologies of text type include a limited number of different items and aim at a complete
set of all possible types that can make up any text.
One important consequence that follows from this definition is that narrative as a genre is
distinguished from the text type ‘narrative’. The text type ‘narrative’ derives from the prevailing
quality of texts considered to be prototypical for the genre narrative or fiction, members of which
are often not pure narratives in the sense of text type. While any text that is called, say, a novel
belongs to the genre narrative, probably no novel is contains only the text type ‘narrative’.
Usually, novels exhibit all text types.
However, any experimental literary text that is called a novel belongs to the genre narrative, even
if it is mainly characterized by the text type ‘description’. The problem of equivocation (one term
denoting different notions) occurs in every case. This can be avoided when another term is
available: thus, the term ‘emphases denote a descriptive genre whereas ‘description’ denotes the
text type usually dominating emphasis. Yet ‘description’ is by no means restricted to this latter
use, and the term ‘emphases mainly refer to literary descriptions depicting pieces of visual art
(Henkel 1997; Klarer 2005).
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There are many varying classifications and typologies, each including different types
(Georgakopoulou 2005). The text types ‘description’ and ‘narrative’, though, seem to be part of
almost all typologies (except for Fludernik 2000; see below, § 3.2). For example, in addition to
those mentioned in the definition above, exposition and instruction are discussed as text types by
Werlich (1976), van Dijk (1980) adds scientific inquiries to the list of text types, and de
Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) include didactic texts. Sometimes, the notion of text type is
meant to characterize entire texts, sometimes not; some authors focus on semantic features,
others on pragmatic features.
Heinemann’s (2000) survey of the notion of text type in linguistics shows that the linguistic
typologies of texts follow the application of different criteria: grammatical properties of texts,
semantic properties of texts, situational context, function, etc. This practice has brought about a
huge variety of heterogeneous concepts. There is no agreement on which notion should satisfy
which criteria. And, what is more, even the use of particular terms is not regular. Thus, linguists
often use our term in the sense of what above was called a genre. For an extremely fine-grained
classification with hundreds of genres, termed “text types,” see Görlach (2004: 23–88).
The sentence is more obvious as a grammatical unit in writing, although certainly not in all kinds
of writing: signs and notices, small ads, notes, forms, tickets all contain frequent examples of
non-sentences (lists of single words, verb less clauses, etc.).
The internal construction of the sentence has always been the province of grammar. We argued
that a number of things in clause and sentence grammar have implications for the discourse as a
whole, in particular, word order, cohesion, and tense and aspect. For the purposes of our
discussion of these discourse features, the sentence will have no special status other than as a
grammatical and orthographic unit which can be exploited where desired for pedagogical
illustration, just as the clause can.
It is possible to devise interactive activities which involve decisions on word order, cohesion and
sequences of tenses in discourse such as the ‘text-jigsaw’ activity. It has been used successfully
with groups at widely different levels to focus on bottom-up choices of these kinds. In this
activity, a text is read in class, and any other desired activities carried out on it. When its content
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is familiar, it is then presented in jigsaw format, divided up into its individual sentences (or
indeed groups of sentences or paragraphs; the decision is purely a practical one).
What this means is that one group or individual gets the text with sentences (or paragraphs) 1, 3,
5, 7, 9, etc. and has to recreate sentences 2,4, 6, 8, etc. in their own words from their familiarity
with the content. The other group or individual gets sentences 2, 4, 6, 8, etc. and has to recreate
the odd-numbered ones. When all the new sentences are ready, the sentences originally provided
are discarded, the two sets of created sentences are put together to see if they make a coherent
and cohesive text, and the pair or group together make any changes needed until they are
satisfied with the finished product. The activity produces interesting results, as with this group of
advanced learners of English.
Clause Relations
Clause-relational approach to written text stressed that the units of written
discourse, rather than always being co-extensive with sentences (though they
sometimes are), were best seen as functional segments (of anything from phrasal to
paragraph length) which could be related to one another by a finite set of cognitive
relations, such as cause-consequence, instrument-achievement, temporal sequence,
and matching relations such as contrasting and equivalence. Individual segments of
texts combined to form the logical structure of the whole and to form certain
characteristic patterns (such as problem-solution). The sequencing of segments and
how the relations between them are signaled were viewed as factors in textual
coherence (see Winter 1977; Hoey 1983).
In fact, the problems which could be subsumed under the notion of cohesion by
conjunction in the last reader activity can also be viewed from a clause-relational
standpoint, in that inappropriate use of conjunctions creates difficulties for the reader
in relating segments of the text to one another coherently. It is also noted that the
borderline between how conjunctions signal clause relations and how certain lexical
items do the same is somewhat blurred, and that conjunctions such as and, so and
because have their lexical equivalents in nouns, verbs and adjectives such as
additional, cause (as noun or verb), consequent, instrumental, reason, and so on.
Therefore, as well as activities that focus on conjunction and other local cohesive
choices, activities aimed at the lexicon of clause-relational signals may also be useful.
Segment-chain activities can be used for this purpose. An opening segment (which
could be a sentence or more) and a closing segment of a text are given to a group of
four or five students, and each individual is given the start of a segment containing a
different lexical clause signal. Individuals complete their own segment with as much
text as they feel necessary, and then compare their segment with everyone else's in
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order to assemble the segments into a coherent text. This involves not only being
satisfied with the individual segments but deciding on an appropriate sequence for the
chain of clause relations that will lead logically to the given closing segment, and
making any changes felt necessary to improve coherence.
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WRITTEN LANGUAGE-II
Patterns and the learner
Learning patterns were originally developed in order to support learning of university students;
however, we think it can be applied to any learners in various situations like engineering,
business, science, and everyday life due to the abstract descriptions of the pattern language.
McCarthy (1993) states that, written discourse analysis is not a new method for teaching
languages, rather it is “fundamentally different way of looking at language compared with
sentence-dominated models" (p. 170). Written text (in this case, English written text) is naturally
organized into several types of patterns.
Written text conforms to rules that most successful writers unconsciously follow and native
readers unconsciously expect to find. Some of the characteristic patterns in written discourse
analysis are the Problem/Solution structure, discussed in Hoey (1994), the Claim/Counterclaim
structure covered in McCarthy (1993), and the General/Specific structure discussed in Coulthard
(1994).
There could be several overall textual patterns as pointed out by Holland and Lewis (1997: 27),
McCarthy (1996: 157), and Mikulecky and Jeffries (1996:295-296), prevailing studies have
reported three types of common patterns that are broadly classified as problem-solution, claim-
counterclaim, and general-specific. The problem-solution pattern, identified by Hoey (cited in
Holland and Lewis 1997:12), consists of four basic elements: situation (within which there is a
complication or problem), problem (within the situation, requiring a response), response or
solution (to the problem), and evaluation or result (of the response /solution).
The claim-counterclaim pattern is one where a series of claims and contrasting counterclaims is
presented in relation to a given issue (Holland and Lewis 1997: 23). The pattern similar to the
hypothetical-real (see McCarthy 1996: 80) is reported to relate to the problem-solution pattern in
that “instead of presenting the ‘facts’ of a situation, it presents a ‘hypotheses about the likely
facts or situation” (Winter 1998: 62). The general-specific pattern, on the other hand, is one in
which a generalization is followed by more specific statements, perhaps exemplifying the
generalization which analyzing and raising students’ awareness resembles the preview-detail
relation of Hoey (cited in McCarthy and Carter 1994:57), and the Listing pattern of Mikulecky
and Jeffries (1986: 103 - 137, and 1996:103 - 131).
Overall pattern is associated with certain words known as discourse-organizing [or signaling ]
words whose job is to organize and structure the argument (McCarthy 1996: 75), and to help a
reader to locate the pattern in written text. Lists of signaling words are reported for the problem-
solution pattern by Holland and Lewis (1997: 16), and McCarthy (1996: 79); for the claim-
counterclaim, by Holland and Lewis (1997:26), Jordan (cited in McCarthy 1996: 80), and Winter
(1998: 62 - 63); and for the general-specific, by Coulthard (1998: 7), and Mikulecky and Jeffries
(1986:103, and 1996: 103).
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The convergence of rhetoric, culture, and communication has led to the development of two
predominant areas of study within the field of communication: intercultural rhetoric and
comparative rhetoric. Intercultural rhetoric illustrates how culture-based arguments are
constructed by advocates during intercultural interactions and how the arguments make sense
within a particular cultural frame or worldview. Rhetorical practices are seen as emerging from
the beliefs and values of distinctive cultural communities, and the convergence of intercultural
communication and rhetoric becomes evident when people act rhetorically and their diverse
cultural assumptions gradually or suddenly become apparent during intercultural interactions.
For intercultural rhetoric, approaching intercultural contexts and situations utilizing theories and
concepts from rhetorical studies affirms non-Western modes of reasoning and encouragement.
Recent methodological developments have allowed critics to more comprehensively represent
rhetorical traditions and to discover novel ways to understand intercultural conflicts and mediate
cultural differences. Conceptualizing rhetorical situations as intercultural dialogues suggests the
ways in which intercultural rhetorical theorists need to be mindful of the multifocal quality of
social discourses.
Rhetorical interpretation of texts benefits from a comparative approach that allows for
speculation with respect for and grounding in another culture’s history, as well as reflection on
the cultural outsider’s motive and assumptions. It is useful for the quest of meaning not to be
limited to the standpoints within each disparate culture; pragmatically, they must have a dialogue
since comparative rhetoric allows the analysis of different discourses, the discovery of common
grounds of engagement, and the revelation of cultural assumptions.
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Discourse and reading in fact follow consistently from what we have said in this lesson and in
earlier ones: we cannot explain discourse patterning at the macro-level without paying due
attention to the role of grammar and lexis; by the same token, we cannot stand-in good reading
without considering global and local reading skills simultaneously.
In recent years, questions of reading pedagogy have centered on whether bottom-up (i.e.
decoding of the text step-by-step from small textual elements such as words and phrases) or top-
down (using macro-level clues to decode the text) strategies are more important.
The debate seems to have settled, quite sensibly, on a compromise between local and global
decoding, and there is ‘general agreement that efficient readers use top-down and bottom-up
processing simultaneously (e.g., Eskey 1988). The best reading materials will encourage an
engagement with larger textual forms (for example through problem-solving exercises at the
whole-text level) but not neglect the role of individual words, phrases and grammatical devices
in guiding the reader around the text (e.g., Greenall and Swan 1986, who achieve a balance of
both ingredients).
But at both the micro- and macro-level, attentiveness in how to introduce the discourse
dimension is called for. In the case of cohesion, for example, the precise relationship between
cohesion and coherence is unclear, and focusing on cohesive devices for reading purposes may
not guarantee any better route towards a coherent interpretation of the text (see Steffensen 1988).
At the macro-level, much has been made in recent years of schema theory, that is, the role of
background knowledge in the reader's ability to make sense of the text.
The theory is that new knowledge can only be processed coherently in relation to existing
knowledge frameworks, and that the efficient reader activates the necessary frameworks to assist
in decoding the text being read. The frameworks are not only knowledge about the world (e.g.
about natural phenomena, about typical sequences of real-life events and behavior), but also
about texts, how texts are typically structured and organized, consequently enabling us to talk
about two kinds of schemata: content and formal, respectively. The theory in itself seems
conceivable enough; the more we are locked into the world of the text, the easier it is to absorb
new information.
It is often held that the teacher's job is to help the reader to activate the appropriate schemata.
While we have already tested the value of predicting what textual patterns a given text may be
going to realize in reader activity, as an awareness activity for constructing patterns in writing, it
is not at all certain whether activating the right formal schema for reading can help much if the
right content schema is lacking.
If the teacher's job, then becomes one of supplying the appropriate content schemata for a
possibly vast number of textual encounters, then we are out of the world of discourse as such and
firmly in the realm of the teaching of culture, and we are not necessarily teaching the learner any
skill that will be subsequently productive. What we have already said, and what may be repeated
now, is that listening and reading have in common a positive and active role for the receiver, and,
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if any insight is to be taken seriously on board from discourse analysis. It is good that listeners
and readers are constantly attending to the segmentation of the discourse, whether by
intonational features in speech, or by orthographical features in writing, or by lexico-
grammatical signals in both.
What is also clear is that good listeners and readers are always predicting what is to come, both
in terms of the next few words and in terms of larger patterns such as problem-solution,
narrative, and so on. This act of prediction may be in the form of precise prediction of content or
a more diffuse prediction of a set of questions that the author is likely to answer. For this reason,
interpreting the author's signals at the level of grammar and vocabulary as to what questions
he/she is going to address is as useful as predicting, for example, the content of the rest of a
given sentence or paragraph. This will mean paying attention to structures such as split sentences
rhetorical questions, front-placing of adverbials and other markers, and any other discourse-level
features. The reading text will be seen simultaneously as an artifact arising from a context and a
particular set of assumptions of world knowledge, and as an unfolding message in which the
writer has encoded a lot more than just content, with signposts at various stages to guide the
reader around.
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Lecture-03
Discourse Markers and Conversation
DISCOURSE MARKERS
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Language
The production of coherent discourse is an interactive process that requires speakers to draw
upon several different types of communicative knowledge that complement grammatical
knowledge of sound, form, and meaning per se. Two aspects of communicative knowledge
closely related to one another are expressive and social: the ability to use language to display
personal and social identities, to convey attitudes and perform actions, and to negotiate
relationships between self and other. Others include a cognitive ability to represent concepts and
ideas through language and a textual ability to organize forms, and convey meanings, within
units of language longer than a single sentence.
Discourse markers – expressions such as oh, well, y’know, and but – are one set of linguistic
items that function in cognitive, expressive, social, and textual domains. Although there were
scattered studies of discourse markers in the early 1980s, their study since then has abounded in
various branches of linguistics and allied fields.
Functions of Discourse Markers " Laurel J. Brinton (1990) pointed out that discourse markers
are used:
- to initiate discourse,
- to mark a boundary in discourse (shift/partial shift in topic),
- to preface a response or a reaction,
- to serve as a filler or delaying tactic,
- to aid the speaker in holding the floor,
- to affect an interaction or sharing between speaker and hearer,
- to bracket the discourse either cataphorically or anaphorically, - to mark either foregrounded or
back grounded information.”
Schiffrin’s analysis of discourse markers (1987) was motivated by several concerns. From a
sociolinguistic perspective, Schiffrin was interested in using methods for analyzing language that
had been developed by variation theory to account for the use and distribution of forms in
discourse. This interest, however, was embedded within a view of discourse not only as a unit of
language but also as a process of social interaction (see Heller 2001; Schegloff, this volume).
The analysis thus tried to reconcile both methodology (using both quantitative and qualitative
methods) and underlying models (combining those inherited from both linguistics and
sociology).
Unifying the analysis was the desire to account for the distribution of markers (which markers
occurred where? why?) in spoken discourse in a way that attended to both the importance of
language (what was the form? its meaning?) and interaction (what was going on – at the moment
of use – in the social interaction?). Schiffrin’s initial work defined discourse markers as
“sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk” (1987a:31) – that is, non-
obligatory utterance-initial items that function in relation to ongoing talk and text. She proposed
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Also proposed was a discourse model with different planes: a participation framework,
information state, ideational structure, action structure, and exchange structure. The specific
analyses showed that markers could work at different levels of discourse to connect utterances on
either a single plane or across different planes. For example, because connects actions and ideas
respectively. In because connects a request (to complete a task) and the justification for the
request.
Meaning
Misunderstanding relayed information can lead to problems, big or small. Being able to
understand understated subtext to be able to “read between the lines “or distinguish between
factual reporting and fake news, editorials, or propaganda all rely on being able to interpret
communication. Therefore, critical analysis of what someone is saying or writing is of ultimate
importance. To go a step further, to take analyzing discourse to the level of a field of study is to
make it more formal, to mesh linguistics and sociology. It can even be aided by the fields of
psychology, anthropology, and philosophy.
The whole object and purpose of language is to be meaningful. Languages have developed and
are constituted in their present forms in order to meet the needs of communication in all its
aspects.
It is because the needs of human communication are so various and so diverse that the study of
meaning is probably the most difficult and baffling part of the serious study of language.
Traditionally, language has been defined as the expression of thought, but this involves far to
narrow an interpretation of language or far too wide a view of thought to be serviceable. The
expression of thought is just one among the many functions performed by language in
certain contexts.
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Lexical meaning is the most important component of sentence meaning is word meaning, the
individual meanings of the words in a sentence, as lexical items. It is through lexical resources
that languages maintain the flexibility their open-ended commitments demand. Every language
has a vocabulary of many thousands of words, though not all are in active use, and some are
known only to relatively few speakers.
Context
Linguistic Context
Linguistic context refers to the context within the discourse, that is, the relationship between the
words, phrases, sentences and even paragraphs. Take the word “bachelor” as an example. We
can’t understand the exact meaning of the sentence “He is a bachelor.” without the linguistic
context to make clear the exact meaning of this word.
Linguistic context can be explored from three aspects: deictic, co-text, and collocation. In a
language event, the participants must know where they are in space and time, and these features
relate directly to the deictic context, by which we refer to the deictic expressions like the time
expressions now, then, etc., the spatial expressions here, there, etc., and the person expressions I,
you, etc... Deictic expressions help to establish deictic roles which derive from the fact that in
normal language behavior the speaker addresses his utterance to another person and may refer to
himself, to a certain place, or to a time.
Situational Context
Situational context, or context of situation, refers to the environment, time and place, etc. in
which the discourse occurs, and also the relationship between the participants. This theory is
traditionally approached through the concept of register, which helps to clarify the
interrelationship of language with context by handling it under three basic headings: field, tenor,
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and mode. Field of discourse refers to the ongoing activity. We may say field is the linguistic
reflection of the purposive role of language user in the situation in which a text has occurred.
Tenor refers to the kind of social relationship enacted in or by the discourse.
The notion of tenor, therefore, highlights the way in which linguistic choices are affected not just
by the topic or subject of communication but also by the kind of social relationship within which
communication is taking place. Mode is the linguistic reflection of the relationship the language
user has to medium of transmission. The principal distinction within mode is between those
channels of communication that entail immediate contact and those that allow for deferred
contact between participants.
Cultural Context
Cultural context refers to the culture, customs and background of epoch in language communities
in which the speakers participate. Language is a social phenomenon, and it is closely tied up with
the social structure and value system of society. Therefore, language cannot avoid being
influenced by all these factors like social role, social status, sex and age, etc. Social roles are
culture-specific functions, institutionalized in a society and recognized by its members. By social
status, we mean the relative social standing of the participants. Each participant in the language
event must know, or make assumptions about his or her status in relation to the other, and in
many situations, status will also be an important factor in the determination of who should
initiate the conversation. Sex and age are often determinants of, or interact with, social status.
The terms of address employed by a person of one sex speaking to an older person, may differ
from those which would be employed in otherwise similar situations by people of the same sex
or of the same age.
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Conversation analysis is an approach to the analysis of spoken d. iscourse that looks at the way
in which people manage their everyday conversational interactions. It examines how spoken
discourse is organized and develops as speakers carry out these interactions. Conversation
analysis has examined aspects of spoken discourse such as sequences of related utterances
(adjacency pairs), preferences for particular combinations of utterances (preference
organization), turn taking, feedback, repair, conversational openings and closings, discourse
markers and response tokens. Conversation analysis works with recordings of spoken data and
carries out careful and fine-grained analyses of this data.
Conversation analysis (CA) is an approach to the study of social interaction that emerged in the
1960s in the writings and lectures of the late sociologist Harvey Sacks and was consolidated in
his collaborations with Emanuel A. Schegloff and Gail Jefferson in the later 1960s and early
1970s. CA is not a subfield of linguistics and does not take language as per its primary object of
study. Rather, the object of study is the organization of human social interaction. However,
because language figures centrally in the way humans interact, CA typically (though not
necessarily) involves the analysis of talk. For all practical purposes, CA can be thought of as the
study of talk in interaction and other forms of human conduct in interaction other than talk, for
example, gaze, gesture, body orientations, and their combinations.
The boundaries of the field are not always completely clear. However, we can treat the
application of the conversation analytic method as criteria to inclusion within the field. This
method involves a series of steps beginning with what Sacks described as “unmotivated
observation” of some stretch of recorded interaction (cop resent or telephone) with the goal
merely of noticing something about it. Once a noticing has been made (e.g., some responses to
yes-no questions are prefaced by “oh”), the researcher can then start assembling a collection of
possible instances.
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A collection constitutes the empirical basis upon which to develop an analysis of what distinctive
work the phenomenon or practice initially noticed through unmotivated observation
accomplishes this being independent of the contextual specifics of any particular instance. The
method is therefore fundamentally qualitative in that it involves case-by-case study of each
instance. However, though fundamentally qualitative in this sense, the method also involves
looking across multiple instances in a collection of cases—it is this that allows us to see and to
describe the generic, stable features of the practice that are independent of the particular
contextual features of any given instance.
The scholarship within CA can be divided up in a number of different ways. One possible
categorization distinguishes studies concerned primarily with the organization of talk itself and
those concerned to use the methods of CA to investigate some other aspect of the social world.
Another possible categorization distinguishes studies of “ordinary conversation” from those of
institutional interaction.
Transcription Conventions
A transcript is a technique for the fixing (e.g., on paper, on a computer screen) of brief events
(e.g., utterances, gestures) for the purpose of detailed analysis. Transcripts are inherently
incomplete and should be continuously revised to display features of an interaction that have
been illuminated by a particular analysis and allow for new insights that might lead to a new
analysis. (See Alessandro Duranti Linguistic Anthropology, Cambridge University Press, 1997:
ch. 5, and References below).
Transcribed data extracts embody an effort to have the spelling of the words roughly indicate
how the words sounded when produced. Often, this involves a departure from standard
orthography.
In addition, the following symbols can be used to convey aspects of the talk that figure most frequently
as design features of talk-in-interaction.
?? Arrows in the margin point to the lines of transcript relevant to the point being
made in the text.
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::: Colons indicate a lengthening of the sound just preceding them, proportional to
the number of colons.
>talk Right and left carats (or “more than” and “less than” symbols) indicate that the
talk between them was speeded up or “compressed” relative to surrounding
talk.
= Equal signs (ordinarily at the end of one line and the start of an ensuing line
attributed to a different speaker) indicate a “latched” relationship -- no silence
at all between them. If the two lines are attributed to the same speaker and are
separated by talk by another, the = marks a single, through-produced utterance
by the speaker separated as a transcription convenience to display overlapping
talk by another. A single equal sign in the middle of a line indicates no break in
an ongoing spate of talk, where one might otherwise expect it, e.g., after a
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completed sentence.
°word° Talk appearing within degree signs is lower in volume relative to surrounding
talk.
WOrd Upper case marks especially loud sounds relative to the WORD surrounding
talk.
While most studies in the area of conversation analysis have examined native speaker talk, in
recent years attention has also shifted to non-native speaker talk. Markee (2000), for example,
shows how conversation analysis can be used as a tool for analyzing and understanding the
acquisition of a second language. He discusses the importance of looking at ‘outlier’ data in
second language acquisition studies pointing out that, from a conversation analysis perspective,
all participants’ behavior makes sense to the individuals involved and must be accounted for,
rather than set aside, in the analysis.
Storch (2001a, 2001b) carried out a fine-grained analysis of second language learner talk as her
students carried out pair work activities in an ESL classroom. She found this analysis allowed
her to identify the characteristics of the talk, and the nature of the interactions they engaged in
that contributed to or impeded their success in the acquisition of the language items they were
focusing on. She also found how the grouping of pairs in the class were important for the nature
of their discourse and the extent to which the discourse was collaborative, and facilitated their
learning or not (see Wong and Zhang Waring 2010 for a discussion of how conversation analysis
can be drawn on in second language teaching and learning).
Conversation Analysis and Second Language Pedagogy locates itself at the node of research and
practice, connecting the findings of conversation analysis (CA) to language teaching. In
one sense, the text contributes to an existing, growing body of research that links CA to
second language (L2) classroom interaction (e.g., Markee, 2000; Mori, 2002; Seedhouse, 2004;
Waring, 2008). However, unlike most work in this vein, the authors are not attempting to
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describe verbal exchanges that occur in the L2 classroom. That is, rather than use CA to better
understand how teachers and students talk.
Lecture-04
Discourse and Sociolinguistics
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DISCOURSE SOCIETY
Discourse communities and speech communities
Discourse community is a group of people who share some kind of activity such as member of a
club or association who have regular meeting. Or a group of students who go to classes at the
same university. Members of a discourse community have particular ways of communicating
with each other. They generally have shared goal and may have shared value and beliefs. Swales
(1990) provides a set of characteristics for identifying a group of people as members of a
particular discourse community, the group must have some set of shared common goals, some
mechanisms for communication, and some way of providing the exchange of information
amongst its member. The community must have its own particular genres, its own set of
specialized terminology and vocabulary, and a high level of expertise in its particular area. These
goals may be formally agreed upon (as in the case of clubs and associations) ‘or they may be
more tacit’ (Swales 1990:24).
The ways in which people communicate which each other and exchange information will vary
according to the group. This might include meeting, newsletter, casual conversations or a range
of other types of written and/or spoken communications. That is, the discourse community will
have particular ways for communicating with each other and ways of getting things done that
have developed through time. Discourse communities also interact with wider speech
communities. For example, the academic discourse community of students and academics also
interacts with the wider speech community of the town or city in which the academic institution
is located (Swales 1993). It is for these reasons that some people prefer the term communities of
practice (Wenger 1998; Barton and Tusting 2005) to the term ‘Discourse community’.
Speech communities and spoken and written discourse Speech community is a boarder term than
the term discourse community. According to Richard Nordquist, speech community is a term in
sociolinguistics and linguistics anthropology for a group of people who use the same variety of a
language and who share specific rules for speaking and for interpreting speech. It includes
discourse communities and the range and varieties of languages that members of the speech
community use to interact with each other. Speech community is important for the discussions of
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spoken and written discourse. In linguistics, a speech community refers to any a group of people
that speak the same language.
Defining a speech community there are some factors that make easier to define a speech
community other than just language. Those are social, geographical, cultural, political and ethnic
factors, race, age and gender. Not all of speakers always be full members of particular speech
communities. For example, is in the case of second language setting. For example, a speaker may
participate, only to a certain degree, in the target speech community. The degree to which occurs
may be due to factors such as age to entry into the speech community, the speech community’s
attitudes and expectations towards the place of second language speakers in the speech
community or other factors such as educational or occupational opportunities, limitations in the
particular speech community.
Discourse and language choice Discourse and language choice is a variation of language when
we interact with the other communities as explained by Holmes (2001) that the choice of
language is being used in such as, with family, among friends, and in religious, educational and
employment settings. Social factors such as who we are speaking to, the social context of the
interaction, the topic, function and goal of the interaction, social distance between speakers, the
formality of the setting or type of interaction and the status of each of the speakers are also
important for accounting for the language choice that a person makes in these kinds of settings.
“A speaker or writer may also be the speaker of a particular language variety but be using that
variety to communicate with a wider speech community than just their own. The best seller Eats,
Shoots & Leaves” (Truss 2003) for examples: Discourse, Social class and Social Networks
Social Class and Social networks are the way we spoken or written with the other but we have to
use the words or speech be right and polite such as when we speak or write something to family,
we use the word be polite.
When language is viewed as a system, we see it in terms of its component parts and how these
interact. The three basic components are substance, form and meaning. Substance refers to the
sounds the language uses (phonic substance), for example, its vowels and consonants, and the
symbols used in writing (graphic substance). Next, we have three basic types of form: grammar,
lexis and phonology. In the case of grammar, English forms include past-tense endings, modal
verbs and prepositions, along with rules for putting these together (syntax). The lexical forms
consist of words, which follow rules for vowel and consonant combinations, how they combine
with other words in collocations, fixed expressions, etc. and how they interact with the grammar.
Phonology gives us the forms for pronunciation, stress (the syllable with most intensity) and
intonation (e.g., whether the voice rises or falls).
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The third component, meaning, refers to what the combinations of form and substance signify
(the semantics). In English, the form was speaking signifies past time, green and blue signify
particular colors and rising intonation often signifies a question. If we reverse this perspective,
meaning is what we intend to say, form is how we assemble the message using appropriate
words, grammar and sounds (or written symbols), and substance is what we actually say or write.
We find information on the system in reference grammars (for English, this includes reference
grammars such as Biber et al. 1999; Carter and McCarthy 2006), in dictionaries (e.g., 3
Macmillan 2002; Hornby 2010), which usually give information on pronunciation. Works
describing English intonation tend to be more specialised (e.g., Cruttenden 1997; Tench 2015).
Discourse ideology
The theory of ideology that serves as the framework for the present paper is multidisciplinary. It
defines ideologies as a special form of social cognition shared by social groups. Ideologies thus
form the basis of the social representations and practices of group members, including their
discourse, which at the same time serves as the means of ideological production, reproduction
and challenge (for details, see Van Dijk, 1998).
The theoretical complexities of this framework are considerable. So far we have more questions
than answers. For instance, we have few explicit ideas about the internal structures of the mental
representations of ideologies. And without such representations we are unable to detail the ways
ideologies influence the underlying mental processes involved in discourse and other social
practices.
As for the social dimension of the theory of ideology, we still ignore among many other things
which social collectivities, and under what conditions, develop ideologies. Accordingly,
examining the ways ideologies influence contextualization is one of the many puzzles that we
face in such a complex theory that needs to bridge the gaps between discourse, cognition and
society.
Ideologies as social beliefs rather trivially ideologies consist of a specific kind of ideas. In
somewhat more technical jargon (in social psychology and political science), we would call them
belief systems or social representations of some kind (Aebischer, Deconchy & Lipiansky, 1992;
Augoustinos, 1998; Farr & Moscovici, 1984; Fraser & Gasket]. 1990). This means that they are
not personal beliefs, but beliefs shared by groups, as is also the case for grammars,
socioculturally shared knowledge, group attitudes or norms and values. Indeed, we assume that
ideologies form the basis of the belief systems or social representations of specific groups (see
also Scarbrough, 1990).
Knowledge, if ideologies control the social representations of groups, they also control the
knowledge acquired and shared by a group. This is true, however, only for a specific kind of
knowledge, namely what we shall call group knowledge. These are the social beliefs which a
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group holds to be true, according to its own evaluation or verification (truth) criteria, as is the
case for scientists, members of a church or members of a social movement. Of course, for other
groups, such beliefs may be mere opinions or false beliefs, and therefore not be called
knowledge at all. The crucial, empirical and discursive, test to distinguish knowledge from other
beliefs is that knowledge shared by a group tends to be presupposed by its members, and not
asserted, in text and talk (except in pedagogical discourse, as well as in discourse directed at non
group members). It is this group knowledge, then, that may be ideological based.
This formulation suggests that we should also speak of beliefs that are generally shared in
society, across (ideological) group boundaries. That is, by definition this kind of cultural
knowledge is non-ideological. There is no difference of opinion, no ideological struggle, and no
opposition in this case. These are the basic beliefs of a culture, on which all others, also the
ideological beliefs of groups, are based.
To stress this general, cultural basis of these beliefs, we may also call them Cultural Common
Ground. This common ground is constantly changing. What is specific group knowledge today
(e.g., within the scientific community), may be general knowledge and hence common ground
tomorrow. And vice versa, what was generally thought to be true, may now appear to be false or
merely an opinion of specific groups (typically so for Christian religion, for instance). Common
ground is the socio-cognitive basis of our common sense, and is generally presupposed in public
discourse, by members of culturally competent members of all groups (except children and
members of other cultures). Note that the notion of (cultural) Common Ground used here is more
general than the notion of common ground as shared knowledge between participants in
conversation, which may also include personal knowledge and group beliefs (Clark, 1996; see
also Smith, 1982).
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LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES
Definitions of both these concepts typically invoke speakers’ feelings and beliefs about language
structure or language use. But a close analysis of their distinctive histories and patterned
distribution reveals that they have not only very different origins but also significant differences
in the way they encourage researchers to focus on distinctive aspects of similar phenomena. In
addition to their different histories and fields of focal concern, the two concepts are typically
associated with very different kinds of methodologies.
Language attitudes, as a concept, are generally associated with an objectivist concern with
quantitative measurement of speakers’ reactions. This concern is surely related to its conceptual
origins in social psychology, quantitative sociolinguistics, and educational linguistics. In
contrast, the concept of language ideologies is associated with qualitative methods such as
ethnography, conversational analysis, and discourse analysis, as will be exemplified in the
various sections of this article. This methodological reliance on qualitative methods is certainly
related to its association with linguistic anthropology, interpretive sociology, and systemic
functional linguistics. Also, in contrast to the history of application for the concept of language
attitudes, language ideologies in harmony with its anthropological origins has tended to
emphasize how speakers’ beliefs and feelings about language are constructed from their
experience as social actors in a political economic system, and how speakers’ often partial
awareness of the form and function of their semiotic resources is critically important.
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While students of language ideologies read them both from speakers’ articulate explanations
(e.g., in interviews or conversational interaction) and from comparatively unreflecting, habitual
discursive practice, students of language attitudes tend to measure reactions through more
standardized and objective forms of data collection (survey, extended interview, matched guise
test, and the analysis of socio-phonetic samples). Apart from the social sciences, research in the
humanities has also taken up language as a cultural phenomenon and has added a historical as
well as an ideological dimension to the study of the emergence of awareness regarding the use of
urban dialects and other local linguistic forms, perhaps as symbolic pushback to sociolinguistic
globalization.
Political culture is the set of attitudes, beliefs, and sentiments which give order and meaning to
a political process and which provide the underlying assumptions and rules that govern behavior
in the political system. It encompasses both the political ideals and the operating norms of a
polity. Political culture is thus the manifestation in aggregate form of the psychological and
subjective dimensions of politics. A political culture is the product of both the collective history
of a political system and the life histories of the members of that system, and thus it is rooted
equally in public events and private experiences.
Political culture is a recent term which seeks to make more explicit and systematic much of the
understanding associated with such long-standing concepts as political ideology, national ethos
and spirit, national political psychology, and the fundamental values of a people. Political
culture, by embracing the political orientations of both leaders and citizens, is more inclusive
than such terms as political style or operational code, which focus on elite behavior. On the other
hand, the term is more explicitly political and hence more restrictive than such concepts as public
opinion and national character.
More specifically, the concept of political culture was developed in response to the need to
bridge a growing gap in the behavioral approach between the level of micro analysis, based on
the psychological interpretations of the individual’s political behavior, and the level of macro
analysis, based on the variables common to political sociology. In this sense the concept
constitutes an attempt to integrate psychology and sociology so as to be able to apply to dynamic
political analysis both the revolutionary findings of modern depth psychology and recent
advances in sociological techniques for measuring attitudes in mass societies. Within the
discipline of political science, the emphasis on political culture signals an effort to apply an
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essentially behavioral form of analysis to the study of such traditional problems as political
ideology, legitimacy, sovereignty, nationhood, and the rule of law. (For a theoretical analysis of
the concept see Verba in Pye & Verba 1965, pp. 512–560.)
Intellectual curiosity about the roots of national differences in politics dates from the writing of
Herodotus, and possibly no recent studies have achieved the richness of understanding of such
classic studies of national temperament as those by Tocqueville, Bryce, and Emerson. But the
dynamic intellectual tradition which inspired political culture studies comes almost entirely from
the studies of national character and the psychocultural analyses of the 1930s and 1940s.
Benedict (1934; 1946), Mead (1942; 1953), Gorer (1948; 1953; 1955), Fromm (1941), and
Klineberg (1950) all sought to utilize the findings of psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology to
provide deeper understanding of national political behavior. A major objection to these studies
was their failure to recognize that the political sphere constitutes a distinct subculture with its
own rules of conduct and its distinct processes of socialization. The practice of moving directly
from the stage of child training to the level of national decision making meant that crucial
intervening processes were neglected.
Language ideologies are always understood to refer to more than just language. They always
entail local conceptualizations of social categories, social activities, and the phenomenological or
experiential worlds associated with them. And for some scholar’s language ideologies are also
about the exercise of power, relations of domination, subordination, struggle, and transformation.
From a slightly different point of view, what we readily recognize as “language ideologies” are
actually often about something other than language culturally and occur in situations where
language as a topic is ideologically appropriated by and put to use in larger political projects.
We have already encountered language ideologies about gendered speech in the United States as
an example where language was recruited to feminist critique of male female relations in the
Women’s Liberation Movement. This language-oriented feminist critique had a great deal in
common with other American social identity-based language oriented political critiques, for
example, critiques of terms for ethnic minorities, the physically disabled, and the mentally
disabled as pejorative and stigmatizing. At the heart of these critiques is the idea that by
replacing pejorative terms with neutral or positive terms we will change people’s attitudes and
treatment toward the groups at issue.
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The most influential and widespread political projects to which languages are ideologically
recruited are those of nation-building (Blommaert 1999; Blommaert and Verschueren 1998;
Inoue 2006; Irvine and Gal 2000; Philips 2000). Scholars both perceive people producing
language ideologies to be engaged in nation-building and are themselves fascinated with the
phenomenon of nation-building, one of the great global ideological projects of the current and
past several centuries. One of the key appeals of the paper “Language Ideology and Linguistic
Differentiation” by Irvine and Gal (2000) is that it deals conceptually with social identity
categories that orient to the nation state in ways that are widely shared among linguistic and
cultural anthropologists.
Group identity categories in analyses of language ideologies that have nation-states as a point of
reference or a point of departure include: nation-states themselves, ethnic/linguistic minorities
within nation-states, colonizers, and colonized in colonial nation-state formation projects and
postcolonial newly independent nation-states. Regions, tribes, and villages are also understood as
existing within nation-states in ways that impinge upon them politically, including in the form of
the imposition of language ideologies.
Irvine and Gal also offer a rare broadly comparative perspective that enables comparisons to be
made between and among ethnic minorities in Eastern European nations and tribes in African
nations, and to find commonalities across nations in processes of the formation of language
ideologies. Situations of language shift and the language ideologies associated with them are also
typically understood in terms of nation-state formation and colonialism.
Moreover, the kinds of powerful institutional domains that generate language ideologies through
their work, particularly law and education, are understood ideologically as arms of the state and
as functioning in nation-state specific conditions. The third institutional domain that has yielded
documentation of language ideologies, namely Christian religion, is generally also treated as
occurring within a specific nation-state, even though its organization may be transnational.
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The concept of speech community plays a role in a number of social sciences, namely sociology,
anthropology, linguists, even psychology. People who study issues of migration and ethnic
identity use social community theory to study things like how immigrants assimilate into larger
societies, for instance. Academics who focus on racial, ethnic, sexual or gender issues apply
social community theory when they study issues of personal identity and politics. It also plays a
role in data collection. By being aware of how communities are defined, researchers can adjust
their subject pools in order to obtain representative sample populations.
Speech and Identity the concept of speech as a means of identifying with a community first
emerged in 1960s academia alongside other new fields of research like ethnic and gender studies.
Linguists like John Gumperz pioneered research in how personal interaction can influence ways
of speaking and interpreting, while Noam Chomsky studied how people interpret language and
derive meaning from what they see and hear.
Types of Communities
Speech communities can be large or small, although linguists don't agree on how they're defined.
Some, like linguist Muriel Saville-Troike, argue that it's logical to assume that a shared language
like English, which is spoken throughout the world, is a speech community. But she
differentiates between "hard-shelled" communities, which tend to be narrow-minded and
friendly, like a family or religious sect, and "soft-shelled" communities where there is a lot of
interaction. But other linguists say a common language is too vague to be considered a true
speech community.
The linguistic anthropologist Zdenek Salzmann describes it this way:
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“People who speak the same language are not always members of the same speech community.
On the one hand, speakers of South Asian English in India and Pakistan share a language with
citizens of the U.S., but the respective varieties of English and the rules for speaking them are
sufficiently distinct to assign the two populations to different speech communities.” Instead,
Salzman and others say, speech communities should be more narrowly defined based on
characteristics such as pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and manner of speaking.
The study of language and political economy emerged during the 1980s from parallel currents in
several fields. Neo-Marxist scholars across the social sciences were increasingly interested in the
symbolic and linguistic aspects of unequally distributed economic and political power. Where
philosophers during the eighteenth century had posited an essential unity between language,
nationality, and the state, twentieth- century studies viewed this unity as a product of ideology
propagated by state institutions, among them publishing (Anderson 1983) and education
(Bourdieu 1977).
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Scholars of language and political economy seek to explain the ways that languages function in
diverse settings both as markers and as constitutive elements of social structures. Identity is
viewed as emerging within the stratifying systems of standardization associated with European-
inspired models of nationalism. Where researchers in the earlier tradition deepened their
investigation of identity as an interactional achievement, these scholars examined the historical
contexts and political ideologies that made social identities inhabitable in the first place. Critical
to this undertaking is the examination of everyday practice as a site for the production of social
hierarchy. Language choice can reflect the understanding of “self” versus “other” within broad
political, historical, and economic contexts, but it can also construct more localized groupings of
ethnicity, gender, or social class within these larger contexts. We have chosen the term nation-
state identities as shorthand for the treatment of subjectivity in this tradition.
Multicultural Identities
People who belong to more than one cultural group must navigate the diverse norms and values
from each of their cultural affiliations. Faced with such diversity, multicultural individuals need
to manage and organize their different and possibly clashing cultural identities within their
general sense of self. The multicultural person, therefore, is not simply the one who is sensitive
to many different cultures. Rather, this person is always in the process of becoming a part of and
apart from a given cultural context. He or she is a formative being, resilient, changing, and
evolutionary.
The 1990s was an explosive decade for the theorization of identity, as scholars began to
challenge static understandings of selfhood that damaged a previous generation of research. This
shift, which helped in nothing short of a sea change within linguistics in the way identity is
viewed, can be attributed to a diversity of factors, only some of which can be recounted here.
Postmodern challenges to the authoritative voice of the analyst matched with the rise of digital
communication, multiculturalism, deconstructionism, and the poststructuralist valorization of
discourse as the site for the production of subjectivity.
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a discursive construct that is both multiple and partial, materializing within the binds of everyday
discourse.
During the same decade, a growing body of research on the globalized new economy began to
theorize identity as fragmented by processes associated with late modernity. The expansion and
intensification of international exchange severed the connection between identity and locale that
had been previously assumed. Whether discussed in terms of “detraditionalization” (Giddens
1991), “liquid modernity” (Bauman 2000), or “network society” (Castells 1996), identity had
lost its deictic grounding in the temporal and spatial fixities that constituted an earlier era,
including the nation-state. The full force of these theorizations did not surface in the code-
switching literature until after the millennium, but their reflexes can be seen in early
sociolinguistic work on urban diasporic communities and minority groups constituted through
transnational migration.
Noteworthy in this regard are two influential ethnographies published in the mid-1990s that
launched quite divergent views of ethnicity as a social construct: Zentella’s (1997) Growing Up
Bilingual and Rampton’s (1995) Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. Both
perspectives are importantly informed by the discursive turn in social theory and offer highly
contextualized discussions of identity as an interactional achievement, even if their
conceptualization of ethnicity at the turn of the century differs. This ethnographically based
generation of research offered renewed attention to the concern with language ideologies,
advancing the idea that language contact brought about by global movement leads to heightened
reflexivity toward the indexical links between language and identity.
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Social Languages
The first tool of inquiry is “social languages.” This tool acknowledges that people use different
styles or varieties of language depending on the settings and purposes in order to recognize
different identities and to engage in different building tasks. Thus, social languages are linguistic
varieties that one employs depending on the social identity that one chooses based on the setting.
For example, I might say, “Hey, guess what? I really love talking about Hispanic culture and
want to know more!” But, in a graduate school interview, I would say, “I have a great interest in
Hispanic culture, and I would like to use this opportunity to do some more research about that
ethnicity.” In the first context, I would take the social identity of a friend in a very informal
context while on the second one; I would be more formal and professional, as of a prominent
student with academic interest. The research question could be, “What is your identity in this
context and which linguistic style do you employ?” In research, I would observe one speaker in
two or more different settings and compare linguistic varieties employed such as word choices,
sentence structure, and usages. This tool helps us to recognize different social identities of each
individual depending on different linguistic context.
All languages, like English or French, are composed of many (a great many) different social
languages. Social languages are what we learn and what we speak. Keep in mind that “social
languages” and “Discourses” are terms for different things. I will use the term “social languages”
to talk about the role of language in Discourses. But as I said above, Discourses always involve
more than language. They always involve coordinating language with ways of acting,
interacting, valuing, believing, feeling, and with bodies, clothes, non-linguistic symbols, objects,
tools, technologies, times, and places. Consider, for instance, the following case of an upper-
middle-class, Anglo-American young woman named “Jane,” in her twenties, who was attending
one of the courses on language and communication. The course was discussing different social
languages and, during the discussion, Jane claimed that she herself did not use different social
languages in different contexts, but rather, was consistent from context to context. In fact, to do
otherwise, she said, would be “hypocritical,” a failure to “be oneself.”
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The second tool is “Discourses,” which include non-verbal communication elements: physical
appearance, use of symbols, gestures, objects, and even timing. In class, as a student, I take my
classroom-essential objects such as a binder, pencil, and a notebook; I write down notes from the
lecture and raise my hand if I want to make a comment. But this same person, I, would act
differently when I am at home talking with my parents in a dinner table. I would not take
anything prepared with me but sit there and engage in a conversation without even raising my
hand.
The question for this tool can be, “What verbal and non-verbal elements do you use to build your
identity and activities? “and “As whom do you want to be recognized and doing what?” The
analyst should, thus, observe and analyze not only the verbal elements but also the non-verbal
elements in a conversation, and then take a step further to infer to the identity of the speaker.
Also, while discourse is a conversation or story, the Discourse involves other elements in
addition to linguistic aspects.
Conversations
When talking with someone, it is helpful to know what type of conversation you are in. You can
do so based on a conversation’s direction of communication (a one-way or two-way street) and its
tone/purpose (competitive or cooperative). If you are in a one-way conversation, you are talking
at someone, rather than with someone. If you are in a two-way conversation, participants are both
listening and talking. In a competitive conversation, people are more concerned about their own
perspective, whereas in cooperative conversation participants are interested in the perspective of
everyone involved. Based on direction and tone, I grouped conversations into four types: debate,
dialogue, discourse, and diatribe.
Diatribe is a competitive, one-way conversation. The goal is to express emotions, browbeat those
that disagree with you, and/or inspires those that share the same perspective.
It is important to know which type of conversation you are in, because that determines the
purpose of that conversation. If you can identify the purpose, you can better speak to the heart of
that conversation. But, if you misidentify the conversation, you are in, you can fall into
conversational pitfalls.
The “Conversations” include all the talks and writings that have been going in a particular
society or a social group with a focus on a specific theme, debate, or motif that is unsettled or
contested. In order to know about the Conversation and to engage, we should know about not
only the issues and different opinions of each side of the debate but also who is on each side. For
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instance, let’s imagine that one student at Calvin College says, “Christians should use less plastic
silverware.” Because of the fundamental Calvinistic CRC theology of Creation-Fall-
Redemption-Restoration, we instinctively know that it refers to not simply the on-going
conversation on environmental issues but also the theology that Christians should be restorers of
the world as the stewards of Christ.
However, people on the other side may refute that plastic silverware can be rather a healthier and
cleaner option—especially for sack lunch and in places like Johnny’s—because then people can
use new ones without sharing, and they are more portable. Hence, the research question could be,
“What is the on-going conversation in this social context? “And “Who are in each side of this
discussion?” In order to answer this, the analyst should be aware of the relevant conversation
that has been taken place in that particular linguistic society. Only by answering this, people can
engage in the “conversation” knowing the implied message.
Definition: Intertextuality describes cases where one oral or written text directly or indirectly
quotes another text or alludes to the text in more subtle ways.
Explanation: A single written or oral text can be in one social language or it can switch between
two or more or even mix them together. Sometimes, however, a text spoken or written in one
social language will accomplish a sort of switching by borrowing words from another text
spoken or written in the same or a different variety of language. One text can directly quote
another text, indirectly quote it, or just allude to what certain hearers or readers (with background
knowledge) will realize are words taken from another source.
Operationalization: I would use this tool when a person’s understanding of the meaning behind
a text is dependent upon their knowledge of other texts in such a way that is of particular interest.
To use this tool, I would search the text for instances where its register or diction or sentence
structure deviates from the normal pattern. In cases of odd constructions, I would look up the
phrases in order to determine where they came from and what they bring to the text. I would also
ask an expert (or conduct research on the text) to familiarize myself with the community out of
which the text arises so as to spot instances of intertextuality more easily. I would then analyze
how the “insider” knowledge contributes to a person’s understanding of the text, as well as how
a lack of understanding changes a person’s reading of the text.
Example: Professor Vanden Bosch is in the habit of incorporating phrases from the Bible into
his utterances in class lectures. Each reference brings with it some meaning from its original
context into its new context as in the statement “The dates in bold on the syllabus are either days
off or days of reckoning.” If I were to keep a running list of these sorts of utterances and write
down some general impressions of them, and then look up any specific references, it would be
interesting to see the difference between knowing something is from the Bible from how it
sounds (and thus interpreting it as being more important or dramatic or serious) and knowing
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something is from a very specific part of the Bible, with a specific textual context containing all
sorts of moral and ideological implications.
Lecture-05
Discourse and Speech
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The speech act theory considers language as a sort of action rather than a medium to convey and
express thoughts. The contemporary Speech act theory developed by J. L. Austin a British
philosopher of languages; he introduced this theory in 1975 in his well-known book of 'How do
things with words. Later John Searle brought the aspects of theory into much higher dimensions.
This theory is often used in the field of philosophy of languages. Austin is the one who came up
with the findings that people not only use that language to assert things but also to do things.
And people who followed him went to greater depths based on this point.
Theory: All sort of linguist communication is comprised of linguistic actions. Previously it was
conceived that the very basic unit of communication is words, symbols, sentences or some kind
of token of all of these, but it was speech act theory which suggested that production or issuances
of words, symbols are the basic units of communication. This issuance happens during the
process of performance of speech act. The meaning of these basic units was considered as the
building blocks of mutual understanding between the people intend to communicate.
“A theory of language is a theory of action”- Greig E. Henderson and Christopher Brown.
The theory emphasis that the utterances have a different or specific meaning to its user and
listener other than its meaning according to the language. The theory further identifies that there
are two kinds of utterances, they are called constative and performative utterances. In his book
of ‘How do things with words’ Austin clearly talks about the disparities between the constative
and performative utterances. A constative utterance is something which describes or denotes the
situation, in relation with the fact of true or false.
Example: The teacher asked Olivia whether she had stolen the candy. Olivia replies
“mmmmmm”. Here the utterances of Olivia describe the event in pact of answering her teacher
whether the situation was true or false.
The performative utterances are something which does not describes anything at all. The
utterances in the sentences or in the part of sentences are normally considered as having a
meaning of its own. The feelings, attitudes, emotions and thoughts of the person performing
linguistic act are much of a principal unit here.
Further Austin divides speech act into three different categories: They are,
1. Locutionary act: This is the act of saying something. It has a meaning and it creates an
understandable utterly to convey or express.
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(10) The use of language in communication goes beyond employing its formal units for the
description of reality. There is much to be learned on what constitutes language and on how it
works from the consideration of the way bits of language are employed for the performance of
various acts in the course of written or spoken interaction. Starting from this conception, the
theory of speech acts sees language as an instrument for the performance of social acts. It
postulates that the smallest unit of human communication is not the sentence as a syntactic unit.
Alternatively, it suggests entities, such as making statements, asking questions, giving orders,
describing, etc. regardless of their linguistic form as basic communicative units.
These are labeled speech acts, whereby speakers do things in the real world. In the following
account, the theory of speech acts, as laid down by its initiators, is depicted by sketching out
its earliest model and tracing its subsequent developments. Further, given the focus of the
speech act theory on the situated expression of meaning, the inclusion of this theory within the
wider scope of discourse analysis is justified by clarifying the existing theoretical connections
between them. Eventually, the paper highlights the applicability of the speech act theory
insights in the analysis and description of written texts. On the whole, this account is meant to
offer broad insights on the earliest versions of the theory, and it can be exploited as an
introductory text on it.
Discourse analysis examines stretches of language in their linguistic and extralinguistic contexts.
It seeks to uncover regularities which could not be accounted for at sentential level by
connecting language bits to the adjacent bits on the one hand and to the external situation on the
other. Among the theoretical lines that have been pursued in the treatment of discourse is the
speech act theory. Although, at its inception this paradigm was not meant to be a model of
discourse analysis, many analysts do make use of its findings to account for a number of issues
that arise in the analysis of language use. McCarthy (1991), in a brief historical overview,
specifies the streams that converge to form the realm of discourse analysis including SAT.
In line with this, Van Dijk (1985), presenting a thorough account of the history of discourse
analysis, mentions the speech act paradigm and clarifies that this approach considers verbal
utterances not only as sentences, but also as specific forms of social action. In other words,
when sentences are used in some context, they should be allocated some extra meaning or
function to be defined in relation to speaker intentions, beliefs, or evaluations, or relations
between speaker and hearer. In this way, the systematic properties of the context could be
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accounted for, and the relation between utterances as abstract linguistic objects and utterances
taken as a form of social interaction could be explained.
In attempting to locate the speech act theory within the domain of discourse analysis, Schiffrin
(1994) pinpoints two aspects of the speech act theory which have a direct relevance to discourse
studies: the way an utterance can perform more than one speech act at a time and the connection
between context and illocutionary force of speech acts.
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Perlocutionary acts
Speakers can mean to communicate more than they say. It is never possible to say what one
means in so many words, speakers require hearer to work to a greater or lesser extent to drive
their message from the words uttered. A special and interesting type of communication has been
explored by the Philosopher Paul Grice under the label of conversational implicature, so called
because what is implied is implicated by virtue of the fact that the speaker and hearer are
cooperatively contributing to a conversation (Akmajian et al, 1995).
"In the past three decades, speech act theory has become an important branch of the
contemporary theory of language thanks mainly to the influence of [J.R.] Searle (1969, 1979)
and [H.P.] Grice (1975) whose ideas on meaning and communication have stimulated research in
philosophy and in human and cognitive sciences. From Searle's view, there are only five
illocutionary points that speakers can achieve on propositions in an utterance, namely:
the assertive, commissive, directive, declaratory and expressive illocutionary points. Speakers
achieve the assertive point when they represent how things are in the world, the commissive
point when they commit themselves to doing something, the directive point when they make an
attempt to get hearers to do something, the declaratory point when they do things in the world at
the moment of the utterance solely by virtue of saying that they do and the expressive point when
they express their attitudes about objects and facts of the world.
Since 1970 speech-act theory has influenced in conspicuous and varied ways the practice of
literary criticism. When applied to the analysis of direct discourse by a character within a literary
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work, it provides a systematic but sometimes cumbersome framework for identifying the
unspoken presuppositions, implications, and effects of speech acts which competent readers and
critics have always taken into account, subtly though unsystematically. Speech-act theory has
also been used in a more radical way, however, as a model on which to recast the theory of
literature in general, and especially the theory of prose narratives.
What the author of a fictional work--or else what the author's invented narrator narrates is held to
constitute a pretended set of assertions, which are intended by the author, and understood by the
competent reader, to be free from a speaker's ordinary commitment to the truth of what he or she
asserts. Within the frame of the fictional world that the narrative thus sets up, however, the
utterances of the fictional characters--whether these are assertions or promises or marital vows
are held to be responsible to ordinary illocutionary commitments.
In speech act theory, the hearer is seen as playing a passive role. The illocutionary force of a
particular utterance is determined with regard to the linguistic form of the utterance and also
introspection as to whether the necessary felicity conditions not least in relation to the speaker's
beliefs and feelings are fulfilled. Interactional aspects are, thus, neglected. However,
conversation is not just a mere chain of independent illocutionary forces rather; speech acts are
related to other speech acts with a wider discourse context. Speech acts theory, in that it does not
consider the function played by utterances in driving conversation is, therefore, insufficient in
accounting for what actually happens in conversation.
Cooperation is a term used in the linguistic literature to show the human behavior in a
conversation (Davies, 2007). Pragmatics cannot work without realizing the figurative or hidden
meaning in the conversational exchange. The conversational exchange works when we have the
addresser and the addressee. If we have X and Y and they are participating in a conversation, X
asks Y about something and he or she expects Y to be cooperative with him or her and answer
his or her question or statement, which should be relevant to what X asks or says. Consequently,
they attempt to communicate to each other. In other words, they cooperate with each other, but it
generates what it is called by Grice; implicatures.
As humans we are social beings and when we talk, we usually talk with or to others (unless we
do a monologue). Paul Grice, an English language philosophe, argues that speakers intend to be
cooperative when they talk. For Grice, cooperative means that the speaker knows that each
utterance is a potential interference in the personal rights, autonomy and wishes (a potential face-
threatening act) of the other. That is why we have to shape our utterances in a certain way.
(9) Grice formulated the principle of cooperation that underlies conversation, as follows:
Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the
accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged (Grice 1975:45)
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Grice’s cooperative principle is a set of norms that are expected in conversations. It consists
of four maxims; we have to follow in order to be cooperative and understood:
Maxim of quality: As speaker we have to tell the truth or something that is provable by
adequate evidence.
Maxim of quantity: We have to be as informative as required, we should not say more
or less.
Maxim of relation: Our response has to be relevant to the topic of discussion.
Maxim of manner: We have to avoid ambiguity or obscurity; we should be direct and
straightforward.
Example
Yet, successful communication does not only depend on WHAT we are saying but also
on HOW we are saying something!
A speaker may also ‘infringe’ a maxim when they fail to observe a maxim with no intention to
deceive, such as where a speaker does not have the linguistic capacity to answer a question. A
speaker may also decide to ‘opt out’ of a maxim such as where a speaker may, for ethical or legal
reasons, refuse to say something that breaches a confidentiality agreement they have with
someone or is likely to incriminate them in some way (Thomas 1995; Cutting 2008).
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Violation is a condition where the speaker does not purposefully fulfill certain maxims for some
other purposes. Grice notices that violation of his maxims takes place when the speaker
intentionally refrains from applying maxims in their conversation. Scholars have fully discussed
diverse reasons of violation of maxims. Grice (1975: 49) underlines that when the speaker
refrains from applying his maxims, the speaker is “liable to mislead’’ their counterparts in
conversation. Goffman (2008: 17) says that the speaker does not abide by Gricean maxims in
order to save face. Chirstoffersen (2005) also argues that in real life situation, people violate the
maxims for different reasons. Khosarvizadeh and Sadehvandi (2011: 122-123) say that the
speaker violates Grice’s maxims in order to cause misunderstandings on their participants’ part
to achieve some other purposes, for example to please counterpart, evade discussion, avoid
unpleasant condition, and express feelings.
Until now, Grice’s cooperative principle has been widely employed to do discourse analysis
including movie dialogues, literature, legal documents, novel dialogues and business negotiation
etc.
Grice (1989: 26) clearly states “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the
stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you
are engaged”. Besides this requirement, other parameters in the field of ESP such as
communication context, disciplinary requirements, professional practice and institutional culture
also become crucial.
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emphasis both of us (in our culture or cultures) place on involvement and independence in
circumstances like the one we are in. And we may consider whether both of us would have the
same answers to these questions (Gee 1993).
Face and politeness across cultures
It is important to point out that the specific nature of face and politeness varies from society to
society and from culture to culture. For example, in some cultures the idea of personal space and
independence may vary. In some societies, parents have more right to interfere in the domestic
affairs of adult children than in others. In some cultures, a bedroom is private and cannot be
entered and in others it is not. In some cultures, refusal of an offer may be merely polite (even if
to an English speaker a refusal may seem like refusing involvement) and in others the opposite
may be true (Cook 1989).
Gu (1990) discusses politeness in relation to Chinese culture while Ide (1982) discusses
politeness in Japanese. Gu sees politeness in Chinese not so much in terms of psychological
wants, but rather in terms of social norms. Face is threatened he argues, not when someone’s
needs are not met, but when someone fails to live up to social standards.
(8) Ide sees politeness in Japanese as something which helps to maintain communication. In
Japanese politeness is less strategic and more a matter of socially obligatory linguistic choices
through which social harmony is achieved (Eelen 2001). It is important to remember, then, that
the use of language will very often vary across cultures and in relation to the social realities of
these cultures (Leech 2009).
Gift-giving is an example of a politeness strategy that varies across cultures. Brown and
Levinson list gift-giving as a positive politeness strategy in English, or in Scollon and Wong-
Scollon’s ( 2001 ) terms an involvement strategy; that is, a strategy by which we show our
closeness and rapport with someone else. We may spend a lot of time deciding what to buy for
the gift, think about what the person receiving the gift will feel about what we have bought them
and what their reaction to our gift might be. In Japanese culture, however, there are times when
gift-giving may mean something quite different from this and be more of a social ritual rather
than a positive politeness strategy. Japanese have many gift-giving occasions throughout the year
that cover many events in Japanese life where gift-giving is more ritual, or an expression of duty.
(10) The ways in which people express politeness also differs across cultures. On one occasion I
asked a group of bilingual Japanese/English students how they would ask a friend to close the
window if they were in the car with them and they were feeling cold. These students had all lived
in an English-speaking country and were fluent in both English and Japanese.
Could you close the window for me?
Can I close the window?
Hey yo, close the window, would you?
This is what they said they would say in Japanese to a Japanese friend:
Isn’t it a little chilly?
It’s cold don’t you think?
I wonder why it’s so cold today?
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In the Japanese examples none of the students actually mentioned the window. When the
instructor asked them about this, one of the students told me that that in Japanese indirectness is
a sign of intimacy and is often used between friends as a sign of mutual understanding and
friendship. Indirectness, then, is often an involvement, or positive politeness, strategy in
Japanese whereas in English it is often an independence, or negative politeness, strategy. The
students also told him that in Japanese culture, involvement is much more important than
independence. Thus, whereas in English a speaker may weigh up what they are saying in terms
of both involvement and independence, a Japanese speaker may give much greater weight to
what they are saying in terms of involvement, rather than independence (see Kadar and Mills
2011 for further discussion of politeness in East Asian cultures).
Face-threatening acts
Some acts ‘threaten’ a person’s face. These are called face-threatening acts. Often, we use
mitigation devices (Fraser 1980) in conversations to take the edge off face-threatening acts. One
example is the use of a ‘pre-sequence’ as in the following invitation:
This example also uses an insertion sequence in the middle to take the edge off the face
threatening act of ‘inviting someone out’. We might also use an off-record speech act as in:
Here, A never actually asked B to go for a drink so doesn’t lose any face by being rejected.
Equally, B hasn’t rejected the invitation on record but simply ‘commented’ on the weather in
their off-record rejection of the invitation.
A person may, equally, feel that their face has been threatened and make this clear to their
audience. An example of this is when the US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton on a visit to the
Congo in 2009 was asked by a student what her husband thought of the issue she was discussing.
(The student actually meant Mr Obama but the translator had mistakenly said Mr Clinton.). In
her response ‘You want me to tell you what my husband thinks?’ she makes it clear that her face
had been threatened. She was in the Congo as the Secretary of State, not the wife of the former
US president, and the question that she had been asked was inappropriate. This, of course, also
led to loss of face for the student, having been reprimanded by the Secretary of State in such a
public setting. After the event the student approached Hilary Clinton and explained the mistake.
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She smiled at the student, rather embarrassedly, and told him not to worry about it (Harnden
2009).
Lecture-06
Pragmatics and the Acquisition of Discourse
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What is pragmatics?
Pragmatics is the study of meaning in relation to the context in which a person is speaking or
writing. This includes social, situational and textual context. It also includes background
knowledge context; that is, what people know about each other and about the world. Pragmatics
assumes that when people communicate with each other they normally follow some kind of
cooperative principle; that is; they have a shared understanding of how they should cooperate in
their communications. The ways in which people do this, however, varies across cultures. What
may be a culturally appropriate way of saying or doing something in one culture may not be the
same in another culture. The study of this use of language across cultures is called cross-cultural
pragmatics.
Paltridge (2012) defines pragmatics as the study of how the meaning of spoken and written
discourse is related to the context in which that speech and writing occurs. Context here is taken
to be the particular social situation that the discourse takes place in, the other text or speech it is
situated with, and any background knowledge that it relies upon.
One of the foundational concepts in pragmatics is speech act theory, which is the idea that
words do things in the world. Words have a literal meaning that can be analyzed for its truth or
falsehood. But words also can be used to effect change in the word, to perform actions. Searle
distinguished between these two types of acts as locutionary and illocutionary acts. And the
actual action that is caused by the words is the perlocutionary act.
One practical example of this is the act of saying “I do” in a marriage ceremony. The words have
a literal meaning, and perform the action of becoming legally married. They are also tied to the
social situation in which they occur, the marriage ceremony, their partner’s speech and the
speech of the marriage official. This example also highlights how various conditions can
influence whether a specific speech act works or not. Austin called these felicity conditions,
which Searle interpreted somewhat rigidly as rules.
Cutting (2002) believes that pragmatics and discourse analysis have much in common in the
sense that both investigate context, text and function. Both fields concentrate on the significance
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of words in communication and how interlocutors convey more than the words they utilized.
Additionally, both of them study discourse and text focusing on how pieces of language become
significant and integrated for their users. Furthermore, the two fields are interested in function.
For instance, in order to interpret a piece of discourse such as we are not amusing, pragmatics
and discourse analysis will take into consideration the fact that Queen Victoria had been in a
long depression, resulted from the death of her husband. Her words were a reply to a joke which
her courtiers had just made. Analysts will infer that her intention was to stop them attempting to
make her laugh and lift her out of the depression (ibid: 1)
Similarly, Puig (2003) states that the two domains, pragmatics and discourse analysis, move
behind the formal description of phrases and concentrate on upper components, for instance,
speech acts and conversational turns. Moreover, both approaches investigate context and its
structuring. Nevertheless, pragmatics exerts more effort to the identification of the speaker’s
intention in addition to the recovering of the covert ingredients which the hearer needs to access.
As for the divergence of pragmatics and discourse analysis, Coulthard (1985) says that discourse
analysis examines how stretches above the sentence level are knitted together. Moreover,
discourse analysis has to depict the construction of suprasentential text or social transaction
through forcing a certain apparatus on the data either overtly or covertly.
A conversation between two people in a restaurant may mean different things to the actual
people speaking, something different to a ‘side participant’ in the conversation (such as someone
sitting next to one of the speakers), and something different to a ‘bystander’ (such as the waiter)
and again something different to someone who may be overhearing the conversation
(Verschueren 1999). Equally, a student’s assignment written for a law course takes on a different
meaning if it is re-typed on the letterhead of a law firm and addressed to a client. The text then
takes on the status and function of ‘a piece of legal advice’ and the reader’s interpretation of the
text is significantly different from the way in which it would have been read by the student’s
professor (Freedman 1989). The linguistic context in terms of what has been said and what is yet
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to be said in the discourse also has an impact on the intended meaning and how someone may
interpret this meaning in spoken and written discourse.
There are, then, a number of key aspects of context that are crucial to the production and
interpretation of discourse. These are the situational context in terms of what people ‘know about
what they can see around them’, the background knowledge context in terms of what people
‘know about each other and the world’ and the co-textual context in terms of what people ‘know
about what they have been saying’ (Cutting 2008: 5).
Background knowledge context includes cultural knowledge and interpersonal knowledge. That
is, it includes what people know about the world, what they know about various areas of life,
what they know about each other (Cutting 2008) and what they know about the norms and
expectations of the particular discourse community, in which the communication is taking place.
Contextual knowledge also includes social, political and cultural understandings that are relevant
to the particular communication (Celce-Murcia and Olshtain 2000).
The ways in which people perform speech acts, and what they mean by what they say when they
perform them, often varies across cultures. One of the Japanese students complained, for
example, that he had had work done by a local (English-speaking) builder that was unsatisfactory
and no matter how much he pushed the matter he could not get the builder to apologize. On
reflection, he realized that this was, in part, due to the different implications that might be drawn
from an apology in English as opposed to an apology in Japanese. For the Japanese student, he
expected the builder to apologize as a matter of course and he was very disturbed that the builder
would not do this.
This did not mean for him, however, that the builder would be taking responsibility for the
unsatisfactory work, or that, having apologized, he would then be obliged to do anything about
it. In English, he discovered, the apology, for the builder, would mean that he was both taking
responsibility for the faulty work and agreeing to do something about it a situation the builder
was most likely keen to avoid given the financial, and other, implications this might have had for
him. In Japan, the apology would not necessarily have had these implications.
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Japanese culture with its stress on social hierarchy, moral duty and the repayment of favours, this
situation is somewhat different.
Japanese speakers of English, further, may frequently say sorry when they mean thank you,
leading to a completely different interpretation of what they mean, from what they intend to
mean (Ide 1998). As Cameron (2001: 74) explains, the act of thanking is an expression of
indebtedness in both English and Japanese. In the case of Japanese, however, ‘a debt not yet
repaid calls for an apology from the debtor’. Apologizing, thus, for a Japanese speaker is one
way of expressing indebtedness, and thanking someone.
Kim (2008) shows how the term mainhada can mean both sorry and thanks in Korean.
Mainhada is used less often than sorry in English, however, as South Koreans often express an
apology implicitly or nonverbally. Also, mainhada is not the only way of thanking in Korean. If
the speaker thinks they are not able to return the benefit they have received from the person they
are thanking, they will say mainhada. If they think they can return the benefit, however, they will
say g amsahada . Mainhada is also used for requesting in Korean. It is used within a group when
the speaker thinks fulfilling the request will be difficult. It is also used with people outside the
group to incorporate them into the group but an honorific will be added to the word (i.e.
mainhabnida ) to show particular respect to that person.
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• Giving instructions
• Making requests
• Defending an argument
In academic writing we use a range of specific functions in order to communicate ideas clearly.
These include:
• Describing processes
• Comparing or contrasting things or ideas
• Classifying objects or ideas
Language forms deal with the internal grammatical structure of words and phrases as well as the
word them. When one compares boy and boys, for example, or man and men, he or she is
considering the relationship between different language forms or structures. Language forms also
include cross curricular academic vocabulary - words or phrases frequently used across different
content areas. Cross curricular academic vocabulary words typically describe or are related to
academic processes and may include:
• Verbs (e.g., hypothesize, analyze)
• Complex prepositions, (e.g., in contrast to, as well as)
• Nouns (e.g., comparison, conclusion, analysis)
(4) While functions address what we do with language, forms are the language structures and
vocabulary that are used to support those functions. Language learners need to acquire both the
functions (uses/purposes) and the forms (structures + cross-curricular vocabulary) that make up
the English language in order to reach higher levels of proficiency. Teachers also need to
understand the language demands of a task as they relate to both function and form in order to
best support students’ language development.
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Productive Rules
It means a discourse in which the participants pay close attention to and understand the other
perspective, and respond to the other side by providing pieces of evidences rather than ignoring
them. I believe that for a discourse to be “productive”, the people involved in the discourse need
to be respectful of each other’s ideas and listen to what the participants have to say. A productive
discourse does not mean that the participants have to come to an agreement.
It also means that a discourse is productive when the participants pay close attention and
understand the other perspective, and respond to the other side by providing pieces of evidences
rather than ignoring them. Moreover, a debate is productive when the participants are not
sidetracked by misunderstandings. I think that when a discourse is taking place, participants need
to choose their words carefully to clearly explain their position. Instead of trying to personally
attack the other side, the participant should work to build a strong argument to prove their point.
Discourse if often seen as unproductive because people get carried away by emotions or do not
respect the other participants. Instead of trying to understand the other side, people focus more
on themselves to prove their own argument. Additionally, many people believe that in a
discourse, people should come to an agreement. They think that one side has to win another.
However, this is not true for a productive discourse. There does not have to be a consensus
reached and a resolution does not represent a productive debate.
Discourse refers to the set of norms, preferences and expectations relating language to context,
which language users draw on and modify in producing and making sense out of language in
context. Discourse knowledge allows language users to produce and interpret discourse
structures such as verbal acts (e.g., requests, offers), conversational sequences (such as question-
answer), activities (such as storytelling and arguing), and communicative styles (such as
women’s speech). Competent language users know the formal characteristics of these structures,
the alternative ways of forming particular structures, and the contexts in which particular
discourse structure are preferred and expected. For example, competent communicators know the
range of linguistics structures which can use to ask for thing’s particular social circumstances.
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Psychological context includes perceived emotion. Language throughout the world has linguistic
resources for converting emotion. In Thai and Japanese, for example, passive voice indicates
negative affect towards a proposition. In other languages, affixes, particles, quantifiers, tense
aspect marking, word order and intonation carry emotional meaning. Competent language users
know which structures convey affective meaning and norms, preferences and expectations
otherwise surrounding their use.
In the course of experiencing language in context, children come to know how language varies
with context, how it sometimes reflects context and sometimes creates contexts. They come to
know how to use language as a tool to elicit attention, to establish relationships and identities, to
perform social actions and to express certain stances. All this the part of what constitutes being a
speaker of a language. Acquiring a second language entails discourse knowledge surrounding the
use of that language. In many cases, second language acquisition may be grammatically
competent but their discourse competence pauses, as acquirers map norms, preferences and
expectations surrounding their first language on to second language situations. Second language
acquisition may have different norms from native speakers for greetings, asking, essay-writing,
interviewing, storytelling, instructing or arguing; for displaying interest, fear, concern, pleasure
or emotional intensity. Discrepancies between non- native and native discourse competence have
both personal and economic consequences when interlocutors misunderstand the contextual
meanings of one another’s language behavior.
Social Acts. All children come to know that language is a tool for not only representing the
world but constituting and changing the world as well. Children use linguistic structures as
resources for carrying out a range of tasks such as asking questions and making requests, offers
and promises. They also develop understandings of what others are trying to accomplish with
their words and adjust their subsequent linguistic acts accordingly, e.g. accepting/rejecting
offers, assessing announcements, agreeing/disagreeing, with assertions, satisfying/dissatisfying
requests, and answering questions.
Affect. Affect is expressed emotion, including displays of moods attitudes, dispositions and
feelings. As noted earlier early in their development, children display affect and interpret the
affective displays of others. Before using words, children vary intonational contours and voice
quality to indicate affect. At the single word stage, children perform a variety of affect loaded
speech acts, such greetings, begging, teasing, cursing and refusing; and in certain speech
communities, use affect- marked pronouns and affixes, morphological particles and respect
vocabulary to display sympathy, anger, deference among
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CHILD DISCOURSE
In the years since Ervin-Tripp and Mitchell-Kernan published the first book on child discourse
(Ervin-Tripp and Mitchell-Kernan 1977), the field has moved through a series of changes. By
turning to a discourse-centered approach, researchers have been able to shift focus, placing the
child’s learning process and productive pragmatic use at the center of their concern.
The early discourse approach developed as a counter to traditional language acquisition studies,
which centered on discovering how children could overcome the limitations of their incomplete
grammatical system. Such studies made judgments of the child’s ability to approximate to the
adult norm based on direct elicitation in experimental settings. The impact of Child Discourse
(Ervin-Tripp and Mitchell-Kernan 1977), along with Developmental Pragmatics (Ochs and
Schieffelin 1979), began a movement toward situationally embedded activities as the domain of
child language studies. Researchers’ interests began to turn away from exclusively
psycholinguistic concerns with factors underlying the development of formal structures to
concentrate on contextually situated learning. 3
The discourse focus looked at children in naturally occurring settings and activities, and paid
attention to their speech and communicative practice in everyday situations (Cook-Gumperz and
Gumperz 1976). This research went beyond linguistic competence to what became known as the
child’s acquisition of communicative competence, which is seen as the knowledge that underlies
socially appropriate speech. This approach was influenced by ethnography of communication
(which saw communicative competence as a contrastive concept to the Chomskyan notion of
linguistic competence), and involved theories of sociolinguistics, speech act usage, and
conversational analysis. Although little conversational analytic work was done at that time, by
the late 1970s and 1980s there was a growing interest in children’s conversational competence
(McTear 1985; Ochs and Schieffelin 1979).
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taking this perspective (e.g., Heath 1983), both the sociocultural contexts of speaking, and the
ways of speaking within specifically defined speech events of a social group or society, became
primary research sites. In contrast to earlier studies of language acquisition, which focused on the
acquisition of grammatical patterns, and later studies, which looked at children’s speech acts, the
new approach looked at speaking embedded in specific interactive situations and at the
communicative, as distinct from linguistic, competence that these practices revealed (Hymes
1962).
Child discourse studies have also broadened to encompass institutional settings and culturally
heterogeneous settings. Second, child discourse studies began to address the question, what does
it mean socially and psychologically for the child to have an ever-increasing linguistic control
over her or his social environment and self-awareness? With a rising interest in Conversation
Analysis (e.g., Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974) in the past 15 years or so, this question has
become refocused somewhat. Rather than looking only for linguistic markers of children’s
developing reflexivity and self-awareness, child discourse studies now also look at speakers’
multimodal displays of affect and attention in the moment, including those of the children
themselves, and how these displays become integrated into (and themselves influence) unfolding
sequences of adult-child interaction (e.g., Goodwin, Cekaite, and Goodwin 2012).
Thirdly, child discourse studies had come to focus on sociolinguistic practices and on events that
were meaningful from children’s own point of view, such as games, teasing rituals, and pretend
play routines. They explored children’s developing competence in their own peer world. In the
past 10 years or so, there has been a proliferation of studies of children socializing children,
many of these in culturally and linguistically heterogeneous settings resulting from transnational
movements and postcolonial societal changes (e.g., seeGoodwin and Kyratzis 2007, 2012, 2014;
Kyratzis 2004 for prior reviews).
We will review some of the most relevant studies in two main situational domains: adult–child
discourse and child–child discourse. Under adult–child discourse, we review studies in
pragmatics of family life, personhood, and self-identity (where space is made for the child to
begin to reflect on her or his own experience), and morality in the talk of everyday life (such as
dinner-table narratives, politeness routines, and other adult–child exchanges). Under child–child
discourse, we review studies of disputes, teasing, and gossip events among older children and of
pretend play among younger children.
Adult–Child Discourse
The world of the family, with its often-subtle distinctions of power and authority, provides
children with their earliest learning experiences of how verbal communication can affect
interpersonal relationships. By participating in family life, children gain practical experience of
family dynamics and how talk is used to control, to persuade, or to conceal real intentions.
Family discourse, particularly at mealtimes and on other ceremonial occasions, provides the
essential testing-ground where children hone their skills as communicators. It is in the family
group that children listen to and learn to construct narratives, tales that reflect past and future
events (Heath 1983).
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And it is through the pragmatic conventions of daily conversations that the relative positioning of
family members is constructed as part of daily discursive practice. In family discussion, children
are able to observe how talk reflects, and at times constructs, status relationships of gender, age,
and power by the ways people talk to each other and about each other. It is also through family
discussion that children first become aware of relationships in a world beyond the family.
Ervin-Tripp, focusing on the pragmatic conventions of family talk, provides important insights
into the linguistic means by which interpersonal relationships are negotiated through the daily
activity of family talk. Her analysis concentrates specifically on the speech acts or activities,
such as requests, directives, greetings and politeness expressions, jokes, and complaints that
demonstrate control of one person over another. In a paper on “Language and power in the
family,” Ervin-Tripp, O’Connor, and Rosenberg (1984: 119) point out the need to distinguish
between effective power, “the ability in a face-to-face interaction to get compliance from an
addressee,” and esteem, “as the right to receive verbal deference.”
In other words, there is not a direct correspondence between descriptors of status and everyday
verbal behavior. Rather, by looking at everyday discourse, we become aware of the variety of
factors of context, interact ants, social position, and/or emotional involvement, as well as activity
scene, that all enter into choices of verbal strategies, and on a situation-specific basis determine
pragmatic choice.
Child–Child Discourse
As noted, Child Discourse (Ervin-Tripp and Mitchell-Kernan 1977) along with Developmental
pragmatics (Ochs and Schieffelin 1979) began a new movement in child language research, one
of looking at situationally embedded activities organized by children themselves as the domain
of child language studies and studies of the acquisition of communicative competence. Several
studies noted the ingenuity of children in making use of repetition, sound play, and other aspects
of “attuned poetic performance” (Cekaite et al. 2014: 7; de Le´on 2007; Garvey 1977) in their
play and games.
However, as described by Schieffelin and Ochs (1996), in addition to looking at “children’s skill
to use language,” the research began to focus on “relating children’s knowledge and performance
to the social and cultural structures, and ideologies that give meaning and identity to a
community” (1996: 252), in this case, to children’s “own peer- [or sibling-kin] group
communities” (Goodwin and Kyratzis 2012: 381). Several influential ethnographic studies of
children’s peer group interactions (e.g., Corsaro 1985; Eckert 1987; Eder 1995; Goodwin 1980,
1990, 2006; Rampton 1995; Thorne 1993) began to be conducted in this vein and illustrated how
groups of children and teens in neighborhoods, school yards, and classrooms used social
practices within such genres as arguments, songs, rhymes, pretend play, gossip stories, teasing,
ritual abuse, jokes, and riddles, and also sanctioning of one another (Goodwin 2006: 22–3; Opie
and Opie 1959), to negotiate belonging, inclusion, shared norms and meaning, and social
hierarchy within the peer group. Many additional ethnographic studies followed, especially from
the 1990s onward.
Many studies of older children, middle school-aged and beyond, have looked at disputes, teasing,
and gossip events among peers, as these provide a means for children to negotiate alignments
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and hierarchy within the peer group. Younger children use pretend play and song games as
venues to negotiate inclusion and peer group hierarchy. Studies of children’s’ and teens’
disputes, teasing, gossip stories, song games, and pretend play have been reviewed recently in
two large literature reviews (Goodwin and Kyratzis 2012, 2014), to which the reader is referred.
However, we present a review of a small number of these studies here, and then draw some
conclusions about what recent child discourse research tells us about how children participate in
the negotiation of norms and moral order across both adult–child and child–child interactions.
Lecture-07
Discourse: Gender, Racism and Religion
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The early focus on women’s speech, sex discrimination through language, and unequal power
relations was maintained in two influential edited volumes: McConnell-Ginet, Borker, and
Furman’s Women and Language in Literature and Society (1980) and Thorne, Kramarae, and
Henley’s Language, Gender and Society (1983). However, several chapters in these volumes
represent another major strand of research in discourse and gender, influenced by
anthropological linguist John Gumperz and sociologist Erving Goffman. Ethnographic work
influenced by Goffman explores gender and discourse as a component of social interaction.
Drawing on Goffman’s (1967) concept of face the individual’s public “image of self,” which
consists of “approved social attributes” that must be constantly maintained and protected and
Lakoff’s (1973) theory of politeness. Brown (1980) claim that women are more polite because
they are “culturally demoted to an inferior status relative to men”.
Discourse is usually defined as the relationship between language and its real-world context.
Many researchers and theorists relate discourse specifically to power structures in a given
society, and this is the area where there is the most overlap between gender and discourse.
Approaches to gender and discourse research may analyze the way language reflects or
influences gender stereotypes, or they may discuss the differences between how men and women
use language.
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Much use of the word discourse in the late 20th and early 21st centuries was influenced by the
work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who defined the use of language and other sign
systems as a means to control people's actions. Drawing on Foucault's theories, many researchers
have analyzed gender in relation to existing social and cultural power structures. Some theorists
argue that the way language is used re-enforces existing power structures, while others claim that
discourse simply reflects the existing state of affairs. The relationship between power and
discourse may also be viewed as cyclical or mutually re-enforcing: social structures influence
language, and language influences social structures. Foucaultian approaches to gender and
discourse tend to focus on the relationship between gender and power.
Some research focuses on the difference between how men and women are portrayed in
discourse. For instance, some studies of gender and discourse analyze the way men and women
are viewed in public communication, such as advertising or TV. The goal of such analysis is
often to reveal the unspoken assumptions about gender interactions and the underlying power
structures that these interactions reveal.
On the other hand, a significant portion of gender discourse studies analyzes the difference
between how women and men themselves use language. These types of studies almost always
concentrate on a particular culture or sub-culture. For example, one study of Malagasy-speaking
people revealed women's speech to be more direct in that cultural context, while men's speech
was more round-about. This study provoked debate about the types of power wielded when each
style of communication was used.
Across many different cultures, women's speech styles are often found to have power within
domestic circumstances, while men's speech is believed to be more powerful in public settings.
Most theorists believe that this difference is due primarily to the way boys and girls are
socialized from a young age, rather than from innate biological differences between the sexes.
They may disagree, however, about whether these differences constitute a form of societal
oppression of women. Those who identify as gender-egalitarian or gender-liberal may argue that
these differences should not exist. On the other hand, some people, such as difference feminists,
would respond that although the power assigned to women in society is of a different type than
that assigned to men, it is not an inherently unequal system.
Many of the themes addressed in research focusing on women’s and men’s spoken discourse
have been identified in computer-mediated discourse. Other patterns of gender and discourse are
emerging in this context as well. Scholars in the field of language and gender were among the
first to examine Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). Susan Herring was a innovator in
this area and, together with her students and colleagues, has continued to be the major researcher
in it. In an overview of CMC research published between 1989 and 2013, Herring and Stoerger
(2014) demonstrate that widespread predictions that gender would be invisible online, and
therefore gender-related differences and inequalities would disappear, were not borne out.
Summarizing the findings of early research on discussion lists and newsgroups which considered
the quantity of talk and the stances that males and females take up in relation to their debaters,
they note that women have a habit to post shorter messages and were more likely to “qualify and
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justify their statements, apologize, express appreciation, support others, and in general, adopt an
‘aligned’ stance toward their debaters”. In contrast, men have a habit to post comparatively
longer messages, were more likely to “begin and close discussions in mixed-sex groups, assert
opinions strongly as ‘facts’, challenge others, use simple language and in general adopt an
argumentative stance toward their debaters”.
The prediction indeed, the hope that CMC would be gender-neutral grew out of the assumption
that it would be anonymous. The trend, however, has been in the opposite direction. Recent
research has continued to document that online discourse tends to replicate gender related
patterns that had previously been observed in spoken interaction, as well as the important insight
that gender-related patterns vary by context. It is essential, therefore, to pay attention to the type
and purpose of online discourse in order to get an accurate understanding of the relationship
between gender and online discourse.
For example, the early question of who talks more, women or men, was answered differently
depending on whether one examined what Tannen (1990) dubbed private or public speaking:
women were found to talk more at home but less at meetings. Just so, Herring and Stoerger
report that researchers looking at online discourse have observed that gender differences in
participation vary by online context: women outnumber and are more active than men on social
networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter etc. While men participate more frequently on
music-sharing sites, the professional social networking sites LinkedIn, and the social news
website.
Furthermore, just as studies of spoken conversation found that men’s contributions at meetings
are more often taken up by the group, Kelly (2012) found that men’s tweets are retweeted more
often than women’s, especially by men, even though women post more on Twitter, and Herring
et al. (2004) found that men’s blogs are linked to and reported on in the mass media more often
than women’s blogs. This is not to say that men’s online discourse always receives more
attention; women may receive more attention, but, unfortunately, of a less desirable kind:
Harding (2007) observes that women receive respectively more online harassment, while
Marwick (2013) notes that they are subjected to more threatening language when they speak up
on social media sites.
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“Races are defined as populations differing in the incidence of certain genes but actually
exchanging or potentially able to exchange genes across the boundary (usually geographic) that
separates them.” Race is considered as a biological, genetically determined concept.
However, this scientific concept has been increasingly challenged. First, it has been argued that
the continued use of the term ‘race’ intensifies the problems of racism. As a result, some African
Americans want to substitute color or ‘colorism’ because skin color is the most obvious sign of
difference. Second, others challenge race from the perspective of the increased ‘hybridity’
(Bhabha, 1994) or racial mixing brought about by increasing globalization and the migration of
people. In this context identity becomes very subjective especially because racism rejects such
people their white parentage or heritage. Since mixed race persons are defined by their darker
skin color not their ethnicity the concept of ‘race’ loses much of its validity. Lastly, the most
important challenge to the use of the concept of race is, however that it is not biological
difference as such that creates racism but its social construction.
Despite these challenges the concept of race is still useful mainly because it promotes racism
which is what the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) and anti-racists the world over is
trying to control. ‘Race’ is a biological reality which leads to the perception of difference which
leads to racism. The theoretical foundations of the relationship between race and the construction
of racism are complex and have important policy implications.
Types Manifestations
Individual Attitudes; everyday behavior
(From Henry, Tator, et. al. The Colour of Democracy: Racism in Canadian Society. 2002,
Harcourt, Toronto. 3rd edition in press)
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These two types of differences are connected via the naturalization of cultural differences. This
implies that fictitious or real, usually visible, more or less unchangeable features are linked as
allegedly natural traits with social, cultural, or mental characteristics (naturalization of cultural
differences).
This naturalizing social construction is accompanied by the hierarchization and negative
evaluation of the racialized other (hierarchization and negative evaluation).
Naturalized hierarchization and negative evaluation subsequently serve to justify and
legitimize power differences, (economic) exploitation and various practices of social as
well as political exclusion (Priester 2003).
Discourse Studies as a cross discipline emerged in all the humanities and social sciences 50 years
ago in the USA and various European countries, but initially focused mostly on formal aspects of
text and talk: text grammar, semantic coherence and narrative and argumentation structures. A
more sociopolitical orientation, Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), focused on forms of discursive
power abuse, was initiated only in the 1980s, but since then has become very popular, for
instance in the study of political discourse, media discourse and phenomena such as racism and
sexism. Most forms of CDS establish direct links between discourse structures and social
structures.
Since the 1980s, social cognitive models have remained the most dominant and influential
accounts of racial bias. These have their origins in Gordon Allport’s seminal work, The Nature of
Prejudice (1954). Allport’s definition of prejudice as “an antipathy based upon a faulty and
inflexible generalization” (1954) about a social group and its members, emphasizes the role that
social categorization and stereotyping play as perceptual-cognitive processes that underlie racial
bias.
Categorizing people into their respective group memberships (such as race, gender, age) is seen
to be driven primarily by our limited cognitive capacity and thereby our need to simplify the
overwhelming amount of stimulus information we receive and need to process quickly and
efficiently.
This group-based or category-based perception is seen as distorting reality because people are
not viewed as individuals in their own right but rather as prototypical group members. In turn,
this leads to stereotyping, which recent social cognition research suggests can occur
automatically and outside conscious awareness (Nosek, Hawkins & Frazier 2011). Stereotyping
of course is just one step away from prejudice literally prejudging someone based solely on their
group membership. This inextricable relationship between categorization, stereotyping and
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prejudice therefore is central to social cognition models of prejudice. Social cognition models
have been criticized for normalizing prejudice and racism as inevitable products of our cognitive
hard-wiring. Critics have also argued that by treating racial categories and racial categorization
as natural rather than social and ideological constructs, social cognition models themselves
reproduce subtle and implicit racism in psychology (Hopkins, Levine & Reicher, 1997).
Strategies are the processes that use these beliefs in a flexible and context-sensitive way, both in
understanding and in the planning and execution of prejudiced discourse and interaction. It is
shown that large part of the cognitive processes involved have a social nature. In particular
ethnic prejudice, formulated in terms of attitude schemata about minority groups, is categorically
organized in terms of their major social functions: dominance, differentiation, distance,
diffusion, diversion or displacement, depersonalization, and the various forms of daily
discrimination.
This functional organization of ethnic attitude schemata also displays other forms of information
ordering, such as local and global coherence, hierarchical relations, and differentiation into
relevant social domains. It is assumed that ethnic groups are strategically represented according
to a number of relevant prototypical characteristics: origin and/ or appearance, socio-economic
position, cultural norms and values, typical actions and interactions, and attributed personal
properties. Besides the contents and the organization of ethnic group schemata, especially the
cognitive strategies for the manipulation of these cognitions appear to be crucial for prejudiced
social information processing in concrete situations. These strategies include: irrelevant
participant categorization, actualization and use of (negative) prototypical properties of minority
members and the evaluation of their actions in terms of these group properties, favoritism in
ambiguous situations of in-group members, negative macro proposition formation, confirmation
of negative group schemata from incidental models of experience, negative information
spreading and displacement across models and group schemata, and in general negative
information retrieval.
It is shown that these cognitive strategies correspond to, and are the basis for, social strategies of
everyday discrimination (as in discourse, selective negative attention and derogatory treatment,
negative attribution, negative expectations, and the maintenance of distance and power). Finally,
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it is shown how everyday talk exemplifies many of these cognitive and social strategies of
prejudice, and how discourse serves various functions in the social diffusion of ethnic attitudes,
the sharing of experiences and the formulation of social precepts for the interaction with
minorities.
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Religious Language
The term "religious language" refers to statements or claims made about God or gods. Here is a
typical philosophical problem of religious language. If God is infinite, then words used to
describe finite creatures might not adequately describe God. The ambiguity in meaning with
respect to the terms predicated of God is the “problem of religious language” or the “problem of
naming God.” These predications could include divine attributes, properties, or actions.
Religious discourse contains stories, supernatural characters, myth, attractive images and
sometimes difficult logic. Therefore, religious texts are filled with metaphor. Metaphors
differently interpret the text, “Christ is God and man,” The metaphor is constructed to be
interpreted in one way rather than another. Relations among words give to fuzziness. Metaphors
lead to additional layers of meaning.
Multiplicity of meaning is encoded in the religious texts. Ambiguity is often found in religious
texts. The word “God” has many meanings. God is benevolent, or malignant, kind, or cruel, a
person or a symbol, etc. Religious contexts can be revealing Ritual speeches as display a degree
of repetition mysterious vocabulary, unusual intonation mark the discourse.
Use of rituals
Archaic elements
Euphemism and metaphor
Semantic opacity
Unusual fluency
Magic words
Religious discourse has already been enlightening for us in a narrower sense. Much work on the
topic of discourse and religion has focused on the linguistic and discursive characteristics of such
practices as rituals, prayers, liturgies, trance, divination, spells, mantra, speaking in tongues, and
other clearly delineated verbal genres. These practices typically involve deliberate and
sometimes spectacular departures from “ordinary” communication, and these departures have
been used to address issues of general linguistic concern.
Geertz (1966) looks to define religion through a cultural lens in an attempt to advance the
anthropological study of religion. Geertz observes, and believes, that the anthropological study
of religion is stagnant due to a narrow focus on "supreme numbers" such as Freud, Durkheim
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and Weber. Attempting to trigger off of the great theories of the past Geertz wants to explore the
"cultural dimension of religious analysis."
Geertz has to further explain what he means by "culture" and "religion." Culture is defined as "a
historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols," which is used by humans to
"communicate, perpetuate and develop their attitudes toward life." Religion is then defined as a
special system of symbols that does four different things. Religion:
Discourse and religion exploit the extremes of religious practice to unsettle linguistic
commonplaces and sharpen understandings of general linguistic and semiotic processes.
Narrowing discourse and religion to the study of the characteristics and peculiarities of
discursive practices carries risks, however. We too often take for granted what makes these
practices religious, which means that we prematurely delimit our object of study and neglect to
explain how these practices come to be seen as ‘religious’ and for whom they are so seen. It is
now well appreciated that we cannot presume the governess of religion as a category (Asad
1983, 1993; Masuzawa 2005; Tambiah 1995) and simply place discursive practices in it, as if
their religious provenance were self-evident and left unchallenged by social actors.
This review addresses two major issues. The first is a fundamental problem for religious
practitioners themselves, that of how to communicate with agents, such as gods, spirits, and
ancestors, who are immaterial. All sorts of discursive resources, from registers to reported
speech, are mobilized in an effort to materialize these agents. The second issue is equally
fundamental but often neglected by analysts: it concerns the manner in which discourse gets
separated out as ‘religious’ in relation to the secular.
(10) A curiosity of this topic is that the literature is both small – few researchers on discourse
would describe what they do as that of “language and religion” or “discourse and religion” – and
large. Large, because a massive literature does exist, but this literature is not preoccupied with
language use and is scattered across disciplines, not to mention the globe, and has a formidable
time depth. After all, all the major religious traditions familiar to us have had deep and abiding
concerns with language, as evidenced by such immense works.
Discourse and religion often address a cardinal problem: How does one communicate with
incorporeal agent’s spirits, gods, ancestors who cannot speak back and make themselves present
to allow for “mutual monitoring”, intention-reading, and the rest, without which interaction
would seem impossible? How are linguistic and discursive resources including relatively marked
uses of language mobilized to address this “problem of presence”, that of communicating with
immaterial interlocutors? As Keane has argued, this problem of presence is fundamental, at least
for understandings of religion that turn on the existence of an “invisible order” of experience.
This problem has tended to inspire “highly marked and self-conscious uses of linguistic
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resources” dramatic departures from the way people ordinarily speak. Consider the problem of
responsiveness.
Addressivity, as Bakhtin sweepingly put it, means an utterance’s “quality of being directed to
someone,” and as Conversation Analysis (CA) has appreciated, this is fundamental to human
interaction. The CA notion of “recipient design” refers to the “multitude of respects in which the
talk by a party in a conversation is constructed or designed in ways which display an orientation
and sensitivity to the particular other(s) who are the coo-participants”, but what can one do when
the co-participants aren’t sensorially there? One may hail and entreat a deity or ancestral spirit
with the aid of a proper name, reverential epithet and address term, vocative case marker and the
like but how can one demonstrate, to others and even to oneself, that one is “communicating”
and that one has received a response?
One basic solution is to resolve the participant role of “speaker” into multiple roles, so that one
can play many parts, as it were.
For this feat represented speech is indispensable. In reporting someone else’s speech, one
distinguishes (minimally) the “animator” role (the one who physically produces the message)
from “author” (the one responsible for composing the message). Innumerable other roles can be
distinguished, too, including what called “principal” (the one committed to the truth of the
message), and the “target” (the addressee for whom the message is ultimately meant; on
participant roles.
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Lecture-08
Political Discourse and the Role of
Multimedia in Discourse Analysis
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POLITICAL DISCOURSE
Representation: Metaphor
One of the central concerns of political discourse is the question of how the world is presented to
the public through particular forms of linguistic representation. For example, how is language
used in attributing meaning to individuals and groups with reference to the performance of their
social practices? How are actions and events perceived and described? Which modes of
reference are used to signify places, objects and institutions within particular positive or negative
frames? The claim is that “reality” is not simply given to us through language; rather it is
mediated through different forms of language representation.
An interesting view has recently arisen in cognitive science concerning the nature of mental
representation. This view is exemplified by the following passages:
Most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found,
on the contrary, that metaphor is persistent in everyday life, not just in language but in
thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and
act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.
The basic-level metaphors allow us to comprehend and draw inferences about these
[emotion] concepts, using our knowledge of familiar, well-structured domains. In short,
the locus of metaphor is not in language at all, but in the way we conceptualize one
mental domain in terms of another.
Human cognition is fundamentally shaped by various poetic or figurative processes.
As these quotations indicate, some researchers in cognition and language have argued that
mental representation is at least in part metaphoric. Rather than seeing metaphors as being solely
or even primarily a linguistic phenomenon, they have proposed it as a mode of representation
and thought.
The reasoning behind this is that certain aspects of our knowledge are difficult for people to
represent: They are overly abstract and complex, and therefore they are represented in terms of
easier-to-understand domains, that is, metaphorically. Therefore, when we think about abstract
ideas such as inflation, the mind, or anger, we use more concrete concepts, a process which
"allows us to refer to it [an abstract concept], quantify it, identify a particular aspect of it and
perhaps even believe that we understand it" (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980).
The argument for metaphoric representation is often made as part of an argument for Cognitive
Linguistics as championed by Lakoff and his colleagues. However, I believe that the issue of
metaphoric representation is an interesting and radical idea which deserves attention in its own
right.
Lakoff (1987) and Johnson (1980) present the use of metaphor in thought as just one part of a
predominant theory of the nature of the mind. But their arguments about "objectivist
metaphysics," generative approaches to linguistics and other controversial ideas may have drawn
attention away from this specific claim. Therefore, in this article I will examine metaphoric
representation as a theory of conceptual structure. I will not be addressing most of the other
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views of its proponents. Of those views, metaphoric representation has probably had the most
direct influence on psychological research, through theories of idiom and metaphor
comprehension. That said, however, it will be impossible to avoid mentioning other views
expressed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) or Lakoff (1987), because some of them are used to
provide support for the notion of metaphoric representation.
More generally, the relation between temperature and emotion provides the ground. Lakoff and
Johnson (1980) do not provide a detailed theory of verbal metaphor; their discussion seems to
accept this kind of view. That is, in insisting that representations are metaphoric or metonymic,
they are contrasting them with a more straightforward relation (called direct understanding).
Since the metaphoric relation is not direct, some kind of mapping is necessary. And in fact, much
of Lakoof and Johnson and Kovecses (1986) consist in spelling out the mappings behind various
conceptual metaphors.
In the late 1970s theorists suggested that the surface realization of language represented the
transformation of an underlying reality (Wilson 1990). The work was based, mainly, on
Halliday’s (1985) functional linguistic theory, which viewed language as a “social fact.” In this
view social and cognitive aspects become reflected within grammar. Politics and ideology were
seen as displayed through grammatical structure, and analyzing language in this way was
referred to as “Critical Linguistics.” This approach has since been expanded, both in
methodology and theory, and is now seen as part of the broader analytic program known as
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Wodak and Meyer (2009) moving the “linguistic” to a
“multi- disciplinary and multi-methodological level”; although grammar remains a central tool in
explaining how ideology, power, and domination become constituted through linguistic
structures.
Van Dijk argues that CDA should not be seen as a method but as a form of critically driven
theory and practice operationalized by politically concerned discourse analysts, whose aim is to
use a variety of methods in the study of power abuse and inequality within society. Such an
approach has been criticized for its own internal politicization, since it seems to begin with the
assumption that certain data sets produce power abuse and then sets off to find and describe such
abuse. Consequently, it is suggested that critical analysts are in danger of confirming what they
already believed from the start. Further, CDA has been criticized for its claim to use linguistic
analysis to confirm forms of power abuse. Widdowson (1995) argues that because of its critical
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orientation CDA “essentially sociological or socio-political rather than linguistic.” And it is also
possible that the political critique of political discourse for political purposes becomes a form of
political discourse itself.
In the past 20 years the “critical” approach to language and to political discourse in particular,
has been one of the fastest-growing areas of applied linguistic research. Many of the scholars
writing on CDA have also been leaders in the field of political discourse; for example, Norman
Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, and Teun van Dijk. The critical analyst sees political discourse as the
use of words and phrases, syntactic processes, and discursive positioning, to either hide or
distribute responsibility in certain ways, or designate specific individuals or groups as belonging
to categories that may serve particular political purposes.
Political Sounds
In studies of political discourse there has been relatively little attention given to how politicians
make use of phonetic, phonological, or supra-segmental features of language for political
purposes. Sociolinguistic research indicates that the way we sound has an impact on how people
perceive us, and this can range from our attractiveness and intelligence to our trustworthiness
and employability.
We know that Margaret Thatcher modified her speech to make herself more attractive to voters,
and that UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s upper-class accent “turns off” some voters. In the
United States recent work has suggested that ex-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice adopts
selected African American speech forms in specific speech contexts and Hall-Lew, Coppock,
and Starr (2010) claim that American politicians’ production of “Iraq’s” second vowel marks
“political conservatism” when produced as /æ/ but political liberalism when produced as /a:/.
In studies of prosody within political interviews, politicians reflect a very fluid and positive style,
with only short pauses in syntactically appropriate positions. It has also been claimed that the
sounds of politicians’ own names, along with the rhythmic patterns they project, can also assist,
or hinder, a politicians’ aim of attracting voters (Smith 1998). Duez (1997) has attempted to
correlate aspects of acoustic patterning with degrees of political power. Duez suggests that
aspects of acoustic delivery within the speeches of ex-French President Franc¸ois Mitterrand
were affected by whether Mitterrand was in the role of challenger or opponent, as opposed to
holder of the position of president. While in the role of president, Mitterrand made use of a
slower articulation rate, but when in the position of challenger, or opponent, the articulation rate
was much more rapid. Hence, Duez suggests that temporal organization could reflect relative
distance from “power.”
A number of studies have also attempted to integrate the prosodic level of language with
discursive and pragmatic levels. Braga and Aldina Marques (2004), argue that supra-segmental
features may be harnessed and used in correlation with syntactic, lexical, and pragmatic features
to achieve specific political effects. In a study of political debates, politicians focused on a set of
prosodic features, including pitch, emphasis, and focus and noted that particular patterns were
found to match argumentative goals such as assertiveness, irony, emotion, and hyperbole. While
the study of sounds and sound patterns involves a variety of technical forms of analysis, it is
nonetheless an important component of the consideration of political discourse.
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Media discourse refers to interactions that take place through a broadcast platform, whether
spoken or written, in which the discourse is oriented to a non-present reader, listener or viewer.
Though the discourse is oriented towards these recipients, they very often cannot make
instantaneous responses to the producer of the discourse, though increasingly this is changing
with the advent of new media technology, as we shall explore. Crucially, the written or spoken
discourse itself is oriented to the readership or listening/viewing audience, respectively. In other
words, media discourse is a public, manufactured, on-record, form of interaction. It is not ad hoc
or spontaneous (in the same way as casual speaking or writing is); it is neither private nor off the
record. Obvious as these basic characteristics may sound, they are crucial to the investigation,
description and understanding of media discourse.
The three main approaches to the study of media discourse can be characterized as
Discourse analytic
Sociolinguistic
Nonlinguistic
Discourse analytic approach is the primary focus of scholars in the study of media discourse.
Discourse analytic approaches that underlie a great deal of the research on media can be
characterized as hybrids of existing frameworks of pragmatics, conversation analysis, variation,
narrative analysis and interactional sociolinguistics optionally interlaced with sociological
content analysis. For example, the approach can be “critical” in the sense of looking at social
impact or inequality or concern political economy in the sense of the social value of language
without necessarily bring into line with a major tradition, such as discourse analysis or media
studies. “Discourse analytic” paradigm, which addresses discourse-level matters related to
larger stretches of talk and text beyond the word or sentence level, including questions of
participant, topic, function, and discourse structure, as well as a range of topics that includes
news interviews, quotation and reported speech, register issues, politeness, positioning and
framing.
The term “sociolinguistic” for work that involves variation and style in the media or a similar
close analysis of language. Sociolinguistic insights, either to characterize some dimension of
media language, such as variation and style, or to inform related discourse level work, such as
genre and register. The “nonlinguistic” research involves work in political science, media
studies, or communication studies paradigms and, to some degree, in cultural studies.
Nonlinguistic domains are referred to by media discourse researchers perhaps more than in any
other topical area of discourse analysis.
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Narrative Structure
Journalists write stories, and accordingly, research into story structure or narrative becomes
relevant to account for their motivations. Frameworks that have been successfully applied to
other domains of talk, such as Labov’s (1972) narrative framework have also been applied to
news discourse. For example, Bell (1991) uses Labov’s framework to examine the global
narrative structure of news across local and national news boundaries, while van Dijk (1988)
outlines a “theory of discourse schemata,” which includes the traditional Labovian narrative
schema as well as a more elaborated “news schema” a “series of hierarchically ordered
categories” that helps define the discourse (van Dijk 1988: 49). Bell (1991, 1994, and 1998) has
long compared the structure of news stories to personal narratives, noting their similarities and
divergences, and using the Labovian framework as a point of departure.
The discursive elaboration and alteration of time elements in the news narrative is another
feature distinctive to media discourse. Linear chronology is not important in a news story to the
extent one would think: “Perceived news value overturns temporal sequence and imposes an
order completely at odds with the linear narrative point” (Bell 1991). In their manipulation of
sequential elements, reporters are not stenographers or transcribers; they are storytellers and
interpreters. This point about a reordered “news chronology,” constrained by the norms of text
and content that underlie news discourse, comes up again in the work of media researchers
Manoff and Schudson (1986).
Ultimately, the researchers are trying to determine what the placement of these profession
bounded informational elements means in the context of news structure and discourse
organization. The surface simplicity of the writing rules (which are standard across newswriting
textbooks) and the complexity of their outputs (which varies across presentation domains) have
only begun to get the attention they deserve. Bell (1991), for instance, notes the common practice
in news-story construction of embedding one speech event into another. For example, a
quotation from an interview is surrounded by information from a press release, but on the surface
it is realized as a unified, coherent “story.” Likewise, Cotter (1999a, in press), in discussing the
progress of a story through time, and Knight and Nakano (1999), in delineating the “press release
reality” that informed reporting of the historic 1997 Hong Kong handover, elaborate on the role
of multiple texts and multiple authors in the production of news. This multiparty/multi-element
infrastructure has been remarked on by other researchers (such as van Dijk 1988), who draw a
range of conclusions, depending on their research focus.
Audience Consideration
Attention to audience is the first step away from text-focused analyses of media, and many
researchers are aware that a theoretical position of media discourse that includes the audience is
desirable. Different linguists or theorists offer different conceptualizations of the audience and its
role in the construction of media realities. In the approaches, which are being addressed here, the
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audience is conceived of as part of the discourse mechanism. This is in contrast with more
conventional assumptions about mass communication which rely on the active sender–passive
receiver “conduit” model, which is now contested. The position of the audience may be one of
the more salient differentiating features of the various research paradigms.
A great deal of the research (from within discourse analysis and sociolinguistics and outside of
it) either casts the audience as individuals who do not have much choice in resisting media
power, or credits the audience’s role with more equality in the relationship: as being both active
and acted upon. There are different ways to explore the concept of audience agency or
interaction in media discourse. Goffman’s frame analysis of radio talk (1981) was one of the first
to articulate and apply the insight that the relationships among the different interlocutors
determine the nature of the speech event and the talk that is appropriate to it. Similarly, in Bell’s
view (1991), which builds on Goffman’s categories of participant roles, the media audience takes
on multiple roles: that of speaker, addressee, auditor, overhearer, and eavesdropper. As media-
savvy participants in the larger culture, we recognize audience roles and embedded points of
view and are conscious when an interviewee – or an interviewer – departs from a prescribed
position.
Meinhof’s work on the visual and textual double messages in television news, which she argues
have cross-cultural implications, is consciously predicated on a focus away from “text-internal
readings, where readers are theorized as decoders of fixed meanings, to more dynamic models,
where meanings are negotiated by actively participating readers” (Meinhof 1994: 212). Her own
three-part taxonomy of communication, which circumvents the sender–receiver model and is
briefer than Goffman’s and Bell’s characterizations, includes actors, activities or events, and the
affected, the effect, or outcome.
The audience is considered from cognitive perspectives, as well. Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983)
led the early work on the cognitive factors in the processing of information that influence
comprehension of texts by readers. They establish that hierarchical relations exist among
discourse strategies; that information comes from many sources within text and context; and that
“forward” and “backward” interpretation strategies operate on the local level to specify the
meaning and constrain interpretation – insights that background many current assumptions about
audience interplay with text. In comprehension research such as this, the audience and its range
of innate psycholinguistic abilities are assumed and essentially backgrounded in the discussion of
other issues. This stands in contrast to the work by investigators who incorporate the tenets of
reception analysis in their investigation of media discourse, a blend of methodologies that has
received little attention by linguists (Richardson 1998).
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level, using phonological, lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic evidence to construct a theory of
“audience design.” Major insights of the framework involve the role of style, which in different
ways can either be responsive to the linguistic norms of an audience, or refer in some way to a
“third party, reference group or model” outside of the speech community (Bell 1991: 127).
Style strategies, thus, can be seen as playing an essential role in redefining and renegotiating the
media’s relationship to the audience. Finally, Cotter (1993, 1999a) attempts to characterize the
nature of the relationship between the news community and the “community of coverage” it
serves. This work focuses on the interactive properties of the “pseudo-dyadic” relationship that
exists between the two communities, as well as on the dynamic of “reciprocal transmission” –
“the interplay of texts, creators, and audience” which allows the media to engage on the social or
phatic level, at the same time providing content that “captures facts about our social worlds”
(Cotter 1999a: 168).
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As a discourse type, advertising has always suffered the consequences of a perceived marginal
status, at different levels. This marginality has to do with the very nature of ads. In fact, one of
the outstanding characteristics of this relatively young form of discourse is its ability to search
successfully desirable elements from other, more clearly defined discourses in order to borrow
credibility from others or enhance some of its own features (Williamson, 1978). The resulting
restlessness and ambiguity contribute to a feeling of mistrust towards it: its features are not its
own and ad discourse might even threaten to replace others, which are more firmly established,
because of this ability to draw inspiration from all possible sources (Freitas, 2010), even when
ads are able to incorporate criticism to themselves as useful material for creation (Myers, 1999).
On account of not enjoying the status of a fully established discourse, advertising has
consistently been a target for attacks aimed at its lack of essential and defining characteristics
(Geis, 1982). This elusiveness would then account for the difficulty of establishing boundaries
on which to base effective standards for assessing and evaluating this form of communication.
Advertising has also been denied seriousness of purpose on the grounds of its ultimate
commercial aims (Myers, 1999). Broadly speaking, these aims would include the sales
promotion of a given product or service, the firm establishment of the presence of a given brand
in the public’s mind, or even the reassurance of the public as to the quality of the product in the
event of rebranding strategies (Brierley, 1995, Wells et al, 1998, Yeshin, 2006). This kind of
socially oriented criticism attacks advertising on moral grounds: the hidden agenda behind
advertising discourse introduces a financial element in this communication process that taints it
and causes it to be seen as less worthy of serious attention (Freitas, 2010). After all, ads consist
in messages that are paid for, conveyed in a space or time.
Examining Ads in Context: advertising seen through the eyes of discourse analysis
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Advertising is referred to as a form of discourse in the sense that it has influenced not only the
structure of language and the modality of lifestyle, but also the content of routine daily acts of
communicative exchanges. The messages of advertising have permeated the entire cultural
landscape. Printed advertisements fill the pages of newspapers and magazines. Commercials
interrupt TV and radio programs constantly. As Beasley and Danesi (2002) pointed out, "brand
names, logos, trademarks, jingles, and slogans have become part and parcel of the 'mental
encyclopedia' of virtually everyone who lives in a modern- day society” (See Wodak, 2006a,
2006b; Wadak, 2007). Advertising has progressed beyond the use of simple techniques for
announcing the availability of products or services. It has expressed into the domain of
persuasion, and its rhetorical categories have become universal in contemporary social discourse.
Because of the growing effectiveness of its persuasion techniques, advertising has become
entrenched into social discourse by virtue of its wide spread diffusion throughout society.
Everywhere one turns, one is bound to find some ad message designed to persuade people to buy
a product. All this leads to the inescapable conclusion that advertising has developed, since the
first decades of the 20th century, into a privileged form of social discourse that has unparalleled
rhetorical force. With the advent of industrialization in the 19th century, style of presentation
became increasingly important in raising the persuasive efficacy of the ad text. Accordingly,
advertising started to change the structure and use of language and verbal communication.
Everything from clothes to beverages was being promoted through resourceful new techniques.
As the 19th century came to a close American advertiser in particular were, as Dyer (1982)
points out, using more colloquial, personal and informal language to address the customer and
also exploiting certain effective rhetorical devices to attract attention to a product. So persuasive
had this new form of advertising become that, by the early decades of the 20th century, it started
becoming a component of social discourse, starting to change some of the basic ways in which
people communicated with each other and in which they perceived commodities and services.
From the 1920s onwards, advertising agencies sprang up all over, broadening the attempts of
their predecessors to build a rhetorical bridge between the product and the consumer's
consciousness (See Sayer, 2006; Saussure & Schulz, 2005).
The language of advertising has become the language of all, even of those who are critical of it.
As Twitchell (2000) puts it "language about products and services has pretty much replaced
language about all other subjects”. It is no exaggeration to claim that today most of our
information, intellectual stimulation, and lifestyle models come from, or are related to,
advertising images. Positioning and image creation have become the primary techniques of what
has come to be known as the era of persuasion in advertising.
This is an era in which advertising messages have moved away from describing the product in
itself to focusing on the consumer of the product, creating product imagery with which the
consumer can easily identify (Woodward and Denton, 1988). Ads and commercials now offer
the same kinds of promise and hope to which religions and social philosophies once held
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exclusive rights: security against the hazards of old age, better positions in life, popularity and
personal prestige, social advancement, better health, and happiness.
A possible way of undertaking the analyses of such a campaign is by bearing in mind a number
of building tasks and discourse analysis questions that are at pale when we assess any sample of
‘language in use’: they have to do with
(1) the significance that a piece of language can lend to certain situations and the way this
happens;
(2) what situations this piece of language is creating in such a way that they are recognized by
the others. Another important issue is related to the establishment of
(3) specific identities and
(4) relationships by means of this language sample (Gee, 2005). A given piece of language will
also indicate some sort of
(5) assessment on social values, will
(6) establish connections with other utterances, making them relevant to the present one, as well
as
(7) attribute prevalence to a given sign system over others (Gee, 2005).
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Lecture-09
Approaches and Methodologies in Discourse-I
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epistemic issues are managed using a wide range of conversational and rhetorical resources
(Potter and Hepburn, 2008).
Discourse is constructed and constructive
Discourse is constructed from a range of resources words, categories, rhetorical commonplaces,
grammatical structures, repertoires, conversational practices and so on, all of which may be
delivered in real time, with prosody and timing, or is built into documents with specific layouts,
fonts and so on. These resources, their use and their conditions of assembly can become topics of
DP study. They are both resources for action and challenges that may require management in
order for one to work round their specific affordances.
Although there are some differences of emphasis, contemporary DP draws heavily on the
methods and approach of conversation analysis. A typical DP study will work with a set of audio
or video recordings collected in some setting. Recent work has used phone calls to neighbor
dispute mediation service, calls to a child protection helpline, video records of family mealtimes.
Researchers often draw on more familiar sets of mundane records of phone interaction to do
primary or comparative work.
Such materials will be digitized and often copied in one pass by a transcription service that is
meant to capture the basic words and speaker transitions. This can facilitate searches through
material for particular themes or events of interest. Often these are generated through data
sessions in which a number of researchers engage with a single example, with repeated viewings
or listening’s and this stimulates introductory ideas that lead to a search for new examples. Such
a search can start to build a introductory body of examples. These are typically transcribed using
the system developed by Gail Jefferson (2004), which captures features of delivery that are
oriented to by participants overlap, volume, prosody in a way that makes them visible on the
page.
Analysis and data sessions, however, typically work with both video/audio and transcript; the
latter is not planned to replace the prior. Unlike in more traditional social psychological work,
specific research questions are rarely developed prior to the research; rather, the research often
takes the setting as the key driver of questions (what kind of practices go on in a neighbor
mediation helpline?) or works with a broad orientation to materials (in what sense can we find
practices of advice giving in these helpline calls?).
A study will commonly work with a flexible corpus of examples. As analysis develops, the
corpus will be refined. Some examples will be uncontrolled and new examples will be
recognized, and therefore included in the corpus. The corpus will often start with standard cases
and try to clarify them, and then consider different or counter cases, which may provide further
specification of the phenomena.
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With interactional materials the orientations of the participants themselves are a primary analytic
resource, as these display their understanding of what is going on in its most basic way. Heritage
(2004) suggests that participants turn towards interaction in at least three ways. First, they
address themselves to immediately preceding talk. Second, they set up the conditions for the
action or actions that will come next. Third, in the production of next actions, participants show
a set of understandings of the prior action: that it is complete, that it was addressed to them rather
than someone else, what kind of action it was and so on. This atmosphere provides for the
intelligibility of interaction that is crucial for participants and offers an extraordinarily rich
resource for analysts.
Some philosophers have criticized this kind of approach to intentions by offering a conceptual
analytic picture of intentions as a language game for making distinctions between different kinds
of actions (e.g., Austin, 1961).
Rather than engage in such conceptual analysis, Derek Edwards (2008) opts for an approach that
considers intentions through considering the practical use of attributions of intention, of the term
intention, and of intentional language more broadly. He notes that actually there is a very wide
range of semantic and grammatical resources that can be used to denote that something was
intended or done intentionally.
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Another feature of this developing critique of attitude work is that it starts to break up the idea of
a single underlying attitudinal dimension in favor of considering the way different kinds of
evaluations can be produced for different purposes. For example, Wiggins and Potter (2003)
highlighted the different roles of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ food evaluations – ‘that pasta is
lovely’ vs ‘I love that pasta.’
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Interactional sociolinguistics (IS) studies the language use of people in face-to-face interaction.
It is a theoretical and methodological perspective on language use with eclectic roots in a wide
variety of disciplines such as dialectology, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, pragmatics,
linguistic anthropology, micro-ethnography and sociology. Basically, IS starts from the finding
that, when people talk, they are unable to say explicitly enough everything they mean. As a
result, to appreciate what is meant, they cannot simply rely on the words that are used but must
also depend on background knowledge, to discover what others assumed the relevant context
was for producing words in.
In fact, people can get very angry when they are put to the test and asked to explain precisely
what they meant. Imagine telling a colleague that you had a flat tire while driving to work, after
which that colleague replies: ‘What do you mean, you had a flat tire?’ Or suppose you ask an
acquaintance: ‘How are you?’, and you are being asked in return:
‘How am I in regard to what? My health, my finance, my school work, my piece of mind, my…
In both cases you might experience surprise or confusion because you feel no extra explanation
is necessary. You may even consider such questions improper and angrily retort: ‘Look! I was
just trying to be polite. Frankly, I don’t give a damn how you are!’
Such reactions indicate that people expect each other to treat talk as incomplete and to fill in
what is left unsaid; but also, that people trust each other to provide a suitable interpretation of
their words, that is, they expect one another to be aware of the social world that extends beyond
the actual setting and of the norms for the use of words that apply there. Put in another way, IS
holds that, because of the incompleteness of talk, all language users must rely on extra-
communicative knowledge to infer, or make hypotheses about, how what is said relates to the
situation at hand and what a speaker possibly intends to convey by saying it.
Interactional sociolinguists in principle try to describe how meaningful contexts are implied via
talk, how and if these are picked up by relevant others, and how the production and reception of
talk influences subsequent interaction. As the examples above show, misinterpreting or failing to
make hypotheses frustrates others’ expectations that you may be willing to share the same view
on what background knowledge is relevant, and this may cost you a friend. Below, we will see
that misinterpreting may result in even greater social damage, but before we go into this it is
necessary to take a closer look at how speakers’ flag, or index, meaningful contexts by using
only a limited but suggestive set of tools. If talk is incomplete, interact-ants need to do
completion work. They have to find out what unstated context a certain word flags or points at
for it to be made sense of. Consequently, words can be said to have indexical meaning, and it is
this meaning that interact-ants need to bring to bear when they interpret talk.
This is obvious with terms such as ‘this’, ‘there’, ‘you’ or ‘soon’, terms that have been
traditionally called indexical or ‘deictic’ in linguistics: every ‘this’ and ‘soon’ points at the
specific context in which it is used, where each time one has to complete its new and specific
meaning. But other words can be considered indexical as well. If this makes you wonder how
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people manage to make the right inferences at all, it is necessary to know that much talk is quite
conventional, or that it tends to produce typical sequences of words and appropriate contexts for
producing them in. There aren’t dozens of ways of casually greeting one another, so you can be
safe to assume that ‘how are you?’
In sum, making inferences on the basis of talk is inextricably bound up with evaluation and
identity in an unequally rewarding social world. We’ve already seen that there are social
repercussions when misunderstandings occur: one may be found unintelligible or impolite. These
repercussions only magnify when interact-ants find themselves in unequal social positions
(imagine saying ‘How am I in regard to what?’ to your boss’s friendly greeting) and in stressful
situations such as job application interviews. Things start to look even bleaker when interact-ants
Interactional sociolinguistics and discourse analysis have culturally different inferencing habits
or contextualization styles, in other words when they interpret cues differently or produce cues
that the other party does not pick up. It is with such recipes for disaster that a number of classics
IS studies have been concerned with, and I turn to these in the next section.
If you want to make an IS analysis, you will need first-hand data that are as rich as possible. This
usually implies doing long-term ethnographic fieldwork in one setting during which you
familiarize yourself with the local communicative ecology, appreciate how it is related to broader
social structures and assemble as much commentary from participants as possible. Without this
ethnographic knowledge, it will be difficult to pick up the background knowledge that interact-
ants in that setting only display via subtle references. Recordings (digital or otherwise) of
naturally occurring speech are a must-have, since it is next to impossible to reconstruct
interactions from memory in the amount of detail you need in order to discover their moment-to-
moment organization. It is not always easy to make recordings, but, once you have them, they
will allow you to revisit the recorded scene as much as you like so as to check hypotheses.
Making a transcript of your recordings is the following indispensable and quite time-intensive
step.
Which extracts are important clearly depends on your research goals? But it is typical for
ethnographic research that these may sometimes slightly shift focus when you arrive at the scene.
For these purposes, the researcher Rampton (1995), initially expected to find adolescents from
different ethnic backgrounds playing around with each other’s heritage languages and finding an
interactional common ground in spite of their ethnic differences (cf. Rampton, 1995). But such
behavior was hard to find, and instead he (Rampton) noticed that ethnic minority students
dominated the classroom floor and silenced most other voices by excelling in what they called
‘doing ridiculous’, that is, slowing down and parodying the lesson (and later on also research
interviews) in not entirely unruly ways. Furthermore, in spite of the fact that these students are
widely noted in Belgium as incompetent or unwilling speakers of Dutch, it turned out that they
regularly switched from one Dutch variety to another for special effect, and Rampton (1995) felt
that bringing out such versatile language skills would help me to rub against common
stereotypes. Therefore, he started identifying all occasions in the data where such playful
behavior could be found and then categorized them according to variety (examples of playful
Antwerp dialect, Standard Dutch, mock English, mock Turkish, etc.).
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IS has also illustrated that technically differing styles do not necessarily lead to
miscommunication, just as miscommunication itself does not automatically lead to conflict or
stereotyping. As mentioned above, a readiness for observing and acknowledging differences can
overcome even seriously diverging communication styles, or, conversely, the absence of
difference does not always prevent negative identification or willful misunderstanding from
taking place. These findings invite us to look beyond the actual interactional setting and observe
how interact-ants approach and evaluate one another as differently positioned social beings who
may, depending on the circumstances, see each other as problematically or delightfully different.
Even when the odds are unfavorable, interact-ants may find other identities, qualities or actions
of a person valuable that may overrule communication difficulties and the effect of stereotyping
(a talented football player’s almost non-existent English will be passed over much more easily
than that of an illegal refugee, who in her turn may find that her English is found cute and
perfectly acceptable by her neighbors for whom she does babysitting). In other words, IS shows
that communication is irrevocably a social happening where identities and relations matter, and
which as such stands in close connection with wider social patterns and conventions that are also
affected by it. This brings us to a third reason why IS is important.
IS offers an excellent tool for analyzing the tension between here-and-now interaction and more
established discursive practices. In putting a microscope on interaction, IS makes clear that
communication can never be taken for granted but always involves collaboration, collusion and
negotiation. As the discussion in section ‘How do you make an IS analysis?’ illustrated, traces of
these processes can be extremely subtle and may go unnoticed when looked at from a further
distance, or their relevance may not be fully appreciated when discussed in isolation from the
established practices that facilitated their production. IS, on the other hand, is well capable of
attending to such subtle traces and to the accompanying perspectives of ‘participants who are
compelled by their subordinate positions to express their commitments in ways that are indirect,
off-record and relatively opaque to those in positions of dominance’ (Rampton, 2001).
Consequently, IS can help to pinpoint those moments when established frames are called into
question, reconfigured or otherwise transformed, and in this way, it can also indicate when
creative restructurings give rise to emergent and potentially habitualzing social configurations. In
short, IS can contribute to our understanding of larger social evolutions.
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Physical Anthropology
Anthropology is a unique academic discipline that operates at the crossroads of the physical
sciences, social sciences and humanities to examine the diversity of human experience across
cultures and over time. Anthropologists in our department study everything from human
evolution to prehistory to life in a globalizing world. Because of this breadth of focus,
anthropology is highly relevant to understanding and living in a rapidly changing world.
Basic tenets of physical anthropology:
Holism: Holism means that a part of something can only truly be understood if examined within
relation to the whole of it. For anthropologists, this means that they try to understand humankind
through the interrelationships of all aspects of human existence for example, human biology has
to be examined within the context of human cultures and vice versa. In addition, all of this must
be examined within the context of the environment and historical processes. In an effort to be
holistic, anthropology is often an interdisciplinary field that crosses over into other fields such as
history, geology, and ecology.
Relativism: Relativism means that judgments, truths, or moral values have no absolutes, and can
only be understood relative to the situation or individuals involved. For anthropologists, this
means that they accept that all cultures are of equal value and must be studied from a neutral
point of view.
A good anthropologist must disregard their own beliefs, morals, and judgments when examining
another culture. They must, instead, examine each culture within the context of its own beliefs.
Universalism: Universalism means that whatever the theoretical principle is, it's equally
applicable to all. For anthropologists, universalism means that we believe all humans are equal in
intelligence, complexity, etc. This is in contrast to ethnocentrism, which is the belief that some
peoples are more important or culturally/biologically better than other peoples.
Culture: All humans have culture. Culture is the set of learned behaviors and knowledge that
belong to a certain set of people. This is different from genetically hardwired behaviors (such as
reflexes) in that they aren't biologically inherited. The most important thing to remember is that
culture is learned.
This may differ from linguistic anthropology because linguists will focus more on the way words
are formed, for example, the phonology or vocalization of the language to semantics and
grammar systems. For example, linguists pay close attention to "code-switching," a phenomenon
that occurs when two or more languages are spoken in a region and the speaker borrows or mixes
the languages in normal discourse. For example, when a person is speaking a sentence in
English but completes his or her thought in Spanish and the listener understands and continues
the conversation in a similar way. A linguistic anthropologist may be interested in code-
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switching as it affects the society and evolving culture, but will not tend to focus on the study of
code-switching, which would be more of an interest to the linguist.
Cultural Anthropology
Culture is the patterns of learned and shared behavior and beliefs of a particular social, ethnic,
or age group. It can also be described as the complex whole of collective human beliefs with a
structured stage of civilization that can be specific to a nation or time period. Humans in turn use
culture to adapt and transform the world they live in.
Cultural anthropologists study the diversity of human cultures and societies around the world
and the processes by which people construct local, regional and global forms of social
relationships. Several anthropologists in our department study the processes by which people
construct particular social identities, worldviews, and forms of community in a changing,
globalizing world. In the contemporary world, much ethnography addresses the manner in which
people in local communities orient themselves to global networks and institutions.
Anthropologists, in general, are more concerned with what discourse structuring might reveal
about culture at large: ‘In every moment of talk, people are experiencing and producing their
cultures, their roles, and their personalities’ (Moerman 1988: xi). The sequential organization of
discourse, and conversational features such as overlapping patterns, breaks, silences, repairs and
the like, can inform an understanding of both individual intention and cultural order. The
genealogy of this technique of paying very close attention to discursive form, often also called
‘conversational analysis’, also traces back to the ethnomethodology of the 1960s and 1970s.
Cultural studies, takes discourse more globally to refer to particular areas of language use. This
approach blurs together three levels of meaning: discourse is the act of talking or writing itself; it
is a body of knowledge content; and it is a set of conditions and procedures that regulate how
people appropriately may communicate and use that knowledge. Rather than the elemental
structures of conversational interaction, this second approach to discourse pursues the
connections between orders of communication, knowledge and power.
Cultural anthropology maintains relations with a great number of other sciences. It has been
said of sociology, for instance, that it was almost the twin sister of anthropology. The two are
presumably differentiated by their field of study (modern societies versus traditional societies).
But the contrast is forced. These two social sciences often meet. Thus, the study of colonial
societies borrows as much from sociology as from cultural anthropology. And it has already been
remarked how cultural anthropology intervenes more and more frequently in urban and industrial
fields classically the domain of sociology.
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There have also been fruitful exchanges with other disciplines quite distinct from cultural
anthropology. In political science the discussion of the concept of the state and of its origin has
been nourished by cultural anthropology. Economists, too, have depended on cultural
anthropology to see concepts in a more comparative light and even to challenge the very notion
of an “economic man” (suspiciously similar to the 19th-century capitalist revered by the classical
economists). Cultural anthropology has brought to psychology new bases on which to reflect on
concepts of personality and the formation of personality. It has permitted psychology to develop
a system of cross-cultural psychiatry, or so-called orthopsychiatry. Conversely, the psychological
sciences, particularly psychoanalysis, have offered cultural anthropology new hypotheses for an
interpretation of the concept of culture.
Linguistic Anthropology
Linguistic anthropologists have ventured into the study of everyday encounters, language
socialization, ritual and political events, scientific discourse, verbal art, language contact and
language shift, literacy events, and media. So, unlike linguists, linguistic anthropologists do not
look at language alone, language is viewed as interdependent with culture and social structures.
According to Pier Paolo Giglioli in "Language and Social Context," anthropologists study the
relation between worldviews, grammatical categories and semantic fields, the influence
of speech on socialization and personal relationships, and the interaction of linguistic and social
communities. In this case, linguistic anthropology closely studies those societies where language
defines a culture or society. For example, in New Guinea, there is a tribe of indigenous people
who speak one language. It is what makes that people unique. It is its "index" language. The tribe
may speak other languages from New Guinea, but this unique language gives the tribe its cultural
identity.
In terms of a language's effect on the world, the rate of spread of a language and its influence on
a society or multiple societies is an important indicator that anthropologists will study. For
example, the use of English as an international language can have wide-ranging implications for
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the world's societies. This can be compared to the effects of colonization or imperialism and the
import of language to various countries, islands, and continents all over the world.
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Lecture-10
Approaches and Methodologies in Discourse-II
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What is EAP?
English for Academic Purposes (EAP) is usually defined as teaching English with the aim of
assisting learners’ study or research in that language. In this sense it is a broad term, covering all
areas of academic communicative practice such as pre-tertiary, undergraduate and post-graduate
teaching, classroom interactions, academic publishing and curriculum issues, as well as research,
student and instructional genres (e.g., Hyland, 2009a). The emergence of EAP in the 1980s, as a
response to growing numbers of second language (L2) students in university courses and in a
framework informed by English for specific purposes, originally produced an agenda concerned
with curriculum and instruction rather than with theory and analysis.
EAP was then largely a materials and teaching-led movement focusing on texts and on the search
for generic study skills, which could be integrated into language courses to make students more
efficient learners. EAP has emphasized the rich diversity of texts, contexts and practices in
which students must now operate. While it continues to be heavily involved in syllabus design
and it needs analysis and materials development, EAP has moved away from purely pedagogic
considerations to become a much more theoretically grounded and research informed
innovativeness.
The role of EAP has therefore changed in response to changing conditions in the academy. The
huge expansion of university places in many countries, together with an increase in full fee-
paying international students to compensate for cuts in government support, has resulted in a
more culturally, socially and linguistically diverse student population than ever before. In
addition, students now take a broader and more heterogeneous mix of academic subjects. In
addition to traditional single-subject or joint-honors degrees, we now find complex modular
degrees and emergent ‘practice-based’ courses such as nursing, management and social work.
These new course configurations are more discoursally challenging for students who have to
move between genres, departments and disciplines. Further, while in the past the main vehicles
of academic communication were written texts, now a broad range of modalities and
presentational forms confront and challenge students’ communicative competence.
As a result, EAP has assumed greater prominence and importance in the academy, forcing it to
evolve and to ask new questions. Instead of focusing on why learners have difficulties in
accessing academic discourses, EAP now addresses the influence of culture and the demands of
multiple literacies on students’ academic experiences. These questions, moreover, accompany
new challenges, which Centre on the increased concern with the English language skills of non-
native English-speaking academics. The ability to deliver workshops in English, to participate in
meetings, to make presentations at international conferences and, above all, to conduct and
publish research in English are all demanded as part of such lecturers’ competence as academics.
This group’s needs are now beginning to be noticed and analyzed, and programs are emerging
which cater to their particular requirements.
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Current EAP aims, therefore, at capturing thicker descriptions of language use in the academy at
all age and proficiency levels, incorporating and often going beyond immediate communicative
contexts to understand the nature of disciplinary knowledge itself. It employs a range of
interdisciplinary influences for its research methods, theories and practices to provide insights
into the structures and meanings of spoken, written, visual and electronic texts, into the demands
placed by academic contexts on communicative behaviors, and into the pedagogic practices by
which these behaviors can be developed. It is, in short, specialized English language teaching
grounded in the social, cognitive and linguistic demands of academic target situations and
informed by an understanding of texts and of the constraints of academic contexts. Discourse
analysis is a key resource in this research agenda and has made an enormous contribution to our
understanding of academic communication.
Discourse analysis is a collection of methods for studying language in action, looking at texts in
relation to the social contexts in which they are used. Because language is an irreducible part of
social life, connected to almost everything we do, this broad definition has been interpreted in
various ways across the social sciences. In EAP it has tended to be a methodology which gives
greater emphasis to actual texts than to institutional social practices, and has largely taken the
form of focusing on particular academic genres such as the research article, the conference
presentation, and the student essay.
Genre analysis can be seen as a more specific form of discourse analysis, which focuses on any
element of recurrent language use, including grammar and lexis that is relevant to the analyst’s
interests. As a result, genre analysis sees texts as representative of wider rhetorical practices and
so has the potential to offer descriptions and explanations both of texts and of the communities
that use them. Genres are the recurrent uses of more or less conventionalized forms through
which individuals develop relationships, establish communities and get things done using
language.
Genres can therefore be seen as a kind of tacit contract between writers and readers, which
influence the behavior of text producers and the expectations of receivers. By focusing on
mapping typicality, genre analysis thus seeks to show what is usual in collections of texts, and so
it helps to reveal underlying discourses and the preferences of disciplinary communities. These
approaches are influenced by Halliday’s (1994) view of language as a system of choices that link
texts to particular contexts through patterns of lexico-grammatical and rhetorical features
(Christie and Martin, 1997) and by Swales’ (1990) observation that these recurrent choices are
closely related to the work of particular discourse communities, whose members share broad
social purposes.
Perhaps the most productive application of discourse analysis in EAP has been to explore the
lexico-grammatical and discursive patterns of particular genres in order to identify their
recognizable structural identity. Analyzing this kind of patterning has yielded useful information
about the ways in which texts are constructed and the rhetorical contexts in which such patterns
are used, as well as providing valuable input for genre-based teaching.
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Academic discourse analysis research has also pointed to cultural specificity in rhetorical
preferences (e.g., Connor, 2002). Although ‘culture’ is a controversial term, one influential
interpretation regards it as a historically transmitted and systematic network of meanings that
allow us to understand, develop and communicate our knowledge and beliefs about the world.
Culture is seen as inextricably bound up with language (Kramsch, 1993), so that cultural factors
have the potential to influence perception, language, learning and communication. Although it is
far from conclusive, discourse analytic research suggests that the schemata of L2 and L1 (first
language) writers differ in their preferred ways of organizing ideas that can influence academic
writing (e.g., Hinkel, 2002).
Discourse analyses of academic texts takes a variety of forms, tending towards the textual, the
critical or the contextual, but there have been two main ways of studying interactions in writing.
Researchers have examined the actions of individuals as they create particular texts (Bosher,
1998), or they have studied the distribution of different genre features to see how they cluster in
complementary distributions (Biber, 2006).
One example of this is a study of self-mention, which concerns how far writers want to interrupt
into their texts though use of ‘I’ or ‘we’, or avoid it by choosing impersonal forms. The use of
self-mention is a rather annoyed issue in academic writing and remains a perennial problem for
students, teachers and experienced writers alike; the extent to which one can reasonably assert
one’s personal involvement remains highly controversial. While claims have to be warranted by
appropriate support and reference to existing knowledge by fitting novelty into a community
consensus, success in gaining acceptance for innovation also involves demonstrating an
individual contribution to that community and establishing a claim for recognition for academic
priority. To some extent this is a personal preference, determined by seniority, experience,
personality and so on (Hyland, 2010), but the study illustrated here shows that the presence or
absence of explicit author reference is a conscious choice by writers to adopt a particular
community-situated authorial identity (Hyland, 2001b).
In all disciplines, writers’ principal use of the first person was to explain the work that they had
carried out by way of representing their unique role in constructing a reasonable interpretation
for a phenomenon. In the hard knowledge corpus and in the more quantitative papers in the soft
fields, this mainly involved setting out methodological procedures so that self-mention helped to
underline the writer’s professional credentials through a familiarity with disciplinary research
practices. In addition, it acts to highlight the part the writer has played in a process that is often
represented as having no agents at all, reminding readers that, in other hands, things could have
been done differently.
In more theoretically oriented articles writers sought less to figure as practical agents than as
builders of coherent theories of reality. Explicit self-mention here establishes a more personal
form of authority, one based on confidence and command of one’s arguments.
It has to be said that the relationships between knowledge, the linguistic conventions of different
disciplines and personal identity are ambiguous and complex. Yet it is equally true that these
broad differences suggest that self-mention varies with different assumptions about the effects of
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A corpus is usually computer-readable and able to be accessed with tools such as concordances
which are able to find and sort out language patterns. The corpus has usually (although not
always) been designed for the purpose of the analysis, and the texts have been selected to
provide a sample of specific text-types, or genres, or a broad and balanced sample of spoken
and/or written discourse (Stubbs 2004).
Corpora may be general or they may be specialized. A general corpus, also known as a reference
corpus: “Aims to represent language in its broadest sense and to serve as a widely available
resource for baseline or comparative studies of general linguistic features.” (Reppen and
Simpson 2004). A general corpus, thus, provides sample data from which we can make
generalizations about spoken and written discourse as a whole, and frequencies of occurrence
and co-occurrence of particular aspects of language in the discourse. It will not, however, tell us
about the language and discourse of particular genres or domain of use (unless the corpus can be
broken down into separate genres or areas of use in some way). For this, we need a specialized
corpus.
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There are, thus, a number of already established corpora that can be used for doing corpus-based
discourse studies. These contain data that can be used for asking very many questions about the
use of spoken and written discourse both in general and in specific areas of use, such as
academic writing or speaking. If, however, your interest is in what happens in a particular genre,
or in a particular genre in a setting for which there is no available data, then you will have to
make up your own corpus for your study.
Hyland’s (2002) study of the use of personal pronouns such as I, me, we and us in Hong Kong
student’s academic writing is an example of a corpus that was designed to answer a question
about the use of discourse in a particular genre, in a particular setting. The specific aim of his
study was to examine the extent to which student writers use self-mention in their texts ‘to
strengthen their arguments and gain personal recognition for their claims’ in their written
discourse, as expert writers do (Hyland 2005). His question was related to issues of discourse
and identity, and the place of this writing practice in a particular academic and social
community.
Harwood (2005) also compiled his own corpus for his study of the use of the personal pronouns I
and we in journal research articles. For his study, Harwood selected research articles from
electronic versions of journals as well as manually scanned articles and converted them to text
format. His analysis of his data was both quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative analysis
examined the frequency of writers’ use of I and we in the texts and the disciplines in which this
occurred. The qualitative analysis examined the use of I and we from a functional perspective;
that is, what the function was of these items in the texts, as well as possible explanations for their
use. He then compared his findings with explanations of the use of I and we in published
academic writing textbooks.
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The choice of which to use is, in part, a matter of the research question, as well as the
availability, or not, of a suitable corpus to help with answering the question. It is not necessarily
the case, however, that a custom-made corpus needs to be especially large. It depends on what
the purpose of collecting the corpus is. As Sinclair (2001) has argued, small manageable corpora
can be put together relatively quickly and can be honed to very specific genres and very specific
areas of discourse use. They can also be extremely useful for the teaching of particular genres
and for investigating learner needs.
There are a number of issues that need to be considered when constructing a corpus.
The first of these is what to include in the corpus; that is, the variety or dialect of the
language, the genre(s) to be included, whether the texts should be spoken, written or both
and whether the texts should be monologic, dialogic or multi-party.
The next issue is the size of the corpus and of the individual texts, as well as the number
of texts to include in each category. The issue is not, however, just corpus size, but also
the way in which the data will be collected and the kinds of questions that will be
examined using the data (McCarthy and Carter 2001). Even a small corpus can be useful
for investigating certain discourse features.
The sources and subject matter of the texts may also be an issue that needs to be
considered.
Other issues include sociolinguistic and demographic considerations such as the
nationality, gender, age, occupation, education level, native language or dialect and the
relationship between participants in the texts.
The representativeness of the corpus further depends on the extent to which it includes the
range of linguistic distribution in the population. That is, different linguistic features are
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differently distributed (within texts, across texts, across text types), and a representative corpus
must enable analysis of these various distributions.
A corpus, then, needs to aim for both representativeness and balance, both of which, as Kennedy
(1998) points out, are in the end matters of judgment and approximation. All of this cannot be
done at the outset, however. The compilation of the corpus needs to take place in a cyclical
fashion with the original design being based on theoretical and pilot study analyses, followed by
the collection of the texts, investigation of the discourse features under investigation, then, in
turn, revision of the design (Biber 1994). As Reppen and Simpson (2002) explain ‘no corpus can
be everything to everyone’. Any corpus in the end ‘is a compromise between the desirable and
the feasible’ (Stubbs 2004).
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Politics on ‘backstage’
It is much more difficult to explore the ‘backstage’, the everyday life of politicians, than the
staging of ‘grand politics. Once we enter the backstage, for example in the European Parliament
(see below), we encounter the routines of political organizations that are at first sight
nontransparent and seem as chaotic as in any organization. Hence, ethnographic research is
needed, such as participant observation in organizations, in-depth and narrative interviews,
shadowing of insiders, and so forth to be able to grasp the processes of political strategizing and
decision-making. Focusing only on typical front-stage activities (such as political speeches, for
example) does not suffice to understand and explain the complexity of ‘politics. This is why the
organizational contexts (structures, rules, regulations, and constraints) have to be accounted for
in detail.
Issues of power, hegemony and ideology have been reconceived as central to social and
linguistic practices in all organizations, since all organizational forms can be translated into
language and communication and because, as Deetz (1982: 135) concluded, talk and writing
‘connect each perception to a larger orientation and system of meaning’. The distinction between
structure and agency is useful, since it moves us away from a preoccupation with individual
motivations and behaviors to the discursive practices through which organizational activity is
performed in ritualized in ever new ways. Four prominent linguistic–discursive approaches have
proven particularly influential in organizational research to date: ethno-methodology;
conversation analysis (CA); sociolinguistic analysis; and (critical) discourse analysis (CDA).
Ethnomethodology, whilst technically rooted in sociology, emphasizes the conditions that have
to be satisfied for certain actions to be perceived as signifying a recognized sanction (Garfinkel
et al., 1981). Conversation analysis (CA) identifies the very detailed aspects of members’ turn-
taking strategies that are critical to performance and membership (Schegloff, 1987; Drew and
Heritage, 1992) and deals with relatively short stretches of interaction as being revealing and
representative of, the organizations’ interactional principles. Sociolinguistic analysis has a basis
in the tradition of correlating sociological parameters (e.g., age, class and gender) with variations
in organizational discourse (Bernstein, 1987). Interactional sociolinguistics has its origins in
symbolic interactionism (Goffman, 1959) and is further developed in the broad domain of
discourse studies, and responds to the criticism that the first approach underplays the effect of
context on organizational discourse.
Studies in this domain are not only labor-intensive due to the required ethnography, but they are
usually organized as case studies that are not easy to generalize from. Nevertheless,
Holzscheiter’s investigation into decision-making procedures about legal requirements of child
protection on the UN level allows important insight into the debates of NGOs and their impact
on government officials (2005). Duranti’s participant observation of a US senator’s election
campaign trail raised awareness about the many discursive practices and persuasive devices
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required to keep on track such a huge campaign and related persons (2006). Decision-making
processes involving both written materials (such as minutes, statements and programs) and
debates in committees lie at the core of qualitative political science research into Israeli
community centers (Yanow, 1996) and of text-linguistic and discourse analytic investigations
into EU committees such as the Competitiveness Advisory Group (Wodak, 2000a, b; Wodak et
al. 2011).
The interdependence of front-stage and backstage becomes truly apparent in these studies;
moreover, it becomes obvious how much is decided on backstage and how negotiations and
compromises are staged and enacted thereafter on front-stage.
DHA provides a vehicle for looking at latent power dynamics and the range of potential in
agents, because it integrates and triangulates knowledge about historical, inter-textual sources
and the background of the social and political fields within which discursive events are
embedded. Moreover, the DHA distinguishes between three dimensions that constitute textual
meanings and structures: the topics that are spoken/ written about; the discursive strategies
employed; and the linguistic means that are drawn upon to realize both topics and strategies (e.g.
argumentative strategies, topoi, presuppositions – see below for an extensive discussion).
Systematic qualitative analysis in the DHA takes four layers of context into account: the inter-
textual and inter-discursive relationships between utterances, texts, genres and discourses; the
extra-linguistic social/sociological variables; the history and archaeology of texts and
organizations; and institutional frames of the specific context of a situation (the specific episodes
under investigation). In this way we are able to explore how discourses, genres and texts change
due to socio-political contexts, and with what effects (see Wodak, 2001).
Furthermore, two concepts are salient for analyzing the backstage of politics: inter-textuality
refers to the linkage of all texts to other texts, both in the past and in the present. Such links can
be established in different ways: through continued reference to a topic or to its main actors;
through reference to the same events as the other texts; or through the reappearance of a text’s
main arguments in another text. The second important process is labeled contextualization. By
taking an argument, a topic, a genre or a discursive practice out of context and restating/realizing
it in a new context, we first observe the process of de-contextualization, and then, when the
respective element is implemented in a new context, of contextualization. The element then
acquires a new meaning, because, as Wittgenstein (1967) demonstrated, meanings are formed in
use.
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Common sense supposes that politicians are very well organized, in spite of the many urgent and
important events they must deal with, which have an impact on all our lives. We all have
cognitive models (event models, experience models, context models: van Dijk, 2008), which
quickly and automatically update, distinguish, comprehend and store such events. From this we
might assume that politicians also regularly access their own set of cognitive models for ‘doing
politics’ in order to respond rapidly, in a rational and quite predictable way, to the various events
they encounter.
However, this is in fact not the case as the everyday life of politicians is as much filled with
accident, coincidence and unpredictability as it is filled with well-planned, strategic and rational
action. Chaotic situations are a necessary feature of ‘politics as usual’; experienced politicians
simply know how to cope with them better thus there is ‘order in the disorder’ (Wodak, 1996,
2009), established inter alia through routines, norms and rituals. Politicians have acquired
strategies and tactics to pursue their agenda more or less successfully. The ‘successes depend on
their position in the field, on their power relations and, most importantly, on what I label
knowledge management: much of what we perceive as disorder depends on inclusion in shared
knowledge or exclusion from shared knowledge.
Hans provides some important answers to the questions posed above which, again, could be
generalized to other political realms. Hans employs both strategic and tactical knowledge when
trying to convince various audiences of his political agenda. These discursive strategies and
tactics also structure his day, which might otherwise seem totally chaotic from the outside, or
much ritualized and bureaucratic oriented, for example, solely towards the drafting and
redrafting of documents. Hans knows the ‘rules of the game’, he hesitates between a range of
communities of practice in very well planned and strategic ways, he employs a wide range of
genres suited to the immediate context in order to push his agenda, and thus possesses a whole
repertoire of genres and modes which he applies in functionally adequate ways for the range of
multimodal modes employed in bureaucracies and political institutions.
In sum: I argue, is how politics works; that is, how politicians work. Hans, as a small-scale
policy entrepreneur, does political work; however, as citizens are excluded from the backstage
and the many communities of practice where Hans implements his strategies and pushes his
agenda these activities and practices remain invisible. Of course, this is not only the case for one
MEP; this is generally true for the field of politics as a whole. To challenge the democratic
deficit, at the very least, information about daily political work would need to be made more
publicly accessible to a certain degree.
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Lecture-11
Discourse and Phonology
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Under the heading of phonology in this chapter we shall take a brief look at what has
traditionally been thought of as 'pronunciation', but devote most of our attention to intonation.
This is partly because the most exciting developments in the analysis of discourse have been in
intonation studies rather than at the segmental level (the study of phonemes and their
articulation) and partly because intonation teaching, where it has taken place, has proceeded on
the basis of assumptions that are open to challenge from a discourse analyst's viewpoint.
Traditional pronunciation teaching has found its strength in the ability of linguists to segment
the sounds of language into isolated items called phonemes which, when used in the construction
of words, produce meaningful contrasts with other words (e.g. the phonemes /p/ and /b/ in
English give us contrasts such as pump and bump, pat and bat, .etc.), The position and manner of
articulation of phonemes in a language like English are well described and can be presented and
practiced in language classes either as isolated sounds, in words, in contrasting pairs of words or
in minimal contexts.
Such features will probably long remain the stock-in-trade of pronunciation teaching and, if well
done, can undoubtedly help leaners with difficulties. When words follow one another in speech,
phonemes may undergo considerable changes. Good advanced learners of English use
assimilations and elisions naturally, but a surprising number of quite advanced learners continue
to articulate the citation-form phonemes of English words in casual, connected speech.
This will not usually cause problems of communication but is undoubtedly a contributing factor
in 'foreign accent', and there may be a case for explicit intervention by the teacher to train
students in the use of the most commonly occurring assimilations and elisions by practicing
pronunciation in (at least minimal) contexts. Alternatively, the answer may be to tackle the
problem simultaneously from a 'top-down' and 'bottom up' approach, on the premise that
articulation, rhythmically (see below) and intonation are inextricably linked, and that good
intonation will have a wash-back effect on articulation in terms of reduced and altered
articulations of individual phonemes, alongside the specific teaching of phonemes and the most
common altered and reduced forms.
When we listen to a stretch of spoken English discourse, we often feel that there is a rhythm or
regularity to it, which gives it a characteristic sound, different from other languages and not
always well-imitated by foreign learners. The impression of rhythm may arise out of a feeling of
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alternation between strong and weak 'beats'. Traditionally, rhythm has been considered an
important element in the teaching of spoken English. This is probably due to two main factors.
Firstly, there does seem to be rhythmically in varying degrees in long stretches of speech,
especially carefully considered deliveries such as broadcast talks, fluent reading aloud, speeches
and monologues, as well as some ordinary conversation. Secondly, the concept of English as a
stress-timed language, deeply rooted in theoretical and applied linguistics, has dominated
approaches to the teaching of rhythm.
At this point, it is useful to change our terminology slightly and introduce the term prominence.
Syllables which stand out in the flow of talk will be referred to as prominent syllables. It is
because the speaker has uttered them with relatively greater intensity, or duration, or pitch
variation compared with surrounding syllables (and our perception of this phenomenon will
usually be due to a variety of such features). It is helpful to have this special term, prominence,
so as not to confuse word stress, which words bear in their citation forms (sometimes called their
isolate pronunciations), with what concerns us most here: the choice of the speaker to make
certain words salient by giving prominence to syllables. This is therefore a more precise use of
the term prominence than is found in some sources (e.g. Cruttenden 1986).
Word stress, as it is traditionally understood, and prominence, as we shall use it here, are two
distinct levels. Where they overlap, of course, is in the fact that prominences may not be
distributed just anywhere in the word, but may only fall on certain syllables. Where two
prominences can occur in the same word, as is often the case with a whole class of words such as
IApanESE, UNiVERsal, conGRAtuLAtions, etc., the second will always be the stronger.
Stress is a large topic and despite the fact that it has been extensively studied for a very long
time, there remain many areas of disagreement or lack of understanding. So, it is important to
consider what factors make a syllable count as stressed. Stress is basically a prominence of
syllable in terms of loudness, length, pitch and quality and all of them work together in order to
make a syllable stressed. As discussed above, two types of stress are important. Firstly, stress on
a syllable within a word (the lexical stress) which changes the grammatical category of a word
(compare insult with insult) and also change meaning among other things. On the other hand,
stress on a word or certain words in a phrase or sentence. This type of stress (on word(s) within
sentences) is called sentence level or prosodic stress. This is, in fact, a change or modification to
word level stress in a sentence which is basically a change of ‘beat’ on certain words in a
sentence. Remember that, we create ‘rhythm’ in spoken language on the basis of stress.
Analyze the following examples (stressed words are shown in bold):
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So, what is happening here in this sentence is about the distinguishing degree of emphasis which
is used for creating contrast in sentences or lines of verse. The question is: why do we create this
difference? This takes place in order to differentiate in environment – superimposition of
intonation (degree of prominence) and it is also the part of the formality of a language.
For the learner of English, information about which syllables may be prominent is useful; it is a
natural part of the lexical competence of native speakers. In this regard, the traditional distinction
between primary stress and secondary stress (see above) may be misleading, and it may .be more
helpful simply to indicate to the learner which syllables are prominent. Otherwise, the learner
may be misled into thinking that primary and secondary stress must be maintained at all costs.
Intonational units
Similar sentences can have a different number of intonation units. The end of each intonation
unit is marked with a hash (/) and the pitch words are bolded. Notice that the speaker with fewer
intonation units spoke faster, with fewer pauses, and with fewer changes in pitch during the
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statement. The sentence with more intonation units sounds more emphatic and deliberate about
what is being said. More intonation units can cause the entire conversation to occur more slowly.
Speakers tend to match each other's English rhythm, so if one speaker has a more emphatic
rhythm, it is likely that other speakers will mirror it.
Brown and her associates are concerned with how speakers manage large stretches of interaction,
in terms of turn-taking and topic-signaling and how speakers use pitch level to interact. For
instance, there seems to be a direct correlation in English between the beginning of a new topic
in speech and a shift to a higher pitch.
Turn-taking is another important aspect of pitch level in this view of intonation. The speaker
can signal a desire to continue a speaking turn by using non-low pitch, even at a point where
there is a pause, or at the end of a syntactic unit, such as a clause. Equally, a down-step in pitch
is often a good turn-yielding cue. The intonational cues interact with other factors such as syntax,
lexis, non-verbal communication and the context itself, and are typical of how the different levels
of encoding have to be seen as operating in harmony in a discourse-oriented view of language
(Schaffer 1983).
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relational processes, relates “any kind of symbolic exchange of meaning’ (Halliday, 1985:129) or
the ideas in human consciousness with their linguistic representation of Sayer, the addressee
labeled as Target, and Verbiage.
Behavioral Process
The behavioral Process standing between material and mental processes relate the physiological
and psychological behaviors such as ‘breathing; coughing; smiling; dreaming; and staring.’
(1985)
Existential process
These processes are processes of existing with a there and to be with no representational
function. An Existent can be an entity, event or action.
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In interpersonal meta-function, the degree of intimacy or distance and the type of the relationship
between the writer and reader or participants in a text through the type of modality can be
explored; besides, the system of pronominal determination describes how a referent can be
recognized through the stances of the referent regarding the speaker and listener.
The Mood element constituted by the Subject and the Finite (auxiliary or lexical verb) and the
remainder of the clause as the Residue, determine the mood of a clause as verbal group. Hence,
the order Subject+Finite establishes the mood as declarative, while the order Finite+ Subject
establishes the mood as interrogative. In a system network, a clause can be declarative or
interrogative with Wh or yes-no format including material, mental, verbal, relational, or
existential processes.
In terms of finite verb, subject and tense choice, SFL helps us express the speech functions such
as persuading, enticing, motivating, demanding, inviting, ordering, proposing, recommending,
confirming, persisting, and denying through a set of Mood clause systems. Through the scale of
delicacy (level of detail and particularity) in the mood system, a clause can be indicative or
imperative.
Indicative clauses are classified into interrogative and declarative; besides the element of tagging
can be explored here.
(Sethe was sick) (Who is she? Is she a ghost in a body?) (He comes back, doesn’t he?)
(Listen to me, will you?) (Let’s move out of this place, shall we?)
Grammatically, textual meta-function at the clausal level enjoys Theme. Thematic structure is
concerned with Theme, and Rhyme, or the old and new information structure or topic and
comment where any component in a clause like Subject, Predicator, Complement or
circumstantial Adjunct can be tropicalized and be placed in thematic position or the beginning of
the clause which is more significant than other locations in a sentence. Muir (1972) proposes
“the thematic element in a clause is the first element which results from choice. “According to
Halliday (1981:330) theme includes the message in a text, indicating the identity of text
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relations. Topic comes first and after that Comment appears to expand, justify and provide
additional information to preceding information.
The clause acts as a message in the thematic statuses of Theme and Rhyme in terms of the local
and spatial position in a sequence where Theme takes the initial position whether marked or
unmarked and rhyme the non-initial position. The information flows like a wave in a sentence
from thematic top to thematic bottom which can be accompanied by rising or falling intonation.
Theme slides toward Rhyme and given information toward New to reveal the location of
information prominence.
Cohesion:
Cohesion, the “non-structural text-forming relations” (Halliday and Hasan 1976) relates to the
“semantic ties” or relations of meaning within text. The cohesive devices of referencing,
substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion were presented by Halliday and Hasan
(1976) and Bloor and Bloor (1995)
Referencing
Classified into homophoric, exophoric and endophoric categories respectively referring to
cultural shared information, immediate situation context, and textual information, referencing
identifies presupposed information throughout the text. (Eggins 1994) Endophoric referencing
divided into anaphoric, cataphoric, and esphoric respectively refers to the previously mentioned
(preceding) information in text, information presented later in the text, the same nominal group
or phrase following the presupposed item. (Halliday and Hasan 1976). There are also personal,
demonstrative, and comparative references referring to speech situation noun pronouns like he,
him or possessive determiners like mine and yours, this, here, there, then, same, equal, so,
similarly, and otherwise.
Substitution and Ellipsis
In Bloor and Bloor (1995: 96), substitution and ellipsis are used to avoid the repetition of a
lexical item through grammatical resources of the language. The substitution and ellipsis can be
nominal, verbal and clausal. Substitution words have the same function such as “one and ones”
for nouns and “do” or “so” as in “do so” or “that and “it” for verbal, nominal, and clausal
substitutions. Functioning at the level of deictic, enumerative, epithet, classifier, and qualifier,
ellipsis as “substitution by zero” refers to a presupposed anaphoric item through structural link.
Lexical Cohesion
Lexical cohesion is non-grammatical and refer to the “cohesive effect achieved by the selection
of vocabulary” like reiteration where a lexical item directly or indirectly occurs through
application of synonym, antonym, metonym, or hyponym or a super-ordinate and collocation
where pair of same event or environment lexical items co-occur or found together within the text.
When these lexical items are closer, the text enjoys higher degree of cohesion.
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Lecture-12
Discourse, Vocabulary and Grammar
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Lexical cohesion
In text, lexical cohesion is the result of chains of related words that contribute to the continuity of
lexical meaning. These lexical chains are a direct result of units of text being "about the same
thing," and finding text structure involves finding units of text that are about the same thing.
Bringing a discourse dimension into language teaching does not by any means imply an
abandonment of teaching vocabulary. Vocabulary will still be the largest single element in
tackling a new language for the learner and it would be irresponsible to suggest that it will take
care-of itself in some ideal world where language teaching and' learning are discourse-driven.
Therefore, in this chapter we shall look at research into vocabulary in extended texts in speech
and writing and consider if anything can be usefully exploited to give a discourse dimension to
vocabulary teaching and vocabulary activities in the classroom. Most are already in agreement
that vocabulary should, wherever possible, be taught in context, but context is a rather catch-all
term and what we need to do at this point is to look at some of the specific relationships between
vocabulary choice, context (in the sense of the situation in which the discourse is produced) and
co-text (the actual text surrounding any given lexical item). The suggestions we shall make will
be offered as a supplement to conventional vocabulary teaching rather than as a replacement for
it.
It is debatable whether collocation properly belongs to the notion of lexical cohesion, since
collocation only refers to the probability that lexical items will co-occur, and is not a semantic
relation between words. Here, therefore, we shall consider the term 'lexical cohesion' to mean
only exact repetition of words and the role played by certain basic semantic relations between
words in creating textuality, that property of text which distinguishes it from a random sequence
of unconnected sentences. We shall consequently ignore collocation associations across sentence
boundaries as lying outside of these semantic relations.
Lexical reiteration can be shown to be a significant feature of textuality, and then there may be
something for the language teacher to exploit. We shall not suggest that it be exploited simply
because it is there, but only if, by doing so, we can give learners meaningful, controlled practice
and the hope of improving their text-creating and decoding abilities, and providing them with
more varied contexts for using and practicing vocabulary.
Reiteration means either restating an item in a later part of the discourse by direct repetition or
else reasserting its meaning by exploiting lexical relations. Lexical relations are the stable
semantic relationships that exist between words and which are the basis of descriptions given in
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dictionaries and thesauri: for example, rose and flower are related by hyponymy; rose is a
hyponym of flower.
1) Repetition
The most direct form of lexical cohesion is repetition of a lexical item; e.g., bear in sentence
Algy met a bear. The bear was bulgy (Halliday, 1985). Here the second occurrence of bear harks
back to the first.
2) Synonym or near – synonym
Synonym is used to mean ‘sameness of meaning’ (Palmer, 1981). Lexical cohesion results from
the choice of a lexical item that is in some sense synonymous with a preceding one; for example,
sound with noise.
3) Superordinate
Superordinate is term for words that refer to the upper class itself (Palmer, 1981). In contrary,
term for words that refer to the lower class itself is hyponym. For example: Henry’s bought
himself a new Jaguar. He practically lives in the car (Halliday and Hasan, 1976)
Here, car refers back to Jaguar; and the car is a superordinate of Jaguar.
4) General Word
The general words, which correspond to major classes of lexical items, are very commonly used
with cohesive force. They are on the borderline between lexical items and substitutes. Not all
general words are used cohesively; in fact, only the nouns are when it has the same referent as
whatever it is presupposing, and when it is accompanied by a reference item (Halliday and
Hasan, 1976: 280-1). For example: There’s a boy climbing the old elm. That old thing isn’t very
safe (Halliday and Hasan, 1976: 280). Here, the reiteration takes the form of a general word
thing.
Prior to undertaking the concept of lexical competence, it is worth defining what competence is
and how it has been viewed so far. The term competence has generated substantial controversy in
the field of general and applied linguistics (Chomsky, 1965; Hymes, 1972). The former regarded
it as a pure grammatical competence, that is, “the speaker hearer’s knowledge of his language”
and the latter observed that this competence was more related to communication: a normal child
acquires knowledge of sentences not only as grammatical, but also as appropriate. He or she
acquires competence as to when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom,
when, where, in what manner. In short, a child becomes able to accomplish a repertoire of speech
acts, to take part in speech events, and to evaluate their accomplishment by others (Hymes,
1972).
A somewhat different type of lexical relation in discourse is when a writer or speaker rearranges
the conventional and well-established lexical relations and asks us, as it were, to adjust our usual
conceptualizations of how words relate to one another for the particular purposes of the text in
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question. In one way or another, our expectations as to how words are conventionally used are
disturbed. A simple example is the following extract from a review of a book on American
military planning. Sometimes our expectations as to how words are conventionally used are
disturbed when the writers arrange usual lexical relations for particular purposes of the text.
Example the depressing feature of Allen’s documents is the picture which emerges of smart but
stupid military planners, the equivalent of America’s madder fundamentalists, happily playing
the fool with the future of the planet. (The Guardian, 13 November 1987)
The depressing feature of Allen's documents is the picture which
emerges of smart but stupid military planners, the equivalent of
America's madder fundamentalists, happily playing the fool with the
future of the planet. (The Gwrdian, 13 November 1987)
Here, two words, smart and stupid, frequently occurring in the language as antonyms, and
therefore incompatible, are to be interpreted as compatible descriptions of the military experts.
To do this we have to adjust our typical expectations of how the two words operate as a related
pair. One reasonable interpretation would be that the -experts are clever ('smart') but morally
reckless (stupid'); to interpret them as meaning 'intelligent but unintelligent' would clearly be a
nonsense.
A distinction is often made between grammar words and lexical words in language. This
distinction also appears sometimes as function words versus content words, or empty words
versus full words. The distinction is a useful one: it enables us to separate off those words which
belong to closed systems in the language and which carry grammatical meaning, from those that
belong to open systems and which belong to the major word classes of noun, verb, adjective and
adverb. This, that, these and those in English belong to a closed system (as do the pronouns and
prepositions) and carry the grammatical meaning of 'demonstratives'. Monkey, sculpture, noise
and toenail belong to open-ended sets, which are often thought of as the 'creative' end of
language. In between these two extremes is another type of vocabulary that has recently been
studied by discourse analysts, a type that seems to share qualities of both the open and the
closed-set words.
McCarthy and McCarthy and Carter introduce the concept of discourse-organizing words whose
job in the text is to organize and structure the arguments, rather than answer for its content or
field. Some of this discourse-organizing vocabulary consists of words that act as pronouns in the
way that they refer in the text to some other part of the text. They include such words, as issue,
problem, assessment, question, position, case, situation, etc.
From a purely grammar-designing perspective, all a linguistic model demands from the lexicon
is the basic semantic and syntactic properties of lexical items which are necessary to use them in
linguistic expressions. This has been captured in formal theories in standard lexical entries
through thematic relations and predicate-argument structures, and, in FG, through classical
predicate frames. Thus, from the point of view of the grammar system, many aspects of the
meaning of a lexical item are simply irrelevant in the generation of a linguistic expression.
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Winter (1977) shows that the relationship between clauses can be signaled by three types of
vocabulary: Vocabulary 1 such as subordination; Vocabulary 2 such as sentence connectors; and
Vocabulary 3 such as lexical items. The last one, Vocabulary 3 is crucial to understanding text
organization, although his main concern is the operation of lexical signaling at the level of the
paragraph.
He expresses as follows;
Although he focuses on the function of vocabulary, this can also explain the structure of the text.
For instance, ‘crisis’ implies that a sentence including it suggests a ‘problem,’ which will be
discussed in the text, and the word ‘decision’ implies a ‘solution’ to it. In this way, particular
words in a text can act as a signal to identify textual patterns. In other words, L2 learners can
reach text organization through an understanding of how vocabulary functions.
It is, however, necessary to understand that identifying textual patterns should be influenced by
the vocabulary size of each L2 learner. A poor command of vocabulary cannot make it possible
for L2 learners to recognize that a certain word can be a signal to a textual property. Moreover,
not only learning the meanings of each word, but also learning the cohesive relations of words is
important in raising learners’ consciousness to identify textual patterns. It is this cohesive
relationship between ‘crisis’ and ‘problem’ which makes it possible to recognize that a sentence,
containing the word ‘crisis,’ should suggest a problem. As a result, lexical knowledge can be
considered to be an essential element in identifying textual patterns.
Textual patterns
There are mainly three patterns of text organization (McCarthy 1991; Holland and Johnson
2000):
Problem-Solution
General-Specific
Claim Counter-claim (or Hypothetical-Real)
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Here, each pattern of text organization shall be discussed, although Problem-Solution and
General-Specific c will be mainly used in the analysis.
Problem-Solution Pattern
Hoey (1994) introduces the main stream of discourse analysis structure. According to him, any
genre of text, such as the plots of fairytales, or the writing of scientists, includes ‘the problem-
solution structure’ (Hoey 1994: 27). He explains this by breaking a short passage consisting of
four sentences, and rearranging the sentences in proper order without any signaling expressing a
time sequence.
General-Specific Pattern
The basic structure of this pattern is that text includes “an initial general statement, followed by a
series of (progressively) more specific statements, culminating in a further generalization”
(Holland and Johnson 2000: 21). In a typical case, a passage including a general statement is
followed by another passage, which expands the generalization, such as exemplifying,
explaining, and/or justifying. McCarthy offers diagrammatic representations:
General statement General statement
↓ ↓
Specific statement Specific statement 1
↓ ↓
Specific statement Even more specific
↓ ↓
Specific statement Even more specific
↓ ↓
etc etc
↓ ↓
General statement General statement
(McCarthy1991)
Claim-Counter-claim Pattern
The third textual pattern consists of a series of claims and contrasting counterclaims, which is
presented on a given topic: Claim 1 → Counter-claim 1 → Claim 2 Counter-claim 2 → This
pattern can be found more frequently “in political journalism, as well as in the letters-to-the
editor pages of newspapers and magazines” (McCarthy 1991), and also “the stock-in-trade of
many a ‘Compare and Contrast …’ academic essay” (Holland and Johnson 2000: 23). For the
purpose of identifying the textual pattern, lexical signals are very useful. For instance, through
lexical items, such as claim, assert, truth, false, in fact, ‘segments’ containing them, can be
identified as elements of the ‘Claim-Counter-claim’ structure.
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Clearly, we might not expect to find problem occurring in this way in a formal scientific report,
nor perhaps come up with as a marker for response (develop would be a more predictable
choice). Therefore, as in all matters, the relationship between vocabulary and register needs to be
brought out when studying textual signaling.
Lexical choice within the identified clusters will depend on the context (textbook, magazine,
news report, etc.), the author's assumptions about the audience (cultured/educated readers of the
popular sensationalist press, etc.) whether the style is to be read as ‘written’ or ‘spoken’, and so
on. Most of the texts we have looked at so far have been toward the 'written/formal/cultured' end
of the spectrum. Mere are two more, this time with a more informal, colloquial tone. They are
presented to illustrate the fact that discourse-signaling words need not necessarily be only rather
‘dry’ academic words taken from the Graeco-Latin vocabulary of English.
Idiomatic phrases are used as signals of the response and its occurrence after a previous
negatively evaluated response (conventional treatments). Idioms are often a problem for the
teacher insomuch as it is not always easy to find natural contexts in which to present them.
Research by Moon (1987) suggests that writers and speakers use idiomatic phrases to organize
their discourse and to signal evaluation, far more frequently than previous linguistic studies of
idiomaticity have suggested. Idioms are good metaphors for the kinds of textual segments we
have been looking at (problem/response, etc.).
Modality
The term modality‟ subsumes a range of concepts within the fields of philosophy, morphology,
syntax, semantics, and discourse analysis. Philosophy deals with modality primarily as it applies
to categories of logic and to logical reasoning, and while some of the terminology used in
philosophical studies of modality is borrowed into other disciplines, these terms are not always
used in the same ways or for the same purposes in other disciplines. As Sulkunen and Törrönen
explain, for linguists, the logical treatment of modalities is too narrow, because it is centered on
truth values of propositions. Linguistic analysis of modalities presents much more diversity in its
problematic and approaches‟ (1997). For their part, linguistic studies of modality can be located
in a variety of linguistic sub-disciplines.
Specifically, morphology describes the lexical forms in which modality is manifested in different
languages, syntax describes the complex syntactic configurations in which modality may be
manifested, and semantics identifies modal meanings and explores the variety of ways these
meanings may be expressed morphologically, syntactically, phonologically, and pragmatically.
This paper, however, takes a discourse analytic approach, specifically a critical discourse
analytic approach, employing the concept of modality to characterize the political orientation of
two sample texts.
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Within critical discourse analysis, modality is understood as encompassing much more than
simply the occurrence of overt modal auxiliaries such as may, might, can, could, will, would,
shall, should, must, and ought. Rather, modality concerns the writer’s (or speaker‟s) attitude
toward and/or confidence in the proposition being presented. In Halliday‟s system, modality is
primarily located in the interpersonal component of the grammar and choices in this component
are independent of grammatical choices in other components, for example, choices of transitivity
in the ideational component (Halliday 2002a: 200).
Although there are broad categories of modality recognized by all scholars in the field, there are
nevertheless differences in the ways in which modalities are classified and categorized. For
example, linguist Otto Jesperson (1924) makes a broad division of modalities into two
categories: those that contain an element of will and those that contain no element of will.
Philosopher Georg von Wright (1951) postulates 4 modes: alethic (necessary, possible,
contingent, impossible), epistemic (verified, undecided, falsified), deontic (obligatory, permitted,
indifferent, forbidden), and existential (universal, existing, empty).
Palmer (1986) focuses on epistemic and deontic modalities, which corresponding roughly with
Jesperson‟s two categories, while Palmer (2001) reorganizes categories of modality such that the
first division is between Propositional modality on the one hand, encompassing both epistemic
and evidential modality, and Event modality on the other hand, encompassing both deontic and
dynamic modality. Propositional modality is concerned with the speaker’s attitude to the truth
value or factual status of the proposition, while Event modality refers to events that are not
actualized, events that have not taken place but are merely potential (Palmer 2001).
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Lesson 35
Reference items in English usually include pronouns (e.g.he, she, it, him, they, etc.),
demonstratives (this, that, these, those), and the article the. For instance,
In this sentence, he refers to Michael which will be treated as a anaphoric reference, and
it refers to the bank which will also be treated as an anaphoric reference. In the above given
examples, Michael and bank will be treated as cataphoric reference. Hence, an anaphoric
reference occurs when a word or phrase refers to something mentioned earlier in the discourse,
whereas a cataphoric reference occurs when a word or phrase refers to something
mentioned later in the discourse.
Brown and Yule (1983) see the nature of reference in text and in discourse as an action on the
part of a speaker/writer. It describes what they are doing “not the relationship which exists
between one sentence or proposition and another.” McCarthy (1991) states that we must consider
the notion of discourse segments as “functional units, rather than concentrating on sentence and
to see the writer/speaker as faced with a number of strategic choices as to how to relate segments
to one another and how to present them to the receiver.” He adds that reference items can refer to
Segments of discourse or situations as a whole rather than to any one specified entity in that
situation. Fox (1987) claims that reference can be successfully made (for instance, through the
use of pronouns) if the referent is “in focus, in consciousness, textually evoked or high in
topicality” and where it “can be operationally defined in terms of the discourse structure.”
To this end, referents are often realized through anaphoric (word or phrase referring backwards
in a text), cataphoric (word or phrase referring forwards in a text), and exophoric (reference to
assumed shared worlds outside the text) devices and can appear as functional units in discourse
segmentation.
This implies the use of language to point to something. Reference therefore has the ability to
point to something within or outside a text.
Halliday and Hassan (1976) states that co-referential forms are forms which instead of being
interpreted semantically in their own right, make reference to something else for their
interpretation. When the interpretation is within the text, this is an „endophoric‟ relation but in a
situation where the interpretation of the text lies outside the text, in the context of situation, the
relationship is „exophoric‟. However, exophoric relations play no part in textual cohesion.
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Endophoric relations on the other hand, form cohesive ties within the text. Endophoric relations
are also of two types, those which look back in the text for their interpretation (anaphoric
relations) and those which look forward to the text for their interpretation (cataphoric relations).
For instance, the following sentences show the use of reference. Referring expressions help to
unify the text and create economy because they save writers from unnecessary repetition.
4. Avoiding repetition of a that-clause after certain verbs (think, hope, believe, suppose, reckon,
guess, be afraid) using ‘SO’
e.g.
“Our team will win today’s match.” “Yeah, I hope so.” (= that our team will win today’s match)
“Is Alex here?” “I think so.” (= that Alex is here)
5. Joining two positive sentences which have different subjects using ‘TOO/ SO’
e.g.
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Conjunction
Conjunctive elements are cohesive not in themselves but indirectly, by virtue of their specific
meanings; they are nor primarily devices for reaching out into the preceding (or following) text,
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but they express certain meaning which presuppose the presence of other components in the
discourse (Halliday and Hasan, 1976). Hasan and Halliday (1976) adopt a scheme of just four
categories, namely additive, adversative, causal, and temporal. According to Halliday (1985),
conjunction is classified into elaboration, extention, and enchancement.
1) Elaboration
Elaboration means one clause that expands another by elaborating on it (or some portion of it) by
restating in other words, specifying in greater detail, commenting, or exemplifying (Halliday,
1985). There are two categories of elaborative relation, namely apposition and clarification.
Apposition
According to Kridalaksana (1993) apposition is a word or phrase which explains other preceding
phrase or clause. In this type of elaboration some element is re-presented, or restated, either by
exposition or example. Look at the example below:
Expository: in other word, that is (to stay), I mean (to say), to put it another way.
Exemplifying: for example, for instance, thus, to illustrate.
Clarification
Here, the elaborated element is not simply restated but reinstated, summarized, made more
precise or in some other way clarified for the purposes of discourse:
Corrective: or, rather, at least, to be more precise
Distractive: by the way, incidentally
Dismissive: in any case, anyway, leaving that a side
Particularizing: in particular, more especially
Resumptive: as I was saying, to resume, to get back to the pint
Summative: in short, to sum up, in conclusion, briefly
Verifactive: actually, as a matter of fact, in fact
2) Extension
Extension means one clause expands another by extending beyond it by adding some new
element, giving an exception to it, or offering an alternative (Halliday, 1985). Extension involves
either addition, adversative, or variation. Additive conjunction acts to structurally coordinate or
link by adding to the presupposed item divided into positive (and, also, moreover, in addition)
and negative (nor). Adversativet is conjunction which relates two clauses that state contras each
other (Kridalaksana, 1993). It acts also to indicate contrary to expectation and signaled by but,
yet, on the other hand, however. Variation includes replacive ‘instead’, subtractive ‘except’ and
alternative ‘or’ types.
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Most learners, when learning the grammar of a foreign language, spend time assimilating the
structure of clauses in that language, i.e., where subjects, objects and adverbials are placed in
relation to the verb, and what options are available for rearranging the most typical sequences.
Discourse analysts are interested in the implications of these different structural options for the
creation of text, and, as always, it is from the examination of natural data that patterns of use are
seen to emerge. Some of the structural options frequently found in natural data are ignored or
underplayed in language teaching (especially those found in spoken data, which are often
dismissed as degraded or bad 'style'), probably owing to the continued dominance of standards
taken from the written code. If the desire is to be faithful to data, grammar teaching may have to
reorient some of its structural descriptions, while others already dealt with in sentence level
exercises may be adequately covered in traditional teaching and simply adjusted to discourse-
oriented approaches. English is what is often called an 'SVO' language, in that the declarative
clause requires a verb at its center, a subject before it and any object after it. This is simply a
labeling device which enables comparisons to be made with declarative realizations in different
languages, some of which will be 'VSO' or 'SOV' languages.
There are in English a variety of ways in which the basic clause elements of subject, verb, and
complement/object, adverbial can be rearranged by putting different elements at the beginning of
the clause. These ways of bringing different elements to the front are called fronting devices.
In English the Theme, the ‘point of departure’ for the clause, is also one of the means by which
the clause is organized as a message. Theme is the ‘glue’ that structures and binds the ideational
and interpersonal meanings. In studies of Theme in children’s writing and in writing in the
workplace, the choice and representation of Theme is seen as a crucial element related to the
success of a text (Martin, 1985, 1992, 1993; Martin and Rothery, 1993; Berry, 1995, 1996;
Stainton, 1996, amongst others). The belief that an understanding of the way in which Theme
works can be usefully incorporated into pedagogy is the motivation behind this and many other
studies of Theme.
Theme, then, is seen to play a crucial role in focusing and organizing the message and to
contribute to the coherence and success of the message. Martin (1992) argues that the choice of
what comes first is “a textual resource systematically exploited” to effect different patterns
(Martin, 1992). Martin adds that the different patterns and meanings made by the choice of
Theme can be manipulated and exploited, consciously or unconsciously, by the writer in order to
convey their ‘angle’ or viewpoint. In more recent work, Martin (2000) and Martin and Rose
(forthcoming) suggest that Theme and many other features in a text function to construe the
writer’s viewpoint.
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Rhyme is everything that is not Theme: it is the part of the clause where the Theme is developed
(Halliday, 1994). A message structure in English is comprised of a Theme plus a Rhyme. There
is an order to the structure: Theme comes first, followed by Rhyme, and whatever is placed in
initial position is Theme (Halliday, 1994). In many instances Rhyme is related to New
Information, while Theme is related to Given Information. Given refers to what is already known
or predictable, while New refers to what is unknown or unpredictable.
Halliday elaborates the distinction between given and new as “information that is presented by
the speaker as recoverable (Given) or not recoverable (New) to the listener” (Halliday, 1994).
Martin (1992) also points out that Theme is equated with “what the speaker is on about” while
New is the structure which is “listener-oriented” (Martin, 1992a:448). Halliday adds that
although the two pairs of clause functions, i.e. Theme/ Given and Rhyme/ New, are similar,
they are not the same thing. Theme realizes the ‘angle’ of the story and the New elaborates the
field, developing it in experiential terms (Martin, 1992). Martin (1992) also adds that Theme is
generally restricted to grounding the genre of the text, while the New is not restricted in this way
and is far more flexible. As interesting as the interaction between these two pairs of concepts is,
an investigation into Given and New is beyond the scope of the present study.
Tense is a term that refers to the way verbs change their form in order to indicate at which time a
situation occurs or an event takes place. For finite verb phrases, English has just one inflectional
form to express time, namely the past tense marker (-ed for regular verbs). Therefore, in English
there is just a contrast between present and past tense. Needless to say, non-finite verb phrases
(to infinitives and –ing forms) are not marked for tense. When occurring with modals, verb
phrases are used in their base form, with no tense marker. Each tense can have a simple form as
well as be combined with either the progressive or perfective aspect, or with both of them.
For instance,
Sentences can also be used in the passive voice (note that the perfect-progressive is not normally
found in the passive):
Time and tense are not overlapping concepts. Though tense is related to time, there is no one-to
one correspondence between the two. Tense is a grammatical category: rather than with
“reality”, it has to do with how events are placed, seen, and referred to along the past-present-
future time line. Thus, a present tense does not always refer to present time, or a past tense to
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past time. Actually, the present and past tenses can refer to all three segments of the time line
(past, present, and future).
Furthermore, the past tense can express tentativeness, often associated with politeness:
Did you want to make a phone call?
Were you looking for me?
Aspect is a grammatical category that reflects the perspective from which an action/situation is
seen: as complete, in progress, having duration, beginning, ending, or being repeated. English
has two aspects, progressive (also called continuous) and perfect (ive). Verbs that are not marked
for aspect (the majority of them are not) are said to have simple aspect. In British English, the
perfective aspect is much more common than in American English, since Americans often use
the past simple where Britons use the present perfect.
Verb phrases can be marked for both aspects at the same time (the perfect progressive, however,
is infrequent). The following combinations are possible: present progressive; past progressive;
present perfective; past perfective; present perfective progressive; past perfective progressive:
He’s sleeping;
He was sleeping
He has slept
He had slept
He has been sleeping
He had been sleeping
Usually, grammars contrast the progressive with the perfective aspect (and the simple, for that
matter) on the basis that the former refers to an action/event as in progress, while the latter tends
to indicate the completeness of an action, to see actions and events as a whole and a situation as
permanent. This is certainly a useful distinction, which will not be questioned here; yet students
must be aware that the above is an oversimplified view, as is demonstrated by the fact that the
two aspects can combine within a single verb phrase.
Conclusion
This chapter has taken a selection of grammatical concepts and has attempted to show how
discourse analysis has contributed to our understanding of the relationship between local choices
within the clause and sentence and the organization of the discourse as a whole. When speakers
and writers are producing discourse, they are, at the same time as they are busy constructing
clauses, monitoring the development of the larger discourse, and their choices at the local level
can be seen simultaneously to reflect the concerns of the discourse as an unfolding production,
with an audience, whether present or projected.
categories discussed here. If grammar is seen to have a direct role in welding clauses, turns and
sentences into discourse.
At the end, Discourse and grammar often complement each other, each imposing a different set
of constraints on speakers' utterances. Discourse constraints are global, pertaining to text
coherence, and/or to interpersonal relations. Grammatical constraints are local, pertaining to
possible versus impossible structures (within specific languages). Yet, the two must meet in
natural discourse. At every point during interaction speakers must simultaneously satisfy both
types of constraints in order to communicate properly.
It is also during conversational interaction that language change somehow takes place. This
overview first explains and exemplifies how discourse constraints guide addressees in selecting
specific grammatical forms at different points in the interaction (discourse 'selecting' from
grammar). It then examines the relationship between discourse and grammar from a grammatical
point of view, demonstrating how a subset of discourse patterns (may) turn grammatical
(grammar 'selecting' from discourse). The central theme is then that discourse depends on
grammar, which in turn depends on discourse.
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Lecture-13
The Nature of Reference in
Text and Discourse
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According to Brown and Yule (1983), “thematisation is a discourse rather than simply a
sentential process. What the speaker or writer puts first would influence the interpretation of
everything that follows.” Thus, a title would influence the interpretation of the text which
follows it. The first sentence of the first paragraph would constrain the interpretation not only of
the paragraph, but also the rest of the text. That is, we assumed that every sentence forms part of
a developing, cumulative instruction which told us how to construct a coherent representation.
“Staging” was a more general, more inclusive, term than thematisation (which refers only to the
linear organization of texts). Every clause, sentence, paragraph, episode and discourse were
organized around a particular element that is taken as its point of departure. It was as though the
speaker presents what he wants to say from a particular perspective. Clements (1979) suggested
that “staging is a dimension of prose structure which identifies the relative prominence given to
various segments of prose discourse.” This definition opened the door to far more than processes
of linearization, and permits the inclusion within “staging” of rhetorical devises like lexical
selection, theme and rhyme, alliteration, repetition, use of metaphor, markers of emphasis, etc. It
meant different structure or word construction would determine what the word which has
prominent position in a sentence. We should use “staging” not as a technical term, but as a
general metaphor to cover the exploitation of such varied phenomena in discourse.
The notion of “relative prominence” arising from processes of thematisation and “staging”
devices has led many researchers, particularly in psycholinguistics, to consider staging as a
crucial factor in discourse structure, because they believe, the way a piece of discourse is staged,
must have a significant effect both on the process of interpretation and on the process of
subsequent recall (Yule, 1983). Regarded with this, staging is the sentence arrangement that
signals how the word, sentence is arranged in clause. The arrangement would influence the
intended meaning of sentence. As Davidson states in Brown and Yule (1986), “the more marked
the construction, the more likely that an implicated meaning will be intended utterance to
convey.”
In discourse analysis, the term of staging is used to show how an idea is represented. The first
sentence of a text or the first word of a sentence will influence the interpretation of everything
that follows. Actually, in a sentence there is a particular word that called as foregrounded and
another one is back-grounded. Other themes used in staging were theme and rhyme.
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perspective on what follows. In the detective story cited in (8), the writer shuttles about,
commenting on the activities of a number of different individuals, located in different parts of
England and Europe within the space of two pages. The coherence of structure is imposed, partly
at least, because locally within the text the author is meticulous in relating events to each other in
time. Each new adverbial phrase marks the fact that the scenario has shifted.
We argued in this Chapter that the 'title' of a stretch of discourse should not be equated with 'the
topic' but should be regarded as one possible expression of the topic. We now wish to propose
that the best way of describing the function of the title of a discourse is as a particularly powerful
thematisation device. In the title of extract the topic entity was thematised, or, to express the
relationship more accurately, when we found the name of an individual thematised in the title of
the text, we expected that individual to be the topic entity. This expectation-creating aspect of
thematisation, especially in the form of a title, means that thematised elements provide not only a
starting point around which what follows in the discourse is structured, but also a starting point
which constrains our interpretation of what follows.
For instance, Rocky slowly got up from the mat, planning his escape. He hesitated a moment and
thought. Things were not going well. What bothered him most was being held, especially since
the charge against him had been weak. He considered his present situation. The lock that held
him was strong, but he thought he could break it.
The topic-entity of this fragment is the individual named 'Rocky' and, because of the thematised
expression in the title, we can read this text with the interpretation that Rocky is a prisoner, in a
cell, planning to break the lock on the door and escape. In an exercise which the researchers
conducted using this text after which subjects were asked to answer several questions, we found
that there was a general interpretation that Rocky was alone, that he had been arrested by the
police, and that he disliked being in prison.
When the researchers presented exactly the same questions to another group who read the
following text, (17b), they received quite different answers.
(17b) A Wrestler in a Tight Corner
Rocky slowly got up from the mat, planning his escape. He hesitated a moment and thought.
Things were not going well.
What bothered him most was being held, especially since the charge against him had been weak.
He considered his present situation. The lock that held him was strong, but he thought he could
break it.
In answering questions on this fragment, subjects indicated that they thought Rocky was a
wrestler who was being held in some kind of wrestling 'hold' and was planning to get out of this
hold.
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Rocky was not alone in a prison cell and had had nothing to do with the police. By providing
different 'starting points' in the thematised elements of the different titles, we effectively
constrained the way in which the piece of text was interpreted. (Anderson et al. (1977) discuss
the different possible interpretations of the one piece of text (without titles) presented in (17a)
and (17b) in terms of knowledge structures or 'schemata' which are activated for the
interpretation of texts.
Extracts (17a) and (17b) provide a particularly dramatic illustration of the effect of thematisation.
There are, of course, many other easily recognizable thematisation devices used in the
organization of discourse structure. Placing headings and sub-headings within a text is a common
thematisation device in technical or public- information documents. It also occurs, you will have
noted, in linguistics textbooks. What these thematisation devices have in common is not only the
way they provide 'starting points' for paragraphs in a text, but also their contribution to dividing
up a whole text into smaller chunks. This 'chunking' effect is one of the most basic of those
achieved by thematisation in discourse.
As Levelt (1981) remarks, it is natural to put the event that happened first before the event which
followed it. A sequence of events in time, told as a narrative in English, will often be presented
in the order in which they happened and, often, with an unspecified implication of a relationship
in which the second event in some sense follows from the first (e.g. was caused by). This type of
non-logical inference has been characterized by Horn (1973) as post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Consider the following passage. Just before it begins, a violent storm has broken, with torrents of
rain:
Between where I stood by the rail and the lobby was but a few yards, yet I was drenched
before I got under cover. I disrobed as far as decency permits, and then sat at this letter
but not a little shaken. (W. Golding, Rites of Passage, Faber & Faber, 1980)
It is not stated that the narrator is 'drenched' by the rain (rather than by, say, perspiration) or why
he wishes to get under cover.
It is not made clear why he disrobes or why he finds himself 'not a little shaken'. The normal
assumption of an English-speaking reader will be, however, that the series of events are
meaningfully related to each other, and he will draw the appropriate inferences that the narrator
is drenched by the rain, wishes to take cover from the rain, disrobes because his clothing has
been drenched by the rain, and is 'not a little shaken' because of his immediately preceding
experience in the violent storm. We stress that these inferences will be drawn by an English-
speaking reader because it appears that in other cultures there are rather different bases for
narrative structures (cf. Grimes, 1975; Grimes (ed.), 1978; Becker, 1980).
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It is clearly the case that there are stereotypical orderings in genres other than those which
obviously consist of a series of events in time. Thus Linde & Labov report that 97% of the
subjects, in a survey in which subjects were asked to describe the lay-out of their apartments,
described them in terms of 'imaginary tours which transform spatial lay-outs into temporally
organised narratives' (i975 "• 9 2 4)
The narrative tour in each case begins at the front door, just as it would if the interviewer were to
arrive for the first time at the apartment. A similar alignment with the point of view of the hearer
is taken by speakers who are asked to give directions in a strange town. They always begin, co-
operatively, from the point where the enquiry is made and then attempt to describe the route as a
succession of acts in time.
In each of these cases then, there is a 'natural' starting point and the description is an attempt to
follow a 'natural' progression. Levelt suggests that by adopting the stereotypical pattern of the
culture 'the speaker facilitates the listener's comprehension' (1981: 94) since both speaker and
hearer share the same stereotype.
It seems very likely that there are other constraints on ordering in types of discourse which are
not simply arranged as a sequence of events in time. Van Dijk (1977) suggests that descriptions
of states of affairs will be determined by perceptual salience so that the more salient entity will
be mentioned first. He suggests that 'normal ordering' will conform to the following pattern:
General - particular
Whole - part / component
Set - subject - element
Including - included
Large - small
Outside - inside
Possessor - possessed
(van Dijk, 1977: 106)
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What is text?
In the humanities, different fields of study concern themselves with different forms of texts.
Literary theorists, for example, focus primarily on literary texts novels, essays, stories, and
poems. Legal scholars focus on legal texts such as laws, contracts, decrees, and regulations.
Cultural theorists work with a wide variety of texts, including those that may not typically be the
subject of studies, such as advertisements, signage, instruction manuals, and other ephemera.
“Discourse is sometimes used in contrast with ‘text,’ where ‘text’ refers to actual written or
spoken data, and ‘discourse’ refers to the whole act of communication involving production and
comprehension, not necessarily entirely verbal. The study of discourse, then, can involve matters
like context, background information or knowledge shared between a speaker and hearer.”
The concept of texture is entirely appropriate to express the property of ‘being a text’. This
characteristic of a text distinguishes it from something that is not a text. The fact that a text
functions as a unity with respect to its environment derives from this ‘texture’. If a passage of
English containing more than one sentence is perceived as a text, there will be certain linguistic
features present in the passage which can be identified as contributing to its total unity and
giving it texture.
For example:
If we find the following instructions in the cooking book;
Wash and core six cooking apples. Put them into a fireproof dish.
It is clear that ‘them’ in the second sentence refers back to the ‘six cooking apples’ of if first
sentence. This anaphoric function of them gives cohesion to the two sentences, so that we
interpret them as a whole; the two sentences together constitute a text. So it is the texture which
makes these two sentences a text.
Ties:
We need a term to refer to a single instance of cohesion, a term for one occurrence of a pair of
cohesively related items. This is called a tie. The relation between them and six cooking apples in
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the above example constitutes a tie. We can characterize any segment of a text in terms of the
number and kinds of ties which it displays. In the above example there is just one tie of the
particular kind which we call reference.
Cohesion:
The concept of cohesion is a semantic one. It refers to relations of meaning that exist within the
texts, and that defines it as a text. Cohesion occurs where the interpretation of some element in
the discourse is dependent on that of another. The one presupposes the other, in the sense that it
cannot be effectively decoded except by recourse to it. When this happens, a relation of cohesion
is set up and the two elements, the presupposing and the presupposed are thereby at least
potentially integrated into a text.
Exophoric reference: Exophora is reference to something extra-linguistic, i.e., not in the same
text. It signals that reference must be made to context of situation. For example; pronouns with
words such as ‘this’ ‘that’ ‘there’ ‘here’ are often exophoric.
Did the gardener water those plants?
It is quite possible that ‘those’ refers to earlier mention of those particular plants in the
discussion. But it is also possible that it refers to the environment in which the dialogue is taking
place – to the context of situation; as It is called – where the plants in question are present and
can be pointed to if necessary. The interpretation would be ‘’those plants there, in front of us.
This kind of reference is called exophora. Since it takes us put side the text altogether.
Exophoric reference is cohesive, since it does not bind the two elements together into a text.
Example-
For he’s a jolly good fellow and so say all of us.
This is an example of the context of situation where the text is not indicating who this ‘he’ is.
Endophoric Reference: Endophoric reference is the general name for within the text.
Endophora is a term that means an expression which refers to something intra-linguistics i.e. in
the same text. For example, in the sentence:
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Here, she is an endophoric expression because it refers to something already mentioned in the
text i.e., sally.
By contrast she was lying on the beach if it appeared by itself, has an exophoric expression; she’
refers to something that the reader is hot told about. Without further information, there is no way
of knowing the exact meaning of an exophoric term where endophoric expression lies within the
text.
One of the striking features of DRT is that it, instead of working with first-order formula syntax,
works with explicit semantic representations. Such representations are called Discourse
Representation Structure (DRS) which describes the objects mentioned in a discourse and their
properties.
Pronouns in Discourse
The pronoun is bound to the noun phrase when semantic rules and contextual interpretation
determine that a pronoun is co referential with a noun phrase. A pronoun is free or unbound
when it refers to some object not mentioned in the discourse.
Pronouns include three classes:
Personal pronoun
Possessive determiners
Possessive pronouns
Personal Pronouns:
The speaker and the addressee of a communication situation are often marked linguistically by
the first- and second-person pronouns. As already mentioned, the reference of the singular first-
and second-person pronouns is very simple as the referents are normally the speaker and the
addressee, whereas the reference of especially the plural first-person pronouns is more complex.
Conventional typological studies have arranged personal pronouns into tables and used the terms
'first', 'second' and 'third person', and 'singular' and 'plural number'.
Examples: If the buyer wants to look the condition of the property, he has to have
another survey. One carried out on his own behalf.
Here in the above example the use of personal pronoun ‘he’ or ‘his’ for ‘buyer’ and ‘one’
for ‘survey’ is a source of personal reference.
Possessive pronouns:
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If possessive pronouns are used, they give two more notions other than speaker and addressee.
They are that of ‘possessor’ and ‘possessed’
Example: That new house is John’s.
I didn’t know it was his.
Here, in the above example the use of possessive pronouns ‘his’ for ‘John’ indicates the
possessor and ‘’s’ is for the possessed ‘house’ includes another source of personal reference.
Reflexive pronouns:
Reflexive pronouns are a kind of pronoun that is used when the subject and the object of the
sentence are the same.
Include myself, ourselves, yourself, yourselves himself, herself, itself, themselves.
Pronouns may be classified by three categories: person, number, and case. Person refers to the
relationship that an author has with the text that he or she writes, and with the reader of that
text. English has three persons (first, second, and third):
First-person is the speaker or writer him- or herself. The first person is personal (I, we,
etc.)
Second-person is the person who is being directly addressed. The speaker or author is
saying this is about you, the listener or reader.
Third-person is the most common person used in academic writing. The author is saying
this is about other people. In the third person singular there are distinct pronoun forms for
male, female, and neutral gender.
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A pronoun antecedent is a word that comes before a pronoun to which the pronoun refers.
Following are definitions of antecedent as well as a review about the types of pronouns,
information about the functions of an antecedent in a sentence, and examples of how to use in a
sentence.
Compound subjects can be a problem. If the subjects are joined by an “and” then the pronoun
needs to be plural, as in "Bob and Paul took their books. If the subjects are joined by "or" or
“nor”, then have the pronoun agree with the subject that is closer, or closest, to the pronoun. An
example is "Either the actor or the singers messed up their performance.
If the pronoun is referring to one thing or a unit, like a team or a jury, then the pronoun needs to
be singular. An example is: "The jury has reached its verdict."
Sometimes words sound plural and are not, like measles or the news. These would need a
singular pronoun, as in: "Measles is not as widespread as it once was." This makes sense if you
replace the word "measles" with "disease."
Lastly, if there is an indefinite pronoun that is being modified by a prepositional phrase, then the
object of the phrase will determine the agreement between the pronoun and its antecedent. These
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special indefinite pronouns are: some, most, all, any, or none. Look at these two sentences:
"Most of the flour fell out of its canister" and "Many of the gems have lost their shine". If the
object, like "flour" is uncountable, then the pronoun has to be singular (its). If the object is
countable, like "gems", then the pronoun needs to be plural (their).
Subject-Predicate (Verb) Agreement Make sure you don't have subject‐verb agreement
problems in a complete sentence. Distractions within a sentence can make you misidentify
subject and verb, leading to an agreement problem. Remember that a verb must agree in person
and number with its subject, regardless of other elements in a sentence.
Locating the subject of a sentence
Your first job is to locate the subject of the sentence. To do this, find the verb, the action word or
the state‐of‐being word, and then determine who or what is being talked about. Then ask
yourself, Is the subject first person (I/we), second person ( you), or third person ( he, she,
it/they)? Is the subject singular or plural? When you've answered these questions, you will know
which form the verb should take. Singular subjects take singular verbs, and plural subjects take
plural verbs.
Subject-verb agreement with a compound subject
In sentences with more than one subject (a compound subject), the word and usually appears
between the elements.
Use a plural verb with a compound subject:
Drinking a glass of milk and soaking in the tub help me fall asleep.
NOT Drinking a glass of milk and soaking in the tub helps me fall asleep.
If each/every precedes a compound subject, treat the subject as singular.
Each dog and cat is to be fed twice a day.
Every house and garage have been searched.
Additive phrases
An additive phrase sometimes makes a sentence look as if it has a compound subject. Examples
of these phrases are accompanied by, along with, as well as, in addition to, including, and
together with. When you use one of these phrases, you are thinking of more than one person or
thing. But grammatically these phrases aren't conjunctions like and. They are actually modifying
the subject, rather than making it compound. Therefore, do not use a plural verb because of these
modifying phrases.
The President of the United States, accompanied by his advisors, was en route to Europe.
NOT The President of the United States, accompanied by his advisors, were en route to
Europe.
Phrases and clauses between subject and verb
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Watch out for phrases and clauses that come between the subject and predicate in a sentence. To
make sure you have the right person and number for the verb, mentally eliminate intervening
phrases and clauses.
The speech that provoked the demonstration and caused the closing of the university was
filled with inaccuracies.
NOT The speeches that provoked the demonstration and caused the closing of the
university were filled with inaccuracies.
Subject-verb agreement
The conjunctions or, either …or, and neither …nor ask you to choose between things rather than
add things. If both elements are singular, use a singular verb. If both elements are plural, use a
plural verb. If one element is singular and one is plural, choose the verb that agrees with the
element closest to it.
The director or the assistant director is planning to be on location.
NOT The director or the assistant director are planning to be on location.
Subject-verb agreement in relative clauses
Agreement problems can occur in relative clauses using which, that, or one of those who. The
verb in a relative clause must agree with the relative pronoun's antecedent (the word the pronoun
stands for). Always ask yourself what the relative pronoun refers to.
He decided to write novels, which are his favorite form.
NOT He decided to write novels, which is his favorite form.
Pronouns may refer to predicate which are not mentioned previously. In discourse, the speaker
may structure his massage in such a way that some new information is attached to ‘given’
elements (i.e., pronouns) intending the hearer to provide the given/ new interpretive procedure.
However, the hearer may have to reverse that procedure and use the new information to decide
what the given referent must have been.
A predicate pronoun is any pronoun that is part of the predicate. A predicate is the part of a
sentence that includes the verb and the words following it that relate to that verb.
Explanation:
Examples:
I will call him.
The teacher gave us a history assignment.
Mother made lunch for them.
For example:
Mother made lunch for them and set it on the picnic table.
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Slide13: A subjective pronoun can be part of a predicate when it is the subject of a clause,
For example:
A subjective pronoun is also used as a subject complement when it follows a linking verb;
For example:
The leaders right now are he and I.
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Lecture-14
Doing Discourse Analysis
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METHODOLOGY
Ethics
Discourse ethics (DE) has two aims: to specify the ideal conditions for discourse and to ground
ethics in the agreements reached through the exercise of such discourse. Discourse ethics
consequently instantiates the intuition that if people discuss issues in fair and open ways, the
resulting conclusions will be morally binding for those appropriately involved in the
conversation. Such a view of ethics has special relevance in a scientific and technological world
characterized by expanding means of communication. DE may also arguably provide the best
framework for understanding the ethics of scientists and engineers operating within their
professional communities.
Theoretical Framework
Discourse ethics is primarily associated with the work of Karl-Otto Apel (1980) and Jürgen
Habermas, who touches his own theory of communicative rationality and action (1981) with
Apel's insights (Habermas 1983, 1989). Apel and Habermas root DE emphasis on the importance
of moral self-sufficiency for both the individual and the moral community (Apel 2001) and in
Aristotle's understanding of the importance of human community praxis as the container in
which all theory must be tested. DE has deeply influenced not only philosophy and sociology but
also, in keeping with its praxis orientation, such applied fields as business ethics (Blickle et al.
Habermas summarizes the basic intuition of discourse ethics with the statement that "under the
moral point of view, one must be able to test whether a norm or a mode of action could be
generally accepted by those affected by it, such that their acceptance would be rationally
motivated" (Habermas 1989).
To define such discourse more carefully, Habermas refines a set of rules first proposed by Robert
Alexy (1978). According to Habermas (1990), these are:
1. Every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take part in a discourse.
2a. everyone is allowed to question any assertion whatever.
2b. everyone is allowed to introduce any assertion whatever into the discourse.
2c. everyone is allowed to express his (or her) attitudes, desires, and needs.
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3. No speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion, from exercising his (or her)
rights as laid down in (1) and (2).
Discourse ethics thus intends to define the conditions of a free and democratic discourse
concerning important norms that affect all members of a community. It aims to do so in ways
that are directly practical for the real and pressing problems facing both local and more
comprehensive communities. In this light, DE would seem well-suited for circumscribing
discourse concerning pressing issues provoked by science and technology.
DE has further played both a theoretical and practical role in connection with the Internet and the
World Wide Web. For example, DE has been used to structure online dialogues regarding
important but highly controversial social issues such as abortion. These dialogues in fact realize
the potential of DE to achieve consensus on important community norms, insofar as they bring to
the foreground important normative agreements on the part of those holding otherwise opposed
positions, agreements that made a pluralistic resolution of the abortion debate possible (Ess and
Cavalier 1997). In 2002 DE served as the framework for the ethics working committee of the
Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), as they sought to develop the first set of ethical
guidelines designed specifically for online research and with a view toward recognizing and
sustaining the genuinely global ethical and cultural diversity entailed in such research. The
guidelines stand as an example of important consensus on ethical norms achieved by participants
from throughout the world.
Data Generation
Data should be generated (for example through interviews and focus groups) for the purpose of
discourse analysis (Goodman and Speer 2015). Potter (1997) defines such data as ‘contrived’ and
claims it is ‘subject to powerful expectations about social science research fielded by
participants; and there are particular difficulties in extrapolating from interview talk to activities
in other settings’ and instead favours ‘naturally occurring talk’ (1997: 148) which is data that has
not been influenced in any way by the researcher. The examples listed in the previous paragraph
would all meet this standard.
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However, Speer (2002) has argued that data cannot clearly be split into these two types
(‘naturally occurring’ and ‘contrived’). Speer claims that all situations can to some extent be
seen as contrived and natural. Any institutional data can be viewed as contrived, equally, all data
is also natural as it will involve real people speaking in real social situations, who will be
‘naturally’ generating action orientated talk. This is true even if that social situation has been
constructed for the sake of research. Those who do not have a problem with, or who value,
‘contrived’ data may well generate data for analysis by conducting interviews (e.g. Leudar et al.
2008) and focus groups (e.g. Goodman and Burke 2010). There is no right or wrong response to
this debate, just as long as the focus is on the interaction in the data, although it is good practice
to (briefly) explain why the chosen approach has been used.
Confidentiality
Confidentiality refers to a condition in which the researcher knows the identity of a research
subject, but takes steps to protect that identity from being discovered by others. Most human
subject’s research requires collection of a sign consent agreement from participants, and thus
researchers are aware of the identity of their subjects. In such cases, maintaining confidentiality
is a key measure to ensure the protection of private information.
This Section of the Guide explores the various forms of discourse analysis including one area,
conversation analysis, that used to be regarded as distinct from discourse analysis but is
increasingly viewed as a form of discourse analysis. The term discourse analysis is thought to
have first appeared in 1952 in the title of a paper by Zellig Harris. However, it was from the late
1960s that it emerged as a cross-disciplinary approach, coinciding in with the interest in
semiotics, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics.
Researchers employ a number of methods to keep their subjects' identity confidential. Foremost,
they keep their records secure through the use of password protected files, encryption when
sending information over the internet, and even old-fashioned locked doors and drawers. They
frequently do not record information in a way that links subject responses with identifying
information (usually by use of a code known only to them). And because subjects may often not
be identified by names alone, but by other identifiers or by combinations of information about
subjects, researchers will often only report aggregate findings, not individual-level data, to the
public.
from a purely methodological point of view, it may sometimes be necessary to lower other
scientific standards in order to ensure confidentiality. This applies in particular to the scientific
ideal of verifiability (see also Research values). In principle, the need for verifiability means that
the researcher must publish sufficient information to enable others to repeat the procedures and
verify the results. The confidentiality requirement may, for example, mean that the results must
be grouped, or names or values modified, in order to ensure that some data cannot be traced back
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to individuals or particularly vulnerable groups. Although this may affect the degree of
verifiability, it is essential that confidentiality is respected. However, this potential conflict
makes it important that the researcher has reflected in advance over what specific strategies
should be aimed for to ensure an epistemic as well as ethical standard.
Researchers may also be faced with a dilemma with regard to maintaining confidentiality in
other situations, where this type of methodological consideration is not involved. For example,
some types of research, such as mapping insider trading or illegal immigration, may be of
interest to business or to government policy. If researchers are served with a court order to reveal
their source, when is it ethically correct to breach confidentiality for such reasons? A further
source of confusion for the individual researcher may be that this is not purely a matter of
conscience, but also a question of the possibility of doing further research. For further reading on
researchers' notification requirement, see the article Duty of secrecy.
There are often no simple solutions in situations where ethical considerations are apparently in
conflict with one another. One pertinent fact, however, is that in cases where it is conceivable
that such a dilemma may arise, researchers must consider carefully in advance whether they
should establish a confidential relationship with the person or persons concerned at all. It is never
straightforward, and almost always wrong, under any circumstances, to establish a relationship
based on deceit with persons upon whom one wishes to conduct research.
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Discourse analysis is a useful tool for studying the political meanings that inform written and
spoken text. Discourse Analysis is the investigation of knowledge about language beyond the
word, clause, phrase and sentence levels. All of them are the basic building blocks of
successful communication. In discourse analysis researchers have to infiltrate language as a
whole beyond the micro level of words and sentences and look at the entire body of
communication produced in a given / particular situation. Discourse analysis refers to attempts to
study the organization of language above the sentence or above the clause, and therefore to
study larger linguistic units, such as conversational exchanges or written texts (Stubbs 1983).
However, Michael Stubbs redefines Discourse in his later work as it is therefore more accurate
to say that text and discourse analysis studies language in context: how words and phrases
fit into both longer texts, and also social contexts of use (Stubbs 2001).
There are a number of issues that need to be considered when planning a discourse analysis
project. The first of these is the actual research question. The key to any good research project
is a well-focused research question. It can, however, take longer than expected to find this
question. Cameron (2001) has suggested that one important characteristic of a good research
project is that it contains a ‘good idea’; that is, the project is on something that is worth finding.
As Cameron and others have pointed out, deciding on and refining the research question is often
the hardest part of the project. It is, thus, worth spending as much time as necessary to get it
right.
Criteria for developing a discourse analysis project
In her book Qualitative Methods in Sociolinguistics, Johnstone (2000) lists a number of criteria
that contribute to the development of a good and workable research topic. In her case, she is
talking about research in the area of sociolinguistics. What she says, however, applies equally to
discourse analysis projects. These criteria include
A well-focused idea about spoken or written discourse that is expressed as a question or a
set of closely related questions;
An understanding of how discourse analytic techniques can be used to answer the
research question you are asking;
An understanding of why your question about spoken or written discourse are important
in a wider context; that is, why answering the question will have practical value and/or be
of interest to the world at large;
Familiarity with and access to the location where your discourse analysis project will be
carried out;
Ability to get the discourse data that is needed for the research project;
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The time it will realistically take to carry out the discourse analysis project, analyze the
results and write up the results of the project;
Being comfortable with and competent in the ways of collecting the discourse data
required by the project;
Being competent in the method of analysis required for the project.
Choosing a Research Topic
Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis, and Critical Discourse Analysis are separate but related areas
of linguistic inquiry. These are concerned with the constituents and structures of discourse (like
words and phrases) as they are used in context to make meaning. Pragmatics often focuses on the
social and generic constraints (like politeness conventions, relative social status, etc.) that shape
communicative situations, while discourse analysis may foreground how discourse constructs
social meanings, serves rhetorical purposes, or creates subject positions. Critical discourse
analysis is particularly interested in the relationship between discourse and the preservation or
subversion of power. Research in these areas may ask questions related to language-in-use and
its meaning-making functions.
A good place to start in choosing a research topic is by drawing up a shortlist of topics that
interest you. You can do this by speaking to other students, by asking colleagues, by asking
teachers and by asking potential supervisors, as well as by looking up related research in the
library. As Cameron (2001) points out, good ideas for research do not ‘just spring from the
researcher’s imagination, they are suggested by previous research’.
It is important, then, to read widely to see what previous research has said about the topic you are
interested in, including what questions can be asked and answered from a discourse perspective.
This reading will also give a view of what the current issues and debates are in the approach to
discourse analysis you are interested in, as well as how other researchers have gone about
answering the question you are interested in from a discourse perspective. It is important to
remember, however, that a research question and a research topic are not the same thing.
A research topic is your general area of interest, whereas the research question is the particular
thing you want to find out and which grows out of your research topic (Sunderland 2010). When
deciding on a topic, there are a few things that you will need to do:
Be aware that selecting a good topic may not be easy. It must be narrow and focused enough to
be interesting, yet broad enough to find adequate information. Before selecting your topic, make
sure you know what your final project should look like. Each class or instructor will likely
require a different format or style of research project.
The next now, needed to focus on research topic. Often aspiring researchers start off with a
project that is overly large and ambitious. Stevens and Asmar (1999) suggest that ‘wiser heads’
know that a good research project is ‘narrow and deep’. In their words, ‘even the simplest idea
can flourish into an uncontrollably large project’. They highlight how important it is for
students to listen to more experienced researchers in their field and to be guided by their advice
in the early stages of the research. They suggest starting off by getting immersed in the literature
and reading broadly and widely to find a number of potential research topics. This can be done
by making heavy use of the library as well as by reading the abstracts of recent theses and
dissertations, some of which are available on the World Wide Web (see Directions for further
reading at the end of this chapter for some of these URLs).
Once the reading has been done, it is useful to write a few lines on each topic and use this as the
basis to talk to other people about the research. Often one topic may emerge as the strongest
contender from these conversations, not only because it is the most original or interesting but
also because it is the most doable in terms of access to data and resource facilities, your expertise
in the use of discourse analysis techniques, as well as supervision support. Here are some of the
ideas my student interested in comparing Chinese and English writing started off with.
Topic 1: A comparison of Chinese students’ essay writing in Chinese and English written
in their first year of undergraduate studies
Topic 2: A comparison of students’ Master’s theses in Chinese and English
Topic 3: An examination of newspaper articles in Chinese and English from an
intercultural rhetoric perspective
Each of these questions is influenced by previous research on the topic. Each of them, however,
has its problems. The first topic is an interesting one. It would be difficult, however, to get texts
written by the same students in their first year of undergraduate studies in the two different
settings. It is also not certain (or perhaps not even likely) that they will be asked to do the same
or even comparable pieces of writing in the two sets of first-year undergraduate study. It is also
not likely that a Chinese student who has completed an undergraduate degree in a Chinese
university would then do the same undergraduate degree in an English medium university. There
is also no suggestion in the first topic as to how the pieces of writing would be analyzed.
The second topic is more possible as some Chinese students do go on to do a degree that
includes a thesis in English after having done a degree with a thesis component in Chinese.
There would, however, be many more students writing coursework essays and assignments in
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English who had done something similar in Chinese. So there is a problem of gaining sufficient
pieces of writing for the study. There is also the problem of gaining access to the students, and
hoping the students will still have the pieces of writing that they did when they were students in
China. It is, of course, possible to do both of these first two studies with writing done by
different students, as most studies of this kind have done.
There is still, however, the problem of getting comparable pieces of writing so that the same, or
at least similar things, can be compared.
The third topic, in some ways, solves the data collection issue as newspaper texts are publicly
available as long as you have access to a library, or an electronic database where previous copies
of newspapers are held. The theoretical framework in this topic, intercultural rhetoric, however,
in the sense of cultural influences of ways of writing in one language on another, has not been
used to examine newspaper articles as it is probably not very common that Chinese writers of
newspaper articles are required to write a newspaper article in English. So, while the third topic
is practical in many ways, the theoretical framework had not been used to approach it at this
stage. My student who was working on this topic decided the notion of genre, rather than
intercultural rhetoric, might be a better place to start. He still retained an interest in intercultural
rhetoric, however, and wanted to include this in some way in his study. His refocused topic, then,
became: A contrastive study of letters to the editor in Chinese and English.
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Student had settled on his topic, but it still needed to be turned into a research question. A
possible first attempt at this question might be,
What are the differences between letters to the editor in Chinese and English?
This question however presupposes an outcome before the study has been carried out; that is,
that there would indeed be differences between the two sets of writings. The question also does
not capture anything of the theoretical models that might be used to answer this question.
His questions, therefore, were now worth asking and capable of being answered from a discourse
analysis perspective. As he argued, most studies of Chinese and English writing either looked at
Chinese, or English writing, but not at both. Also, few studies used the same textual criteria for
the two sets of analyses. Many previous studies of this kind, further, focused on ‘direct’ or
‘indirect’ aspects of Chinese and English writing and did not go beyond this to explore how the
various parts of the texts combine together to create coherent texts. So, what he was doing was
theoretically useful, it was possible to collect the texts and he was capable of analyzing the data
in the way that he proposed.
It is important, then, as my student did, to strike a balance between the value of the question and
your ability to develop a discourse analysis project you are capable of carrying out; that is, a
project for which you have the background, expertise, resources and access to data needed. It is
also important to spend as much time as is needed to get the research question right as research
questions that are well-designed and well-worded is key to a good research project (Sunderland
2010).
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Sunderland (2010) provides helpful advice on how to connect data collection and analysis with
your research question(s). She suggests completing a table such as the one shown in Table 1.1 to
do this.
Table 1.1: Connecting data collection, analysis and research questions (Sunderland 2010)
Research Question Data Needed Data Collection Data Analysis
1.
2.
3.
However, that things are not always as neat as Table 10.1 might suggest. Sometimes one
research question might require more than one set of data or you might be able to use one set of
data to address more than one research question. What you will see, however, from your chart is
whether there are any gaps that still need to be filled or data that still needs to be collected to
address each of your questions (Sunderland 2010).
There are a number of different kinds of projects that can be carried out from a discourse
analysis perspective. A number of these are described below, together with examples of previous
discourse projects and details of the data that were collected for each of these projects.
Replication of previous discourse studies
One kind of study to consider is a replication study. Indeed, there has been a resurgence of
interest in these kinds of studies in recent years. The editor of the journal Language Teaching, for
example, argues that:
Such research should play a more significant role in the field than it has up to now and
that it is both useful and necessary. (Language Teaching review panel 2008)
As Santos (1989) points out, the findings of many studies are often not tested by further studies
which follow the same methodology and a similar data set either at the same point in time or at
some stage later when the findings may be different. Santos describes this lack of replication
studies as a serious weakness in applied linguistics research. Such studies provide both the
accumulation and consolidation of knowledge over time.
introductions and Bhatia’s (1993) and Hyland’s (2004) research on research article abstracts.
Once she had compared her findings with the results of previous research, she then compared her
two data sets with each other to examine the extent to which they were similar in terms of
discourse organization and function, also the focus of previous research.
looked at a new and emerging genre in his study of personal advertisements on the internet. His
study was based on data collected from internet dating sites in the United States and Singapore.
He broke his data up into three groupings based on three types. He then carried out a lexical
analysis of the texts, looking at word frequency and collocations by gender and country of origin
to see to what extent males and females differ in their expectations of each other, and the kinds
of words and expressions they use to express these expectations.
Nakane and the Wang studies that have just been described drew on a number of different
discourse analysis and other research perspectives to work towards answers to their research
questions. When combining perspectives in this way, it is important to understand the basis of
the perspectives being drawn on to appreciate what this placing together implies and, indeed, if it
is possible to do this. People working in the area of conversation analysis, for example, would
consider Nakane’s combination of conversation analytic techniques and ethnography impossible
as for a conversation analyst the evidence is in the data, and the closest an analyst is able to get
to understanding an event is in the transcription and analysis of the data. For them, insiders’
views are only intuitions and not, in their view, admissible in the analysis and interpretation of
the data. My view, however, is that Nakane strengthened rather than weakened her study by
combining perspectives in the way that she did.
Cameron (2005) discusses the problems associated with what she calls ‘theoretical and
methodological eclecticism’. She points out that sometimes this carries a high risk of
superficiality as the researcher may be trying to do too many things at once and not end up doing
any of them properly (which is not the case in either the Nakane or the Wang studies).
It is not impossible to mix discourse analysis and other methods. What this requires, however, is
‘a clear rationale for putting approaches together, a sophisticated understanding of each
approach, and an account of how the tensions between approaches will be handled in [the] study’
(127).
A researcher can, then, combine an approach to discourse analysis with a non-discourse analytic
perspective on the research, as both Nakane and Wang have done in their studies. Both Nakane
and Wang have shown how doing this can provide more of an account of the issue they are
examining than might have been possible with just the one, single discourse analysis (or other
research) perspective. It is crucial, however, in the planning of this kind of project that each of
the approaches are weighed up against each other, identifying what kind of information each
approach can (and cannot) supply. By doing this the use of one approach to discourse analysis in
combination with another approach to discourse analysis or other approaches to research can be
justified. Indeed, often an approach of this kind can provide a fuller and more explanatory
perspective on the question under investigation than might be provided with just the one single
perspective.
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Lecture-15
Discourse Genre and Critical Discourse
Analysis
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The thinness of the written signs and the distance from the receiver often leave the writer
uncertain whether the produced artifact will evoke the desired meanings and effects. On the
receptive side, the reader may struggle with interpretation of what precise meanings could have
been intended by the author or other presenter of the signs. The problem of arrangement over
limited clues is most distressing when the text is written in a hard-to-read script or in a language
the reader has limited familiarity with. Then the reader may be left with just ink marks on paper
that cannot be animated into meanings and intentions. Even if the reader is highly literate in the
language, ambiguous words, unfamiliar references, novel ideas, difficult syntax, or complex
arguments can make an act of reading an imaginative and interpretive challenge.
These thin symbols only interpretable in an approximate way, at a different time and in a
different place, by a different person, with different motives and mental contents have proved
remarkably robust in allowing communication of the complex thoughts of philosophy,
accumulation of extensive interrelated knowledge and theories of science, planning and
coordination of large architectural projects, and maintenance of large institutions such as legal
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systems and government bureaucracies. Meaning is not fully available and immanent in the bare
spelled words. Interact ants’ familiarity with domains of communication and relevant genres
make the kind of communication recognizable: establishing roles, values, domains of content,
and general actions that then create the space for more specific, detailed, refined utterances and
meanings spelled out in the crafted words.
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The perspective presented here has several clear implications for the analysis of discourse. First,
discourse occurs within a social situation and should be understood and analyzed, as it operates
meaningfully within that situation.
Second, discursive situations are understood by their participants as organized and structured so
as to be meaningful and sensible to them. The mechanisms by which definitions of situation and
action are shared among participants are at the heart of social systematicity and of the
organization of discourse.
Third, the knowledge, thought, and meanings expressed within situated utterances then become
part of the ongoing resources and definition of the situation for future utterances. Discourse is to
be understood dynamically, within the construction of those situations and of the larger social
activity systems within which those utterances occur.
Fourth, regularities of linguistic form usually accompany stabilizations of social groups and
activities so, to look for linguistic orders, we should look to social orders; and, to look for social
orders, and we should look to linguistic orders. While in the past geography may have been the
dominant coverable of linguistic variation, with literacy and other communication at a distance
technology the social variables of linguistic variation are increasingly tied to more extensive
groupings such as social and cultural institutions, disciplines and professions, work
organizations, and media audiences.
Fifth, linguistic entrainment into particular discursive practices goes hand in hand with
socialization into activity networks and with cognitive development into the forms of thinking
associated with interacting in those activity systems. Internalization of linguistic action
transforms into dispositions and orientations.
Sixth, when discourse travels outside of its original ambit, the mechanisms for that wider travel
are themselves topics of examination. This includes study of the genres within which such
discourses arise, the genres in which they travel, and the genres into which they are received, as
well as the processes that occur at the translation border between genres. Those discourses that
seem to circulate freely among multiple situations also deserve investigation for the mechanisms
by which they appear meaningful at multiple sites and for the differential ways in which they are
integrated into different discursive systems and their genres.
In sum, utterances are parts of social life, and the discourses produced within our social life
are to be understood within all the dimensions of life. The signs we study are only the residue
of complex psychosocial cultural processes, in which they served as mediators of meaning.
While we may study them as residues, for the regularities to be found in residues, their
fundamental order is only to be found in their full animation as meaningful communication in
the unfolding interactions of life. The orders of discourse are to be found in the dynamics of
life processes.
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What is Genre?
Genres are ways in which people ‘get things done’ through their use of spoken and written
discourse. Genres are activities that people engage in through the use of language. Academic
lectures and casual conversations are examples of spoken genres. Newspaper reports and
academic essays are examples of written genres. Instances of a genre often share a number of
features. They may be spoken or written in typical, and sometimes conventional, ways. They also
often have a common function and purpose (or set of functions and purposes). Genres may
typically be performed by a particular person aimed at a particular audience. Genres change
through time. This may, for example, be in response to changes in technologies or it may be as a
result of changes in values underlying the use of the particular genre.
Genre analysis and English for specific purposes
The approach to genre analysis commonly employed in the teaching of English for specific
purposes is based on Swales’ (1981, 1990, 2004) analyses of the discourse structure of research
article introductions. Swales use the notion of moves to describe the discourse structure of texts.
In his book Genre analysis Swales (1990) argued that communicative purpose was the key factor
that leads a person to decide whether a text is an instance of a particular genre or not. He has
since, however, revised this view, saying that it is now clear that genres may have multiple
purposes and that these may be different for each of the participants involved (Askehave and
Swales 2001). Also, instances of a genre which are similar linguistically and rhetorically may
have ‘startling differences in communicative purpose’ in the words of Swales and Rogers (1995).
The communicative purpose of a genre, further, may evolve over time. It may change, it may
expand or it may shrink (Swales 2004). Communicative purpose, further, can vary across
cultures even when texts belong to the same genre category.
Rhetorical genre studies
Researchers in rhetorical genre studies describe genres as part of the social processes by which
knowledge about reality and the world are made. Genres, in this view, both respond to and
contribute to the constitution of social contexts, as well as the socialization of individuals.
Genres, then, are more than just socially embedded; they are socially constructive.
Linguists such as Hasan (1989) have suggested that the crucial properties of a genre can be
expressed as a range of possible textual structures. Martin (1992), equally, puts forward the view
that genres can be defined in terms of similarities and differences in the discourse structures of
the texts. While discourse structure is clearly a characterizing feature of some genres, it is not
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always the case that every instance of a particular genre will have exactly the same discourse
structure (nor indeed the same communicative purpose) (Askehave and Swales 2000).
Communicative purpose is an important (although complex) criterion for deciding whether a text
is an instance of a particular genre. That is, a text may be presented in an unusual way (for that
particular genre) but still have the same communicative aim as other instances of the particular
genre. In some cases, the text might be considered a ‘best example’ of the particular genre, and
in others, it might be so atypical as to be considered a ‘problematic’ example of the genre.
The issue of genre identification is, thus, a complex one and requires a flexible rather than a
static view of what it is that leads users of a language to recognize a communicative event as an
instance of a particular genre. A key factor in this process lies in a perspective on genre based on
the notion of prototype (Rosch 1978, 1983) rather than on sets of defining features. Genres are
most helpfully seen as ‘resources for meaning’ rather than ‘systems of rules’ (Swales 2002).
Bhatia (1993) and Bawarshi and Reiff (2010) present steps for carrying out the analysis of
genres, in their case written genres. It is not necessary to go through all the stages that they list,
nor in the order in which they are presented. For example, we may decide to take a ‘text-first’ or
a ‘context-first’ approach to the analysis of a particular genre (Flowerdew 2002, 2011). That is,
we may decide to start by looking at typical discourse patterns in the texts we are interested in (a
text-first approach), or we may decide to start with an examination of the context of the texts we
want to investigate (a context-first approach). The steps, then, should be used flexibly and
selectively depending on the starting point of the analysis, the purpose of the analysis, the aspect
of the genre that we want to focus on and the level of prior knowledge we already have of the
particular genre.
The first step, however, is to collect samples of the genre you are interested in. Bhatia suggests
taking a few randomly chosen texts for exploratory investigation, a single typical text for
detailed analysis, or a larger sample of texts if we wish to investigate a few specified features.
Clearly, the more samples you can collect of the genre, however, the better you will be able to
identify typical features of the genre.
The next step is to consider what is already known about the particular genre. This includes
knowledge of the setting in which it occurs as well as any conventions that are typically
associated with the genre. For information on this, we can go to existing literature such as guide
books and manuals as well as seek practitioner advice on the particular genre. It is also helpful to
look at what analyses have already have been carried out of the particular genre, or other related
genres, by looking at research articles or books on the topic.
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We next need to refine the analysis by defining the speaker or writer of the text, the audience of
the text and their relationship with each other. That is, who uses the genre, who writes in the
genre, who reads the genre and what roles the readers perform as they read the text?
We also need to consider the goal, or purpose, of the texts. That is, why do writers write this
genre, why do readers read it and what purpose does the genre have for the people who use it?
A further important consideration is typical discourse patterns for the genre. That is, how are the
texts typically organized, how are they typically presented in terms of layout and format and
what are some language features that typically re-occur in the particular genre? Equally, what do
people need to know to take part in the genre, and what view of the world does the text assume
of its readers? That is, what values, beliefs and assumptions are assumed or revealed by the
particular genre (Bawarshi and Reiff 2010)?
We should also think about the networks of texts that surround the genre and to what extent
knowledge of these is important in order be able to write or make sense of a particular genre.
An important stage in genre analysis, formerly, is an examination of the social and cultural
context in which the genre is used. In the case of a written text, factors that might be considered
Include:
The setting of the text
The focus and perspective of the text
The purpose of the text
The intended audience for the text, their role and purpose in reading the text
The relationship between writers and readers of the text; expectations, conventions and
requirements for the text
The background knowledge, values and understandings it is assumed the writer shares
with their readers, including what is important to the reader and what is not
The relationship of the text has with other texts.
These aspects of a genre, of course, are not as distinct as they appear in this kind a listing. As
Yates and Orlikowski (2007) point out, they are deeply intertwined and each, in its way, has an
impact on what a writer writes, and the way they write it.
These are the range of factors that impact on how the text is written, how it will be read and,
importantly, how it will be assessed.
Setting of the text The kind of university and level of study, the kind of degree
(e.g., honors, master’s or doctoral, research or professional)
Study carried out in a ‘hard’ or ‘soft’, pure or applied,
convergent or divergent area of study Becher and Trowler 2001)
Focus and Quantitative, qualitative or mixed method research
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text
and understandings extent to which students should show what they know, what
issues students should address, what boundaries students can
cross
Relationship the text How to show the relationship between the present research and other
people’s research on the topic, what counts as valid previous research,
has with other texts acceptable and unacceptable textual borrowings, differences between
reporting and plagiarizing
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Lesson-45
CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Critical discourse analysis explores the connections between the use of language and the social
and political contexts in which it occurs. It explores issues such as gender, ethnicity, cultural
difference, ideology and identity and how these are both constructed and reflected in texts. It
also investigates ways in which language constructs and is constructed by social relationships. A
critical analysis may include a detailed textual analysis and move from there to an explanation
and interpretation of the analysis. It might proceed from there to deconstruct and challenge the
text being examined. This may include tracing underlying ideologies from the linguistic features
of a text, unpacking particular biases and ideological presuppositions underlying the text, and
relating the text to other texts and to people’s experiences and beliefs. Critical discourse
analysis starts with the assumption that language use is always social and that discourse both
‘reflects and constructs the social world’ (Rogers 2011).
There is no single view of what critical discourse analysis actually is, so it is difficult to present a
complete, unified view on this. Fairclough and Wodak (1997), however, describe a number of
principles for critical discourse analysis which underlie many of the studies done in this area.
These include
Social and political issues are constructed and reflected in discourse
Power relations are negotiated and performed through discourse
Discourse both reflects and reproduces social relations
Ideologies are produced and reflected in the use of discourse
Social and political issues are constructed and reflected in discourse
The first of Fairclough and Wodak’s principles is that critical discourse analysis addresses social
and political issues and examines ways in which these are constructed and reflected in the use of
certain discourse strategies and choices.
Power relations are negotiated and performed through discourse
The next principle of critical discourse analysis is that power relations are both negotiated and
performed through discourse. One way in which this can be looked at is through an analysis of
who controls conversational interactions, who allows a person to speak and how they do this.
Discourse both reflects and reproduces social relations
A further principle of critical discourse analysis is that discourse not only reflects social relations
but is also part of, and reproduces, social relations. That is, social relations are both established
and maintained through the use of discourse.
Ideologies are produced and reflected in the use of discourse
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Another key principle of critical discourse analysis is that ideologies are produced and reflected
in the use of discourse. This includes ways of representing and constructing society such as
relations of power, and relations based on gender, class and ethnicity.
Critical discourse analysis ‘includes not only a description and interpretation of discourse in
context, but also offers an explanation of why and how discourses work’ (Rogers 2004).
Researchers working within this perspective are concerned with a critical theory of the social
world, the relationship of language and discourse in the construction and representation of the
social world, and a methodology that allows them to describe, interpret and explain such
relationships. (Rogers 2011)
Researchers working within this perspective are concerned with a critical theory of the social
world, the relationship of language and discourse in the construction and representation of the
social world, and a methodology that allows them to describe, interpret and explain such
relationships. (Rogers 2011)
A critical analysis, then, might commence by deciding what discourse type, or genre, the text
represents and to what extent and in what way the text conforms to it (or not). It may also
consider to what extent the producer of the text has gone beyond the normal boundaries for the
genre to create a particular effect.
The analysis may consider the framing of the text; that is, how the content of the text is
presented, and the sort of angle or perspective the writer or speaker is taking. Closely related to
framing is the notion of foregrounding; that is, what concepts and issues are emphasized, as well
as what concepts and issues are played down or back-grounded in the text. Equally important to
the analysis are the background knowledge, assumptions, attitudes and points of view that the
text presupposes (Huckin 1997).
At the sentence level, the analyst might consider what has been tropicalized in each of the
sentences in the text; that is, what has been put at the front of each sentence to indicate what it is
‘about’. The analysis may also consider who is doing what to whom; that is, agent-patient
relations in the discourse, and who has the most authority and power in the discourse. It may also
consider what agents have been left out of sentences such as when the passive voice is used, and
why this has been done.
At the word and phrase level, connotations of particular words and phrases might be considered
as well as the text’s degree of formality or informality, degree of technicality and what this
means for other participants in the text. The choice of words which express degrees of certainty
and attitude may also be considered and whether the intended audience of the text might be
expected to share the views expressed in the text, or not.
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The procedure an analyst follows in this kind of analysis depends on the research situation, the
research question and the texts that are being studied. What is essential, however? is that there is
some attention to the critical, discourse and analysis in whatever focus is taken up in the analysis
(Rogers 2011).
Critical discourse analysis, then, takes us beyond the level of description to a deeper
understanding of texts and provides, as far as might be possible, some kind of explanation of
why a text is as it is and what it is aiming to do. It looks at the relationship between discourse
and society and aims to describe, interpret and explain this relationship. As van Dijk (1998) has
argued, it is through discourse that many ideologies are formulated, reinforced and reproduced.
Critical discourse analysis aims to provide a way of exploring this and, in turn, challenging some
of the hidden and ‘out of sight’ social, cultural and political ideologies and values that underlie
texts.
Multimodal discourse analysis considers how texts draw on modes of communication such as
pictures, film, video, images and sound in combination with words to make meaning. It has
examined print genres as well as genres such as web pages, film and television programs. It
considers how multimodal texts are designed and how semiotic tools such as colour, framing,
focus and positioning of elements contribute to the making of meaning in these texts.
Much of the work in multimodal discourse analysis draws from Halliday’s (1978, 1989) social
semiotic approach to language, a view that considers language as one among a number of
semiotic resources (such as gesture, images and music) that people use to communicate, or make
meaning, with each other. Language, in this view, cannot be considered in isolation from
meaning but needs to be considered within the sociocultural context in which it occurs.
Multimodal discourse analysis, thus, aims to describe the socially situated semiotic resources that
we draw on for communication. Halliday (2009) describes three types of social meanings, or
functions that are drawn on simultaneously in the use of language. These are ideational (what the
text is about), interpersonal (relations between participants) and textual meanings (how the
message is organized). In multimodal texts these meanings are realized visually in how the
image conveys aspects of the real world (the ideational, or representational meaning of the
image), how the images engage with the viewer (the interpersonal, or modal meaning of the
image) and how the elements in an image are arranged to archive its intention or effect (the
textual, or compositional meaning of the image).
Jewitt (2009) describes four theoretical assumptions that underlie multimodal discourse analysis.
The first is that language is part of an ensemble of modes, each of which has equal potential to
contribute to meaning. Images, gaze and posture, thus, do not just support meaning, they each
contribute to meaning. The second is that each mode of communication realizes different
meanings and that looking at language as the principal (or sole) medium of communication only
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reveals a partial view of what is being communicated. The third assumption is that people select
from and configure these various modes in order to make meaning and that the interaction
between these modes and the distribution of meanings between them are part of the production
of meaning. The fourth assumption is that meanings that are made by the use of multimodal
resources are, like language, social. These meanings, further, are shaped by the norms, rules and
social conventions for the genre that are current at the particular time, in the particular context.
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