11 Discourse analysis

There’s two types of favors, the big favor and the small favor. You can measure the size of
the favor by the pause that a person takes after they ask you to “Do me a favor.” Small
favor – small pause. “Can you do me a favor, hand me that pencil.” No pause at all. Big favors
are, “Could you do me a favor …” Eight seconds go by. “ Yeah? What?”
“… well.” The longer it takes them to get to it, the bigger the pain it’s going to be.
Humans are the only species that do favors. Animals don’t do favors. A lizard doesn’t go up to
a cockroach and say, “Could you do me a favor and hold still, I’d like to eat you alive.” That’s a
big favor even with no pause. Seinfeld (1993)

In the study of language, some of the most interesting observations are made, not in terms of
the components of language, but in terms of the way language is used, even how pauses are
used, as in comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s commentary. We have already considered some of the
features of language in use when we discussed pragmatics in the preceding chapter. We
were, in effect, asking how it is that language-users successfully interpret what other
language-users intend to convey. When we carry this investigation further and ask how we
make sense of what we read, how we can recognize well-constructed texts as opposed to
those that are jumbled or incoherent, how we understand speakers who communicate more
than they say, and how we successfully take part in that complex activity called conversation,
we are undertaking what is known as discourse analysis.
142 The Study of Language

Discourse analysis

The word “discourse” is usually defined as “language beyond the sentence” and so the
analysis of discourse is typically concerned with the study of language in texts and
conversation. In many of the preceding chapters, when we were concentrating on
linguistic description, we were concerned with the accurate representation of the
forms and structures. However, as language-users, we are capable of more than simply
recognizing correct versus incorrect forms and structures. We can cope with fragments
in newspaper headlines such as Trains collide, two die, and know that what happened
in the first part was the cause of what happened in the second part. We can also make
sense of notices like No shoes, no service, on shop windows in summer, understanding
that a conditional relation exists between the two parts (“If you are wearing no shoes,
you will receive no service”). We have the ability to create complex discourse inter-
pretations of fragmentary linguistic messages.

Interpreting discourse

We can even cope with texts, written in English, which we couldn’t produce ourselves
and which appear to break a lot of the rules of the English language. Yet we can build
an interpretation. The following example, provided by Eric Nelson, is from an essay by
a student learning English and contains all kinds of errors, yet it can be understood.

My Town
My natal was in a small town, very close to Riyadh capital of Saudi Arabia. The
distant between my town and Riyadh 7 miles exactly. The name of this Almasani
that means in English Factories. It takes this name from the peopl’s carrer. In my
childhood I remmeber the people live. It was very simple. Most the people was farmer.

This example may serve to illustrate a simple point about the way we react to language
that contains ungrammatical forms. Rather than simply reject the text as ungrammat-
ical, we try to make sense of it. That is, we attempt to arrive at a reasonable inter-
pretation of what the writer intended to convey. (Most people say they understand the
“My Town” text quite easily.)
It is this effort to interpret (or to be interpreted), and how we accomplish it, that
are the key elements investigated in the study of discourse. To arrive at an inter-
pretation, and to make our messages interpretable, we certainly rely on what we
know about linguistic form and structure. But, as language-users, we have more
knowledge than that.
Discourse analysis 143

Cohesion

We know, for example, that texts must have a certain structure that depends on factors
quite different from those required in the structure of a single sentence. Some of those
factors are described in terms of cohesion, or the ties and connections that exist within
texts. A number of those types of cohesive ties can be identified in the following
paragraph.

My father once bought a Lincoln convertible. He did it by saving every penny he

could. That car would be worth a fortune nowadays. However, he sold it to help pay
for my college education. Sometimes I think I’d rather have the convertible.

There are connections present here in the use of words to maintain reference to the same
people and things throughout: father – he – he – he; my – my – I; Lincoln – it. There are
connections between phrases such as: a Lincoln convertible – that car – the convertible.
There are more general connections created by a number of terms that share a common
element of meaning, such as “money” (bought – saving – penny – worth a fortune – sold –
pay) and “time” (once – nowadays – sometimes). There is also a connector (However)
that marks the relationship of what follows to what went before. The verb tenses in the
first four sentences are all in the past, creating a connection between those events, and a
different time is indicated by the present tense of the final sentence.
Analysis of these cohesive ties within a text gives us some insight into how writers
structure what they want to say. An appropriate number of cohesive ties may be a
crucial factor in our judgments on whether something is well written or not. It has also
been noted that the conventions of cohesive structure differ from one language to the
next and may be one of the sources of difficulty encountered in translating texts.
However, by itself, cohesion would not be sufficient to enable us to make sense of
what we read. It is quite easy to create a highly cohesive text that has a lot of
connections between the sentences, but is very difficult to interpret. Note that the
following text has connections such as Lincoln – the car, red – that color, her – she,
letters – a letter, and so on.

My father bought a Lincoln convertible. The car driven by the police was red. That
color doesn’t suit her. She consists of three letters. However, a letter isn’t as fast as a
telephone call.

It becomes clear from this type of example that the “connectedness” we experience
in our interpretation of normal texts is not simply based on connections between
144 The Study of Language

the words. There must be some other factor that leads us to distinguish connected
texts that make sense from those that do not. This factor is usually described as
“coherence.”

Coherence

The key to the concept of coherence (“everything fitting together well”) is not some-
thing that exists in words or structures, but something that exists in people. It is people
who “make sense” of what they read and hear. They try to arrive at an interpretation
that is in line with their experience of the way the world is. Indeed, our ability to make
sense of what we read is probably only a small part of that general ability we have to
make sense of what we perceive or experience in the world. You may have found when
you were reading the last example (of oddly constructed text) that you kept trying to
make the text fit some situation or experience that would accommodate all the details
(involving a red car, a woman and a letter). If you work at it long enough, you may
indeed find a way to incorporate all those disparate elements into a single coherent
interpretation. In doing so, you would necessarily be involved in a process of filling in a
lot of gaps that exist in the text. You would have to create meaningful connections that
are not actually expressed by the words and sentences. This process is not restricted to
trying to understand “odd” texts. In one way or another, it seems to be involved in our
interpretation of all discourse.
It is certainly present in the interpretation of casual conversation. We are continually
taking part in conversational interactions where a great deal of what is meant is not
actually present in what is said. Perhaps it is the ease with which we ordinarily
anticipate each other’s intentions that makes this whole complex process seem so
unremarkable. Here is a good example, adapted from Widdowson (1978).

HER: That’s the telephone.

HIM: I’m in the bath.
HER: O.K.

There are certainly no cohesive ties within this fragment of discourse. How does each
of these people manage to make sense of what the other says? They do use the
information contained in the sentences expressed, but there must be something else
involved in the interpretation. It has been suggested that exchanges of this type are best
understood in terms of the conventional actions performed by the speakers in such
interactions. Drawing on concepts derived from the study of speech acts (introduced in
Chapter 10), we can characterize the brief conversation in the following way.
 Discourse analysis 145

She makes a request of him to perform action.

He states reason why he cannot comply with request.
She undertakes to perform action.

If this is a reasonable analysis of what took place in the conversation, then it is clear
that language-users must have a lot of knowledge of how conversation works that is
not simply “linguistic” knowledge.

Speech events

In exploring what it is we know about taking part in conversation, or any other speech
event (e.g. debate, interview, various types of discussions), we quickly realize that there
is enormous variation in what people say and do in different circumstances. In order to
begin to describe the sources of that variation, we would have to take account of a
number of criteria. For example, we would have to specify the roles of speaker and hearer
(or hearers) and their relationship(s), whether they were friends, strangers, men, women,
young, old, of equal or unequal status, and many other factors. All of these factors will
have an influence on what is said and how it is said. We would have to describe what the
topic of conversation was and in what setting it took place. Some of the effects of these
factors on the way language is used are explored in greater detail in Chapters 19 and 20.
Yet, even when we have described all these factors, we will still not have analyzed the
actual structure of the conversation itself. As language-users, in a particular culture, we
clearly have quite sophisticated knowledge of how conversation works.

Conversation analysis

In simple terms, English conversation can be described as an activity in which, for the
most part, two or more people take turns at speaking. Typically, only one person
speaks at a time and there tends to be an avoidance of silence between speaking turns.
(This is not true in all situations or societies.) If more than one participant tries to talk
at the same time, one of them usually stops, as in the following example, where A stops
until B has finished.

A: Didn’t you [ know wh-

B: [ But he must’ve been there by two
A: Yes but you knew where he was going

(A small square bracket [ is conventionally used to indicate a place where simulta-

neous or overlapping speech occurs.)
146 The Study of Language

For the most part, participants wait until one speaker indicates that he or she has
finished, usually by signaling a completion point. Speakers can mark their turns as
complete in a number of ways: by asking a question, for example, or by pausing at the
end of a completed syntactic structure like a phrase or sentence. Other participants can
indicate that they want to take the speaking turn, also in a number of ways. They can
start to make short sounds, usually repeated, while the speaker is talking, and often use
body shifts or facial expressions to signal that they have something to say.

Turn-taking

There are different expectations of conversational style and different strategies of

participation in conversation. Some of these strategies seem to be the source of what
is sometimes described by participants as “rudeness” (if one speaker cuts in on another
speaker) or “shyness” (if one speaker keeps waiting for an opportunity to take a turn
and none seems to occur). The participants characterized as “rude” or “shy” in this
way may simply be adhering to slightly different conventions of turn-taking.
One strategy, which may be overused by “long-winded” speakers or those who are
used to “holding the floor,” is designed to avoid having normal completion points
occur. We all use this strategy to some extent, usually in situations where we have to
work out what we are trying to say while actually saying it. If the normal expectation is
that completion points are marked by the end of a sentence and a pause, then one way
to “keep the turn” is to avoid having those two markers occur together. That is, don’t
pause at the end of sentences; make your sentences run on by using connectors like
and, and then, so, but; place your pauses at points where the message is clearly
incomplete; and preferably “fill” the pause with a hesitation marker such as er, em,
uh, ah.
In the following example, note how the pauses (marked by …) are placed before and
after verbs rather than at the end of sentences, making it difficult to get a clear sense of
what this person is saying until we hear the part after each pause.

A: that’s their favorite restaurant because they … enjoy French food and when they
were … in France they couldn’t believe it that … you know that they had … that
they had had better meals back home

In the next example, speaker X produces filled pauses (with em, er, you know) after
having almost lost the turn at his first brief hesitation.

X: well that film really was … [ wasn’t what he was good at

Y: [ when di-
 Discourse analysis 147

X: I mean his other … em his later films were much more … er really more in the
romantic style and that was more what what he was … you know … em best at doing
Y: so when did he make that one

These types of strategies, by themselves, should not be considered undesirable or dom-

ineering. They are present in the conversational speech of most people and they are part of
what makes conversation work. We recognize these subtle indicators as ways of organiz-
ing our turns and negotiating the intricate business of social interaction via language. In
fact, one of the most noticeable features of conversational discourse is that it is generally
very “co-operative.” This observation has been formulated as a principle of conversation.

The co-operative principle

An underlying assumption in most conversational exchanges seems to be that the

participants are co-operating with each other. This principle, together with four maxims
that we expect our conversational partners to obey, was first described by the philosopher
Paul Grice. The co-operative principle is stated in the following way: “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). Supporting this principle are four maxims, often called the “Gricean maxims.”

The Quantity maxim: Make your contribution as informative as is required, but not
more, or less, than is required.
The Quality maxim: Do not say that which you believe to be false or for which you
lack adequate evidence.
The Relation maxim: Be relevant.
The Manner maxim: Be clear, brief and orderly.

It is certainly true that, on occasion, we can experience conversational exchanges in

which the co-operative principle may not seem to be in operation. However, this
general description of the normal expectations we have in conversation helps to
explain a number of regular features in the way people say things. For example, during
their lunch break, one woman asks another how she likes the sandwich she is eating
and receives the following answer.

Oh, a sandwich is a sandwich.

In logical terms, this reply appears to have no communicative value since it states
something obvious and doesn’t seem to be informative at all. However, if the woman is
148 The Study of Language

being co-operative and adhering to the Quantity maxim about being “as informative as
is required,” then the listener must assume that her friend is communicating some-
thing. Given the opportunity to evaluate the sandwich, her friend has responded
without an explicit evaluation, thereby implying that she has no opinion, good or
bad, to express. That is, her friend has essentially communicated that the sandwich
isn’t worth talking about.

Hedges

We use certain types of expressions, called hedges, to show that we are concerned about
following the maxims while being co-operative participants in conversation. Hedges can
be defined as words or phrases used to indicate that we’re not really sure that what we’re
saying is sufficiently correct or complete. We can use sort of or kind of as hedges on the
accuracy of our statements, as in descriptions such as His hair was kind of long or The
book cover is sort of yellow (rather than It is yellow). These are examples of hedges on
the Quality maxim. Other examples would include the expressions listed below that
people sometimes put at the beginning of their conversational contributions.

As far as I know …,
Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but …
I’m not absolutely sure, but ….

We also take care to indicate that what we report is something we think or feel (not know),
is possible or likely (not certain), and may or could (not must) happen. Hence the differ-
ence between saying Jackson is guilty and I think it’s possible that Jackson may be guilty. In
the first version, we will be assumed to have very good evidence for the statement.

Implicatures

When we try to analyze how hedges work, we usually talk about speakers implying
something that is not said. Similarly, in considering what the woman meant by a
sandwich is a sandwich, we decided that she was implying that the sandwich wasn’t
worth talking about. With the co-operative principle and the maxims as guides, we can
start to work out how people actually decide that someone is “implying” something in
conversation. Consider the following example.

CAROL: Are you coming to the party tonight?

LARA: I’ve got an exam tomorrow.
 Discourse analysis 149

On the face of it, Lara’s statement is not an answer to Carol’s question. Lara doesn’t say
Yes or No. Yet Carol will immediately interpret the statement as meaning “No” or
“Probably not.” How can we account for this ability to grasp one meaning from a
sentence that, in a literal sense, means something else? It seems to depend, at least
partially, on the assumption that Lara is being relevant and informative, adhering to
the maxims of Relation and Quantity. (To appreciate this point, try to imagine Carol’s
reaction if Lara had said something like Roses are red, you know.) Given that Lara’s
original answer contains relevant information, Carol can work out that “exam tomor-
row” conventionally involves “study tonight,” and “study tonight” precludes “party
tonight.” Thus, Lara’s answer is not simply a statement about tomorrow’s activities, it
contains an implicature (an additional conveyed meaning) concerning tonight’s
activities.
It is noticeable that, in order to describe the conversational implicature involved in
Lara’s statement, we had to appeal to some background knowledge (about exams,
studying and partying) that must be shared by the conversational participants.
Investigating how we use our background knowledge to arrive at interpretations of
what we hear and read is a critical part of doing discourse analysis.

Background knowledge

A particularly good example of the processes involved in using background knowledge

was provided by Sanford and Garrod (1981), who presented readers with a short text,
one sentence at a time. Their text begins with the following two sentences.

John was on his way to school last Friday.

He was really worried about the math lesson.

Most people who are asked to read these sentences report that they think John is probably
a schoolboy. Since this piece of information is not directly stated in the text, it must be an
inference. Other inferences, for different readers, are that John is walking or that he is on a
bus. These inferences are clearly derived from our conventional knowledge, in our
culture, about “going to school,” and no reader has ever suggested that John is swimming
or on a boat, though both are physically possible, if unlikely, interpretations.
An interesting aspect of the reported inferences is that they are treated as likely or
possible interpretations that readers will quickly abandon if they do not fit in with
some subsequent information. Here is the next sentence in the text.

Last week he had been unable to control the class.

150 The Study of Language

On encountering this sentence, most readers decide that John is, in fact, a teacher and
that he is not very happy. Many report that he is probably driving a car to school. Then
the next sentence is presented.

It was unfair of the math teacher to leave him in charge.

Suddenly, John reverts to his schoolboy status, and the inference that he is a teacher is
quickly abandoned. The final sentence of the text contains a surprise.

After all, it is not a normal part of a janitor’s duties.

This type of text and manner of presentation, one sentence at a time, is rather artificial,
of course. Yet the exercise involved does provide us with some insight into the ways in
which we “build” interpretations of what we read by using a lot more information than
is presented in the words on the page. That is, we actually create what the text is about,
based on our expectations of what normally happens. In attempting to describe this
phenomenon, researchers often use the concept of a “schema” or a “script.”

Schemas and scripts

A schema is a general term for a conventional knowledge structure that exists in

memory. We were using our conventional knowledge of what a school classroom is
like, or a “classroom schema,” as we tried to make sense of the previous example. We
have many schemas (or schemata) that are used in the interpretation of what we
experience and what we hear or read about. If you hear someone describe what
happened during a visit to a supermarket, you don’t have to be told what is normally
found in a supermarket. You already have a “supermarket schema” (food displayed on
shelves, arranged in aisles, shopping carts and baskets, check-out counter, and other
conventional features) as part of your background knowledge.
Similar in many ways to a schema is a script. A script is essentially a dynamic
schema. That is, instead of the set of typical fixed features in a schema, a script has a
series of conventional actions that take place. You have a script for “Going to the
dentist” and another script for “Going to the movies.” We all have versions of an
“Eating in a restaurant” script, which we can activate to make sense of this short text.

Trying not to be out of the office for long, Suzy went into the nearest place, sat down
and ordered an avocado sandwich. It was quite crowded, but the service was fast, so
she left a good tip. Back in the office, things were not going well.
Discourse analysis 151

On the basis of our restaurant script, we would be able to say a number of things about
the scene and events briefly described in this short text. For example, although the text
doesn’t have this information, we would assume that Suzy opened a door to get into
the restaurant, that there were tables there, that she ate the sandwich, then she paid for
it, and so on. The fact that information of this type can turn up in people’s attempts to
remember the text is further evidence of the existence of scripts. It is also a good
indication of the fact that our understanding of what we read doesn’t come directly
from what words and sentences are on the page, but the interpretations we create, in
our minds, of what we read.
Indeed, crucial information is sometimes omitted from important instructions on the
assumption that everybody knows the script. Think carefully about the following
instructions from a bottle of cough syrup.

Fill measure cup to line

and repeat every 2 to 3 hours.

No, you’ve not just to keep filling the measure cup every 2 to 3 hours. Nor have you to
rub the cough syrup on your neck or in your hair. You are expected to know the script
and drink the stuff from the measure cup every 2 or 3 hours.
Clearly, our understanding of what we read is not only based on what we see on the
page (language structures), but also on other things that we have in mind (knowledge
structures). To understand more about the connection between these two things, we
have to take a close look at the workings of the human brain.
152 The Study of Language

Study questions
1 How is the word “discourse” usually defined?
2 What is the basic difference between cohesion and coherence?
3 How do speakers mark completion points at the end of a turn?
4 What are hedges in discourse?
5 Which maxim does this speaker seem to be particularly careful about?

I may be mistaken, but I thought I saw a wedding ring on his finger.

6 In the study of discourse understanding, what are scripts?

Tasks
A In the analysis of discourse, what is “intertextuality”?
B In conversation analysis, what is the difference between a “preferred” response
and a “dispreferred” response? How would you characterize the responses by
She in these two examples?

(i) HE: How about going for some coffee?

SHE: Oh … eh … I’d love to … but you see … I … I’m supposed to get this
thing finished … you know.
(ii) HE: I think she’s really sexy.
SHE: Well … er … I’m not sure … you may be right … but you see … other
people probably don’t go for all that … you know … all that make-
up … so em sorry but I don’t think so.

C The following extract is from a conversation between two women chatting

about people they both knew in high school (Overstreet, 1999: 112–113).
The phrase or something is used twice by Crystal in this extract. Is she
adhering to the Co-operative Principle and the Quality maxim or not? How
did you decide?
JULIE: I can’t remember any ge- guys in our grade that were gay.
CRYSTAL: Larry Brown an’ an’ John Murphy. I – huh I dunno, I heard John
Murphy was dressed – was like a transvestite or something.
JULIE: You’re kidding.
CRYSTAL: I – I dunno. That was a – an old rumor, I don’t even know if it was true.
JULIE: That’s funny.
CRYSTAL: Or cross-dresser or something.
J U L I E : Larry – Larry Brown is gay?
Discourse analysis 153

D (i) Identify the main cohesive ties in this first paragraph of a novel (Faulkner, 1929).
(ii) What do you think “they” were hitting?

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence.
Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and
they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and
he hit and the other hit. They went on, and I went along the fence. Luster
came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped
and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in
the grass.

E This is a version of a story described in Widdowson (2007). When most people

first read this story, they find it confusing. Can you identify the source of this
confusion in terms of background knowledge or assumptions?

A man and his son were crossing the street one day when a car suddenly came
towards them and hit the boy, knocking him down. In less than ten minutes an
ambulance came and took the boy to the nearest hospital. As the boy was being
taken into the emergency room, one of the surgeons saw him and cried out, “Oh
no. This is my son!”

F (i) What is Critical Discourse Analysis?

(ii) How might the following text be analyzed using that approach? This
text originally appeared in the British newspaper the Sun (February 2,
1989) and is cited in van Dijk (1996: 98) and Cameron (2001: 127).

BRITAIN INVADED BY ARMY OF ILLEGALS

Britain is being swamped by a tide of illegal immigrants so desperate for a
job that they will work for a pittance in our restaurants, cafés and
nightclubs.
Immigration officers are being overwhelmed with work. Last year, 2191
“illegals” were nabbed and sent back home. But there were tens of thousands
more, slaving behind bars, cleaning hotel rooms and working in kitchens …
Illegals sneak in by:
* D E C E I V I N G immigration officers when they are quizzed at airports
* D I S A P P E A R I N G after their entry visas run out
* F O R G I N G work permits and other documents
* RUNNING AWAY from immigration detention centres
154 The Study of Language

Discussion topics/projects
I In the study of discourse, a distinction is often made between “new information”
(treated as new for the reader or listener) and “given information” (treated as
already known by the reader or listener). Read through the following recipe for
bread sauce and identify the ways in which given information is presented.
(Try to think carefully about carrying out the instructions in the Method
section and how many unmentioned things you are assumed to have and use.)

Ingredients: 1 small onion 3 oz. fresh breadcrumbs

2 cloves 1 oz. butter
1 cup of milk pepper and salt
Method: Peel the onion and push cloves into it. Simmer gently with the milk
and butter for at least twenty minutes. Remove the onion, pour the milk
over the breadcrumbs. Let this stand to thicken and reheat before
serving.

(For background reading, see chapter 5 of Brown and Yule, 1983.)

II According to Deborah Schiffrin, “the analysis of discourse markers is
part of the more general analysis of discourse coherence” (1987: 49). Looking at the
use of discourse markers (in bold) in the following extract from conversation, do you
think that they help to make this discourse more coherent? If any of them were
omitted, would it become less coherent? Given these examples, how would you
define discourse markers? Do you think the word like (used twice here) should be
treated as a discourse marker?

I believe in that. Whatever’s gonna happen is gonna happen. I believe …

that … y’know it’s fate. It really is. Because eh my husband has a brother, that
was killed in an automobile accident, and at the same time there was another
fellow, in there, that walked away with not even a scratch on him. And I really
fee- I don’t feel y’can push fate, and I think a lot of people do. But I feel that
you were put here for so many, years or whatever the case is, and that’s how it
was meant to be. Because like when we got married, we were supposed t’get
married uh like about five months later. My husband got a notice t’go into the
service and we moved it up. And my father died the week … after we got
married. While we were on our honeymoon. And I just felt, that move was
meant to be, because if not, he wouldn’t have been there. So eh y’know it just
s- seems that that’s how things work.

(For background reading, see chapter 3 of Schiffrin, 1987.)

Discourse analysis 155

Further reading
Basic treatments
Cutting, J. (2008) Pragmatics and Discourse (2nd edition) Routledge
Widdowson, H. (2007) Discourse Analysis Oxford University Press
More detailed treatments
Paltridge, B. (2006) Discourse Analysis Continuum
Renkema, J. (2004) Introduction to Discourse Studies (2nd edition) John Benjamins
Specifically on spoken discourse
Cameron, D. (2001) Working with Spoken Discourse Sage
Conversation analysis
Have, P. (2007) Doing Conversation Analysis (2nd edition) Sage
Psathas, G. (1995) Conversation Analysis Sage
The Gricean maxims
Chapman, S. (2005) Paul Grice: Philosopher and Linguist Palgrave Macmillan
Grice, P. (1989) Studies in the Way of Words Harvard University Press
Schemas and scripts
Brown, G. and G. Yule (1983) Discourse Analysis (chapter 7) Cambridge University Press
Other references
Grice, P. (1975) “Logic and conversation” In P. Cole and J. Morgan (eds.) Syntax and Semantics
3: Speech Acts (41–58) Academic Press
Faulkner, W. (1929) The Sound and the Fury Jonathan Cape
Overstreet, M. (1999) Whales, Candlelight and Stuff Like That: General Extenders in English
Discourse Oxford University Press
Sanford, A. and S. Garrod (1981) Understanding Written Language Wiley
Schiffrin, D. (1987) Discourse Markers Cambridge University Press
van Dijk, T. (1996) “Discourse, power and access” In C. Caldas-Coulthard and M. Coulthard
(eds.) Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis (84–104) Routledge
Widdowson, H. (1978) Teaching Language as Communication Oxford University Press
Introduction

Think about the sentence “I’m hungry.” If I’m at home with my

young daughter and she says “I’m hungry”, anyone listening would
have a feeling that she means “Feed me” or “Give me some food.”
I have a responsibility to care for my daughter, that care involves
making sure she is fed, and she’s not old enough to feed herself, so
when I hear the words “I’m hungry”, I take them as meaning some-
thing different to what she says. If I was only focused on the words,
not the meaning, I might hear “I’m hungry” and respond with “I’m
tired”, guessing that we were talking about our physical states. (Or I
might say, “Pleased to meet you, Hungry. I’m Sean”, a silly joke that
kids seem to like.) However, in reality I react to what my daughter
means, not to what she says, and take the appropriate action by fnd-
ing her something to eat.
If I’m out with a friend and he says “I’m hungry”, which are the
same words, they mean something different. If I’ve just asked him
what he wants to do, his words might now mean “Let’s eat.” My
relationship with my friends is different from my relationship with
my daughter. I don’t have the same responsibility to feed my friends,
unless I have invited them to dinner, so hearing “I’m hungry” might
be seen as an offer to eat together. If a student in my class says
“I’m hungry”, I would probably arrive at a different understanding
of what she means. I don’t have any responsibility to feed my stu-
dents. I don’t eat with them except on rare occasions such as after
graduation, and never in the classroom. I might then understand that
the student is giving an excuse, explaining that she wants to leave the
classroom to buy a snack.
To really understand language we can’t just look at the words,
although they are of course important. We have to think about who
(my daughter, a friend, a student) is talking to whom (a father, a
friend, a lecturer), where (at home, a public place, a classroom) and
for what purpose (a demand for food, an offer to eat, an excuse for
leaving).

ix
x Introduction

Text, in linguistic terms, means “the words used in a language

event”. Texts include speeches by one person, conversations that in-
clude many speakers (all the participants’ words count as part of the
text), songs, novels, restaurant menus, newspaper articles and so on.
Discourse, as many linguists use the term, means the text, that is,
the language used, plus the context in which it appears. “I’m hungry”
is only properly understood by thinking about the words and who
said them to whom in what place. “I’m hungry” is a bit of discourse
that could mean a variety of things, depending on the context. In this
book I use the terms text and discourse as they are appropriate, but
it is often diffcult to discuss texts without considering them as part
of discourse, so the terms are sometimes interchangeable. Words are
always used in a certain context.
Discourse analysis means “the study of language in use”.
Language can be analysed without thinking about the context, for
instance if we said that “I’m hungry” is a subject, a verb and an ad-
jective. To do discourse analysis means that we must take account of
those individual words of the text, but we must also recognise that
people use language in many different contexts, and understanding
those contexts is necessary if we want to understand language.
Discourse analysis can be done to either spoken language or writ-
ten language. Some authors make a distinction between “spoken dis-
course” and “written texts” (Jackson & Stockwell, 2011), but I don’t
think this is always a useful distinction. Whether someone says “I’m
hungry” or sends me a text message saying the same thing, I have to
understand that message based on thinking about those words, but
also by thinking about who is speaking or writing and what my rela-
tionship is with that person.
Let’s look at another example of discourse analysis. I often eaves-
drop on other people’s conversations. This is not entirely because
I’m nosey about other people’s lives, although I am, but rather it is
because I like hearing how different people talk. I’m mostly inter-
ested in the different ways that people can say things, not so much in
what they are actually talking about.
When I frst began teaching at a British university, I had many
chances to hear people using language in ways that were new to me.
I’m not British and I was in my late thirties when I started lecturing
in London, so hearing young people from Britain and the rest of the
world speaking all around me throughout the day kept me very busy
 Introduction xi

eavesdropping. It was fascinating then, and remains so now, to hear

how differently they could use language when compared to me and
to one another, despite the fact that we were all speaking English.
I still clearly recall a striking example of language use that caught
my attention and set me to thinking about the topics which are dis-
cussed in this book. I saw Kiran, a student at the university, approach
another young woman named Rana who had a mobile phone in her
hand. Kiran looked at Rana and her phone, then said, “You got an
iPhone, you cow.”
The frst part of this utterance, “You got an iPhone”, is interesting
enough. (Note that I’m using utterance here to mean “small amount
of spoken language”, without worrying about whether it is a word,
phrase, clause or sentence.) Why would Kiran point out something
so obvious? Certainly Rana knew that she had a phone. But leave
that aside for a moment and look at the second part: “you cow”. I
know a cow is a farm animal; Rana was obviously not one. I also
know that cow can be used as a slur to insult people, relying on some
common perceptions we have of cows as large, lazy and unintelli-
gent. However, Rana’s reaction did not show her to be insulted. She
laughed and explained that her family had recently signed up for a
phone plan which included new phones. Kiran explained that she
had wanted to get one but could not afford to do so. The two women
spoke for a few more minutes, then walked off discussing where
they would go for lunch.
It appeared that cow here was not insulting. Instead, Kiran appears
to have used it to show that she was jealous of Rana, that she thought
Rana was lucky to have such a phone, and that she was happy for
Rana. Kiran could rely on her existing relationship with Rana, one
that was quite obviously friendly, to help Rana interpret “you cow”
as something other than an insult. Within the context of their rela-
tionship “you cow” was interpreted as something quite opposed to
an insult. It was a signal that their relationship was of a type in which
cow could not possibly be interpreted as an insult and so had to be
taken as a sign of affection. Here “cow” had a social meaning, akin
to saying “We’re friends.”
This is discourse analysis. Individual words, phrases and clauses
have meaning on their own, but they can only be understood by
looking at their co-text, the words that surround them, and at their
context, the real-world situations in which the words are used. Cow
xii Introduction

sometimes means “farm animal”, sometimes is an insult and some-

times means “We’re friends”.
In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Humpty Dumpty says,
“When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean –
neither more nor less.” Alice is unconvinced, asking if people can
use words to mean more than one thing. Humpty Dumpty replies,
“The question is which is to be master – that’s all.” Discourse ana-
lysts, and linguists in general, agree with Mr Dumpty. Words mean
what people want them to mean. It doesn’t matter that the dictionary
might not list “We’re friends” as a meaning of cow. A discourse
analytic look at Kiran and Rana’s exchange makes it clear that they
agreed that it meant that.
If you’re interested in language, I suggest you eavesdrop, talk and
listen, and read as much as you possibly can. The world is full of
language in use, so the discourses waiting to be analysed are in-
numerable. You’ll never be bored at even the most terrible flm if
you focus on the language and ignore the cardboard actors, boring
plot and unfunny jokes. Think about why the characters talk as they
do and compare their discourse to what you know about how real
people talk.
The rest of this book is an explanation of some of the things that
linguists think about when they analyse discourse. In Chapter 1 we
look at texts, including those features that allow us to see how dif-
ferent parts of a text are joined together into a cohesive unit larger
than any one word or sentence within it. In Chapter 2 we begin to
look at discourse by examining how we make meaning from texts
in which not everything that is meant is actually spoken aloud or
written down. In Chapter 3 we examine the producers (writers and
speakers) of discourse, thinking about ways that they differ from
each other and how that affects the discourses that they produce. In
Chapter 4 we discuss how the context of discourse helps shape the
linguistic features that appear within it. In Chapter 5 we look at the
information presented in discourse: how it is organised, how certain
parts can be highlighted, and how some parts of the information can
be omitted, yet understood by those who read or listen.
 Discourse Analysis
Lecture 5
Spoken and Written Discourse
2018-2019
There are many ways to classify discourse:

• According to whether it is written or spoken

• The distinction between speech and writing is often referred to

as channel (D. Hymes) or medium.

• Spoken and written discourse differ for many reasons. Spoken

discourse has to be understood immediately; written discourse
can be referred to many times
 Major Differences
1. Grammatical intricacy
2. Lexical density
3. Nominalization
4. Explicitness
5. Contextualization
6. Spontaneity
7. Repetition, hesitations, and redundancy
8. Detachment/involvement
 1. Grammatical Intricacy
• Written discourse is more structurally complex and more
elaborate than spoken discourse .

• In other words, sentences in spoken discourse are short and

simple, whereas they are longer and more complex in written
discourse.

• However, Halliday thinks that spoken discourse is NOT less

organized. He argues that spoken discourse has its own kind of
complexity.
 1. Grammatical Intricacy
• In spoken discourse clauses are long and spread out, and with
more complex relations between them than in writing.
Halliday used the term “grammatical intricacy” to describe
such a case.

• So, spoken discourse can be grammatically intricate as well.

 Example
• This is an extract by a judge on a television song competition
containing sets of clauses that are long and spread out in the
way that Halliday describes. The judge is talking about the
winner of the show who came to the audition dressed in a
grunge outfit and who transformed herself throughout the
show.
 Example
• “You are fabulous, truly, truly fabulous. And you know
what’s so fabulous about you? I believe that the real, true
artists, the people that are around you for a long time, who
touch people’s lives, are those artists that have lots of
contradictions within them, and you had many
contradictions within you when you first rocked up. You
looked like a skate punk and you had this aura of “Don’t
mess with me” about you, and, but every time you step in
front of us, you take another step towards being what we
wanna create here, which is a superstar artist. That was a
fantastic song for you. You just rocked the house and I
can’t believe they have got you in heels! Absolute class act,
darling.”
 2. Lexical Density
 Lexical density refers to the ratio of content words (i.e.
nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) to grammatical or
function words (e.g. pronouns, prepositions, articles) within a
clause.

 Written discourse according to Halliday tends to be more

lexically dense than spoken discourse.

 Spoken discourse is less lexically dense than written

discourse. Content words tend to be spread out over a number
of clauses in spoken discourse, whereas in written discourse
they are tightly packed into individual clauses.
 Example
• The following extract from Brown’s (1992:9) Casablanca:
Script and Legend:

• A-WRITTEN If Casablanca defined true love for a

generation of incurable romantics, it also defined the
aesthetic possibilities of cinema for a generation of film
lovers. (25 words)

• B- Yvonne: Who do you think you are, pushing me

around? What a fool I was to fall for a man like you.
(21 words)
 Example
• Example A which is written discourse illustrates the higher
lexical density that is typical of many written texts. In this
extract there are 7 content words in each of the 2 clauses.
There are many more content words than function words in
this extract.

• B is an example of spoken discourse. In B there are fewer

content words per clause compared to example A.
 3. Nominalization
 Nominalization refers to presenting actions and events as
nouns rather than as verbs.

 Written discourse has a high level of nominalization: i.e. more

nouns than verbs.
 Written discourse also tends to have longer noun groups than
spoken discourse.

 This leads to a situation where the information in the text is

tightly packed into fewer words and less spread out than in
spoken discourse.
 Exercise
• Complete the table below by finding other nominalizations in
the first text above, based on the verbs in the second text.

Verb Nominalization
reproduce reproduction
vary
duplicate
divide
mutate
combine
 Example
a) “The construction of the pyramids represented the
Egyptians’ attempt . . . .”
b) “When the Egyptians built the pyramids, they were trying
c) The construction attempts were successful. . . .”

a) This information enables us to formulate precise

questions.
b) This information enables the formulation of precise
questions.

a) I studied last night and it was tiring.

b) Studying last night was tiring.
 4. Explicitness
 Writing is more explicit than speech, depending on the
purpose of the text. A writer/speaker can state something
explicitly or imply it depending on many variables.

 Example:
 Yvonne: Will I see you tonight?
 Rick: I never make plans that far ahead.

 In this conversation, she asks him a yes or no question but

hasn’t been given a yes or no answer. She has to work out
Rick’s intended meaning from the situation.
 5. Contextualization
• Contextualization refers to the extent that knowledge of
context is needed to interpret a text.

• Writing is more decontextualized than speech. Speech is more

attached to context than writing because speech depends on a
shared situation and background for interpretation.

• This is true of conversation but is not true of speech and

writing in general.

• Spoken discourse (such as lectures) does not generally show a

high dependence on a shared context, while written discourse
(such as personal letters) does.
 6. Spontaneity
 Spoken discourse is spontaneous, thus:
a. Spoken discourse lacks organization and is ungrammatical
because it is spontaneous, whereas written discourse is
organized and grammatical.
b. Spoken discourse contains more uncompleted and
reformulated sentences.
c. Topics can be changed prematurely.
d. Speakers may ask for clarification, correct, interrupt and
overlap.
e. Speakers use intonation, gestures, and body language to
convey meanings.
 So, spoken discourse is organized differently from written
discourse.
7. Repetition, Hesitation, and Redundancy

 Spoken discourse contains more repetition, hesitations, and

redundancy because it is produced in real time (i.e. on the
spot).

 Spoken discourse has many pauses and fillers, such as ‘hhh’,

‘er’ and ‘you know’ so that speakers give themselves time to
think about what they want to say.
 Example
• Bashir: At this early stage would you say that you were happily
married
• Diana: Very much so (1) er the pressure on – on both as a couple (.)
with the media was phenomenal (1) and misunderstood by a great
many people (1) we’d be going around Australia for instance. Hhh (2)
and (.) you – all you could hear was oh (.) she’s on the other side (1)
now if you’re a man (1) like my husband a proud man (.) you mind
about that if you hear it every day for four weeks (.) and you feel (.)
low about it y-know instead of feeling happy and sharing it.

• Pauses are shown in brackets, the numbers in brackets indicate the

length of the pause in seconds and (.) indicates a micro pause that is too
small to count.
• hedge
 A Continuum View
• McCarthy (2001) argues for a continuum view rather than
simple, one-dimensional difference between spoken and
written discourses. Differences are viewed as being on a
continuum.
 Detachment/ Involvement
• Speakers interact with their audiences, writers
do not (much)
Spoken Written
• Speaker, hearer • Writer, reader
• Sharing knowledge • Is displaced in time and
concerning the context of place
the conversation • Concerned with presenting
• Monitor the effect something defensible when
• Face to face contact read by different readers, at
• Signal understanding and different times, in different
ask for clarification places
 Chafe
• Speakers interact with their audiences, writers do not.

• Detachment from the audience typical of writers– passives,

nominalizations

• Involvement with the audience is typical of speakers – using

first person pron., speaker’s mental processes, monitoring of
information flow, emphatic particles, fuzziness, direct quotes
 Detachment
1. passive voice
• Suppressing the direct involvement of an agent
in action

• E.g.
• I studied this phenomenon and experimented
with an electric guitar
• The phenomenon was studied through
experiments with an electric guitar.
 Detachment
2. Nominalization
• Allowing predications to be integrated within
larger sentences
• Suppressing the direct involvement of an agent
in an action
• I will succeed in the interview if you help me.
• My future success depends on your support.
Detachment in spoken and written
discourse
 Involvement in speaking
1. First person pronouns
2. Speaker’s mental processes
3. Monitoring of information flow
4. Emphatic particles
5. Fuzziness
6. Direct quotes
 Involvement
1) first person pronouns
 Involvement
2) speaker’s mental processes
• And I had no idea how I had gotten there.
• But … I can recall … uh … a big undergraduate
class that I had.
• And I thought … am I alive?
 Involvement –monitoring of
information flow
• A speaker monitors the communication channel which
exists with the listener and attempts to make sure that
the channel is functioning well.
• Fillers are colloquial expressions like “well, I mean, you
know” which perform one or another of these
functions:
• Well … I took off four weeks.
• But … but as it is still I mean … everybody knows
everybody.
• So we … so we … you know, we have this confrontation.
• These expressions were entirely absent in the written
discourse sample.
Involvement –emphatic particles
 Involvement – fuzziness
• Vagueness and hedges are also more prevalent in
speaking and may also express a desire for
experiential involvement as opposed to the less
human kind of precision which is fostered by
writing
• Schemes for striking, lifting, pushing, pulling, and
so on.
• Moving the bridge a meter or two.
• The banker is something like forty-seven
• And he started sort of circling.
 Involvement – direct quotes

• Direct quotes also express involvement in

actual events which tends to be lacking in
written language.
• And uh … she said, “Sally can I have one of
your papers?
• And I said, “Well no I’m afraid I don’t.”
• Direct quotes are much more frequent in
spoken discourse than in written discourse.
 Major Differences
1. Grammatical intricacy
2. Lexical density
3. Nominalization
4. Explicitness
5. Contextualization
6. Spontaneity
7. Repetition, hesitations, and redundancy
8. Detachment/involvement
 Summary
speakers interact with their audiences,
writers do not.
• Written language • Spoken language
• Detachment • Involvement
• The use of passives • First person references
• nominalizations • Speaker’s mental
processes
• Monitoring of
information flow
• Emphatic particles
• fuzziness

Spoken extremes written

Spontaneous conversational language vs formal academic prose
 Reasons
• Production: The writer is removed from the
readers, performs a monologue with minimal
feedback and no verbal interaction
• Interpretation: Written language has
permanence, can be read again and again but
the structure remains constant from
performance to performance.
 Coherence and Cohesion
Weaving meanings together in
Discourse:
1. lexical cohesion
 What makes a text hang together?
• Coherence and cohesion
• Basically, any text becomes an effective text when it meets the criteria below :
• meanings in a text make sense in relation to the context of the text as well as
the listener’s or reader’s prior experience and cultural knowledge: this is what
is known as coherence
• meanings are related or tied together by linguistic devices such as repetition
or text connectors: this is what is known as cohesion, and the devices that
create these links are referred to in general terms as cohesive devices.
• It is important to realise that, even where there are no recognisable cohesive
signals in a text, a listener or reader may use their cultural knowledge together
with their experience of language use to construct coherence. Look at the
dialogue below, for example, and see if you can make sense of the interaction:
• Luanne [shouting] Phone!
• Anton I’m in the bath
• Luanne OK
(Adapted from Widdowson, 1978, p. 29)
Luanne calls Anton to answer the phone (a message communicated in a single word –
Phone!), and Anton’s response functions to inform Luanne that he is unable to come.
To make sense of the interchange you will have (unconsciously) drawn on your prior
knowledge of similar social situations, as well as your experience of how spoken texts
typically ‘hang together’.
Coherence, therefore, should be understood as primarily a mental phenomenon, one
that is generated by the experience of a reader or listener rather than by the text
itself. However, not all texts rely solely on the reader/listener to create coherence.
Often a coherent text is the result of effective use of cohesive devices. Such devices
serve to 'glue‘ together the different meanings that make up a text and help a
reader/listener make sense of a situation. For example, they may express logical
relationships connecting different parts of a message. Consider the text below:
I once acquired a set of recordings of a Bach piano concerto. I was very fond of
it, but my mother was forever criticizing my poor taste […] Consequently, I now
hardly listen to Bach. (Biber et al., 2002, p. 390)
Linking adverbials such as consequently in the text above create and mark the
semantic relationship which writers or speakers perceive as holding between
the utterances they produce. Other cohesive devices such as reference signal
that the identity of what is being talked or written about can be recovered from
the surrounding text by means of pronouns.
• For example, the meaning of it in the second sentence below can be
recovered by tracking back in the text to the noun group it references
(underlined) in the first sentence:
• The company is set to announce a new contract to supply equipment to
hospitals across the region. Hopefully it will safeguard jobs into the next
decade.
• In sum, although the absence of cohesive devices does not automatically
make a text incoherent, such devices play an important role in contributing to
the coherence of a text. One of the main reasons for incoherence in a text is
the lack of cohesive relations, or cohesive ties between items in the sense
that each sentence is largely self-contained and does not contribute to the
interpretation of any other. Thus the text does not hang together as an
internally cohesive piece of language. As a result, it is unlikely that any reader
could make such a random collection of disconnected topics coherent by
supplying an overall meaning or communicative purpose.
• By coherence we mean binding the meanings in a text together so as to
create a unified text . In other words, coherence is sometimes referred to as
giving texture (consistency) to a text. Lexical cohesion, which refers to the
lexical features that link one part of a text with another , such as repetition ,
synonymy and hyponymy, is crucial in creating a coherent text. In fact, lexis,
as Halliday (1975, p. 281) has stated 'is simply the open-ended and most
'delicate" aspect of the grammar of a language'. Therefore, as the figure
below outlines, cohesion includes both lexical and grammatical components.
Types of cohesion
Using lexis to make a text hang together
• Lexical chains
• Strings of connected words within a text are referred to as lexical chains. When
several of these chains come together in a text to create an overall impact and
meaning, the text is said to be lexically cohesive. As Firth stated , we know a word
by the company it keeps (1957, p.11). Accordingly, the lexical chains provide
evidence of the unity of meaning, consistency and tight focus of the text. Not all
texts will show the same degree of consistency and focus.
• In the following text, which is concerned with explaining volcanic activity, all the
words which are connected to each other and which form threads of related
meaning are underlined. (Note: for ease of reference, each sentence or clause
complex has been numbered.)

• [1] A volcano begins when magma inside the earth forces its way up into the crust.
[2] When pressure in the magma builds up, the magma forces its way up, and exits
as lava. [3] A volcano also throws up steam and other gases, ashes and dust. [4] It
does not throw up fire. [5] Sometimes material from inside the volcano is thrown
50 or 60 kilometres into the air. [6] In fact the dust and ashes from a volcano may
blow around the world for years.
• [7] There are three types of volcanoes: an active volcano is one which is
erupting; [8] a dormant volcano is one which is ‘sleeping’ – it may not have
erupted for many years but could erupt at any time; [9] and an extinct
volcano is one which is dead and will not erupt again. (Shubert, 1998, p. 35)

• We can see from the identification of the lexical chains that two major
aspects of volcanoes are developed as the text unfolds: (a) the composition
of volcanoes (sentences 1–6) and the different types of volcano (sentences
7–9) and (b) the material processes involved in volcanic eruption. We can
see that, together, the two chains build a set of related words concerning
volcanic activity. The lexical chains, in other words, help create the unity of
meaning, consistency and tight focus of the text. For this reason, analysis of
lexical chains can provide evidence of how cohesive a text is.
• Cohesion through taxonomic relations
• In addition to creating texture through repeating the similar or opposite meanings in
a text, lexical reiteration can be used to indicate class-subclass and part-whole
relations. In the case of class-subclass relations, the superordinate or the item
referring to a more general class links to items referring to members of its class.
Taxonomies (or classification systems) are frequently drawn on in the academic
prose register. The more specialized the field, the more specialized the taxonomy.
• We have kinds of taxonomies: part-whole taxonomies (e.g. bus, car, train are all
types of transport), whole- part taxonomies (e.g. plant and its’ parts such as seed
and shoot). In part–whole taxonomic relationships, the relation between a part (e.g.
seed or shoot) and the whole (e.g. plant) is referred to as meronymy. Co-meronymy
is the relation between two parts of the same whole (e.g. plumule and radicle). As in
the case of relations of member to class, relationships of part to whole are also given
various names in English depending on the field. For example, mushrooms (part) are
an ingredient of beef stroganoff (whole). Terms for ‘part’ include part, content,
ingredient, constituent, element, component, piece, segment and portion.
2. Grammatical Cohesion
Weaving an argument together
• As you may remember, there is a number of lexical resources
which are commonly used to ‘glue’ together the meanings in a
text. These resources for lexical cohesion can be divided into sense
relations (synonymy, antonymy, meronymy and hyponymy) and
lexical repetition. Yet, there is a second group of linguistic
resources which help to make a text hang together. These are the
resources for grammatical cohesion, they include grammatical
devices such as the text connectors like “but, for example, and
then again” to link different (and often contrasting) views and
ideas. These connecting words and phrases are referred to as ‘text
connectors’.
• Grammatical cohesion is the use of various grammatical devices to ‘glue’
together the meanings in a text and help to create its ‘texture’. In the
following sections you will see how grammatical analysis can be used to
diagnose and make explicit areas for development in a writer’s textual
meaning-making.
• Analysing text connectors
• Text connectors are words or phrases that connect ideas across (but not
within) clause complexes and stretches of text, and make explicit the
relationship between them. We can identify four main types of relationship:
• additive: adding points (using and for example)
• contrastive: contrasting, comparing, and conceding points, e.g. yet
• causal: signalling reasons or consequences , e.g. Then, so
• temporal: signalling time, sequence or transition, e.g. Now.
Linking meaning logically: the role of text connectors
• Text connectors play a similar role to conjunctions in that they connect
different parts of a text by explicitly signalling the semantic link (such as
comparison or result). However, whereas conjunctions are restricted to
joining together words, groups or clauses within a clause complex, text
connectors bind together meanings across longer stretches of text beyond the
clause complex:
• Wars are costly exercises because they cause death and destruction.
(structural – conjunction)
• Wars cause death and destruction. They can also cause rifts in political
alliances. As a result they are costly exercises. (cohesive – text connector)
• Often, as in the second example, text connectors come at the beginning of
sentences.
• So, we can say that, text connectors serve to weave
together ideas and arguments. That is, they create bridges
to previous sections of, and meanings in a text and act as
signposts in the development of a discussion. It is also
clear that these connectors are to some extent sensitive to
context, particularly mode. In the next section we will
explore another grammatical device for creating texture –
a cohesive device referred to as ‘reference’.
Reference: is the use of words such as pronouns and articles, which do not
have meanings of their own if the sentence they are in, is taken out of context
and presented in isolation. To infer their meaning the reader has to refer them
to something else that appears in the text (Tom: "How do you like my new
Mercedes Vito?" - Marry: "It is a nice van, which I'm also thinking of buying".).
- Sentences connect by means of two types of references:
Anaphoric references– those that refer a reader/listener ‘backwards’ to a
previously mentioned point in the text. e.g. it, this.
Cataphoric references– those that point the reader/listener forward. E.g the
man we’ve all been waiting for, the one and only– Mr Sanders.
• Pronouns are an example of a reference item, which is a grammatical
resource that serves to keep track of the participants (i.e. the people and
things) in a text as it develops. Reference items can be used to signal that
what they are referring to can be retrieved or recovered in a previous or
subsequent section of the text. For example, she in the sentence below refers
back to my sister Laura:
• Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. The
bridge was being repaired: she went right through the Danger sign.
(Atwood, 2001, p. 8)
Aside from pronouns, other common reference items are determiners (used as
specific reference items). In the extract above, for example, The in The bridge
signals that a bridge in the previous sentence is being referred to. Notice that
in this case, grammatical cohesion (The) works together with lexical cohesion
(repetition of bridge).
• The following extract from news reports provides an illustration of reference-
retrieval problems:
• Ampofo was being outboxed, but then amazingly put his opponent down in
the third and fifth rounds. The new champion, who lost the title to Regan a
year ago, said …
• In the case above we have an example of what is termed indirect reference,
where the connection has to be inferred. Thus the reader must do a certain
amount of work in order to infer that Ampofo is The new champion.
• Notice, though, that your interpretation is affected by your background
knowledge; for example, someone familiar with the world of boxing would
probably have little difficulty interpreting this example.
• Third person pronouns (he/she/it/they) may also require a good deal of work
on the part of the addressee, particularly in spontaneous interaction. The
following conversational extract illustrates this point. See if you find any of
the underlined items difficult to retrieve.
• Nobody really likes, you know, snow snowmen and things like that. Okay? So
we built this snowman round this rock and this car came back cos he came
he just came in to hit it and he burst into and broke his bumper, this massive
dent in his bumper and he drove round. Cos they did it to me before. I made
another one in the park earlier. And they just drove in, knocked it over and
ran out. So I put in a rock this time and it was so funny though. (Biber et al.,
1999, p. 331)
• The listener/reader has to do a fair amount of work to interpret several of these
references. For example, it is necessary to infer that he is the driver of the car and
they are the people in the car. In two of the cases, it seems to refer to the
snowman but in the other cases, the pronoun it refers more generally to what
happened.
• Another potential source of confusion when using or interpreting third person
pronouns concerns gender and the issue of gender bias. For example, if the
gender of a referent is unknown or irrelevant, which pronoun form do English
speakers use? For example, how would you respond to the following comment?
• I went to see the new Romeo and Juliet last night with a friend. I thought it was a
great production but my friend didn’t like it at all.
• Which of the following responses would you make?
• Why didn’t he?
• Why didn’t she?
• Why didn’t he or she?
• Why didn’t they?
Substitution and ellipsis as Grammatical Cohesive Devices:
• Substitution and ellipsis are both devices used by English speakers to avoid
having to repeat redundant or retrievable information. They are in many
ways similar to reference, and there is often considerable overlap between
reference, substitution and ellipsis.
• There are three types of substitution:
• Noun substitution
• Verb substitution
• Clause substitution
• Examples:
• In noun group substitution, the words used for substitution are one/ones, the
same:
• Which windows do you want me to clean first?
The ones at the front.
• Could I have the scallops for a starter?
I’ll have the same please.
• In verb group substitution, the verb do is used to substitute for another verb
group:
• Did anyone lock the door?
Someone must have done.
• In clause substitution, so substitutes for a positive clause and not for a negative
clause:
• Is it going to rain?
The forecast says so.
• Is the party over yet?
I hope not.
• Josh said he’ll finish the report before he goes.
Well if not, the boss’ll be furious.
• Ellipsis is the omission of part of a clause or clause complex when that part
can be understood by the listener or reader. It functioned to achieve
grammatical reduction, particularly in situations where speakers are rapidly
processing their own speech and responding to the speech of others. Like
reference items, ellipsis may be either textual or situational. Textual ellipsis
(also called ‘endophoric ellipsis’) refers specifically to elements which can be
recovered from the text rather than the situation; it is therefore cohesive.
• Situational ellipsis (also called ‘exophoric ellipsis’), on the other hand, is non-
cohesive. Compare the following, where < > indicates the ellipsed
word/phrase:
• < > Want a lift to the station?
• I’m sure they told me he was from Japan. That’s why I was so surprised when I
realised he wasn’t < >.
• In the first example, the subject and finite (Do you) is omitted, but it can be
supplied from the situation and is thus an example of situational ellipsis, and
not cohesive. In the second example, however, the prepositional group from
Japan can be retrieved from the previous clause; the ellipsis establishes a
cohesive link between the two clauses and is therefore an example of textual
ellipsis.
• Both textual and situational ellipsis may take place at different points in the
clause, initial, medial or final. Here are some examples of textual ellipsis
where different grammatical elements have been omitted:
• Ellipsis of subject: <many of these genes>
• Many of these genes have been identified and < > are known to encode
normal constituents of cells and endocrine systems.
• Ellipsis of subject and finite: <the patient will>
• in fact the patient will very often tell you what is wrong with them […] I don’t
mean < > give you a diagnosis but they will tell you what the matter is if you
give them time.
• Ellipsis of everything after the finite:
• <got two plants in it>.
• This got two plants in it! It has < >.
• Ellipsis of whole clause: <he’s had something to eat>
• he’s had something to eat then oh yes < > definitely < >
 Discourse Analysis
Application
Lecture 5

Spoken and written discourse

 Ellipsis vs substitution

1. Can you study?

2. Yes I can >>>> Yes I can study
3. Did you study
4. Yes I did >>>> Yes I studied
5. Have you studied
6. Yes I have >>>> Yes I have studied
 Text 1
• Let’s be honest, success is hard, hhh not complicated, just
hard. You have to work hard, dedicate and commit yourself
for your goals and one more thing you have to- have to be
determined. In life er there are many things that will distract
you but you need to challenge them. Success is a way of
thinking you take on to achieve your goals. And I’ll be
honest, it is not easy to accomplish success. It’s human
nature to- to look for quick fixes. The reason for this is
because we naturally choose the easiest possible solutions
or shortcuts. If we really really want to learn how to- how to
be successful, though, we have to go against our nature and
challenge the three mental barriers that knock us off course:
chasing “magic bullets” and fearing failure and letting guilt
control you.
 Text 2
• Success is achieved by hard work, dedication,
commitment, and determination. However, distractions
need to be challenged to discipline oneself to
accomplish goals. Most importantly, success is a
mindset one adopts to be successful. Success is not
achieved easily. That is, human beings naturally
gravitate towards the path of least resistance. Hence,
resistance to temptation determines one’s success and
achievements. In doing so, three mental barriers need to
be challenged, i.e., chasing “magic bullets,” fearing
failure, and feeling guilty. By demolishing these mental
barriers, success can be achieved.
• Let’s be honest, success is hard, hhh • Success is achieved by hard work,
not complicated, just hard. You have dedication, commitment, and
to work hard, dedicate and commit determination. However, distractions
yourself for your goals and one more need to be challenged to discipline
thing you have to- have to be oneself to accomplish goals. Most
determined. In life er there are many importantly, success is a mindset one
things that will distract you but you adopts to be successful. Success is
need to challenge them. Success is a not achieved easily. That is, human
way of thinking you take on to beings naturally gravitate towards the
achieve your goals. And I’ll be path of least resistance. Hence,
honest, it is not easy to accomplish resistance to temptation
success. It’s human nature to- to look determines one’s success and
for quick fixes. The reason for this is achievements. In doing so, three
because we naturally choose the mental barriers need to be challenged,
easiest possible solutions or shortcuts. i.e., chasing “magic bullets,” fearing
If we really really want to learn how failure, and feeling guilty. By
to- how to be successful, though, we demolishing these mental barriers,
have to go against our nature and success can be achieved.
challenge the three mental barriers
that knock us off course: chasing
“magic bullets” and fearing failure
and letting guilt control you.
• Let’s be honest, success is hard, hhh • Success is achieved by hard work,
not complicated, just hard. You have dedication, commitment, and
to work hard, dedicate and commit determination. However, distractions
yourself for your goals and one more need to be challenged to discipline
thing you have to- have to be oneself to accomplish goals. Most
determined. In life er there are many importantly, success is a mindset one
things that will distract you but you adopts to be successful. Success is
need to challenge them. Success is a not achieved easily. That is, human
way of thinking you take on to beings naturally gravitate towards the
achieve your goals. And I’ll be path of least resistance. Hence,
honest, it is not easy to accomplish resistance to temptation
success. It’s human nature to- to look determines one’s success and
for quick fixes. The reason for this is achievements. In doing so, three
because we naturally choose the mental barriers need to be challenged,
easiest possible solutions or shortcuts. i.e., chasing “magic bullets,” fearing
If we really really want to learn how failure, and feeling guilty. By
to- how to be successful, though, we demolishing these mental barriers,
have to go against our nature and success can be achieved.
challenge the three mental barriers
that knock us off course: chasing Spoken vs. Written
“magic bullets” and fearing failure
and letting guilt control you.
• Let’s be honest, success is hard, hhh
not complicated, just hard. You have • Grammatical Intricacy: clauses are
to work hard, dedicate and commit long and spread out e.g.,
yourself for your goals and one more 1. You have to work hard and dedicate
thing you have to- have to be and commit yourself for your goals
determined. In life er there are many and one more thing you have to- to be
things that will distract you but you determined
need to challenge them. Success is a 2. The reason for this is because we
way of thinking you take on to naturally choose the easiest possible
achieve your goals. And I’ll be solutions or shortcuts.
honest, it is not easy to accomplish 3. If we really really want to learn how
success. It’s human nature to- to look to- how to be successful, though, we
for quick fixes. The reason for this is have to go against our nature and
because we naturally choose the challenge the three mental barriers
easiest possible solutions or shortcuts. that knock us off course: chasing
If we really really want to learn how “magic bullets” and fearing failure
to- how to be successful, though, we and letting guilt control you.
have to go against our nature and
challenge the three mental barriers
that knock us off course: chasing
“magic bullets” and fearing failure
and letting guilt control you.
• Let’s be honest, success is hard, hhh
not complicated, just hard. You have • Lexical density: e.g.,
to work hard, dedicate and commit 1. Let’s be honest success is hard, hhh
yourself for your goals and one more not complicated, just hard.
thing you have to- have to be (5 content words vs. 6 function
determined. In life er there are many words)
things that will distract you but you 2. If we really really want to learn how
need to challenge them. Success is a to- how to be successful, though, we
way of thinking you take on to have to go against our nature and
achieve your goals. And I’ll be challenge the three mental barriers
honest, it is not easy to accomplish that knock us off course: chasing
success. It’s human nature to- to look “magic bullets” and fearing failure
for quick fixes. The reason for this is and letting guilt control you.
because we naturally choose the (21 content words vs. 22 function
easiest possible solutions or shortcuts. words)
If we really really want to learn how
to- how to be successful, though, we
have to go against our nature and
challenge the three mental barriers
that knock us off course: chasing
“magic bullets” and fearing failure
and letting guilt control you.
• Let’s be honest, success is hard, hhh
not complicated, just hard. You have • Nominalization: e.g.,
to work hard, dedicate and commit 1. Success
yourself for your goals and one more 2. Fixes
thing you have to- have to be 3. Solutions
determined. In life er there are many
4. Failure
things that will distract you but you
need to challenge them. Success is a 5. Guilt
way of thinking you take on to
achieve your goals. And I’ll be
honest, it is not easy to accomplish
success. It’s human nature to- to look
for quick fixes. The reason for this is
because we naturally choose the
easiest possible solutions or shortcuts.
If we really really want to learn how
to- how to be successful, though, we
have to go against our nature and
challenge the three mental barriers
that knock us off course: chasing
“magic bullets” and fearing failure
and letting guilt control you.
• Let’s be honest, success is hard, hhh
not complicated, just hard. You have • Repetition, Hesitation, and
to work hard, dedicate and commit Redundancy: e.g.
yourself for your goals and one more 1. Let’s be honest success is hard, hhh
thing you have to- have to be not complicated, just hard.
determined. In life er there are many 2. In life er there are many things that
things that will distract you but you will distract you but you need to
need to challenge them. Success is a challenge them.
way of thinking you take on to 3. If we really really want to learn how
achieve your goals. And I’ll be to- how to be successful,
honest, it is not easy to accomplish
4. The reason for this is because we
success. It’s human nature to- to look
naturally choose the easiest possible
for quick fixes. The reason for this is
solutions or shortcuts.
because we naturally choose the
easiest possible solutions or shortcuts.
If we really really want to learn how Only 1 example of passive voice is used:
to- how to be successful, though, we to be determined
have to go against our nature and Few cohesive devices being used. (and,
challenge the three mental barriers because)
that knock us off course: chasing
“magic bullets” and fearing failure
and letting guilt control you.
• Let’s be honest, success is hard, hhh
not complicated, just hard. You have • Involvement:
to work hard, dedicate and commit • Emphatic particles e.g.,
yourself for your goals and one more 1. Let’s be honest success is hard, hhh
thing you have to- have to be not complicated, just hard.
determined. In life er there are many 2. If we really really want to learn how
things that will distract you but you to- how to be successful,
need to challenge them. Success is a
way of thinking you take on to
achieve your goals. And I’ll be • monitoring of information flow
honest, it is not easy to accomplish 1. Let’s be honest success is hard, hhh
success. It’s human nature to- to look not complicated, just hard
for quick fixes. The reason for this is 2. and one more think you have to- have
because we naturally choose the to be determined.
easiest possible solutions or shortcuts.
If we really really want to learn how
No passive voice is used and no
to- how to be successful, though, we
nominalization. No cohesive devices
have to go against our nature and
being used.
challenge the three mental barriers
that knock us off course: chasing
“magic bullets” and fearing failure
and letting guilt control you.
• Success is achieved by hard work,
dedication, commitment, and • Grammatical Intricacy: clauses are
determination. However, distractions more complicated, e.g.,
need to be challenged to discipline 1. However, distractions need to be
oneself to accomplish goals. Most challenged to discipline oneself to
importantly, success is a mindset one accomplish goal
adopts to be successful. Success is 2. That is, human beings naturally
not achieved easily. That is, human gravitate towards the path of least
beings naturally gravitate towards the resistance.
path of least resistance. Hence, 3. Hence, one’s resistance to temptation
resistance to temptation has a huge impact on how successful
determines one’s success and one is at achieving his goals.
achievements. In doing so, three
mental barriers need to be challenged,
i.e., chasing “magic bullets,” fearing
failure, and feeling guilty. By
demolishing these mental barriers,
success can be achieved.
• Success is achieved by hard work,
dedication, commitment, and • Lexical density: e.g.,
determination. However, distractions 1. Success is achieved by hard work,
need to be challenged to discipline dedication, commitment, and
oneself to accomplish goals. Most determination.
importantly, success is a mindset one (7 content words vs. 3 function words)
adopts to be successful. Success is 2. resistance to temptation
not achieved easily. That is, human determines one’s success and
beings naturally gravitate towards the achievements.
path of least resistance. Hence,
(5 content words vs. 3 function words)
resistance to temptation
determines one’s success and
achievements. In doing so, three
mental barriers need to be challenged,
i.e., chasing “magic bullets,” fearing
failure, and feeling guilty. By
demolishing these mental barriers,
success can be achieved.
• Success is achieved by hard work,
dedication, commitment, and • Repetition, Hesitation, and
determination. However, distractions Redundancy: e.g.
need to be challenged to discipline none
oneself to accomplish goals. Most
importantly, success is a mindset one
adopts to be successful. Success is
not achieved easily. That is, human
beings naturally gravitate towards the
path of least resistance. Hence,
resistance to temptation
determines one’s success and
achievements. In doing so, three
mental barriers need to be challenged,
i.e., chasing “magic bullets,” fearing
failure, and feeling guilty. By
demolishing these mental barriers,
success can be achieved.
• Success is achieved by hard work,
dedication, commitment, and • Nominalization: e.g.,
determination. However, distractions 1. Success
need to be challenged to discipline 2. Work
oneself to accomplish goals. Most 3. Dedication
importantly, success is a mindset one
4. Commitment
adopts to be successful. Success is
not achieved easily. That is, human 5. Determination
beings naturally gravitate towards the 6. resistance
path of least resistance. Hence, 7. Temptation
resistance to temptation 8. Achievements
determines one’s success and
9. Failure
achievements. In doing so, three
mental barriers need to be challenged,
i.e., chasing “magic bullets,” fearing
failure, and feeling guilty. By
demolishing these mental barriers,
success can be achieved.
• Success is achieved by hard work,
dedication, commitment, and • Detachment/ Involvement : e.g.
determination. However, distractions • Nominalization
need to be challenged to discipline
oneself to accomplish goals. Most • Passive
importantly, success is a mindset one
1. Success is achieved by hard work,
adopts to be successful. Success is
dedication, commitment, and
not achieved easily. That is, human
determination.
beings naturally gravitate towards the
path of least resistance. Hence, 2. distractions need to be challenged
resistance to temptation 3. Success is not achieved easily.
determines one’s success and 4. three mental barriers need to be
achievements. In doing so, three challenged
mental barriers need to be challenged, 5. success can be achieved
i.e., chasing “magic bullets,” fearing
failure, and feeling guilty. By
demolishing these mental barriers,
success can be achieved.
• Success is achieved by hard work,
dedication, commitment, and • Cohesive devices: e.g.
determination. However, distractions • Reference : These
need to be challenged to discipline • Conjunctions However
oneself to accomplish goals. Most • Ellipsis
importantly, success is a mindset one
• Substitution doing so
adopts to be successful. Success is
not achieved easily. That is, human • Lexical cohesion
beings naturally gravitate towards the 1. . Success … success
path of least resistance. Hence, 1. Commitment … temptation
resistance to temptation
determines one’s success and
achievements. In doing so, three
mental barriers need to be challenged,
i.e., chasing “magic bullets,” fearing
failure, and feeling guilty. By
demolishing these mental barriers,
success can be achieved.
Discourse Analysis
Lecture 1
Cohesion Exercises
 Anaphoric vs. Cataphoric Reference
• John is leaving, what do you think of this?
• John noticed that the door was open, when he arrived.
anaphoric relation (looking backwards)

• What do you think of this? John is leaving

• When he arrived, John noticed that the door was open
cataphoric relation (looking forward)

Match and determine the type of reference:

a) As she entered the building 1) Jim fell over
b) When he was running upstairs 2) the woman saw a huge crowd
 Exercise
Identify whether the reference words are anaphoric or
cataphoric:
• For many years, East German people devised 1creative
ways to sneak out of East Germany. Some people dug
tunnels; 2 others tried crashing through checkpoints with cars,
trucks, or busses; 3still others flew out in small airplanes or
balloons. One woman tied herself to the bottom of a car and
passed through a checkpoint unnoticed. And one family sewed
fake Russian uniforms for 4themselves; then, they pretended
to be Russian soldiers and simply drove through a checkpoint.
Some desperate people tried scrambling over a barbed-wire
fence or a wall. 5These people were often shot.
 Answer
1/ Creative Ways is Cataphoric, referring downward to digging
tunnels, crashing through checkpoints, flying out, tying oneself to the
bottom of a car, sewing fake Russian uniforms, and scrambling over a
fence or wall.
2/ Others is Anaphoric, referring upward to people.

3/ Still Others is Anaphoric, referring upward to people.

4/ Themselves is Anaphoric, referring upward to family.

5/ These people is Anaphoric, referring upward to desperate people.

 Conjunction
Examples:

• He ate the cornflakes. Then , he ate the packet

• Finally, I would like to thank all of you for coming.
• No students arrived. So, he went home.
• He bought a hat and some sun cream. But he still got sunburnt.
 Exercise
Write suitable conjunctions
1. Justice implies a sense of equality for all, …….it implies an
acceptance of a standard that applies to the whole community.
2. The weather was very cold ……… John wore gloves.
3. Paul was sad ……… his cricket team had lost the match.
4. We waited for Sue ……… she didn’t turn up.
 Substitution
• Nominal substitution

(1) My axe is too blunt. I must get a sharper one

(2) When I was a kid, I had a kitten but then it lost. I wish I had
the same now.

• Verbal substitution

(1) You think Joan already knows? - I think everybody does

(2) Why didn’t you write the essay, Jono? All of your friends
did .
 Substitution
• Clausal substitution

(1)... if you've seen them so often. of course you get to know

them very well'. 'I believe so,' Alice replied thoughtfully.

(2) Do you think that the assignment will due this week? I
hope not! I haven’t written anything!

(3) Everyone thinks he’s guilty. If so, no doubt he’ll resign.

 ELLIPSIS
Nominal ellipsis –the omitted noun is bracketed(1)
1) They do not like it, yet (they) said nothing.
2) I don’t like the yellow T-shirt. I’ll take the blue (T-shirt).

Verbal ellipsis
1) Have you been swimming?- Yes, I have (been swimming).
2) Who was playing the piano? – John was (playing the piano).
3) I hear Smith is having an operation? – He has (had an operation).

Clausal ellipsis
1) Would you like anything else? (I’d like) A cup of tea, please.
2) The son was missing but the father didn’t know (that the son was
missing)
 Reference, Substitution, Ellipsis
a. This is a fine hall you have here. I’m proud to be lecturing
in it.

b. This is a fine hall you have here. I've never lectured in a

finer one.

c. This is a fine hall you have here. I've never lectured in a

finer.
 Reference, Substitution, Ellipsis
a. This is a fine hall you have here. I’m proud to be lecturing
in it. (reference)

b. This is a fine hall you have here. I've never lectured in a

finer one. (substitution)

c. This is a fine hall you have here. I've never lectured in a

finer. (ellipsis)
 Lexical cohesion
4. In Hyponymy, one thing is a subtype of another. For example:

• Flowers have always been interesting to me. Daffodils are my

favorite.

• One of the colours I really like is purple.

• Daffodils are a subtype of flower; daffodil is a hyponym of

flower:
 Lexical cohesion
5. Another important relationship is the PART-WHOLE one
(meronymy):

The human body is an intricate mechanism. The arm, for

example, is used for different kinds of leverage.

His left hand had four fingers rather than five.

 Exercise
Underline the cohesive devices and mention their types and
subtypes:

• My father once bought a Lincoln convertible. He did it by

saving every penny he could ... That car would be worth a
fortune nowadays. However, he sold it to help pay for my
college education. Sometimes I think I’d rather have the
convertible.

14
 Answer
Underline the cohesive devices and mention their types and
subtypes:

• My father once bought a Lincoln convertible. He did it by

saving every penny he could ... That car would be worth a
fortune nowadays. However, he sold it to help pay for my
college education. Sometimes I think I’d rather have the
convertible.

15
Chapter 1

Thinking about the Text

In this chapter we look at the relations between words that make

up discourse, specifcally the links between words that join them
into what linguists call a text. We then examine some features of
spoken conversations, a genre of text that is of particular interest
to discourse analysts because of its high frequency in daily life and
its special function as a means of creating and maintaining social
relations.

Look at the letters abc in that order. You’ll probably think of them
as the frst three letters of the alphabet. One of the frst songs many
children learn is the alphabet song, so people will often think of the
alphabet when they see abc.
Now look at the letters in the order cab. You’ll now recognise
them as a word. As a regular user of English, you know a surprising
number of words. At the time you started school you probably knew
a few thousand words. By the time you became an adult you knew
tens of thousands.
You might not use tens of thousands of words regularly, but you
know them when you see them. For example, you probably talk
about going up a staircase or climbing the stairs quite regularly, but I
doubt you often say that you ascend the stairs, even if you recognise
that word. That’s the difference between your productive language
skills (speaking and writing) and your receptive language skills
(listening and reading). Most of the time when we produce lan-
guage, we rely on comfortable words that we use often. When we
receive language, we’re able to understand many more words, even
if we rarely use them ourselves.
You might not be an English teacher or a linguist, but you cer-
tainly have a lot of tools in your head for determining what is accept-
able in English and what is not. Returning to our three letters, what if

1
2 A Beginner’s Guide to Discourse Analysis

they were in the order bac? A doctor or nurse might think of bac as
the initialism for “blood alcohol content”, but that should be written
BAC, as initialisms are usually written in capital letters. Although
you realise that bac is not a word on its own, you will quickly see
that it could be part of a word such as back, tobacco or even antibac-
terial if you add more letters.
Now consider the letters in the order acb. That doesn’t look like a
possible pattern for letters in an English word, even if we add more
letters. Your spelling tool, the accumulation of knowledge you have
that tells you what works and what doesn’t work in English, prob-
ably can’t do anything with the combination acb. As a regular user
of English, you’re pretty good at recognising which patterns of let-
ters are allowed and which patterns are not.
Note that we are looking at written words here, but if we were
talking to each other in person about this, you could think the same
way about the possible sound combinations of English. Some sound
patterns are possible, some are not and some only occur at times.
(This is the study of phonology, the sound system of languages.)
For example, we don’t usually start words with a t sound followed
by an s sound in English. When pronouncing a word like tsunami
that English borrowed from Japanese, some people won’t be sure
whether we should try to pronounce the t or not. Is it pronounced
tsu-na-mi or su-na-mi? There isn’t really a correct answer to this. It
depends on whether you want to pronounce the word like a Japanese
person would, or in a way that sounds English. (Most English speak-
ers don’t have a problem pronouncing a ts sound at the end of words,
of course. Think of rabbits and habits.)
When you think about how letters are organised through spelling
rules into written words or about how sounds are organised through
phonological rules into spoken words, you’re taking advantage of
one of the tools you have in your head for analysing language. When
you looked at acb and decided that it was not part of an English
word, you were drawing on your knowledge of spelling, your spell-
ing tool, to analyse that letter combination.
You have another tool at your disposal to help you think about how
language works. It tells you how the words that you know are organ-
ised into acceptable patterns. This tool is called grammar. Grammar
is an odd word. Some people grow up learning English, they speak
it regularly, they hear it on TV and radio, they write emails and text
 Thinking about the Text 3

messages and they read English books, magazines and newspapers.

They use grammar to recognise acceptable patterns of words con-
stantly, yet they regularly say things like “I’m really bad at English
grammar.” What they mean, I think, is that they can’t explain gram-
mar: they don’t remember the difference between active and passive
voice, they can’t recall what a gerund is and so on. Of course they
are good at using grammar. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be able to
say or write anything that made sense.
When you read or hear “He ate the apple”, you know that it is
grammatically acceptable. It makes sense. You’re relying on some of
the rules of grammar that you know to analyse those four words and
decide that together they make up an acceptable English sentence.
If you see “The apple he ate”, you probably get a feeling that those
words are possible in that order but more words are needed to make
it complete. “The apple he ate was delicious” is one way you could
turn those four words into a complete sentence. What about “Ate
apple the he?” I don’t think you can do anything to make that into a
sentence. Those are four words that are not organised properly. Just
as you knew that cab was a possible pattern of letters but acb wasn’t,
your knowledge of grammar tells you which patterns of words are
possible and which are not.
This chapter is not about spelling, phonology or grammar. It is
about words and sentences, either written or spoken, that are im-
portant linguistic units to consider when we discuss the organisation
of language. Sounds are organised into words through phonological
rules, and words are organised into sentences through grammatical
rules. For many people, their education about the various linguistic
units stopped at that point, but linguists often talk about the next
level of linguistic unit, one bigger than words and sentences. They
call this next level a text.
People use text to mean a variety of things: a text message, a text-
book, and words on a computer screen could each be called text.
That’s fne. People use words to mean different things depending on
what they are talking about. Linguists know those defnitions of text,
but they also use the word text as a convenient way of referring to
all kinds of different types of language. Linguists use text to mean
“a set of coherent words that present a message”. All of the words
in the text work together, that is, they are coherent, to create a mes-
sage bigger than any one word on its own. This means that things
4 A Beginner’s Guide to Discourse Analysis

we might normally think of as texts, such as textbooks, novels and

Shakespeare’s plays, are texts, but so are things that might not be
immediately obvious, such as recipes, bus schedules, songs, news-
paper articles and instruction manuals.
Sometimes people seem shy about using the word text to refer
to these everyday things. They recall their school teachers call-
ing great works of literature texts, so it may seem that calling
a recipe for chicken soup a text is a bit silly. It’s common to
feel a bit odd using words in new ways. I’ve heard people say
they don’t like ordering coffee from Starbucks because they are
expected to say short and tall instead of small and large. (Or
is a tall a medium and a grande a large?) We’re comfortable
using words that we know because we know precisely how to
use them. You might feel like you were being pompous if you
were to use the phrase acute myocardial infarction instead of the
common one heart attack.
Linguists are not calling things texts to be pompous. They use
the word because it is a convenient way to refer to things that have
some elements in common, although they may be quite different in
other ways.

Cohesion

Returning to the chicken soup I mentioned earlier, how can long,

complex novels have something in common with a short, simple
recipe for a hot lunch? The frst thing to consider when looking
at what defnes a text is to think about how the words in the text
are connected to each other in a way that makes it clear that they
belong together. Halliday and Hasan (1976), in their infuential book
Cohesion in English, explain that cohesion is the collective name for
all of those links that connect the different parts of a text. Look at the
following sentence:

1.1
We showed it to him yesterday, but he forgot.

You certainly understand all of the words in that sentence. You know
that it means roughly “More than one person showed something to
 Thinking about the Text 5

one person yesterday, but the person who was showed forgot.” More
specifcally, you know that him, for example, refers to a single male
being, probably a human, but maybe an animal or alien. You know
how him works, but you don’t actually know who him is here, do
you? Him is a form of reference, a word that has some meaning
on its own, but has a more specifc meaning if we refer somewhere
else in the text. Him refers to someone, but we don’t know who he
is. This is the difference between a word that you understand and a
word that is interpretable. A word that is interpretable is a word that
refers specifcally to someone or something. Him in 1.1 is uninter-
pretable because you know the word’s usual function, but you don’t
know what it really means. If we add another sentence, you’ll see
that you know more about him.

1.2
Vikram said he hadn’t seen the book before. We showed it to him
yesterday, but he forgot.

Now you can see what him means very specifcally. Him refers
to Vikram. In 1.2 him is interpretable, as we know that it refers to
Vikram and only Vikram. It doesn’t refer to any other person in this
text, although of course in other texts, him would refer to someone
else. Halliday and Hasan explained this property of him and similar
words by saying that these words presuppose something else. When
we see these words, we know how they work, but we also know that
we need more information to interpret them. In 1.2 you had to look
back in the text to interpret him. This is called anaphoric reference.
This process of looking back applies to either looking back through
the printed words of a written text or to looking back in time through
the words of a spoken text.
Those things that are being referred back to can be called either
referents or antecedents. In the previous example the reference him
refers to the referent Vikram. The words reference and referent com-
plement each other nicely in form, but sometimes when we talk, they
can be confusing as reference sounds like the plural form referents.
I’ve often been asked, “Did you say reference or referents?”, so I
tend to say antecedent.
It is also possible to refer forward to words that will come later in
the text. This is called cataphoric reference. When someone says,
6 A Beginner’s Guide to Discourse Analysis

“Listen to this”, the word this is uninterpretable. You don’t know

what it means until the person continues to talk. Using cataphoric
reference is a way of engaging someone in the text. Saying “Listen
to this”, might signal that the speaker is about to tell a new joke,
explain something important or deliver some exciting news.
Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise starts with the sentence “They
shoot the white girl frst”, which is an excellent example of how
cataphoric reference can draw readers into a story. Those six words
create several questions in readers’ minds. Who are they? Who is the
white girl? (The is also a reference, as it points at a specifc person
here, but we don’t know who she is yet.) Why was she shot?
Anaphoric reference and cataphoric reference are known together
as endophoric reference, which means that they refer to words that
are found in the text. The other words in the text can be called the co-
text, so an endophoric reference refers to something in the co-text,
the words that the reference appears with.
There are also references that refer to things outside of the text.
When someone says, “Look at that” and points, we don’t know what
that is from the person’s words, we will only know from looking at
whatever is being pointed at. This is known as exophoric reference.
An exophoric reference refers to the context, which is the physical
space or situation in which the text is produced. (Think of the en
in endophoric as meaning in the text and the exo in exophoric as
meaning exit or out of the text. That’s how I remember them.) When
you’re talking to someone in person, it is often convenient to use
exophoric references to the context in which you’re talking because
you can both see the same things (“Do you want this?”) and hear
the same things (“What was that noise?”). When an author writes a
book, he or she doesn’t usually know where someone will read it, so
it is diffcult to use exophoric references, but there can still be nu-
merous endophoric references to the co-text because the reader can
look back and forth through the words.
Look back at 1.2. (Vikram said he hadn’t seen the book before.
We showed it to him yesterday, but he forgot.) You should now be
able to see that it in the second sentence is interpretable because
it is an anaphoric reference, pointing back to the book. We , on the
other hand, is uninterpretable. We don’t know who we is here. It’s
more than one person, but we don’t know which people. (Note that
we is also interesting as it can be inclusive or exclusive. Inclusive we
 Thinking about the Text 7

refers to both the speaker and the listener, such as when I say “We
should have lunch together sometime”, to you. Exclusive we refers
to the speaker and other people, but doesn’t include the listener, as
in “We’d appreciate it if you’d be quiet for a minute.”)
Cohesion, as Halliday and Hasan defne it, is like glue that holds
the text together. Glue is adhesive, meaning it sticks to other things,
but glue is also cohesive, meaning it sticks to itself. In the same
way, different parts of a text have to be sticky or cohesive. As you
read or listen to a text, you encounter numerous words like him,
they and it, which refer anaphorically or cataphorically to other
parts of the text. Since you’re reading or listening to the whole text,
you can interpret these words and see how they help different sec-
tions of the text stick together. You can see that the whole text, des-
pite being made up of many words and sentences, belongs together
as a linguistic unit.
Someone who comes into the room part-way through a speech or
who starts reading a book in the middle will fnd many of the refer-
ences uninterpretable. When you pass people on the street, you’ll
often hear them say things like, “She said so but he didn’t think we
should use the green one.” There are several words in that sentence
that presuppose that the information being referred to can be found
elsewhere in the text, which shows that we can’t understand lan-
guage by looking at individual words or sentences. We have to ana-
lyse the text as a distinct linguistic unit in order to make sense of it.
In the following section we will look in more detail at the fve major
categories of cohesion: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction
and lexical cohesion.

Reference – personal reference

Halliday and Hasan (1976) list three types of reference: personal,

demonstrative and comparative. Personal references are those
which, not surprisingly, are often used to refer to people.

Subjects – I, you, he, she, it, we, they

Objects – me, you, him, her, it, us, them
Possessive modifers – my, your, his, her, its, our, their
Possessive heads – mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs
8 A Beginner’s Guide to Discourse Analysis

Of course these don’t all have to refer to people. They could refer
to chairs, them could refer to snakes and it could refer to almost
anything except people, but it is easy to remember these by recall-
ing that they often refer to people. (To be fair, we do sometimes
call people it. When you answer the phone, you might ask, “Who
is it?” and not mean to give offense. On the other hand, asking
someone, “Do you know it?” while pointing at another person
would be quite rude.)
It is important to mention that these words are sometimes called
pronouns, as your school teacher might have called them. You may
wonder if what you learnt in school was wrong, but the answer is
“No.” We can talk about things using different words, depending on
what we want to explain. Sometimes it is correct to call me a father,
sometimes a husband, sometimes a man and so on. Similarly, I, you
and the other words are pronouns when we want to describe them
in some situations, but when we want to call them by what they do,
personal reference is the best term because they commonly refer
to people.
Personal references have all of those properties that were
explained earlier. (When I talked about him earlier, I was talking
about personal reference, although I did not use the term.) They pre-
suppose that their antecedents can be found outside the text (exo-
phoric reference) or inside the text (endophoric reference). If the
antecedent is inside the text, it will be found either earlier in the text
(anaphoric reference) or later in the text (cataphoric reference). In
all of these cases, the personal reference is interpretable as meaning
something specifc.
Generalised exophoric references are a special type of reference
that are used to refer to everyone or to unspecifed people. These
commonly appear in aphorisms like “One never knows what might
happen”, where the reference one refers to people in general, not to
any specifc person in the text. They is also often used this way, such
as in “They say it’s going to rain.” Who says so? Meteorologists on
television? The newspaper’s weather reporters? No specifc person
or people are referred to, but we are not really concerned with who
specifcally, so we just use they to point generally at someone who
might likely have said it.
Extended text references are those where it is used to refer to
a larger section of text than just a word or phrase. Compare the
 Thinking about the Text 9

meaning of it in the following two examples, a modifed version of

an example found in Halliday and Hasan (1976).

1.3
1. He lost his phone. It was expensive.
2. He lost his phone. It was pretty careless.

In 1.3.1 it refers to “his phone”, a noun phrase. This is personal

reference. Note that it wouldn’t matter if the frst sentence of
1.3.1 was “He lost his expensive black Samsung phone.” In this
case it would refer to more words of the co-text, “his expensive
black Samsung phone”, but this is still just a noun phrase. In
1.3.2, however, it refers to more than just the phone. Here, it
refers to the act of “losing his phone”. This is extended text refer-
ence, as it refers to both the verb “lost” and the noun phrase “his
phone” together.

Exercise – personal reference

Identify personal references in the following sentences. Decide

whether the references are anaphoric (pointing back in the text),
cataphoric (pointing forward in the text) or exophoric (pointing out-
side of the text). Identify what the references presuppose.

1. When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. – Samuel

Johnson
2. Just do it. – Nike
3. Before she went home, Sally had to say goodbye to Ellen
Ferguson. – Kit Reed

Exercise – personal reference (commentary)

In sentence 1 the anaphoric personal reference he presupposes a man.
More accurately we should say that he presupposes “a man who is
tired of London”, as he doesn’t refer to men generally; only those
who are “tired of London” must also be “tired of life.” Anaphoric
reference is much more common than cataphoric reference in most
texts.
10 A Beginner’s Guide to Discourse Analysis

In sentence 2 it is an exophoric reference. It doesn’t refer to

anything in the text. Readers are free to decide for themselves
what they should “Just do.” Exophoric references are common in
advertisements: “Because I’m worth it” (L’Oreal), “I’m lovin’ it”
(McDonald’s) and “Have it your way” (Burger King). In all of these
cases it is left for the reader to decide what it refers to.
In sentence 3 she is a cataphoric reference that presupposes Sally,
or more specifcally “the Sally that had to say goodbye to Ellen
Ferguson”. It’s always good to remember that references are very
specifc. No other Sally is referred to here, only this specifc one.

Reference – demonstrative reference

this, that, these, those, here, there, now, then, the

Demonstrative references usually refer to things in terms of their

proximity to the text’s producer. (For convenience, we can refer to a
speaker or writer of a text as the producer, and the listener or reader
as the receiver.) If I say, “Look at this”, you know to look somewhere
near me. If I say, “Look at that”, you know to look somewhere other
than near me. It’s helpful to remember that demonstrative references
often point at (or demonstrate) where something is. These references
are selective, as they force the user to choose to identify something
as being near or far. Using this is more precise than that because this
means “near me”, but that means “anywhere except near me.”
It is important not to confuse the demonstrative that with the rela-
tive pronoun that. The relative pronoun that in a sentence like “The
dog that we saw was really old” is not pointing at anything. In this
sentence that joins “We saw a dog” and “The dog was old” into one
sentence. Remember that the demonstrative that points while the
relative that joins.
This and that can also be used as either heads or modifers. Heads
are the main or only words of phrases. In “Look at this” the word
this is a head. Modifers are words that accompany other words, giv-
ing more information about heads. In “Look at this pen” the word
this is a modifer as it tells us more about which pen to look at. (Pe n
is a head in “Look at this pen.”)
 Thinking about the Text 11

The word the is also a demonstrative as it is used to point at things.

However, the is non-selective, as it doesn’t tell us about how prox-
imal (close) or distal (far) the referent is. Compare this pen, which
points to a pen that is close to me, that pen, which points to a pen
that is not close to me and the pen, which points to a specifc pen, but
without explaining whether or not it is close.
People learning English are sometimes confused by the, because
some languages only have selective demonstrative references like
this and that, so speakers of those languages are used to always
selecting references based on distance. They’re not sure about the,
which doesn’t let you choose how far away something is. On the
other hand, English is not as precisely selective as some other lan-
guages, which have three selective demonstrative references. In
Japanese and Korean, to name two examples, speakers must select
between “near me”, “near you” and “not near me or near you”.
When I learnt to speak some Japanese, I often said things like
“Look at that (near you) speeding car” when I meant “Look at
that (not near you) speeding car.” I think I made a lot of Japanese
people nervous.
This and that are not only used to point at physical items like pens
and cars. These demonstratives can also be used to point at identif-
able sections of text. If I say, “Listen to this”, the demonstrative this
refers cataphorically forward in time to whatever I’m about to say.
After I fnish talking, my wife might say, “I’ve already heard that”,
where that refers anaphorically back in time to whatever I just said.
In the following sentence from Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake,
think about how readers would interpret the word that: “She can
hear him, he needs to believe that, but she’s giving him the silent
treatment.” Readers know that presupposes “she can hear him”, so
Atwood doesn’t have to write it again.
There are other demonstrative references. Here and there are
usually used to point at physical locations. If I say, “Look over
here”, you must be able to see me to interpret where here is. This
is an exophoric reference as the word here refers to the context
in which I say it. If I send you an email saying “Let’s meet there
at noon”, you will know I’m using there to point at a place, but
you’ll need more information to interpret what there refers to. If
your previous email to me suggested meeting at a restaurant called
12 A Beginner’s Guide to Discourse Analysis

The Fat Duck for lunch, you’ll know that there refers to “at The Fat
Duck” and nowhere else.

Note – demonstrative there and existential there

Don’t confuse demonstrative reference there with the existential

there, which appears in sentences like “There’s a funny smell in this
room.” In this sentence there is used as a subject; it is not pointing
at anything. “There’s a funny smell in this room” means something
like “A funny smell in this room exists.” Similar uses of existential
there appear in sentences like “There are three reasons…” (“Three
reasons exist…”) and “There was a game starting at 4 pm.” (“A
game starting at 4 pm existed.”)
You can often distinguish the existential there from demonstrative
reference there in spoken texts by the way they are said. Look at the
word there, which appears twice in the frst part of Shel Silverstein’s
poem Bear in There.

There’s a Polar Bear

In our Frigidaire–
He likes it ’cause it’s cold in there.

The frst there is existential. It has a grammatical role as a subject,

but doesn’t mean anything other than “A Polar Bear exists in our
Frigidaire.” We can signal this when we talk by saying something
like “Thur’s a Polar Bear…” The frst there’s unimportance in mean-
ing allows us to say it quickly and with little stress. The second there
is a demonstrative reference that presupposes “In our Frigidaire”.
We don’t say “…cold in thur” for the second there; instead we say
it clearly.

Now and then are also demonstrative references, but they refer to
times. It’s diffcult to use now to mean anything other than “at the
present time”, but then can mean whatever time is specifed else-
where in the co-text or context. When my daughter says, “Pick me
up after school”, and I say, “See you then”, I mean “See you when I
pick you up after school.”
 Thinking about the Text 13

Reference – comparative reference

The fnal category is comparative reference, in which one section

of the text is interpreted by comparing it to some other section of the
co-text. In the sentence “This tree is taller than that tree”, we don’t
know the exact height of “this tree”, but we know that on a scale of
“tallness” it is taller than “that tree”. It is tempting to say that the
trees are being compared in terms of height, but there are other ways
of measuring height (i.e. shorter), so it is best to recognise that taller
compares the trees on a scale of “tallness” only. Comparative refer-
ence is also commonly used to compare on a scale of quantifable
units, as in “This tree is taller than three metres.”
Comparative references are made through the use of the compara-
tive forms of adjectives. In the case of the adjective big, for example,
the base form is big, the comparative is bigger and the superlative is
biggest. When a text producer uses the base form, big, as in “Use a
big bowl” in a recipe book, readers are asked to interpret big in re-
lation to their general knowledge of the size of bowls, but they are
not asked to compare big to anything in the text. (Consider that it
would be diffcult to interpret “Use a big fange” if you don’t know
anything about the usual size of a fange.)
The superlative form, as in “Use your biggest bowl”, asks readers
to interpret biggest in relation to the context in which they are re-
ceiving the text. For each reader this will be different depending on
the size of the bowls they possess. As with the base form big, biggest
demands an interpretation based on something outside of the text.
The comparative form of the adjective makes reference to the co-
text for interpretation. In the following pair of sentences how do
readers make sense of bigger? “Use a big bowl to prepare the icing.
Use a bigger bowl to prepare the batter.” Readers will know that
bowls can only be bigger in relation to other bowls. In this case the
second sentence doesn’t provide any point of comparison, but the
frst sentence does, leading to the interpretation “Use a bigger bowl
(than the big bowl used to prepare the icing) to prepare the batter.”
Not all adjectives use er in the comparative form. Some com-
parative adjectives are irregular, such as good-better and bad-worse.
(Far and old are sometimes confusing as each has two comparative
forms, farther and further and older and elder.) Some polysyllabic
adjectives use the form more+base form, as in more beautiful and
14 A Beginner’s Guide to Discourse Analysis

more intelligent. The general rule is that adjectives of one syllable

use the er form and adjectives of three or more syllables use the
more+base form. There is some ambiguity as to whether we should
use er or more+base with two syllable words. Is the comparative
form of lovely either lovelier or more lovely? Notice that William
Shakespeare used more lovely while Russian painter Wassily
Kadinsky used lovelier.
Shakespeare – Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art
more lovely and more temperate.
Kandinsky – An empty canvas is a living wonder ... far lovelier
than certain pictures.
(Keen-eyed readers will also have spotted that Shakespeare used
more+base for temperate, which could be pronounced as a three-
syllable word. You see now why I called the previous rule a “gen-
eral” one.)
Take care to distinguish between more in the more+base form,
which compares a quality (Shakespeare’s more lovely compares thee
to a summer’s day in terms of “loveliness”) and more on its own,
which compares amounts. In the following example more compares
the amount of 40 pounds to the amount of money we need: “It’s
going to cost 40 pounds. We need more money.”

Note – clauses

A clause is a subject and a predicate. A predicate is a verb and

anything else that says something about the subject. So a clause is a
subject, a verb and anything remaining that is related to that subject.
In the following sentences the subjects are in bold and the predicates
are in italics.

1. Arianna plays piano beautifully.

2. My wife’s brother’s daughter has studied piano for ten years.
3. Jessica sang the song and Arianna played the piano.

It’s more precise to refer to clauses than to sentences, as one sen-

tence can contain more than one clause. In sentence 3 above, there
are two clauses, but it is only one sentence. Think of sentence as
being a description of the orthography, that is, a sentence is a group
 Thinking about the Text 15

of words starting with a capital letter and ending with terminal

punctuation: full stop, question mark or exclamation mark. Think
of clause as being a description of the grammar, that is, subject, verb
and anything else that relates to that subject.
Recognising and analysing clauses are important to thinking about
communication. In the NWA song Express Yourself, rapper Dr Dre
says, “It gets funky when you got a subject and a predicate.” I’m not
sure about the “funky” part, but it is clear that to “express yourself”
you do need both the subject and the predicate. If you’re only given
a subject, such as the doctor, you don’t know what the doctor did. If
you’re only given a predicate, such as gathered the grapes, you don’t
know who or what did it.

Substitution

Substitution, like reference, is a form of cohesive relation in that dif-

ferent words, phrases and clauses are linked, joining them into a text-
level linguistic unit. Only a few words act as substitutes. One, ones
and same are nominal substitutes, which means they are words that
can take the place of nouns. The verb do in all its forms – do, does,
did, done, has done, has been doing and so on – is the verbal substi-
tute, taking the place of verbs or parts of verbs. The clausal substi-
tutes so and not take the place of clauses and parts of clauses.
Look at the word one in the following sentence from Bram
Stoker’s Dracula. What does the word one presuppose here?
“I trust that your journey from London has been a happy one,
and that you will enjoy your stay in my beautiful land.” You’ll
see that the nominal one substitutes for the noun journey in this
example.
Substitution is similar to reference in that one word presupposes
another word or words, but reference and substitution are not the
same. Compare the meaning of it and one in the following two
examples.

1.4
1. I have a red pen. Do you want it?
2. I need my red pen. Do you want the blue one?
16 A Beginner’s Guide to Discourse Analysis

In 1.4.1, you’ve seen that it refers to “the red pen that I have”. The
personal reference it in the second sentence presupposes the exact
same thing that was already mentioned in the frst sentence. In
1.4.2, you’ve recognised that one in the second sentence substitutes
for pen, but we are now talking about a different pen than the pen
mentioned in the frst sentence. Substitution involves repudiation,
which means that we are still referring to the same general class of
things, but to a different specifc item in that class. In 1.4.2 the nom-
inal substitute one repudiates red with blue, so we are still talking
about pens, but a blue pen, not a red one. The substitute one presup-
poses the head pen, but repudiates the modifer red.
The nominal substitute one is not the same as the cardinal number
one. Cardinal numbers are used for counting: one dog, two cats,
three sheep and so on. Look at the following example sentences and
determine what ones substitutes for. “I need my red pens. You can
have the blue ones.” Here you can see that ones substitutes for pens
and repudiates red again, but we don’t know how many pens we are
talking about. The nominal substitutes are not counting things, but
are instead replacing their antecedents.
Look at the sentences in 1.5, more examples from Dracula, and
determine what do in 1.5.1 and so in 1.5.2 presuppose.

1.5
1. If this book should ever reach Mina before I do, let it bring my
goodbye.
2. Lord Godalming had slipped away for a few minutes, but now he
returned. He held up a little silver whistle as he remarked, “That
old place may be full of rats, and if so, I’ve got an antidote on call.”

In 1.5.1 do substitutes for “reach Mina” and repudiates the book

with I. (The sentence is still about the general case of “reaching
Mina”, but the specifc thing that is doing the reaching is now I, not
the book.) This do is a verbal substitute. It doesn’t have any mean-
ing on its own, unlike the lexical verb do in “Do your homework,
please” which means “perform” or “attempt to complete”. We can
only interpret the verbal substitute do in 1.5.1 by looking at its co-
text “If this book should ever reach Mina”.
In 1.5.2 the clausal substitute so presupposes “that old place may
be full of rats”. This is a clause because it contains both a subject
 Thinking about the Text 17

“that old place” and a verb “may be”. However, we can see that the
substitute so should be read as “… and if that old place is (not ‘may
be’) full of rats, I’ve got…” This is the repudiation.
The clausal substitute not functions as so, except that it changes
the polarity of the clause it substitutes for. Polarity refers to whether
the verb is positive (“It is almost time to go”) or negative (“It isn’t
time to go yet”). Polarity doesn’t have anything to do with whether
the meaning is positive or negative, so “Fraser lost his job” displays
positive polarity, even though Fraser will be unhappy about being
laid off.
In 1.6, look at how the clausal substitutes so and not allow the
someone to affrm or deny something without repeating an entire
clause.

1.6
1. Lily: Is she going to the party?
Ngozi: I think so. ( so = “she is going to the party”)
2. Lily: Is she going to the party?
Ngozi: I think not. (not = “she is not going to the party”)

It is especially noticeable here that so and not substitute for some-

thing someone else said. Substitution, like all cohesive relations in
texts, doesn’t only take place within the words that the producer
uses. We can also make links between things we say or write and
things others have said or written.

Ellipsis

Like substitution, ellipsis involves the replacement of one thing with

another. However, instead of using words as substitutes, in ellipsis
we replace words with nothing. This may seem odd in theory, but
in practice we do it constantly. When you read “Mia went home
and ate dinner” you know Mia did two things: went home and
ate dinner. You interpret Mia as the subject of the verbs went and
ate, even though Mia was only mentioned once. There is nominal
ellipsis, the omission of a noun which can be found elsewhere in
the co-text. The sentence could have been written “Mia went home
and Mia ate dinner”, but it was not necessary to do so because the
18 A Beginner’s Guide to Discourse Analysis

subject of the second verb, ate, couldn’t be anyone else but Mia.
(Using Mia twice may in fact be somewhat confusing. We are so
accustomed to nominal ellipsis in sentences like this that seeing
Mia as the subject of ate may lead us to wonder if this is a different
person also named Mia.)
We sometimes have trouble spotting these omissions when we read
or hear language, probably because we are so used to interpreting el-
lipsis without thinking about it. Slowing down our interpretation of
language to identify ellipsis is not something we normally do, but
we certainly use ellipsis in speaking and writing quite commonly.
In the short novel The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka describes a
man’s reaction to having been turned into a large insect. Look at the
following excerpt and identify places where Kafka omitted the sub-
ject he from the words.

1.7
“He felt a slight itch up on his belly; pushed himself slowly up on
his back towards the headboard so that he could lift his head better;
found where the itch was, and saw that it was covered with lots of
little white spots…”

You will have seen that he appears in meaning, although not in the
words, before three verbs: (he) pushed, (he) found and (he) saw.
Kafka relied on his readers’ successful interpretation of ellipsis,
making additional uses of he unnecessary.
As with substitution, there are three types of ellipsis: nominal el-
lipsis, verbal ellipsis and clausal ellipsis. It is verbal ellipsis when
all or part of the verb is omitted, but is understood from the sur-
rounding text. Similarly, clausal ellipsis entails the omission of an
entire clause, or at least both the subject and the verb of the clause.

1.8
1. He said that he’d eaten sushi before. He hadn’t, but it seemed
embarrassing to admit the truth.
2. Over three hours the CEO talked about the company, changes to
procurement procedures and new health regulations.

In 1.8.1 eaten sushi before has been omitted after “He hadn’t” in the
second sentence. This is verbal ellipsis because part of the verb had
 Thinking about the Text 19

eaten has been omitted, but the subject he remains in the text. The
second sentence is interpreted as “He hadn’t (eaten sushi before),
but it seemed embarrassing to admit the truth.”
In 1.8.2, the CEO and talked about have been omitted before
both “changes to procurement procedures” and “new health regu-
lations” in the second sentence. This is clausal ellipsis as both the
subject the CEO and the verb talked have been omitted. This is
interpreted as “Over three hours the CEO talked about the com-
pany, (the CEO talked about) changes to procurement procedures
and (the CEO talked about) new health regulations. We can see
that the words the CEO talked about are optional in the text’s
written form, but are present in the text’s meaning whether or not
they appear.

Exercise – ellipsis

Identify examples of ellipsis in the following sentences. Explain

which words are missing from the text. Think about which ele-
ments of the text (nouns, verbs or clauses) could have been
inserted, but were omitted because the same words already
appeared.

1. You can’t deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your

favorite chair and stays as long as it wants. – Hearts in Atlantis
by Stephen King.
2. It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live. – Harry
Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling.

Exercise – ellipsis (commentary)

To recognise the ellipsis in sentence 1, ask yourself “What stays as
long as it wants?” The answer is laughter, so this is nominal ellipsis.
The word laughter or the personal reference it could have appeared
before stays but was omitted here as readers know the word is there
in the meaning, if not in the actual text.
Sentence 2 could have been written as “It does not do to dwell on
dreams and it does not do to forget to live.” This is clausal ellipsis, as
the subject it and the verb does not do have both been omitted. It was
20 A Beginner’s Guide to Discourse Analysis

not necessary to write it does not do to twice, as readers presuppose

the existence of the second one by looking back in the text.

Conjunctions

Conjunctions are used to show specifc types of connection in texts.

Comedian Rodney Dangerfeld said, “My wife and I were happy for
twenty years. Then we met.” The temporal conjunction then shows
that there is a time relation between the frst sentence and the second,
that is, the frst one happened before the second one. Dangerfeld’s
joke relies on the conjunction, as most listeners would likely assume
at frst that he meant he and his wife were happy together for twenty
years after they met.
Although it is common for receivers of texts to assume that sen-
tences heard or read frst also come frst chronologically, this doesn’t
have to be so. Consider “He let himself in quietly. First, of course,
he had to fnd his door keys, not the easiest thing to do noiselessly
in his current state.” In the preceding sentences the second clause in
the sequence, “he had to fnd his door keys”, comes chronologically
before the frst clause “He let himself in…”, as indicated by the tem-
poral conjunction frst.
The four types of conjunction and their simplest forms are as follows:

1. Temporal then (time relation) “I went home then I ate dinner.”

As explained above, then shows that the two events are linked in
chronological sequence. (Don’t confuse the temporal conjunc-
tion then in this example with the demonstrative reference then
in “It starts at 5 o’clock. I’ll see you then.” Here then presup-
poses “at 5 o’clock.”)
2. Causal so (cause-and-effect relation) “I went home so I could
eat dinner.” Here so shows that the frst clause “I went home…”
caused the possibility (“could”) of eating dinner.
3. Adversative but (unexpected relation) “I went home but there
was nothing for dinner.” By using but the author makes it ex-
plicit that going home led to the expectation of eating dinner,
which in this case was not possible (“nothing for dinner”).
4. Additive and – adding relation “I went home. And before I knew
it, dinner was served.” Additive and is sometimes confusing.
 Thinking about the Text 21

People are tempted to say that and means then here because
they guess that “going home” happened before the “serving of
dinner”. However, this is information the reader is inserting into
the text based on knowledge of eating dinner at home. The and
in the clause simply tells the reader to take the clauses as being
related, or add them, but doesn’t specifcally say what kind of
relation the two clauses have.

We can sometimes interpret the relation between clauses without a

conjunction by relying on other available information. If you read
“It’s cold. Wear a jacket”, you know that being cold is unpleasant
and that wearing a jacket keeps you warm. You take the two clauses
and attempt to make them coherent based on your knowledge of the
world. (Coherence, the relation between texts and their receivers,
as opposed to cohesion, the relation between words in a text, will
be discussed in detail in the next chapter.) There is enough rela-
tion between cold and jacket that we could describe them as weak
collocations of each other, which helps us see the relation between
the clauses despite the fact that the conjunction is left implicit. The
text’s writer could also choose to make the relation between clauses
explicit. In “It’s cold, so wear a jacket”, the causal conjunction so
provides the explicit link between cold and wear a jacket. “Because
it is cold, wear a jacket” shows the same relation, this time through
the use of the causal conjunction because. In these examples the
causal conjunctions so and because provide an explicit link, one that
is visible in the text and doesn’t only exist in the reader’s mind, and
so they are cohesive.

Lexical cohesion

Words are not only related to each other in terms of how they refer to
or substitute for one another. Lexical cohesion is the term Halliday
and Hasan (1976) used to describe how the meanings of words cre-
ate links in text. Think about the word duck. What does it mean? You
know some possible meanings, but without more co-text you can’t
say precisely. In a discussion of farm animals you will interpret duck
as a bird as you will hear the names of other farm animals in the text.
As you read a restaurant menu, you will interpret duck as a cooked
meal as you will see the names of other foods listed. The duck that
22 A Beginner’s Guide to Discourse Analysis

swims in a pond and the duck we eat are not the same thing, but the
word duck on its own is not enough for us to know which sense is
meant if I ask you, “What does duck mean?” You can only determine
which sense of duck I’m using once you have a co-text to work with,
words like farm, cow and pond or restaurant, menu and beef. (Of
course, in an active children’s game that includes words like jump
and run, you will probably interpret duck as “lower your head”.)
Words like farm, cow and duck are collocations, meaning they
are words that tend to appear close to each other in texts. After we
mention farm we don’t have to mention duck, but duck is more likely
to appear in the co-text of farm than other words like helicopter,
pastry or ninja. This is not to say that farm and ninja can’t appear
together in specifc types of text, for example in stories about feudal-
era Japan, but we are unlikely to guess that such words would appear
together in general texts.
Remember collocation by noting it has the word location in
it. Collocations are words that tend to appear in the same place.
Researchers in corpus linguistics, which is the simultaneous ana-
lysis of large numbers of texts, can use computer programmes to
determine how likely some words are to be collocations of other
words. They can even see how close certain words will often be
to other words. You don’t need to have a computer to make such
determinations, however, as it is often enough to rely on intuition. A
mention of farm will allow you to predict the appearance of farm-
related words because you already know quite a bit about what can
be found and done on a farm, even if you aren’t a farmer. Of course,
your intuition could be wrong. Not all farms have tractors, horses
and felds. In a text about server farms you’d see different colloca-
tions: computer, network, processor and so on.
Some words are very strong collocations, meaning they are
highly likely to appear together in texts, or even side by side. The
opposite of fresh breath is usually bad breath, but the opposite of
fresh bread is stale bread. These words collocate so strongly that
mixing them around either sounds odd (good breath) or changes
the meaning of what is being said (stale bread is old, but bad bread
doesn’t taste good). When you’re learning a foreign language, it
can sometimes be diffcult to recognise that some word combina-
tions don’t exist because they are not common collocations, even
though they may make sense together. Circumstances collocates
 Thinking about the Text 23

with unusual (“unusual circumstances”) quite often, but less often

with weird, even though weird and unusual are synonyms (words
that have the same or very similar meanings) in many ways. Native
English speakers who are not familiar with the concept of colloca-
tion are sometimes at a loss to explain these patterns in English, even
though they use the patterns precisely. A quick way to have a rough
look at possible collocational strength is to google the two words
while putting them in quotation marks. Unusual circumstances is
more than ten times as common together as weird circumstances.
Other strong collocations don’t necessarily appear side by side,
but are highly likely to appear together. Sons collocates quite
strongly with daughters, to the extent that people sometimes say
things like “I have two sons but no daughters” when asked if they
have any children. Mentioning daughters is unnecessary here –
people will assume there are none if they are not mentioned – but the
strong collocation between sons and daughters seems to bring the
word daughters into a text with sons in it. Sons and daughters can
be described as being in the same collocational feld. They don’t
necessarily appear right together, but the mention of one makes the
mention of the other more likely.
Determining the difference between strong collocations and
weak collocations is not a precise distinction unless you frst de-
termine which frequencies will count as strong or weak. Corpus
linguistics, in which precise, computer-aided counts can be made,
is a powerful tool for making such distinctions, but not everyone
has access to corpora (bodies of linguistic) and the software for
doing so. Nevertheless, it can be useful to call collocations strong
or weak to distinguish between them in a general way. Sons and
daughters collocate strongly with parents. Sons and daughters are
weaker collocations of aunt and uncle. A discussion of familial rela-
tions is more likely to mention someone’s parents than their parents’
sisters and brothers. Weaker still is the link between sons, daughters
and teachers. Of course, people who are teachers may have sons and
daughters, but when discussing teachers we are more likely to men-
tion students.
Numerous useful terms exist for discussing the relations between
some collocations more precisely. Meronyms are words that mean
part of a thing, but are used to represent the whole. If you read “His
car needed to be repaired. The engine was broken”, you recognise
24 A Beginner’s Guide to Discourse Analysis

that the two sentences are cohesive because an engine is a part of a

car. Car and engine are collocations, but engine is more precisely a
meronym of car. You would also recognise a link between repaired
and broken, as repair and break are antonyms, words that have
opposite meanings.
We often see that texts are lexically cohesive through reiter-
ation, the mention of the same things more than once in the text.
Sometimes this is as simple as direct repetition, using the same
word twice. Seeing run in different sentences in a text is a clue that
those sentences are related. Repetition includes different forms of a
word: run, ran, runner and running are related even though they are
not identical. These differences are described through morphology,
(morph = “change”, ology = “study of”). The a in ran indicates that
this is the past tense of the present tense run, the er suffx on runner
indicates that this is a noun (“person who runs”) and the ing suffx
indicates that this is either a gerund (a verb used as a noun) as in
“Running is good exercise” or part of a present continuous verb, as
in “The dog is running around the park.” Despite the morphological
differences, we can see that run, ran, runner and running are repeti-
tions of the same essential meaning. (See Chapter 3 for a note on
morphology.)
Reiteration also includes synonymy, which was previously
described as the relation between words with the same meaning.
Child and kid might be called synonyms as they both mean “young
person”. This is the denotation, or primary literal meaning, of those
two words. However, like most synonyms these are not identical
in all ways. Child may make us think or feel positively about the
innocence and naivety of the people being described. These are the
connotations, the feelings and non-literal meanings of the word.
Kid has different, sometimes negative, connotations: rambunctious,
overactive and troublesome. The movie Kids, about sexually active,
drug-using young teenagers, likely took its name from these con-
notations of kid. (Brat, meaning “troublesome child”, includes the
negative feelings in its denotation, which has led friends of mine to
refuse to buy their daughters Bratz dolls.) Synonyms are also some-
times different in how formal or informal they are. Child is more
formal than kid, so a science textbook or doctor would be more
likely to use child. (Even more formally, a child could be a “sexually
immature human”.) Synonyms are also not always the same in all
 Thinking about the Text 25

senses of the words. In one sense, kid means “child”, but in another
kid means “young goat”.
Finally, reiteration includes subordination and superordina-
tion. Subordinates are types of something, so a Honda Jazz is a
subordinate of car, and car is a subordinate of vehicle. In this hier-
archy, Honda Jazz is thus also a subordinate of vehicle. To describe
the relationship between these words starting at the top of the hier-
archy, vehicle is a superordinate of car, and car is a superordinate
of Honda Jazz. Be careful about the distinction between meronymy
and ordination; engine is a meronym of car because an engine is
part of a car, but an engine is not a type of car, so it is not a subor-
dinate of car.
The discussion of lexical cohesion is a discussion of content words.
Content words are, as their name implies, those words that have at
least some meaning on their own, without referring elsewhere in the
text. These are the words in the word categories that tell us what the
text is about: nouns, adjectives and adverbs. These words are open-
class words, meaning we can add new words to these categories as
times change, introduce new words such as camera and computer as
new technologies are developed and introduce new words such as
selfe and Facebook as new social practices arise that take advantage
of those new technologies. Open-class words can easily be moved
into new categories, as the noun friend did when people started using
it as a verb in “I friended her on Facebook.” (Linguistic conserva-
tives may not like these changes, but they must acknowledge that
they have happened.) You can often communicate simple thoughts
using only content words, for instance by pointing at your stomach
and saying “Hungry.”
Function words are those which help with the grammar of sen-
tences. These words don’t make much sense on their own: articles,
prepositions, auxiliary and modal verbs and so on. These words are
largely closed-class words, meaning we don’t easily add new words
in these categories. You can certainly think of new content words
you have learnt recently, perhaps even as you have been reading this
book, but I doubt you can recall having come across a new prepos-
ition (in, on, under, behind, to, of and so on) since you frst learnt
English. The references and substitutes discussed earlier in this
chapter are function words (and non-words, in the case of ellipsis),
so they rely on co-text for their meanings to be interpretable.
26 A Beginner’s Guide to Discourse Analysis

The meaning of cohesion

Thus far in this chapter you have read about texts, and in particular
how the study of cohesion provides us with accurate terms to use
when we describe the relations between different parts of a text.
This is not to say that you did not previously understand texts when
you read them, of course, but as a linguist, and more precisely as a
discourse analyst, it is important that you’re able to describe these
relations accurately. You can’t analyse discourse, as it was described
in the Introduction, without being able to analyse the relations be-
tween the words that make up the text of the discourse. Halliday
and Hasan (1976) argue that it is especially important to recognise
non-structural cohesion, which are those links that connect words
in different sentences, as opposed to structural cohesion, which are
those links that connect words within the same sentence.
So, for example, in “He had won the victory over himself”, the
penultimate sentence of George Orwell’s novel 1984, we know that
He is the subject, had is an auxiliary verb-marking tense, won is
the main verb, the victory is the object and over himself is a prep-
ositional phrase that explains more about the victory. We can see
the link between He, the frst word of the sentence, and himself, the
fnal word, partly because we know about grammar, but also because
himself is a personal reference. This is structural cohesion.
Now look at that sentence and the fnal sentence of 1984 together:
“He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” There
are no grammatical links to rely on to see us the relation between
the two sentences. The grammar of the frst sentence ended at him-
self. Now, the only link between the two sentences is the He in the
second one. This is non-structural cohesion. Despite the fact that the
two sentences are grammatically independent from the other, we see
them as part of one semantic unit called a text, which is, assuming
we read the whole way through, Orwell’s novel.

Exercise – cohesion

Find examples of cohesion in the following text, a recipe for chicken

stew from the BBC Good Food website. A commentary on some of
the cohesive links follows.
 Thinking about the Text 27

01 Heat the sunfower oil in a large pan. Use a larger one if you plan to double the
02 recipe to preserve some soup for freezing. Fry the garlic for 5 minutes, making
03 sure to stir it repeatedly. Pour in the stock slowly to avoid splashing. Then stir
04 in the potatoes and spices.
05 Add the chicken and boil the mixture. Stir in the carrots and remaining vegetables.
06 Cover the pan and simmer for 45 minutes. Make sure to stir the stew every few
07 minutes. Once the chicken is tender the stew is ready. Serve with fresh pepper.
08 Cool and freeze any extra soup, but use it within a month of freezing.

Exercise – cohesion (commentary)

reference
It (line 03) anaphorically presupposes the garlic (line 02).
The in the mixture points at “the mixture you have made by fol-
lowing the instructions up until this point”, that is, the whole frst
paragraph plus add the chicken in line 05.
Larger compares “the pan you use if you plan to double the
recipe” with the large pan mentioned in the frst sentence of line 01.
substitution
One in line 01 substitutes for the head pan. The text continues to
discuss the general class pans, but a different subclass, so larger
repudiates large.
ellipsis
In line 05 we interpret the instructions as “Stir in the carrots and (stir
in) the remaining vegetables” although the verb stir has been omit-
ted before the remaining vegetables.

conjunction
The temporal conjunction then appears in line 03, linking “Pour
in the stock…” and “…stir in the potatoes…” in a time sequence.
Readers would likely interpret this as a time sequence based on their
general knowledge of instructional texts, which typically link items
in sequence. However, the author has chosen to make the sequential
order clear here. (Temporal conjunctions could have been used in
other places, such as before fry in line 02.)
lexical cohesion
Many of the words are collocations. Pa n , fry and oil are all related to
cooking. Stock, soup and boil are all related to liquids. Carrots and
potatoes are subordinates of vegetables.
28 A Beginner’s Guide to Discourse Analysis

Spoken language

For much of history, written texts were seen as the most important
form of human language while spoken texts were dismissed as rela-
tively unimportant. Partly this had to do with the ephemeral nature
of speech. It was hard to analyse things people said without having
access to technology that allowed words to be recorded and carefully
analysed. This was, in part, related to who could write. When the
ability to write was limited to certain members of society, especially
those with more economic and social power, it was inevitable that
their written words were seen as more prestigious than the spoken
words of socially weaker illiterate people. This had to do, in part,
with what was written, especially the important religious texts that
were painstakingly copied out by hand.
This is no longer the case. Spoken texts can be recorded, tran-
scribed and analysed. Literacy is more common throughout many
societies. Spoken language is now recognised as having an important
social function, allowing people to develop and maintain social rela-
tions. In addition, it is recognised that linguistic innovation comes
through spoken language. New words typically appear in speech
long before lexicographers decide that they are common enough to
be included in dictionaries. If we want to know about language, we
can’t dismiss spoken texts as minor, unimportant relations of writ-
ten texts. At the very least, we have to acknowledge that most of
us talk a lot more than we write. A study of university students by
Mehl et al. (2007, p. 82) found that “women and men both use on
average about 16,000 words per day”. It would be very diffcult to
produce even an approximation of that number of written words in a
day without resorting to writing nonsense or using a lot of repetition.
So far in this chapter I have mostly discussed written texts, so it is
important to point out that the features of cohesion apply to spoken
texts as much as to written texts. The words that make up political
speeches, conversations at a café, lectures and so forth will all be
cohesive or we would not recognise them as texts. Some spoken
texts are similar to written texts in that they are planned, that is,
prepared ahead of time. An important speech will often be writ-
ten, rewritten and edited before it is delivered orally to an audience.
Politicians who regularly deliver speeches are known for making
 Thinking about the Text 29

the same supposedly offhand comments and jokes at the same time
on each occasion that they make a speech. Their careful planning
includes preparing their words in such a manner that they don’t look
completely planned. Television and radio news broadcasts, univer-
sity lectures and songs are also planned spoken texts.
Other spoken texts are spontaneous events for which the partici-
pants don’t prepare ahead of time: chance meetings with friends on
the street, informal discussions at work and so on. When you make
arrangements to meet someone for lunch, you know you will talk,
but you might not have any thoughts about what you will talk about
or how you will say it. Most of us are so well versed in participating
in spontaneous spoken interactions that we don’t think about them at
all. It’s only when we are asked to give a speech or make a presenta-
tion, both planned speech events, that we start to panic.
The line between planned and spontaneous texts is not clearly
defned. Instead of picturing a strict delineation, it is best to imagine
a continuum with completely planned texts at one end and com-
pletely spontaneous texts at the other. If you arrange to meet
someone to tell them some interesting news about yourself, you
may have some ideas about what you want to say, but you prob-
ably don’t take too much time planning how you will deliver your
news. You might call this a mostly spontaneous spoken text. On the
other hand, a good lecturer will plan her words to an extent, perhaps
using a PowerPoint presentation to show her plan to the audience,
but she’ll allow some spontaneity, taking questions and mak-
ing remarks appropriate to her audience. This would be a mostly
planned spoken text.
Written texts can also be described as planned or spontaneous.
You spend more time preparing a university essay, job application
or email to a co-worker than you do a text message to a friend or a
note on the refrigerator reminding a family member to buy milk. We
can generally say that spoken texts tend to be more spontaneous than
written texts, but there is overlap between the two.
Most of the language education we receive is about planned writ-
ten texts, although it may not be described as such. Teachers show
students how to write sentences and essays, university lecturers
explain how to write formal academic papers and career counsellors
teach people how to write CVs and cover letters. The nature of spon-
taneous spoken texts is mostly left unexplained. Parents may give
30 A Beginner’s Guide to Discourse Analysis

some explicit instruction on how to talk, reminding their children to

say “please” when they make requests, for example, but for the most
part we learn how to talk spontaneously without direct explanations.

Conversation

If we want to explain how language works, we must be able to discuss

all texts, not just those planned written ones that were historically
considered most worthy of study. Informal spoken conversations,
which are probably the most commonly occurring speech event
for the majority of people, can’t be ignored. Sacks, Schegloff and
Jefferson (1974) wrote what has become a very infuential article to
explain how we talk spontaneously. Although the title of their paper,
A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for con-
versation, is not particularly simple, their purpose is: explain what a
conversation is and what rules people follow when they participate
in one. Understanding Sacks et al.’s (1974) explanation of conver-
sation, much as with Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) explanation of
cohesion, is fundamental to understanding the ways in which people
use language.
To begin, it is important to defne precisely what is meant by
conversation. Sacks et al. (1974, p. 700–701) defne it as a spoken
interaction between a few speakers in which people mostly talk one
at a time. Additionally, neither the topic, the number of turns each
person will have, nor the length of each turn is set in advance. In
practice, there is no set limit on how many people can be involved
in a conversation, but once you pass a small number, typically
given as four or fve, it becomes diffcult for everyone to have a
turn, and some management, at least informally, is needed to make
sure everyone has the opportunity to speak. Even small, relatively
informal business meetings typically have a chair to keep speak-
ers organised. Conversations among friends may sometimes become
similarly managed once too many people are involved. The more
common occurrence is for the group of friends to divide into two
or more smaller groups of a size better suited to conversation: one
group in the kitchen, another by the television, and so on. We can see
that Sacks et al.’s defnition of conversation is quite specifc. Some
spoken texts are not conversations: a political speech is given by
 Thinking about the Text 31

one person, a lecture’s topic is set in advance, a meeting’s length is

often predetermined and so on. However, as conversations feature so
prevalently in our daily lives, they are a special type of spoken text
that is worthy of special attention in linguistic analyses.
Sacks et al. (1974) have provided us with precise terms to dis-
cuss the units of language that make up spontaneous conversations.
Planned texts, especially written ones, are divided into sentences,
each of which is made up of a subject, a verb and optional additional
elements. Conversations may include sentences, but they often
don’t. Conversations, instead, are made up of clause-length, phrase-
length and word-length turn construction units (TCUs). Unlike in
a written text, in which it is expected that we write in sentences,
participants in a conversation use shorter units of language. In 1.9
identify which TCUs are clauses, phrases and words.

1.9
01 A : you want the book?
02 B : the older edition?
03 A : yeah
04 B : sure
05 A : good enough?
06 B : thanks

Turn 01 is the only clause TCU here. It features a subject you and
a verb want. It is not spoken as a question grammatically, that is,
A doesn’t say “Do you want the book?” but we can recognise that
it is a question from the inclusion of the question mark signalling
rising intonation. (The distinction to be made here is between an
interrogative clause, one which shows that it is asking something
through grammar (e.g. “Would you like some coffee?”), and a ques-
tion, which can be made without grammar (e.g. Saying “Coffee?”
while holding up a pot.)
Turns 02 and 05 are phrase TCUs. B’s turn 02 is a noun phrase as
it has a head noun edition and two modifers: the and older. There
is no verb, so it is not a clause, but we can interpret the phrase by
looking at turn 01 and guessing that B is asking “Is it the older edi-
tion?” or perhaps “Do you want the older edition?” Speaker A must
have arrived at a satisfactory interpretation as the response “yeah”
in turn 03 allowed the conversation to progress. A’s turn 05 is also a
phrase, likely interpretable as “Is that good enough?” or “Is it good
32 A Beginner’s Guide to Discourse Analysis

enough?” as B responded with “thanks” and did not ask for add-
itional clarifcation.
Turns 03, 04 and 06 are word TCUs. None of them would be inter-
pretable in isolation – if you came around a corner to hear someone
say “Yeah”, you would not know what he or she responded to – but
within this conversation, a spoken text in which each part relies on
the rest of the text for its interpretation, they are all enough despite
their brevity.
Sacks et al. (1974) also discuss sentence TCUs, but linguists often
prefer the term clause to sentence. The term sentence does provide
some information about orthographical features (capital letters,
hyphens, punctuation, etc.) of the relevant words, as sentences are
usually said to start with a capital letter, contain at least one clause
and end with a terminal punctuation (that is, a full stop, question
mark or exclamation mark). However, sentence doesn’t tell us much
about grammar, as “He walked home and ate dinner while she stayed
and studied at the library” is only one sentence, but four clauses.
Calling that a four-clause sentence (or four-clause complex) pro-
vides more information than just sentence.

Turn completion

We can also use 1.9 to think about how we know when speakers have
fnished their turns: grammar, intonation and action. Turn 01, as dis-
cussed, is grammatically complete as a clause because it has a sub-
ject you, a verb want and an object the book. A competent English
user would hear this and realise that it is a fully formed clause that
doesn’t need any more words to be complete.
In addition, turn 01 was spoken with rising intonation, which
signals that it is to be taken as a completed question. Rising in-
tonation, when used in yes/no questions, typically begins at the
start of the fnal syllable in the question. Transcribers may indi-
cate this with an arrow rising from left to right (Q) before the
last syllable of the question. I could have written “you want the
Qbook” to make it clearer to readers that this turn was said with
rising intonation. This is more accurate than using a question
mark as I did in 1.9 because, although we use a question mark
for different types of questions in written language, we don’t use
 Thinking about the Text 33

the same intonation for all questions. Yes/no questions are com-
monly signalled with rising intonation while wh- questions (who,
what, where, when, why and how) are not. (Try saying “What day
is it?” and “Is it Tuesday?” and notice that while you may rise on
the syllable day in Tuesday, you don’t rise anywhere in “What
day is it?”).
Finally, we can see that turn 01 was complete as an action, mean-
ing that a receiver would understand why it was said. In this turn, it
is simple as it is a question, but other actions could be responses,
offers, warnings, statements of information and so on.
When a turn is completed, the speaker has created what Sacks
et al. (1974) call a transition-relevance place (TRP), a point at
which it is obviously possible for another speaker to begin speak-
ing. Note that this doesn’t mean another speaker must speak, only
that a space in the text has been opened where a transition to another
speaker might occur.
Look again at turns 02, 03 and 04 of 1.9 while considering how
turns which are completed by grammar, intonation and action mark
TRPs. (Rising intonation has been indicated with arrows for clarity.)

1.9
01 A : you want the Qbook (TRP)
02 B : the older ediQtion (TRP)
03 A : yeah (TRP)
04 B : sure ( T R P , no one chooses to speak, conversation ends)

Turn 02 is grammatically a noun phrase. Rising intonation on the

turn indicates that it is to be taken as a yes/no question. As an action,
it doesn’t answer the question in turn 01, so it will be interpreted
as a request for clarifcation about the question in turn 01. Turn 03
doesn’t feature any grammatical relations between words as it is just
one word. However, listeners will realise that there is an elliptical
clause here, so turn 02 will be interpreted as something like, “yeah
[it is the older edition].” No intonation is indicated in turn 03, yet
without it turn 03 is still easily interpretable as an action for it is a
response to the question in turn 02. Turn 04, despite also featuring
only elliptical grammar (“sure [I want the book]”) and no intonation,
is also easily interpretable as an action, in this case a response to
turn 01. The question in turn 02 is answered in turn 03, so a listener
34 A Beginner’s Guide to Discourse Analysis

will look back to fnd an earlier turn to make turn 04 relevant as an

action.
To clarify something written in the previous paragraph, it should
be said that all speech features intonation, whether it is rising, fall-
ing or level, but transcribers typically only indicate features of
intonation that they want to discuss. For most purposes, it would be
too laborious to show all intonation contours. If spoken transcrip-
tions don’t show intonation, you should assume that the words were
spoken in the most obvious way. In fact, this holds true for many fea-
tures of conversation: pauses, volume, speed and so on. Transcribers
rarely show all of them, choosing instead to focus on those which
they think are most relevant to their current purpose.
Conversations take place among multiple speakers, but as con-
versations are spontaneous, there is no set order of turns that each
participant must follow. Speakers instead allocate turns in two
ways: other-selection, in which the current speaker indicates who
should speak next, and self-selection, in which someone chooses
to speak, despite no indication in the text that he or she should
speak next.
Other-selection is often done through the use of a vocative, which
is a person’s name, title or other means of addressing a specifc
person. The name Johnny in “Johnny, be good” is a vocative as it
is being used to talk to Johnny. The name Johnny in “Do you know
Johnny?” is not a vocative as it is being used to talk about Johnny,
not to him. In 1.10 some examples of other-selection by vocative are
presented with the vocatives marked in italics.

1.10
1. What do you think, Abby?
2. Nurse, please pick up line 02.
3. Excuse me, sir. You dropped your wallet.

In English we typically use commas in written texts or pauses in

spoken texts to separate vocatives from the co-text. This marks them
as distinct from other uses of the same words when they are being
used to denote someone. Consider the difference between “Let’s
ask the nurse”, meaning “Let’s ask the person who is a nurse” and
 Thinking about the Text 35

“Nurse, please pick up line 02”, meaning “You who are a nurse,
please pick up line 02.”
Other-selection is also done commonly by using the personal ref-
erence you, as in “Will you come with me?” In larger groups of
people it is common to use gaze or to point with a fnger to make it
clear which person you refers to exophorically.
Self-selection occurs when cues from grammar, intonation or
action make it clear that the current speaker’s turn is fnished, but
there is no indication in the text about who should speak next.
(Note that at the end of a completed turn that has no indication of
who should speak next the current speaker may choose to continue
speaking.) When someone greets you with “Hello”, you know that
to be polite you should reply with a greeting, but you haven’t been
specifcally chosen to reply. In 1.11, speaker E says “See ya later” to
a group of friends. Speaker F then self-selects to respond, followed
by simultaneous self-selection by speakers K, J and A. (The square
bracket [ indicates that turns 03, 04 and 05 all began at the same
time.)

1.11 (Data collected by Kirsten Marsh)

01 E : I’m off. See ya later
02 F: Bye babes
03 K: [Laters
04 J: [See ya tomorrow
05 A: [Bye

Conversations are texts, but they differ from most other text genres
as they are spontaneously produced by their participants. Being able
to identify TRPs, by understanding the construction of turns, turn
completion and speaker selection, allows us to see how speakers
work together to build these texts.

Exercise – turns

Identify the TCUs and TRPs in the following transcription. Explain

whether turn-taking happens via self-selection or other-selection. A
commentary on some of the features follows.
36 A Beginner’s Guide to Discourse Analysis

Two restaurant serving staff, J & K, discuss some of their customers.

01 J: Have you been to table eighteen
02 K : Yeah I took them a jug of tap water
03 J: Anything Qelse
04 K : No

Exercise – turns (commentary)

In line 01 J produces a clause-length interrogative TCU. Although
it is grammatically a yes/no question, J did not produce it with any
rising intonation. This is likely because the grammar of the clause
makes it apparent that it is a question, so rising intonation would be
possible, but redundant. This turn features other-selection, as you
refers to K, thus selecting her to speak next.
Line 02, although one turn, should be analysed as two separate
TCUs: the word-length TCU “Yeah” and the clause-length TCU
“I took them a jug of tap water.” The frst TCU is an action that
responds to J’s question in turn 01. (Note that “Yeah” here features
clausal ellipsis, as we interpret K’s “Yeah” as “Yeah [I have been
to table eighteen].”) There is thus a TRP after “Yeah”, as this turn
is possibly complete; a question has been answered. However, K
self-selects to continue speaking, producing the clause-length TCU
“I took them a jug of tap water.” This is a declarative clause that
elaborates on J’s question in line 01.
J’s phrase-length TCU in line 03 again features ellipsis, and is
likely to be interpreted as “[Did you take them] anything Qelse”.
The rising intonation and the elliptical information help us inter-
pret this as a new action. Although J has not said you in turn 03, we
should see this as other-selection, as the elliptical you indicates that
K should speak next.
The word-length TCU “No” in line 04 shows us that K has inter-
preted “Anything Qelse” as an action requiring a response. There is
now a TRP after “No” in which either speaker could choose to con-
tinue the conversation. If neither one speaks, the conversation ends.
Discourse Analysis
Lecture 4
Coherence
 Exercise on cohesion
Underline the cohesive devices and mention their types and
subtypes. Indicate the word(s) they link with.

• My father once bought a Lincoln convertible. He did it by

saving every penny he could. That car would be worth a
fortune nowadays. However, he sold it to help pay for my
college education. Sometimes I think I’d rather have the
convertible.

2
 Answer
Device Type Subtype Antecedent
1 He reference anaphoric father
My father once bought a
2 did substitution verbal bought
Lincoln convertible.
3 It reference anaphoric buying
He1 did2 it3 by saving
4 He reference anaphoric father
every penny he4 could
5 --- ellipsis verbal saved
..5. That6 car7 would be
6 That Reference Anaphoric Lincoln
worth a fortune
7 Car hyponym -- Lincoln
nowadays. However8,
8 However conjunction Contrast
he9 sold it10 to11 help
9 He reference Anaphoric Father
pay for mAy college
10 It reference Anaphoric Car
education. Sometimes12
11 To conjunction Causal --
I think I’d rather have
12 Sometimes conjunction Temporal --
the13 convertible14.
13 The reference Anaphoric Lincoln
14 convertible repetition -- convertible
3
 Cohesion and Coherence
Read the following texts. For each one: decide if the text is cohesive.
1) Identify some cohesive ties.
2) Does it make sense?

a. Tom worked very hard but earned little money and died very poor at the
age of 35. Three years later his father took him to play at concerts in the
great cities of Europe.

b. The Austrian composer Mozart was a musical genius. He has got a

swimming pool. It actually tingles on your skin to tell you it’s working.
Water would then come out of fountains such as the one shown here. And
that’s why dogs still chase rabbits.
 Cohesion and Coherence
Read the following texts. For each one, decide if the text is cohesive.
1) Identify some cohesive ties.
2) Does it make sense?
a. Tom worked very hard but earned little money and died very poor at the age of
35. Three years later his father took him to play at concerts in the great cities
of Europe.
b. The Austrian composer Mozart was a musical genius. He has got a swimming
pool. It actually tingles on your skin to tell you it’s working. Water would then
come out of fountains such as the one shown here. And that’s why dogs still
chase rabbits.
Both texts are cohesive. The sentences are connected with pronouns, substitution,
and conjunctions.
However, neither text is coherent as they do not make sense. Coherence, thus, is
not based on explicit linguistic devices but rather on the interaction between the
reader and the text, and the resulting understanding and perception of coherence.
 Cohesion vs coherence
• Coherence refers to textual relations which are inferred, but which are not
explicitly expressed. Examples include relations between speech acts (such
as offer–acceptance or complaint–excuse), which may have to be inferred
from context, or other sequences which are inferred from background
nonlinguistic knowledge.
• While cohesion, as mentioned before, relies heavily on grammatical
knowledge, coherence is grounded in the thinking process. Coherence is
the result of a reader’s appropriate response to the writer’s plan and relates
to the discourse world of written texts.

• It usually fits a conventionally and culturally acceptable rhetorical

tradition in terms of sequence and structure. In the process of interpreting a
written text, the reader assesses his specific purpose for reading and then
uses his knowledge of the world, previous experience in reading, and
familiarity with writing conventions and different types of genres to
arrive at that degree of interpretation deemed necessary.
 Can we have one without the other?
Cohesion without coherence:
– Wash and core six apples.
– Then, use them to cut out the material for your new suit.

This discourse is about apples, but it is incoherent (doesn’t make sense).

Coherence without cohesion:

– I came home from work at 6:00pm.
– Dinner consisted of two chicken breasts and a bowl of rice.

This discourse ‘makes sense’ (it’s about somebody’s evening), but there are no
overt signs of cohesion (e.g., no lexical repetition or pronouns or
conjunctions).
 How to achieve coherence?
• There are two strategies that constitute text
coherence:

• Local coherence (micro-level coherence):

Relations between utterances, sentences, or
propositions that are structured as sequential
continuations
• Global coherence (macro-level coherence):
Using knowledge of the world and background
knowledge
 Micro-level coherence (logical relationships)

1. Temporal relation: 5. Exemplification:

A number 16 bus finally arrived. I The buses never arrive on time
asked the driver whether he was these days.
going to the university. Yesterday I waited 20 minutes for
2. Causal sequence: the number 16.
The number 16 bus was half an hour 6. Restatement:
late. At the beginning of this piece there
I missed most of the syntax lecture. is an example of Hyponymy.
3. Cause–effect sequence: The writer uses a general term
John broke his leg. followed by a specific term.
He skied over a cliff. 7. Adversative (contrast):
4. Elaboration / explanation (where, He loves holiday adventures.
who): His wife prefers to stay at home .
I ate at a good restaurant last week. 8. Parallelism:
It was Tikka’s. John bought an Acura for the trip.
Bill rented a BMW for the family.
 Example
• Which example is coherent? Why? Determine the logical relation between
the two sentences of the coherent example.

• 1 a. I love to collect classic automobiles. My favourite car is my 1899 Rolls

Royce.
• 1 b. I love to collect classic automobiles. My favourite car is my 2012
Toyota.

• The reason why only the first of the sequences “makes sense” is that our
assumptions about cars do not allow us to derive an interpretation of (1b)
which is consistent with our assumption that the text is coherent. (1a)
succeeds as a text because the contextual assumption that a 1899 Rolls
Royce is a member of the set of classic automobiles enables the hearer to
establish that the two segments satisfy the relation of elaboration.
 Match the two halves of these short texts.
1. Shares in Palm Heights fell by 50% a. Pool, garden, comfort, privacy.
after 3 days.
2. Doctor Foster went to Denmark in a b. They may be recovered via the police
shower of rain. officer on payment of a fine.
3. Magical residence; modern farmhouse c. Add ginger slices and stir well.
in village.
4. Shockingly, 10 football players are at d. The company had suffered budget
risk of foot injuries. discrepancies.
5. Bicycles parked other than in the e. We are blocking the pavement. Thank
places provided are likely to be you.
confiscated.
6. Boil water in a saucepan. f. Nike shoes can help prevent you being
one of them.
7. To all smokers, please cross the road to g. He stepped in a puddle up to his waist.
smoke. He never went there again.
Answer: 1=d, 2=g, 3=a, 4=f, 5=b, 6=c, 7=e
Easy to guess due to collocations and implicit logical connections despite the absence of
explicit links
What is the logical relation between the 2 parts of each text?
1. Shares in Palm Heights fell d. The company had suffered Causal: situation - reason
by 50% after 3 days. budget discrepancies.
2. Doctor Foster went to g. He stepped in a puddle up Temporal (and then) implied
Denmark in a shower of rain. to his waist. He never went
there again.
3. Magical residence; modern a. Pool, garden, great view, Elaboration– more details
farmhouse in village. comfort, privacy. about general statement

4. Shockingly, 10 football f. Nike shoes can help prevent Adversative (contrast)=

players are at risk of foot you being one of them. however, but
injuries.
5. Bicycles parked other than b. They may be recovered via Adversative (contrast)=
in the places provided are the police officer on payment however or but
likely to be confiscated. of a fine. Contrast between confiscated
& recovered
6. Boil water in a saucepan. c. Add ginger slices and stir Temporal = implying and then
well.
7. To all smokers, please cross e. We are blocking the Causal: situation - reason
the road to smoke. pavement. Thank you.
 Global coherence: Using knowledge of
the world and background knowledge
• We certainly rely on the syntactic structure and lexical items used in a
linguistic message to arrive at an interpretation, but it is a mistake to think
that we operate only with this literal input to our understanding.

• We interpret texts with or without explicit linguistic connections between

those elements by relying on our expectations and shared knowledge in
reading the following poster.
Sociolinguistics Seminar: Thursday 3rd June, 12.00 p.m.
Dr. Mona Mounir, Department of Arabic Language, Dammam University.
‘Dialects of Spoken Arabic‘

• We assume that June belongs to this year, and refers to the date of the
seminar; that the person mentioned is the presenter; that the host is the
department mentioned.
 Global coherence: Using knowledge of
the world and background knowledge
• ‘The question of how people know what is going on in a text is a special case
of the question of how people know what is going on in the world at all'.
• When one encounters a new situation (or makes a substantial change in one's
view of the present problem) one selects from memory a structure called a
mental model. This is a remembered framework to be adapted to fit reality
by changing details as necessary.
• A) When you go the polling station / advising dept
• B) tell the clerk your name and address. / employee name, ID
• By resorting to the voting mental model, one can make sense of the clerk, the
station, and the need for such information.
• A) John's car crashed into a guard-rail.
• B) When the ambulance came, it took John to the hospital.
• Our expectations are conceptual including hospital, doctor, medical centre in
cases of injury and accidents. In this way we can see the connection between
the two sentences.
Global coherence: Using knowledge of
the world and background knowledge
Global coherence involves constructing a single mental model. What is the
connection between the statements in each of the following texts?

1. John was playing with his toy. Mary was building a castle and Sue was
blowing soap bubbles.

2. A husband (to his wife on the phone): You’ll have to do the shopping
today. Jessica fell and broke her leg at the playground and we’re at the
emergency ward.

3. Ron’s wife died in 1980. He married again in 1990; his wife now lives in
Spain.
 Answer
Global coherence involves constructing a single mental model. What is the
connection between the statements in each of the following texts?

1. John was playing with his toy. Mary was building a castle and Sue was blowing
soap bubbles.
The three people are children playing .

2. A husband (to his wife on the phone): You’ll have to do the shopping today.
Jessica fell and broke her leg at the playground and we’re at the emergency
ward.
John was supposed to do the shopping but now has to take care of Jessica.

3. Ron’s wife died in 1980. He married again in 1990; his wife now lives in Spain.
His second wife lives in Spain. The first one is dead! (The noun “wife” refers
to 2 different people.)
 Read and figure out what the text is
about:
Before they start, conditions are less than ideal and security is at
risk. But the problem is soon resolved as each of their arms
repeats the same movement, the one in time with the other. In this
way, the obstacle is removed, thus avoiding the need to stop and
perform the operation by hand. The process continues until
change in conditions makes it unnecessary.

1. Did you understand the general, overall meaning of the texts?

2. Are there cohesive ties?
3. What makes comprehension easier or more difficult?
 If you’re told text (2) is about windscreen
wipers, how far can you make sense of the text?

Windscreen wipers

Before they start, conditions are less than ideal and

security is at risk. But the problem is soon resolved as
each of their arms repeats the same movement, the one
in time with the other. In this way, the obstacle is
removed, thus avoiding the need to stop and perform the
operation by hand. The process continues until change
in conditions makes it unnecessary.
 Example
• "It was on hill.”
• “About a mile and a half from the village "
• Locally, the relation between this sentence and
the previous one is elaboration.
• Globally, What possibilities are there? A
prison? A cemetery? Others?
 Example
• Shares in Palm Heights fell by 50% after 3
days.
• The company had suffered budget
discrepancies.
• Locally, the relation between the second
sentence and the previous one is causal.
• Globally, the company’s financial situation is
deteriorating as a result.
 Wrap up
• Which is less explicit, cohesion or coherence?
• How can it be recovered?
• Do cohesion and coherence always go hand in
hand?
• What are different kinds of coherence?
 Discourse Analysis
Sixth lecture
Conversation analysis

2021
 Overview
Conversation analysis
Openings & closings
Adjacency pairs
Sequences (insertion, pre-expansion, post-
expansion)
Preference organization
Application: example, group work
 Conversation
What is conversation?
Conversation is not a structural product in the same way that a sentence is – it
is rather the outcome of negotiation between two or more independent, goal-
directed individuals, with often divergent interests - Stephen C Levinson
 Conversation

Characteristics of conversation:
• social process
• negotiation
• verbal exchange between two or more persons
• bound to a conventional system of usage
• bound to a shared vocabulary
• takes place constantly in social interaction
• verbal and non-verbal components

4
 Conversation Analysis

What is conversation analysis (CA)?

• CA is now a settled discipline, developed since the pioneering work in the

sixties (1960’s) by the sociologist Harvey Sacks.

• It is an approach to study spoken discourse to examine how spoken

discourse is organized, how conversation is developed, and how sequence
and structure are built.

5
 Conversation Analysis

What does Conversation Analysis (CA) do?

• Talk makes things happen, and the conversation analyst has something to
say about how. How do participants of a social action structure, order and
coordinate their action, the action of others and the actual situation?

• In more detail, the conversation analyst describes what people are saying
as…
- transmission of news
- requesting
- invitation
- compliments
- denial
- complaints
- arguments etc.

6
 Opening/Closing

Openings and Closings

• Conversational ‘rituals’ vary from culture to culture
– Opening/Closing telephone conversations in America and Saudi Arabia
 Opening/Closing

Opening types

A. Phone calls

B. Ritualistic openings
• Utterances have different meanings when they occur at the beginning
– ‘Hey!’
– ‘How are you?’
• Summons--Answer
• Greeting--Greeting

• Often done simultaneously

 Opening/Closing

Openings
• One of the most common examples of opening is what usually happens in
telephone conversation.

• Summoning in telephone conversation is part of the opening.

Example:
(Summons-Answer Sequences)
First utterance is a summons, the second utterance an answer to the summons,
establishing an open channel for talk (three part structure).

Child: Mommy? 1.summons

Mum: Yes, dear. 2. answer
Child: Can I have chocolate? 3. reason for summons
 Opening/Closing
Openings of US telephone conversations follow a certain sequence:

1. Summons / Answer.
2. Identification / recognition.
3. Greeting.
4. How are you.
5. Reason for call. (Schegloff, 1986, p. 11)
 Opening/Closing

Openings in Telephone Conversations

• In telephone conversations the ringing of the telephone acts as the summons.
• Additional potential problems are identification/recognition

A: (causes telephone to ring at B’s location) summons

B: Hello answer + display for recognition
A: Hi greeting 1 =claim that A has recognized B + claim that B can recognize A
B: Oh hi! greeting 2 + claim that B has recognized A
 Opening/Closing

Let’s analyze this:

Openings in Telephone Conversations

• A: Hello. (…) (pause)

• B: Hello.
• A: oh, hello Anne, what’s up.
• B: Nothing much. I just had something I wanted to ask you.
 Opening/Closing

Closings

FTA: Clsoings are Face Threatening Acts. They indicate you no longer want to
continue while the other speaker may want to, or vice versa. So, we need to
negotiate them carefully.

Pre-closings prepare for the closing.

• Body language
• Excuses
• Ritualistic expressions (e.g. ‘good’, ‘ok’)
– Signal invitation to or willingness to pass on one’s turn
• Invitation for or offering of ‘unmentioned mentionables’ (any unfinished
business)
 Opening/Closing
Typical closing section:
1. Pre-closing sequence: Two turn units ‘Ok’ or ‘alright’ and falling intonation.
2. Closing sequence: Using ‘bye bye’ or similar expressions.

Pre-closing sequences:
1. Referring back to something previously said.
Example: “ You did find your bags and that’s all that matters.”
2. Expressing good wishes
Example: “Enjoy your vacation!”
3. Restatement of the reason of calling……etc
Example: “ Yeah I just called to make sure you’re doing well.”
 Opening/Closing
The closing section may be:
1- Shortened: When the archetype closing and pre-closing are skipped.
Example: “I have to go. Bye!” or “Gotta run! Bye”

2- Extended: By continued repetition of pre-closing and closing items.

Example:
A: Bye
B: Bye
A: Love you
B: Love you too
A: Sleep well
B: You too
 Opening/Closing
Problematic closings:

A: Well, I must go now. We must get together soon.

B: All right, when?
A: Oh…. I’ll call you
B: When will you call me? I’m busy Monday …

1. A wrong illocutionary reading to a pre-closing formula: (B) understood

that it was a request for commitment but it was a polite pre-closing
formula.
2. Possible reason for such misunderstandings: Different cultural
backgrounds.
 Opening/Closing
Closing
• Closing a conversation can be done by saying, ‘ok, bye, anyway, or other parting phrase like
See you, bye.

Example:
A: Why don’t we all have lunch?
B: Okay, so that would be in St. Jude’s wouldn’t it?
A: Yes
B: Okay so …
A: One o’clock in the bar closing implicative topic (arrangement)
B: Okay
A: Okay? one or more pairs of passing turns with
B: Okay then thanks very much indeed George – pre-closing items (okay, alright, so …)
A: - Alright
B: //See you there
A: //See you there
B: Okay
A: Okay // bye terminal elements
B: // bye
 CA
Opening: Closing:
• Summons-answer • Future arrangment
• Recognition • Preclosing
• Greeting-greeting • Closing
• How are you
• Reason for the call
 Adjacency Pairs

Adjacency pairs: definition

• A sequence of two utterances

• Adjacent (one after the other)
• Produced by different speakers
• Ordered as a first pair part (FPP) and a second pair part (SPP)
• An FPP (first pair part) requires a suitable SPP (second pair part)

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 Adjacency Pairs

Adjacency pairs: types

Adjacency pairs are the fundamental unit to conversational organization
• Question – Answer What do you do? I’m a lawyer.
• Greeting – Greeting Good morning Good morning
• Offer – Acceptance Do you need help with that? No, thanks
• Request – Acceptance Can I use your pen? Sure!
• Complaint – Excuse/Denial
My room is a mess! I’m sorry/ I was out
• Compliment – Acknowledgement (acceptance/rejection)
You look gorgeous Thank you / Not really!

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 Adjacency Pairs

Many possible responses to a question (SPP)

E.g., “Do you know how to get to Building 117?”
• Answer It’s the second building on the right.
• Assurance of ignorance I’m afraid I don’t!
• Suggestion for asking someone else (re-routing)
The porter should know.
• Postponement I’ll look it up and tell you. / I’ll tell you when you get there
• Refusal to provide an answer I won’t tell you! / I can’t tell you.

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 Adjacency Pairs

Functions of adjacency pairs

• starting and closing a conversation

• moves in conversations

• First Pair Part (FPP) has the function of selecting next speaker

• Components can be used to build longer sequences

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 Adjacency Pairs/Insertion sequences

Insertion sequences

• Sometimes, one adjacency pair is embedded in another adjacency pair (Insert

expansions)

• These can have various functions like:

– Clarifying
– Delay of expected response

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 Adjacency Pairs/Insertion sequences

Insertion sequences
1. A: May I please speak to Rodney? question
2. B: May I ask who’s calling? question
3. A: Alan. answer
4. B: Just a minute. I’ll get him. Answer

• CONDITIONAL RELEVANCE:
responding (#4) to the matrix adjacency pair (#1) is relevant (highly
expected, and even required) upon responding to the inserted one (#2-3)
 Adjacency Pairs/Insertion sequences

Insertion sequences can be multiple

A: Can I borrow your car? question
B: When?
A: This afternoon. insertion
B: For how long? sequences
A: A couple of hours.
B: Okay. answer

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 Adjacency Pairs/Pre-expansions
Pre-expansions
• Sequence expansion allows talk which is made up of more than a single
adjacency pair to be constructed
• Sometimes, an adjacency pair is inserted before another (related) adjacency
pair, in order to
a) Set the stage E.g., Pre-announcement
A: Did you hear the news? (first pair part) FPP
B: No, what? (second pair part) SPP
A : I’m engaged! (first pair part) FPP (core: announcement)
B: WOW! Congratulations! (second pair part) SPP

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 Adjacency Pairs/Pre-expansions
Pairs
b) Protect the speaker E.g., Pre- invitation

A: Are you busy tomorrow night? FPP

B: No, no plans. SPP
A: Shall we go to the movies? FPP (core: invite)
B: Sure! SPP

A: Are you busy tomorrow night? FPP

B: Yes, I have to prepare for an exam. SPP
A: I was going to invite you to the movies, but maybe later. FPP (core: invite)
B: Oh, sorry! SPP

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 Adjacency Pairs/Pre-expansions

c) Protect the listener E.g., Asking something delicate

A: Can I ask you something kind of personal FPP

B: Yeah, go ahead SPP
A: Exactly how do you feel about Norman? FPP (core: delicate question)
B: I like him a lot, but there’s nothing between us,
if that’s what you mean. SPP

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 Adjacency Pairs/Post-expansions

• Post-expansions are (related) Adjacency Pairs that occur after another

(core) Adjacency Pair. They may also be used for clarification.
• E.g.
• A: Who said you couldn’t go? FPP (core)
• B: Steve SPP
• A: Who’s he? FPP (post)
• B: He’s in charge of registration, he said they were full up. SPP

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 Sequence Closing Thirds (SC3)

Sequence Closing Thirds

Sometimes, an adjacency pair will have a third part to it. This is called the
Sequence Closing Third (SC3)
E.g.
– A: Could you do this for me? FPP
– B: Sure! SPP
– A: Great! SC3

SC3s are a type of post-expansion.

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 Adjacency Pair Preference Organization

Adjacency Pair Preference Organization: Preferred and dis-preferred

• In adjacency pairs, there are two possibilities of pairs that could happen.

• One is preferred (the hearer provides expected responses/ answers).

• Preferred means participants display a systematic preference for agreeing,
accepting, granting, etc.

• Another one is dis-preferred (the hearer provides unexpected responses).

• Dis-preferred means participants disagreeing, rejecting, refusing, etc. It is
often preceded by
• a ‘delay,
• a ‘preface’ and / or
• ‘account’.
Common adjacency pairs and typical preferred and dispreferred second pair parts
(Levinson12, 1983)
Matching
 Group Presentations
Every group of 4 work on one conversation

Role Area Details

• Speakers’ roles are analyzed.
Participant roles and context
A • The context and topic are explained.
(optional)
• Opening summons, greeting, how are you, other sequences are
separated out and labelled in relation to the conversation type.
B Openings and closings
• Reason mentioned for the conversation is pointed out. (optional)
• Closings are analysed in terms of pre-closing types.

Adjacency pairs & Preference • Various adjacency pair FPP and SPPs are identified.
C • Preferred and dis-preferred pairs are analyzed.
organization
• Insertion sequences, pre-expansion sequences, and post-expansion
D Sequences, and expansions sequences are analyzed and their functions are pointed out.
Phone conversation:
1. John: Hi, Alice, it’s John. How are you?
2. Alice: Oh, hi, John! Im fine. You?
Sample
3. John: I’m ok.
4. Alice: I was just thinking about you.
5. John: That’s nice. I was wondering if you’d like to go to a movie
Analyze:
tonight.
1. Opening
6. Alice: Sure, I’d love to! What’s playing? 2. Closing
7. John: I was thinking about that new comedy “Lights Out.” What do 3. FPP & SPP
you think? 4. Preferred SPP
8. Alice: Sounds great! 5. Dis-preferred
9. John: OK, I’ll pick you up around 7:30pm. The movie starts at 8:00 SPP
pm. 6. Insertion
sequence
10. Alice: See you then. Bye!
11. John: hey, don’t forget to bring your umbrella. It may rain.
12. Alice: sure, thanks for reminding me.
13. John: Bye!
14. Alice: Bye!
 Conversation 1
1. MARK: Excuse me. Could you tell me where the library is?
2. NANCY: Yes, it’s that way. You go three blocks to Washington Street,
then turn right. It’s on the corner, across from the bank.
3. MARK: Thanks! I’ve only been in town a few days, so I really don’t
know my way around yet.
4. NANCY: Oh, I know how you feel. We moved here a year ago, and I
still don’t know where everything is! Here is a map of the city, you can
use it.
5. MARK: But isn’t this yours?
6. NANCY: Never mind, I have a lot at home and I don’t need it any
more.
7. MARK: Thank you.
8. NANCY: No worries.
9. MARK: Have a nice day!
10. NANCY: You too.
 Conversation 2
• HIM: I saw you standing here, and I just had to come tell you you have the most striking
sense of style I've seen all day. I'm Joe.
• HER: Hi… I'm Tina.
• HIM: Hi Tina. How's your night going?
• HER: Okay. How's your night going?
• HIM: It's going all right. So tell me, New York native or you come from somewhere far away?
• HER: Nope, I'm New York, born and raised.
• HIM: Ah, all right. So you know all the secret places the tourists and I can only guess about.
• HER: Where are you from?
• HIM: Right now or originally?
• HER: Um… right now.
• HIM: Right now I'm a New York native. Well, not native, but I live here, if that counts for
anything.
• HER: How long have you lived here?
• HIM: Umm… I guess about two years, yeah? What do you do here in the City?
• HER: I'm a paralegal.
• HIM: Oh cool, cool. Does that mean you aspire to be a lawyer someday.
• HER: maybe one day. Who knows?
• HIM: OK nice to meet you, please enjoy your night.
• HER: Nice to meet you. Thank you, you too.
 Conversation 3
• Mr. Adam: Good morning, Dr. John
• Dr. John: Good morning, What's wrong with you?
• Mr. Adam: I have been suffering from fever since yesterday.
• Dr. John: Do you have any other symptoms?
• Mr. Adam: I also have a headache.
• Dr. John: Let me take your temperature. At this time the fever is 102 F. Don’t worry, there
is nothing serious. I’m giving you the medicine and you will be all right in couple of days.
• Mr. Adam: Thank you doctor.
• Dr. John: But get your blood tested for malaria, and come with the report tomorrow.
• Mr. Adam: OK doctor.
• Dr. John: I shall recommend at least two days rest for you.
• Mr. Adam: Would you prepare a medical certificate for me to submit to my office?
• Dr. John: Sure . . . (pause)
• Dr. John: Here it is.
• Mr. Adam: Thank you. How much shall I pay you?
• Dr. John: You can pay the consultation fee at the reception desk.
• Mr. Adam: Thank you doctor
• Dr. John: It's all right, take care and get well soon.
• Mr. Adam: Thank you, see you tomorrow.
 Sample 4
• A: Good evening
• B: Good evening, how can I help you?
• A: I have been getting headaches almost every day lately.
B: Have you just started getting a lot of headaches?
A: I never had very many headaches before, but the last few weeks I have been getting a lot
of them.
B: Have you had any unusually stressful situations in your life lately?
A: My mother just passed away last Tuesday.
B: I'm sorry. How about sleep? Are you getting enough rest?
A: I have been working really hard, and sleep has not been a priority.
B: Have you bumped your head or fallen lately?
A: No, I haven't hit my head.
B: I am going to send you to a neurologist for a few tests and then I can diagnose you.
• A: Thank you.
• B: (picking up the phone) Ms. Ann please come over her
• C: Yes
• B: He needs to see a neurologist for a few tests, here are the required tests.
• C: OK sir would you please come with me?
• A: OK thank you doctor.
• B: No problem, take care.
 Conversation 5
• JAMES: Good morning, Professor Austin, how are you doing?
• PROF. AUSTIN: Good morning, James. I am doing well. And you?
• JAMES: I’m great, thank you. This is my friend Emma. She is thinking
about applying to this college. She has a few questions. Would you mind
telling us about the process, please?
• PROF. AUSTIN: Hello, Emma! It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m more than
happy to speak with you. Please stop by my office next week.
• EMMA: It’s a pleasure to meet you too, professor. Thank you so much
for helping us.
• PROF. AUSTIN: Don’t mention it. Hopefully, I will be able to answer all your
questions!
• JAMES & EMMA: Bye!
• PROF. AUSTIN: Bye!
 Conversation 6
• JANE: Hi, Helen! How’s it going?
• HELEN: Fine, thanks — and you?
• JANE: Just fine. Where are you off to?
• HELEN: To the library. I’ve got a history exam next week and need to start
studying. Ugh.
• JANE: Oh, no. I don’t like history.
• HELEN: I don’t like it either but it is compulsory.
• JANE: How was your exam yesterday? I hope you did well.
• HELEN: Please don’t remind me. Im trying to forget and focus on history
now.
• JANE: OK! I'll let you go, see you later then. Good luck!
• HELEN: Thanks. See you later.
 Conversation 7
• WAITER: Hello, I’ll be your waiter today. Can I start you off with something
to drink?
• RALPH: Yes. I’ll have iced tea, please.
• ANNA: And I’ll have lemonade.
• WAITER: OK. Are you ready to order, or do you need a few minutes?
• RALPH: I think we’re ready. I’ll have the tomato soup to start, and the
roast beef with mashed potatoes and peas.
• WAITER: How do you want the beef — rare, medium, or well done?
• RALPH: Well done, please.
• ANNA: And I’ll just have the fish, with potatoes and a salad.
• WAITER: Do you like your fish grilled or fried?
• ANNA: Can I have it baked?
• WAITER: Sure. Your orders will be ready in five minutes. Please enjoy your
time.
• RALPH & ANNA: Thank you!
 Conversation 8
Situation: Jane is shopping in the supermarket names Tesco and bumps into her friend Lucy.
Lucy: Hi Jane.
Jane: Hi Lucy.
Lucy: I didn't know you were coming to Tesco this afternoon.
Jane: I always shop in Tesco on a Tuesday.
Lucy: Why on Tuesdays?
Jane: There are not so many shoppers on Tuesdays.
Lucy: I usually shop on a Monday but I didn't feel well yesterday.
Jane: Oh, I'm sorry. I hope you are feeling better today.
Lucy: Yes, thank you.
Jane: I am going to buy some apples.
Lucy: I will come with you. I want to get some apples.
Jane: I like sweet red apples.
Lucy: I prefer the crisp green apples.
Jane: Bananas are my favourite fruit.
Lucy: Do you like pears?
Jane: Yes. I eat lots of fruit.
Lucy: The mushrooms look very good. I will buy a punnet.
Jane: Yes. I will also buy some mushrooms.
Lucy: When I get home I will make some mushroom soup.
Jane: I enjoy eating mushroom omelettes.
Lucy: I need onions.
Jane: To make my omelette I will need eggs.
Lucy: Would you like to try some of my soup when it's made?
Jane: That would be lovely.
Lucy: I'll bring some round at 6 p.m.
Jane: Will you be able to stay and have an omelette?
Lucy: Yes I will, thank you. See you at 6 tonight.
Jane: Goodbye.