Nam Can Tho University Discourse Analysis

REVISION
1. What is Discourse Analysis?
Discourse Analysis is an approach to the analysis of language that looks at patterns of
language across texts as well as the social and cultural contexts in which the texts occur.
Discourse Analysis considers the way that the use of language presents different views of the
wold and different understandings.
2. What’s the relationship between language and context?
In order to understand the meaning of what a person says or writes, we need to know
something about the situational and cultural context in which it is located.
The actual choices a person makes from the optionsthat are available to them within the
particular context of culture, thus, take place within a particular context of situation, both of which
influence the use of language in the text.
3. What are the differrent views of Discourse Structur? Explain ech one in detail.
a. Discourse as the social construction of reality
Texts are seen as communicative units which are embeded in social and cultural practices.
b. Discourse and socially situated identities
Discourses involve the socially situated identities that we enact and regconize in the different
settings that we interact in. They include culture-specific ways of performing and recognizing
identities and activities.
c. Discourse and performance (performativity)
Performance brings the social world into being (Bucholtz and hall 2003).
People ‘are who they are because of the way they talk’ not ‘because of who they (alreaddy)
are’ (Cameron 1999:144).
We ‘are not who we are because of some inner being but because of what we do’ (Pennycook
2007:70).
All texts are in an intertextual relationship with other texts.
4. What’s Pragmatics?
Pragmatics is the study of meaning in relation to the (social, situational, textual, background
knowledge) context in which a person is speaking or writing.
Pragmatics assumes that when people communicate with each other, they normally follow
some kinds of cooperative principle; that is, they have a shared understanding of how they should
cooperate in their communications.
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5. What’s the link among language, context and discourse?

We must understandd how language functions in context to understand the relationship
between what is said and what is understood in spoken or written discourse.
The context of situation (physical, social, mental worlds and participants’ roles) impctas on
what we say and how other people interpret what we say in spoken and written discourse.
6. What aspects of context are crucial to the production and interpretation of discourse?
- Situational context (what people know about what they can see around them)
- Background knowledge context: cultural and interpersonal knowledge (what people know
about each other and the world)
- Co-textual context (what people know about what they have been saying)
- Contextual knowledge (social, political and cultural understandings)
7. What acts occur when we say things?
- Locutionary act: the literal meaning of the actual words
- Illocutionary act: the speakeer’s intention in uttering the words
- Perlocutionary act: the effect the utterance has on the thoughtd or actions of the other person
8. What are felicity conditions?
These are the conditions for a speech act to work.
- A generally accepted procedure for successfully carrying out the speech act
- Appropriate circumstances for the use of the speech act
- The procedure musr be carried out correctly and completely. The speech act performer must
have the required thoughts, feelings and intentions for the speech act to be felicitous.
9. What is presupposition? How many kinds are there?
Presupposition refers to the common ground that is assumed to exist between language users
such as assumed knowledge of a situation and/or the world.
Conventional presuposition: less context-dependent, typically linked to particular linguistic
forms
Pragmatic presupposition: context-dependent arise from the use of an utterance in a
particular context
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10. State the cooperative principle and its maxims. What is the difference between flouting
and violating maxims?
We should aim to make our conversational contribution ‘such as is required, at the stage at
which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction’ of the exchange in which we are engaged.
Maxim of Quality: say what people believe to be true and what they have evidence for.
Maxim of Quantity: make our contribution as informative as is required for the particular
purpose and not make it more informative than is required.
Maxim of Relation: make our contribution relevant to the interaction, or we should indicate
in what way it is not.
Maxim of Manner: be clear in what we say, avoid ambiguity or obscurity, be brief and orderly
in our contribution to the inetraction.
* The difference between flouting and violating maxims:
- Flouting a maxim: a speaker doesn’t observe a maxim but has no intention of deceiving or
misleading the other person.
- Violating a maxim: there is a likelihood that speakers are liable to mislead the other person.
11. What is conversatinal implicature?
Conversational implicature refers to the inference a hearer makes about a speaker’s intended
meaning that arises from their use of the literal meaning of what the speaker said, the conversational
principle and its maxims.
12. What do hearers draw on to calculate an implicature?
- The conventional meanings of words,
- The cooperative principle and its maxims,
- The linguistic and non-linguistic context of the uttterance,
- Items of background knowledge,
- And the fact that all of these are available to both participants and they both assume this to
be the case.
13. Explain the three ways inmplicature can be created.
- A maxim can be followed in a straightforward way and the hearer implicates what the
speaker intends. No implicature is generated that is necessary for the interpretation of the utterance.
- A maxim might also be flouted because of a clash with another maxim. For example, one
flouts the maxim of quality (the truth) in order to obey the maxim of quantity (be brief).
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- A maxim might be flouted in a way that exploits a maxim. For example, one has given less
information than is required andd is flouting the maxim of quantit.
A: How are we getting to the airport tomorrow?
B: Well… I’m going with Peter.
From which she derives that she may have to make her own way to the airport.
14. Define the terms: Conventional, particularized and scalar implicatures.
- With conventional implicatures, no particular context is required in order to derive the
implicature.
- Particularized conversational implicatures, however, are derived from a particular context,
rather than from the use of the words alone. These result from the maxim of relation. That is, the
speaker asssumes the hearer will research for the relevance of what is said and derive an intended
meaning.
- Scalar implicatures are derived when a person uses a word from a set of words that express
some kinds of scale and values. A speaker may choose one item from a scale, then correct it while
speaking to cancel out another item in the scale.
15. What are ‘involvement’ and ‘independence’?
Independence refers to a person’s right not be dominated by others, not to be imposed on by
others and to be able to act with some sense of individuality or autonomy.
We do this , for example, by not presuming other people’s needs or intersts, by giving people
opinions, by not imposing on other people and by apologizing for interruptions.
16. What do we consider to choose a politeness and strategy?
- How socially close and distant we are from our hearer.
- How much or how little power the hearer has over us.
- How significant what I want is to me, and to the person I am talking to.
- How much emphasis both of us (in our culture and cultures) place on involvement and
independence in circumstances like the one we are in.
- Whether both of us would have the same answers to these questions.
17. What mitigation devices do speakers use to take the edge off face threatening acts?
- Use of a ‘pre-sequence’
- Use of insertion sequence
- Use of an off-record speech act
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18. What is genre?

- Genres are ways in which people ‘get things done’ through their use of spoken and written
discourse.
- Genres are activities that people engage in through the use of language. Academis lectures
and casual conversation are examples of spoken genres.
- Genres may typically be performed by a particular person aimed at a particular audience.
- There may be certain contexts in which a genre typically occurs. Genres change through
time.
19. What aspects do we draw on to assign a text to a genre category?
We draw on many aspects of language and context to do this.
- The author (or speaker) of the text
- The intended audience of the text
- The purpose of text
- The situation in which the text occurs, the physical form of the text.
- A pre-sequence to the text, as well as the discourse structure of the text.
- The content of the text
- the level of formality of the text
- The style or register of the text
- And whether it is a spoken or a written text.
* Communicative purpose is an important (although complex) criterion for deciding whether
a text is an instance of a particular genre.
20. What notions in genre theory show the relationships between genres?
- The notions of genre networks, genre chains, genre sets, and andrepertoires of genres
 The use of one genre may assume or depend on the use of a number of other interrelated
genres.
21. What are interactive and interactional rhetorical resources and their functions?
- Interactive metadiscourse resources help guide the readers through a text.
- These resources aim to lead readers to the author’s preferred interpretation of their text.
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- Interactional metadiscourse resources includes the ways in which writers express their
stance towards what they are saying as well as how they explicitly engage with or address their
readers in their texts.

22. What are the steps involved in genre analysis?

- First, collect samples of the genre tou are interested in.
- Next, consider what is already known about the particular genre.
- Refine the analysis by defineing the speaker or writer of the text, the audience of text and
their relationship with each other.
- Consider the goal, or purpose, of the texts, then typical discourse patterns for the genre.
- Consider values, beliefs and assumptions revealed by the particular genre and also the
networks of texts that surround the genre.
23. What factors do we need for examining the social and cultural context of the genre?
- The setting of the text;
- The focus and perspective of the text;
- The purpose(s) of the text;
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- The intended audience for the text, their role and purpose in reading the text;
- The relationship between writers and readers of the text;
- Expectations, conventions and requirements for the text;
- The background knowledge, values and understandings it is assumed the writers shares with
their readers, including what is important to the reader and what is not;
- The relationship the text has with other texts.
24. What is conversation analysis?
Conversation annalysis is an approach to the analysis of spoken discourse that looks at the
way in which people manage their everyday conversational interactions. It examines how spoken
discourse is organized and develops as speakers carry out these interactions.
25. What is the rule of turn taking?
One person speaks at a time, after which they may nominate another speaker, or another
speaker may take up the turn without being nominated (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974, Sacks
2004).
26. What can speakers do to give up turns, hold on to and take a turn?
a. To signal that we have come to the end of a turn
- Completion of a syntactic unit
- Falling intonation, then pausing
- Signals such as ‘mmm’ or ‘anyway’
- Eye cocntect, body position and movement and voice pitch
b. To hold on to a turn
- Not pausing for too long at the end of an utterance and starting straight away with saying
something else
- Pausing during an utterance rather than at the end of it
- Increase the volume of what wee are saying by extending a syllable or a vowel
- Speak over someone ealse’s attempt to take our turn.
c. To take a turn
Overlap as a strategy for taking a turn, as well as to prevent someone else from taking the turn
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27. What are adjacency pairs?

Adjacency pairs are a fundamental unit of conversational organization and a key way in which
meanings are communicated and interpreted in conversations.
Adjacency pairs are utterances produced by two successive speakers in a way that the second
utterance is identified as related to the first one ass an expected follow-up to that utterance.

28. What are insertion sequences?

An insertion sequence is where one adjacency pair comes between the first pair and the
second pair part of another adjacency pair.
For example:
A: Shall I wear the blue shoes?
B: You’ve got the black ones.
A: They’re not comfortable.
B: Yeah, they’re the best then, wear the blue ones.
29. What is feedback?
Feedback is the ways in which listeners show they are attending to what is being said. This
can be done, for example, by the use of ‘response tokens’ such as ‘mmm’ and ‘yeah’, by
paraphrasing what the other person has just said or through body position and the use of eye contact.
30. What is repair?
Repair is the way speakers correct things they or someone else has said, and check what they
have understood in a conversation. Repair is often done through self repair and other repair.