Discourse Analysis: An

Approach to Language
Research

Speaker: Zesa S. Mino, Ph.D.

What is Discourse?
• A continuous stretch of language larger than a
sentence, often constituting a coherent unit, such as
sermon, argument, joke or narrative. (Crystal,1992)

• Stretches of language perceived to be meaningful,

unified and purposive. (Cook, 1989)
Example of Discourse:
Scene: Husband is taking a shower. He left his phone in the living room.
Husband: My phone is ringing!
Wife: I’m still cooking!
Child: Okay Mom & Dad, I’ll be the one to answer the call.

How do the speakers manage to make sense of what the other says?

The husband makes a request for the wife to perform an action.

The wife states a reason why she cannot comply with the request.
The child undertakes to perform the action.
What Is Discourse Analysis ?
• Discourse analysis study the ways sentences and utterances
(speech) go together and how those texts and interactions fit into our
social world. It should be noticed also that discourse analysis is not
just the study of language, but a way of looking at language as well.
• Discourse analysis is a research method for studying written or
spoken language in relation to its social context. It aims to
understand how language is used in real life situations.
• Discourse analysis is sometimes defined as the analysis of language
'beyond the sentence'.
 Functional Linguistics Formal Linguistics
Period of
s – Present 1970 1920s – 1960s
Popularity
The content and
Linguistic form – how a word is
communicative function of the
pronounced, how it is structured, and Prime Concern
linguistic form outside
where it occurs in a sentence
language
Performance – the speaker’s Competence – the internalized, ideal
actual use of language in native speaker-hearer knowledge of Subject of Study
speech situations language, which is error-free
Naturally-occurring language Invented examples Data
To describe (descriptive) To theorize (theoretical) Purpose
Major
Firth, Halliday, Grice, Austin Bloomfield, Chomsky
Proponents
Key Takeaways: Discourse Analysis
• Discourse analysis looks at conversations in their social
context.
• Discourse analysis melds linguistics and sociology by taking
into account the social and cultural context that language is
used.
• It can be used by businesses, academic researchers, or the
government—any person or organization that wants to better
understand an aspect of communication.
What is discourse analysis used for?

•Conducting discourse analysis means

examining how language functions and how
meaning is created in different social contexts.
It can be applied to any instance of written or
oral language, as well as non-verbal aspects of
communication such as tone and gestures.
 Discourse Analysis (DA) As A Qualitative Research Method
• Fairclough posits that DA is aiming to systematically explore often
opaque relationships of causality and determination between discursive
practices, events and texts, and wider social and cultural structures,
relations and processes. (Locke, 2004)
• Language has a magical property: when we speak or write we craft
what we have to say to fit the situation or context in which we are
communicating. (Gee,1999)
• Wodak (2001) claims, language is not powerful on its own – it gains
power by the use powerful people make use of it.
 Four Main Assumptions of DA:
1. Language is ambiguous. What things mean is never absolutely clear.
2. Language is always ‘in the world’. That is, what language means is
always a matter of where and when it is used.
3. The way we use language is inseparable from who we are and the
different social groups to which we belong.
4. Language is never used all by itself. It is always combined with other
things such as our tone of voice, facial expressions and gestures when
we speak, and the fonts, layout and graphics we use in written texts.
Seven Approaches to Studying DA
1. Speech-act Theory
2. Interactional Sociolinguistics
3. Ethnography of Communication
4. Pragmatics
5. Conversation Analysis
6. Variation Analysis
7. The Cooperative Principle (CP)
The Speech-act Theory Approach
• Founders of the speech act theory are John Austin & John Searle.
• It is concerned with the ways in which language can be used.
• Language is used to perform actions.
• This theory provides the insight that the basic unit of
conversational analysis must be functionally motivated rather than
formally defined one.
• It focus on interpretation rather than the production of utterances
in discourse.
The Interactional Sociolinguistics Approach
• Represents the combination of three disciplines: anthropology,
sociology, and linguistics.
• It focuses on using language in the social context
•  It centrally concerned with the importance of context in the production
and interpretation of discourse
•  Her basic concern is the accomplishment of conversational coherence.
• It focuses on analysis of grammatical and prosodic features in
interactions.
The Ethnography of Communication Approach
• This approach is used to enhance communication with group members, make
sense of group members’ decisions, and distinguish groups from one another,
among other things.
• The way we communicate depends a lot on the culture we come from. Some
stereotypes:
Waray - waray: the assertive?
Hiligaynon: the soft spoken?
Cebuano: the talkative and friendly?
• Ethnography investigates speaker culture.
Cont.
• The ethnography of communication extends understandings of cultural
systems to language, at the same time relating language to social organization
• This theory concerned with understanding the social context of linguistic
interactions: ‘who says what to whom, when, where, why and how’.
•  the goals of ethnography are at least in the first instance descriptive, and
information about diverse “ways of speaking” is a legitimate contribution to
knowledge in its own right.
• The approach is concerned with the linguistic resources people use in context,
not just grammar in the traditional sense, but the socially situated uses and
meanings of words, their relations, and sequential forms of expression.
The Pragmatic Approach
• The pragmatic approach study the ways in which context
contributes to meaning.
• This theory formulates conversational behavior in terms of
general “principles” rather than rules. 
• This principle is the broken down into specific maxims:
Quantity (say only as much as necessary), Quality (try to
make your contribution one that is true), Relation (be
relevant), and manner (be brief and avoid ambiguity)
Cont.
• Pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning depends
not only on structural and linguistic knowledge (e.g.
grammar, lexicon, etc.) of the speaker and listener, but also on
the context of the utterance, any pre-existing knowledge about
those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and other
factors.
• Pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome
apparent ambiguity, since meaning relies on the manner, place,
time etc. of an utterance.
The Conversation Analysis Approach
• Conversational analysis is particularly interested in the sequencing of
utterances, i.e. not in what people say but in how they say it.
• Concern to understand how social members make sense of everyday life. 
• CA is a branch of ethnomethodology. There are two grossly apparent facts:
a) only one person speaks at a time
b) speakers change recurs
Its major problems:
• lack of systematization- thus quantitative analysis is impossible
• limited  its ability to deal comprehensively with complete, sustained interactions
The Variation Analysis Approach
• Fundamental narrative structures are evident in spoken narratives of personal
experience.
• The strength is its clarity and applicability
•  Variationists’ approach to discourse stems from quantitative of linguistic
change and variation.
•  It focused on social and linguistic constraints on semantically equivalent
variants, the approach has also been extended to texts.
• Variation is alternative ways of saying the same thing.
The Cooperative Principle (CP) Approach
• H.P. Grice (1975) introduces the ‘Cooperative Principle’ approach to describe how conversation
operates. He also introduces the concept of ‘Conversational Implicature’ to describe how we infer
unstated meanings in ordinary conversations.
• Grice calls these rules ‘maxims of conversation’. These are four:
1.The Maxim of Quantity
Make your contribution as informative as required (Don’t say too much or too little)
2. The Maxim of Quality
Don’t say what you believe to be false
3. The Maxim of Relation
Be relevant (stay on the topic)
4. The Maxim of Manner
Be clear and avoid ambiguity
 Approach to Studying DA Focus of Research Research Question
CA Sequences of talk Why say that at that moment?

Structural Variationists Structural categories within texts Why that form?

Speech Act Communicative acts How to do things with words?

Ethnography of Communication as cultural How does discourse reflect
Communication behaviour culture?
Interactional Social and linguistic meanings
What are they doing?
Functional Sociolinguistics created during communication

Pragmatics Meaning in interaction What does the speaker mean?

What is the conversational
CP Maxim violated
implicature?
How is discourse analysis different from other
methods?
• Unlike linguistic approaches that focus only on the rules of language
use, discourse analysis emphasizes the contextual meaning of
language.
• It focuses on the social aspects of communication and the ways people
use language to achieve specific effects (to build trust, to create doubt,
to evoke emotions, or to manage conflict).
• Instead of focusing on smaller units of language, such as sounds, words
or phrases, discourse analysis is used to study larger chunks of
language, such as entire conversations, texts, or collections of texts.
The selected sources can be analyzed on multiple levels.
 Level of Communication What is analyzed?
Words and phrases can be analyzed for ideological associations,
Vocabulary
formality, and euphemistic and metaphorical content.
The way that sentences are constructed (e.g. verb tenses, active or
Grammar passive construction, and the use of imperatives and questions) can
reveal aspects of intended meaning.
The structure of a text can be analyzed for how it creates emphasis or
Structure
builds a narrative.
Texts can be analyzed in relation to the conventions and
Genre
communicative aims of their genre (e.g. political speeches).
Non-verbal aspects of speech, such as tone of voice, pauses, gestures,
Non-verbal communication and sounds like “um”, can reveal aspects of a speaker’s intentions,
attitudes, and emotions.
The interaction between people in a conversation, such as turn-taking,
Conversational codes interruptions and listener response, can reveal aspects of cultural
conventions and social roles.
OPEN FORUM
 How to conduct discourse analysis?

• Step 1: Decide on your discourse analysis approach

• Step 2: Define the research question & select content
of analysis
• Step 3: Design your collection method and gather
your data
• Step 4: Gather information and theory on the context
How to conduct discourse analysis?

•Step 5: Investigate the context

•Step 6: Read the transcripts
•Step 7: Identify themes in the data
•Step 8: Identify the language that is used to
construct each theme.
How to conduct discourse analysis?

•Step 9: Identify commonalities in the use of

language in relation to the construction of each
theme.
•Step 10: Analyze the content for themes and
patterns
•Step 11: Review your results and draw
conclusions
 Methods of Discourse Analysis
• Before starting the research, there are four questions to ask to
yourself (Burgoyne, 1994: 195, and Titscher et al., 2012);
a. What research question am I trying to answer?
b. What analysis will provide a useful response to the
question?
c. To conduct this analysis what data do I need and from
whom?
d. What are the practical steps to obtain and record these
data?
Data Analysis and Interpretation
• Discourse Analysis is a method of analyzing data
along with Content Analysis, Qualitative Comparative
Analysis (QCA), Grounded Theory, and other
Phenomenological approaches.
Two Ways to Present Data in DA
1. Coding
2. Categorizing
What is Coding?
• Refers to the action while codes refer to the names given to the
concepts derived through coding (Corbin & Anselm, 2008).
• Shaheen and George, (2011), explain that the main purpose of
coding is to break down the data, rearranging and grouping it
into identified categories and subcategories which bring
together data about a topic which has so far been scattered
across sources, and ultimately allow comparison within the
data.
What is Categorizing?
• Categorizing would be to approach the data with a pre-set
list of coding categories (priori coding) as prescribed by
prior research that were carried out in the same field, or
based on existing theory or literature (Corbin & Anselm,
2008) The category names may be derived from the data
itself, existing theory or literature (Strauss & Corbin, 2008).
• The researchers could also sort to combine both
approaches.
Some Methods to Use along with DA (Titscher et
al., 2012)
• Grounded Theory (Glasser/Strauss). This is a methodology for
generating theories on the basis of data, which can be linguistic
and contextual. The approach is qualitative even though the
corpus is usually large amounts of text. Mostly, interviews,
notes and observation reports.
• Ethnography (Hymes). Ethnography is the study of individual
cultures, and formal models of linguistics for the interpretation
of human behaviour in cultural contexts are studied.
 Cont.
• Narrative Semiotics (Greimas). Communication consists of
semiotic processes, that is, the linking of sign and signified through
meanings, so bases the study on the two levels of texts: surface
structure and deep structure. This is qualitative and linguistic.
• SYMLOG (Bales/Cohen). This is the acronym for “A System for the
Multiple Level Observation of Groups” and investigates three
levels: verbal and non-verbal behavior, the content of ideas
imparted during the communication and the pros and contras
values.
 Cont.
• Conversation Analysis (Sacks/Schegloff/Jefferson). Ethnomethodology
has developed specific methods of text analysis whose particular field of
application is everyday conversation and stories. Conversation Analysis
is concerned with the communicative principles of the (re-)production of
social order in linguistic and non-linguistic interaction.
• Objective Hermeneutics (Oevermann). The material used is family
conversations or public speeches. The data are broken down into
individual meaning units with the purpose of analyzing the reason of the
speaker in the use of those syntactic categories. In this discipline, there
must be established a distinction between internal and external context.
Cont.
• Membership Categorization Device (Sacks).This is related to
sociology and attempts to reconstruct the tools used by the
participants for description and categorization. This tries to
investigate with conversation analysis everyday rationality,
colloquial language and everyday events.
• Content Analysis. This is a quantitative and linguistic method
with several variations according to the level where it does
the research: syntactic, semantic, pragmatics or a mixture
among them.
 Cont.
• Functional Pragmatics (Ehlich/Rehbein). This considers speakers and
hearers both relevant in the speech action and distinguishes between
the surface and the structure in the process. The structure is the socially
agreed form while the surface is the single special cases analyzed. The
purpose of the speaker is basic in this discipline.
• Distinctions Theory Text Analysis (Tischer/Meyer). This is also
qualitative and understands communication as a three-stage selection
process: information, utterance and understanding. The hearer
discriminates the irrelevant information in the process of understanding
so the starting point is linguistics.
Cont.
• CDA (Fairclough). CDA stands for Critical Discourse Analysis.
This is based on discourse not text. This is non-linguistic and
includes intertextuality and sociocultural knowledge.
• Discourse Historical Method (Wodak). A key idea in this
approach derived from Critical Discourse Analysis is “text
planning”. The speech situation, the status of participants,
time and place, and other sociological variables are
determinants in text production. The corpus is interviews,
rounds of discussion and the like.
Sample Research using DA as Method (Written)
Illustrative Example: Written Narratives From the Survivors of Typhoon Yolanda
Research question: What discursive strategies are evident in journal entries
written by survivors of Typhoon Yolanda?
Source of Data: This example uses two “journals” written SHS students in
Sogod National High School as part of their activity in Reading and Writing
Class . Note that there are 40 documents for this dataset. For our purposes, we
are interested in the discursive strategies of the journals and what these reveal
about the hurricane as both a literal incident and a discursive one.
Sample Discourse From the Data
• R1N1 Yolanda was not supposed to reach landfall until one or two o’clock this
afternoon. But, the eye of the storm hit directly over top of us this morning
around eleven o’clock. It was completely calm outside, almost unbelievable.
Forecasters said not to be fooled, that the worst is yet to come. Mama made a
pot of soup in case the current goes out. But, by 12:30 everything looked as if
it was settling down, so we ate the soup. Now, at 1:15, we are sitting here with
no current and no supper. Go figure. 8:30 Our current is back on. My Papa
returned home safe and sound, after making a thirty minute trip into an hour
and a half because of flooded roads. The storm is over, and it wasn’t as bad as
they said. I would hardly call it the “Storm of the Century.” I called the school’s
hotline and got good news: No Classes Friday.
 Sample Discourse From the Data
• R2N2 After Yolanda had left Thursday afternoon my dad and I went riding around
our neighborhood to see the damage. We went down every road around our house
and our road. There was a creek on both sides of my house that were completely
covered by the overflowing creeks. This left only two roads that we could get to and
both of them were completely flooded also. By Friday afternoon all the roads were
clear except those roads that I got to see that had been washed out. The asphalt,
dirt, and the tubes that the water flows through was completely gone; there was
nothing but rapidly flowing water for at least 30 feet. The flooding in Sogod started
that Friday. I didn’t get to see much of the flooding until the beginning of next week,
when one of my mom’s friends, Ms. Janet, called and asked if we could bring our
creek boat to help her move some of her things out of her house in Bontoc on
Monday, September 20th.
 Raw Data Codes

Yolanda was not supposed to reach landfall until one or two o’clock this afternoon.
Messaging
But, the eye of the storm hit directly over top of us this morning around eleven o’clock.

It was completely calm outside, almost unbelievable. Forecasters said not to be Attitude
fooled, that the worst is yet to come. Mama made a pot of soup in case the current Exposition
goes out. But, by 12:30 everything looked as if it was settling down, so we ate the Messaging
soup.
Now, at 1:15, we are sitting here with no current and no supper. Go figure. Attitude
8:30 Our current is back on. My Papa returned home safe and sound, after making a
Exposition
thirty minute trip into an hour and a half because of flooded roads. The storm is over,
Messaging
and it wasn’t as bad as they said.
I would hardly call it the “Storm of the Century.” I called the school’s hotline and got Self-mention
good news: No Classes Friday. Disclaiming
 Categories R1 R2
Emotion Conflicted Resigned
Tone/style Interactive Dispassionate
Evident (gradually
Sarcasm/skepticism Absent
diminishing)
Energetic (attitudinally
Voice Flat (minimal attitude)
rich)
Self-mention Attitudinal/reflective Active
Intentionality To reflect To inform
Mode of discourse Transformative Expository
Reader’s experience Transformation Information
Sample Research using DA as Method (Spoken)
Illustrative Example: Discourse Analysis On Hiligaynon Mass Sermon: A
Comparative Study

Research question: What are locution, illocution and perlocutionary acts of the priest
in the sermon? What are the actual perlocutionary act of the listeners/parishioners?
Source of Data: This example uses only one Hiligaynon mass sermon. The sources
of data for the first question are the recorded video of the mass, and interview
answers from the priest answering the first question. The source of data for the
second question comes from the parishioners who listened the sermon. These two
data will be compared as to the objective of the study.
 Method to be Used Coding & Categorizing
Priest

Locution Sermon about the Parable of The Sower (Matthew 13: 3-23)

The parable of the sower is about one kind of seed planted in four different soils. In the
Bible, soil (ground, earth) is symbolic of the human heart. It’s our heart –the core of our
Illocution being– that determines which spiritual path that we are on. The seed is the word of God. He
plants His word in each person’s heart. The result depends on our response to Him.

For listeners to assess their faith and belief in God and in turn, strengthen it
Perlocution to become responsible creations of the Lord.
 Method to be Used Coding & Categorizing
R1 (Raw Response) R2 (Raw Response)
There are four types of believers. One, those
A man’s reception of God’s Word is who are weak in their belief in God, they are
determined by the condition of his the seeds who fell on the road. Second, the
heart. Salvation is more than a believers of God for a short period time, their
superficial, albeit joyful, hearing of belief does not last. They are the seeds who
Perlocution the gospel. Someone who is truly fell on rocks. Third, believers of God but their
saved will go on to prove it. May our belief is not steadfast, they are the seeds that
faith and our lives exemplify the fell in thorny soil. The last is, those who
"good soil" in the Parable of the strongly believe in God, their belief do not
Sower. weary, they are the seeds that fell in good
soil.
References:
• Corbin, J., & Anselm, S. (2008). Basics of Qualitative Research:Techniques and Procedures for Developing
Grounded Theory (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc.
• Creswell, J. W. (2007). Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five
• Gee (1999) An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. London and New York: Routledge.
ISBN 0-203-01988-1 Master e-book ISBN
• Locke (2004) Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum Publishing Group. ISBN 0 8264 64866. PDF.
• Shaheen, R., & George, O. (2011). Analysis of qualitative data. Retrieved from
http://www.academia.edu/5424360/Analysing_qualitative_data
• Titscher, Stefan, Michael Meyer, Ruth Wodak & Eva Vetter, 2012: Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis,
London: Sage.
• Wodak, Ruth (2001) Aspects of critical Discourse Analysis. In Wodak, R & Meyer, M Methods of Critical
Discourse Analysis, Sage.PDF
Thank you for
listening!