Discourse Analysis: An Overview

Introduction to Discourse Analysis

• Discourse is situated within a web of communication, where utterances and texts respond to or refer to others.
• Discourse helps to position people through spoken and written interactions.
• Identities are multiple and fluid, varying based on context and language use.
• Language is combined with other communicative modes such as fashion, gestures, and objects.
• Written texts often include images, layout, and multimedia elements.
• Discourse analysis has expanded to consider how language combines with other communicative modes.
• Discourse analysis helps to understand people's meanings and improve communication effectiveness.
• It provides insights into social identities, relationships, and societal structures.
• It illuminates how societies are maintained through communication activities.
• The study can help in understanding power dynamics and differing perspectives on reality.
• Discourse analysis explores the study of politics, power, psychology, and romance through language.

Texts and Texture

• Discourse analysts study texts and conversations.
• Texts and conversations are differentiated from random collections of sentences and utterances.
• Meaning is critical for a text, making it a text, with choice serving as the basis for meaning.
• Meaning distinguishes discourse analysis from linguistics focused solely on linguistic forms.
• M.A.K. Halliday's linguistics prioritizes meaning over syntax and morphology.

Approaches to Discourse Analysis

• Language performs actions, from single utterances to complete texts.
• Genre analysts view texts as collections of actions performed with words.
• Discourse is used strategically to communicate identities and intentions.
• Subtle language cues signal intentions and feelings.
• Different discourses enable different actions, like 'liking' posts on social media.
• Language is part of social practice, constructing identities and realities.
• Different groups use language differently, reflecting their worldviews.
• Discourses are associated with different people and systems of knowledge.
• Discourses involves how language advances realities and relationships.
• Discourse is ideological, serving certain interests.
• Multiple perspectives are needed for meaningful discourse analysis.
• Statements about power need understanding of text and context.

Cohesion, Coherence, and Intertextuality

• Texture is what makes a text a text and is created by cohesion, coherence, and intertextuality.
• Cohesion involves linguistic features, while coherence involves reader expectations.
• Intertextuality involves the relationship between a text to other texts.
• Cohesion involves readers finding connections in the text to understand it.
• Readers must perform mental operations, like locate parts of the text as they are going through it.
• Cohesion leads readers to look forward or backward in the text.
• Coherence relies on concrete features in the text that trigger expectations.
• For me to interpret something as a 'story, the different parts need to be arranged in a certain way.

Cohesion Explained

• Halliday and Hasan describe types of linguistic devices for connectedness.
• Grammatical Cohesion: Uses grammar to connect elements. Conjunction: Uses 'connecting words' to join clauses and sentences.
• Gives additional, contrastive, causative, or sequential information. Reference: Uses pronouns to refer to other words
• Forces the reader to look backward.
• Pronouns refer to the participants in the text.
• Antecedent: The word or group of words a pronoun refers to
• Types of Reference Anaphoric: points back to a word previously Cataphoric: points forward to a word that has not been used yet Exophoric: points to something outside the text
• Substitution: Uses other words than pronouns to refer to a word or phrase to a earlier phrase
• Ellipsis: Leaves something out.

Coherence Explained

• Coherence is a quality in which texts are easy to understand.
• Meaning is derived from knowledge, such as shopping lists, stories, and more.
• Generic Framework: Expectations about the information in different types of texts such as "before" and "after" ads.
• Logical Sequence: Texts present information in a predictable format
• Texts use patterns such as "Problem-Solution", beginning by presenting a problem and offering solutions.
• Narrative has predictable components that include ABSTRACT, ORIENTATION, COMPLICATING ACTION, RESOLUTION and CODA.
• Cultural Models: Conceptual framework to understand how the world works "videotapes in the mind"
• Models such as the kind of work a "coach" does can help to understand the overall meaning.

Intertextuality

• Intertextuality refers to the connections between a text and other texts.
• Bakhtin posits that all texts borrow from and anticipate others, forming a larger network of texts.
• Connections can be explicit, such as direct quotations, or implicit. Paraphrasing and presuppositions can be more subtle. The source is not always cited.
• Presupposition links texts and creates shared assumptions.
• Interdiscursivity is borrowing genres or styles.
• Hashtags create intertextuality

Genre Analysis

• Texts structured follow "genre frameworks".
• Genres are the means by which people achieve certain tasks.
• Genres depend on the communicative purpose.
• Communicative purpose contains multiple steps, known as "moves," that are like the steps in a recipe.
• Moves are steps in a text that must be included in order for the text to achieve its communicative purpose