Understanding Discourse Analysis (Week 1)

Discourse Analysis

• Discourse analysis is the study of language, specifically how sentences and utterances combine to make texts and interactions
• It looks at how these texts and interactions fit into the social world It focuses on:
• How people use language in real life to do things like joke, argue, persuade, flirt
• To show that they are certain kinds of people or belong to certain groups
• How language helps show different kinds of social identities It assumes that:
• Language is ambiguous, and communication involves interpretation
• Language is always 'in the world' with meaning tied to context
• Language is inseparable from social groups
• Language is combined with tone, expressions, fonts, and layout

The Ambiguity of Language

• People don't always say what they mean, or mean what they say
• This is because language is ambiguous by nature
• To say exactly what we mean all the time would be impossible
• Language is an imperfect tool for precise expression
• We always mean to communicate more than just one thing
• Discourse analysis can detect when people are trying to deceive you by using the ambiguity of language to achieve persuasion or compliance

Language in the World

• Meaning is made by reference to the social context within which we communicate
• The meaning of an utterance can change dramatically depending on who is saying it, when and where it is said, and to whom it is said
• Language is situated in at least four ways:
• Within the material world
• Within relationships.
• Within history
• In relation to other language

Language and Social Identity

• Discourse is situated by who says (or writes) what to whom, but people are also situated by discourse i.e., through discourse, people demonstrate who they are and their relationship to others
• People enact their identities through discourse
• Identities are multiple and fluid rather than singular and fixed
• The way we use language changes based on the identity we want to enact

Language and Other Modes

• Enacting an identity requires more than changing language
• You also have to dress and act in certain ways
• Language must combine with fashion, gestures, and objects
• Written texts consist of more than words
• We communicate in ways that don’t involve language
• Understanding how people use language requires attention to how it combines with other communicative modes
• This includes pictures, gestures, music, and the layout of physical environments

The use of Discourse Analysis

• Allows for better understanding of communication between people
• Highlights misunderstandings, offenses made when saying the wrong thing, or deception
• Shows how societies are put together and maintained through communication
• Explains how people interact and exert power
• Explains how people view reality differently and how texts create our view of reality

Texts and Texture

• Discourse analysts analyse 'texts' and 'conversations'
• Meaning is the most important thing that makes a text a text
• Meaning is based on choice
• Making meaning is whenever I choose one thing rather than another from a set of alternatives
• Two key things that make a text a text:
• Features inherent in the language itself
• An awareness of the conventions of the language that helps us to work out the relationships among words

Connections or Relationships

• What makes a text a text is relationships or connections
• Cohesion - Relationships between words, sentences or other elements inside the text
• Coherence - Relationship between the text and someone reading it and the social conventions used
• Intertextuality - One text and other texts may need reference in the process of making sense of the text

Texts and Their Social Functions

• Patterns of texture are associated with kinds of texts and text producers
• Social functions of different texts contribute to how such texts function in the social world, and to the definition of the people that take part in them
• This means study is called Genre analysis.
• Genres are recognisable communicative events characterised by a set of communicative purposes identified and mutually understood
• Genres are highly structured and conventionalised with constraints on allowable contributions in terms of their intent, positioning, form and functional value
• Genres are not defined as types of text but rather as types of communicative events.
• Genres are characterised by constraints on what can and cannot be done within them.
• Expert users exploit these constraints in creative and unexpected ways

Communicative Events

• Texts as instances of people doing things with or to other people
• Texts are often trying to get one more than one thing done.
• People’s purpose using text might be multiple and complex
• The different people using the text might also have different purposes in mind

Conventions and Constraints

• Genres are about 'getting things done', the way they are structured and the kinds of features they contain are determined by what people want to do with them
• Genres come with 'built-in' constraints as to what kinds of things they can include and what kinds of things they cannot, based on the activity they are trying to accomplish
• The move structure of a particular genre often determines how successfully I am able to fulfil the communicative purpose of the genre
• The conventions and constraints are not only that they make communicative events more efficient but also that they demonstrate that the person who produced the text knows how we do things
• The ability to successfully produce this type of genre following particular conventions is taken as an indication that the writer is a 'certain kind of person'

Creativity

• Successful texts defy conventions and push the boundaries of constraints
• The most successful texts are those that defy conventions.
• There are limitations to how much a genre can be altered and still be successful
• There are always risks associated with being creative

Points to Remember

• Innovating effectively exploits existing expectations
• Creativity must have a relationship to the communicative purpose and context
• Being able to successfully defy conventions is a badge of expertise

Discourse Communities

• Genres are used not just to get things done but also to show ourselves to be members of particular groups and to demonstrate that we are qualified to participate in particular activities
• Genres are always associated with certain groups of people that have certain common goals and common ways of reaching these goals.
• John Swales calls these groups discourse communities which consist of expert members, that members have ways of regularly communicating, and that members tend to share a certain vocabulary or jargon
• The two most important characteristics of discourse communities are that members have common goals and common means of reaching those goals
• Every time a member makes use of a particular genre, he or she not only moves the group closer to the shared goals but also validates these goals as worthy and legitimate and shows him or herself to be a worthy and legitimate member of the group

Links

• Not only genres link people together, they also link people with certain activities, identities, roles and responsibilities
• Genres help to regulate and control what people can do and who people can be
• This is exercised since the goals of the community are built in to the texts.
• Mastery of the genre = members buy into the goals of the community, relationships between text producer and user become fixed and can be difficult to change

Ideology

• Genres are tools through which people, groups and institutions define and structure social life
• Genres and ideologies are promoted through: versions of reality, author relationships with readers, representation of other peoples' words, indexing and invoking concepts
• An ideology is a specific set of beliefs and assumptions people have about things: good and bad, right and wrong, normal and abnormal.
• Ideologies help to create a shared worldview and sense of purpose
• Ideologies limit the way we look at reality and marginalise or exclude altogether people, things and ideas that do not fit into these models
• All texts, even those that seem rather innocuous or banal, somehow involve these systems of inclusion and exclusion

How Forms Create Exclusion

• Filling out forms asks to whether we are married or single which may exclude other categories
• Marital status is an important aspect of our identity (although it may have very little bearing)
• Being offered only the categories married and single promote the idea that being married is somehow the natural or normal state of affairs
• Forms construct you as a certain kind of person, what are you answering?

Whats and Whos

• Whenever we use language we are representing the world (ideational); we are creating relationships (interpersonal); and we are joining sentences and ideas together (textual)
• All those functions play a role in promoting ideology
• We represent the world through language by choosing words that represent people, things or concepts (participants); and words about what these participants are doing with, to, or for one another (processes)

Changing Perception

• The words we use to participate and how we use them can also change impressions
• Transitivity always constructs certain kind of relationship between participants
• Those with agency are actors, others are passive - In that way they have more charge of the process
• These processes include physical action, saying or writing, linking participants or processes to other participants

Relationships and Ideology

• Actions can be transformed into ‘things’ through a process called nominalisation which is characteristic of academic texts
• Ideology is promoted in the relationships texts create
• We construct relationships through words we choose to express
• In turn help determine relationships and how formal our speech is

Register

• The degree of 'formality' of language is a matter of Halliday's term Register
• Registers tend to communicate that we are 'certain kinds of people'.
• The use of different registers can also be seen in cigarette warnings

Discourse representation

• Texts often refer to or somehow depend on other texts for meaning in which is termed intertextuality, and intertextuality is how ideologies are promoted in discourse
• We nearly always end up communicating how we think about the other texts/utterances when taking them into account
• Discourse is often attributed or not to other people

Words

• Authors create 'versions of reality' on their choice of words and how they combine them
• Authors construct relationships between themselves and their readers
• Authors represent the words of other people and position themselves in relation to other people
• Authors index/ 'invoke' larger concepts and systems
• Responding and creating power dynamics

Levels of Analysis

• Direct quotation has impact especially as it relates to reported word
• Paraphrase or summarising
• The effect is the warning gives the 'gist' of what the Surgeon General said instead of a direct quote
• Selected quotation with 'scare quotes' puts scepticism on them
• Author doesn't tell us who said Smoking kills-stronger warnings are more a 'fact than opinion
• Presuppositions are implicit assumptions about background beliefs

Discourse

• Not just mixing people's words - mixing Genres.
• Mix social languages and mixing genres, a practice we call interdiscursivity,
• Discourse- a discussion of topic which includes a particular viewpoint regarding topic with associated assumptions, knowledge, beliefs, and societal expectations
• A seemingly innocent phrase can be ideological
• Promotes cultural models of what brides and grooms are to act

Discourses

• Not only reinforces, but evokes broader theories about marriage, gender relations
• Encompass marriage, gender, morality, and economics
• To show ideologies and stereotypes

Spoken Discourse

• Explores special aspects of spoken discourse and how speech is not so different from writing
• The way that people produce different kinds of registers
• Promote some versions or realities or ideologies
• Speech is more interactive
• Respond what previous speaker has said
• Conversations can alter what were saying based on reactions
• More transient and spontanious

Transience

• Make up as we go
• Not always well planned
• Making listening more challenging that reading

Speech

• Often also depend on other methods -Gaze, gestures,facial expressions to get across our message
• Speech = less explicit
• Takes into account physical and social context

Deitic

• Expressions - this and that used in concert to understand interactions are a part of deictic expressions
• It is the cooperative party in this conversation and that the people should mean what they say

Pragmatics

• The study of how people use words to accomplish actions in their conversation such as threatening or apologizing
• To help us understand people figure out other peoples actions
• The way our analytical problems are to be mattered to Logic conditions and conclusions need to be present while in others

Conversation

• analysis on the other hand comes out of traditions called with the old Mythology
• Social activity which uses procedure for people can have with one - another to interpret their experience
• Mutually exclusive this approach is different windows I will show the phenomenon for communications.

Strategic Interaction

• Negotiating what we are doing depends on how we are Interacting
• In that respect face strategies I have to showing people what we are like and what a relation that can be made from face stradegies to showing who we.

Conversational Strategies

• Frame.
• Face

Interactivite Sociolinguistics

• Concerned in that area where they are so sub tile that they give into people signalling with each other to interperts what is meant
• Gumperz important insights by that people belonging to different groups that they signal and interpert that in the result it can cause misunderstandings with that area.

Presentation of Self

• Performance and expression is needed equipment in that process
• As people show them roles that will set upon what is going on

Face Negotiation

• Positive affect = Honour and Reputation or Face is a positive social value/aspect a person gets from effectively presenting to others that 'self' is in fact that 'self'

Involvement

• Nicknames to connect us, using slang
• Common views

Independence

• More respectful , being more indepentent that wants to keep safe for what everyone wants.

The Context

• In what is meant an utterend depends on what an utter end says or what.
• What conversation depends of and is being Interpertide

Context

• Firth is to divide the components 1-The Relevant features for the people ,Personalities 2-The Relevant objects within the situations. 3-The effects of verbal function

Context in short or more of what.

• Halladay focuses on the main elements 1- Field this Social action 2- Tenor parts and relationships 3 - Mode a Rhetorical channel for the relationship

Competitiveness

• Hymes is central to come for a model called the Ethnography Of Speaking and Communicating.

Ethnography Speaking

• 1- The Setting
• The participants
• Ends purpose
• Sequence the order and what is Normal the act
• key mood
• interments tools used to community
• Norms - communication
• Genre- a structure

Discourse Analysis

1- What is what is worth it for to get those texts to see what their about. 2- Try to understand how difference and convos are linked and somtimes in many ways. 3 -How linkages work to CREATE social identifies

Discourses is used for everything one day to day.

• Language to come to those to what others or to a certain context

What others have.

• Power with what will have to do from.
• That language use the same is tied into how Construct socialy relationships or what their for.

All 3 can not be seprate

• If we divide the ways in the people and we can get how to analyse them we need .

Discourses in how their used

1- Socialy or what there known for to be in short

The one way to know is that text be good

Linguistic

And those parts form unfiled walls or what so ever