Discourse Analysis PDF

**Discourse Analysis** Discourse analysis (DA) is a broad field of study that draws some of its theories and methods of analysis from disciplines such as linguistics, sociology, philosophy and psychology. More importantly, discourse analysis has provided models and methods of engaging issues that e...

**Discourse Analysis** Discourse analysis (DA) is a broad field of study that draws some of its theories and methods of analysis from disciplines such as linguistics, sociology, philosophy and psychology. More importantly, discourse analysis has provided models and methods of engaging issues that emanate from disciplines such as education, cultural studies, communication and so on. **What is Discourse Analysis?** The term 'discourse analysis' was first used by the sentence linguist, **Zellig Harris** in his **1952** article entitled 'Discourse Analysis'. According to him, discourse analysis is a method for the analysis of connected speech or writing, for continuing descriptive linguistics beyond the limit of a simple sentence at a time (Harris 1952). Meanwhile, scholars have attested to the difficulty in coming up with a comprehensive and acceptable definition for discourse analysis. However, a way to simplify the attempt to define discourse analysis is to say that discourse analysis is 'the analysis of discourse'. The next question, therefore, would be 'what is discourse?' Discourse can simply be seen as language in use **(Brown & Yule 1983; Cook 1989)**. It therefore follows that discourse analysis is the analysis of language in use. By 'language in use', we mean the set of norms, preferences and expectations which relate language to context. Discourse analysis can also be seen as the organization of language above the sentence level. **The term 'text' is, sometimes, used in place of 'discourse'**. The concern of discourse analysis is not restricted to the study of formal properties of language; it also takes into consideration what language is used for in social and cultural contexts. - Discourse analysis, therefore, studies the relationship between language (written, spoken -- conversation, institutionalized forms of talk) and the contexts in which it is used. What matters is that the text is felt to be coherent. **Guy Cook (1989:6-7)** describes discourse as language in use or language used to communicate something felt to be coherent which may, or may not correspond to a correct sentence or series of correct sentences. - Discourse analysis, therefore, according to him, is the search for what gives discourse coherence. He posits that discourse does not have to be grammatically correct, can be anything from a grunt or simple expletive, through short conversations and scribbled notes, a novel or a lengthy legal case. What matters is not its conformity to rules, but the fact that it communicates and is recognized by its receivers as coherent. Similarly**, Stubbs (1983:1)** perceives discourse analysis as 'a conglomeration of attempts to study the organization of language and therefore to study larger linguistic units, such as conversational exchanges or written text.' Again, **we affirm that what matters in the study of discourse, whether as language in use or as language beyond the clause, is that language is organized in a coherent manner such that it communicates something to its receivers.** Discourse analysis evolved from works in different disciplines in the 1960s and early 1970s, including linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, psychology and sociology. Some of the scholars and the works that either gave birth to, or helped in the development of discourse analysis include the following: 1. J.L. Austin whose *How to Do Things with Words* (1962) introduced the popular social theory, speech-act theory. 2. Dell Hymes (1964) provided a sociological perspective with the study of speech. 3. John Searle (1969) developed and improved on the work of Austin. 4. The linguistic philosopher, M.A.K. Halliday greatly influenced the linguistic properties of discourses (e.g. Halliday 1961), and in the 1970s he provided sufficient framework for the consideration of the functional approach to language (e.g. Halliday 1973). 5. H.P. Grice (1975) and Halliday (1978) were also influential in the study of language as social action reflected in the formulation of conversational maxims and the emergence of social semiotics. 6. The work of Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) also developed a model for the description of teacher-pupil talk. The study grew to be a major approach to discourse. 7. Some work on conversation analysis also aided the development of discourse analysis. Some of such works from the ethnomethodological tradition include the work of Gumperz and Hymes 1972. Some other works influential in the study of conversational norms, turn-taking, and other aspects of spoken interaction include Goffman (1976, 1979), and Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974). The brief review above shows that the approach to discourse is anything but uniform, so below is an attempt to provide a more systematic insight into some of the approaches to discourse. - Discourse analysis is the study of language in use. It is the study of the meanings we give language and the actions we carry out when we use language in specific contexts. Discourse analysis is also sometimes defined as the study of language above the level of a sentence, of the ways sentences combine to create meaning, coherence, and accomplish purposes. However, even a single sentence or utterance can be analyzed as a "communication" or as an "action," and not just as a sentence structure whose "literal meaning" flows from the nature of grammar. Eg: "I pronounce you man and wife" - Sometimes the term "**pragmatics"** is used for the study of language in use (Levinson, 1983), and people reserve the phrase "**discourse analysis**" for studying how the sentences in an oral or written "text" pattern together to create meaning and coherence and to define different genres (e.g. dialogues, narratives, reports, descriptions, explanations, and so forth). - The phrase "discourse analysis" covers both pragmatics (the study of contextually specific meanings of language in use) and the study of "texts" (the study of how sentences and utterances pattern together to create meaning across multiple sentences or utterances). - **Discourse analysis** is not just the study of language, but a way of looking at language that focuses on how people use it in real life to do things like joke and argue and persuade and flirt, and to show that they are certain kinds of people or belong to certain groups. This way of looking at language is based ***on four main assumptions***. They are: - ***Language is ambiguous***. What things mean is never absolutely clear. All communication involves interpreting what other people mean and what they are trying to do. - ***Language is always 'in the world'.*** That is, what language means is always a matter of where and when it is used and what it is used to do. - ***The way we use language is inseparable from who we are and the different social groups to which we belong.*** We use language to display different kinds of social identities and to show that we belong to different groups. - ***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. What language means and what we can do with it is often a matter of how it is combined with these other things. 1. **The ambiguity of language** 2. **Language in the world** 3. **Language and social identity** 4. **Language and other modes** - Consider the following list of words: - Milk - Spaghetti - Tomatoes - Rocket - Light bulbs - According to the linguist M.A.K. Halliday, meaning is the most important thing that makes a text a text; it has to *make sense*. A text, in his view, is everything that is meaningful in a particular situation. And the basis for *meaning* is *choice* (Halliday 1978: 137). - Whenever I choose one thing rather than another from a set of alternatives (yes or no, up or down, red or blue), I am making meaning. This focus on meaning, in fact, is one of the main things that distinguishes Halliday's brand of linguistics from that of other linguists who are concerned chiefly with linguistic *forms*. - You will still probably not be able to recognize this as a text because you do not have any understanding of what motivated these choices (why I wrote down these particular words) and the relationship between one set of choices (e.g. 'Milk' vs. 'Juice') and another. - It is these two pieces of missing information -- **the *context* of these choices and the *relationships* between them** -- which form the basis for what we will be calling *texture* -- that quality that makes a particular set of words or sentences a text, rather than a random collection of linguistic items. - A: What do we need to get at the shop? - B: Well, we need some milk. And I want to make a salad, so let's get some tomatoes and rocket. And, oh yeah, the light bulb in the living room is burnt out. We'd better get some new ones. - According to this formulation, there are two important things that make a text a text. **One** has to do with **features inherent** in the language itself (things, for example, like **grammatical 'rules**'), which help us to understand the relationship among the different words and sentences and other elements in the text. It is these features that help you to figure out the relationship between the various sets of choices (**either lexical or grammatical)** that you encounter. - The **second** part of Halliday's formulation has to do with something that cannot be found in the language itself, but rather exists inside the minds of the people who are perceiving the text, what Halliday calls an ***awareness* of the conventions** of the language (and, by extension, broader conventions of communication in a given society) which helps us to work out the relationships among words, sentences, paragraphs, pictures and other textual elements, as well as relationships between these combinations of textual elements and certain social situations or communicative purposes. These conventions give us a kind of 'framework' within which we can fit the language. The framework for the text above, for example, is 'a shopping list'. As soon as you have that framework, this list of words makes perfect sense as a text. In fact, you do not even need to refer back to the conversation above to understand what the text means and how it will be used. All of the information about what people do with shopping lists is already part of your ***common knowledge*** (the knowledge you share with other people in society). -  There is still one more thing that helps you to make sense of this as a text, and that has to do with the connections that exist between this particular collection of words and other texts that exist outside of it. For example, this text might be related to the conversation above. In other words, all texts are somehow related to other texts, and sometimes, in order to make sense of them or use them to perform social actions, you need to make reference to these other texts. - To sum up, the main thing that makes a text a text is ***relationships* or *connections*.** Sometimes these relationships are between words, sentences or other elements ***inside*** the text. These kinds of relationships create what we refer to as ***cohesion***. Another kind of relationship exists between the text and the person who is reading it or using it in some way. Here, meaning comes chiefly from **the background knowledge** the person has about certain **social conventions** regarding texts as well as **the social situation** in which the text is found and what the person wants to do with the text. This kind of relationship creates what we call ***coherence***. Finally, there is the relationship between one text and other texts in the world that one might, at some point, need to refer to in the process of making sense of this text. This kind of relationship creates what we call ***intertextuality*.** [TEXTS AND THEIR SOCIAL FUNCTIONS] ============================================== Different patterns of texture are associated with different types of texts. Newspaper articles, for example, tend to favor particular kinds of cohesive devices and are structured in a conventional way with a summary of the main points in the beginning and with the details coming later. To understand why such textual conventions are associated with this type of text, however, we need to understand something about the people who produce and consume it and what they are *doing* with it. *The study of the social functions of different kinds of texts is called genre analysis.* ================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================== The notion of *genre* in discourse analysis goes beyond examining the conventional structures and features of different kinds of texts to asking what these structures and features can tell us about the people who use the texts and what they are using them to do. In his book *Analyzing Genre*, Vijay Bhatia, drawing on the work of John Swales, defines genre as follows: ================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================= (A genre) is a recognizable communicative *event* characterized by a set of *communicative purposes* identified and mutually understood by members of the community in which it occurs. Most often it is highly structured and *conventionalized* with *constraints* on allowable contributions in terms of their intent, positioning, form and functional value. These constraints, however, are often *exploited by expert members* of the discourse community to achieve private intentions within the framework of the socially recognized purpose(s). (Bhatia 1993:13) =========================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================== There are three important aspects to this definition: first, that genres are not defined as types of texts but rather as types of *communicative events*; second, that these events are characterized by *constraints* on what can and cannot be done within them; and third, that *expert* users often *exploit* these constraints in creative and unexpected ways. ==================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================== Genres are communicative events =============================== - We are in many ways accustomed to thinking of texts as 'objects'. Seeing them as 'events', however, highlights the fact that all texts are basically instances of people doing things with or to other people: a newspaper article is an instance of someone *informing* someone else about some recent event; a recipe is an instance of someone *instructing* another person how to prepare a particular kind of food; and a job application letter is an instance of someone *requesting* that another person give him or her a job. ======================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================= - As Martin (1985: 250) points out, 'genres are how things get done, when language is used to accomplish them.' Thus, the ways different kinds of texts are put together is inseparable from the things the text is trying to 'get done' in a particular historical, cultural and social context. =============================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================== - Most texts are not just trying to get only one thing done. The *communicative purposes* of texts are often multiple and complex. ================================================================================================================================ Conventions and Constraints =========================== - Because genres are about 'getting things done', the way they are structured and the kinds of features they contain are largely determined by what people want to do with them. The kinds of information I might include in a job application, for example, would be designed to convince a prospective employer that I am the right person for the job. ======================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================= - 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. These constraints govern not just *what* can be included, but also *how* it should be included. =================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================== - The order in which I do things in a genre, what in *genre analysis* is called the 'move structure' of a particular genre, often determines how successfully I am able to fulfill the communicative purpose of the genre. ======================================================================================================================================================================================================================== - What is important about these conventions and constraints is not just that they make communicative events more efficient, but also that they demonstrate that the person who produced the text knows 'how we do things' ======================================================================================================================================================================================================================= Creativity ========== - That is not to say that all job application letters, or other genres like newspaper articles and recipes, are always exactly the same. Often the most successful texts are those which break the rules, defy conventions and push the boundaries of constraints. Expert producers of texts, for example, sometimes mix different kinds of texts together, or embed one genre into another, or alter in some way the moves that are included or the order in which they are presented. Of course, there are limitations to how much a genre can be altered and still be successful at accomplishing what its producers want to accomplish. There are always risks associated with being creative: ================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================ - the existence of conventions ============================ - The communicative purpose of the genre and the context in which it is used. =========================================================================== - Mastery of the rules. ===================== Discourse Communities ===================== - At the center of the concept of genre is the idea of *belonging*. We produce and use genres not just in order 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*. ============================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================ - The two most important characteristics of discourse communities are that members have common goals and common means of reaching those goals (genres). These goals and the means of reaching them work to reinforce each other. 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. ====================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================== Thus, genres not only link people together, they also link people with certain activities, identities, roles and responsibilities. In a very real way, then, genres help to regulate and control what people can do and who people can' be' in various contexts. ================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================ Genres are not just 'text types' that are structured in certain ways and contain certain linguistic features; they are important tools through which people, groups and institutions define, organize and structure social reality. =================================================================================================================================================================================================================================== **[DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY]** - How texts promote certain points of view or versions of reality. - Whether we are aware of it our not, our words are never neutral. They always represent the world in a certain way and create certain kinds of relationships with the people with whom we are communicating. For this reason, **texts always to some degree promote a particular *ideology***. - ***An ideology*** is a specific set of beliefs and assumptions people have about things like what is good and bad, what is right and wrong, and what is normal and abnormal. I**deologies** provide us with models of how the world is 'supposed to be'. In some respects, **ideologies help to create a shared worldview** and sense of purpose among people in a particular group. On the other hand, ideologies also limit the way we look at reality and tend to marginalize 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. **Whos Doing Whats'** - The linguist Michael Halliday (1994) pointed out that whenever we use language we are always doing three things at once: - We are in some way representing the world: which he called **the *ideational* function** of language; we are creating, ratifying or negotiating our relationships with the people with whom we are communicating, which he called the ***interpersonal* function** of language, and we are joining sentences and ideas together in particular ways to form cohesive and coherent texts, which he called the ***textual* function** of language. All of these functions play a role in the way **a text promotes a particular ideology** or worldview. - According to Halliday, we represent the world through language by choosing words that represent people, things or concepts **(*participants***), and words about what these participants are *doing* to, with or for one another (***processes***). All texts contain these two elements: ***participants* and *processes***. James Paul Gee (2011) calls them 'whos doing whats'. - Rather than talking about texts representing reality, however, it might be better to talk about texts 'constructing' reality, since, depending on the words they choose to represent the 'whos doing whats' in a particular situation, people can create very different impressions of what is going on. 1. We might **choose** **different words** to represent the same kinds of **participant.** 2. The **words we use for processes** and how we use them to link participants together can also create different impressions of what is going on. One of the key things about *processes* is that they always construct a certain kind of ***relationship* between participants.** - Halliday calls this **relationship *transitivity***. An important aspect of transitivity when it comes to **ideology** has to do with which participants are portrayed as performing actions and which are portrayed as having actions done to or for them. **Relationships** - Another important way texts promote ideology is in the relationships they create between the people who are communicating and between communicators and what they are communicating about, what Halliday calls the ***interpersonal* function of language.** - We construct relationships through words we choose to express things like certainty and obligation (known as the system of *modality* in a language). - Another way we use language to construct relationships is through the style of speaking or writing that we choose. The Russian literary critic Mikhail **Bakhtin** calls these different styles of speaking and writing '**social languages**', a term which is also used by James Paul Gee. - **Halliday** is more likely to see **degrees of 'formality**' in language as a matter of what he calls ***register*,** the different ways we use language in different situations depending on the topic we are communicating about, the people with whom we are communicating, and the channel through which we are communicating (e.g. formal writing, instant messaging, face-­‐to-­‐face conversation) **Intertextuality** - As we have mentioned before, texts often refer to or somehow depend for their meaning on other texts. We called the relationship texts create with other texts *intertextuality*, and **intertextuality is another important way ideologies are promoted in discourse**. - According to Bakhtin, all texts involve some degree of intertextuality. We cannot speak or write, he argues, without borrowing the words and ideas of other people, and nearly everything we say or write is in some way a response to some previous utterance or text and an anticipation of some future one. - When we appropriate the words and ideas of others in our texts and utterances, we almost always end up communicating how we think about those words and ideas (and the people who have said or written them) in the way we represent them. We might, for example, quote them verbatim, paraphrase them, or refer to them in an indirect way, and we might characterize them in certain ways using different 'reporting' words like 'said,' or 'insisted,' or 'claimed.' - Intertextuality does not just involve mixing other people's words with ours. It can also involve mixing genres and mixing social languages. [Corpus Linguistics Discourse Aanalysis] In fact, the focus of most discourse analysis is on looking very closely at one or a small number of texts or conversations of a particular type, trying to uncover things like how the text or conversation is structured, how writers/speakers and readers/listeners are constructed, how the text or conversation promotes the broader ideological agendas of groups or institutions, and how people actually use the text or conversation to perform concrete social actions. **Corpus-­‐assisted discourse analysis** is unique in that it allows us to go beyond looking at a small number of texts or interactions to analyzing a large number of them and being able to compare them to other texts and conversations that are produced under similar or different circumstances. It also allows us to bring to our analysis some degree of **'objectivity'** by giving us the opportunity to test out the theories formulated in the close analysis of a few texts or conversations on a much larger body of data in a rather systematic way. **A *corpus* is basically a collection of texts in digital format that it is possible to search through and manipulate using a computer program.** There are a number of large corpora, such as the **British National Corpus**, which is a very general collection of written and spoken texts in English. You can also find general corpora of texts produced in different varieties of English and also other languages. There are also a large number of specialized corpora available, that is, collections of texts of one particular genre (such as business letters) or in one particular register (such as academic writing). There are even multimodal corpora in which not just verbal data but also visual data are collected and tagged. Normally, corpora are used by linguists in order to find out things about the grammatical and lexical patterns in particular varieties of language or particular kinds of texts. A lot of what we know about the differences among the different varieties of English (such as British English, American English, and Australian English) or among different registers for example comes from the analysis of corpora. Discourse analysts have only recently started using corpora, and the number of discourse analytical studies that rely heavily on corpora is still relatively small. The reasons for this have to do with the way discourse analysts have traditionally viewed what they do. Discourse analysts are not just interested in linguistic forms and patterns but also in how language is actually used in concrete social situations. Computer analysis using large corpora seems to go against this key aim: texts in corpora are taken out of their social contexts, and even the information we often get from the analysis, which usually consists of things like lists of frequently used words or phrases, is often presented outside of the context of the texts in which these words and phrases occur. Other than this, the analysis of corpora also presents other problems for discourse analysts. As we asserted at the beginning of our study of discourse analysis: 'People don't always say what they mean, and people don't always mean what they say.' A big part of discourse analysis, in fact, is figuring out what people mean when they do not say (or write) it directly. Any method which takes language and ***its meaning at face value*** is of limited use to discourse analysts. Words and phrases, as we have seen, can have multiple meanings depending on how they are used in different circumstances by different people, and just because a word is used frequently does not mean it is particularly important. Often the most important meanings that we make are implicit or stated indirectly. Despite these potential problems, however, the *computer-­assisted* analysis of corpora can still be a very valuable tool for discourse analysts. The key word in this phrase is *assisted*. The computer analysis of corpora cannot be used by itself to *do* discourse analysis. But it can *assist* us in doing discourse analysis in some very valuable ways. First, it can help us to see the data that we are analyzing from a new perspective. Often seeing your data broken down into things like concordances or frequency lists can help you to see things that you missed using more traditional discourse analytical techniques. Second, it can help us to see if we can generalize our theories or observations about certain kinds of texts or certain kinds of interactions. If you find certain features in a business email you are analyzing, the most you can say is that this particular email has these features and that these features function in the particular social situation from which the email comes in a certain way. If, however, you have access to a large number of similar emails, or emails from the same company, then you can start to make generalizations about the kinds of features that are common to business emails, or the kinds of features that are common to emails in this particular company. **This has obvious applications to *genre analysis* in which the analyst is interested in identifying certain conventions of language use associated with particular kinds of texts.** Finally, and most importantly, the analysis of corpora can help us to detect what we have been calling **\'Discourses with a capital D\' -- systems of language use that promote particular kinds of ideologies and power relationships.** These are usually quite educated guesses that we make based on world knowledge, scholarly research, common sense and the analysis of lots of different texts over a long period of time. The analysis of large corpora, however, gives us a more empirical way to detect trends in language use -- how words and phrases tend to reoccur---across a large number of texts, which might signal a 'Discourse', and also to detect if and how such language use changes over time (Baker, 2005; 2006). Of course, being able to detect 'Discourses' through the computer analysis of corpora requires the creative combination of multiple analytical procedures, and it also necessarily involves a large amount of interpretative work by the analyst. The computer analysis of corpora do not provide discourse analysts with answers. Rather, they provide them with additional information to make their educated guesses even more educated and their theory building more evidence-­‐based.