Discourse Analysis PDF

# What is Discourse Analysis? This chapter provides an overview of discourse analysis, 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. The chapter commences by presenting the origins of the...

# What is Discourse Analysis? This chapter provides an overview of discourse analysis, 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. The chapter commences by presenting the origins of the term discourse analysis. It then discusses particular issues which are of interest to discourse analysts, such as the relationship between language and social context, culture-specific ways of speaking and writing and ways of organizing texts in particular social and cultural situations. * The chapter continues with a discussion of different views of discourse analysis. These range from more textually oriented views of discourse analysis which concentrate mostly on language features of texts, to more socially oriented views of discourse analysis which consider what the text is doing in the social and cultural setting in which it occurs. This leads to a discussion of the social constructionist view of discourse; that is, the ways in which what we say as we speak contributes to the construction of certain views of the world, of people and, in turn, ourselves. * The relationship between language and identity is then introduced. This includes a discussion of the ways in which, through our use of language, we not only 'display' who we are but also how we want people to see us. This includes a discussion of the ways in which, through the use of spoken and written discourse, people both 'perform' and 'create' particular social, and gendered, identities. * The chapter discusses the relationship between texts. It discusses how we produce and understand texts in relation to other texts that have come before them as well as other texts that may follow them. ## Discourse Analysis ### What is discourse analysis? Discourse analysis examines patterns of language across texts and considers the relationship between language and the social and cultural contexts in which it is used. Discourse analysis also considers the ways that the use of language presents different views of the world and different understandings. It examines how the use of language is influenced by relationships between participants as well as the effects the use of language has upon social identities and relations. It also considers how views of the world, and identities, are constructed through the use of discourse. The term discourse analysis was first introduced by Zellig Harris (1952) as a way of analysing connected speech and writing. Harris had two main interests: the examination of language beyond the level of the sentence and the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour. He examined the first of these in most detail, aiming to provide a way for describing how language features are distributed within texts and the ways in which they are combined in particular kinds and styles of texts. * An early, and important, observation he made was that: **connected discourse occurs within a particular situation - whether of a person speaking, or of a conversation, or of someone sitting down occasionally over the period of months to write a particular kind of book in a particular literary or scientific tradition.** There are, thus, typical ways of using language in particular situations. These discourses, he argued, not only share particular meanings, they also have characteristic linguistic features associated with them. What these meanings are and how they are realized in language is of central interest to the area of discourse analysis. ### The relationship between language and context By 'the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour' Harris means how people know, from the situation that they are in, how to interpret what someone says. If, for example, an air traffic controller says to a pilot 'the runway is full at the moment', this most likely means it is not possible to land the plane. This may seem obvious to a native speaker of English but a non-native speaker pilot, of which there are many in the world, needs to understand the relationship between what is said and what is meant in order to understand that he/she cannot land the plane at that time. * The use of a language in different situations can have different meanings; For example, if I say 'the runway is full at the moment' to a friend who is waiting with me to pick someone up from the airport, this is now an explanation of why the plane is late landing (however I may know this) and not an instruction to not land the plane. * The same discourse, thus, can be understood differently by different language users as well as understood differently in different contexts. ## The discourse structure of texts Discourse analysts are also interested in how people organize what they say in the sense of what they typically say first, and what they say next and so on in a conversation or in a piece of writing. This is something that varies across cultures and is by no means the same across languages. An email, for example, to me from a Japanese academic or a member of the administrative staff at a Japanese university may start with reference to the weather saying immediately after Dear Professor Paltridge something like Greetings! It's such a beautiful day today here in Kyoto. I, of course, may also say this in an email to an overseas colleague but is it not a ritual requirement in English, as it is in Japanese. * There are, thus, particular things we say and particular ways of ordering what we say in particular spoken and written situations and in particular languages and cultures. ## Different views of discourse analysis There are in fact a number of differing views on what discourse analysis actually is. Social science researchers, for example, might argue that all their work is concerned with the analysis of discourse, yet often take up the term in their own, sometimes different, ways (Fairclough 2003). * Mills (1997) makes a similar observation showing how through its relatively short history the term discourse analysis has shifted from highlighting one aspect of language usage to another, as well as being used in different ways by different researchers. * Fairclough (2003) contrasts what he calls 'textually oriented discourse analysis' with approaches to discourse analysis that have more of a social theoretical orientation. He does not see these two views as mutually exclusive, however, arguing for an analysis of discourse that is both linguistic and social in its orientation. * Cameron and Kulick (2003) present a similar view. They do not take these two perspectives to be incompatible with each other, arguing that the instances of language in use that are studied under a textually oriented view of discourse are still socially situated and need to be interpreted in terms of their social meanings and functions. ## Discourse and intertextuality All texts, whether they are spoken or written, make their meanings against the background of other texts and things that have been said on other occasions (Lemke 1992). Texts may more or less implicitly or explicitly cite other texts; they may refer to other texts, or they may allude to other past, or future, texts. We thus 'make sense of every word, every utterance, or act against the background of (some) other words, utterances, acts of a similar kind' (Lemke 1995: 23). All texts are, thus, in an intertextual relationship with other texts. * As Bazerman (2004: 83) argues: **We create our texts out of the sea of former texts that surround us, the sea of language we live in. And we understand the texts of others within that same sea.** ## Cultural ways of speaking and writing Different cultures often have different ways of doing things through language. * As Hymes (1964) explored through the notion of the ethnography of communication. Hymes' work was a reaction to the neglect, at the time, of speech in linguistic analyses and anthropological descriptions of cultures. His work was also a reaction to views of language which took little or no account of the social and cultural contexts in which language occurs. In particular, he considered aspects of speech events such as who is speaking to whom, about what, for what purpose, where and when, and how these impact on how we say and do things in culture-specific settings. * There are, for example, particular cultural ways of buying and selling things in different cultures. How I buy my lunch at a takeaway shop in an English-speaking country is different, for example, from how I might do this in Japan. In an English-speaking country there is greater ritual use of Please and Thanks on the part of the customer in this kind of interaction than there is in Japan. How I buy something in a supermarket in an English-speaking country may be more similar to how I might do this in Japan. The person at the cash register in Japan, however, will typically say much more than the customer in this sort of situation, who may indeed say nothing. This does not mean that by saying nothing the Japanese customer is being rude. It simply means that there are culturally different ways of doing things with language in different cultures. The sequence of events I go through may be the same in both cultures, but the ways of using language in these events and other sorts of non-linguistic behaviour may differ. ## Discourse and socially situated identities When we speak or write we use more than just language to display who we are, and how we want people to see us. * The way we dress, the gestures we use and the way/s we act and interact also influence how we display social identity. * Other factors which influence this include the ways we think, the attitudes we display and the things we value, feel and believe. * As Gee (2011) argues, the ways we make visible and recognizable who we are and what we are doing always involves more than just language. It involves acting, interacting and thinking in certain ways. It also involves valuing and talking (or reading and writing) in appropriate ways with appropriate 'props', at appropriate times and in appropriate places. ## Discourse and performance As Gee explains: * a Discourse is a 'dance' that exists in the abstract as a coordinated pattern of words, deeds, values, beliefs, symbols, tools, objects, times, and places in the here and now as a performance that is recognizable as just such a coordination. Like a dance, the performance here and now is never exactly the same. It all comes down, often, to what the 'masters of the dance' will allow to be recognised or will be forced to recognize as a possible instantiation of the dance. This notion of performance and, in particular, performativity, is taken up by authors such as Butler (1990, 1991, 1997, 1999, 2004), Cameron (1999), Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2003), Hall (2000) and Pennycook (2004, 2007). The notion of performativity derives from speech act theory and the work of the linguistic philosopher Austin. It is based on the view that in saying something, we do it (Cameron and Kulick 2003). That is, we bring states of affairs into being as a result of what we say and what we do. Examples of this are I promise and I now pronounce you husband and wife. Once I have said I promise I have committed myself to doing something. Once a priest, or a marriage celebrant, says I now pronounce you husband and wife, the couple have 'become' husband and wife. Performance, thus, brings the social world into being (Bucholtz and Hall 2003). * Butler, Cameron and others talk about doing gender in much the way that Gee talks about discourse as performance. * Discourses, then, like the performance of gendered identities, are socially constructed, rather than 'natural'. *** Discourses, then, involve the socially situated identities that we enact and recognize in the different settings that we interact in. They include culture-specific ways of performing and culture-specific ways of recognizing identities and activities. Discourses also include the different styles of language that we use to enact and recognize these identities; that is, different social languages (Gee 1996). Discourses also involve characteristic ways of acting, interacting and feeling, and characteristic ways of showing emotion, gesturing, dressing and posturing. They also involve particular ways of valuing, thinking, believing, knowing, speaking and listening, reading and writing (Gee 2011). *** * People 'are who they are because of (among other things) the way they talk' not 'because of who they (already) are' (Cameron 1999: 144). * We, thus, 'are not who we are because of some inner being but because of what we do' (Pennycook 2007: 70). * It is, thus, 'in the doing that the identity is produced' (Pennycook 2011). Social identities, then, are not pre-given, but are formed in the use of language and the various other ways we display who we are, what we think, value and feel, etc.