Paper Group 2 of Discourse Analysis 4
Paper Group 2 of Discourse Analysis 4
Paper Group 2 of Discourse Analysis 4
PAPER
Discourse Analysis
By : Group 2
Class 6E
2021-2022
i
DISCUSSION
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i. has a beginning and an end
j. oral and written
This definition is more complete when compared to other definitions or
discourse limitations presented by other linguists.
B. Discourse Communities
Swales ( 1990 ) provides a set of characteristics for identifying a group of people
as members of a particular discourse community. The group must have some set of
shared common goals, some mechanisms for communication and some way of
providing the exchange of information among its members. The community must have
its own particular genres, its own set of specialized terminology and vocabulary and a
high level of expertise in its particular area. These goals may be formally agreed upon
(as in the case of clubs and associations) ‘or they may be more tacit’. The ways in which
people communicate with each other and exchange information will vary according to
the group. This might include meetings, newsletters, casual conversations or a range of
other types of written and/or spoken communication. That is, the discourse community
will have particular ways of communicating with each other and ways of getting things
done that have developed through time. There will also be a threshold level of expertise
in the use of the genres the discourse community uses for its communications for
someone to be considered a member of that community.
A discourse community is a group of people who share some type of activity.
Members of a discourse community have certain ways of communicating with one
another. They generally have a common goal and may have shared values and beliefs.
A person is often a member of a discourse community. more than one discourse
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community. For example A student at a university, a member of a community volunteer
organization and a member of a church group. The way they communicate within each
group, and their values and beliefs vary.
A telephone call centre is an example of a discourse community. Cameron’s (
2000 ) study of telephone call centres in the United Kingdom suggests what some of
the characteristics of this kind of discourse community might be. She found, for
example, that the telephone operators in the call centres she examined were trained to
communicate with customers on the phone in very particular ways. They were trained
to answer the phone ‘with a smile in their voice’. They were asked to pay attention to
the pitch of their voice so that they conveyed a sense of confidence and sincerity in
what they said. They were required to talk neither too loudly nor too quietly. They were
trained not to drag out what they said, or to speed through what they were saying. They
were also required to provide sufficient feedback to their callers so that the callers knew
they had been understood.
Devitt ( 2004 : 42–4) adds to this discussion by proposing three types of groups
of language users: communities , collectives and networks. Communities are ‘groups
of people who share substantial amounts of time together in common endeavors’, such
as a group of people who all work in the same office. Collectives are groups of people
that ‘form around a single repeated interest, without the frequency or intensity of
contact of a community’, such as people who are members of a bee-keeping group, or
voluntary members of a community telephone advice service. Networks are groups of
people that are not as tightly knit as speech communities with connections being made
by one person ‘who knows another person, who knows another person’, such as
connections that are made through email messages sent and received by people who
may never have met each other (and perhaps never will), but are participating in a
common discourse.
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family, among friends and in religious, educational and employment settings. Social
factors such as who we are speaking to, the social context of the interaction, the topic,
function and goal of the interaction, social distance between speakers, the formality of
the setting or type of interaction and the status of each of the speakers are also important
for accounting for the language choice that a person makes in these kinds of settings
(Holmes 2008 ).
The US legal drama The Good Wife (CBS 2011 ) provides an example of the
use of language by the same speaker in different social, professional and personal
settings. The lead character in the show, Alicia Florrick, returns to the legal profession
after many years of being a homemaker when her husband goes to jail following a sex
and corruption scandal. In the show, she is a lawyer, a mother, the wife of a disgraced
former state attorney and has a romantic relationship with a colleague in the law firm in
which she works. She behaves, and uses language differently, when she is in each of
these different situations, depending on whether she in her office, in a court of law or at
home in her apartment. The way she speaks also depends on the role which is most
prominent at the time, who she is speaking to, and the purpose of the interaction in
which she is engaged.
Each of these examples highlights the point made by Litossoleti ( 2006 ), Eckert
( 2008 ) and Pennycook ( 2010 ) that language is both a social (Litossoleti and Eckert)
and local (Pennycook) practice, and the meanings that are made through the use of
language are based in the ideologies, activities and beliefs of what it means to be in a
particular place, at a particular time and in a particular setting. In the words of Eckert:
people fashion their ways of speaking, moving their styles this way or that as they move
their personae through situations from moment to moment, from day to day, and through
the life course. (2008: 463)
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Gender, then, is not simply a natural and inevitable consequence of one's
biological sex (Weatherall 2002). Rather, 'part of the routine, constant work of
everyday, mundane social interactions'; that is, the 'product of social practice' (Eckert
and McConnell-Ginet 2003:5). Gender, further, as Swann (2002:47) points out:
has been seen as very fluid, or less well-defined than it once appeared. In line with
gender theory more generally, researchers interested in language and gender are
increasingly focusing on plurality and diversity among female and male language
speakers, and on gender as a performativity – something that is 'done' in context, rather
than a fixed attribute.
Many of the conversations on the TV show Sex and the City are examples of
how the main character, through the use of language, performs gender. In the following
quote, Miranda asks Carrie why she accepted her boyfriend's proposal. In her response,
Carrie enforces and asserts, through the use of her language, her gender identity, that a
woman who, because she loves her boyfriend, should accept his proposal for marriage:
Miranda: I'm going to ask an unpleasant question now. Why did you ever say yes?
Carrier: Because I love him . . . a man you love kneels on the street, and gives you a
ring. You said yes. That's what you do. (King 2002)
Discussions about how men and women talk, and what they do when they talk,
have also been extended to how people talk about men and women. Holmes (2004), for
example, compared the use of the terms female and female and found that the social
meaning of these terms has changed over the past 30 years. He found women, for
example, had gone from being characterized as disrespectful to situations where this
was no longer the case (although women were more commonly used in written English
than in spoken English). He also found that while lady/ladies can be used as a sign of
politeness in today's formal settings, it can also be used in informal settings to belittle
and demean (see Mills 2008, Mills and Mullany 2011 for a further discussion of sexist
language). As stated by Holmes (2004: 156),
Gender identity is then a complex construction. All levels of language and
discourse, as well as nonverbal aspects and other types of behavior are involved in doing
gender (Butler 2004). Gender, in turn, interacts with other factors such as social class
and ethnicity (Eckert 2011). As Holmes observes:
gender is just one part of a person's social identity, and it is an aspect, which will be
more or less prominent in different contexts. In some contexts, for example, it may be
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more important to emphasize one's professional skills, one's ethnic identity, or one's age
than one's gender. (1997: 9)
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class, perhaps because the show's audience already knows it (not because, in this case,
it's irrelevant).
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CONCLUSION
A. Conclusion
Discourse is a series of related sentences, which connect propositions one
proposition with another, forming a single unit, so that a harmonious meaning is formed
between the sentences. The most complete and highest or largest language unit above
a sentence or clause with continuous high coherence and cohesion, which is able to
have a real beginning and end, delivered orally or in writing. the various ways we
express our social identity, communities, Language as social and local practice, gender,
ideology through discourse.
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REFERENCE
https://youtu.be/9cNf0P0ooaU
https://books.google.co.id/books?hl=en&lr=&id=8SjbFBKq35QC&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=inf
o:VMUO9ZzuM4oJ:scholar.google.com/&ots=7sD8BU4FGP&sig=wBynbNacaR87jsad
LXC8HhO0ZJw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288289784_Language_as_a_Local_Practice
Paltridge Brian. 2012. Discourse Analysis An Introduction. 2nd edition. New York:
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Schiffrin Deborah, Tannen Deborah and Heidi E. Hamilton. 2001. The Handbook of
Discourse Analysis. Malden, Massachusetts 02148 USA : Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
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