McCarthy, M.

(1991), Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers, Cambridge: CUP,

pp. 5-9.

'I only said "if"!' poor Alice

pleaded in a piteous tone.
The two Queens looked at
each other, and the Red Queen
remarked, with a little shudder,
'She says she only said "if"-'
'But she said a great deal
more than that!' the White
Queen moaned, wringing her
hands.'Oh, ever so much more
than that!'

Lewis Carroll: 7?1tvughthe Looking

018m

1.1 A brief historical overview

Discourse analysis is concerned with the study of the relationship between

language and the contexts in which it is used. It grew out of work in
different disciplines in the 1960s and early 1970s, including linguistics,
semiotics, psychology, anthropology and sociology. Discourse analysts
study language in use: written texts of all kinds, and spoken data, from
conversation to highly institutionalised forms of talk.
At a time when linguistics was largely concerned with the analysis of
single sentences, Zellig Harris published a paper with the title 'Discourse
analysis' (Harris 1952). Harris was interested in the distribution of linguis-
tic elements-in extended texts, and the links between the text and its social
situation, though his paper is a far cry from the discourse analysis we are
hsed to nowadays. Also important in the early years was the emergence of
stmiotics and the French structuralist approach to the study of narrative. In
the 1960s, Dell Hymes provided a sociological perspective with the study of
speech in its social wmng (e.g. Hymes 1964). The linguistic philosophers
sudr as Austin (1962), Searle (1969)and Grice (1975)were also influential in
tbe study of language as social action, reflected in speech-act theory and
the formulation of conversational maxims, alongside the emergence of
1 What is discourse analysis?

pragmatics, which is the study of meaning in context (see Levinson 1983;

Leech 1983).
British discourse analysis was greatly influenced by M. A. K. Halliday's
functional approach to language (e.g. Halliday 1973), which in turn has
connexions with the Prague School of linguists. Halliday's framework
emphasises the social functions of language and the thematic and infor-
mational structure of speech and writing. Also important in Britain were
Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) at the University of Birmingham, who
developed a model for the description of teacher-pupil talk, based on a
hierarchy of discourse units. Other similar work has dealt with doctor-
patient interaction, service encounters, interviews, debates and business
negotiations, as well as monologues. Novel work in the British tradition
has also been done on intonation in discourse. The Bfitish work has
principally followed structural-linguistic criteria, on the basis of the iso-
lation of units, and k t s of rules defining well-formed sequences of dis-
course.
American discourse analysis has been dominated by work within the
ethnomethodological tradition, which emphasises the research method of
close observation of groups of people communicating in natural settin~s.It
examines types of speech event such as storytelling, greeting rituals and
verbal duels in different cultural and social settings (e.g. Gumperz and
Hymes 1972). What is often called conversation analysis within the
American tradition can also be included under the general heading of
discourse analysis. In conversational analysis, the emphasis is not upon
building structural models but on the close observation of the behaviour of
participants in talk and on patterns which recur over a wide range of
natural data. The work of Goffman (1976; 1979), and Sacks, Schegloff and
Jefferson (1974) is important in the study of conversational norms, turn-
taking, and other aspects of spoken interaction. Alongside the conversation
analysts, working within the sociolinguistic tradition, Labov's investi-
gations of oral storytelling have also contributed to a long history of
interest in narrative discourse. The American work has produced a large
number of descriptions of discourse types, as well as insights into the social
constraints of politeness and face-preserving phenomena in talk, overlap-
ping with British work in pragmatics.
Also relevant to the development of discourse analysis as a whole is the
work of text grammarians, working mostly with written language. Text
grammarians see texts as language elements strung together in relationships
with one another that can be defined. Linguists such as Van Dijk (1972), De
Beaugrande (1980), Halliday and Hasan (1976) have made a significant
impact in this area. The Prague School of linguists, with their interest in the
structuring of information in discourse, has also been influential. Its most
important contribution has been to show the links between grammar and
d'iscourse.
 1.2 Form a n d f k t i m k

Discowse analysis has grown into a wide-ranging and heterogeneous

discipline which finds its unity in the description of language above the
sentence and an interest in the contexts and cultural influences which affect
language in use. It is also now, increasingly, forming a backdrop to research
in Appliod Linguistics, and second language learning and teachingdin
particular.

The famous British comedy duo, Eric Morecambe andErnie Wise, started
one' of their shows in 1973 with the following dia,lqpe:
(1.1) Ernie: Tell 'em about the show.
Eric (to the audience): Have we got a show for you m i g h t folks!
Have we got a show for you! (aside to Ernie) Have we got a
show for them?

This short dialogue raises a number of problems for anyone wishing to do a

linguistic analysis of it; not least is the question of why it is funny (the
audience laughed at Eric's question to Ernie). Most people would agree that
it is funny because Eric is playing with a grammatical structure that seems
to be ambiguous: 'Have we got a show for you!' has an inverted verb and
subject. Inversion of the verb and its subject happens only under restricted
conditions in English; the most typical circumstances in which this happens
is when questions are being asked, but it also happens in exclamations (e.g.
'Wasn't my face red!'). So Eric's repeated grammatical f o m clearly under-
goes a change in how it is interpreted by the audience between its second
and third occurrence in the dialogue. Eric's inverted grammatical fom in
its first two occurrences clearly has the hnction of an exclamation, telling
the audience something, not asking them anything, until the humorous
moment when he begms.to doubt whether they do have a show to offer, at
which point he uses the same grammatical form to ask Ernie a genuine
qucstion. There seems, then, to be a lack of one-to-one correspondence
between grammatical form and communicative function; the inverted form
in itselfdoes not inherently carry an exclamatory or a questioning function.
By the same token, in other situations, an' uninverted declarative form
(subject before verb), typically associated with 'statements', might be heard
as a question requiring an answer:
(1-2) A: You're leaving for London.
Ek Yes, immediately.
So how we interpret grammatical forms depends on a number of factors,
some linguistic, some purely situational. One linguistic feature that may
affect our interpretation is the intonation. In the Eric and Ernie sketch,
Eric's intonation was as follows:
1 What is discourse analysis?

(1.3) Eric (to the audience): Have we got a SHOW for you tonight folks!
Have we got a SHOW for you! (aside to Ernie)
HAVE
we got a show for them?

Two variables in Eric's delivery change. Firstly, the tone contour, i.e. the
direction of his pitch, whether it rises or falls, changes (his last utterance,
'have we got a show for them' ends -ina rising tone). Secondly, his voice
jumps to a higher pitch level (repr&ented here by writing have above the
line). Is it this which makes his utterance a question? Not necessarily. Many
questions have only falling tones, as in the following:

(1.4) A: What was he wearing?

B: An anorak.
A: But was it his?

So the intonation does not inherently carry the function of question either,
any more than the inversion of auxiliary verb and subject did. Grammatical
forms and phonological forms examined separately are unreliable indica-
tors of function; when they are taken together, and looked at in context, we
can come to some decision about functign. So decisions about communica:
tive function cannot solely be the domain of grammar or phonology.
Discourse analysis is not entirely separate from the study of grammar and
phonology, as we shall see in Chapters 2 and 4, but discourse analysts are
intetested in a lot more than linguistic forms. Their concerns include how it
is that Eric and Ernie interpret each other's grammar appropriately (Ernie
commands Eric to tell the audience, Eric asks Ernie a question, etc.), how it
is that the dialogue between the two comics is coherent and not gobbledy-
gook, what Eric and Ernie's roles are in relation to one another, and what
sort of 'rules' or conventions they are following as they converse with one
another.
Eric and Ernie's conversation is only one example (and a rather crazy one
at that) of spoken interaction; most of us in a typical week will observe or
take part in a wide range of different types of spoken interaction: phone
calls, buying things in shops, perhaps an interview for a job, or with a
doctor, or with an employer, talking formally at meetings or in classrooms,
informally in cafks or on buses, or intimately with our friends and loved
ones. These situations will have their own formulae and conventions which
we follow; they will have different ways of opening and closing the
encounter, different role relationships, different purposes and different
settings. Discourse analysis is interested in all these different factors and
tries to account for them in a rigorous fashion with a separate set of
descriptive labels from those used by conventional grammarians. The first
fundamental distinction we have noted is between language forms and
discourse functions; once we have made this distinction a lot of other
 1.3 Speech acts and discourse stmctwra

conclusions can follow, and the labels used to describe discourse need not
clash at all with those we are all used to in grammar. They will in fact
complement and enrich each other. Chapters 2,3 and 4 of this book will
therefore be concerned with examining the relationships between language
forms (grammatical, lexical and phonological ones), and discourse func-
tions, for it is language forms, above all, which are the raw material of
language teaching, while the overall aim is to enable learners to use
language functionally.

Can you create a context and suggest an intonation for the forms in the
left-hand column so that they would be heard as performing the functions
in the right-hand column, without changing their grammatical structure?

1. did I make a fool of myself (a) question (b) exclamation

2. you don't love me (a) question (b) statement
3. youeatit (a) statement (b) command
4. switch the light on (a) command (b) question

1.3 Speedr acts and diawurse structures

So far we have suggested that form and function have to be separated to

understand what is happening in discourse; this may be necessary to
analyse Eric and Ernie's zany dialogue, but why discourse analysis? Applied
linguists and language teachers have been familiar with the term function
for years now; are we not simply talking about 'functions' when we analyse
Eric and Ernie's talk? Why complicate matters with a whole new set of
jargon?
In one sense we are talking about 'functions': we are concerned as much
with what Eric and Ernie are doing with language as with what they are
saying. When we say that a particular bit of speech or writing is a request or
an instruction or an exemplification we are concentrating on what that
piece of language is doing, or how the listenerheader is supposed to react;
for this reason, such entities are often also called speech acts (see Austin
1%2 and Searle 1%9). Each of the stretches of language that are carrying
the force of requesting, instructing, and so on is seen as performing a
particular act; Eric's exclamation was performing the act of informing the
audience that a great show was in store for them. So the approach to