English Discourse Analysis

D
iscourse analysis: rapidly growing eld of study where it studies
disciplinary diversity. Multidisciplinary in its origins (linguistics,
philosophy and anthropology) and its development resulting from a
postmodern discursive turn in the social sciences. It starts changing
around the 50s and 60s. The interest in linguistics seemed to changed and it
started being more of a functional paradigm more than a formal one
(linguistics), ask ourselves ‘why do we want to use THIS language’.
Stubbs de nes DISCOURSE as ‘the language above the sentence or above
the clause’.

THREE WAYS OF LOOKING AT DISCOURSE

Textual perspective - coherence/cohesion
What makes this ‘text’ a text rather than just a random collection of
sentences or utterances? What holds it together so that people can make
sense of it?
Functional perspective - speech acts/social actions/genres
What are people trying to do with this text and how do we know?
Critical perspective - identities and ideologies
What kinds of people are the authors of this text or the participants in the
conversation trying to show themselves to be, and what kinds of beliefs or
values are they promoting?

DEFINITIONS OF DISCOURSE
Fasold: ‘the study of discourse is the study of any aspect of language
use’
Fairclough: ‘Discourse is for me more than just language use, it is
language use, whether speech or writing, seen as a type of social
practice’
Jones: discourse analysis is a way of looking at language that focuses on
how people use it in real life to do things and to show that they are certain
kinds of people or belong to certain groups.

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WHAT IS A TEXT?
A text is an authentic language used in a particular context, of any size,
spoken or written. A text is meaningful.
Halliday and Hasan claim that ‘a text has texture and this is what
distinguishes it from something that is not a text. It derives this texture from
the fact that it functions as a unity with respect to its environment’.

Texture often results from the cohesive ties within the text which link the
parts together.
TEXT > TEXTURE > UNITY > COHESION

OTHER COHESION DEVICES

GRAMMATICAL: tense, aspect, syntactic parallelism
LEXICAL: collocations, lexical elds, paraphrase (expansion/
condensation)

UNIT 2: KEY CONCEPTS AND

METHODS IN DISCOURSE
ANALYSIS
GENRES: prototypes or mental constructs we use to create or interpret
actual texts (COGNITIVE)
GENRES: groups of similar texts (LINGUISTIC - SEMIOTIC)
GENRES: social practices, communicative events (SOCIAL)
GENRE
Cognitive approach -> genre: socially shared mental representation

GENRE KNOWLEDGE is organised in genre schema(s)/schemata.

There are two ways of storing information:

FRAMES: are part of the schemas that have non-sequential sets of
concepts (waiter, customer, food, bill…)
SCRIPTS: conventional sequence of activities (order)

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 SCHEMAS IN THE COMPREHENSION PROCESS
In text comprehension we use knowledge of the word (socially shared frames
and scripts) learnt from personal experience, and combine it with information
from the text tot construct a new model of the situation. [the process if rapid,
complex, dynamic and constructive]
Mental schemas (frames and scripts) set up expectations which help us
predict what will happen, and which guide our interpretation.

In linguistics we would say that genres are groups of text. Partridge claims
that ‘a genre is a kind of text. Academic lectures and casual conversations
are examples of spoken genres. Newspaper reports and academic essays
are examples of written genres’ (output).

Emphasis on the SOCIAL: genres as social practices or communicative

events. Fairclough de nes genres as ‘diverse of acting and relating, of
producing social life, in the semiotic mode. Examples are: everyday
conversation, meetings in various types of organisation, political and other
forms of interview, and book reviews).

Genres are ideal but texts are actual. Genres are ‘fuzzy’ and exible but
texts are free since they can borrow exibly and creatively from one or more
genres. Actual texts will not neatly t the genre
‘prototype’.
John Swales says that a genre comprises a
class of communicative events, the members of
which share some set of
communicative purposes. These purposes
are recognised by the expert of the parent
discourse community and thereby constitute
the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes the
schematic structure of the discourse and in uences
and constraints choice of content and style.

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DISCOURSE MODES
Discourse modes are a higher level of abstraction, ways of operating with
language, which may enter into different genres in exible ways. Unlike
genres, modes don’t have a particular function.

Actual texts will creatively draw on discourse modes and genres. Texts may:
Follow one genre are closely (prototypically)
Diverge from one genre
Mix/hybridize various genres - often for special effect such as to attract our
attention or generate humor.

Genres are in constant change, hence their characteristic of being uid. They
specialise for technologies.

TEN FEATURES OF GENRES

Genres are similar to concepts and schemas in that we have mental representation of genres which we
use when we communicate
Genres are ideal, texts are real

Genres may or may not include language

Genres are socially shared mental representation by members of a community

Genres often have socially agreed names

Genres are essentially characterised by the function(s) they perform

The function of a genre guides its features ( structure, layout, style, lexis, grammar…)

Genres have structure

Genres are identi ed by formal, social and contextual factors

Genres are highly exible: they can change, blend, evolve and die out

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AS A RESEARCH METHOD

There is no single method for a discourse analysis.
HEURISTIC is a procedure we can use to think about texts in systematic
ways drawing on different approaches and techniques.

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APPROACHES TO DISCOURSE
What do the texts do or achieve? Functionality/activities
How do they achieve it? Formal/structural features/identities
Why do the texts seek to achieve so? Critical/social aspects - ideology/
identities

No need to follow any particular order. Analysts look for PATTERNS that
recur through a range of texts.

UNIT 4.
EARLY PRAGMATIC THEORY

HOW DO WE UNDERSTAND TEXTS?

Discourse analysis helps us understand how language is being used in
society. Makes us question what kinds of knowledge do we use to understand
socially-situated language in use?

HOW DO WE UNDERSTAND TEXTS?

Pragmatic knowledge -> knowledge of what we take a speaker is doing with
language. ‘When we hear people speak we bring to the process a store of
knowledge related to what the speaker is doing with language’’.
MODELS OF COMMUNICATION.
H.P.Grice -
Cooperative
principle ->
make your
‘conversational
contribution
such as is
required, at the
stage at which
it occurs, by the
accepted

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 purpose or direction of the talk exchange’.
- quality: do not say what you believe to be false
- Quantity: give the most helpful amount of information
- Relation: be relevant
- Manner: put what you say in the clearest, briefest and most orderly
manner.

SPEECH ACTS
Pragmatic knowledge: knowledge of what a speaker is doing with language.
Searle - speech acts:
- locution
- Illocution
- Perlocution

MODEL OF COMMUNICATION

Sender - message/channel - receiver

1. Code model of communication (or the MESSAGE TRANSMISSION

MODEL ‘linear models’)
2. Gricean model of communication

Sender - message/channel - receiver.

Codi es locution ….. decodi es locution + implies illocution …. + infers
illocution.
3. Ostensive-inferential model of communication
Cognitive principle of relevance: human cognition tends to be geared to the
maximisation of relevance.
Communicative principle of relevance: every utterance (or other act of
communication) communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance.
Relevance (of some information, in a context)
a. The greater cognitive effects, the greater the relevance;
b. The smaller the processing effort needed to achieve those effects, the
greater the relevance.
Understanding includes:
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- grabbing hearers’ attention
- Parsing
- Enriching explicit meanings - she’s t, for her age (inference)
- Retrieving implicit meanings
- Activan the relevant schema

UNIT 5. PRAGMATICS IM/

POLITENESS METAPRAGMATICS
Linguistic im/politeness research
Sociopragmatics -> interpersonal meanings

Relational work = ‘the ‘work’ individuals invest in negotiating relationships with

others’
➡ ‘Comprises the entire continuum of verbal behaviour with direct, impolite,
rude or aggressive interaction through to polite interaction, encompassing
both appropriate and inappropriate forms of social behaviour’

POLITENESS: strong motivation for choosing to speak one way or another -

for choosing not to express ourselves with clarity and directness (Searle)
Lakoff (1973)
- be clear - cooperative principles - maxims
- Be polite: politeness principle - maxims
POLITENESS: communication of social meanings considered appropriate
according to the norms and conventions of a speci c local context or genre,

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and related to positive emotions

LINGUISTIC IM/POLITENESS
POLITENESS - communication of social meanings considered appropriate
according to the norms and conventions of a speci c local context or genre,
and related to positive emotions.
IMPOLITENESS - communication of social meanings considered
inappropriate according to the norms and conventions of a speci c local
context or genre, and related to negative emotions.

ETIC approaches:
SECOND-ORDER IM/POLITENESS - analyst’s examination of texts to
identify (im)politeness strategies using given taxonomies.
- Speaker-oriented (S as producer of politeness)
- Role of analyst
- Use of a-priory theoretical constructs/taxonomies
Top-down approach:
Politeness2: Brown & Levinson (1978-1987) FACE

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 Impoliteness2: Culpeper (2005)

EMIC approaches:
FIRST-ORDER IM/POLITENESS - lay people’s talk about (im)politeness,
norms of behaviour or what is considered (in)appropriate in a particular
occasion.

POLITENESS2: FACE-THREAT MITIGATION BROWN &

LEVINSON (1978/87)
Model person -> rationality and face
Face: public self-image an individual desires for themselves.
1. The need to belong in a group and be liked and approved of (positive face
‘I like you’ - involvement)
2. The need for freedom of action, claim for privacy (negative face ‘I respect
you’ - independence)
Communication as Face-threatening -> need to protect face
There is no faceless communication (Scollon & Scollon 2001)
Speech act theory -> face-threatening acts

SECOND-ORDER IMPOLITENESS (CULPEPER - 1996, 2005)

Culpeper’s face attacks refer to communicative strategies to attack both

positive and negative face or more generally to create social disharmony.
Culpeper proposed a classi cation of impoliteness as a reversal system to
Brown and Levinson’s politeness. The system comprises ve super
strategies:

Bald on-record impoliteness The use of language in a direct way in situations

in which speakers do not intend to maintain
others’ face

Positive impoliteness The use of particular acts to attack others’ positive

face
Negative impoliteness The use of acts to attack others’ negative face

Mock politeness (sarcasm) The use of insincere politeness

Withholding politeness The absence of politeness where it is expected.

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 Con ict patterns: attacks on wish to be liked / an appreciated group member
and/or on freedom of action, imposition / lack of respect - face/identity non-
veri cation
CONFLICT PATTERNS
Explicitly associate O with a negative aspect = ANA
criticising

Call the other names = insulting CON

Express disagreement ED

Condescend, scorn, ridicule CSR

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Impose course of action ICA

Frighten/threaten FR

Exclude the O from an activity EOA

Disassociate from O DFO

Be disinterested, unconcerned DUU

Invade the O’s space = interrupting IOS

Put O’s indebtedness on record PIR

Sarcasm SRC

Use inappropriate identity markers IIM

Use obscure or secretive lang OSL

Use taboo words TW

LINGUISTIC IM/POLITENESS RESEARCH

SECOND-ORDER IMPOLITENESS - analyst’s examination of texts to identify
(im)politeness strategies using a priori designed taxonomies
ETIC — top-down

FIRST-ORDER IMPOLITENESS - how participants in verbal interaction make

explicit use of the terms ‘polite’ and ‘politeness’ to refer to their own and
others’ social behaviour
EMIC — Bottom-up

METAPRAGMATICS
Metapragmatics examines re exive awareness on the part of participants in
interactions, and observers of interactions, about the language that is being
used in those interactions (Haugh 2018: 619).
Tsakona (2020: 19) says that metapragmatics involves the analysis of
speakers’ knowledge and discourse of pragmatic phenomena (such as
humor).

Metapragmatics evaluations of im/politeness:

1. Variability
2. Argumentativity

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 METHOD OF ANALYSIS
1. Valence - positive or negative
2. Classi cation - meta pragmatic labels
3. Arguments - metapragmatics comments and rationale (social norms,
moral values and emotions)

UNIT 6. NARRATIVE ANALYSIS

Prototypical narratives: linguistic features

A sequence of events that have the same participants, order of

events is crucial for the story.
High frequency of nite verbs, usually in the past
Adverbials of time
Character generally introduced in the beginning (personal reference)
Dynamic progression, events/states related to previous events and
times, rather than to speech time
Narratives — prototypical structure.

SPOKEN NARRATIVES
ABSTRACT Optional summary which introduces the general
topic of the narrative. How its meant to be
taken.

ORIENTATION Optional element. Background info (characters,

place, time). Verbs denoting states are common.
COMPLICATING ACTION Clauses which describe event and move story
forward. Typically action verbs in the past
RESULT OR RESOLUTION Serves as an end to the narrative events — not
necessarily positive endings
CODA Servers as a bridge from the story world to the
current time of telling — optional / restates the
meaning
EVALUATIONS Narrator comments on action from outside story
world

(DIGITAL) NARRATIVE RESEARCH

Small stories
Shared stories
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 Networked stories
Transmedia stories

SMALL STORIES
Traditionally either under-represented or not viewed as stories within
narrative analysis.
‘Our aim then has been to shift emphasis from stories about the self,
typically long, teller-led, of past and single non-shared events to
stories about short (fragmented, open-line) tellings about self and
other of ongoing, future or shared events, allusions to tellings,
deferrals of tellings, etc’ (Georgapolulous 2013: 58)
Small stories research has highlighted the need for such small
stories, be they in conversational or interview contexts, to be
included in the remit of narrative and identity analysis as equally
worthy data as the life stories which have monopolised the attention
of narrative studies’

SHARED STORIES
Digital comments around the same social story: small stories that are shared.
Some shared stories are more widely known narratives, for example
references to national events (elections) or to television shows, sports
events…

SHARED STORIES AND NETWORKED NARRATIVES

Small stories are de ned as multi-semiotic, often literally ‘small’, multiply
authored and mobile discourse activities of taking a perspective on what is
shared, and creating a plot. ‘Networked narrative’ allows individuals to
participate collectively in the construction of ‘shared stories’ and through this
process for narrators to co-construct their social identities through their
interactions with others.
These shared stories do not necessarily retell the known events, but often
provide the audience’s reaction to an evaluation of the narrative content
which has been published elsewhere. The shared story thus connects
narrative events produced in one media and consumed in an o ine context,
and the evaluation of those events within the online environment of another
media platform = networked narratives.

Shared, small stories in networked, transmedia narratives:

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 A) Add evaluation to the same stories; a comment which project an
emotional response to the update.
B) Add a further narrative episode to the same story; a comment which
extends the narrative content.
C) Tell a parallel but separate narrative; a comment which includes a
second story.

TRANSMEDIA NARRATIVES
A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new
text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. Transmedia
storytelling is a response to media convergence and the development of
participatory culture.
Issues of organisation and sequencing become less important — focus on
the connections between story words and the sharing of a common ctional
core.
Adaptation, which reproduces the original narrative with minimum
changes into a new medium and is essentially redundant to the
original work.
Extension, which expands our understanding of the original by
introducing new elements into the ction (story)

SMALL STORIES AND IDENTITY

Georgakopoulou’s heuristics:
1) Ways of telling
2) Sites
3) Tellers

Ways of telling: refer to the communicative how: the socioculturally shaped

and more or less conventionalised semiotic and, in particular, verbal choices
of a story.
Language choice (indexicals) related to identity involving stances of
alignment, ambivalence, dis/a liation…that can be rati ed,
negotiated or contested.
Ways of tellings — looking at the stories’ plots, the types of events
and experience that they narrate, the intertextual links of the current
story with other stories.
Sequentiality: its introduction into and exit from a conversation.

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 The telling roles and rights it raises fro the interlocutors, the
interactional management between interlocutors during its tellings.

Sites: refer to the social spaces in which narrative actives take place and
capture the conglomerate of situational context factors ranging from physical
(e.g., seating) arrangements to meditational tools that the participants may
employ. Perceptions and norms of what counts as expected, acceptable and
valued set of language resources, style, activity, etc.

Tellers: as participants of a communicative activity and as complex entities,

as social actors with social identities, as here-and-now communicators with
particular roles of participation and, last but not least, as individuals with
speci c biographies and self-projects. Self-projects consist in the way in
which tellers see themselves over time through the stories they tell.

UNIT 7. CRITICAL APPROACHES

TO DISCOURSE
Critical approaches are concerned with the ways in which discourse helps to
construct certain ‘version of realities’ (ideologies) and certain relationships of
power between individuals and groups. Critical Discourse Studies is highly
inter-disciplinary approach to language in use. It includes not only applied
analysis but also philosophical, theoretical, methodological and practical
developments. CDS examines real-word examples of language use and the
text is their main unit of analysis. Inspired by Austin and Wittgenstein —
language is always doing something. CDS aims to uncover hidden features
of language use and debunk their claims to authority.

CDS — How discourse gures in social processes, social structures and

social change. CDS draws heavily on social theories and seeks to develop a
critically contextualised approach to linguistics which identi es issues of
ideology, power and inequality as central to the eld (Flowerdew &
Richardson 2018: 1).

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Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is discourse analytical research that
primarily studies the way social-power abuse and inequality are enacted,
reproduced, legitimated and resisted by text and talk in the social and
political context. With such dissident research, critical discourse analysts
take an explicit position and thus want to understand, expose, and ultimately
challenge social inequality. This is also why CDA may be characterised as a
social movement of politically committed discourse analysts.

Key features of social constructionism (Gill 2000: 173)

A critical stance towards taken-for-granted knowledge, and a
scepticism towards the view that our observations of the world
unproblematically yield its true nature to us.
A recognition that the ways in which we commonly understand the
world are historically and culturally speci c and relative.
A conviction that knowledge is socially constructed — that is, that
our current ways of understanding the world are determined not by
the nature of the world itself but by social processes.
A commitment to exploring the ways that knowledges — the social
construction of people, phenomena or problems — are linked to
actions/practices.

Meaning of DISCOURSE:

Discourse as language use (uncount noun)

Discourse as a speci c set of meanings expressed through particular
forms and uses which give expression to particular institutions or
social groups.
Example: neoliberal discourse, racist discourse, discourse of nationalism,
fascism, misogyny, homophobia = recognisable in terms of the IDEOLOGIES
they convey.

Discourses are underpinned by ideologies. Ideology = the taken-for-granted

assumptions, beliefs and value-systems which are shared collectively by
social groups. Ideologies can come to be accepted as part of common
sense through a process of legitimation.

The values and beliefs we hold which seem to be ‘normal’ and

‘commonsense’ are in fact constructs of the organisations and institutions
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 around us, created and shared through language = HEGEMONIC power /
ideology.

STRATEGIES OF LEGITIMATION IN DISCOURSE

Authorization Legitimation by reference to some type of
authority either institutionally invested authority
or other types.

Rationalization By reference to the purpose, function or facts of the

social practice presented as reasonable arguments.
Moral evaluation Is legitimation by drawing on di erent values or by
means of directly evaluate clauses.
Mythopoesis/story-telling Entails legitimation through the telling of stories.

COURTROOM DISCOURSE — register which includes:

Legal jargon
Speci c participant roles — rights and obligations
Formal turn-taking and adjacency pairs (allowable contributions)
Genres like court case and related subgenera like a cross-
examination (sub/genres have internal organisation)

The genre of court cross-examination:

Function of the genre = to persuade judge / jury of somebody’s guilt or
innocence (antagonism)
How? By creating a negative impression of witness against their case or a
positive impression of witness supporting their case and through speci c
use of the language (e.g., questioning strategies).

Van Dijk = socio-cognitive framework for the study of ideology alongside

identity in discourse.
Cognitive — to organise attitudes towards sets of values and beliefs,
de nes the social identity of a group and its interests (who are we,
what do we do, how do we feel towards, why…)
Social — ideology is socially shared by a group and thus coordinates
the group’s activities.
Discursive — ideologies are expressed in discourse by individual
members of a group.

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 Ideologies often promote the interests of speci c social groups. They may
involve US vs THEM dynamics in situations of social con ict — divergent
ideologies. In-groups and out-groups.

IDEOLOGY AND GROUP IDENTITY

Strategy of polarisation:
Positive in-group description — discursive processes of a liation
with in-group.
Negative out-group description — discursive processes of
DISAFFILIATION with out-group.

Presuppositions = background assumptions whose truth is taken for

granted. Di cult to identify and challenge.
Questions instead of statements Would your care to tell me how the heroin came
to be in your house tonight? — indirect question

Comparative adjectives We want to set people free so that have greater

power over their own lives
Adjectives, adverbs We must break free of the EU and take back control
of our country’
De nite noun phrases What I intend to ask you is some questions about
the murder of P. Q about 11 o’clock on the 16th of
November’

Main functions of language / the focus of discourse analysis: enact identities

and a liate with others (individual — groups identities)

Essentialism vs. Social constructionism

IDENTITY AS SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED IN DISCOURSE
A process rather than a given or product
Located in concrete, speci c interactional occasions
Yields constellations of identities, rather than individual, monolithic
constructs
Results from processes of negotiation and contextualisation, rather
than from the individual
Entails discursive work

Identity (who we are, how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive
us) is not de ned simply by: where we were born and brought up, who our
parents are or were, which socio-economic group we happen to belong to;
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 we constantly build and negotiate identity (individual, social, institutional).
Identity is also multifaceted.

Naming practices: how do given names de ne us? Do they say anything

about our places of origin, our religion, our language(s), our age, our class..
System of address: rst name vs. Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms/Dr., in introduction
sequences — familiarity, relative status, ranking of imposition (politeness)

CONSTRUCTING GROUP IDENTITY THROUGH LANGUAGE:

Construction of group identity by categorising themselves/others (or
being categorised by others) as belonging to a social group through
particular types of representation
Where there is social con ict — linguistic con ict (impoliteness - dis/
a liation processes)
Relational work and the construction of (group) identities in
discourse.

UNIT 8. CORPUS-BASED
APPROACHES TO DISCOURSE
All previous approaches to discourse focus on a relatively small number of
texts and involve very close analysis. A corpus-based approach to discourse
analysis allows for the analysis of a large collection of texts
We can test our theories arising from close analysis of one or two
texts
We can compare di erent texts produced under similar
circumstances
It brings some degree of ‘objectivity’ to our analysis

CORPUS = A collection of texts in digital format that can be searched

through and manipulated using a computer programme.
A corpus involves ‘a collection of (1) machine-readable (2) authentic texts
(including transcripts of spoken data) which is (3) sampled to be (4)
representative of a particular language or language variety’.

WHAT IS NOT CORPUS?

A list of words
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 A text archive
Collection of citation and/or quotations

Large corpora:
BNC — the British National Corpus. General corpus of written and
spoken texts
Specialised corpora — e.g., business letters, academic articles
Linguists use corpora to examine grammatical and lexical patterns in
particular varieties of language or particular kinds of text
Di erences and similarities British English, American English,
Australian English…
Forensic lingustics
Genre analysis
But DA scholars are not just interested in language forms and patterns but
also in how language is used in concrete social practices.
‘Computer analysis using large corpora seems to go against this key aim:
text in corpora are taken out of their contexts’ (Jones 2012: 32)

Other problems: we don’t always say what we mean, and we often mean
more than what we say. Most important meaning it often implicit and
indirect.

Computer-assisted analysis of corpora can still be valuable for discourse

analysts. Computers can assist discourse analysts in several ways:
To see the data under analysis in a new perspective
To see if we can generalise our theories or observations about certain
texts or interactions
To help us detect ‘big-D Discourses’ (Gee 1999) or ‘systems of
language use that promote particular kinds of ideologies and power
relationships.
DISCOURSE VS. DISCOURSES
Discourse or Little ‘D’ discourse (Gee 1999) or Language and other
meaning-making devices used in particular social practices (Fairclough
2003). A set of meanings, metaphors, representations, images, stories,
statements and so on that in some way together produce a particular version
of events.

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 Discourses or Big ‘D’ Discourse (Gee 1999) or discourse as representation
(Fairclough 2003). Patterns in corpus also embody particular social values
and views of the world. Surrounding any one object event, person, etc, there
may be a variety of di erent discourses, each with a di erent story to tell
about the world, a di erent way of representing it to the world. There are
di erent ways of talking about or representing the same thing (idea, person,
events, etc.)

Computer-assisted discourse analysis is not a science and cannot be

seen as ‘more ‘scienti c’ than the close analysis of texts just because
computers and quanti cation are involved. The computer analysis of corpora
does no provide discourse analysts with answer. Rather, it provides them
with additional information to make their educated guesses even more
educated and their theory building more evidence based.

CORPUS-ASSISTED DISCOURSE STUDIES

CADS argues that the aim of the eld is to uncover, in the discourse type
under investigation, what we might call non-obvious meaning— that is,
meaning which might no be readily available to perusal by the naked eye.

Heuristics
Description (What?) What linguistic patterns are in the corpus?

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 Interpretation (How?) How can we understand these patterns as
contributing towards discourse?

Explanation (Why?) Why are these patterns/discourse here? Relate to

history/society/context

Evaluation (Why?) Who bene ts or not from these patters and what
and how should something change?

Conducting CADS involves:

Building a corpus
• What kind of texts?
• How many?
• Representative sample? E.g., business letters
• Pre-determined criteria such as topic (through hashtags on
Twitter) or keyword. Baker & McEnery compiled newspaper texts
containing the words ‘refugee(s)’ or ‘asylum seeker’
• A reference corpus — to compare with your primary corpus. You
can use available corpora like BNC
Cleaning and tagging the corpus
• Cleaning — delete non-words if not of interest (hashtags,
emoticons, repetitions…)
• Tagging — assigning codes to certain parts of texts (e.g., opening,
closing…) or certain words (POS) to aid your analysis
• Each text should be saved in separate text le
Analysis the corpus with computer tools
• Import your corpus in the form of text to your computer
programme (AntConc)
• In AntConc, use command File > Open File(s) or Ctrl + F and
import as many les as you wish
Interpreting the data

WORD FREQUENCY. FUNCTION & CONTENT WORDS

Function words like articles, preposition, pronouns and other grammatical
words are the most frequent words. They may help us understand
grammatical patters, style and register in the corpus. Content words like
nouns, verbs and adjectives are usually more relevant when aiming to
discover ‘discourses’.

COLLOCATION

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 A co-occurrence relationship between two words. Words are said to
collocate with one another is one is more likely to occur in the presence of
the other than elsewhere. E.g., ‘commit’ is usually associated with negative
words such as ‘crime’.
Collocation analysis is especially useful to understand ‘discourses’ because
they can reveal patterns of association between di erent kinds of words or
concepts.

CONCORDANCE
A concordance is a list of all instances of a word, phrase, grammatical
structure, etc. in the corpus, usually displayed in a special format called
‘KWIC’ (key word in context). KWIC display places the search term, called
the ‘node’, in the middle and shows a few words to the left and a few words
to the right of the node. Concordances can be sorted alphabetically based
on the words either to the right or left of the node.

UNIT 9. POLITICAL ORATORY

AND INTERTEXTUALITY
Politicians use rhetoric in order to
Increase impact of their ideas and their persuasive potential
Legitimise their claims
Delegitimise the claims of their political opponents.
RHETORICAL STRATEGIES
Metaphor
➡ Metaphor — something is something else
➡ Simile — something is LIKE something else
➡ Personi cation — inanimate objects / abstract ideas take on human
characteristics
Euphemism — use of mild, ino ensive, vague language to present an idea/
action in a more positive way.

Parallelism — expression of several ideas in a series of similar structures.

POLITICAL ORATORY AND INTERTEXTUALITY

Role of intertextuality in text production/comprehension
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POLITICAL SPEECHES
Function — to persuade.
Aristotle identi ed three main features of persuasion: ethos — pathos —
logos

ETHOS:
➡ Construction of moral character of the speaker
➡ Semiotic means used to create an impression of trust and belief —
through language and
• the way they stand
• Their response
• Body language
• Gestures, intonation and pitch
• The way they take questions
PATHOS
➡ Feelings / appealing to audience’s emotions which will draw support
for their arguments and views
Emotional means like:
• Fanning up nationalistic feelings
• Encouraging hatred or sympathy
• Using fear
• Resources like telling anecdotes, using emotive terms…
LOGOS
➡ Logic/logical argumentation — proving a truth through argumentation

Look at the lexis. Is it more clearly related to ethos (character), pathos

(emotions) or logos (argument, policy maker)? Provide examples at the
level of nouns, verbs, adjectives. Pronouns.
Identify rhetorical strategies (Metaphors, similes and personi cation,
parallelisms, doubling and tripling (rule of 3)
Intonation, rhythm, stress, devices like alliteration...
Audience management (through language, gestures, gaze, position…

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Intertextuality: explicit/implicit allusions and references to other texts,
people or events

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