Discourse Analysis

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
What is discourse?
Three Approaches to Discourse

Formal/Structural Functional Social
 Discourse is  Discourse is  Discourse is a kind
language above the language in of social practice
level of a clause or a use/language in action
sentence  The way we use
language is connected to
 Understanding the kinds  How people use the way we form social
of rules and conventions language to do things identities and participate in
that govern the ways we groups and institutions
join clauses and sentences
to form text
What is Discourse?
• “A series of connected
utterances, such as
• conversation, story,
• lecture, or any other
communication event.” (Levine, Rowe)
• “Discourse: a continuous stretch of language larger
than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit
such as a sermon, argument, joke, or narrative.”
(Crystal)
• “Novels, as well as short conversations or groans
miight be equally rightfully named discourses” (Cook).
What is discourse analysis?
• The process of discovering the rules of a series of connected

utterances, such as conversation, lecture or any other
communication event.
• Discourse analysts study the way sentences and utterances
go together to make texts and interactions and how these
texts and interactions fit into our social world.
• A way of looking at language that focuses on how people use
it in real life to do certain things and
to show that they are certain kinds
of people and belong to certain
types of groups.
Importance of Discourse Analysis
• To communicate more effectively

• Discourse analysis is not just a study of
language.
Written and Oral Discourse
• Speech is more spontaneous
• Speech is interactive
• The speaker can adjust the
register to suit the audience.
• The speaker can use extralinguistic signals (gestures,
expressions)
• Slang and contracted forms of language are part of
oral discourse.
• The speaker can use rhythm,tone,intonation,speed.
• The speaker can easily hide his mistakes when talking
than when writing.
Written and Oral Discourse
The writer does not know his audience and therefore

cannot adjust his writing for his audience.
The writer has more time, which leads to more complex
syntax and a well-planned output.
The reader is not there to respond to the text while the
writer is writing it, and the writer is not there to respond
to the reader's questions when the reader is reading it.
Written discourse can use charts, tables or formulas
Writing has permanence.
Writing tends to be more explicit than speech.
What makes a text a text?
Beaugreande's seven criteria:

1.cohesion
2. coherence
3. intertextuality
4. intentionality
5. acceptability
6. situalionality
7. informativeness
meaning
texture - the quality that makes a particular set
of words or sentences a text rather than a
random collection of linguistic items
It's all about relationships: coherence, cohesion
and intertextuality
Cohesion
• the quality in a text that forces you to look

either backward or forward in the text in order
to make sense of the things you read
• two types: grammatical cohesion and lexical
cohesion
Grammatical Cohesion
1. Conjunction
contrastive
"The government was pleased that casualties from

last week’s unusually heavy monsoon rains were
kept to a minimum. The economic losses caused by
the severe flooding in Metro Manila and its
surrounding provinces, however, have been huge."
-from "Economic Cost of Floods", The Philippine Daily Inquirer
1. Conjunction - use of connecting devices

additives
The student had to write a short story for
class. In addition to this, she had to write a
book report for the story that she made.
1. Conjunction
causative
The storm brought with it heavy rains and
flooding. Because of this, classes were
suspended.
1. Conjunction
sequential
First, research about your topic. Then,
create an outline. After you have prepared
the outline, you can finally write the first
draft..
2. Reference - use of pronouns

anaphoric - using words that point back
from Reader's Digest's "Laughter, The Best Medicine"


cataphoric - using words that point forward
from Inquirer.net

exophoric- using words that refer to something not
present in the text.
If you want to come up with an output that exceeds

expectations, you must put in more time and effort.
3. Substitution - using other words to refer to an

antecedent
The man wanted to enter the room without

getting noticed, and he succeeded
in doing so.
4. Ellipsis - omission of a noun, verb or phrase
"There is much to support the view that it is

clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we
may make them take the mould of arm or
breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains,
our tongues to their liking."
- Virginia Woolf
Lexical Cohesion
For a lot of women, the go-to shoe has

always been the stiletto heel for its built-in
glamour. For me, changing into a pair of heels is
all it takes to instantly dress up my outfit.
But I guess it’s a sign of the times when
fashionable women like First Lady Michelle
Obama, Carla Bruni and Victoria Beckham can
now be seen out and about in—gasp!—flats.
-"Say Hello to Power Flats", Philippine Daily Inquirer
Lexical chains
Coherence
- general overall interrelatedness in the text

- parts of a text are conceptually and
procedurally related; they appear in a logical
and predictable sequence
Analyzing cohesion and coherence
#1: How is this text put together in a formal way??
#2: What are the authors trying to do using this text?
#3 How does Starbucks portray itself as a company
using this text?
Genre Analysis
-What makes a letter a letter, an essay an essay, a news article a
news article and so on.
-"A genre comprises a class of communicative events the

members of which share some set of communicative purposes.
...Exemplars of a genre exhibit various patterns of similarity in
terms of structure, style, content and intended audience. If all
high probability expectations are realized, the exemplar will be
viewed as prototypical by the parent discourse community."
(Swales, 1980)
Analyzing Spoken Discourse
Pragmatics
Conversation Analysis
Openings,closings,turn-taking mechanisms,
adjacency pairs, back-channeling
More Approaches to Discourse
• Textual analysis - how texts are structures

beyond the level of the sentence
• Genre Analysis - the structure and
communicative purpose of different types of
texts and the way these texts function in the
groups of people who use them
More Approaches to Discourse
• Critical Discourse Analysis - uncovering

ideology and power in discourse
• Pragmatics - how people do things with words
and how they interpret what other people or
doing when they speak
• Conversational Analysis - how people create
order in their social interactions through the
structure and procedural rules of conversation
More Approaches to Discourse Analysis
• Interactional Sociolinguistics - how people

manage social identities and social activities
as they interact
• The ethnography of speaking - uncovering the
knowledge speakers need in order to be
competent participants in speech events within
communities
More Approaches to Discourse Analysis
• Mediated Discourse Analysis - how concrete,

real time social actions are mediated through
discourse
• Multimodal discourse analysis - how people
deploy different semiotic modes in
communication
• Corpus-assisted discourse analysis - uses
word frequency counts and other techniques
in corpus linguistics to aid discourse analysis.
References
Discourse Analysis A resource Book for Students by

Rodney H. Jones
(from
http://www.personal.cityu.edu.hk/~enrodney/Portfolio2/DI
SCOURSE_ANALYSIS.pdf
)
http://www.routledge.com/cw/9780415610001-jones/s1/
section-a/
www.routledge.com/cw/9780415610001-jones/s1/section-
b/
www.routledge.com/cw/9780415610001-jones/s1/section-c/

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DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Three Approaches to Discourse

• The process of discovering the rules of a series of connected

• To communicate more effectively

The writer does not know his audience and therefore

Beaugreande's seven criteria:

• the quality in a text that forces you to look

"The government was pleased that casualties from

1. Conjunction - use of connecting devices

2. Reference - use of pronouns

from Reader's Digest's "Laughter, The Best Medicine"

2. Reference - use of pronouns

2. Reference - use of pronouns

If you want to come up with an output that exceeds

3. Substitution - using other words to refer to an

The man wanted to enter the room without

4. Ellipsis - omission of a noun, verb or phrase

"There is much to support the view that it is

For a lot of women, the go-to shoe has

- general overall interrelatedness in the text

-"A genre comprises a class of communicative events the

• Textual analysis - how texts are structures

• Critical Discourse Analysis - uncovering

• Interactional Sociolinguistics - how people

• Mediated Discourse Analysis - how concrete,

Discourse Analysis A resource Book for Students by

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