UNIT 1 (intro) DISCOURSE AND TEXT
Some scholars agree that there should be a different definition of discourse & text, they don’t
agree that discours has to be defined as something or something else. The confusion among
scholars is understable because discourse and text are notions that reflect things very wide
and abstract, without forgetting that language is complex.
For some people, discourse is different from text. People like Coulthard and Beaugrande,
discourse to refer to spoken language and text to the written language.
For some others, like Halliday, discourse refers to the process, which is something that is
dynamic. It is not complete. Texts are the product of “that process”. Text, in other words is
like the result of the process, which is discourse.
Another way that could distinguish discourse and text is that discourse refers to language in
context. There is no disagreement in this because when analyzing discourse, we need to
take into consideration the context that piece of discourse is in. Text can be seen
decontextualized. In this case, when analysing a text, we do not need the context.
But agreement that both text and discourse need to be defined in terms of meaning
(meaning here does not refer to a meaning of a word, but a general notion of meaning
instead) and that coherence text/pieces of discourse are those that form a meaningful whole.
(Coherence is also a very important notion in discourse analysis. Coherence is the quality
that makes a text a text, and also is what makes a discourse and/or a text meaningful to the
reader or the listener. We know coherence by intuition)
Discourse can be defined as a particular stretch of language that has unity or hangs
together. To make it more understandable is the “glue” that unites different linguistic
elements that we have put in the same plate and its final result is the text. That unity and
sense that text should have is coherence.
Nunan also distinguishes discourse in this way --¬ discourse refers to the interpretation of
the communicative event in context. We take the communicative event combined with the
appropriate context and we analyse it.
According to Cook, discourse can be long or short, spoken or written, but the only
compulsory condition is that it is perceived as meaningful by the receivers (coherent) and it
is successful in communicating.
There are two ways of looking at discourse:
- See how the discourse works, how it is structured (we are dealing here with formal
features of discourse) --¬ text linguistics / analysis.
*We focus here in cohesion. Within cohesion, we have connectors… They have a
role in the sentence. Another thing we have within cohesion are anaphoric pronouns,
like a pronoun that refers to something that has been mentioned before (element of
structure of the text).
Another element is the lexical elements that we use to avoid repeating something
that has been said before.
- Study a particular bit of discourse to see what the discourse tells you about the
participants (DA and pragmatics)
- In this case we are taking into account other features which are not linguistic, like
gender, something that has nothing to do with the linguistic field but still affects the
language in discourse.
Other features are age, social group, place that someone comes from...
