UNIT 11: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
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—DISCOURSE: the analysis of discourse is concerned with the study of language in texts and conversations.!
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—Interpreting discourse: we can cope with texts which appear to break a lot of the rules of the English
language. Yet we can build an interpretation. The following example, provided by Eric Nelson, contains all
kind of errors, yet it can be understood:
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My town.
My natal was in a small town, very close to Riyadh capital of Saudi Arabia. The distant between
my town and Riyadh 7 miles exactly. The name of this Almasani that means in English Factories. It
takes this name from the peopl’s carrer. In my childhood I remember the people live. It was very
simple. Most the people was farmer.
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Rather than simply reject the text as ungrammatical, we try to make sense of it. It’s this effort to interpret
and how we accomplish it that are the key elements investigated in the study of discourse.
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—Cohesion: cohesion is formed by the ties and connections that exist between texts. For example:
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My father once brought a Lincoln convertible. He did it by saving every penny he could. That car
would be worth a fortune nowadays. However, he sold it to help pay for my college education.
Sometimes I think I’d rather have the convertible.
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There are connections here in the use of words to maintain reference to the same people and things
throughout: father — he — he — he; my — my — I; Lincoln — it.
Analysis of these cohesive ties within a text gives us some insight into how writers structure what they
want to say. However, by itself, cohesion would not sufficient to enable us to make sense of what we
read.
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—Coherence: the key to the concept of “coherence” isn’t something that exists in words or structures, but
something that exists in people. It’s people who “make sense” of what they read and hear. For example:
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MATT: Have you ever seen “Titanic”?
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KAT: I hate Leonardo DiCrapio.
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MATT: Oh, okay then…
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There are no cohesive ties within this fragment of discourse, so how does each of these people manage
to make sense of what the other says? They do use the information contained in the sentences expressed,
but there must be something else involved in the interpretation. Matt asks Kat if she has ever seen
“Titanic” and she answers that she hates Leonardo DiCaprio; since DiCaprio is the main actor of the
movie, Matt understands that she hasn’t seen it.
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—Speech events: there is enormous variation in what people say and do in different circumstances. For
example, we would have to specify the roles of speaker and hearer and their relatioship (whether they
are friends, strangers, men, women, young, old, of equal status or not, etc).
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—Communicative competences: it’s a concept that was created by Dell Hymes. According to
him, when we use language we find four different parameters:
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1. Possibility: this means that it has to be gramatically correct. For example: “Green
ideas sleep furiously”. This sentence is gramatically correct but it doesn’t make any sense.
So this sentence is not possible.
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