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Discourse Analysis – Rodney H. Jones
SECTION A: Introduction
What is discourse analysis?
Discourse analysis is considered as the study of language and of the way people use language in real life. First of all, discourse analysis is based on four assumptions: 1 - Language is ambiguous , because people sometimes may not express what they really want to mean, indeed people don’t always say what they mean and they don’t always mean what they say. For example if we need a pen and ask a friend “do you have a pen?” our friend will interpret this question and will understand we need a pen, but without the field of interpretation, this question may also be considered as aimed to know if that person owns or not a pen. 2 - Language is always in the world, which means that language is always related to the context in which it’s used and by whom; language is always situated in the material world, in relationships between people, in the social and cultural context in which the speaker or the writer occurs. Finally, language is also strictly related to history, to what comes before. 3 - Language and social identity, because the way we use language depends on who we are and on the social group we belong to. Discourse is made up of whos and whats, that’s to say that it’s made up of speakers, or writers, and the object of their speech. By means of language, people always show their identities, but it’s important to underline that each person may have one or more identities, and the language people use depends on the identity they want to enact.
4 - Language and other modes, because language isn’t the only mean we use in order to express who
we are, indeed our multiple identities are also expressed through gestures, our tone of voice, our facial expressions, the way we get dressed. All of these modes, related to the language we use, contribute and help us in the building of our social identities.
Texts and texture
Discourse analysts analyse text and conversation; according to Halliday’s theory, text is everything which makes sense in a particular situation , and the sense and the meaning of texts are gained through particular choices which every speaker has to make based on the meaning and the sense he wants to spread. Halliday also considered language as a system of meanings accompanied, expressed and built by speakers through forms, in particular syntax and morphology , which put all of these meanings together. If we consider, for example, a list of words they may not be considered as a text. What makes them a text is texture , so “ texture makes a text a text ” and it’s texture itself which helps speaker to distinguish between a list of words or sentences and a discourse. There’re other two important elements which contribute to the creation of texts:
- Particular features, such as grammatical rules which make us understand the relationships between words and sentences
- The semantic relationship among words, because even though they’re not grammatical elements, two or more words may be considered as linked each other due to the meanings all of them carry. Obviously, a conversation is very different from a general list of words, because a conversation is also made up of additive conjunctions, such as “and” or “also”, verbs, pronouns, which make us understand how words are related and connected together. Halliday’s theory, indeed, is also based on the idea that people are aware of the conventions of language , and this awareness makes them understand how and why words, sentences, paragraphs, pictures are related one another. Through these conventions, people own a kind of framework or structure in which they are able to fit language so that it makes sense. What’s fundamental is that a particular list of words is often linked to other words and texts, indeed we always have to relate texts to other texts in order to correctly use them and make them make sense. The connection among words, sentences, paragraphs is built through cohesion , while we talk about coherence when the meaning of a text also comes from the background in which the speaker or the sender lives and has produced that given text. Finally, intertextuality occurs when we need to refer to other texts in order to understand the meaning of a text, so when we need to relate one text with others. Texts and their social functions Each text may have different structures and forms, and its structure depends on its function in the world, so we can clearly talk about the fact that the structure of a text is based on given conventions that a speaker or writer has to follow according to what he or she wants to communicate and spread. The study of the social functions of each kind of text is called genre analysis. Vijai Bhatia says that genres are communicative events characterized by communicative purposes and by constraints or limits about what we can or can’t do with them. Experts always use and overcome these limits in order to achieve private intentions in an unexpected way. In the field of discourse analysis, genre makes us understand how people do things by means of language; this is why text and genre are always linked because through genre it’s possible to discover how things get done. Moreover, since genre is characterized by communicative purposes, the way people build and use genre strictly depends on the aim they want to reach, for example if we think about an application letter, it is used by the job applicant as a way to get employed, but the employer may consider this letter as something which will help him in understanding who’s going to be employed and who’s not based on the information, the details and the language people employ in order to write it. The fact that someone is able to write an application letter also by respecting its particular move structure , that’s to say the order people follow to create a genre and to accomplish their communicative purpose, will make the employer consider that person as someone who’s able to communicate. As we said before, genre is always linked to some boundaries and limits based on what we can do or not with a particular genre, but many texts result to be successful because experts are able to go beyond those limits and free their creativity so that many different genres mix one into another, but of course all the different genres which get mixed must be related to the communicative purposes of the speaker, otherwise it would be impossible to relate text and context. At the centre of genre there’s the idea of belonging , because the genre we commonly use also depends on the fact that we want to show our belonging to a given social group, for example students or teachers use
According to Bakhtin, all the different styles of speaking or writing may be considered as “social languages” but Halliday calls them “ register ” – > this word is used in order to represent the way we use language according to the situation we are in and the people we’re talking to, and of course our register or social language may change depending on if we’re talking to our mother, our boss or our teacher. Another important element underlined by Bakhtin is the concept of intertextuality , that’s to say the connection among texts. Bakhtin affirms that most of the times when we want to understand what a text spreads or means we need to refer to other texts, so they’re related and connected because we often borrow ideas and words from other texts when we communicate. The main characteristic of texts is the fact that they spread ideologies about what’s good or bad, right or wrong, and this is due to the fact that, as Gee affirms, there’re frozen theories we are subjected to. These frozen theories are considered as cultural modes , and they involve all the expectations people have about a particular situation. Foucault affirms that all these cultural modes belong to a system of knowledge known as “ Discourse” which may change as the time passes and may be somehow contradictory. If we consider, for example, the discourse of marriage we may compare the 19th^ century Europe when the discourse of marriage was based on the ideals of commitment and duty, so divorce was illegal and marriages were totally based on devotion, and nowadays marriages which are mainly based on different ideals, such as love or personal gratification. Spoken discourse Even though speech isn’t considered very different from writing due to the fact that speakers, as writers, produce genres based on their communicative purposes, there’re some differences between speech and writing. 1 - Speech is more interactive , because it occurs in real time so that we can immediately answer to what our hearer says, or we can also change what we want to say according to our hearers’ reactions to our speeches or to what he says, so both the parties of a conversation are able to answer in real time to what the other person says. 2 - Speech is more spontaneous. In writing, we always can control, rewrite and edit what we want to say, and words in a certain sense are also permanent, while speeches aren’t planned and if none records us while speaking, they’re not permanent. 3 - Speech is less explicit than writing, because writing is totally based on language while speeches also rely on our gestures, our facial expressions or our tone of voice. Moreover, speech may also be considered as more physical , because it occurs in a physical place where both the speaker and his hearer are, while writing always occurs in a kind of virtual place, such as a chat for example. The most important difference between speech and writing is the fact that speech may also be supported by demonstrative pronouns such as “this”, “that” or adverbs such as “here” and “there” which are used by speakers in order to refer to a concrete situation shared by both the parties. There’re also some types of speeches which don’t respect these features , for example when people talk by telephone they’re in different places so their conversation can’t be supported by cues such as demonstrative pronouns or facial expressions. If we also consider instant messaging conversations, they’re similar to speech because they’re interactive, but as writing they’re permanent.
Spoken language, sometimes, may be ambiguous due to the fact that it’s inexplicit so if people don’t say what they mean and don’t mean what they say, we have to find some instruments in order to make what they say make sense. In order to understand what our interlocutors truly mean, we may refer to two different analytical traditions: 1 - Pragmatics , which is the study of how people use words in order to request, threaten, ask questions, apologize, and so on, so it helps us in understanding the way people use language in order to do actions. It is a kind of logic approach , indeed through logic we can deduce all those conditions which give meaning to a given utterance. 2 - Conversation analysis, is a kind of approach whose aim is to understand what people mean but it’s less logic than pragmatics, because it focuses on the methods , for example the sequence of the utterances, used by people who belong to the same group use in order to interact one another. Strategic interaction Conversation is made up and built through actions, so in a conversation we debate, we flirt, we gossip and to many other things because the way we use conversation is based on our will to show who we are and the social group we belong to. Our social identities, anyway, depend on the conversational strategies we use in order to negotiate between who we are and what we do. The two most important conversational strategies are face strategies , which regard who we are and the relationship which links us and the people we’re talking to, and framing strategies which regard what we do in a conversation, for example if we gossip, commiserate, apologize and so on. Face strategies and framing strategies come from the interactional sociolinguistics which has been founded and mainly analysed by John Gumperz who affirmed that the way people talk or simply communicate depends on the groups they belong to, because each social group owns its own form of communication, this is why when people who come from different social groups communicate there may be some misunderstandings. Erving Goffman too contributed to analyse the concepts of face and frame: he considered face as the positive social values people want to show to own, and a person’s face also depends on how he or she is able to make people accept his or her line , that’s to say his or her vision of what’s going on. Frame , on the other hand, is the definition of a situation that we use in order to communicate with other people.
- FACE STRATEGIES – > our identity in society depends on the people we talk to, such as friends, superiors or subordinates, indeed the way we talk and the strategies we use in a conversation depend on how close or distant we are from the person we’re talking to. Face may be considered as a person’s reputation, his or her public image granted to each other by all the participants in a communicative event. This definition makes us understand that: 1 - There’s a difference between our public image and our true self, because our image, the face we want to show, depends on the people we’re talking to. 2 - The image we spread of ourselves is the result of a kind of give and take with the person we’re talking to.
- Field , that’s to say the social action which takes place
- Tenor , which regards all those people who take part in the conversation
- Mode , so the channel through which a conversation takes place. The only problem with his model was the fact that he didn’t give a particular explanation of all these three categories so discourse analysts weren’t sure about what could fit in each of them. Another important linguistic anthropologist who developed is model of context was Dell Hymes who affirmed that his model of context was called “the ethnography of speaking” and that competence was one of its main features. In particular, Hymes talked about communicative competence , because he said that, in order to create a successful communication people don’t need to know the linguistic system, they also have to be capable to recognize what has to be said, where, when and to whom, in this way they will be considered as a part of a speech community – > a group of people who use one language variety based on the same norms and rules. Hymes’s model of context was made up of 8 elements: S etting P articipants E nds A ct sequence K ey I nstrumentalities N orms of interaction G enre All of these elements were considered to be subjective to the speaker, each speaker, according to Hymes, owns his subjective communicative competence and has to shape his language depending on the social group he interacts with. Ethnography is the key word of Hymes’s model of context, and this is a research method, or an approach which aims to analyse how people live in particular social groups, their behaviour, the forms of communication they use. This is also an important element of this model of context because Hymes wanted to spread the idea that people may be considered as a part of a speech community only if they are able to understand what communication truly means for people in different situations. Mediated discourse analysis When discourse analysts start analysing a discourse they firstly have to decide which part of the discourse analyse first, so mediated discourse analysis helps them to answer this question because it makes them think about what’s going on and which are the other things, such as texts or conversations, which influence and take part in the situation they have to analyse. If we consider, for example, a situation which involves people at a Starbucks, it’s obvious that the answer to the question “what’s going on” depends on which person we’re focusing on: people sitting at a table drinking a coffee, the cashier receiving money, the barman making the coffee and so on. So, as a consequence, mediated discourse analysis pays attention on the social identities of the people who are involved and enact in a particular situation. In order to understand the link between discourse and real life, first of all we’ve to focus on the idea that different texts and conversation may be, directly or indirectly, linked each other and how these links create social practices – > with the term “social practice” we refer to a sequence of actions, in which a given action is strictly related to what comes before and after it, which combine each other and become
conventionalized because they occur over and over and always involve the same kinds of people in the same kinds of situations. Consequently, language becomes conventionalized too because people are always expected to act and to speak in a certain way according to their social practice and their social identity. As we know, discourse is “language in use” so people use language in order to enact something such as apologise, ask questions, make requests also by using a particular kind of genre analysis based on which identity they want to enact. The difference between mediated discourse analysis and all the other approaches is that, while all these approaches use discourse in order to understand which social role people play, mediated discourse analysis aims to understand the role of discourse in social actions. So, mediated discourse analysis analyses the action which is mediated through all of these discursive approaches and the answer to “What’s going on here?”, as we’ve already said before, may be different from one person to another, because it depends on what they’re doing. Multimodal discourse analysis It’s known that discourse involves language and other modes, such as non-verbal cues, images, music, gesture, the context which includes a particular setting and different kinds of participants, so all of these elements affect language and the way it’s perceived by people. Multimodal discourse analysis focuses on all these modes of communication – > if we consider a spoken conversation, for example, people communicate by using language but they also express something through their facial expression, the tone of their voice, their way of getting dressed, how close or far they’re from the person they’re talking too. So, multimodal discourse analysis aims to understand how all of these modes, which are considered as systems used in order to make meaning, co-work in order to produce discourse. There is a difference between “modes” and “medias” because medias, such as tv, telephones, computers are those elements which carry and make modes spread. Multimodal discourse analysis is divided in two approaches: 1 - The first one focuses on texts, such as magazines, books, web pages, films. One of the main points of multimodal discourse analysis on texts is the so-called “Systemic functional linguistics” developed and spread by Halliday. Halliday affirmed that grammar is made up of resources used by people in order to produce the meaning they want, and he also affirmed that elements such as music, images, films have their kind of grammar, because all of their components co-operate in order to create meaning. This idea was applied in the book “Reading Images: The grammar of visual design” whose authors, Kress and van Leeuwen subverted the common idea that the way people interpret images depends on their interaction with language since images can’t be understood alone. Kress and van Leeuwen, on the other hand, believed that images have their own grammar , which allows them to create and spread different meanings even without referring to language. 2 - The second approach to multimodal discourse analysis is called “ Multimodal interaction analysis ” and it focuses on the social interaction. Multimodal interaction analysts observe sequentiality , so how all the elements of a discourse are ordered, and simultaneity , which refers to how these elements affect each other.
This means that when we analyse and relate texts, conversations and Discourses, corpus-assisted analysis gives us the opportunity to figure out if a word, a phrase, a sentence or a particular feature occur and reoccur and if they belong to a particular trend of language, which, of course, can change over time. SECTION B: Development: approaches to discourse analysis Three ways of looking at discourse Studying discourse involves many different elements and many different rules, indeed it’s important to consider at least three perspectives which start from 3 different ways to consider and think about discourse: 1 - Language above the level of the clause or sentence , is a way of looking at discourse which aims to understand which rules must be followed in order to put sentences or clauses together to create texts. This perspective was introduced by the linguist Zelling Harris who, not only invented the discourse analysis but they also developed a method to understand how linguistic elements and features are distributed and organised in a text. Moreover, since he wanted to bring discourse analysis to a next level, he also wanted to understand how was it possible to correlate linguistic features and non- linguistic ones, for example which situation that text belongs to. 2 - Language in use, is the way we use language, the way it changes because of the variety, so the way people speak in the context they are into, or maybe it has got to do with the different types and registers of language, for example if I’m an archaeologist, the use I make of English in the writing form belongs to the purpose language is performed to. This perspective was introduced by H.G Widdowson who suggested to consider discourse as an action, that’s to say that we do things like apologizing, promising, making requests but he also suggested to comprehend that every kind of discourse is strictly connected to the activity people perform or to what they want to communicate, this is why it’s possible to distinguish and identify multiple linguistic registers. 3 - Language as a social practice is the way language changes and shapes society by means of specific ideologies which can be positive or negative and which create discourses around which people would recognize themselves. The French philosopher Foucault considered discourse as an instrument used by people in order to build their own social identities, indeed he spoke about economic discourse, psychiatric discourse and so on, according to the idea that people wanted to spread about themselves. The American discourse analyst James Gee distinguished between discourse and Discourse, d iscourse, refers to language in use so to the way we speak, while D iscourse with capital letter refers to language plus other stuffs, like the way we move our hands, the tone of our voice and other identity markers, which define us as people in a community. Cohesion and coherence Texture is what makes a text a text, and it’s achieved through coherence and cohesion:
- Cohesion is connected to all the linguistic features which characterise texts and how all of these features co-operate in order to create mental activities. Moreover, it’s also considered as the element which, when we analyse a text, makes us look
backward and forward to understand the sense of what we’re analysing.
- Coherence , on the other hand, regards the way in which readers use that given text, it means that coherence is strictly linked to all the expectations we have before reading a text, so to the so-called “framework”. According to Halliday and Hasan, cohesion is divided in:
- Grammatical cohesion
- Lexical cohesion Grammatical cohesion includes four main elements, that’s to say: 1 - Conjunction , which is performed through and with connecting words which link sentences, phrases, clauses all together and when two or more sentences are linked each other through conjunctions, readers find easier to understand the meaning of the second clause by referring to the first one. Connecting words may be: additive, when they add information (and, also), contrastive (but, however) when we need to underline the contrast between the two linked sentences, causative (because, consequently) when there’s a cause-effect relation which links them, and sequential (then, finally) used in order to express in which order all the events develop. These connecting words make the reader look backward and forward to the previous sentence, in this way it’s easier to figure out the meaning of the second one. 2 - Reference , is a linguistic device, which consists on using words in order to refer to words already mentioned in a text. Through reference, readers will be able to understand which are the different participants in a text. Reference can be:
- anaphoric , when we use a word in order to refer to something previously mentioned
- cataphoric , when the word we decide to use refers to something which will be mentioned later
- exophoric , when we use this word in order to talk about something which is external to the text. 3 - Substitution, is a form of grammatical cohesion which is similar to reference but it doesn’t imply to use a pronoun in order to refer to the antecedent, it’s also possible to use other words. 4 - Ellipsis, consists in omitting a verb, a noun but also a whole sentence and maintaining that it’s clearly understandable by referring to the context. If grammatical cohesion focuses on the grammatical elements which link words, lexical cohesion focuses on the semantic relationship among all of them. One of the main examples of lexical cohesion consists in the repetition of words and on the consequent creation of lexical chains , which make a text more cohesive and make reader understand which is its main topic, so what’s the text about. Halliday and Hasan assume that texture can be tight or loose depending on the amount of cohesive device it involves; generally speaking, communication follows the principle of the “ least effort ” which means that sometimes it’s not necessary to add words or connections among words because maybe that connection is implicit.
someone in order to share with him or her some activities such as dinners, events and so on, this is why, according to the language, it’s mostly positive and romantic. Finally, these kinds of advertisements also establish a kind of prototype shared by the social opinion, according to which kind of partner may be more or less desired and suitable. Personal advertisement is a particular genre but it can be characterised by sub-genres which change depending on the community in which these articles are written and, of course, on the ideas and values shared by all of them. One of the main sub-genres may be “matrimonial advertisements”, mostly written in countries such as Africa or India, but the main element which must be underlined is the fact that these matrimonial advertisements aren’t written by the seeker, so it’s not the person who’s looking for a partner who writes the article, but most of the times these articles are written by parents or relatives. Moreover, if personal advertisements included moves such as a personal introduction and description, the main moves, which characterise matrimonial advertisements, don’t concern the description of the “seeker” but they concern information such as the immigration status, the religion, the educational attainment. So, as a consequence, the style or the moves employed in a particular sub-genre depend on the communicative purpose of the sub-genre itself, so on the aims which the writer of the article wants to accomplish. If we consider the genre of personal advertisements they’re in a certain sense “conventionalised” because all of these articles are written in a certain and standard way, so people can easily recognize all of the articles which belong to this genre; on the other hand there’re two particular strategies which can make us play with the conventions of a particular genre:
- Genre bending which consists in avoiding to answer to all of the modes of a particular genre, so it consists in flouting information, and in order for it to create an effect, people have to understand which is the information which can be flouted, for example in a personal advertisement people can’t flout the personal information about their physical appearance or the way in which people can enter in contact with them.
- Genre blending , it consists in creating a text by blending the conventions which belong to many genres. These two strategies are useful for all those people who try to establish a kind of distance between themselves and what they’re doing, for example if we think again about personal advertisements people rationally know what they’re doing but they try to distinguish themselves from all those people who post these ads by flouting these conventions. As we know, at the beginning personal advertisements were published on journals or magazines, but as the time passed the Medias, which spread this and other genres of advertisements, began to change, indeed nowadays advertisements in general are mainly spread through radio, television, or websites. The fact that the Medias through which advertisements spread have changed, led to this genre to change too : personal advertisements which are publish online, nowadays can also be characterised by self-photos or videos, moreover all these websites on which personal advertisements are publish produce a kind of standardization about how these articles must be written and which moves have to be followed by the authors, and we can also think about the fact that nowadays smartphones, tablets or computers use the GPS tool which allows all the partner-seekers because to find someone who’s physically and geographically closer.
Constructing reality Texts are made up of many important elements; among all of them, we can identify process and participants which are two elements used by authors in order to spread particular ideologies or a version of reality. Processes concerns all those relationships which link participants in different ways, such as one participant can be represented while he’s doing something for the other one, they can be linked in a cause-effect relationship, they can be the speaker and the listener, the writer and the reader and so on. Processes can be transformed into participants and be connected with other processes or other participants through a technique, which is called “ nominalization ” – > if we consider, for example, all the warning advertisements which many governments put on cigarettes, it’s easy to see how the act of smoking is nominalised. In the warning advertisement spread by the American government “Smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and may complicate pregnancy” The act of smoking becomes the subject of this sentence and so it’s nominalised , moreover it’s the linked in a process of causing with the other elements of the sentence, that’s to say all of these deadly diseases. Another important element is the modal verb “may ” which relates the act of smoking to the pregnancy, but this relation is weaker than the one which involves the act of smoking with the diseases, since the verb “may” makes the readers think about the fact that it’s not sure that smoking can complicate pregnancy. This makes us understand that modality is fundamental because it’s one of the strategies used by texts authors in order to construct and spread a given kind of reality and the relationship between the participant and the process. Another strategy regards the pronouns “your” and “we”. Let’s consider the Australian advertisement: “Smoking seriously harms you and others around you” The act of smoking here is nominalised again and it’s still related to the other participants of the sentence in a process of causing, but here the pronoun “you” makes the readers feel totally implied in this statement, indeed we may also analyse the statement: “Protect children: don’t make them breathe your smoke” This statement makes the reader a participant of the act of putting in danger children’s life. The way in which the author and the readers of a particular text, statement or advertisement are represented depends on the fact that the last strategy employed by authors in order to spread a particular kind of reality is the so-called “ social language ”. “Social language” is a particular linguistic strategy, which is very common among writers because they use it in order to portray readers and themselves too as certain kinds of people. In the advertisement: “Smoking when pregnant harms your baby” The author employs a kind of social language which portrays himself or herself as a person who’s not very different from the readers, and the reader is portrayed as a pregnant woman through the possessive adjective “your”.
there’s another important concept, that’s to say the “ felicity conditions ” which occur when a particular utterance perfectly fits in the social conditions in which it’s pronounced, it means that the conditions in which a particular speech act should be pronounced and the conditions in which it’s effectively pronounced are the same. These conditions may be related to the speaker, to the time or the place in which the utterance is pronounced and also to the addressees of the utterance. While pragmatics focuses on the meaning of words in context, conversation analysis affirms that conversations follow a given pattern based on which an utterance should come previously and the other one should follow it , indeed here utterances are considered as actions and they’re interpreted according to the sequence in which they occur in a conversation. Conversation analysts, such as Schegloff and Sacks, focus on the sequence in which the utterances appear in a conversation, and they affirm that utterances commonly appear in pairs, and these pairs are called “ adjacency pairs ”. The two utterances involved in these pairs share a kind of conditional relevance , it means that the structure of the second utterance is conditioned by the first one, for example is the first utterance is a question, the following one has to be an answer, on the other hand the way in which the first sentence is understood is conditioned by the second one, it means that if I give you an answer, your utterance has to be structured as a question. This also means that all the expectations that people have towards a conversation regard the structure of the conversation itself so, when an utterance is structured as a question, the participant of the conversation expects the second utterance to be an answer, if his or her expectation is fulfilled, it is a “ preferred response ” because it’s the most efficient one, but if the expectation isn’t fulfilled, conversation analysts say that the preferred response is “ officially absent ”. Finally, if pragmatics affirms that the genre of the speech act depends on the intentions and the identity of the speaker, conversation analysis assumes that the way in which an utterance is interpreted depends on the conditions of the whole conversation. Negotiating relationships and activities The way we communicate each other depends on the relationship we have with the person we’re talking to, and the act of speaking or talking is related to two strategies:
- Involvement strategies, which are used in order to appear friendly and they’re mostly used when the topic of the conversation is less serious.
- Independence strategies, used in order to appear distant or to separate us from the person or people we’re talking to. This kind of strategies is used when the topic of the conversation is serious or embarrassing for both the participants. When we talk to someone, both of the people involved in a conversation recognize how distant or close are and which is the more powerful party of the conversation, otherwise the conversation has to be negotiated in order to understand and establish who is the “ruler” of the conversation. Although that, we all start an interaction with someone with a particular set of expectations or frameworks, and these expectations are called “ face systems ”. There’re three kinds of face systems:
- Deference face system – > when both the participants of a conversation are socially distant and so they use independence strategies.
- Solidarity face system – > when both people are close and equal, so they both use involvement strategies.
- Regardless of their social distance – > in this conversation one person has more power of the other, so one will use the independent strategy while the other one will use involvement strategy, in this case the more powerful one will use involvement strategies in order to appear friendly. These face systems are considered as resources that people use in order to manipulate or negotiate the conversation , indeed a person may use involvement strategies in order to establish the idea that one of them is more powerful than the other one, this is why these strategies are able to change the pattern of the relationship which links the participants of the conversation. As we know, discourse is defined as “whos doing whats”, indeed through language we can express that we’re joking, arguing, commiserating, these all are signals we give to the people we’re talking to through the so-called contextualization cues, which help us showing what we are doing or how our interaction should be interpreted. These cues may be both verbal and non-verbal:
- Verbal contextualization cues – > we use these cues in order to represent what we’re doing through our language, vocabulary, or grammar in our utterances, for example we can easily mark the fact that our utterance is beginning or ending through words or expressions, called “discourse markers”, such as “okay, so, well, finally” and so on.
- Non-verbal contextualization cues – > they include gestures, facial expressions, the tone of voice we use in order to pronounce an utterance, but they are less understandable than verbal contextualization cues. These contextualization cues, both verbal and non-verbal, help us in managing the interactive frames, that’s to say framing strategies which show that we’re sure about what we’re doing with our language but they also are interactive , and this means that the way they’re used is influenced by the topic of the conversation, by what has been said previously and also by the relationship which links the participants of the conversation. These interactive frames, moreover, are strategies which help the speakers in negotiating the conversation with the other participants, this means that through these strategies one of the participant can establish the pattern of the conversation and, as a consequence, the most powerful participant, but there may be cases in which the other participant doesn’t accept the frame or the pattern which has been established , and so he can totally change the conversation or contest the other speaker in order to show his or her disagreement. This attempt to superimpose one frame or another will make the conversation result ambiguous. The speaking model Ethnography of speaking mainly focuses its analysis on the speech event , that’s to say on the communicative activity which has a specific beginning and a specific end; speech event occur in speech acts and they both are part of a biggest unit of analysis which is called “ speech situation ”. Speech acts, such as joking, asking, apologising, may occur in different speech events, that’s to say in different conversations.
- Norms of interaction and norms of interpretation , that’s to say what the participants of a speech event consider to be polite or impolite, so which behaviour must be enacted during a speech event. 8. Genre or type of speech event, it is fundamental because it makes readers or hearers of a particular speech event understand which kind of speech event they’re taking part to. All of these elements are strictly related, they can’t exist on their own and the way in which one element is link to another creates a particular kind of speech act. Mediation Mediated discourse analysis starts from the concept of mediation , that’s to say the medium through which the message can spread. When we talk about media, we think about television, newspapers, smartphones, and it’s important to underline the fact that the media we use in order to spread our message changes its meaning , because the messages we may spread through a newspaper are different from the ones we may spread through a message on our smartphone. The Russian psychologist Vygotsky affirmed that the action we all take are mediated by the cultural tools , which can be technological, abstract, mental and so on, and they help the sender of the message to communicate in an easier way. Of course, each original tool has its affordances and its constraints , it means that each of them makes us do something but it doesn’t allow us doing something else, for example if we decide to spread our message through an email we’ll be able to control our writing and to erase something, but on the other hand we won’t be able to answer immediately or maybe to see which consequence our message has produced on our addressee. All of us have different cultural tools, this means that we can decide which one to use in order to perform a particular action, so discourse affects how we think but also what we can do and, consequently, who we are. When someone is very skilled in using a particular cultural tool, he or she will also be able to adapt this cultural tool in order to overcome the tension , which occurs between its affordances and its constraints. For example, if we think about nowadays dating websites, all the subscribers have to upload their pictures and this is a cultural tool which has its affordances, for example the fact that the subject will focus more on introducing his personality rather than on describing his physical appearance, but it also has its constraints because he won’t be able to control his private information about his true self. As we’ve already seen, sometimes people don’t own a specific cultural tool and so they’re not able to do a specific action, this is why they’re obliged to adapt the cultural tools they already have in order to achieve their goals. However, when the cultural tools are appropriated to the situation, these situations in mediated discourse analysis are called “ sites of engagement ” in which the actors, the cultural tool and the social relationships allow the actors to make a specific action. There’s a particular difference between context and sites of engagement:
- Context are external to the social actor and it’s focused on the whole text
- Sites of engagement involve all the cultural tools which can be used by the social actor in order to accomplish a particular action, indeed they’re mainly focused on the action rather than on the text.
Indeed, according to Ron and Suzanne Scollon, sites of engagement are made up of three fundamental elements:
- Discourses in place , which regard all the cultural tools, which help the social actor in making a particular action.
- Interaction order , which regards the social relationships, which link all the participants of the conversation.
- Historical body , which represents the knowledge, the abilities and the experiences of the social actor. Modes, meaning and action Multimodal discourse analysis focuses on an approach which is related to texts, and on another approach which is related to real time interactions, and both these approaches have different meaning potentials, this means that they have constraints and affordances and make people do some actions rather than others. In written texts, for example, all the information are ordered by following the logic of time, while all the elements which belong to a particular image are ordered by following the logic of space, but while images make us perceive, for example, different tones of colour, the word “pink” in a text doesn’t represent the exact colour but it’s whole range, this is due to the fact that there’re some things which can’t be expressed through words. Halliday established three functions of language, and then Kress and van Leeuwen in their work “Reading images: the grammar of visual design” decided to apply these three functions to images too:
- Ideational function – > if in language it’s conceived by linking processes and participants, according to images this function is fulfilled by linking figures (participants) and then they all are linked through visual processes. There’re different kinds of images, they can be classificatory, analytical, but in particular they can be narrative and here the processes are represented through vectors which allow us understand and represent which is the direction of the action.
- Interpersonal function – > images are characterised by the facts that the viewers of a particular image establish a kind of relationship with what’s represented, and this relationship is established through different devices such as gaze, perspective, but also through long shots, which tend to establish a kind of distance, and close ups which make the viewer feel psychologically and emotionally closer to the subject of the image. The concept of “ modality ” can be applied to images too, and it depends on how realistic the image seems to be, indeed photographs are more realistic than paintings, so the concept of modality is applied in a stronger way.
- Textual function – > this function focuses on the way in which all the different elements of a given image are spatially ordered, in means that they can be at the top or at the bottom of the image, on the left, on the right, at the centre and so on. According to the language, Halliday affirmed that on the left of the sentence, so at its beginning, there are all the given information, while on the right there’re the new ones, and similarly people tend to look at images in the same way in which they read texts, so from left to right, this is why in images too the given information appear on the left and the new ones appear on the right. In the same way, the information which appear on the top of the image are considered as abstract, while the real and concrete ones appear at the bottom.
