DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
The term “discourse” is used for both spoken and written language with particular attention to:
– a wide variety of other factors that are more social in nature → who produces/receives the discourse, in
which setting, for what reason ecc.
– refers to systematic variation between different kinds of texts based on features internal to the text and
external to the text.
– is more complete than text linguistics and text types which refers mostly to the internal features.
Discourse analysis focuses on
• relationship between language and the social and cultural contexts in which it is used.
• how language presents different views of the world and different understandings.
• how we construct our views of the world and our identities through the language we use.
“Discourse analysis” → introduced by Harris (1952) to:
• study language beyond the level of the sentence → describing features and styles of texts.
• understand the relationship between linguistic/non-linguistic behaviour → motivation for using
language in certain ways/contexts.
Different “discourses” share particular meanings and have characteristic linguistic features associated with
them → understanding both of them is the objective of discourse analysis.
The relationship between language and context.
It means how people know, from the situation they are in, how to interpret what someone says.
➔ contexts are not objective conditions: subjective ones that we constantly update we interact with
each other in our social groups.
The same discourse can be understood differently by different language users as well as understood
differently in different contexts.
So in order to understand the meaning of what a person says or writes we need to know something about
the situational and cultural context in which it is located.
• context of situation → In the context of situation the reader must identify:
-the FIELD: what is being spoken about?
-the TENOR: what are the relationships?
-the MODE: what are the circumstances in which the communication takes place?
• context of culture → meanings/assumptions that people in a certain culture share. It also incorporates
the culturally evolved expectations of ways of behaving and getting things done.
