Scarica Discourse Analysis: A Brief Overview of Brian Paltridge's Work e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity!
A Brief of Brian Paltridge's Discourse Analysis
1.1 What is discourse analysis?
Discourse analysis focuses on knowledge about language and the world beyond the word, clause, phrase, sentence that is needed for successful communication, it looks at patterns of language across texts and considers the relationship between language and the social and cultural contexts in which it is used. It considers what people mean by what they say, and the way language presents different views of the world and different understandings. It examines how the use of language is influenced by relationships between participants, and the effects that the use of language has upon social identities and relations. Discourse analysis examines both spoken and written texts. The term ' Discourse Analysis ' was first introduced by Harris as the examination of language beyond the level of the sentence and the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour.
I. By 'the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour ' Harris means how people know, from the situation that they are in, how to interpret what someone says.
II. A number of language use that are discussed in the area of discourse analysis are also discussed in the area of pragmatics. Pragmatics is interested in what people mean by what they say, rather than what words in their most literal sense might mean by themselves.
III. Discourse analysts are also interested in how people organize what they say in the sense of hat they typically say first, say next and so on. Mitchell was one of the first researchers to examine the discourse structure of texts. He introduced the notion of ' stages' into discourse analysis. Other researchers working in the area known as conversation analysis have looked at how people open and close conversations and how people take turns and overlap their speech in conversations.
IV. One useful way of looking at the ways in which language is used by particular cultural groups is through the notion of the ethnography of communication. Hymes started this work in reaction to views of language which took little or no account of the social and cultural contexts in which language occurs. He considered aspects of speech events such as who is speaking to whom , about what , for what purpose, where , and when , and how these impact on how we say and do things in culture-specific settings.
V. The notion of communicative competence is an important part of the background to the ethnography of communication. Communicative competence involves not only knowing a language, but also what to say to whom and how to say it properly in a particular situation. It includes not only knowing what is grammatically correct and what is not, but also when and where to use language appropriately and with whom.
VI. Discursive competence draws together the notion of textual competence, generic competence and social competence. Textual competence refers to the ability to produce and interpret contextually appropriate texts. Generic competence describes how we are able to respond to both recurring and new communicative situations. Social competence describes how we use language to take part in social and institutional interactions.
1.2. Discourse analysis is a view of language at the level of text, but is also a view of language in use; communicative goals, perform certain communicative acts and participate in certain communicative events. Discourse analysis considers how people manage interactions with each other and how people communicate within particular groups and societies.
I. Texts are communicative units which are embedded in social and cultural practices.
III. Discourses then are socially constructed, rather than 'natural'. People 'are who they are because of the way they talk'. Social identities are, thus, not pre-given, but are formed in the use of language and the various other ways we display who we are, what we think.
IV. All texts, spoken or written, make their meanings against the background of other texts. Texts may refer to other texts, or they may allude to other past or future texts. All texts are, thus, in an intertextual relationship with other texts.
1.3. Differences between spoken and written discourse :
- Written discourse, tends to be more lexically dense than spoken discourse;
- There is more nominalization in written texts; that is where actions and events are presented as nouns rather than as verbs;
- Usually writing is more explicit than speech;
- W riting is more decontextualized than speech. This view is based on the perception that speech depends on a shared situation and background for interpretation.
- Speaking is more disorganized and ungrammatical than writing. That is because spoken discourse is often produced spontaneously.
- Spoken discourse use intonation, gesture and body language to convey meaning and also uses much more repetition, hesitation and redundancy than written discourse. This is because it is produced in real time.
- Discourse and society 2.1. A key notion of discourse analysis is the concept of discourse community that is a group of people who share some kind of activity such as members of a club or association who have regular meetings. The group must have shared common goal and particular ways of communicating with each other. Discourse communities also interact with wider speech communities. There are three types of groups of language users : Communities are group of people who share substantial amounts of time together. Collectives are groups of people that 'form around a single repeated interest, without the frequency of contact of a community.' Networks are groups of people who almost never met each other but are participating in a common discourse.
2.2. The term speech community refers to any group of people that speak the same language. The notion of speech community, then, is broader than that of discourse communities; it includes discourse communities and the repertoire of languages that members of the speech community use to interact with each other.
I. There are a number of factor that define a speech community other than just language. These might include social, geographical, cultural, political and ethnic factors, race, age and gender.
2.3. Speakers may also have a linguistic repertoire that they use to interact in their particular communities. Social factors such as who we are speaking to, the social context, the function and goal of the interaction are important for the language choice.
3.4. In order for a person to interpret what someone else says, some kind of cooperative principle must be assumed. The cooperative principle has four maxims: The maxim of quality The maxim of quantity The maxim of relation The maxim of manner
On some occasions speakers flout the co-operative principle and don't observe the maxim. A speaker is flouting a maxim if they do not observe a maxim but has no intention of misleading the other person. A person is violating a maxim if there is a likelihood that they are liable to mislead the other person.
3.6. I. Cross-cultural pragmatics means that what may be preferred or accepted in a culture, may be unaccepted in another culture. Speakers of different languages and cultures may have different ways of observing these maxims. Different pragmatic norms reflect different cultural values.
IV. The failure to understand a pragmatic intention in another language and culture is called cross-cultural pragmatic failure. There are two types : Sociopragmatic failure is when a speaker of a second language assesses situational factors on the basis of the norms of their first language. Pragmalinguistic failure is when a speaker transfers the procedure and linguistic means of realizing a speech act from their first language to their second language.
3.7. A further key notion in pragmatics is the concept of conversational implicature. Conversational implicature refers to the inference a hearer makes about a speaker's intended meaning. An implicature 'is generated intentionally by the speaker and may, or may not be understood by the hearer'.
3.8. Two further notions are politeness and face. The specific nature of politeness and face varies from society to society and from culture to culture. Politeness and face are important for understanding why people choose to say things in a particular way in spoken and written discourse. Politeness principles are: 'don't impose', 'give options', 'make your hearer feel good'. 3.11. Some acts 'threaten' a person's face. These are called face-threatening acts, that is when a speaker says something that represents a threat to another individual's self-image.
3.12. Politeness strategies are not the same across languages and cultures. A lack of understanding of politeness strategies in different languages and cultures can be a cause of cross-cultural pragmatic failure.
- Discourse and genre 4.1. A genre is a 'kind of text' that occurs in a particular context, is organized in a particular way and has a particular purpose. Genres change through time, are dynamic. People, further, may deliberately place one genre within another and this is called genre embedding.
III. To assign a text to a genre category we may consider the content of the text, the level of formality, the style or register of the text and whether it is a spoken or written text. But assigning a text to a genre category, doesn't necessarily involve an exact match in terms of
characteristics. Rather, it involves the notion of "sufficient similarity" to have a relationship with other examples of the genre in the particular genre category.
4.3. The area of contrastive rhetoric or intercultural rhetoric looks at the use of genres across cultures.
4.5. There are a number of steps for carrying out the analysis of genres. The first step is to consider the social and cultural context in which it occurs. The next stage is to define the speaker or writer of the text, the audience and also the goal of the
text. The next step is to select the collection of texts we wish to examine.
- Discourse and conversation Conversation analysis looks at ordinary everyday spoken discourse such as casual conversation, and aims to understand how people manage their interactions. It also looks at how social relations are developed through the use of spoken discourse and how it is organized. Conversation is the main way in which people come together, exchange information and maintain social relations. A further key feature of conversation analysis is the primacy of the data as the source of information. Conversation analysis look for phenomena which regularly occur in the data.
5.3. A particular interest of conversation analysis is the sequence and structure of spoken discourse. Aspects of conversational interactions that have been examined from this perspective include conversational openings and closings. Closing may be extended by repetition of pre-closing and closing items (such as "bye bye", "sleep well"/"you too"). Closings are thus complex interactional units which are sensitive to the speaker's orientation to continuing or closing the conversation.
III. Conversation analysis has also examined how people take turns in spoken interactions. The basic rule is that one person speaks at a time, after which they may nominate another speaker, but there are a number of ways in which we can signal that we have come to the end of a turn. This may be through the use of falling intonation, pausing, eye contact, body position. A speaker may also use overlap as a strategy for taking turn, as well as to prevent someone else
from taking the turn.
IV. Adjacency pairs are a key way in which meanings are communicated and interpreted in conversations. Adjacency pairs are utterances produced by two successive speakers in a way that the second utterance is identified as related to the first one as an expected follow-up to that utterance.
5.4. Some second pair parts may be preferred and others may be dispreferred, for example a compliment can be followed by an "accept" or a "reject".
5.5. Feedback : the way in which listeners show they are attending to what is being said. This can be done through the use of 'response tokens' (such as "mmm" and "yeah"), or through body position or eye contact.
5.6. The repair is the way speakers correct things they or someone else has said, and check what they have understood in a conversation. Repair is often done thorough self repair and other repair.
5.10. An offer may be followed by an acceptance or a refusal. The acceptance is less complex than a refusal, is preferred and is usually immediate and involves the use of a direct speech act.
III. Antonymy describes opposite or contrastive meanings such as old and new.
V. Hyponymy refers to classes of lexical items where the relationship between them is one of "class to member" type relationship, for example flower and rose: rose is a hyponym of flower.
VI. Meronymy is where lexical items are in a 'whole to part' relationship with each other for example kitchen and bathroom.
6.6. Collocation describes associations between vocabulary items which have the tendency to occur together.
6.8. A further way in which language contributes to the texture of a text is through the use of substitution and ellipsis. With substitution, a substitute form is used for another language item, phrase or group. With ellipsis some essential elements is omitted from the text and can be recovered by referring to a preceding element in the text. One important difference between reference and ellipsis substitution is that reference can reach a long way back in the text whereas ellipsis and substitution are limited to the preceding clause.
6.10. Two further elements to the texture of a text is the relationship between theme and rheme in a clause. Theme is the starting point of a clause: that is, what the clause is 'about'. The remainder of the clause, or what the clause has to say about the theme is the rheme.
Language is not in its natural state. Language always occurs in texts, in discourse. While coherence is as much an issue that involves a reader as the writer, coherence is very hard to achieve if the text in the first place doesn't have cohesion.
