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Discourse Analysis
What we mean by “discourse”? We can say that it could be in the study of language; like a sub-field of linguistic. Linguistic has a lot of sub-fields, like phonology (the study of the sounds of languages) or grammar (the study of how words are put together to form sentences), so discourse analysis is one of this sub-fields, that is the study of how sentences and utterances are putted together to form texts and interactions and how these fit in our social world. Discourse analysis is not just the study of language, is more the study of how people use language in real life, this way of looking is based on four main assumption:
- Language is ambiguous
- Language is “in the world”
- The way we use language is inseparable from who we are and the different social groups to which we belong
- Language is never used all by itself
Let’s talk about the ambiguity of language: often, in all of our communication, we can find a lot of elements of meaning that are not expressed directly by the words we are spoken or written; so we can say that “people don’t always say what they mean, and people don’t always mean what they say”, but not because they are trying to trick us, just because language is ambiguous.
“Language in the world” means that language is always a matter of where and when it is used; the words we say or write, sentences, texts, always depends on the context they are used.
Whenever people speak or write, they are, through their discourse, somehow demonstrating who they are and what their relationship is to other people.
Discourse analysts used to focus exclusively on the written or spoken language, but now people are realising that there a lot of ways to comunicate something that not involve language, so for understand this we have to pay attention to the way language is combined with other communicative modes (gesture, pictures…).
Studying discourse analysis make us understand how the societies in which we live are put together and their use of modes of communication, so discourse analyst analyse “text” and “conversation”. According to M.A.K. Halliday the most important thing in a text is “meaning”, this makes a text a text, for making a text has sense; the main thing that makes a text a text is relationship or connection, sometimes relationships are between words or sentences, and this takes the name of cohesion. The relationship between a text and the person who is reading is called coherence, because of the person social conventions about text or the situation where the text is found, etc. The last relationship is called intertextuality and it’s the connection between two texts.
Let’s talk about the structures and expectations associated to different kinds of texts
contribute to how they function in the social word; different patterns of texture are associated with different types of text, newspaper articles, tend to favour particular kinds of cohesive devices and are structured to sum up the main points at the beginning and then explain the details, for example. To understand how these types of textual conventions we have to understand the people who produce and consume it, this study is called genre analysis. We are used to think about genre while talking of movies, for example (western, horror, fantasy), in discourse analysis analysing a genre, on the contrary, is the study of the structure and features that tell us the way people use texts. According to Bhatia, “a genre is a recognisable communicative event characterised by a set of communicative purposes identifies and mutually understood by members of the community in which occurs”. There are 3 important aspects of genre: communicative purpose, constraints and creativity.
The communicative purpose of genres are often multiple and complex; a recipe, for example, may persuading us to make a certain dish or to buy a certain product, a newspaper could inform you about an event or affect on your opinion according to the text.
Constraints make the communicative events more efficient and demonstrate that the person who produced the text knows “how to do things”.
Texts, always promove certain points of view or a version of reality, that means that our words are never neutral, they always represent the world in a certain way and create a relationship with the people with we are communicating; in fact texts promote a particular ideology.
According to MAK Halliday again, when we use language we are always doing 3 things at once:
- representing the world, the ideational function of language
- creating, ratifying or negotiation with the people whom we are communicating, the interpersonal function of language
- we are joining sentences and ideas in way to form cohesive and coherents texts, the textual function. The words we choose to link participants together can also create differents impressions of what is going on; one of the key things about process (word about what participants are doing to), is that the participants construct a relationship between them, Halliday calls this relationship transitivity.
The idea of context, the idea that the meaning of utterances depends on the context came with a 1923 paper written by Bronislow Malinowski, which he argued that we can’t understand words spoken by a group of people very different from our own with a translation. We must have to knowledge of the situation where the words were spoken and the significance of the relationship the speakers had in that situation. This is “context”, that could even be practically anything from the place and time of the day of an utterance to the speaker view of the matter, etc.
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There are differents way for how people look at “discourse analysis”; some have taken a formal approach to discourse, thinking simply that “discourse is above the level of clause or sentences”, other people take a more functional approach, defining discourse as “language in use”, and finally there are who take a social approach to discourse, thinking about the way we use language and how it works in different groups or institutions.
The method to analyse discourse proposed by Zelling Harris is called “distributional analysis”, the idea is to identify particular linguistic features and determine how they occur in texts relative to other features, that is, which features occur next to other features or in the same environment with them. Analysing a discourse we are mostly interested in how the different elements of texts or conversations are put together to form unified wholes. These factors are called cohesion (how pieces of text are stuck together) and coherence (the overall pattern of elements in a text or conversation that conforms to our expectations about how different kinds of interactions ought to be structured).
One of the basic tasks of a discourse analyst is to figure out what makes a text a text and what makes a conversations a conversations, in other words what gives to a text or a conversations texture. As we saw, texture is made by cohesion and coherence, where the first one has to do with linguistics features and the second one with “frameworks” that readers approach texts and what they want to use text to do. (ex of cohesion: Lady Gaga doesn’t appeal to me, but my sister loves her)
Halliday describe two broad kinds of linguistic devices that are used to force readers to engage in this process of backward and forward looking which gives texts a sense of connectedness. One type depends on grammar (grammatical cohesion) and the other one depends on the meanings of words (lexical cohesion). Devices used for create grammatical cohesion are: conjunction, reference, substitution and ellipses. Lexical cohesion involves the repetition of words from the same semantic field.
Conjuctions in cohesion can be additive, causative and sequential, but they can’t be the only factor that make a word stick together with another one, another way for doing this is to use reference. According to Eggins what reference does is to help the reader to keep track of the various participants in the text as he or she reads. There 3 types of reference:
- anaphoric reference, using words that point back to a word used before
- cataphoric reference, using words that point forward to a word that has not been used yet
- exophoric reference, using words that point to something outside the text.
Substitution is like reference, except rather than using pronouns, other words are used to refer to an antecedent, which has either appeared earlier or will appear later. Substitution can also be used to refer to the verb or the entire predicate of a clause. Ellipsis is the omission of a nous, verb or phrase on the assumption that it is understood from the linguistic context.
Coherence is a matter of interpretative frameworks that the reader brings to the text for making it works and for understand its elements and how it works together.
The main purpose of analysing genre is to determine the way a particular genre is put together is its communicative purpose. John Swales illustrated the idea of moves (steps that one have to follow for reach his/her communicative purpose), and according to him there are four moves to follow:
- establish the field
- summarises the related research
- creates a research space
- introduces the study These moves are, of course, facoltative to use.
One genre which has a particularly consistent set of communicative moves in the genre of the personal advertisement.
According to Bhatia there are two ways to play with generic conventions: genre bending (making a realisation of genre creative and unique, without changing the structure) and genre blending (mixing two genres).
To conduct a corpus assisted discourse analysis requires a number of steps, which include building a corpus, cleaning and tagging the corpus, analysing the corpus with computer tools and interpreting the data. The first step is to build a corpus deciding what kinds of texts you want to include in it, then we have to decide how many texts we want to analyse and even if we need a reference corpus. Nowadays there are useful tools for analysing corpora, such as WordSmith Tools and AntConc.
