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DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
A5 – SPOKEN DISCOURSE
In many ways, speech is not different from writing, from the production of different kinds of genres to the using of different kinds of “social languages”. But there are some ways in which speech differs a lot from writing. For instance, speech is more interactive. When speaking to others, we receive an instant feedback with their responses; writing is a slower process , we have to wait for a response. Furthermore, conversations are always constructed among the different parties having them, because as the conversation carries on, we decide what to say based both on what the previous speaker has said and what we expect the subsequent speaker to say after we have spoken. Second of all, speech is often more spontaneous than writing. When we write, we tend to think over and over, revise and edit what we have written before showing it to other people. While formal speeches and lectures are planned, most casual conversation is made up as we go along. Speech is also transient ; that is to say verba volant , which means words fly and this makes listening in some ways more challenging than reading. Unless words are recorded, there’s no way people can return to them, save or transport them into other contexts. There are certain kinds of conversations that share features of both speech and writing: instant messaging and text-based computer chats ; they involve a certain amount of permanence (what we have written in our chats stays unless we delete them) and also lack the non-verbal cues that are part of physical co-presence.
-Making sense of conversation
The main problem is that, when they engage in conversation, people do not mean what they say and do not say what they mean. There is a certain amount of ambiguity in written language, and even a lot more of it in spoken language due to its inexplicit, context-specific nature. So, the question is, if people do not say what they mean or mean what they say, how can we understand what they say and engage in conversations with them? In order to do this, where are two different analytical traditions called pragmatics and conversation analysis. Pragmatics , with its roots in philosophy, is the study of how people use words to accomplish actions in their conversations, like requesting, threatening and apologizing. Its aim is to help us understand how people figure out the actions other people are trying to take with their words and respond appropriately. Conversation analysis comes from ethnomethodology , which focuses on how ordinary members of a society choose to interact with one another. Because these two analytical frameworks come from such different traditions, they approach the problem in two different ways: pragmatics tends to use logic , asking what conditions need to be present for a participant in a conversation to understand the meaning of what’s being said (pragmatic force). On the other hand, conversation analysis approaches the problem not with logic, but also as one of locally contingent action. According to this perspective, people make sense of what other people say not thanks to logic, but by paying attention to the local conditions of the conversation itself.
A6 – STRATEGIC INTERACTION
Conversations happen when multiple actions are put together to from activities. We also use conversations to show what kind of people we are and to maintain certain kinds of relationships with the people with whom we are talking. But these activities and identities are not engaged and constructed by us only, but together with the people with whom we are interacting. We call these methods conversational strategies. There are two basic kinds of conversational strategies: face strategies and framing strategies. Face strategies regard showing who we are and what kind of relationship we have with the people with whom we are talking. Framing strategies have more to do with showing what we are doing in the conversation, for example whether we are arguing, teasing, flirting or gossiping. These two concepts come from an approach to discourse known as interactional sociolinguistics , which regards the subtle ways people signal and interpret what they think they are doing and who they think they are being in social interaction. It was first theorized by anthropologist John Gumperz , whose most important insight was that people belonging to different groups have different ways of signalising and interpreting cues about conversational identity and activities, and this can often lead to misunderstanding or conflict. Another important influence on interactional sociolinguistics is American sociologist Erving Goffman , who compared social interaction to a dramatic performance. Social actors in everyday life, like stage actors, use certain “expressive equipment” like costumes, props, and settings to perform roles and routines. The goal of these performances is to promote our particular line or version of who we are and what is going on. Goffmain himself invented the concepts of face and frames in discourse analysis. A person’s face is tied up with how successful they are at ‘pulling off’ their performance and getting others to accept their line. By ‘frames’ he meant ‘ definitions of a situation built up in accordance with principals of organisation which govern events ’.
-Showing who we are: Face strategies
Our identities are always constructed in relation to the people with whom we are interacting. Some of them are out friends, and others are complete strangers. Some are our superiors and others are our subordinates. When we talk, other than conveying information about the topic we’re talking about, we also convey information about how close or distant we think we are from the people we are talking to, along with information about whether we are social equals or whether one has more power than the other. In order to do this, we use face strategies. The term ‘face’ is often used to underline a person’s honour or reputation. Many cultures have the notions of ‘ giving ’ people face (helping them to maintain a sense of dignity or honour) and of ‘ losing face ’ (when people suffer a loss of dignity and honour). Based on the work of Goffman and others like him, we define face as ‘ the negotiated public image mutually granted to each other by participants in a communicative event ’. There are three important aspects to this definition: the first is that one’s face is one’s public image and not one’s true self; the social image that constitutes face is not the same for every interaction we do. We wear different faces for different people. The second important aspect is ‘negotiated’, which is always the result of a kind of ‘give and take’ with the one with whom we are interacting. Finally, this image is ‘mutually granted’, which means successfully presenting a certain face in interaction depends on the people with whom we are interacting cooperating with us.
The second approach to multimodal discourse analysis is called multimodal interaction analysis which, in fact, analyses multimodality in interaction paying attention to sequentiality
- how elements are ordered in relation to one another – and simultaneity – how elements that occur at the same time affect one another. Both of these approaches have been applied to both static texts and dynamic interactions. Approaches based on systemic functional grammar have been used to analyse things like gestures and gaze, and multimodal interaction analysis has been applied to more static texts like advertisements.
B1 – THREE WAYS OF LOOKING AT DISCOURSE
The study of discourse has been approached by many in many different ways: some have taken a formal approach to discourse, saying it was ‘ language above the level of the clause or sentence ’; others take a more functional approach , defining discourse as ‘ language in use ’. Finally, there are those who take a social approach, defining discourse as a kind of social practice. What they meant by this is that the way we use language is tied up with the way we construct different social identities and relationships and participate in different kinds of groups and institutions. Although these three different approaches are often treated as separate, they are better seen as three interrelated aspects of discourse. The way people use language cannot really be separated from the way it is put together, and the way people use language to show who they are and what they believe cannot be separated from the things people are using language to do in particular situations.
-Language above the clause
The use of ‘discourse’ to refer language above the level of the clause has its roots in the work of linguist Zellig Harris who wanted to take the study of linguistic to a whole new level. Before that, linguists had tried hard to understand how sounds are put together to form word and how word are put together to form sentences. Harris’ aim was to understand how sentences are put together to form texts. It was common knowledge in the 20th century that texts could be analysed starting from their formal structure, even before Harris invented the term ‘discourse analysis’. The method Harris proposed for the analysis of discourse, called ‘ distributional analysis ’, involved identifying which features occurred next to other features or ‘in the same environment’. It wasn’t just simply understanding how linguistic features are distributed throughout texts. It was important for him to understand how the form that texts take is related to the social situations in which they occur. When studying the formal aspect of discourse, what we are most interested in is how the different elements are put together to form unified wholes. In order to do that, we look for linguistic features (words and grammar), and the overall pattern of the text or conversation. We can refer to these two things as cohesion – how pieces of the texts are stuck together – and coherence – the overall sequence of elements in a text or conversation.
-Language in use
The second most important aspect in discourse analysis is how people actually use language to get things done in specific contexts, because it’s often very difficult to understand what a piece of language means without referring to the social context in which it’s being used and what the person using it is trying to do.
The way we today view discourse has its roots in both Halliday ’s approach to the study of grammar which differed a lot from earlier approaches by focusing less on the forms language takes and more on the social functions accomplished by language, and the work of British philosophers Austin and Grice who laid the foundation for pragmatics – the study of how people do things with language. There are a number of ways to study language in use. For instance, one is to think about discourse itself as a kind of action , and to explore how, when we talk or write, we are actually doing things like apologising, promising, threatening or making requests. Finally, we might consider how people use discourse strategically to try to communicate their interpretation of a situation or to manage their relationships with the people with whom they are communicating.
-Language and ‘Social practice’
The third aspect of discourse involves the role of language in ‘ social practice ’. Language is seen not just as a system for making meaning, but as part of larger systems through which people construct social identities and social realities. This view of discourse has been studied the most by French philosopher Michel Foucault , who thought discourse is the main tool through which we construct ‘knowledge’ and exert power over other people. Different kinds of discourse are associated with different kinds of people and different ‘ systems of knowledge ’. In fact, he spoke of clinical discourse , economic discourse , the discourse of natural history and psychiatric discourse. American discourse analyst James Gee thought of this aspect of discourse as a way to explore how people use language to advantage certain versions of reality and certain relationships of power but also how our beliefs , values and social institutions are constructed through and supported by discourse. According to this view of discourse, discourse is always ‘ ideological ’, which means that it always has ‘ an agenda ’, that it always ends up serving the interests of certain people over those of others.
B2 – COHESION AND COHERENCE
One of the most basic tasks in discourse analysis is to figure out what gives text and conversations texture. Texture comes from cohesion and coherence. Cohesion regards linguistic features in the text, and coherence involves the kind of ‘ framework ’ with which the reader approaches the text. What creates cohesion, though, is not just the linguistic features within the text alone, but the fact that these features lead readers to perform certain mental operations – to locate and take note of earlier or later parts of the text as they are going through it. For example, if I say ‘Lady Gaga doesn’t appeal to me, but my sister loves her’, to understand the meaning of ‘her’ in the second clause, not only you have to refer back to the first clause, but also you have to be smart enough to know that ‘her’ refers to Lady Gaga and not my sister. So, cohesion is the quality in a text that forces you to look either backward or forward in the text in order to make sense of the things you read, and it’s by doing this that the text takes on a quality of connectedness. In the case of coherence, it’s wrong to say it’s just a matter of the ‘ frameworks ’ or sets of expectation we bring to texts: concrete features must exist in the text which are often arranged in a certain order and conform to or ‘trigger’ those expectations.
There are other kinds of frameworks build up according to our understanding of how the world works: these frameworks are called cultural models. Cultural models are very important to interpret the meaning of a text. The most important thing to remember about cultural model is that they are, in fact, cultural, meaning they reflect the beliefs and values of a particular group of people in a particular place at particular time.
B3 – ALL THE RIGHT MOVES
Texts structured according to particular generic frameworks are called genres. These genres are more than just texts, but also means through which people get things done, and their structure depends a lot on what people using a genre want or need to do. In other words, it all depends on the communicative purpose of a genre. The overall communicative purpose of a genre can be divided into several steps – or moves – that users need to follow in order to achieve the desired purpose. John Swales, the father of genre analysis, showed the idea of moves in his analysis of introductions to academic articles. Instead of asking ‘how is this text structured?’ he asked ‘what do writers of such texts need to do in order to achieve their desired purpose?’. To answer this, Swales identified four moves characteristic of such texts: Establishing the field in which the writer of the study is working; Summarising the related research on one aspect of the field; Creating a research space for the present study raising a question; Introducing the study by indicating what the investigation being reported will accomplish for the field. The point Swales was trying to make was not that these moves apply to everything, but that they are prototypical moves that one would expect to occur in this genre. But, while some genres have very strict rules about which moves should be included and what order they should be in, other genres exhibit much more variety. One genre with a consistent set of communicative moves is the genre of the ‘ personal advertisement ’ – or dating advertisement – that sometimes appears in newspapers and also on online social media and dating sites. These kinds of advertisements tend to involve five moves: The advertiser describes himself or herself; The advertiser describes the kind of person they are looking for; The advertiser describes the kind of relationship or activities they wish to engage in with the target; The advertiser gives additional information, makes a humorous remark or issues a challenge; The advertiser indicates how they can be contacted. If this kind of ads appear in newspapers, they are often written in a kind of telegraphic style omitting non-essential function words. In most cases, self-descriptions and other-descriptions contain information like age , appearance , and a list of positive adjectives , and the goal is almost always a romantic or sexual relationship or activities normally associated with or act as euphemisms for sex or romance. Many different kinds of discourse communities use this genre for different purposes, and so there could be ‘ sub-genres ’ of the personal advertisement for communities of het singles, gay men, seniors, and many other groups.
One particular sub-genre of personal ads is those placed by lesbians in search of reproductive partners: ’Loving, stable lesbian couple require donor. Involvement encouraged but not essential. HIV test required. London. BoxPS34Q .’ As you can see there is no elaborate description of the kind of person they wish, but the term ‘donor’ communicates all of the necessary information.
B6 – NEGOTIATING RELATIONSHIPS AND ACTIVITIES
-Power and politeness
Whenever we interact with someone, we always communicate something about our relationship with them by using various discursive strategies, divided into involvement strategies and independence strategies : involvement strategies are used to communicate friendliness or solidarity, while independence strategies are used to communicate respect or deference. In many cases, the interactors know how close they are and whether one of them has more power than the other; on the other hand both parties need to negotiate their relationship. These negotiations are common when people move from more distant to closer relationship, or when one person wishes to challenge another person’s assertion of power or dominance. Regardless, we always approach interactions with sets of expectations of how independence and involvement strategies will be used to communicate information: these expectations are called face systems. Most people start interactions with three basic ideas: In interactions where the parties are socially distant but relatively equal, both parties might use independence strategies ( deference face system ) In interactions where people are close and relatively equal, they use involvement strategies ( solidarity face system ) In interactions in which one person has more power than the other the more powerful one is more likely to use involvement strategies and the less powerful one uses independence strategies. These systems are not to be considered ‘rules’ but broad sets of expectations people draw on to decide how to act towards other people and how to interpret others’ behaviour towards them. Since power and distance are relative and not absolute, and because interaction involves the negotiation of power and distance, people are more likely to use both independence and involvement strategies, mixing them according to the context.
-Framing and contextualization cues
There are other ways to signal people what we think we are doing in an interaction. Whenever we speak, in fact, we communicate not just the message contained in our words, but also information about what we think we are doing and, therefore, how our words should be interpreted. There are two kinds of frames : broader primary framework consisting on the sets of expectations we bring to a particular situation and smaller, more dynamic interactive frames which regard our negotiated ideas about what we are doing moment by moment in a conversation. Contextualization cues are particularly important in the role play in helping us to manage and negotiate interactive frames. Sometimes these cues are verbal , meaning that we signal what we are doing through our choice of topic , vocabulary , grammar , or the language we use. These verbal cues often involve adopting a particular social language or certain genres associated with particular
(or vectors) while in actions; classificatory, representing figures that have similarities and differences; or analytical, representing figures in ways in which parts are related to wholes. Interpersonal function it creates and maintain some kind of relationship between the producer of the message and its recipient. In images, viewers are placed into relationships with the figures in the image and, by extension, to the producers of the image, thanks to perspective and gaze. Textual function while texts are organised sequentially, images are organised spatially. Figures in an image can be placed anywhere; although producers of images have much less control than producers of written texts over how viewers ‘read’ the image, they can create pathways for the viewer’s gaze by, for example, placing different figures in different places within the frame and making some more prominent and others less prominent.
-Multimodality in interaction
Modes in face to face interaction such as gaze and gesture also fulfil these three functions. Gazing, for example, has an obvious interpersonal function , creating a relationship between the gazer and what or who he’s looking at. Also, it carries ideational meaning because the gazer is looking at, watching or paying attention to something. Finally, gaze has often a textual function because it manages things like turn-taking in conversations. Inter-modal relationships in adverts are complicated, but they can be even more so in dynamic interactions, and this because participants have so many modes available to them to make meaning. There are what Norris calls ‘ embodied ’ modes such as gaze , gesture , posture , head movement , proxemics – the distance one maintains from his or her interlocutor –, spoken language , and prosody – features of stress and intonation in a person’s voice –. There are also ‘ disembodied ’ modes like written texts, images, signs, clothing, etc. One more problem with analysing multimodality in face-to-face interactions is that the spatial boundaries of interactions are not always as clear as the spatial boundaries of texts. Norris has the answer to this problem: the practice of mediated discourse analysis and taking action as her unit of analysis. In this way the analyst begins by asking what actions participants are doing and then try to determine which modes are being used to do these actions. Actions are always made up of smaller actions and contribute to make up larger actions. Norris divides actions into three types: Lower-level actions the smallest units of communicative modes, such as gestures, postural shifts, gaze shifts and tone units; Higher-level actions such as ‘having a cup of coffee’; Frozen actions a half-eaten plate of food, an unmade bed; The aim of multimodal interaction analysis is, then, to understand how participants in interaction work together to weave lower-level actions and body movement into higher-level actions.
