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A1 WHAT IS DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
What do we mean by ‘discourse’? It is the study of language. It is one of the many sub-fields of linguistics, as phonologists study the sound of language and lexicographers study words, discourse is a way of looking a language that focuses on how people use it in real life to do things like persuade, flirt, joke (…) Discourse is based on four main assumptions: 1. Language is ambiguous, it’s never absolutely clear / 2. Language is always “in the world”: what it means is always a matter of where and when it’s used / 3. The way we use language reflects who we are and it can’t do otherwise / 4. Language is never used all by itself but it’s always combined with other elements like tone of voice and facial expressions. The ambiguity of language - Nearly all communication contains some element of meaning that are not expressed directly by the words that are spoken or written. Example: ‘do you have a pen?’ is indirectly asking to receive a pen, but it does not communicate the intention directly. People don’t always say what they mean and don’t always mean what they say, because language is ambiguous. Language in the world - The way we understand the meaning of things is by referring to the social context within which they are speaking or writing, the meaning of an utterance can change depending on who’s saying it and to whom. It’s unlikely that the phrase ‘Do you have a pen?’ asked from a teacher to a student is asking to receive a pen, rather to make sure the student has a pen. Language is always situated: within the material world (on a sign or a textbook), within relationships (what kind of power does the person speaking have on us), in history (in relation to what happened before or what will happen afterwards) and in relation to other utterances (what we say always has a context). Language, social identity and other modes - Whenever people write or speak, they are somehow demonstrating who they are and what their relationship is to other people. Identities are multiple, because we can change who we are depending on the way we use language: my university professor identity is different to my yoga teacher identity. Of course, it’s not by itself, because I also must dress a certain way, act a certain way with certain people, so language alone cannot express who I am. So what good is discourse analysis? We have to remember that we already engage in discourse analysis all the time when we try to figure out what people mean. It can help us understand how societies are put together, so it’s also the study of romance, psychology, friendship, politics (…). A2 TEXTS AND TEXTURE Discourse analysis analyses text and conversation, but what is ‘text’ and what is ‘conversation’? the most important thing that makes a text such, it has to make sense. A text (according to linguist M.A.K. Halliday) is everything that is meaningful in a particular situation. In the list of words (ex. dal libro Milk Spaghetti Tomatoes Rocket Light bulbs) there might be a reason why one chose Milk instead of Juice, and the mix of words makes no sense to us because we don’t know what motivated the choices: two pieces of information are missing, relationship and context. Grammatical rules help make sense in a text because they help us see the relationship between the words, and context, in this case those words are in a list, so we assume they have something to do with one another. Except for light bulbs, they all belong to the category of food (rocket: rocket lettuce) if we put them in a conversation involving someone who’s going to the shop and someone who’s telling them what they need, it’d make sense. Another thing that exists according to Halliday is an awareness of the conventions of the language, that give us a “framework” that would be, for the text above, a shopping list. To sum it up, the main things that make a text a text are connections/relationships. This is what we call cohesion , meaning comes from the background knowledge we have about the convention in which the text is found.
A3 TEXTS AND THEIR SOCIAL FUNCTIONS
Different patterns of texture are associated with different types of text. for example, newspaper articles tend to favour particular kinds of cohesive devices, and to understand this better we need to understand something about the people who produce it and what they’re doing with it: genre analysis. To better understand what a genre is, we must think of movies, but not all films fit neatly into genres (ex. scary movie is actually a comedy, or a mix of the two). The notion of genre is actually better understood this way: it is a communicative event characterized by a set of communicative purposes identified by members of the community in which it occurs. We must remember that: genres aren’t types of texts but types of communicative events; these events are made of constraints on what can and cannot be done with them; expert users often exploit these constraints in unexpected ways. Genres are communicative events - It may seem unusual to think of a recipe, a job application, or a newspaper article as an “event” because we tend to think of texts as “objects”. A newspaper article is informing us, a recipe is instructing us on how to make a dish, a job application is requesting to be hired. But they often have more than one intention, for example a newspaper article might also want to influence our opinion and a recipe might also want to persuade us to buy the ingredients. Conventions and constraints - Genres are remodelled based on what people want to do with them: they include and exclude certain information. For example, in a job application I will add what I consider convincing enough to let me have the job and I’ll exclude other things. It also has to follow a special order: specifying the post I am applying for at the beginning will let the reader have a framework for the information that’ll come later. Knowing how to properly write an application letter also demonstrates to the employer that the person who wrote it is a “certain type of person” with a specific level of education. Creativity - As film producers (Brokeback Mountain or Scary Movie) show us, sometimes the most effective way to make a successful text are those who break the rules, mixing different genres and defying the schematic rule is a proof that a text can be altered and still accomplish what we want to accomplish. Such creativity would not be possible without the existence of conventions and constraints, for example writing a job application as a sonnet would be useful if I want a job as an editor at a literary magazine. A4 DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY Our words are never neutral. Texts always, to some degree, promote a certain ideology, based on how someone speaks we can tell what they consider is good or bad, what is right or wrong. Ideologies can also exclude things that don’t fit into certain models. For example, when we have to fill out a document we are often asked our relationship type, whether we are ‘married’ or ‘single’, not offering any other options for people like monks or bachelors who have no intention of getting married, hence promoting the idea that marriage is a somehow “natural” thing. Whos Doing Whats - The linguist Halliday pointed out that whenever we use language we are doing three things at once: representing the world ( ideational function); creating relationships with the people with whom we are communicating ( interpersonal function); and joining sentences and ideas together in particular ways to form cohesive and coherent texts ( textual function). According to him, we represent the world through language by choosing words that represent people or concepts ( participants ) and words about what these participants are doing to, with or for one another ( processes ). All texts contain participants and processes. Relationships - Texts promote ideology through the relationships they create between people and what they are communicating about, known as the interpersonal function of language. For example, a priest or minister may say "you may now kiss the bride" instead of "kiss the bride". Social languages are different
what is going on. Pragmatics approaches the problem as a matter of logic, while conversation analysis approaches the problem as one of locally contingent action. These two approaches represent two different windows on the phenomenon of conversation, with each illuminating a different aspect of it. A6 STRATEGIC INTERACTION The most important details in this text are the two basic kinds of conversational strategies: face strategies and framing strategies. Face strategies involve showing who we are and what kind of relationship we have with the people with whom we are talking, while framing strategies involve showing what we are doing in the conversation. Interactional sociolinguistics is an approach to discourse that focuses on the ways people signal and interpret what they think they are doing and who they think they are being in social interaction. Gumperz's insight that people belonging to different groups have different ways of signalling and interpreting cues about conversational identity and conversational activities can lead to misunderstandings and conflict. Interactional sociolinguistics has been used in studies of intercultural communication, and Erving Goffman's book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) compared social interaction to a dramatic performance. Goffman proposed the concept of face and frames, which relate to how we negotiate these 'definitions of situations' with other people and use them as a basis for communicating and interpreting meaning. Showing who we are: face strategies - Social identity is a complex topic. It is important to note that our identities are always constructed in relation to the people with whom we are interacting. Face strategies are used to convey information about how close to or distant from the people with whom we are talking, as well as whether we are social equals, or one has more power than the other. The term 'face' is often used to denote a person's honour or reputation and is often used to help them maintain a sense of dignity or honour. The definition of face is based on the work of Goffman and other social scientists. Face is the negotiated public image mutually granted to each other by participants in a communicative event. There are three important aspects to this definition: it is one's public image rather than one's 'true self', it is negotiated, and it is mutually granted. Face is the aspect of our identity which defines us in relation to others, and if one person's idea of the relationship is different from the other, chances are one or the other will end up 'losing face'. The everyday ideas of 'giving face' and 'losing face' are also important in this regard. The two broad kinds of strategies we use to negotiate our identities and relationships in interaction are involvement strategies and independence strategies. Involvement strategies involve calling people by their first names or using nicknames, using informal language, showing interest in someone, asking personal questions, and emphasizing common experiences or points of view. Independence strategies involve using more formal language and terms of address, trying to minimize the imposition, being indirect, apologizing, and depersonalizing the conversation. These strategies can be used to establish or maintain closeness with the people with whom we are interacting, or to assert power over them. We all have two social needs: to be liked and respected, and to protect our own need to be liked and respected. We must balance and negotiate these needs in communication to show who we are in relation to the people around us. Showing what we are doing: framing strategies - Goffman's idea of frames is based on the work of Gregory Bateson, who used it to explain the behaviour of monkeys he had observed at the zoo. Bateson noticed that the monkeys displayed hostile signals, seemingly fighting with or attempting to bite one another, but were actually playing. He then realized that they must have some way of communicating to one another how a particular display of aggression should be interpreted, whether as an invitation to fight or an invitation to play. Goffman's concept of the primary framework of interaction states that interactions involve a variety of activities, such as touching, delivering a lecture, and listening to a lecture.
However, interactions rarely involve just one activity, as they often involve a variety of different activities within the primary framework. For example, a lecturer might give explanations, tell jokes, or rebuke members of the audience if they are not paying attention. Additionally, medical examinations may include multiple frames, such as playing and consulting. To signal these frame changes, we need ways to signal them and negotiate them with the people with whom we are interacting. A7 CONTEXT, CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION What is context? - The idea that the meaning of utterances depends on the context in which they are produced can be traced back to the anthropologist Malinowski’s ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages’ , in which he argued that we cannot understand the words spoken by members of societies very different from our own through mere translation. The problem with this idea is determining which aspects of the situation or of ‘cultural knowledge’ need to be considered in the production and interpretation of utterances. John Firth (1957) proposed that context can be divided into three components:
- the relevant features of participants; 2) the relevant objects in the situation; and 3) the effect of the verbal action. Michael Halliday proposed a three-part model of context, which consists of: 1) Field : the social action that is taking place; 2) Tenor : the participants, their roles and relationships; and 3) Mode : the symbolic or rhetorical channel and the role which language plays in the situation. However, Halliday's model suffers from some of the same problems as Firth's, such as unsure where to fit things like the social identities of participants and their membership in certain social groups, or why things like the physical mode, the rhetorical form, and the role language plays in the situation should be subsumed under the same category. Context and competence - Halliday explains context from an essentially linguistic point of view, seeing it as part of a language’s system of ‘meaning potential’. ‘There is no need to bring in the question of what the speaker knows,’ he writes; ‘the background to what he does is what he could do–a potential , which is objective, not a competence, which is subjective. Knowledge or mastery of the linguistic system alone is not sufficient for successful communication. People also need to know and master various rules, norms and conventions regarding what to say to whom, when, where, and how. Hymes developed a model of what he considered to be the essential elements of context, which consists of eight components, each beginning with one of the letters of the word 'SPEAKING'. These components include S stands for setting, P stands for participants, E stands for ends, A stands for act sequence, K stands for key, I stands for instrumentalities, N stands for norms of interaction, and G stands for genre. However, the model suffers from the same fundamental problem as those of Firth and Hymes: why are some elements included and others not? The crucial difference between this model and the others is that these elements do not represent objective features of context, but rather more subjective features of competence. Ethnography is a research method developed in the field of anthropology which is concerned with describing the lived experiences of people in particular social groups. It involves not just analysing the texts and talk that they produce from a distance, but spending time with them, observing them as they use language, and talking to them at length about the meanings they ascribe to different kinds of utterances and different kinds of behaviour. Issues of cross cultural pragmatics are increasingly being explored through ethnographic methods. A8 MEDIATED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS The most important question in discourse analysis is how to determine what texts or conversations are worth analysing in the first place. This includes conversations between customers and the cashier, the communication between the cashier and the person making the coffee, the chatting that occurs between
Interactive text based forms of communication are becoming increasingly popular. Discourse analysts need to focus on patterns and structures in the organization of elements in texts and on the sequentially and simultaneity of actions as people interact using these texts. As new forms of media are developed, our idea of what we mean by a text, or a conversation is changing. Computer mediated conversations are often written rather than spoken, and they may extend over days or months on discussion forums or Facebook walls. Conversations often travel across communication media and modes. Multimodal communication presents challenges for communicators and discourse analysts alike, as different modes and media alter the kinds of meanings we can make. This phenomenon is known as resemiotisation, where meanings change as they are shaped by the different modes we use. Rick Iedema (2001) gives an example of resemiotisation, where meanings associated with the building of a new wing of a hospital changed as they were expressed orally in planning meetings, then later in the written language of reports, and finally in the graphic language of architectural drawings. Modes can never be analysed in isolation from other modes, and authors and conversational participants often shift from foregrounding one mode to foregrounding other modes. A10 CORPUS ASSISTED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS Corpus assisted discourse analysis is unique in that it allows us to go beyond looking at a small number of texts or interactions and compare them to other texts and conversations. It also allows us to bring some degree of 'objectivity' by testing out theories on a larger body of data. A corpus is a collection of texts in digital format that can be searched through and manipulated using a computer program. Corpora are collections of texts produced in different varieties of English and other languages, that are used by linguists to analyse grammatical and lexical patterns and have also been used in forensic linguistics to answer questions about authorship. Discourse analysts have only recently started using corpora, and the number of discourse analytical studies that rely heavily on them is still relatively small. Discourse analysts are traditionally interested in how language is used in social situations. Computer analysis using large corpora goes against this aim, as texts are taken out of their contexts and information is often presented outside of the context of the texts. Additionally, any method which takes language and its meaning at face value is of limited use to discourse analysts, as words and phrases can have multiple meanings depending on how they are used. Computer-assisted analysis of corpora can be a valuable tool for discourse analysts. It can help to see the data from a new perspective and generalize theories or observations about certain kinds of texts or interactions. It can also help to identify conventions of language use associated with specific kinds of texts. The analysis of corpora can help us detect 'Discourses with a capital D' - systems of language use that promote ideologies and power relationships. It requires the creative combination of multiple analytical procedures and interpretative work by the analyst, and is not a science, but an art. It does not provide answers, but rather additional information to make educated guesses even more educated and theory building more evidence based. Theory or method? - The analysis of corpora can help us detect what we have been calling 'Discourses with a capital D' - systems of language use that promote particular kinds of ideologies and power relationships. The analysis of large corpora, however, gives us a more empirical way to detect trends in language use and to detect if and how such language use changes over time. Corpus assisted discourse analysis is not a science, it is an art, and the biggest danger of employing it is that the analyst comes to see it as somehow more ‘scientific' than the close analysis of texts. The computer analysis of corpora does not provide discourse analysts with answers, but rather provide them with additional information to make their educated guesses even more educated and their theory building more evidence based.
B1 THREE WAYS OF LOOKING AT DISCOURSE
This book explores three different approaches to analyzing discourse: a formal approach, a functional approach, and a social approach. It is argued that good discourse analysis requires taking into account all three perspectives, as the way people use language cannot 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 they are using language to do in particular situations. Language above the clause - Zellig Harris proposed the term 'discourse analysis' in the 1950s to understand how sentences are put together to form texts. The idea that texts could be analysed in terms of their formal structure was popular in the early and mid-20th century, especially in literature. Harris proposed a method called 'distributional analysis' , which was like grammatical analysis. Harris' idea was to identify linguistic features and determine how they occurred in texts. He also wanted to understand how these features correlate with non-linguistic behaviour beyond texts. Discourse analysts studied how the different elements of texts or conversations are put together to form unified wholes, looking for two kinds of things: linguistic features and the overall pattern of the text or conversation. Language in use - Discourse analysts focus on how people use language to get things done in specific contexts. There are several ways to study language in use, such as considering discourse itself as a kind of action, exploring the role of discourse in certain kinds of activities, and considering how people use discourse strategically to communicate their interpretation of a situation or manage their relationships. Language and “social practice” - The third aspect of discourse is the role of language in social practice. It is seen as part of larger systems through which people construct social identities and social realities. Michel Foucault argued that discourse is the main tool through which we construct knowledge and exert power over other people. James Gee distinguishes this view from others by saying that discourses are "ways of being in the world, or forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities". It is difficult to look at discourse from only one perspective, as it requires understanding how the text is put together and how people are using it in specific social contexts. This aspect of discourse leads us to explore how people use language to advance certain versions of reality and certain relationships of power, and also how our beliefs, values and social institutions are constructed through and supported by discourse. B2 COHESION AND COHERENCE Discourse analysts are responsible for understanding what makes a text a text and what makes a conversation a conversation. Texture comes from cohesion and coherence, which are primarily based on linguistic features in the text and the framework with which the reader approaches the text and what they want to use the text to do. Cohesion 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 were to say, ‘Lady Gaga doesn’t appeal to me, but my sister loves her’, I would have to perform mental operations to locate and take note of earlier or later parts of the text. Cohesion is the quality in a text that forces you to look either backward or forward in the text to make sense of the things you read. It is also important to note that concrete features must exist in the text which are often arranged in a certain order and conform to or trigger those expectations. For example, for me to interpret a text as a shopping list, it must have a certain structure (a list), certain kinds of words (generally nouns), and those words must represent things that I am able to purchase (as opposed to abstract things like 'world peace' or unaffordable items like the Golden Gate Bridge).
interpretive framework based on their knowledge of the kind of business and cultural notions of what a 'perfect body' might look like. There are several different interpretative frameworks that we use to make sense of texts, such as a generic framework , which is based on the expectations we have about different kinds of texts, the kinds of information we expect to encounter in texts of different kinds, and the order in which we expect that information to be presented. This framework is based on the expectations we have about different kinds of texts, the kinds of information we expect to encounter in texts of different kinds, and the order in which we expect that information to be presented. This framework is based on the expectations we have about different kinds of texts, the kinds of information we expect to encounter in texts of different kinds, and the order in which we expect that information to be presented, along with other kinds of lexical or grammatical features we expect to encounter. Different parts of a text are not just grammatically and lexically related, but also conceptually and procedurally related. This principle has its origins in cognitive science and early research in artificial intelligence. However, some of the knowledge we use to make sense of texts is part of larger conceptual frameworks that we build up based on our understanding of how the world works. James Paul Gee (2010) explains that cultural models are "videotapes in the mind" based on experiences we have had and depicting what we take to be prototypical people, objects and events. These models reflect the beliefs and values of a particular group of people in a particular place at a particular point in history and reinforce them when we encounter texts like the one above. B3 ALL THE RIGHT MOVES Genres are texts that are structured according to generic frameworks, but their communicative purpose is the most important factor in analysing them. John Swales, the father of genre analysis, illustrated the idea of moves in his analysis of introductions to academic articles by identifying four moves characteristic of such texts. This suggests that the overall communicative purpose of a genre can be broken down into several steps that users need to follow in order to achieve the desired purpose. An introduction to an academic article, he said, typically:
- Establishes the field in which the writer of the study is working.
- Summarizes the related research or interpretations on one aspect of the field.
- Creates a research space or interpretive space (a ‘niche’) for the present study by indicating a gap in current knowledge or by raising questions; and
- Introduces the study by indicating what the investigation being reported will accomplish for the field. Of course, not all introductions to academic articles contain all four of these moves in exactly the order presented by Swales. Some article introductions may contain only some of these moves, and some might contain different moves. Swales argued that academic article introductions should contain all four of the prototypical moves one would expect to occur in this genre, and that understanding these default expectations is the first step to understanding how 'expert users' might creatively flout these conventions. However, not all genres are equally 'conventionalized', and some genres have strict rules about which moves should be included and what order they should be in. Sensual, imaginative brunette, 25, artistic, intelligent, with a sense of humour. Enjoys home life, cooking, sports, country life. No ties, own home. Seeking a tall, strong, intelligent fun companion with inner depth for passionate, loving romance, 25Y35. Photo guarantees reply. Must feel able to love Ben my dog too. London/anywhere.
Advertisements consist of five moves: describing the advertiser, describing the type of person they are looking for, describing the kind of relationship or activities they wish to engage in, giving additional information, making a humorous remark or issue a challenge, and indicating how they can be contacted. Dating ads in other contexts tend to have similar move structures, such as 1, 2, 3, and 5. These moves are essential for the overall communicative purpose of finding a partner. Self-descriptions and other descriptions contain information about age, appearance, and personality expressed in lists of positive adjectives, and the goal is usually a romantic or sexual relationship or activities. Sub-genres of the personal advertisement can be identified for different discourse communities, with different conventions and constraints on what kind of information should be included and how it should be structured. Generic variation is not just a matter of the different values or styles of different discourse communities, but is also very often a function of differences in the overall communicative purpose of the sub-genre (finding a sexual partner, a wife, a reproductive partner). Bending the blending - Personal advertisements remain highly conventionalized, with strict constraints on what is considered a relevant contribution. Expert users of this genre often try to make their ads stand out by 'playing with' the conventions of the genre, such as genre bending and genre blending. Examples of genre bending include flouting expectations for self-Y aggrandizement, while genre blending involves mixing the conventions of one genre with another. Coupland's study found that advertisers blend the conventions of a dating ad genre with the conventions of an automobile ad genre to subtly distancing themselves from the discourse community while still identifying with it. This strategy is seen as a way of resisting the commodifying nature of the genre and humanizing themselves through modesty and humor. Blending and bending genres are common in nearly all communities and are often markers of users' expertise. Whether a particular use of a genre is considered a creative innovation, or an embarrassing failure is ultimately a matter of whether the original communicative purpose of the genre is achieved. Modes, media and context - The most important details in this text are the factors that determine how genres are used and how they change. These include the different modes available for constructing the genre, the media through which genres are produced and distributed, and the changes in the genre itself due to the migration of personal advertisements online. These changes include the ability to upload digital photographs and video, fill out web forms, send online messages, engage in real-time video chat, and use GPS tools to search for suitable partners. Finally, the development of mobile technologies has enabled users to access these genres anywhere through their mobile phones and use GPS tools. B4 CONSTRUCTING REALITY Participants and processes - The main way authors of texts promote ideologies is by constructing versions of reality in which certain kinds of participants are excluded and those that are included are linked to each other in certain relationships, often based on the actions they are portrayed as engaging in. Different kinds of processes link participants in different ways, such as physical action, saying or writing, thinking, and feeling, linking verbs like ‘to be’ or ‘to seem’, possessing another with words like ‘to have’ or ‘to contain’, and cause and effect with words like ‘to cause,’ ‘to lead to,’ or ‘to result in’. One example of how participants and processes can be combined in texts to create certain versions of reality can be found in the warning labels that most governments require appear on cigarette packets: Caution: Cigarette Smoking May be Hazardous to Your Health. Here, the process type used is relational (‘to be’), linking the nominalized process of smoking cigarettes to a possible attribute: ‘hazardousness’. This link is weakened using the modal verb ‘may’, which reduces the certainty of the statement. In 1970, the U.S. Congress passed new legislation, which revised the warning to read : Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined that Cigarette Smoking is Dangerous to Your Health. The first difference we can notice about this statement is that it is now characterized as a ‘warning’ rather than just a ‘caution’. The
force. Austin's insight was revolutionary, as most philosophers of language focused on analysing sentences in terms of whether they were 'true'. He also noted that speech acts have three kinds of force: locutionary force, illocutionary force, and perlocutionary force. Austin's concept of felicity is the ability of an utterance to perform a particular action. To be felicitous, certain conditions must be met, such as what is said, who utters the speech act, and the person or people to whom the utterance is addressed. These conditions are related to what is said, who utters the speech act, and the person or people to whom it is addressed. Austin and his followers suggest that the main way to figure out what people are trying to do when they speak to us is by trying to match the conditions in which an utterance is made to the conditions necessary for kinds of speech acts. This can be done by using the cooperative principle to realize that the speaker is flouting the maxim of quality and that there must be some reason for this, and by analysing the conditions in which the utterance is made to figure out what the speaker is actually trying to do. Sense and sequencing - Conversation analysis begins with the assumption that conversations are orderly and that they follow a predictable pattern. It differs from pragmatics in that it considers the utterance that occurred prior to the utterance in question and the one that occurs afterwards to be more important. Schegloff and Sacks (1973) suggest that social interaction is often arranged in pairs of utterances, known as adjacency pairs. These pairs have a relationship of conditional relevance, meaning that the first utterance determines what the second utterance can be. Conversation analysts believe that the conditions that determine how an utterance should be interpreted must exist within the conversation itself. Conversation analysis focuses on how speakers make use of the default expectations people bring to conversations to make meaning. The idea behind adjacency pairs is that when one person says something, he or she creates a ‘slot' for the next person to 'fill in' in a particular way. If they do not fill in the expected way, their interlocutor hears the preferred response as being 'officially absent'. An example of this is the exchange between a woman and her boyfriend: [ A: I love you. B: Thank you .] The preferred response to an expression of love is a reciprocal expression of love, and when this response is not given, it creates implicature. Adjacency pairs consist of first utterances that have a preferred second utterance, such as acceptance or greeting. The preferred response is chosen not because the person who offered the first utterance would prefer it, but because it usually requires less conversational work and is the most efficient. Disreferred responses are often added to avoid unintended implicature. Conversations can be divided into adjacency pairs, which can be complex but help make sense of conversations and achieve actions in an orderly way. B6 NEGOTIATING RELATIONSHIPS AND ACTIVITIES Power and politeness - The two categories of discursive strategies used in interactions are involvement and independence. Involvement strategies are used to communicate friendliness or solidarity, while independence strategies are used to communicate respect or deference. People approach interactions with expectations about how independence and involvement strategies will be used to communicate information about power and intimacy. These expectations face systems vary across cultures and groups, but most people enter interaction with three basic ideas: in interactions where the parties are socially distant but relatively equal, both parties are likely to use independence strategies; in interactions where people are close and relatively equal, they are likely to use involvement strategies; and in interactions where one person has more power than the other, they are more likely to use independence strategies. People usually employ both independence and involvement strategies, mixing them tactically depending on the situation and what they are trying to accomplish in the interaction. Face strategies are not just
reflections of expectations about relationships, but resources that people use to manage and sometimes change those relationships. They can be used to negotiate social distance, enact power relationships, and manipulate others into doing things they may not normally be inclined to do. Involvement strategies are used to create or strengthen the impression of a power difference, while independence strategies are used to endow the topic under discussion with a certain 'weightiness'. Framing and contextualisation cues - Conversational strategies like involvement and independence are not just ways to communicate and manage relationships, but also to communicate something about what we are doing. We use contextualization cues to communicate this information, such as our choice of topic, vocabulary, grammar, or language. These cues are important in signalling primary frameworks and helping us to manage and negotiate interactive frames. Examples of verbal cues include adopting a particular social language or genres associated with particular kinds of activities. Discourse markers are words or phrases that mark the end of one activity and the beginning of another. Contextualization cues include non-verbal signals such as gestures, facial expressions, gaze, use of space, and paralinguistic signals such as alterations in the pitch, speed, rhythm, or intonation of voices. Gumperz found a mismatch between the ways South Asian servers in a staff canteen in a British airport used intonation as a contextualization cue and the ways their British customers interpreted them. This suggests that contextualization cues do not contain information about what we think we are doing, but rather activate culturally conditioned assumptions about context, interactional goals, and interpersonal relationships. Interactive frames are dynamic and can change rapidly in an interaction. They are a matter of negotiation between participants, and the way they are used and interpreted often has a lot to do with previous events and the history of the relationship. Sometimes participants may disagree regarding what's going on, so they may either accept or contest the frame. B7 THE SPEAKING MODEL Speech acts, speech events and speech situations - The main unit of analysis for the ethnography of speaking is the speech event , which is a communicative activity that has a clear beginning and end and in which people's shared understandings of the relevance of various contextual features remain fairly constant. Examples of speech events include religious ceremonies, lessons, debates, and conversations. The main distinction between a speech situation and a speech event is coherence, as participants tend to approach speech events with consistent sets of expectations that remain the same throughout the event. To distinguish between a speech situation and a speech event, it is important to ask if the same rules of SPEAKING apply throughout the phenomenon. Speaking - The ethnography of speaking does not focus on rules and expectations about speaking, but rather on the circumstances in which certain kinds of speaking take place. Ron and Suzanne Scollon have used the term ‘the Grammar of Context’ to refer to a model similar to Hymes’s speaking model. This model is based on the idea of markedness, which suggests that when people deviate from the default or expected way of using language, the result is often the expression of some special, more precise or additional meaning. The components of the SPEAKING model are not meant to provide an objective list of those elements of context which need to be followed. The SPEAKING model is a set of guidelines an analyst can use to find out what aspects of context are important and relevant from the point of view of participants. The SPEAKING model devised by Hymes is a set of guidelines for analysts to find out what aspects of context are important and relevant from the point of view of participants. It consists of three components: setting, participants, and ends. Setting refers to the time and place of the speech event as well as any other physical circumstances, such as the ‘psychological setting’ or the ‘cultural definition’ of a scene. Participants refer to the different kinds of identities, roles and rights that different participants have, which will depend on
between the action of crossing the street and other actions such as carrying on a conversation or making sure their companion gets across the street safely. Sites of engagement are a matter of the interaction between texts, people, habits, expectations, and goals of individuals, while contexts are external to the social actor. B9 MODES, MEANING AND ACTION Multimodal discourse analysis is the analysis of how multiple modes of communication interact when we communicate. It is divided into two broad approaches, one focusing on texts and one focusing on real time interactions. Different modes have different affordances and constraints, meaning that they have different sets of meaning potential and allow us to take different kinds of actions. For example, written text and spoken language are governed by the logic of time, while images are governed by the logic of space. People strategically mix different modes when they are communicating, so that the constraints of one mode are balanced out by the affordances of others. Communicative functions of modes - Halliday's idea that language has three basic functions: representation, communication, and organization. Kress and van Leeuwen argue that these three functions provide a useful starting point for studying all modes. Images also fulfil these functions differently than language. Ideational functions : The ideational function of language is to link participants (nouns) with processes (verbs). In images, participants are portrayed as figures and the processes that join them together are portrayed visually. In narrative images, action processes are usually represented by vectors, compositional elements that indicate the directionality of an action. Interpersonal functions : The most important details in this text are that language and images both create and maintain relationships between the producer of the message and its recipient. In language, these relationships are created through the language's system of modality, as well as through the use of different ‘social languages' or ‘registers'. In images, viewers are placed into relationships with the figures in the image through devices like perspective and gaze. The image of the child in figure B9.3 illustrates both devices, with the camera angle positioning the viewer above the child and the child's direct gaze creating a sense of intimacy with the viewer. Long shots tend to create a more impersonal relationship, while close tend to create a feeling of psychological closeness and physical closeness. Images are judged by how realistic they appear to the viewer. Photographs are seen as more trustworthy than drawings or paintings, while scientific diagrams and sketches are seen as having more authority. Black and white images are seen as more ‘realistic' than colour images. Textual functions : Images are organized spatially, with figures in the centre or periphery of the image, on the top or bottom, the left or right, and in the foreground or in the background. Producers can create pathways for the viewer's gaze by placing different figures in different places within the frame and making some more prominent and others less prominent. Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) posit that the left side of an image is more likely to contain 'given' information and the right side to contain 'new' information, based on Halliday's idea that people tend to ‘read' images in a linear fashion. The distinction between the upper part of an image and the lower part is related to the metaphorical connotations of 'up' and 'down' in many cultures. Kress and van Leeuwen suggest that the top part of the image is often used for more 'ideal', generalised or abstract information, while the bottom section tends to
provide factual information such as where the product can be obtained. This can be seen in figure B9. where the figures of the man and woman on the left constitute 'given' information, while the virus on the right constitutes 'new' information. Multimodality in interaction - Modes in face to face interaction such as gaze and gesture fulfill three functions: interpersonal, ideational, and textual. In dynamic interactions, participants have many modes to make meaning, such as embodied (gaze, gesture, posture, head movement, proxemics, spoken language, prosody) and disembodied (written texts, images, signs, clothing, furniture, etc.). All of these modes organize meaning differently, and not all of them are of equal importance to participants at any given moment. How is the analyst to determine which modes to focus on in a multimodal analysis? Norris (2005) solves the problem of multimodality in faceYtoYface interactions by adopting the practice of mediated discourse analysis and taking action$ as the unit of analysis. Norris divides actions into three types: lower level actions, higher level actions, and frozen actions. The goal of multimodal interaction analysis is to understand how participants in interaction work cooperatively to weave together lower level actions into higher level actions, helping to create and reinforce social practices, social relationships, and social identities. B10 PROCEDURE FOR CORPUS-ASSISTED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS Corpus assisted discourse analysis requires several steps, including building a corpus, cleaning and tagging the corpus, analysing the corpus with computer tools, and interpreting the data. The first step in building a corpus is to decide what kinds of texts to include and how many texts to include. A reference corpus is also needed to compare the primary corpus with. For example, Baker and McEnery chose texts based on whether they contained the words refugee or asylum seeker. The most important details in this text are that it is important to take out any HTML code or formatting that might interfere with the analysis of a corpus, and that each text in the corpus is saved in separate text files. The analysis of the corpus is carried out with a computer program, and there are several programs available for free on the internet. The six most basic procedures useful for the discourse analyst are: Generating word frequency lists, calculating type token ratio, analysing concordances, analysing collocation, analysing keywords, and creating dispersion plots. Word frequency and type token ratio : In AntConc, a word frequency list can be generated by clicking on the Word List tab and then clicking the Start button. Type token ratio is a measure of how many kinds of words occur in the text in relation to the total number of words. In the British National Corpus, the type token ratio for the corpus of written texts is 45.53, while the type token ratio for the corpus of spoken texts is 32.96. Function words are the most frequent words in any text, while content words like nouns, verbs and adjectives are more relevant to finding evidence of ‘Discourses’. Concordances : Concordances show words in context of sentences or utterances and can be sorted alphabetically based on the words to the right or left of the target word. In AntConc, concordances are created by typing a word or phrase into the Search Term box and can be sorted alphabetically based on the word one, two, three, etc. places to the left or right of the search term. Collocation analysis : Collocation is the fact that certain words tend to appear together, often taking on a negative or positive meaning based on the kind of words they are often grouped with. Analysing the kinds of words that appear together with other words is an important way to understand the 'Discourses' expressed in a corpus. To perform a collocation analysis with AntConc, click the Collocate tab and enter your chosen search term. The result will be a list of collocates, their rank, overall frequency, and the frequency with which they occur to the left and right of the search term.
Lady Gaga's meat dress voted most iconic outfit. Pop diva Lady Gaga's meat dress which raised eyebrows at the recent MTV Video Music Awards has topped the list of the most iconic outfits of 2010. The eccentric 'Poker Face' hitmaker, who is known for her outrageous fashion sense created ripples with her meaty outfit which has swept a poll by website MyCelebrityFashion.com. "What's everyone's big problem with my meat dress? Haven't they seen me wear leather? Next time, I'll wear a tofu dress and the soymilk police will come after me," said the 24-year-old singer who lashed at her critics for the controversy created by her meat ensemble. The most important details in this text are that it is a news article, and that it is structured in a certain way. It is held together by a few cohesive devices, such as the headline, which summarizes the main idea of the text in a telegraphic language. The text is also held together by several cohesive devices, such as conjunction, logical connectors, and reference. However, there are no instances of conjunction, logical connectors, or reference in the text. The author of this article uses rephrasing to refer to previously mentioned people and objects by calling them different names, such as Lady Gaga and the meat dress. This rephrasing increases the entertainment value of the piece and allows the author to efficiently deliver additional information about the people and things under discussion. The article uses four lexical chains to bind the sentences and paragraphs together and reinforce the main messages. These chains are formed by words related to Lady Gaga, the meat dress, the winning of awards or elections, and shock or controversy. They highlight the four main elements of the story: Lady Gaga's meat dress caused controversy and has been voted as most iconic fashion item by fans. C3 ANALYSING GENRES Analysing genres involves understanding how they function in social groups and how they reflect and reinforce concerns. Genres are related to other genres in sequential and non-sequential relationships, such as in networks where genres have intertextual relationships. Genres can also exist in larger genre ecologies where they can affect one another in subtle and dramatic ways. Unlike natural ecosystems, genre ecologies are not static and change over time as societies and their members change. Understanding genres requires as much attention to social context as it does to texts. Online personal ads and online news sources are replacing print-based personal ads in terms of fulfilling communicative goals. Genre analysis must consider not only the structure and function of a genre, but also its dynamic nature and evolution in response to changing social conditions, relationships with other genres, and multiple functions it may serve in different discourse communities. The blog genre is an example of a dynamic genre that has adaptable to different discourse communities and uses various subgenres such as art, photo, video, and microblogs. Scholars have identified two broad types of blogs: filter type and diary type, which serve different discourse communities and have different conventions associated with them. Filter type blogs typically begin with a title, date/time, and author. The body of the entry typically includes an introduction, linked or embedded material, and a comment. The most important move is to direct readers to external news, information, or media sources through hyperlinks, quotes, embedded media, or attribution. Tools at the end allow readers to comment or share the entry via email or social
media. Filter type blogs are used to select content from other websites that may be of interest to readers. This process, along with the perspective the blogger takes on the selected content, defines membership in the discourse community. Diary type blogs tend to follow a slightly different structure and include different kinds of moves. Diary type blogs are similar to filter type blogs in that they focus on sharing personal experiences, thoughts and impressions. They are primarily intended for the author's friends and serve the function of developing and strengthening personal relationships. They also often include embedded media, such as digital photographs, and are facilitated through processes like commenting and linking to blogs and blog entries posted by other members of the community. Blogs have a complex evolutionary history and relationship with older genres. Diary type blogs fulfil some of the communicative functions previously fulfilled by handwritten journals, travel logs, personal letters, and personal web pages, while filter type blogs draw on the traditions of press clipping services, news digests, edited anthologies, newspaper editorials and letters to the editor. Scholars consider blogs to be a hybrid genre, the result of a creative blending of multiple other genres made possible by new technology. C4 OTHER PEOPLE’S VOICES Texts are linked to, draw upon, respond to, and anticipate other texts, and the ways authors position themselves and their texts in relation to other authors and other texts contributes significantly to the version of reality they end up portraying and the ideology they end up promoting. Authors can use direct quotation to validate the words of the other person or paraphrase them to give author's more flexibility in characterizing the words in ways that support their point of view. Sometimes authors will employ a mixture of quotation and paraphrase, using quotation marks only for selected words or phrases. The most common way to appropriate the words of others is to assert them as facts, which can be seen as acts of plagiarism in academic contexts. Presuppositions are implicit assumptions about background beliefs that are presented as taken for granted facts. Both assertions and presuppositions make the words and ideas represented more difficult to evaluate and open up possibilities for authors to change, alter, exaggerate, underplay or otherwise distort the words and ideas of others. Discourse analysts can never be certain of how conscious authors are of the source of these ideas in the discourse of others. C5 ANALYSING SPEECH ACTS Principles from pragmatics and conversation analysis can be applied to understanding how people make sense of potentially ambiguous contributions in social interaction, such as apologies and threats. Apologies are often accompanied by explicit language, while threats are often issued in an indirect fashion to avoid legal or moral accountability. Interpreting apologies - Apologies are among the most studied speech acts, but there is still disagreement among scholars as to the conditions that must be present to make an apology felicitous. A: You forgot B: Yes. I am sorry. A: You're always doing it. B: I know. In this conversation, the phrase 'I am sorry' in B's utterance helps to make sense of A's previous utterance ('You forgot') as a 'complaint' rather than as simply an assertion. However, A does not fully accept B's apology, leading B to infer that further work has to be performed on the apology front. The important thing
