Discourse analysis

Two kinds of L as objects of study:

• One abstracted in order to study how the rules of language work.

• The other one which is used to communicate something and is felt to be coherent. This kind of language is L in use and called discourse: and the search for what gives В coherence is discourse analysis.

The origin of DA:

• The first known students of L in western tradition the scholars of Greece and Rome divided grammar from rhetoric.

• The former being concerned with the rules of L as an isolated object

• The latter with how to do things with words, to achieve effects, to communicate successfully with people in particular contexts.

• In 20^th linguistics alongside sentences linguistics, there have also been approaches which studied language as part of society and the world.

• In Britain this tradition developed in the work of Firth, who saw language, not as an autonomous system, but as part of a culture, which is in turn responsive to the environment.

Zellig Harris coined the term DA and initiated the search for L rules which would explain how sentences were connected within a text by a kind of extended grammar. It singled out the rules to explain how one sentence followed the other.

Pioneers in the field of DA (Labov, Grice, Sinclair)

• What is the basic unit of interaction? How can it be characterized and labeled?

• What are the communicative functions of discourse units? How many functions are there?

• How are these functions realized lexico-grammatically?

• What structures do the basic combine to form?

• What are the relationships between the discource and the speakers and hearers?

Discourse and text

• D presupposes on-line processing of a verbally presented message (word by word) as a constituent part of a speech event.

Structure of L

• Paragraph

• Sentence

• Phrase

• Word

• Morpheme

• Phoneme

Though there are cohesive links between sentences a paragraph depends on content and stylistic decisions not only grammatical ones.

In a conversation there are no grammatical constrains on the choice of answer.

Sinclair: discourse is a new level with its own rank scale of units and its own type of relations among these units.

In discourse analysis the sentences are transformed into utterances. Each utterance has a certain communicative intention.

Lecture 6 1.12.2011

Levels of analysis

• At different levels of analysis we focus attention on different features of language. We use data as different kinds of evidence.

• Sound-spelling correspondences in English: the lack of congruence between its phonological and graphological systems

• One G element “i” has two different phonological values and three graphological elements: I, ui and y which have the same phonological value.

• Analyzing words we can say that some of them are internally structured. – thing, building, walking – ing, morphology. – unit of meaning, dependent, cannot occur in a separate way, only when attached to some other word. When attached, brings about various changes in meaning.

• Bike as informal variant of the word bicycle.

• The occurrence of a common, ready-made sequence like “time stands still” and “time seems to hang as if judged guilty” which plays on an association of the words “hang”, “judge” and “guilty”.

• Structurally equivalent sentences:

1. In oxford people still ride bikes.

2. In oxford people still wear gowns

3. In oxford people still have servants.

Overt and covert structures

• To go beyond the linguistic text to the social context to which it relates is to seek to infer the communicative activity or discourse.

• At his level analysis approximates to interpretation and we ask not just what the text means in respect to its informal properties, but what the writer might mean by the text, and what the text might mean to a reader. We move into the domain of pragmatics (study, what people mean by language when they use it in a normal context of social life).

J. L. Austin: a theory of speech acts or speech events

• Statements

• Ethical propositions which are intended to show emotions, prescribe conduct, or to influence in a certain way

• Performatives, in which the saying of the words constitutes the performing of an action.

• How we do recognize that the utterance is performative?

• Austin came to the conclusion that in saying anything one performs some kind of act.

• A locutionary act of saying something in the full sense of saying

• An elocutionary act which is saying something for attaining a certain communicative goal.

• A perlocutionary act which means producing an impact on the hearer’s feelings, thought and conduct, causing a change in the mind and behavior of the listener.

What governs the linguistic realization of speech acts?

• SEARLE: regulative and constitutive rules

• All interaction has regulative rules which govern greetings, choice of topics, interruption and so on. These rules may vary from community to community.

• Constitutive rules control the ways in which an utterance of given form realizes its elocutionary force. E.g., the CR for promising.

• Searle argues that we can classify all the verbs as semantic complexes. That is each verb carries some additional information – request\beg. Are concerned with the differences in the relative status of the speaker and the hearer. Boast\congratulate\ - differences in the way the utterance relates to the interests of the speaker and the hearer.

The parson may object to it: the pragmatic meaning of the utterance:

• The parson – the use of definite article – particular clergyman assumed to be known about by both the speaker and the hearer. – noun phrase takes on pointing function and as such becomes communicatively active as reference.

• Elocutionary force: the speaker is talking about something, expressing a proposition by using the symbolic conventions of the code to key us into a context of shared knowledge. But the speaker is not just talking about something, but is doing so in order of perform some kind of elocution or communicative act.

• Different pragmatic possibilities: warning, reason, and so on, are not signaled in the language itself. They have to be inferred from the context.

• Perlocutionary effect: in making an utterance, the person expresses a certain intended meaning designed not just to be understood as such, but to have some kind of effect on the second person: to frighten, or persuade, or impress, or establish a sense of common purpose or shared concern.

• When we talk about propositional reference, elocutionary force, and perlocutionary effect, we are dealing not with the semantic meaning as encoded in the language itself, but the pragmatic meaning which people achieve in speech act.

Communication:

• Verbalization (speech production) and understanding

• Both processes V and U can be viewed as multilevel activities.

Verbalization:

• On the first level motive and intention emerge in a definite communicative situation as part of some practical activity.

• On the second level the sender’s though is shaped first as a topic-comment structure and then as a propositional structure (functional relations between the sentences).

• On the third level the speaker chooses lexical and grammatical units which are combined with each other in the form of inner speech.

• On the 4^th level the utterance if finally shaped as a verbal expression of thought.

• The process of understanding can also be presented as a set of levels, but in fact it doesn’t take place in this way. We process all types of information simultaneously. Though for the purpose of some research we can single out certain levels

• According to Kamenskaya: experiments proved that we process all types of information simultaneously. But for the purposes of some research we can identify the level of motivation, the level of initial text processing, and the level of more profound text processing.

• Some other scholars study the process of understanding as a series of strategies employed by the receiver.

Strategies of understanding: