DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

discourse is often described as “language-in-use” or “socially situated text and talk”, i.e., analysts ask how written, oral and visual texts are used in specific contexts to make meanings, as opposed to analyzing language-as-anabstract-system. Other disciplines - philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, political science, media studies - tend to use the term to mean what is ‘sayable’ or ‘thinkable’ about a topic in any given political, social, historical, cultural context.

Discourse analysis is the study of how sentences in spoken and written language form larger meaningful units such as paragraphs, conversations, interviews, etc. It also deals with:

a) how the choices of articles, pronouns, and tenses affect the structures of the

discourse

b) the relationship between utterances in a discourse, and

c) the moves made by speakers to introduce a new topic, change the topic, or

insert a higher role relationship to the other participants.

This contrasts with typical studies of modern linguistics, which are chiefly concerned with the study of the structure of language, such as sound segments (phonetics and phonology), parts of words (morphology), meaning (semantics), and the order of words in sentences (syntax). Discourse analysts study the larger chunks of language as they flow together. In recent studies of textual unity and inter-sentential links small bits of language like “oh”, “well” and interjections are also covered.

when analyzing discourse, researchers are not only concerned with “purely” linguistic facts; they pay equal or more attention to language use in relation to social, political and cultural aspects. In short, in this chapter, we are going to adopt the general definition of Discourse Analysis as the study of language in use.

Discourse Analysis or Text Linguistics is the examination of language use by members of a speech community.

The discourse in the question belongs to a particular genre which is telegraphic (short) message possibly a text message sent from a phone or from a computer as an e-mail message. Notice that the vowels are deleted, yet the message is still comprehensible.

 The example is a newspaper ad that is also considered within the the domain of discourse analysis because they are self-explanatory texts that fulfil the conventions of their own genre.

Analyzing a text requires a variety of background knowledge: linguistic, pragmatic, and epistemic-e.g. world knowledge. However, it is not possible to draw clear-cut lines among these notions. Thus, the line between pragmatics and discourse analysis is fuzzy. Discourse analysis makes use of pragmatic concepts while accounting for human communication.

Cohesion refers to the ties and connections which exist within texts that link different parts of sentences or larger units of discourse. It can be defined as the individual grammatical and lexical devices signalling connectedness within the discourse itself.

Reference can be described as the use of words in the text which do not have a meaning of their own, such as pronouns, but they contribute greatly to the connectedness of the text. To infer their meaning the reader has to refer to some entity within the text.

Reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion are the elements of reference.

The types of reference are; Anaphoric reference, Cataphoric reference and exophoric reference.

Clausal substitution: It replaces clauses with so; replaces and negates

with not.

Additive conjunctions (AND), Adversative conjunctions (BUT), Casual conjunctions (Therefore) and Temporal conjunctions (NEXT) are the types of conjunctions.

Coherence is a notion that unifies discourse in terms of the meaning of sentences and their organization in an orderly manner to make the discourse totally comprehensible. Coherence derives from the speaker’s/writer’s cooperation to produce and understand the aim, topic and direction of the ongoing discourse in the current context.

Schemata might be defined as prior knowledge of typical situations which enable people to understand the underlying meaning of words in a given text. This mental framework is thought to be shared by a language community and to be activated by key words or context in order for people to understand the message.

1) Cohesion, which has to do with the relationship between text and syntax. Phenomena such as conjunction, ellipsis, anaphora, cataphora etc. are basic for cohesion.

2) Coherence, which has to do with the meaning of the text. Here we may refer to elements of knowledge or to cognitive structures that do not have a linguistic realization but are implied by the language used, and thus influence the reception of the message by the interlocutor.

3) Intentionality, which relates to the attitude and purpose of the speaker or writer.

4) Acceptability, which concerns the preparation of the hearer or reader to assess the relevance or usefulness of a given text.

5) Informativity, which refers to the quantity and quality of new or expected information.

6) Situationality, which points to the fact that the situation in which the text is produced plays a crucial role in the production and reception of the message.

7) Intertextuality, which refers to two main facts: a) a text is always related to some preceding or simultaneous discourse; b) texts are always linked and grouped in particular text varieties or genres (e.g.: narrative, argumentative, descriptive, etc.) by formal criteria.

extra-linguistic signals are the ones like grimaces, gestures, expressions such as ‘here’, ‘now’, or ‘this’ are used. Employment of nonsense vocabulary, slang and contracted forms -we’re, you’ve are other features of spoken discourse.

Conversation is an enterprise in which one person speaks, and another listens. Discourse analysts who study conversation note that speakers have systems for determining when one person’s turn is over and the next person’s turn begins. This exchange of turns or ‘floors’ is signalled by such linguistic means as intonation, pausing, and phrasing. Some people await a clear pause before beginning to speak, but others assume that ‘winding down’ is an invitation to someone else to take the floor. When speakers have different assumptions about how turn exchanges are signalled, they may inadvertently interrupt or feel interrupted. On the other hand, speakers also frequently take the floor even though they know the other speaker has not invited them to do so.

In face-to-face conversation, participants have a wide range of strategies for creating a complete and meaningful text and maintaining involvement; they coordinate their talk and secure understanding with body language, paralinguistic features like intonation, volume, and tempo, interactional cues like understanding checks and attention signals, along with grammatical features like discourse markers, hedges, and tags.

(a) Understanding checks: These are signals used by the speaker to check whether what has been said is understood, such as: y’know, right?, yaa? Sahi mi?, etc.  

(b) Attention signals are used by the listeners to show that they are following the conversation, such as m’hm, uh-huh, wow, really?, Evet, hakkikaten, etc.

(c) Discourse markers are words that are used to manipulate the conversation: well, I’m not sure anyway,  etc.  

(d) Hedges are linguistic devices that are used in order to show that the speaker is not totally involved in what is being said. In other words, the speaker is trying to weaken the impact of the utterance. kind of, sort of, well, let’s say, etc. 

(e) Tags are questions asked to obtain confirmation of the listener on a previously uttered statement. Tag questions: with auxiliary, reversed negative polarity and personal pronoun It’s cold, isn’t it? It’s not cold, is it?, etc.