Topic 8: Discourse Analysis

Text and discourse

• Text = any object that can be read
• Discourse = use of language (spoken / written) in social context for communication
• Discourse analysis = study - relationship between language and its context
• - what gives discourse coherence

Discourse analysis

• 60's
• American school
• Dell Hymes (speech in social settings)
• British School
• Austin, Searle and Grice (language as a social action)
• Speech Act Theory
• Conversational Maxims
• Pragmatics
• 70's
• American school
• Gumperz and Hymes (conversation analysis)
• storytelling, greetings and verbal duels
• Labov (oral narrative)
• Discourse organisation
• Social constraints (politeness, face-preserving)
• British school
• Halliday (functional approach - SFL)
• Text related to social situations (filed = purpose; tenor = relationship; mode = channel)

Seven standards of textuality

• (de Beaudegrande and Dressler)
• Cohesion (ways components are connected)
• Coherence (continuity of senses)
• Intentionality (text fulfils an intention)
• Acceptability (receiver's attitude towards text)
• Informativity (information: given / new)
• Situationality (text relevant to a situation)
• Intertextuality (text dependant on other texts)

Cohesion

• Grammatical
• Substitution - nominal / verbal / clausal
• Ellipsis - textual / clausal / situational
• Reference - exophora / endophora (anaphora / cataphora)
• Deixis - place / time / discourse / social (T-V distinction / honorifics)
• Conjunction - elaboration / extension / enhancement
• Graphological devices
• Lexical (Halliday and Hasan, 1976)
• Repetition = reiteration
• Synonym
• Identity of reference (synonym in its narrowest sense / superordinates)
• without identity of reference
• Hyponymy = higher linguistic unit
• Meronymy = part of entity represented
• Antonymy = opposite
• Collocation
• Lexical chains = sequence of related words (ex. Rome -> capital -> city -> inhabitant)

Coherence and discourse markers

• Coherence
• Cohesion (important contribution)
• Receivers interpretation of logical relations
• intentionality, acceptability, situationality, informativity and intertextuality
• Achieved by presuppositions or implications connected to general world knowledge
• Discourse markers
• Definition = glue that binds together a text
• Linking words or phrases or sentence connectors
• additive
• adversative
• causal
• temporal