Discourse Analysis and Texts

INTRODUCTION: KEY TOPICS IN THE STUDY OF DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

WHAT IS DISCOURSE ANALYSIS?

  • Discourse analysis is the study of language, considered a sub-field of linguistics.
  • Linguistics sub-fields:
    • Phonology: Study of language sounds.
    • Grammar: Study of sentence formation.
    • Discourse analysis: Study of texts and conversations within a social context.
  • Discourse analysis examines language use in real-life situations, such as joking, arguing, persuading, and displaying social identities.
  • Four assumptions:
    • Language is ambiguous; interpretation is always involved.
    • Language is situated in the world, dependent on context.
    • Language is inseparable from social identity and group belonging.
    • Language is combined with non-verbal cues and visual elements.
The ambiguity of language
  • Communication often contains unspoken elements of meaning.
  • Example: Asking 'Do you have a pen?' may be a request to borrow, not just a question about possession.
  • People don't always say what they mean due to language's ambiguity.
  • Expressing oneself precisely is challenging.
  • Communication involves multiple intentions beyond the literal meaning.
  • Discourse analysis aids in detecting deception.
  • Ambiguous language can be used to persuade or manipulate.
  • Example: Labelling a product 'less sweet' instead of 'low in sugar.'
  • Politicians may use ambiguous language to avoid clear stances or target different messages to various audiences.
Language in the world
  • Understanding communication requires considering the social context.
  • Meaning varies based on who is speaking, when, where, and to whom.
  • Example: A teacher asking 'Do you have a pen?' is likely confirming exam readiness, not requesting a pen.
  • Discourse is always situated in at least four ways:
    • In the material world (e.g., shop sign, textbook).
    • Within relationships (e.g., how well you know someone, power dynamics).
    • In history (relation to past and future events).
    • In relation to other language (part of a web of discourse).
Language and social identity
  • Discourse demonstrates who people are and their relationships.
  • Identities are enacted through discourse.
  • Language use helps create 'who they are.'
  • Doctors are doctors because they can talk like doctors.
  • Social media influencers create a personal brand through discourse.
  • Identities are multiple and fluid.
  • The language used varies depending on the situation.
  • People may not always have control over how they can 'be.'
  • Discourse constraints exist in various settings (e.g., classrooms, clinics).
  • Social media influencers are also constrained by community guidelines.
  • Who people can be is determined by available discourse options.
Language and other modes
  • Enacting identities requires combining language with dress, gestures, and objects.
  • Written texts combine words with images, layout, and sometimes sound or video.
  • Discourse analysts now recognize the importance of non-linguistic communication.
  • Understanding language meaning requires attention to other communicative modes.
  • Many texts contain no words.
  • Discourse analysis can still be applied using semiotic resources.
  • 'Semiotic' refers to anything signifying meaning.
  • Resources include words, sounds, gestures, images, and colors.
So what good is discourse analysis?
  • Discourse analysis is used to interpret meaning.
  • Learning how to analyze discourse is useful to improve communication.
  • Understanding how discourse works can help avoid misunderstandings and deception.
  • Discourse analysis can help understand societies and social relationships.
  • It helps understand how people exert power and influence.
  • It provides insight into different views of reality.
  • It is indirectly the study of politics, power, psychology, and romance.

TEXTS AND TEXTURE

  • Discourse analysts examine 'texts' and 'conversations.'
  • This unit considers written texts.
Meaning as the basis for a text
  • Consider the following list of words:
    • milk
    • spaghetti
    • tomatoes
    • rocket
    • light bulbs
  • M.A.K. Halliday argues that meaning—the most important thing—makes a text a text; it has to make sense.
  • A text should be meaningful in a situation.
  • Meaning is based on choice.
  • Choosing one thing over another makes meaning.
  • Halliday's linguistics emphasizes meaning over linguistic forms.
  • Linguistics historically studied syntax first, then meaning.
  • Halliday's approach sees language as a system of meanings expressed through forms.
Inferring the context from choices
  • Making sense of the list of words includes considering them as a series of choices.
  • There must be some reason for choosing 'milk' instead of 'juice.’
  • You need some understanding of what motivated the choices and the relationship between one set of choices and another to recognize it as a text.
  • The missing information includes:
    • Context for the choices.
    • The relationship between them.
  • These form the basis for texture, that quality that makes a particular set of words or sentences a text rather than a random collection of linguistic items.
  • Halliday explains that a language speaker’s ‘ability to discriminate between a random string of sentences and one forming a discourse is due to the inherent texture in the language and to his awareness of it.’
Internal and external features of texture
  • Two important things make a text:
    • Features inherent in the language itself, which help us understand the relationship among the different words and sentences and other elements in the text.
    • Something that cannot be found in the language itself, but rather exists inside the minds of the people who are perceiving the text, what Halliday calls an awareness of the conventions of the language which helps us to work out the relationships among words, sentences, paragraphs, pictures, and other textual elements, as well as relationships between these combinations of textual elements and certain social situations or communicative purposes.
  • Two things that help you to make sense of the list:
    • The fact that they appear in a list helps to connect them because you automatically think that they would not have been put together in the same list if they did not have something to do with one another.
    • Another ‘internal’ thing that holds these words together as a potential text is that they are similar; with the exception of ‘light bulbs,’ they all belong to the same semantic field (i.e. words having to do with food).
  • If the words appeared in a conversation like this, it would be easier to understand the relationship among them:

Franny: What do we need to get at the shop?
Zoe : Well, we need some milk. And I want to make a salad, so let’s get some tomatoes and rocket. And, oh yeah, the light bulb in the living room is burnt out. We’d better get some new ones.

  • Important words that join words together are:
    • 'and,' which creates an additive relationship among them, indicating that they are all part of a cumulative list.
    • ‘we’ and ‘need.’
    • The verb ‘need’ connects the things in the list to some kind of action that is associated with them and the word ‘we’ connects them to some people who are also involved in this action.
The language user's awareness
  • This second part of Halliday’s formulation has to do with something that cannot be found in the language itself, but rather exists inside the minds of the people who are perceiving the text, what Halliday calls an awareness of the conventions of the language which helps us to work out the relationships among words, sentences, paragraphs, pictures, and other textual elements, as well as relationships between these combinations of textual elements and certain social situations or communicative purposes.
  • These conventions give us a kind of ‘framework’ within which we can fit the language.
  • The framework for the text above is ‘a shopping list.’
  • All of the information about what people do with shopping lists is already part of your common knowledge.
Relationships between texts
  • There is still one more thing that helps you to make sense of this as a text, and that has to do with the connections that exist between this particular collection of words and other texts that exist outside of it.
  • For example, this text might be related to the conversation above.
  • It might also be related to other texts, like a recipe for rocket salad Zoe found in a cookbook.
  • When Franny and Zoe go to the supermarket, they will connect this text to still other texts like signs advertising the price of tomatoes or the label on the milk carton telling them the expiry date.
  • All texts are somehow related to other texts.
  • You need to make reference to these other texts to make sense of them or use them to perform social actions.
Cohesion, coherence, and intertextuality
  • The main thing that makes a text a text is relationships or connections.
  • These kinds of relationships create what we refer to as cohesion. This is how the internal structure of a text conveys relationships.
  • Another kind of relationship exists between the text and the person who is reading it or using it in some way. Meaning here comes chiefly from the background knowledge the person has about certain social conventions regarding texts as well as the social situation in which the text is found and what the person wants to do with the text. This kind of relationship creates what we call coherence (how it relates to the reader and its social situation.)
  • Finally, there is the relationship between one text and other texts in the world that one might, at some point, need to refer to in the process of making sense of this text. This kind of relationship creates what we call intertextuality (relationship to other texts).