This guide for students and practitioners is introduced by Christopher J. Hall, Patrick H. Smith, and Rachel Wicaksono. This presentation talks about discourse analysis and its several definitions including the pervasive relevance of discourse (analysis), linguistic approaches to discourse analysis, social approaches to discourse analysis, and themes in contemporary discourse analysis. This will discuss the nature of discourse analysis in context significant to all PhD Language Studies students around the globe.

2. DISCOURSE
ANALYSIS
Prepared by
NAOMIE S. BAGUINAT-DAGUINOTAS

3. Discourse surrounds us in everyday
life, often in ways that seem so normal
we barely notice them: from the
combining of texts and images in
school books, on food packaging and
road signs; to greetings between
friends and between strangers; to the
writing of emails and academic essays

4. Capital D Discourse
“Discourse with a big “D” is always more
than just language. Discourses are ways
of being in the world, or forms of life
which integrate words, acts, values,
beliefs, attitudes, social identities, as
well as gestures, glances, body position,
and clothes.”
(Gee 19)

5. “In the end a Discourse is a
`dance’ that exists in the
abstract as a coordinated pattern
of words, deeds, values, beliefs,
symbols, tools, objects, times,
and places in the here and now
as a performance that is
recognizable as just such a
coordination.”
(Gee 19)

6. As these examples imply, the word
discourse refers to spoken or
written language (perhaps in
combination with
images) used to communicate
particular meanings.

7. Objects of discourse
‘Discourse’ refers to any utterance which is
meaningful. These texts can be:
- written texts
- oral texts (‘speech’/’talk’)
- mixed written/oral texts (e.g. Internet chat)
Discourse does not depend on the size of a text
(“P” and “Ladies” can both be analyzed as
discourse)

8. Definitions of Discourse
A particular unit of language (above the
sentence), or discourse in structure;
A particular focus on language use,
discourse as function.

9. Definition of Discourse
Discourse – written and spoken
Discourse
Speaker /
writer
Hearer/ reader
Context

10. Discourse analysis is the
practice of exploring what kinds of
speaking, writing and images are
treated as ‘normal’ (and ‘abnormal’) in
real situations, and the proportions,
combinations and purposes of discourse
that are conventionally acceptable (or
not) in these situations.

11. Discourse Analysis
Concerned with identifying an authoritative
account (of something);
Because discourses are often contested,
discourse analysis often contrasts different
discursive formations to highlight social
conflict and power relations;
“Discourses are articulated through a huge
range of images, texts and practices… and
any and all of these are legitimate sources
for discourse analysis.”

12. As we have already said, discourse is
analyzed in a variety of disciplinary
fields including (but not limited to)
linguistics, anthropology, sociology,
philosophy, literature and psychology,
by people with a wide variety of aims,
methods, theories and topics.

13. Going back to the illustration
…

14. One way of starting to think about an approach is to
consider how the context being researched is
similar to or different from your own. Another way
of choosing an approach to discourse analysis is to
think about which topics or themes the various
approaches have been associated with, and whether
these are topics or themes which interest you.
For example, if you are a teacher interested in error
correction in classroom discourse it would be useful
to look at conversation analysis and the considerable
body of work by conversation analysts on repair

15. In conversation analysis,
repair
refers to the ways in which speakers correct
unintended forms and non-understandings,
misunderstandings or errors during a
conversation.
A self-initiated repair is when the speaker
corrects himself/herself: ‘You know Jim,
erm, what’s his name, John?’
An example of an other-initiated repair is
when the listener replies: ‘ Hmm? ’

16. It’s important to remember that discourse
analysis is not a neutral, objective method
for describing language use as it ‘really is’.
All the different approaches are underpinned by assumptions about:
• language (especially the relationship between language,
thought and society);
• relationships between the practice of analysis and ‘real
life’;
• the kind of changes we, as applied linguists, should be
helping our clients make.

17. What all these discourse analysts have in
common is an interest in the following
question:
How does the study of discourse
illuminate cultural and social
processes?

18. As applied linguists, we can probably
narrow down this general question to:
How does the study of discourse
illuminate the cultural and social
processes that can lead to language-
related problems, and solutions, for
our clients?

19. In an early study of the management of
social relationships through discourse,
the anthropologist Bronislaw
Malinowski (1999 [1923]) observed how
the meaning of much small talk is
almost entirely context-defined.

20. Employing the phrase phatic
communion, he showed how these
predictable patterns of ritual text help
create positive feeling between
speakers – not because of what the
words mean, but because of what they
do.

21. Phatic communion
is a term used by
Malinowski to refer to
communication which
is not intended to
convey information
but which functions as
a way of creating or
maintaining social
contact.

22. In English
‘How are you?’, ‘Have
a nice day!’ and
‘Terrible weather!’ are
examples of phatic
communion.

23. By filling in silences or helping to start
and end new topics, the meaning of
these patterns of text is created by the
context in which the words occur.
Changing the context can change the
meaning of the text.

24. In Scotland, ‘greeters’ employed by a
supermarket to stand at the entrance
to the shop and tell customers to
“Enjoy your shopping experience”
were ridiculed by the very customers
the shop was trying to create a
relationship with.

25. In this case, the supermarket customers
implicitly recognized the social
bonding work being attempted by use
of ritual text and resisted the
exploitation of phatic communion for
commercial purposes (Cameron, 2002).

26. LINGUISTIC
APPROACHES TO
DISCOURSE
ANALYSIS

27. A corpus (plural corpora) is a digital
collection of authentic spoken or written
language. Corpora are used for the
analysis of grammatical patterns and
estimations of the frequency of words,
word combinations and grammatical
structures. The results are useful in, for
example, additional language education,
translation, lexicography and forensic
linguistics.

28. There are applied linguists who dispute the validity
and methods of CL for solving real-world language
problems (for example Widdowson, 2000), though
there are also those who argue that CL can be used
to investigate not just patterns of linguistic
structure and deployment, but also the role of
language in social and cultural processes, making
CL a possible tool in critical discourse analysis
(Baker, 2006). The role of CL in studies of English as
lingua franca is an interesting and a controversial
case, with some scholars using CL to try and
discover grammar and lexis which are ‘core’ to
(typically associated with) all lingua franca talk,
regardless of setting, participants, etc.

29. Influences on discourse analysis
sociolinguistics
Discourse Analysis
psycholinguistic
s
computational
linguistics pragmatics
other non-
linguistic
disciplines
other linguistic
disciplines

30. Functional approach to discourse
Roman Jakobson: language performs six
functions:
Addressor(emotive);
Context (referential)
Addressee (conative);
Contact (phatic);
Message (poetic);
Code (metalinguistic).

31. Approaches to Discourse
Deborah Schiffrin (1994) singles out 6 major
approaches to discourse:
the speech act approach;
interactional sociolinguistics;
the ethnography of communication;
pragmatic approach;
conversation analysis;
variationist approach.

32. Speech act theory
Speech act theory is part of the wider
discipline of pragmatics. The work of
philosopher J. L. Austin provided pragmatics
with a theoretical framework for
understanding the relationship between
speaker, hearer, utterance and context
(Austin, 1975).

33. Using the concept of speech act as the
principal object of study, Austin
distinguished between the words used in
the act (locution), the intention or
force of the speaker (illocution) and
the effect of the utterance on the
listener (perlocution).

34. Speech acts are utterances which operate as a
functional unit in communication; for
example: promises, requests, commands and
complaints. In speech act theory, utterances
involve two kinds of meaning: a locutionary
meaning, which is the literal meaning of the
words and structures being used; and an
illocutionary meaning, which is the effect
the utterance is intended to have on the
listener. A perlocutionary act is the effect
or result of the utterance.

35. Speech act theory recognizes that language is not only
a way of communicating ideas, but can also be used,
depending on the participants and their
sociocultural contexts, to transform their reality. In
other words, we say things that not only are
judgeable as true or false, but can also perform an
action that impacts on the world. A speaker who
says, ‘It’s hot in here’ may simply mean to observe
that it’s hot (the propositional meaning, or, using
Austin’s term, the locutionary force); but they
might also be making a request for a window to be
opened (the illocutionary force), with the effect
that the listener opens a window (the
perlocutionary force).

36. Approaches to Discourse
The Speech Act Approach
Founders of the speech act theory: John Austin & John
Searle.
There are different types of speech acts:
e.g. “speak louder” (directive)
“Oxford Street is a shopper’s paradise” (assertive)
Speech act theory was not first developed as a means of
analyzing discourse, particular issues in speech act theory
(indirect speech acts, multiple functions of utterances)
led to discourse analysis

37. The Birmingham School
An early use of discourse analysis in applied
linguistics was the description of classroom
discourse by John Sinclair and Malcolm
Coulthard (1975). Developed out of an
approach to structural analysis in
linguistics, Sinclair and Coulthard’s
groundbreaking work identified twenty-two
combinable speech acts that typified the
verbal behaviours of primary school
teachers and their pupils in traditional,
teacher-centred lessons.

38. Their model involved a discourse hierarchy
composed of units of discourse from the
largest unit, lesson; down to transaction
(episodes within the lesson usually bounded
by discourse markers such as ‘right’ and
‘now then’); then exchange, a unit of
discourse comprising combinations of
question–answer–feedback moves; and finally
the smallest unit, act (nominating students,
getting them to put their hands up and so
on).

39. Sinclair and Coulthard suggested that typical of
classroom discourse was the ‘eliciting
exchange’, comprising the three core moves
of teacher initiation, followed by student
response, followed by teacher feedback or
evaluation (IRF/E). For example:
Teacher: What’s the past form of the verb
‘swim’? Initiation
Student: Swam Response
Teacher: Swam, good! Feedback and evaluation

40. Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is
interested in the social context of
language. In SFL, language is analyzed
as a resource used in communication,
as opposed to a decontextualized set
of rules. It is an approach which
focuses on functions (what language is
being used to do), rather than on
forms.

41. The central claim of SFL is that the
structural choices made in the
construction of texts are ultimately
derived from the functions that
language serves in a context of use.
Halliday’s framework for describing
texts and their social contexts
comprises three elements, which
together reflect the concept of
register.

42.  The field of discourse: what is happening?
What is the nature of the social action that is
accomplished by the text?
The tenor of discourse: who is taking part?
What kinds of temporary and permanent
status and roles do the participants have in
the interaction and in other interactions in
which they might take part?
The mode of discourse: what part does the
language of the text play (including whether
the discourse is spoken or written, and its
rhetorical mode: persuasive, didactic,
expository, etc.)?

43. Halliday’s semantic framework for identifying
the functions of language also consists of
three categories, which are (in a rather
simplified form):
The ideational function: how the semantic
content of a text is expressed.
The interpersonal function: how the
semantic content is exchanged or
negotiated.
The textual function: how the semantic
content is structured in the text.

44. SFL uses these two frameworks to explore the
relationships between social contexts and
functions of language, paying attention to
how:
experiential meanings are activated by
features of the field;
interpersonal meanings are activated by
features of the tenor;
textual meanings are activated by features
of the mode.

45. Approaches to Discourse
The ethnography of communication
The way we communicate
depends a lot on the culture we
come from. Some stereotypes:
Finnish people: the hardest
nation for communication, quiet
and serious?
Turkish people: very
talkative and friendly?
Ethnography investigates
speaker culture

46. Ethnographic approaches to discourse analysis
are part of a sociolinguistic tradition and are
closely associated with the work of Hymes
(1972). With the intention of extending
Chomsky’s linguistic competence /
performance model, Hymes proposed the
construct of communicative competence:
knowledge of whether and to what degree
an utterance is considered by a specific
community or group to be grammatical,
socially appropriate, cognitively feasible and
observable in practice.

47. Communicative competence is not only the
ability to form utterances using grammar,
but also the knowledge of when, where and
with whom it is appropriate to use these
utterances in order to achieve a desired
effect. Communicative competence includes
the following knowledge: grammar and
vocabulary; the rules of speaking (how to
begin and end a conversation, how to
interrupt, what topics are allowed, how to
address people and so on); how to use and
respond to different speech acts; and what
kind of utterances are considered
appropriate.

48. Communicative approach
stresses that the aim of learning a
language is communicative
competence. Teachers who base their
lessons on a communicative approach
may follow a syllabus based on
functions or topics, teaching the
language needed to perform a variety
of authentic tasks and to
communicate appropriately in
different situations.

49. Approaches to Discourse
Interactional sociolinguistics
Represents the combination of three disciplines:
anthropology, sociology, and linguistics.
Focuses on how people from different cultures may share
grammatical knowledge of a language but
contextualize what is said differently to produce
different messages.
e.g. “yeah, bring them down here. I’ll flog them for you”
(Australian English)

50. The work of interactional
sociolinguists
focuses on the fleeting, unconscious and
culturally variable conventions for signalling
and interpreting meaning in social
interaction. Using audio or video recordings,
analysts pay attention to the words, prosody
and register shifts in talk, and what speakers
and listeners understand themselves to be
doing with these structures and processes.

51. anthropological linguist John Gumperz,
the founder of interactional
sociolinguistics, was mainly interested
in contexts of intercultural
miscommunication, where unconscious
cultural expectations and practices
for conveying and understanding
meaning are not necessarily shared
between speakers

52. Much of Gumperz’s work focuses on
intercultural communication and
misunderstanding and aims to show
that our understanding of what a
person is saying depends not just on
the content of their talk but on our
ability to notice and evaluate what he
calls contextualization cues, which
include: intonation, tempo, rhythm,
pauses, lexical and syntactic choices
and non-verbal signals.

53. Gumperz adapted and extended Hymes’
ethnographic framework by examining how
interactants with different first languages
apply different rules of speaking in face-to-
face interaction.
Observation of the canteen staff at work showed that
they didn’t exchange many words with their
colleagues, but when they did, the way in which
they pronounced these words was interpreted
negatively. For instance, instead of saying Gravy?,
with rising intonation, as a way of offering gravy,
the South Asian staff used falling intonation.

54. Contrastive rhetoric
Compares the organization of texts
written in different languages,
based on the assumption that there
are characteristic patterns of writing
associated with culturally determined
ways of thinking.

55. the applied linguist Robert Kaplan claimed
that there were differences in the way that
discourse was organized between languages.
He suggested that written texts were
organized in ways that corresponded to the
‘thought patterns’ of the five ‘cultures’:
Semitic, Russian, Romance, European and
Oriental. For example, ‘European’ writing
was supposed to be organized in a linear,
hierarchical pattern, whereas ‘Oriental’
writing was spiral and non-hierarchical.

56. Language
processing
research investigates
how the linguistic
knowledge that is
stored in the
mind/brain is used in
real time (as the
cognitive events
unfold) to produce
and understand
utterances.

57. Cognitive discourse analysis
Approach which takes into account the
mental representations and processes
involved in the production and
comprehension of discourse, including
the role of socially shared knowledge
stored in individuals’ long-term memory
and the capacity and limitations of
their short-term (working) memory.

58. Mental models are representations of
situations in the mind which are constructed
on the basis of sensory and linguistic
input, general knowledge, beliefs,
attitudes and intentions. They are
the starting point for writing and speaking
and the endpoint for listening and reading.
Mental models
contain far more detailed information
than can be mapped onto the linguistic
expressions we use to produce (encode) and
comprehend (decode) them.

59. Conceptual blending theory
looks at how the
meaning of texts
is
comprehended
in real
time by a
listener or
reader prompted
by
linguistic cues to
activate mental
models.
These models
allow speaker-listeners
to distinguish
between different
elements of a text and
understand where
there is a relationship
(‘blending’)
between
these
elements.

60. SOCIAL
APPROACHES TO
DISCOURSE
ANALYSIS

61. Approaches to Discourse
Conversation analysis
e.g. A: This is Mr. Smith may I help you
B: I can’t hear you
A: This is Mr. Smith
B: Smith.
Conversational analysis is particularly
interested in the sequencing of utterances,
i.e. not in what people say but in how they
say it

62. Conversation analysts
interested in the organizational structure
of spoken interaction, including how
speakers decide when to speak in a
conversation (rules of turn-taking) and
how the utterances of two or more
speakers are related (adjacency pairs
like A: ‘How are you?’ B: ‘Fine
thanks.’).

63. As well as describing structures
and looking for patterns of interaction,
some analysts are also interested in how
these structures relate to the ‘doing of’
social and institutional roles,
politeness, intimacy, etc. What
conversation analysts want to know is:
why that now?

64. Traditionally,
psychology has
understood the
cognitive and
emotional states of
individuals to be the
source of interactive
phenomena such as
friendship, aggression
and the influence of
one person’s beliefs
on another.

65. Discursive psychologists
interested in how (and which) ways of
talking and behaving are understood by
people to mean that a person is (being)
friendly, aggressive, loving and so on:
how we ‘do’ friendliness, for example,
and what we recognize as friendliness
when we see and hear it.

66. Critical discourse analysts
study the ways in
which social power,
dominance and
inequality are enacted,
reproduced and
resisted by text and
talk in social and
political contexts.

67. THEMES IN
CONTEMPORARY
DISCOURSE
ANALYSIS

68. Multi-modal discourse can use any way of
communicating meaning, including
design of everyday objects, sculpture,
still or moving images and sounds.
Recent developments in communication
technology favor the creation and
display of multi-modal texts which
combine oral and written forms of
language along with music, images and
other non-linguistic elements.

69. A search of YouTube for ‘Gandhi
speeches’ will provide many examples
of multi-modal texts. In a typical
YouTube Gandhi video, you can hear a
speech, read the transcript, watch a
rolling display of photos, drawings and
posters of Gandhi, and perhaps listen
to some lead-in music – all in one
‘text’.

70. Multi-voiced texts
Multiple voicing or heteroglossia is a
concept associated with Mikhail
Bakhtin, who suggested that all spoken
and written texts echo aspects of all
the other texts that have been
experienced by the speaker or writer,
and all the ways in which the texts
have been subsequently interpreted.

71. Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia
suggests that a text can’t be reduced
to a single, fixed, self-enclosed, ‘true’
meaning which is determined by the
intention of its author. Instead, the
meanings of the words in the text, and
the ways in which these words are
combined, are linked to conditions of
cultural production and reception.

72. What texts mean,
therefore, depends
on the multitude of
understandings,
values, social
discourses, cultural
codes and so on of
all their potential
readers and
hearers.

73. Texts and contexts
Minimally, context comprises the
linguistic, proximal, temporal,
geographical, interpersonal and
ideological dimensions of the situation
in which a text is produced and
interpreted

74. Context is thus analyzed as an
interactively constituted mode of
praxis’- educational jargon for
‘practice’ or ‘enaction’, from the
Greek verb prattein, ‘to do’.

75. So, while your conversation with a
classmate might take place within a
classroom, the classroom context (with
all its typical constraints on
‘acceptable’ ways of talking and
behaving) might not be made relevant
in talk between pupils after the
teacher has left the room, when jokes
about, for example, gender difference
make ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ a more
noticeable aspect of the context than
‘pupil’.

76. Intercultural communication
A descriptive social-psychological
approach (Spencer-Oatey and Franklin,
2009) tends to assume that:
• cultural and linguistic factors are inextricably linked (we
communicate the way we do because of our culture);
• cultural and linguistic factors precede interaction (in contrast
to the assumptions of discursive psychology, critical discourse
analysis and Duranti and Goodwin’s (1992) proposal);
• cultural and linguistic factors are likely to be the cause of
frequent difficulties in intercultural communication.

77. The direction of causality described
above as social-psychological is
assumed to be from culture to
language; we communicate in certain
ways because of our culture.
Causality is the relationship between
causes and effects. The causality of two
events describes the extent to which one
event happens as a result of the other.

78. HOW CAN DOING
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
HELP THE CLIENTS OF
APPLIED
LINGUISTS?

79. describe precisely how our clients’ lives
are affected by language, based not on
folk beliefs, but on the systematic
collection and analysis of relevant
evidence, central to which are
language data.
In some cases, individual clients will
benefit from interventions designed to
help them in their specific situation.

80. In other cases, we may choose to focus
on interventions that seek to bring
about a fundamental shift in our
clients’, and other peoples’,
perceptions of their situation. These
interventions include or combine
attempts to effect a move from a
prescriptive (deficit) perspective on
language use (in which ‘non-standard’
groups and practices are seen as
inferior),

81. to a descriptive perspective which
demonstrates the integrity of our
clients’ use of language, or to a critical
perspective which exposes
discrimination against our clients, or to
an interactionist perspective which
attempts to show how language
problems are locally constructed in
specific contexts of use.

82. Action research
is a form of self-reflective enquiry
(which may include discussion and
reading) undertaken by participants in
social contexts with the aim of improving
their situation in some way. Action
researchers often organize their
activities in ongoing cycles of
reflection and action.