Chapter 3 Discourse

SECTION C

EXPLORATION: ANALYZING
DISCOURSE
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C1 DOING DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: FIRST STEPS

As we said in section B1, there are basically three different ways of looking at
discourse: discourse as language beyond the clause; discourse as language in
use; and discourse as social practice. Each of the three different ways of looking
at discourse can lead us to ask different kinds of questions about the texts and
interactions that we encounter in our social lives. A view that sees discourse as
language above the level of the clause or the sentences leads us to ask: What
makes this text or a conversation a text or conversation rather than just a random
collection of sentences or utterances? What holds it together so that people can
make sense of it? A view that sees discourse as language in use leads us to ask:
What are people trying to do with this text and how do we know? Finally, a view
that sees discourse as a matter of social practice and ideology leads us to ask:
What kinds of people are the authors of this text or the participants in this
conversation trying to show themselves to be, and what kinds of beliefs or values
are they promoting?

Consider, for example, the text that is printed on the cardboard sleeve that comes
wrapped around a cup of coffee that you buy at Starbucks.

Starbucks is committed to reducing our

Environmental impact through increased
use of post-consumer recycled materials.
Help us help the planet.
_____
First –ever 10% post-consumer fiber cup

60% post-consumer fiber sleeve
_____
Intended for single use only.

© 2005 Starbucks Coffee Company All rights reserved
US Patent no 5.205.47S and no. 6.863.644 and related
foreign patents pending
www.starbucks.com/wayiseeit

Although this text seems to be rather straightforward and in some ways trivial, if
we apply the three perspectives on discourse that we discussed in Section B1, we
can start to see how complex it really is, and how it relates to all sorts of non-‐
trivial aspects of our daily lives.

We might start by looking at how this text is put together in a formal way. First of
all, we would notice that there are three different sections, and so can ask
ourselves how we interpret these three sections as going together, and how we
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interpret the separate sentences in each section as relating to one another.

One way we are able to make sense of this text is because of certain grammatical
features in it. For example, we know that the pronoun ‘us’ in the second sentence
refers to the name Starbucks in the first sentence, and this helps us to link these
two sentences together. Also, the sentence in the second section (‘First-‐ever 10%
post-‐consumer fiber cup 60% post-‐consumer fiber sleeve’ and the first sentence
in the third section (‘Intended for single use only’) are incomplete. What they
really mean is (‘This cup and sleeve are the first-‐ever 10% post-‐consumer fiber
cup and 60% post-‐consumer fiber sleeve’ and ‘This cup and sleeve are intended
for single use only.’ Since the same bit is left out of both of these sentences, this
helps us to relate the two sentences together.

But another way we make sense of this text comes from our expectations about
how texts like this are put together. We have seen thousands of similar kinds of
texts (such as product labels) in our lives, and so we know that what the product
manufacturers are trying to emphasize is usually placed in a more prominent
position (like the top) and that ‘legal’ or ‘technical’ information (e.g. stuff about
patent, copyright, warnings, etc.) is usually put at the bottom in smaller lettering.
This makes us pay less attention to it, although sometimes this information is
really the most important information in the text.

After considering the formal features of the text, we might then go on to consider
what exactly the authors of this text are trying to do. We would see that they are
actually trying to do a number of things. For example, in the first section, there
are two kinds of things they are doing: one is informing us (‘Starbucks is
committed to reducing our environmental impact…’) and the second is telling us
to do something through an imperative sentence (‘Help us help the planet’). Such
actions are sometimes not altogether straightforward. For example, when
Starbucks asks you to ‘help them help the planet’ what they are also doing is
asking you to help them make more money by buying more coffee.

The third section of the text also contains some rather ‘indirect’ actions. By
giving the patent number of the sleeve, for example, Starbucks is not just
informing us, but is also warning us that the design for this sleeve belongs to
them and we cannot use it. Finally, by giving as their website URL, they are not
just informing us, but also inviting us to visit this website.

All in all, what the company is doing with this text is rather complex and
sometimes indirect. They are not just trying to tell us about this sleeve or about
their company policies; they are also trying to portray themselves as a ‘good
company’ in order to make us want to buy more coffee from them.

If we then consider this text from the perspective of discourse as social practice,
we might notice that there are several different (‘capital D’) ‘Discourses’ mixed
together. There is the ‘Discourse of Environmentalism’ in the first section, the
‘Discourse of Science’ in the second section (signaled by numbers like 10% and
60% and technical terms like ‘post-‐consumer fiber’), and the ‘Discourse of Law’
in the last section (signaled by legal terms like ‘All rights reserved’). By using
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these three Discourses, the company is trying to show you that they are a certain
kind of company with certain kinds of values and certain kinds of power: first,
that they are a ‘green’ and ‘socially responsible’ company; second, that they are a
‘modern’ and ‘scientific’ company that is on the cutting edge of innovation; and
third, that they are a powerful company that is able to hire lawyers to sue you if
you infringe on their patent or copyright.

This way of looking at this text and texts like it can be useful because it not only
helps us to interpret the meanings the authors are trying to express and the
actions they are trying to perform with the text, but also how the authors are
trying to manipulate us into thinking or feeling certain things or feeling certain
emotions about Starbucks or performing certain actions ourselves like ordering
a second cappuccino.

And so one ‘way in’ to discourse analysis is to consider a text or a conversation
from the three perspectives on discourse we described in Section B1. In the
following sections, you will practice applying analytical tools and methods that
grow out of these three perspectives on discourse.

 Find additional examples online

Activity

Another ‘way in’ to discourse analysis might be to apply the four principles of
discourse discussed in Section A1 to a particular text or interaction.

1) The ambiguity of language
2) Language in the world
3) Language and social identity
4) Language and other modes

These principles also lead us to ask specific kinds of questions about a text or
interaction.

Look, for example, at the interaction below taken from my Facebook ‘News Feed’
(figure C1.1). The first thing you need to know, if you do not know this already, is
that people who use Facebook often take various ‘quizzes’ or surveys which
purport to tell them something about their personalities or their hidden desires.
Friends sometimes pass these surveys around among themselves as a way to
share things that are of interest to them and build a feeling of closeness.

The second thing you need to know is that Emily Jane Wheeler is my niece and
when she took this quiz she was 13 years old. Cheri Jones Wheeler is her mother
and my sister.

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Figure C1.1 My Facebook News Feed

In order to apply the principles we discussed in Section A1 to this text, we might
ask the following four sets of questions:

1. How is the language in this interaction ambiguous? What do the people need
to know in order to interpret one another’s utterances correctly? Are there any
hidden or ‘veiled’ meanings expressed?

2. How is meaning situated? How much does the meaning of these utterances
depend on where they appear and who says them and what they are trying to do
with these utterances?

3. How do people use language to express something about who they are
(including the ‘kinds of people’ they are and what kinds of relationships they
have with the other people in the interaction)?

4. How are other modes (pictures, layout, emoticons) combined with language to
express meaning?

Discuss how posing these kinds of questions can help you to better understand
this interaction and then use the two methods outlined in this section (applying
the ‘three perspectives’ and the ‘four principles’) to perform a preliminary
analysis on a piece of discourse from your own life.

 Do more activities online
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C2 ANALYZING TEXTURE

As we said in Section B2, not only is texture (cohesion and coherence) necessary
to turn a collection of words or sentences into a text, but different kinds of texts –
like shopping lists, newspaper articles and ‘before and after ads’ – have specific
kinds of texture associated with them.

First, different kinds of texts tend to use different kinds of cohesive devices.
Descriptive texts which give information about people or things (scientific
descriptions, encyclopedia entries) often make heavy use of pronoun reference
since pronouns allow writers to refer to the person or thing being talked about
without repeating his, her or its name. Advertising texts, on the other hand,
which describe products, are more likely to use repetition, since there are
benefits to repeating the name of the product in this context. Legal texts also
prefer repetition to reference since repeating a word rather than referring to it
with a pronoun avoids ambiguity.

Analytical and argumentative texts often make heavy use of conjunction, since
making logical connections between ideas is usually central to the process of
making an argument. In some ways, however, such devices can be deceptive,
used to give a text the appearance of logic when the relationships between ideas
are not actually logical. In a speech given shortly after Hong Kong’s return to
China in 1997, for example, a university president in the territory made the
following statement:

I see a stable society because the future prosperity of Hong Kong and of the
region demands it.

Although the use of the word because casts what follows it as a reason why Hong
Kong will remain stable, what is actually given is a consequence of stability
(prosperity) rather than a reason why it will occur. What results is a kind of
tautology or ‘circular argument’.

We also mentioned above that different kinds of texts are also based on different
kinds of generic frameworks – they present information or actions in certain
predictable sequences – and they trigger different kinds of word knowledge.
Consider the following newspaper article.

Lady Gaga's meat dress voted most iconic outfit

Pop diva Lady Gaga's meat dress which raised eyebrows at the recent
MTV Video Music Awards has topped the list of the most iconic outfits of
2010.
The eccentric 'Poker Face' hitmaker, who is known for her outrageous
fashion sense created ripples with her meaty outfit which has sweeped a
poll by website MyCelebrityFashion.com.
"What's everyone's big problem with my meat dress? Haven't they seen
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me wear leather? Next time, I'll wear a tofu dress and the soy milk police
will come after me," said the 24-‐year-‐old singer who lashed at her critics
for the controversy created by her meat ensemble.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/uk/Lady-‐Gagas-‐meat-‐dress-‐
voted-‐most-‐iconic-‐outfit/articleshow/7127426.cms

Perhaps the most obvious thing that makes the above text a text is that we
immediately recognize it as a certain kind of text: a news article. This generic
framework is triggered by a number of things. First, and most obvious are the
circumstances in which we are likely to encounter the text, in this case on the
website of The Times of India. There are other features of the text as well that
mark it as a newspaper article so that, even when it is transplanted into a
different context (like this book), we still recognize it as a news article. One of the
most salient is the headline – a kind of title which summarizes the main idea of
the text in a kind of telegraphic language in which non-‐essential words like
articles and auxiliary verbs are left out.

Once the generic framework of a newspaper article is triggered, we expect the
information in the text to be presented in a certain way. For example, we expect
the first paragraph of the article to sum up the main points in the article, the
second paragraph to give a more elaborated account of these main points, and
subsequent paragraphs to present further details or the reactions of various
people to the news. It is in part because newspaper articles are structured in this
way that we are able to read them so efficiently.

Apart from its overall structure, this text is also held together by a number of
cohesive devices that are also characteristic of news articles. It might be useful,
however, to first consider the kinds of devices which are not used. There are no
instances, for example, of conjunction. This is not unusual since news articles (as
opposed to editorials or opinion pieces) are meant to report what happened
rather than to offer analysis or opinions. When news articles do use logical
connectors, they are usually of the additive or sequential type.

There is also relatively little use of reference in the text. Although there are
instances in which relative pronouns point back to their antecedents (‘meat
dress which…’, ‘hitmaker, who is known…’), and also places where possessive
pronouns are used (‘her outrageous fashion sense’, ‘her meaty outfit) and where
the definite pronoun is used to refer back to a specific thing (‘The eccentric poker
face hitmaker’), there are no instances in which Lady Gaga is referred to as ‘she’
or the meat dress is referred to as ‘it’. The exception to this relative paucity of
pronouns is in a quote from Lady Gaga herself in the third paragraph in which
she refers to herself using the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘me’ and her critics using the
pronoun ‘they’).

Rather than using pronouns, the author of this article chooses to refer back to
previously mentioned people and objects by calling them different names. Lady
Gaga, for example, becomes ‘The eccentric “Poker Face“ hitmaker’, and ‘meat
dress’ becomes ‘meaty outfit’ and ‘meat ensemble’. Such rephrasing is not limited
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to people and objects, but is also used for actions, for example, ‘raised eyebrows’
becoming ‘created ripples’.

There are many possible reasons for this, not least of which is the fact that
phrases like ’eccentric ”Poker Face” hitmaker’ are much more interesting than
mere pronouns and so increase the entertainment value of the piece. A more
important reason, however, given the purpose of a news article to convey
information, is that such rephrasing allows the author not just to achieve
cohesion but also to efficiently deliver to the reader additional information about
the people and things under discussion. By calling Lady Gaga ‘The eccentric
”Poker Face“ hitmaker’, the author is able not just to refer back to Lady Gaga, but
also to deliver additional information about her: that she is ‘eccentric’, that she
has a number of hit songs, and that the title of one of those songs is ‘Poker Face’.

The reiteration of key people, objects and concepts in articles like this using
alternate words and phrases creates lexical chains, which not only serve to bind
the sentences and paragraphs together but also reinforce the main messages of
such articles. In the article above, there are four such chains: First is the one
formed by words related to Lady Gaga (‘Pop diva’, ‘hitmaker’, ‘singer’), second,
the one formed by words related to the ‘meat dress’ (‘outfit’, ‘fashion’, ‘wear’,
‘dress’, ‘ensemble’), third, the one formed by words related to the winning of
awards or ‘elections’ (‘voted’, ‘iconic’, ‘Awards’, ‘sweeped (sic)’, ‘poll’), and,
finally, the one formed by words having to do with shock or controversy (‘raised
eyebrows’, ‘eccentric’, ‘outrageous’, ‘created ripples’, ‘problem’, ‘come after’,
‘lashed’, ‘critics’, and ‘controversy’). These four lexical chains taken together
serve to highlight the four main elements of the story: Lady Gaga’s meat dress,
which caused a controversy when she wore it, has been voted as most iconic
fashion item by fans.


Activity

Now have a look at a text about the same topic which has a rather different
purpose and, consequently, a rather different texture. The text below is from a
blog by the animal rights group PETA. Its purpose is not so much to give
information about what Lady Gaga wore as it is to make an argument that her
choice of dress was unethical.

Last night, Lady Gaga tried once again to shock the world, this time by
wearing a "meat dress" during her acceptance of the Video of the Year
award at MTV's Video Music Awards. Lately, Lady Gaga has been having a
hard time keeping her act "over the top." Wearing a dress made out of
cuts of dead cows is offensive enough to bring comment, but someone
should whisper in her ear that there are more people who are upset by
butchery than who are impressed by it—and that means a lot of young
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people will not be buying her records if she keeps this stuff up. On the
other hand, maybe it was fake and she'll talk about that later. If not,
what's next: the family cat made into a hat? Meat is the decomposing flesh
of a tormented animal who didn't want to die, and after a few hours under
the TV lights, it would smell like the rotting flesh it is and likely be
crawling in maggots—not too attractive, really. The stunt is bringing lots
of people to PETA.org to download a copy of our vegetarian/vegan starter
kit, so I guess we should be glad.

http://www.peta.org/b/thepetafiles/archive/2010/09/13/Lady-‐Gagas-‐
Meat-‐Dress.aspx

Analyze the texture of the above text, noting how the strategies used to achieve
cohesion and coherence are different from those used in the news article and
discuss why you think these differences exist. You can use the following
questions to guide your analysis:

• What are the most common cohesive devices used in the text? What
kinds of relationships do these devices create among different parts of
the text? Are these relationships clear and logical?
• What kind of overall structure does the text have? Is the order in
which information is given in the text important? Do you have to use
any previous knowledge about this kind of text or about the topic of
the text to understand it?
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C3 ANALYZING GENRES

Analyzing genres involves more than just analyzing the structure of particular
types of texts. It involves understanding how these text types function in social
groups, how they reinforce and reflect the concerns of and social relationships in
these groups, and how they change over time as societies and the groups within
them change. Therefore, analyzing genres requires as much attention to social
context as it does to texts.

Part of this context includes other genres that the genre under consideration is
related to. Genres are related to other genres in a number of different ways. First,
actions or ‘communicative events’ associated with genres are usually part of
larger chains of events that involve different genres. The personal ads we looked
at in the Section B3, for example, might be followed by letters or emails, phone
calls and dinner dates. And so, just as moves in a genre are often arranged in a
kind of sequential structure, genres themselves are also often related to one
another in sequential chains based on the ways they are employed by people as
they work to achieve larger communicative purposes.

Genres are also related to other genres in non-‐sequential relationships that are
called networks. A job application letter, for example is related to the job ad that
prompted it, the applicant’s résumé which might accompany the letter, and any
letters of reference former employers or teachers of the applicant might have
written in support of the application. The letter is also related to the letters of all
of the other applicants who are applying for the same job. Genres are said to be
linked together in networks when they have some sort of intertextual
relationship with one another, that is, when one genre makes reference to
another genre or when the users of a genre need to make reference to another
genre in order to realize the communicative purpose for which the genre is
intended.

Genres can also be seen as existing in larger genre ecologies in which texts that
are not directly related to one another in chains or networks can nevertheless
affect one another in sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic ways. Like
natural ecologies, genre ecologies are not static: conditions change; old discourse
communities dissolve and new ones form; and genres change and evolve as users
creatively bend or blend them, or else become extinct if they can no longer fulfill
the communicative goals of their users. Online personal ads, for example, are fast
replacing print-‐based personal ads because they offer users more efficient ways
to fulfill their communicative goals. Similarly, online news sources are giving rise
to changes in print-‐based news magazines, many of which now contain shorter
articles and more pictures in imitation of their online counterparts.

Genre analysis, therefore, must account not just for the way a particular genre is
structured and its function in a particular discourse community, but also the
dynamic nature of the genre, how it has and continues to evolve in response to
changing social conditions, the relationships it has to other genres past and
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present, and the multiple functions it might serve in multiple discourse
communities.

One particularly good example of the dynamic nature of genres and their
adaptability to different discourse communities and different communicative
purposes is the genre of the weblog or blog. Technically a blog is simply a
dynamic web page that is frequently updated with entries appearing in reverse
chronological order. Since the introduction of blogs in the mid 1990s, however,
they have developed certain conventionalized features: blog entries, for example,
are typically short, written in an informal style, and often contain links to other
blogs, web pages or online content such as videos. Blogs also often contain
features such as opportunities for readers to comment, ‘blogrolls’ (a list of
hyperlinks to related blogs) and ‘permalinks’ (hyperlinks that point to specific
entries or forums contained in the blog’s archives).

Like the personal advertisements analyzed in the last section, the genre of the
blog also contains many sub-‐genres used by different discourse communities for
different communicative purposes. There are, for example, art blogs and photo
blogs and video blogs and microblogs, just to mention a few varieties. Scholars of
this genre, however, have identified two broad types of blogs: the filter-‐type and
the diary-‐type. These two types have different conventions associated with them
and tend to serve different discourse communities.

Filter-‐type blogs are blogs whose main purpose is to deliver to readers news
stories and links to other media which are ‘filtered’ based on readers’ presumed
membership in a particular discourse community (usually characterized by
things like political beliefs, lifestyle, or profession). Below (figure C3.1) is an
entry from one of these types of blogs called The Daily Dish, a political blog
moderated by the commentator Andrew Sullivan from 2006 to 2011, which
advocated socially progressive and fiscally conservative views.

This entry illustrates many of the moves typical of entries in filter-‐type blogs.
They usually begin with a title, followed by information about when the entry
was published (Date/Time) and who wrote it (Author). The body typically
begins with an introduction to the material that will be linked to, quoted or
embedded, as well as some kind of comment on the material. Introducing and
commenting moves are sometimes realized separately, but sometimes, as in this
example, they are realized together (‘A powerful video of a man standing up for
his mothers.’) The most important move in entries in filter-‐type blogs is that of
pointing readers to some news, information or media external to the blog itself.
This is sometimes done with a hyperlink, sometimes with a quote from the
original source, sometimes with some embedded media (such as a photograph or
a video), and sometimes with a combination of these methods. All three methods
are present in the example below. Some sort of attribution of the original source
or author of the material is also usually included. Finally, such entries also
commonly include tools at the end which give readers a chance to comment on
the entry or to share it through email or social media like Facebook.
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Figure C3.1 From The Daily Dish

As was noted above, the main communicative purpose of this type of blog entry
is to ‘filter’ or select content from other websites that may be of interest to
readers of a particular blog. It is this process of selection, along with the
perspective that the blogger takes on the selected content that acts to define
membership in the particular discourse community that the blog serves. By
linking to this particular story, embedding this particular video, and referring to
it as ‘powerful’ and to the speaker as ‘a man standing up for his mothers,’ the
author of this entry constructs the discourse community which this blog serves
as made up of people who are likely to support marriage rights for same sex
couples. At the same time, readers of the blog who choose to ‘share’ this entry
are also likely to share it with other like-‐minded people. For this reason, critics of
filter-‐type blogs have pointed out that, rather than encouraging political debate,
they tend to act as ‘echo-‐chambers’ in which members of discourse communities
simply communicate among themselves and reinforce one another’s opinions.
Diary-‐type blogs tend to follow a slightly different structure and include different
kinds of moves. The example below is from the blog of a young woman from
Singapore attending Brown University in the United States.
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Figure C3.2 From Don’t Make Me Mad (Cheryn-ann Chew’s blog)

As in filter-‐type blogs, diary-‐type blog entries begin with a title and the date and
time the entry was written. Sometimes, as in this entry, they do not contain the
author’s name since all of the entries in the blog are by the same author. The
move structure of diary-‐type blogs tends to be more open and unpredictable
than in filter-‐type blogs, since the purpose is for the author to reflect on an
experience, thought or memory, and this reflection may take the form of a
narrative, an analysis or even an argument. In the example above, the blogger
begins by introducing the topic she is going to be writing about, then goes on to
give some evaluative comment on this topic, and then goes on to offer some
elaboration or details about the topic. Diary-‐type blogs also sometimes include
embedded media, usually in the form of digital photographs.

As with filter-‐type blog entries, the communicative purpose of these entries, to
share personal experiences, thoughts and impressions, helps to define the
discourse community. Although anyone can read such blogs, they are primarily
intended for the author’s friends and serve the function of developing and
strengthening personal relationships. It is, in fact, the often intensely personal
nature of the material in such blogs expressed in a public forum that makes this
genre particularly unique.

This focus on creating solidarity within a particular discourse community, then,
is something that both filter-‐type and diary-‐type blogs share. Often this is
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facilitated through processes like commenting and linking to blogs and blog
entries posted by other members of the community. These practices of
commenting and linking also serve to uphold the norms of the community and
police its membership, communicating things like approval, acceptance and
shared values. Although links or references to other texts are not as central a
part of diary-‐type blogs as they are of filter-‐type blogs, they do occur. In the
example above, for example, the author refers to pictures posted on her
Facebook page.

Thus blog entries exist in an intertextual relationship with other texts and other
genres. They are sequentially linked in chains to previously posted entries and
are often entrained to a sequence of external events, whether it is an unfolding
news story or the unfolding personal life of the blogger. They form networks
with other texts like entries on other blogs, web pages, social media sites, stories
in online newspapers and YouTube videos. They are also part of wider ecologies
of texts and relationships within discourse communities and societies, often
playing an important part in the management of social networks or in public
debates about important events or political issues.

Blogs also have a complex evolutionary history and relationship with older
genres. Although blogger Rebecca Blood (2000) insists that blogs are the
internet’s first ‘native genre’, other scholars have pointed out their relationship
to older genres. Diary-‐type blogs, for example, fulfill some of the communicative
functions previously fulfilled by handwritten journals, travel logs, personal
letters, and personal web pages; and filter-‐type blogs draw on the traditions of
press clipping services, news digests, edited anthologies, newspaper editorials
and letters to the editor. Many scholars therefore consider blogs to be a hybrid
genre, the result of a creative blending of multiple other genres made possible by
new technology.


Activity

Because of their short history and the multiple purposes to which they can be
put, the conventions and constraints associated with blogs are difficult to pin
down. Even the distinction between filter-‐type blogs and diary-‐type blogs
discussed here is not hard and fast; many blog entries combine features of both
types.

The advantage of analyzing blogs is that they give us an opportunity to observe a
newly emerging and dynamic genre, which has the potential to fulfill many
different kinds of communicative purposes for many different kinds of discourse
communities. In order to understand something about this variety, go to a blog
directory like Technorati.com (http://technorati.com/blogs/directory/) and
compare entries from blogs from two different categories. The categories listed
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in Technorati include: entertainment, business, sports, politics, autos,
technology, living, green and science.

Use the following questions to guide your analysis:

 What are the discourse communities these blogs serve? How do you
know? In what ways do they fulfill Swales’s defining characteristics of
a discourse community (see D3) and in what ways do they deviate
from these defining characteristics? How do the blogs you have chosen
contribute to defining and maintaining these discourse communities?
 What are the communicative purposes of these blogs? How do they
differ?
 How are the move structures of the two entries that you have chosen
similar or different? Do they resemble diary-‐type blog entries or filter-‐
type blog entries, or do they constitute a different type altogether?
How do the moves and the ways they are structured contribute to the
realization of the overall communicative purposes of the two entries?
 How are the blog entries that you have chosen linked to other texts or
genres in either genre chains or genre networks? How are they
situated within larger textual ecologies? What other genres do they
resemble?
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C4 OTHER PEOPLE’S VOICES

As we have said before, texts are always linked to, draw upon, respond to, and
anticipate other texts. And the ways authors position themselves and their texts
in relation to other authors and other texts contributes significantly to the
version of reality they end up portraying and the ideology they end up
promoting.

There are many different ways authors might represent the words of other
people in their texts. They might, for example, quote them verbatim using some
kind of reporting verb like ‘said’ or ‘claimed.’ Sometimes the effect of direct
quotation can be to validate the words of the other person by implying that what
they said or wrote is so important and profound that it is worth repeating word
for word. Ironically, however, this technique can also have the opposite effect,
creating a distance between the author and the words he or she is quoting and
sometimes implying a certain skepticism towards those words – a way of saying,
‘please note that these are not my words.’ Often in cases of direct quotation, the
reporting word that is used is important in indicating the author’s attitude
towards the words being quoted; it is quite a different thing to ‘note’ something,
to ‘claim’ something or to ‘admit’ something.

Another way authors represent the words of other people is to paraphrase (or
‘summarize’) them. This, of course, gives author’s much more flexibility in
characterizing these words in ways that support their point of view. Reporting
words are also often important in paraphrases. In fact, sometimes words
characterizing what the other person seems to be doing with his or her words
are used a substitute for the utterance, as when ‘He said, “I’m terribly sorry.”’ is
glossed as ‘He apologized.’

Sometimes authors will employ a mixture of quotation and paraphrase, using
quotation marks only for selected words or phrases. This is most often done
when authors want to highlight particular parts of what has been said either to
validate those words or to express skepticism about them. Quotes that are put
around single words or phrases are sometimes called ‘scare quotes’ and are
usually a way of saying things like ‘so called…’ or ‘as s/he put it…’

By far the most common way to appropriate the words of others is by not
attributing them to another person at all, but by simply asserting them as facts.
Such practices have different implications in different contexts. In academic
contexts, for example, they are often considered acts of plagiarism. In most other
contexts, however, such practices are seen as signs that the author of the text has
‘bought into’ the ideas promoted by the other person. If a politician says in a
speech, ‘In order to be a secure nation, we must work for energy independence,’
and then the next day a newspaper editorialist asserts, ‘Energy independence is
vital to our national security,’ without citing the politician as the source of this
idea, chances are that the politician would not accuse the newspaper of
plagiarism, but rather praise it for the wisdom of its editorial staff.
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Finally, often the words and ideas of other people are not directly asserted, but
rather indirectly presumed in texts. Presuppositions are implicit assumptions
about background beliefs that are presented as taken for granted facts. They are
among the main devices authors use to promote their ideological positions. They
are particularly effective in influencing people because they portray ideas as
established truths and preempt opportunities to question or debate them.

Both assertions and presuppositions make the words and ideas represented
more difficult to evaluate because the sources of those words and ideas are
invisible. Like paraphrase, both also open up lots of possibilities for authors to
change, alter, exaggerate, underplay or otherwise distort the words and ideas of
others. On the other hand, assertion and presupposition also make the
relationship between the author and the person whose words he or she is
borrowing more ambiguous. The discourse analyst can never be certain of how
conscious authors are of the source of these ideas in the discourse of others or
certain of who these others are.

Table C4.1 gives examples of these different forms of discourse representation.

Table C4.1 Different forms of discourse representation

Direct quotation The councilwoman said, ‘because of
unforeseen circumstances, we will be
revising the planned completion date
of the project.’

Paraphrase The councilwoman said that the
project would be delayed.

Selective quotation The councilwoman admitted that the
completion date of the project would
have to be ‘revised.’

Assertion The project is experiencing severe
delays.

Presupposition Unreasonable delays have plagued the
project.

Whose islands are these?

As an example of the way authors represent the words, actions and ideas of other
people and how these representations promote certain versions of reality,
consider the newspaper article below published on the website of CNN in 2009.
The article concerns a dispute between China and Japan over the sovereignty of a
small group of islands in the South China Sea — known by the Chinese as the
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Diaoyu islands and by the Japanese as the Senkaku islands — and efforts by the
U.S. government to mediate in the dispute. Although many people consider news
articles to be relatively ‘objective’ presentations of the facts of a particular event,
the words reporters use to portray participants and processes, and the way they
choose to represent what relevant parties say about the event almost always
promotes a particular ideological stance.

China shuns U.S. mediation in its island dispute with Japan

By the CNN Wire Staff
November 3, 2010 -‐-‐ Updated 0401 GMT (1201 HKT)

(CNN) -‐-‐ The United States can forget about hosting trilateral talks involving
China and Japan over the disputed islands, Beijing said via state media
Wednesday.

"The territorial dispute between China and Japan over the Diaoyu Islands is the
business of the two nations only," Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said,
according to the Xinhua news agency.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the offer during discussions with
Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi last week, Xinhua said.

Relations between Beijing and Tokyo have been strained by their growing
dispute over the islands, which China calls the Diaoyu and Japan calls the
Senkaku.

Japan in early September arrested a Chinese fishing crew off the islands, leading
to a diplomatic battle.

In response, China made increasingly aggressive diplomatic threats. Beijing also
halted ministerial-‐level talks with Tokyo, and both sides canceled trips to each
other's nations.

Japan has since released the fishing crew, but Beijing has repeatedly said the
islands belong to China.

Beijing also says most of the South China Sea belongs to China, disputing
neighboring countries' claims. The clash over territorial waters and islands -‐-‐
and the natural resources that go with them -‐-‐ is a flashpoint in the Asia-‐Pacific
region.

From: http://articles.cnn.com/2010-‐11-‐
03/world/china.japan.disputed.islands_1_island-‐dispute-‐diaoyu-‐islands-‐beijing-‐
and-‐tokyo?_s=PM:WORLD

The first thing that we can notice about this version of the facts is the different
kinds of processes the different parties are portrayed as engaging in. China
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(meaning the Chinese government) is described as ‘shunning mediation,’ ‘making
threats’ and ‘halting talks’, whereas the U.S. (in the person of the Secretary of
State) is described as ‘making an offer’ and wishing to ‘host talks’. Clearly, the
U.S. side is portrayed as the more reasonable and conciliatory of the two parties.
The portrayal of Japan is more neutral: although it is portrayed as ‘arresting’ a
Chinese fishing crew, later it is portrayed as ‘releasing’ the crew.

Apart from the processes associated with the different actors, the ways the
words of those actors are represented also reinforce the impression that China
acted aggressively. In the first paragraph, the words of the Chinese Foreign
Ministry spokesperson are paraphrased in a way that gives them an aggressive,
argumentative tone: ‘The United States can forget about hosting trilateral talks.’
From the direct quotation that is given in the next paragraph, however, it is clear
that this is not at all what the spokesperson said. The article does not quote nor
give much detail about what the U.S. Secretary of State said that led to this
response other than characterizing it as an ‘offer.’ Whether it was an offer
however or something else such as a ‘threat’ or a ‘warning’ is clearly open to
interpretation given the Chinese response.

The final paragraphs of the article give background information about the
situation in the form of multiple assertions and presuppositions whose sources
the reader cannot be certain of. It is asserted, for example, that China has made
‘increasingly aggressive diplomatic threats,’ although it is not clear why their
actions have been characterized in such a way or by whom. In the last paragraph,
the seemingly objective statement,’ the clash over the territorial waters and the
islands – and the natural resources that go with them – is a flashpoint in the Asia-‐
Pacific region’, hides within it the presupposition that the motivation behind the
disputes is primarily economic rather than a matter of patriotism or the
historical legitimacy of the claims.


Activity

The article below, published in the China Daily, gives a rather different version of
events. Try to analyze it in the same way, noting how different participants and
processes are characterized, how the words of different actors are represented,
and how these features in the text contribute to its ideological stance.

China: Trilateral talks merely US wishful thinking

(Xinhua) Updated: 2010-‐11-‐02 14:54

BEIJING -‐ Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said Tuesday it is
merely wishful thinking of the United States to propose hosting official talks
between China, Japan and the US.

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Ma made the remarks when asked to comment on a hearsay that the US side has
told the Chinese side that it is willing to host trilateral talks between China, Japan
and the United States to impel China and Japan to exchange views on a series of
issues.

"I'd like to clarify the discussions between Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi
and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Hanoi last week," said Ma.

He said both sides discussed strengthening cooperation between China, Japan
and the United States, so as to work together for the peace and development of
the Asia-‐Pacific region.

He noted the US side proposed holding official trilateral talks between China,
Japan and the United States.

"I'd like to stress that this is only the thinking of the US side," he said.

He said China is looking at making full use of all current dialogue and
cooperation mechanisms in the Asia-‐Pacific region with the hope of making them
more effective in promoting peace and development in the region.

"The Diaoyu Islands and their adjacent islets are an inalienable part of China's
territory and the territorial dispute over the islands is an issue between China
and Japan," said the spokesman.

"It is absolutely wrong for the United States to repeatedly claim the Diaoyu
Islands fall within the scope of the US-‐Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and
Security. What the United States should do is to immediately correct its wrong
position," Ma said.

"Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and China's foreign ministry have made
clear many times on various occasions China's solemn stance," he added.

After her meeting with Japanese Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara in Hawaii last
Thursday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed the Diaoyu Islands issue
could invoke the US-‐Japan security treaty.

The Chinese government was strongly dissatisfied with her statement.

Ma said Friday that as a bilateral agreement reached during the Cold War, the
US-‐Japan security treaty should not harm the interests of third parties, including
China.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-‐11/02/content_11491199.htm

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C5 ANALYZING SPEECH ACTS

In this section we will consider how principles from pragmatics and
conversation analysis can be applied to understanding how people make sense of
potentially ambiguous contributions in social interaction. The two types of
contributions we will focus on are apologies and threats. Apologies are
potentially ambiguous because, although they are often accompanied by rather
explicit language like ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I apologize’, this language, in the absence of
other things like an assumption of responsibility or a promise not to repeat the
offending action, is sometimes not enough to make the apology felicitous.
Furthermore, words like ‘I’m sorry’ are sometimes used in cases where no
apology is intended at all. Threats are potentially ambiguous because people
often issue them in an indirect fashion in order to avoid legal or moral
accountability, and because, in some situations, people might interpret
utterances as threats, when they were not intended as such.

Interpreting apologies

Apologies are among the most studied kind of speech act. Despite this, because of
the complexity and context-‐dependent nature of apologies, there is still
considerable disagreement among scholars as to the conditions that must be
present to make an apology felicitous. Part of the reason for this is that people
themselves vary considerably in terms of what they require to be ‘satisfied’ by
another’s attempt at apologizing in different situations. Consider the following
conversation);

A: You forgot!
B: Yes. I am sorry.
A: You're always doing it.
B: I know.
(from Schegloff 1988)

As analysts looking at this conversation with no knowledge of the context in
which it takes place, we must rely on the sequential placement of the utterances
in order to make sense of what the speakers mean by their words. In particular,
the phrase ‘I am sorry’ in B’s utterance in the second line helps us to make sense
of A’s previous utterance (‘You forgot’) as a ‘complaint’ rather than as simply an
assertion. At the very least, we can be sure that B has taken this utterance to be a
complaint. Furthermore, coming as it does after a statement about his or her own
behavior (You forgot!), rather than a statement about something or somebody
else (like ‘It’s raining’), we are able to interpret B’s statement ‘I am sorry’ as an
apology rather than an expression sympathy. Finally, we are able to interpret B’s
statement as an apology because A appears to interpret in that way.

At the same time, however, A does not fully accept B’s apology: rather than
saying something like, ‘It’s okay,’ he or she makes yet another assertion (‘You’re
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always doing it’), which we also interpret as a complaint, or rather, an
elaboration on the first complaint. This is not the preferred response to an
apology (which is an acceptance of the apology) and thus leads B to infer that
further work has to be performed on the apology front. Thus B’s next
contribution, ‘I know’, is offered not as a simple statement of fact or agreement
but as a further admission of guilt, an elaboration of the original apology.

The important thing to notice about this exchange is that the statement ‘I am
sorry’ is apparently not sufficient to successfully perform the apology. In the first
instance it is also accompanied by an acknowledgement of fault (‘Yes’), but even
this is not enough to elicit A’s acceptance of the apology. B is also required to
acknowledge an even greater fault (that his or her ‘forgetting’ is not a
momentary lapse but a habitual behavior). Therefore, even when an utterance
seems to satisfy a set of objective conditions for an apology, there is no
guarantee that it will be accepted as such by the recipient.

A number of scholars have attempted to formulate the ‘felicity conditions’ for
apologies. Owen (1983), for example, offers this simple set of criteria:

• The act A specified in the propositional content is an offence against
addressee H
• H would have preferred S’s not doing A to S’s doing A and S believes H
would have preferred S’s not doing A to his doing A
• A does not benefit H and S believes A does not benefit H
• S regrets (is sorry for) having done A
• (the utterance) counts as an expression of regret by S for having done A.
There are at least two potential problems with this set of conditions. The first is
that the propositional content of apologies (what is being apologized for) is often
not explicitly stated in the apology itself but rather implied based on some
pervious action or utterance, and when it is stated, even if it represents an
offence against the addressee, it may not be exactly the offence for which the
addressee is seeking an apology. B in the above example might say, ‘I’m sorry for
upsetting you,’ which is quite different from saying ‘I’m sorry I forgot.”

The second problem has to do with what needs to be done in order for the
utterance to ‘count’ as an expression of regret. As we saw above, the utterance ‘I
am sorry’, which is clearly an expression of regret, is not always sufficient to
accomplish an apology. At the same time, there are many instances in which
regret is expressed which would not be considered apologies. For example, a job
applicant might receive a letter with the sentence, ‘we regret to inform you that
your application has not been accepted.’ Even though this is an explicit
expression of regret, and the addressee might indeed regard the rejection as an
offense, few people would regard this as a true apology.

Cohen, Olshtain and Rosenstein (1986) have pointed out that apologies often
involve one or more of the following verbal strategies:

• an expression of apology (I am sorry)
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• an explanation or account of the situation (I’ve had a lot on my mind
lately)
• an acknowledgement of responsibility (I know)
• an offer of repair (how can I make it up to you?)
• a promise of forbearance (I’ll never do it again)
The ‘perfect’ apology, in fact, contains all of these elements, even when some or
most of them are implicit rather than stated outright. For something to have the
‘force’ of the apology, however, only one of these strategies is necessary. In some
cases in which only one strategy is used, however, the speaker leaves it up to the
addressee to infer that an apology has been made by referring to the
conversational maxims. I might, for example, say ‘I feel terrible about shouting at
you yesterday,’ flouting the maxim of relevance (my internal state of mind may
not seem directly relevant to our conversation), leading my interlocutor to take
the statement as implying something more than a simple assertion.
In many cases, however, addressees require more than one of the above
strategies to be used in order to be satisfied that the apology is ‘complete’ and
‘sincere’.

Activity

One of the most famous disagreements regarding the speech act of apologizing
began on April 1, 2001 when a US spy plane flying without permission in Chinese
airspace collided with a Chinese fighter jet, causing it to crash and killing the
pilot, before making an emergency landing on Hainan island. The Chinese
authorities detained the crew of the US plane for eleven days while they waited
for the U.S. to ‘apologize’ for illegally entering their airspace and causing the
death of the pilot. The incident ended when the U.S. government issued what has
come to be known as ‘the letter of the two sorries’. Many on both the U.S. and
Chinese sides insisted, however, that the ‘two sorries’ expressed in the letter
were not ‘true apologies’.

The ‘two sorries’ were:

1) Both President Bush and Secretary of State Powell have expressed
their sincere regret over your missing pilot and aircraft. Please convey to
the Chinese people and to the family of pilot Wang Wei that we are very
sorry for their loss.

2) We are very sorry the entering of Chinese air space and the landing did
not have verbal clearance, but are pleased the crew landed safely.
(United States Government, 2001)

Based on Owen’s felicity conditions for an apology and Cohen and his colleagues’
list of strategies, decide whether or not you think these ‘sorries’ constitute true
apologies. Give reasons for your decision. You should particularly consider:

1) if the propositional content referred to matches with the offenses perceived
by the Chinese side;
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3) if enough of the strategies for apologizing are expressed or implied to make
the apologies convincing.

Interpreting threats

Threats suffer from a similar ambiguity as apologies because people often
depend a great deal on implicature when issuing them. Consequently, as with
apologies, how they are interpreted by those to whom they are issued matters a
great deal.

In some ways the felicity conditions for threatening are quite similar to those for
promising, warning and advising. All of these speech acts have to do with
something that will or will not happen in the future, depending on whether or
not certain conditions are met. In fact, very often words like promise, advise and
warn are used to issue threats, as in:

I’m warning you. If I see you around here again, I promise you, I’ll kill you.

and

If you value your life, I advise you to pay what you owe.

The main differences between a threat and these other three speech acts are that
1) unlike a promise, what is threatened is harmful rather than beneficial to the
addressee, 2) unlike a warning, the action requested is for the benefit of the
speaker rather than the addressee, and, 3) unlike advice, the speaker takes his or
her own perspective not the hearer’s and he or she controls the outcome rather
than the hearer.

The linguist Roger Shuy summarizes these differences in the following table:

Table C5.1 Comparison of threatening, warning, advising and promising (adapted
from Shuy 1993: 98)

Threatening Warning Advising Promising
To the √
speaker’s
benefit
To the √ √ √
hearer’s
benefit
To the √
hearer’s
detriment
From √ √ √
speaker’s
perspective
From hearer’s √
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perspective
Speaker √ √
controls
outcome
Hearer √ √
controls
outcome

Activity

Roger Shuy is a forensic linguist, the kind of language expert who is sometimes
called upon by courts and law enforcement officers to make judgments about
what people meant, in order to determine if they have committed a crime. In his
book Language Crimes (1993) he relates the case of a man named Don Tyner
who was accused of making threats to a business associate named Vernon Hyde
who resigned from his organization after securing ownership of a number of
shares in a racehorse. After Hyde’s resignation, Tyner repeatedly contacted Hyde
and accused him of lying and swindling his company. Hyde interpreted these
accusations as threats, though Tyner repeatedly denied threatening Hyde. On
one occasion, after Hyde had accused Tyner of threatening him several times, the
following exchange occurred:

Tyner: How’s David?
Hyde: Do what?
Tyner: How’s David?
Hyde: You mean my son?
Tyner: Yep.
Hyde: Don, don’t threaten my son. Do a lot of things but don’t ever
threaten my son.
Tyner: I didn’t threaten anybody, I just said, ‘How’s David?’
(from Shuy 1993:109)

Without more complete evidence, of course, it is impossible to determine
whether or not Tyner was really threatening Hyde or his son. Instead, consider
what you think might have led Hyde to interpret the statement ‘How’s David’ as a
threat based your knowledge of:
1) the cooperative principle and conversational maxims;
2) The felicity conditions for a threat.

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C6 ANALYZING CONVERSATIONAL STRATEGIES

In this section we will further explore the strategies we use to manage
relationships (face) and activities (frames) in interaction. The kinds of
interaction we will use as examples in this section, however, are not from face-‐
to-‐face conversations, but rather from computer-‐mediated interactions, in
particular, interactions using Facebook and MSN Messenger.

As we have explained, mediated interactions are different from face-‐to-‐face
spoken conversations in a number of ways. For one thing, in much computer-‐
mediated communication, people type their ‘utterances’ rather than speaking
them. In addition, these interactions rarely involve the same kind of synchrony
that face-‐to-‐face conversation does. Whereas face-‐to-‐face interactions occur in
‘real time’, giving us access to other’s people’s utterances as they are forming
them, most computer mediated interaction is asynchronous, involving a ‘time
lag’ between production and reception, whether it be the momentary lag
between the time when one party types a message and the other person reads it
which we experience in instant messaging or the much longer time lags
associated with email, blogs and social networking sites.

Perhaps the most important difference between face-‐to-‐face interaction and
computer-‐mediated interaction is that many of the non-‐verbal and paralinguistic
resources available in face-‐to-‐face communication are not available in text based
computer mediated communication. This is significant because these are
precisely the resources people often use as contextualization cues to frame their
conversational activities, and they can also play an important role in the face
strategies of involvement and independence. Users of text based communication
tools, then, need to make use of different resources such as graphics, emoticons,
orthography and punctuation to fulfill the functions that non-‐verbal and
paralinguistic communication do in face-‐to-‐face encounters.

Face strategies on Facebook

Perhaps more than any other kind of computer-‐mediated communication, social
networking sites are designed to give users tools to communicate about and
manage their social relationships with others. Facebook is about ‘face’ precisely
in the sense in which we defined it in Section A6: ‘the negotiated public image
mutually granted to each other by participants in a communicative event.’ Users
of Facebook are centrally concerned with constructing and maintaining their
‘public images’, with saving face, and with ‘giving face’ to others.

It is not uncommon for people to have many Facebook ‘friends’ (hundreds or
even thousands), and yet they do not enjoy the same kind of relationships with
all of these ‘friends’: with some of them they are socially close, and with others
they are socially distant; some of them are their social equals, while others are in
a hierarchical relationship with them. The problem with Facebook, however, is
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that it is biased towards a face system of symmetrical solidarity. Nearly all of the
resources it makes available, from the initial mechanism of ‘friending’, to photo
sharing, to the exchange of virtual tokens like ‘pokes’ and ‘vampire bites’ are
designed to express involvement. Some (see for example Kiesler 1986, Landow
1992) have even suggested that it is a fundamental characteristic of all
computer-‐mediated communication that it flattens hierarchies and encourages
self-‐disclosure, a phenomenon Joseph Walther (1996) calls ‘hyperpersonal
communication’.

For some users this is not a problem — the whole point of a social networking
site for them is to help them get closer to those in their social network — and it
certainly is not a problem for the company that runs Facebook since the more
people share with one another using involvement strategies, the more
information about them is available to sell to advertisers. It does become a
problem, however, when people who are accustomed to hierarchical or
deference face systems in face-‐to-‐face communication have to negotiate their
relationships in an environment that is biased towards involvement, as when
students and professors or employees and employers become ‘friends’.

These difficulties are especially salient in ‘wall posts,’ since these constitute
‘publically performed conversations’ which people who are not involved in
typically have access to. Therefore, the relationships people enact in these
interactions are not just negotiated between the interactants, but also displayed
to a larger audience.

The example below (figure C6.1) illustrates how one of my students strategically
mixed independence and involvement strategies when ‘tagging’ me in a picture
in her photo album.

Figure C6.1 Excerpt from the author’s Facebook Wall

The first thing that should be noted regarding this example is that ‘tagging’
someone in a photo on Facebook is a clear example of involvement. Not only
does it assume a relationship of solidarity, but also makes the assumption that
the person tagged does not mind advertising this relationship to other users.
Consequently, it is also a threat to the ‘negative face’ of the person who has been
tagged, potentially violating their desire for autonomy and privacy. There are
also other instances of involvement in this example, such as the optimistic and
complimentary message, the informal language and the use of emoticons (like :)
127
and :D) and unconventional spelling and punctuation (like ‘ur’, ‘jokessssss’, and
the repetition of the exclamation point at the end of the message).

At the same time, there are also instances of independence strategies, most
notably the use of the title ‘Prof. Jones’ to address me. What is interesting about
this is that, like many university professors, I am on a ‘first name basis’ with my
students. In other words, this student uses an independence strategy on
Facebook which she probably would not use in face-‐to-‐face interaction with me.
One reason for this may be to compensate for the involvement strategies that
otherwise dominate the message and to mitigate the potential threat to my
negative face.


Activity

Analyze the postings on Facebook or some other social network service you use.
Does this service encourage the adoption of a particular face system among
users? Do the people in your network (including yourself) use different mixtures
of independence and involvement strategies when interacting with people with
whom they have different kinds of relationships? In particular, how do people
who are socially distant or who are in hierarchal relationships manage face
strategies? Can you find examples of interactions which would have been
managed differently had they taken place face-‐to-‐face?

Contextualization cues in instant messaging

As we have said above, text-‐based computer mediated communication differs
from face-‐to-‐face conversation in that users do not have access to many of the
resources normally used to issue contextualization cues, such as body language,
facial expressions and paralinguistic signals. As a result, they have, over the
years, developed a multitude of other ways with which to frame and reframe
their utterances, including emoticons, screen names, status updates,
unconventional spelling, creative use of punctuation, and code-‐mixing (the
mixing of words from different languages). A number of scholars (see for
example Danet et al. 1997, Herring 2001) have shown how users of chat and
instant messaging systems use such cues to signal ‘what’s going on’ in online
interaction.

Speakers of Chinese like many of the students I teach in Hong Kong also have at
their disposal written ‘final particles’, sounds that often occur at the end of
spoken utterances which signal the speaker’s attitude towards the utterance or
the hearer, which users of chat and instant messaging programs regularly insert
(often in Romanized form) in their written messages (though they hardly ever
appear in more formal written Chinese).

128
Below is an example of how such resources can be used as contextualization cues
in instant messaging exchanges. It is an excerpt from a conversation between
two university students in Hong Kong, one a female named Tina, and the other a
male named Barnett.

Barnett: u're....~?!
Tina: tina ar.......
Tina: a beautiful girl........
Tina: haha...
Tina: ^_^
Barnett: ai~
Barnett: i think i'd better leave right now....^o^!

The conversation starts out with Barnett asking for clarification of Tina’s
identity. The tilde (~) here signifies a lengthening of the previous utterance,
giving it a playful, insistent quality. Tina replies with her name, followed by a
Romanized final particle (‘ar’), which in Cantonese is often used to soften
affirmative statements so they do not sound too abrupt, followed by a number of
ellipsis marks (…) indicating that there is more to come. In her next message she
elaborates on her identity, referring to herself as ‘a beautiful girl’, which might be
interpreted as either a boast or an attempt at seduction. In her next two
messages, however, she puts a ‘joking frame’ around her previous description
with the words ‘haha…’ and a smiling emoticon (^_^). Barnett replies with ‘ai’ a
Romanization of the Cantonese word 哎, often used as an expression of pain,
frustration or indignation, which he lengthens with a tilde (~) in the same way it
might be if spoken in a particularly exaggerated way. He then adds, in the next
message, that he thinks he had better leave the conversation, but reframes this as
a playful threat with the humorous emoticon ^o^ , which represents the face of a
clown.

What is going on in this short exchange, of course, has very little to do with Tina
giving an objective appraisal of her looks or even boasting, or with Barnett
expressing concern and threatening to terminate the conversation. Instead, this
is clearly an episode of playful teasing or flirting. Without the contextualization
cues supplied by such things as punctuation, emoticons, and tokens like ‘haha’,
however, the conversation would take on a very different meaning.

Activity

a. Choose an utterance which you might send to your friend via instant
messaging such as ‘u finish hw?’ (‘have you finished the homework?) and discuss
how the message could be ‘framed’ differently (as, for example, a warning, an
offer, a boast, a complaint, a sympathetic remark, etc.) by attaching to it one of
the emoticons from the range of default choices offered by MSN Messenger
(Figure C6.2).

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Fig C6.2 MSN Messenger emoticons

b. Save an instant messaging conversation as a ‘history file’ and analyze it in
terms of how things like code choice, spelling, punctuation, capitalization and
emoticons are used to strategically frame and re-‐frame messages.

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C7 ANALYZING CONTEXTS

Analyzing the communicative competence members of a particular speech
community bring to a particular speech event requires more than just the
analysis of texts or transcripts (though one can often tell a lot from such an
analysis). It requires observing people interacting in the speech event and
talking to them about what they think they need to know in order to participate
in it successfully. Often one must talk with multiple participants in order to find
out what it is like for people playing different roles in the event.

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson and the psychiatrist Jurgen Ruesch (Ruesch
and Bateson 1968) say that there are at least four kinds of information an
ethnographer should gather: 1) members’ generalizations (what participants
think other people need to know and do to participate in the speech event); 2)
individual experiences (the specific, concrete knowledge and experiences of
individual people who have participated in the speech event in the past); 3)
‘objective’ observation (the observation of people participating in the speech
event); and 4) the analyst’s comparison of what he or she has observed and
heard from participants with his or her own knowledge and behavior in similar
speech events in his or her own speech community. Sometimes these different
kinds of information contradict one another: participants, for example, may
attribute certain behavior to other members of their speech community but say
that they themselves do things differently, or they may say they behave in a
particular way but can be observed behaving in an entirely different way. The
important thing for the analyst is not to privilege any of these four kinds of
information, but to take them together in order to get a full picture of what is
going on from the point of view of the participants. It is important to remember
that the ethnographer of speaking is less interested in what is ‘objectively’
occurring in a speech event as in what participants think is occurring and what
they need to know to participate as legitimate members of their group.

The greatest danger in using a model like Hymes’s SPEAKING model is that the
analyst simply describes the expectations participants have regarding each of the
components in a rather mechanical way, like filling out a check list, without
offering much in the way of analysis. While this can at least provide a general
idea of how the speech event happens, it does not tell us very much about why it
happens the way it does. The analyst cannot stop at just describing the various
components, but also needs to ask 1) why different components have particular
expectations associated with them, 2) how the expectations associated with
different components interact and affect one another, and 3) why certain
components seem more important and other components less important to
participants.

Below are some useful tips to help you avoid falling into the trap of mechanical
description:

Compare and contrast
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One way to really understand whether the communicative competencies you
have uncovered through your analysis are really significant is to compare and
contrast different speech events or the different experiences and perspectives of
different participants engaged in the same speech event. One of the reasons
Ruesch and Bateson recommend that analysts compare the speech event they
are studying with one that is more familiar to them is to help them to better
notice those aspects of the speech event which they might be misunderstanding
or taking for granted,

Be specific

It is important for the analyst to be as specific as possible in his or her
description of the expectations people have about the different components. This
sometimes involves asking probing questions or observing what people say or
do carefully, paying close attention to detail.

Remember that all components are not equal

One of the most important things an analyst will want to notice is that
participants may regard the expectations governing some components to be
stricter than those governing others, and that some behavior might be regarded
as more or less ‘compulsory’, while other behavior might be regarded as
‘optional’. It is also important to note how expectations regarding one
component can affect the kinds of expectations participants have about other
components. In other words, it is important to notice which kinds of behavior
tend to co-‐occur in speech events (for example, the genre of a joke may tend to
co-‐occur with a humorous or light-‐hearted key).

Explore transgressions

One good way to understand what people are expected to do in a particular
situation is to find out what happens when they fail to do what they are expected
to do. This is because, while appropriate behavior usually passes unremarked
upon, inappropriate behavior is often an occasion for participants to explicitly
discuss their otherwise tacit assumptions and expectations. Therefore, noticing
or talking with participants about mistakes, transgressions, inappropriate
behavior or ‘incompetence’ can be a good way to clarify what they regard as
appropriate and why.

‘Don't Bite My Shit’

It would be impossible to conduct a full ethnographic analysis of a speech event
in the space remaining in this section. What I can do, however, is discuss the
meaning and significance of a particular utterance in the social and cultural
context in which it occurs. The utterance, one which I heard frequently during
my ethnographic study of urban skateboarders in Hong Kong (reported in Jones
2008), is: “Hey man, don’t bite my shit.’ I heard this utterance or some variation
of it many times during my fieldwork, sometimes uttered in a playful manner,
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and sometimes with deadly seriousness. In order to understand the meaning of
the utterance and the kinds of cultural expectations that underpin it, it is
necessary to understand something about the cultural context in which it occurs.

Skateboarding in Hong Kong, as in most places, takes place within the context of
a speech situation, which we can call a ‘skate session’. These sessions usually
occur at skate parks, but sometimes occur in other places such as on sidewalks,
in parking lots and in city squares. Skaters regard the skating that goes on in
parks and that which goes on in these other places to be two different ‘genres’ of
skating, one which is called ‘park skating’ and the other is called ‘street skating’.
In Hong Kong, ‘park skating’ always occurs during the day when the skate parks
are open, and ‘street skating’ almost always occurs at night when fewer people
are around to interfere with the activity. Skate sessions can last many hours and
sometimes involve skaters moving from setting to setting. They may, for
example, begin a session in the skate park in the afternoon, and then move to the
street after the skate park closes.

Skaters generally participate in skate sessions in ‘crews’ or ‘posses’, groups of
people who usually skate together and who often share a certain style of
dressing or acting (for example ‘punk’ or ‘hip-‐hop’) and are usually of a similar
level of skill. People hardly ever skate alone. One reason for this is that among
the main aims of a skating session is to let others witness one performing daring
or difficult tricks. This aim of making oneself as spectacle for others is reinforced
by the the fact that they often bring video cameras with them during skate
sessions to film one another.

At a skate park at any given time there are likely to be multiple ‘crews’, and one
of the core competencies for members of this community is understanding how
to manage the use of space in order to avoid conflicts among crews. In street
skating sessions these conflicts can sometimes become intense if one crew
claims the exclusive right to skate at a particular spot and tries to deny access to
other crews. At skate parks, this does not happen since these parks are public
property and the rights for all skaters to use them is policed by park attendants
and security guards. Therefore, different crews must cooperate and carefully
negotiate the use of space.

Skate sessions normally consist of multiple ‘speech events’ including
conversations, horseplay, games of ‘SKATE’ (a highly structured game in which
skaters compete in performing tricks) and ‘doing lines’. ‘Doing lines’ involves
skaters taking turns executing ‘lines’ upon various obstacles (such as rails, stairs
and ramps). A ‘line’ is one or more ‘tricks’ (most of which have names ‘ollie’ and
‘kickflip’) done in succession. Skaters work to compose lines which showcase
their skill and imagination. Often members of different crews will occupy
different parts of the park and content themselves with different obstacles.
Sometimes, however, people from different crews make use of the same obstacle,
having to take turns with one another. It is in the mechanism of turn taking
among members of different crews that the notion of ‘biting someone’s shit’
becomes relevant.

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‘Biting someone’s shit’ in the context of the ‘speech event’ of ‘doing lines’ refers
to the action of imitating or repeating the line executed by the previous person in
the queue. The meaning of this action depends crucially on the relationship
between the person who does it and the person whose line has been imitated.
When it is done by a member of a different crew, it can be taken as a challenge or
sign of disrespect – a transgression of the rules of etiquette associated with
‘doing lines’. In this case, the utterance ‘Hey man, don’t bite my shit,’ can be
interpreted as a warning or a threat. In cases where the person who ‘bites one’s
shit’ is a member of one’s own crew, it can be seen as a matter of friendly
competition or even a way of showing respect for one’s crew member by
emulating him. In this case, the utterance ‘Hey man, don’t bite my shit,’ might be
interpreted as teasing. In the context of a different speech event, such as a game
of ‘SKATE’, repeating the trick that the previous person has done is expected and
so does not constitute ‘biting someone’s shit’.

The point that this example illustrates is that the meaning of an utterance like
‘don’t bite my shit’ cannot be interpreted with reference to only one component
of the SPEAKING model, but can only be understood as a matter of the
interaction among multiple components: place, participants, goals, the expected
sequence of acts, the tone in which the utterance is said, the various media
involved in the communication (including things like participants’ dress and
their skateboards), norms about what constitutes ‘showing respect’ to others,
and the genre—whether it is ‘park skating’ or ‘street skating’. More importantly,
successful use of and interpretation of this speech act incorporates a complex
range of cultural knowledge regarding the values, identities and norms of
conduct of this particular community of young (mostly male) skateboarders in
Hong Kong.


Activity

Choose a speech event in which people that you know normally participate but
with which you are not entirely familiar. Interview the people involved with the
aim of finding out what their expectations are about who should say what to
whom, when, how and why. Ask people both about the kind of communicative
competence most members of their speech community have and about their own
personal competence and their own personal experiences with this particular
speech event. After that, see if you can find occasion to observe people taking
part in this speech event. Notice not just what is said, by who says it, when and
how. Use the components of the SPEAKING model as a guideline for your
analysis. Choose a number of phrases or an exchange that you think could not be
fully understood outside of the context of this speech event, and list the kind of
knowledge people need to have to interpret these utterances correctly.

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C8 DOING MEDIATED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

In this section we will explore how to apply the tools of mediated discourse
analysis to the analysis of social actions, social practices and sites of engagement.
The three concepts that we will be working with are:

1) the notion of affordances and constraints: the idea that different kinds of
cultural tools make certain kinds of actions and certain kinds of social identities
associated with those actions either more or less possible;

2) the notion of social practices: the idea that certain actions combined with
other actions and with certain cultural tools come to be regarded as
recognizable social practices and that discourse can play an important role in
maintaining and promoting these social practices;

3) the notion of sites of engagement: the idea that actions take place at the nexus
of cultural tools, social relationships and the experiences, knowledge and skill of
individual social actors, and the way these three elements come together can
help us to understand how a particular social action will be performed.

‘Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover’

In her book The Breakup 2.0, Ilana Gershon discusses how different kinds of
media affect the way people perform the action of ‘breaking up’ with a romantic
partner and the way they come to regard this action as a particular kind of social
practice. Of course there are many ways this action could be performed. One
might confront the person with whom one wishes to break up face-‐to-‐face either
in public or in a private place, call him or her on the telephone, or send what is
known as a ‘Dear John Letter’. Technology has introduced a number of new
cultural tools with which to perform this action: one could send an email, for
example, negotiate the breakup using instant messaging or mobile phone based
text messaging, or one could post a message or change one’s ‘relationship status’
on Facebook.

Gershon interviewed a large number of people about their ideas about and
experiences of breaking up and found that people had very strong feelings about
how the medium used can affect the action of breaking up. In particular, they felt
that people who used the ‘wrong’ medium risked enacting the ‘wrong’ kind of
social identity, that is, being considered ‘the wrong kind of person’ by others.

Activity

Think about the affordances and constraints of the different kinds of media one
might use to accomplish the action of breaking up. For example, breaking up
face-‐to-‐face makes it easier for the person doing the breaking up to gauge the
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other person’s reaction and adapt his or her message accordingly, but it can
make it more difficult to end the conversation (and the relationship) quickly and
easily. This medium also makes it easier for the person being ‘broken up with’ to
respond and ask for reasons and clarification, but it may make it more difficult
for him or her to hide any feelings of disappointment or sadness that might arise.
Because of these affordances and constraints, people tend to think some media
are ‘better’ for breaking up than other media and associate different media for
breaking up with different ‘kinds of people’.

Fill in the chart below based on your own beliefs and experiences about the
things different media make harder or more difficult to do during the breaking
up process. Then rank the different media in terms of 1) how much you would
prefer to use it if you are breaking up with someone, and 2) how much you
would prefer it to be used if you are the one being broken up with. Note if there
is a difference in your ranking for these two situations. How do you account for
this difference? What does this tell you about the relationship between cultural
tools and social identities?

Compare your answers with those of someone else and discuss if and why you
have different opinions about the kinds of people associated with different media
for breaking up.

Table C8.1 Cultural tools for breaking up

Medium Affordances and Constraints Rank
(1) (2)
Face-‐to-‐Face
Conversation

Telephone
Conversation

Letter or Email

Instant
Messaging
Conversation
Text Message

Facebook
Relationship
Status

Of course, most of the time when people engage in a complex social practice like
breaking up with a lover they use a combination of cultural tools, including a
combination of media. They might begin breaking up with a text message,
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continue the negotiation of the break up through an instant messaging
conversation, and complete the process in a face-‐to-‐face meeting.

Think about how the social practice of breaking up is constructed in your social
circle. What smaller actions are usually included in this practice (such as ‘making
an appointment to meet’, or ‘apologizing for hurting the other person’s feelings’)
and how are these usually combined? What sorts of cultural tools (such as
objects, media, genres, social languages, gestures or facial expressions) are used
and how do these tools affect how the practice is accomplished?

Being ‘In a relationship’ on Facebook

Just as breaking up is a complex social practice, entering into a romantic
relationship with someone can also be complicated. The people involved must
negotiate the point at which they are prepared to express to each other and to
other people that they know that they are ‘in a relationship’. This is
accomplished differently in different societies. In North America when I was
growing up, boys usually gave their girlfriends their school ring which the girl
would wear around her neck to announce that she was ‘going steady’ with the
owner of the ring.

The ways the social practice of entering into a relationship have changed as a
result of new media like Facebook is also a topic Gershon takes up in her book.
Facebook provides a specific tool for people to accomplish the action of
announcing their ‘relationship status’ to others, allowing them to indicate on
their profiles if they are ‘single’, ‘in a relationship’, ‘engaged’, ‘married’, ‘in a civil
union’, ‘in a domestic partnership’, ‘it’s complicated’, ‘in an open relationship’,
‘widowed’, ‘separated’, or ‘divorced’.

This tool itself comes with a number of obvious affordances and constraints.
While it allows users to indicate that they are in certain kinds of relationships,
for example, it makes it more difficult for them to indicate that they are in other
kinds of relationships that may not be covered by the choices in the drop down
menu. It also makes ambiguity in relationships more difficult by putting social
pressure on users to announce their status to others in their social network.
Gershon talks about the negotiations couples go through about when to make
their relationship ‘Facebook official’, as well as the complications that arise when
they end up breaking up and having to decide how and when to change their
relationship status back to ‘single’.

The problem is that one cannot fully understand how this cultural tool has
affected the practices of entering into and maintaining romantic relationships
just by looking at these choices, because not everybody uses them in the same
way. Different people and groups have different ways of using the ‘relationship
status’ on Facebook. Some people use it not to announce romantic relationships
but to avoid having to give information about their romantic entanglements by,
for example, indicating that they are ‘married’ to their best friend. The only way
to understand how social practices of relationship management have changed
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because of Facebook is to consider the interaction among the cultural tools the
website makes available, the relationships among the people in a particular
social network, and the knowledge, habits and norms associated with the
‘historical bodies’ of specific users.

Activity

Consider your social network on Facebook or some other social networking site
as a site of engagement. Think about how you and your friends use and interpret
the ‘relationship status’ function (or some other equivalent function on another
site). Analyze how the accomplishment of the social practice of using this
function depends on 1) the affordances and constraints built into the technology
itself, 2) the actual relationships among the people who belong to your social
network, especially those who are associated with each other using this function,
and 3) your own habits, knowledge and experiences associated with this
function.

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C9 ANALYZING MULTIMODALITY

In this section we will practice applying some of the ideas we introduced in
Sections A9 and B9 to the analysis of multimodality in a text and a face-‐to-‐face
interaction. We will try to show how the analysis of multimodality can not just
help us to understand how texts and interactions are structured, by also how
they promote certain ideologies and power relationships.

Multimodal discourse analysis is a complex and rapidly developing field, and it
would be impossible to demonstrate all of the many tools and concepts analysts
have developed for the analysis of things like images, gestures, gaze and posture.
Instead we will introduce a few basic tools and key questions that can guide you
in this kind of analysis and encourage you to refer to the sources in the list of
Further Readings for information on other tools and procedures.

‘It’s nice to be chased’

This first example is an advertisement that appeared in the stations of the Mass
Transit Railway in Hong Kong in 2005. It portrays a woman with wings in the
foreground and two men in the background holding butterfly nets. The setting of
the picture seems to be a wooded area reminiscent of the setting of fairly tales,
and this ‘fairly tale feeling’ is increased by the unconventional dress of the
participants and the wings on the woman's back. Underneath the two men
appears the slogan: ‘It’s nice to be chased. Butterfly Bra by Wacoal’ (figure C9.1).

Figure C9.1 Wacoal Bra advertisement (1)

Ideational Function

This picture contains three participants: one woman and the two men, who are
interacting with one another in a kind of narrative. The image shows one
moment in the story, which the viewer is invited to imagine as part of a more
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extended (perhaps endless) ‘chase’. As a narrative, however, it is interesting
because the main action consists only of ‘gazing’; the viewer is asked to infer the
higher-‐level action of ‘chasing’ from the information in the slogan, the butterfly
nets and his or her own world knowledge.

The main action vectors are formed by the gazes of the two men toward the
woman who is looking away rather than retuning the gaze (see figure C9.2). At
first this seems to be a one-‐sided action, as the woman does not return the gaze.
However, the words help to give the impression that the woman actually is
aware of the men's gaze but is pretending not to be. Rather than returning their
gaze, she is ‘playing hard to get,’ responding to the gaze by 'posing'.

The thing that makes this picture interesting and problematic is a second set of
vectors moving downward from each of the men's shoulders with their arms
moving towards one another. This gives the impression that they might be
holding hands, although their hands are obscured by foliage. And so the status of
the participants becomes ambiguous-‐-‐the vector from their eyes moves towards
the woman. The vector from their arms moves towards each other. Aside from
the hint of a homosexual relationship, this ambiguity constructs these figures as
both cooperating to catch the woman and competing with each other.

Figure C9.2 Wacoal Bra advertisement (2)

Interpersonal Function

None of the participants in the picture looks at the viewer. The men look towards
the woman, and the woman looks up into space. This gives the viewer the feeling
of looking at a private scene. In other words, the viewer takes the position of a
voyeur. Positioning the reader like this reinforces the theme of the picture-‐-‐
'watching'. The men are secretly watching the woman. The woman is secretly
pretending not to know she is being watched. And the viewer is secretly
watching the whole scene. Thus, although the viewer is not connected to the
characters through gaze, he or she is nevertheless made to feel somehow part of
the image by being placed into this voyeur-‐like position.

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The woman is positioned in the foreground of the image, closer to the viewer,
and, although she is not looking at him or her, this creates and increased feeling
of intimacy and identification with this character. The intimacy is increased
because we can see her face and the men cannot, and also because she is
(presumably) 'speaking' to us through the printed text.

Although the forest vegetation and the men are shown in photographic accuracy,
the picture does not seem to present a 'true' or realistic world, but rather a
dream world. This impression is reinforced by the high color saturation and the
non-‐realistic elements (such as the woman's wings).

Textual Function

The woman is obviously the most important character in the story as she is
placed in the foreground of the picture with her whole body displayed while the
men are in the background with half of their bodies obscured. The woman is also
placed in the lower left quadrant of the picture, the quadrant of the ‘given’ and
the ‘real’, while the men occupy the upper right quadrant of the picture, where
the ‘new’ and the ‘ideal’ usually appear. There are a number of possible reasons
for this. One is that the woman in the picture is intended to be portrayed as
passive, earth-‐like and 'natural', and the men as active, thinking, rational,
intellectual. Another reason might be that the woman (and her bra) are
presented as a cause and the men chasing her are presented as a result of this
cause. Still another possibly is that the intended viewer of the image (probably a
woman) is likely be more interested in the men—and if she ‘reads’ the picture in
the expected way, her eye moves across and upward to towards the men' in the
upper part of the picture. The irony is that while the image portrays men looking
at a woman, the composition of the image is such that the gaze of the viewer
moves away from the woman and towards the men.

Ideology

This picture is rich in imagery from both science and literature. The scene
reminds the viewer of fairly tales and myths containing forest nymphs. At the
same time, there is the clear hint of sexual pursuit, reinforced by the relative lack
of clothing of all participants. The innocence of the ‘Discourse’ of fairly tales,
then, is juxtaposed with the 'adultness' of the sexual narrative. There is also the
‘Discourse of science’ present, with the woman being portrayed as a 'specimen'
for the men to catch, admire, examine and catalogue. The implication is that she
is just one of many specimens that may have been caught. The ad seems to be
communicating to young women that to be put in the position of the woman in
this ad is desirable: to be watched (secretly) by men, to be competed over, to be
‘chased’ are things to which she should aspire. At the same time, although the
woman in the image is passive, there is still a sense that she is in some way in
control of the situation; she enjoys being chased, and catching her is likely to be
difficult since she has the advantage of wings which her pursuers lack. Thus, the
product, the Butterfly Bra, like the butterfly wings, is constructed as making a
woman simultaneously more desirable but less likely to be ‘caught’.

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Activity

Find an advertisement from a magazine, website, billboard or some other
medium which features one or more images and analyze it in the same way we
analyzed the example above, considering how the visual elements (as well as the
text) create ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning. Also consider how
these three kinds of meaning work together to promote a particular ‘version of
reality’ or to create or reinforce a certain set of social relationships.

Fifteen seconds in a writing center

Now we will turn to how you might go about analyzing multimodality in face-‐to-‐
face interaction, using as an example just fifteen seconds of interaction in a
university writing center where students go to get advice about their written
assignments from peer tutors. The fact that we will only be looking at a very
small segment attests to the multimodal richness of most face-‐to-‐face interaction
-‐-‐ quite a lot can occur in just fifteen seconds. At the same time, this kind of
microanalysis can also be risky if the analyst looses sight of the higher-‐level
actions that the segment under analysis is part of. Thus, in a thorough
multimodal analysis of interaction, the analysts always alternates his or her
attention from the small details to the ‘big picture’, always asking how micro-‐
elements like gaze and posture shifts, gesture and intonation contours help
participants to accomplish the higher-‐level actions they are engaged in.

This example also demonstrates one way of producing a multimodal
transcription. The segment of interaction to be analyzed is presented in 12
frames captured from a digital video of the tutoring session (see figure C9.4). The
frames were not captured at any regular time interval. Rather, a frame was
captured each time a new meaningful lower-‐level action such as a gaze shift, a
gesture, or a ‘tone unit’ of speech was produced. As can be seen in the images, in
many of the frames multiple meaningful actions were performed across multiple
modes simultaneously. In the type of transcription demonstrated here (adapted
from Norris 2005), things like head movements, the trajectory of gestures and
the direction of gaze are marked with arrows, and the speech of participants is
represented in text of varying sizes above their heads, the size and direction of
the letters representing stress and intonation.

The analysis we will demonstrate here will focus on intermodal relationships,
how actions taken with different modes of communication work together and
affect one another. It will make use of two basic concepts: sequentiality -‐-‐ the idea
that lower-‐level actions are arranged in meaningful sequences to form higher-‐
level actions -‐-‐ and simultaneity – the idea that when actions are produced at the
same time, they can affect how each other should be interpreted. Related to these
two concepts is the notion that all actions are mutually negotiated between
participants in interaction. The actions that one person performs are always in
some ways influenced or constrained by the actions that the other person
performs.

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As mentioned above, one aim of such an analysis is to identify the lower-‐level
actions and understand how they combine together to form higher-‐level actions.
The ultimate aim, however, is to use such an analysis to understand how people
use the many resources that are available to them to perform social practices and
enact social identities in ways that promote and reinforce particular ‘Discourses’
or social relationships.

a. (1 sec) b. (2 sec) c. (3 sec)
d. (5 sec) e. (6 sec) f. (7 sec)
g. (8 sec) h. (9 sec) i. (10 sec)
j. (13 sec) k. (14 sec) l. (15 sec)

Figure C9.3 An interaction in a writing center

The two participants in this segment are the tutor (the woman seated on the
right, and the client (the man seated on the left). The session begins with the
tutor saying, ‘so…ummm,’ and making two small beat gestures with her pen
towards the client’s essay lying on the table in time with the two syllables (frame
a). Beat gestures are perhaps the most common kinds of gestures. We use them
to keep time in interactions, often tracking the rhythm of our speech, and they
are important in helping participants synchronize things like turn taking. They
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can also function to signal that a new higher-‐level action or a new ‘frame’ is being
taken up, much like discourse markers (see Section B6). In this case the two beats
along with the utterance signal that a new part of the tutoring session is about to
start.

In frames b though f the tutor asks, ‘is there anything in particular you think you
want some more help with?’ This utterance is accompanied by a complex
combination of actions that contribute to constructing the meaning of the
utterance and the relationship between the participants. As she says the words,
‘anything particular’, the tutor points to the client’s essay and inscribes a circle in
the air with her pen. This is followed by a downward motion on the stressed
syllable ‘TIC’. Gestures like this, which involve pointing, are known as deictic
gestures. The tutor follows this deictic gesture towards the essay with another
one, pointing her pen towards the client when she says, ‘YOU think.’ Right after
she utters the word ‘think’, the client leans slightly forward and raises his hand
to his chin, forming the iconic gesture5 of a person deep in thought. This is a good
an example of the way listeners use modes like gesture to contribute to
conversations even when they do not have access to the resource of speech.

As the tutor says, ‘you want some more help with,’ she gazes at the client,
signaling that she is preparing to end her turn. Gaze is an important resource for
the managing of turn-‐taking in conversation, with speakers often looking away
when they are speaking and then turning their gaze back to their interlocutor
when they are finished. When the tutor finishes her question, she leans back
slightly and brushes the hair from her face, almost as if she is clearing
interactional space for the client’s response as he issues a hesitant ‘ummmmm’.

As she is waiting for his response, the tutor tilts her head downward and directs
her gaze towards the essay, as if signaling that it is there that the client might
find the answer to her questions (frame i). This is also a kind of deictic gesture,
but she is using her head to point rather than her hand. The client answers this
downward motion with an upward motion of his arm to touch his glasses,
another iconic gesture signaling that he is ‘searching’ for something he would
like help with. Then the client lowers his hand and asks, ‘do you know the
meaning of this paragraph?’, inscribing exactly the same kind of circle above his
essay that the tutor had just moments before (frame k).

The modes of gaze, head movement, posture, gesture, and prosody in this short
segment do not just help participants to frame their utterances and organize the
interaction. These modes also work together to construct the higher-‐level action
of ‘having a tutorial’ and to construct the relationship between the two
participants as one of unequal power. The tutor demonstrates her power over
the client in a number of small ways: though gaze (she gazes at him much more
than he does at her), though her posture (she sits higher and straighter than he

5 Iconic gestures can be distinguished from other kinds of gestures for conveying ideas such as
metaphoric gestures. Whereas iconic gestures represent concepts or actions in a way that forms a
rather direct physical imitation of them, metaphoric gestures represent concepts and actions in
more abstract, metaphorical ways.
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does), and though gestures (she frequently points at him and at his essay with
her pen and her head). Furthermore, all of the client’s gestures (the ‘thinking’
gesture, the ‘searching’ gesture, and the imitation of the tutor’s deictic circle)
seem to be in response to the tutor’s words or gestures, as if she is controlling
him like a puppet. Another important mode the tutor uses to maintain control of
the interaction, which we have not mentioned, is object handling. Not only does
she hold a pen throughout the interaction (while the client is empty handed), but
she also keeps her left hand placed on the edge of the client’s essay during this
entire segment as if she is prepared to take it away from him at any moment.

Activity

Videotape a short interaction and divide a segment of the video into frames using
an easy to use computer program like iMovie (Mac) or Windows Movie Maker.
Analyze how participants use the modes of gesture, gaze, posture, head
movement, and prosody along with the mode of spoken language to create
meaning and manage the interaction. Pay attention to how lower-‐level actions
are sequenced to form higher-‐level actions and how actions performed
simultaneously affect one another’s meaning.

145
C10 ANALYZING CORPORA

In order to illustrate the procedures for corpus assisted discourse analysis
explained in Section B10, in this section I will examine a corpus of song lyrics by
Lady Gaga, compare it to a more general corpus of pop music, and discuss how
things like concordances and frequency lists can be used to generate theories
about texts in a corpus. Working though these procedures with a specific corpus
will also give me a chance to discuss some of the practical aspects of creating and
working with corpora. I recommend that you download AntConc or some other
software program for corpus analysis before reading this chapter, and as you
read along try out some of the procedures with a corpus of your own, perhaps a
corpus of song lyrics from your own favorite singer.

My corpus consists of the lyrics of 59 songs released by Lady Gaga as of
November, 2010. Song lyrics are a good example of a type of text which might
have to be ‘cleaned’ or otherwise altered before being suitable for inclusion in a
corpus. For example, such texts often include things like labels indicating ‘chorus’
or ‘verse’, which are not relevant to the analysis and should be removed.6
Sometimes repeated words or phrases are written in a kind of shorthand (e.g. I
love you x 3). These need to be written out fully so that the texts reflect exactly
what is sung. For my corpus, song titles and labels like chorus and verse were
deleted. Each song was saved in a separate text file and loaded into AntConc.

For my reference corpus I decided to choose a more general sampling of pop
music from the same period. Thus, I compiled a corpus of the Billboard top 100
pop songs from November 2010. What this means, of course, is that my reference
corpus is almost twice the size of my primary corpus. This is, in fact, normal,
since a reference corpus generally contains a broader sampling of texts. These
texts were prepared in the same manner as the texts for the Lady Gaga corpus.

Table C10.1 Size of corpora and type token ratio

No. of Texts No. of Tokens No. of Types Type Token
Ratio
Lady Gaga 59 11.44 19601 1713
Songs
Top 100 Hits 100 33412 3680 9.07
(11/11)

Table C10.1 shows the number of texts as well as the number of tokens and types
in each corpus. It also shows the type token ratio for each corpus. Note that the
type token ration for both of these corpora is rather low compared to the BNC
written (45.53) and spoken (32.96) corpora. This is not surprising. Pop music

6 A more advanced practitioner, especially one interested in genre analysis, might remove these
labels but also ‘tag’ the different parts of songs using XML language so that analysis could be done
just on the choruses or just on the verses of songs.
146
generally involves quite a lot of repetition and a fairly narrow range of topics. As
can be seen from the chart, the type token ratio for the Lady Gaga corpus is
slightly higher than the reference corpus, suggesting that Lady Gaga’s lyrics
might exhibit more lexical complexity than other pop music produced around the
same time.

Table C10.2 Top five function words

100 Top Songs Lady Gaga Songs
Word Rank Freq. % of Word Rank Freq. % of
Tokens Tokens
I 1 1709 5.11 I 1 866 4.41
you 2 1167 3.49 you 2 718 3.66
the 3 870 2.6 the 3 463 2.36
and 4 687 2.05 oh 4 433 2.2
it 5 629 1.88 me 5 398 2.03

Table C10.2 shows the frequency of the most frequently occurring function words
in the two corpora along with their overall ranking, their numerical frequency
and the percentage of the total tokens they represent. Note that the percentage
of total tokens is important when you are comparing corpora of different sizes.
Some programs will calculate this for you, but with AntConc users must do this
themselves.

The fact that the most frequent words in both of these corpora are ‘I’ and ‘you’ is
consistent with other corpus based studies of popular music. Murphey (1992)
found a similar degree of frequency for these pronouns in a corpus of English
pop songs from the late 80s. This, of course, makes sense given that pop songs
usually involve a singer (or singer persona) singing to another person, usually a
lover.

What is interesting in our findings is the relative frequency of the accusative
form ‘me’ in the Lady Gaga corpus. In fact, the pronoun ‘me’ occurs almost twice
as frequently in the Lady Gaga corpus (2.03% of the total tokens) than it does in
the reference corpus (1.3% of the total tokens). This suggests that the singer
persona in Lady Gaga’s songs portrays herself more frequently in the ‘object’
position, the position of having things done to or for her, than singers in other
songs.

Table C10.3 Top five content words

100 Top Songs Lady Gaga Songs
Word Rank Freq. % of Word Rank Freq. % of
Tokens Tokens
like 23 234 .70 love 17 193 .98
baby 34 166 .49 baby 21 158 .80
know 36 155 .46 want 29 109 .56
love 39 143 .43 know 36 91 .46
gonna 42 127 .38 no 37 91 .46
147

Table C10.3 shows the five most frequent content words in the two corpora. As
you can see, content words occur much less frequently than function words.
Again, the words listed are words normally associated with pop music like ‘love’
and ‘baby’. One interesting finding is the grater frequency of the word ‘love’ in
the corpus of Lady Gaga lyrics compared to the reference corpora. This might
lead one to think that love is a greater preoccupation of Lady Gaga than it is of
other popular singers. But the truth, of course, is more complicated than that
and, as we will see below, has much to do with the way the notion of ‘love’ is
discursively constructed in Lady Gaga’s music.

Word frequency lists can often suggest suitable candidates for concordance
searches and collocation analysis. In this case, I have decided to do a
concordance of the word ‘me’, due to its relative frequency in the Lady Gaga
corpus as compared to the reference corpus. Figures C10.1 and C10.2 show
sections of that search, which revealed a number of different kinds of words
congregating around the word ‘me’. One of the most common, of course, was
‘love’. Another common collocate was ‘look’ or ‘looked’, with the singer persona
frequently talking about being looked at or not being looked at. Other common
phrases included ‘touch me’, ‘kiss me’, ‘feel me’, and ‘tell me’.

This initial analysis suggests some very interesting differences between the
construction of ‘love’ in the Lady Gaga corpus and that in the reference corpus: In
the Lady Gaga corpus ‘love’ and its associated processes of looking, touching and
kissing are often portrayed as directed toward the singer. That is, the singer is
portrayed primarily as the object of other people’s love.

Figure C10.1 Partial concordance list for ‘me’

148

Figure C10.2 Partial concordance list for ‘me’

A collocation analysis of the word ‘love’ also reveals differences between the
Lady Gaga corpus and the reference corpus. Table C10.4 shows the five top
collocates of the word love in a span ranging from five words to the left of love
and five words to the right

Table C10.4 Top 5 collocates of ‘love’ (span 5L, 5R)

Lady Gaga Corpus 100 Song Corpus
I I
you you
want my
your the
me me

While ‘I and ‘you’ collocate frequently with the word ‘love’ in both corpora, the
words “want’ and ‘your’ appear as the third and forth most frequent collocates in
the Lady Gaga corpus as opposed to ‘my’ and ‘the’, which take these places in the
reference corpus, again suggesting a greater preoccupation on the part of the
singer in the Lady Gaga corpus than in the reference corpus with receiving love
from the listener.

One final procedure I would like to demonstrate is the keyword list, which, as you
will recall from Section B10 is generated by calculating the statistical probability
of words occurring in a corpus with reference to a larger, more general corpus.
Keywords, in other words, are words that are in some ways ‘special’, in that they
occur with a greater frequency than they would in ‘normal’ circumstances.

Figure C10.3 shows the 22 words with the highest measure of ‘keyness’ in the
Lady Gage corpus. Some of these words appear simply because they are unique
to this collection of songs and are unlikely to occur in other songs –words like
149
‘Alejandro’ (a man’s name and the title of one of Lady Gaga’s songs), and ‘fu’
which occurs in the lyrics: ‘I want your fu-‐fu-‐fu-‐fu future love.’

Other words, however, while they might be common in pop songs, are words
that point to topics that are particularly salient in the music of Lady Gaga, words
like ‘disco’, ‘fame’ and ‘romance’. One particularly interesting finding is the high
keyness of negative words like ‘dirty’ and ‘bad’. It is also interesting that the two
words with the highest degree of ‘keyness’ in the corpus are the ‘sound words’
‘oh’ and ‘eh’, reflecting the frequently occurring streams of nonsense syllables
that characterize Lady Gaga’s lyrics.

Figure C10.3 Keywords in the Lady Gaga corpus


Activity

a. Use the analysis described above as the starting point for a closer examination
of Lady Gaga’s song lyrics (available at http://www.ladygaga.com), using some of
the principles of text analysis discussed in section B4. You might, for example,
focus on things like transitivity, modality, and intertextuality). Does your close
reading of the text confirm and build upon any of the findings of the corpus
analysis?
b. Compile your own corpus of pop songs from another singer and conduct a
similar analysis, comparing this singer’s discourse with that of Lady Gaga.

150

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