Chapter 1 What's Discourse Analysis
Chapter 1 What's Discourse Analysis
Chapter 1 What's Discourse Analysis
“In his view, contexts are not objective conditions but rather (inter)subjective constructs that are constantly updated by
participants in their interactions with each other as members of groups or communities.”
“Firth draws on the anthropologist Malinowski’s (1923, 1935) notions of context of
situation and context of culture to discuss this relationship, arguing that in order to
understand the meaning of what a person says or writes we need to know something
about the situational and cultural context in which it is located. That is, if you don’t know
what the people involved in a text are doing and don’t understand their culture ‘then you
can’t make sense of their text’ (Martin 2001: 151).”
- Situational context, or context of situation, refers to the environment, time and place, etc. in which the discourse
occurs, and also the relationship between the participants. ...
- Cultural context refers to the culture, customs and background in language communities in which the speakers
participate.
-- Do you think he will?
-- Perhaps eventually he will. I think he should, and I very much hope he will.
(Zhang yunfei, 2000, p.245)
“Discourse analysis, then, is interested in ‘what happens when people draw on the knowledge
they have about language . . . to do things in the world’ (Johnstone 2002: 3). It is, thus, the
analysis of language in use. Discourse analysis considers the relationship between language and
the contexts in which it is used and is concerned with the description and analysis of both spoken
and written interactions. Its primary purpose, as Chimombo and Roseberry (1998) argue, is to
provide a deeper understanding and appreciation of texts and how they become meaningful to
their users”
‘how people organize what they say in the sense of what they typically say first,
and what they say next and so on in a conversation or in a piece of writing.”
There are, thus, particular things we say and particular ways of ordering what we
say in particular spoken and written situations and in particular languages and
cultures.
Stages
Mitchell (1957) was one the first researchers to examine the discourse structure of
texts.
- the ways in which people order what they say in buying and selling interactions.
(the overall structure of these kinds of texts)
-introducing the notion of stages into discourse analysis;
the steps that language users go through as they carry out particular
interactions.
- His interest was more in the ways in which interactions are organized at an
overall textual level than the ways in which language is used in each of the stages
of a text.
Hasan (1989a) has continued this work into the analysis of service encounters, as
has Ventola (1984, 1987). Hasan and Ventola aim to capture obligatory and
optional stages that are typical of service encounters.
- Greetings
- Rapport building
- Exchange of information
- Thanking
- Closing
An example: Insurance buying-selling interactions
In explaining to her parents why she thought Gregory was the worst (least moral) character in the story, the young woman
said the following:
Well, when I thought about it, I don’t know, it seemed to me that Gregory should be the most offensive. He showed no understanding for Abigail,
when she told him what she was forced to do. He was callous. He was hypocritical, in the sense that he professed to love her, then acted like that.
Earlier, in her discussion with her boyfriend, in an informal setting, she had also explained why she thought Gregory was
the worst character. In this context she said:
What an ass that guy was, you know, her boyfriend. I should hope, if I ever did that to see you, you would shoot the guy. He uses her and he says he
loves her. Roger never lies, you know what I mean?
“She had used two very different forms of language. The differences between Jane’s two social languages are everywhere
apparent in the two texts.
Jane appears to use more “school-like” language to her parents. Her language to them requires less inferencing on their part
and distances them as listeners from social and emotional involvement with what she is saying, while stressing, perhaps, their
cognitive involvement and their judgment of her and her “intelligence.” Her language to her boyfriend, on the other hand,
stresses social and affective involvement, solidarity, and co-participation in meaning making.
This young woman is making visible and recognizable two different versions of who she is and what she is doing. In one case
she is “a dutiful and intelligent daughter having dinner with her proud parents” and in the other case she is “a girlfriend
being intimate with her boyfriend.”
Gee (1996)
More details about Gee’s concept of social languages can be found here
Discourse and Performance
It is based on the view that in saying something, we do it (Cameron and Kulick
2003). That is, we bring states of affairs into being as a result of what we say and
what we do. Examples of this are I promise and I now pronounce you husband
and wife . Once I have said I promise I have committed myself to doing something.
Once a priest, or a marriage celebrant, says I now pronounce you husband and
wife , the couple have ‘become’ husband and wife.
Discourses are socially constructed, rather than ‘natural’. People ‘are who they are
because of (among other things) the way they talk’ not ‘because of who they
(already) are’ (Cameron 1999: 144).
Example:
What kind of identity was the influencer Reem Alsanea performing in her social
media posts?
Snapchat videos
Discourse and Intertextuality
All texts, whether they are spoken or written, make their meanings against the
background of other texts and things that have been said on other occasions
(Lemke 1992). Texts may more or less implicitly or explicitly cite other texts; they
may refer to other texts, or they may allude to other past, or future, texts. We thus
‘make sense of every word, every utterance, or act against the background of
(some) other words, utterances, acts of a similar kind’ (Lemke 1995: 23). All texts
are, thus, in an intertextual relationship with other texts.
What does that mean for discourse?
As Bazerman (2004: 83) argues:
We create our texts out of the sea of former texts that surround us, the sea of
language we live in. And we understand the texts of others within that same sea.
Texts carry traces from other cultural texts and through the combination of these
various meanings, our texts create their unique meanings