Chapter 1

What is discourse analysis?

Discourse analysis
Discourse Analysis
Discourse

Language in use; language above the sentences

- Includes the social, cultural, and psychological aspects in addition to

language
- Includes any ways of expressing meaning
- Typical ways of using language in particular situations that have shared
meanings and characteristic linguistic features.
Discourse and text
What is discourse analysis?
“Discourse analysis examines patterns of language across texts and considers the
relationship between language and the social and cultural contexts in which it is used.
Discourse analysis also considers the ways that the use of language presents different
views of the world and different understandings. It examines how the use of language is
influenced by relationships between participants as well as the effects the use of
language has upon social identities and relations. It also considers how views of the
world, and identities, are constructed through the use of discourse.”

— Discourse Analysis: An Introduction (Continuum Discourse) by Brian Paltridge

https://a.co/7pOnKSE
Discourse with the big D >

discourse with a small d > language in use

Learn more about big D Discourse and small d discourse

Content
- The relationship between discourse and context
- The discourse structure of texts
- Cultural ways of speaking and writing
The relationship between language and context?
What is context?

What is the relationship between context and language?

Why is context important in discourse analysis?

The relationship between language and context?
“By ‘the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour’ Harris means
how people know, from the situation that they are in, how to interpret what
someone says.”
The runway is full at the moment

- The expression above has a particular meaning in a particular situation and

may mean something different in another situation.
“The same discourse, thus, can be understood differently by different language
users as well as understood differently in different contexts (van Dijk 2011).”
Researchers define context from different point of views in order to answer
questions encountered in their analyses.
“context is a subjective construct that accounts not only for the uniqueness of each text but also for the common
ground and shared representations that language users draw on to communicate with each other (van Dijk 2008).”

“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).”

— Discourse Analysis: An Introduction (Continuum Discourse) by Brian Paltridge

https://a.co/bdm1q1W
“Halliday (1971) takes the discussion further by linking context of situation with
actual texts and context of culture with potential texts and the range of possibilities
that are open to language users for the creation of texts. The actual choices a
person makes from the options that are available to them within the particular
context of culture, thus, take place within a particular context of situation, both of
which influence the use of language in the text”

— Discourse Analysis: An Introduction (Continuum Discourse) by Brian Paltridge

https://a.co/3jJs5hu
- Linguistic context:

- 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?

-- I don‟t know. He might.

-- I suppose he ought to, but perhaps he feels he can‟t.

-- Well, his brothers have. They perhaps think he needn‟t.

-- 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”

— Discourse Analysis: An Introduction (Continuum Discourse) by Brian Paltridge

https://a.co/apFJRpw
The discourse structure of texts
By this we mean:

‘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.

- See the textbook for examples

Example: stages of Whatsapp chats
Participants: two classmates

purpose : asking about homework

- Greetings
- Rapport building
- Exchange of information
- Thanking
- Closing
An example: Insurance buying-selling interactions

A study that examines the structure of insurance buying-selling interactions.

- analysis of 40 recorded sales encounters involving actual salesmen (n=3) meeting with prospective buyers (n=57).
- despite alleged individual differences, the following sequence of events and relative times were common to all
discussions regarding the typical sales encounter:
Stage One: Content Initiation
Stage Two: Rapport Building
Stage Three: Exchange of Information
Stage Four: Persuasion Attempts
Stage Five: Close Attempts
Stage Six: Rapprochement
Other researchers have also investigated recurring patterns in spoken
interactions:

Researchers working in the area known as conversation analysis have looked at

how people open and close conversations and how people take turns and overlap
their speech in conversations, for example.
Cultural ways of speaking and writing
“Different cultures often have different ways of doing things through language.”

-Hymes’s (1964) notion of the ethnography of communication.

In particular, he considered aspects of speech events such as who is speaking to

whom, about what, for what purpose, where and when, and how these impact on
how we say and do things in culture-specific settings.
Examples
- Particular cultural ways of buying and selling things in different cultures
- “It simply means that there are culturally different ways of doing things with language in different cultures. The
sequence of events I go through may be the same in both cultures, but the ways of using language in these events
and other sorts of non-linguistic behaviour may differ. “

- Different ways of advertisements a company might have for different overseas

branches
Different views of discourse analysis
Fairclough (2003) contrasts ‘textually oriented discourse analysis’ with approaches
to discourse analysis that have more of a social theoretical orientation, arguing for
an analysis of discourse that is both linguistic and social in its orientation.
Example: the analysis of Obama’s victory speech
Obama's speech (2008)

- David Crystal (2008) > textually oriented analysis

- Higgins’s (2008) > socially oriented analysis
Today, we will discuss ....

● Discourse as the social construction of reality

● Discourse and social identities
● Performance
● Intertextuality
Discourse as the social construction of reality
The view of discourse as the social construction of reality see texts as
communicative units which are embedded in social and cultural practices. The
texts we write and speak both shape and are shaped by these practices.
Discourse, then, is both shaped by the world as well as shaping the world.
Discourse is shaped by language as well as shaping language. It is shaped by the
people who use the language as well as shaping the language that people use.
Discourse is shaped, as well, by the discourse that has preceded it and that which
might follow it. Discourse is also shaped by the medium in which it occurs as well
as it shapes the possibilities for that medium. The purpose of the text also
influences the discourse. Discourse also shapes the range of possible purposes of
texts (Johnstone 2007).
Example: analysis of the BBC Panorama interview with the
late Prince Diana
Discourse and socially situated identities
“As Gee (2011) argues, the ways we make visible and recognizable who we are
and what we are doing always involves more than just language. It involves acting,
interacting and thinking in certain ways. It also involves valuing and talking (or
reading and writing) in appropriate ways with appropriate ‘props’, at appropriate
times and in appropriate places.”

— Discourse Analysis: An Introduction (Continuum Discourse) by Brian Paltridge

https://a.co/aLChUt4
Discourses, then, involve the socially situated identities that we enact and
recognize in the different settings that we interact in. They include culture-specific
ways of performing and culture-specific ways of recognizing identities and
activities.
Discourses also include the different styles of language that we use to enact and
recognize these identities; that is, different social languages (Gee 1996).
Discourses also involve characteristic ways of acting, interacting and feeling, and
characteristic ways of showing emotion, gesturing, dressing and posturing. They
also involve particular ways of valuing, thinking, believing, knowing, speaking and
listening, reading and writing (Gee 2011).
Social languages > examples:

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