Discourse Analysis

(ENG523)

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Lecture-08
Political Discourse and the Role of
Multimedia in Discourse Analysis

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POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Representation: Metaphor

One of the central concerns of political discourse is the question of how the world is presented to
the public through particular forms of linguistic representation. For example, how is language
used in attributing meaning to individuals and groups with reference to the performance of their
social practices? How are actions and events perceived and described? Which modes of
reference are used to signify places, objects and institutions within particular positive or negative
frames? The claim is that “reality” is not simply given to us through language; rather it is
mediated through different forms of language representation.

An interesting view has recently arisen in cognitive science concerning the nature of mental
representation. This view is exemplified by the following passages:
 Most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found,
on the contrary, that metaphor is persistent in everyday life, not just in language but in
thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and
act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.
 The basic-level metaphors allow us to comprehend and draw inferences about these
[emotion] concepts, using our knowledge of familiar, well-structured domains. In short,
the locus of metaphor is not in language at all, but in the way we conceptualize one
mental domain in terms of another.
 Human cognition is fundamentally shaped by various poetic or figurative processes.

As these quotations indicate, some researchers in cognition and language have argued that
mental representation is at least in part metaphoric. Rather than seeing metaphors as being solely
or even primarily a linguistic phenomenon, they have proposed it as a mode of representation
and thought.

The reasoning behind this is that certain aspects of our knowledge are difficult for people to
represent: They are overly abstract and complex, and therefore they are represented in terms of
easier-to-understand domains, that is, metaphorically. Therefore, when we think about abstract
ideas such as inflation, the mind, or anger, we use more concrete concepts, a process which
"allows us to refer to it [an abstract concept], quantify it, identify a particular aspect of it and
perhaps even believe that we understand it" (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980).

The argument for metaphoric representation is often made as part of an argument for Cognitive
Linguistics as championed by Lakoff and his colleagues. However, I believe that the issue of
metaphoric representation is an interesting and radical idea which deserves attention in its own
right.
Lakoff (1987) and Johnson (1980) present the use of metaphor in thought as just one part of a
predominant theory of the nature of the mind. But their arguments about "objectivist
metaphysics," generative approaches to linguistics and other controversial ideas may have drawn
attention away from this specific claim. Therefore, in this article I will examine metaphoric
representation as a theory of conceptual structure. I will not be addressing most of the other
views of its proponents. Of those views, metaphoric representation has probably had the most
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direct influence on psychological research, through theories of idiom and metaphor

comprehension. That said, however, it will be impossible to avoid mentioning other views
expressed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) or Lakoff (1987), because some of them are used to
provide support for the notion of metaphoric representation.

One disadvantage in discussing metaphoric representation is that it is necessary to discuss

verbal metaphor. And as is well known, metaphor is one of the most difficult and intransigent
problems in language. Indeed, even defining metaphor is by no means an easy task. For the
present purposes, then, a minimal description will have to serve. In verbal metaphor, there are
usually two explicit parts: a topic, which is the entity being talked about, and the vehicle, which
is the metaphoric material being predicated of the topic. (Some authors refer to these as the target
and source, respectively.) For example, in Lee is a block of ice, Lee is the topic, and block of ice
is the vehicle. The implicit connection between the two is often referred to as the ground. In this
case, the ground is that blocks of ice have a cold temperature, and this is interpreted in terms of
emotional unresponsiveness.

More generally, the relation between temperature and emotion provides the ground. Lakoff and
Johnson (1980) do not provide a detailed theory of verbal metaphor; their discussion seems to
accept this kind of view. That is, in insisting that representations are metaphoric or metonymic,
they are contrasting them with a more straightforward relation (called direct understanding).
Since the metaphoric relation is not direct, some kind of mapping is necessary. And in fact, much
of Lakoof and Johnson and Kovecses (1986) consist in spelling out the mappings behind various
conceptual metaphors.

Things turn “Critical”

In the late 1970s theorists suggested that the surface realization of language represented the
transformation of an underlying reality (Wilson 1990). The work was based, mainly, on
Halliday’s (1985) functional linguistic theory, which viewed language as a “social fact.” In this
view social and cognitive aspects become reflected within grammar. Politics and ideology were
seen as displayed through grammatical structure, and analyzing language in this way was
referred to as “Critical Linguistics.” This approach has since been expanded, both in
methodology and theory, and is now seen as part of the broader analytic program known as
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Wodak and Meyer (2009) moving the “linguistic” to a
“multi- disciplinary and multi-methodological level”; although grammar remains a central tool in
explaining how ideology, power, and domination become constituted through linguistic
structures.

Van Dijk argues that CDA should not be seen as a method but as a form of critically driven
theory and practice operationalized by politically concerned discourse analysts, whose aim is to
use a variety of methods in the study of power abuse and inequality within society. Such an
approach has been criticized for its own internal politicization, since it seems to begin with the
assumption that certain data sets produce power abuse and then sets off to find and describe such
abuse. Consequently, it is suggested that critical analysts are in danger of confirming what they
already believed from the start. Further, CDA has been criticized for its claim to use linguistic
analysis to confirm forms of power abuse. Widdowson (1995) argues that because of its critical
orientation CDA “essentially sociological or socio-political rather than linguistic.” And it is also
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possible that the political critique of political discourse for political purposes becomes a form of
political discourse itself.

In the past 20 years the “critical” approach to language and to political discourse in particular,
has been one of the fastest-growing areas of applied linguistic research. Many of the scholars
writing on CDA have also been leaders in the field of political discourse; for example, Norman
Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, and Teun van Dijk. The critical analyst sees political discourse as the
use of words and phrases, syntactic processes, and discursive positioning, to either hide or
distribute responsibility in certain ways, or designate specific individuals or groups as belonging
to categories that may serve particular political purposes.

Political Sounds

In studies of political discourse there has been relatively little attention given to how politicians
make use of phonetic, phonological, or supra-segmental features of language for political
purposes. Sociolinguistic research indicates that the way we sound has an impact on how people
perceive us, and this can range from our attractiveness and intelligence to our trustworthiness
and employability.

We know that Margaret Thatcher modified her speech to make herself more attractive to voters,
and that UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s upper-class accent “turns off” some voters. In the
United States recent work has suggested that ex-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice adopts
selected African American speech forms in specific speech contexts and Hall-Lew, Coppock,
and Starr (2010) claim that American politicians’ production of “Iraq’s” second vowel marks
“political conservatism” when produced as /æ/ but political liberalism when produced as /a:/.

In studies of prosody within political interviews, politicians reflect a very fluid and positive style,
with only short pauses in syntactically appropriate positions. It has also been claimed that the
sounds of politicians’ own names, along with the rhythmic patterns they project, can also assist,
or hinder, a politicians’ aim of attracting voters (Smith 1998). Duez (1997) has attempted to
correlate aspects of acoustic patterning with degrees of political power. Duez suggests that
aspects of acoustic delivery within the speeches of ex-French President Franc¸ois Mitterrand
were affected by whether Mitterrand was in the role of challenger or opponent, as opposed to
holder of the position of president. While in the role of president, Mitterrand made use of a
slower articulation rate, but when in the position of challenger, or opponent, the articulation rate
was much more rapid. Hence, Duez suggests that temporal organization could reflect relative
distance from “power.”

A number of studies have also attempted to integrate the prosodic level of language with
discursive and pragmatic levels. Braga and Aldina Marques (2004), argue that supra-segmental
features may be harnessed and used in correlation with syntactic, lexical, and pragmatic features
to achieve specific political effects. In a study of political debates, politicians focused on a set of
prosodic features, including pitch, emphasis, and focus and noted that particular patterns were
found to match argumentative goals such as assertiveness, irony, emotion, and hyperbole. While
the study of sounds and sound patterns involves a variety of technical forms of analysis, it is
nonetheless an important component of the consideration of political discourse.

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DISCOURSE AND MEDIA

Approaches to Media Discourse Current Question

Media discourse refers to interactions that take place through a broadcast platform, whether
spoken or written, in which the discourse is oriented to a non-present reader, listener or viewer.
Though the discourse is oriented towards these recipients, they very often cannot make
instantaneous responses to the producer of the discourse, though increasingly this is changing
with the advent of new media technology, as we shall explore. Crucially, the written or spoken
discourse itself is oriented to the readership or listening/viewing audience, respectively. In other
words, media discourse is a public, manufactured, on-record, form of interaction. It is not ad hoc
or spontaneous (in the same way as casual speaking or writing is); it is neither private nor off the
record. Obvious as these basic characteristics may sound, they are crucial to the investigation,
description and understanding of media discourse.

The three main approaches to the study of media discourse can be characterized as

 Discourse analytic
 Sociolinguistic
 Nonlinguistic

Discourse analytic approach is the primary focus of scholars in the study of media discourse.
Discourse analytic approaches that underlie a great deal of the research on media can be
characterized as hybrids of existing frameworks of pragmatics, conversation analysis, variation,
narrative analysis and interactional sociolinguistics optionally interlaced with sociological
content analysis. For example, the approach can be “critical” in the sense of looking at social
impact or inequality or concern political economy in the sense of the social value of language
without necessarily bring into line with a major tradition, such as discourse analysis or media
studies. “Discourse analytic” paradigm, which addresses discourse-level matters related to
larger stretches of talk and text beyond the word or sentence level, including questions of
participant, topic, function, and discourse structure, as well as a range of topics that includes
news interviews, quotation and reported speech, register issues, politeness, positioning and
framing.

The term “sociolinguistic” for work that involves variation and style in the media or a similar
close analysis of language. Sociolinguistic insights, either to characterize some dimension of
media language, such as variation and style, or to inform related discourse level work, such as
genre and register. The “nonlinguistic” research involves work in political science, media
studies, or communication studies paradigms and, to some degree, in cultural studies.
Nonlinguistic domains are referred to by media discourse researchers perhaps more than in any
other topical area of discourse analysis.

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Narrative Structure

Journalists write stories, and accordingly, research into story structure or narrative becomes
relevant to account for their motivations. Frameworks that have been successfully applied to
other domains of talk, such as Labov’s (1972) narrative framework have also been applied to
news discourse. For example, Bell (1991) uses Labov’s framework to examine the global
narrative structure of news across local and national news boundaries, while van Dijk (1988)
outlines a “theory of discourse schemata,” which includes the traditional Labovian narrative
schema as well as a more elaborated “news schema” a “series of hierarchically ordered
categories” that helps define the discourse (van Dijk 1988: 49). Bell (1991, 1994, and 1998) has
long compared the structure of news stories to personal narratives, noting their similarities and
divergences, and using the Labovian framework as a point of departure.

The discursive elaboration and alteration of time elements in the news narrative is another
feature distinctive to media discourse. Linear chronology is not important in a news story to the
extent one would think: “Perceived news value overturns temporal sequence and imposes an
order completely at odds with the linear narrative point” (Bell 1991). In their manipulation of
sequential elements, reporters are not stenographers or transcribers; they are storytellers and
interpreters. This point about a reordered “news chronology,” constrained by the norms of text
and content that underlie news discourse, comes up again in the work of media researchers
Manoff and Schudson (1986).

Ultimately, the researchers are trying to determine what the placement of these profession
bounded informational elements means in the context of news structure and discourse
organization. The surface simplicity of the writing rules (which are standard across newswriting
textbooks) and the complexity of their outputs (which varies across presentation domains) have
only begun to get the attention they deserve. Bell (1991), for instance, notes the common practice
in news-story construction of embedding one speech event into another. For example, a
quotation from an interview is surrounded by information from a press release, but on the surface
it is realized as a unified, coherent “story.” Likewise, Cotter (1999a, in press), in discussing the
progress of a story through time, and Knight and Nakano (1999), in delineating the “press release
reality” that informed reporting of the historic 1997 Hong Kong handover, elaborate on the role
of multiple texts and multiple authors in the production of news. This multiparty/multi-element
infrastructure has been remarked on by other researchers (such as van Dijk 1988), who draw a
range of conclusions, depending on their research focus.

Audience Consideration

Attention to audience is the first step away from text-focused analyses of media, and many
researchers are aware that a theoretical position of media discourse that includes the audience is
desirable. Different linguists or theorists offer different conceptualizations of the audience and its
role in the construction of media realities. In the approaches, which are being addressed here, the

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audience is conceived of as part of the discourse mechanism. This is in contrast with more
conventional assumptions about mass communication which rely on the active sender–passive
receiver “conduit” model, which is now contested. The position of the audience may be one of
the more salient differentiating features of the various research paradigms.

A great deal of the research (from within discourse analysis and sociolinguistics and outside of
it) either casts the audience as individuals who do not have much choice in resisting media
power, or credits the audience’s role with more equality in the relationship: as being both active
and acted upon. There are different ways to explore the concept of audience agency or
interaction in media discourse. Goffman’s frame analysis of radio talk (1981) was one of the first
to articulate and apply the insight that the relationships among the different interlocutors
determine the nature of the speech event and the talk that is appropriate to it. Similarly, in Bell’s
view (1991), which builds on Goffman’s categories of participant roles, the media audience takes
on multiple roles: that of speaker, addressee, auditor, overhearer, and eavesdropper. As media-
savvy participants in the larger culture, we recognize audience roles and embedded points of
view and are conscious when an interviewee – or an interviewer – departs from a prescribed
position.

Meinhof’s work on the visual and textual double messages in television news, which she argues
have cross-cultural implications, is consciously predicated on a focus away from “text-internal
readings, where readers are theorized as decoders of fixed meanings, to more dynamic models,
where meanings are negotiated by actively participating readers” (Meinhof 1994: 212). Her own
three-part taxonomy of communication, which circumvents the sender–receiver model and is
briefer than Goffman’s and Bell’s characterizations, includes actors, activities or events, and the
affected, the effect, or outcome.

The audience is considered from cognitive perspectives, as well. Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983)
led the early work on the cognitive factors in the processing of information that influence
comprehension of texts by readers. They establish that hierarchical relations exist among
discourse strategies; that information comes from many sources within text and context; and that
“forward” and “backward” interpretation strategies operate on the local level to specify the
meaning and constrain interpretation – insights that background many current assumptions about
audience interplay with text. In comprehension research such as this, the audience and its range
of innate psycholinguistic abilities are assumed and essentially backgrounded in the discussion of
other issues. This stands in contrast to the work by investigators who incorporate the tenets of
reception analysis in their investigation of media discourse, a blend of methodologies that has
received little attention by linguists (Richardson 1998).

In Richardson’s work, the audience is foregrounded as a key element in the production of

discourse meaning both through the researchers’ emphasis on audience comprehension of texts,
and by the audience’s response to texts in the data-eliciting process itself. Bell (1984, 1991) has
worked to articulate a framework for considering the role of the audience on the sociolinguistic

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level, using phonological, lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic evidence to construct a theory of
“audience design.” Major insights of the framework involve the role of style, which in different
ways can either be responsive to the linguistic norms of an audience, or refer in some way to a
“third party, reference group or model” outside of the speech community (Bell 1991: 127).

Style strategies, thus, can be seen as playing an essential role in redefining and renegotiating the
media’s relationship to the audience. Finally, Cotter (1993, 1999a) attempts to characterize the
nature of the relationship between the news community and the “community of coverage” it
serves. This work focuses on the interactive properties of the “pseudo-dyadic” relationship that
exists between the two communities, as well as on the dynamic of “reciprocal transmission” –
“the interplay of texts, creators, and audience” which allows the media to engage on the social or
phatic level, at the same time providing content that “captures facts about our social worlds”
(Cotter 1999a: 168).

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ADVERTISING AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Advertising Messages as Samples of Social Interaction and Activities

Advertising is a means of communication with the users of a product or service. Advertisements
are messages paid for by those who send them and are intended to inform or influence people
who receive. Ads are wonderful examples of the diverse roles discourse can fulfill in society. To
consider them as discourse types can prove very enlightening about the ways people
communicate and relate to each other within the different spheres where they perform their daily
activities. This exemplary character is basically connected with the very nature of ads:
advertising is one of the liveliest and most representative forms of discourse when it comes to
displaying its own inner functioning, since it not only enhances its status as a linguistic form of
communication but also foregrounds the need for context when it comes to the full understanding
of the overall message which is the cornerstone of discourse analysis as a method of discursive
interpretation (Cook, 1992).

As a discourse type, advertising has always suffered the consequences of a perceived marginal
status, at different levels. This marginality has to do with the very nature of ads. In fact, one of
the outstanding characteristics of this relatively young form of discourse is its ability to search
successfully desirable elements from other, more clearly defined discourses in order to borrow
credibility from others or enhance some of its own features (Williamson, 1978). The resulting
restlessness and ambiguity contribute to a feeling of mistrust towards it: its features are not its
own and ad discourse might even threaten to replace others, which are more firmly established,
because of this ability to draw inspiration from all possible sources (Freitas, 2010), even when
ads are able to incorporate criticism to themselves as useful material for creation (Myers, 1999).
On account of not enjoying the status of a fully established discourse, advertising has
consistently been a target for attacks aimed at its lack of essential and defining characteristics
(Geis, 1982). This elusiveness would then account for the difficulty of establishing boundaries
on which to base effective standards for assessing and evaluating this form of communication.

Advertising has also been denied seriousness of purpose on the grounds of its ultimate
commercial aims (Myers, 1999). Broadly speaking, these aims would include the sales
promotion of a given product or service, the firm establishment of the presence of a given brand
in the public’s mind, or even the reassurance of the public as to the quality of the product in the
event of rebranding strategies (Brierley, 1995, Wells et al, 1998, Yeshin, 2006). This kind of
socially oriented criticism attacks advertising on moral grounds: the hidden agenda behind
advertising discourse introduces a financial element in this communication process that taints it
and causes it to be seen as less worthy of serious attention (Freitas, 2010). After all, ads consist
in messages that are paid for, conveyed in a space or time.

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Examining Ads in Context: advertising seen through the eyes of discourse analysis
Advertising is referred to as a form of discourse in the sense that it has influenced not only the
structure of language and the modality of lifestyle, but also the content of routine daily acts of
communicative exchanges. The messages of advertising have permeated the entire cultural
landscape. Printed advertisements fill the pages of newspapers and magazines. Commercials
interrupt TV and radio programs constantly. As Beasley and Danesi (2002) pointed out, "brand
names, logos, trademarks, jingles, and slogans have become part and parcel of the 'mental
encyclopedia' of virtually everyone who lives in a modern- day society” (See Wodak, 2006a,
2006b; Wadak, 2007). Advertising has progressed beyond the use of simple techniques for
announcing the availability of products or services. It has expressed into the domain of
persuasion, and its rhetorical categories have become universal in contemporary social discourse.
Because of the growing effectiveness of its persuasion techniques, advertising has become
entrenched into social discourse by virtue of its wide spread diffusion throughout society.

Everywhere one turns, one is bound to find some ad message designed to persuade people to buy
a product. All this leads to the inescapable conclusion that advertising has developed, since the
first decades of the 20th century, into a privileged form of social discourse that has unparalleled
rhetorical force. With the advent of industrialization in the 19th century, style of presentation
became increasingly important in raising the persuasive efficacy of the ad text. Accordingly,
advertising started to change the structure and use of language and verbal communication.
Everything from clothes to beverages was being promoted through resourceful new techniques.
As the 19th century came to a close American advertiser in particular were, as Dyer (1982)
points out, using more colloquial, personal and informal language to address the customer and
also exploiting certain effective rhetorical devices to attract attention to a product. So persuasive
had this new form of advertising become that, by the early decades of the 20th century, it started
becoming a component of social discourse, starting to change some of the basic ways in which
people communicated with each other and in which they perceived commodities and services.
From the 1920s onwards, advertising agencies sprang up all over, broadening the attempts of
their predecessors to build a rhetorical bridge between the product and the consumer's
consciousness (See Sayer, 2006; Saussure & Schulz, 2005).

The language of advertising has become the language of all, even of those who are critical of it.
As Twitchell (2000) puts it "language about products and services has pretty much replaced
language about all other subjects”. It is no exaggeration to claim that today most of our
information, intellectual stimulation, and lifestyle models come from, or are related to,
advertising images. Positioning and image creation have become the primary techniques of what
has come to be known as the era of persuasion in advertising.

This is an era in which advertising messages have moved away from describing the product in
itself to focusing on the consumer of the product, creating product imagery with which the
consumer can easily identify (Woodward and Denton, 1988). Ads and commercials now offer
the same kinds of promise and hope to which religions and social philosophies once held
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exclusive rights: security against the hazards of old age, better positions in life, popularity and
personal prestige, social advancement, better health, and happiness.

Lack of clear discourse boundaries: multimodality and overall coherence in advertising

messages as addressed by discourse analysis
Ads are good examples of why communication processes should be analyzed in a global manner.
Although a complete analysis that encompasses every element is not possible for the reasons
mentioned above, analysis should strive, nonetheless, to take as much as possible into account:
‘Actual analyses, of course, develop in detail only a small part of the full picture. However, any
discourse analysis needs, at least, to give some consideration, if only as background, to the whole
picture’ (Gee, 2005).
In the specific case of multimedia advertising campaigns, the ‘whole picture’ should doubtlessly
be the main focus of analysis. This is where the message effectively lies, since ‘each medium
presents its own obvious advantages for advertisers, but also some disadvantages. Multimedia
campaigns offer one way of compensating for the weaknesses of one channel by using the strong
points of others’ (Freitas, 2004). In that manner, the intended ‘advertising pressure’ can be
exerted upon the viewers (Brochand et al., 1999), guaranteeing that, in one way or another, they
will be exposed to at least a part of the divulgation effort.

A possible way of undertaking the analyses of such a campaign is by bearing in mind a number
of building tasks and discourse analysis questions that are at pale when we assess any sample of
‘language in use’: they have to do with

(1) the significance that a piece of language can lend to certain situations and the way this
happens;
(2) what situations this piece of language is creating in such a way that they are recognized by
the others. Another important issue is related to the establishment of
(3) specific identities and
(4) relationships by means of this language sample (Gee, 2005). A given piece of language will
also indicate some sort of
(5) assessment on social values, will
(6) establish connections with other utterances, making them relevant to the present one, as well
as
(7) attribute prevalence to a given sign system over others (Gee, 2005).

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Discourse Analysis of Telecom Ads:

It can be seen that the ad has used different font sizes and colors to grab the attention of the
audience. It is also noticed that the information regarding the conditions that apply in availing the
promoted product or services are given at the bottom of the layout in fine prints. People hardly
read that part because it is written in very small fonts. People tend to ignore the information not
deliberately but unconsciously, which are written in small font as it does not attract people as
much as the big colored fonts. It is tactics followed by the ad makers to make the audience not to
notice all the written information.

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Lecture-09
Approaches and Methodologies in Discourse-I

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DISCURSIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Principals of Discursive Psychology

Current Question
Discursive psychology is an approach that addresses psychological matters in terms of how they
figure in discourse in conversations over family mealtimes, in therapy sessions, in witness
statements. It begins with psychology, as it confronts people as they live their lives.

Discursive psychology is usefully understood as working with three fundamental observations

about the nature of discourse. Discourse is:
 Oriented to action
 Situated sequentially, institutionally and rhetorically
 Constructed and constructive
These observations’ structure analytic work in DP. We will take them in turn.

Discourse is action orientation

DP starts with a focus on discourse as a central resource for performing action. These may be
comparatively discrete actions, which have speech act verbs associated with them invitation,
complaint, say or they may be complex, institutionally fixed practices where no speech act verb
exists using questions to give ‘person centered’ advice, perhaps. Often actions are done
indirectly, via descriptions of some kind that provide a different kind of accountability for the
speaker than an ‘on-the-record’ speech act. The key point is that discourse is studied for how
action is done rather than treated as a medium for access to putative mental objects (intentions,
dislikes). This is a very different start-point from that of cognitive psychology, which was largely
born out of an engagement with linguistics, and more specifically out of a concern with
grammatical structure and abstract semantics (Potter and te Molder, 2005).
Discourse is situated
A central recognition of DP is that actions are situated. The most profound way that action is
situated is in terms of the here and now of conversational sequence. Talk is occasioned. This
point is at the heart of discursive psychological research practice. When we move from language
as an abstract system that has a static and abstract relation to the world and to mental
organizations to an action-focused approach, we are immediately considering the way events
unfold in real time. A second major way in which an action is situated is institutionally. DP
does not adopt a position of contextual determinism; it does not treat all interaction in a doctor’s
surgery, say, as intrinsically medical. Nor does it treat institutional talk as organized into
coherent, conceptually organized discourses, such that medical settings will implicate a medical
discourse or register.
A third major way in which an action is situated is rhetorically. This came out of the early
engagement with Billig’s (1996) rhetorical psychology. It highlights the way that descriptions
are often organized to counter actual or potential alternatives and organized in ways that manage
actual or possible attempts to undermine them (Potter, 1996). A major theme in DP is the way

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epistemic issues are managed using a wide range of conversational and rhetorical resources
(Potter and Hepburn, 2008).
Discourse is constructed and constructive
Discourse is constructed from a range of resources words, categories, rhetorical commonplaces,
grammatical structures, repertoires, conversational practices and so on, all of which may be
delivered in real time, with prosody and timing, or is built into documents with specific layouts,
fonts and so on. These resources, their use and their conditions of assembly can become topics of
DP study. They are both resources for action and challenges that may require management in
order for one to work round their specific affordances.

Methodological Procedures of Discursive Psychology

Although there are some differences of emphasis, contemporary DP draws heavily on the
methods and approach of conversation analysis. A typical DP study will work with a set of audio
or video recordings collected in some setting. Recent work has used phone calls to neighbor
dispute mediation service, calls to a child protection helpline, video records of family mealtimes.
Researchers often draw on more familiar sets of mundane records of phone interaction to do
primary or comparative work.

Such materials will be digitized and often copied in one pass by a transcription service that is
meant to capture the basic words and speaker transitions. This can facilitate searches through
material for particular themes or events of interest. Often these are generated through data
sessions in which a number of researchers engage with a single example, with repeated viewings
or listening’s and this stimulates introductory ideas that lead to a search for new examples. Such
a search can start to build a introductory body of examples. These are typically transcribed using
the system developed by Gail Jefferson (2004), which captures features of delivery that are
oriented to by participants overlap, volume, prosody in a way that makes them visible on the
page.

Analysis and data sessions, however, typically work with both video/audio and transcript; the
latter is not planned to replace the prior. Unlike in more traditional social psychological work,
specific research questions are rarely developed prior to the research; rather, the research often
takes the setting as the key driver of questions (what kind of practices go on in a neighbor
mediation helpline?) or works with a broad orientation to materials (in what sense can we find
practices of advice giving in these helpline calls?).

A study will commonly work with a flexible corpus of examples. As analysis develops, the
corpus will be refined. Some examples will be uncontrolled and new examples will be
recognized, and therefore included in the corpus. The corpus will often start with standard cases
and try to clarify them, and then consider different or counter cases, which may provide further
specification of the phenomena.

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With interactional materials the orientations of the participants themselves are a primary analytic
resource, as these display their understanding of what is going on in its most basic way. Heritage
(2004) suggests that participants turn towards interaction in at least three ways. First, they
address themselves to immediately preceding talk. Second, they set up the conditions for the
action or actions that will come next. Third, in the production of next actions, participants show
a set of understandings of the prior action: that it is complete, that it was addressed to them rather
than someone else, what kind of action it was and so on. This atmosphere provides for the
intelligibility of interaction that is crucial for participants and offers an extraordinarily rich
resource for analysts.

Studies in Discursive Psychology

Intention: institutions and practices

Ideas of intention have had a range of different roles in the social sciences. One of the most
influential is probably in the field social cognition, where the theory of planned behaviour
(Ajzen, 1991) has been associated with more than a thousand articles in the last two decades.
This theory treats intentions as the product of a number of different elements, which work in
combination to affect behavioural outcomes. Intention is treated as a kind of mental push that
will result in the person engaging in the actual behaviour, unless something intervenes to prevent
it.

Some philosophers have criticized this kind of approach to intentions by offering a conceptual
analytic picture of intentions as a language game for making distinctions between different kinds
of actions (e.g., Austin, 1961).

Rather than engage in such conceptual analysis, Derek Edwards (2008) opts for an approach that
considers intentions through considering the practical use of attributions of intention, of the term
intention, and of intentional language more broadly. He notes that actually there is a very wide
range of semantic and grammatical resources that can be used to denote that something was
intended or done intentionally.

Attitude: caring and closing

One of the major areas of historical and contemporary social psychology is the study of attitudes.
Indeed, attitudes are a commonplace of work from across the social sciences. The discursive
psychological critique of the way attitudes was conceptualized was developed right from the start
(Potter and Wetherell, 1987, 1988; Potter, 1998). It emphasized that evaluations were part of
practices embedded in interaction, where they played particular roles. And it emphasized that
evaluations are often produced by constituting the ‘attitudinal object’ in particular ways rather
than by claiming a personal psychological position.

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Another feature of this developing critique of attitude work is that it starts to break up the idea of
a single underlying attitudinal dimension in favor of considering the way different kinds of
evaluations can be produced for different purposes. For example, Wiggins and Potter (2003)
highlighted the different roles of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ food evaluations – ‘that pasta is
lovely’ vs ‘I love that pasta.’

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INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

What is Interactional Sociolinguistics?

Current Question
Interactional sociolinguistics (IS) studies the language use of people in face-to-face interaction.
It is a theoretical and methodological perspective on language use with eclectic roots in a wide
variety of disciplines such as dialectology, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, pragmatics,
linguistic anthropology, micro-ethnography and sociology. Basically, IS starts from the finding
that, when people talk, they are unable to say explicitly enough everything they mean. As a
result, to appreciate what is meant, they cannot simply rely on the words that are used but must
also depend on background knowledge, to discover what others assumed the relevant context
was for producing words in.

In fact, people can get very angry when they are put to the test and asked to explain precisely
what they meant. Imagine telling a colleague that you had a flat tire while driving to work, after
which that colleague replies: ‘What do you mean, you had a flat tire?’ Or suppose you ask an
acquaintance: ‘How are you?’, and you are being asked in return:
‘How am I in regard to what? My health, my finance, my school work, my piece of mind, my…
In both cases you might experience surprise or confusion because you feel no extra explanation
is necessary. You may even consider such questions improper and angrily retort: ‘Look! I was
just trying to be polite. Frankly, I don’t give a damn how you are!’

Such reactions indicate that people expect each other to treat talk as incomplete and to fill in
what is left unsaid; but also, that people trust each other to provide a suitable interpretation of
their words, that is, they expect one another to be aware of the social world that extends beyond
the actual setting and of the norms for the use of words that apply there. Put in another way, IS
holds that, because of the incompleteness of talk, all language users must rely on extra-
communicative knowledge to infer, or make hypotheses about, how what is said relates to the
situation at hand and what a speaker possibly intends to convey by saying it.

Interactional sociolinguists in principle try to describe how meaningful contexts are implied via
talk, how and if these are picked up by relevant others, and how the production and reception of
talk influences subsequent interaction. As the examples above show, misinterpreting or failing to
make hypotheses frustrates others’ expectations that you may be willing to share the same view
on what background knowledge is relevant, and this may cost you a friend. Below, we will see
that misinterpreting may result in even greater social damage, but before we go into this it is
necessary to take a closer look at how speakers’ flag, or index, meaningful contexts by using
only a limited but suggestive set of tools. If talk is incomplete, interact-ants need to do
completion work. They have to find out what unstated context a certain word flags or points at
for it to be made sense of. Consequently, words can be said to have indexical meaning, and it is
this meaning that interact-ants need to bring to bear when they interpret talk.

This is obvious with terms such as ‘this’, ‘there’, ‘you’ or ‘soon’, terms that have been
traditionally called indexical or ‘deictic’ in linguistics: every ‘this’ and ‘soon’ points at the
specific context in which it is used, where each time one has to complete its new and specific
meaning. But other words can be considered indexical as well. If this makes you wonder how

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people manage to make the right inferences at all, it is necessary to know that much talk is quite
conventional, or that it tends to produce typical sequences of words and appropriate contexts for
producing them in. There aren’t dozens of ways of casually greeting one another, so you can be
safe to assume that ‘how are you?’

In sum, making inferences on the basis of talk is inextricably bound up with evaluation and
identity in an unequally rewarding social world. We’ve already seen that there are social
repercussions when misunderstandings occur: one may be found unintelligible or impolite. These
repercussions only magnify when interact-ants find themselves in unequal social positions
(imagine saying ‘How am I in regard to what?’ to your boss’s friendly greeting) and in stressful
situations such as job application interviews. Things start to look even bleaker when interact-ants
Interactional sociolinguistics and discourse analysis have culturally different inferencing habits
or contextualization styles, in other words when they interpret cues differently or produce cues
that the other party does not pick up. It is with such recipes for disaster that a number of classics
IS studies have been concerned with, and I turn to these in the next section.

How do you make an IS analysis?

If you want to make an IS analysis, you will need first-hand data that are as rich as possible. This
usually implies doing long-term ethnographic fieldwork in one setting during which you
familiarize yourself with the local communicative ecology, appreciate how it is related to broader
social structures and assemble as much commentary from participants as possible. Without this
ethnographic knowledge, it will be difficult to pick up the background knowledge that interact-
ants in that setting only display via subtle references. Recordings (digital or otherwise) of
naturally occurring speech are a must-have, since it is next to impossible to reconstruct
interactions from memory in the amount of detail you need in order to discover their moment-to-
moment organization. It is not always easy to make recordings, but, once you have them, they
will allow you to revisit the recorded scene as much as you like so as to check hypotheses.
Making a transcript of your recordings is the following indispensable and quite time-intensive
step.

Which extracts are important clearly depends on your research goals? But it is typical for
ethnographic research that these may sometimes slightly shift focus when you arrive at the scene.
For these purposes, the researcher Rampton (1995), initially expected to find adolescents from
different ethnic backgrounds playing around with each other’s heritage languages and finding an
interactional common ground in spite of their ethnic differences (cf. Rampton, 1995). But such
behavior was hard to find, and instead he (Rampton) noticed that ethnic minority students
dominated the classroom floor and silenced most other voices by excelling in what they called
‘doing ridiculous’, that is, slowing down and parodying the lesson (and later on also research
interviews) in not entirely unruly ways. Furthermore, in spite of the fact that these students are
widely noted in Belgium as incompetent or unwilling speakers of Dutch, it turned out that they
regularly switched from one Dutch variety to another for special effect, and Rampton (1995) felt
that bringing out such versatile language skills would help me to rub against common
stereotypes. Therefore, he started identifying all occasions in the data where such playful
behavior could be found and then categorized them according to variety (examples of playful
Antwerp dialect, Standard Dutch, mock English, mock Turkish, etc.).

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Why is Interactional Sociolinguistics important?

Interactional Sociolinguistics is important because it draws our attention to the existence of

subtle cultural differences in the systematic combination of verbal and non-verbal signs which
signal contexts and construct meaning, differences that are often hard to pin down by those who
use them. IS can claim credit for having shown in great detail that disastrous consequences may
follow if such different styles remain hidden and lead to miscommunication in gatekeeping
encounters: applicants do not only fail to get a job or admission to a course, but often find their
personal and ethnic background targeted as the cause for communication failure. IS has thus
managed to uncover meaning and reason behind communicative styles that are regularly
identified as inarticulate and incoherent, and the social relevance of this cannot be
underestimated. It has shown that seemingly unintelligible job applicants or uninterested children
are in fact sensible and involved if you (are willing to) read their contextualization cues in an
appropriate way or you are prepared to accept their different cueing habits.

IS has also illustrated that technically differing styles do not necessarily lead to
miscommunication, just as miscommunication itself does not automatically lead to conflict or
stereotyping. As mentioned above, a readiness for observing and acknowledging differences can
overcome even seriously diverging communication styles, or, conversely, the absence of
difference does not always prevent negative identification or willful misunderstanding from
taking place. These findings invite us to look beyond the actual interactional setting and observe
how interact-ants approach and evaluate one another as differently positioned social beings who
may, depending on the circumstances, see each other as problematically or delightfully different.
Even when the odds are unfavorable, interact-ants may find other identities, qualities or actions
of a person valuable that may overrule communication difficulties and the effect of stereotyping
(a talented football player’s almost non-existent English will be passed over much more easily
than that of an illegal refugee, who in her turn may find that her English is found cute and
perfectly acceptable by her neighbors for whom she does babysitting). In other words, IS shows
that communication is irrevocably a social happening where identities and relations matter, and
which as such stands in close connection with wider social patterns and conventions that are also
affected by it. This brings us to a third reason why IS is important.

IS offers an excellent tool for analyzing the tension between here-and-now interaction and more
established discursive practices. In putting a microscope on interaction, IS makes clear that
communication can never be taken for granted but always involves collaboration, collusion and
negotiation. As the discussion in section ‘How do you make an IS analysis?’ illustrated, traces of
these processes can be extremely subtle and may go unnoticed when looked at from a further
distance, or their relevance may not be fully appreciated when discussed in isolation from the
established practices that facilitated their production. IS, on the other hand, is well capable of
attending to such subtle traces and to the accompanying perspectives of ‘participants who are
compelled by their subordinate positions to express their commitments in ways that are indirect,
off-record and relatively opaque to those in positions of dominance’ (Rampton, 2001).
Consequently, IS can help to pinpoint those moments when established frames are called into
question, reconfigured or otherwise transformed, and in this way, it can also indicate when
creative restructurings give rise to emergent and potentially habitualzing social configurations. In
short, IS can contribute to our understanding of larger social evolutions.

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DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY

Physical Anthropology

Anthropology is a unique academic discipline that operates at the crossroads of the physical
sciences, social sciences and humanities to examine the diversity of human experience across
cultures and over time. Anthropologists in our department study everything from human
evolution to prehistory to life in a globalizing world. Because of this breadth of focus,
anthropology is highly relevant to understanding and living in a rapidly changing world.
Basic tenets of physical anthropology:
Holism: Holism means that a part of something can only truly be understood if examined within
relation to the whole of it. For anthropologists, this means that they try to understand humankind
through the interrelationships of all aspects of human existence for example, human biology has
to be examined within the context of human cultures and vice versa. In addition, all of this must
be examined within the context of the environment and historical processes. In an effort to be
holistic, anthropology is often an interdisciplinary field that crosses over into other fields such as
history, geology, and ecology.
Relativism: Relativism means that judgments, truths, or moral values have no absolutes, and can
only be understood relative to the situation or individuals involved. For anthropologists, this
means that they accept that all cultures are of equal value and must be studied from a neutral
point of view.

A good anthropologist must disregard their own beliefs, morals, and judgments when examining
another culture. They must, instead, examine each culture within the context of its own beliefs.
Universalism: Universalism means that whatever the theoretical principle is, it's equally
applicable to all. For anthropologists, universalism means that we believe all humans are equal in
intelligence, complexity, etc. This is in contrast to ethnocentrism, which is the belief that some
peoples are more important or culturally/biologically better than other peoples.
Culture: All humans have culture. Culture is the set of learned behaviors and knowledge that
belong to a certain set of people. This is different from genetically hardwired behaviors (such as
reflexes) in that they aren't biologically inherited. The most important thing to remember is that
culture is learned.

This may differ from linguistic anthropology because linguists will focus more on the way words
are formed, for example, the phonology or vocalization of the language to semantics and
grammar systems. For example, linguists pay close attention to "code-switching," a phenomenon
that occurs when two or more languages are spoken in a region and the speaker borrows or mixes
the languages in normal discourse. For example, when a person is speaking a sentence in
English but completes his or her thought in Spanish and the listener understands and continues
the conversation in a similar way. A linguistic anthropologist may be interested in code-

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switching as it affects the society and evolving culture, but will not tend to focus on the study of
code-switching, which would be more of an interest to the linguist.

Cultural Anthropology

Culture is the patterns of learned and shared behavior and beliefs of a particular social, ethnic,
or age group. It can also be described as the complex whole of collective human beliefs with a
structured stage of civilization that can be specific to a nation or time period. Humans in turn use
culture to adapt and transform the world they live in.

Cultural anthropologists study the diversity of human cultures and societies around the world
and the processes by which people construct local, regional and global forms of social
relationships. Several anthropologists in our department study the processes by which people
construct particular social identities, worldviews, and forms of community in a changing,
globalizing world. In the contemporary world, much ethnography addresses the manner in which
people in local communities orient themselves to global networks and institutions.

Anthropologists, in general, are more concerned with what discourse structuring might reveal
about culture at large: ‘In every moment of talk, people are experiencing and producing their
cultures, their roles, and their personalities’ (Moerman 1988: xi). The sequential organization of
discourse, and conversational features such as overlapping patterns, breaks, silences, repairs and
the like, can inform an understanding of both individual intention and cultural order. The
genealogy of this technique of paying very close attention to discursive form, often also called
‘conversational analysis’, also traces back to the ethnomethodology of the 1960s and 1970s.

Cultural studies, takes discourse more globally to refer to particular areas of language use. This
approach blurs together three levels of meaning: discourse is the act of talking or writing itself; it
is a body of knowledge content; and it is a set of conditions and procedures that regulate how
people appropriately may communicate and use that knowledge. Rather than the elemental
structures of conversational interaction, this second approach to discourse pursues the
connections between orders of communication, knowledge and power.

Cultural anthropology maintains relations with a great number of other sciences. It has been
said of sociology, for instance, that it was almost the twin sister of anthropology. The two are
presumably differentiated by their field of study (modern societies versus traditional societies).
But the contrast is forced. These two social sciences often meet. Thus, the study of colonial
societies borrows as much from sociology as from cultural anthropology. And it has already been
remarked how cultural anthropology intervenes more and more frequently in urban and industrial
fields classically the domain of sociology.

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There have also been fruitful exchanges with other disciplines quite distinct from cultural
anthropology. In political science the discussion of the concept of the state and of its origin has
been nourished by cultural anthropology. Economists, too, have depended on cultural
anthropology to see concepts in a more comparative light and even to challenge the very notion
of an “economic man” (suspiciously similar to the 19th-century capitalist revered by the classical
economists). Cultural anthropology has brought to psychology new bases on which to reflect on
concepts of personality and the formation of personality. It has permitted psychology to develop
a system of cross-cultural psychiatry, or so-called orthopsychiatry. Conversely, the psychological
sciences, particularly psychoanalysis, have offered cultural anthropology new hypotheses for an
interpretation of the concept of culture.

Linguistic Anthropology

Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It
is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered
languages, and has grown over the past century to encompass most aspects of language structure
and use. As a field of anthropology, linguistic anthropologists are concerned with how
language influences culture. This can include how language impacts social interactions, beliefs,
cultural identity, and other important aspects of culture.

Linguistic anthropologists have ventured into the study of everyday encounters, language
socialization, ritual and political events, scientific discourse, verbal art, language contact and
language shift, literacy events, and media. So, unlike linguists, linguistic anthropologists do not
look at language alone, language is viewed as interdependent with culture and social structures.

According to Pier Paolo Giglioli in "Language and Social Context," anthropologists study the
relation between worldviews, grammatical categories and semantic fields, the influence
of speech on socialization and personal relationships, and the interaction of linguistic and social
communities. In this case, linguistic anthropology closely studies those societies where language
defines a culture or society. For example, in New Guinea, there is a tribe of indigenous people
who speak one language. It is what makes that people unique. It is its "index" language. The tribe
may speak other languages from New Guinea, but this unique language gives the tribe its cultural
identity.

Linguistic anthropologists may also take an interest in language as it relates to socialization. It

can be applied to infancy, childhood, or a foreigner being en-cultured. The anthropologist would
likely study a society and the way that language is used to socialize its young.

In terms of a language's effect on the world, the rate of spread of a language and its influence on
a society or multiple societies is an important indicator that anthropologists will study. For
example, the use of English as an international language can have wide-ranging implications for

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the world's societies. This can be compared to the effects of colonization or imperialism and the
import of language to various countries, islands, and continents all over the world.

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Lecture-10
Approaches and Methodologies in Discourse-II

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ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

What is EAP? Current Question

English for Academic Purposes (EAP) is usually defined as teaching English with the aim of
assisting learners’ study or research in that language. In this sense it is a broad term, covering all
areas of academic communicative practice such as pre-tertiary, undergraduate and post-graduate
teaching, classroom interactions, academic publishing and curriculum issues, as well as research,
student and instructional genres (e.g., Hyland, 2009a). The emergence of EAP in the 1980s, as a
response to growing numbers of second language (L2) students in university courses and in a
framework informed by English for specific purposes, originally produced an agenda concerned
with curriculum and instruction rather than with theory and analysis.

EAP was then largely a materials and teaching-led movement focusing on texts and on the search
for generic study skills, which could be integrated into language courses to make students more
efficient learners. EAP has emphasized the rich diversity of texts, contexts and practices in
which students must now operate. While it continues to be heavily involved in syllabus design
and it needs analysis and materials development, EAP has moved away from purely pedagogic
considerations to become a much more theoretically grounded and research informed
innovativeness.

The role of EAP has therefore changed in response to changing conditions in the academy. The
huge expansion of university places in many countries, together with an increase in full fee-
paying international students to compensate for cuts in government support, has resulted in a
more culturally, socially and linguistically diverse student population than ever before. In
addition, students now take a broader and more heterogeneous mix of academic subjects. In
addition to traditional single-subject or joint-honors degrees, we now find complex modular
degrees and emergent ‘practice-based’ courses such as nursing, management and social work.
These new course configurations are more discoursally challenging for students who have to
move between genres, departments and disciplines. Further, while in the past the main vehicles
of academic communication were written texts, now a broad range of modalities and
presentational forms confront and challenge students’ communicative competence.

As a result, EAP has assumed greater prominence and importance in the academy, forcing it to
evolve and to ask new questions. Instead of focusing on why learners have difficulties in
accessing academic discourses, EAP now addresses the influence of culture and the demands of
multiple literacies on students’ academic experiences. These questions, moreover, accompany
new challenges, which Centre on the increased concern with the English language skills of non-
native English-speaking academics. The ability to deliver workshops in English, to participate in
meetings, to make presentations at international conferences and, above all, to conduct and
publish research in English are all demanded as part of such lecturers’ competence as academics.
This group’s needs are now beginning to be noticed and analyzed, and programs are emerging
which cater to their particular requirements.

Current EAP aims, therefore, at capturing thicker descriptions of language use in the academy at
all age and proficiency levels, incorporating and often going beyond immediate communicative
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contexts to understand the nature of disciplinary knowledge itself. It employs a range of

interdisciplinary influences for its research methods, theories and practices to provide insights
into the structures and meanings of spoken, written, visual and electronic texts, into the demands
placed by academic contexts on communicative behaviors, and into the pedagogic practices by
which these behaviors can be developed. It is, in short, specialized English language teaching
grounded in the social, cognitive and linguistic demands of academic target situations and
informed by an understanding of texts and of the constraints of academic contexts. Discourse
analysis is a key resource in this research agenda and has made an enormous contribution to our
understanding of academic communication.

What has discourse analysis told us about EAP?

Discourse analysis is a collection of methods for studying language in action, looking at texts in
relation to the social contexts in which they are used. Because language is an irreducible part of
social life, connected to almost everything we do, this broad definition has been interpreted in
various ways across the social sciences. In EAP it has tended to be a methodology which gives
greater emphasis to actual texts than to institutional social practices, and has largely taken the
form of focusing on particular academic genres such as the research article, the conference
presentation, and the student essay.

Genre analysis can be seen as a more specific form of discourse analysis, which focuses on any
element of recurrent language use, including grammar and lexis that is relevant to the analyst’s
interests. As a result, genre analysis sees texts as representative of wider rhetorical practices and
so has the potential to offer descriptions and explanations both of texts and of the communities
that use them. Genres are the recurrent uses of more or less conventionalized forms through
which individuals develop relationships, establish communities and get things done using
language.

Genres can therefore be seen as a kind of tacit contract between writers and readers, which
influence the behavior of text producers and the expectations of receivers. By focusing on
mapping typicality, genre analysis thus seeks to show what is usual in collections of texts, and so
it helps to reveal underlying discourses and the preferences of disciplinary communities. These
approaches are influenced by Halliday’s (1994) view of language as a system of choices that link
texts to particular contexts through patterns of lexico-grammatical and rhetorical features
(Christie and Martin, 1997) and by Swales’ (1990) observation that these recurrent choices are

Current Question
closely related to the work of particular discourse communities, whose members share broad
social purposes.

Perhaps the most productive application of discourse analysis in EAP has been to explore the
lexico-grammatical and discursive patterns of particular genres in order to identify their
recognizable structural identity. Analyzing this kind of patterning has yielded useful information
about the ways in which texts are constructed and the rhetorical contexts in which such patterns
are used, as well as providing valuable input for genre-based teaching.
Academic discourse analysis research has also pointed to cultural specificity in rhetorical
preferences (e.g., Connor, 2002). Although ‘culture’ is a controversial term, one influential
interpretation regards it as a historically transmitted and systematic network of meanings that

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allow us to understand, develop and communicate our knowledge and beliefs about the world.
Culture is seen as inextricably bound up with language (Kramsch, 1993), so that cultural factors
have the potential to influence perception, language, learning and communication. Although it is
far from conclusive, discourse analytic research suggests that the schemata of L2 and L1 (first
language) writers differ in their preferred ways of organizing ideas that can influence academic
writing (e.g., Hinkel, 2002).

An example analysis of an EAP genre

Discourse analyses of academic texts takes a variety of forms, tending towards the textual, the
critical or the contextual, but there have been two main ways of studying interactions in writing.
Researchers have examined the actions of individuals as they create particular texts (Bosher,
1998), or they have studied the distribution of different genre features to see how they cluster in
complementary distributions (Biber, 2006).

One example of this is a study of self-mention, which concerns how far writers want to interrupt
into their texts though use of ‘I’ or ‘we’, or avoid it by choosing impersonal forms. The use of
self-mention is a rather annoyed issue in academic writing and remains a perennial problem for
students, teachers and experienced writers alike; the extent to which one can reasonably assert
one’s personal involvement remains highly controversial. While claims have to be warranted by
appropriate support and reference to existing knowledge by fitting novelty into a community
consensus, success in gaining acceptance for innovation also involves demonstrating an
individual contribution to that community and establishing a claim for recognition for academic
priority. To some extent this is a personal preference, determined by seniority, experience,
personality and so on (Hyland, 2010), but the study illustrated here shows that the presence or
absence of explicit author reference is a conscious choice by writers to adopt a particular
community-situated authorial identity (Hyland, 2001b).

In all disciplines, writers’ principal use of the first person was to explain the work that they had
carried out by way of representing their unique role in constructing a reasonable interpretation
for a phenomenon. In the hard knowledge corpus and in the more quantitative papers in the soft
fields, this mainly involved setting out methodological procedures so that self-mention helped to
underline the writer’s professional credentials through a familiarity with disciplinary research
practices. In addition, it acts to highlight the part the writer has played in a process that is often
represented as having no agents at all, reminding readers that, in other hands, things could have
been done differently.

In more theoretically oriented articles writers sought less to figure as practical agents than as
builders of coherent theories of reality. Explicit self-mention here establishes a more personal
form of authority, one based on confidence and command of one’s arguments.

It has to be said that the relationships between knowledge, the linguistic conventions of different
disciplines and personal identity are ambiguous and complex. Yet it is equally true that these
broad differences suggest that self-mention varies with different assumptions about the effects of
authorial presence and rhetorical intrusion in different knowledge-making communities. These
are issues worth addressing and exploring further with students, for only by developing a

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rhetorical consciousness of these kinds of features can they gain control over their writing in
academic contexts.

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CORPUS APPROACHES TO DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

What is corpus and design of Corpora

Current Question
Before discussing corpus-based approaches to discourse analysis it is necessary to define what a
corpus actually is. It is generally assumed that a corpus is a collection of spoken or written
authentic texts that is representative of a particular area of language use, by virtue of its size and
composition. It is not always the case, however, that the corpus is representative of language use
in general, or even of a specific language variety, as the data set may be very specialized (such as
material collected from the internet) and it may not always be based on samples of complete
texts. The data may also be only of the spoken or written discourse of a single person, such as a
single author’s written work. It is important, then, to be aware of the specific nature and source
of corpus data so that appropriate claims can be made from the analyses that are based on it
(Kennedy 1998, Tognini-Bonelli 2004).

A corpus is usually computer-readable and able to be accessed with tools such as concordances
which are able to find and sort out language patterns. The corpus has usually (although not
always) been designed for the purpose of the analysis, and the texts have been selected to
provide a sample of specific text-types, or genres, or a broad and balanced sample of spoken
and/or written discourse (Stubbs 2004).

“Corpus studies draw on collections of texts that are

usually stored and analyzed electronically. They look at the
occurrence and re-occurrence of particular linguistic features to
see how and where they occur in the discourse. They may look
at words that typically occur together (collocations) or they may
look at the frequency of particular items. Corpus studies may
look at language use in general, or they may look at the use of a
particular linguistic feature in a particular domain, such as
spoken academic discourse, or use of the item in a particular
genre, such as university tutorial discussions.”

Corpora may be general or they may be specialized. A general corpus, also known as a reference
corpus: “Aims to represent language in its broadest sense and to serve as a widely available
resource for baseline or comparative studies of general linguistic features.” (Reppen and
Simpson 2004). A general corpus, thus, provides sample data from which we can make
generalizations about spoken and written discourse as a whole, and frequencies of occurrence
and co-occurrence of particular aspects of language in the discourse. It will not, however, tell us
about the language and discourse of particular genres or domain of use (unless the corpus can be
broken down into separate genres or areas of use in some way). For this, we need a specialized
corpus.

A specialized corpus, as Hunston (2002) explains is:

“A corpus of texts of a particular type, such as newspaper editorials, geography textbooks,
academic articles in a particular subject, lectures, casual conversations, essays written by
students etc. It aims to be representative of a given type of text. It is used to investigate a

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particular type of language.” Specialized corpora are required when the research question
relates to the use of spoken or written discourse in particular kinds of texts or in particular
situations. A specialized corpus might be used, for example, to examine the use of hedges in
casual conversation or the ways in which people signal a change in topic in an academic
presentation. It might look at an aspect of students’ academic written discourse and compare this
with use of the same features in published academic writing, or it may look at discourse features
of a particular academic genre such as theses and dissertations, or a discourse level aspect of
dissertation defenses.

Design and Construction of Corpora

There are, thus, a number of already established corpora that can be used for doing corpus-based
discourse studies. These contain data that can be used for asking very many questions about the
use of spoken and written discourse both in general and in specific areas of use, such as
academic writing or speaking. If, however, your interest is in what happens in a particular genre,
or in a particular genre in a setting for which there is no available data, then you will have to
make up your own corpus for your study.

Hyland’s (2002) study of the use of personal pronouns such as I, me, we and us in Hong Kong
student’s academic writing is an example of a corpus that was designed to answer a question
about the use of discourse in a particular genre, in a particular setting. The specific aim of his
study was to examine the extent to which student writers use self-mention in their texts ‘to
strengthen their arguments and gain personal recognition for their claims’ in their written
discourse, as expert writers do (Hyland 2005). His question was related to issues of discourse
and identity, and the place of this writing practice in a particular academic and social
community.

Harwood (2005) also compiled his own corpus for his study of the use of the personal pronouns I
and we in journal research articles. For his study, Harwood selected research articles from
electronic versions of journals as well as manually scanned articles and converted them to text
format. His analysis of his data was both quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative analysis
examined the frequency of writers’ use of I and we in the texts and the disciplines in which this
occurred. The qualitative analysis examined the use of I and we from a functional perspective;
that is, what the function was of these items in the texts, as well as possible explanations for their
use. He then compared his findings with explanations of the use of I and we in published
academic writing textbooks.

A further example of a researcher-compiled corpus is Ooi’s (2001) study of the language of

personal ads on the World Wide Web. Ooi had to make up his own corpus to see how people use
language in this particular genre. A large-scale corpus of language use on the world wide web, in
general, would not have told him this. ‘Off the shelf’ corpora and custom-made corpora, then,
each have their strengths, and their limitations.

The choice of which to use is, in part, a matter of the research question, as well as the
availability, or not, of a suitable corpus to help with answering the question. It is not necessarily
the case, however, that a custom-made corpus needs to be especially large. It depends on what
the purpose of collecting the corpus is. As Sinclair (2001) has argued, small manageable corpora
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can be put together relatively quickly and can be honed to very specific genres and very specific
areas of discourse use. They can also be extremely useful for the teaching of particular genres
and for investigating learner needs.

Issues to Consider in Constructing a Corpus

There are a number of issues that need to be considered when constructing a corpus.
 The first of these is what to include in the corpus; that is, the variety or dialect of the
language, the genre(s) to be included, whether the texts should be spoken, written or both
and whether the texts should be monologic, dialogic or multi-party.
 The next issue is the size of the corpus and of the individual texts, as well as the number
of texts to include in each category. The issue is not, however, just corpus size, but also
the way in which the data will be collected and the kinds of questions that will be
examined using the data (McCarthy and Carter 2001). Even a small corpus can be useful
for investigating certain discourse features.
 The sources and subject matter of the texts may also be an issue that needs to be
considered.
 Other issues include sociolinguistic and demographic considerations such as the
nationality, gender, age, occupation, education level, native language or dialect and the
relationship between participants in the texts.

Authenticity, representativeness and validity of the corpus

Authenticity, representativeness and validity are also issues in corpus construction, as well as
whether the corpus should present a static or a dynamic picture of the discourse under
examination; that is, whether it should be a sample of discourse use at one particular point in
time (a static, or sample corpus) or whether it should give more of a ‘moving picture’ view of the
discourse that shows change in language use over a period of time (a dynamic, or monitor
corpus) (Kennedy 1998 ; Reppen and Simpson 2002 ).
Kinds of texts to include in the corpus
A key issue is what kind of texts the corpus should contain. This decision may be based on what
the corpus is designed for, but it may also be constrained by what texts are available. Another
issue is the permanence of the corpus; that is, whether it will be regularly updated so that it does
not become unrepresentative, or whether it will remain as an example of the use of discourse at a
particular point in time (Hunston 2002).
Size of the texts in the corpus
The size of texts in the corpus is also a consideration. Some corpora aim for an even sample size
of individual texts. If, for example, the corpus aims to represent a particular genre, and instances
of the genre are typically long, or short, this needs to be reflected in the collection of texts that
make up the corpus.

The representativeness of the corpus further depends on the extent to which it includes the
range of linguistic distribution in the population. That is, different linguistic features are
differently distributed (within texts, across texts, across text types), and a representative corpus
must enable analysis of these various distributions.

A corpus, then, needs to aim for both representativeness and balance, both of which, as Kennedy
(1998) points out, are in the end matters of judgment and approximation. All of this cannot be
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done at the outset, however. The compilation of the corpus needs to take place in a cyclical
fashion with the original design being based on theoretical and pilot study analyses, followed by
the collection of the texts, investigation of the discourse features under investigation, then, in
turn, revision of the design (Biber 1994). As Reppen and Simpson (2002) explain ‘no corpus can
be everything to everyone’. Any corpus in the end ‘is a compromise between the desirable and
the feasible’ (Stubbs 2004).

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POLITICS AS USUAL: INVESTIGATING POLITICAL DISCOURSE IN ACTION

Politics on ‘backstage’
It is much more difficult to explore the ‘backstage’, the everyday life of politicians, than the
staging of ‘grand politics. Once we enter the backstage, for example in the European Parliament
(see below), we encounter the routines of political organizations that are at first sight
nontransparent and seem as chaotic as in any organization. Hence, ethnographic research is
needed, such as participant observation in organizations, in-depth and narrative interviews,
shadowing of insiders, and so forth to be able to grasp the processes of political strategizing and
decision-making. Focusing only on typical front-stage activities (such as political speeches, for
example) does not suffice to understand and explain the complexity of ‘politics. This is why the
organizational contexts (structures, rules, regulations, and constraints) have to be accounted for
in detail.

Issues of power, hegemony and ideology have been reconceived as central to social and
linguistic practices in all organizations, since all organizational forms can be translated into
language and communication and because, as Deetz (1982: 135) concluded, talk and writing
‘connect each perception to a larger orientation and system of meaning’. The distinction between
structure and agency is useful, since it moves us away from a preoccupation with individual
motivations and behaviors to the discursive practices through which organizational activity is
performed in ritualized in ever new ways. Four prominent linguistic–discursive approaches have
proven particularly influential in organizational research to date: ethno-methodology;
conversation analysis (CA); sociolinguistic analysis; and (critical) discourse analysis (CDA).

Ethnomethodology, whilst technically rooted in sociology, emphasizes the conditions that have
to be satisfied for certain actions to be perceived as signifying a recognized sanction (Garfinkel
et al., 1981). Conversation analysis (CA) identifies the very detailed aspects of members’ turn-
taking strategies that are critical to performance and membership (Schegloff, 1987; Drew and
Heritage, 1992) and deals with relatively short stretches of interaction as being revealing and
representative of, the organizations’ interactional principles. Sociolinguistic analysis has a basis
in the tradition of correlating sociological parameters (e.g., age, class and gender) with variations
in organizational discourse (Bernstein, 1987). Interactional sociolinguistics has its origins in
symbolic interactionism (Goffman, 1959) and is further developed in the broad domain of
discourse studies, and responds to the criticism that the first approach underplays the effect of
context on organizational discourse.

Studies in this domain are not only labor-intensive due to the required ethnography, but they are
usually organized as case studies that are not easy to generalize from. Nevertheless,
Holzscheiter’s investigation into decision-making procedures about legal requirements of child
protection on the UN level allows important insight into the debates of NGOs and their impact
on government officials (2005). Duranti’s participant observation of a US senator’s election
campaign trail raised awareness about the many discursive practices and persuasive devices
required to keep on track such a huge campaign and related persons (2006). Decision-making
processes involving both written materials (such as minutes, statements and programs) and
debates in committees lie at the core of qualitative political science research into Israeli
community centers (Yanow, 1996) and of text-linguistic and discourse analytic investigations

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into EU committees such as the Competitiveness Advisory Group (Wodak, 2000a, b; Wodak et
al. 2011).

The interdependence of front-stage and backstage becomes truly apparent in these studies;
moreover, it becomes obvious how much is decided on backstage and how negotiations and
compromises are staged and enacted thereafter on front-stage.

Pragmatic–linguistic expertise becomes salient in the discourse analysis of daily (political)

interactions: much knowledge is regularly presupposed in every interaction (Goffman, 1981;
Wodak, 2009a: 45ff.). Misunderstandings occur when presuppositions or other indirect
pragmatic devices either are not available or differ significantly. Sharing presupposed and
inferred meanings and hence including or excluding others in strategic ways is, I believe,
constitutive of political power play and of achieving one’s aims in the political arena (Jäger and
Maier 2009).

The discourse-historical approach

DHA provides a vehicle for looking at latent power dynamics and the range of potential in
agents, because it integrates and triangulates knowledge about historical, inter-textual sources
and the background of the social and political fields within which discursive events are
embedded. Moreover, the DHA distinguishes between three dimensions that constitute textual
meanings and structures: the topics that are spoken/ written about; the discursive strategies
employed; and the linguistic means that are drawn upon to realize both topics and strategies (e.g.
argumentative strategies, topoi, presuppositions – see below for an extensive discussion).

Systematic qualitative analysis in the DHA takes four layers of context into account: the inter-
textual and inter-discursive relationships between utterances, texts, genres and discourses; the
extra-linguistic social/sociological variables; the history and archaeology of texts and
organizations; and institutional frames of the specific context of a situation (the specific episodes
under investigation). In this way we are able to explore how discourses, genres and texts change
due to socio-political contexts, and with what effects (see Wodak, 2001).

Furthermore, two concepts are salient for analyzing the backstage of politics: inter-textuality
refers to the linkage of all texts to other texts, both in the past and in the present. Such links can
be established in different ways: through continued reference to a topic or to its main actors;
through reference to the same events as the other texts; or through the reappearance of a text’s
main arguments in another text. The second important process is labeled contextualization. By
taking an argument, a topic, a genre or a discursive practice out of context and restating/realizing
it in a new context, we first observe the process of de-contextualization, and then, when the
respective element is implemented in a new context, of contextualization. The element then
acquires a new meaning, because, as Wittgenstein (1967) demonstrated, meanings are formed in
use.

Politics as usual: perspectives and limitations

Common sense supposes that politicians are very well organized, in spite of the many urgent and
important events they must deal with, which have an impact on all our lives. We all have
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cognitive models (event models, experience models, context models: van Dijk, 2008), which
quickly and automatically update, distinguish, comprehend and store such events. From this we
might assume that politicians also regularly access their own set of cognitive models for ‘doing
politics’ in order to respond rapidly, in a rational and quite predictable way, to the various events
they encounter.

However, this is in fact not the case as the everyday life of politicians is as much filled with
accident, coincidence and unpredictability as it is filled with well-planned, strategic and rational
action. Chaotic situations are a necessary feature of ‘politics as usual’; experienced politicians
simply know how to cope with them better thus there is ‘order in the disorder’ (Wodak, 1996,
2009), established inter alia through routines, norms and rituals. Politicians have acquired
strategies and tactics to pursue their agenda more or less successfully. The ‘successes depend on
their position in the field, on their power relations and, most importantly, on what I label
knowledge management: much of what we perceive as disorder depends on inclusion in shared
knowledge or exclusion from shared knowledge.

Hans provides some important answers to the questions posed above which, again, could be
generalized to other political realms. Hans employs both strategic and tactical knowledge when
trying to convince various audiences of his political agenda. These discursive strategies and
tactics also structure his day, which might otherwise seem totally chaotic from the outside, or
much ritualized and bureaucratic oriented, for example, solely towards the drafting and
redrafting of documents. Hans knows the ‘rules of the game’, he hesitates between a range of
communities of practice in very well planned and strategic ways, he employs a wide range of
genres suited to the immediate context in order to push his agenda, and thus possesses a whole
repertoire of genres and modes which he applies in functionally adequate ways for the range of
multimodal modes employed in bureaucracies and political institutions.

In sum: I argue, is how politics works; that is, how politicians work. Hans, as a small-scale
policy entrepreneur, does political work; however, as citizens are excluded from the backstage
and the many communities of practice where Hans implements his strategies and pushes his
agenda these activities and practices remain invisible. Of course, this is not only the case for one
MEP; this is generally true for the field of politics as a whole. To challenge the democratic
deficit, at the very least, information about daily political work would need to be made more
publicly accessible to a certain degree.

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Lecture-11
Discourse and Phonology

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DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND PHONOLOGY

Pronunciation and rhythm

Under the heading of phonology in this chapter we shall take a brief look at what has
traditionally been thought of as 'pronunciation', but devote most of our attention to intonation.
This is partly because the most exciting developments in the analysis of discourse have been in
intonation studies rather than at the segmental level (the study of phonemes and their
articulation) and partly because intonation teaching, where it has taken place, has proceeded on
the basis of assumptions that are open to challenge from a discourse analyst's viewpoint.

Traditional pronunciation teaching has found its strength in the ability of linguists to segment
the sounds of language into isolated items called phonemes which, when used in the construction
of words, produce meaningful contrasts with other words (e.g. the phonemes /p/ and /b/ in
English give us contrasts such as pump and bump, pat and bat, .etc.), The position and manner of
articulation of phonemes in a language like English are well described and can be presented and
practiced in language classes either as isolated sounds, in words, in contrasting pairs of words or
in minimal contexts.

Such features will probably long remain the stock-in-trade of pronunciation teaching and, if well
done, can undoubtedly help leaners with difficulties. When words follow one another in speech,
phonemes may undergo considerable changes. Good advanced learners of English use
assimilations and elisions naturally, but a surprising number of quite advanced learners continue
to articulate the citation-form phonemes of English words in casual, connected speech.

This will not usually cause problems of communication but is undoubtedly a contributing factor
in 'foreign accent', and there may be a case for explicit intervention by the teacher to train
students in the use of the most commonly occurring assimilations and elisions by practicing
pronunciation in (at least minimal) contexts. Alternatively, the answer may be to tackle the
problem simultaneously from a 'top-down' and 'bottom up' approach, on the premise that
articulation, rhythmically (see below) and intonation are inextricably linked, and that good
intonation will have a wash-back effect on articulation in terms of reduced and altered
articulations of individual phonemes, alongside the specific teaching of phonemes and the most
common altered and reduced forms.
Current Question
When we listen to a stretch of spoken English discourse, we often feel that there is a rhythm or
regularity to it, which gives it a characteristic sound, different from other languages and not
always well-imitated by foreign learners. The impression of rhythm may arise out of a feeling of
alternation between strong and weak 'beats'. Traditionally, rhythm has been considered an
important element in the teaching of spoken English. This is probably due to two main factors.

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Firstly, there does seem to be rhythmically in varying degrees in long stretches of speech,
especially carefully considered deliveries such as broadcast talks, fluent reading aloud, speeches
and monologues, as well as some ordinary conversation. Secondly, the concept of English as a
stress-timed language, deeply rooted in theoretical and applied linguistics, has dominated
approaches to the teaching of rhythm.

Word stress and prominence

At this point, it is useful to change our terminology slightly and introduce the term prominence.
Syllables which stand out in the flow of talk will be referred to as prominent syllables. It is
because the speaker has uttered them with relatively greater intensity, or duration, or pitch
variation compared with surrounding syllables (and our perception of this phenomenon will
usually be due to a variety of such features). It is helpful to have this special term, prominence,
so as not to confuse word stress, which words bear in their citation forms (sometimes called their
isolate pronunciations), with what concerns us most here: the choice of the speaker to make
certain words salient by giving prominence to syllables. This is therefore a more precise use of
the term prominence than is found in some sources (e.g. Cruttenden 1986).

Word stress, as it is traditionally understood, and prominence, as we shall use it here, are two
distinct levels. Where they overlap, of course, is in the fact that prominences may not be
distributed just anywhere in the word, but may only fall on certain syllables. Where two
prominences can occur in the same word, as is often the case with a whole class of words such as
IApanESE, UNiVERsal, conGRAtuLAtions, etc., the second will always be the stronger.

Stress is a large topic and despite the fact that it has been extensively studied for a very long
time, there remain many areas of disagreement or lack of understanding. So, it is important to
consider what factors make a syllable count as stressed. Stress is basically a prominence of
syllable in terms of loudness, length, pitch and quality and all of them work together in order to
make a syllable stressed. As discussed above, two types of stress are important. Firstly, stress on
a syllable within a word (the lexical stress) which changes the grammatical category of a word
(compare insult with insult) and also change meaning among other things. On the other hand,
stress on a word or certain words in a phrase or sentence. This type of stress (on word(s) within
sentences) is called sentence level or prosodic stress. This is, in fact, a change or modification to
word level stress in a sentence which is basically a change of ‘beat’ on certain words in a
sentence. Remember that, we create ‘rhythm’ in spoken language on the basis of stress.
Analyze the following examples (stressed words are shown in bold):

Mary’s younger brother wanted fifty chocolate peanuts.

So, what is happening here in this sentence is about the distinguishing degree of emphasis which
is used for creating contrast in sentences or lines of verse. The question is: why do we create this

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difference? This takes place in order to differentiate in environment – superimposition of

intonation (degree of prominence) and it is also the part of the formality of a language.

For the learner of English, information about which syllables may be prominent is useful; it is a
natural part of the lexical competence of native speakers. In this regard, the traditional distinction
between primary stress and secondary stress (see above) may be misleading, and it may .be more
helpful simply to indicate to the learner which syllables are prominent. Otherwise, the learner
may be misled into thinking that primary and secondary stress must be maintained at all costs.

Intonational units Current Question

Intonation units are an important component of American English pronunciation and speech.
An intonation unit is a segment of speech. It can be as small as a single word, or as long as a
sentence. Two sentences with identical grammatical structure may be comprised of differing
numbers of intonation units when spoken, based on the intent or emotional state of the speaker.
It's important to learn to distinguish these units because they give subtle meanings and help
organize a conversation. There is no single determiner as to where intonation units begin and end
or how many a single sentence contains, but there are clues. Generally, intonation units:

 begin with faster speech, and end with slower speech

 include a single pitch word
 end with a pitch boundary

Intonation units and emotion

Current Question
Individual speakers alter the number of intonation units they use. Some of this is based on
individual patterns and habits, but speakers also alter intonation units based on emotion. A faster
speaker will generally use fewer intonation units and may be seen as being more urgent, frantic,
excited, and anxious. A slower speaker may have more intonation units and may be perceived as
being more emphatic, determined, and insistent. Of course, these are the extremes, and most
people normally speak somewhere in the middle range.

Elements of intonation units

Sentences can often be broken up into multiple intonation units. Each intonation unit usually has
a single pitch word and ends in a pitch boundary. Each pitch word conveys information to the
listener, and each pitch boundary helps organize how speakers take turns speaking.

Similar sentences can have a different number of intonation units. The end of each intonation
unit is marked with a hash (/) and the pitch words are bolded. Notice that the speaker with fewer
intonation units spoke faster, with fewer pauses, and with fewer changes in pitch during the
statement. The sentence with more intonation units sounds more emphatic and deliberate about
what is being said. More intonation units can cause the entire conversation to occur more slowly.
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Speakers tend to match each other's English rhythm, so if one speaker has a more emphatic
rhythm, it is likely that other speakers will mirror it.

Brown and her associates are concerned with how speakers manage large stretches of interaction,
in terms of turn-taking and topic-signaling and how speakers use pitch level to interact. For
instance, there seems to be a direct correlation in English between the beginning of a new topic
in speech and a shift to a higher pitch.

Turn-taking is another important aspect of pitch level in this view of intonation. The speaker
can signal a desire to continue a speaking turn by using non-low pitch, even at a point where
there is a pause, or at the end of a syntactic unit, such as a clause. Equally, a down-step in pitch
is often a good turn-yielding cue. The intonational cues interact with other factors such as syntax,
lexis, non-verbal communication and the context itself, and are typical of how the different levels
of encoding have to be seen as operating in harmony in a discourse-oriented view of language
(Schaffer 1983).

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HALLIDAY’S SIX IDEATIONAL METAFUNCTION

Michael Halliday, the founder of systemic functional linguistics, calls these three functions
the ideational, interpersonal, and textual. The ideational function is further divided into the
experiential and logical. For this reason, systemic linguists analyze a clause from three
perspectives. In Halliday’s SFL, language as a social phenomenon is functional .i.e. it is
concerned with the mechanism of text structure, function and meaning of language. It begins an
analysis of language in social context where a particular lexico-grammatical choice is
constructed under the influence of the social and cultural context.

Ideational and Experiential Function

Ideational Meta-function: Ideational meta-function provides grammatical resources at clause

rank to construe the inner and outer experience or 'goings-on' of the word, as the domain of
functions and meanings of the world through the systems of transitivity. It has two components
of logical and experiential functions.
 The concept of Transitivity:
In traditional grammar, transitivity was developed as the concept of transitive or intransitive verb
(Halliday, 1976) whether the verb takes an object or not, but in SFL it functions to link grammar
to the meta functions; however, in Halliday’s terms, transitivity as a major component in
experiential function of the clause deals with the “transmission of ideas “representing ‘processes’
or ‘experiences’: actions, events, processes of consciousness and relations” (1985). It is a
semantic system to analyze representations of reality in a linguistic text and create the same
experience through various lexico-grammatical options influenced by different mind styles or
authorial ideology. (Fowler, 1986).
It manifests how certain choices encode the author’s certain ideological stance affected by social
and cultural institution because according to Fowler these linguistic codes cannot reflect reality
neutrally and definitely embody ideologies. (1986) It also functions as a rich analytic tool
utilized in critical discourse analysis, dealing with “who or what does what to whom or what?”
where actor, action and goal as affected are highlighted. Transitivity with inter-related options to
represent different types of process or experience investigated from above, below, and around
consists of process, participant with different labels such as Actor, Goal; Sensor, Phenomenon;
Carrier, Attribute; and circumstance including Cause, Location, Manner, Means and Instrument.
Process refers to a semantic verb (doing, happening, feeling, sensing, saying, behaving, and
existing) and anything that it expresses like event, relation, physical, mental or emotional state
when sorted in the semantic system of the clause is classified into material, relational, mental,
verbal, behavioral, and existential processes. (Halliday, 1976)
 Material Process
Classified into intentional or spontaneous performance of an animate or inanimate, material
processes, externalized and concrete embody an action verb of doing or happening, a doer is

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labeled as Actor and optional Goal, affected by the process and circumstance that provides
details of the verb in terms of place, time, manner, condition, etc.
 Mental Process
Classified into three categories of cognition, perception and affection, mental processes,
internalized and consciousness type, are concerned with participants labeled as Sensor and
Phenomenon. Mental processes can be viewed from:
'From above', it construes perception, cognition and affection
'From below', it includes Process + Sensor + Phenomenon
'From around', it manifests the content of consciousness such as a thought
 Relational Process
Classified into intensive, attributive, identifying, circumstantial, and possessive, Relational
processes are concerned with the processes of description regarding the abstract relations.
Irreversible attributive process assigns a quality, or adjective to a participant titled as Carrier
realized by a noun or a nominal phrase. Reversible Identifying process consists of two nominal
phrases as participants, a Token holder and a Value meaning, referent, and status (Halliday,1985)
that can be turned into passive voice.
 Verbal Process
th
5 Slide: A verbal process of direct or indirect report, standing on the border of mental and
relational processes, relates “any kind of symbolic exchange of meaning’ (Halliday, 1985:129) or
the ideas in human consciousness with their linguistic representation of Sayer, the addressee
labeled as Target, and Verbiage.
 Behavioral Process
The behavioral Process standing between material and mental processes relate the physiological
and psychological behaviors such as ‘breathing; coughing; smiling; dreaming; and staring.’
(1985)
 Existential process
These processes are processes of existing with a there and to be with no representational
function. An Existent can be an entity, event or action.

Impersonal and Logical Function

Grammatically, interpersonal meta-function at the clausal level enjoys Mood. Mood is

concerned with the topic of information or service and whether it is giving or demanding and the
tenor of the relationship between interact ants. Tenor deals with gender or status-based power.
Muir (1972:92) and Halliday (1981:30) define Mood parallel to interpersonal communication
which embraces three grammatical categories of speech function, modality and tone. The
interpersonal meta-function concentrates on social roles and relations through formality degree,
pronouns, clausal mood (whether declarative, imperative or interrogative), etc.

In interpersonal meta-function, the degree of intimacy or distance and the type of the relationship
between the writer and reader or participants in a text through the type of modality can be
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explored; besides, the system of pronominal determination describes how a referent can be
recognized through the stances of the referent regarding the speaker and listener.

The Mood element constituted by the Subject and the Finite (auxiliary or lexical verb) and the
remainder of the clause as the Residue, determine the mood of a clause as verbal group. Hence,
the order Subject+Finite establishes the mood as declarative, while the order Finite+ Subject
establishes the mood as interrogative. In a system network, a clause can be declarative or
interrogative with Wh or yes-no format including material, mental, verbal, relational, or
existential processes.

In terms of finite verb, subject and tense choice, SFL helps us express the speech functions such
as persuading, enticing, motivating, demanding, inviting, ordering, proposing, recommending,
confirming, persisting, and denying through a set of Mood clause systems. Through the scale of
delicacy (level of detail and particularity) in the mood system, a clause can be indicative or
imperative.
Indicative clauses are classified into interrogative and declarative; besides the element of tagging
can be explored here.
(Sethe was sick) (Who is she? Is she a ghost in a body?) (He comes back, doesn’t he?)
(Listen to me, will you?) (Let’s move out of this place, shall we?)

Speech-functional roles help meaning to be achieved through Mood such as statement or

question requesting, commanding and offering. Semantic dimensions of functions such as
declaration dealing with information exchange (statement), asking information (question), and
demanding service (commands) are omnipresent in every language while the structure,
organization, degree and realizations of delicate choices differ from one language to another. For
every grammatical category, there are different realizations. Interact ants are involved in a
conversation with indicating, demanding, and evaluating responses and information through the
degree of probability. Metaphorically, a command can be regarded as a statement or a question.
Sethe should/ must /will give her daughter freedom. Would she ask him to stay?

Textual function and References

Grammatically, textual meta-function at the clausal level enjoys Theme. Thematic structure is
concerned with Theme, and Rhyme, or the old and new information structure or topic and
comment where any component in a clause like Subject, Predicator, Complement or
circumstantial Adjunct can be tropicalized and be placed in thematic position or the beginning of
the clause which is more significant than other locations in a sentence. Muir (1972) proposes
“the thematic element in a clause is the first element which results from choice. “According to
Halliday (1981:330) theme includes the message in a text, indicating the identity of text
relations. Topic comes first and after that Comment appears to expand, justify and provide
additional information to preceding information.

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The clause acts as a message in the thematic statuses of Theme and Rhyme in terms of the local
and spatial position in a sequence where Theme takes the initial position whether marked or
unmarked and rhyme the non-initial position. The information flows like a wave in a sentence
from thematic top to thematic bottom which can be accompanied by rising or falling intonation.
Theme slides toward Rhyme and given information toward New to reveal the location of
information prominence.
 Cohesion:
Cohesion, the “non-structural text-forming relations” (Halliday and Hasan 1976) relates to the
“semantic ties” or relations of meaning within text. The cohesive devices of referencing,
substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion were presented by Halliday and Hasan
(1976) and Bloor and Bloor (1995)
 Referencing
Classified into homophoric, exophoric and endophoric categories respectively referring to
cultural shared information, immediate situation context, and textual information, referencing
identifies presupposed information throughout the text. (Eggins 1994) Endophoric referencing
divided into anaphoric, cataphoric, and esphoric respectively refers to the previously mentioned
(preceding) information in text, information presented later in the text, the same nominal group
or phrase following the presupposed item. (Halliday and Hasan 1976). There are also personal,
demonstrative, and comparative references referring to speech situation noun pronouns like he,
him or possessive determiners like mine and yours, this, here, there, then, same, equal, so,
similarly, and otherwise.
 Substitution and Ellipsis
In Bloor and Bloor (1995: 96), substitution and ellipsis are used to avoid the repetition of a
lexical item through grammatical resources of the language. The substitution and ellipsis can be
nominal, verbal and clausal. Substitution words have the same function such as “one and ones”
for nouns and “do” or “so” as in “do so” or “that and “it” for verbal, nominal, and clausal
substitutions. Functioning at the level of deictic, enumerative, epithet, classifier, and qualifier,
ellipsis as “substitution by zero” refers to a presupposed anaphoric item through structural link.
 Lexical Cohesion
Lexical cohesion is non-grammatical and refer to the “cohesive effect achieved by the selection
of vocabulary” like reiteration where a lexical item directly or indirectly occurs through
application of synonym, antonym, metonym, or hyponym or a super-ordinate and collocation
where pair of same event or environment lexical items co-occur or found together within the text.
When these lexical items are closer, the text enjoys higher degree of cohesion.

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Lecture-12
Discourse, Vocabulary and Grammar

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DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND VOCABULARY-I

Lexical cohesion

In text, lexical cohesion is the result of chains of related words that contribute to the continuity of
lexical meaning. These lexical chains are a direct result of units of text being "about the same
thing," and finding text structure involves finding units of text that are about the same thing.

Bringing a discourse dimension into language teaching does not by any means imply an
abandonment of teaching vocabulary. Vocabulary will still be the largest single element in
tackling a new language for the learner and it would be irresponsible to suggest that it will take
care-of itself in some ideal world where language teaching and' learning are discourse-driven.
Therefore, in this chapter we shall look at research into vocabulary in extended texts in speech
and writing and consider if anything can be usefully exploited to give a discourse dimension to
vocabulary teaching and vocabulary activities in the classroom. Most are already in agreement
that vocabulary should, wherever possible, be taught in context, but context is a rather catch-all
term and what we need to do at this point is to look at some of the specific relationships between
vocabulary choice, context (in the sense of the situation in which the discourse is produced) and
co-text (the actual text surrounding any given lexical item). The suggestions we shall make will
be offered as a supplement to conventional vocabulary teaching rather than as a replacement for
it.

It is debatable whether collocation properly belongs to the notion of lexical cohesion, since
collocation only refers to the probability that lexical items will co-occur, and is not a semantic
relation between words. Here, therefore, we shall consider the term 'lexical cohesion' to mean
only exact repetition of words and the role played by certain basic semantic relations between
words in creating textuality, that property of text which distinguishes it from a random sequence
of unconnected sentences. We shall consequently ignore collocation associations across sentence
boundaries as lying outside of these semantic relations.

Lexical reiteration can be shown to be a significant feature of textuality, and then there may be
something for the language teacher to exploit. We shall not suggest that it be exploited simply
because it is there, but only if, by doing so, we can give learners meaningful, controlled practice
and the hope of improving their text-creating and decoding abilities, and providing them with
more varied contexts for using and practicing vocabulary.

Reiteration means either restating an item in a later part of the discourse by direct repetition or
else reasserting its meaning by exploiting lexical relations. Lexical relations are the stable
semantic relationships that exist between words and which are the basis of descriptions given in
dictionaries and thesauri: for example, rose and flower are related by hyponymy; rose is a
hyponym of flower.

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1) Repetition
The most direct form of lexical cohesion is repetition of a lexical item; e.g., bear in sentence
Algy met a bear. The bear was bulgy (Halliday, 1985). Here the second occurrence of bear harks
back to the first.
2) Synonym or near – synonym
Synonym is used to mean ‘sameness of meaning’ (Palmer, 1981). Lexical cohesion results from
the choice of a lexical item that is in some sense synonymous with a preceding one; for example,
sound with noise.
3) Superordinate
Superordinate is term for words that refer to the upper class itself (Palmer, 1981). In contrary,
term for words that refer to the lower class itself is hyponym. For example: Henry’s bought
himself a new Jaguar. He practically lives in the car (Halliday and Hasan, 1976)
Here, car refers back to Jaguar; and the car is a superordinate of Jaguar.
4) General Word
The general words, which correspond to major classes of lexical items, are very commonly used
with cohesive force. They are on the borderline between lexical items and substitutes. Not all
general words are used cohesively; in fact, only the nouns are when it has the same referent as
whatever it is presupposing, and when it is accompanied by a reference item (Halliday and
Hasan, 1976: 280-1). For example: There’s a boy climbing the old elm. That old thing isn’t very
safe (Halliday and Hasan, 1976: 280). Here, the reiteration takes the form of a general word
thing.

Textual aspects of lexical competence

Prior to undertaking the concept of lexical competence, it is worth defining what competence is
and how it has been viewed so far. The term competence has generated substantial controversy in
the field of general and applied linguistics (Chomsky, 1965; Hymes, 1972). The former regarded
it as a pure grammatical competence, that is, “the speaker hearer’s knowledge of his language”
and the latter observed that this competence was more related to communication: a normal child
acquires knowledge of sentences not only as grammatical, but also as appropriate. He or she
acquires competence as to when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom,
when, where, in what manner. In short, a child becomes able to accomplish a repertoire of speech
acts, to take part in speech events, and to evaluate their accomplishment by others (Hymes,
1972).

A somewhat different type of lexical relation in discourse is when a writer or speaker rearranges
the conventional and well-established lexical relations and asks us, as it were, to adjust our usual
conceptualizations of how words relate to one another for the particular purposes of the text in
question. In one way or another, our expectations as to how words are conventionally used are
disturbed. A simple example is the following extract from a review of a book on American
military planning. Sometimes our expectations as to how words are conventionally used are
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disturbed when the writers arrange usual lexical relations for particular purposes of the text.
Example the depressing feature of Allen’s documents is the picture which emerges of smart but
stupid military planners, the equivalent of America’s madder fundamentalists, happily playing
the fool with the future of the planet. (The Guardian, 13 November 1987)
The depressing feature of Allen's documents is the picture which
emerges of smart but stupid military planners, the equivalent of
America's madder fundamentalists, happily playing the fool with the
future of the planet. (The Gwrdian, 13 November 1987)
Here, two words, smart and stupid, frequently occurring in the language as antonyms, and
therefore incompatible, are to be interpreted as compatible descriptions of the military experts.
To do this we have to adjust our typical expectations of how the two words operate as a related
pair. One reasonable interpretation would be that the -experts are clever ('smart') but morally
reckless (stupid'); to interpret them as meaning 'intelligent but unintelligent' would clearly be a
nonsense.

Vocabulary and the organizing text

A distinction is often made between grammar words and lexical words in language. This
distinction also appears sometimes as function words versus content words, or empty words
versus full words. The distinction is a useful one: it enables us to separate off those words which
belong to closed systems in the language and which carry grammatical meaning, from those that
belong to open systems and which belong to the major word classes of noun, verb, adjective and
adverb. This, that, these and those in English belong to a closed system (as do the pronouns and
prepositions) and carry the grammatical meaning of 'demonstratives'. Monkey, sculpture, noise
and toenail belong to open-ended sets, which are often thought of as the 'creative' end of
language. In between these two extremes is another type of vocabulary that has recently been
studied by discourse analysts, a type that seems to share qualities of both the open and the
closed-set words.

McCarthy and McCarthy and Carter introduce the concept of discourse-organizing words whose
job in the text is to organize and structure the arguments, rather than answer for its content or
field. Some of this discourse-organizing vocabulary consists of words that act as pronouns in the
way that they refer in the text to some other part of the text. They include such words, as issue,
problem, assessment, question, position, case, situation, etc.

Psychological correlate of a natural language is the notion of communicative competence as

introduced by Hymes (1972). He explicitly states that communicative competence comprises
“not only the ability to understand and interpret linguistic expressions, but also the ability to use
these expressions in appropriate and effective ways according to the conventions of verbal
interaction prevailing in a linguistic community”. It seems natural to suppose that lexical
competence, which could accordingly be defined as the ability to use words in appropriate and
effective ways in verbal interaction, is part of communicative competence as defined above.
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However, in current linguistic theory there has been an unfortunate tendency to concentrate on
the particular analysis of lexical meaning in order to account for the structural properties of
lexical items, while ignoring significant aspects of the use and behavior of lexemes in linguistic
utterances.

The reasons behind this strategy may be the following:

From a purely grammar-designing perspective, all a linguistic model demands from the lexicon
is the basic semantic and syntactic properties of lexical items which are necessary to use them in
linguistic expressions. This has been captured in formal theories in standard lexical entries
through thematic relations and predicate-argument structures, and, in FG, through classical
predicate frames. Thus, from the point of view of the grammar system, many aspects of the
meaning of a lexical item are simply irrelevant in the generation of a linguistic expression.

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DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND VOCABULARY-II

Signaling larger textual patterns

Winter (1977) shows that the relationship between clauses can be signaled by three types of
vocabulary: Vocabulary 1 such as subordination; Vocabulary 2 such as sentence connectors; and
Vocabulary 3 such as lexical items. The last one, Vocabulary 3 is crucial to understanding text
organization, although his main concern is the operation of lexical signaling at the level of the
paragraph.

He expresses as follows;

I have included the following five items which represent a larger

clause relation in English. My reason for doing so is that these
relations may sometimes exist as clause relations within the unit of the
paragraph. The items are situation, problem, solution, observation, and
evaluation. (Winter 1977)

Although he focuses on the function of vocabulary, this can also explain the structure of the text.
For instance, ‘crisis’ implies that a sentence including it suggests a ‘problem,’ which will be
discussed in the text, and the word ‘decision’ implies a ‘solution’ to it. In this way, particular
words in a text can act as a signal to identify textual patterns. In other words, L2 learners can
reach text organization through an understanding of how vocabulary functions.

It is, however, necessary to understand that identifying textual patterns should be influenced by
the vocabulary size of each L2 learner. A poor command of vocabulary cannot make it possible
for L2 learners to recognize that a certain word can be a signal to a textual property. Moreover,
not only learning the meanings of each word, but also learning the cohesive relations of words is
important in raising learners’ consciousness to identify textual patterns. It is this cohesive
relationship between ‘crisis’ and ‘problem’ which makes it possible to recognize that a sentence,
containing the word ‘crisis,’ should suggest a problem. As a result, lexical knowledge can be
considered to be an essential element in identifying textual patterns.

Textual patterns Current Question

There are mainly three patterns of text organization (McCarthy 1991; Holland and Johnson
2000):
 Problem-Solution
 General-Specific
 Claim Counter-claim (or Hypothetical-Real)
Here, each pattern of text organization shall be discussed, although Problem-Solution and
General-Specific c will be mainly used in the analysis.
Problem-Solution Pattern

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Hoey (1994) introduces the main stream of discourse analysis structure. According to him, any
genre of text, such as the plots of fairytales, or the writing of scientists, includes ‘the problem-
solution structure’ (Hoey 1994: 27). He explains this by breaking a short passage consisting of
four sentences, and rearranging the sentences in proper order without any signaling expressing a
time sequence.
General-Specific Pattern
The basic structure of this pattern is that text includes “an initial general statement, followed by a
series of (progressively) more specific statements, culminating in a further generalization”
(Holland and Johnson 2000: 21). In a typical case, a passage including a general statement is
followed by another passage, which expands the generalization, such as exemplifying,
explaining, and/or justifying. McCarthy offers diagrammatic representations:
General statement General statement
↓ ↓
Specific statement Specific statement 1
↓ ↓
Specific statement Even more specific
↓ ↓
Specific statement Even more specific
↓ ↓
etc etc
↓ ↓
General statement General statement
(McCarthy1991)
Claim-Counter-claim Pattern
The third textual pattern consists of a series of claims and contrasting counterclaims, which is
presented on a given topic: Claim 1 → Counter-claim 1 → Claim 2 Counter-claim 2 → This
pattern can be found more frequently “in political journalism, as well as in the letters-to-the
editor pages of newspapers and magazines” (McCarthy 1991), and also “the stock-in-trade of
many a ‘Compare and Contrast …’ academic essay” (Holland and Johnson 2000: 23). For the
purpose of identifying the textual pattern, lexical signals are very useful. For instance, through
lexical items, such as claim, assert, truth, false, in fact, ‘segments’ containing them, can be
identified as elements of the ‘Claim-Counter-claim’ structure.

Register and signaling vocabulary

In claiming that particular vocabulary items tend to cluster round certain elements of text
patterns we are ignoring the important fact that register is closely tied to lexical selection.
Among the signals of the problem element, we proposed problem, drawback and obstacle.
Clearly, we might not expect to find problem occurring in this way in a formal scientific report,
nor perhaps come up with as a marker for response (develop would be a more predictable

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choice). Therefore, as in all matters, the relationship between vocabulary and register needs to be
brought out when studying textual signaling.

Lexical choice within the identified clusters will depend on the context (textbook, magazine,
news report, etc.), the author's assumptions about the audience (cultured/educated readers of the
popular sensationalist press, etc.) whether the style is to be read as ‘written’ or ‘spoken’, and so
on. Most of the texts we have looked at so far have been toward the 'written/formal/cultured' end
of the spectrum. Mere are two more, this time with a more informal, colloquial tone. They are
presented to illustrate the fact that discourse-signaling words need not necessarily be only rather
‘dry’ academic words taken from the Graeco-Latin vocabulary of English.

Idiomatic phrases are used as signals of the response and its occurrence after a previous
negatively evaluated response (conventional treatments). Idioms are often a problem for the
teacher insomuch as it is not always easy to find natural contexts in which to present them.
Research by Moon (1987) suggests that writers and speakers use idiomatic phrases to organize
their discourse and to signal evaluation, far more frequently than previous linguistic studies of
idiomaticity have suggested. Idioms are good metaphors for the kinds of textual segments we
have been looking at (problem/response, etc.).

Modality

The term modality‟ subsumes a range of concepts within the fields of philosophy, morphology,
syntax, semantics, and discourse analysis. Philosophy deals with modality primarily as it applies
to categories of logic and to logical reasoning, and while some of the terminology used in
philosophical studies of modality is borrowed into other disciplines, these terms are not always
used in the same ways or for the same purposes in other disciplines. As Sulkunen and Törrönen
explain, for linguists, the logical treatment of modalities is too narrow, because it is centered on
truth values of propositions. Linguistic analysis of modalities presents much more diversity in its
problematic and approaches‟ (1997). For their part, linguistic studies of modality can be located
in a variety of linguistic sub-disciplines.

Specifically, morphology describes the lexical forms in which modality is manifested in different
languages, syntax describes the complex syntactic configurations in which modality may be
manifested, and semantics identifies modal meanings and explores the variety of ways these
meanings may be expressed morphologically, syntactically, phonologically, and pragmatically.
This paper, however, takes a discourse analytic approach, specifically a critical discourse
analytic approach, employing the concept of modality to characterize the political orientation of
two sample texts.
Within critical discourse analysis, modality is understood as encompassing much more than
simply the occurrence of overt modal auxiliaries such as may, might, can, could, will, would,

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shall, should, must, and ought. Rather, modality concerns the writer’s (or speaker‟s) attitude
toward and/or confidence in the proposition being presented. In Halliday‟s system, modality is
primarily located in the interpersonal component of the grammar and choices in this component
are independent of grammatical choices in other components, for example, choices of transitivity
in the ideational component (Halliday 2002a: 200).

Although there are broad categories of modality recognized by all scholars in the field, there are
nevertheless differences in the ways in which modalities are classified and categorized. For
example, linguist Otto Jesperson (1924) makes a broad division of modalities into two
categories: those that contain an element of will and those that contain no element of will.
Philosopher Georg von Wright (1951) postulates 4 modes: alethic (necessary, possible,
contingent, impossible), epistemic (verified, undecided, falsified), deontic (obligatory, permitted,
indifferent, forbidden), and existential (universal, existing, empty).

Palmer (1986) focuses on epistemic and deontic modalities, which corresponding roughly with
Jesperson‟s two categories, while Palmer (2001) reorganizes categories of modality such that the
first division is between Propositional modality on the one hand, encompassing both epistemic
and evidential modality, and Event modality on the other hand, encompassing both deontic and
dynamic modality. Propositional modality is concerned with the speaker’s attitude to the truth
value or factual status of the proposition, while Event modality refers to events that are not
actualized, events that have not taken place but are merely potential (Palmer 2001).

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Lesson 35

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND GRAMMAR-I

Reference

Reference items in English usually include pronouns (e.g.he, she, it, him, they, etc.),
demonstratives (this, that, these, those), and the article the. For instance,

Michael went to the bank. He was annoyed because it was closed.

In this sentence, he refers to Michael which will be treated as a anaphoric reference, and
it refers to the bank which will also be treated as an anaphoric reference. In the above given
examples, Michael and bank will be treated as cataphoric reference. Hence, an anaphoric
reference occurs when a word or phrase refers to something mentioned earlier in the discourse,
whereas a cataphoric reference occurs when a word or phrase refers to something
mentioned later in the discourse.

Brown and Yule (1983) see the nature of reference in text and in discourse as an action on the
part of a speaker/writer. It describes what they are doing “not the relationship which exists
between one sentence or proposition and another.” McCarthy (1991) states that we must consider
the notion of discourse segments as “functional units, rather than concentrating on sentence and
to see the writer/speaker as faced with a number of strategic choices as to how to relate segments
to one another and how to present them to the receiver.” He adds that reference items can refer to
Segments of discourse or situations as a whole rather than to any one specified entity in that
situation. Fox (1987) claims that reference can be successfully made (for instance, through the
use of pronouns) if the referent is “in focus, in consciousness, textually evoked or high in
topicality” and where it “can be operationally defined in terms of the discourse structure.”
Current Question
To this end, referents are often realized through anaphoric (word or phrase referring backwards
in a text), cataphoric (word or phrase referring forwards in a text), and exophoric (reference to
assumed shared worlds outside the text) devices and can appear as functional units in discourse
segmentation.

This implies the use of language to point to something. Reference therefore has the ability to
point to something within or outside a text.

Halliday and Hassan (1976) states that co-referential forms are forms which instead of being
interpreted semantically in their own right, make reference to something else for their
interpretation. When the interpretation is within the text, this is an „endophoric‟ relation but in a
situation where the interpretation of the text lies outside the text, in the context of situation, the
relationship is „exophoric‟. However, exophoric relations play no part in textual cohesion.
Endophoric relations on the other hand, form cohesive ties within the text. Endophoric relations
are also of two types, those which look back in the text for their interpretation (anaphoric
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relations) and those which look forward to the text for their interpretation (cataphoric relations).
For instance, the following sentences show the use of reference. Referring expressions help to
unify the text and create economy because they save writers from unnecessary repetition.

Ellipsis and substitution

In English grammar, substitution (or an ellipsis-substitution) is the replacement of a word or

phrase with a "filler" word (such as one, so, or do) to avoid repetition.
1. Avoiding repetition of nouns in formal situation using ‘THAT/ THOSE’
e.g.
 There are people who support this idea just as there are those who are against it.
 They perform an essential function: that of reminding us of the human cost
when we get things wrong.
2. Avoiding repetition of nouns in informal situation using ‘ONE/ ONES’
‘One’ is used instead of repeating a singular countable noun.
e.g.
 Can I get you a drink? It’s okay, I’ve already got one (= a drink).
 Is this your umbrella? No, mine is the big blue one (= umbrella).
‘Ones’ is used instead of repeating a plural noun.
e.g.
 I think his best poems are his early ones (= poems).
 People who smoke aren’t the only ones (= people) affected by lung cancer.
3. Avoiding repetition of a verb and its object complement using ‘DO SO’
e.g.
 “Put the car away, please.” “I’ve already done so.”(= put the car away)
 She won the competition on 1997 and seems likely to do so (= win the competition)
again this year.
In Informal English we can use ‘do it’ or ‘do that’.
e.g.
 Mrs. Smith waved as she walked past. She does it/ does that every morning.
 Ray told me to put in a new battery. I did it/ did that, but the radio still doesn’t work.

4. Avoiding repetition of a that-clause after certain verbs (think, hope, believe, suppose, reckon,
guess, be afraid) using ‘SO’
e.g.
“Our team will win today’s match.” “Yeah, I hope so.” (= that our team will win today’s match)
“Is Alex here?” “I think so.” (= that Alex is here)
5. Joining two positive sentences which have different subjects using ‘TOO/ SO’
e.g.
 I love fishing. My brother loves fishing.
 I love fishing and my brother does too.

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 I love fishing and so does my brother.

6. Joining two negative sentences which have different subjects using ‘EITHER/ NEITHER’
e.g.
 I don’t like reading books. He doesn’t like reading books.
 I don’t like reading books and he doesn’t either.
 I don’t like reading books and neither does he.
"Ellipsis is a special instance of substitution, in that it involves substitution by zero. Instead of
one of the lexical items mentioned for substitution, no item is used, and the hearer/listener is left
to fill in the gap where the substitute item, or the original item, should have appeared."

1. Leaving out words after auxiliaries (do, be, have, modals)

e.g.
 I’ll come and see you when I can. (= can come and see you)
 She says she has finished, but I don’t think she has. (= has finished)
2. Leaving out to-infinitives
e.g.
 I wanted to come with you, I won’t be able to. (= to come with you)
 “Let’s go for a walk.” “I don’t want to.” (=to go for a walk)
3. Leaving out articles, possessives, personal pronouns, auxiliaries at the beginning of sentences
e.g.
 My wife’s on holiday. => Wife’s on holiday.
 Have you seen Joe? => Seen Joe?
 I couldn’t understand a word. => Couldn’t understand a word.

The Differences between Reference and Substitution

"It is important to point out differences between reference and ellipsis-substitution. One
difference is that reference can reach a long way back in the text whereas ellipsis and substitution
are largely limited to the immediately preceding clause. Another key difference is that with
reference there is a typical meaning of co-reference. That is, both items typically refer to the
same thing. With ellipsis and substitution, this is not the case. There is always some difference
between the second instance and the first. If a speaker or writer wants to refer to the same thing,
they use reference. If they want to refer to something different, they use ellipsis-substitution
(Halliday 1985)."

Conjunction

Conjunctive elements are cohesive not in themselves but indirectly, by virtue of their specific
meanings; they are nor primarily devices for reaching out into the preceding (or following) text,
but they express certain meaning which presuppose the presence of other components in the
discourse (Halliday and Hasan, 1976). Hasan and Halliday (1976) adopt a scheme of just four

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categories, namely additive, adversative, causal, and temporal. According to Halliday (1985),
conjunction is classified into elaboration, extention, and enchancement.
1) Elaboration
Elaboration means one clause that expands another by elaborating on it (or some portion of it) by
restating in other words, specifying in greater detail, commenting, or exemplifying (Halliday,
1985). There are two categories of elaborative relation, namely apposition and clarification.
 Apposition
According to Kridalaksana (1993) apposition is a word or phrase which explains other preceding
phrase or clause. In this type of elaboration some element is re-presented, or restated, either by
exposition or example. Look at the example below:
Expository: in other word, that is (to stay), I mean (to say), to put it another way.
Exemplifying: for example, for instance, thus, to illustrate.
 Clarification
Here, the elaborated element is not simply restated but reinstated, summarized, made more
precise or in some other way clarified for the purposes of discourse:
 Corrective: or, rather, at least, to be more precise
 Distractive: by the way, incidentally
 Dismissive: in any case, anyway, leaving that a side
 Particularizing: in particular, more especially
 Resumptive: as I was saying, to resume, to get back to the pint
 Summative: in short, to sum up, in conclusion, briefly
 Verifactive: actually, as a matter of fact, in fact
2) Extension
Extension means one clause expands another by extending beyond it by adding some new
element, giving an exception to it, or offering an alternative (Halliday, 1985). Extension involves
either addition, adversative, or variation. Additive conjunction acts to structurally coordinate or
link by adding to the presupposed item divided into positive (and, also, moreover, in addition)
and negative (nor). Adversativet is conjunction which relates two clauses that state contras each
other (Kridalaksana, 1993). It acts also to indicate contrary to expectation and signaled by but,
yet, on the other hand, however. Variation includes replacive ‘instead’, subtractive ‘except’ and
alternative ‘or’ types.

 Replacive: on contrary, instead

 Subtractive: apart from that, except
 Alternative: alternatively
3) Enhancement
Enhancement means one clause expands another by embellishing around it by qualifying it
with some circumstantial feature of time, place, cause or condition (Halliday, 1985).

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DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND GRAMMAR-II

Theme and rhyme

Most learners, when learning the grammar of a foreign language, spend time assimilating the
structure of clauses in that language, i.e., where subjects, objects and adverbials are placed in
relation to the verb, and what options are available for rearranging the most typical sequences.
Discourse analysts are interested in the implications of these different structural options for the
creation of text, and, as always, it is from the examination of natural data that patterns of use are
seen to emerge. Some of the structural options frequently found in natural data are ignored or
underplayed in language teaching (especially those found in spoken data, which are often
dismissed as degraded or bad 'style'), probably owing to the continued dominance of standards
taken from the written code. If the desire is to be faithful to data, grammar teaching may have to
reorient some of its structural descriptions, while others already dealt with in sentence level
exercises may be adequately covered in traditional teaching and simply adjusted to discourse-
oriented approaches. English is what is often called an 'SVO' language, in that the declarative
clause requires a verb at its center, a subject before it and any object after it. This is simply a
labeling device which enables comparisons to be made with declarative realizations in different
languages, some of which will be 'VSO' or 'SOV' languages.

There are in English a variety of ways in which the basic clause elements of subject, verb, and
complement/object, adverbial can be rearranged by putting different elements at the beginning of
the clause. These ways of bringing different elements to the front are called fronting devices.

In English the Theme, the ‘point of departure’ for the clause, is also one of the means by which
the clause is organized as a message. Theme is the ‘glue’ that structures and binds the ideational
and interpersonal meanings. In studies of Theme in children’s writing and in writing in the
workplace, the choice and representation of Theme is seen as a crucial element related to the
success of a text (Martin, 1985, 1992, 1993; Martin and Rothery, 1993; Berry, 1995, 1996;
Stainton, 1996, amongst others). The belief that an understanding of the way in which Theme
works can be usefully incorporated into pedagogy is the motivation behind this and many other
studies of Theme.

Theme, then, is seen to play a crucial role in focusing and organizing the message and to
contribute to the coherence and success of the message. Martin (1992) argues that the choice of
what comes first is “a textual resource systematically exploited” to effect different patterns
(Martin, 1992). Martin adds that the different patterns and meanings made by the choice of
Theme can be manipulated and exploited, consciously or unconsciously, by the writer in order to
convey their ‘angle’ or viewpoint. In more recent work, Martin (2000) and Martin and Rose
(forthcoming) suggest that Theme and many other features in a text function to construe the
writer’s viewpoint.

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Rhyme is everything that is not Theme: it is the part of the clause where the Theme is developed
(Halliday, 1994). A message structure in English is comprised of a Theme plus a Rhyme. There
is an order to the structure: Theme comes first, followed by Rhyme, and whatever is placed in
initial position is Theme (Halliday, 1994). In many instances Rhyme is related to New
Information, while Theme is related to Given Information. Given refers to what is already known
or predictable, while New refers to what is unknown or unpredictable.

Halliday elaborates the distinction between given and new as “information that is presented by
the speaker as recoverable (Given) or not recoverable (New) to the listener” (Halliday, 1994).
Martin (1992) also points out that Theme is equated with “what the speaker is on about” while
New is the structure which is “listener-oriented” (Martin, 1992a:448). Halliday adds that
although the two pairs of clause functions, i.e. Theme/ Given and Rhyme/ New, are similar,
they are not the same thing. Theme realizes the ‘angle’ of the story and the New elaborates the
field, developing it in experiential terms (Martin, 1992). Martin (1992) also adds that Theme is
generally restricted to grounding the genre of the text, while the New is not restricted in this way
and is far more flexible. As interesting as the interaction between these two pairs of concepts is,
an investigation into Given and New is beyond the scope of the present study.

Tense and aspect

Tense is a term that refers to the way verbs change their form in order to indicate at which time a
situation occurs or an event takes place. For finite verb phrases, English has just one inflectional
form to express time, namely the past tense marker (-ed for regular verbs). Therefore, in English
there is just a contrast between present and past tense. Needless to say, non-finite verb phrases
(to infinitives and –ing forms) are not marked for tense. When occurring with modals, verb
phrases are used in their base form, with no tense marker. Each tense can have a simple form as
well as be combined with either the progressive or perfective aspect, or with both of them.

For instance,

 I work; I’m working; I have worked; I have been working (present)

 I worked; I was working; I had worked; I had been working (past)

Sentences can also be used in the passive voice (note that the perfect-progressive is not normally
found in the passive):

 I am told; I’m being told; I have been told I was told

 I was being told; I had been told

Time and tense are not overlapping concepts. Though tense is related to time, there is no one-to
one correspondence between the two. Tense is a grammatical category: rather than with
“reality”, it has to do with how events are placed, seen, and referred to along the past-present-
future time line. Thus, a present tense does not always refer to present time, or a past tense to

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past time. Actually, the present and past tenses can refer to all three segments of the time line
(past, present, and future).

Furthermore, the past tense can express tentativeness, often associated with politeness:
 Did you want to make a phone call?
 Were you looking for me?
Aspect is a grammatical category that reflects the perspective from which an action/situation is
seen: as complete, in progress, having duration, beginning, ending, or being repeated. English
has two aspects, progressive (also called continuous) and perfect (ive). Verbs that are not marked
for aspect (the majority of them are not) are said to have simple aspect. In British English, the
perfective aspect is much more common than in American English, since Americans often use
the past simple where Britons use the present perfect.

Verb phrases can be marked for both aspects at the same time (the perfect progressive, however,
is infrequent). The following combinations are possible: present progressive; past progressive;
present perfective; past perfective; present perfective progressive; past perfective progressive:
 He’s sleeping;
 He was sleeping
 He has slept
 He had slept
 He has been sleeping
 He had been sleeping
Usually, grammars contrast the progressive with the perfective aspect (and the simple, for that
matter) on the basis that the former refers to an action/event as in progress, while the latter tends
to indicate the completeness of an action, to see actions and events as a whole and a situation as
permanent. This is certainly a useful distinction, which will not be questioned here; yet students
must be aware that the above is an oversimplified view, as is demonstrated by the fact that the
two aspects can combine within a single verb phrase.
Conclusion

This chapter has taken a selection of grammatical concepts and has attempted to show how
discourse analysis has contributed to our understanding of the relationship between local choices
within the clause and sentence and the organization of the discourse as a whole. When speakers
and writers are producing discourse, they are, at the same time as they are busy constructing
clauses, monitoring the development of the larger discourse, and their choices at the local level
can be seen simultaneously to reflect the concerns of the discourse as an unfolding production,
with an audience, whether present or projected.

A discourse-oriented approach to grammar would suggest not only a greater emphasis on

contexts larger than the sentence, but also a reassessment of priorities in terms of what is taught
about such things as word order, articles, ellipsis, tense and aspect, and some of the other
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categories discussed here. If grammar is seen to have a direct role in welding clauses, turns and
sentences into discourse.

At the end, Discourse and grammar often complement each other, each imposing a different set
of constraints on speakers' utterances. Discourse constraints are global, pertaining to text
coherence, and/or to interpersonal relations. Grammatical constraints are local, pertaining to
possible versus impossible structures (within specific languages). Yet, the two must meet in
natural discourse. At every point during interaction speakers must simultaneously satisfy both
types of constraints in order to communicate properly.

It is also during conversational interaction that language change somehow takes place. This
overview first explains and exemplifies how discourse constraints guide addressees in selecting
specific grammatical forms at different points in the interaction (discourse 'selecting' from
grammar). It then examines the relationship between discourse and grammar from a grammatical
point of view, demonstrating how a subset of discourse patterns (may) turn grammatical
(grammar 'selecting' from discourse). The central theme is then that discourse depends on
grammar, which in turn depends on discourse.

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Lecture-13
The Nature of Reference in
Text and Discourse

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STAGING AND THE REPRESENTATION OF DISCOURSE

STRUCTURE
Thematisation and Staging

According to Brown and Yule (1983), “thematisation is a discourse rather than simply a
sentential process. What the speaker or writer puts first would influence the interpretation of
everything that follows.” Thus, a title would influence the interpretation of the text which
follows it. The first sentence of the first paragraph would constrain the interpretation not only of
the paragraph, but also the rest of the text. That is, we assumed that every sentence forms part of
a developing, cumulative instruction which told us how to construct a coherent representation.

“Staging” was a more general, more inclusive, term than thematisation (which refers only to the
linear organization of texts). Every clause, sentence, paragraph, episode and discourse were
organized around a particular element that is taken as its point of departure. It was as though the
speaker presents what he wants to say from a particular perspective. Clements (1979) suggested
that “staging is a dimension of prose structure which identifies the relative prominence given to
various segments of prose discourse.” This definition opened the door to far more than processes
of linearization, and permits the inclusion within “staging” of rhetorical devises like lexical
selection, theme and rhyme, alliteration, repetition, use of metaphor, markers of emphasis, etc. It
meant different structure or word construction would determine what the word which has
prominent position in a sentence. We should use “staging” not as a technical term, but as a
general metaphor to cover the exploitation of such varied phenomena in discourse.

The notion of “relative prominence” arising from processes of thematisation and “staging”
devices has led many researchers, particularly in psycholinguistics, to consider staging as a
crucial factor in discourse structure, because they believe, the way a piece of discourse is staged,
must have a significant effect both on the process of interpretation and on the process of
subsequent recall (Yule, 1983). Regarded with this, staging is the sentence arrangement that
signals how the word, sentence is arranged in clause. The arrangement would influence the
intended meaning of sentence. As Davidson states in Brown and Yule (1986), “the more marked
the construction, the more likely that an implicated meaning will be intended utterance to
convey.”

In discourse analysis, the term of staging is used to show how an idea is represented. The first
sentence of a text or the first word of a sentence will influence the interpretation of everything
that follows. Actually, in a sentence there is a particular word that called as foregrounded and
another one is back-grounded. Other themes used in staging were theme and rhyme.

Thematic organization appears to be exploited by speakers / writers to provide a structural

framework for their discourse, which relates back to their main intention and provides a

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perspective on what follows. In the detective story cited in (8), the writer shuttles about,
commenting on the activities of a number of different individuals, located in different parts of
England and Europe within the space of two pages. The coherence of structure is imposed, partly
at least, because locally within the text the author is meticulous in relating events to each other in
time. Each new adverbial phrase marks the fact that the scenario has shifted.

Titles and Thematisation

We argued in this Chapter that the 'title' of a stretch of discourse should not be equated with 'the
topic' but should be regarded as one possible expression of the topic. We now wish to propose
that the best way of describing the function of the title of a discourse is as a particularly powerful
thematisation device. In the title of extract the topic entity was thematised, or, to express the
relationship more accurately, when we found the name of an individual thematised in the title of
the text, we expected that individual to be the topic entity. This expectation-creating aspect of
thematisation, especially in the form of a title, means that thematised elements provide not only a
starting point around which what follows in the discourse is structured, but also a starting point
which constrains our interpretation of what follows.

For instance, Rocky slowly got up from the mat, planning his escape. He hesitated a moment and
thought. Things were not going well. What bothered him most was being held, especially since
the charge against him had been weak. He considered his present situation. The lock that held
him was strong, but he thought he could break it.

The topic-entity of this fragment is the individual named 'Rocky' and, because of the thematised
expression in the title, we can read this text with the interpretation that Rocky is a prisoner, in a
cell, planning to break the lock on the door and escape. In an exercise which the researchers
conducted using this text after which subjects were asked to answer several questions, we found
that there was a general interpretation that Rocky was alone, that he had been arrested by the
police, and that he disliked being in prison.

When the researchers presented exactly the same questions to another group who read the
following text, (17b), they received quite different answers.
(17b) A Wrestler in a Tight Corner
Rocky slowly got up from the mat, planning his escape. He hesitated a moment and thought.
Things were not going well.

What bothered him most was being held, especially since the charge against him had been weak.
He considered his present situation. The lock that held him was strong, but he thought he could
break it.

In answering questions on this fragment, subjects indicated that they thought Rocky was a
wrestler who was being held in some kind of wrestling 'hold' and was planning to get out of this
hold.
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Rocky was not alone in a prison cell and had had nothing to do with the police. By providing
different 'starting points' in the thematised elements of the different titles, we effectively
constrained the way in which the piece of text was interpreted. (Anderson et al. (1977) discuss
the different possible interpretations of the one piece of text (without titles) presented in (17a)
and (17b) in terms of knowledge structures or 'schemata' which are activated for the
interpretation of texts.

Extracts (17a) and (17b) provide a particularly dramatic illustration of the effect of thematisation.
There are, of course, many other easily recognizable thematisation devices used in the
organization of discourse structure. Placing headings and sub-headings within a text is a common
thematisation device in technical or public- information documents. It also occurs, you will have
noted, in linguistics textbooks. What these thematisation devices have in common is not only the
way they provide 'starting points' for paragraphs in a text, but also their contribution to dividing
up a whole text into smaller chunks. This 'chunking' effect is one of the most basic of those
achieved by thematisation in discourse.

Natural Order and Point of View

As Levelt (1981) remarks, it is natural to put the event that happened first before the event which
followed it. A sequence of events in time, told as a narrative in English, will often be presented
in the order in which they happened and, often, with an unspecified implication of a relationship
in which the second event in some sense follows from the first (e.g. was caused by). This type of
non-logical inference has been characterized by Horn (1973) as post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Consider the following passage. Just before it begins, a violent storm has broken, with torrents of
rain:

Between where I stood by the rail and the lobby was but a few yards, yet I was drenched
before I got under cover. I disrobed as far as decency permits, and then sat at this letter
but not a little shaken. (W. Golding, Rites of Passage, Faber & Faber, 1980)

It is not stated that the narrator is 'drenched' by the rain (rather than by, say, perspiration) or why
he wishes to get under cover.

It is not made clear why he disrobes or why he finds himself 'not a little shaken'. The normal
assumption of an English-speaking reader will be, however, that the series of events are
meaningfully related to each other, and he will draw the appropriate inferences that the narrator
is drenched by the rain, wishes to take cover from the rain, disrobes because his clothing has
been drenched by the rain, and is 'not a little shaken' because of his immediately preceding
experience in the violent storm. We stress that these inferences will be drawn by an English-
speaking reader because it appears that in other cultures there are rather different bases for
narrative structures (cf. Grimes, 1975; Grimes (ed.), 1978; Becker, 1980).

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It is clearly the case that there are stereotypical orderings in genres other than those which
obviously consist of a series of events in time. Thus Linde & Labov report that 97% of the
subjects, in a survey in which subjects were asked to describe the lay-out of their apartments,
described them in terms of 'imaginary tours which transform spatial lay-outs into temporally
organised narratives' (i975 "• 9 2 4)

The narrative tour in each case begins at the front door, just as it would if the interviewer were to
arrive for the first time at the apartment. A similar alignment with the point of view of the hearer
is taken by speakers who are asked to give directions in a strange town. They always begin, co-
operatively, from the point where the enquiry is made and then attempt to describe the route as a
succession of acts in time.

In each of these cases then, there is a 'natural' starting point and the description is an attempt to
follow a 'natural' progression. Levelt suggests that by adopting the stereotypical pattern of the
culture 'the speaker facilitates the listener's comprehension' (1981: 94) since both speaker and
hearer share the same stereotype.

It seems very likely that there are other constraints on ordering in types of discourse which are
not simply arranged as a sequence of events in time. Van Dijk (1977) suggests that descriptions
of states of affairs will be determined by perceptual salience so that the more salient entity will
be mentioned first. He suggests that 'normal ordering' will conform to the following pattern:
General - particular
Whole - part / component
Set - subject - element
Including - included
Large - small
Outside - inside
Possessor - possessed
(van Dijk, 1977: 106)

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THE NATURE OF REFERENCE IN TEXT AND IN DISCOURSE-III

What is text?

In linguistics, the term text refers to:

1. The original words of something written, printed, or spoken, in contrast to
a summary or paraphrase.
2. A coherent stretch of language that may be regarded as an object of critical analysis.

Text linguistics refers to a form of discourse analysis a method of studying written or spoken
language that is concerned with the description and analysis of extended texts (those beyond the
level of the single sentence). A text can be any example of written or spoken language, from
something as complex as a book or legal document to something as simple as the body of an
email or the words on the back of a cereal box.

In the humanities, different fields of study concern themselves with different forms of texts.
Literary theorists, for example, focus primarily on literary texts novels, essays, stories, and
poems. Legal scholars focus on legal texts such as laws, contracts, decrees, and regulations.
Cultural theorists work with a wide variety of texts, including those that may not typically be the
subject of studies, such as advertisements, signage, instruction manuals, and other ephemera.

“Discourse is sometimes used in contrast with ‘text,’ where ‘text’ refers to actual written or
spoken data, and ‘discourse’ refers to the whole act of communication involving production and
comprehension, not necessarily entirely verbal. The study of discourse, then, can involve matters
like context, background information or knowledge shared between a speaker and hearer.”

The concept of texture is entirely appropriate to express the property of ‘being a text’. This
characteristic of a text distinguishes it from something that is not a text. The fact that a text
functions as a unity with respect to its environment derives from this ‘texture’. If a passage of
English containing more than one sentence is perceived as a text, there will be certain linguistic
features present in the passage which can be identified as contributing to its total unity and
giving it texture.
For example:
If we find the following instructions in the cooking book;
Wash and core six cooking apples. Put them into a fireproof dish.

It is clear that ‘them’ in the second sentence refers back to the ‘six cooking apples’ of if first
sentence. This anaphoric function of them gives cohesion to the two sentences, so that we
interpret them as a whole; the two sentences together constitute a text. So it is the texture which
makes these two sentences a text.
Ties:
We need a term to refer to a single instance of cohesion, a term for one occurrence of a pair of
cohesively related items. This is called a tie. The relation between them and six cooking apples in
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the above example constitutes a tie. We can characterize any segment of a text in terms of the
number and kinds of ties which it displays. In the above example there is just one tie of the
particular kind which we call reference.
Cohesion:
The concept of cohesion is a semantic one. It refers to relations of meaning that exist within the
texts, and that defines it as a text. Cohesion occurs where the interpretation of some element in
the discourse is dependent on that of another. The one presupposes the other, in the sense that it
cannot be effectively decoded except by recourse to it. When this happens, a relation of cohesion
is set up and the two elements, the presupposing and the presupposed are thereby at least
potentially integrated into a text.

Reference and Discourse Representation

Reference is an act of directing or indicating something by using some linguistic elements.

Reference is a systemic relation. The reference is no way constrained to match the grammatical
class of the item it refers to. Reference is a particular type of cohesion and its criteria is the
specific nature of the information that is signaled for retrieval. In the case of reference, the
information to be retrieved in the referential meaning’ the identity of the particular thing or class
of things that is being referred to; and the cohesion lies in the continuity of reference, whereby
the same thing enters into the discourse for the second time.

Manners of Reference: on the basis of referring to a thing as identified in the context of

situation or as identified in the surrounding text reference appears in two forms or manners.

 Exophora or Exophoric reference.

 Endophora or endophoric reference

Exophoric reference: Exophora is reference to something extra-linguistic, i.e., not in the same
text. It signals that reference must be made to context of situation. For example; pronouns with
words such as ‘this’ ‘that’ ‘there’ ‘here’ are often exophoric.
Did the gardener water those plants?

It is quite possible that ‘those’ refers to earlier mention of those particular plants in the
discussion. But it is also possible that it refers to the environment in which the dialogue is taking
place – to the context of situation; as It is called – where the plants in question are present and
can be pointed to if necessary. The interpretation would be ‘’those plants there, in front of us.
This kind of reference is called exophora. Since it takes us put side the text altogether.

Exophoric reference is cohesive, since it does not bind the two elements together into a text.
Example-
For he’s a jolly good fellow and so say all of us.

This is an example of the context of situation where the text is not indicating who this ‘he’ is.
Endophoric Reference: Endophoric reference is the general name for within the text.
Endophora is a term that means an expression which refers to something intra-linguistics i.e. in
the same text. For example, in the sentence:

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I saw sally yesterday, she was lying on the beach

Here, she is an endophoric expression because it refers to something already mentioned in the
text i.e., sally.
By contrast she was lying on the beach if it appeared by itself, has an exophoric expression; she’
refers to something that the reader is hot told about. Without further information, there is no way
of knowing the exact meaning of an exophoric term where endophoric expression lies within the
text.

A theory of discourse interpretation that uses such an intermediate level of representation

is Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), formalism proposed in the early 1980s by Hans
Kamp. Discourse Representation Theory explain certain discourse phenomena, such as the
interaction between indefinite noun phrases and (anaphoric) pronouns in texts shown before, the
traditional account of considering meaning in terms of truth conditions turned out to be
unsatisfactory. DRT adopts the rather `dynamic' view of natural language semantics, where the
meaning of a sentence is defined in how it can change the context.

One of the striking features of DRT is that it, instead of working with first-order formula syntax,
works with explicit semantic representations. Such representations are called Discourse
Representation Structure (DRS) which describes the objects mentioned in a discourse and their
properties.

Pronouns in Discourse

The pronoun is bound to the noun phrase when semantic rules and contextual interpretation
determine that a pronoun is co referential with a noun phrase. A pronoun is free or unbound
when it refers to some object not mentioned in the discourse.
Pronouns include three classes:
 Personal pronoun
 Possessive determiners
 Possessive pronouns

Personal Pronouns:
The speaker and the addressee of a communication situation are often marked linguistically by
the first- and second-person pronouns. As already mentioned, the reference of the singular first-
and second-person pronouns is very simple as the referents are normally the speaker and the
addressee, whereas the reference of especially the plural first-person pronouns is more complex.
Conventional typological studies have arranged personal pronouns into tables and used the terms
'first', 'second' and 'third person', and 'singular' and 'plural number'.
 Examples: If the buyer wants to look the condition of the property, he has to have
another survey. One carried out on his own behalf.
 Here in the above example the use of personal pronoun ‘he’ or ‘his’ for ‘buyer’ and ‘one’
for ‘survey’ is a source of personal reference.
Possessive pronouns:

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If possessive pronouns are used, they give two more notions other than speaker and addressee.
They are that of ‘possessor’ and ‘possessed’
 Example: That new house is John’s.
 I didn’t know it was his.
Here, in the above example the use of possessive pronouns ‘his’ for ‘John’ indicates the
possessor and ‘’s’ is for the possessed ‘house’ includes another source of personal reference.
Reflexive pronouns:
Reflexive pronouns are a kind of pronoun that is used when the subject and the object of the
sentence are the same.
Include myself, ourselves, yourself, yourselves himself, herself, itself, themselves.

Pronouns may be classified by three categories: person, number, and case. Person refers to the
relationship that an author has with the text that he or she writes, and with the reader of that
text. English has three persons (first, second, and third):
 First-person is the speaker or writer him- or herself. The first person is personal (I, we,
etc.)
 Second-person is the person who is being directly addressed. The speaker or author is
saying this is about you, the listener or reader.
 Third-person is the most common person used in academic writing. The author is saying
this is about other people. In the third person singular there are distinct pronoun forms for
male, female, and neutral gender. 

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THE NATURE OF REFERENCE IN TEXT AND IN DISCOURSE-II

Pronouns and Antecedent Nominals

A pronoun antecedent is a word that comes before a pronoun to which the pronoun refers.
Following are definitions of antecedent as well as a review about the types of pronouns,
information about the functions of an antecedent in a sentence, and examples of how to use in a
sentence.

Defining a Pronoun Antecedent

The word “antecedent” means something that precedes something else. In language, it is the
word that a pronoun refers back to. Since the pronoun replaces the noun, it has to agree in
number. So, if the antecedent, or word that comes before, is singular, then the pronoun that takes
its place must also be singular. It can be confusing if there are several words between the
pronoun and its antecedent. These words or clauses have no bearing on the words and they need
to be ignored.
Following are some special situations with examples of the correct way to have pronoun
antecedent agreement.

Compound subjects can be a problem. If the subjects are joined by an “and” then the pronoun
needs to be plural, as in "Bob and Paul took their books. If the subjects are joined by "or" or
“nor”, then have the pronoun agree with the subject that is closer, or closest, to the pronoun. An
example is "Either the actor or the singers messed up their performance.

If the pronoun is referring to one thing or a unit, like a team or a jury, then the pronoun needs to
be singular. An example is: "The jury has reached its verdict."

Sometimes words sound plural and are not, like measles or the news. These would need a
singular pronoun, as in: "Measles is not as widespread as it once was." This makes sense if you
replace the word "measles" with "disease."

Indefinite Pronouns That Are Antecedents

There are several rules concerning the use of indefinite pronouns as antecedents and the pronoun
antecedent agreement. The following indefinite pronouns are singular and need a singular
pronoun: one, no one, someone, everyone, anyone, nobody, anybody, somebody, everybody,
nothing, anything, and something, everything, each, either, neither. An example is "Everything
here has its own box."
The plural indefinite pronouns: several, both, few, and many, need to have a plural pronoun, like
in this sentence: "Several are there because of their looks."

Lastly, if there is an indefinite pronoun that is being modified by a prepositional phrase, then the
object of the phrase will determine the agreement between the pronoun and its antecedent. These
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special indefinite pronouns are: some, most, all, any, or none. Look at these two sentences:
"Most of the flour fell out of its canister" and "Many of the gems have lost their shine". If the
object, like "flour" is uncountable, then the pronoun has to be singular (its). If the object is
countable, like "gems", then the pronoun needs to be plural (their).

Pronouns and Antecedent Predicates

Subject-Predicate (Verb) Agreement Make sure you don't have subject‐verb agreement
problems in a complete sentence. Distractions within a sentence can make you misidentify
subject and verb, leading to an agreement problem. Remember that a verb must agree in person
and number with its subject, regardless of other elements in a sentence.
Locating the subject of a sentence
Your first job is to locate the subject of the sentence. To do this, find the verb, the action word or
the state‐of‐being word, and then determine who or what is being talked about. Then ask
yourself, Is the subject first person (I/we), second person ( you), or third person ( he, she,
it/they)? Is the subject singular or plural? When you've answered these questions, you will know
which form the verb should take. Singular subjects take singular verbs, and plural subjects take
plural verbs.
Subject-verb agreement with a compound subject
In sentences with more than one subject (a compound subject), the word and usually appears
between the elements.
Use a plural verb with a compound subject:
 Drinking a glass of milk and soaking in the tub help me fall asleep.
 NOT Drinking a glass of milk and soaking in the tub helps me fall asleep.
If each/every precedes a compound subject, treat the subject as singular.
 Each dog and cat is to be fed twice a day.
 Every house and garage have been searched.
Additive phrases
An additive phrase sometimes makes a sentence look as if it has a compound subject. Examples
of these phrases are accompanied by, along with, as well as, in addition to, including, and
together with. When you use one of these phrases, you are thinking of more than one person or
thing. But grammatically these phrases aren't conjunctions like and. They are actually modifying
the subject, rather than making it compound. Therefore, do not use a plural verb because of these
modifying phrases.
 The President of the United States, accompanied by his advisors, was en route to Europe.
 NOT The President of the United States, accompanied by his advisors, were en route to
Europe.
Phrases and clauses between subject and verb

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Watch out for phrases and clauses that come between the subject and predicate in a sentence. To
make sure you have the right person and number for the verb, mentally eliminate intervening
phrases and clauses.
 The speech that provoked the demonstration and caused the closing of the university was
filled with inaccuracies.
 NOT The speeches that provoked the demonstration and caused the closing of the
university were filled with inaccuracies.
Subject-verb agreement
The conjunctions or, either …or, and neither …nor ask you to choose between things rather than
add things. If both elements are singular, use a singular verb. If both elements are plural, use a
plural verb. If one element is singular and one is plural, choose the verb that agrees with the
element closest to it.
 The director or the assistant director is planning to be on location.
 NOT The director or the assistant director are planning to be on location.
Subject-verb agreement in relative clauses
Agreement problems can occur in relative clauses using which, that, or one of those who. The
verb in a relative clause must agree with the relative pronoun's antecedent (the word the pronoun
stands for). Always ask yourself what the relative pronoun refers to.
 He decided to write novels, which are his favorite form.
 NOT He decided to write novels, which is his favorite form.

Pronouns and ‘new’ Predicates

Pronouns may refer to predicate which are not mentioned previously. In discourse, the speaker
may structure his massage in such a way that some new information is attached to ‘given’
elements (i.e., pronouns) intending the hearer to provide the given/ new interpretive procedure.
However, the hearer may have to reverse that procedure and use the new information to decide
what the given referent must have been.

A predicate pronoun is any pronoun that is part of the predicate. A predicate is the part of a
sentence that includes the verb and the words following it that relate to that verb.

Explanation:
Examples:
 I will call him.
 The teacher gave us a history assignment.
 Mother made lunch for them.

A sentence may have more than one predicate;

For example:
 Mother made lunch for them and set it on the picnic table.
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Slide13: A subjective pronoun can be part of a predicate when it is the subject of a clause,

For example:

 Mary brought a cake she made for the party.

A subjective pronoun is also used as a subject complement when it follows a linking verb;

For example:
The leaders right now are he and I.

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Lecture-14
Doing Discourse Analysis

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METHODOLOGY
Ethics

Proponents of discourse ethics reverse the order in which we normally address ethical
uncertainties. Instead of starting with one theory or another and then taking it out into the world
to solve problems, they start with a problem and try to create a moral structure to solve it. Ethical
solutions become ad hoc, custom generated to resolve specific conflicts. It doesn’t matter so
much, therefore, that people come to an issue like bribery from divergent moral grounds because
that difference is erased by the key element of discourse ethics: a foundational decision to cut
away from old ideas and make new ones.

Discourse ethics (DE) has two aims: to specify the ideal conditions for discourse and to ground
ethics in the agreements reached through the exercise of such discourse. Discourse ethics
consequently instantiates the intuition that if people discuss issues in fair and open ways, the
resulting conclusions will be morally binding for those appropriately involved in the
conversation. Such a view of ethics has special relevance in a scientific and technological world
characterized by expanding means of communication. DE may also arguably provide the best
framework for understanding the ethics of scientists and engineers operating within their
professional communities.

Theoretical Framework
Discourse ethics is primarily associated with the work of Karl-Otto Apel (1980) and Jürgen
Habermas, who touches his own theory of communicative rationality and action (1981) with
Apel's insights (Habermas 1983, 1989). Apel and Habermas root DE emphasis on the importance
of moral self-sufficiency for both the individual and the moral community (Apel 2001) and in
Aristotle's understanding of the importance of human community praxis as the container in
which all theory must be tested. DE has deeply influenced not only philosophy and sociology but
also, in keeping with its praxis orientation, such applied fields as business ethics (Blickle et al.

Habermas summarizes the basic intuition of discourse ethics with the statement that "under the
moral point of view, one must be able to test whether a norm or a mode of action could be
generally accepted by those affected by it, such that their acceptance would be rationally
motivated" (Habermas 1989).
To define such discourse more carefully, Habermas refines a set of rules first proposed by Robert
Alexy (1978). According to Habermas (1990), these are:

1. Every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take part in a discourse.
2a. everyone is allowed to question any assertion whatever.
2b. everyone is allowed to introduce any assertion whatever into the discourse.
2c. everyone is allowed to express his (or her) attitudes, desires, and needs.

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3. No speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion, from exercising his (or her)
rights as laid down in (1) and (2).

Discourse ethics thus intends to define the conditions of a free and democratic discourse
concerning important norms that affect all members of a community. It aims to do so in ways
that are directly practical for the real and pressing problems facing both local and more
comprehensive communities. In this light, DE would seem well-suited for circumscribing
discourse concerning pressing issues provoked by science and technology.

DE has further played both a theoretical and practical role in connection with the Internet and the
World Wide Web. For example, DE has been used to structure online dialogues regarding
important but highly controversial social issues such as abortion. These dialogues in fact realize
the potential of DE to achieve consensus on important community norms, insofar as they bring to
the foreground important normative agreements on the part of those holding otherwise opposed
positions, agreements that made a pluralistic resolution of the abortion debate possible (Ess and
Cavalier 1997). In 2002 DE served as the framework for the ethics working committee of the
Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), as they sought to develop the first set of ethical
guidelines designed specifically for online research and with a view toward recognizing and
sustaining the genuinely global ethical and cultural diversity entailed in such research. The
guidelines stand as an example of important consensus on ethical norms achieved by participants
from throughout the world.

Data Generation

As discourse analysis is concerned with what is accomplished in interaction, the most

appropriate sources of data are those that contain some kind of interaction. This may be different
from other qualitative methods as it means that conversations rather than stand-alone texts are
preferable (although also acceptable). This nevertheless means that a wide range of data can be
used to conduct discourse analyses including (but by no means limited to) ordinary conversations
(e.g. Stokoe and Edwards 2006) media data, (including televised discussion programs, e.g.
Goodman 2010) and a range of ‘institutional talk’ (e.g. Lea and Auburn 2001 on the talk of
convicted offenders).

Data should be generated (for example through interviews and focus groups) for the purpose of
discourse analysis (Goodman and Speer 2015). Potter (1997) defines such data as ‘contrived’ and
claims it is ‘subject to powerful expectations about social science research fielded by
participants; and there are particular difficulties in extrapolating from interview talk to activities
in other settings’ and instead favours ‘naturally occurring talk’ (1997: 148) which is data that has
not been influenced in any way by the researcher. The examples listed in the previous paragraph
would all meet this standard.

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However, Speer (2002) has argued that data cannot clearly be split into these two types
(‘naturally occurring’ and ‘contrived’). Speer claims that all situations can to some extent be
seen as contrived and natural. Any institutional data can be viewed as contrived, equally, all data
is also natural as it will involve real people speaking in real social situations, who will be
‘naturally’ generating action orientated talk. This is true even if that social situation has been
constructed for the sake of research. Those who do not have a problem with, or who value,
‘contrived’ data may well generate data for analysis by conducting interviews (e.g. Leudar et al.
2008) and focus groups (e.g. Goodman and Burke 2010). There is no right or wrong response to
this debate, just as long as the focus is on the interaction in the data, although it is good practice
to (briefly) explain why the chosen approach has been used.

Confidentiality

Confidentiality refers to a condition in which the researcher knows the identity of a research
subject, but takes steps to protect that identity from being discovered by others. Most human
subject’s research requires collection of a sign consent agreement from participants, and thus
researchers are aware of the identity of their subjects. In such cases, maintaining confidentiality
is a key measure to ensure the protection of private information.

This Section of the Guide explores the various forms of discourse analysis including one area,
conversation analysis, that used to be regarded as distinct from discourse analysis but is
increasingly viewed as a form of discourse analysis. The term discourse analysis is thought to
have first appeared in 1952 in the title of a paper by Zellig Harris. However, it was from the late
1960s that it emerged as a cross-disciplinary approach, coinciding in with the interest in
semiotics, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics.

Researchers employ a number of methods to keep their subjects' identity confidential. Foremost,
they keep their records secure through the use of password protected files, encryption when
sending information over the internet, and even old-fashioned locked doors and drawers. They
frequently do not record information in a way that links subject responses with identifying
information (usually by use of a code known only to them). And because subjects may often not
be identified by names alone, but by other identifiers or by combinations of information about
subjects, researchers will often only report aggregate findings, not individual-level data, to the
public.

from a purely methodological point of view, it may sometimes be necessary to lower other
scientific standards in order to ensure confidentiality. This applies in particular to the scientific
ideal of verifiability (see also Research values). In principle, the need for verifiability means that
the researcher must publish sufficient information to enable others to repeat the procedures and
verify the results. The confidentiality requirement may, for example, mean that the results must
be grouped, or names or values modified, in order to ensure that some data cannot be traced back

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to individuals or particularly vulnerable groups. Although this may affect the degree of
verifiability, it is essential that confidentiality is respected. However, this potential conflict
makes it important that the researcher has reflected in advance over what specific strategies
should be aimed for to ensure an epistemic as well as ethical standard.

Researchers may also be faced with a dilemma with regard to maintaining confidentiality in
other situations, where this type of methodological consideration is not involved. For example,
some types of research, such as mapping insider trading or illegal immigration, may be of
interest to business or to government policy. If researchers are served with a court order to reveal
their source, when is it ethically correct to breach confidentiality for such reasons? A further
source of confusion for the individual researcher may be that this is not purely a matter of
conscience, but also a question of the possibility of doing further research. For further reading on
researchers' notification requirement, see the article Duty of secrecy.

There are often no simple solutions in situations where ethical considerations are apparently in
conflict with one another. One pertinent fact, however, is that in cases where it is conceivable
that such a dilemma may arise, researchers must consider carefully in advance whether they
should establish a confidential relationship with the person or persons concerned at all. It is never
straightforward, and almost always wrong, under any circumstances, to establish a relationship
based on deceit with persons upon whom one wishes to conduct research.

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DOING DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Developing a Discourse Analysis Project

Discourse analysis is a useful tool for studying the political meanings that inform written and
spoken text. Discourse Analysis is the investigation of knowledge about language beyond the
word, clause, phrase and sentence levels. All of them are the basic building blocks of
successful communication. In discourse analysis researchers have to infiltrate language as a
whole beyond the micro level of words and sentences and look at the entire body of
communication produced in a given / particular situation. Discourse analysis refers to attempts to
study the organization of language above the sentence or above the clause, and therefore to
study larger linguistic units, such as conversational exchanges or written texts (Stubbs 1983).
However, Michael Stubbs redefines Discourse in his later work as it is therefore more accurate
to say that text and discourse analysis studies language in context: how words and phrases
fit into both longer texts, and also social contexts of use (Stubbs 2001).

There are a number of issues that need to be considered when planning a discourse analysis
project. The first of these is the actual research question. The key to any good research project
is a well-focused research question. It can, however, take longer than expected to find this
question. Cameron (2001) has suggested that one important characteristic of a good research
project is that it contains a ‘good idea’; that is, the project is on something that is worth finding.
As Cameron and others have pointed out, deciding on and refining the research question is often
the hardest part of the project. It is, thus, worth spending as much time as necessary to get it
right.
Criteria for developing a discourse analysis project

In her book Qualitative Methods in Sociolinguistics, Johnstone (2000) lists a number of criteria
that contribute to the development of a good and workable research topic. In her case, she is
talking about research in the area of sociolinguistics. What she says, however, applies equally to
discourse analysis projects. These criteria include
 A well-focused idea about spoken or written discourse that is expressed as a question or a
set of closely related questions;
 An understanding of how discourse analytic techniques can be used to answer the
research question you are asking;
 An understanding of why your question about spoken or written discourse are important
in a wider context; that is, why answering the question will have practical value and/or be
of interest to the world at large;
 Familiarity with and access to the location where your discourse analysis project will be
carried out;
 Ability to get the discourse data that is needed for the research project;

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 The time it will realistically take to carry out the discourse analysis project, analyze the
results and write up the results of the project;
 Being comfortable with and competent in the ways of collecting the discourse data
required by the project;
 Being competent in the method of analysis required for the project.
Choosing a Research Topic

Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis, and Critical Discourse Analysis are separate but related areas
of linguistic inquiry. These are concerned with the constituents and structures of discourse (like
words and phrases) as they are used in context to make meaning. Pragmatics often focuses on the
social and generic constraints (like politeness conventions, relative social status, etc.) that shape
communicative situations, while discourse analysis may foreground how discourse constructs
social meanings, serves rhetorical purposes, or creates subject positions. Critical discourse
analysis is particularly interested in the relationship between discourse and the preservation or
subversion of power. Research in these areas may ask questions related to language-in-use and
its meaning-making functions.

A good place to start in choosing a research topic is by drawing up a shortlist of topics that
interest you. You can do this by speaking to other students, by asking colleagues, by asking
teachers and by asking potential supervisors, as well as by looking up related research in the
library. As Cameron (2001) points out, good ideas for research do not ‘just spring from the
researcher’s imagination, they are suggested by previous research’.

It is important, then, to read widely to see what previous research has said about the topic you are
interested in, including what questions can be asked and answered from a discourse perspective.
This reading will also give a view of what the current issues and debates are in the approach to
discourse analysis you are interested in, as well as how other researchers have gone about
answering the question you are interested in from a discourse perspective. It is important to
remember, however, that a research question and a research topic are not the same thing.

A research topic is your general area of interest, whereas the research question is the particular
thing you want to find out and which grows out of your research topic (Sunderland 2010). When
deciding on a topic, there are a few things that you will need to do:



brainstorm for ideas V Important Q
choose a topic that will enable you to read and understand the literature
 ensure that the topic is manageable and that material is available
 make a list of key words
 be flexible
 define your topic as a focused research question
 research and read more about your topic
 formulate a thesis statement
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Be aware that selecting a good topic may not be easy. It must be narrow and focused enough to
be interesting, yet broad enough to find adequate information. Before selecting your topic, make
sure you know what your final project should look like. Each class or instructor will likely
require a different format or style of research project.

Focusing a Research Topic

The next now, needed to focus on research topic. Often aspiring researchers start off with a
project that is overly large and ambitious. Stevens and Asmar (1999) suggest that ‘wiser heads’
know that a good research project is ‘narrow and deep’. In their words, ‘even the simplest idea
can flourish into an uncontrollably large project’. They highlight how important it is for
students to listen to more experienced researchers in their field and to be guided by their advice
in the early stages of the research. They suggest starting off by getting immersed in the literature
and reading broadly and widely to find a number of potential research topics. This can be done
by making heavy use of the library as well as by reading the abstracts of recent theses and
dissertations, some of which are available on the World Wide Web (see Directions for further
reading at the end of this chapter for some of these URLs).

Once the reading has been done, it is useful to write a few lines on each topic and use this as the
basis to talk to other people about the research. Often one topic may emerge as the strongest
contender from these conversations, not only because it is the most original or interesting but
also because it is the most doable in terms of access to data and resource facilities, your expertise
in the use of discourse analysis techniques, as well as supervision support. Here are some of the
ideas my student interested in comparing Chinese and English writing started off with.

 Topic 1: A comparison of Chinese students’ essay writing in Chinese and English written
in their first year of undergraduate studies
 Topic 2: A comparison of students’ Master’s theses in Chinese and English
 Topic 3: An examination of newspaper articles in Chinese and English from an
intercultural rhetoric perspective
Each of these questions is influenced by previous research on the topic. Each of them, however,
has its problems. The first topic is an interesting one. It would be difficult, however, to get texts
written by the same students in their first year of undergraduate studies in the two different
settings. It is also not certain (or perhaps not even likely) that they will be asked to do the same
or even comparable pieces of writing in the two sets of first-year undergraduate study. It is also
not likely that a Chinese student who has completed an undergraduate degree in a Chinese
university would then do the same undergraduate degree in an English medium university. There
is also no suggestion in the first topic as to how the pieces of writing would be analyzed.
The second topic is more possible as some Chinese students do go on to do a degree that
includes a thesis in English after having done a degree with a thesis component in Chinese.
There would, however, be many more students writing coursework essays and assignments in
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English who had done something similar in Chinese. So there is a problem of gaining sufficient
pieces of writing for the study. There is also the problem of gaining access to the students, and
hoping the students will still have the pieces of writing that they did when they were students in
China. It is, of course, possible to do both of these first two studies with writing done by
different students, as most studies of this kind have done.
There is still, however, the problem of getting comparable pieces of writing so that the same, or
at least similar things, can be compared.

The third topic, in some ways, solves the data collection issue as newspaper texts are publicly
available as long as you have access to a library, or an electronic database where previous copies
of newspapers are held. The theoretical framework in this topic, intercultural rhetoric, however,
in the sense of cultural influences of ways of writing in one language on another, has not been
used to examine newspaper articles as it is probably not very common that Chinese writers of
newspaper articles are required to write a newspaper article in English. So, while the third topic
is practical in many ways, the theoretical framework had not been used to approach it at this
stage. My student who was working on this topic decided the notion of genre, rather than
intercultural rhetoric, might be a better place to start. He still retained an interest in intercultural
rhetoric, however, and wanted to include this in some way in his study. His refocused topic, then,
became: A contrastive study of letters to the editor in Chinese and English.

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DOING DISCOURSE ANALYSIS-III

Turning the Topic into a Research Question

Student had settled on his topic, but it still needed to be turned into a research question. A
possible first attempt at this question might be,
 What are the differences between letters to the editor in Chinese and English?
This question however presupposes an outcome before the study has been carried out; that is,
that there would indeed be differences between the two sets of writings. The question also does
not capture anything of the theoretical models that might be used to answer this question.

The refocused set of questions that my student ended up with was:

1. In what ways are Chinese and English letters to the editor similar or different?
2. Can we use genre theory and intercultural rhetoric to understand these similarities and
differences?
His question, hence, became more focused. It did not yet state exactly what aspects of genre
theory he would draw on for his analysis, however. These became clearer as he read further on
his topic and carried out trial analyses. He then decided to look at the generic structures in the
two sets of texts and the typical rhetorical types (such as problem–solution, compare and
contrast, etc.) present in the texts. He also decided to look at the use of logico-semantic relations
(Martin 1992) between clauses in the two sets of texts as his reading had told him this was an
aspect of writing, in some genres at least, that differs in Chinese and English writing.

His questions, therefore, were now worth asking and capable of being answered from a discourse
analysis perspective. As he argued, most studies of Chinese and English writing either looked at
Chinese, or English writing, but not at both. Also, few studies used the same textual criteria for
the two sets of analyses. Many previous studies of this kind, further, focused on ‘direct’ or
‘indirect’ aspects of Chinese and English writing and did not go beyond this to explore how the
various parts of the texts combine together to create coherent texts. So, what he was doing was
theoretically useful, it was possible to collect the texts and he was capable of analyzing the data
in the way that he proposed.

It is important, then, as my student did, to strike a balance between the value of the question and
your ability to develop a discourse analysis project you are capable of carrying out; that is, a
project for which you have the background, expertise, resources and access to data needed. It is
also important to spend as much time as is needed to get the research question right as research
questions that are well-designed and well-worded is key to a good research project (Sunderland
2010).

Connecting Data Collection, Analysis and Research Questions

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Sunderland (2010) provides helpful advice on how to connect data collection and analysis with
your research question(s). She suggests completing a table such as the one shown in Table 1.1 to
do this.
Table 1.1: Connecting data collection, analysis and research questions (Sunderland 2010)
Research Question Data Needed Data Collection Data Analysis

1.

2.

3.

However, that things are not always as neat as Table 10.1 might suggest. Sometimes one
research question might require more than one set of data or you might be able to use one set of
data to address more than one research question. What you will see, however, from your chart is
whether there are any gaps that still need to be filled or data that still needs to be collected to
address each of your questions (Sunderland 2010).

Kinds of Discourse Analysis Projects

There are a number of different kinds of projects that can be carried out from a discourse
analysis perspective. A number of these are described below, together with examples of previous
discourse projects and details of the data that were collected for each of these projects.
Replication of previous discourse studies
One kind of study to consider is a replication study. Indeed, there has been a resurgence of
interest in these kinds of studies in recent years. The editor of the journal Language Teaching, for
example, argues that:
Such research should play a more significant role in the field than it has up to now and
that it is both useful and necessary. (Language Teaching review panel 2008)
As Santos (1989) points out, the findings of many studies are often not tested by further studies
which follow the same methodology and a similar data set either at the same point in time or at
some stage later when the findings may be different. Santos describes this lack of replication
studies as a serious weakness in applied linguistics research. Such studies provide both the
accumulation and consolidation of knowledge over time.

Samraj’s (2005) study of research article abstracts and introductions is an example of a

replication study. Her aim was to test the results of previous research into the discourse
structure of research article introductions to see whether they apply to articles written in the area
of conservation. She also wished to look at whether the discourse structure of the research article
abstracts was as different from the discourse structure of research article introductions as
previous research had claimed them to be. She analyzed her data using models that had been
used in previous research on this topic, namely Swales’ (1990) research into research article
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introductions and Bhatia’s (1993) and Hyland’s (2004) research on research article abstracts.
Once she had compared her findings with the results of previous research, she then compared her
two data sets with each other to examine the extent to which they were similar in terms of
discourse organization and function, also the focus of previous research.

 Using different discourse data but the same methodology

A further way of using previous research is to carry out a study which uses different discourse
data from a previous study, but the same methodology so as to be able to compare and contrast
your findings with those of the original study. Yang’s (1997) study of the opening sequences in
Chinese telephone calls did this. She collected 80 Chinese telephone conversations made by
three Chinese families living in Beijing. She analyzed the opening sequences of these
conversations, then compared her findings with the findings of previous research into opening
sequences in telephone calls in the United States and a number of other countries and, in
particular, published claims about ‘canonical’ openings of telephone conversations in English.
 Analyzing existing data from a discourse analysis perspective
Channell’s (1997) study of telephone conversations took already published data, a conversation
supposed to be between the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker-Bowles, and analyzed it to see
in what way the speakers expressed love, what the effect of the telephone was on their talk and
what features of the conversation mark it as being the talk of two people who are in a close and
intimate relationship. She looked at topic choice and topic management, ways of expressing love
and caring, the language of desire and the way in which the speakers said goodbye to each other.
Her study confirmed previous work on telephone closings in that both speakers employed an
elaborate set of pre-closings and continued repetitions (such as ‘love you’, ‘love you forever’ and
‘love you too’) before concluding their conversation. Anyhow, her study does show the value of
taking already existing data to see how discourse analytic techniques can help to further
understand already published data.
 Analyzing discourse data from a different perspective
Another possibility is to take data that has already been analyzed from one discourse perspective
and analyze it from another. Orr (1996) did this in her study of arguments in a reality TV show.
Her particular interest was in using conversation analysis as an alternate way of looking at data
that had already been examined from a frame semantics perspective (Lee, 1997) to see what this
other perspective might reveal about the nature of the interactions. Her study followed the
philosophy of conversation analytic studies in that she started with the data and allowed the
details of the analysis to emerge from her transcriptions. Through repeated listening’s to the data
she saw how the speakers challenged and countered each other’s points of view in a series of
cyclical moves until one or the other speaker accepted the point of the argument.
 Focusing on unanalyzed genres
Another possibility is to focus on data that has not been analyzed before and describe
characteristic features of the particular discourse. This could, for example, be an analysis of one
of the many new genres that are emerging through the use of new technologies, or it may be
examples of a genre that has not been analyzed before from a discourse perspective. Ooi (2001)
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looked at a new and emerging genre in his study of personal advertisements on the internet. His
study was based on data collected from internet dating sites in the United States and Singapore.
He broke his data up into three groupings based on three types. He then carried out a lexical
analysis of the texts, looking at word frequency and collocations by gender and country of origin
to see to what extent males and females differ in their expectations of each other, and the kinds
of words and expressions they use to express these expectations.

Combining discourse and other research perspectives

Nakane and the Wang studies that have just been described drew on a number of different
discourse analysis and other research perspectives to work towards answers to their research
questions. When combining perspectives in this way, it is important to understand the basis of
the perspectives being drawn on to appreciate what this placing together implies and, indeed, if it
is possible to do this. People working in the area of conversation analysis, for example, would
consider Nakane’s combination of conversation analytic techniques and ethnography impossible
as for a conversation analyst the evidence is in the data, and the closest an analyst is able to get
to understanding an event is in the transcription and analysis of the data. For them, insiders’
views are only intuitions and not, in their view, admissible in the analysis and interpretation of
the data. My view, however, is that Nakane strengthened rather than weakened her study by
combining perspectives in the way that she did.

Cameron (2005) discusses the problems associated with what she calls ‘theoretical and
methodological eclecticism’. She points out that sometimes this carries a high risk of
superficiality as the researcher may be trying to do too many things at once and not end up doing
any of them properly (which is not the case in either the Nakane or the Wang studies).

It is not impossible to mix discourse analysis and other methods. What this requires, however, is
‘a clear rationale for putting approaches together, a sophisticated understanding of each
approach, and an account of how the tensions between approaches will be handled in [the] study’
(127).
A researcher can, then, combine an approach to discourse analysis with a non-discourse analytic
perspective on the research, as both Nakane and Wang have done in their studies. Both Nakane
and Wang have shown how doing this can provide more of an account of the issue they are
examining than might have been possible with just the one, single discourse analysis (or other
research) perspective. It is crucial, however, in the planning of this kind of project that each of
the approaches are weighed up against each other, identifying what kind of information each
approach can (and cannot) supply. By doing this the use of one approach to discourse analysis in
combination with another approach to discourse analysis or other approaches to research can be
justified. Indeed, often an approach of this kind can provide a fuller and more explanatory
perspective on the question under investigation than might be provided with just the one single
perspective.

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Lecture-15
Discourse Genre and Critical Discourse
Analysis

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Genre as social action

Discourse arises among people, in interaction, and it is part of the means by which people
accomplish social actions. Meanings arise within the pragmatic unfolding of events and mediate
the alignment of participants to perceptions of immediate situations and relevant contexts
(whether fictive or non-fictive) called to mind by language. Language is crafted, deployed, and
interpreted by individuals in the course of social participation, even when individuals use
language in a personally reflective mode, considering one’s own identity, commitments, and
actions while using received language. Language users (with particular neurophysiological
capacities and individual histories of language experience) in the course of interaction call upon
the resources of language that are socially and culturally available and that have been typified
through histories of social circulation; nonetheless, individuals construct meanings and
consequentiality from their perception of particular novel situations and of their participant
action in those situations.

 The thinness of the written sign

Slide3: In written language, these themes of situated alignment over meaning are both
highlighted and obscured. Because written texts often communicate with people at a distance of
time and space, the here-and-now existence of one’s interlocutor is typically invisible at the
moment of writing or reading. If our interlocutors come to mind, they appear as acts of
imagination based on limited clues obtained from prior texts or interactions, rather than as
embodied presences. Without immediate interactive response we cannot rapidly repair, modify,
or expand the utterance to increase alignment. The communicative clues for a successful
alignment over meanings and actions must be carried through the arrangement of the few letters
of the alphabet in words, sentences, and larger units along with punctuation, graphic elements,
and material-ties of the medium.

The thinness of the written signs and the distance from the receiver often leave the writer
uncertain whether the produced artifact will evoke the desired meanings and effects. On the
receptive side, the reader may struggle with interpretation of what precise meanings could have
been intended by the author or other presenter of the signs. The problem of arrangement over
limited clues is most distressing when the text is written in a hard-to-read script or in a language
the reader has limited familiarity with. Then the reader may be left with just ink marks on paper
that cannot be animated into meanings and intentions. Even if the reader is highly literate in the
language, ambiguous words, unfamiliar references, novel ideas, difficult syntax, or complex
arguments can make an act of reading an imaginative and interpretive challenge.

These thin symbols only interpretable in an approximate way, at a different time and in a
different place, by a different person, with different motives and mental contents have proved
remarkably robust in allowing communication of the complex thoughts of philosophy,
accumulation of extensive interrelated knowledge and theories of science, planning and
coordination of large architectural projects, and maintenance of large institutions such as legal
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systems and government bureaucracies. Meaning is not fully available and immanent in the bare
spelled words. Interact ants’ familiarity with domains of communication and relevant genres
make the kind of communication recognizable: establishing roles, values, domains of content,
and general actions that then create the space for more specific, detailed, refined utterances and
meanings spelled out in the crafted words.

 Typification, social organization, and social change

Genre typifications result from a process of psycho-social category formation. The categories
themselves have no permanent substance. Genre taxonomies, nonetheless, can be useful to map
users’ categories within a defined social historical space and to define widespread functional
patterns in vigorous social systems. Further, though human neurobiological organization may
favor certain patterns of cognition (such as episodic memory) and perception (such as
organization and salience in visual fields), which may in turn lead to preferences for certain
sequencing of statements or recognition of text structures, these still operate below the level of
organized social utterance within coordinated activity. Even in the short run, major changes in
social relations, economic conditions, governmental regulations, disciplinary goals,
communicative technologies or other situational dimensions can lead to a rapid genre change.
Indeed, the affordances of electronic search, rapid communication, and instantaneous access to
wide ranges of information are currently changing genres in numerous social spheres vary
rapidly, with further consequences for the social organization of activities, leading to further
genre evolution.
What provides for communicative stability is not the genre in itself, but the system of activity
that the genre is part of (Engestrom, 1987, 1990; Bazerman, 1994a; Russell, 1997). No matter
how stabilized and defining genres may appear within some long enduring social systems, we
must also remember that genre is a categorization of an utterance and is not a full account or
description of any individual utterance itself and its meaning. Even if a text is widely and
unproblematically attributable to a single genre (let us say, a bank cheque), it nonetheless carries
out a specific communication in a specific context, identifying payer, payee, bank and account,
and dates of transaction and will fail if there is some failure in these elements reported in the
document.
Further, these documents can circulate to different situations as parts of different activities, even
if the original context is recognized. In a court proceeding, this cheque (recognized as such) may
turn into a piece of evidence of fraud (if it meets another very special set of criteria, drawn from
legal rules of evidence). Fifty years from now it can become historical evidence of the financial
dealings of a famous writer. That is, it may be viewed both variously and multiply in terms of
genre. Genres facilitate interpretation of meaning or anticipation of interpretation, and may
thereby guide production or reception, but they do not rule absolutely, nor do they displace local
acts of meaning making that have evolutionary potential for the systems they are embedded in.
 Implications for discourse analysis

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The perspective presented here has several clear implications for the analysis of discourse. First,
discourse occurs within a social situation and should be understood and analyzed, as it operates
meaningfully within that situation.

Second, discursive situations are understood by their participants as organized and structured so
as to be meaningful and sensible to them. The mechanisms by which definitions of situation and
action are shared among participants are at the heart of social systematicity and of the
organization of discourse.

Third, the knowledge, thought, and meanings expressed within situated utterances then become
part of the ongoing resources and definition of the situation for future utterances. Discourse is to
be understood dynamically, within the construction of those situations and of the larger social
activity systems within which those utterances occur.

Fourth, regularities of linguistic form usually accompany stabilizations of social groups and
activities so, to look for linguistic orders, we should look to social orders; and, to look for social
orders, and we should look to linguistic orders. While in the past geography may have been the
dominant coverable of linguistic variation, with literacy and other communication at a distance
technology the social variables of linguistic variation are increasingly tied to more extensive
groupings such as social and cultural institutions, disciplines and professions, work
organizations, and media audiences.

Fifth, linguistic entrainment into particular discursive practices goes hand in hand with
socialization into activity networks and with cognitive development into the forms of thinking
associated with interacting in those activity systems. Internalization of linguistic action
transforms into dispositions and orientations.

Sixth, when discourse travels outside of its original ambit, the mechanisms for that wider travel
are themselves topics of examination. This includes study of the genres within which such
discourses arise, the genres in which they travel, and the genres into which they are received, as
well as the processes that occur at the translation border between genres. Those discourses that
seem to circulate freely among multiple situations also deserve investigation for the mechanisms
by which they appear meaningful at multiple sites and for the differential ways in which they are
integrated into different discursive systems and their genres.

In sum, utterances are parts of social life, and the discourses produced within our social life
are to be understood within all the dimensions of life. The signs we study are only the residue
of complex psychosocial cultural processes, in which they served as mediators of meaning.
While we may study them as residues, for the regularities to be found in residues, their
fundamental order is only to be found in their full animation as meaningful communication in
the unfolding interactions of life. The orders of discourse are to be found in the dynamics of
life processes.

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DISCOURSE AND GENRE

One of the key ways in which people communicate with each other is through the participation in
particular communicative events, or genres. A letter to the editor is an example of a genre. Other
examples of genres are news reports, business reports, parliamentary speeches, summing up in a
court of law and weather reports.

What is Genre?
Current Question
Genres are ways in which people ‘get things done’ through their use of spoken and written
discourse. Genres are activities that people engage in through the use of language. Academic
lectures and casual conversations are examples of spoken genres. Newspaper reports and
academic essays are examples of written genres. Instances of a genre often share a number of
features. They may be spoken or written in typical, and sometimes conventional, ways. They also
often have a common function and purpose (or set of functions and purposes). Genres may
typically be performed by a particular person aimed at a particular audience. Genres change
through time. This may, for example, be in response to changes in technologies or it may be as a
result of changes in values underlying the use of the particular genre.
Genre analysis and English for specific purposes
The approach to genre analysis commonly employed in the teaching of English for specific
purposes is based on Swales’ (1981, 1990, 2004) analyses of the discourse structure of research
article introductions. Swales use the notion of moves to describe the discourse structure of texts.
In his book Genre analysis Swales (1990) argued that communicative purpose was the key factor
that leads a person to decide whether a text is an instance of a particular genre or not. He has
since, however, revised this view, saying that it is now clear that genres may have multiple
purposes and that these may be different for each of the participants involved (Askehave and
Swales 2001). Also, instances of a genre which are similar linguistically and rhetorically may
have ‘startling differences in communicative purpose’ in the words of Swales and Rogers (1995).
The communicative purpose of a genre, further, may evolve over time. It may change, it may
expand or it may shrink (Swales 2004). Communicative purpose, further, can vary across
cultures even when texts belong to the same genre category.
Rhetorical genre studies
Researchers in rhetorical genre studies describe genres as part of the social processes by which
knowledge about reality and the world are made. Genres, in this view, both respond to and
contribute to the constitution of social contexts, as well as the socialization of individuals.
Genres, then, are more than just socially embedded; they are socially constructive.
Linguists such as Hasan (1989) have suggested that the crucial properties of a genre can be
expressed as a range of possible textual structures. Martin (1992), equally, puts forward the view
that genres can be defined in terms of similarities and differences in the discourse structures of
the texts. While discourse structure is clearly a characterizing feature of some genres, it is not

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always the case that every instance of a particular genre will have exactly the same discourse
structure (nor indeed the same communicative purpose) (Askehave and Swales 2000).

Communicative purpose is an important (although complex) criterion for deciding whether a text
is an instance of a particular genre. That is, a text may be presented in an unusual way (for that
particular genre) but still have the same communicative aim as other instances of the particular
genre. In some cases, the text might be considered a ‘best example’ of the particular genre, and
in others, it might be so atypical as to be considered a ‘problematic’ example of the genre.

The issue of genre identification is, thus, a complex one and requires a flexible rather than a
static view of what it is that leads users of a language to recognize a communicative event as an
instance of a particular genre. A key factor in this process lies in a perspective on genre based on
the notion of prototype (Rosch 1978, 1983) rather than on sets of defining features. Genres are
most helpfully seen as ‘resources for meaning’ rather than ‘systems of rules’ (Swales 2002).

Steps in Genre Analysis

Bhatia (1993) and Bawarshi and Reiff (2010) present steps for carrying out the analysis of
genres, in their case written genres. It is not necessary to go through all the stages that they list,
nor in the order in which they are presented. For example, we may decide to take a ‘text-first’ or
a ‘context-first’ approach to the analysis of a particular genre (Flowerdew 2002, 2011). That is,
we may decide to start by looking at typical discourse patterns in the texts we are interested in (a
text-first approach), or we may decide to start with an examination of the context of the texts we
want to investigate (a context-first approach). The steps, then, should be used flexibly and
selectively depending on the starting point of the analysis, the purpose of the analysis, the aspect
of the genre that we want to focus on and the level of prior knowledge we already have of the
particular genre.

The first step, however, is to collect samples of the genre you are interested in. Bhatia suggests
taking a few randomly chosen texts for exploratory investigation, a single typical text for
detailed analysis, or a larger sample of texts if we wish to investigate a few specified features.
Clearly, the more samples you can collect of the genre, however, the better you will be able to
identify typical features of the genre.

The next step is to consider what is already known about the particular genre. This includes
knowledge of the setting in which it occurs as well as any conventions that are typically
associated with the genre. For information on this, we can go to existing literature such as guide
books and manuals as well as seek practitioner advice on the particular genre. It is also helpful to
look at what analyses have already have been carried out of the particular genre, or other related
genres, by looking at research articles or books on the topic.

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We next need to refine the analysis by defining the speaker or writer of the text, the audience of
the text and their relationship with each other. That is, who uses the genre, who writes in the
genre, who reads the genre and what roles the readers perform as they read the text?

We also need to consider the goal, or purpose, of the texts. That is, why do writers write this
genre, why do readers read it and what purpose does the genre have for the people who use it?

A further important consideration is typical discourse patterns for the genre. That is, how are the
texts typically organized, how are they typically presented in terms of layout and format and
what are some language features that typically re-occur in the particular genre? Equally, what do
people need to know to take part in the genre, and what view of the world does the text assume
of its readers? That is, what values, beliefs and assumptions are assumed or revealed by the
particular genre (Bawarshi and Reiff 2010)?

We should also think about the networks of texts that surround the genre and to what extent
knowledge of these is important in order be able to write or make sense of a particular genre.

The social and cultural context of genres

Current Question
An important stage in genre analysis, formerly, is an examination of the social and cultural
context in which the genre is used. In the case of a written text, factors that might be considered
Include:
 The setting of the text
 The focus and perspective of the text
 The purpose of the text
 The intended audience for the text, their role and purpose in reading the text
The relationship between writers and readers of the text; expectations, conventions and
requirements for the text
 The background knowledge, values and understandings it is assumed the writer shares
with their readers, including what is important to the reader and what is not
 The relationship of the text has with other texts.
These aspects of a genre, of course, are not as distinct as they appear in this kind a listing. As
Yates and Orlikowski (2007) point out, they are deeply intertwined and each, in its way, has an
impact on what a writer writes, and the way they write it.

These are the range of factors that impact on how the text is written, how it will be read and,
importantly, how it will be assessed.
Setting of the text  The kind of university and level of study, the kind of degree
(e.g., honors, master’s or doctoral, research or professional)
 Study carried out in a ‘hard’ or ‘soft’, pure or applied,
convergent or divergent area of study Becher and Trowler 2001)

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Focus and  Quantitative, qualitative or mixed method research

 Claims that can be made, claims that cannot be made
perspective of the  Faculty views on what is ‘good’ research
text

Purpose of the text  To answer a question, to solve a problem, to prove something, to

contribute to knowledge, to display knowledge and
understanding, to demonstrate particular skills, to convince a
reader, to gain admission to a particular area of study
Audience, role and  To judge the quality of the research
 Primary readership of one or more examiners, secondary
purpose in reading readership of the supervisor and anyone else the student shows
their work to
the text  How readers will react to what they read, the criteria they will
use for assessing the text, who counts the most in judging the
quality of the text
Relationship  Students writing for experts, for admission to an area of study
(the primary readership), students writing for peers, for advice
between writers and (the secondary readership)
readers of the text

Expectations,  An understanding and critical appraisal of relevant literature

 A clearly defined and comprehensive investigation of the
conventions and research topic
 Appropriate use of research methods and techniques for the
requirements for research question
the text  Ability to interpret results, develop conclusions and link them to
previous research
 Level of critical analysis, originality and contribution to
knowledge expected
 Literary quality and standard of presentation expected
 Level of grammatical accuracy required
 How the text is typically organized, how the text might vary for
a particular research topic,
 area of study, kind of study and research perspective
 What is typically contained in each chapter
 The amount of variation allowed in what should be addressed
and how it should be addressed
 The university’s formal submission requirements in terms of
format, procedures and timing
Background  The background knowledge, values and understandings it is
assumed students will share with their readers – what is
knowledge, values important to their readers, what is not important to their readers
 How much knowledge students are expected to display, the
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and understandings extent to which students should show what they know, what
issues students should address, what boundaries students can
cross
Relationship the text How to show the relationship between the present research and other
people’s research on the topic, what counts as valid previous research,
has with other texts acceptable and unacceptable textual borrowings, differences between
reporting and plagiarizing

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Current Question Lesson-45

CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Critical discourse analysis explores the connections between the use of language and the social
and political contexts in which it occurs. It explores issues such as gender, ethnicity, cultural
difference, ideology and identity and how these are both constructed and reflected in texts. It
also investigates ways in which language constructs and is constructed by social relationships. A
critical analysis may include a detailed textual analysis and move from there to an explanation
and interpretation of the analysis. It might proceed from there to deconstruct and challenge the
text being examined. This may include tracing underlying ideologies from the linguistic features
of a text, unpacking particular biases and ideological presuppositions underlying the text, and
relating the text to other texts and to people’s experiences and beliefs. Critical discourse
analysis starts with the assumption that language use is always social and that discourse both
‘reflects and constructs the social world’ (Rogers 2011).

Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis

There is no single view of what critical discourse analysis actually is, so it is difficult to present a
complete, unified view on this. Fairclough and Wodak (1997), however, describe a number of
principles for critical discourse analysis which underlie many of the studies done in this area.
These include
 Social and political issues are constructed and reflected in discourse
 Power relations are negotiated and performed through discourse
 Discourse both reflects and reproduces social relations V Important Q
 Ideologies are produced and reflected in the use of discourse
Social and political issues are constructed and reflected in discourse
The first of Fairclough and Wodak’s principles is that critical discourse analysis addresses social
and political issues and examines ways in which these are constructed and reflected in the use of
certain discourse strategies and choices.
Power relations are negotiated and performed through discourse
The next principle of critical discourse analysis is that power relations are both negotiated and
performed through discourse. One way in which this can be looked at is through an analysis of
who controls conversational interactions, who allows a person to speak and how they do this.
Discourse both reflects and reproduces social relations
A further principle of critical discourse analysis is that discourse not only reflects social relations
but is also part of, and reproduces, social relations. That is, social relations are both established
and maintained through the use of discourse.
Ideologies are produced and reflected in the use of discourse

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Another key principle of critical discourse analysis is that ideologies are produced and reflected
in the use of discourse. This includes ways of representing and constructing society such as
relations of power, and relations based on gender, class and ethnicity.

Critical discourse analysis ‘includes not only a description and interpretation of discourse in
context, but also offers an explanation of why and how discourses work’ (Rogers 2004).
Researchers working within this perspective are concerned with a critical theory of the social
world, the relationship of language and discourse in the construction and representation of the
social world, and a methodology that allows them to describe, interpret and explain such
relationships. (Rogers 2011)

Doing critical discourse analysis

Researchers working within this perspective are concerned with a critical theory of the social
world, the relationship of language and discourse in the construction and representation of the
social world, and a methodology that allows them to describe, interpret and explain such
relationships. (Rogers 2011)

A critical analysis, then, might commence by deciding what discourse type, or genre, the text
represents and to what extent and in what way the text conforms to it (or not). It may also
consider to what extent the producer of the text has gone beyond the normal boundaries for the
genre to create a particular effect.

The analysis may consider the framing of the text; that is, how the content of the text is
presented, and the sort of angle or perspective the writer or speaker is taking. Closely related to
framing is the notion of foregrounding; that is, what concepts and issues are emphasized, as well
as what concepts and issues are played down or back-grounded in the text. Equally important to
the analysis are the background knowledge, assumptions, attitudes and points of view that the
text presupposes (Huckin 1997).

At the sentence level, the analyst might consider what has been tropicalized in each of the
sentences in the text; that is, what has been put at the front of each sentence to indicate what it is
‘about’. The analysis may also consider who is doing what to whom; that is, agent-patient
relations in the discourse, and who has the most authority and power in the discourse. It may also
consider what agents have been left out of sentences such as when the passive voice is used, and
why this has been done.

At the word and phrase level, connotations of particular words and phrases might be considered
as well as the text’s degree of formality or informality, degree of technicality and what this
means for other participants in the text. The choice of words which express degrees of certainty
and attitude may also be considered and whether the intended audience of the text might be
expected to share the views expressed in the text, or not.

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The procedure an analyst follows in this kind of analysis depends on the research situation, the
research question and the texts that are being studied. What is essential, however? is that there is
some attention to the critical, discourse and analysis in whatever focus is taken up in the analysis
(Rogers 2011).

Critical discourse analysis, then, takes us beyond the level of description to a deeper
understanding of texts and provides, as far as might be possible, some kind of explanation of
why a text is as it is and what it is aiming to do. It looks at the relationship between discourse
and society and aims to describe, interpret and explain this relationship. As van Dijk (1998) has
argued, it is through discourse that many ideologies are formulated, reinforced and reproduced.
Critical discourse analysis aims to provide a way of exploring this and, in turn, challenging some
of the hidden and ‘out of sight’ social, cultural and political ideologies and values that underlie
texts.

Discourse Analysis and Multimodality

Multimodal discourse analysis considers how texts draw on modes of communication such as
pictures, film, video, images and sound in combination with words to make meaning. It has
examined print genres as well as genres such as web pages, film and television programs. It
considers how multimodal texts are designed and how semiotic tools such as colour, framing,
focus and positioning of elements contribute to the making of meaning in these texts.

Much of the work in multimodal discourse analysis draws from Halliday’s (1978, 1989) social
semiotic approach to language, a view that considers language as one among a number of
semiotic resources (such as gesture, images and music) that people use to communicate, or make
meaning, with each other. Language, in this view, cannot be considered in isolation from
meaning but needs to be considered within the sociocultural context in which it occurs.
Multimodal discourse analysis, thus, aims to describe the socially situated semiotic resources that
we draw on for communication. Halliday (2009) describes three types of social meanings, or
functions that are drawn on simultaneously in the use of language. These are ideational (what the
text is about), interpersonal (relations between participants) and textual meanings (how the
message is organized). In multimodal texts these meanings are realized visually in how the
image conveys aspects of the real world (the ideational, or representational meaning of the
image), how the images engage with the viewer (the interpersonal, or modal meaning of the
image) and how the elements in an image are arranged to archive its intention or effect (the
textual, or compositional meaning of the image).

Jewitt (2009) describes four theoretical assumptions that underlie multimodal discourse analysis.
The first is that language is part of an ensemble of modes, each of which has equal potential to
contribute to meaning. Images, gaze and posture, thus, do not just support meaning, they each
contribute to meaning. The second is that each mode of communication realizes different
meanings and that looking at language as the principal (or sole) medium of communication only
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reveals a partial view of what is being communicated. The third assumption is that people select
from and configure these various modes in order to make meaning and that the interaction
between these modes and the distribution of meanings between them are part of the production
of meaning. The fourth assumption is that meanings that are made by the use of multimodal
resources are, like language, social. These meanings, further, are shaped by the norms, rules and
social conventions for the genre that are current at the particular time, in the particular context.

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