Lecture One: Discourse analysis/ An Overview

WHAT IS DISCOURSE?
Before analyzing discourse analysis, it is useful to shade light on the term ‘discourse’ first. To discourse
analysts, ‘discourse’ means the actual instances of communicative action in the medium of language, although
some define the term more broadly as “meaningful symbolic behaviour in any mode” (Blommaert, 2005: 2).
In this sense, discourse is a mass noun. Discourse analysts typically speak of discourse rather than discourses,
they treat this word the same way they treated other things for which we often use mass nouns, such as music
(we say some music or ‘three pieces of music, rather than ‘three musics’), or when we say ‘information’ (the
flow of information, a great deal on information), rather than ‘thousands of informations’. Communication
can of course involve other media besides language, such as photography, clothing, music, architecture, and
dance can be meaningful too. That’s why, discourse analysts often need to think about the connection between
language and other such modes of semiosis or meaning-making.
Not all linguistic communication is spoken or written: there are manual languages, such as American Sign
Language, whose speakers use gesture rather than sound or graphic signs. It is conventional to use the word
‘speaker’ as a cover term for people who are writing or gesturally signing in addition to those who employ the
aural-oral mode.
Calling what we do ‘discourse analysis’ rather than ‘language analysis’ underscores the fact that we are not
centrally focused on language as an abstract system. We tend instead to be interested in what happens when
people draw on the knowledge they have about language, knowledge based on their memories of things they
have said, heard, seen, or written before, to do things in the world: exchange information, express feelings,
make things happen, create beauty, entertain themselves and others, and so on. This knowledge- a set of
generalizations, which can sometimes be stated as rules, about what words generally mean, about what goes
where in a sentence, and so on- is what is often referred to as ‘language’, when language is thought of as an
abstract system of rules or structural relationships. Discourse is both the source of this knowledge (people’s
generalizations about language are made based on the discourse they participate in) and the result of it (people
apply what they already know in creating and interpreting new discourse).
Some scholars, such as Foucault (1972, 1980) differentiate between Discourse (as a mass noun) and discourses
(as count noun). Discourses are conventional ways of talking that both create and are created by conventional
ways of thinking. These linked ways of talking and thinking constitute ideologies (sets of interrelated ideas)
and serve to circulate power in society. In other words, ‘Discourses’ in this sense involve patterns of belief and
habitual action as well as patterns of language. Discourses are ideas as well as ways of talking that influence
and are influenced by the ideas. Discourses, in their linguistic aspect, are conventionalized sets of choices for
discourse, or talk. Some discourse analysts distinguish the two meanings of ‘discourse’ orthographically, using
Discourse (with a capital D) for the former and discourse (with a lower-case d) for the latter (Gee, 2005).
However, the two senses of the word ‘discourse’, as mass noun (discourse) and as count noun (discourses) are
crucially connected.

DR. BUSHRA NI’MA RASHID 1

ANALYSIS
Why discourse analysis rather than ‘discourseology’ on the analogy of ‘phonology’, ‘discoursegraphy’ on the
analogy of ‘ethnography’, or ‘discourse criticism’, on the analogy of ‘literary criticism’, or ‘rhetorical
criticism’? discourse analysis typically focuses on the analytical process in a relatively explicit way. It is useful
to think of discourse analysis as analogous to chemical analysis. Like chemical analysis, discourse analysis is
a methodology that can be used in answering many kinds of questions.
Discourse analysts start with a variety of research questions, and these research questions are often not
questions that only discourse analysts ask. Instead, they are often questions that discourse analysts share with
other people, both in linguistics and in other fields. Some discourse analysts ask questions that are traditionally
asked in linguistics: questions about linguistic structure, about language change, about meaning, about
language acquisition and so on. What distinguishes discourse analysis from other sorts of study that bear on
human language and communication lies not in the questions discourse analysts ask but in the way, they try
to answer them: by analyzing discourse- that is, by examining aspects of the structure and function of language
in use. discourse analysts often find it useful to divide longer stretches of discourse into parts according to
various criteria and then look at the characteristics of each part.
But analysis can also involve taking apart less literally. One way of analyzing something is by looking at it in
a variety of ways. An analysis might involve systematically asking a number of questions, systematically
performing a variety of tests. Such an analysis could include a breaking-down into parts. It could also include
a breaking-down into functions (what is persuasive discourse like? What is narrative like?), or according to
participants (How do men talk in all-male groups? Etc.

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Discourse analysts do what people in their everyday experience of language do instinctively and largely
unconsciously: notice patterning’s of language in use and the circumstances (participants, situations, purposes,
outcomes) with which these are typically associated. The discourse analyst’s contribution to this otherwise
mundane activity is to do the noticing consciously, deliberately, systematically, and, as far as possible,
objectively, and to produce accounts (descriptions, interpretations, explanations) of what their investigation
have revealed.

Much of the work, but not by any means all, a great deal of discourse analysis is done by linguists who would
not call themselves applied and much by scholars in other disciplines – sociology, psychology, psychotherapy,
for example – who would not call themselves linguists. Discourse analysis is part of applied linguistics but
does not belong exclusively to it; it is a multi-disciplinary field, and hugely diverse in the range of its
interests. For many, the interest in discourse is beyond language in use (Jaworski &Coupland, 1999, p. 3)
to “language use relative to social, political and cultural formations . . ., language reflecting social order but
also language shaping social order and shaping individuals’ interaction with society.”
That, this is no overstatement may quickly be demonstrated by indicating something of the range of discourse-
related books published in recent years: discourse and politics (Schäffner & Kelly-Holmes, 1996; Howarth et

DR. BUSHRA NI’MA RASHID 2

al.,2000); ideologies (Schäffner, 1997), and national identity (Wodak et al., 1999); Environmental discourse
(Hajer, 1997; Harre, Brockmeier, & Muhlhausler, 1999);Discourse and Gender (Walsh, 2001; Wodak, 1997;
Romaine, 1998); Discourse of Disability (Corker & French, 1999) and The Construction of Old Age
(Green,1993); Applied Discursive Psychology (Willig, 1999); Professional Discourse(Gunnarson, Linell, &
Nordberg, 1997) and Professional Communication across Cultural Boundaries (Scollon, Scollon, &
Yuling, 2001), and many others

Jaworski and Coupland (1999, pp. 3–6) explain why so many areas of academic study have become so gripped
by enthusiasm for discourse analysis in terms, firstly, of a shift in epistemology, “a falling off intellectual
security in what we know and what it means to know . . . The question of how we build knowledge has come
to the fore, and this is where issues to do with language and linguistic representation come into focus.” They
point, secondly, to a broadening of perspective in linguistics, with a growth of linguistic interest in analysis of
conversation, stories, and written text, in “the subtleties of implied meaning” and in the interaction of spoken
language with non-linguistic communication. And, thirdly, they note how, in the changed political, social and
technological environment in which we now live – the postmodern world of service industry, advertising, and
communications media – discourse “ceases to be ‘merely’ a function of work; it becomes work [and the]
analysis of discourse becomes correspondingly more important.”
DEFINING DISCOURSE
Discourse analysis may, broadly speaking, be defined as the study of language viewed communicatively and/or
of communication viewed linguistically. Any more detailed spelling out of such a definition typically involves
reference to concepts of language in use, language above or beyond the sentence, languages meaning in
interaction, and language in situational and cultural context. Depending on their convictions and affiliations
– functionalism, structuralism, social interactionism, etc. – linguists will tend to emphasize one, or some, rather
than others in this list.
To illustrate this point, let us imagine four linguists preparing to work with the following small sample:
A: You THREW it so you GET it
B: Moira + I’ll call my MUM
Linguist 1 sees a text – the verbal record of a speech event, something visible, palpable and portable, consisting
of various bits of linguistic meaning (words, clauses, prosodic features, etc.). This linguist is mainly interested
in the way the parts of the text relate to each other to constitute a unit of meaning. Linguist 2 sees beyond the
text to the event of which it is the verbal record. Linguist 2 is most likely the person who collected the data;
and who made the following note describing some features of the situation in which the exchange took place:

[sunny Sunday afternoon, Edinburgh

Botanic Garden, two girls, both aged 7 or
8, on a path; one of them has kicked the
ball they are playing with into the bushes]

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This linguist is mainly interested in the relationships between the various factors in the event: the participants,
their cultural backgrounds, their relation-ship to each other, the setting, what is going on, the various linguistic
choices made, etc.
Linguist 3 sees the text and the event but then beyond both to the performance being enacted, the drama being
played out between the two girls: what has happened, who is responsible, how the girls evaluate these facts
(relate them to some existing framework of beliefs and attitudes about how the world– their world – works),
how they respond to them, what each is trying to achieve, their strategies for attempting to achieve these
objectives, etc. This linguist is mainly interested in the dynamics of the process that makes the event happen.
Linguist 4 sees the text, the event, and the drama; but beyond these, and focally, the framework of knowledge
and power which, if properly understood, will explain how it is possible for the two children, individually and
jointly, to enact and interpret their drama in the way they do.

We may, not unreasonably, imagine that our four linguists are colleagues in the same university department.
Each recognizes the validity of the perspective of each of the others, and the fact that, far from there being any
necessary conflict or “incommensurability” between them (but cf. Pennycook, 1994a), the perspectives are
complementary: all are needed for a full understanding of what discourse is and how it works.

As implied by the above, I do not think there is much to be gained from attempts to achieve a single definition
of discourse that is both comprehensive and succinct. (For a list and discussion of such definitions, see for
example Jaworski & Coupland 1999: 1–7.) Here instead is a set of definitions in the style of a dictionary entry
for “discourse”:
Discourse
1. the linguistic, cognitive and social processes whereby meanings are expressed, and intentions interpreted in
human interaction (linguist 3);
2. the historically and culturally embedded sets of conventions which constitute and regulate such processes
(linguist 4);
3. an event in which such processes are instantiated (linguist 2);
4. the product of such an event, especially in the form of visible text, whether originally spoken and
subsequently transcribed or originally written (linguist 1).
WHAT IS A TEXT?
A text can be defined as "an actual use of language", as distinct from a sentence which is "an abstract unit of
linguistic analysis". We identify a piece of language as a text as soon as we recognize that it has been produced
for a communicative purpose. But we can identify a text as a purposeful use of language without necessarily
being able to interpret just what is meant by it. It is common experience to come across texts in an unknown
language which we nevertheless recognize as public notices, food, labels, menus, or operating instructions,
and to be frustrated by the "inability" to understand them.

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Clearly, we need to Know the "language a text is in" to be able to interpret it. But this is not the only condition
on interpretation. We may Know what the language means but shill not understand what is meant by its use in
a text.
Let's consider again the public notice' KEEP OFF THE GRASS'. We may know well enough what the word
"grass" denotes. But what the word denotes is not the same as knowing what it is meant to "refer" to when it
occurs here in the phrase "the grass". The definite article "the" signals that what is being referred to is a matter
of "shared knowledge", (the grass). But which grass? We should know what is meant here by relating the text
to the "context" in which it is located.
Does the "grass" here refer just to the patch where the notice is related, or to other patches nearby as well, or
to the whole park?
The range of reference is not specified in the language itself. We make assumptions about what it is based on
what we know about public notices of this kind and how they are conventionally meant to be understood. In
other words, we relate the text not only to the actual situational context in which we find it, but to the abstract
cultural context of what we know to be conventional. And by relating text to context we infer not only what
the notice refers to, but also what its purpose is. We recognize that it is intended as a prohibition, although
whether we choose to pay any attention to it is another matter – and one we shall be taking up later.

The same point can be made about other notices we come across in daily life. Thus, we recognize that the texts
"HANDLE WITH CARE" or "THIS SIDE UP" refer to a container on which they are written and function as
requests, and that "WET PAINT" refers to some surface in the immediate vicinity that has been newly painted,
and functions as a warning.
Similarly, when we see the label "KEEP AWAY FROM CHILDREN" on a medicine bottle, we take this as a
specific warning in reference to the contents of the bottle, rather than as a piece of general advice to keep clear
of young people always.
When we come across notices and labels, we make sense of them by relating the language to the immediate
perceptual context where they are located, and to the conceptual context of our "knowledge" of how such texts
are designed to function.
We cannot make sense out of them simply by focusing on the language itself. In the case of simple text like
notices and labels, establishing the language-context connections is usually a straightforward matter. But with
other texts, making such connections is not so easy.
TEXT AND DISCOURSE
Simple texts such as notices, labels, and instructions are designed to be directly acted upon and to get things
done. But of course, not all texts are so simple in form or so straightforward in function. Not all texts extend
beyond the sentence, a great many of them do: travel guides, information leaflets, newspaper articles,
interviews, speeches, reports, poems, and so on.

DR. BUSHRA NI’MA RASHID 5

Some of these have an obvious utility function but others are meant to serve a range of different social purposes:
to give information, express a point of view, shape opinion, provide entertainment, and so on.
Furthermore, these functions are frequently combined in complex ways: a travel guide, for example, may
provide information, but is also designed to promote the attractions it describes; and what is presented as a
factual account in a newspaper article will usually reflect, and promote, a point of view.

Whether simple or complex, all texts are uses of language which are produced with the intention to refer to
something for some purpose. We identify a stretch of language as a text when we recognize this intention, and
there are times when the intention is made explicit as when a text is labeled as a notice, or instructions, or
report or proclamation.
But recognizing a text is not the same as realizing its meaning. You may not know what is being referred to in
a text, or in part of a text; or you may know full well what is being referred to but fail to see what communicative
purpose lies behind the reference. In the case of simple texts, like public notices, it will be a straightforward
matter to match up intention with interpretation, but in the cases of more complex ones, like newspaper articles,
such matching can prove to be highly problematic.
People produce texts to get a message across, to express ideas and beliefs, to explain something, to get other
people to do certain things or to think in a certain way, and so on. We can refer to this complex of
communicative purposes as the "discourse" that underlies the text and motivates its production in the first
place.

But at the receiving end, readers or listeners then must make meaning out of the text to make it a communicative
reality. In other words, they must interpret the text as a discourse that makes sense to them. Texts, in this view,
do not contain meaning, but are used to mediate it across discourses.
Sometimes, the mediation is relatively straightforward, as with the notices: "what the text means to the reader
will generally match up with what the producer of the text meant by it".
So, the term "discourse" is taken here to refer both to what a text producer meant by a text and what a text
means to the receiver. Of course, what somebody means by producing a text may well relate to broader issues
of what social and ideological values they subscribe to, and another way of thinking of discourse is indeed to
focus on such broader issues and look at how texts can be used to express, and impose, certain ways of thinking
about the world.
HISTORICAL VIEW OF DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Discourse analysis deals with language in use: written text of all kinds and spoken data. It receives attention
in different disciplines in the 1960s and early 1970s, including linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, psychology
and sociology. At a time when linguistics was largely concerned with the analysis of single sentences, Zelling
Harris published a paper with the title 'Discourse analysis' in 1952. Harris was interested in the distribution of
linguistic elements in extended texts, and the links between the text and its social situation. Also important in

DR. BUSHRA NI’MA RASHID 6

the early years was the emergence of semiotics and the French structuralist approach to the study of narrative.
In the 1960s, Dell Hymes provided a sociological perspective with the study of speech in its social setting. The
linguistic philosophers such as Austin (1962), Searle (1969) and Grice (1975) were also influential in the study
of language as social action, reflected in speech-act theory and the formulation of conversational maxims,
alongside the emergence of pragmatics which is the study of meaning in context.
British discourse analysis was greatly influenced by M. A. K. Halliday's functional approach to language,
which in turn has connexons with the Prague School of linguists. Halliday's framework emphasizes the social
functions of language and the thematic and informational structure of speech and writing. Also important in
Britain were Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) at the University of Birmingham, who developed a model for the
description of teacher pupil talk, based on a hierarchy of discourse units. Other similar work has dealt with
doctor-patient interaction, service encounters, interviews, debates and business negotiations, as well as
monologues. Novel work in the British tradition has also been done on intonation in discourse. The British
work has principally followed structural-linguistic criteria, on the basis of the isolation of units, and sets of
rules defining well-formed sequences of discourse.
American discourse analysis has been dominated by work within the ethnomethodological tradition, which
emphasizes the research method of close observation of groups of people communicating in natural settings.
It examines types of speech event such as storytelling, greeting rituals and verbal duels in different cultural
and social settings. What is often called conversation analysis within the American tradition can also be
included under the general heading of discourse analysis. In conversational analysis, the emphasis is not upon
building structural models but on the close observation of the behavior of participants in talk and on patterns
which recur over a wide range of natural data. The work of Goffman (1976; 1979), and Sacks Schegloff and
Jefferson (1974) is important in the study of conversational norms, turn-taking, and other aspects of spoken
interaction. Alongside the conversation analysts, working within the sociolinguistic tradition, Labov's
investigations of oral storytelling have also contributed to a long history of interest in narrative discourse. The
American work has produced many descriptions of discourse types as well as insights into the social constraints
of politeness and face-preserving phenomena in talk, overlapping with British work in pragmatics.
Also relevant to the development of discourse analysis is the work of text grammarians, working mostly with
written language. Text grammarians see texts as language elements strung together in relationships with one
another that can be defined. Linguists such as Van Dijk (1972), De Beaugrande (1980), Halliday and Hasan
(1976) have made a significant impact in this area. The Prague School of linguists, with their interest in the
structuring of information in discourse, has also been influential. Its most important contribution has been to
show the links between grammar and discourse.
FORM AND FUNCTION
A grammatical form depends on several factors: some are linguistic, some are purely situational. Linguistic
feature that may affect our interpretation is the intonation. In different kind of spoken interaction as phone

DR. BUSHRA NI’MA RASHID 7

calls, buying things in shops, interview for a job, in classroom, they have their own formula for example
opening and closing the encounter, different role relationships, different purposes and different settings.
Form is concerned with syntactic structure up to the sentence level, i.e. the arrangement of morphemes and
words into the larger units of group, clause, and finally, sentence. Form is also concerned with the syntagmatic
relationship between words within clauses and sentences. For example, “I’m taller than you” is different from
“You’re taller than I am”. Inverting ‘I’ and ‘you’ around the comparative adjective changes the propositional
meaning of the sentence. Function, however, is concerned with the utterance’s purpose, i.e. what the utterance
is meant to achieve. For example:
Father: Get the tools down off the shelf
Son: You’re taller than I am!
The son uttered “You’re taller than I am” for the purpose of refusing to comply with a command. This is a very
different function of than that of:
A: Which of us is taller?
B: You’re taller than I am
…where, “You’re taller than I am”, functions to provide information to a question. Nothing about the form,
that is the syntactic structure of the utterance itself, or the syntagmatic relation between the words within it,
allowed us to predict its function.

SPEECH ACTS AND DISCOURSE STRUCTURES

Importantly speaking, form and function must be separated to understand what is happening in discourse.
Discourse Analysis has an important preoccupation about the approach of communicative language teaching
that emphasizes the functions or speech acts that pieces of language perform overlaps. Discourse analyst is
much more interested in the process by which, for example, an inverted verb and subject come to be heard as
an informing speech act, and to get at this, we must have our speech acts fully contextualized both in terms of
the surrounding text and of the key features of the situation. Discourse analysis is fundamentally concerned
with the relationship between language and the contexts of its use. Discourse has beginning, middle or end

THE SCOPE OF DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Discourse analysis is not only concerned with the description and analysis of spoken interaction. In addition
to all our verbal encounters we daily consume hundreds of written and printed words: newspapers articles,
letters, stories, recipes, instructions, notices, comics, billboards, leaflets bushed through the door, and so on.
We usually expect them to be coherent, meaningful communications in which the words and/ or sentences are
linked to one another. The principal objective is to have a much better understanding. Discourse analysis is
used to cover the study of spoken and written interaction.

The Birmingham model is a relatively simple and powerful model which has connexons with the study of
speech acts. Framing move that is called the function of such utterances. The unions of two of them are

DR. BUSHRA NI’MA RASHID 8

questions and answers and can be called a transaction. There is other model called exchange that consists of a
question, and an answer and a comment. These different situations will require different formulae.
Generally, D.A. is concerned both with spoken and written texts. In both cases, D.A. attempts to explain how
linguistic form relates to functions, a relationship which is not univocal that is one given linguistic form
does not lead necessarily to only one function. And spoken and written discourse have different social uses
communicative functions, which makes the form of spoken and written texts completely different.

Participants in spoken interaction produce and process text as they go along and there is no need for it to be
retained as a record for it to mediate their discourse, and this mediation, is regulated on-line to negotiate
whatever convergence between intention and interpretation is required for the purpose.
Written text, on the other hand, is not jointly constructed. It is typically designed and recorded unilaterally in
the act of production by one of the participants, the writer, as a completed expression of the intended message.
The text is then taken up and interpreted as a separate process. The mediation is displaced and delayed, and
this obviously will make a convergence between intention and interpretation more difficult to achieve.

And there is a further difficulty, when people communicate; they do not only produce linguistic texts. In
speech, they make use not only of language but of "paralanguage"-tones of voice, varying stress, pauses, and
so on, and what they say is accompanied by facial expression, or gesture, as part of the message they intend to
get across. In written communication, too, how a text is given a shape by choice of typeface, or its arrangement
on a page, may suggest significance over and above what it signifies linguistically.
And it may be "multimodal" in that the text is accompanied by, and related to, other modes of communication-
pictures, diagrams, charts, and so on.

It is the lack of direct correspondence between text and discourse that makes communication so indeterminate,
and so intriguing.

When we use language, we do not just present the meanings that are encoded in it; we exploit them as a
potential resource for making meaning of our own. The encoded meanings are semantic meanings and are what
are described in dictionaries and grammar books.
To know a language is to know what they are. But in using a language we not only put this knowledge on
display but also act upon it as appropriate to our communicative intentions: in other words, we always make
this semantic meaning serve "a pragmatic purpose".

TEXT AND TALK

It is important to mention here that Van Dijk (1997: 2) clarifies that there are certain complicated ideas
concerning the concept ‘discourse’. He says that language use is not limited to spoken language, but also
involves written (or printed) language, communication and interaction, as is the case when we read our daily

DR. BUSHRA NI’MA RASHID 9

newspaper, our textbooks, our mail (on paper or email), or the myriad‫ وافر‬of different text types that have to
do with our academic or other work.

A text can be defined as "an actual use of language", as distinct from a sentence which is "an abstract unit of
linguistic analysis". We identify a piece of language as a text as soon as we recognize that it has been produced
for a communicative purpose. But we can identify a text as a purposeful use of language without necessarily
being able to interpret just what is meant by it. It is common experience to come across texts in an unknown
language which we nevertheless recognize as public notices, food, labels, menus, or operating instructions,
and to be frustrated by the "inability" to understand them.

Clearly, we need to Know the "language a text is in" to be able to interpret it. But this is not the only condition
on interpretation. We may know what the language means but shall not understand what is meant by its use in
a text.

Let's consider again the public notice ‘KEEP OFF THE GRASS'. We may know well enough what the word
"grass" denotes. But what the word denotes is not the same as knowing what it is meant to "refer" to when it
occurs here in the phrase "the grass". The definite article "the" signals that what is being referred to is a matter
of "shared knowledge", (the grass). But which grass? We should know what is meant here by relating the text
to the "context" in which it is located.

Does the "grass" here refer just to the patch where the notice is related or to other patches nearby as well, or to
the whole park?

The range of reference is not specified in the language itself. We make assumptions about what it is based on
what we know about public notices of this kind and how they are conventionally meant to be understood. In
other words, we relate the text not only to the actual situational context in which we find it, but to the abstract
cultural context of what we know to be conventional. And by relating text to context we infer not only what
the notice refers to, but also what its purpose is. We recognize that it is intended as a prohibition, although
whether we choose to pay any attention to it is another matter – and one we shall be taking up later.

The same point can be made about other notices we come across in daily life. Thus, we recognize that the texts
"HANDLE WITH CARE" or "THIS SIDE UP" refer to a container on which they are written and function as
requests, and that "WET PAINT" refers to some surface in the immediate vicinity‫ مجاورة‬that has been newly
painted, and functions as a warning.

Similarly, when we see the label "KEEP AWAY FROM CHILDREN" on a medicine bottle, we take this as a
specific warning in reference to the contents of the bottle, rather than as a piece of general advice to keep clear
of young people always.

DR. BUSHRA NI’MA RASHID 10

When we come across notices and labels, we make sense of them by relating the language to the immediate
perceptual context where they are located, and to the conceptual context of our "knowledge" of how such texts
are designed to function.
We cannot make sense out of them simply by focusing on the language itself. In the case of simple text like
notices and labels, establishing the language-context connections is usually a straightforward matter. But with
other texts, making such connections is not so easy.

Talk, on the other hand, and as we know it from everyday conversations, parliamentary debates or job
interviews, is typically a form of interaction, involving language users as speakers and recipients. This is not
the case for texts as letters, news reports, textbooks, laws notices or scholarly contributions. These seem to be
objects, or products of verbal acts, rather than forms of interaction.

However, just like talk, texts also have ‘users’ namely ‘authors’ and ‘readers’. In this case, we can speak of
‘written communication’ or even of ‘written interaction’ although the participants here do not usually interact
face-to-face, and the readers seem to be more passively involved in the interaction: except for an exchange of
letters or in a media debate they seldom react to writers by written back.
Generally speaking, and as we call a text as a product of writing, it is relevant to call talk as a product of
speaking or as ongoing interaction. It is however, emphasized that discourse studies should deal both with the
properties of text and talk and with what is usually called the context, that is, the other characteristics of the
social situation or the communicative event that may systematically influence text or talk. In sum, discourse
studies are talk, and text in context.

Text Discourse Analysis

-is a message coded in auditory or visual -Interpersonal activity/ transaction between
medium speaker and hearer
-Written as well as spoken
-Essays, notices, road signs etc -Interviews, commentaries, speeches

In the discourse studies available in conventional linguistics, the notion of ‘text’ is not situated on the same
plane as that of ‘discourse’. According to Widdowson, "text is that which meaningful, potential is, be it a sign
or chain of signs, and discourse is the process of reading the text" (159). For Chafe (1992) the two terms appear
in free variation:

"The terms ‘discourse’ and ‘text’ are used in similar ways. Both terms may refer to a unit of language larger
than the sentence: one may speak of a discourse or a text" (300).

For Crystal, they refer to two different things: "Text refers to a stretch of language recorded or transcribed for
the purpose of analysis and description" (307). For the linguist Beaugrande (1981) text is seen as language
units that have a definable communicative function, characterized by such principles as cohesion and coherence

DR. BUSHRA NI’MA RASHID 11

and information which can be used to provide a formal definition of what constitutes their identifiable textuality
or texture.

CONTEXT
The word interaction encodes two of our focal factors: context (“inter”), the participants, understood in terms
of their roles and statuses as well as their uniqueness as individuals, between whom the discourse is enacted;
and function (“action”), the socially recognized purposes to the fulfillment of which the interaction is directed;
what Gee (1999, p. 13) calls the whos and whats of discourse.
When you speak or write anything, you use the resources of English to project yourself as a certain kind of
person, a different kind in different circumstances. If I have no idea who you are or what you are doing, then I
cannot make sense of what you have said, written or done . . . What I mean by a “who” is a socially situated
identity, the “kind of person” one is seeking to be and enact here and now. What I mean by a “what” is a
socially situated activity that the utterance helps to constitute.

Note that Gee talks of “projecting,” “enacting,” “seeking,” “constituting,” as if context is part of what people
think and do and create rather than merely a fixed set of circumstances constraining what they may think and
may do.

This idea that context is something psychological and dynamic, within the minds of the participants and part
of the discourse process, is prevalent in most of the ways and means we have discussed. Hymes’ model, for
example, distinguishes between setting – the physical surroundings – and scene, the participants’
understanding of the kind of thing that is going on, the “psychological setting.” Context activates prediction-
making; SFL explains how this happens:
You [construct] in your mind a model of the context of situation; and you do it in something like these terms.
You assign to it a field . . ., a tenor . . . and a mode. You make predictions about the kinds of meaning that are
likely to be foregrounded in this kind of situation. So you come with your mind alert . . . (Halliday & Hasan,
1985, p. 28)

In a discussion of theories of context in relation to the needs of teachers and learners, Widdowson (1998, p.
15) criticizes relevance theory for “dissociating inference from interaction, and therefore from the on-line
context which is interactionally constructed in the actual activity of interpretation”; i.e. it is not enough for a
theory of contextual meaning to be a psychological theory, it must also be an interactional theory.

THE AMBIGUITY OF ‘DISCOURSE’

There is another complication: we have used the term ‘discourse’ in an ‘abstract’ way, in which we
characterize discourse as a communicative event and in which we refer to it in general. However, we may refer
to specific types or social domain of language use and discourse, for example, when we talk about ‘medical
discourse’ or ‘political discourse’. On the other hand, we may use the word ‘discourse’ more concretely, as a

DR. BUSHRA NI’MA RASHID 12

count noun and refer to a single, conversation or news report and say ‘this discourse’ or ‘a discourse on the
front page’ for example, and we may use the plural discourses either.
The problem may rise when we do not refer to language use or communicative interaction, but which may
rather or also refer to ideas or ideologies.
Another complication concerning the term ‘discourse’, in many times, we can delimit the beginning and the
end of a discourse. But there are situations where this is less obvious. Sometimes we have a long parliamentary
debate about an issue, a debate that may go (with interruptions) for days. Is this one discourse, or a compound
discourse consisting of various installments (on different days), or a sequence of discourses (the speeches of
MPs; member of parliaments), or what? The same would be true for a debate on an issue on the editorial page
of a newspaper, or the serial installments of a movie on television, or the various ‘articles’ in an encyclopedia.
However, whenever we face such complications, we need theoretical notions that define the beginning or the
end of text and talk, their unity or coherence, intertextual relations between different discourses, intentions of
speakers or writers, settings, time, place, and other aspects of the communicative context, in this way, it will
be relevant to distinguish between ‘simple’ and compound’ discourses, or between ‘discourses’ and ‘discourse
complexes’.
DIFFERENT VIEWS AND PARADIGMS ON DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

It seems clearly that when one defines discourse as “is a form of language” he or she simply must shed light
on what this means, for instance what such language use consists of, what its components are, how these
components are ordered, or how they may be combined into larger constructs. At this point, it seems obvious
that the description of discourse focuses on various structures. The first linguist to refer to discourse analysis
with connection to structure was Zellig Harris. In 1952, he investigated the connectedness of sentences, naming
his study 'discourse analysis.' Harris claimed explicitly that discourse is the next level in a hierarchy of
morphemes, clauses and sentences. He viewed discourse analysis procedurally as a formal methodology,
derived from structural methods of linguistic analysis: such a methodology could break a text down into
relationships (such as equivalence, substitution) among its lower-level constituents. Structural was so central
to Harris's view of discourse that he also argued that what opposes discourse to a random sequence of sentences
is precisely the fact that it has structure: a pattern by which segments of the discourse occur (and recur‫)تتكرر‬
relative to each other.
Michael Stubbs says, 'Any study which is not dealing with (a) single sentences, (b) contrived by the
linguist‫مفهومه من اللغوي‬, (c) out of context‫خارج السياق‬, may be called discourse analysis.' (Stubbs, 1983: 131). In
other words, there is a shift of focus from sentences in isolation to utterances in context: to study language in
use is to study it as discourse. This is a fact that 'knowledge of a language is more than knowledge of individual
sentences.' (Leech 2008:76). The true meaning of a sentence can't be assigned by its only linguistic
construction, but it largely depends on reference (meaning in relation to exterior world), sense (meaning in
relation to linguistic system) and force (meaning in relation to situational context). Let's take an example: I
love you. Clearly the assigned meaning is different in different situations if the speaker is one's lover or beloved

DR. BUSHRA NI’MA RASHID 13

as opposed to one's parent or child. As Chomsky states, “To understand a sentence we must know more than
the analysis of this sentence on each linguistic level. We must also know the reference and meaning of the
morphemes or words of which it is composed; naturally, grammar cannot be expected to be of much help here.”
(Chomsky 2002:103-04). Widdowson also criticizes the well familiar definition of discourse analysis that
discourse is the study of language patterns above the sentence and states;
If discourse analysis is defined as the study of language patterns above the sentence, this would seem to imply
that discourse is sentence writ large: quantitatively different but qualitatively the same phenomenon. It would
follow, too, of course, that you cannot have discourse below the sentence. (Widdowson, 2004: 3)

In other words, the discourse information is crucial to a complete theory of language. Smith and Kurthen also
argue that “the existence of arbitrary and language-specific syntactic and referential options for conveying a
proposition‫ مقترح‬requires a level of linguistic competence beyond sentential syntax and semantics” (Smith and
Kurthen 2007:455). Sentential models of linguistic competence are unequipped‫ غير جاهز‬to explain the existence
of and the difference between multiple sentence forms with the same semantic interpretation. Similarly, Prince
argues, “sentential grammars alone are not capable of constraining the use of definite and indefinite NPs”
(Prince 2004:119).
There are several additional reasons for assuming that linguistic competence must be modeled beyond the level
of the sentence. First, sentential grammars rely on the artefactual boundaries of written language. In some
respects, this is a (short-term) advantage. The boundaries may be too small, but they nonetheless provide a
well-defined range of linguistic phenomena for a model of language to explain. In fact, this approach has been
taken by generative grammarians for years with a great deal of success. However, the long-term disadvantages
are also obvious. When one starts with a definition of language, any phenomena that do not fit into that
definition will generally be ignored. If that definition is too narrow, then crucial data may be lost.
Also, choosing to define language in terms of sentences automatically includes a bias towards the type of
language that one has been trained to consider 'proper' as opposed to what one knows through the initial process
of first language acquisition. This argument alone takes our views beyond sentential boundaries. Once we
accept that a language is not confined to sentence boundaries, we are free to explore broader possibilities.
Second, the phenomenon of language requires at least a limited extension of sentential grammars. For example,
sentential grammars cannot completely account for the determination of pronoun co-reference, the scope of
quantifiers, or the use of discourse deixis. In addition, 'English null arguments provide more evidence that
knowledge of a language consists of more than a grammar for producing and interpreting sentences' (Tracy,
1995:215). It is obvious that null subjects play an active role in conversational English, though they have
received little attention in the past due to their rarity in written or 'formal' English. It is also clear that the
presence of implicit null objects in English may not be distinguishable from truly intransitive constructions
without an examination of extra-sentential information.

While defining discourse, three definitions have been discussed – one derived from formalist paradigm, other
from functionalist paradigm and third that includes both formalist and functionalist paradigms. Discourse

DR. BUSHRA NI’MA RASHID 14

analysis also deals with these paradigms. Formalist or structural analysis of discourse describes '… discourse
at several levels or dimensions of analysis and in terms of many different units, categories, schematic patterns
or relations' (Dijk, 1985:4). Structural analyses focus ‘on the way different units’ function in relation to each
other but they disregard 'the functional relations with the context of which discourse is a part' [Dijk, 1985:4].
Structurally based analysis of discourse finds 'constituents' (smaller linguistic units that have particular
'relationship' with one another and that can occur in a restricted number of (often ruled-governed)
'arrangements. Structural views of discourse analysis accept that discourse is comprised of 'units.' Harris's
unit was the morpheme (and their combination into sentences) while Linde, Labov and many other linguists
identified clause as unit, and many contemporary structural analyses of discourse view the sentence as the unit
of which discourse is comprised.
The structural view of discourse analysis places discourse in a hierarchy of language structures, thus, fostering
the view that one can describe language in a unitary way that continues unimpeded from morpheme to clause
to sentence to discourse. But this kind of analysis does not pay attention to the purposes and functions for
which so called 'units' are designed to serve in human affairs.
Discourse analysis is necessarily the analysis of language in use. The functionalist view of discourse analysis
asserts that 'the study of discourse is the study of any aspect of language use' (Fasold, 1990:65). Discourse
analysis cannot be restricted to the description of linguistic forms independent of the purposes and functions
which these forms perform. Functional analyses of discourse rely less upon the strictly grammatical
characteristics of utterances as sentences, than upon the way utterances are situated in contexts.
It might appear that the only thing all these definitions have in common is that, in one way or another, they all
involve studying language and its effects. Is discourse analysis, then, simply the study of language and its
effects? It has been described that way. It has been suggested, for example, that “the name for the field
‘discourse analysis’…says nothing more or other than the term ‘linguistics’: the study of language” (Tannen,
1989:6). In a way, this is correct: discourse analysis is the study of language, in everyday sense in which most
people use the term. What most people mean when they say “language” is talk, communication, discourse. (In
formal language study, both descriptive and prescriptive, the term “language” is often used differently, to refer
to structures or rules that are thought to underlie talk). Even if discourse analysis is, basically, “the study of
language”, however, it is useful to try to specify what makes discourse analysis different from other approaches
to language study.

CONTEXTS AND CULTURES OF LANGUAGE IN USE

Here are grouped approaches which focus on the sensitivity of ways of speaking (and writing) to situational
and cultural differences. Ethnography of communication (Gumperz & Hymes, 1986; Duranti, 1997, Saville-
Troike, 2003):

DR. BUSHRA NI’MA RASHID 15

 • offers a framework for the study of speech events, seeking to describe the ways of speaking associated with
speech communities and to understand the role of language in the making of societies and cultures;

• involves both insider-like (“emic”) understanding of culturally specific ways of communicating (both verbal
and non-verbal) and of the various beliefs and attitudes which connect with these ways; and outsider
objectivity, encapsulated in Hymes’ well-known “SPEAKING” acronym – an “etic” framework of speech
event components: setting and scene, participants, ends (purposes, outcomes), act sequences, key (attitudinal
aspects), instrumentalities (norms and styles of speech), norms of interaction and interpretation, and genre
(the discourse type).

The knowledge that members of communities have of ways of speaking includes knowing when, where and
how to speak, what to speak about, with whom, and so forth. The idea that we need, in addition to a theory of
grammatical competence, a theory of communicative competence (Hymes, 1972) arises from this fact.
Speakers need knowledge not only of what is grammatically possible but also of what is appropriate and
typically done. Interactional sociolinguistics (Schiffrin, 1994; Gumperz, 2001) aims at “replicable analysis
that accounts for our ability to interpret what participants intend to convey in everyday communicative
practice” (Gumperz, 2001). It pays attention to culturally specific contextual presuppositions, to the signals –
“contextualization cues” such as code- and style-switching, and prosodic and lexical choices – which signal
these, and to the potential for misunderstanding which exists in culturally complex situations. It shares with
CA a keen attention to detail and a focus on members’ procedures but differs from it in its interest in processes
of inferencing and in the consequences of contextual variation and cultural diversity (for example, Tannen,
1984a).

FUNCTIONS AND STRUCTURES OF LANGUAGE IN USE

Grouped here are text-friendly models of language and grammar-friendly approaches to text. Systemic-
functional linguistics (SFL) (Halliday, 1978; Halliday & Hasan, 1985; Martin, 1992)

• sees language not as an autonomous system but as part of the wider socio-cultural context, as “social
semiotic”; the aim is “to look into language from the outside and specifically, to interpret linguistic
processes from the standpoint of the social order” (Halliday, 1978, p. 3);

DR. BUSHRA NI’MA RASHID 16

 • sees grammar as meaning potential – a “potential” that is functionally determined by the need of speakers
and writers to simultaneously represent experience (the ideational function), manage their relationship with
their co-participants (the interpersonal function) and produce dialogue or monologue, whether spoken or
written, which is cohesive and coherent (the textual function); the realization of these meta-functions can be
discerned both at the micro-level of clause structure (e.g., systems of transitivity) and at the macro-level of
context (register features of “field,” “tenor,” and “mode”);

• provides a comprehensive theory of text analysis and genre (Martin, 2002).

Text-linguistics (de Beaugrande & Dressler, 1981; Levinson, 1983, p. 288 for the distinction between this and
“speech act (or interactional)” approaches ;) is not so much a single approach to discourse as a somewhat
indeterminate set of interests or predispositions. These include:

• focus on text, generally defined as language “above,” “beyond” or “longer than” the sentence, and
especially on the structure of texts and on their formal (syntactic and lexical), or surface, features;

• achievement – and the role of various kinds of lexis in signaling these (Hoey, 1991); on cohesion
generally (e.g., Halliday & Hasan, 1976); on rhetorical patterns of textual meaning such as general-
particular and problem-solution (Hoey, 1983, 2001); and on text structure seen in terms of hierarchies of
textual relationships (Mann & Thompson, 1987)

• a particular concern with the analysis of written texts (see, for example, Connor & Johns, 1990; Mann
& Thompson, 1992).

USES OF DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

1. INTERACTION

It is with the concept of interaction that discourse (for the analyst) comes to life. Entrances are made, intentions
are formed, topics are introduced, turns are taken, actions are performed, reactions are prompted and in turn
reacted to; understandings are checked, contributions are acknowledged, breakdowns occur, repairs are
contrived; exits are negotiated. People are at work, doing things with meanings (producing them, interpreting
them, and negotiating them), co-creating an event whose trajectory ‫ مسار‬may be clear to none of them until it
is complete, and perhaps not even then.

DR. BUSHRA NI’MA RASHID 17

This is discourse seen not as product (a text on a page) but as process, joint action in the making (Clark, 1996),
and in consequence most difficult to capture and analyze without losing sight of its essence. The very smallest
details – the falling-from-high pitch tone on which B says “Moira” for example – may be the most telling in
revealing what is happening and with what intended, or unintended, effect.

The concept of discourse as interaction is present in all current ways and means of doing discourse analysis.
In pragmatics, meaning is seen as “a dynamic process, involving the negotiation of meaning between
speaker and hearer, the context of utterance (physical, social, and linguistic) and the meaning potential
of an utterance” (Thomas, 1995, p. 22). The interactional workings of intention and effect are central to
Speech Acts Theory; Grice’s maxims “are essentially ground rules for the interactive management of
intentions” (Widdowson, 1998, p. 13); and the mutual establishment and maintenance of rapport (the
avoidance of threats to face) underpins theories of politeness and tact.

Conversation Analysis and Interactional Sociolinguistics provide somewhat contrasting approaches to the
description of the accomplishment of interaction, the former more focused on the internal (to the text)
mechanisms of turn-taking and sequencing, the latter highlighting the links between the micro-processes of
the text, for example intonational and other “contextualization cues,” and the macro-world of social structures
and cultural presuppositions. IRF analysis (Initiating move (from the teacher), Responding move (from the
pupil), Feedback move (from the teacher) provides a somewhat static post hoc view of the accomplished
interaction as a hierarchical patterning of acts, moves, exchanges, and transactions.

The Interactionality of Discourse is not restricted to the spoken language. “Text is a form of exchange; and
the fundamental form of a text is that of dialogue, of interaction between speakers . . . In the last resort,
every kind of text in every language is meaningful because it can be related to interaction among
speakers, and ultimately to ordinary everyday spontaneous conversation” (Halliday & Hasan, 1985, p.
11). It can be argued that written no less than spoken interaction involves dynamic processes of interaction
between readers and writers. Hoey, for example (2001, p. 11) defines text as “the visible evidence of a
reasonably self-contained purposeful interaction between one or more writers and one or more readers,
in which the writer(s) control the interaction and most of (characteristically all) the language.” The point
about writer control, however, is a reminder that though monologic written interaction may be likened to
spoken interaction as a dynamic process of pragmatic meaning creation (Widdowson, 1995), it is unlike it in
the crucial respect of being non-reciprocal. The writer may anticipate the imagined reactions of the reader, but
cannot respond to the actual ones.

Much that is characteristic of written discourse is explained by this fact. As Widdowson (1979, p. 176) puts it,
“the writer assume[s] the roles of both addresser and addressee [and] incorporate[s] the interaction
within the process of encoding itself.” For the reader, normal Gricean principles operate: “People do not
consume texts unthinkingly but process them in normal pragmatic ways, inferring meanings . . .”
(Widdowson, 2000, p. 22).

DR. BUSHRA NI’MA RASHID 18

2. MEANING

Discourse analysis has shed light on how meaning can be created through the arrangement of chunks of
information across a series of sentences or through the details of how an observer takes up and responds
to what has been said. It sheds light on how speakers indicate their semantic intentions and how readers
interpret what they read and the cognitive abilities that underlie human symbol use.

Traditional approaches about linguistic variation and language change involve examining internal causes of
change, such as tendency to treat new words as analogous to old ones, adapting foreign sounds and words to
the phonological and morphological patterns of the borrowing language as well as external causes of change
such as geographical or social isolation of one group from another, which often leads to divergence of words
and phrases and sentences. Discourse analysis has also described external social and material influences that
effect changes in patterns of language use influences such as economic change, geographic mobility and
patterns of variation.

Discourse analysis continues to be useful in answering questions that are posed in many fields that
traditionally focus on human life and communications and sociology, as well as in fields in which the details
of discourse have not always been thought relevant, such as geography, psychology, medicine, law, public
policy and business. Discourse analysis is useful to study the personal identity and social identification, as
illustrated by work on discourse and gender or discourse and ethnicity. It has been used in the study of how
people define and create life span process such as aging and social adaptation or conflict accomplished in
public and private life. To the extent that discourse and discourses- meaning making, in linguistic and other
modes and ways of acting, being and envisioning self and environment are at the Centre of human experience
and activity. Discourse analysis helps one to know about the roles of language in human cognition, art and
social life. The literary style has been exploring social life. It has been exploring artistic uses of language, and
the role of aesthetics and ―performance in language use.

Anyone who wants to understand human beings can understand discourse. Hence the potential uses of
discourse analysis are almost innumerable. Discourse analysis helps us to know about social variations, such
as dominance, oppression or solidarity.

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