Introduction to discourse Analyse

LANGUAGE AS SAYING, DOING, AND BEING

What is language for?

Many people think language exists so that we can "say things" in the sense of
communicating information. However, language serves a great many functions in our
lives.
Giving and getting information is by no means the only one. Language does, of course,
allow us to inform each other. But it also allows us to do things and to be things, as well.
In fact, saying things in language never goes without also doing things and being things.

Language allows us to do things.

It allows us to engage in actions and activities.
We promise people things, we open committee meetings, we argue over politics, and we
"talk to God" (pray).
These are among the myriad of things we do with language beyond giving and getting
information.

Language allows us to be things.

It allows us to take on different socially significant identities.
We can speak as experts—as doctors, lawyers, anime aficionados, or carpenters—or as
"everyday people."
To take on any identity at a given time and place we have to "talk the talk," not just "walk
the walk." When they are being gang members, street-gang members talk a different talk
than do honor students when they are being students.
Furthermore, one and the same person could be both things at different times and
places.

In language, there are important connections among saying (informing), doing (action),
and being (identity).
If I say anything to you, you cannot really understand it fully if you do not know what I am
trying to do and who I am trying to be by saying it.
To understand anything fully you need to know who is saying it and what the person
saying it is trying to do.

Let's take a simple example. Imagine a stranger on the street walks up to you and says "Hi,
how are you?" The stranger has said something, but you do not know what to make of it.
 Who is this person? What is the stranger doing?
Imagine you find out that the person is taking part in a game where strangers ask other
people how they are in order to see what sorts of reactions they get. Or imagine that the
person is a friend of your twin and thinks you are your sibling (I have a twin and this sort
of thing has often happened to me).
Or imagine the person is someone you met long ago and have long forgotten, but who,
unbeknownst to you, thinks of you as a friend.
In one case, a gamer is playing; in another case, a friend of your sibling’s is mistakenly
being friendly; and, in yet another case, someone who mistakenly thinks he is a friend of
yours is also being friendly.
Once you sort things out, everything is clear (but not necessarily comfortable).

My doctor, who also happens to be a friend, tells me, as she greets me in her office: "You
look tired." Is she speaking to me as a friend (who) making small talk (what) or is she
speaking to me as a doctor (who) making a professional judgment (what) about my
health? It makes quite a big difference whether a friend (who) is playfully insulting (what)
his friend in a bar or a hard-core biker (who) is threatening (what) a stranger.
The words can be the same, but they will mean very different things.
Who we are and what we are doing when we say things matters.

TWO FORMS OF DISCOURSE ANALYSIS:

Descriptive and "Critical" Discourse analysis is the study of language-in-use.

There are many different approaches to discourse analysis.
Some of them look only at the "content" of the language being used, the themes or
issues being discussed in a conversation or a newspaper article, for example.
Other approaches pay more attention to the structure of language ("grammar") and how
this structure functions to make meaning in specific contexts.
These approaches are rooted in the discipline of linguistics.
APPROACHES TO DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Approach means the adoption of one or more combinations of the ways to certain
aspects of the total discourse reality.
Discourse Analysis can be categorized into internal and external approaches.
The internal approach focuses on: looking for internal rules that native speakers use to
generate grammatically correct sentences. Isolated sentences, grammatically well-
formed, without context and invented or idealized.
The external approach focuses on: asking how we use language to communicate, any
stretch of language felt to be unified, achieving meaning, in context and observed.
In discourse analysis, there are varieties of approaches developed from various sources.

These are analyzed under four main headings: rules and principles, contexts and cultures,
functions and structures, and power and politics.

RULES AND PRINCIPLES

These include speech act theory, politeness theory and conversation analysis.
Develop speech acts or the communicative functions of sentences in conversation.
For example; using utterances to report events, make statements about the requested
information or action, or to prohibit action.
 Adjust one’s language to fit the social context of the conversation in keeping with cultural
conventions and social roles.
Emerge conversational skills in face-to-face verbal interaction.
These include knowing when and how to take a turn in conversation; how to initiate,
elaborate, or terminate a topic, and how to respond to a speaker in keeping with the
pragmatic constraints set by the preceding utterance. These involve issues of politeness,
formality, and the age or status of one’s listener in what have been called “styles” or
“registers” of speech.

CONTEXTS AND CULTURES

These are focused on the ethnography (scientific description of people and their culture,
customs and habits) of communication and interactional sociolinguistics.
In cultural differences ethnography of communication offers a framework for the study
of speech events, seeking to describe the ways of speaking associated with particular
speech communities and to understand the role of language in the making of societies
and cultures.
It involves both (verbal and non-verbal) understanding of culturally specified ways of
communicating and the various beliefs and attitudes.

FUNCTIONS AND STRUCTURES

These are grouped as text models of language and grammar approaches to text in
systemic-functional linguistics.
Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a theory of language centred around the notion
of language function. While SFL accounts for the syntactic structure of language, it places
the function of language as central (what language does, and how it does it), in
preference to more structural approaches, which place the elements of language and
their combinations as central.
SFL starts at social context, and looks at how language both acts on, and is constrained
by, this social context.
It provides a comprehensive theory of text analysis.
Language is not seen 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.
Grammar is seen 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).

POWER AND POLITICS

These approaches focus on critical analysis and necessarily share with the concerns of
Pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches.
Aims (CA) to lay the "hidden effects of power," the kind of effects may stigmatise [great
disapproval], the vulnerable ,exclude the marginal, naturalise privilege and, through the
simple contrivance of presenting ideology as common sense.
 Concerns (CA) with issues of identity, dominance, resistance, and with seeking out
evidence in text especially in media and advertising texts, political documents and
speeches of class, gender, ethnic and other kinds of bias.

IDENTIFYING SPEECH ACT THEORY

Speech act is the smallest unit of meaning. Speech event is the largest social recognized
of speech activity in conversation, discussion and lecture.
speech in social interaction does not have just one function. The conceptual schema of
speech act has different purposes or functions.The first category common to most
schemes recognize that a speech act serves to express the speaker’s personal state of
mind or attitude
The other function of speech act is to bring the participants in contact or in relationship
with each other. It maintains social contact, or phatic communication (used for social
interaction not to give meaning).
(Austin 2003:4) describes distinctive performatives, i.e. utterances which are either true
or false but which bring about a particular social effect being uttered for a performative
function to have the desired effect; it has to meet certain social and cultural criteria, also
called felicity conditions.

TYPES OF FELICITY CONDITIONS

There are several types of felicitous conditions:

Propositional content, which requires participants to understand language, not to act
like actors.
Preparatory, where the authority of the speaker and the circumstances of the speech act
are appropriate to its being performed successfully.
Sincerity, where the speech act is being performed seriously and sincerely.
Essential, where the speaker intends that an utterance be acted upon by the addressee.

FELICITOUS VS INFELICITOUS

In linguistics and philosophy of language, an utterance is felicitous if it is prammatically

well-formed.
An utterance can be infelicitous because it is self-contradictory, trivial, irrelevant, or
because it is somehow inappropriate for the context of utterance.
Researchers in semantics and pragmatics use felicity judgments much
as syntacticians use grammaticality judgments.
The terms felicitous and infelicitous were first proposed by J. L. Austin as part of his
theory of speech acts.
In his thinking, a performative utterance is neither true nor false, but can instead be
deemed felicitous or infelicitous according to a set of conditions whose interpretation
differs depending on whether the utterance in question is a declaration ("I sentence you
to death"), a request ("I ask that you stop doing that"), or a warning ("I warn you not to
jump off the roof").

DISCOURSE AS ACTION
 In real life we do not produce and participate in the same kinds of discourse all the time.
Our communication takes various forms to orient ourselves in different ways.
All different activities are predictably associated with certain situations and speech
events that is discourse structures, which exhibit conventional speech acts, settings,
topics, participants’ purposes and other context features.
Different speech events are associated with different topics.
The more conventionalized speech act or event is the more expectations we seem to
have about the setting, participant role and internal structure. within a given culture too;
discourse structure varies in different social, professional, age, gender group, etc.
The situational, social, and cultural varieties of speech acts and events have been mainly
documented by sociolinguistic research on the expression of politeness theory.

Felicity conditions for declarations:

Conventionality of procedure: the procedure (e.g. an oath, a promise invoking a divine

witness) follows its conventional form.
Appropriate participants and circumstances: the participants are able to perform a
felicitous speech act under the circumstances (e.g. a judge can sentence a criminal in
court, not on the street).
Complete execution: the speaker completes the speech act without errors or
interruptions.

Felicity conditions for requests:

Propositional content condition: the requested act is a future act of the hearer.
Preparatory precondition:
1. The speaker believes the hearer can perform the requested act.
2. It is not obvious that the hearer would perform the requested act without being asked.
Sincerity condition: the speaker genuinely wants the hearer to perform the requested
act.
Essential condition: the utterance counts as an attempt by the speaker to have the
hearer do an act.

Felicity conditions for warnings:

Propositional content condition: it is a future event.

Preparatory precondition:
1. The speaker believes the event will occur and be detrimental to the hearer.
2. The speaker believes that it is not obvious to the hearer that the event will occur.
Sincerity condition: the speaker genuinely believes that the event will be detrimental to
the hearer.
 Essential condition: the utterance counts as an attempt by the speaker to have the
hearer recognize that a future event will be detrimental.

BUT WHY WOULD WE WANT TO DO THIS?

Some approaches to discourse analysis, which we can call “descriptive”, answer this
question by saying that their goal is to describe how language works in order to
understand it, just as the goal of the physicist is to describe how the physical world
works in order to understand it.
In both cases — the discourse analyst and the physicist — their hope may also be to deep
explanations of how language or the world works and why they work that way .
Some other approaches to discourse analysis, which we can call “critical” as in “critical
discourse analysis”, answer this question differently.
Their goal is not just to describe how language works or even to offer deep explanations,
though they do want to do this.
They also want to speak to and, perhaps, intervene in, social or political issues, positions,
and controversies in the world.
They want to apply their work to the world in some fashion.
Different linguistic approaches to discourse analysis use different theories of grammar
and take different views about how to talk about meaning.
The approach we deal with looks at meaning as an integration of ways of saying
[informing], doing [action], and being [identify], and grammar as a set of tools to bring
about this integration.
To take an example, consider the two sentences below:
1. Hornworms sure vary a lot in how well they grow.
2. Hornworm growth exhibits a significant amount of variation.
Sentence 1 is in a style of language (called the “vernacular”) we use when we want to talk
as an “everyday person,” not as a specialist of any kind. This is the identity (being) it
expresses.
It is a way to express an opinion based on one’s own observations (of hornworms in this
case). This is an action (doing). The sentence can be used to do other actions as well,
such as show surprise or entice someone to grow hornworms.
The sentence is about hornworms, which are cute green caterpillars with little yellow
horns. This is a part of what the sentence says (informing).
Sentence 2 is in a specialist style of language, one we would associate with biology and
biologists.
It expresses one’s identity (being) as being such a specialist.
It is not just expressing an opinion based on one’s observations of hornworms, it is
making a claim based on statistical tests of “significance” that are “owned” and
“operated” by the discipline of biology, not any one person, including the speaker or
writer.
This is an action (doing). The sentence is not about hornworms, but “hornworm growth,”
an abstract trait of hornworms (much less cute than hornworms).
This is part of what the sentence says (informing).
 The grammar (structure) of the two sentences is very different.
In sentence 1, the subject of the sentence—which names the “topic” of the sentence—is
the noun “hornworms.”
But in sentence 2, the subject is the noun phrase “hornworm growth.”
“Hornworm growth” is a noun phrase that expresses a whole sentence’s worth of
information (“Hornworms grow”) and is a much more complex structure than the simple
noun “hornworms.”
It is a way to talk about an abstract trait of hornworms, and not the hornworms
themselves. It is also part of what makes this language “specialist” and not “everyday.”

The phrase “significant amount of variation” in sentence 2 uses an abstract noun

(“variation”) rather than the verb “vary” in sentence 1 and combines this noun with
“significant amount.”
So a process (varying) has been turned into an abstract thing (“variation”) that can be
quantified using statistics (“significant amount”).
This, too, is, again, now a way to talk about abstract things rather than more concrete
things and processes in the world.
It is also, again, part of what makes this language “specialist” and ties it to tools (like
statistical tests of significance) in a discipline and not just to an individual’s observations
in the world.

DOING VS BEING

So the grammar of the two sentences offers us different ways to say things that amount
to different ways of doing (actions) and being (identity).
Looking closely at the structure of language as it is being used can help us uncover
different ways of saying things, doing things, and being things in the world.

WHAT ARE TYPES OF DISCOURSE ANALYSIS?

Discourse analysis is a broad interdisciplinary field that includes various qualitative methods
for studying language use. Due to the evolving nature of the field, scholars have varying
opinions on the specific number of discourse analysis types.

Some common approaches to discourse analysis include:

Narrative analysis
Narrative analysis is the study of how stories are told and how they shape our understanding
of the world. Narrative analysts are interested in story structure, content, and function. They
may also be interested in how stories are told in different social contexts and how. they are
used to construct and maintain social identities and power relations.

For example, you might study how the story of Christopher Columbus is told in different
cultures and how it shapes people’s understanding of heroism.

Conversation Analysis (CA)

Conversation analysis studies everyday conversation. CA researchers are interested in the

micro-level details of conversation, such as turn-taking (speaking vs. listening), gaze (eye
contact), and body language. They may also be interested in how conversation is used to
achieve different social goals, such as building relationships, managing conflict, and
exchanging information.

If you’re a conversation analyst, you could study how people use turn-taking and gaze to
negotiate social status in a job interview.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

Critical discourse analysis focuses on the relationship between language and power.

CDA researchers are interested in how language is used to construct and maintain social
inequalities. They may also be interested in how language can be used to challenge and resist
social oppression.

You might study how politicians use language to construct and maintain social divisions in a
campaign speech. Think “us vs. them” or “haves vs. have-nots.

Foucauldian Discourse Analysis

Foucauldian discourse analysis is a type of CDA based on Michel Foucault’s theories.

Foucault argued that discourse is not simply a tool for communication but that it also plays a
role in shaping our knowledge and understanding of the world. Foucauldian discourse
analysts are interested in how discourse is used to construct and maintain social norms and
power relations.

If you are a Foucauldian discourse analyst, you might study how medical discourse
constructs and maintains the power of doctors over patients.

Key Concepts of Discourse Analysis

Some of the core concepts in discourse analysis include:

Context: Discourse analysts are interested in how the context of a communicative event
affects the meaning of the language used.
For example, the meaning of "home" will differ depending on whether it is spoken to a
family member, a friend, or a stranger.
Power: Discourse analysts also examine how power relations are reflected in language
use.
For example, how a manager speaks to an employee will likely differ from how the
employee speaks to the manager.
Identity: Discourse can also be used to construct and maintain different identities.
For example, how a politician speaks in a campaign speech tends to differ from how they
speak to their constituents in a private meeting.

By “going beyond the word or sentence,” discourse analysis aims to grasp how language
structures both texts and social contexts.
DA provides a deeper understanding and appreciation of language and “how it becomes
meaningful to users.”
Meaning created by users

Here are some questions that discourse analysts might ask:

How does language construct identity in different contexts?

How does language negotiate or influence power?
How does language create and maintain reality?
How do frames of reference influence language interpretation?
How can language promote social change?
By posing questions that delve beneath the surface of language, you can uncover the
subtleties that help us comprehend the power and influence of it.