Discourse Analysis

Dr. Muhammad Shahbaz

m.Shahbaz@gcwus.edu.pk
0345-6725710
Outline
 What is Discourse
 What is discourse Analysis?
 Discourse as multidisciplinary approach
 Application of Discourse Studies
 Types of discourse studies
 Features of discourse
 How to do Discourse Analysis?
 Approaches to Discourse Analysis
 Recent trends in Discourse Studies
 Conclusion
 References
What is “Discourse’’?

writtenSemiotics
or Extended
spoken language

The term discourse

analysis first entered
Disco general use in a
urse series of papers
published by Zellig
Harris beginning in
1952
What is Discourse?
Discourse is: ‘language above the sentence level or above the
clause’. Stubbs 1998
The study of discourse is the study of any aspect of language use.
Fasold 1990

"Discourse is the way in which language is used socially to convey broad

historical meanings. It is language identified by the social conditions of its
use, by who is using it and under what conditions. Language can never be
'neutral' because it bridges our personal and social worlds," (Henry and
Tator 2002).
"Discourse is not produced without context and cannot be understood
without taking context into consideration ... Discourses are always connected
to other discourses which were produced earlier, as well as those which are
produced synchronically and subsequently.” Fairclough and Wodak (1997, p. 277)
S
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Discourse with Small ‘d’ and Capital ‘D’

Interacting

"d"
discourse Behaving Valuing
refers to the
features of D
language

Believi Thinking Macro

ng
Micro James Paul Gee (2008)
Multidisciplinary Approach

 Linguistics  Human Geography

 Education  Environmental Science
 Sociology  Communication Studies
 Anthropology  Biblical Studies
 Social Work  Public Relations
 Cognitive Psychology  Translation Studies
 Social Psychology  Each Of Which Is Subject To
 Its Own Assumptions,
Cultural Studies
Dimensions Of Analysis, And
 International Relations Methodologies .
DA may focus on any
sort of texts

 DA may focus on any sort of texts written or

spoken.

 The term “text” in discourse Analysis, refers

to any stretch of spoken or written language.

 News reports, textbooks, company reports,

personal letters, business letters, email and
faxes.
  Both informal and institutional.
 Ininformal fields, DA has been used to
analyze how people interact in
DA is conversation, in service encounters,
how they tell stories, they gossip and
conducted in how they chat with each other.
many fields of  In formal fields, DA has been fruitfully
employed in the political arena, in
activity analyzing the media, in the law and in
business and other forms of
bureaucracy and in educational
settings.
DA Focuses on Language in its Contexts of Use

 Another word for context is situation. In order to understand the

meaning of an utterance, one needs to know the particular
features of the situation in which it was uttered.
 The physical and temporal setting;
 The participants (speaker or writer, listener or reader)
 The purposes, motives, agendas of the participants
 The channel of communication (e.g., face to face, electronic,
televised, written)
Functional Approach To Discourse
Roman Jakobson: language performs six functions:
 Addressor(emotive)
 Context (referential)
 Addressee (conative)
 Contact (phatic)
 Message (poetic)
 Code (metalinguistic)
What is analyzed?
Vocabulary Words and phrases can be analyzed for ideological associations, formality, and
euphemistic and metaphorical content.

The way that sentences are constructed (e.g., verb tenses, active or passive
Grammar construction, and the use of imperatives and questions) can reveal aspects of
 intended meaning.
The structure of a text can be analyzed for how it creates emphasis or builds a
Structure narrative.
Texts can be analyzed in relation to the conventions and communicative aims of
Genre their genre (e.g., political speeches or tabloid newspaper articles).

Nonverbal Non-verbal aspects of speech, such as tone of voice, pauses, gestures, and sounds
like “um”, can reveal aspects of a speaker’s intentions, attitudes, and emotions.
communication
Conversational The interaction between people in a conversation, such as turn-taking,
interruptions and listener response, can reveal aspects of cultural conventions
Codes and social roles.
Functional Approach: Communicative Forces

 How is language used persuasively – e.g., to request, accept, refuse, complain?

 What sort of language is polite language?
 How do people use language to convey meanings indirectly?
 What constitutes racist or sexist language?
 How do people exercise power through their use of language?
 What might be the hidden motivations behind certain uses of language?
 How is language used in academic essays, in research articles, in conference presentations, in
letters, in reports and in meetings?
 How is language used by particular social groups?
 How do teachers or politicians or business executives use language? How do men and women
vary in their use of language?
 What is particular about the language used by such people that it identifies them as belonging to
particular social groups?
Applications of Discourse Analysis
 Organizational change and organizational studies – 10.
 Corporate social responsibility – 5.
A search [October
 Employee development and human resource development – 7. 2009] of Emerald's
 Education – 3. journal database
content (all fields
 Entrepreneurship – 3. excluding full text)
 Accountancy – 9. for the phrase
"discourse
 Library and information management – 6. analysis" over the
 Gender issues and diversity – 7. last ten years

produced results
Political economy – 2. with the following
 Hospitality – 2. distribution
 Marketing, market research, and corporate communications – 7.
 Sociology and social work – 4.
 Miscellaneous (gaming, law, supervenience, quality, nutrition, psychopathology, virtual communities, health
care) – 8.
Types of Discourse

Narrative Descriptive

Persuasive Argumentative
Features of Discourse
1. Cohesion
 Links and ties within the text
2. Coherence
What makes a text semantically meaningful
3. Intentionality
 The message must be conveyed.
4. Acceptability
 Approval from the receivers
5. Informativeness
 Some new information must be included in the discourse.
6. Situationality
 Setting and circumstances
7. Intertextuality
 Reference to the world outside the world
APPROACHES TO DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Pragmatics (Grice Interactional

Sociolinguistics
1975, Leech 1983, (Gumperz 1982,
Levinson 1983) Goffman 1959-1981)

 Speech Act Ethnography of

Communication
Theory (Austin
(Dell Hymes, 1972b,
1955, Searle 1969)
 Pragmatics. Analytical approach which involves contextual considerations.

 Interactional sociolinguistics……how people in a conversation identify extra communicative elements….to

illustrate a way in which social background knowledge is implicated in the signaling and interpreting of meaning.

 Speech Acts……..actions through utterances

 Ethnography… understands the social world in terms of the ‘lived experience’ of those who inhabit it.
…..Observations, interviews, field notes, lived experiences or narratives of participants

 CA …..Language as social Practice……concern with the sequential organization of actions, and, in particular the
mechanics of turn-taking….. conversational analysts work on naturally occurring and closely transcribed
conversational data.

 Variation Analysis: The study of the way language varies in communities of speakers. This concentrates on the
interaction of social factors (such as a speaker’s gender, ethnicity, age, degree of integration into their community,
etc.) and linguistic structures (such as sounds, syntactic forms, intonation features, words, etc.).
Recent approach to DA
 If in traditional studies discourses were analysed in relation to
social processes that form them, then recently researchers
started talking about bidirectional and complex relations
between discourses and social practices:

Discourses of food Social

Practice
“Healthy Food” “Healthy
lifestyle”
  Critical discourse analysis emerged from 'critical linguistics'
developed at the University of East Anglia in the 1970s.

Critical  Key theorists are Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak and Teun
van Dijk but many others, bringing together many
approaches.
Discourse
Analysis  They share a common view of language as a means of social
construction: language both shapes and is shaped by society.

 CDA focus— Text, talk and visuals to have the holistic view
and in-depth understanding and exploration.
Main Characteristics of works in CDA

Sexism
Problem or issue racism
oriented colonialism
or
other relevant social
problems

CDA does not

characterize a school, a A Critical
field, or sub discipline Approach to
of DA study Text &
Talk
 An inter -- multidisciplinary approach??????

Deals with social

problems……..
Society
Cognition
politics
 Humanities and
social sciences:
Psychology
Sociology, Law,
 CDA is part of broad spectrum  Pol. science
Literature
 Media
 CDA studies all levels and dimensions of discourse

Grammar,
Schematic
organization, Style,
Rhetoric
Speech Acts
Pragmatics
strategies and
interactions.
Involves
Semiotics:
 CDA not only Verbal Signs, Pictures,
Films,
sounds, music,
gestures
A Few Examples of CDA Application

Focus on group
Problem or relations of power,
issue oriented dominance &
inequality

Class, gender, ethnicity,

religion, race, sexual Underlying
Corpus Assisted
Discourse Analysis Corpus approaches to discourse or discourse approaches to
corpora are becoming more and more popular.
(CADS)
Though CL is essentially a quantitative approach, the CAD
analysts introduce an additional qualitative dimension to it.

Corpus can be used for analyzing discourse markers

Corpus can be used for move analysis in a genre.

Corpus
Supported
Collocation Analysis

DA Methods • The analysis is conducted by interpreting collocation patterns (more frequent

than random co-occurences)

Concordance Analysis

• The analysis is conducted by interpreting concordance patterns (a list of all the occurrences
of a particular search term in a corpus presented within the context they occur in.

Key-Words Analysis

• Here the analysis is based on key words which are the lexical items that show
marked frequency in one text compared to another.
 Why use CADA?
Baker(2006) outlined following advantages of Corpus based approaches:
 Corpus tools by providing many examples of a given linguistic
feature can ensure a greater degree of objectivity than can a
qualitative analysis

 Corpus based approach can identify “ the incremental effect of

discourse”, which means how discourses are built over time even
if particular items do not occur that frequently

 Another advantage which serves as a check on the analyst is the

opposite of incremental effect. The one particular feature
present in one single text which attracts the attention of analyst ,
may be absent from the corpora of texts.

 It offers triangulation.
Multimodal Discourse Analysis
 Multimodality entered linguistics through the groundbreaking work of Kress and
Van Leeuwen in Reading Images (1996) and Multimodal Discourse (2001).
 Texts which linguists study create meanings not only through language but
also through visual features and elements such as images, colour, the layout of
pages, even through material objects and architecture.
 In multimodal communication, the different modes had become more
integrated and visual elements were being used to communicate complex ideas
and attitudes.
 Besides linguistic patterns other modalities such as pictures, films, or video,
images and sounds.
 What Kress and Van Leeuwen presented was the possibility of taking the
power of description so useful for drawing out buried ideologies
Tools and Processes for Efficiently Managing Qualitative
Research

 The Transana software: Transana offers multimedia integration and tools for
transcription and analysis of audiovisual data. It is distinguished from other software
packages that tend to favor textual analysis (https://www.transana.com/).
 Atlas.ti (similarly to NVIVO below) supports large volumes of data sources in
multiple formats, including websites and social media.
 The NVIVO database can be deployed to process multimodal data e.g., transcribe
audiovisual data, format interviews and discussion groups, download data from the
Internet, create projects, import sources, and link data to external sources and
analyze images.
 NVIVO also supports diverse formats of data i.e., text, multimedia, PDFs, images,
Excel surveys, notes, websites and social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter,
YouTube videos and Survey Monkey
Mediated Discourse
 Mediated discourse analysis, an approach to discourse developed by Ronand Suzanne Scollon in
the late 1990’s

 MDA employs ‘methodological interdiscursivity’ (Scollon, 2000); that is it integrates multiple

approaches for data gathering and data analysis (linguistic landscaping, multimodal analysis,
discourse analysis, ethnographic observations, sociolinguistics interviews, etc.) in order to
strengthen any potential weaknesses of the methodologies in use.
 Attempts to answer this question by shifting our focus away from discourse, and on to the actions
people use discourse to take.
 The only way to determine which discourse is worth analyzing, MDA argues, is to first understand
what people are doing, and then to attempt to determine what role discourse plays in these actions.
Feminist Discourse/Critical Discourse Analysis

 Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) builds on the tenets of CDA and has
been described as "a political perspective on gender, concerned with demystifying
the interrelationships of gender, power, and ideology in discourse" (Lazar, 2007, p.
144).

 Lazar explains that feminist CDA includes: (1) feminist analytical resistance or
activism; (2) the assumption that “gender” is an ideological structure; (3) a
recognition of the complexity of gender and power relations; (4) attention to the
role of discourse in the (de)construction of gender; and (5) critical reflexivity as
praxis (Lazar, 2010; Lazar, 2007).
Discourse Stylistics

 Discourse stylistics is an innovative approach in stylistic analysis. It is a

combination of discourse and stylistic analysis and a branch of stylistics
which draws specifically on the techniques and methods of discourse
analysis (Simpson, 2002:136).
 In the 1980s came the term discourse stylistics, made popular in the 1990s
through the sub-title of Ronald Carter & Paul Simpson work (1989).
 The application of discourse stylistics provides a testing basis about
discourse and also provides literary criticism with a useful means for
appreciating literary appreciation and it is a natural development from
both (Ghailan, 2006: 14).
The Scope of Discourse Studies within
Pedagogy and Linguistics
 Lexicography  Semantics
 Lexical studies  Pragmatics
 Grammatical studies  Stylistics
 Register/genre analysis  Literary study
 Language variation  Sociolinguistics
 Contrastive analysis  Discourse analysis
 Translation studies  Forensic linguistics
 Language change  Computational linguistics
 Language teaching  Corpus Linguistics
References

 Bachmann Ingo (2011) Civil partnership – “gay marriage in all but name”: a corpus-driven analysis of
discourses of same-sex relationships in the UK Parliament. "Corpora”, vol. 6 (1), s. 77-105
 Halliday, M. A. K. & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London:
Edward Arnold.
 Halliday, M. A. K. & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London:
Edward Arnold.
 Widdowson, H. G. (1998b). The theory and practice of Critical Discourse Analysis. Applied Linguistics,
19: 136–151.
 An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics, John Sinclair, 2005.
 https://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/9780472033850-part1.pdf · PDF file
 McEnery, A., Xiao, R. and Tono, Y. (2006) Corpus-Based Language Studies: An Advanced Resource
Book. London & New York: Routledge
 Leech, Geoffrey. (1992). Claimed and unclaimed Resources of Corpus Linguistics.
 htl.linguist.univ-paris-diderot.fr/leon/leon_hs.pdf · PDF file