DISCOURSE

ANALYSIS

Amaliah Khairina (2201410077)

Annis Luthfiana (2201410051)

Shofia Desy R (2201410073)

M. Rizqi Adhi P (2201410007)

Junnilalita A.V (2201410148)

INTRODUCTION

Applied linguistics interested in discourse

analysis because it is aware of the

inability the formal linguistics account for

how participants in communication

achieved meaning.

What is discourse?

A strecth of language in use, of any

length, and in any mood which achieves

meaning and coherence for those involved

(Routledge’s book)

What is discourse analysis?

Discourse analysis can be defined as the use and

development of theories and methods which

elucidate how this meaning and coherence is

achieved.

The focus of this chapter is to examine the DA

among other approches in language use.

Early AL DA

In the 1950s DA was seen and understood as a

theoretical and structural linguistics as the

potensial extension in language analysis

beyond the level of single sentences to

discover the distributional principles between

sentences as well as within them (Harris

1952).

Inresponce to theoretical stimuli, the

1970s and the 1980s saw a major works

on DA emerging from AL perspective. The

concern of DA in language teaching is

related to some treatments in language

teaching and learning.

TEXT, CONTEXT, AND DISCOURSE

Much early DA work in AL saw text (the linguistic

element in communication) as essentially distinct

from context (the non linguistic elements) and

discourse as the two in interaction to create

meaning.

TEXT "Text" is written material. We discuss the text

when we study a novel, drama, or short story. You

might even call a letter to someone a text.

CONTEXTContext variously included consideration of such

factors as:

the situation or immediate environment of

communication;

the participants and their intentions, knowledge,

beliefs, and feelings, as well as their roles,

relations, and status;

the cultural and ideological norms and assumptions

against which a given communication occurs;

language which precedes or follows that under

analysis, sometimes referred to as ‘co-text’

other texts evoked for the participants and affecting

their interpretation – sometimes referred to as

‘intertext’

non-linguistic meaningful communicative

behaviour, i.e. paralanguage, such as voice quality,

gestures, and facial expressions

use of other modes of communication

accompanying the use of language, such as music

and pictures;

the physical medium of communication, such as

speech, writing, print, telephone, computer.

DISCOURSE

"Discourse" can mean spoken

conversation or a written discussion

of a single topic.

The binary opposition of text and context, however,

and the itemisation of contextual components, has

come to be seen as problematic. If context and text are

separate, then the status of text itself becomes

precarious.

As linguistic forms, if text is separated from context

for the purposes of analysis, text ceases to have any

actual existence, and seems at odds with the aim of

DA to deal with the realities of language in use rather

than linguistic abstractions.

There is no use of language which does not have a

situation, participants, co-text, paralanguage, etc.

Early DA, however, often work with this binary

text/context distinction. At that time, DA was indeed

experienced as the addition of a new dimension (i.e.

context) to their existing object of study (i.e. text).

And now, DA turned to a variety of approaches to

communication from outside linguistics.

PRAGMATICS

Interest in the role of context led initially to the classic

texts of pragmatics and attention to how discourse is

structured by what speakers are trying to do with their

words, and how their intentions are recognised by their

interlocutors.

Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) used the pragmatic

notion of the act as a fundamental unit of analysis,

showing how acts combine to form higher units

(which they called moves, exchanges and

transactions) in an attempt to formulate rules

analogous to those in structural grammars. It is

known as Birmingham School of Discourse

Analysis (Birch, 1982)

The approach focused upon language in isolation

from other modes of communication, and, working

from transcriptions after the event, tended to treat

discourse as a product rather than a process.

Schema Theory

Schema theory is a powerful tool in DA

as it can help to explain both high level

aspects of understanding such as

coherence, and low level linguistic

phenomena such as article choice.

Both pragmatics and schema theory have remained

salient in many approaches to DA.

But their focus is very much on understanding as a

product, explained after the event, rather than a

process.

Their representations of how communication works

can seem removed from the actual development of

discourse as it appears for participants.

Conversation analysis

Working from the premise, consistently denied in

Chomskyan linguistics:

that talk in interaction,

including casual conversation,

is fundamentally ordered,

CA made use of newly available recording

technology to transcribe and closely analyse

actually occurring conversation,

seeking to understand how participants make

sense of,

find their way about in,

and act on the circumstances in which they find

themselves’ (Heritage 1984: 4) and through this

close analysis to understand the patterns of social

life (Bhatia et al. 2008: 4) as realized in talk.

Ethnography, language ecology, linguistic

ethnography

Like CA, it isfirmly committed to seeking

significance in the details and apparent disorder

of everyday communication, and understanding

participants’ own perspectives on the meaning

and dynamics of what is happening.

It too rejects the idealisations and

generalisations of formal linguistics. 

SEMIOTICS, PARALINGUAGE AND MULTIMODALITY

Discourse analysts have long shown awareness of the need to incorporate such phenomena into their analyses, but also of the difficulty of doing so systematically

The study of signs and

symbols, what they mean

and how they are used.

SEMIOTICS

Every spoken language has a volume,

speed, pitch, and intonation.

Those paralinguistic element convey

key information about the speaker’s

identity, attitude, and commitment.

PARALANGUAGE

In exploitation of paralanguage in

spoken communication is an

instance of multimodality as it

involves visual, non-linguistics

sound, and other sensor stimuli

MULTIMODALITY

GENRE ANALYSIS

Genre analysis was developed by

Swales and colleagues in connection

with the teaching of English for Specific

Purposes and is thus closely linked to

the language learning approach to DA.

Genre analysis seeks to understand any

communicative event as an instance of a genre,

defined as ‘a class of communicative events which

share some set of communicative purposes’ (Swales

1990: 58).

Examples of genres are such events as academic

articles, news bulletins, advertisements, prayers,

operas, menus.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

"Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a type of

discourse analytical research that primarily

studies the way social power abuse, dominance,

and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and

resisted by text and talk in the social and

political context." 

(Teun van Dijk, The Handbook of Discourse

Analysis)

CDA is concerned with ideology, power

relations and social injustices, and how

these are represented and reproduced

through language.

They may focus primarily upon discourse

practices and ideologies, or seek to link

discourse and social structures, or to situate

specific discourses such as those of racism

within a broader historical perspective.

Critical discourse analysis (CDA)

investigates how language use may

be affirming and indeed reproducing

the perspectives, values and ways

of talking of the powerful, which

may not be in the interests of the

less powerful.

Back to Detail and Forward to

Generalization: Corpus Linguistics

The advent of corpus analysis, however

has enabled DA partially to redress

these shortcomings, and to add a

quantitative dimension to research.

Corpus linguistics, like other forms of linguistic

analysis before it, is an invaluable tool for DA.

Yet in its quest for understanding of how

participants in communication achieve

meaning, DA cannot limit itself to textual

analysis alone, any more than it can limit itself

to the cultural and psychological context of

language use without attention to actual text.

FINAL WORDS

There is a valid case for saying that

there is no longer a single theory or

method of analysis which can be clearly

labeled as discourse analysis.

It has become a superordinate term for a

wide range of traditions for the analysis of

language in use, so general and all-inclusive

that it is hardly worth using.

Perhaps the term discourse analysis has

had its day. It is now so built into the fabric

of applied linguistics that any analysis of

language in use is discourse analysis of

some kind.

REFERENCE

James, Simpson. 2011. The Routledge

Handbook of Applied Linguistics. (pp.

431 – 440)