UMA Seminar: Session 1 INTRO. & GRAL.

ORIENTATION TO DA 14/03/2018
Dr. Mercedes Díez Prados (mercedes.diez@uah.es)

UNIT 1: DEFINING DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

1.1. TRADITIONAL LINGUISTICS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

 Much language study and language teaching has been devoted to sentences. Yet, we all know that
communicating successfully is not exclusively a question of producing correct sentences. Not all
sentences are relevant or suitable; one cannot just put any sentence after another and hope that it will
mean something. Besides, people do not always speak –or write- in complete sentences and yet they
still succeed in communicating.
 However, there is nothing intrinsically wrong in concentrating on the sentence. Linguists have
always tended to concentrate on the study of artificially constructed sentences in order to find out how
language works.
 It is possible to approach language from many different directions. Throughout history, linguistic
analysis has tended to operate at the level of sentence grammar or units below the sentence (
morphological structure of words). In fact, we know a great deal about the way sentences are
structured. We have convincing models of analysis for sentences and smaller grammatical units but
we still fail to have models as fully developed as these for larger units such as the paragraph or texts
(assuming that they have structure).
 Sentences (and sometimes words) have been considered in isolation: Traditional Greek and Latin
grammars devoted a great deal of their time and energies to tabulating the various forms of nouns,
adjectives and verbs in paradigmatic fashion. This tradition has continued to the present time
(grammar books for French, Spanish, etc.). Such paradigms, without doubt, make useful
generalizations but are constrained to sentence level.
 Mainstream American linguistics in the first half of the twentieth century continued to work within
the confines of the sentence and even -following Bloomfield- excluded considerations of semantics
(meaning).
 In the 2nd half of this century, Chomsky effected a “revolution” in linguistics but continues to work
within the limits of sentence structure independent of considerations of context and situation.
Chomsky assumed that actual language is ‘degenerate’ and deviates from the rules of grammar.
 It might be argued that the treatment of language in terms of sentences has been quite successful
in revealing how language works. W/in the sentence we can establish rules and constraints concerning
what is and is not allowed, whereas beyond the sentence, such rules seem either to disintegrate or turn
into rules of a different kind: social rules or psychological rules (not linguistic).
 Although the study of sentences in isolation may be necessary in certain occasions, we should
recognize that there is more to producing and understanding meaningful language, in other words, to
communicating than knowing how to make or recognize correct sentences.

 According to Cook (1989: 6), we have two different kinds of language as potential objects for study:

a) one abstracted in order to teach language or literacy, or to study how the rules of language work,
b) and another which has been used to communicate something and is felt to be coherent (and, may, or
may not, happen to correspond to a correct sentence or a series of sentences).

 This latter kind o language –language in use, for communication is called discourse; and the search
for what gives coherence is discourse analysis.
 The two approaches are not mutually exclusive. D may be composed of 1 or more than 1 well-formed
grammatical sentences –and in fact it often is- but it does not have to be. It can have grammatical
‘mistakes’ in it, and often does. D treats the rules of grammar as a resource, conforming to them when
it needs to, but departing from them when it does not. It sometimes does the same with conventional
meanings too (look at sentence Which of you people is the fish? in Activity 1, for instance).

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 UMA Seminar: Session 1 INTRO. & GRAL. ORIENTATION TO DA 14/03/2018
Dr. Mercedes Díez Prados (mercedes.diez@uah.es)

 For Cook (1989: 7):

Discourse can be anything from a grunt or single expletive, through short conversations and scribbled
notes right up to Tolstoy’s novel, War and Peace, or a lengthy legal case. What matters is not its
conformity to rules, but the fact that it communicates and is recognized by its receivers as coherent
Cook (1989: 7)

 (Cook, p. 7) Rules of grammar may operate w/in sentences and as well as between them. There are
different types of errors:
 Morphological: wrong word endings (The knight kill a dragon)
 Syntactic: wrong word order (The a knight dragon killed)
 Semantic: wrong meaning (The knight killed a teaspoon)
 In the same way that there are rules w/in sentences which limit what word may follow another, there
may be discourse rules which restrict which sentence can follow another one. For example, if we have
the sentence “The knight killed the dragon”, what sentence would follow?

a) The pineapple was on the table.

b) He cut off its head with his sword.

How do you know?

 However, sentence combinations seem to depend more on world knowledge than on linguistic rules.
 How, then, do we recognize a stretch of lg. as meaningful and unified? There are two possible
reasonings:

a) Employing lg. rules, which operate w/in and bet. sentences.

b) Using world knowledge (of the social conventions)

1.2. WHAT IS DISCOURSE ANALYSIS? DEFINITION BY DIFFERENT AUTHORS

DEFINITIONS BY DIFFERENT AUTHORS

It may have become clear from the previous sections that discourse analysis is not a simple enterprise. In
its full richness it involves all levels and methods of analysis of language, cognition, interaction, society,
and culture. This is of course not surprising, since discourse itself is a manifestation of all these dimensions
of society. This means that integral discourse analysis is necessarily an interdisciplinary task and also that
its complexity forces us to make specific choices among the many available methods, depending on the
goals and functions of our analysis. (Dijk, Handbook of Discourse Analysis, pp. 10-11).

Discourse analysis is concerned with the study of the relationship between language and the contexts in
which it is used. It grew out of work in different disciplines in the 1960s and early 1970s, including
linguistics, semiotics, psychology, anthropology and sociology. Discourse analysts study language in use:
written texts of all kinds, and spoken data, from conversation to highly institutionalised forms of talk. [...]
Discourse analysis has grown into a wide-ranging and heterogeneous discipline which finds its unity in the
description of language above the sentence and an interest in the contexts and cultural influences which
affect language in use. It is also now, increasingly, forming a backdrop to research in Applied Linguistics,
and second language learning and teaching in particular. (McCarthy, Discourse Analysis for Language
Teachers, pp. 5 & 7)

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 UMA Seminar: Session 1 INTRO. & GRAL. ORIENTATION TO DA 14/03/2018
Dr. Mercedes Díez Prados (mercedes.diez@uah.es)

The term ‘discourse analysis’ has come to be used with a wide range of meanings which cover a wide range
of activities. It is used to describe activities at the intersection of disciplines as diverse as sociolinguistics,
psycholinguistics, philosophical linguistics and computational linguistics. [...] In this book we take a
primarily linguistic approach to the analysis of discourse. We examine how humans use language to
communicate and, in particular, how addressers construct linguistic messages for addressees and how
addressees work on linguistic messages in order to interpret them. We call on insights from all of the inter-
disciplinary areas we have mentioned, and survey influential work done in all these fields, but our primary
interest is the traditional concern of the descriptive linguist, to give an account of how forms of language
are used in communication." (Brown & Yule, Discourse Analysis, pp. viii & x).

Discourse analysis examines how stretches of language, considered in their full textual, social, and
psychological context, become meaningful and unified for their users. It is a rapidly expanding field,
providing insights into the problems and processes of language use and language learning, and is therefore
of great importance to language teachers. (G. Cook, Discourse, p. ix).

Discourse analysis is the study of the language of communication- spoken or written. The system that
emerges out of the data shows that communication is an interlocking social, cognitive, and linguistic
enterprise. [...] There is no agreed-upon set of analytic procedures for the description of discourse. (E.
Hatch, Discourse and Language Education, p. 1).

Any approach to discourse analysis and pragmatics has, presumably, to represent two distinguishable but
related discourse worlds in the pursuit of its objective, namely the characterization of speaker/writer
meaning and its explanation in the context of use. On the one hand, [...] discourse analysis must portray the
structure of suprasentential text or social transaction by imposing some framework upon the data, explicitly
or implicitly. On the other hand, [...] discourse analysis should offer us a characterization of how, in the
context of negotiation, participants go about the process of interpreting meaning (whether this is reciprocal
as in conversation or non-reciprocal as in reading or writing need not detain us here, suffice that the process
is interactive). (M. Coulthard, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis, p. viii)

General characteristics:

Conclusions from definitions:

 DA analysis  language in use in communicative contexts.

 Contexts are multidimensional: cognitive, linguistic, socio-cultural.

 Communication is multifaceted contribution from other disciplines (sociology, psychology,
anthropology, philosophy, etc.)  interdisciplinarity.
 The unit of analysis: the text.
 The type of language used for analysis: data collected from communicative situations.
 DA comprises different methods of analysis.

A definition drawn from general characteristics:

Discourse analysis is an interdiscipline which applies different methods in order to study language as used
in communicative contexts in all its manifestations (speaking and writing, listening and reading).

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 UMA Seminar: Session 1 INTRO. & GRAL. ORIENTATION TO DA 14/03/2018
Dr. Mercedes Díez Prados (mercedes.diez@uah.es)

Form and function

As Schiffrin and other authors comment, an important issue in DA is the relationship between form and
function. In fact, Renkema bases his definition for DA in this relationship. For him, DA is “the discipline
devoted to the investigation of the relationship bet. form and function in verbal communication” and to
illustrate his definition, he provides the following example of an exchange.
Let us analyze in terms of FORM and FUNCTION this other conversation:

A: Say, there’s a good movie playing tonight.

B: Actually, I have to study.

A: Too bad.

B: Yes, I’m sorry.

A: Well, I guess I don’t need to ask you if you want me to pick you up.

In this example we can see that form and function do not hold a one-to-one relationship: A’s 1st utterance
is a statement (form) but it works as an invitation (function). B knows this (he didn’t respond anything like
“That’s nice” or “I didn’t know that”) and responds w/ another statement which counts as a refusal of the
invitation. A, in turn, interprets it as such and responds w/ a statement of regret. Therefore, regarding form,
all these utterances can be considered statements (whose main function is the transmission of info.), but
each fulfils a different function.
When different forms are used for getting across approximately the same content, Renkema explains, they
often lead to differences in function. The aim of DA is, precisely, to explain the systematic differences in
forms and functions and the relations bet. them.

1.3. THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE DISCIPLINE TO THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE

 As opposed to previous approaches to language, discourse analysis provides an insight into language
by:
 Studying real language (data collected from real communication).
 Expanding the limits of study above sentence level and developing models to discover the
structure of this higher unit.
 Including the context in the analysis.
 Taking into account the participants in the interaction.
 In sum, expanding the domain of study and resorting to other non-linguistic disciplines to fully
explain linguistic phenomena.

 (Cook. section 1.5) When receiving a ling. message, we pay attention to factors other than lg. (e.g.,
body lg., voice quality, and other paralinguistic features).
 We are also influenced by the situation and the social/cultural relations w/ the participants.
 This entire world that surrounds lg. is the context and lg. may not be studied w/out it. Traditional
linguists discarded it from the study of lg.: they either invent examples or adapt actual utterances to
accommodate their analysis.
 Linguists will also eliminate idiosyncratic features of individuals’ lg. (idiolect).
 This process of eliminating features of context is called idealization. For a D analyst, however, all
these features are important to truly understand the meaning of what is being said.
 Therefore, we have two approaches to language (Cook, p. 14):

a) Sentence linguistics.
b) Discourse analysis.

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 UMA Seminar: Session 1 INTRO. & GRAL. ORIENTATION TO DA 14/03/2018
Dr. Mercedes Díez Prados (mercedes.diez@uah.es)

 But they are not irreconcilable: they need each other.

 Let us have a look at the following comparison established by Cook (1989: 12) between traditional
linguistics and discourse analysis:

Sentence linguistics data Discourse analysis data

Isolated sentences Any stretch of language felt to be unified

Grammatically well-formed Achieving meaning

Without context In context

Invented or idealized Observed

1.4. DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF DISCOURSE

 In Approaches to Discourse, Schiffrin distinguishes 6 approaches to the linguistic analysis of

discourse:

1. Speech act theory

2. Interactional sociolinguistics
3. Ethnography of communication
4. Pragmatics
5. Conversation analysis
6. Variation analysis

 Speech act theory, developed by Austin and Searle, postulates that lg. is used not just to describe the
world but to perform a range of other actions. The action can be indicated in the utterance itself. For
ex., the utterance I promise to be there tomorrow performs the act of promising. The utterance The
grass is green performs the act of asserting. An utterance may also perform more than one act:

S: Can you pass the salt

H: (passes the salt)

 The speaker’s utterance can be understood both as a Q (about H’s ability) and a request (for H to pass
the salt to S). These two understandings are distinguishable thanks to the context of situation. The SA
approach to D focuses upon the kind of knowledge speakers share in order to produce and interpret
acts through words.
 SAT provides a means by which to segment texts (i.e. acts), and thus a framework for defining units
that could then be combined into larger structures.
 Interactional sociolinguistics, whose main representative is John Gumperz, comes from
anthropology, sociology and linguistics and, thus, is concerned with culture, society and language. An
example of the kinds of things that this approach studies we can see the following interaction:

Following an informal graduate seminar at a major university, a black student approached the instructor,
who was about to leave the room accompanied by several other black and white students, and said:

A: Could I talk to you for a minute? I’m gonna apply for a fellowship and I was wondering if I could
get a recommendation?

The instructor replied:

B: OK. Come along to the office and tell me what you want to do.

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 UMA Seminar: Session 1 INTRO. & GRAL. ORIENTATION TO DA 14/03/2018
Dr. Mercedes Díez Prados (mercedes.diez@uah.es)

As the instructor and the rest of the group left the room, the black student said, turning his head ever so
slightly to the other students:

A: Ahma git me a gig! (Rough gloss: “I’m going to get myself some support”).

 This approach relies upon actual utterances in social contexts and the focus of analysis is how
interpretation and interaction are based on the interrelationship of social and linguistic meanings.
 The approached known as ethnography of communication is based on anthropology.
 One of the most influential work in this approach is that developed by Dell Hymes. He challenges
Chomsky’s theory on the explanation of competence, which is the tacit knowledge a native speaker has
of the rules of lg. What Dell Hymes proposed instead was that scholarship focuses on communicative
competence: the tacit social, psychological, cultural and linguistic knowledge that governs appropriate
use of language (included, but not limited to grammar).
 Dell Hymes, an anthropologist, developed what he called the SPEAKING MODEL to promote the
analysis of discourse as a series of speech events and speech acts within a cultural context. It uses the
first letters of terms for speech components of the speech event; the categories are so productive and
powerful in analysis that you can use this model to analyze many different kinds of discourse. This
model was developed on the basis of ethnographic research.
 These are the components (http://www.acs.appstate.edu/~mcgowant/hymes.htm#hymes#hymes)

Setting and Scene:

"Setting refers to the time and place of a speech act and, in general, to the physical circumstances"
(Hymes 9741: 55). The living room in the grandparents' home might be a setting for a family story.
Scene is the "psychological setting" or "cultural definition" of a scene, including characteristics
such as range of formality and sense of play or seriousness (Hymes 1974: 55-56). The family story
may be told at a reunion celebrating the grandparents' anniversary. At times, the family would be
festive and playful; at other times, serious and commemorative.
Participants
Speaker and audience. Linguists will make distinctions within these categories; for example, the
audience can be distinguished as addressees and other hearers (Hymes 1974: 54 & 56). At the
family reunion, an aunt might tell a story to the young female relatives, but males, although not
addressed, might also hear the narrative.

Ends
Purposes, goals, and outcomes (Hymes 1974: 56-57). The aunt may tell a story about the
grandmother to entertain the audience, teach the young women, and honor the grandmother.

Act Sequence
Form and order of the event. The aunt's story might begin as a response to a toast to the
grandmother. The story's plot and development would have a sequence structured by the aunt.
Possibly there would be a collaborative interruption during the telling. Finally, the group might
applaud the tale and move onto another subject or activity.

Key
Cues that establish the "tone, manner, or spirit" of the speech act (Hymes 1974: 57). The aunt
might imitate the grandmother's voice and gestures in a playful way, or she might address the
group in a serious voice emphasizing the sincerity and respect of the praise the story expresses.

Instrumentalities
Channels (written, telegraph, oral, etc.) and styles of speech (Hymes 1974: 58-60). The aunt
might speak in a casual register with many dialect features or might use a more formal register
and careful grammatical "standard" forms.

Norms

1
Hymes, Dell (1974) Foundations of Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia: U of
Pennsylvania P.

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Dr. Mercedes Díez Prados (mercedes.diez@uah.es)

Social rules governing the event and the participants' actions and reaction. In a playful story by
the aunt, the norms might allow many audience interruptions and collaboration, or possibly those
interruptions might be limited to participation by older females. A serious, formal story by the
aunt might call for attention to her and no interruptions as norms.

Genre
The kind of speech act or event (fairy tale, advertisement). The aunt might tell a character anecdote
about the grandmother for entertainment, but an exemplum as moral instruction. Different
disciplines develop terms for kinds of speech acts, and speech communities sometimes have their
own terms for types.

 According to this view, cultural conceptions of communication are deeply connected w/ conceptions
of person, cultural values, and world knowledge. The factors in the SPEAKING Model also deal with
the relationship between form and function.
 The pragmatic approach is based, according to Schiffrin, on the philosophical ideas of Grice.
Pragmatics is most concerned w/ analyzing speaker meaning at the level of utterances and this often is
equivalent to a sentence, rather than a text. But since an utterance is, by definition, situated in a context
(including a linguistic context, that is, a text), pragmatics often ends up including DA and providing
means of analyzing D along the way.
 Pragmatics can explain the (apparent) lack of connection between utterances like the following:

A: Smith doesn't seem to have a girlfriend these days.

B: He has been paying a lot of visits to New York.

 We can interpret B’s utterance as cooperative at a level of understanding which the meaning of words
by themselves cannot provide. Hearers supplement the literal meaning of utterances w/ an assumption
of human rationality and cooperation. What Gricean pragmatics suggests is that human beings work
with basic assumptions about one another and their conduct and that they draw specific inferences
about one another’s intended meanings from those assumptions. Grice called this process of
inferencing convertational implicature. It is the meaning that an addressee has to deduct form what is
actually said, considering the context of the utterance.
 Conversational analysis, most notably applied by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, tries to discover
how conversations are structured. The next example shows that conversations have an expected
organization and that in case interlocutors do not follow the usual method, such deviance is noticed:

(Police make call)

(Receiver is lifted, and there is a one second pause)

Police: Hello.

Other: American Red Cross.

Police: Hello, this is Police Headquarters...er, Officer Stratton (etc.).

 This is an exchange that seems to violate a rule that the person answering the phone is the one who
talks first. However, what the ex. actually illustrates in the working of a deeper rule of sequencing in
talk. Schegloff uses it to see how telephone openings and sequences in gral. are formulated. He suggests
that this example can be considered a summons-answer sequence:

- The telephone ring is the summons.

- This summons opens a conditional relevance for a second part of the sequence: an answer.

 In this ex. there is no typical answer (Hello?). The police’s hello is thus a response to the “empty slot”:
Hello redoes the summons. Therefore, the example is not an anomaly but reflects the regular operation
of adjacency pairs in gral. and summons-answer in particular: since moves are sequenced, speakers

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 UMA Seminar: Session 1 INTRO. & GRAL. ORIENTATION TO DA 14/03/2018
Dr. Mercedes Díez Prados (mercedes.diez@uah.es)

can entry into the conversation in a coordinated way, which results in an orderly exchange of turns
w/in conversations.
 Schegloff and Sacks analyzed a large number of telephone conversations and found that many of them
ended with the pair:

A: Okay?

B: Alright.

This type of pair can also occur in the middle of a conversation to change the topic.

 The variationist approach stems from studies of linguistic variation and change. Labov developed
the methodology and theory underlying these studies. According to this approach, ling. variation is
patterned both socially and linguistically and such patterns can be discovered only through systematic
investigation of a speech community.
 An important part of the variationist approach to D is the discovery of formal patterns in texts (often
narratives). Labov and Waletzky (1967) carried out an investigation to find out how people usually tell
each other stories (i.e. narratives) in everyday life. The purpose of this investigation was to find out if
there were correlations between the social characteristics of story tellers and the structure of their
stories (Renkema 2004: 193 ff.). For this purpose, Labov and Waletzky collected stories from people
belonging to different social classes.
 Although they did not find a definite correlation between the narrator’s social characteristics and the
structure of his/her stories, they came up with interesting observations on the structure of everyday
narratives.
 In the following example of a passage of narration, we can observe one device that are recurrent in
most texts of this kind:

One of the most dramatic danger-of-death stories was told by a retired postman on the Lower East Side:
his brother had stabbed him in the head with a knife. He concludes:

And the doctor just says, "Just about this much more," he says, "and you'd a been dead."

 This last utterance can be recognized as an evaluation, since it is a device the narrator uses to highlight
a given aspect in their reported experience in order to reveal the point of the story.
 Labov and Waletzky arrived at a five-component story structure:

1. Orientation (optional): information about the characters, place, time and situation.
2. Complication: the main component; it usually ends with a result
3. Evaluation: necessary for a story to be complete. It makes clear what the significance of
the story is.
4. Solution: sometimes it coincides with the evaluation In the story above, the solution is
that he had not been dead).
5. Coda (optional): closing sentences with which the narrator returns to the moment that the
story began; for example: “Well, that’s the way it happened”.

 Despite their differences, according to Schiffrin, all approaches take a stand, sometimes implicitly, on the
relationship between structure and function, text and context.
 Stubbe et al. (2003) present and exemplify 5 approaches:
1. Conversation analysis
2. Interactional sociolinguistics
3. Pragmatics: Politeness theory
4. Critical Discourse Analysis
5. Discursive Psychology.
 1 and 2 have been explained and illustrated above. Politeness Theory is a different
approach within Pragmatics (the ones included in Schiffrin’s approachers were
SAT and Pragmatics, which she equates with Grice’s Cooperative Principle model.

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 UMA Seminar: Session 1 INTRO. & GRAL. ORIENTATION TO DA 14/03/2018
Dr. Mercedes Díez Prados (mercedes.diez@uah.es)

2.1 OTHER APPROACHES

2.1.1 Text Linguistics: Beaugrand and Dressler’s model (7

standandards of textulity)
 Two central notions regarding the analysis of texts are those of cohesion and coherence, which can be
contextualized within a larger discursive concept: that of textuality (Beaugrande & Dressler ) or texture
(Halliday and Hasan), which, in general terms is responsible for distinguishing between a text an and
non-text.
 What, then, makes a sequence of sentences or utterances a text? De Beaugrande and Dressler claim
that “it seems reasonable to require that a science of texts should be able to describe or explain both
the shared features and the distinctions among” different text types, such as a road sign, a poem, a news
article, etc. For that, we need to find out what standards texts must fulfill in order to be considered
texts.
 These authors define a TEXT as a COMMUNICATIVE OCCURRENCE which meets 7 standards of
TEXTUALITY, in such a way that, if a text does not satisfy any of these standards, the text will not be
communicative (= a non-text):
o Cohesion
o Coherence
o Intentionality
o Acceptability
o Informativity
o Situationality
o Intertextuality
 The 1st 2 are text-centered notions, while the rest are considered user-centered notions.

1. COHESION
 As Renkema defines it, “it is the connection which results when the interpretation of a textual elem. is
dependent on another elem. in the text”.
According to De Beaugrande and Dressler, “it concerns the ways in which the components of the
SURFACE TEXT (i.e. what we actually hear or see) are mutually connected w/in a sequence”. In their
opinion, cohesion rests upon grammatical dependencies.

 Cohesive devices for DeB&D are mechanisms like:

(1) Devices that contribute to stability (equivalence):
a) Recurrence (repetition of words or expressions). It can fulfill different functions (to re-affirm one’s
viewpoint, to reject material stated, to overcome irrelevant interruptions, esthetically in poems, etc.).
Ex:
Marlow: What, my good friend, if you gave us a glass of punch in the meantime?...
Hardcastle: Punch, sir!...
Marlow: Yes, sir, punch! A glass of warm punch, after our journey, will be comfortable.
b) Partial recurrence (the shifting of already used elems. to different classes, e.g., from noun to vb.).
Ex:Parallelism (repeating a structure but filling it w/ new elems. ). Ex:
(In the Declaration of Independence, the British King is described as
follows):
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns (vb + possessive + DO).
They is a series of similar actions  relatedness emphazised by the parallelism of form.
c) Paraphrase (repeating content but conveying it with different expressions). Ex.:
I had never seen a murderer... the decent symbol which indemnifies the taker of a life.

2. Devices that contribute to economy:

a) Pro-forms (replacing content-carrying elems, w/ elems. w/ no independent content, e.g. do, so,
pronouns):
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.
b) Ellipsis (repeating a struct. and its content but omitting some of the surface expressions):
The daughter is said to be well-bread and beautiful; the son an awkward booby, reared up and spoiled
at his mother’s apron strings.

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Dr. Mercedes Díez Prados (mercedes.diez@uah.es)

c) Tense and aspect.

d) Functional sentence perspective (ordering of expressions to show the importance or newness of their
content).

2. COHERENCE
a) Renkema:
“the connection which is brought about by something outside the text” (p. 35)
something = world knowledge
b) Beaugrande and Dressler:
“the ways in which the components of the textual world, i.e. the configuration of concepts and relations
which underlie the surface text, are mutually accessible and relevant” (p. 4)

Concept = a configuration of knowledge which can be recovered or activated consistently in the mind.
Relations = links between concepts which appear together in a textual world.

 In the text CHILDREN AT PLAY, “children” is an object concept and “play” an action concept, and
the relation between them is that the children are the agents of the action.
 People will supply as many relations as are needed if the text does not provide them, that is, if they are
not explicit. For example, in the road sign, the text receiver should assume that “slow” makes better
sense as referring to the “quantity of motion” than as an “attribute” of the children.
 A text “makes sense” because there is continuity of senses among the knowledge activated by the
expressions of the text. A “senseless” or “non-sensical” text is one in which text receivers cannot
discover such continuity, usually because there is a serious mismatch bet. the configuration of concepts
and relations expressed in the text and the receivers’ prior knowledge of the world.
 DeB & D think that coherence can be illustrated by a gp. of relations labeled under CAUSALITY.
These relations concern the ways in which one situation or event affects the conditions for some other
one. The relations we can find are the following:
1. Cause:
Jack fell down and broke his crown.
 The event of “falling down” is the cause of the event “breaking”, since it created the necessary conditions
for the latter. This latter event is the effect of the former one.

2. Enablement (factibilidad): (weaker type of causality)

The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts, all on a summer day.
The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts, and took them quite away.
 The Queen’s action created the sufficient, but not necessary conditions for the knave’s action.

3. Reason: when an action follows as a rational response to some previous event:

Jack shall have but a penny a day
Because he can't work any faster
 The low pay is not actually caused or enabled by the slow working, but it is “a reasonable and predictable
outcome”.

4. Purpose: an event or situation is possible via a previous event or situation:

Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to get poor dog a bone.
 According to DeB & D, coherence is not merely a feature of texts, “but rather the outcome of
cognitive processes among text users. The simple juxtaposition of events and situations in a text will
activate operations which recover or create coherence relations”. That effect can be noticed in the following
example:

The king was in the counting house, counting all his money.
The Queen was in the parlour, eating bread and honey.
The Maid was in the garden, hanging out the clothes;

3. INTENTIONALITY

 It concerns the text producer’s attitude that the text should fulfill his intentions (e.g. to distribute
knowledge or any other goal).

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Dr. Mercedes Díez Prados (mercedes.diez@uah.es)

4. ACCEPTABILITY
 It concerns the text receiver’s attitude that the text should have some use or relevance for him/her (e.g.
to acquire knowledge).
 the sequence of sentences should be acceptable to the intended audience in order to qualify as a text.
The receiver must accept the given text as cohesive and coherent for it to be a text. Factors such as text
type, social or cultural setting influence what we accept as a cohesive and coherent text.
 Acceptability also favors the contribution of the receiver to the coherence of a text, such that missing
material in the text would be supplied or disturbances tolerated if present. The operation of inferencing
illustrates how receivers support coherence by making their own contributions to the sense of the text.

5. INFORMATIVITY
 It concerns the extend to which the occurrences of the text presented are expected vs. unexpected or
known vs. unknown/certain.
 Texts must contain the right amount of new information. Texts which display a lot of new information
are more interesting but more demanding as well. For DeB & D, the more unexpected a text is, the
more informative.

6. SITUATIONALITY
 It concerns the factors which make a text relevant to a situation of occurrence.

7. INTERTEXTUALITY
 It concerns the factors which make the utilization of one text dependent upon knowledge of one or
more previously encountered texts (i.e. the ways in which the production and reception of a given text
depends upon the participants' knowledge of other texts).

2.1.1.1 Expanding the notion of cohesion: Halliday and Hasan’s model

They distinguish 2 main types: Grammatical and Lexical cohesive devices

2.1.1.1.1 Grammatical cohesion

Subdivided into:
1. Reference: when two or more expressions in the text refer to the same person, thing or idea. Another
definition: when one item in a text points to another element for its interpretation.
 There are two types of reference, of which only the second one is cohesive:
 Exophoric reference, which refers to the situation:
Example 1: Look at that? (that = sth. in the situation)2
 Endophoric reference, when the referring expression refers to something mentioned in the text.
Example 2: A: ‘Look at the moon’,
B: ‘I can’t see it’  there is co-referentiality between it and the moon.
 Endophoric reference can be cataphoric or anaphoric.
 Cataphoric reference points forward the referring expression appears 1st and then the referent:
Example 3:
To see how it works, type VER and press ENTER. You will see this on your screen:

3 MS-DOS Version 6.00

 Anaphoric reference (by far the most common) points backwards the referent appears 1st and then
the referring expression.
Example 4:
It rained for day and night for two weeks. The basement flooded and everything was under water. It
spoilt all our calculations.

2
All examples are taken from different sources: Halliday and Hasan (1976), McCarthy (1991), Renkema
(1993), Hatch (1994), Halliday (1994) and Bloor and Bloor (1995).

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Dr. Mercedes Díez Prados (mercedes.diez@uah.es)

 There are 3 main types of cohesive reference:

 Personal reference
 Demonstrative reference
 Comparative reference
 Personal reference  they can be:
 Personal pronouns (masc., fem., neuter)
 Possessives (as modifier or head)
 Demonstratives it depends on the use of:
 Determiners (this, that, the)
 Adjuncts (here, now, then, there)
 Comparative  represented through the following elements to forge links w/ previously mentioned
entities.
 Adjectives like same, other, identical, better, more
 Adverbs like identically, similarly, less
 Practice: Can you recognize the cases of reference in the following examples:
 Personal:
West African dwarf sheep are found roaming about the towns and villages in many southern parts of West
Africa in small flocks. They thrive and breed successfully in areas of
trypanosomiasis risk. Their coat colour is either predominantly white with
irregular black patches, or black marked with white patches.
 Demonstrative:
Be careful of wasps, bees, and hornets. These are dangerous.
 Comparative
Beecher Stowe gives a moving account of the horrors of slavery. Clemens’ treatment of the issue
in the classic novel Hucleberry Finn is lighter but more subtle.
*** When readers/listeners come across a pronoun or a determiner, they are forced to mentally link it with
the nominal to make sense of the text. This has a very strong cohesive force (Bloor and Bloor 1995)
 Halliday and Hasan distinguish between two types of cohesive devices:
o Intrasentential links: those which work within the limits of the same sentence (a sentence
is defined by orthographical criteria: it starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop)
and
o Intersentential links: those that link two different sentences.
 HH focused exclusively on INTERsentential links, since, according to them,
grammar could account for all relations within the sentence.

2. Substitution: replacement of one element with another which is not a personal pronoun.
 In contrast to reference, substitution refers not to a specific entity but to a class of items. That is, the
main difference between reference and substitution is that, in the case of referential cohesion, the tie
exists between two or more references to the same concept, but with substitution we do not have
correferentiality, but rather a substitute for a word or group of words:
Reference:
Would you like this cake? I bought it this morning  co-referentiality
Substitution:
Would you like this cake? Or do you prefer the other one?  it replaces the word cake, but refers
to the general class of cakes. It is cohesive because the only way to interpret one is by looking at the
previous mention of cake.
 Substitution is used when the speaker/writer wishes to avoid repetition of a lexical item and thus uses
one of the grammatical resources of the lg. to replace the item.
 There are 3 types of substitution:
 Nominal
 Verbal
 Clausal
 Nominal one/ones, same: they can stand in place of (parts of ) NGps:
Examples:
(1) A: Would you like some sandwiches?
B: Please pass the ones with cucumber in.
(2) A: I’m having chicken and rice.
B: I’ll have the same.

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Dr. Mercedes Díez Prados (mercedes.diez@uah.es)

 Verbal any nonfinite form of the vb. do (plus, sometimes, additional words like it or that), can
stand in place of the lexical verb in a Verbal Gp.:
Examples:
(1) We met in Brazil. Do you remember?
Yes, we must have done in place of met in Brazil.
 Clausal  the words so and not stand in place of an entire clause and the meaning of the substitute
can only be interpreted in terms of what has previously been expressed.
(1) A: I do mean something else.
B: I thought so
(2) A: And I would like to take advantage of Lady Bracknell’s temporary absence [...]
B: I would certainly advise you to do so.
 The equivalent negative expression is illustrated in the following example:
(3) A: Well, I don’t intend to get killed if I can help it.
B: I suppose not.

3. Ellipsis: implies deletion of a word, phrase or clause. It is also called ‘substitution by zero’.
 There are also 3 types:
 Nominal
 Verbal
 Clausal
 Nominal  the head noun is not realized
A: Have you got the cucumber sandwiches cut for Lady Bracknell?
B: Yes, sir (Algemon inspects them and takes two [E].)
 Verbal  common in all short answers and responses. In the following example the lexical verb is
omitted:
A: I’ll help you. I’ll save you.
B: You can’t [E]
A: I can [E]
 It is also possible to omit the finite and realize the lexical verb:
The boys were filling the bags, the men [E] moving them to the dikes.
 Clausal  when an entire clause is omitted.
Get up quick and open the door. If you don’t [E], they will break it down.

4. Conjunction or conjunctives
 Even though they are classified as grammatical, conjunctions or conjunctives are half way between
grammatical and lexical, because, despite the fact that they have a grammatical function of linking
words, conjunctives themselves carry a meaning load.
 Conjunction is the cohesive tie between clauses or sections in a text to demonstrate a meaningful
relationship between them. When the linking is established between ideas, events or phenomena we
talk about conjunctives. It is done through conjunctive adjuncts (e.g., then, for this reason, on the other
hand).
 There are different sub-classifications of conjunctives. The original, and probably, more well-known
is the one established in Cohesion in English, which sub-divides them into:
 Additive (and, furthermore, again, also, moreover, besides, additionally, in addition)
 Adversative (but, yet, however, though, nevertheless, still, on the other hand, instead, rather)
 Causal (so, thus, therefore, consequently, accordingly, because of that)
 Temporal (then, next, afterwards, after that, subsequently, previously)
Practice: What conjunctives linking different sentences can you identify? What type are they?
It is easy to identify theoretical conflicts in management accounting. For example, contingency
theorists argue that the type of management accounting system which is appropriate to an
organization is dependent on a number of organization-specific variables. By contrast, the emphasis
in much of the management accounting research published between the late 1950s ant the mid-
1970s was on the development of the specific normative models which were allegedly suitable for
use in a wide variety of organizations without any context-specific adaptation.

There is a severe shortage of mathematics teachers in Britain and America. As a consequence of

this, far too many people leave school without any interest in pursuing the study of subjects like
engineering that rely on mathematical concepts. Two possible solutions are available. Firstly, it

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Dr. Mercedes Díez Prados (mercedes.diez@uah.es)

should be a priority to train more teachers; secondly, teachers’ salaries should be made competitive
with other jobs in order to attract young people to the profession.

 Conjunctives have the rhetorical function of signaling the direction of argument.

 The more elaborate classification, due to its many sub-divisions, is the one presented in Halliday
(1994).

3.1.1.1.1 Lexical Cohesion: Reiteration and collocation

Lexical
 Cohesion between lexical items takes place when the choice of an item relates to the lexical choices
that have gone before.
 There are different types of lexical relations, since they have been modified by Halliday and Hasan
on several occasions. Here I include the one I think is the most comprehensive one (i.e., it includes all
subtypes):
 There are two main types:
a) Reiteration, and within this:
(a) Repetition: this includes both repetition of the same item with exactly identical form or repetition
with word class change (e.g., repeat and repetition).
(b) Synonym: in order to avoid repeating a word, the speaker/writer may use another word with similar
or the same meaning (e.g., policeman and cop).
 Open question: whether there exist true synonyms or whether each term adds different
connotations (like in the case of policeman and cop, there are differences in terms of register).
 Due to this difficulty to find true synonyms, we can also have what is called near-synonym to
name the relationship in a text between two terms which refer to the same entity, although they
may not be exact synonyms or may not be synonyms in a different context.
Examples:
(1) boss and employer is a given text
(2) left, exodus, abandoned, deserted, evacuated, moved all entail the core meaning of leave.
 In the same way that we can have repetition with word class change, there also exists synonymy
with word class change (e.g., breadth and wide).
(c) Antonymy: they can be exclusive categories (e.g., male vs. female) because they are the only two
possibilities (i.e., binary absolute opposites) or words with opposite or contrastive meanings.
(d) Superordinate: and hyponym: when two words are related because one, more general word
includes another one in its meaning. The more general term (the name of the class) is the
superordinate and each member of the class is the hyponym.
Example:
The word country (class: superordinate) includes elements such as Brazil, Spain, United States,
etc. (hyponyms)
 A relationship can also be established between the members of the class: co-hyponyms.
(e) General noun: an extreme case of superordinate (words with a very broad meaning). General
nouns would be: person, people, place, thing and idea
Example
The idea outlined above should provide the basis for the practical analysis of texts.
 A special case of general nouns, are summary nouns or anaphoric nouns (A-nouns), which are used
to summarize or refer back to sections in a text. They are extremely important in academic writing.
Examples:
This explanation has been challenged by [...]
The controversy outlined in the first section is [...]
However, serious questions have been raised about even the few proposals outlined above
[...]
(f) Metonymy: is the kind of relationship established between the whole and its parts.
At its six-month checkup, the brakes [part] had to be repaired. In general, however, the
car [whole] was in good condition.
*** Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between a hyponymic relation and a metonymic one:
Is something a member of the class X or part of that X?

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Dr. Mercedes Díez Prados (mercedes.diez@uah.es)

b) Collocation: two words collocate when they regularly co-occur, that is, they often occur in the same
surroundings. When 2 words tend to occur together in texts, we tend to expect them together. Some
examples would be:
 sheep: wool
 fires: hot: burn
 congress: politician
 illness: doctor
 garage: repair
 government: politician
 Extreme cases of collocation are clichés (fixed expressions or idioms).
 H & H also include in this categorization of collocation pairs of words taken from ordered series
(e.g. the days of the week).
 The cohesive effect of pairs of collocates depends on their tendency to share the same lexical
environment (i.e. to occur in collocation), rather than on any systematic semantic relationships
that may be established between them.
 Collocation varies w/ writer, genre and time.

3.1.1.2 Expanding the notion of coherence: Downing’s proposal

 Downing (1999) presents an approach to coherence that actually brings together cognitive and textual
factors that are responsible for coherence.
 Her definition of coherence:

A cognitive network which, presumably, will contribute significantly to the internal stability of a text or
discourse, and even to the relative stability of a body of similar texts and discourses.

- a cognitive phenomenon
- responsible for the stability of the text of the same type
- as such, it depends (in part, at least) on the receiver

 Coherence is a matter of degree

 Texture is a matter of degree
 The achievement of coherence is a collaborative process: producer and receiver
 the writer anticipates the possibilities of interpretation on the part of the reader and
 the reader uses his/her knowledge (of discourse, the world) in order to find coherence.
 According to Downing, There are 4 frameworks that contribute to coherence:
1. Schemata (seen in Session 3 in detail), to apply it to the analysis of literary texts.
2. Genres and text types:
 Genre embraces everyday genres (not only literary ones): political speech, a letter to the editor, a
cookbook recipe, the report of an interview, etc.
 Classification of text types:
- Narrative: Facts or concepts in the temporal context.
- Found in different genres: stories, biographies, jokes, etc.
- Expository: analysis into or synthesis from constituent elements of concepts.
- Descriptive: factual phenomena in the spatial context.
- Argumentative: relations between concepts, establishing similarities and contrasts.
- Supporting or weakening arguments.
- Procedural: future behavior of the text producer/receiver.
3. Macrostructures & superstructure:
 Macrostructures are means for achieving global coherence. A macrostructure is the global meaning
of discourse (Renkema 1993: 57)
 Superstructure: D contains not only a meaning structure, but also a form structure, a superstructure
(Renkema 1993: 60). E.g. a letter of application (it has a specific form): introduction to the
application + a reference to the CV or references.

4. Topicality: Topic can be roughly defined as ‘what a stretch of discourse is about’ (topic =
‘aboutness’).

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Dr. Mercedes Díez Prados (mercedes.diez@uah.es)

3.1.1.3 Functional linguistics: Register model

The concept of register in its threefold division into field, tenor and mode, and the relationship of each of
the components with the three metafunctions distinguished by Halliday: ideational, interpersonal and
textual, respectively.

 Field refers to what is actually happening, that is, to the social action that is taking place; as such,
it is reflected in the ideational or experiential meanings of text, namely, the types of processes
reflected (material, mental, verbal, etc.), the participants (actor, goal, beneficiary, etc.) and
circumstances associated to these processes.
 Tenor refers to who is taking part, the statuses and roles of the participants and their
interrelationships; this feature is expressed through the interpersonal function represented by the
concepts of subject, predicate, complement and adjunct, as well as mood. According to Halliday,
the ideational or experiential meaning of language is a way of reflecting, whereas the interpersonal
one is a way of acting.
 Mode refers to what part language is playing in the particular situation, including the channel
(spoken versus written) used; the corresponding metafunction would be the textual one, as
reflected in the order of the elements in the configuration of sentences in the text (their themes and
rhemes) and the cohesive devices linking them.

Disciplines in Discourse Analysis

Discipline
of origin

Anthropology Sociology Linguistics Psychology Philosophy

Ethnography Interactional Ethnomethodology Variation Text Functional Psycholinguistics Pragmatics

of communication Sociolinguistics Approach Linguistics Linguistics

Conversation Speech Gricean

Analysis Act pragmatics
Theory

Figure 1. Approaches according to discipline of origin.

3.1.1.4 Towards an integration of approaches:

Layers of analysis:

 Non critical discursive layers:

1. Analyzing the contextual parameters of the text.
2. Analyzing the text structure.
3. Analyzing the discourse type.

 Towards a critical analysis of the text.

Integration of approaches:

 Analysis of the contextual parameters of the text by means of:

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Dr. Mercedes Díez Prados (mercedes.diez@uah.es)

 Identifying the register components (field, tenor and mode (Halliday’s SFL).
 Identifying other contextual variables not present in the register model, complementing it
with Hymes’s SPEAKING Model.
 Analysis of the textual structure to discover:
 Cohesion and coherence (text-centred notions in B&D 1981)
 Rhetorical and interactional patterns.
 Analysis of the discourse type:
 Identifying genre
 Identifying text type

From the acritical phases to the critical one:

 Critical analysis of the text: identifying social significance of discourse in terms of ideology and value
judgments (implicit and explicit).
 Approach adopted: closely follows Fairclough (1989) critical: connections between language,
power and ideology that may be hidden for the addressees of a text.
 Makes use of acritical ling. approaches  based on DA but goes beyond that.

Fairclough’s (1989) Stages of CDA

1. Description of a text
2. Interpretation of the relationship between text and interaction
3. Explanation of the relationship between interaction and social context

Description of the formal properties

- What experiential, relational and expressive values do words and grammar have?
- What metaphors are use?
- How are (simple) sentences linked together?
- What interactional conventions are used?
- What larger-scale structures does the text have?

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Dr. Mercedes Díez Prados (mercedes.diez@uah.es)

GETTYSBURG ADDRESS
NOVEMBER 19, 1863
(1) Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in

Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal* 3.

(2) Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and

so dedicated, can long endure. (3) We are met on a great battle-field of that war. (4) We have come to

dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation

might live. (5) It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

(6) But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we cannot hallow -- this ground.

(7) The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to

add or detract.* (8) The world will little note, nor longer remember what we say here, but it can never forget

what they did here.* (9) It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which

they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.* (10a) It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the

great task remaining before us (10b)-- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that

cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion (10c)-- that we here highly resolve that

these dead shall not have died in vain (10d)-- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom

(10e)-- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.*

3
Asterisks indicate points of audience reaction, such as applause.

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