Discourse analysis

May 2012
Carina Jahani
carina.jahani@lingfil.uu.se
 Course structure
• 7 lectures with some exercies
• Examination:
– written paper
– oral presentation
– written exam
 Basic concepts
• What is discourse analysis?
“Discourse analysis is, one may say, a fuzzy discipline,
perhaps more oriented toward chaos theory than toward
the kinds of paradigms applied linguists are more
accustomed to using. The obvious reason for the
fuzziness lies in the hugenumber of variable implicated in
the process of text generation and text recognition…
Discourse analysts will need to struggle along with careful
descriptive approaches, dealing with as many of the
variables as possible, but recognizing that any presently
conceived model will necessarily be incomplete.” (Kaplan
and Grabe 2002: 216)
 Cognitive models
Have a psychological rather than a linguistic basis, a
concern with the cognitive processes underlying text
production and text comprehension. Text is seen as
an integral part of human social and psychological
activities. Texts are the products of problem-solving
activities.
 Critical Discourse Analysis

Text and talk play a key role in maintaining and

legitimating inequality, injustice, and oppression
in society
Relate discourses to the social situations they
belong to, thus not only structure-focused.
Has explicit social and political goals.
 Anthropological linguistics
the interpretation of text rather than only its
linguistic elements, the communicative nature
of language and its uses in real-world settings
 Sociolinguistics
Sociological perspective on language and
communication
author/speaker involving the reader/listener
readers/listeners are expected to actively re-
create the text in their own mind, to construct
their own personal overtones to the information
 Tagmemics
Tagmemics makes the kind of distinction made
between phone and phoneme at higher levels of
linguistic analysis; contextually conditioned
synonyms are considered different instances of a
single tagmeme. Emic – etic.
Emic - insider-analysis
Etic – outsider-analysis
Language is ONE component in a unified field of
human behaviour.
 Systemic approach
• Cohesion
(componentional cohesion, organic cohesion,
structural cohesion)
• Grammatical metaphor
• Genre
 Text linguistics
Functional linguistics
How syntactic structures are used for discourse
purposes
Grammar must have evolved as a mechanism for
speeding up the processing of both local and
global aspects of text coherence
Givón, Dooley and Levinsohn
 Text linguistic approach
• What is a text?
– Unity of time
– Unity of place
– Unity of action
– Unity of participants

(story, chapter, section, paragraph, proposition)

(information flow, grounding, logical coherence, relation
between propositions, reported speech, deixis,
participant reference)
 Spoken versus written discourse
• spoken discourse (dialogue) – written
discourse (monologue)
(But note also oral narrative discourse)
• Monologue versus dialogue (conversation)
• Conversation analysis
(outside the scope of this course)
 Narrative versus non-narrative
discourse
All monologue is not narration
• Contingent temporal succession:
a time line, where the events are
chained to earlier and later events

• Agent orientation
events which are controlled by an agent
Four common types of monologue
(written or oral)
Agent orientation
+ -
Temporal + NARRATIVE PROCEDURAL
succession - BEHAVIOURAL EXPOSITORY
 FOCUS IN THIS COURSE
• NARRATIVE MONOLOGUE
• oral storytelling
• written fiction
• “life stories”
• etc. etc.
(But note that dialogue can be, and is often
embedded in a story)
 oral – written production:
important differences
• Frequency of repetition
(e.g. speech orienters, tail – head linkage, evidential
markers)
• Deviations from standard word order
• Text organization
• Hedges (you know, well, sort of)
• Vocabulary
• Paralinguistic signals (mimicry, voice, intonation
versus punctuation)
 Coherence
a coherent text can be structured into ONE single
overall mental representation
Mental representation:
the text (internal contextualization)
prior knowledge and expectations (heavily based on
culture and other pre-conditions)
(external contextualization)
coherence must be judged after reading/hearing
the whole text
 Cohesion
the use of linguistic means to signal coherence
Common types of cohesion:
1. Identity (Identical forms)
repetition
lexical replacement
pronouns and other pro-forms
substitution
ellipsis
 Cohesion
2. Lexical relations
hyponymy
part-whole
collocation
 Cohesion
3. Morphosyntactic patterns
consistency of inflectional categories
echoing utterances
discourse pragmatic structuring

4. Signals of relations between propositions

5. Intonation patterns