Approaches to discoourse analysis

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Introduction
The term discourse analysis is very ambiguous. Roughly speaking, it refers to attempts to study
the organisation of language above the sentence or above the clause, and therefore to study larger
linguistic units, such as conversational exchanges or written texts. It follows that discourse
analysis is also concerned with language use in social contexts, and in particular with interaction
or dialogue between speakers. There are many approaches to discourse analysis. Approaches to
discourse analysis belongs to different disciplines.

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Discourse Analysis:
Discourse has occupied many aspects of everyday life. Learning how to engage in discourse is
one of the most important goals in language learning and teaching. It pays attention to different
patterns in discourse and to focus on context and linguistic strategies that are most relevant .
Discourse Analysis involves Real Text not invented, constructed and artificial text.
Discourse Analysis works with Utterances not independent sentences
Approaches to Discourse
Deborah Schiffrin “Approaches to Discourse” (1994) singles out 6 major approaches to
discourse:
• the speech act approach;
• interactional sociolinguistics;
• the ethnography of communication;
• pragmatic approach;
• conversational analysis;
• variationists approach.
Speech Acts
Utterances are used to do things; they are actions; what John Austin called performatives.
In linguistics, an utterance defined in terms of a speaker’s intention and the effect it has on a
listener.
Speech-act theory, was introduced by Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin (How to Do Things With
Words, 1962) and further developed by American philosopher J.R. Searle, considers the types of
acts that utterances can be said to perform:
J.L Austin observed that ‘many utterances do not communicate information, but are
equivalent to actions, e.g.
• I apologise…’
• I promise….’
• ‘I will….’ (at a wedding’
• ‘I name this ship….’
Performatives:
Austin called such utterances performatives, which he saw as distinct from statements that
convey information (constatives).
I christen/name this ship The Queen Elisabeth (performative).

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Maurice Garin won the Tour de France in 1903 (constative)
Performatives cannot be true or false.
Explict vs implicit performatives:
• Explicit performatives are performative utterances that contain a performative verb that
makes explicit what kind of act is being performed.
 I promise to come to your talk tomorrow afternoon.
• implicit performatives are performative utterances in which there is no such verb.
 I’ll come to your talk tomorrow afternoon.
Searle’s Five Categories of Speech Acts
Representatives: the speaker is committed in varying degrees to the truth of a proposition:
e.g. ‘affirm’, ‘believe,’ ‘conclude’, ‘report’;
I think the Berlin Wall came down in 1989
Directives: the speaker tries to do something
e.g. ‘ask’, ‘challenge’, ‘command’, ‘request’.
Pass me the towel, will you?
Commissives: the speaker is committed in varying degrees, to a certain course of action,
e.g. ‘bet’, ‘guarantee,’ ‘pledge’, ‘promise’ ‘swear’.
That’s the last time I’ll waste my money on so- called bargains
Expressives: the speaker expresses an attitude about a state of affairs,
e.g., ‘apologise’, ‘deplore’, ‘thank’, ‘welcome’-
Well done, Elisabeth!
Commissives: the speaker is committed in varying degrees, to a certain course of action,
e.g. ‘bet’, ‘guarantee,’ ‘pledge’, ‘promise’ ‘swear’.
That’s the last time I’ll waste my money on so- called bargains
Expressives: the speaker expresses an attitude about a state of affairs,

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e.g., ‘apologise’, ‘deplore’, ‘thank’, ‘welcome’-
Well done, Elisabeth!
Declarations: the speaker alters the status quo by making the utterance,
e.g., I resign, you’re offside’, ‘I name this child’, ‘you’re nicked’, ‘you’re busted, punk.’
The three stages of a (successful) speechact
• the locutionary act or the locution: the act of communication by the production of an
utterance;
• the illocutionary act or illocution: in other words, that is the message that is transmitted,
which may not always correspond to the literal meaning of the words;
• the perlocutionary act: that is the particular effect of the utterance, which does not
necessarily correspond to the locutionary act.
Felicity conditions
the person performing the speech act has to have authority to do so – only certain people are
authorised to perform certain speech acts;
the speech act has to be performed in the appropriate manner (sometimes this involves respecting
precise wording), this can also include the demeanour
• sincerity conditions have to be present: the speech act must be performed in a sincere
manner: verbs such as promise, vow, or guarantee are only valid if they are uttered
sincerely.
Difference between direct and indirect speech acts
• A direct match between a sentence type and an illocutionary force, equals a direct speech
act.
• In addition, explicit performatives, which happen to be in the declarative form, are also
taken to be direct speech acts, because they have their illocutionary force explicitly
named by the performative verb in the main part of the sentence.
• If there is no direct relationship between a sentence type and an illocutionary force, it
indicates an indirect speech act .When an explicit performative is used to make a request
it functions as a direct speech act; the same is the case when an imperative is employed.
By comparison, when an interrogative is used to make a request, we have an indirect
speech act.

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Interactional Sociolinguistics: Gumperz 1982, Goffman 1959-1981
– Focus on how people from different cultures may share grammatical knowledge of a language,
but differently contextualize what is said such that very different messages are produced
(Gumperz, 1982).
– Centrally concerned with the importance of context in the production and
interpretation of discourse.
– Units of analysis: grammatical and prosodic features in interactions.
– Gumperz demonstrated that interactants from different socio-cultural backgrounds
may “hear” and understand discourse differently according to their interpretation
contextualisation cues in discourse. E.g. intonation contours, ‘speaking for
another’, alignment, gender.
– Schiffrin (1987): focused on quantitative interactive sociolinguistic analysis, esp.
discourse markers (defined as ‘sequentially dependent elements which bracket
units of talk).
– Basic concern: the accomplishment of conversational coherence.
– She argues for the importance of both qualitative and quantitative / distributional
analysis in order to determine the function of the different discourse markers in
conversation.
Ethnography of Communication
(Dell Hymes (1972b, 1974)

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The approachis concerned with:
(1) the linguistic resources people use in context, not just grammar in the traditional sense,
but the socially situated uses and meanings of words, their relations, and sequential forms
of expression;
(2) the various media used when communicating, and their comparative analysis, such as
online "messaging" and how it compares to face–to–face messaging;
(3) the way verbal and nonverbal signs create and reveal social codes of identity,
relationships, emotions, place, and communication itself.
Prime unit of analysis: speech event.
Definition: ‘The speech event is to what analysis of verbal interaction what the sentence
is to grammar … It represents an extension in the size of the basic analytical unit from
the single utterance to stretches of utterances, as well as a shift in focus from … text to …
interaction’.
– Speech event refers to ‘activities … that are directly governed by rules or norms
for the use of speech’ (Hymes 1972:56)
– Speech event comprises components (Hymes SPEAKING formula).
– Analysis of these components of a speech event is central to what became known
as ethnography of communication or ethnography of speaking, with the
ethnographer’s aim being to discover rules of appropriateness in speech events.
– Genres often coincides with speech eventsThe ethnographic framework has led
to broader notions of communicative competence.

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– Problem: Lack of explicitness in Hymes’ account on the relationship between
genre and other components of the speaking grid and their expression in language
and
– Recognition of the close relationship between speech events and their
social/cultural contexts.
Pragmatics (Grice1975, Leech 1983, Levinson 1983)
 It Formulates conversational behavior in terms of general “principles” rather than
rules. Pragmatics pays attention on “ context”
 At the base of pragmatic approach is to conversation analysis is Gricean’s co-
operative principle (CP).
 This principle seeks to account for not only how participants decide what to DO
next in conversation, but also how interlocutors go about interpreting what the
previous speaker has just done.
 This principle is the broken down into specific maxims: Quantity (say only as
much as necessary), Quality (try to make your contribution one that is true),
Relation (be relevant), and manner (be brief and avoid ambiguity).
 Provides useful means of characterizing different varieties of conversation, e.g. in
interactions, one can deliberately try to be provocative or consensual.
 Significant problem: it implies that conversations occur co-operatively, between
equals where power is equally distributed etc.
 In reality: conversations involve levels of disagreement and resistance; power is
constantly under contestation.
ConversationAnalysis (CA)
(Harold Garfinkel1960s-1970s)
What is conversation analysis?
CA says that talk makes things happen, and the conversation analyst has something to
say about how.
CA is now a settled discipline, developed since the pioneering work in the sixties by the
sociologist Harvey Sacks
o Garfinkel (sociologist) concern: to understand how social members make sense of
everyday life.
o Sack, Schegloff, Jefferson (1973)tried to explain how conversation can happen at
all.
o CA is a branch of ethnomethodology.

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What does CA do?
It stydies about:
 opening and closing conversation
 topic-organization
 turn-taking
 adjacency pairs
 next speaker selection
 Two grossly apparent facts: a) only one person speaks at a time, and b) speakers
change recurs. Thus conversation is a ‘turn taking’ activity.
 Speakers recognize points of potential speekar change – turn constructional unit
(TCU).
 CA identified TCU as the critical units of conversation, it has not specified
exactly how a TCU boundary can be recognized in any situation.
 Models conversation as infinitely generative turn-taking machine, where
interactants try to avoid lapse: the possibility that no one is speaking.
 Contribution: the identification of ‘adjacency pairs’: conversational relatedness
operating between adjacent utterances.
 Adjacency pair: first and second pair parts.
 Major problems:
a) lack of systematicity- thus quantitative analysis is impossible; 2) limited I its
ability to deal comprehensively with complete, sustained interactions; 3)
though offers a powerful interpretation of conversation as dynamic interactive
achievement, it is unable to say just what kind of achievement it is.
Variation Analysis
(Labov 1972a, Labov and Waletzky1967)
o L & W argue that fundamental narrative structures are evident in spoken narratives of
personal experience.
o Developed by Lobov (1972) and in particular his description of the structure of spoken
narratives has made a major contribution to the analysis of discourse. Structure of a
narrative of personal experience:
o 1-Abstract (summary of story, with its point) 4-Evaluation (narrator’s attitude
towards narrative)
o 2-Orientation (in respect of place, time and situation) 5-Resolution (protagonist’s
approach to crisis)

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o 3-Complication (temporal sequence of events, 6- Coda (point about narrative
as a whole)
o Strength: its clarity and applicability.
o Problems: data was obtained from interviews.
o Variationists’ approach to discourse stems from quantitative of linguistic change and
variation.
o Although typically focused on social and linguistic constraints on semantically equivalent
variants, the approach has also been extended to texts
Approaches to Studying
Discourse
Focus of Research Research
Question
structural CA Sequence of
structures
Why that
next?
Variationists Structural
categories within
texts
Why that
form?
Functional Speech Acts Communicative
acts
How to do
things with
words?
Ethnography of
Communication
Communication as
cultural behaviour
How does
discourse
reflect
culture?
Interactional
Sociolinguistics
Social and
linguistic
meanings created
during
communication
What are
they
doing?

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Pragmatics Meaning in
interaction
What does
the
speaker
intend to
say?
Functional approachto discourse:
• Roman Jakobson:language performs six functions:
 Addressor(emotive);
 Context (referential)
 Addressee (conative);
 Contact (phatic);
 Message (poetic);
 Code (metalinguistic).
He says Utterances have multiple functions;
• The major concern: discourse analysis can turn out into a more general and broader
analysis of language functions. Or it will fail to make a special place for the analysis of
relationships between utterances.
Structural-Functional Approaches to SpokenDiscourse
• Refers to two major approaches to discourse analysis which have relevance to the
analysis of casual conversation
• They are the Birmingham School and Systemic Functional Linguistics.
Birmingham School
Model developed by Sinclair et.al (1975) for
analysis of classroom discourse.
Considering teacher’s questions-pupils’ answers discourse
they identified units of pattern (bounded by discourse
markers such as ‘Now , then’ and ‘Right’) which they called ‘Transaction

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The next level of pattern consists of
question-answer-feedback which is called ‘Exchange’.
The next level represent a single action such as
questioning, answering and feeding back which is called ‘Move’.
Finally there are local, micro-action (such as nominating a student, acknowledge)
which is called ‘Acts’. These levels form a rank-scale in which any level
is composed of all the levels below it.
Systematic functional linguistics
Systematic functional linguistics is one variety of functional linguistics, its distinctive feature
being the concern to explain the internal organization of language in terms of the functions that it
has evolved to serve (Halliday, 1978,1994).
It investigate how language is structured to achieve socio-cultural meaning, it focuses on the
analysis of texts, considered in relationship to social context in which they occur.
It is similar to conversational analysis, both are concerned to describe the relationship between
language and its social context.
However the focus of SFL is on the way that language is organized to enable conversation to
function as it does, but CA focuses on social life and sees conversation as a key to that.

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Conclusion
Discourse studies language above the clause and sentence it is concerned with context. The use
of language in context and out of context. Discourse analysis is not a discipline which exists on
its own. It is influenced by other disciplines and influences them as well. There are many
approaches of discourse analysis. These approaches are relate to different disciplines.. Every
approach explain different point of view about it. Speech act theory says that utterance are used
to perform action. Conversational analysis related to sociology One of the concerns in sociology
is to understand how social members make sense of everyday life. To address this problem it
pays attention to commonplace activities such as conversation. sociology considers
conversation as a particularly appropriate and accessible resource for its enquiry to the most.
Ethnography of communication is Concerned with understanding the social context of linguistic
interactions: ‘who says what to whom, when, where. Why, and how’.Prime unit of analysis:
speechevent. Pragmatics studies about the context in which language is being used. Variation
analysis studies about a Structural categories within texts. Interact ional sociolinguistics studies
about Communication as a way of signaling social activities and social identities. Attention to
strategies speakers use to signal activity and identity.

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References:
 www.wikipedia.com
 www.slideshare.com
 https://www.google.com.pk/?gws_rd=cr,ssl&ei=Sja0
VJyoM8O0UaXYgOgE#q=approaches+to+discourse
+analysis
 http://linguistlist.org/pubs/journals/get-
journals.cfm?JournalID=6537
 https://jumarohisnanto.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/ap
proaches-to-discourse-analysis/

Approaches to discoourse analysis

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