Week 8 9

APPLIED LINGUISTICS AND
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
 Discourse analysis is concerned with the
study of the relationship between language
and the contexts in which it is used
(McCarthy, 1997).
 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 institutionalized
forms of talk (McCarthy, 1997).

 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.

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
FOR LANGUAGE
TEACHERS
 Arising out of a variety of disciplines,
including linguistics, sociology, psychology,
and anthropology, discourse analysis has
built a significant foundation for itself in
Applied Linguistics.
 These disciplines that contributed to
discourse analysis shared a common
interest in ‘language in use’, in ‘how real
people use real language’, as opposed to
studying artificially created sentences.

Why discourse analysis is of
immediate interest to language
teachers?
 Discourse analysis is therefore of
immediate interest to language teachers
because they too have questions of
how people use language, uppermost in
their minds:
 (i) when they design teaching materials,
and
 (ii) when they engage learners in
exercises and activities aimed at making
them proficient users of the target
language.

Discourse analysis enables teachers to get
insight into how:
 (i) texts are structured beyond sentence-level’ ;
 (ii) talk follows regular patterns in a wide range
of different situations’ ;
 (iii) such complex areas as intonation, operate
in communication’ ;
 ‘(iv) discourse norms (the underlying rules that
speakers and writers adhere to) and their
realisations (the actual language forms which
reflect those rules) in language differ from
culture to culture, etc.

WRITTEN DISCOURSE
 Without a command of the rich and
variable resources of the grammar
offered by the English language, the
construction of natural and sophisticated
discourse is impossible (McCarthy,
1997).
 Spoken and written discourses display
grammatical connections between
individual clauses and utterances –
grammatical cohesion and textuality

Grammatical cohesion and
textuality
 These grammatical links can be
classified under three broad types:
 (1). Reference (or co-reference)
 (2). Ellipsis/substitution
 (3). Conjunction

(1). Reference
 Reference items in English include
pronouns (e.g. he, she, it, him, they,
etc.), demonstrative (this, that, these,
those), the article the, and items like
such a. (McCarthy, 1997).
 The following are examples of different
types of reference at work:

Example 1
 “The schoolmaster was leaving the village,
and everybody seemed sorry. The miller at
Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted
cart and horse to carry his goods to the city of
his destination, about twenty miles off, such a
vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the
departing teacher’s effects”
 The italicised items refer.
 (from the novel, Jude the Obscure, by Thomas
Hardy) cited in McCarthy (1997).

(i). Anaphoric reference
 For the text to be coherent, we assume
that him in ‘lent him the small white tilted
cart’ is the schoolmaster introduced
earlier;
 Likewise, his destination is the
schoolmaster’s.
 Referents for him and his can be
confirmed by looking back in the text;
this is called anaphoric reference
(looking backward).

(ii). Exophoric reference
 Such a also links back to the cart in the
previous sentence. The novel opens with
the schoolmaster leaving the village.
 Which schoolmaster? Which village?
 On the previous page of the novel, the two
words At Marygreen stand alone, so we
reasonable assume that Marygreen is the
name of the village, and that the character
is (or has been) schoolteacher of that
village.

 We are using more than just the text
here to establish referents; the author
expects us to share a world with him
independent of the text, with typical
villages and their populations
(everybody), their schoolmasters and
millers.
 Thus, references to assumed, shared
worlds outside of the text are exophoric
references (looking outward).

Example 2
 “They pressed round him in ragged
fashion to take their money. Andy,
Dave, Phil, Stephen, Bob.”
 (Graham Swift, 1983, The Sweet Shop
Owner) cited in McCarthy (1997).

(iii). Cataphoric reference
 In this particular text, neither anaphoric nor
exophoric reference supplies the identity of
they; we have to read on, and are given
their identities in the second sentence.
 Where referents are withheld in this way,
we can talk of cataphoric reference
(looking forward).
 This is a classic device for engaging the
reader’s attention; referents can be
withheld for quite long stretches of text.

(2). Ellipsis and
Substitution
 Ellipsis is the omission of elements normally
required by the grammar which the
speaker/writer assumes are obvious from
the context and therefore need not be
raised (McCarthy, 1997).
 Ellipsis is distinguished by the structure
having some ‘missing’ element.
 Exp. “The children will carry the small
boxes, the adults the large ones.”
 (‘will carry’ is supplied from the first clause
to the second. This type of main-verb
ellipsis is anaphoric.)

Types of Ellipsis
 English has broadly three types of
ellipsis: nominal, verbal and clausal.
 (i). Nominal Ellipsis - often involves
omission of a noun headword:
 Exp. “Sally liked the pink tiles; myself I
preferred the green.”

(ii). Verbal ellipsis
 Two very common types of verbal-group
ellipsis are what Thomas (1987) cited in
McCarthy (1997) calls echoing and
auxiliary contrasting.
 Echoing repeats an element from the
verbal group:
 Exp. A. “Will anyone be waiting?”
 B. “Mary will, I should think.”

 Auxiliary contrasting is when the
auxiliary changes:
 Exp. A. Has he remarried?
 B. No, but he will one day, I’m
sure.

 In English, varying degrees of ellipsis are
also possible within the same verbal group:
 Exp. A. Should any one have been
told?
 B. Siva should.
 ___ should have.
 ___ should have been.
 (these variants are not directly translatable to
other languages and will have to be learnt.)

(iii). Clausal ellipsis
 (iii). In English, individual clause elements may
be omitted; especially common are subject-
pronoun omissions (‘doesn’t matter’, ‘hope so’,
‘sorry, can’t help you’, etc.).
 Whole stretches of clausal components may
also be omitted:
 Exp. “She said she would take early
retirement as soon as she could and she
has.”
 (She said she would take early retirement as soon as
she could and she has done it.)

Substitution
 Substitution is similar to ellipsis, in that, in English, it
operates either at nominal, verbal or clausal level
(McCarthy, 1997).
 The items commonly used for substitution in English
are:
 One(s): I offered her a seat. She said she didn’t want
one.
Do: Did Larry take that letter? He might have done.
So/not: Do you need a lift? If so, wait for me; if not,
I’ll see you there.
Same: He chose the roast chicken; I chose the
same.

 Most learners practise and drill these
items in sentence-level grammar
exercises. They are not easily and
directly translatable to other languages.
Many common, everyday substitutions
tend to be learnt idiomatically (e.g.
responses such as ‘I think/hope
so’)(McCarthy, 1997).

Question
 What are the problems faced by
students in the Malaysian language
classroom?

(3). Conjunction
 A conjunction does not set off a search
backward or forward for its referent, but
does presuppose a textual sequence,
and signals a relationship between
segments of the discourse
 Important questions:
What roles do they play in creating
discourse?
How are they distributed in speech and
writing?

 Halliday (1985) cited in McCarthy (1997)
offers a scheme for the classification of
conjunctive relations and includes
phrasal types as well as single-word
everyday items such as and, but, or, etc.
 The following are some examples of
Halliday’s classification based on three
category headings:

Elaboration, extension,
enhancement
Type and sub-types Examples
 Elaboration – apposition
- clarification
 Extension - addition
- variation
 Enhancement – spatio-
temporal
- causal-
conditional
 in other words
 or rather
 and/but
 alternatively
 there/previously
 consequently/in that
case

 Based on natural data, especially
spoken, a few conjunctions are (and,
but, so, and then) are overwhelmingly
frequent.
 There is also a wide use of and, where
the reader/listener can supply additive,
adversative, causal and temporal
meanings, depending on contextual
information (McCarthy, 1997).

Examples
 “She’s intelligent. And she’s very reliable.’
(additive)
 “I’ve lived here ten years and I’ve never
heard of that shop.” (adversative: could be
substituted with but)
 “He fell in the river and caught a chill.”
(causal)
 “I got up and made my breakfast.”
(temporal
sequence)

 Equally, the possible choices of
conjunction will often overlap in
meaning, with little overall difference
(McCarthy, 1997):
 Example-
 A: “What about this meeting then?”
 B: “I may go, (and, or, but, though,
then) I may not; it
all depends.”

Question
 What are the problems faced by
Malaysian learners?

SPOKEN DISCOURSE
 Spoken language is a vast subject and
there is a variety of different types of
speech in people’s everyday lives.
However, casual conversation is almost
certainly the most frequent for most
people. The rest will depend on our
daily occupation and what sorts of
contacts we have with others (McCarthy,
1997).
 Examples of common types of speech:

Common types of
speech
 Telephone calls (business and private)
 Service encounters (shops, post offices, etc.)
 Interviews (jobs, journalistic, in official settings)
 Classroom (classes, seminars, lectures, tutorials)
 Rituals (prayers, sermons, weddings)
 Monologues (speeches, stories, jokes)
 Language-in-action (talk accompanying doing: fixing,
cooking, assembling, demonstrating, etc.)
 Casual conversation (strangers, friends, intimates)
 Organising and directing people (work, home, in the
street)
 Etc.

Characteristics of conversation
CHARACTERISTICS
OF CONVERSATION
Adjacency
Pairs
Exchanges
Turn-taking

(1). Adjacency pairs
 Pairs of utterances in talk are often
mutually dependent; a most obvious
example is that a question predicts an
answer, and that an answer presupposes a
question.
 It is possible to state the requirements, in a
normal conversational sequence, for many
types of utterances, in terms of what is
expected as a response and what certain
responses presupposes.
 Some examples:

Examples
Utterance function
 Greeting
 Congratulation
 Apology
 Inform
 Leave-taking
Expected response
 Greeting
 Thanks
 Acceptance
 Acknowledge
 Leave-taking

 Pairs of utterances such as greeting-
greeting and apology-acceptance are
called adjacency pairs (Schegloff and
Sacks, 1973) cited in McCarthy (1997).
 Adjacency pairs are of different types.
Some ritualised first pair-parts may have
an identical second pair-part (i.e. hello-
hello, happy New Year-happy New
Year), while others expect a different
second pair-part (i.e. congratulations-
thanks).

 Equally, a second pair-part such as
thanks will presuppose quite a wide
range of first pair-parts (i.e. offers,
apologies, informing moves,
congratulations, etc.)
 Other first pair-parts have various
possibilities and generate further
expectations too. For example, the word
invitation.

Example
 A: “Would you like to come over for dinner tomorrow?”
 B: “Yes, that would be nice.” (accept)
 “Yes, if it could be after eight.” (accept with
condition)
 “No.” (reject)
 (We probably react against the ‘No’ answer;
politeness codes demand a more elaborate structure
for the the response: B: “Thanks very much, but I’m
afraid I’m booked up tomorrow night, what about
…..” (etc.) )

 B: “Thanks very much, but I’m afraid I’m booked
up tomorrow night, what about …..” (etc.)
 (We can segment the polite refusal of the
invitation into appreciation (‘thanks very
much’), softener (‘I’m afraid’), reason (‘I’m
booked up’) and face-saver (‘what about …’)
 This pattern would typically be found
between adult friends, colleagues, etc. , in
informal but polite situations. More intimate
situations may well omit the ‘softener’.

 Each of these elements will have
several possible realisations, and these
can be practised in language learning in
a systematic way .
 Different roles and settings will generate
different structures for adjacency pairs,
and discourse analysts try to observe in
natural data just what patterns occur in
particular settings (McCarthy, 1997).

(2). Exchanges
 The exchange is the central unit in the
analysis of classroom talk, and it could
be applied outside of the classrooms.
 Exchanges are independently
observable entities; adjacency pairs
may be found within their boundaries,
but first and second pair-parts do not
necessarily coincide with initiating and
responding moves (McCarthy, 1997).

Example
 A: “Congratulations on the new job, by
the way.”
 B: “Oh, thanks.”
 A: “I’ve just passed my driving test.”
 B: “Oh, congratulations.”
 A: “Thanks.”

 Sinclair-Coulthard (1975) cited in McCarthy
(1997) identified a pattern of three-part
exchange in traditional classrooms (i.e.
initiation – response – follow-up) where the
teacher made the ‘initiation’ and the ‘follow-up’
move, while the pupils were restricted to
‘responding’ moves.
 In a good many language classes this is still the
pattern, especially in situations where large
classes of perhaps 40 to 50 pupils is the norm.
 Where this happens, it is likely that pupils will
have the chance to practise only a very
impoverished range of utterance functions
(McCarthy, 1997).

(3). Turn-taking
 Discourse analysis have observed how
speech participants organise
themselves to take turns at talk.
 In any piece of natural English
discourse, turns will occur smoothly, with
only little overlap and interruptions, and
only very brief silences between turns
(on average, less than a second)
(McCarthy, 1997).

Sequence
 People take turns when they are selected
or nominated by the current speaker, or if no
one is selected, they may speak of their own
accord (self-selection). If neither of these
conditions applies, the person who is
currently speaking may continue (Sacks, et
al. 1974) cited in McCarthy (1997).
 While the current speaker is talking,
listeners are attentive to the syntactic
completeness or otherwise of the speaker’s
contribution, and to clues in the pitch level
that may indicate that a turn is coming to a
close (McCarthy, 1997).

 A common turn-taking device include
‘back-channel’ (i.e mm, ah-ha, yeah, no,
right, sure, etc.) – linguistic means of not
taking the turn when one has the
opportunity, or simply making it clear to the
speaker that we are attending to the
message.
 Others include ‘utterance-completion’
(the way speakers predict one another’s
utterances and often complete for them)
and ‘overlaps’ (or overlap with them as
they complete the utterances).

Classroom
 The traditional classroom has very ordered
turn-taking under the control of the teacher,
and pupils rarely speak out in turn.
 Pair work and group work do attempt to
break this rigid turn-taking pattern, but do
not always succeed in recreating more
natural patterns (Sinclair & Coulthard,
1975) cited in McCarthy (1997).
 However, the looser the restrictions on
what and when people (pupils) may speak,
the more naturally the turn-taking emerges.

Problems
 It is not a question of telling learners that
speakers take turns; they know this naturally
from their own language. The problem is to
make sure that activities generate the natural
sorts of turn-taking patterns.
 However, two other problems may arise:
 (i). Dominant speakers often grab too may turns
(gender can be a factor here);
 (ii). The question of culture-specific conventions
(i.e.
the ‘silence’ and ‘thinking-time’ factors in a
conversation, etc.)

Question
 What is the situation in the Malaysian
language classroom?

Week 8 9

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Week 8 9