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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) speech act

• 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 approach is 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 (Grice 1975, 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.

Conversation Analysis (CA)

(Harold Garfinkel 1960s-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 approach to 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 Spoken Discourse

• 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:

speech event. 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

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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/