Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Cook - Discourse Paper
Cook - Discourse Paper
[Cook]
1. What is Discourse?
1.1Discourse and the Sentence:
Discourse Analysis
Any stretch of lang felt to
be unified
Grammatically well-formed
Without context
Invented or idealized
Achieving meaning
In context
Observed
language it turns out that almost all the results lie within a relatively
short stretch which we may call the sentence... Only rarely can we
state restrictions across sentences.
If we are to find an answer to the problem of what gives stretches of
language unitiy and meaning, we must look beyond the formal rules
operating with sentences, and consider the people who use language,
and the world in which it happens as well. Yet before we do so, it
would be as well to see just how far formal, purely lingusitic rules can
go in accounting for the way one sentence succedes another.
2. Formal Links
2.1 Formal and contextual links:
In order to account for discourse, we need to look at features outside
the language. This facts enable us to construct stretches of lang as
discourse, as having a meaning and a unity for us. The way we
recognize correct and incorrect sentences is different. We can do this
through our knowledge of grammar without reference to outside
facts.
We can describe the two ways of approaching language as contextual,
referring to facts outside language, and formal, referring to facts
inside language.
Contextual features are somewhere outside this physical realization of
the language. Streteches of language treated only formally are
referred to as text.
Now although it is true that we need to consider contextual factors we
cannot say that there are no formal links bet sentences in discourse.
We shall now try to categorize these formal links and then examine
how far they will go in helping to explain why a succession of
sentences is discourse, and not just a disconnected jumble.
Formal links bet sentences and bet clauses are known as Cohesive
Devices.
Verb forms: The form of the verb can limit the choice of the verb
form in the next.
Parallelism: Another link within discourse is effected by parallelism,
a device which suggests a connection, simpy because the form of one
sentence or clause repeats the form of another. This is often used in
speeches, prayers, poetry, and advertisements. It can have a
powerful emotional effect.
It doesnt have to be necessarily grammatical parallelism. It may be a
sound parallelism; as in the rhyme, rhythm, and other sound effects
of verse. One might even extend the idea and talk of semantic
parallelism where two sentences are linked because they mean the
same thing.
Requests
Requests
for help
Pleas
Requests
for sympathy
Prayers
Certainly no list could ever claim to be exhaustive and complete.
Be
Be
Be
Be
Dont impose
Give options
Make your receiver feel good.
Lang system
USER
Paralanguage
Knowledge
Pronunciation
Grammar
Vocabulary
Voice
Face
Body
GOAL
Cultural
World
Reasoning
Traditionally, language teaching has concentrated only on the hree
levels of the formal language system pronunciation, grammar, and
vocabulary and the way in which they function within the sentence,
on the assumption that other aspects of communication will follow
fairly automatically. It remains true, of course, that the formal system
needs to be acquired in some way. Is is not, however, all that is
needed for communication.
What we need to decide as language teachers is the degree to which
other components of communication need teaching. All human beings
have reasoning power, world knowledge, and knowledge of at least
one culture, but the divisions bet these categories, and the nature of
their contents are not always clear.
The pragmatic theories we have examined leave a number of
unasnwered questions. It is not always clear, for example, where the
Clause
Phrase
Word
Phrase
Word
Phrase
Word
Phrase
Word
Word
Word
A pioneering and influential study in this field was carried out at the
University of Birmingham by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975). The
discourse type it chose to analyse was school lessons.
S & C recorded a number of British primary school lessons. On the
basis of these data they proposed a rank structure for these lessons
as follows:
Lesson
Transaction
Exchange
Move
Act
They then drew up rules, based on the data, showing how these acts
combine together to form moves and how moves combine to form
various kinds of exchange rather as grammarians formulate rules
describing how words combine into phrases, or phrases into clauses.
One kind of exchange, for example, consisted of between one and
three moves:
Opening
(answering)
(follow up)
discourse------------------------------------------------
4.5Turn Taking:
Overlap of turns occurs in only abt 5 per cent of conversation or less,
strongly suggesting that speakers somehow know exactly when and
where to enter. Where there is overlap bet turns it has some particular
signnificance: signalling annoyance, urgency, or a desire to correct
what is being said. Conversely, pauses bet turns also carry particular
meaning.
The significance of this approach for the langugage learner is
considerable. Turn-taking mechanisms, the way in which speakers
hold or pass the floor, vary bet cultures and bet languages. Overlap in
a given situation is more or less tolerated in some societies than in
others.
Efficient turn-taking also involves factors which are not linguistic. Eye
contact is one strong means of signalling, and in British culture (in
very general terms) it can often be observed that speakers look away
during their turn and then look their interlocutor in the eye at the end.
Body position and movement also play and important part. Intonation
and volume contribute to turn-taking too.
The relative status of the speakers, or the role which one of them is
playing, are also important. In formal situations roles can clearly give
people special rights, but even in conversation where according to
our definition unequal power is suspended it is unlikely that
knowledge of participants social status will be wholly forgotten.
Students fall silent when the professor speaks in the bar as well as
in the seminar.
4.6Turn types:
One kind of turn alternation the ethnomethodologists describe is an
adjacency pair. This occurs when the utterance of one speaker makes
a particular kind of response very likely. A greeting, for example, is
likely to be answered by another greeting. In an adjacency pair, there
is often a choice of two likely responses. A request is most likely to be
Acceptance (preferred)
Refusal (dispreferred)
Denial (pr.)
Admission (dispr.)
Expected answer (pr.)
Unexpected ans. (dispr.)
5. Discourse as dialogue.
Given...... New.
Given....... New.
Each given unit being already known by the receiver, or deriving from
a preceding piece of new information.
Our choices among the options for arranging the information are
neither arbitrary, nor just aesthetic devices to ensure variety, but
have some communicative funciton, making discourse more readily
comprehensible.
As we do make important choicies bet alternative versions of
sentences, even though each one is correct in itself, then in a
succession of sentences, it is possible that the choice is being
dictated by the sentence before, each one having a knock-on effect
on the structure of the next. At first then, it would seem that this
ordering of information is another instance of a formal connection bet
sentences in discourse. On closer inspection it turns out to be also
contextual, dictated by what is going on in the mind of the sender and
the assumptions he or she makes about what is going on in the mind
of the receiver.
One way of understanding this is to view the discourse as proceeding
by answering imagined and unspoken questions by the receiver. In
this light, all discourse seems to proceed like a dialogue, even if the
other voice is only present as a ghost.
6. Knowledge in discourse
6.2Complex schemata:
Not surprisingly, considering the complexity of the interaction of
minds, language, and the world, the description we have given so far
is highly simplified. Acutal discourse is unlikely to be interpretable
with reference to a single schema. In reality the mind must activate
many schemata at once, each interacting with the other. It must be
capable of moving rapidly from one to another, of using more than
one simultaneously, of focusing on a sub-schema (say a menuschema within a `restaurant-schema). It must be capable of builiding
new schemata, and of ditching old ones.
Participants in conversation have certain - no doubt highly culturebound assumptions abt possible courses for a conversation, length
and type of turn, total duration, and so on. Less reciprocal discourse
will also activate schemata.
6.3 Relevance:
Schemata, then, are data structures, representing stereotypical
patterns, which we retrieve from memory and employ in our
understanding of discourse. The successful communicator selects just
those features which differ from this schema, enabling the receiver to
adjust it and to bring it closeer to the individual instance which is
being described.