Discourse Analysis Terminology

by Mary Joyce Z. Bautista Discourse is any connected piece of speech or writing

while text is a continuous piece of spoken or witten
language, especially one with a recognizable beginning
Discourse Analysis
and ending.
-Focuses on knowledge about language beyond the
Discourse is the pragmatic process of meaning
word, clause, phrase and sentence that is needed for
negotiation. Text is the product.
successful communication.
Discourse Structure of Texts - interest of how people
-Patterns of language across texts and considers the
organize what they say in a conversation or a piece of
relationship between language and the social and
writing depending on particular languages and cultures.
cultural contexts in which it is used.
Stages - the steps that the language users go through as
-Considers the ways that the use of language presents
they carry out particular interactions.
different views of the world and different
understandings.
Co-operative Principle - pertains to making our
conversational contribution such as is required at the
-Examines both spoken and written texts.
stage where it occurs, by the accepted purpose or
direction of the exchange in which we are engaged.
Language and Context
Conversation Analysis - studying or having fine-grained
-Discourse analysis is interested in what happens when
analyses of the recurring patterns in spoken
people draw on the knowledge they have about
interactions.
language to do things in the world. It is the analysis of
language in use. It laso considers the relationships and
Cultural Ways of Speaking and Writing
the contexts in which it is used.
Ethnography of Communication - investigating the
Kinds of Context
relationship between the particular social group and its
language or other symbolic resources in order to learn
Situational context – what people know about what
something of how members of the group live, interact,
they see around them.
and communicate.
Background knowledge context – what people know
Communicative Competence - involves not only
about each other and the world (social context which
knowing a language, but also what to say to whom, and
involves cultural knowledge and interpersonal
how to say it appropriately in a particular situation.
knowledge.
Four Components of Communicative Competence
Textual context (linguistic context) – what people know
about what they have been saying.
Grammatical competence – mastery of the language
code.
Pragmatics
Sociolinguistic competence – knowledge of appropriate
-Concerned with how the interpretation of language
language use.
depends on knowledge of the real world.
Discourse competence – knowledge of how to connect
-Focused in what people mean by what they say rather
utterances in a text so it is both cohesive and coherent.
than what words in their most literal sense might mean
by themselves.
Strategic competence – mastery of the strategies that
speakers use to compensate for breakdowns in
-Considers meaning in reference to the users or the
communication as well as the strategies they use to
purpose of communication.
enhance the effectiveness of the communication.
Discourse and Text
 Speech Events
- Circumstances surrounding the utterance.
- Communicative rule-governed sequences.
- Described in six components:
 Setting – the place and time at which the event
takes place.
 Participants – traditionally speech is described
in terms of speaker and hearer
 Key – the tone in which an event is performed
 Channel – the choice of oral or written
communication.
 Message content – the topic of the speech
event.
Speech Acts
-Actions performed via utterances.
-Groups of utterances with a single interactional
function.
Direct speech acts – when we mean exactly what we
say.
Indirect speech acts – when we intend something quite
different from the literal meaning.
Locutionary act - basic act of utterance which produces
a meaningful linguistic expression.
Illocutionary act - performed via the communicative
force of an utterance.
Perlocutionary act - an utterance with a function
intending it to have an effect.
Discourse and Performance
Performativity - based on the view that in saying
something, we do it. It is about bringing state of affairs
into being as a result of what we say and what we do.
Discourse and Intertextuality
Intertextuality - all texts, whether spoken or written,
make their meanings against the background of other
texts and things that have been said on other occasions.
Discourse and Society
Discourse Community - a group of people who share
some kind of activity. Members have particular ways of
communicating with each other. They generally have
shared goals and may have shared values and beliefs.
Three Types of Groups of Language Users:
Communities – groups of people who share substantial
amounts of time together in common endeavors.
Collectives – groups of people that form a single
repeated interest, without the frequency or intensity of
contact of a community.
Networks – groups of people that are not as tightly knit
as speech communities with connections being made by
one person who knows another person , who knows
another person.
Speech Community – a group of people in which
members share a particular set of norms for
communication which reflect certain views on linguistic
behavior such as what is the prestigious variety of the
language in a particular setting, even if not all members
of the community actually are able to use this variety.
Implications and Influences of Discourse Analysis on
Language Teaching
Teachers who incorporate terms or make
students familiar with discourse analysis allow critical
thinking and deeper understanding of language. In the
teaching of language, discourse can be a tool for
studying interactions among language learners. Also,
learners can benefit from using discourse analysis to
explore what language is and how it is used to achieve
communicative goals in different contexts. Through this,
there’s a possibility that communication problems in
the classroom could be prevented or even fixed. It may
encourage both students and teachers to aim for their
goals in learning and teaching a language respectively.
References
Paltridge, B. (2006). Discourse Analysis. New York, NY:
Continuum International Publishing Group.
Gee, J.P., & Handford, M. (2012). The Routledge
Handbook of Discourse Analysis. New York, NY:
Routledge
Baker, P., & Ellece, S. (2011). Key Terms in Discourse
Analysis. New York, NY: Continuum
International Publishing Group.