UNIT 1 – INTRODUCING DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

INTRODUCING DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Defining text and discourse:

• In everyday use >

o Text > limited to written language
o Discourse > used more in relation with spoken language
• However, modern linguistics >
o Text > includes every type of utterance, from magazine articles or cooking recipes to
television interviews or normal conversations among friends

De Beaugrande and Dressler’s definition of text

They define text as a communicative event that must satisfy the following seven criteria:

• COHESION > which refers to the close relationship between text and syntax
o Ellipsis, anaphora, cataphora, recurrence or conjunction are crucial for cohesion
• COHERENCE > has to do with the meaning of the text and with the elements of knowledge or cognitive
structures which are implied by the language used and thus influence the reception of the message.
• INTENTIONALITY > has to do with the attitude of the speaker/writer
• ACCEPTABILITY > concerns the preparation of the reader/hearer to assess the relevance or usefulness
of a text
• INFORMATIVITY > refers to the quantity and quality of the information
• SITUATIONALITY > indicates that the situation in which a text is produced plays a key role in the
production and reception of the message
• INTERTEXTUALITY > alludes to the facts that
o Texts are always related to some preceding or simultaneous discourse
o Texts are always linked and grouped in particular types or genres (descriptive, narrative) by
formal criteria

Tischer et al. explain that :

• Cohesion and coherence > text-internal > TEXT
• Intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality and intertextuality > text-external > CONTEXT

All approaches within Discourse Analysis view text and context as the two kinds of information that contribute
to the communicative content of an utterance.

Reflections on some of the definitions of Discourse Analysis

Schiffrin et al. note that all the definitions of discourse and discourse analysis fall into three main categories:
• Anything beyond the sentence
• Language use
• A broader range of social practice that includes non-linguistic and non-specific instances of language

Schiffrin views discourse as utterances, i.e., “units of linguistic production (whether spoken or written) which
are inherently contextualized”

Slembrouck claims that Discourse Analysis is concerned with language use in social contexts.

Van Dijk and Johnstone point out that Discourse Analysis is essentially multidisciplinary and therefore it
involves not only the field of Linguistics, but also Poetics, Semiotics, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology,
History, Communication research, Political science, Literary criticism, etc.

Therefore remember > Discourse Analysis is the study of language in use, including text and context as parts
of discourse.
BRIEF HISTORY OF TEXT LINGUISTICS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

In the 20th century, new disciplines emerged within the field of Linguistics, all of which are interrelated:
• Functional Grammars (Functionalism)
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Pragmatics
• Text Linguistics
• Discourse Analysis

All these schools agreed that a good linguistic description should go beyond the sentence and believe that if a
study is only limited to the syntactic analysis of sentences, certain meanings and aspects of language will not
be embraced or understood.

There was a “progressive integration” of both disciplines, for many scholars have moved from Text Linguistics
into Discourse Analysis as part of the natural flow of their beliefs and ideas.

Within the category of discourse, then, we may include not only the “purely” linguistic content, but also sign
language, dramatization, or ‘bodily hexis’. Thus, it can be said that discourse is multi-modal, for it uses form
than one semiotic system and performs several functions at the same time.

One of the discourse analyst’s tasks is to explain the connection between these other modes of communication
and language.

APPROACHES TO THE PHENOMENON OF DISCOURSE

• Formal Approach > Discourse is defined as a unit of language beyond the sentence
• Functional Approach > Discourse is defined as language in use

Harris (formalist) > first linguist to use the term discourse analysis:
• he viewed discourse as the next level in a hierarchy of morphemes, clauses and sentences

This was criticized due to the results of studies such as Chafe’s (functionalist) > units used by people in their
speech cannot always be categorized as sentences. People normally produce units that have a semantic and
intonational closure, but not necessarily a syntactic one.

Functionalists give much importance to the purposes and functions of language. Functional analysis’ main focus
is the way in which people use language in order to achieve certain communicative goals. Discourse is not
regarded as one more of the levels in a hierarchy, but as an all-embracing concept which includes not only the
propositional content, but also the social, cultural and contextual contexts.

What do discourse analysts do? They explore matters such as face-to-face conversations; the language,
images, symbols, etc. used in e-mails; turn-taking in telephone conversations; the language of humour, etc.

THE DATA FOR DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Discourse analysts normally work with some kind of corpus. A corpus is “a collection of linguistic data, either
written texts or a transcription of recorded speech”.

DATA COLLECTION

When setting out to analyse discourse, the analyst faces several initial problems:

• What type of discourse am I going to analyse?

 o The researcher may focus his study on spoken or written language, or may be interested in a
particular kind of discourse or genre
• How am I going to collect the data I need, and in case I want to analyse spoken discourse, how am I
going to transcribe and annotate the data so as to show the features of both text and context as
faithfully as possible?
o The criteria for selecting a sample (and therefore transforming the material into data)
depends on the goals of research. Once I have collected my data, the approach taken will
guide me as to what procedure to choose: e.g. transcribing spoken discourse, keying texts in,
scanning, downloading material from the internet, etc.

TRANSCRIBING THE DATA

When dealing with talk or spoken discourse, the researcher turns the spoken discourse into a document called
transcript by means of the process of transcription. If he/she aims at some degree of objectivity, s/he should
try to use a system of transcription that shows, as faithfully as possible, all the variables that intervene in the
studied phenomenon.

A conversation analyst would include not only words in her transcription, but also other aspects such as the
sequential organization of utterances of the different participants, as well as interruptions and pauses. Some
analysts will include information about the text, such as genre, date and place of publication, etc. Others will
include information about the speakers (sex, age, occupation, etc.) or about paralinguistic features such as
pronunciation and intonation patterns, or even laughter.

However, there is no single and accepted way to transcribe speech. Each analyst focuses on the features that
best fit the goal of his/her research.

ETHICS OF DATA COLLECTION

It is an ethical requirement that the researcher obtain the consent of the participants, not only to take part in
the study but also to use the data they provide. Researchers must protect all participants and observe their
legal rights.

CORPORA FOR DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Corpus > a collection of linguistic data (written or transcriptions), used to verify hypotheses about a language.

For Bilber > main features of corpus-based analysis are:

• Empiricism > analyses the patterns of use in natural texts
• Utilization of a large and principled collection of natural texts as the basis for analysis
• Use of computers for analysis
• Use of both quantitative and qualitative techniques

WHY USE CORPORA?

• They facilitate the investigation of language in use
• We can use databases of authentic texts thanks to the aid of corpus linguistics
• It allows researchers to analyse patterns of use (e.g. lexical associations and their distribution across
different registers)

The first large corpus of English-language data was transcribed by hand and stored on index cards which were
processed manually. It was known as the Survey of English Language, which consisted of a million words
included in 200 texts of spoken and written material. The whole survey was computerized and is now known
as the London Lund Corpus.

COMPUTER CORPORA AND CONCORDANCE PROGRAMS

Examples of Modern corpora are:

 • British National Corpus (BNC)
• Corpus of Contemporary American (COCA)
• International Corpus of English (ICE)
• The Bank of English

Online Corpora:
• The Shakespeare Online Corpus
• The Experimental BNC website
• The Davies Corpus

CONCORDANCE PROGRAMS

They turn electronica texts into databases that can be searched. Some of them are:
• Word Cruncher
• TACT
• SARA
• WordSmith Tools > widely used by linguists, lexicographers and discourse analysts

Reich’s classification of Corpora

• Medium
o Spoken corpora
o Written corpora
o Mixed corpora
• National varieties
o British corpora
o American corpora
o International corpora
• Historical variation
o Diachronic corpora
o Synchronic corpora
o Corpora which cover only one stage of language history
• Geographical/dialectal variation
o Corpus of dialect samples
o Mixed corpora
• Age
o Adult English corpora
o Child English corpora
• Genre
o Literary texts corpora
o Technical English corpora
o Non-fiction corpora
o Mixed corpora
• Open-endedness
o Closed/unalterable corpora
o Monitor corpora
• Availability
o Commercial corpora/Non-commercial research corpora
o Online corpora/corpora on ftp servers/corpora on floppy disks or CD-ROMS

UNIT 2
 INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS

The interactional sociolinguistic approach to discourse analysis concerns the study of the relationships
between language, culture and society. Therefore, it is multidisciplinary and it has its roots in Anthropology,
Sociology and Linguistics.

It views discourse as a social interaction in which construction and negotiation of meaning is facilitated by
the use of language. It focuses on how this interaction depends on culturally-informed but situated inferential
processes, which play a role in the speakers’ interpretative constructions of the kind of activity they are
engaged in.

One of the main concerns of Interactional Linguistics is the study of the practices of contextualization: “Context
is something which is made available in the course of interaction and its construal depends on inferential
practices in accordance with conventions which speakers may or may not share”.

John Gumperz > emphasized the fact that cognition and language are affected by social and cultural forces.

A key concept is that of contextualization cue, which Gumperz defines as “any verbal sign which when
processed in co-occurrence with symbolic grammatical and lexical signs serves to construct the contextual
ground for situated interpretations, and thereby affects how constituent messages are understood”.

Examples of contextualization cues:

• Intonation or any prosodic choices
• Code-switching/ style switching
• Lexical or syntactic choices
• Facial and gestural signs

Contextualization cues function indexically, i.e. they are deictic. However, they are not necessarily lexically
based: we may signal relational values by means of, for instance, prosody or facial and body gestures,
independently of the propositional content of utterances. So human communication can be said to be
“channelled and constrained by a multilevel system of learned, automatically produced and closely coordinated
verbal and non-verbal signals”.

Speakers and hearers do not always contextualize cues in the same way. This may lead to misunderstandings,
which may have been damaging for certain groups, especially those who belong to minorities.

So, remember: the main idea behind Gumperz’s sociolinguistics of interpersonal communication is the fact that
speakers are members of social and cultural groups and, as such, the way they use language not only reflects
their group identity but also provides indices of who they are, what they want to communicate, and how skilful
they are in doing so.

Erving Goffman and the study of spoken interaction

Goffman’s sociology centres on the physical co-presence rather than on social groups, and thus he focuses on
aspects of interaction order such as:

• Particular settings > e.g.: going through an interview and how it affects talk
• Forms of self-maintaining behaviour > e.g.: the display of focused interaction
• Conduct in public situations involving shyness, face-saving behaviour, public displays of competence
> e.g.: response cry of pain, such as Ouch
• The role of temporal and spatial activity boundaries which lead to inclusion or exclusion from talk in
interaction

Goffman also gives importance to the state of co-presence, which draws attention to the body, its disposition
and display.
One way of viewing the self as a social, interactive construction is through the notion of face, i.e. “the positive
social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular
contact”. A crucial condition of interaction is the maintenance of face: interactants are expected to behave in
a manner that is consistent with this image in order to be in face or to maintain face.

Goffman also focuses his analysis on the way in which social actors organize their experience in terms of
recognizable activities (e.g.: a meeting, a lecture, a card game), which are the frames through which people
structure their experience. The organization of framing activity is socially situated.

An important notion related to the concept of frame is that of footing (posición), which relates to a speaker’s
shifting alignments in relation to the events at hand. This concept brings out the need to distinguish between
different speaker roles, namely:
• ANIMATOR > the participant that produces the talk
• AUTHOR > the one that creates the talk
• FIGURE > the one that is portrayed by the talk
• PRINCIPAL > the one that is responsible for the talk

All these roles may be played by different people, but a single participant can also play two or more roles at
the same time, or fill different position slots at different moments during the same interaction.

Example of footing roles:

In a typical TV commercial:
• The voice-over takes the role of animator
• The advertising agency which scripts the message has the role of author
• The manufacturer is the principal

So the animator of this particular discourse is producing the talk for another, thus s/he can neither be the
author nor the principal. The author of the message is the advertising agency, which is delivering the essence
of the original position taken by the principal (the manufacturer in this case).

Similarities in Gumperz’s and Goffman’s approaches

• Both authors focus on situated meaning

• They study the interaction between the self and the other, and the context of talk
• They conceive language as indexical to the social world
• These author’s ideas complement each other
o Goffman tries to describe and understand the form and meaning of the social and
interpersonal contexts from a sociological perspective
o Gumperz sees language as a socially and culturally constructed symbol system that reflects
and at the same time creates macro-level social meaning and micro-level interpersonal
meaning.

POLITENESS

The concept of politeness is not easy to define. But politeness as a linguistic phenomenon has been researched
by looing at it from wider perspectives than those attached to the everyday use of the term.

Theories of Politeness

• Green explains that when we talk about politeness within pragmatic studies we refer to strategies for
maintaining or changing interpersonal relations. The goals of the speakers when using these
strategies may be ends in themselves (purely social conversation or “small talk”) or they may be a link
in a chain of goals whose ultimate end is to influence someone’s behaviour or attitude.
• Brown and Levinson note a growing interest in “the linguistic expression of social relationships”, of
which politeness phenomena are an obvious and pervasive example.
 • Authors such as Lakoff explain that politeness principles have long been considered to have wide
descriptive power in respect of language use, to be major determinants of linguistic behaviour, and to
have universal status.

Politeness phenomena are a paradigm example of pragmatic usage, for they are seen as the exercise of
language choice to create a context intended to match the addressee’s notion of how he or she could be
addressed.

APPROACHES TO POLITENESS

1) The social-norm view reflects the understanding of politeness embraced mainly by the English-speaking
world in a general way. It assumes that each society has certain rules and norms that prescribe a particular
behaviour or way of thinking within a context. This sense of politeness is associated with what constitutes
“good manners” as well as with a certain speech style, whereby a higher degree of formality implies greater
politeness.

This view can be associated to what Grundy describes as “folk view of politeness”.

2) The conversational-maxim view is principally based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle (CP) and maxims. Grice
assumes that the CP is always observed and that any real or apparent violation of the maxims signals
conversational implicatures, i.e., non-explicit messages intended by the speaker to be inferred by the hearer.

Maxims of Speech:
• Maxim of Quality > do not give information that is false or that is not supported by evidence
• Maxim of Quantity > give us much information as is needed, and no more
• Maxim of Relation > say things that are pertinent to the discussion
• Maxim of Manner > be clear and brief, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity

3) The face-saving view is the best known of the approaches to politeness. Brown & Levinson assume the
general correctness of Grice’s view of conversational interaction, explicitly adopting a view of the rational and
efficient nature of talk.

B&L base much of their theory on Goffman’s concept of face (the individual’s self-esteem), which can be lost,
maintained, enhanced or threatened. The fact that some acts can threaten face and thus require some kind of
softening is the organizing principle of their theory.

This this the most influential of all approaches to politeness.

4) The conversational-contract view also adopts Grice’s notion of Cooperative Principle and recognizes the
importance of Goffman’s notion of face, but it differs in certain important ways from Brown and Levinson’s
view.

Within this perspective, all the participants of an interaction enter into a conversation and continue within it
with the understanding of a current Conversational Contract at every turn. “Being polite constitutes operating
within the then-current terms and conditions of the Conversational Contract”.

THE CONVERSATIONAL-MAXIM VIEW

a) Leech’s approach to politeness:

According to Leech, the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle do not operate in isolation. They
often create a tension in a speaker who must determine, for a given speech context, what message to convey
and how do it. The role of the Politeness Principle is “to maintain the social equilibrium and the friendly
relations which enable us to assume that our interlocutors are being cooperative in the first place”. Leech
explains that politeness concerns a relationship between two participants, but speakers also show politeness
to third parties who may or may not be present in the speech situation. In order to show politeness, the
participants in a speech situation observe the following maxims:

1. TACT MAXIM (in impositives and commissives)

a. Minimize cost to other
b. Maximize benefit to other
2. GENEROSITY MAXIM (in impositives and commissives)
a. Minimize benefit to self
b. Maximize cost to self
3. APPROBATION MAXIM (in expressives and assertives)
a. Minimize dispraise of other
b. Maximize praise of other
4. MODESTY MAXIM (in expressives and assertives)
a. Minimize praise of self
b. Maximize dispraise of self
5. AGREEMANT MAXIM (in assertives)
a. Minimize disagreement between self and other
b. Maximize agreement between self and other
6. SYMPATHY MAXIM (in assertives)
a. Minimize antipathy between self and other
b. Maximize sympathy between self and other

All these maxims can be summarized as follows > Other things being equal, minimize the expression of beliefs
which are unfavourable to the hearer and at the same time (but less important) maximize the expression of
beliefs which are favourable to the hearer.

Leeches distinguishes between:

• Relative Politeness > politeness vis-à-vis a specific situation
• Absolute Politeness > the degree of politeness inherently associated with specific speaker actions

Therefore, some illocutions (like orders, for instance) are inherently impolite and others (like offers) are
inherently polite.

Fraser observes that Leech’s conclusions seem to strong, when asserting, for example, that to order is
inherently conflictive. For instance, in a situation where a teacher ordered a student to put her prize-winning
solution on the board for the class, the order would not be conflictive at all and would not require the use of
negative politeness strategies: the teacher could directly order the student to present the cause and results of
her success without having to minimize any impoliteness, because the act of ordering would be regarded as
polite.

b) Robin Lakoff’s approach to Politeness

Lakoff defines Politeness as “a device used in order to reduce friction in personal interaction” and proposes
two rules of Pragmatic Competence:

1. Be Clear > this rule is in agreement with Grice’s rules or maxims of conversation
2. Be polite

She explains that these two rules are at times reinforcing and at other times in conflict with each other. In
general, when clarity is in conflict with politeness, politeness supersedes: avoiding offence in a conversation
is considered more important than achieving clarity.

In addition, she posits three Rules of Politeness:

1. Don’t Impose > used when Formal/Impersonal politeness is required

2. Give Options > used when Informal politeness is required
3. Make A Feel Good – Be Friendly > used when Intimate politeness is required
These three rules are applicable depending on the type of politeness required as understood by the speaker.
For instance, if a participant assesses the situation as requiring Formal Politeness (Don’t Impose), he could ask
the hearer about his personal life by introducing the question with another, non-imposing question (a) or any
other kind of pre-sequence (b):
a) Would you mind if I asked you a personal question?
b) I don’t want to sound to inquisitive, but…

If the speaker were in a situation requiring Informal Politeness, s/he might ask the personal question directly
without asking for permission, but s/he would probably use hedges and/or an indirect question to mitigate the
act as in:

They tell me you’re under pressure in your personal life

If the speaker wants to make the hearer ‘feel good’, to make her sense him/her as a friend, Intimate Politeness
is needed, and therefore s/he might say:

Come on, sweetie; tell me about it. I will understand; I’ve also had a lot of pressure in my marriage all
along these years

Lakoff undoubtedly sheds light on the phenomenon of politeness as a system which is relative to the level of
formality holding in human relationships. However, one of the criticisms made of her politeness framework is
the fact that “the reader is never told how the speaker or hearer is to assess what level of politeness is
required”.

THE FACE-SAVING VEW: BROWN & LEVINSON’S THEORY OF POLITENESS

Undoubtedly, the most influential study on politeness phenomena so far is that of Brown & Levinson’s. “Central
to our model is a highly abstract notion of “face” which consists on two specific kinds of desires (‘face-wants’)
attributed by interactants to one another: the desire to be unimpeded in one’s actions (negative face), and the
desire (in some respects) to be approved of (positive face).

B & L argue that there is a direct relationship between the face of the speaker and certain variables which they
call Sociolinguistic Variables:

a) The social distance (D) of S [speaker] and H [hearer] (a symmetric relation)

b) The relative power (P) of S and H (an asymmetric relation)
c) The absolute ranking (R) of impositions in the particular culture

According to B & L, all the speakers of a language have both a positive and a negative face. There are acts that
intrinsically threaten the interlocutor’s face, which these authors call Face Threatening Acts (FTAs). In general,
speakers try to minimize the face threat of these acts by using a series of strategies summarised and illustrated
in the following figure:
The more an act threatens S’s or H’s face, the more S will want to choose a higher-numbered strategy, given
the fact that these strategies afford payoffs of increasingly minimized risk. This means that if what the speaker
has to say could in some way be offensive or impolite to the hearer, it is very likely that the speaker will use an
off record strategy, characterized by the use of mitigating elements which convey certain meanings indirectly.

If on the contrary, S wants his/her utterance to be effective (because, for example, there is an urgency or the
situation is task-oriented), it is most likely that S will use an on record strategy. When going on record, S may
do it baldly (sin rodeos) or by using positive or negative politeness.

Positive politeness strategies are oriented towards the positive face of H; they show S’s desire for or approval
of H’s wants. Negative politeness strategies aim at H’s negative face, i.e. his/her basic desire to maintain his/her
terrain and self-determination.

B&L’s politeness strategies: Examples

If S uses an on record strategy, there is only one interpretation of his/her intention and there is no room for
ambiguity. Bald on record strategies are considered to be in conformity with Grice’s Maxims and they are used
when maximum efficiency is required. Consider these examples:

• Help!! > urgent, desperate situation. Compare to then non-urgent and non-desperate Could you help
me with the washing-up, please?
• Don’t move!! > If S sees a Boa constrictor approaching H
• Hands up!! > when the police find a criminal

If the situation is not desperate, does not call for urgency or does not require maximum efficiency, S can still
go on record but with either positive or negative politeness. Here are some examples:

• What a beautiful hat you’re wearing > on record with positive politeness
• Can you pass the salt? > on record with negative politeness – conventionally indirect request

If S wants to do an FTA, but for some reasons wants to avoid the responsibility for doing it, s/he will most
probably go off record and leave the interpretation to the addressee. By going off record S will always be
flouting one or more of the Gricean Maxims:

• What a beautiful dress! = Please, buy me that dress (Off record strategy: Give hints, which flouts the
Relevance Maxim)
• John is a bit silly = John is very silly (Off record strategy: understate, which flouts the Quantity Maxim)
• John is a real genius = John is stupid (Off record strategy: be ironic, which flouts the Quality Maxim
 • I’m going you-know-where = I’m going to the toilet (Off record strategy: be vague, use euphemisms,
which flouts the Manner Maxim.

Criticisms of Brown & Levinson’s model of politeness

B&L have been criticized, among other things, for claiming that their theory has a universal value, for being
ethnocentric and for assuming an individualistic concept of face.

The main underlying assumption in B&L’s view of face is an individualistic view of the interactants as mainly
sensitive towards a satisfaction of mutual face wants. Other scholars, on the contrary, have stressed the
situational diversification of systems of politeness as well as their conventional nature.

Lavandera criticizes other aspects of B&L’s theory: she views politeness as a continuum and not as a dichotomy,
and she supplements the notion of illocutionary force with that of politeness force. “emphasizing thereby the
latter’s obligatory nature”. She also emphasizes the conditions under which the expressions are used, i.e., the
situation, and not the expressions themselves, for these conditions are crucial to determine the judgment of
politeness. Politeness, therefore, is a property of utterances and not of sentences.

In her review of B&L’s Theory of Politeness she directs the reader’s attention to what she describes as its
weaknesses:

• Brown and Levinson do not take into account any strategies aimed at impoliteness
• It is impossible to account for the fact that there can be an accumulation of similar strategies in the
same speech act if we ascribe the degree of politeness to a strategy and not to the entire speech act
within which it occurs
• A distinction should be made between strategies like “Be pessimistic”, which are purely pragmatic,
and other strategies which contain a specific linguistic description such as “Employ a diminutive”

Thus, in her view, even though B&L achieve some valuable and important aims, they do not succeed in
providing a complete account of the phenomenon of politeness.

CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

Conversation analysis originated as an approach to the study of social organization of everyday conduct. It
started with Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodological approach. This approach suggests that:
• Knowledge is not autonomous or decontextualized.
• People’s actions generate and reproduce the knowledge through which individual conduct and social
circumstances are intelligible (comprehensible).
• What speakers produce are typifications, i.e. categories that are adjusted according to whether an
actor’s anticipation is confirmed by another’s action or not.

Conversational Analysis has many things in common with other approaches to discourse analysis:
• Like Interactional Sociolinguistics, it is concerned with social order
• Like Ethnographic Studies, it is concerned with human knowledge and it believes that no detail of a
conversation should be neglected a priori as unimportant
• Like most approaches, it focuses on detailed analyses of particular sequences of utterances that have
actually occurred.

But Conversational Analysis is different from other approaches in that:

• It has a particular way of analysing discourse
• It rejects the use of too many idealizations
• It focuses on talk-in-interaction, and uses tape-recorded conversations as source data since they
consider it to be objective information whose analysis can be replicated. But some aspects of the
context (e.g. social relations, setting or personal attributes of a given participant) are not considered
to have much relevance.

Method and central concepts of Conversation Analysis

Conversation analysts assume that:
• Interaction is structurally organized > thus, they search for recurrent patterns, distributions and forms
of organization
• Contributions to interaction are contextually oriented
• No order or detail in interaction can be dismissed a priori as disorderly, accidental or irrelevant

Central criteria:
• The data must be fully observable
• Replicated analysis should look essentially the same
• If data do not explain themselves, then more empirical data should be captured

Sequential structures of social interaction are explored at different levels: move, turn, exchange, transaction,
and interaction.

Sequential analysis is not interested in single utterances but in how utterances are designed to tie with or fit
prior utterances, or in the implications of an utterance for what should come next in the discourse.

Linear sequences: Turn-Taking

• Turn-taking is used for talking in different speech-exchange systems (interviews, meetings, debates…)
• There is a basic set of rules governing turn-construction
• These rules provide for the allocation, coordination and transfer of turns, so as to minimize gap and
overlap

Turn-taking is a form of social action and thus it operates in accordance with a local management system. This
system constitutes a set of conventions for getting, keeping or giving away turns.

A TRP (Transition Relevance Place) refers to any possible change of turn (e.g. the end of a phrase/clause, or a
pause).

Speakers may hold the floor (hacer uso de la palabra) for extended periods of time, and while they do so, they
expect their interlocutors to indicate that they are listening by means of:
• Head nods
• Smiles
• Facial expressions
• Attentiveness showed by using backchannels (such as uh-uh, yeah, mmm, etc.) which provide
feedback to the speaker regarding the positive reception of her message

The absence of backchannels may be interpreted negatively, as a form of disagreement or lack of attention or
interest on the part of the hearer.

Adjacency pairs

An adjacency pair is a sequence of two utterances which are adjacent and produced by different speakers. The
first part normally expects a given second part

• Greeting-greeting
o 1st part: A: Hello
o 2nd part B: Hello
• Offer-Acceptance
o A: Would you like a coffee?
o B: Yes, please
• Apology-minimization
o A: Sorry
o B: Don’t worry. It’s OK

Nested adjacency pairs

Adjacency pairs are not always adjacent. Frequently, insertion sequences occur in which, for instance, a
question-answer pair is embedded within another, thus we speak of nested adjacency pairs.

Preference organization

The concept of preference organization underlies the idea that there is a hierarchy operating over the potential
second parts of an adjacency pair. Thus, there is at least one preferred and one dispreferred category of
response to first parts, a concept that is closely connected to that of markedness.

Examples:

a) Unmarked, preferred second

a. Can I ask you a question?
b. Of course!
b) Marked, dispreferred second
a. Mom, can I celebrate my birthday at Burger King’s with my friends?
b. Well, maybe. Everything will depend on your behaviour this week.

Levison explains that dispreferred seconds normally show these features:

• Delays: use of prefaces, pauses, repair initiators or insertion sequences.

• Prefaces: use of markers or announcers of dispreferreds like Uh, and well, production of token
agreements before disagreements, use of appreciations or apologies if relevant, use of qualifiers,
hesitation in various forms (including self-editing), etc.
• Accounts: carefully formulated explanations for why the dispreferred act is being done.
• Declination component: adapted to the nature of the first part, but characteristically indirect or
mitigated.

Other sequences: Repair

Repair shows how preference organization works within and across turns. It is a device for the correction of
misunderstandings, mishearings or non-hearings.

Self-initiated repair is differentiated from other-initiated repair

• Self-initiated repair within a turn may be signalled by glottal stops, lengthened vowels, etc.
o Her name was Joane…err…nooo, sorry… Julia!
• Other-initiated repair may be signalled by echo-questions, repetition with stress on problematic
syllables, or by using expressions such as:
o What? Pardon? Excuse me?...

Pre-sequences

An example of pre-sequence is a summons, because it prefigures a turn which contains the reason for the
summons:
A. Carol! > Summons
B. What! > Answer to summons
C. Could you come down a minute? > Reason for summons

Most pre-sequences can be said to prefigure the specific kind of action that they potentially precede.
Other examples of pre-sequences:
• Pre-invitation
o A: Any plans for tomorrow?
o B: Not really, why?
o A: Do you feel like going to the movies?
• Pre-request
o A: Are you going to use your car tomorrow?
o B: No, why?
o A: I was just wondering if you could lend it to me in the morning because I have a very
important appointment and need to get there early
• Pre-closing
o A: So remember to bring your coat tomorrow. It’s going to be cold
o B: Yeah, sure
o A: See you tomorrow, then
o B: See you. Bye-bye!
• Pre-arrangement
o A: What time do you get up in the mornings?
o B: At 7.30
o A: I’ll call you at 8.00 tomorrow, then, so we can talk and plan for the day.
• Pre-announcement
o A: You won’t believe it!
o B: What?
o A: My son finally got his degree from the University of Oxford!!

Insertion Sequences

Insertion sequences are concerned with, for instance, repair or establishing a temporary hold

Example:

A: Hello
B: Good morning. Could you put me through Mr Richards, please?
A: Hang on a minute, please
B: Yes
A: I’m afraid he is not here today
B: Thanks, anyway. Bye

Overall Organization

Overall organization refers to the organization of the talk exchange within some specific type of conversation.

Example: “classes of verbal interchanges” such as telephone calls, a talk among friends, etc., which have some
special features in, for instance, their opening (e.g. summons in a telephone call) or closing sections (e.g.
making arrangements, use of markers such as Ok or so).

UNIT 3 – VARIATION ANALYSIS AND NARRATIVE ANALYSIS

Variation Analysis: The study of linguistic change

The origins of Variation Analysis is within the fields of linguistics. Variation Analysis is concerned with the
variation and changes observed in language along different speech communities.
The most prominent figure within this approach is William Labov, who argues in favour of the inadequacy of
intuition as a source of information about language structures, as well as in favour of the importance of the
vernacular language (the variety showing the most systematic grammar of a dialect).

Labov views language as a “property of the speech community, an instrument of social communication that
evolves continuously throughout human history, in response to a variety of human needs and activities”.

Labov demonstrated how language changes spread through society, by showing that linguistic changes are
normally carried out by certain social groups, and that dialect variation is by no means free or random.

Variation analysis combines both qualitative and quantitative research techniques.

An important notion in Variation Analysis is the notion of constraint. The overall information structure of a text
imposes certain constraints on its parts. E.g.: Recipes normally contain a list of ingredients. Therefore, the
referents on the list necessarily have to be related to food.

Linguistic change can be studied at the different levels of linguistic analysis:

• Semantic: E.g. the alternate terms lift and elevator share the same referents and their use may vary
according to variables such as dialect, speech community or speech situation.
• Phonological: E.g. the pronunciation of the word schedule may vary geographically.
• Syntactic: E.g. the syntactic options such as Who is he talking to? vs. To whom is he talking? may vary
according to the speech situation.
• Textual: the dialect/variety used may vary according to the text type > E.g. in narratives, people tend
to use the vernacular language

Variationist Analysis: The Vernacular

Variationist base their analysis of narrative on what speakers actually say, therefore it is very important for
them to work with samples of authentic speech data. This leads them to seek the mode of speech called the
vernacular.

The vernacular is the variety of language acquired in pre-adolescent years and used by speakers when they pay
minimum attention to speech.

In order to collect samples of the vernacular, variationists resort to sociolinguistic interviews, which allow them
to discover the regular rules of language and the social distribution of variants. In these interviews the
respondents are asked to tell narratives of personal experience.

Narrative Analysis

Labov and Waletzky define a narrative as a particular unit in discourse which contains smaller units having
particular syntactic and semantic properties.

The skeleton of a narrative consists of a series of temporally ordered clauses which Labov calls narrative
clauses. Broadly speaking, narratives contain a beginning, a middle, and an end, but if we look at them in detail,
we shall find all or some of the following elements:

• Abstract > one or two clauses summarizing the story

• Orientation One or more clauses which give information about the place, time, the participants or the
situation.
• Complicating action > sequential clauses which describe the events.
• Evaluation > the means used by the narrator to point out the aim of the narrative, i.e., why it is told,
or to give information on the consequences of the event for human needs and desires.
 • Result or resolution > the set of complicating actions which follow or coincide with the most
reportable event
• Coda > a free clause at the end which indicates the end of a narrative. It precludes the potential
question “And what happened then?”

Not all narratives have the six elements. According to Labov, their basic characteristics is their temporal
sequence. Thus, for him the simplest possible narrative consists of just a complication without a clear
resolution (e.g. He was being followed when walking along a dark road at midnight).

Minimal narratives have both complication and resolution (E.g.: Someone broke into her home and stole all her
jewels). In more complex narratives, the structure O-C-E-R-C (Orientation, Complicating action, Evaluation,
Resolution and Coda) appears to be the most common.

The data extracted from narratives will vary depending on the social context within which they are collected.

Labov’s and Waletzky’s framework has proved to be useful in approaching a wide variety of narrative situations
and types, including:
• Oral memoirs
• Folk tales
• Avant garde novels
• Therapeutic interviews
• Narratives of everyday life

Essential concepts in Narrative Analysis

Reportability: telling a narrative requires a person to hold the floor longer and the narrative to carry enough
interest for the audience to justify its telling, i.e. the narrative has to be reportable. Thus,

• a reportable event is defined as “one that justifies the automatic reassignment of speaker role to the
narrator”.
• A most reportable event is the event that is less common than any other in the narrative and has the
greatest effect upon the needs and desires of the participants in the narrative”.

Credibility: the extent to which listeners/readers believe that events happened in the way the narrator
describes them.

Causality: a narrative needs a sequence of events (explained casual relations) that link the orientation to the
most reportable event.

Point of view: an ideological framework within which events are seen or presented by the narrator (rarely a
conscious process).

Subjectivity: a subjective event is one that the narrator became aware of through memory, emotional reaction
or internal sensation.

Objectivity: events have to be known to the narrator through experience. According to Labov, the narratives
of personal experience that have the greatest impact upon audiences are those that use the most objective
means of expression, because objectivity increases credibility.
Information Structures

One of the main concerns of variationists is to search for the information structures that prevail in discourse.
Thus, differences among text types can be discovered by examining how certain linguistic forms fit a given
distributional pattern.

• Temporal structure is a central criterion for the definition of narrative. The linear presentation of
event clauses in a narrative is crucial for the assignment of reference time.
• Descriptive structure. Narrative descriptive orientation may preface the narrative action, or it may be
embedded within the complicating action.
• Evaluative structure. There is normally a lot of subjectivity involved in the process of making a point
when telling a story, and the point is generally indicated by means of some kind of evaluation.

Narrative and Identity

Discourse practices such as narrative have a central role in social practices within which individuals and groups
present themselves to others, thereby building their identity. For that reason, narrative discourse has proved
to be a very fertile ground for the study of the construction of individual/group identity.

Thus, narrative analysis provides a systematic way of understanding how people make events in their lives
meaningful and how they engage in the ongoing construction of their identities. The process of building one’s
identity is very closely related to the process of taking stances in discourse, be it towards ideologies, other
people, situations, etc.

Some strategies used to conduct identity may be the following:

• The way a speaker/writer uses reference in discourse

• The use of quotation
• Use of pronouns or forms of address
• The blending of different voices within the same narrative
• Etc.

UNIT IV

FUNCTIONAL SENTENCE PERSPECTIVE: THEMATIC AND INFORMATION STRUCTURES

FUNCTIONALISM

Functionalism grew as an alternative to Formalism. Functionalism relies on a pragmatic view of language as

social interaction. It focuses on the rules that govern verbal interaction. Its origins can be traced back to the
Linguistic School of Prague.

FUNCTIONAL SENTENCE PERSPECTIVE

Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) is a linguistic theory which refers to an analysis of utterances or texts in
terms of the information they contain. The role of each part of utterances is evaluated for its semantic
contribution to the whole.

A key concept within this theory is that of communicative dynamism which is defined by Firbas as “the relative
extent to which a linguistic element contributes towards the further development of the communication”.

FSP provides a functional explanation for word order: all things being equal, the order of words in a sentence
corresponds to an increase in communicative dynamism.

For elements determine communicative dynamism:

 1. Linear Modification > the relation between word order and communicative dynamism.

2. The contextual factor > has to do with whether a given meaning is retrievable or irretrievable from
the immediately relevant context, a distinction that has created the opposition context-dependent /
context-independent.

3. The semantic factor > which deals with the so-called dynamic functions
a. The theme is considered to be the part of the sentence which carries the lowest degree of
communicative dynamism.
b. The rheme carries the highest degree of communicative dynamism.

4. Prosodic prominence > a factor which can only be studied in spoken language. For instance, it deals
with the function that certain tones or other prosodic features fulfil in discourse.

THEMATIC STRUCTURE: THEME VS. RHEME

The thematic structure of a clause contains two main elements:

• Theme > it is the speaker’s or writer’s point of departure.

• Rheme > it is the rest of the message.

Different elements can be chosen as initial constituents of a clause, or themes. Examine the examples in the
table below:

THEME RHEME

Millie didn't buy that house.

That house Millie didn’t buy.

What Millie did not buy was that house.

It was that house Millie didn’t buy.

Speakers/writers choose the theme depending on the angle from which they project the message, and
therefore this choice affects its final meaning. Choosing one or other point of departure will also show that the
speaker makes different assumptions about the stage of knowledge of the hearer.

The theme always contains an ideational element (i.e., an entity functioning as subject, complement or
circumstantial adjunct), which Halliday refers to as topical theme or experiential theme.

Experiential themes may be accompanied by two other kinds of themes:

Non-experiential themes, which can be divided into two main kinds:

1. Interpersonal themes, which include:

a. Continuative themes, manifested as pragmatic markers of request, response, surprise,
hesitation, etc.: (e.g.: Well, Hey, Please, etc.)
b. Adjuncts of stance: e.g.: (apparently, certainly, possibly, etc.)
c. Vocatives and appellatives: (e.g.: Mr Thompson! Ladies and Gentlemen)

2. Textual themes, which include connective adjuncts or discourse markers such as however, finally,
anyway, etc., which connect a clause to the previous part of the text by indicating relations of
consequence, addition or concession, among others.
Thus, the different kinds of themes can be combined in only one clause, forming what we know as Multiple
Themes:

Well, anyway, she didn’t want to come

Continuative Connective adjunct Subject

Non-experiential, Non-experiential, Experiential Theme Rheme

Interpersonal theme Textual theme

THEME RHEME

DETACHED THEMES

Some themes are detached from the main clause.

A subtype of these are normally lexical noun phrases which stand outside the clause and are called Absolute
Themes.

The war with Irak, everyone thinks something should be done

Absolute theme Exp. Theme

Dislocations are different from absolute themes in that the dislocated element is a constituent of the clause,
and is repeated by a co-referential pronoun in its normal position within the clause.

She’s beautiful, that woman Your house, it’s on fire!

Right-dislocated theme Left-dislocated theme

THEMATIC CLAUSES

When two or more clauses are joined together in a complex clause, the clause that is placed first is said to be
thematic with respect to the whole complex sentence.

Examples:

Coordination:
My sister came over but I was not here.
Theme Rheme

Subordination:

When my friends saw me I was at London Bridge

Theme Rheme

THEME, SUBJECT AND TOPIC

It is important to note that theme is a different category from syntactic subject and from topic, even though
the three tend to coincide in one wording.

Theme > point of departure of the message

Subject > syntactic element of clause structure
Topic > what the text is about

Examples:
 My new neighbour is quite a character
Subject/Theme/Topic (the three coincide)

In the US, the people celebrate Thanksgiving in November

Theme Subject Topic (they do not coincide)

MARKED AND UNMARKED THEMES

Certain types of information may be foregrounded or thematized, depending on the purposes of

communication.

• Marked themes > those which do not coincide with the expected first constituent of each mood of
structure.
• Unmarked themes > those which co-exist with the expected first constituent of the mood structure.

Note: the different mood structures with their corresponding expected first constituents are:

a) Declarative: Subject
b) Polar interrogative: Finite + subject
c) Wh-interrogative Wh-element
d) Imperative Predicator or let + subject

Examples:

Mary failed the math exam

UNMARKED THEME RHEME

The math exam Mary failed

MARKED THEME RHEME

THEMATIZATION /STAGING

The process by which the speaker/writer has to choose a beginning point has to do with the linear organization
of sentences and texts, and has been called thematization or staging.

The linear organization of a clause, paragraph or text can be manipulated in order to bring certain items or
events into greater prominence than others by means of the process of thematization or staging. For instance,
the title of a newspaper article, or the title of a book constitutes a powerful thematization device used by the
author.

Thematization then creates certain expectations in the readers or hearers, for the thematized elements
constrain their interpretation of the discourse that follows.

INFORMATION STRUCTURE: GIVEN VS. NEW

Spoken discourse takes the form of a sequence of information units. Information units are structures made
up of two functions: the New and the Given. So, from a structural point of view, all information units have an
obligatory new element and an optional given element.

Given information > Recoverable (from the co-text or context)

New information > Non-recoverable
Typically, the Given precedes the New, and the New is always marked by tonic prominence. The element
which has this prominence is the one carrying information focus.

So, I went to LONdon, and you to BRUssels

Given New Given New

MARKED AND UNMARKED FOCUS

In normal, unemphatic discourse, the unmarked distribution starts with the Given information and progresses
towards the new. This process is known as the principle of end-focus.

The focus normally marks where the New element ends (as it typically falls on the last lexical item in the clause),
but it is not always clear where it begins, or where the boundary between the Given and the New would be.

All the people were running for their LIVES

Focus
< NEW >

The principle of end-focus tells us that the unmarked option for the focus is to fall on the last lexical item of
the clause. So the focus will be marked when it does not fall on the last lexical item.

A focus is marked for emotive purposes, or when the speaker wants to contrast or correct something which
has been said or implied in the previous discourse or in the situational context.

Julia met Anna this MORning > Unmarked focus

Julia met ANNA this morning > Marked focus. Contrast: Julia met Anna, not Mary

BUT… HOW DO WE IDENTIFY THE FOCUS?

Speakers divide their information into segments (information units) realized by tone units. Tone units always
contain a syllable which is more prominent. This syllable contains the intonation nucleus of the unit and
constitutes the focus of information. The information focus represents the peak or highest point of the unit.

The placement of the focus constitutes the main strategy used by speakers of English for communicating
contrast and emphasis in the spoken language.

CLEFT CONSTRUCTIONS: IT-CLEFT AND WH-CLEFT

Speakers often re-organize the content of a single clause into two related parts or units in order to place the
focus of a new element that follows a form of the verb be. This is called clefting, and it can be done by using
two different constructions:

It-cleft: It was a NECKLACE (that) I gave her for her birthday

New Given

Wh-cleft: What I gave her for her birthday was a NECKLACE

Given New

Focus of both clefts >NECKLACE (marked with tonic stress)

Main discourse function of cleft constructions > to mark contrastive focus

Clef constructions can also be used to:

• Highlight expressions of time/place

o It was in Paris that I met her
• Signal a shift to a new episode
o It was only after several moths that I realized he had a problem
 • Suggest exclusiveness
o What I like is to do snorkelling

INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THEMATIC STRUCTURE: GIVEN + NEW, AND THEME + RHEME

Information and thematic structures are closely related from the semantic point of view. Under normal
conditions, speakers/writers will choose the theme from what is Given and will locate the New within the
Rheme. But Given is not the same as Theme, and New is not the same as Rheme.

The theme is what the speaker chooses to take as her point of departure, while the given is that the listener
already knows. Thus:

Theme + Rheme > is speaker-oriented

Given + New > is listener-oriented

Therefore, the speaker can play with both the thematic and the information structure of her discourse in order
to produce a wide variety of rhetorical effects.

Examples:

Prototypical case > Given coincides with Theme

(A: When are you coming to Madrid?)

B: I’m planning on going next month
Theme Rheme
Given New

Non-prototypical case > where B plays with the two systems in order to produce a contrastive effect

(A: Mary likes Madrid)

B: Paris is where she wants to go, though!
Theme Rheme
New Given

IMPORTANT > It is not the structure of discourse which determines whether information is treated as New or
Given. On the contrary, the factor determining this choice is the speaker’s moment-to-moment assessment of
the relationship between what he wants to say and his/her hearer’s informational requirements.

SOME REMARKS ABOUT HALLIDAY’S INFORMATION STRUCTURE ANALYSIS

a) Brown & Yule > Halliday makes a simplification of the function of pitch prominence when saying that
it consists in solely marking the focus. It may have several other functions, such as marking the
beginning of a speaker’s turn or of a new topic.
b) It is very difficult to find such perfect tone groups as the ones Halliday describes. On the contrary, it is
very common to find tightly rhythmically bound structures with several peaks of prominence. Thus
many scholars do not believe that the information unit should contain only one focus or that it should
be realized with only one tonic.
c) Other authors, such as Prince, have pointed out that the two-way division of information into Given
and New is inadequate. Price classifies information by means of a pair of cross-cutting dichotomies:
information can be discourse-old or discourse-new and, on the other hand, it can be either hearer-old
or hearer-new. Consider the example:

They went to Rome to see Pope Francis, and they met their old friend Ricardo there

Rome > Discourse-new but hearer-old

Pope Francis > Discourse-new but hearer-old
Their old friend Ricardo > Discourse-new and hearer-new

UNIT V

POST-STRUCTURALISM AND ITS DERIVED APPROACHES: CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS,

POSITIVE DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND MEDIATED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

POST-STRUCTURALISM

Post-structuralism originated as a reaction against the “absolutism” and totalizing concepts of Structuralism.
Its main assumptions are:

• The concept of ‘self’ as a singular and coherent entity is a fictional construct, thus in order to study a
given text a reader/hearer must understand how this discourse is related to the writer’s/speaker’s
own personal concept of self.
• Each human reader builds an individual aim and meaning for a given text. Therefore, the author’s
intended meaning is secondary to the meaning that the reader perceives > this phenomenon is
known as ‘decentring’ of the author.
• The meaning of a text, then, shifts in relation to the variables related to the reader’s identity. None
of the possible interpretations is considered to be the right one. All of them contribute to the better
understanding of a text.

Although originally labelled as a structuralist, Michel Foucault came to be regarded as the most important
representative of the post-structuralist movement. Like the structuralists, Foucault believed that language and
society were shaped by rule-governing systems, but unlike them, he did not believe that there were definite
underlying structures that could explain the human condition, nor did he think that one could study discourse
from an objective point of view.

Post-structuralism conceives of the social space (institutions, identities, etc.) and the world of material objects
as discursive in nature. Thus, for post-structuralists there is nothing outside the text. However, they do not deny
the material world.

In sum > there is a deep sense in post-structuralism that we live in a linguistic universe. ‘Reality’ in this universe
is only mediated reality, which is governed by things such as the structure of ideology, the various cultural
codes, etc. All meaning is textual and intertextual, and it circulates in economies of discourse, for every text
exists only in relation to other texts.

Post-structuralist discourse theory has it weaknesses, the main one being its failure to present an explicit
method for the analysis of actual instances of text or social interaction-in-context. Nevertheless, some authors
have attempted to apply some aspects of this theory to the analysis of real discourse in action.

Social Theory

Social Theory is considered to be outside the mainstream of Sociology. It has been affected by recent
developments in feminism, critical race theory, multiculturalism and other movements associated with groups
that are somehow perceived as oppressed. Thus, social theorists are suspicious of “objectivity.

Some social theorists, such as Michel Foucault or Pierre Bourdieu, have made important contributions to the
study of language and discourse.
Michel Foucault’s contribution to the theory of discourse is mainly found in such areas as the relationship of
discourse and power, the discursive construction of social subjects and knowledge, and the functioning of
discourse in social change. His work is divided in three stages:

• Archaeological work
• Genealogical studies
• Ethics

Foucault’s early archaeological work includes a constitutive view of discourse, i.e., discourse constitutes or
constructs society on various dimensional planes: social subjects, forms of self, social relationships, objects of
knowledge, etc. He insists on the prevalence of discourse structures over human agency, a view that has the
following implications:

• Meaning is governed by the formative rules of discourse; thus, it does not originate in the speaking
subject.
• Social identity is ‘dispersed’. The social subject is replaced by a ‘fragmented’ subject with unstable
identities enabled by discursive formations.
• The acquisition of social identities is a process of immersion into – and submission to – discursive
practice.

In the second stage of Foucault’s work, his Genealogical Studies, he turns his focus to truth/power regimes and
how they affect the bodily disposition. Thus Foucault analyses two major ‘technologies’ of power:

• Discipline is a technology for handling masses of people, and manifests in diverse forms, such as the
architecture of schools, prisons or factories, etc., thus ‘objectifying’ the subject.
• Confession is a ritual of discourse and, contrary to discipline, it subjectifies people. However, Foucault
believes this is only an illusion, for confession draws the person more into the domain of power.

In his third stage, Foucault shifts his focus to the ethics of the postmodern subject, and he develops an ethical
orientation for the postmodern era which is based on the idea that an analysis of the techniques of domination
can be counterbalanced by an analysis of the techniques of the self.

Summing up, Foucault’s main ideas and contributions to Discourse Analysis:

1. He focused on discourse as a system of representation (i.e. the rules and practices that produce
meaningful statements and regulate discourse in different historical periods).
2. Discourse is a way of representing the knowledge about a particular topic at a given historical moment.
3. All practices have a discursive aspect
4. It is discourse, not the things in themselves, which produces knowledge (for we can only have a
knowledge of things if they have a meaning).
5. All discursive practice are defined in terms of their relations to others, and depend upon others in
complex ways.
6. The practices and techniques of modern ‘biopower’, such as examination and confession, are
discourse to a significant degree.
7. Discourse has a political nature, for the exertion of power occurs both in and over discourse.
8. Social change is discursive in nature: changing discursive structures are a sign of social change.

But Foucault’s analysis of discourse does not include discursive and linguistic analyses of real texts.

Pierre Bourdieu is a philosopher and social theorist who is associated with these three main key concepts:

1. The metaphor of symbolic capital, which establishes an analogy between financial capital and
symbolic resources (e.g. the access to discourse situations and the ability to mobilize sets of linguistics
conventions). Certain groups in society possess more symbolic capital than others, and the more
capital one has, the easier it is to invest it profitably.
 2. The notion of Habitus, which refers to individual differences in practical linguistic competence. The
formation of habitus is permanently modified and sanctioned by the relative success/failure in the
market of linguistic exchanges. It is shown through language use.
3. The notion of bodily hexis, which associates linguistic practices with deep-rooted bodily dispositions.
Thus, for instance, members of the upper-social classes will have a different bodily disposition
associated to their use of language than members of the lower classes.

From Bourdieu’s point of view, then:

• Communicative efficiency is subsidiary to political efficiency and the desire to dominate and gain
profit. Therefore, according to Bourdieu, comprehension is not the primary goal of communication.
• Authority and credibility in a particular situation do not necessarily imply an impeccable use of
standard language. The value of any given utterance depends highly on the speaker’s capacity or
ability to impose his/her criteria (and this capacity is not determined only in linguistic terms).

So his sociological critique of linguistics entails a three-way displacement of concepts:

• He replaces the concept of grammaticalness by the notion of acceptability.

• He speaks of relations of symbolic power, rather than of relations of communication, thereby
replacing the question of the meaning of speech by the question of value an power of speech
• He uses the term symbolic capital (associated to the speaker’s position in the social structure) instead
of linguistic competence.

Mikhail Bakhtin argues that language must be seen as a concrete lived reality (not an abstract system) because
it is an essentially social phenomenon which is rooted in the ambiguities of everyday life. The basic ideas of his
work are:
• Language is dialogic: utterances are the basis of language, and they always contain an implicit
respondent voice
• Discursive practice is essentially heteroglossic: texts often contain the various voices that have been
involved in their production. For example, a film text normally includes the voice of the screenplay
writer, the director, and the people involved in its production.

According to Bakhtin, there is an internal struggle in language which is conceptualized in terms of a conflict
between:
• Centripetal forces > are associated with political centralization and a unified cultural canon. They
generate authoritative and inflexive discourse: religious dogma, teachers, fathers, etc.
• Centrifugal forces > allude to the stratification of language into varieties related to different genres,
professions, age groups and so on.

The essential dialogic and heteroglossic nature of language ensures that our views and understanding of the
world, as well as our relations with others and our sense of our own identity, are always evaluative and
ideological.

Genres are viewed as the drive belts between the history of language and the history of society, and therefore,
any change or transformation in genre conventions contributes to, and therefore indicates, social change.

But note the following: some linguists have not accepted post-structural theories on the grounds that they are
politically oriented and biased. However, social theories have had a considerable influence upon other and
subsequent approaches to discourse, such as Critical Discourse Analysis, Positive Discourse Analysis, and
Mediated Discourse Analysis.

CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS (CDA)

Critical linguists focused on the analysis of language as text or discourse, rather than as decontextualized sets
of possible sentences in the Chomskyan fashion, and they based their analytical approach mainly on Halliday’s
systemic/functional grammar. Critical linguist studies were based on the premise that grammar is an ideological
instrument for categorization of things that occur in the world. Van Dijk, Fairclough and Wodak are three of
the most prominent current researchers in CDA.

Van Dijk defines the discipline as: “CDA is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way
social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced and resisted by text and talk in the
social and political context. With such dissident research, critical discourse analysts want to understand, expose
and ultimately resist social inequality.”

CDA dos not have a unitary theoretical framework. However, all perspectives within CDA will try to ask and
answer questions about the way certain discourse are deployed in the reproduction of social dominance,
featuring such notions as discrimination, power, dominance, hegemony, ideology, gender, race, etc.

Thus CDA is a form of social action, and uses the analysis of discourse to make people aware of social and
political issues. CDA tries to bridge the gap between micro- and macro-levels of social order. E.g.: A racist
speech in parliament is a discourse at the microlevel of social interaction in the specific situation of a debate,
but at the macrolevel – and at the same time – it may enact or be a constituent part of a legislation of the
reproduction of racism.

CDA focuses on social cognition (i.e. social representation in the minds of social actors) as the empirical missing
link between discourse and dominance, in order to show the relationship with discourse and dominance, by
attempting to show the nature of its relationship with discourse and society.

CDA believes that language always manifests itself as the representative of an ideological system. Most CDA
studies, then, deal with different aspects of power, domination and social inequality.

Discourse and Power

Power is multi-faceted and can take different forms (physical power, military power, political power, etc.). It is
associated with rank and status. Social power is defined in terms of control. The members of a social group will
have power if they can control the acts and minds of members of other groups.

Regarding the relationship between power and discourse, CDA takes the following statements as axiomatic:

• Access to specific forms of discourse is itself a power resource.

• If we can influence people’s mind by using our power, we will indirectly control their actions.
• Those groups who control most influential discourse also have more chances of controlling the minds
and actions of others.

When the groups who control the discourse abuse their power and other groups accept this abuse, CDA uses
the term hegemony. The hegemonic groups constitute the power elites. CDA defines elites in terms of their
symbolic power.

The elites can enact their power by controlling the context of discourse (i.e.. its time, place, setting, etc.). E.g.:
Professors control the context of appointments with students (not viceversa), or CEOs (not employees) call for
a meeting at the time, place and circumstances which are convenient to them.

CDA is specially concerned with those forms of context control which are more morally/legally unacceptable,
such as the exclusion of women by men, or any other kind of discrimination or marginalization. Through these
models of context control, the less power are censored or not heard. Their voices are blocked. The discourse
itself becomes a ‘segregated’ structure.

Very subtle manifestations of dominance can be found at the semantic, syntactic, morphological or
phonological levels. E.g.: by dominating the flood or the (im)politeness strategies, or by using some rhetorical
figures or a certain intonation. Indeed, it is a well-known fact that those people who are in power may feel
entitled to be impolite towards their subordinates (e.g.: members of high military ranks toward lower rank
soldiers).

Other linguistic strategies commonly used to express power are pauses, laughter, hedges, interruptions, choice
of topic, topic change, etc.

Ideology, social cognition and discourse

Ideology is a key notion in CDA, for it is considered to establish the connection between discourse and society.
ideologies are shared by the members of a group to have an effective communicative interaction.

Ideologies control social groups and their discourse. For Van Dijk , ideologies are developed by dominant groups
to reproduce and legitimate their domination. Thus, for instance, groups may have ideological racist or sexist
beliefs that condition their discourse and social practices.

Ideologies are both social systems and mental representations that form the basis of social cognition (i.e. the
shared knowledge and attitudes of a group). This means that ideologies not only have a social function but also
cognitive functions of belief organization which finally make up the basis of discourse.

Steps to follow when doing Critical Discourse Analysis

1. Focus on a social problem that has a semiotic aspect.

2. Identify obstacles to the social problem being tackled > this can be done through analysis of the
network of practices it is located within, the relationship of semiosis to the elements within the
practice(s), interactional analysis, linguistic and semiotic analysis, etc.
3. Consider if the social order (network of practices) “needs” the problem.
4. Identify possible ways past the obstacles
5. Reflect critically on the analysis

Criticisms levelled at CDA

Schegloff argues that the type of research carried out by CDA does not include a detailed and systematic
analysis of discourse. Additionally, other authors have accused CDA of being ‘left-leaning’ and thus politically-
oriented.

Martin observes that all these criticisms seem to suggest that CDA should move in the direction of Peace
Sociolinguistics, a circumstance that led him to call for the development of Positive Discourse Analysis.

POSITIVE DISCOURSE ANALYSIS (PDA)

PDA argues for constructive discourse research. Thus, its aim is to engage in “heartening accounts of progress”
rather than in “discouraging accounts of oppression”.

As a novel and recent approach, PDA still has a long way to go in the development of its methodology and tools
for analysis. However, this is an approach with strong foundations, for it is grounded on Systemic Functional
Linguistics, as well as on positive values and intentions.

MEDIATED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS (MDA)

MDA…

- is an approach to Discourse Analysis which focuses more upon human social action than texts or discourses.

- does not consider language as the only mediational means; technology, non-verbal communication and
physical objects used by an agent in taking an action are mediational means as well.
- explores the actions individuals take with texts, as well as the consequences of those actions.

- is interdisciplinary. It integrates concepts from mediated action theory, sociocultural psychology,

anthropological linguistics and intercultural communication.

Ron Scollon explains that MDA is a framework for looking at social actions with the following two questions in
mind:
• What is the action going on here?
• How does discourse figure into these actions?

Central Concepts in MDA

Mediated action – This is the unity of analysis in MDA. Analysts focus on the acting of social actors because
discourses are not merely material objects: they are instantiated in the social world as social action.

Site of engagement – the social space where mediated action occurs. The focus is on real time, irreversible
actions, rather than on objectivized analysis of discourses.

Mediational means – the material means (e.g., the body, dress and movements of the material actors) through
which mediated action is carried out. Mediational means are multiple in a single action, and they are polyvocal,
intertextual and interdiscursive.

Practice – Mediated action is only interpretable within practices. E.g. having dinner at a restaurant is
interpreted as a different action from having dinner at home.

Nexus of practice – discursive and non-discursive practices are interconnected to form nexus of practice.

E.g. the nexus of practice related to eating out in an Italian restaurant would include:

• Ordering practices > e.g. we have to differentiate the different types of pasta
• Eating practices > e.g. alone or with someone
• Discursive practices > e.g. pronounce some Italian words
• Physical spacing practices > e.g. there is a place for the staff and a place for the customers

MDA as a theory of social action

Most of the things we say are accompanied by action, and conversely, most of our actions are accompanied by
language.

The most important principle in MDA theory is the principle of social action:

- Discourse is not seen as a system of representation, thought or values, but as a matter of social actions.

- Mediated action, i.e. the person or persons in the moment of taking an action along with the mediational
means which are used by them, is therefore the ecological unit of analysis.

- All social action is based on tacit, normally unconscious actions which form the different practices.

- The individual’s accumulated experience of social actions is called the habitus or the historical-body

Methods in MDA

MDA includes multiple methods in order to identify and analyse key mediated actions, such as:

- Ethnography of communication surveys of key situations and participants > focusing on social issues so as
to obtain information about the participants, the mediational means, the scenes or situations, and the events
and actions.
- Issue-based surveys of public discourse > providing an independent analysis of the significance of topics,
mediational means and mediated actions, to cross-check against the ethnography of communication surveys.

- Public opinion and focus group surveys of issues and situations > providing information about the means of
determining the socio-political issues that are central across the public at large. Then they are compared with
the analysis of public discourses and those of specific concrete mediated actions taken in specific sites of
engagement.

Each type of data can be seen from four different perspectives:

- Member’s generalizations > expressed by statements such as “We usually do X or Y”, which may be
contrasted with generalizations about other groups of people.

- Individual experience > members of a social group make sweeping generalizations about their group, but, if
given the chance, they make a disclaimer about these generalizations by saying that they do not do everything
their group does since they are different.

- Neutral/objective data > MDA is sceptical of objectivised data. However, the introduction of the point of
view of a distant observer provides important information for the analysis, and thus MDA introduces the
examination of the analyst by using cameras, tape recorders, etc. as mediational means to complete the
information.

- Playback responses > used to focus on linguistic details of social interactions since it provides the original
participants in a scene with an ‘objective’ record of their actions and the analysis developed by an external
observer.

Mediated Social Interaction

All discourse is mediated and all mediations are discursive. E.g., in the news discourse, the primary social
interactions are among the producers (producers, photographers, editors, journalists) and not between the
producers. Thus, the sender-receiver model of communication is misleading, because it makes us think that the
social interaction occurring in texts is between the author or producer and the reader or audience.

Interdisciplinarity

MDA is an interdisciplinary approach to discourse. The integration of many disciplines brings about some crucial
problems:
• Representation and action > there is a tension between the study of abstract systems of
representation and the study of social actors living in real time. MDA considers that the habitus of
social actors and the mediational means carry with them the life history of the person, as well as the
histories and social structures of the world in which they were created.
• Linguistic relativity > MDA places all studies of practice within a broader study of the place of the
practice in the whole ecology of the social actor.
• Units of analysis > Mediated action is taken as the unit of analysis. But the use of this unit entails
certain problems
o Whether language is a unique mediational means or whether there are other cognitive
structures underlying other semiotic systems.
• Methodology > tape recording, transcription or playback focus more on linguistic data than on
mediated action and the social actors, and this may lead to errors of interpretation or analysis. The
solution is found in ethnographic studies.
• The psychology of the social actor > the MDA analysis faces the problem of not having a well-
grounded analytical basis for attributing a given action to a particular social actor, and thus s/he has
to resolve to what extent it is necessary to enter into the psychology of the social actor.
 How does MDA analyse discourse?

As an example of how social actions are analysed in MDA, Scollon analyses the social action involved in having
a cup of coffee with friends. This action is not simple, for it involves a very complex and nested set of actions
(e.g. lining up, ordering, paying, etc.). Likewise, the discourse of the conversation among friends is not the only
one in the action: there are other discourses implied, such as the discourse of service encounters, of the
international marketing of coffee, etc.

Geosemiotics

MDA has developed a broad and systematic analysis of how language appears in the material world, called
Geosemiotics. It holds the assumption that a very important aspect of the meaning of all language is based on
the material, concrete, physical placement of that language in the world.

From this perspective, “any human action is a process of selection among many semiotic systems which are
always in a kind of dialectical dialogicality with each other”. The key to the analysis of any human action is
indexicality, i.e. the meaning of signs based on their material location.

Geosemiotics not only applies to signs or other symbols, but also to signals and messages such as those sent
off by our bodies, and whose meaning depends greatly on where they are and what they are doing ‘in place’.

Indexicality

Indexicality is defined as the “property of the context-dependency of signs, especially language; hence the
study of those aspects of meaning which depend on the placement of the sign in the material world.”

Our meanings are signalled by means of:

• Icons > signs that resemble the objects being signs > e.g. emoticons
• Indexes > signs which point to or are attached to the object > e.g. an arrow
• Symbols > signs which are arbitrarily or conventionally associated with the object > e.g. the signs of
written language.

Central elements in Geosemiotics

• Social actor > a person who moves in the physical world and ‘gives off’ different signals, such as race,
age, sex, etc.
• Interaction order > the set of social relationships we take up and try to maintain with other people
who are in our presence.
• Visual semiotics > the visual frame of the social action. E.g.: how the interaction order is represented
visually and how placement of visual symbols affects their interpretation.
• Place semiotics > all actions take place somewhere in the physical universe. Both semiotic and non-
semiotic spaces (i.e. spaces where signs are forbidden) are taken into account.

So, from the point of view of Geosemiotics, everything surrounding us may influence our taking particular
actions: from our location in a city or place, to the people with whom we interact or the signs that form part of
the whole picture of our social interactions.

MDA, thus, takes a holistic approach to the analysis of discourse by considering every element related to and
interconnected with the discourse situation and the social action being carried out.