AN INTRODUCTION OF DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

SUMMARY

Since the study of language in use, as a goal of education, a means of education, and an
instrument of social control and social change, is the principal concern of applied linguistics, it is
easy to see why discourse analysis has such a vital part to play in the work that applied
linguistics does, and why so much of the work that has been done over the last few decades on
developing the theory and practice of discourse analysis been done by applied linguists
(Widdowson, Candlin, Swales, for example) or by linguists (notably Halliday and his followers)
for whom the integration of theory and practice is a defining feature of the kind of linguistics
that they do.

A. The definition of discourse

Deborah Schifrin stated that there are three main categories of discourse definition:
 Anything beyond sentence
Phonology, morphology, pragmatics, syntax, semantic s all of those things go into
sentence level. They are kind of linguistics detail. Discourse looks anything beyond a
sentence, string two sentences or more or conversations then you’ve got a discourse.
 Language in use
This is about how people go about doing the language in the context that their doing it.
It is about any situation where people use the language (language in a particular
situation). For example the language that you and I use in the coffee shop and someone
analyze the discourse about the particular situation.

 A broader range of social practice that include non-linguistics and non -specific instances
of language.

In this sense, discourse can include social practices that are non –linguistics (the things
like the clothes that people wearing, things that they are carrying with them like
technology devices, bags or properties, gesture, etc.)
 Foucault’s sense of discourse

“Not just the language of an individual communication (which Foucault regards as a

“sample”), but the larger system of thought within the particular historical location
that make certain things “thinkable” and “sayable”, and regulating who can say them”

B. The definition of discourse analysis

Wikipedia : general term for a number of approaches to analyze written, vocal, or sign
language use, or any significant semiotic event.

Stubbs, M (1983) : discourse analysis concerns with language use in social context, and
in particular with the interaction or dialogue between speakers. Discourse analysis is
sometimes defined as the analysis of language “beyond the sentence”

Discourse Analysis is an increasingly popular and important area of language study. It

discusses not only about language itself but also how it relates with society, culture, and
thought. It is use to describe activities in several disciplines, such as linguistics,
sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics.

C. Object of discourse analysis

 Discourse refers to any utterance which is meaningful. These texts can be:
- written texts
- oral texts
- mixed written/oral texts
 Discourse does not depend on the size of a text

D. Scope of discourse analysis

Discourse analysis is not a discipline which exists on its own. It is influenced by other
disciplines and influences them as well. It is a two-way process …
 For this reason discourse analysis examines spoken and written texts from all sorts of
different areas (medical, legal, advertising) and from all sorts of perspectives (race,
gender, power)
Discourse analysis has a number of practical applications - for example in analysing
communication problems in medicine, psychotherapy, education, in analysing written
style etc.
E. Form of discourse analysis
Descriptive analysis (largely linguistics) : describe how the language works in order to
understand it. Looking at the actual language detail and how languages and grammar
work together to kind of cohere then make things meaningful.
Critical analysis (applied, political) : it is not just to describe how the language works or
even to offer deep explanations, though they do want to do this. It is about how power
flows and operates within society using language.
F. Influences the discourse analysis
 1. Sociolinguistics : social interaction in conversation; social context
Data : transcribed spoken data
2. Psycholinguistics : issues related to language comprehension
Data : short constructed text or sequences of written sentences
3. Computational linguistics : model of discourse processing
Data : short constructed text
4. Pragmatics : relationship between language and its users . Pragmatics concerns
apeech-act, and what people can infer from language but it is not said (implicature,
presupositions, indirect speech acts) but generally concern with choices in
individual utterancesn, not pattern of choices throughout a discourse.
Data : transcribed spoken data
G. Approaches to discourse
Deborah Schiffrin “Approaches to Discourse” (1994) singles out 6 major approaches to
discourse:
 the speech act approach;
 interactional sociolinguistics;
 the ethnography of communication;
 pragmatic approach;
 conversation analysis;
 variationis approach.
H. Why study discourse analysis
As linguists : to find out how works, to improve our understanding of an important kind
of human activity
As educators : to find out how good texts work, so that we can focus on teaching our
students these writing/speaking strategies.
As critical analysts : to discover meanings in the text are not obvious on the surface