DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Name : Vivin Agustin

NIM : 8206112007
Subject : Discourse Analysis
Lecturer : Dr. Anni Holila Pulungan, M. Hum

Questions:
1. Find the theory and examples of the function below:
a. Phatic function
b. Emotive function
c. Conative function
d. Referential function
2. Find the different between discourse and text & give the example!
3. Explain the influences of Discourse Analysis to another studies & give the example!
4. Elaborate the approaches to discourse!

Answers:
1. Roman Jakobson defined functions of language (or communication functions),
according to which an effective act of verbal communication can be described. Each
of the functions has an associated factor. The following are the definition and example
based on Jakobson (1960):
a. The phatic function: is language for the sake of interaction and is therefore
associated with the Contact/Channel factor. The Phatic Function can be
observed in greetings and casual discussions of the weather, particularly with
strangers. It also provides the keys to open, maintain, verify or close the
communication channel
e.g. "Hello?"
"Ok?"
"Hummm"
"Bye"
b. The emotive function: relates to the Addresser (sender) and is best exemplified
by interjections and other sound changes that do not alter the denotative
meaning of an utterance but do add information about the Addresser's
(speaker's) internal state.
e.g. "Wow, what a view!"
Whether a person is experiencing feelings of happiness, sadness, grief or
otherwise, they use this function to express themselves.
c. The conative function: engages the Addressee (receiver) directly and is best
illustrated by vocatives and imperatives.
e.g. "Tom! Come inside and eat!"
 d. The referential function: corresponds to the factor of context and describes a
situation, object or mental state. The descriptive statements of the referential
function can consist of both definite descriptions and deictic words.
e.g. "The autumn leaves have all fallen now."
Similarly, the referential function is associated with an element whose true
value is under questioning especially when the truth value is identical in both
the real and assumptive universe.

2. Edmundson, (1981: 4) states that "A discourse is a structured event of manifest to

linguistic (and other) behavior" (discourse is a structured event manifested in the
behavior of language or other) and text a structured sequence of linguistic expressions
forming a unitary whole is a set of structured language expressions forming a unity).
Thus, discourse is a structured event expressed through language, while the text is a
sequence of structured language statements (Sumarlam, 2003, p. 5).
David Crystal (1987) distinguishes the concept between discourse analysis and text
analysis, as follows.
“Discourse analysis focuses on the structure of naturally occur spoken language”
e.g. conversations, interviews, commentaries, and speech.
“Text analysis focusses on the structure of written language”.
e.g. essays, notices, road signs, and chapters”

3. One of the main purposes of using discourse analysis is to present power and
dominance features to represent the inequalities, subjectivity, and other issues in
society. The following are the influences of Discourse Analysis to another studies:
a. Law
According to Van Dijk (1985), the field of law also has a textual or dialogical
nature, comprised of laws, legal (inter)action, and legal documents that also
demands discourse analysis to reveal inequality
E.g. In the courtroom reflected through language as language is the most
powerful natural weapon to effectuate justice in societies.
b. Psychology
Potter (2012) used discourse analysis to analyse how the psychological issues
and objects are constructed, understood, and displayed in the interaction of
everyday lives of people, both individually and collectively.
c. Nursing & Medicine
The discourse analysis is used by Bergh et al. (2015) to critically analyse the
interview responses of nurses and managers. The study reflects how cost-
effectiveness, ideologies, and priorities affect nurses’ patient education work.
d. Phonology & Morphology
Kim et al. (2015) analysed the relationship of discourse and morphology
E.g. between children’s bilingual experience and morpho-syntactic
development and concluded that the linguistic complexity of teacher talk and
 instructional approach may influence children’s development of
morphological and morpho-syntactic awareness.
e. Engineering and IT
Ferreira et al. (2012) presented these aspects in visual programming.
e.g. Discourse analysis and Semiotic Engineering framework also assisted in
the representation of new teaching strategies in computational thinking
programs with Agent Sheets.
f. Politics
Mulderrig (2017) investigated the UK government’s anti-obesity campaign by
critically analysing the adverts and policy documents to reveal how obesity
was reconceptualised and distorted during the campaign. Discourse analysis
has its manifestations in the systemic analysis of language used in literature as
well.

4. There are some approaches to discourse analysis, such as Speech Act Theory,
Interactional Sociolinguistics, Ethnography of Communication, Pragmatics,
Conversational Analysis, Variation Analysis, etc.
a. Speech Act Theory (Austin 1955, Searle 1969)
It is a logico-philosophic perspective on conversational organization focusing
on interpretation rather than the production of utterances in discourse. It
grows from the basic belief that language is used to perform actions. Based on
this theory, every utterance can be analyzed as the realization of the speaker’s
intent (illocutionary force) to achieve a particular purpose. The focus the
analysis is speech act (SA) or illocutionary force (IF). The principal problem
faced by the linguists is the lack of a one-to-one match up between discourse
function (IF) and the grammatical form. This theory provides the insight that
the basic unit of conversational analysis must be functionally motivated rather
than formally defined one.
b. Interactional Sociolinguistics
This theory grows out of the work of anthropologists. It centrally concerned
with the importance of context in the production and interpretation of
discourse. It focuses on analysis of grammatical and prosodic features in
interactions. Gumperz (1982) demonstrated that interactants from different
socio-cultural backgrounds may “hear” and understand discourse differently
according to their interpretation contextualization cues in discourse, e.g.
intonation contours, ‘speaking for another’, alignment, gender. Schiffrin
(1987) focused on quantitative interactive sociolinguistic analysis, especially
discourse markers. Her basic concern is the accomplishment of conversational
coherence. She argues for the importance of both qualitative and quantitative
analysis in order to determine the function of the different discourse markers
in conversation.
c. Ethnography of Communication
This theory concerned with understanding the social context of linguistic
interactions: ‘who says what to whom, when, where, why and how’. The
 prime unit of analysis is speech event. Speech event refers to ‘activities that
are directly governed by rules or norms for the use of speech’ (Hymes
1972:56). Speech event comprises components (Hymes SPEAKING grid).
Analysis of these components of a speech event is central to what became
known as ethnography of communication or ethnography of speaking, with the
ethnographer’s aim being to discover rules of appropriateness in speech
events. The ethnographic framework has led to broader notions
of communicative competence. Problem: Lack of explicitness in Hymes’
account on the relationship between genre and other components of the
speaking grid and their expression in language and recognition of the close
relationship between speech events and their social or cultural contexts.
d. Pragmatics (Grice 1975, Leech 1983, Levinson 1983)
This theory formulates conversational behaviour in terms of general
“principles” rather than rules. At the base of pragmatic approach is to
conversation analysis is Gricean’s co-operative principle (CP). This principle
seeks to account for not only how participants decide what to DO next in
conversation, but also how interlocutors go about interpreting what the
previous speaker has just done. This principle is the broken down into specific
maxims: Quantity (say only as much as necessary), Quality (try to make your
contribution one that is true), Relation (be relevant), and manner (be brief and
avoid ambiguity). It provides useful means of characterizing different varieties
of conversation.
e.g. In interactions, one can deliberately try to be provocative or consensual.
Its significant problem is it implies that conversations occur co-operatively,
between equals where power is equally distributed etc. However, in reality,
conversations involve levels of disagreement and resistance and power is
constantly under contestation.
e. Conversation Analysis
Garfinkel’(1960) concern to understand how social members make sense of
everyday life. Sack, Schegloff, Jefferson (1973) tried to explain how
conversation can happen at all. CA is a branch of ethnomethodology. There
are two grossly apparent facts: a) only one person speaks at a time, and b)
speakers change recurs. Thus conversation is a ‘turn taking’ activity. Speakers
recognize points of potential speaker change-turn constructional unit (TCU).
CA identified TCU as the critical units of conversation. It has not specified
exactly how a TCU boundary can be recognized in any situation. Models
conversation as infinitely generative turn-taking machine, where interactants
try to avoid lapse: the possibility that no one is speaking. Its major problems:
1) Lack of systematization- thus quantitative analysis is impossible;
2) Limited  its ability to deal comprehensively with complete, sustained
interactions;
3) Though offers a powerful interpretation of conversation as dynamic
interactive achievement, it is unable to say just what kind of achievement it is.
f. Variation Analysis
 Labov and Waletzky (1967) argue that fundamental narrative structures are
evident in spoken narratives of personal experience. The overall structure of
fully formed narrative of personal experience involves six stages: 1) Abstract,
2) Orientation, 3) Complication, 4) Evaluation, 5) Resolution, 6) Coda, where
1) and 6) are optional. The strength is its clarity and applicability. However,
the problem is that data was obtained from interviews. Variationists’ approach
to discourse stems from quantitative of linguistic change and variation.
Although typically focused on social and linguistic constraints on semantically
equivalent variants, the approach has also been extended to texts.

REFERENCES

Bergh, A. L., Friberg, F., Persson, E., & Dahlborg Lyckhage, ‐ E. (2015). Perpetuating ‘New
Public Management’ at the expense of nurses’ patient education: a discourse analysis.
The Nursing Inquiry, 22(3), 190–201. https://doi.org/10.1111/nin.12085
Ferreira, J. J., de Souza, C. S., de Castro Salgado, L. C., Slaviero, C., Leitão, C. F., &
Moreira, F. D. F. (2012, September). Combining cognitive, semiotic and discourse
analysis to explore the power of notations in visual programming. In Visual Languages
and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 2012 IEEE Symposium on (pp. 101–108).
IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/VLHCC.2012.6344492
Jakobson, R. (1960) "Linguistics and Poetics", in T. Sebeok, ed., Style in Language,
Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press
Kim, T. J., Kuo, L. J., Ramírez, G., Wu, S., Ku, Y. M., de Marin, S., & Eslami, Z. (2015).
The relationship between bilingual experience and the development of morphological
and morpho-syntactic awareness: a cross-linguistic study of classroom discourse.
Language Awareness, 24(4), 332–354. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658416.2015.1113983
Mulderrig, J. (2017). Reframing obesity: a critical discourse analysis of the UK’s first social
marketing campaign. Critical Policy Studies, 11(4), 455–476.
https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2016.1191364
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