Licenciatura del idioma inglés.

Proyecto final.

Materia: Análisis del discurso en ingles

Introduction.
Discourse analysis is used to study the language and its applications in texts and
contexts. It focuses on the entire conversation and real text instead of constructed
or artificial text. It helps linguists to know the role of language in improving the
understanding of people. It enables teachers to learn many language strategies to
teach students writing/speaking skills in a better way. The aims of discourse
analysis are focused on the clear in-depth meaning of the language. The uses of
language and its effects, the impact of language on society. The association of the
language with cultures, interpersonal relationships and communication. Various
components of the language like vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, tone of
voice, fonts, and written form. Some advantages of discourse analysis are:
 It provides a way of thinking and analyzing the problem.
 It enables us to understand the context and perception of the speaker.
 It can be applied at any given time, place and people.
 It helps to learn any language its, origin and association with society and
culture.
Discourse analysis is the study of social life, understood through analysis of
language in its widest sense (including face-to-face talk, non-verbal interaction,
images, symbols and documents). It offers ways of investigating meaning, whether
in conversation or in culture. Discourse analytic studies encompass a broad range
of theories, topics and analytic approaches for explaining language in use.
Discourse analysis involves looking beyond the literal meaning of language,
understanding the context in which social interaction takes place and exploring
what was said, when and why.
Approaches to discourse analysis are not easy to pin down. Different studies focus
on different types of data (including spoken and written) and different types of
discourse. Some discourse studies tend to draw on more than one approach.
Despite the diversity of origin and definition, discursive approaches share several
conceptions about social life. Firstly, ‘language and interaction are best understood
in context’. Insightful interpretation of data involves understanding contexts such as
local circumstances (e.g. setting, participants) and/or wider discourses that shape
language and interaction. Discourse is the creation and organization of the
segments of a language above as well as below the sentence. It is segments of
language which may be bigger or smaller than a single sentence, but the adduced
meaning is always beyond the sentence.
The structural view of discourse analysis places discourse in a hierarchy of
language structures, thus fostering the view that one can describe language in a
unitary way that continues unimpeded from morpheme to clause to sentence to
discourse. But this kind of analysis does not pay attention to the purposes and
functions for which so called 'units' are designed to serve in human affairs.
Discourse analysis is necessarily the analysis of language in use. The functionalist
view of discourse analysis asserts that 'the study of discourse is the study of any
aspect of language use' (Fasold 1990:65). Discourse analysis cannot be restricted
to the description of linguistic forms independent of the purposes and functions
which these forms perform. Functional analyses of discourse rely less upon the
strictly grammatical characteristics of utterances as sentences, than upon the way
utterances are situated in contexts.
There are different types of approaches to discourse analysis but the ones I am
going to talk about are: speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics,
ethnography of communication, pragmatics, conversational analysis, and variation
analysis.
 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 word can be analyzed as the realization
of the speaker’s intent (illocutionary force) to achieve a particular purpose.
 Interactional Sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1982, Goffman 1959-1981)
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 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.

 Ethnography of Communication (Dell Hymes, 1972b, 1974)

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. 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.

 Pragmatics (Grice 1975, Leech 1983, Levinson 1983)

This theory formulates conversational behavior 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.

 Conversation Analysis (CA), Harold Garfinkel 1960s-1970s

Garfinkel’ (sociologist) 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.

 Variation Analysis (Labov 1972a, Labov and Waletzky1967)

Labov and Waletzky 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.

Discourse analysis is sometimes defined as the analysis of language ‘beyond the

sentence’. This contrasts with types of analysis more typical of modern linguistics,
which are chiefly concerned with the study of grammar: the study of smaller bits of
language, such as sounds (phonetics and phonology), parts of words
(morphology), meaning (semantics), and the order of words in sentences (syntax).
Discourse analysts study larger chunks of language as they flow together. The
definition of analysis is the process of breaking down a something into its parts to
learn what they do and how they relate to one another. Discourse analysis is a
broad term for the study of the ways in which language is used in texts and
contexts. Discourse analysis will enable to reveal the hidden motivations behind a
text or behind the choice of a particular method of research to interpret that text.
Discourse analysis is nothing more than a deconstructive reading and
interpretation of a problem or text.
Discourse Analysis will, thus, not provide absolute answers to a specific problem,
but enable us to understand the conditions behind a specific “problem” and make
us realize that the essence of that “problem”, and its resolution, lie in its
assumptions; the very assumptions that enable the existence of that “problem”. By
enabling us to make these assumption explicit, Discourse Analysis aims at allowing
us to view the “problem” from a higher stance and to gain a comprehensive view of
the “problem” and ourselves in relation to that “problem”. Discourse Analysis is
meant to provide a higher awareness of the hidden motivations in others and
ourselves and, therefore, enable us to solve concrete problems – not by providing
unequivocal answers, but by making us ask ontological and epistemological
questions.
Conclusion.
The method of discourse analysis focuses on any text that can provoke any kind of
discourse, a response of any sort. In this way, it broadens the range of topics and
subjects an analyst can use, such as in medical journals, newspaper articles, and
even a president’s speech or a casual conversation. The method of discourse
analysis has been used as far back as the 1950s. It has become useful in studying
language as a tool for social interaction. 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.

References.
Stubbs, M. 1983. Discourse Analysis: The Sociolinguistic Analysis of Natural
Language. England: Basil Blackwell Publisher Limited
Tannen, D. (s.f.). Linguistic Society.
https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/discourse-analysis-what-speakers-do-
conversation
Prezi. (2015) Discourse analysis.
https://prezi.com/riirayzbopuh/critical-discourse-analysis-cda/