Discourse Analysis

By Nadira Chahboub

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 Main definitions
• Languages:

On the most important ways we understand what

people mean when they communicate is by
reference to the social context within which they are
speaking or writing.

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Consider the following list of words
• Milk
• Car
• Bread
• Peace
• Coronavirus
• Visa

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 Consider the conversation
• Ali: what do we need to get at the shop?
• Sami: Well, we need some milk and bread. And
we must hurry, I have to wash my car this
afternoon.
• Ali: Me too, I must to fix an appointment for visa. By
the way, what about the Coronovisus, are you
following the news.
• Sami: not really, It is better to be in peace than
following all these problems in world.

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 How do people „„accomplish talk‟‟?

Knowledge of the sociocultural context and the social

psychological situation can help us, for example, to
distinguish between angry and joking behavior.
Conversation analysis examines the structure of
human dialogues.

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 The meaning
• The meaning of an utterance can change
dramatically depending on who is saying it, when
and where it is said, and to whom it is said.

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 Language is always situated in four
ways:
1. Language is situated within the material world,
and where we encounter it, whether it be on a
shop sign or in a textbook or on a particular
website will contribute to the way we interpret it.
2. Language is situated within relationship; one of
the main ways we understand what people mean
when they speak or write is by referring to who
they are, how we know them, and whether or not
they have some kind of power over us.

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3. Language is situated in history, that is, in
relation to what happened before and what we
expect to happen afterwards.

4. Language is situated in relation to other

language – utterances and text always respond to
or refer to other utterances and texts; that is
everything that we say or write is situated in a
kind of network of discourse.

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 ROLE OF LANGUAGE
• Language orders our perceptions, and makes
things happen and thus shows how language can
be use to contrast and create social interaction
and diverse social worlds.

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• We will be concerned with social texts of all kinds;
that is, the conversation, newspaper stories, novels
and soap operas, which are a central and
inescapable part of everyday life. Indeed the term
“text” will be used in broad sense, to include not
only writing prima facie but also the written record
of spoken; the transcript of the interview will be as
much our concern as the prepared narrative.

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 LANGUE AND PAROLE
• Ferdinand de Saussure distinguishes between a
„„language‟‟ (langue) in its structural form and the
spoken word (parole). Saussure‟s distinction is
synchronic rather than diachronic; the actual
utterance by a person is a product of that speaker‟s
having been socialized into a language which is
relatively fixed during his or her lifetime.

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 DISCOURSE
• According to Schiffrin (1994), the definition of
discourse as language “above the sentence”; the
sentence is viewed as the unit of which discourse
is comprised.
• Discourse can either be spoken or written.

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• According to Crystal (1992) “Discourse is a
continuous stretch of (especially spoken) language
larger than a sentence, constituting a coherent unit
such as a sermon, argument, joke, or narrative”.

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• The definition of discourse denotes a method of
communication that conforms to particular
structural and ethnographic norms and marks a
particular social group by providing a means of
solidarity for its members and a means of
differentiating that group from other groups.

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