How does computational discourse analysis help develop language policies?

Computational discourse analysis (CDA) is a branch of linguistics that uses computational methods
to study how language is used in different contexts and purposes
CDA can help develop language policies by providing insights into the linguistic features, patterns,
and effects of different types of discourse, such as political, educational or discourse. In this
article, you will learn how CDA can help you understand and evaluate language policies, as well as
how you can apply CDA tools and techniques to your own data

What is language policy?

Language policy is a set of decisions and actions that affect the status, use, and diversity of
languages in a given society. Language policy can be explicit or implicit, formal or informal, and can
have various goals and impacts, such as promoting or suppressing certain languages, fostering or
hindering multilingualism, supporting or or marginalizing certain groups of speakers. Language
policy can also influence various domains and levels of language use, such as education, media,
law, or Identity.

Why is CDA relevant for language policy?

CDA can help you analyze how language policy is constructed, communicated, and contested
through different types of discourse. For example, you can use CDA to examine how language
policy documents, speeches, or campaigns use certain linguistic strategies, such as framing,
persuasion, or legitimization, to convey their goals and values, or to address their audiences and
stakeholders You can also use CDA to investigate how language policy affects or reflects the
discourse practices and patterns of different speakers and communities, such as their language
choices, styles, or ideologies

Why narrative?

 Narrative has been the most intensively studied form of discourse.

 Typically, events are related in the order In which they occur.
 The task of understanding a narrative - to reconstruct a sequence of events and their
interrelationship from "highlights" which appear explicitly in the narrative.

Scripts
First developed by Roger Schank and his colleagues at Yale University.
In the 1970s, Roger Schank and Robert Abelson formulated the Cognitive Script Theory. They
showed that through our own experience, and by observing how others behave, we store the
cognitive scripts in our memory and then retrieve these scripts when required to guide our
behaviour

 The script is intended to capture a person's knowledge about a stereotyped sequence of

events
 People share scripts, so they omit the obvious things when they speak
 Restaurant script

Restaurant script
The customer carefully gave his order to the waiter. Thirty minutes later he returned with the
wrong entrée.
Who is he?
Who brought the food?
Alternative paths are possible within one track
Scripts were used by a program called SAM (Script Applier Mechanism)
If a text matches one of the headers of a script and in addition mentions some action within the
script, the script will be activated. SAM then fills in the script with information from the text.

Plans

To analyze descriptions of novel sequences of events, Schank and Abelson proposed another type
of knowledge, plans.
A means-ends analysis must be performed; that is, we must try to understand how later events in
a text act to further previously stated goals.
A plan consists of

 a goal
 Alternative sequences of actions for achieving that goal, and
 Preconditions for applying the various sequences
Example:
Willa was hungry. She grabbed the La Liste (the world's best restaurant selection) guide. She got in
her car.
Hungry dine at a restaurant → find out where the restaurant is learn this from a guide → get to
the restaurant
A plan is represented using rules of four different types. These rules will form the links of a casual
chain.
Frames

The basic "chunk" of knowledge is the frame.

Prototype frames describe classes of objects or situations.
Instance frames describe individual objects or situations.
Each instance frame must be an instance of some prototype frame.
Some prototypes (e.g. "kitchen") are viewed as instances of a more general prototype (e.g.
"room").

Each frame contains a set of labeled slots specify the properties, constituents, and/or participants
in the object or situation represented by the frame.

A word which functions as the verb does here, we call a predicate and words which function as the
nouns do are called arguments.