Discourse Analysis.

Pragmatics
GUMAROVA MALIKA, FL-42
 What is Discourse?
The word ‘discourse’ is taken from the Latin word ‘discursus’ which means a ‘conversation’

There are 3 ways of defining discourse:

 1) in terms of the formal units - Discourse is language above the
sentence. It is to do with the collective meaning communicated by
the sentence.

2) in terms of it's function - Discourse is language behavior linked to a

social practice. There are many different types of social situation;
therefore, there are different types of discourse appropriate to each
one. For example, the discourse of law is unique to the legal
profession.

 3) Discourse is a 'system of thought’. In other words, due to the

different beliefs and ideologies people can understand things in
completely different ways. For example, while we talk about terrorists,
others might talk of freedom fighters.
 What is Discourse Analysis?

Discourse Analysis is a field of study that examines the way in which a text
communicates an intended message between a sender (speaker/writer) and
receiver(hearer/reader).
It analyzes how language is used, not at the word or sentence level, but at the level
of discourse taking into consideration the surrounding social and historical contexts.
The objects of discourse analysis—discourse, writing, talk, conversation,
communicative event, etc.—are variously defined in terms of coherent sequences of
sentences, propositions, speech acts or turns-at-talk.
The first linguist to refer to discourse analysis was Zellig Harris.
In 1952, he investigated the connectedness of sentences, naming his
study ‘Discourse Analysis’.
Harris claimed explicitly that discourse is the next level in a hierarchy of
morphemes, clauses and sentences.
He viewed discourse analysis procedurally as a formal methodology,
derived from structural methods of linguistic analysis: such a
methodology could break a text down into relationships (such as
equivalence, substitution) among its lower-level constituents.
In Europe, French philosopher Michel Foucault became one of the key
theorists of the subject, especially of discourse.
He wrote ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge’. Foucault directs his analysis
toward the "statement" (énoncé), the basic unit of discourse. "Statement" has
a very special meaning in the Archaeology: it makes propositions, utterances,
or speech acts meaningful. In contrast to classic structuralists, Foucault does
not believe that the meaning of semantic elements is determined prior to their
articulation. In this understanding, statements themselves are not propositions,
utterances, or speech acts. Rather, statements constitute a network of rules
establishing what is meaningful, and these rules are the preconditions for
propositions, utterances, or speech acts to have meaning.
His works have had an increasing impact especially on discourse analysis in
the social sciences.
 There is an increasing integration of discourse analysis with its sister disciplines, such as
semiotics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Besides that discourse analysis includes
many disciplines such as sociology, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology
etc. These different disciplines tend to concentrate on different aspects of discourse.
Therefore, it can be defined as a multi-disciplinary approach.
 What is Pragmatics?

Pragmatics is the study of how words are used, or the study of the use of linguistic signs,
words and sentences, in actual situations.

It considers language as an instrument of interaction, what people mean when they

use language and how we communicate and understand each other.
 What would happen to language if
Pragmatics did not exist?

Pragmatics acts as the basis for all language interactions and contact. It is a key feature to the
understanding of language and the responses that follow this. Therefore, without the function of
Pragmatics, there would be very little understanding of intention and meaning.

 'Can you pass the salt?'

 Literal Meaning: Are you physically able to do this task?
 Literal Response: 'Yes'

 (Pragmatic Meaning: Will you pass me the salt?

 Pragmtic Response: pass the salt to the speaker.)
Paul Grice is best known within the field of Linguistics for his work on
the philosophy of language, and - within Pragmatics - his work on
Conversational Implicature (and Maxims).
Grice both studied and taught at Oxford, as well as taking a
professorship at the University of California from 1967 onwards.
Throughout this long career, he published many studies and journal
articles, such as: “Meaning” (1957), “Utterer’s Meaning, Sentence
Meaning, and Word Meaning” (1968), and "Presupposition and
Conversational Implicature" (1981).
John Langshaw Austin (1911-1960) studied the same degree
at Grice, Literae Humaniores ('Greats') at Oxford, receiving a
first class honors in 1933.
After serving in MI6 during World War II, Austin became a
professor at Oxford, teaching Moral Philosophy.
In 1955 he visited Harvard to give guest lectures which would
form the basis for 'How to do things with words'
Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher known for his works on
philosophy of language, among other subjects.
Despite studying Mathematics and Philosophy at Cambridge
University from 1890, his career developed into one of publishing
and researching many various subjects.
On work which he is famous for is the Theory of Descriptions. This
theory argues that the syntactic form of descriptions (e.g.
phrases that take both definite and indefinite articles) are
misleading, as it does not correlate their logical and semantic
architecture. Basically, Russell stated that the context of phrases
can vary given their article status.
Some of the aspects of language
studied in pragmatics include:

 Deixis: meaning 'pointing to' something. In verbal communication however,

deixis in its narrow sense refers to the contextual meaning of pronouns, and in
its broad sense, what the speaker means by a particular utterance in a given
speech context.
 Presupposition: referring to the logical meaning of a sentence or meanings
logically associated with or entailed by a sentence.
 Performative: implying that by each utterance a speaker not only says
something but also does certain things: giving information, stating a fact or
hinting an attitude. The study of performatives led to the hypothesis of Speech
Act Theory that holds that a speech event embodies three acts: a locutionary
act, an illocutionary act and a perlocutionary act (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969).
 Implicature: referring to an indirect or implicit meaning of an utterance derived
from context that is not present from its conventional use.
Pragmatics vs Discourse Study

 Discourse Analysis, like Pragmatics, is concerned with language in use and in context.
 Pragmatics is an indispensable source for, but is not the same as Discourse Analysis.
Discourse Analysis draws on the concepts and tools of Pragmatics, but the former is a
broader, more empirically-oriented discipline than the latter, because it includes
many schools and traditions which are not necessarily found within the scope of
Pragmatics.
 Pragmatics, on the other hand, is a more theoretically-oriented discipline, which has
traditionally been concerned with topics (such as speech acts, implicatures or
reference) which are used by, but are not necessarily central topics within, discourse
studies.