Discourse Analysis

GROUP 10

HABIBATUL AMRI 18018096

HANIFATUL HUSNI 18018098
IFANI RAMADHANI 18018099
SANIA TRICAHYATI 18018106
What is discourse Analysis?

Stubbs (1983:1)

• Discourse is language about sentence level.

• Discourse analysis is concerned with language use in

social contexts, and in particular with interaction or
dialogue between speakers.

Kelas Berkebun Junior 2020

 1. Pragmatics and Politeness Theory

What is Pragmatics?

Context is clearly crucial in interpreting what is meant, and pragmatics

extends the analysis of meaning beyond grammar and word meaning to the
relationship between the participants and the background knowledge they
bring to a situation. Pragmatics is concerned with the analysis of meaning
in interaction.

According to Fasold (1993) pragmatics is a study of the use of context to

make inferences about meaning. It is another broad approach to discourse.
Now-days pragmatics has a broader discussion, for example ethnography of
communication, some psycholinguistics aspects, moreover
discourse analysis included also.

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 Pragmatics and Politeness Theory
Conversational maxims and implicatures

Politeness, entails taking account of social factors, such as how well you know
somebody, what their social role or relative status is in relation to yours, and the kind of
social context in which you are interacting. Robin Lakoff, an American pragmatics
researcher who has been called ‘the mother of modern politeness theory’ introduced
three rules of politeness :

1. Don’t impose
e.g. use modals and hedges: I wonder if I might just open the window a little

2. Give options
e.g. use interrogatives including tag questions: do you mind if I open the window? it
would be nice to have the window open a little wouldn’t it?
Be friendly
e.g. use informal expressions, endearments: e.g. Be a honey and open the window
darling

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Pragmatics and Politeness Theory

Conversational implicatures

Conversational implicatures are the assumptions suggested by the speaker

and inferred by the hearer
in an exchange situation.

• e.g.
A : Are you going to John’s party?
B : I have heard Mary is going.

• Conventional Implicatures
 not based on the cooperative principle or maxim.
 not depend on special contexts
 It is associated with specific words

e.g.
• “Mary is crying but she is glad”.
• The sentence “A but B” will be based on the relationship between A and B
and an implicature between the information in A and B. “Mary is crying is
contrast to “she is glad”
.

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 Sociolinguistics and politeness

Politeness theory has come in for a good deal of criticism in recent

years, especially from sociolinguists. Researchers studying Asian cultures,
for instance, point to evidence of Western bias in what is categorized as
linguistically polite, as opposed to required conventional behaviour. The
use of address forms and honorifics, in languages such as Chinese,
Japanese and Korean, is typically a matter of social convention or
linguistic etiquette, rather than strategic choice.

Respect or deference is encoded in certain linguistic forms which are

required when talking to one’s elders or those of higher status, for
instance. While such features are typically optional in Western languages,
they are entirely predictable on the basis of the social characteristics of
the participants in many Asian languages

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 Ethnography of Speaking

Insiders and outsiders

Another distinction which is highlighted by an ethnography of speaking
or communication approach is the role of the researcher as an insider or an
outsider in a community. There has been a great deal of discussion in
sociolinguistics about the relative advantages of researching a culture from
the inside, as a member of a community, as opposed to coming into a com-
munity as a researcher from outside.

Early sociolinguists and anthropological linguists were typically

outsiders in the cultures they researched and described. This had some
advantages since it was often easier to identify ways of speaking and rules
of interaction that contrasted with those they were familiar with. Researchers
noticed when there was a silence where they expected to hear talk, for
example, and vice versa; they noticed restrictions on speaking rights which
differed from those in their own societies, and so on.

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The framework that Hymes developed for the analysis of communicative events involved the following components:

• Genre or type of event: e.g. phone call, conversation, business meeting, lesson, interview, blog
• Topic or what people are talking about: e.g. holidays, sport, sociolinguistics, politics
• Purpose or function: the reasons for the talk: e.g. to plan an event, to catch up socially, to teach something, to persuade
someone to help you
• Setting : where the talk takes place: e.g. at home, in classroom, in an office
• Key or emotional tone: e.g. serious, jocular, sarcastic
• Participants : characteristics of those present and their relationship: sex, age, social status, role and role relationship: e.g.
mother–daughter, teacher–pupil, TV interviewer, interviewee and audience
• Message form , code and/or channel: e.g. telephone, letter, email, language and language variety, non-verbal
• Message content or specific details of what the communication is about: e.g. organizing a time for a football match,
describing how a tap works
• Act sequence or ordering of speech acts: e.g. greetings, meeting turn-taking rules, ending a telephone conversation
• Rules for interaction or prescribed orders of speaking: e.g. who must speak first, who must respond to the celebrant at a
wedding, who closes a business meeting
• Norms for interpretation of what is going on: : e.g. that how are you does not require a detailed response in most Western
English speaking societies, that it is polite to refuse the first offer of more food in some cultures.
 Ethnography of Speaking

- The speech community

Is any groups of speaker that shares a linguistic code and rules

for interpreting that code.
E.g: The Indian community in Methnab, The Egyptian
community in Onizah

- Speech Styles

Are the linguistic options available to the specch community.

Saudis, for example have a choice of two major varieties – a
local dialect and the standard arabic. By contrast, Americans
have a choice not between major varieties but between five
different degrees of formality within the one standard
language.

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 Interactional Sociolinguistics
Contextualization cues
Contextualization cues signal con-textual presuppositions, i.e. knowledge that the speaker assumes
the listener has already or information that they can work out for themselves by paying attention to
features of the context. Contextualization cues thus allow participants to infer the most likely
interpretation of an utterance. They may take a range of forms.

Miscommunication
When people from different language or even different dialect backgrounds interact, clashes between
discourse norms are possible, with a risk of miscommunication. Using an interactional
sociolinguistics approach, we can look for clues to help interpret what speakers intended to
communicate in the specific context of their talk.
 Conversation Analysis (CA)

Preferred and dis-preferred second pair parts

.
Side sequences appear to challenge the claim that an invitation is followed by
an acceptance (preferred response) or a refusal (dis-preferred response), but on
closer examination they prove to be simply another regular pattern within what
CA researchers call the ‘systematics’ of the organization of turn-taking in
everyday conversation. The pattern is still evident; it is just more complex.

Conversational feedback

Adjacency pairs are one aspect of the systematics of turn-taking which is a

focus of CA. Attention to conversational feedback is another. At times in a
conversation, one person may hold the floor for a period while recounting a
narrative, for instance, or describing an experience, or explaining how something
works. Meanwhile the other participant typically provides evidence that they are
attending to the speaker, i.e. some kind of feedback which may be verbal ( mm ,
uh-huh , right ) or non-verbal (head nodding, attentive gaze).

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Interruptions and overlaps
In analyzing this interaction, a CA researcher typically begins by comparing it with mundane
conversation in which the order, size and type of turns are relatively free. A CA analysis of this
episode identifies the ways in which the participants display an orientation to different rules,
namely the rules of a meeting where speakers typically expect to complete even relatively long turns
without interruption. In this excerpt, then, the overlap disrupts the turn of the person who holds the
floor, and in the context of the talk, this deviation from one-at-a-time talk can be interpreted as
indicating disagreement.

Keeping just to the text

It is worth emphasizing an important methodological point that has been briefly mentioned
several times in the discussion so far: a basic characteristic of a CA approach is that you should not
begin the analysis with any preconceived ideas about what will be worth examining. Unlike the
ethnography of communication and the interactional sociolinguistics approaches, the analysis
should not include any information from your field notes, or interviews or the participants’
reflections on the talk. The data is primary, and all relevant information should be deducible from
the data, and relevant categories for analysis should arise out of the data.
 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

Power and CDA

. Power may also be enacted in more subtle ways in interactions which are apparently
very urbane and democratic. Setting the agenda of a discussion, for instance, is one way of
exercising influence in even a very democratic interaction. The person who decides what
will be discussed and what will be excluded is subtly exercising control over the topics of
talk which will be considered relevant. In a formal meeting, this may take the form of a
written agenda whose contents are determined by the meeting chair in advance. When there
is no written agenda, the meeting chair usually exercises power by determining what topics
will be discussed and who may contribute.

Ideology and CDA

CDA researchers aim to expose the hidden messages and especially the taken-for-
granted assumptions that underlie much of our everyday discourse. Because advertisers
make use of discourse to influence our behavior – typically to persuade us to buy their
product – adverts are one of the most obvious targets of CDA. Adverts appeal to their
audience’s emotions, their desires and fears, and to their often unexamined attitudes and
beliefs.

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THANK YOU