Text & Discourse Analysis

Introduction
What is discourse/text?
Context
What is discourse/text analysis?
 Introduction
• What is discourse/text?
When we use language, we:
- Combine words to form phrases, and
- Combine phrases to form clauses and sentences, and
- Combine sentences to form larger stretches of language known as
discourse (= text).

A discourse, or a text, is a stretch of language that may be longer than

one sentence. For example, conversations, stories, jokes, letters, etc.

Longer than one sentence (= consists of a string (set) of sentences).

Discourse/text is the use of language above and beyond the sentence:
How people use language in context.

Discourse is the language use.

Beyond and above are features (aspects) of discourse:

Above the sentence means (context).

Beyond the sentence means (language and context)
 Context
• What is a context?
That which occurs before and/or after a word, a phrase, or even a longer
utterance or a text.

The context often helps in understanding the particular meaning of the

word, phrase, longer utterance, etc.
- What time does it get dark in the summer?
(dark is understood as meaning having no light.)

- Her husband's sudden death was the start of a dark chapter in her
life. (dark is understood as meaning sad).

- I've just been promoted, but keep it dark - I don't want everyone to
know just yet. (dark means secret).
A context includes all of the following:

1- Substance: the physical material which carries or relays text.

2- Music and pictures

3- Paralanguage: meaningful behavior accompanying language, such as,

voice quality (breathy or creaky), gestures, facial expressions, and touch
(in speech).

4- Co-text (= linguistic context): the actual words and sentences that

precede or follow an utterance, they belong to the same discourse.

5- Participants (= speaker and hearer): their intentions, beliefs, feelings,

knowledge, attitudes. Participants are usually described as:
speaker: (= sender and addresser)
hearer: (= receiver and addressee).
A context includes all of the following:

6- Levels of formality: the relation between speaker and hearer.

teacher and student, captain and soldier, doctor and patient
father and son, brother and sister, two friends
7- Shared knowledge of the world (= cultural and social knowledge):
It helps the participants understand the meaning of a text.

8- place and time of speaking

Discourse enables information to be communicated in particular
contexts.

A: Would you like tea or coffee?

B: Coffee keeps me awake.

B’s answer might be interpreted as:

1- a request for tea in certain contexts (e.g. late at night before
going to bed).

2- a request for coffee in other contexts (e.g. late at night while

studying for an exam).
 What is Discourse Analysis?
• Discourse analysis is a branch of linguistics that focuses on language
use above and beyond the sentence.

Discourse analysis is the study of language use. (the study of discourse)

- D.A goes above the sentence, by examining units larger than a

sentence such as conversation exchange, written and spoken texts.
A: I have run out of petrol.
B: There is a petrol station around the bend. Conversation exchange

- D.A goes beyond the sentence, by examining the relationship

between the language and the context.
• D.A is at the intersection of psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics,
stylistics, philosophic and computational linguistics. D.A is a branch
where all these sciences meet.

Sociolinguistics
Computational linguistics D.A Psycholinguistics

philosophic linguistics
Stylistics