Discourse analysis May 2012 Carina Jahani

Course structure 7 lectures with some exercies Examination: – written paper – oral presentation – written exam

Basic concepts What is discourse analysis? “Discourse analysis is, one may say, a fuzzy discipline, perhaps more oriented toward chaos theory than toward the kinds of paradigms applied linguists are more accustomed to using. The obvious reason for the fuzziness lies in the hugenumber of variable implicated in the process of text generation and text recognition… Discourse analysts will need to struggle along with careful descriptive approaches, dealing with as many of the variables as possible, but recognizing that any presently conceived model will necessarily be incomplete.” (Kaplan and Grabe 2002: 216)

Cognitive models Have a psychological rather than a linguistic basis, a concern with the cognitive processes underlying text production and text comprehension. Text is seen as an integral part of human social and psychological activities. Texts are the products of problem-solving activities.

Critical Discourse Analysis Text and talk play a key role in maintaining and legitimating inequality, injustice, and oppression in society Relate discourses to the social situations they belong to, thus not only structure-focused. Has explicit social and political goals.

Anthropological linguistics the interpretation of text rather than only its linguistic elements, the communicative nature of language and its uses in real-world settings

Sociolinguistics Sociological perspective on language and communication author/speaker involving the reader/listener readers/listeners are expected to actively re- create the text in their own mind, to construct their own personal overtones to the information

Tagmemics Tagmemics makes the kind of distinction made between phone and phoneme at higher levels of linguistic analysis; contextually conditioned synonyms are considered different instances of a single tagmeme. Emic – etic. Emic - insider-analysis Etic – outsider-analysis Language is ONE component in a unified field of human behaviour.

Systemic approach Cohesion (componentional cohesion, organic cohesion, structural cohesion) Grammatical metaphor Genre

Text linguistics Functional linguistics How syntactic structures are used for discourse purposes Grammar must have evolved as a mechanism for speeding up the processing of both local and global aspects of text coherence Givón, Dooley and Levinsohn

Text linguistic approach What is a text? – Unity of time – Unity of place – Unity of action – Unity of participants (story, chapter, section, paragraph, proposition) (information flow, grounding, logical coherence, relation between propositions, reported speech, deixis, participant reference)

Spoken versus written discourse spoken discourse (dialogue) – written discourse (monologue) (But note also oral narrative discourse) Monologue versus dialogue (conversation) Conversation analysis (outside the scope of this course)

Narrative versus non-narrative discourse All monologue is not narration Contingent temporal succession: a time line, where the events are chained to earlier and later events Agent orientation events which are controlled by an agent

Four common types of monologue (written or oral) Agent orientation +- Temporal succession +NARRATIVEPROCEDURAL -BEHAVIOURALEXPOSITORY

FOCUS IN THIS COURSE NARRATIVE MONOLOGUE oral storytelling written fiction “life stories” etc. etc. (But note that dialogue can be, and is often embedded in a story)

oral – written production: important differences Frequency of repetition (e.g. speech orienters, tail – head linkage, evidential markers) Deviations from standard word order Text organization Hedges (you know, well, sort of) Vocabulary Paralinguistic signals (mimicry, voice, intonation versus punctuation)

Coherence a coherent text can be structured into ONE single overall mental representation Mental representation: the text (internal contextualization) prior knowledge and expectations (heavily based on culture and other pre-conditions) (external contextualization) coherence must be judged after reading/hearing the whole text

Cohesion the use of linguistic means to signal coherence Common types of cohesion: 1. Identity (Identical forms) repetition lexical replacement pronouns and other pro-forms substitution ellipsis

Cohesion 2. Lexical relations hyponymy part-whole collocation

Cohesion 3. Morphosyntactic patterns consistency of inflectional categories echoing utterances discourse pragmatic structuring 4. Signals of relations between propositions 5. Intonation patterns