term ‘DA’ & initiated a search for language rules which would explain how sentences were connected within a text by a kind of extended grammar. In 1952, in an article entitled ‘[r]
(1)(2)OBIECT OF STUDY
Here are two pieces of language:
This box contains, on average, 100
Large Plain Paper Clips Applied
Linguistics is therefore not the same as Linguistics The tea’s hot as it could be This is Willie Worm Just send 12
(3) Playback Raymond Chandler Penguin Books
in association with Hamish Hamilton To Jean and Helga, without whom this book could
never have been written One The voice on the telephone seemed to be sharp and
(4)Questions for Discussion
1 Which part of these two stretches of
language is part of a unified whole?
2 What sort of text is it? What is the other one?
4 How you distinguish between
(5) 1st piece:
• correct sentences • doesn’t make sense • no feeing of unity • not meaningful and
unified
• gobbledegook
• randomly assembled
without reason
2nd piece:
• only complete
sentence
• does make sense • is meaningful and
(6) In the 2nd piece, we could restore the
(7)Coherence
The quality of being meaningful and unified
(which the 2nd passage has but the 1st lacks)
Necessary for communication and for foreign
language learning but cannot be explained by concentrating on the internal grammar of
sentences
There is more to producing and understanding
(8) People not always speak or write in
complete sentences, yet they still succeed in communication
(9) “There were too many loose ends, too
many leftovers Too much Hanging over his head.”
“He knocked hard Once, twice and a
third time.” (John Katzenbach)
“But I had to be alone To breathe air
(10)Discourse & the Sentence
- Two Different Kinds of Language as Potential Objects for Study
Sentences: concerned with rules
Discourse (DA): may (not) be composed
of a correct sentence or a series of
(11) “We thought it was right to come to a decision
when I next met them last night.” (said by British politician Geoffrey Howe in a TV
interview)
“Which of you people is the fish?”
Discourse treats the rules of grammar as a
resource, conforming to them when it needs to, but departing form them when it does not
Discourse can be anything: a grunt,
(12)Two approaches to language: Sentence Linguistics (SL) and DA
SL data
Isolated sentences
Grammatically
well-formed
Without context
Invented or
idealized
DA data
Any stretch of
language felt to be unified
Achieving meaning
In context
(13)The Origins of Discourse Analysis
DA is not sth totally new
The first known students of language in the
western tradition, the scholars of Greece and Rome, were aware of the above different approaches, divided grammar from rhetoric
Grammar: concerned with the rules of
language as an isolated subject
Rhetoric: how to things with words, to
achieve effects and to communicate
(14) In 20th century linguistics, alongside sentence
linguistics, there have been influential
approaches which studied language in its full context, as part of society and the world
US linguists and anthropologists did research
into the languages and society of native Americans (Indians)
British linguists (J R Firth) saw language not
(15)DA at the intersection of diverse disciplines
Many other disciplines – philosophy,
psychology and psychiatry, sociology
and anthropology, Artificial Intelligence, media studies, literary studies often
examine their object of study – the mind, the society, other cultures, computers, the media, works of
(16) Many disciplines have plenty of insights
to offer to DA
The most useful distinction is to think of
(17)The term “discourse analysis”
Zellig Harris (a sentence linguist) coined the
term ‘DA’ & initiated a search for language rules which would explain how sentences were connected within a text by a kind of extended grammar
In 1952, in an article entitled ‘DA’, he
(18) Harris’s conclusions: possible
conclusions for DA:
“continuing descriptive linguistics
beyond the limits of a single sentence at a time” (This is Harris’s aim &
concern.)
“correlating culture & language
(19) Having weighed up the two options, at
the end of the article, Harris concluded: ’ … in every language it turns out that almost all the results lie within a
(20)Brown & Yule’s View
“DA on the one hand includes the study
of linguistic forms and the regularities
of their distribution and, on the other
hand, involves a consideration of the general principles of interpretation by which people normally make sense of
(21) If we are to find the answer to the
(22) We must see just how far formal, purely
linguistic rules can go in accounting for the way one sentence succeeds
another
We must look beyond the formal rules
(23)Discourse versus Text 1st approach of text
Type of linguistic unit
larger than the sentence
The verbal record of a
communicative act (Brown & Yule)
The linguistic product of
a communicative
process (Widdowson)
2nd approach of text A semantic or
communicative category (Halliday & Hasan)
A communicative occurrence which
possesses constitutive conditions of textual
communication: cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality &
intertextuality) (De
(24)Text Analysis (TA) & DA
Text Analysis
Deals with formal
features (cohesion, text structure)
Little reference to
extra-linguistic factors
Relationship b/t TA
& DA?
Discourse analysis Deals with a
functional analysis of language in use
(coherence, context of situations,
writer/speaker’s intention or
(25)DA’S OBJECT OF STUDY
‘…discourse is … language in use.’
(Brown & Yule)
‘Discourse is a communicative process
by means of interaction Its situational outcome is a change in a state of