ENG523 Official Handouts

A Brief Historical Overview Learning

Discourse analysis as a whole is the work of text grammarians, working mostly with written language. Text grammarians see texts as language elements pass into together in relationships with one another that can be defined. Linguists have made a significant impact in this area. Its most important contribution has been to show the links between grammar and discourse. Discourse analysis has grown into a wide-ranging and various disciplines which find its unity in the description of language above the sentence and an interest in the contexts and cultural influences which affect language in use. It is also now, increasingly, forming an environment to research in Applied Linguistics, second language learning and teaching in particular.

British discourse analysis was greatly influenced by M. A. K. Halliday's functional approach to language (e.g. Halliday 1973), which in turn has connections with the Prague School of linguists. Halliday's framework emphasizes the social functions of language and the thematic and informational structure of speech and writing. Also important in Britain were Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) at the University of Birmingham, who developed a model for the description of teacher-pupil talk, based on a hierarchy of discourse units. Other similar work has dealt with doctor patient interaction, service encounters, interviews, debates and business negotiations, as well as monologues. Novel work in the British tradition has also been done on intonation in discourse. The British work has principally followed structural-linguistic criteria, on the basis of the isolation of units, and sets of rules defining well-formed sequences of discourse.

American discourse analysis has been dominated by work within the ethno methodological tradition, which emphasizes the research method of close observation of groups of people communicating in natural settings. It examines types of speech event such as storytelling, greeting rituals and verbal duels in different cultural and social settings (e.g., Gumperz and Hymes 1972). What is often called conversation analysis within the American tradition can also be included under the general heading of discourse analysis. In conversational analysis, the emphasis is not upon building structural models but on the close observation of the behavior of participants in talk and on patterns which persist over a wide range of natural data. The work of Goffman (1976; 1979), and Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) is important in the study of conversational norms, turn taking, and other aspects of spoken interaction. Alongside the conversation analysts, working within the sociolinguistic tradition, Labov's investigations of oral storytelling have also contributed to a long history of interest in narrative discourse. The American work has produced a large number of descriptions of discourse types, as well as insights into the social constraints of politeness and face-preserving phenomena in talk, overlapping with British work in pragmatics. According McCarthy (1991), discourse analysis describes the language above the sentence: its context and the cultural influence, which affect language in use. A discourse carries much more than its form, it also carries its own particular function, which means that there is not necessarily one-to-one relationship between a given supra-segmental choice and a meaning, hence form and function might be analyzed separately in order to depict the real meaning of a discourse. According to Halliday (1970), intonation plays a crucial role in conveying meaning. If the intonation of a sentence is changed, its meaning will also be changed. Thus, the particular way the sentences are produced and carry their individual meaning, and the analysis must go far beyond sentences forms in order to be possible to depict the real meaning of the spoken interaction.

The famous British comedy duo, Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, started one of their shows in 1973 with the following dialogue: Ernie: Tell me about the show. Eric (to the audience): Have we got a show for you might folks! Have we got a show for you! (Aside to Ernie) Have we got a Show for them?

This short dialogue raises a number of problems for anyone wishing to do a linguistic analysis of it; not least is the question of why it is funny (the audience laughed at Eric's question to Ernie). Most people would agree that it is funny because Eric is playing with a grammatical structure that seems to be ambiguous: ' Have we got a show for you!' has an inverted verb and subject. Inversion of the verb and its subject happens only under restricted conditions in English; the most typical circumstances in which this happens is when questions are being asked, but it also happens in exclamations (e.g. Wasn’t my face red!). So Eric's repeated grammatical form clearly experiences a change in how it is interpreted by the audience between its second and third occurrence in the dialogue. Eric's inverted grammatical form in its first two occurrences clearly has the function of an exclamation, telling the audience something, not asking them anything, until the humorous moment when he begins to doubt whether they do have a show to offer, at which point he uses the same grammatical form to ask Ernie a genuine question. There seems, then, to be a lack of one-to-one correspondence between grammatical form and communicative function; the inverted form in itself does not inherently carry an exclamatory or a questioning function. By the same token, in other situations, an' uninverted declarative form (subject before verb), typically associated with 'statements', might be heard as a question requiring an answer. Eric and Ernie's conversation is only one example (and a rather crazy one at that) of spoken interaction; most of us in a typical week will observe or take part in a wide range of different types of spoken interaction: phone calls, buying things in shops, perhaps an interview for a job, or with a doctor, or with an employer, talking formally at meetings or in classrooms, informally in cafes or on buses, or closely with our friends and loved ones. These situations will have their own formulae and conventions which we follow; they will have different ways of opening and closing the encounter, different role relationships, different purposes and different settings. Discourse analysis is interested in all these different factors and tries to account for them in a difficult fashion with a separate set of descriptive labels from those used by conventional grammarians. The first fundamental distinction we have noted is between language forms and discourse functions; once we have made this distinction a lot of other conclusions can follow, and the labels used to describe discourse need not clash at all with those we are all used to in grammar. They will in fact complement and enrich each other. Chapters 2,3 and 4 of this book will therefore be concerned with examining the relationships between language forms (grammatical, lexical and phonological ones), and discourse functions, for it is language forms, above all, which are the raw material of language teaching, while the overall aim is to enable learners to use language functionally.

Reader Activity 1

Can you create a context and suggest an intonation for the forms in the left-hand column so that they would be heard as performing the functions in the right-hand column, without changing

their grammatical structure?

Q1. Did I make a fool of myself

1. question
2. exclamation?

Q2. You don't love me

1. question
2. statement

Q3. You eat it

1. statement
2. command

Q4. Switch the light on

1. command
2. question

Text and Interpretation

Markers of various kinds, i.e., the linguistic signals of semantic and discourse functions (e.g., in English the –ed on the verb is a marker of pastness), are very much concerned with the surface of the text. Cohesive markers are no exception: they create links across sentence boundaries and pair and chain together items that are related (e.g., by referring to the same entity). But reading a text is far more complex than that: we have to interpret the ties and make sense of them. Making sense of a text is an act of interpretation that depends as much on what we as reader bring to a text as what the author puts into it. Interpretation can be seen as a set of procedures and the approach to the analysis of texts that emphasizes the mental activities involved in interpretation can be broadly called procedural. Procedural approaches emphasize the role of the reader in actively building the world of the text, based on his/her experience of the world and how states and events are characteristically manifested in it. The reader has to activate such knowledge, make inferences and constantly access his/her interpretation in the light of the situation and the aims and goals of the text as the reader perceives them. The work of De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) is central to this approach. If we rake a text which is cohesive in the sense described Above, we can see that a lot more mental work has to go on for the reader to make it coherent: