Week 1

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Week 1

People analyse discourse for some of these reasons…

• To curate online content or identify trends

• To help improve communication between doctors and patient

• To understand why some advertising is more effective than others- e.g. clickbait

• To show how ideas and information spread and are reentextualised Defining discourse analysis…

• For Stubbs (1983, p. 1) discourse refers to any piece of language longer than a sentence or a clause

• “…the analysis of language in use” (p. 3 textbook)

• Looking at patterns of language across texts as well as the social and cultural contexts in which the texts occur

• Our discourse shows our identity- we ‘display’ who we are and create our social identity

• “The complete meaning of a word is always contextualised” (p. 9 textbook)

• “These meanings, however, change over time in relation to particular contexts of use and changes in the social, cultural and ideological background/s to this use” (p. 9 textbook)

• Discourses are socially constructed

• All texts are in an intertextual relationship with other texts

• Common ground: an assumption that speakers do not need to spell out those things which are obvious to the sensory receptors of hearer, or which hearers can very easily reason out on the basis of knowing the language and its conventions, and using that knowledge in the world around us

• But need context as well!

• Context, phrasing and presentation are all important in the meaning we take away from a text

• Speaker = speaker/writer and Hearer = hearer/reader Ideologies in text

• Impossible to produce an ideologically neutral text

• Ideologies are ‘hidden’ rather than overtly stated

• They are subjective rather than objective

• Shown through:

• Word connotations

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• Overlexicalisation

• Suppression or lexical absence

• Structural oppositions

• Register

• Semiotics- signs and symbols

• Discourse- language in use

• Text- spoken, written and signed

• Reentextualisation- reinterpretation of a word in a text

• Common ground- shared understanding we can see in discourse, as well as general knowledge

• Display question (rhetoric), genuine question (information seeking question) and admonishment (showing your expression)

• DA is the study of text, communication and language; how it is used and why it is used

• Ideology

• Indexical meaning- what do the words signify or represent? What are their connotations?

Machin and Mayr Reading (2012)

• Terms for analysing word choices for their implicit ideologies

• Word connotations – e.g. corporate-speak

• Overlexicalisation (superfluous language) – e.g. male nurse or female doctor

• Suppression or lexical absence (omitting certain words) – e.g. leaving out negative facts when telling a positive story in a job interview

• Structural oppositions (positioning the parties involved in discourse in opposite places) – e.g. good vs. bad

• Genre of communication or register – e.g. a recipe compared with an essay

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Week 2

Discourse Structures

• For syntax, languages often have agreed-upon rules about what is and what isn’t grammatical

• Text structure rules are less formal, because there are so many ways to structure a text

E.g. Ways to start a request…

• Can I have

• Can you give me

• May I- more hedging, politeness

• I want/need/demand/must have

• Give/pass me- straight to the point

• Would you mind

• If you could give me Coherence

• Relevance

• Logical structure

• The text describes a world that is internally consistent and generally accords with accepted human knowledge

• This sequence of information is not random – causality Cohesion

• Paltridge categorises cohesive devices into 5 categorisations (these may differ across resources)

1. REFERENCE- typically pronouns and demonstratives to cut down on repetition

• Anaphora (refers to something already mentioned)

• Cataphora (refers to something later on)

• Exophora (not clear from the discourse but is clear from the context- e.g.

“can you give me it”

• Homophora (refers to real-world knowledge)

• Comparative/bridging references

• Reference helps to cut down repetition 2. LEXICAL COHESION

• Repetition of same or similar field of words – shared frame of references

• Hyponyms, hypernyms, synonyms, etc.

3. COLLOCATION

• Set expressions/lexical bundles and co-occurrences

• 3 words or more that commonly occur together

• These require reference to external sources to verify (e.g. dictionary or corpus)

4. CONJUNCTION

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• ‘Joining’ words- and, or, etc.

5. SUBSTITUTION AND ELLIPSIS

• More in discourse (two or more participants) than a monologue

• Similar to reference, but more immediate

• Wider range of rephrasing options- fills a grammatical slot Ideology and Cohesive Devices

• Cohesive devices often carry argument

• Machin and Mayr’s reporting verbs (2012: 59)

• They vary in intention and meaning

• Especially present in news articles!!!

• Paltridge- Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)

• Appraisal and attribution are SFL terms

• Appraisal- the attitudes that someone has towards something

• Attribution- who’s being seen to be behind something or what’s being seen to cause what

• Other scholars (e.g. CDA scholars) will use more generic terms like “attitudes”

or “evaluative language” that come through