Assignment 4: Discourse Analysis

Rega Detapratiwi

2201409057 

405-406

Summary of Discourse Analysis

According to m Stubbs (1983:1), discourse analysis is defined as concerned with language use beyond the boundaries of a sentence/utterance, the interrelationships between language and society and the interactive or dialogic properties of everyday communication.

The differences between text analysis and discourse analysis are:

Text Analysis

Discourse Analysis

1.       Needs linguistic analysis 2.       Interpretation is based on linguistic evidence 3.       Text analysts need the right ‘knife’ to cut the right ‘bread’ 4.       Different ‘knives’ for different ‘bread’ 5.       The study of formal linguistic devices that distinguish a text from random sentences. (Nunan:1993)

1.       How texts relate to contexts of situation and context of culture 2.       How texts are produced as a social practice 3.       What texts tell us about happenings, what people think, believe etc. 4.       How texts represent ideology (power struggle etc.) 5.       Study these text-forming devices which has goal to show how the linguistic elements enable language users to communicate. (Nunan:1993)

The definition of Discourse analysis is the study of how stretches of language used in communication assume meaning, purpose and unity for their users: the quality of coherence. The coherence itself derives from an interaction of text with given participants (context: participants’ knowledge and perception of paralanguage, other texts, the situation, the culture, the world in general and the role, intentions and relationships of participants).

Several approaches in Discourse Analysis are:

1.       Speech Act Theory (Austin 1955, Searle 1969)

It is a logico-philosophic perspective on conversational organization. Focus on interpretation rather than the production of utterances in discourse. Every utterance can be analyzed as the realization of the speaker’s intent (illocutionary force) to achieve a particular purpose. Principal problems: the lack of a one-to-one matchup between discourse function (IF) and the grammatical form.

2.       Interactional Sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1982, Goffman 1959-1981)

It is centrally concerned with the importance of context in the production and interpretation of discourse which analyze grammatical and prosodic features in interactions unit.

It is focused on quantitative interactive sociolinguistic analysis, esp. discourse markers (defined as ‘sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk) and the unit analysis is turn. (Schiffrin: 1987).

3.       Ethnography of Communication (Dell Hymes (1972b, 1974)

It is concerned with understanding the social context of linguistic interactions: ‘who says what to whom, when, where. Why, and how’. The unit of analysis is speech event which comprises components. Analysis of these components of a speech event is central to what became known as ethnography of communication or ethnography of speaking, with the ethnographer’s aim being to discover rules of appropriateness in speech events.

4.       Pragmatics (Grice 1975, Leech 1983, Levinson 1983)

It is formulates conversational behavior in terms of general “principles” rather than rules. At the base of pragmatic approach is to conversation analysis is Gricean’s co-operative principle (CP). This principle is the broken down into specific maxims: Quantity (say only as much as necessary), Quality (try to make your contribution one that is true), Relation (be relevant), and manner (be brief and avoid ambiguity.

5.       Conversational Analysis (Harold Garfinkel 1960s-1970s)

It is used to understand how social members make sense of everyday life. There are two grossly apparent facts: a) only one person speaks at a time, and b) speakers change recurs. Thus conversation is a ‘turn taking’ activity. Models conversation as infinitely generative turn-taking machine, where interactants try to avoid lapse: the possibility that no one is speaking. The contribution of CA is the identification of ‘adjacency pairs’ (fisrt and second pair parts): conversational relatedness operating between adjacent utterances.

6.       Variation Analysis (Labov 1972a, Labov and Waletzky1967

Variationists’ approach to discourse stems from quantitative of linguistic change and variation. Although typically focused on social and linguistic constraints on semantically equivalent variants, the approach has also been extended to texts.

7.       SFA (Structural-Functional Approaches)

Discourse analysis can turn out into a more general and broader analysis of language functions. Or it will fail to make a special place for the analysis of relationships between utterances. It refers to two major approaches to discourse analysis which have relevance to the analysis of casual conversation (the Birmingham School and Systemic Functional Linguistics).