Riassunto completo Discourse Analysis - Lingua Inglese III

Chapter 1: What is discourse analysis?

Patterns of language

Discourse analysis is the analysis of language across the text and takes into consideration the relationship between language, social, and cultural context in which it is used. It also considers the different views of the world and different understandings presented by the use of language. It is important to remember that the use of language is influenced by the relationships between participants and that the use of language has many effects on social identities and relations.

Zellig Harris introduced the term, and his goal was to analyse connected speech and writing. He had two main interests: the examination of language beyond the level of sentences and the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour (how people know how to interpret what is said, depending on the situation in which they are). An important observation that he made was that there are typical ways of using language in particular situations; these discourses share particular meanings, and they also have characteristic linguistic features associated with them.

According to Van Dijk, the context is not objective but an (inter)subjective construct that is constantly updated by participants. The link between society and discourse is often indirect and depends on how users define the genre, or the communicative event, in which they are engaged.

The relationship between language and context

The relationship between language and context is fundamental to the work of Firth and Halliday. Firth's notion of "context of situation" borrows from different concepts, such as Malinowski's "context of culture," to discuss this relationship. If we want to understand what a person says or writes, we need to know something about the situational and cultural context in which it is located.

Halliday goes further, linking the context of the situation with actual texts and the context of cultures with potential texts and the range of possibilities that are open to language users for the creation of texts. So, the choices a person makes depend on the options that are available in a determined context of culture or context of situation, which both influence the use of language.

Sinclair believes that language should be studied in occurring contexts in which it is used, and the analysis of meaning is its key focus. So, discourse analysis is the analysis of language in use and takes into consideration the relationship between language and analysis of both spoken and written interactions. Its main purpose is to provide a deeper understanding of texts and how they become meaningful to the users.

The discourse structure of texts

Discourse analysts are also interested in how people organize what they say (what they say first, how they continue, how they end the conversation/text, and so on). This is determined by cultures. Mitchell was one of the first who examined the discourse structure of texts. He observed how people usually structure their conversation when they need to buy or sell something. He introduced the notion of stages, which are the steps that language users go through when they carry out a particular interaction. According to Mitchell, language is used as a co-operative action and the meaning of language depends on the situational context.

Stages can be realized in many ways: in a service encounter, a greeting such as "Hi, how are you?" is not always necessary when we buy something, while requests such as "Can I have" or "Give me" are necessary. All those elements change depending on the situation, the age of the participants, if it takes place face to face or on the phone, etc.

Felix-Brasdefer combines different approaches to discourse analysis. He examines speech acts, such as requests, offers, and greetings, in two different settings. Then, he examines sequential patterns in the talk to see how the customer and the server produce the speech acts. He observes that US customers prefer indirectness in requests, while Mexicans often use a request without a verb. In addition, US customers frequently placed their request in the second turn of the interaction, while there was more variation in the case of Mexican customers. They also made requests for availability of the product before making a request more often than US customers.

Cultural ways of speaking and writing

Different cultures often have different ways of doing things through language. This has been explored especially by Hymes, through the notion of ethnography of communication. His work was also a reaction to views of language which took little or no account of the social and cultural contexts in which language occurs.

For example, how I buy my lunch at a takeaway shop in an English-speaking country is different from how I might do this in Japan. In an English-speaking country, "Please" and "Thanks" are more used than in Japan. We might think that the Japanese customer is being rude, but they just have culturally different ways of doing things with language.

Different views of discourse analysis

There are many different views on what discourse analysis is. Mills shows how the term discourse analysis has shifted from highlighting one aspect of language usage to another, as well being used in different ways by different research.

The scholars of the area of Foucauldian discourse analysis pay attention especially to matters of power, arguing that power is always present in the use of discourse. Foucault believes that discourse produces ways of thinking and views of reality, and shapes people’s identities. He also does not believe in the concept of absolute truth because it is something that continuously shifts.

Fairclough contrasts what he calls textually oriented discourse analysis with approaches to discourse analysis that have more of a social theoretical orientation. Discourse analysis is also the analysis of how people achieve certain communicative goals through the use of language. Discourse analysis considers how people manage interactions with each other, how they communicate with other groups and with other cultures.

Discourse as the social construction of reality

The view of discourse as the social construction of reality recognizes the relationship between language and thought and the power of language to construct different perspectives on things. There are limits to what language can do, and this affirmation leads to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says that language controls our perceptions, thinking, and behaviour. Through the use of language, we construct realities and views of the world. Discourse, then, is both shaped by the world as well as shaping the world. Discourse is shaped by language as well as shaping language. Discourse is also shaped by the discourse that has preceded it and what might follow it.

An example of the social constructivist view of discourse can be seen in the use by President Donald Trump of the term 'fake news' to describe media reports that he is not happy with. Words such as 'migrant' and 'refugee', in the past, have had positive connotations, because they have been seen as contributing to building a country. But now, these terms often have negative connotations, especially when used by the media. The use of language shapes our thinking even if we are not aware of it, and produces ways of seeing people and the world, which can change over time.

Discourse and socially situated identities

When we speak or write, we use more than just language to show who we are, and how we want people to see us. The way we dress, the gestures we use, the way we act, and interact also have an influence. Other factors that influence this include the ways we think and the things we value, feel, and believe. Gee says that the ways we make visible who we are and what we are doing always involve more than just language. In addition, a given discourse can also involve more than just one single identity: an individual can simultaneously be a mother, a wife, a CEO. Discourses, then, involve the socially situated identities. They include culture-specific ways of performing and culture-specific ways of recognizing identities and activities.

Discourse and performance

The notion of performativity derives from speech act theory and the work of Austin and Searle. It is based on the view that in saying something, we do it. If a priest says “I now pronounce you husband and wife” he’s changing the state of things, he’s turning a couple into husband and wife. So, social identities are not pregiven, but are formed in the use of language and the various other ways we display who we are, what we think, value, and feel, and so on.

For example, when a baby is born and someone says ‘It’s a girl!’, they are not simply reporting on a fact but also, through the use of discourse, assigning a gender category to the child. We are not who we are, however, because of how we physically look or where we were originally born. We can look Asian but be American because we were born there, so it’s a complex situation.

Discourse and intertextuality

Texts may cite other texts. They may refer to other texts, or they may allude to other past, or future, texts. All texts are, thus, in an intertextual relationship with other texts. The term intertextuality is attributed to Kristeva, who argues that a text is kind of a 'productivity' in which various semiotic codes, genres are combined and transformed. As Sealy points out, any academic work has strong intertextual connections with other work on similar topics, like the communications with and between the series and publishing editor of the book, comments made by the reviewers, the publishing house’s meeting, the contract, etc.

Research perspectives and discourse analysis

A study can have different perspectives: it can have a qualitative orientation or a quantitative one. The qualitative studies aim to examine how people use discourse in natural settings and conditions and context is highly taken into consideration. On the other hand, quantitative research will draw on numeric data, analysed using statistical methods. In this view, there’s a single objective reality, and the researcher’s goal is to uncover this reality and provide an explanation for it. A researcher might, however, mix methods, collecting and analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data in order to achieve a fuller understanding of an issue.

Chapter 2: Discourse and society

Discourse communities and communities of practice

Two important notions in discourse analysis are discourse community and communities of practice. Swales provides a set of characteristics for identifying a group of people as members of a specific discourse community: the group must share a set of common goals, mechanisms for communication; the community must have its own genres, specialized terminology, and vocabulary. The ways in which people communicate with each other and exchange information will vary according to the group. Swales has recently added two more features to his definition of discourse communities. A discourse community develops a sense of silential relations: there are things that don’t need an explanation and don’t need to be said between members of a specific group.

A telephone call centre is an example of a discourse community. Cameron, during the study of these, found out that operators were trained to communicate on the phone in particular ways, often following scripts. They were trained to speak with a certain pitch of their voice in order to sound confident and sincere, and to speak not too loudly or too quietly, too fast or too slow. They also need to provide sufficient feedback, so that the callers knew they had been understood. So, call centre workers have common goals (providing the service or making the sales), and common ways of sharing information, their own particular service call genres and their own terminology and vocabulary for the product or service they are dealing with.

People can have different degrees of membership of discourse communities: they may consist of close-knit networks of members (writers of poetry and their readers) or loose-knit groups of members (advertising producers, consumers). Discourse communities may also be made up of several overlapping groups of people and an individual can be part of more than one community.

However, some scholars prefer the term communities of practice instead of discourse communities. Madsen studies the members of a multi-ethnic martial arts club in Denmark. The members had a shared repertoire of resources, such as belt colours and the club logo, names for martial arts techniques and commands, shared norms such as standing in line in a particular order and keeping silent during practice. People who were new to the group developed, learned, and adopted the shared practices and learned what they meant to the group. Madsen shows how members of the group, which was linguistically diverse, developed affiliations and relations with each other through their use of discourse, in this case through Danish.

Another way of describing groups of language users is communities, collectives, and networks. Communities are groups of people who share time together in a given place, such as colleagues who work in the same office. Collectives are groups of people who spend time together because they share a common interest, such as members of a book club or volunteers. In the case of a network, it is formed by people whose connections are made through email, texts between people who may never have met each other (and perhaps never will) but are participating in a common discourse.

Gee talks about affinity spaces. In these spaces, people connect with each other based primarily on shared activities, interests, and goals, not shared race, class, culture, ethnicity, or gender. These spaces often occur online. In these groups, members might communicate with each other through English, but they might also do this in their first language where there are other members of the group that share the language.

Language as social and local practice

Speakers often have a linguistic repertoire that they draw on for their linguistic interactions. They may have several languages or language varieties they use to interact within their particular communities. The choice of language or language variety may be determined by the domain in which the language is being used, such as with family, friends, and in religious, educational settings. Social factors, such as who we are speaking to, the social context of the interaction, the topic, function and goal, social distance, the type of interaction are also important for accounting for the language choice that a person makes in these kinds of settings.

An example can be the one of migrant workers, who were not permitted to board a bus because of the way they were dressed, showing how clothing, as a mode of communication, can send just as strong a message as language in terms of what can (and cannot) be done in particular social and cultural settings and how people can belong (or not) to particular groups.

Discourse and gender

Gender is not just a natural and inevitable consequence of one’s biological sex but it’s part of the routine, of the everyday, mundane, social interaction, so it’s the product of social practice. A person learns how to act like a woman in a particular social setting, of a particular social class, so it’s not natural. Our identity is made of our gestures, movements, ways of using language, but those things are being acquired in the interactions that we have with each other.

Hall conducted research on the use of language by telephone sex workers in the US. Not all of the sex workers were heterosexual nor were they all female: one was a male Mexican American who was able to ‘replicate’ Asian, Latina and Black women’s personas through his use of accent, intonation, voice quality, and choice of vocabulary. So, this shows us how gender is not something that a person has, but something that a person does.

Since we can’t determine the gender of a person by looking at them, it’s important to use gender-neutral language. But not everyone is willing to use and accept it. For example, The Washington Post invites us to try to avoid using the pronoun they as the generic singular, while the Oxford Modern English Grammar supports its usage.

Gender also interacts with other factors, such as social class and ethnicity. The ways that people speak are, first of all, associated with particular roles, activities, and personality traits, and the way of speaking may point to, or index, a person’s social class or ethnic identity. Indexical signs are clues, traces, and symptoms of referential objects. The features of language use which index a particular identity are not at a single level, such as a particular vowel quality, choice of vocabulary, grammatical structures, or language variety. The use of language may be, in part, intentional, and it may, in part, be habitual. Identity, further, is not something that is pre-assigned in fixed social categories. It is something that emerges in practice. A person, then, will have a multiplicity of identities which may be at play all at the same time, at different levels of prominence.

Discourse and identity

A person may have several identities, each of which is more important at different points in time. They may have an identity as a woman, as a mother, as someone's partner, and as an office worker, for example. The ways in which people display their identities include the way they use language and the way they interact with people. Identities are not natural, however. They are constructed, in large part, through the use of discourse. Plus, they’re not fixed, but constantly constructed and reconstructed as people interact with others.