Lingua e traduzione inglese - Discourse analysis

Discourse analysis

What is discourse analysis?

Discourse analysis is sometimes defined as a sub-field of linguistics and thus the study of language, but actually, it is more than just a study of language; it’s something wider and more specific. We could define it better as a research study of written or spoken language, in other words, the ways sentences and utterances go together to make texts and interactions and the use of them in social context. It therefore deals with the communicative act, namely the moment in which the code, or we can call it Saussure’s langue, turns into message, Saussure’s parole and the variables related to it: it takes indeed into account the diaphasic, diastratic dimensions, as well as the diatopic and diachronic ones (the evolution of the linguistic uses).

This way of looking at language is indeed based on four main assumptions:

• Language is ambiguous: Communication involves interpreting what other people mean and what they’re trying to do. People don’t always say what they mean and people don’t always mean what they say. Language is never used all by itself; language is combined with other things like tone of voice, facial expressions, gestures, etc. For example, "Do you have a pen?" communicates not only a need for a pen but also that you don’t wish to impose on them or that you feel a bit shy about borrowing a pen, which is why you’re indirectly asking even though you know they have one.
• Language is always “in the world”: What language is a matter of where and when and what it’s used. We understand what the other person is saying to us thanks to the social context; we’re speaking of language that is somehow situated. Language can be situated in four ways:
  • In the material world: Shop signs, textbook, website.
  • In relationship: Who they are and the relationship we have with this person.
  • In history: Relations with what happened before and what will happen afterward.
  • In relation to other language: Everything that we say or write is situated in a kind of network of discourse.
• Language is the expression of social identity and situated within relationships: The way we use language is inseparable from who we are and the different social groups to which we belong. Whenever people speak or write they are demonstrating who they are and what their relationship is with other people.

So what good is discourse analysis?

We always use discourse analysis when we try to figure out what people mean by what they say and when we try to express our multiple and complicated meanings to them. Discourse analysis can help us to understand how the societies in which we live are put together and how they’re maintained through our day-to-day activities of speaking, writing, and making use of other modes of communication.

Approaches to discourse analysis

Over the years people have approached the study of discourse in many different ways but first we have to focus on three different definitions of what discourse is based on three perspectives.

1. Formal approach: Defines it as “a language above the level of the clause or sentence” so it tries to understand the rules that govern the ways we join clauses and sentences.
2. Functional approach: Leads to questions about how people use language to do things like make requests or how we interpret other people while talking.
3. Social approach: Sees discourse as a social practice, so how people use language in relation to different social identities and relationships. It’s tied up with issues of what we believe to be right and wrong.

Although these three approaches are treated as separate, we have to take into account all three of these perspectives, because the way people use language to show who they are cannot be separated from the things people are using language to do in particular situations.

Probably originated by the linguistic Zelling Harris, he wanted to understand how sentences are put together to form texts. The idea that text could be analyzed in terms of their formal structure was actually very popular but what Harris proposed for the analysis of discourse was not much different from how people go about doing grammatical analysis. The idea was to identify particular linguistic features and determine how they occurred next to the others.

However, his ambitions went beyond simply understanding how linguistic features are distributed throughout texts but also understanding how these features correlate with non-linguistic behavior beyond texts. When focusing on the formal aspect of discourse, we are interested in how the different elements of texts or conversations are put together to form unified wholes. We usually look for two kinds of things: linguistic features such as grammar and words and we look at overall patterns of the text or conversations (basically cohesion and coherence).

Functional aspect

The second aspect focuses on how people actually use language to get things done in specific contexts, because it’s very difficult to understand what a piece of language means without referring to the social context in which it is being used and what the person is trying to say. Michael Halliday was an important scholar that focused his attention more on the social functions accomplished by language. The truth is that there are a number of ways to study language in use, for example considering discourse as a kind of action or to consider language in use to explore the role of discourse in certain kinds of activities and to examine how different kinds of discourse make certain kinds of actions.

Social aspect

In the third aspect, language is seen as part of larger systems through which people construct social identities and social realities. People use language in all different ways that show who we are and also reflect our different ideas about the world. It was Michel Foucault who first argued that discourse is the main tool through which we construct ‘knowledge’. Different kinds of discourse are associated with different kinds of people and different systems of knowledge. This aspect leads us to explore how people use language to advance certain versions of reality and certain relationships of power that are constructed through and supported by discourse.

Texts and texture

Milk, spaghetti, tomatoes, rocket, light bulbs. It makes no sense—Halliday says that meaning is the most important thing that makes a text a text, the basis of meaning is choice. Whenever I choose one thing rather than another from a set of alternatives, I am making meaning. In Halliday’s view, the meaning is the most important followed by syntax and morphology. Language is in this way just a system of meanings accompanied by forms that express the meaning. So the previous list of words can be seen as a series of choices. It’s the context and the relationship between them that makes a texture.

There are two important things that make a text:

• Features inherent in the language itself: Grammatical rules that help us understand the relationship between words and sentences. These features help you understand the relationship between the various sets of choices that you encounter. In the case of the list, all of this is missing but you can understand that they are connected together because they have something in common.
• They are similar because all of these words (no light bulbs) belong to the same semantic field, but it’s not enough to consider this list as a text. There are no grammatical elements and it will be easier if they appeared in a conversation (we need milk and tomatoes etc.). For example, a conversation about a shopping list. Different words, new words are added. One important word is “and” which creates an additive relationship among them indicating that they’re part of a list. Other important words are “we” that connects them to some people who are involved in the action and “need” that connects the things in the list to some kind of action that is associated with them.

Halliday calls it an awareness of the conventions of the language that help us to understand the relationship between these words. These conventions give us a framework that, in this case, is a shopping list and it’s clear you don’t need more explanation. It can also be the case of two people that speak; we have A that says what they need and B writes it in that way, or it can be a recipe.

Things that make a text a text

- Relationship or connections: They can be between words or sentences or other elements inside the text. When these relationships are created, we talk about cohesion. There can be a relationship between the text and the person who is reading or using it in some way; the meanings come from the background of the person, this relationship creates coherence. The relationship between a text and another text creates intertextuality.

Cohesion and coherence

One of the most basic tasks for a discourse analysis is to figure out what gives text and conversations texture. Texture comes from cohesion and coherence. The first has to do with linguistic features in the text, while the second with the kind of “framework” with which the reader approaches the text. What creates cohesion is not just the linguistic features but the fact that these features lead readers to perform certain mental operations. In the sentence ‘Lady Gaga doesn’t appeal to me but my sister loves HER’, we have to go back to the first clause and be smart to understand that her refers to Lady Gaga and not the sister. So cohesion is the ability to look backward or forward in the text in order to make sense of the things we read.

Cohesion

Halliday and Hasan describe two kinds of linguistic devices that are used to force readers in this process of backward and forward: one type depends on grammar and the other depends on the meanings of words. Devices used to create grammatical cohesion include conjunction, reference, substitution, and ellipses, while lexical cohesion involves the repetition of words.

• Conjunction: Refers to the use of various connecting words like AND and BUT, conjunctive adverbs like furthermore and however. It causes the reader to look back to the first clause in a pair of joined clauses to make sense of the second one.

‘Connecting words’ can be grouped into different kinds depending on the relationship between clauses or sentences that they join together:

• Additive: They add information “and” “moreover” “in addition”.
• Contrastive: They set up some kind of contrast “but” “however”.
• Causative: They set up some kind of cause “because” “consequently” “therefore”.
• Sequential: They indicate the order of facts or events “firstly” “subsequently” “finally”.

All connecting words cause the reader to look back to a previous clause in order to understand the subsequent clause, and the kind of connecting word used guides the reader in understanding the relationship between two clauses. But we have another way to connect the texts known as Reference and there are basically three kinds of it:

1. Anap