Discourse analysis

1. Department of English Language and Literature
Major: English Language and Literature
Discourse Analysis
Session 4 Context
Dr. Badriya Al Mamari
Academic year 2021/2022

2. CONTEXT Understanding
concepts
□ introduction
□ situational context
□ cultural and interpersonal background context
□ exophora, deixis and intertextuality

3. Introduction to pragmatics and discourse
The first section of this lecture defines pragmatics and discourse.
First, let us look at what they are not, by using an example. In Queen Victoria’s
famous words ‘We are not amused’, if we analyse the grammar and say that :
1.‘we’ is the noun phrase subject of the sentence containing a first person plural
pronoun,
2.‘are’ is the main verb agreeing with ‘we’,
3.‘not’ is a negative marker, and
4.‘amused’ is an adjectival complement,
We are doing an analysis of the syntax.

4. Syntax
 is the way that words relate to each other, without taking into
account the world outside; it includes grammar, and does not consider
who said it to whom, where, when or why.

5. Returning to the Queen Victoria example, if we analyse the meaning
of her words in isolation, and say that :
• ‘we’ indicates the person speaking,
• ‘are’ identifies a state rather than an action, and
• ‘amused’ has a sense synonymous with ‘entertained’ or ‘distracted’,
We are looking at the semantics of the text.

6. Semantics
 is the study of what the words mean by themselves, out of context, as
they are in a dictionary. Semanticists would not consider, here, the
contextual background features about Queen Victoria and her courtiers,
or why she said this.

7. Moving on to what pragmatics and discourse analysis are, we can
start by saying that they are approaches to studying language’s relation
to the contextual background features

8.  They would take into account the fact that, in the example, Queen
Victoria had been in a prolonged depression, caused by the death of her
husband Albert, and her courtiers knew this, and that her words were a
response to a joke which they had just made. Analysts would infer that the
Queen’s intention was to stop them trying to make her laugh and lift her out
of the depression, and that her statement implies a reminder that she has to
be respected as Queen.

9. Pragmatics and discourse analysis have much in common:
1. they both study context, text and function.

10. CONTEXT.
 Both pragmatics and discourse analysis study the meaning of words in context,
analysing the parts of meaning that can be explained by knowledge of the physical
and social world, and the socio-psychological factors influencing communication,
as well as the knowledge of the time and place in which the words are uttered or
written (Stilwell Peccei 1999; Yule 1996).
 Both approaches focus on the meaning of words in interaction and how
interactors communicate more information than the words they use.

11.  The speaker’s meaning is dependent on assumptions of knowledge that
are shared by both speaker and hearer:
 the speaker constructs the linguistic message and intends or implies a
meaning,
 and the hearer interprets the message and infers the meaning (Brown
and Yule 1983; Thomas 1995).

12.  The second feature that pragmatics and discourse analysis have in
common is that they 2.both look at discourse, or the use of language, and
text, or pieces of spoken or written discourse, concentrating on how
stretches of language become meaningful and unified for their users
(Cook 1989).

13.  Discourse analysis calls the quality of being ‘meaningful and unified’
coherence;
 pragmatics calls it relevance. Both approaches would take into account
the fact that Victoria’s words were intended to be seen as relevant to the
courtiers’ joke and to anything that they should say afterwards.

14.  Finally, pragmatics and discourse analysis have in common the fact that
they are 3.both concerned with function: the speakers’ short-term
purposes in speaking, and long-term goals in interacting verbally.
 Function is related to the speech act theory. Speech act theory describes
what utterances are intended to do, such as promise, apologise and
threaten.

15.  Pragmatics 4.differs from discourse analysis in the importance given to
the social principles of discourse. Pragmatics can explain the example thus:
the Queen complied with the social maxims of being relevant, precise,
clear and sincere, and her courtiers expected her to do so, and she obeyed
the social principles of politeness in that her request for the courtiers to
stop is indirect, which aims to avoid offence.

16.  Pragmatics takes a socio-cultural perspective on language usage,
examining the way that the principles of social behaviour are expressed is
determined by the social distance between speakers. It describes the
unwritten maxims of conversation that speakers follow in order to
cooperate and be socially acceptable to each other.

17. Pragmatics Vs Discourse analysis
 Pragmatics uses discourse as data and seeks to draw generalizations that have
predictive power, concerning linguistic competence.
 Discourse Analysis focuses on individual discourse, using the findings of pragmatic
theory to see how interlocutors use and interpret language in a specific context.

18. Context outside text
 Activity 1:
 This excerpt from a conversation between two students in the common room
of the Applied Linguistics department of the University of Edinburgh. The text
deals with the meaning of words in context (the physical and social world) and
assumptions of knowledge that speaker and hearer share.

19. Comment on the Activity:
Typically, there are three sorts of context to observe here:
the situational context, what speakers know about what they can see
around them
the background knowledge context, what they know about each other and
the world
the co-textual context, what they know about what they have been saying.

20. 1.Situational context
 In the excerpt about hill walking in Arran, there is an example of words taking
on meaning in the situational context: ‘They were like this. Swollen up like this.’
DM must be making a gesture that he knows AF can see, holding his hands open
and rounded to show what Michelle’s knees looked like. You may have seen
people talking on the telephone and making gestures with their hands or face;
what is funny about this is that hearer and speaker do not share the situational
context, so the gestures do not add meaning to the words.

21. 1.The situational context
is the immediate physical co-presence, the situation where the interaction is
taking place at the moment of speaking. It is not by chance that DM uses the
words ‘like this’. ‘This’ is a demonstrative pronoun, used for pointing to
something, an entity, that speaker and hearer can see. Any overhearer who
cannot see DM’s hands would not know how badly his wife’s knees were
swollen.

22. Activity 2
From written language, from “The English Struwwelpeter”, a book from the beginning
of the twentieth century that contains moralistic, humorous tales about naughty children
who are punished for their bad behaviour. There is one such tale called The story of
Augustus who would not have any soup. The tale begins with Augustus as ‘a chubby lad
who ate and drank as he was told, and never let his soup grow cold’. Then one day he
screams ‘I won’t have any soup today.’ Here is verse two:
Next day, now look, the picture shows
How lank and lean Augustus grows!
Yet, though he feels so weak and ill, The naughty fellow cries out
still – ‘Not any soup for me, I say:
O, take the nasty soup away!
I won’t have any soup today.’

23. By the fifth day, “Augustus” was dead. The poem is meant to be read to
children who can look at the book in front of them: the words ‘the
picture’ refer to the one in the book, and the name ‘Augustus’ refers to the
boy in the picture. The child who does not look at the picture will not
know exactly ‘how lank and lean’ the boy is. The picture adds a visible
situational context.

24. 2.Background knowledge context
The second type of context is that of assumed background knowledge. This
can be either :
 □ cultural general knowledge that most people carry with them in their
minds, about areas of life
 □ interpersonal knowledge, specific and possibly private knowledge
about the history of the speakers themselves

25. a.Cultural background knowledge
In the hill-walking-in-Arran excerpt, AF and DM share cultural background
knowledge about the low mountains on the island: AF does not appear
surprised that DM and his friends went ‘hill walking’, that they could walk
for eight hours there, or that the walk was strenuous enough to make
somebody’s knees swell. Here, the community of people who could be
assumed to know about the mountains are British people, or people who
have visited or studied the British Isles.

26. Groups with mutual knowledge vary in size
 For example,
most nationalities of the world would understand a conversation assuming
knowledge of the fact that stars come out at night, the sun is high at midday
or the world is round. The community can also be relatively small: in the hill-
walking example, out of all the forty or so students on the course, maybe
only AF and DM know that ‘Francesca’ is David’s girlfriend, and that ‘Alice’ is
from London.

27. Activity 3
 The community who could fully appreciate the meaning of these words would be people
with an interest in North American popular music.
 Within that community there will be a smaller group of people who know all about
rhythm and blues, its singers and bands, its history and geography.
 Within that community, there will be an even smaller group of people who know every
song that a particular rhythm and blues band has recorded, as well as the life histories of
each of the band members.
 These smaller groups may form what Swales (1990) calls discourse communities, if they
have the broadly agreed common public goals, special mechanisms for communication and
they have a special lexis or vocabulary.

28.  It is this cultural context and shared attitude of a group that can make
the humour of one country difficult to understand for people of another
country, and the humour of one generation incomprehensible to another
generation.

29.  To be continued in session 4 >>>>>>

30. b.Interpersonal background knowledge
 In the hill-walking excerpt, we see that AF and DM know who ‘Michelle’ is.
This is the interpersonal context. DM will have told AF in a previous
conversation that his wife’s name is ‘Michelle’; he might also have told her
where ‘home’ is – AF might have actually been to DM’s home and learnt quite
a lot about Michelle.
 Shared interpersonal knowledge is knowledge acquired through previous
verbal interactions or joint activities and experiences, and it includes privileged
personal knowledge about the interlocutor.

31. Referring to context
 The act of using language to refer to entities in the context is known as
reference: an act in which a speaker uses linguistic forms to enable the hearer
to identify something.
 The speaker uses linguistic forms, known as referring expressions, to enable
the hearer to identify the entity being referred to, which is in turn known as
the referent.

32.  For example, in the words ‘I went with Francesca (0.5) and David’,
the first person singular personal pronoun ‘I’ is a referring expression which
refers to the person speaking, who is the referent.
Similarly, the proper nouns ‘Francesca’ and ‘David’ are the referring
expressions that refer to the two people whose names are Francesca and
David, the latter being the referents.

33. A)Exophoric reference
Example: from Activity 1
DM // I went with Francesca (0.5) and David.
AF Uhuh?
DM Francesca’s room-mate. (2) And Alice’s – a friend of Alice’s from
London (1). There were six of us. Yeah we did a lot of hill walking.

34. When this is the first mention of the referent, in the sense that there is no previous
mention of the reference in the preceding text, we call it exophoric reference.
Exophora is dependent on the context outside the text.
 the ‘us’ and the ‘we’ are not exophoric because they refer back to DM, Francesca,
David, Francesca’s room-mate, the friend of Alice’s, and Michelle, who are all mentioned
elsewhere in the text.
 The nouns ‘Francesca’ and ‘David’ are used as exophoric reference because they point
to people who are in the cultural context and are not referred to previously in the text.

35. B)Deixis.
If the referring expression points to the referent in the context, it is known as
deixis. There are three types of deixis:
• 1.person,
• 2.place
• 3.time.

36. 1.Person deixis
 When we talk of person deixis we mean the use of expressions to point
to a person, with the personal pronouns ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’, ‘we’
and ‘they’:
− We are not amused
− So you went to Arran.
− We got back (1) er (2) Michelle and I got home she looked at her knees.
(0.5) - They were like this.

37. 2.Place deixis
 Spatial or place deixis is words used to point to a location, the place where
an entity is in the context, as in the demonstrative adverbs ‘there’, ‘here’, the
demonstrative adjectives and pronouns ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘these’, ‘those’:
− They were like this.
− That was great.

38. 3.Time deixis
Time deixis is expressions used to point to a time, as in ‘next day’,
‘then’ and ‘now’:
Next day, now look, the picture shows.

40. 3.Intertextuality
 Intertextuality is more often interpersonal than cultural, since it usually refers
to knowledge gained in previous conversations between the people who are
speaking.
 So, it is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text.
 Intertextual figures include: allusion, quotation, calque, plagiarism, translation,
and parody(imitation) .
 An example of intertextuality is a writer’s borrowing and transformation of a
prior text, and incorporating an aspect of it in a new text.

41. Ex. Intertextuality - Simpsons
• Almost every episode of The Simpsons contains at least one film reference
to a famous film scene.
• The Simpsons also contains intertextual references to politics, religion –
nearly every aspect of social, political and cultural life

42. Context
Context is the surrounding situation in which a word is used.
 Ex. If I were teaching the word goal in context I could use images.
(e.g. Nelson Mandela) to evoke the life of a man who overcame difficulties
in order to achieve his goals.

43. 3.Co-text
co-text is the surrounding words.
 Ex To be able to use the word goal in English, learners would have to
know the verbs that commonly occur with it, such as achieve / set /
accomplish or score (if talking about football)

44. What is co-text?
 The words surrounding a particular word or passage within a text that
provide context and help to determine meaning.

45.  Ex.
a key to a door
a key on a keyboard
a key to solve the problem
 The words door, keyboard, and the problem are co-text of the
word “ key”

46. Co-text Vs Context
Context Co-text
– the non-verbal environment in
which a word is used
– the linguistic environment of a
word

47. Voluntary presentation
Co_text

48. Concepts in co-text (cutting, 2002, p.9):
 1.Grammatical cohesion:
 1.1. endophoric reference
 1.2.Substitution
 1.3.Ellipsis
 2.Lexical cohesion
 2.1.Repetition
 2.2.Superordinates
 2.3.General words
 Reference: Cutting, J. (2005). Pragmatics and discourse: A resource book for
students. Routledge.