The document discusses different definitions and characterizations of discourse. It defines discourse as (1) a set of terms, metaphors, and ways of talking that constitute an object, and (2) an exchange in talk or text that performs social actions. It also distinguishes between "big D" discourse, which refers to general ways of viewing the world, and "small d" discourse, which refers to actual language use. The document provides examples of toxic discourse from literature and analyzes how discourse is used to accomplish different social actions in interaction.

1. Dr. Hamzah, M.A., M.M.
English Department
Universitas Negeri Padang

2. Two definitions of ‘discourse’
(a) A set of terms, metaphors, allusions, ways of
talking, references and so on, which constitute
an object
(b) Exchange in talk (or text) that performs social
actions
2

3. Characterizing Discourse
 The big D and small d:
 The Big D: general ways of viewing the world
and general ways of behaving (including
speaking)
 The discourse of racial discrimination: the ideologies and
belief therein
 Discourse mahogany
 The small d: actual, specific language use.

4. Toxic discourse (big D)
 “Much work in the field of ecocriticism, established in
American literary studies during the 1990s, assumes that the
natural world is endangered, and that some of the human
activities that threaten nature also put human health and life
at risk. [...] My argument focuses on a particular type of risk—
exposure to chemical substances [...] This focus allows me to
foreground how my argument builds upon Buell's earlier
analyses of toxic discourse but also how contemporary
novelists use chemical substances as a trope for the blurring of
boundaries between body and environment, public and
domestic space, and harmful and beneficial technologies.”
 -Heise, “Toxins, Drugs + Global Systems”

5. Toxic Discourse (big D)
 “The modern nature that toxic discourse
recognizes as the physical environment
humans actually inhabit is not a holistic
spiritual or biotic economy but a network or
networks within which, on the one hand,
humans are biotically imbricated (like it or not)
and, on the other hand, nature figures as
modified (like it or not) by techne” (657)
 -Buell, “Toxic Discourse”

6. First: Discourse that constitutes an object
6
Usually some cultural object (marriage, crime, obesity etc)
Data:
Media texts (e.g. news reports, magazine articles,
newspaper features)
Personal accounts (e.g. in interviews, diaries)

7. From The Sun online 21 June 2006
7

8. ENGLAND’S next clash will be against a nation of
GUINEA PIG eaters.We avoided a showdown with old
enemy Germany — for now — and will play Ecuador
on Sunday.
Here’s your Sun guide to the South American team’s
dangermen — plus a few facts about the country
where their national dish is a roasted pet.
It would be easy to underestimate them. But Ecuador
beat mighty Brazil and Argentina in the South
American qualifying rounds.
[continues]
8

9. ENGLAND’S next clash will be
against a nation of GUINEA
PIG eaters.We avoided a
showdown with old enemy
Germany — for now — and will
play Ecuador on Sunday.
Here’s your Sun guide to the
South American team’s
dangermen — plus a few facts
about the country where their
national dish is a roasted pet.
9
The whole nation?
Nothing else?
Why “old enemy”?
Facts?
Whose pet?

10. Ecuador’s capital Quito is 9,300ft
above sea level, giving their
footballers a home advantage when
they play in the thin air.
They were a Spanish colony until they
seized their independence in 1822.
Out of a population of 14 million,
3,000 Ecuador fans are in Germany.
Football is the No1 sport but they
also love basketball and bullfights.
The main exports are coffee and
bananas.
The language is Spanish. But let’s hope
their fans get no chance to shout Olé
against England in Stuttgart on
Sunday.
10
Other facts not
chosen?
Inevitable Spanish-
speaker behaviour?
Who’s ‘us’?

11. The Times online 22 June 2006
11

12. PRESIDENT BUSH sought to
repair his tattered reputation in
Europe yesterday, talking of his
“deep desire” to close the
Guantanamo Bay prison camp
and conceding that his response
to the 9/11 terrorist attacks had
not been understood by much of
the continent.
12
Assumes it is
tattered
Compare
expressing his
deep desire
Assumes
(someone) has
made an
accusation

13. 2. Discourse accomplishing actions in interaction
13
Data:
Video or audiotape recordings
People speak in a sequence, in turns.
Each turn has an implication for the next.

14. An example of analysing language-in-interaction:
14
How do care-staff offer choices to
people with intellectual impairments?

15. Offering choices
15
avi

16. Repeat questions can imply a ‘wrong’ choice
16
Alec:
avi

17. Defining discourse:
 Discourse is: ‘language above the sentence or above the clause.
 The study of discourse is the study of any aspect of language
use.
 Discourse is for me more than just language use: it is language
use, whether speech or writing, seen as a type of social
practice
 Discourse is language use relative to social, political and
cultural formation—it is language reflecting social order but
also language shaping social order, and shaping individuals’
interaction with society… it is an inescapable important
concept for understanding society and human responses to it,
as well as for understanding language itself.

18. Discourse analysis
 Different from linguistic disciplines:
 not focus on a specific/definable scope of
inquiry, or on systems of linguistic symbols or
rules for sequencing words or inferring
meanings.
 but focus on language use motivated by real
communicative needs and language as a means
through which we accomplish various actions
and interactions

19. Discourse analysis seeks to
 describe and explain linguistic phenomena in
terms of the affective, cognitive, situational, and
cultural contexts of their use
 To identify linguistic resources through which
we (re)construct our life (our identify, role,
activity, community, emotion, knowledge, belief,
ideology).
 Discourse analysis essentially asks why we use
language the way we do and how we live lives
linguistic, the function of language in use.

20. Background
 The linguistics turn in social studies
 A shift in epistemology
 The rise in importance of discourse has coincided with a falling
off of intellectual security in what we know and what it means to
know—that is, the question of how we build knowledge has come
to the fore, and this is where issues to do with language and
linguistic representation come into focus.
 The building of knowledge and interpretations is very
largely a process of defining boundaries between
conceptual classes—a matter of classification with
language.

21. Background
 Broadening perspective in linguistics
 A relatively new area of importance to
linguistics, which moves beyond its earlier
ambitions to describe sentences and to gain
autonomy for itself as a “scientific’ area of
academic study.
 Post-modernity and technologisation of discourse
 The shift in advanced capitalist economies from
manufacturing to service industry
 Rapid growth in communication media: language
becomes marketable and a sort of commodity

22. Discourse and discourse studies
 In everyday life, we often produce several sentences at a
time, which form a larger coherent whole. In an interview
from the manager of a company, you may reply like this:“I
will be happy to attend for an interview on Monday next at
10 a.m. I will bring with me the full details of my
testimonials as you suggest…” these are usually called
discourse.
 Discourse is “language above the sentence or above the
clause” (Stubbs, 1983: 1). 1960s grammarians became
convinced of the usefulness of considering stretches
longer than individual sentences in their analyses, at
least two terms came to be used in parallel fashion: text
linguistics and discourse analysis.

23. Discourse and Discourse studies
 Originally, some people preferred to use text
to refer to written language and kept
discourse strictly for oral production.
 In this course, we do not make any
distinctions between text linguistics and
discourse analysis, and between discourse
and text, because they are now often used
interchangeably.

24. Discourse versus pragmatics
 Discourse analysis is also called discourse
linguistics and discourse studies, or text
analysis.pragmatics is more concerned with
meaning, discourse is more concerned with the
formal and information structure.

 Discourse analysis is the study of how sentences in
spoken and written language form larger
meaningful units such as paragraphs,
conversations, interviews, etc.

25. Example of discourse
 (1) a. Pick up a handful of soil in your
garden. Ordinary, unexciting earth. Yet it is
one of Nature’s miracles, and one of her
most complex products. Your success as a
gardener will largely depend upon its
condition, so take the first bold step in
gardening—get to know your soil. (text)

26. Non discourse
b. Fertilizers put back what the rain
and plants take away. Plastic pots are
not just substitutes for clay ones. Pears
are a little more temperamental than
apples. Supporting and training are not
quite the same thing. (nontext)

27. Task and Goal of Discourse Analysis
 tasks in discourse analysis is to explore the linguistic
features which characterize discourses.
 The goal of discourse analysis is to examine how the reader
or user of a discourse recognizes that the
words/phrases/sentences in a discourse must be co-
interpreted—that parts of a discourse are dependent on
others.
 One of the most important features of discourse is that they
have cohesion. Besides, some other topics of discourse
analysis include information structure, coherence, discourse
markers, conversational analysis.

28. Definitions of Discourse (1)
 A particular unit of language (above the
sentence), or discourse in structure;
 A particular focus on language use,
discourse as function.

29. Discourse as structure ?
 Problem:you can have a unit which looks like a sentence
but doesn’t mean anything
 e.g. Colourless green ideas sleep furiously
 … but on the other hand the units in which people speak
do not always look like sentences.
 e.g. You can run a hou- whatcha- now whatcha you can run
a house-you can run a house a- and do the job, which is
important, y’ can’t y- a man can’t do it himself, and a
woman can’t do it himself w- if y’ want it to be successful.
In most cases.
 How do you analyse something which is not a
 sentence?

30. Discourse as a System of
functions ?
e.g. “what’s the time?”
 Phatic function (opens a contact)
 Emotive function (conveys the need of the speaker)
 Conative function (asks something of the addressee)
 Referential function (makes reference to the world
outside the language)
 PROBLEM:
 Discourse analysis may turn into a more general and
broader analysis of language functions.

31. Definition of Discourse (2)
Discourse – written and spoken
Discourse
Speaker
/ writer
Hearer/
reader
Context

32. Objects of discourse
 ‘Discourse’ refers to any utterance which is
 meaningful. These texts can be:
 - written texts
 - oral texts (‘speech’/’talk’)
 - mixed written/oral texts (e.g. Internet chat)
 Discourse does not depend on the size of a text
 (“P” and “Ladies” can both be analysed as
 discourse)

33.  Definitions of ‘discourse’ (3)
(a) A set of terms, metaphors, allusions, ways
of talking, references and so on, which
constitute an object
(b) A to-and-fro of exchanges in talk (or text)
that performs social actions

34. The scope of discourse analysis
 Discourse analysis is not a discipline which exists on its
own. It is influenced by other disciplines and influences
them as well. It is a two-way process …
 For this reason discourse analysis examines spoken and
written texts from all sorts of different areas (medical,
legal, advertising) and from all sorts of perspectives
(race, gender, power)
 Discourse analysis has a number of practical
applications - for example in analysing communication
problems in medicine, psychotherapy, education, in
analysing written style etc.

35. Influences on discourse analysis
 sociolinguistics
Discourse Analysis
psycholinguistics
computational
linguistics pragmatics
other non-
linguistic
disciplines
other linguistic
disciplines

36. Approaches to Discourse
 Deborah Schiffrin “Approaches to Discourse”
 (1994) singles out 6 major approaches to discourse:
 the speech act approach;
 interactional sociolinguistics;
 the ethnography of communication;
 pragmatic approach;
 conversation analysis;
 variationist approach.

37. Approaches to Discourse (1)
The Speech Act Approach
Founders of the speech act theory: John Austin & John
Searle.
There are different types of speech acts:
 e.g. “speak louder” (directive)
 “Oxford Street is a shopper’s paradise“ (assertive)
Although speech act theory was not first developed as a means
of analyzing discourse, particular issues in speech act theory
(indirect speech acts, multiple functions of utterances) led to
discourse analysis

38. Speech Act Theory
 Stems from the Philosophy of Language
 How we accomplish actions with words
 Knowledge of required underlying
assumptions
 Interpretations of acts through language
 Contextually dependent

39. Approaches to Discourse (2)
Interactional sociolinguistics
Represents the combination of three disciplines:
anthropology, sociology, and linguistics.
Focuses on how people from different cultures may share
grammatical knowledge of a language but contextualize
what is said differently to produce different messages.
e.g. “yeah, bring them down here. I’ll flog them for you”
(Australian English)

40. Interactional Sociolinguistics
 Culturally bound
 Lack of shared background knowledge produces
mismatched intentions/interpretations
 How language is situated in different areas of life

41. Approaches to Discourse (3)
The ethnography of communication
The way we communicate
depends a lot on the culture we
come from. Some stereotypes:
Finnish people: the hardest
nation for communication, quiet
and serious?
Turkish people: very talkative and
friendly?
Ethnography investigates
speaker culture

42. Ethnography of Communication
 Holistic analysis of meaning/behaviour
 Includes world views and cultural values
 Focus in particularities of each communicative
situation, e.g.:
 People
 Setting
 Context, etc.

43. Approaches to Discourse (4)
Pragmatics
H. P. Grice: the cooperative principle and
conversational maxims.
People interact by using minimal assumptions about
one another.

44. Pragmatics
 Inferential interpretations of speaker’s intent
 Assumption of cooperation (Grice)
 Hearers search for meaning behind adherence to or
breaking of maxims
 Contextually bound

45. Approaches to Discourse (5)
Conversation analysis
 e.g. A: This is Mr. Smith may I help you
 B: I can’t hear you
 A: This is Mr. Smith
 B: Smith.
Conversational analysis is particularly
interested in the sequencing of utterances,
i.e. not in what people say but in how they
say it

46. Conversation Analysis
 Stems from sociological studies
 Sees conversation as the building of social order
 Interpretation is limited to the utterances themselves
 No preconceived categories before the analysis takes
place.

47. Variationist Approaches
 Search for patterns in discourse
 How are the patterns constrained by the discourse?
 Segementation of discourse (typically narrative) into
sections
 More emphasis on text than context
 Uses traditional linguistic categories of analysis

48. Summary of approaches to discourse

Approaches to Studying Discourse Focus of Research Research Question
Structural CA Sequences of talk Why say that at that
moment?
Variationist Structural categories
within texts
Why that form?
Functional Speech Acts Communicative acts How to do things
with words?
Ethnography of
Communication
Communication as cultural
behaviour
How does discourse
reflect culture?
Interactional
Sociolinguistics
Social and linguistic
meanings created during
communication
What are they doing?
Pragmatics Meaning in interaction What does the
speaker mean?

49. Data for discourse analysis
 Discourse analysis insist on the use of naturally
occurring data, not invented data.
 Typically based on the linguistic output of someone
other than the analyst.
 Typically taken from written texts or tape-recordings.
 Rarely in the form of single sentence, but in the form
of a stretch of conversation or text.
 Performance data containing features like hesitations,
slips, and non-standard forms which a linguist like
Chomsky believed should not have to accounted for in
the grammar of a language.

50. Two broad functions of language
 Transational
Representative
Referential
Ideational
Descriptive
 content, message,
information
 Factual, propositional,
informative
 Message oriented
 Interactional
Expressive(Buhler)
Emotive (Jakobson)
Interpersonal (Halliday)
Social-expressive (Lyons)
 Social relations, personal
attitudes
 Communicative, phatic,
interpersonal, negotiation of
social roles
The conversation’s pace intrigues me:
It isn’t intended to go anywhere, just fill
the time of the day…on and on and on
with no point or purpose other than to
fill the time, like the rocking of the chair.

51. Major topics in discourse analysis
 The role of context
 Topics and discourse content
 Discourse structure
 Conversational structure
 Cohesion
 Coherence
 Discourse and human social life

52. The context of situation
 Firth: A context of situation for linguistic work brings into relation the following
categories
 The relevant features of participants: persons and personalities
 The relevant objects
 The effect of the verbal action
 Hymes: context…on the one hand limits the range of possible interpretation, and on
the other hand, supports the intended interpretation
 SPEAKING: setting, participants, ends, act, key, instrument, norm, genre
 Halliday:
 Mode of discourse
 Field of discourse: topics
 Tenor of discourse: participants and their relationship
 Principle of local interpretation
 The hearer should not construct a context any larger than is needed to arrive at
an interpretation.
 The baby cried. The mommy picks it up.
Place two fingers in the two holes directly to the
left of the finger stop. Remove finger nearest stop.
He seemed to resent them on that occasion and
will not wear them today.
(The front door bell rings.)
Mother: Open the door, darling. Who is it?
Rebecca: It’s only Maggie.
Mother: (looking sheepish) Oh hello, Mrs.
Thomson.
Mrs. Thomson: (smiles) Hello.

53. Topic and discourse content
 Topic:
 Aboutness: the part of utterance about which something is said, which is
the element central to the discourse.
 Topic identification:
 Explicit ways of identifying a topic
 Once upon a time
 As for money
 Have you heard the one about…
 Did I tell you what happened to me last night?”
 By the way…
 Sentential topic and topicalization
 Topic-comment structure: the speaker announces a topic and then says
something about it
 That new book by Thomas Lee / I haven’t read yet
 Discourse topic: Not an NP, but a proposition
N: y’ see, there’re there’re two ways
you can read what she said
one way is
medical schools look at transcripts
they look for major
and they see math major
and they circle with a red pen
and they add ten points to your score at something
and they let you in more often
the other thing is
they look at your transcript and look at your score
and they look at your MCAT and look at your letter
of recommedation
they admit people

54. Discourse structure
 Problem of linearization: first-mentioned influences
second-mentioned.
 I can’t stand Sally. She’s tall and thin and walks like a crane.
 I really admire Sally. She’s tall and thin and walks like a crane.
 She married and became pregnant.
 She became pregnant and married.
 Thematic organization of the sentence:
 Theme:
 the left-most constituent of the sentence,
 the starting point of the utterance
 Rheme:
 What the speaker states about, or in regard to, the starting point of the
utterance.
John kissed Mary
Mary was kissed by John
It was John who kissed Mary
It was Mary who was kissed by John
What John did was kiss Mary
Who John kissed was Mary
Mary, John kissed her
Why are different syntactic structures
with the same propositional content used?
The more marked the construction, the more
likely an implicated meaning will be expressed
What time did you leave the building?
What I did at five thirty was leave the building.
Dear John:
Me, I’m sitting here at my desk writing to you. What’s outside my window
is a big lawn surrounded by trees and it’s a flower bed that’s in the middle
of the lawn. When it was full of daffodils and tulips was in the spring. Here
you’d love it. It’s you who must come and stay sometimes; what we’ve got
Plenty of room.
Love, Sally
Dear John:
I’m sitting here at my desk writing to you. A big lawn surrounded by trees is
outside my window and a flower bed is in the middle of the lawn. It was full
of daffodils and tulips in the spring. You’d love it here. You must come and
stay sometime; we’ve got pleanty of room.
Love, Sally
Dear John:
I’m sitting here at my desk writing to you. Outside my window is a big lawn
surrounded by trees, and in the middle of the lawn is a flower bed. It was full
of daffodils and tulips in the spring. You’d love it here. You must come and
stay sometimes; we’ve got plenty of room.
theme (topic) rheme (comment)
I ‘m sitting here
Outside my window is a big lawn
In the middle of the lawn is a flower bed
This bed was full of daffodils
You ‘d love it here
You must come and stay
We ‘ve got plenty of room
Thematic
Progression

55. Conversational structure
 Adjacency Pairs : mutual dependency of utterances and their expected responses
 Utterance function Expected response
 Greeting greeting
 Congratulation thanks
 Apology acceptance
 Inform acknowledge
 Leave-taking leave taking
 Turn-taking
 Natural talk: little interruption and overlap; brief silence; turn-taking is
nominated or self-selected; overlap occuring towards the completion of the
utterance
 Interactional and transactional talk
 Transactional talk is for getting business done in the world, i.e., in order to
produce some change in the situation.
 Interactional talk has as its primary function the lubrication of the social wheels,
establishing roles and relationships with another person prior to transactional
talk.

56. Cohesion and coherence
 text<texture<cohesion (cohesive relations)
 A text has texture and this is what distinguishes it from something
that is not a text…The texture is provided by the cohesive relation.
 Wash and core six cooking apples. Put them into a fireproof dish.
 Reference: the forms whose interpretation depends on other
linguistic items.
 Apaphoric: refers back
 Cataphoric: refers forward. Look at it, the sun.
 Cohesion may also be derived from lexical relationships like
hyponymy, part-whole, collocalibitly, syntactic repetition.
anaphor
antecedent
Bird Flu (Avian Influenza)
All viruses, including influenza, must invade living cellsin order to reproduce. If both ahuman
influenza virus and an avian influenza virus enter the same cell, they may randomly trade genetic
material. This process, known as reassortment, gives rise to new virusesthat resemble both the
human and avian strains.
Bird Flu
flu
influenza
virus
strain
genetic material
bird
avian
process
enter
invade
trade
avian
human
reproduce
reassortment
Bird Flu

57. coherence
 Lat: cohaerere: to stick together
 In general, coherence refers to the grammatical and semantic
interconnectedness between stentences that form a text
(discourse grammar). It is the semantic structure, not its formal
meaning which create coherence.
 In a narrow sense, coherence is separated from grammatical
cohesion and specifically signifies the semantic meaning and the
cohesion of the basic interconnection of the meanings of the text,
its content/semantic and cognitive structure. Semantic
coherence can be represented as a sequence of propositions that
form a constellation of abstract concepts and connected relations.
When a series of sentences seems incoherent, the listener can
use inference to understand the text.
That’s the telephone
I’m in the bath.
O.K.

58. coherence/interpreting a
speaker’s/writer’s intended
meaning
 Computing communicative function
 What’s the time, because I’ve got to go out at eight?
 Using knowledge of the world
 A bottle of whisky, please.
 How old are you?
 I’m a sophomore in the college.
 OK.
 Top-down and bottom-up processing
 Top-down processing: predicting on the basis of the context plus the composite meaning of the
sentences already processed what the sentence is most likely to mean
 Bottom-up processing: working out the meanings of the words and structure of a sentence and
build up a somposite meaning for the sentence
 Representing background knowledge: the organization of the knowledge and experience necessary
for discourse interpretation
 Frames: Minsky
 Schemata
 Mental models

59. Frame : a fixed representation of
the world
 Frame: structured repositories for our conventional
knowledge
 Minsky proposes that our knowledge is stored in memory
in the form of data structures, i.e., frames, and which
represent stereotyped situations.
 When one encounters a new situation, one selects from
memory a structured called a Frame. This is a remembered
framework to be adapted to fit reality by changing details as
necessary.
 Frames for linguistic facts
 The basis structure of a frame contains labelled slots which
can be filled with expressions, fillers.
 House: to be filled by kitchen, bathroom, address
 A particular HOURSE is an instantiation of the house frame, and can be
represented by filling the slots with the particular features of the individual
house.
 Example: voting frame

60. Schemata
 Schemata: high-level complex knowledge structure, which function as
ideational scaffolding in the organization and interpretation of experience.
 Deterministic view sees schemata as tereotypical, fixed ways to interpret
one’s experience.
 There’s a party political broadcast coming on—do you want to watch it?
 No, switch it off, I know what they are going to say already.
 Weak version: schemata seen as the organized background knowledge
which leads us to expect or predict aspects in our interpretation of
discourse.
 Structures of expectation
 Bartlett: our memory for discourse was not based on straight reproduction, but
was constructive. This constructive process uses information from the
encountered discourse, together with knowledge from past experience related
to the discourse at hand, to build a mental representation. That past experience
can’t be accumulation of successive individuated events and experiences, it
must be organized and made manageable
Every Saturday night, four good friends get together. When Jerry,
Mike, and Pat arrived, karen was sitting in her living room writing
some notes. She quickly gathered the cards and stood up to greet
her friends at the door. They followed her into the living room but
as usual they couldn’t agree on exactly what to play. Jerry eventually
took a stand and set things up. Finally, they began to play. Karen’s
recorder filled the room with soft and peasant music. Early in the
evening, Mike noticed Pat’s hand and the many diamonds…

61. What’s a mouse?

62. Why is it difficult for rural students to
describe these picutures

63.  More shared knowledge between the reader and writer
facilitates reading process
Reader’s
Knowledge
Writer’s
Knowledge

64.  STORY GRAMMAR
 Margie was holding tightly to the string of her beautiful new ballooon. Suddenly a gust
of wind caught it, and carried it into a tree. It hit a branch, and burst. Margie cried and
cried.
STORY: SETTING EPISODE
EPISODE: EVENT REACTION
EVENT: EVENT EVENT (CHANGE OF STATE)
REACTION: INTERNAL RESPONSE OVERT RESPONSE
STORY
SETTING EPISODE
EVENT REACTION
EVENT EVENT OVERT INTERNAL

65. Educational Implications
 Corresponding schemata are essential for understanding.
However, identifying lack of familiarity as a contributing
element is only the beginning, not the end, of a satisfactory
explanation.
 All discourse processing involves both local and global
structure. With familiar texts, we tend to rely more on our
knowledge of the global structure to guide our way through a
text; in the absence of schematic guidance, local cohesive
relations must play a relatively more important role in making
sense out of connected discourse.
 Helpful strategies
 Actively processing discourse
 Relating new information with experience

66. Helpful strategies
 Actively processing discourse: when we process information at deeper semantic
level, we remember more of what we read
 Relating new information with existing schemata
 Asking questions
 Writing summaries or outlines of the material
 Individually designed notations
 Connecting proportions in discourse
 Explicitly looking for relationships between concepts in discourse (LSA,
latent semantic analysis, Kintche)
 Paying close attention to anaphoric references
 Establishing a network of interrelated propositions
 Identifying the main points
 Building global structures
 Writing a summary

67.  How do you analyse discourse?
 Various ways. Depends on what sort of discourse you’re
interested in.
 Constituting an object vs realising a social action

68.  Constituting an object
 Usually some cultural object (marriage, crime,
obesity etc)
 Data:
 Media texts (eg news reports, magazine articles,
newspaper features)
 Personal accounts (eg in interviews, diaries)

69.  From The Sun online 21 June 2006

70.  ENGLAND’S next clash will be against a nation of
GUINEA PIG eaters.We avoided a showdown with old
enemy Germany — for now — and will play Ecuador
on Sunday.
 Here’s your Sun guide to the South American team’s
dangermen — plus a few facts about the country
where their national dish is a roasted pet.
 It would be easy to underestimate them. But Ecuador
beat mighty Brazil and Argentina in the South
American qualifying rounds.
 [continues]

71.  ENGLAND’S next clash will be
against a nation of GUINEA
PIG eaters.We avoided a
showdown with old enemy
Germany — for now — and will
play Ecuador on Sunday.
 Here’s your Sun guide to the
South American team’s
dangermen — plus a few facts
about the country where their
national dish is a roasted pet.
The whole nation?
Nothing else?
Why old enemy?
Facts?
Whose pet?

72.  Ecuador’s capital Quito is 9,300ft above
sea level, giving their footballers a home
advantage when they play in the thin air.
 They were a Spanish colony until they
seized their independence in 1822. Out
of a population of 14 million, 3,000
Ecuador fans are in Germany. Football is
the No1 sport but they also love
basketball and bullfights.
 The main exports are coffee and
bananas.
 The language is Spanish. But let’s hope
their fans get no chance to shout Olé
against England in Stuttgart on Sunday.
Other facts
not chosen?
Inevitable Spanish-
speaker behaviour?
Who’s ‘us’?

73.  The Times online 22 June 2006

74.  PRESIDENT BUSH sought to
repair his tattered reputation in
Europe yesterday, talking of his
“deep desire” to close the
Guantanamo Bay prison camp
and conceding that his response
to the 9/11 terrorist attacks had
not been understood by much of
the continent.
Assumes it is
tattered
Compare
expressing his
deep desire
Assumes
(someone) has
made an
accusation

75.  Discourse as language-in-interaction
 Language in interaction comes through in a sequence,
in turns. Each turn has an implication for the next.
 An example analysis: doctors delivering diagnoses.
 Do they tell the patient immediately?

76.  Dr. is telling mother about son
Notice that Dr. describes test results first

77. Dr. moves from test to treatment without explicit diagnosis

78.  What does this results-first practice achieve?
(a) Gives patient the sight of the evidence first
(b) Shows that the diagnosis when given is well-founded
(c) Allows the patient to guess or predict what is to come
(d) Allows them to voice it themselves

79.  Some worries & objections
 It’s not quantitative, so is it ‘subjective’?
- not particularly; argument still has to convince readers, editors
etc., by appeal to established findings & theory
Is it useful?
- reveals how objects get constituted & unmasks the
interests that serves (and perhaps could be resisted)
- shows how mundane interaction achieves its business
(and perhaps could be improved)

81. British Columbia Whale Watching Industry
example one from Phillips, N. & Hardy, C. (2002).
 Business study of whale watching industry
 Identified actors
 Collected data
 Findings
 Outcomes

82. Actors
1. Main - commercial whale watchers
researchers
2. Lesser -amateur whale watchers
seaplane companies
ferry companies
fishing boat companies
3. Regulators - Govt. British Columbia
Coastguards
Travel & tourism boards & assoc

83. Data collection
 17 tape recorded, semi-structured i/views
key actors (1995-96)
 Textual materials - brochures, books etc
 Scholarly texts
 Internet Movie Database
 Microsoft Cinemania CD-ROM
 Film oriented Internet newsgroups
 Personal communications
 Movies - Moby Dick to Free Willy

84. Findings
 Concept of whales changed from dangerous monsters
to intelligent individuals
 Resulted through complex processes of multiple
discourses
 This provided a space within which institutional
entrepreneurs worked to influence the field

85. Outcomes of research
 Broader, more contextualised understanding of
collaboration (discursive activity)
 Developed framework based on a discursive approach
to explain dynamics of collaboration
 Understand how collaboration can be managed

86. Example 2 from:
Tuffin, K., Praat, A. & Frewin, K. (2004)
New Zealand Journal of Psychology,
Vol 33, No. 2.
“Analysing a Silent Discourse:
Sovereignty and tino
rangatiratanga in Aotearoa”

87. Points of interest
 Social psychology of race relations
 Discursively analyses construction of sovereignty from
focus group
 Offers alternative to dominant discourses surrounding
nationhood
 Illustrates how oppressive ‘race talk’ can be challenged

88. Extract 1: What’s your
understanding of sovereignty?
Gareth: That ((pause)) what we’re really talking
about constantly is tino rangatiratanga. I mean
that’s the safe basis to go back to because that’s
what the Treaty actually says. Um sovereignty is a
translation of that, and it’s a translation which ah
has been one that Maori have used, probably
without thinking very much about it because it
was clearly the word that ah Britain was using
((pause)) and more recently the Settler
Government ((pause))…

89. Extract 2:
Gareth:…We could get into much more detail than
that. um - I think for instance that this country has
suffered. Ah from picking up a notion of
sovereignty=of national sovereignty based on the
way that Britain saw it, and still to some extent
sees it. In one narrow window of her history mm
ah and it’s a very unusual meaning and it’s a
meaning that says sovereignty is a single thing and
it’s concentrated and exercised only in one place
mm and most of the states in the world that I’m
aware of don’t operate that way.

90.  Why you shouldn’t do Discourse Analysis
 - recording the data (other than media texts) isn’t always easy
- transcribing the data is laborious
- mastering the craft of explicating what’s going on, without
overinterpreting it or merely describing it, is hard
- you won’t come away with a demonstration that X caused Y
- or a survey of the incidence of A is X in Y population etcetera

91.  Why you might do Discourse Analysis
 - you get close to the data
- the data (eg video recordings) are of life as it’s lived
- you uncover the subtle organisation of language, the
prime medium of our social lives (and selves)
- You plug in to social practices that - at the grandest -
constitute reality and our place in it

92.  Other reasons why discourse analysis might
interest you
- it might be connected to your life (job, family,
friends and so on)
- it can go on your cv
- if you get interested in the subject you might want
to take it further (tesi, specialistica)
 so it’s worth starting to think about what
you are interested in (linguistically)

93. References:
Du Gay, P. (1996). Consumption and identity at work London: Sage
Publications.
Fairclough, N. (1995). Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold.
Fasold, R. (1990). Sociolinguistics of Language. Oxford: Blackwells.
Phillips, N. & Hardy, C. (2002). Discourse analysis : Investigating processes of
social construction. Thousand Oaks, CA : Sage Publications.
Smith, P. & Bell, A. (2007).Unravelling the web of discourse analysis in Media
Studies: Key issues and debates. Eoin Devereux (ed). London: Sage
Publications.

94.  The End