discourse analysis

1. DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
MISHELL ARREAGA ENDARA

2.  Discourse analysis means analysing how people use
language in different contexts or in particular
situations; discourse analysis also includes the study
of non-linguistic cues used by people in certain
situations together such as clothing, gestures, etc.
WHAT IS DISCOURSE ANALYSIS?

3.  Form is concerned with syntactic structure and function is
concerned with the utterance’s purpose.
 Grammatical forms and phonological forms examined
separately are unreliable indicators of function; when they are
taken together, and looked at in context, we can come to some
decision about function.
 There is a lack of one-to-one correspondence between
grammatical form and communicative function.
 How people interpret grammatical forms depends on a number
of factors like intonation.
FORM AND FUNCTION

4.  Each of the stretches of language that are carrying the function
of requesting, instructing, and so on is seen as doing an act; this
act is also called “speech act”.
 The analysis of discourse structures analyzes how grammatical
and lexical forms are put together to represent an speech act
such as: requesting, informing, etc.
SPEECH ACTS AND DISCOURSE
STRUCTURES

5.  Two features of spoken discourse are framing moves and
transactions; transactions with framing moves can be found in
a classroom setting, but also in other types of settings such as:
telephone calls, job interview.
 Another features of spoken discourse is called: exchange, it is
the process of asking > answering > and commenting, it is a
three-part exchange and each part is a “move”. The moves are
classified in: the opening move, which is the first part of the
exchange, the second part is called the answering move and
the third part the follow-up move.
SPOKEN DISCOURSE

6.  The classroom is not a place where real conversations can take
place, it is more a place where the teacher asks and the pupils just
give answers; the pupils have limited rights as speakers.
 Conversations outside the classroom take place freely; both
speakers are more or less equals in interaction, each speaker enjoy
the right to initiate, respond and follow up in their exchanges.
 There is a useful way for describing talk in and out of the classroom
which is using the Sinclair-Coulthard 'Birmingham' model.
CONVERSATIONS OUTSIDE THE
CLASSROOM

7.  Talk is seen as casual and it is done among equals, i.e
everyone will have a part to play in controlling and
monitoring the talk.
 When it comes to the analysis of talk discourse analysts
devote their attention more to observing how people
behave and how they cooperate in the management of
discourse, how pairs of utterances relate to one another,
how turn-taking is managed, how conversational openings
and closings are effected, how topics enter and disappear
from conversation, and how speakers engage in strategic
acts of politeness, face-preservation and so on.
TALK AS A SOCIAL ACTIVITY

8.  In contrast with spoken discourse in written discourse the writer
has time to think about what to say and how to say it, and the
sentences are usually well formed in a way that the utterances of
natural, spontaneous talk are not.
 Links between the clauses and sentences of text is known as
cohesion. Most texts display links from sentence to sentence in
terms of grammatical features such as pronominalisation, ellipsis
and conjunction of various kinds
WRITTEN DISCOURSE

9.  Cohesion is a feature of text, cohesion gives texture to the text
by the use of cohesive markers, they create links across sentence
boundaries and pair and chain together items that are related.
 Making sense of a text is an act of interpretation that depends as
much on what we as reading bring to a text as what the author
puts into it.
 Interpretation can be seen as a set of procedures and the mental
activities involved in interpretation can be called procedural.
 Procedural focuses on the role of the reader in actively building
the world of the text based on the reader´s experiences of the
world
TEXT AND INTERPRETATION