Discourse Analysis

2.  Speech Act Theory
 focuses on communicative acts performed
through speech. Utterances do not only say
things, they do things.
 Interactional Sociolinguistics focuses on the
social and linguistic meaning created during
interaction.

3.  Pragmatics
 The role of context led to pragmatics
(Austin 1962; Searle 1969, 1975; Grice 1975)
and attention to how discourse is structured
by what speakers are trying to do with their
words, and how their intentions are
recognized by their interlocutors.

4.  Schema theory
 Mental constructs of expected sequences of events or
combinations of elements which discourse participants use
to interpret what is said or written (Cook 1994: 9–23;
Semino 2002).
 It explains coherence, and cohesion.
 For example,
 1.The taxi was late. The driver couldn’t find our house.
 2. The taxi was late. The sailor couldn’t find our house. In
the binary conception of discourse as text + context a
schema can be classed as context, as it is a kind of
knowledge, derived from experience of the world, in
whose light each new text is interpreted (Cook 1994).

5.  Conversation Analysis
 CA’s primary interest is in the social act
(Seedhouse 2004: 3) through language (Hutchby
and Wooffift 1998: 14).
 CA analyses actually occurring conversation,
seeking to understand how participants ‘make
sense of, find their way about in, and act on the
circumstances in which they find themselves’
(Heritage 1984: 4) and through this close
analysis to understand the patterns of social life
(Bhatia et al. 2008: 4) as realized in talk.

6.  Ethnography, language ecology, linguistic
ethnography
 Understanding of culture through an analysis
of all details of everyday life in a given
context.
 focuses on language and communication as
cultural behavior.

7.  Semiotics, paralanguage
 Every spoken utterance has a volume, speed,
pitch and intonation in addition to its linguistic
form, propositional content and pragmatic force,
and these paralinguistic elements convey key
information about the speaker’s identity,
attitude, and commitment.
 This is so even in telephone conversations when
participants do not see each other. There are in
addition a host of paralinguistic visual
phenomena such as gesture, facial expressions,
eye movements and contact (or lack of it) and a
rich semiotics of such factors as dress,
proximity, position, and touch.

8.  Multimodal analysis
 Multimodal analysis concerns itself largely with the
multiple dimensions of meaning made possible by modern
printing, computer and mobile technologies, paying
attention to the significance of the presentation of the
written words themselves (Walker 2001), in different fonts,
colours, sizes, arrangements, animations, etc., and to the
many communicative modes with which they co-occur,
such as still and moving pictures, music, diagrams, tables,
etc.
 Particular attention has been paid to multimodality in the
media (e.g. O‟Keefe 2006; Talbot 2007), in advertising
(Myers 1999; Cook 2001; Johnson 2008), in educational
resources, and in computer mediated communication (e.g.
Herring 2004).

9.  Genre analysis
 Understanding any communicative event as
an instance of a genre, defined as ‘a class of
communicative events which share some set
of communicative purposes’ (Swales 1990:
58). Examples of genres are such events as
academic articles, news bulletins,
advertisements, prayers, operas, menus.
 Genre analysis identifies the conventions
which characterise these different genres.