Knowledge in Discourse, chapter 6

1. Knowledge in Discourse
CHAPTER 6: GUY-COOK
BY. ZOOBIA ABBAS

2. Introduction
• Production and reception of discourse is a result of
1. World knowledge
2. And, Social knowledge
But for successful communication is the result of the production by sender and receiving by receiver
 In recent years, the role of knowledge in discourse production and comprehension is stimulated by findings
associated with artificial intelligence.
 Artificial Intelligence sees the role of knowledge and language interacted and reproduce the process in computers.
 we need to look more precisely at the role of KNOWLEDGE and how it interacts with language to create a
DISCOURSE.

3. Schemata
• Schema theory suggests that people understand texts and experiences by
comparing them with stereotypical mental representations of similar cases.
• Schema theory is a theory which attempts to explain how we comprehend and
relate to a text.
• Cook says; The mind stimulated by key words or phrases, in the text, or by the
content, activates a knowledge schema, and uses it to make sense of the schema.
• Shortly, A schema is the pre-existent knowledge of typical situations.

4. Schemata
witness in a court case
1. I woke up at seven forty. I had breakfast at 8 and left for work at about 8.30.
2. I woke up at seven forty. I was wearing pyjamas. After lying still for a few
minutes, I threw back the duvet, got out of bed, walked to the door of the
bedroom, opened the door, switched on the light …
• Question
• . How does the witness know which detail is required or omitted?

5. .
Schemata allow human communication to be economical.
1. I went to work.
2. I went to work in my clothes.
A sender needs only mention features which are not contained in it.
3. I went to work in my pyjamas.

6. EVIDENCE FOR SCHEMATA
• 1. Assumption is made to fill in details which were not actually given:
I go to bed at 11 p.m.
• 2. The use of definite article:
I was late and we decided to call a taxi . Unfortunately, the
driver spent a long time finding our house.
• 3. Interpretation of words with more than one meaning:
• The king put his seal on the letter.

7. COMPLEX SCHEMATA
All of us come to a text with different outlooks that color our interpretation.
Actual discourse is unlikely to be interpretable with reference to a single schema.
Mind activates many schemata at a time. They all interact with each other and
simultaneously involving many more sub schemata in them.

8. Complex Schemata
• But schemata need not to be limited to unordered catalogues of people and
things within a stereotyped situation or stereotyped sequences of events telling
us what is likely to happen next.
• We might surmise the schema in a school lesson:
• The roles of teacher and students
• Responses to possibble events. But what about the flat or house in which you
live? Is there a standardised schema of a ‘house’ ?

9. Relevance
• Schemata are data structures: providing stereotypical patterns which are
retrieved from memory and employed in our understanding of discourse.
• A successful communicator select the features different from that schema and
enable the speaker to adjust it closer to what already is being conveyed.

10. Relevance Theory (RT)
• Relevance Theory (RT) builds from Grice’s ideas that speakers make use of principles or
maxims in conversations.
• In this cognitive model, the effects of new information are worked out by the hearers
against the background of existing assumptions. Whilst a cognitive environment is shared
by all members of a speech community, the work left for the hearers is to choose a context
for an utterance so as to make the correct inferences about the speaker’s meaning.

11. RELEVANCE
• The Relevance theory tries to answer the question:
What determines which schema gets activated?
• In short, Relevance theorists Sperber and Wilson consider that human mind
have a long- term aim: to increase their knowledge of the world.
• In each encounter with discourse, we start with a set of assumptions, whose
accuracy we seek to improve.

12. RT
• Information is relevant when it has a significant effect on our assumptions, that
is, when it allows us to alter our knowledge structures to give us a more accurate
representation of the world.
• According to the theory;
 Other things being equal, the greater the contextual effects, the greater the relevance.
 Other things being equal, the smaller the processing effort, the greater the relevance.

13. What is relevant information?
• Information is relevant to you if it interacts in a certain way with your existing
assumptions about the world.
• There are 3 types of interaction leading to contextual effects:
1) it produces new information
2) it strengthens our existing assumptions.
3) it contradicts and eliminates our existing assumptions.

14. DISCOURSE DEVIATION
• Miscommunication may occur in a number of situations, such as:
• When there are misjudgments and mismatches of schemata between the sender
and the receiver. These are particularly likely when people try to communicate
across cultures
• Communication suffers when people make false assumptions about shared
schemata
• When one, steps outside the predictable patterns (discourse deviation)

15. Language learner as social outsider
Language learners are social outsiders of a different community by virtue of belonging to
another.
 They may fail to understand or to make them understood because they lack the social
knowledge to create the discourse.
As a result they may come with the oddities and we may judge this negatively and
positively.
So, the success in communication depends as much upon the receiver as on the sender.
And between speakers of different languages ; it depends as much upon the native
speaker as on the foreign learner.

16. CONCLUSION
• There is a lot to be needed in the creation and understanding of coherent discourse than knowledge
of the language system alone.
• Coherence is created by our interaction.
• Schema might differ from one person to another.
• We fill in the details using our background knowledge.
• We can connect some information with our existing knowledge even if the sender hadn’t mention
that.
• Communication suffers when people make false assumptions about shared schemata.
• When one steps outside the predictable patterns, miscommunication may occur.