This document discusses discourse and the role of knowledge and schemata in discourse analysis. It defines discourse as language used in a social context and explains that discourse analysts study both written and spoken texts to understand relationships between participants, their goals, and contextual factors. It also discusses how schemata (preexisting knowledge structures) allow communication to be efficient by enabling understanding without explicit details. Relevance theory holds that information is relevant if it interacts with existing assumptions to strengthen or contradict them. Miscommunication can occur if people have mismatched schemata or make false assumptions about shared knowledge.

1. T.C.
NECMETTİN ERBAKAN UNIVERSITY
THE INSTITUDE OF EDUCATIONAL SCIENCES
THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE
TEACHING
KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE
By
İPEK YILDIRIM

2. WHAT IS DISCOURSE ???

3. If we are aware enough, we will realize about
the extraordinary range of contexts in which
communication is involved
 Because of its pervasiveness in life, discourse is studied in a number of
different disciplines.
 In the field of applied linguistics, the most relevant is that which has come to
be known as ‘discourse analysis’.
 The discourse analysis studies texts, whether written or spoken, long or
short.

4. Discourse analysts work with ‘utterances’,
and they focus on the following questions
when analyzing texts:
 Who are the participants in the discourse? (writer and reader(s)/speaker(s)
and listener(s)
 What is their relationship?
 Is it one between equals?
 What are their goals?

5. More specifically,
discourse analysts ask:
 ‘What does this piece of language mean in this context?’
 What factor enable us to interpret the text?
 What do we need to know about the context?
 What clues are there in the surrounding text which will enable us to
apprehend the meaning?

6. KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE
 So far, we had answered these questions.
 And lastly, we have seen how the receiver’s knowledge affects the ordering of
information and thus the grammatical choices and word order of discourse
too.
 Now, we need to look more precisely at the role of KNOWLEDGE and how it
interacts with language to create a DISCOURSE.

7.  In recent years, the role of knowledge in discourse
production and comprehension has been stimulated by
findings in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
 Artificial Intelligence tries to understand how knowledge
and language interact and reproduce the process in
computers.

8. Schemata:
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.

9. SCHEMATA
A 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.
1. 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 …

10. How does the witness know
which detail is required or
omitted?

11.  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.

12. EVIDENCE FOR SCHEMATA
1. Assumption is made to fills 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.

13. COMPLEX SCHEMATA
 All of us come to a text with different
outlooks that colour our interpretation.
 Actual discourse is unlikely to be
interpretable with reference to a single
schema.

14. The mind must activate many schemata
at once each interacting with the other:

15.  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’ ?

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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)

21.  Especially 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.

22.  Delete any information which you think the two
children would have in common.:
Peter: Do you like autumn Bob?
Bob: No I don’t. It’s a dull season. The grass is yellow. The leaves fall from the
trees. It often rains. I like winter and summer. In summer the days are longer and
warmer and the nights are shorter than in autumn.
Peter: But I like autumn. I think it’s a beautiful season. I like to go to the forest
in autumn. It’s so beautiful.
Bob: And what about spring? Do you like it?
Peter: Oh yes, I like it very much, too. The leaves of the trees are small and
green. The grass is green, too. It’s warm in spring. I think that all seasons are
wonderful.

23. Rewrite the passage, remove superfluous information:
 Earnest Miller Hemingway was born indoors in 1899 at Oak Park, a highly
respectable suburb of Chicago, a large city in the USA. The young Earnest,
who grew older as the years passed by, attended a local school, and although
energetic and successful in all school activities, he twice ran away from
home, though he returned on both occasions. In 1921 he was married of his
own free will to a woman he had met and fallen in love with. That year he
came to Europe by boat as a roving correspondent. He ate food every day and
slept at night.

24. Find evidence of schemata for the use of
definite article.
 I bought a bicycle yesterday. The frame is extra large.
 I looked into the room. The ceiling was very high.
 A bus came roaring round the corner. The vehicle nearly flattened the
pedestrian.
 Draw a diameter in black. The line is about three inches.
 She decided to sell the cow and buy a shop with the money.
 It was dark and stormy the night the millionaire was murdered.
 The killer left no clues for the police to trace.

25. 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.