Textual analysis for social research

ANALYSING DISCOURSE
Textual analysis for social research
Namibia University of Science and Technology,
Windhoek, Namibia
Lazarus Gawazah

TABLE OF CONTETS
Part 1
• Social analysis, discourse analysis, text analysis
Texts, social events and social practices
Intertextuality and assumptions
PART 3
• Discourses and representations
Discourses
 Representations of social event

TEXTS AS A SOURCE OF DISCOURSE
• Texts are seen in this book as parts of social events.
• One way in which people can act and interact in the course of social
events is to speak or to write.
• events and texts themselves also have causes – factors which cause a
particular text or type of text to have the features it has.
• We can broadly distinguish two causal ‘powers’ which shape texts: on
the one hand, social structures and social practices; on the other
hand, social agents, the people involved in social events (Archer 1995,
Sayer 2000).

TEXTS AND SOCIAL AGENTS
• Social agents are not ‘free’ agents, they are socially constrained, but
nor are their actions totally socially determined.
• Agents have their own ‘causal powers’ which are not reducible to the
causal powers of social structures and practices (on this view of the
relationship between structure and agency, see Archer 1995, 2000).
• Social agents texture texts, set up relations between elements of
text.

SOCIAL EVENTS, SOCIAL PRACTICES, SOCIAL STRUCTURES
• Social structures are very abstract entities.
• One can think of a social structure (such as an economic structure, a social
class or kinship system, or a language) as deﬁning a potential, a set of
possibilities.
• However, the relationship between what is structurally possible and what
actually happens, between structures and events, is a very complex one.
• Events are not in any simple or direct way the effects of abstract social
structures.
• Their relationship is mediated – there are intermediate organisational
entities between structures and events. Let us call these ‘social practices’

SOCIAL PRACTICES
• Social practices can be seen as articulations of different types of social
element which are associated with particular areas of social life
• social practices from the perspective of this book is that they articulate
discourse (hence language) together with other non-discoursal social
elements. We might see any social practice as an articulation of these
elements:
Action and interaction
Social relations
Persons (with beliefs, attitudes, histories etc.)
The material world
Discourse

CONT…
• The relationship between these different elements of social practices
is dialectical, as Harvey argues (Fairclough 2001, Harvey 1996) “this is
a way of putting the apparently paradoxical fact that although the
discourse element of a social practice is not the same as for example
its social relations, each in a sense contains or internalizes the other –
social relations are partly discoursal in nature, discourse is partly
social relations. Social events are causally shaped by (networks of)
social practices – social practices define particular ways of acting, and
although actual events may more or less diverge from these
deﬁnitions and expectations (because they cut across different social
practices, and because of the causal powers of social agents), they are
still partly shaped by them”.

DISCOURSE AS AN ELEMENT OF SOCIAL
PRACTICES: GENRES, DISCOURSES AND STYLES
• discourse ﬁgures in three main ways in social practice;
Genres (ways of acting)
Discourses (ways of representing)
Styles (ways of being)

TEXT AS ACTION, REPRESENTATION,
IDENTIFICATION
• three major types of meaning
• Representation corresponds to Halliday’s ‘ideational’ function
• Action is closest to his ‘interpersonal’ function, though it puts more emphasis on text as
a way of (inter)acting in social events, and it can be seen as incorporating Relation
(enacting social relations)
• We can see Action, Representation and Identification simultaneously through whole
texts and in small parts of texts
• When we analyse speciﬁc texts as part of speciﬁc events, we are doing two
interconnected things:
• (a) looking at them in terms of the three aspects of meaning, Action, Representation and
Identification, and how these are realized in the various features of texts (their
vocabulary, their grammar, and so forth);
• (b) making a connection between the concrete social event and more abstract social
practices by asking, which genres, discourses, and styles are drawn upon here, and how
are the different genres, discourses and styles articulated together in the text?

Relational approach to text analysis
• Social structures
• Social practices
• Social events
Actions and their social relations
Identiﬁcation of persons
Representations of the world
• Discourse (genres, discourses, styles)
• Semantics
• Grammar and vocabulary
• Phonology/graphology

Cont…
• Analysis of the ‘external’ relations of texts is analysis of their relations with
other elements of social events and, more abstractly, social practices and
social structures.
• Analysis of relations of texts to other elements of social events includes
analysis of how they ﬁgure in Actions, Identiﬁcations, and Representations
(the basis for differentiating the three major aspects of text meaning).
• There is another dimension to ‘external’ relations, relations between a text
and other (‘external’) texts, how elements of other texts are ‘intertextually’
incorporated and, since these may be ‘other people’s’ texts, how the voices
of others are incorporated; how other texts are alluded to, assumed,
dialogued with, and so forth.
• Analysis of the ‘internal relations’ of texts includes analysis of:

Cont…
• Semantic relations: Meaning relations between words and longer
expressions, between elements of clauses, between clauses and between
sentences, and over larger stretches of text (Allan 2001, Lyons 1997)
• Grammatical relations: The relationship between ‘morphemes’ in words
(e.g. ‘sick’ and ‘ness’ in ‘sickness’), between words in phrases (e.g. between
definite article (‘the’), adjective (‘old’) and noun (‘house’) in ‘the old
house’), between phrases within clauses and between clauses in sentences.
• Vocabulary (or ‘lexical’) relations: Relations of collocation, i.e. patterns of
co-occurrence between items of vocabulary (words or expressions). For
example, ‘work’ collocates with ‘into’ and ‘back to’ more than with ‘out of’
in the texts of Blair’s ‘New Labour’ party in the UK, whereas in earlier
Labour texts the pattern was reversed – ‘into work’, ‘back to work’, ‘out of
work’ (Fairclough 2000, Firth 1957, Sinclair 1991, Stubbs 1996)

Cont…
• Phonological relations: Relations in spoken language, including
prosodic patterns of intonation and rhythm; graphological relations in
written language – e.g relations between different fonts or type sizes
in a written text.

Intertextuality and assumption
Text analysis issues
• Intertextuality and reported speech
• Assumptions and implicit meaning
• Dialogicality
Social research issues
• Social difference
• Hegemony, the universal and the particular
• Ideology
• The public sphere

Interxtuality
• intertextuality is the presence of actual elements of other texts within a text – quotation
• We can differentiate four ways of reporting (see Leech and Short 1981 for a fuller
account):
• Direct reporting Quotation, purportedly the actual words used, in quotation marks, with
a reporting clause (e.g. She said: ‘He’ll be there by now’).
• Indirect reporting :Summary, the content of what was said or written, not the actual
words used, no quotation marks, with a reporting clause (e.g. She said he’d be there by
then). Shifts in the tense (‘he’ll’ becomes ‘he’d’) and deixis (‘now’ becomes ‘then’) of
direct reports.
• Free indirect reporting :Intermediate between direct and indirect – it has some of the
tense and deixis shifts typical of indirect speech, but without a reporting clause. It is
mainly signiﬁcant in literary language (e.g. Mary gazed out of the window. He would be
there by now. She smiled to herself.).
• Narrative report of speech act: Reports the sort of speech act without reporting its
content (e.g. She made a prediction)

Assumption and implicit meaning
• Existential assumptions: assumptions about what exists
• Propositional assumptions: assumptions about what is or can be or will be the case
• Value assumptions: assumptions about what is good or desirable
• Each of these may be marked or ‘triggered’ (Levinson 1983) by linguistic features of a
text, though not all assumptions are ‘triggered’.
• For example, existential assumptions are triggered by markers of definite reference such
as definite articles and demonstratives (the, this, that, these, those).
• Prepositional assumptions are triggered by certain verbs (‘factive verbs’) – for instance ‘I
realized (forgot, remembered) that managers have to be flexible’ assumes that managers
have to be flexible.
• Value assumptions can also be triggered by certain verbs – for instance, ‘help’ (e.g. ‘a
good training programme can help develop flexibility’) assumes that developing flexibility
is desirable.

Ideologies and assumptions
• Value systems and associated assumptions can be regarded as belonging to
particular discourses – a neo-liberal economic and political discourse in the
case of the assumption that anything which enhances ‘efﬁciency and
adaptability’ is desirable.
• Existential and propositional assumptions may also be discourse-specific –
a particular discourse includes assumptions about what there is, what is
the case, what is possible, what is necessary, what will be the case, and so
forth. In some instances, one might argue that such assumptions, and
indeed the discourses they are associated with, are ideological.
• Assumed meanings are of particular ideological signiﬁcance – one can
argue that relations of power are best served by meanings which are
widely taken as given.

Discourses and Representations
• The identification and analysis of discourses is now a preoccupation
across the humanities and social sciences.
• Foucault (1972, 1984) has been a decisive inﬂuence.
• The analysis of discourse for Foucault is the analysis of the domain of
‘statements’ – that is, of texts, and of utterances as constituent
elements of texts.
• But that does not mean a concern with detailed analysis of texts –
the concern is more a matter of discerning the rules which ‘govern’
bodies of texts and utterances.

Levels of abstraction
• In talking about discourses as different ways of representing, we are
implying a degree of repetition, commonality in the sense that they
are shared by groups of people, and stability over time.
• In any text we are likely to ﬁnd many different representations of
aspects of the world, but we would not call each separate
representation a separate discourse

Texts and discourses
• Different texts within the same chain of events or which are located in relation to the
same (network of) social practices, and which represent broadly the same aspects of the
world, differ in the discourses upon which they draw.
• For instance, Example an extract from a book written by two long-standing left-wing
members of the British Labour Party on ‘New Labour’s’ view of what it calls ‘the global
economy’ and what they call ‘capitalist globalization’.
• One difference between the representation of global economic change in this left-wing
political discourse and the New Labour political discourse of the ‘Third Way’ is that
‘transnational companies’ are referred to as the agents dominating economic change –
who ‘divide and conquer’.
• In New Labour representations of global economic change, by contrast, these companies
are not represented at all, and economic change (‘globalization’ and so forth) is
represented as a process without social agents – as something which is just happening
rather than something that people or companies or governments are doing
• (see Fairclough 2000 for comparative analysis of New Labour texts)

Identifying and characterizing discourses
• How do we go about identifying different discourses within a text?
We can think of a discourse as
 representing some particular part of the world.
 representing it from a particular perspective. Correspondingly,
• in textual analysis one can:
 Identify the main parts of the world (including areas of social life)
which are represented – the main ‘themes’.
Identify the particular perspective or angle or point of view from
which they are represented

Representations of social events
• Textual analysis issues
Clause elements: processes, participants, circumstances
Exclusion or inclusion of elements of social events
Abstract or concrete
representations of social events
Representation of processes, and process types
Representation of social actors
Representation of time and space
Grammatical metaphor (e.g. nominalization)
• Social research issues
Governance
Recontextualization
The universal and the particular
Agency ‘
Space–times’

Cont…
• The focus in this chapter is on Representational meanings in the
clause.
• What can be represented in clauses includes aspects of the physical
world (its processes, objects, relations, spatial and temporal
parameters), aspects of the ‘mental world’ of thoughts, feelings,
sensations and so forth, and aspects of the social world.

The clause from a representational perspective
• All three main types of meaning (Action, Representation, Identification) are
simultaneously at issue in clauses, and each gives a particular perspective
on the clause, and particular analytical categories
• (see the ‘multifunctional’ analysis of clauses in Halliday 1994)
• Clause were look at in terms of Actional meanings, and this included
looking at categories of speech function (Statement, Demand, etc.)
• and at Grammatical Mood (declarative, interrogative, imperative). The
perspective and the categories are different when one looks at
Representational meanings: from this perspective, clauses can be seen as
having three main types of element: Processes, Participants, and
Circumstances

Cont…
• Processes are the happenings or states of affairs represented in a
clause . They are realised by verb phrase(e.g. went, started crying, will
be singing, drank).
• Participants are those elements which denote who or what is directly
involved in the process. They are typically realised by noun
phrase(e.g. the man, Margaret, my left foot, an interesting book).
• Circumstances contribute additional, and frequently optional,
information regarding the who, when, where, how, for how long, and
so on, of the process. They are typically realised by adverb phrase and
prepositional phrase (e.g. last Saturday, very quickly, on my pillow,
before the meeting).

Concrete and abstract representations of events
• Social events can be represented at different levels of abstraction and
generalization. We can usefully distinguish three levels of
concreteness/abstraction
Most concrete: representation of speciﬁc social events
More abstract/generalized: abstraction over series and sets of social
events
Most abstract: representation at the level of social practices or social
structures

Representation as recontextualization
• These are specific ‘principles’ according to which they incorporate
and re-contextualize social events
• These principles underlie differences between the ways in which a
particular type of social event is represented in different fields,
networks of social practices, and genres
• . Elements of social events are selectively ‘filtered’ according to such
recontextualizing principles (some are excluded, some included and
given greater or lesser prominence).
• These principles also affect how concretely or abstractly social events
are represented, whether and how events are evaluated, explained,
legitimized, and the order in which events are represented

Cont…
• Presence: Which elements of events, or events in a chain of events,
are present/absent, prominent/backgrounded?
• Abstraction: What degree of abstraction/generalization from
concrete events?
• Arrangement: How are events ordered?
• Additions: What is added in representing events –
explanations/legitimations (reasons, causes, purposes), evaluations?

Representations of social actors
• Just as there are choices in the representation of processes, so also
there are choices in the representation of social actors.
• Social actors are usually Participants in clauses, though they may not
be (they may be within Circumstances instead), and not all
Participants are social actors
• they may be physical objects for instance (compare ‘the car hit Mary’,
‘the car hit a rock’ – both ‘Mary’ and ‘a rock’ are objects of the verb,
i.e. Participants, but only ‘Mary’ is a social actor).

choices available in representation of social
actors in terms of the following variables
• Inclusion/exclusion
We can distinguish two types of exclusion of social actors
a) suppression – i.e. not in the text at all
b) backgrounding – i.e. mentioned somewhere in the text, but having to be
inferred in one or more places
• Pronoun/noun
 Is the social actor realized as a pronoun (‘I’, ‘he’, ‘we’, ‘you’, etc.) or as a
noun?
• Grammatical role
Is the social actor realized as a Participant in a clause (e.g. Actor, Affected),
within a Circumstance (e.g. in a preposition phrase, for instance ‘She
walked towards John’), or as a Possessive noun or pronoun (‘Laura’s friend’,
‘our friend’)

Cont…
• ‘Activated’/’passivated’
Is the social actor the Actor in processes (loosely, the one who does things
and makes things happen), or the Affected or Beneficiary (loosely, the one
affected by processes)?
• Personal/impersonal
Social actors can be represented impersonally as well as personally – for
instance referring to the police as ‘the filth’ is impersonalizing them.
• Named/classified
Social actors can be represented by name (e.g. ‘Fred Smith’) or in terms of
class or category (e.g. ‘the doctor’). If the latter, they can be referred to
individually (e.g. ‘the doctor’) or as a group (‘the doctors’, ‘doctors’).

Representations of time and place
• A general distinction within representations of both time and place is
between representations of location (e.g. ‘at 9pm’, ‘in Lancaster’) and
representations of extent (duration, distance – e.g. ‘for 3 hours’, ‘for 3
miles’).
• Various linguistic features contribute to the representation of time: the
tense of verbs (past, present and future time, e.g. ‘played’, ‘plays’, ‘is going
to play’)
• the aspect of verbs, the distinction between progressive and non-
progressive (‘is playing’, ‘plays’) and between perfect and non-perfect (‘has
played’, ‘plays’), adverbials (e.g. ‘today’, ‘yesterday’, ‘tomorrow’),
• conjunctions and prepositions which mark temporal (as well as spatial)
relations (e.g. while, before, after; between, in front of, behind, etc.)

References
• Allan, K. (2001) Natural Language Semantics, Oxford: Blackwell.
• Fairclough N. (2003) Analysing discourse. London: Routledge
• Halliday, M. (1994) An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd edition, London:
Edward Arnold
• Fairclough, N. (2000a) ‘Discourse, social theory and social research: the case of welfare
reform’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 4: 163–95.
• Foucault, M. ( 1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Pantheon.
• Lyons, J. (1977) Semantics, 2 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Archer, M. (1995) Realist Social Theory: the Morphogenetic Approach, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
• Sayer, A. (2000) Realism and Social Science, London: Sage
• Foucault, M. (1984) ‘The order of discourse’, in M. Shapiro (ed) The Language of
Politics, Oxford: Blackwell.

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