DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

NATHALY MENDOZA CARRILLO

CODE: 91100405933





APPLIED LINGUISTICS





UNIVERSITY OF PAMPLONA
VILLA DEL ROSARIO
2014
The term discourse comes from Latin discurus which means conversation or
speech. Some linguists define discourse as a continuous stretch language larger
than a sentence.
Beaugrande (1981) stablishes seven characteristics to qualify a written or a spoken
text. These are:
Cohesion
Coherence
Intentionality
Acceptability
Informativeness
Situationality
Intertextuality
Since it is not easy to define what a discourse is, there are some features in order
to understand this term. Ferdinand de Saussure divided the concept of language
into langue and parole. Langue means a system that enables people to speak
they do, and parole, means a particular set of produced statements.
In linguistics, discourse can be divided into two groups: written and spoken
discourse. In the written, the writer of the text does not know who is going to read
his work but in the spoken discourse, the speaker usually knows the listeners and
he is aware of the fact that he is being to be listened and also to experiment the
reactions of the public.
Other features of the discourse can be discourses expressed formally and
informally. The informal discourse makes use of active voice, personal pronouns
and verbs which show feelings such as I think, I believe. While the formal
discourses are more governed by strict rules and use passive voice.
Discourse analysis studies the use of language by its native population and
investigates the functions of language with its forms produced in the oral and
written way. Zellig Harris was the first modern linguists who studied the relation of
sentences and put the name discourse analysis. He proposed the grammatical
examinations in the syntactic investigations.
British and American scholars made a significant contribution to the evolution of
discourse analysis. The British focused on the study of the social functions of
language but the Americans focused on examining small communities of people
and their discourse in genuine circumstances.
In our speeches, the links are divided into two groups: formal, which refers to facts
that are present in the text, and the contextual refers to the outside world, the
knowledge.
There are several types of links used in the discourse. They are:
Substitution: to avoid repeating the same word several times
Ellipsis: it replaces a phrase by a gap/the omission of a noun, verb or a
clause
Reference: the use of words which do not have meanings of their own
Conjunctions: relationship between clauses or sentences.
Lexical cohesion: links between words which carry meaning such as verbs,
nouns and adjectives.
Nowadays it is important to have a second language but if we are not able to teach
it or if we do not know how to teach it, we will be doing anything. Most of the
people know that to be successful in language learning is the interaction, using
both, written and spoken form. In fact, the students failures are in the
communication process because their speeches are not very well in order to
express an idea or just to explain something.
The most remarkable of learners of a foreign language is the amount of vocabulary
used every day and the amount of time needed in order to memorize it. The major
problem of the students is the lexis because unlike the grammar, there are new
words that we need to add according to the contexts and situations.
Scholars have used new techniques in order to increase the vocabulary
memorization of learners and also making it easier for students to improve their
lexis.