Task 1.

Iwan, S.Pd.

Kinds of Discourse Analysis

Lakoff in Juez (2005) provides the following taxonomy in terms of the relationship we see
between the forms used and the particular discourse. Discourse may thus be:
1. Formal/ informal.
2. Reciprocal/ non-reciprocal.
3. Spontaneous/ non-spontaneous.
4. Face-to-face/ telephone conversation.
5. Public/ private.
6. Task-oriented (discourse oriented towards a particular purpose, e.g. Psycotherapy).
7. Literate (includes all modes of linguistic communication in writing).
8. Memorable (intended to last, to go on, to be recorded for the future).
9. Empathic (we can see what each participant is feeling, e.g.: face-to-face normal
conversation, dialogue).
10. Monologic (one party tends to do most of the talking)
11. Truthful (designed for the purpose of fact-finding, e.g. psychotherapy, legal court
discourse) vs. fictional discourse (Searle, 1979b)
12. Spoken/ visual (gestures, movements, etc.) (Fairclough, 1989).
13. Dyadic/ triadic/ group (Various parts can take a role. Writing is generally non-dyadic, but
letters are) (Simmel, 1950).

According to van Dijk (2002) in Juez (2005) stated that discourse analysis is essentially
multidisciplinary, and involves linguistics, poetics, semiotics, psychology, sociology,
anthropology, history, and communication research. What I find crucial though is that precisely
because of its multi-faceted nature, this multidisciplinary research should be integrated. We
should devise theories that are complex and account both for the textual, the cognitive, the social,
the political and the historical dimension of discourse.

Relaed to the types of Discourse analysis, Juez (2005) in her book explained that there are three
types of discourse (political, medical and computer-mediated discourse), continually, she
explained some discourse studies such as Pragmatics, Conversational Analysis, Interactional
Sociolinguistics, Ethnography of Communication, Variation Analysis, Functional Sentence
Perspective, Post-structural and Social Theory,
Critical Discourse Analysis and Mediated Discourse Analysis.

Continually, even when a discipline is hard to delimit, as is the case of DA, we can learn a great
deal about its field of concern by observing what practitioners do. If we look at what discourse
analysts do, we will find they investigate matters such as:
 Turn-taking in telephone conversations
 The language of humor
 Power relationships in doctor/patient interviews
 Dialogue in chat rooms
 The discourse of the archives, records or files of psychoanalysts
  The conversation at a dinner table
 The scripts of a given television programme
 The discourse of politicians
 The study of racism through the use of discourse
 How power relations and sexism are manifested in the conversation between men and
women
 Openings and closings in different types of conversations
 The structure of narrative
 Representations of black/white people (or any race) in the written media (magazines,
newspapers, etc.)
 The strategies used by speakers/writers in order to fulfill a given discourse function
 The use of irony or metaphor for certain communicative aims
 The use of linguistic politeness
 The discourse of E-mail messages
 Legal discourse used in trials
 And a long etcetera…

Reference:

Juez, Laura Alba (2005). Discourse Analysis for University Student. Universidad Nacional de
Educación a Distancia: Madrid.