Discourse Analysis

Vũ Bảo Thoa
Nguyễn Thị Thanh Truyền
Trương Thị Thùy Trang
K 38-Quang Ngai
 1-1
Discourse Analysis

Schemata
Schema (sing.)  schemata (pl.)

What is schema?

By Bao Thoa
 Discourse
Analysis
What is schema?
A schema isare
Schemata a pre-existing
said to be knowledge
‘higher-
structure in memory.
level complex (and even
conventional or habitual)
knowledge structures’.
(van Dijk, 1981:
141)
 Discourse
Analysis
Schemat
- Sch em ata areaconsidered to be deterministic,
to predispose the experiencer to interpret his
experience in a fixed way.
- There may also be deterministic schemata
which we use when we are about to
encounter certain types of discourse.
A: There’s a party political broadcast coming on - do
you want to watch it?
B: No - switch it off - I know what they’re going to
say already.
 Discourse
Analysis

Schemata can be seen as the organised

background knowledge which leads us to
expect or predict aspects in our
interpretation of discourse.
 Discourse
Analysis
Schemat
a (with no dialogue), a group
After watching a film
of American subjects described in great detail the
actual events of the film and what filming
techniques had been employed. In contrast, a
group of Greek subjects produced elaborate
stories with additional events and detailed
accounts of the motives and feelings of the
characters in the film.
In Tannen (1980)
 Discourse
Analysis
Schem ata
- In some uses of the term ‘schemata’ by other writers,
the ‘active, developing’ aspect is not promoted.
E.g. Rumelhart & Ortony propose that ‘schemata
represent stereotypes of concepts’. They present a
schema for FACE which has subschemata for EYE,
MOUTH, CHIN, etc.,
- The schema for FACE might best be described as a
prototype for the various human objects called ‘faces’,
- A schema is a fixed ‘data structure’.
- They propose that the GIVE schema has 3 variables:
a giver, a gift and a recipient.
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
7.6.5 Mental models
How many of you have great ideas
for yourself?
Do those ideas really get put into
practice?
Where does the real problem life?
THE ANSWER IS“Mental models”
......................

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
 A mental model is an explanation of
someone's thought process about how something
works in the real world. It is a representation of the
surrounding world, the relationships between its
various parts and a person's intuitive perception
about his or her own acts and their consequences.

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
 “Mental models”
A view of how we interpret discourse
(and experience) which does not
appeal to stereotypic knowledge or
fixed storage systems has been put
forward by Johnson-Laird in a series
of papers.
 Principles of mental models
Mental models are based on a small set of
fundamental assumptions (axioms), which
distinguish them from other proposed
representations in the psychology of
reasoning (Byrne and Johnson-Laird, 2009).

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
(36) This book fills a much needed gap.
(36) Cuốn sách này lấp đầy một khoảng trống rất
cần thiết.
Upon futher analysis, however, we can work out
that the sentence is actually saying that it is the gap,
not the book, which is needed.

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
 (37) The fish attacked the swimmer.
- When subjects were asked to recall a sentence like
(37), Anderson et al., found that the word shark was
a much better recall cue than word fish.
- Johnson-Laird accounts for this finding by
suggesting that readers interpreted the sentence by
constructing a mental model in which the relevant
event and entities were represented.

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
A major function of language is to enable one
person to have another’s experience of the world
by proxy: instead of a direct apprehension of a
state of affairs, the listener construct a model of
them based on a speaker’s remarks.
(38) The man who lives next door drives to work.

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
(39) All of the singers are professors.
All of the poets are professors.
The sentences can give rise several different
versions of a mental model  All of the singers are
poets or all of the poets are singer  None of the
singers are poets.  Some of the singer are poets

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
(39) All of the singers are professors.
All of the poets are professors.
(40) singer = professor = poet
(41) a. singer = professor
b. poet = professor
(42) a. singer = professor = poet
b. singer = professor
c. poet = professor

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Discourse analysis via
a mental model
By Thuy Trang
Johnson-Laird’s view of discourse
understanding via mental models
• It is never described in terms of the sets of
stereotypical elements found in “frames” or of
characteristic events of a narrative “schema.”

• Reason: the practical details of mental models

remain elusive.

• They seem to represent a way of thinking about

how we understand discourse rather than a way
of doing analysis of discourse.
 Mental model construction
We use pre-existing knowledge and experience to get a
“picture ” of the situation described by the discourse.

How is that we do not use

all of our pre-existing
knowledge?
 Example
Recall to a sentence: “The fish attacked the
swimmer”
-> There are several cues for fish, which a mental
model theory predict: shark, blood, teeth, ocean,
bite, splash.

What are better?

-> Currently, we have no answer to these
questions.
 Advantage of a mental model
 Provide a richer presentation than rather bare
outlines of the stereotypic versions found in scripts
and scenario.
 However, the unconstrained potential of the mental
model concept leads to the other extreme, namely a
pathological inability to process text. A well-
documented case-history of an individual whpes
“mental models” were unconstrained is presented in
Luria (1969).
 Compromise representation
 There should be enough richness of detail to
capture the potential complexity of pre-existing
knowledge/experience.

 There should also be a constrain on how much

of this richness of detail during processing of
the discourse.