Discourse Analysis

Agenda
• Natural Language Understanding (NLU)
• Discourse Analysis
• Background to Discourse
• Definition
• Example of Discourse
• Criteria for Qualifying a Discourse
• Discourse Unit
• Types of Discourse Units
• What is Discourse Analysis???
• Discourse Analyst
• Discourse Analyst/Discourse Analysis Focuses on??
• From Where We Can Study a Discourse???
• Discourse Analysis also Focuses on
• Reading Material

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Background to Discourse
• Up to this point of the book, we have focused primarily on language
phenomena that operate at the word or sentence level.
• Of course, language does not normally consist of isolated, unrelated
sentences, but instead of collocated, related groups of sentences. We
refer to such a group of sentences as a discourse.

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Discourse Definition
• Originally the word 'discourse' comes from Latin 'discursus' which denoted
'conversation, speech'.

• Definition 1:
• "Discourse: a continuous stretch (an unbroken sequence of utterences) of
(especially spoken) language larger than a sentence, often constituting a
coherent unit such as a sermon (religious speech), argument, joke, or narrative
(occurrence of an act or event)" (Crystal 1992:25).
• Definition 2:
• According to Cook (1990:7) novels, as well as short conversations or groans
might be equally rightfully named discourses.
• Definition 3:
• Discourse - The study of linguistic units larger than a single utterance (Juraffsky)

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Example of Discourse
• Gracie:
• Oh yeah... And then Mr. and Mrs. Jones were having matrimonial trouble, and my brother was hired to watch Mrs. Jones.

• George:
• Well, I imagine she was a very attractive woman.

• Gracie:
• She was, and my brother watched her day and night for six months.

• George:
• Well, what happened?

• Gracie:
• She finally got a divorce.

• George:
• Mrs. Jones?

• Gracie:
• No, my brother's wife.

(Juraffsky)
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Criteria for Qualifying a Discourse
• Seven criteria which have to be fulfilled to qualify either a written or a spoken text as a discourse have
been suggested by Beaugrande (1981). These include:
• Cohesion –
• grammatical relationship between parts of a sentence essential for its interpretation;

• Coherence –
• the order of statements relates one another by sense.

• Intentionality –
• the message has to be conveyed deliberately and consciously;

• Acceptability –
• indicates that the communicative product needs to be satisfactory in that the audience approves it;

• Informativeness –
• some new information has to be included in the discourse;

• Situationality –
• circumstances in which the remark is made are important;

• Intertextuality –
• reference to the world outside the text or the interpreters' schemata;

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Discourse Unit
• In TBMT, the unit for analysis is a ‘discourse’ unit (DU) rather than a
sentence.
• Definition of DU
• A DU is that part of the text which is between two successive discourse
boundaries (DBs).
• Discourse Boundary
• DB, itself, is like a sentence boundary (e.g. '.') across which there are no
anaphoric and/or cataphoric reference links.
(M.A. Khan, 2004)

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Types of Discourse Unit
• Mono-sentential Discourse
• If a discourse consist of only one sentence then it is called mono-sentential
discourse or simple discourse.
• For example:
• [Be patient on what you have in your hand.]
• Poly-sentential Discourse
• If a discourse consist of more than one sentences then it is called poly-
sentential discourse or complex/ compound discourse.

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Types of Discourse Unit (Cont..)
• Example of poly-sentential discourse
• [Los Angeles—A man who claims to be Angelina Jolie's former drug dealer says the star was
high on cocaine when she took part in a TV interview back in 2000.
• According to Franklin Meyer, the 25-year-old actress visited him both before and after the
interview with broadcaster Charlie Rose to buy cocaine.
• 'She'd taken coke,' he told Life & Style magazine. 'She did the show and then she came back
over after.‘ ]
(The Daily News: 22 Oct, 2010)

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What is Discourse Analysis???
• Discourse analysis is the examination of spoken, signed or written
language for any aspect of linguistic behavior.
• Sign language (also signed language)
• is a language which, instead of acoustically conveyed sound patterns, uses visually
transmitted sign patterns (manual communication, body language) to convey meaning—
simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or
body, and facial expressions to fluidly express a speaker's thoughts.

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Discourse analysts
• A person performing discourse analysis is called discourse analyst.

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Discourse Analyst/Discourse Analysis
Focuses on??
• Focus on any aspect of linguistic behavior:
• study of particular patterns of pronunciation,
• word choice,
• sentence structure,
• semantic representation,
• pragmatic analysis of how we organize speech encounters
• (and any combination of these in spoken, written and
signed discourse).

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From Where We Can Study a Discourse???
• A wide array of linguistic ‘texts’ are explored in the study of discourse.
These might consist of:
• a conversation or a letter;
• a speech, a memo or a report;
• a broadcast, a newspaper article or an interview;
• a lesson, a consultation or a confrontational (argumentation) encounter;
• an advertisement,
• a flyer or a piece of gossip.

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Discourse Analysis also Focuses on
• Cohesion
• Coherence
• References resolution
• Ellipsis resolution and
• Ambiguity resolution
• (will talk in comming lectures)

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Reading/References
• Daniel Jurafsky, Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing,
Computational Linguistics and Speech Recognition.

 Kamil Wiśniewski, July 12th, 2007, Discourse Analysis. Retrieved from:

http://www.tlumaczenia-angielski.info/linguistics/discourse.htm, Retrieved date: Oct 16, 2010.

 M.A.Khan, “ Text Based Machine Translation System”, PhD Thesis, 1995.

 The Daily News, “Jolie was high on cocaine during TV interview: Former drug dealer”, dated: 22 Oct, 2010.
http://dailymailnews.com/1010/22/ShowBiz/index.php?id=3

 M.A.Khan, “MACHINE TRANSLATION BEYOND SENTENCE BOUNDARIES ”,, In Proceedings of Workshop on Proofing Tools and Language
Technologies, July 1-2, Patras University, Greece.
www.mabidkhan.com/.../Scientific%20Khyber,%20Vol%201,%202004.pdf

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