Hanoi, June 2018

By: MA Tran Thi Minh Chau

WHAT IS DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ?

Discourse analysis study the ways sentences

and utterances (speech) go together to
make texts and interactions and how those
texts and interactions fit into our social world.

It should be noticed also that discourse

analysis is not just the study of language, but
a way of looking at language as well.
This way of looking at language is based on
four main assumptions:
1) Language is ambiguous. What things mean is never absolutely
clear.
 
2) Language is always ‘in the world’. That is, what language means is
always a matter of where and when it is used.
 
3) The way we use language is inseparable from who we are and
The different social groups to which we belong.
 
4) Language is never used all by itself. It is always combined with
other things such as our tone of voice, facial expressions and
gestures when we speak, and the fonts, layout and graphics we use in
written texts.
I.1. The functions of language
I. 2. Spoken and written language
I. 3. Sentence and utterance
I. 4. DA at the intersection of diverse
disciplines
I. 5. Discourse versus Text
I. 6. Text Analysis (TA) & DA
I. 7. Context , Culture AND Communication
 DA cannot be limited to linguistic forms
independent of their purposes/functions.
 2 terms to describe the major functions of
language: transactional & interactional.
 Other pairs of terms:
 representative/expressive
 referential/emotive
 ideational/interpersonal;
 descriptive/social-interactive
 The most important function of language:
the communication of information (Lyons;
Bennett).
 The faculty of language has enabled the
human race to develop diverse cultures.
 Language used to convey “factual or
propositional information”: primarily
transactional; message-oriented.
 Language is used to establish and
maintain social relationships: phatic in
sociology & anthropology ( nhân loại học)
 A lot of daily human interaction is
characterized by the primarily
interpersonal than the primarily
transactional use of language.
 Spoken & written language: which one is
primarily transactional?
I.2.1. Manner of Production:
 What are the differences
between the speaker & the writer?
Voice, paralinguistic cues
How to control the communicative
production process.
What are the advantages for the
writer/the speaker?
 Problems of representing spoken &
written language.
 Text: a technical term: the verbal record
of a communicative act.
 Written text: may be presented in many
ways to serve various purposes of writers:
conventions, punctuation rules, layout,
paragraphing, lineation, genres, etc.
 Spoken text:
• Simplest view: a tape-recording of a
communicative act.
• The discourse analyst makes a written
transcription of a tape-recording.
• The segmental record of spoken words:
normal orthographic conventions.
• The suprasegmental record (esp. rhythmic
& temporal features): no standard
conventions.
 The transcription of a spoken text
should be presented using the
conventions of written language.
 The notion ‘Text’ may appear
objective.
 The perception & interpretation of
each text is essentially subjective.
 Different individuals pay attention
to different aspects of texts.
 How do you interpret this
statement:
‘The major differences between
speech and writing derive from the
fact that one is essentially
transitory and the other is designed
to be permanent.’
(Brown & Yule, p. 13)
 “DA on the one hand includes the study of
linguistic forms and the regularities of
their distribution and, on the other hand,
involves a consideration of the general
principles of interpretation by which
people normally make sense of what they
hear or read.”
If we are to find the answer to the problem
of what gives stretches of language unity and
meaning, what must we do?
We must see just how far formal, purely
linguistic rules can go in accounting for the
way one sentence succeeds another.
We must look beyond the formal rules
operating within sentences, & consider the
people who use the language, the world in
which it happens.
 The norm of written language:
highly literate language.
 The norm of spoken language: the
speech of those who have not spent
many years exposed to written
language.
 Features that characterize spoken
language and written language?(15-
17)
 Non-technically: sentences are written &
utterances are spoken.
 Lyons’ view: distinction b/t ‘system
sentences and text sentences’.
 In DA, the term ‘sentence’ is used in the
sense of ‘text sentence’, not ‘system
sentence’.
 Differences b/t a discourse analyst & a
sentence grammarian. (p. 19-20)
 I.3.1. On ‘data’
 I.3.2. Rules versus regularities
A regularity in discourse: a linguistic
feature which occurs in a definable
environment with a significant frequency.
DA: a set of techniques, rather than a
theoretically predetermined system for
the writing of ‘linguistic rules’.
The discourse analyst’s aim: to discover &
describe regularities.
I.3.3. Product versus process
 Sentence-as-object view
 Text-as-product view
 Discourse-as-process view

I.3.4. On ‘Context’
 Acceptability of a language string
 Many other disciplines – philosophy,
psychology and psychiatry, sociology
and anthropology, Artificial
Intelligence, media studies, literary
studies often examine their object
of study – the mind, the society,
other cultures, computers, the
media, works of literature – through
language, and are thus carrying out
their own DA.
 Many disciplines have plenty of insights to
offer to DA.
 The most useful distinction is to think of
other disciplines as studying sth else through
discourse; whereas DA has discourse as its
prime object of study.
 1st approach of text  2nd approach of text
 Type of linguistic unit  A semantic or
communicative category
larger than the
sentence. (Halliday & Hasan)
 A communicative
 The verbal record of a occurrence which
communicative act possesses 7 constitutive
(Brown & Yule) conditions of textual
communication: cohesion,
 The linguistic product coherence, intentionality,
of a communicative acceptability,
process (Widdowson) informativity,
situationality &
intertextuality) (De
Beaugrande & Dressler)
 Text Analysis  Discourse analysis
 Deals with formal  Deals with a
features functional analysis
(cohesion, text of language in use
structure) (coherence, context
of situations,
 Little reference to writer/speaker’s
extra-linguistic intention or
factors. interpretation,…)
 Relationship b/t
TA & DA?
1.7 CONTEXT, CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION

1.7.1.Context

It Could mean practically anything from the place and

time of day of an utterance, to speakers’ political views
or religious beliefs. 
 
Context can be divided into three components:
1.The relevant features of participants, persons,
personalities
2.The relevant objects in the situation
3.The effect of the verbal action
4.Sitting and time
5.The field or the social where the action take place
1.7.2.The relationship between context and
competence:
Knowledge or mastery of the linguistic system
alone is not sufficient for successful communication.
People also need to know and master various rules,
norms and conventions regarding what to say to
whom, when, where, and how — which is called
communicative competence.

*There may be persons whose English I can

grammatically identify but whose messages escape
me.