assignment 4

Discourse analysis

Discourse analysis is defined as language use beyond the boundaries of a sentence/utterance, the interrelationships between language and society and the interactive or dialogic properties of everyday communication (Stubbs, 1983:1).

For wider definition, discourse analysis are the study of how stretches of language used in communication assume meaning, purpose and unity for their users; called the quality of COHERENCE. A general consensus that COHERENCE does not derive solely from the linguistic forms and propositional content of a text, though these may contribute to it. COHERENCE derives from an interaction of text with given participants (context). Context here means the  participants’ knowledge and perception of paralanguage, other texts, the situation, the culture, the world in general and the role, intentions and relationships of participants.

Discourse analysis are related to how texts relate to contexts of situation and context of culture, how texts are produced as a social practice, what texts tell us about happenings, what people think, believe etc, how texts represent ideology (power struggle etc.).

There are several approaches in discourse analysis as follow:

*        Speech Act Theory

In this approaches, every utterance can be analyzed as the realization of the speaker’s intent (illocutionary force) to achieve a particular purpose. Principal problems: the lack of a one-to-one match up between discourse function (IF) and the grammatical form. Unit of analysis: speech act (SA) or illocutionary force (IF). Provides the insight that the basic unit of conversational analysis must be functionally motivated rather than formally defined one.

*        Interactional Sociolinguistics

Centrally concerned with the importance of context in the production and interpretation of discourse. The units of analysis of the approach are grammatical and prosodic features in interactions. The basic concern of this approach is  the accomplishment of conversational coherence

*        Ethnography of Communication

This approach is concerned with understanding the social context of linguistic interactions: ‘who says what to whom, when, where. Why, and how’. The prime unit of analysis is speech event.

*        Pragmatics

Pragmatics formulates conversational behaviour in terms of general “principles” rather than rules. It provides useful means of characterizing different varieties of conversation, e.g. in interactions, one can deliberately try to be provocative or consensual.

*        Conversational Analysis

Refers to Garfinkel (sociologist), this approach concerns  to understand how social members make sense of everyday life while Sack, Schegloff, Jefferson (1973)tried to explain how conversation can happen at all.

This approach drive some problems a) lack of systematicity- thus quantitative analysis is impossible; 2) limited I its ability to deal comprehensively with complete, sustained interactions; 3) though offers a powerful interpretation of conversation as dynamic interactive achievement, it is unable to say just what kind of achievement it is.

*        Variation Analysis

Variationists’ approach to discourse stems from quantitative of linguistic change and variation. Although typically focused on social and linguistic constraints on semantically equivalent variants, the approach has also been extended to texts. The Problems in this approach is data is obtained from interviews.

*        SFL (Structural-Functional Approaches)

In this approach, utterances may have multiple functions. The major concern here is the discourse analysis can turn out into a more general and broader analysis of language functions. Or it will fail to make a special place for the analysis of relationships between utterances.