The discourse bitDiscourse, genre and discourse type

Definitions of discourse

• The literature provides many different definitions of “discourse” (see Jaworski and Coupland 1-37 for an overview). In reality they have more overlap than would appear at first sight.• The first set of definitions are structural. Discourse “is used to refer to

any piece of connected language, written or spoken, which contains more than one sentence” (Thornborrow and Wareing 1998: 240) or “meaning beyond the clause” (Martin and Rose 2003: 1).

1. Language above the level of sentence• Discourse analysis in this context consists of “attempts to study the

organisation of language above the sentence or above the clause, and therefore to study larger linguistic units, such as conversational exchanges or written texts” (Stubbs 1983: 1). • the organisational mechanisms at play in language above the clause

level “the rules and conventions underlying the use of language in extended stretches of text” (Carter et al 1997: 318) • the norms of cohesion for example - are very different from those at

work within the clause, that is, syntax, morphology and phonology.

2. Language in use: doing things in a context• discourse analysis is “the analysis of language in use” (Brown & Yule

1983: 1), “language that is doing some job in some context” (Halliday 1985: 10) and “[a]s such it cannot be restricted to the description of linguistic forms independent of the purposes or functions which these forms are designed to serve in human affairs” (Brown & Yule 1983: xiii).• every utterance or written sentence always has a context, is always in

some sense referring to something already said and inviting a response, is always designed to do something to somebody, a reader or a listener

Activities and norms

• discourse as constructive (and constraining) of social relations• discourse analysis is seen as studying the set of norms governing how

activities are normally conducted using language, • what kinds of language behaviour are normally permitted and not

permitted and are normally frequent or infrequent, in a certain social setting: “the analysis of language as it is used to enact activities, perspectives, and identities” (Gee 1999: 4-5).

• analysts commonly refer to “the ‘discourse’ of advertising”, and so on (Carter et al 1997: 318). • a very large number of human activities are conducted almost entirely

through language and in some sense actually consist of the language used to carry them out. • See genre and discourse communities (Swales)• A discourse community is a group of people who share a set of

discourses, understood as basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about those goals. Linguist John Swales defined discourse communities as "groups that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals."

Communities and their norms

• Some examples of a discourse community might be those who read and/or contribute to Linguistic Inquiry or Applied linguistics,• or members of a forum for Breaking Bad fans.• Each discourse community has its own unwritten rules about what

can be said and how it can be said:• for instance, the journal will not accept an article with the claim that

“Discourse is the coolest concept”; • Most people move within and between different discourse

communities every day.

• We eat discourse (mouthwatering menu-language, for instance like “flame-roasted peppers drizzled with truffle oil”) • we drink discourse (“hints of tobacco, vanilla, chocolate and ripe

berries in this feisty Australian Shiraz”); • we look at discourse (those minimalist paintings and cryptic

installations in galleries that depend entirely on curators and critics’ descriptions of them for their existence as art); • To be able to understand culture and society you have to be able to

analyse their discourses. (Lodge 2008: 32)

Language in use – for a purpose

• discourse analysis studies how language is used to (attempt to) influence the beliefs and behaviour of other people.• discourse structure and function: the principles of discourse

organisation that writers / speakers employ to communicate effectively. • the ways in which the meaning potential of lexis is actually activated

in discourse in attempts to do things to hearers / readers, in accordance with the above mentioned functional view.

What people actually say

• the possibilities of language behaviour permitted in abstract by the language system would appear to be far wider than the actual behaviour we observe (in texts) to be habitually performed by speakers/writers.

Evidence driven text linguistics

• Corpus linguistics can be defined most simply as: that set of studies into the form and/or function of language which incorporate the use of computerised corpora in their analyses.• It is a form of text linguistics and as such is evidence-driven. • It shares with other forms of text linguistics the purpose and rationale

of describing the interactions between writers/speakers and readers/hearers as evidenced in the linguistic trace, that is, the texts, that these interactions leave behind.

Micro and macro

• Corpora have been studied to shed light on the use of single lexical items (lexicology and dictionary making). Lexical and grammatical studies work at a more micro level• Discourse studies work at a more macro level, analysing features of a

discourse type: typical phraseologies, textual cohesion, authorial style, figurative meaning, evaluative meaning, social, political, cultural and religious ideologies as expressed in text, and much else.

Sociolinguistics

• Stubbs calls corpus linguistics inherently diachronic (like all text linguistics) since “it studies what has frequently occurred in the past” (2007: 131). But this study is often a precursor to generalising and therefore predicting how things are and will be done in the language now and in the future• it is inherently sociolinguistic since it studies texts which are the

record of “real communicative acts in a discourse community”

primings

• As the work of Hoey (2005) shows, it is also inherently psycholinguistic• corpora are also the repository of and evidence for writers’ and

speakers’ acquired language primings, that is, their combined knowledge of how linguistic items can be used to communicate meanings (equivalent to their communicative competence, Hymes 1971)

Co-selection and units of meaning

• meanings are not located in single words, but in “units of meaning” in Sinclair’s terminology, and consequently that communicative discourse unfolds largely as a series of semi-fixed phrases (2006: 11-12)• lexical items are very largely co-selected by speakers in batches rather

than singly and therefore meanings in utterances, including and especially evaluative meanings, are prosodic – spreading over stretches of language - rather than atomistic in nature.

comparisons

• Word-frequency counts, although often informative in themselves, become more revealing still in comparison with similar lists derived from other discourse types in that they can thus highlight both the typical grammar and also the recurrent topics of a discourse type under study. • E.g. SiBol: a comparison of word frequencies in UK newspapers in the

years 1993 and 2005 sheds light not only on developments over the period in society and politics, but also on changes in newspaper prose style, stance towards the reader and newspaper organisation and production techniques.

Frequency and probability

• most of the linguistic analysis performed using computerised corpora is born out of a statistical methodological philosophy, the search for ‑and belief in the importance of recurring ‑ patterns. • It is based on the twin concepts of frequency (a factor of [past]

observation) and probability (a factor of [future] predictability). In other words, if something is seen to happen frequently in a language, then it is significant.

Non obvious meaning

• The aim of the CADS approach is the uncovering, in the discourse type under study, of what we might call non-obvious meaning, that is, meaning which might not be readily available to naked-eye perusal. There would be little point in involving corpus techniques to uncover meanings which were readily available to traditional types of discourse analysis. • For instance, we hardly need a corpus of websites about travel to tell

us that place names will be high on the list of lexis of such texts. We have no need for a corpus to discover that the names of characters will occur frequently in a novel or that the past will normally be the preferred tense for narrative.

Heterogeneric corpora

• Traditional corpus linguistics has, quite naturally, tended to privilege the quantitative approach.• In the drive to produce more authentic dictionaries and grammars of

a language, much early corpus work was characterised by the compilation of often very large corpora of heterogeneric discourse types in the desire to obtain an overview of the greatest quantity and variety of discourse types possible, in other words of the chimerical but useful fiction we call the “general language” (“general English”, “general Italian”, and so on).

The study of discourse types

• CADS tends to work with monogeneric corpora• Since it is the discourse which is to be studied the aim of CADS is to

acquaint ourselves as much as possible with the discourse type(s) in hand.• CADS researchers typically engage with their corpus in a variety of

ways. As well as via wordlists and concordancing, intuitions for further research can also arise from reading or watching or listening to parts of the data-set, a process which can help provide a feel for how things are done linguistically in the discourse-type being studied.

Examining the data from all angles

• Data can be sorted and analysed according to language features as well as semantic fields – for example use of metaphor, evaluative patterns, modality, hyperbole, irony.• The chapters in Patterns and Meanings in Discourse give examples of

many such analyses.• If you are not sure of how usual or unusual a feature is you can

consult the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English or• The Cambridge Grammar of English• Or Macmillan’s corpus based online dictionary

Participants, goals and language use

• Given that P is a discourse participant (or possibly an institution) and G is a goal, often a political goal:• (i) How does P achieve G with language?• (ii) What does this tell us about P?• (iii) Comparative studies: how do P1 and P2 differ in their use of

language? Does this tell us anything about their different principles and objectives?

A RQ for interactive discourse data

• Given that P(x) is a particular participant or set of participants, DT is the discourse type, and R is an observed relationship between or among participants:• How do {P(a), P(b)…P(n)} achieve / maintain R in DT [using language]?

Para-replication

• Given that A is an author, Ph(x) is a phenomenon or practice or behaviour, and DT(x) is a particular discourse type.• A has said P(x) is the case in DT(a)• Is Ph(x) the case in DT(b)• This is a classic “hypothesis-testing” research question: we test the

hypothesis that whatever practice has been observed by a previous author in some discourse type will be observable in another. It is a process we might call para-replication, that is, the replication of an experiment with either a fresh set of texts of the same discourse type or of a related discourse type, “in order to see whether [findings] were an artefact of one single data set” (Stubbs 2001: 124).

Use of language features

• Given that P(x) is a participant or category thereof, and LF(x) is a particular language feature:• Do {P(a)} and {P(b)} use LF(x) in the same way?• Such research aims to ascertain whether different participants use a

particular linguistic feature in the same or different ways. The research may proceed to attempt to explain why this is the case.

Research design and corpus compilation

• Corpus design is intrinsic and fundamental part of the analysis.• It is guided by the RQ and affects the results.• Design criteria are interpretative and must be explicit (why you chose

the texts you did, how and why you organised them in the way you did)• Different purposes = different corpora.