ELISA DÍAZ PRADA COMUNICACIÓN Y DIScurso EN LENGUA INGLESA CURSO 2024-2025
3. DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Jones, R. H. (2019). Discourse Analysis. Routledge.
Canning & Walker (2024). Discourse Analysis. Routledge.
In one sense, it can be said that discourse analysis is the study of language.
Many people would define discourse analysis as a sub-field of linguistics, which
is the scientific study of language. Linguistics has many sub-fields, each of which
looks at a different aspect of language. Phonology is the study of the sounds of
languages and how people put them together to form words. Grammar is the
study of how words are put together to form sentences and spoken utterances.
And discourse analysis is the study of the ways sentences and utterances are put
together to make texts and interactions and how those texts and interactions fit
into the social world.
But discourse analysis is not just the study of language. It is a way of looking at
language that focuses on how people use it in real life to do things such as joke
and argue and persuade and flirt, and to show that they are certain kinds of
people or belong to certain groups. This way of looking at language is based on
four main assumptions:
1. Language is ambiguous. What things mean is never absolutely clear. All
communication involves interpreting what other people mean and what
they are trying to do.
2. Language is always ‘in the world’. That is, what language means is always
a matter of where and when it is used and what it is used to do.
3. The way we use language is inseparable from who we are and the
different social groups to which we belong. We use language to display
different kinds of social identities and to show that we belong to different
groups.
4. Language is never used all by itself. It is always combined with other
things, such as our tone of voice, our facial expressions and gestures
when we speak, and the fonts, layout and graphics we use in written
texts. What language means and what we can do with it is often a matter
of how it is combined with these other things.
Based on these four principles, we can understand why discourse analysis is
studied. We try to figure out what people mean by what they say and to express
our multiple and complicated meanings to them. Learning how to analyse
discourse is aimed at making processes that already take place beneath
the surface of your consciousness more explicit.
Why do you think discourse analysis is useful? Say whether the following
statements are true or false:
1. By understanding how discourse works, we will be able to understand people
better and communicate effectively. None of us are immune to
misunderstandings, to offending people by saying the wrong thing, to struggling
to get our message across, or to being taken in by someone who is trying
somehow to deceive us. True
ELISA DÍAZ PRADA COMUNICACIÓN Y DIScurso EN LENGUA INGLESA CURSO 2024-2025
2. Discourse analysis can also help us to understand how the societies in which
we live are put together and how they ae maintained through our day-to-day
activities of speaking, writing and making use of other modes of communication.
True
3. It helps us predict political trends (ideology) with high accuracy by focusing
primarily on grammatical patterns in discourse. False
4. It can help us to understand why people interact with one another the way we
do and how they exert power and influence over on another. True
5. Discourse analysis allows us to determine universal truths that are fixed
across all cultures. False
6. It can help us to understand how people view reality differently and why, and
how the texts that we are exposed to come to create our view of reality. True
Therefore, the study of discourse analysis is not just the study of how we use
language. It is also indirectly the study of politics, power, psychology, romance
and a whole lot of other things.
Discourse analysts analyse ‘texts’ and ‘conversations. The following sections will
be focused on written texts.
3.1. TEXT AND TEXTURE
Jones, R. H. (2019). Discourse Analysis. Routledge.
Canning & Walker (2024). Discourse Analysis. Routledge.
Texture is the quality that makes a particular set of words or sentences a text
rather than a random collection of linguistic items. The main thing that makes a
text a text is relationships or connections.
Complete the missing words which refer to those relationships or
connections. The first letter is provided.
Sometimes these relationships are between words, sentences or other
elements inside the text = Cohesion___________
Another kind of relationship exists between the text and the person who is
reading it or using it in some way. Here, meaning comes chiefly from the
background knowledge the person has about certain social conventions
regarding texts as well as the social situation in which the text is found
and what the person wants to do with the texts = Coherence____________
Finally, there is the relationship between one text and other texts in the
world that one might, at some point, need to refer to in the process of
making sense of this text = Intertextuality_____________
A. Cohesion
Cohesion refers to the lexical and grammatical choices (the language resources)
that combine to make a discourse a connected whole. It is the quality in a text
that forces you to look either backward or forward in the text in order to make
sense of the things you read, and it is through your acts of looking backward
and forward that the text comes to take on a quality of connectedness. Halliday
and Hassan describe two broad kinds of linguistic devices that are used to force
ELISA DÍAZ PRADA COMUNICACIÓN Y DIScurso EN LENGUA INGLESA CURSO 2024-2025
readers to engage in that process: grammatical cohesion and lexical
cohesion.
1. Grammatical cohesion
The devices used to create grammatical cohesion include:
Conjunction (using ‘connecting words’). Connecting words do not just
establish a relationship between the two clauses, but they also tell us
what kind of relationship it is:
- Addition. Information is added to the previous clause or sentence.
Examples of additive conjunctions are and, furthermore, moreover, in
addition, as well, etc.
- Contrast with the previous clause or sentence. Examples of contrastive
conjunctions are but and however.
- Cause and effect. Because, consequently and therefore are examples
of causative conjunctions.
- The order facts or events come in. Firstly, subsequently, then and
finally are examples of sequential conjunctions.
Reference (using a pronoun, demonstrative and comparatives to refer to
another word). It is a very common way to make texts ‘stick together’ by
means of words that refer to words used elsewhere in the text.
The word or group of words that a pronoun, demonstrative or
comparative refers to is called its antecedent.
There are basically three kinds of reference
- Anaphoric reference – using words that point back to a word used
before.
- Cataphoric reference – using words that point forward to a word that
has not been used yet.
- Exophoric reference – using words that point to something outside the
text (reference)
Substitution (substituting one word or phrase for another word or
phrase). It is similar to reference except that, rather than using pronouns,
other words are used to refer to an antecedent, which has either
appeared earlier or will appear later.
Ellipsis (leaving something out). It is the omission of a noun, verb or
phrase on the assumption that it is understood from the linguistic context.
In order to fill in the gap(s), readers need to look back to previous clauses
or sentences, as in the example below (see activity 3)
1) Look at the highlighted words in the following sentences. What type
of reference is taken place in each one?
When she was challenged by reporters, Lady Gaga insisted that the dress was
not intended to offend anyone. Cataphoric
After Lady Gaga appeared at the MTV Music Video Awards in a dress made
completely of meat, she was criticised by animal rights groups. Anaphoric
If you want to know more about this controversy, you can read the comments
people have left on animal rights blogs. Exophoric
ELISA DÍAZ PRADA COMUNICACIÓN Y DIScurso EN LENGUA INGLESA CURSO 2024-2025
2) Identify substitution in the following sentences:
Besides wearing a meat dress, Lady Gaga has also worn a hair one (dress),
which was designed by Chris March.
If Lady Gaga was intending to shock people, she succeeded in doing so (to shock
people).
3) Where is the ellipsis in the following example?
There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we,
them.
The ellipsis in the sentence is found in the phrase:
"and not we, them."
Here, “wear” is omitted after “we” but understood from earlier in the sentence. The full
form would be:
"and not we wear them."
This omission of a word or words that are understood from context is called ellipsis, and
it helps avoid repetition while keeping the sentence concise.
2. Lexical cohesion
It occurs as a result of the semantic relationship between words or reiteration.
Reiteration is reference to the same entity or idea by repetition of a lexical item,
or the use of other semantically connected lexis via synonymy, antonymy,
hyponymy, meronymy and collocation.
Taken together, these words form a lexical chain, which helps to bind the text
together. Lexical chains not only make a text more cohesive but also highlight
the topic or topics that the text is about and so can provide context for
determining the meaning of ambiguous words.
Halliday and Hasan call these devices ‘ties’. It is the job of discourse analysts to
reveal the ‘patterns of ties’ that give certain kind of texts ‘texture’. In other
words, cohesion works not just because of cohesive devices, but also because
these devices are deployed in particular kinds of patterns, something that will
be explored in a different section which will deal with analysing genres.
1) Look at the following example and identify lexical cohesion.
Lady Gaga, who came under fire recently for wearing a meat bikini on the cover
of Vogue Hommes Japan, wore a raw meat dress at last night’s VMAs. It was
one of many outfits she wore throughout the night.
2) Now, consider reiteration in some of its forms and how it creates
lexical cohesion by looking at a UK Government press release on Covid-
19.
ELISA DÍAZ PRADA COMUNICACIÓN Y DIScurso EN LENGUA INGLESA CURSO 2024-2025
Young coronavirus (COVID-19) patients have told their stories of battling
the virus and suffering long-term debilitating effects as part of a new film
encouraging people to get their vaccines.
The video features several patients who experienced serious symptoms of
COVID-19 or developed long COVID, as well as the doctors and frontline
staff who treated them, to warn of the dangers of the virus for those who
are not vaccinated. It is narrated by A&E doctor, Dr Emeka Okorocha.
It comes as people aged 16 to 17 in England are offered a COVID-19
vaccine by today (Monday 23 August), meeting the government’s target.
More than 360,000 have already been vaccinated and letters and texts
were sent last week to the remaining people inviting them to book an
appointment with their GP or visit their nearest walk-in centre.
All at-risk people aged 12 to 15 in England have also been invited for a
vaccination and young people are encouraged to take up the offer as soon
as possible to build vital protection before returning to school in
September.
The latest figures show that hospitals are seeing a rise in unvaccinated
young adults admitted with COVID-19. A fifth of COVID-19 hospital
admissions in England are aged 18 to 34 – 4 times higher than the peak in
the winter of 2020.
Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/young-covid-patients-share-stories-to-urge-others-to-
get-jabbed
3) Watch and listen to US President Donald Trump’s words, when talking
to talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel about his proposed Muslim ban.
Observe the answer he gives in reply to the question Isn’t it wrong to
discriminate against people because of their religion?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=Sqhg2FNzKHM&ab_channel=JimmyKimmelLive
(up to 1:07)
What can you tell about the cohesion of Trump’s answer?
