3 Contents Preface ……………………………………………………………………… 7 Chapter 1: Discourse and Discourse Analysis ………………………. A Brief Overview of Discourse Analysis ………………………………. The Concept of Discourse …………………………………………. Criteria for Identifying Discourse ………………………………….
Spoken vs Written Language …………………………………………. 24 Chapter 2: Context and the Role of Contextual Analysis in Discourse Analysis ………………………………………………………………………… 27 2. The concept of context ……………………………………………. The role of context in discourse ………………………………….
Models of context ………………………………………………………. Firth’s model of context ……………………………………. Dell Hymes’ model of context ………………………………………. Halliday’s model of context ………………………………………….
34 Chapter 3: Cohesion in English Discourse ………………………. Lexical cohesive devices …………………………………………. Superordinate and Meronymy ……………………………………. 94 Chapter 4: Pragmatic Approaches to Discourse Analysis …….
Three components of a speech act ……………………………. Classification of speech acts …………………………………………… 107 5 4. Indirect speech acts ………………………………………………. The cooperative principle ………………………………………….
Different types of presupposition ………………………………. 132 List of English terms and the Vietnamese equivalents ……………… 137 6 7 PREFACE Discourse analysis is a branch of linguistics that deals with the largest unit of language in communication - discourse or text. Although it has a rather long history in the field of linguistic study, it is still a new subject which causes language learners in general, and Vietnamese learners of English in particular, many difficulties. In the curriculum for English majors at Hanoi Open University, discourse analysis is a subject of two credits aimed at assisting Translation sub-majors in their third or fourth year.
It is learned at the same time with other subjects like translation skills, translation studies, pragmatics, etc. This book is intended to provide Hanoi Open University students of English with basic information about discourse analysis and about how to make use of the subject in their translation career. In an attempt to make the subject more practical, we design and suggest exercise for the learners after each main point. In addition, questions for discussions are also supplied at the end of the chapter to help consolidate the learners’ knowledge.
Although the data of the book comes from various sources, ranging from linguistic books, Discourse Analysis textbooks to dictionaries and literary works, we 8 base our book much on Introducing Discourse Analysis by Van H. (2006), Discourse Analysis by Brown G. (1983), Cohesion in English by Halliday M. (1976), Pragmatics by Yule G.
(1996) and Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers by Carthy M. Finally, despite the fact that a great deal of effort and time has been put into the compilation of this book, mistakes are definitely inevitable. Therefore, any suggestions and corrections are warmly welcomed! 9 Chapter 1 DISCOURSE AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OBJECTIVES In this chapter, we will learn: - the history and development of discourse analysis - the concept of discourse - inherent features of a discourse - the differences between spoken and written language 1. A Brief Overview of Discourse Analysis In recent years, discourse or text has become a popular term as a linguistic unit above the sentence level (the other units include phoneme, morpheme, word, phrase, clause and sentence).
The first research on discourse can be traced back to British linguist J. In the study released in 1935, Firth urged linguists to work on conversations since, in his view, only by studying conversations can we understand language and its functions better (Malcolm Coulthard, 1977: 1). This was seen as a breakthrough in language study as during this time language was studied in isolation from the context, with attention paid to language forms and structures. In another study published in 1951, J.
Firth claims that the fundamental task of descriptive linguistics is to highlight the meaning of speech and linguists should consider the communicative process in the context because language is only meaningful when put into a specific speech event. In spite of the encouragement, Firth was not the first linguist to study language above the sentence level. In fact, his view was not recognized by the then linguists. During that time, under the influence of Bloomfield, and then Chomsky, linguists only focused on formal and structural problems of language for many decades, and, for this reason, meaning was put aside.
10 It was not until the late 1950s that the first official studies on discourse appeared. Harris (1952) was the person who mentioned the term discourse for the first time in his article entitled Discourse Analysis. Despite such a promising title, the study was considered by Malcolm Coulthard (1993: 3) to be disappointing because Harris adopted Bloomfield’s theories in studying discourse. According to Harris, the formal relationship among utterances or sentences could be analysed without any understanding of the meaning of morphemes or words.
Armed with this view, Harris made use of the Distribution theory of the American Descriptive Linguistics in investigating the structure of the unit above the sentence level. Today, most linguists believe that it is impossible to study discourse just based on the formal relationship between the sentences. Also during this time there appeared a noticeable study on discourse entitled Buying and selling in Cyrenaica: a situational statement by Mitchell (1957). In this research, Mitchell introduced a model of language used in buying and selling.
The model includes five stages, namely (1) salutation, (2) enquiry as to the object of sale, (3) investigation of the object of sale, (4) bargaining, and (5) conclusion. Thus, it can be said that although Harris was the first to mention the term discourse analysis, it was Mitchell who actually studied discourse first through his study on language in social settings. Admittedly, though all the studies did not offer an insight into the concept of discourse, they helped to open a new, promising way of studying language in use in contrast with those earlier studies on the form and structure of language in isolation from the context. The 1960s and 1970s saw a great development in the field of discourse analysis.
Some of the best-known works include Austin’s speech act theory in How to Do Things with Words (1962), Dell Hymes’ ethnography of communication in Language in Culture and Society: a Reader in Linguistics and Anthropology (1964), Searle’s speech act theory in Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969), M.K Halliday’s functional approach to language in Explorations in the Functions of Language (1973), Grice’s cooperative principle in Logic and Conversation (1975), and Sinclair and Coulthard’s classroom language model in Towards an Analysis of Discourse (1975). Discourse analysis in Vietnam did not receive much attention from linguists until the end of the twentieth century. Among the earliest and most popular works on discourse analysis is Hệ thống liên kết văn bản bằng tiếng Việt by Tran Ngoc Them (1985, 1999). However, perhaps the most noticeable are Diep Quang Ban’s series on discourse analysis, namely Văn bản và liên kết trong tiếng Việt (1998), Giao tiếp, văn bản, mạch lạc, liên kết, đoạn văn (2002), and Giao 11 tiếp diễn ngôn và cấu tạo của văn bản (2002).
Other well-thought-of works include An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (2000) and Phân tích diễn ngôn: một số vấn đề lý luận và phương pháp (2003), both by Nguyen Hoa and Introducing Discourse Analysis by Hoang Van Van (2006). In conclusion, discourse analysis is now universally recognized as a branch of linguistics. Though it may have been looked at from different angles with somewhat controversial views, it finds its unity in the belief that it deals with the largest unit of language and that it investigates a unit of meaning in social settings, not as a unit of form isolated from the context. The Concept of Discourse Let us consider the following extracts: Extract 1: A: Why don’t you hold me for a while, honey? B: My hands are dirty.
Extract 2: Only five hundred years ago, the oceans were the limits of people’s knowledge of the world in which they lived. They were afraid to sail out into the oceans because no one knew what might be waiting for them there; the shore was the edge of the world, many people believed. The Portuguese navigators who began to break through this darkness stayed within sight of the coasts as they discovered the shape of Africa. Then in 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed directly across the Atlantic.
He thought he had reached India, but he had really discovered the American continents and islands in the unknown seas until those lands had become familiar parts of the world. Phileas Fogg lived, in 1872, at No. 7, Saville Row, Burlington Gardens, the house in which Sheridan died in 1814. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit.
But his spirit was roused at last; the cruel insult to his dead mother had set his blood on fire. He would have recoiled still more had he been aware that her attachment rose unsolicited, and was bestowed where it awakened no reciprocation of sentiment; for the minute he discovered its existence he laid the blame on Heathcliff's deliberate designing. 12 Extract 1: is a discourse as the two utterances are related in terms of their communicative functions. Extract 2 is also a discourse because the sentences are related in terms of the idea they share.
Extract 3 is not a discourse because it consists of unrelated sentences which are put together at random (it should be noted that the first sentence is quoted from Around the World in Eighty days, the second from The Adventures of Tom Shawyer, the third from Oliver Twist, and the last from Wuthering Heights.) So what is discourse? Here are two of the very many definitions of discourse: Discourse can be defined as a stretch of language consisting of several sentences, which are perceived as being related in some way. Sentences can be related, not only in terms of the idea they share, but also in terms of the jobs they perform within the discourse - that is in terms of their functions., 1993) Discourse is language that is functional - language that is doing some job in some context as opposed to isolated words or sentences. Discourse can be spoken, written or in any other medium of expression. Discourse is a unit of language in use.
It is not a grammatical unit, like a clause or a sentence. Discourse is a semantic unit, a unit not of form but of meaning. A discourse does not consist of sentences; it is realized by, or encoded in sentences., 1976) In terms of size, from Halliday & Hasan’s definition, it can be inferred that a discourse can be realized by a word like Ouch!, STOP; a phrase like NO SMOKING, NO FISHING; a clause/sentence like Here lies Arthur, the once and future king found on king Arthur’s tomb; a paragraph; a cluster of paragraphs; a book or even as big as a whole library on the condition that it makes a meaningful whole. Notice should be taken that in this coursebook, in order to avoid any further complexity for the learner, no distinction is made between discourse and text.
The two terms are used interchangeably throughout this book. The term discourse analysis/text analysis refers to a branch of linguistics that studies discourse/text. Criteria for Identifying Discourse According to Bell R. (1991: 163 - 171), there are seven criteria that can help to identify a 13 discourse.
They are also the seven inherent features of a discourse. (i) cohesion: How do the clauses hold together? (ii) coherence: How do the propositions hold together? (iii) intentionality: Why did the speaker / writer produce this? (iv) acceptability: How does the reader take it? (v) informativity: What does it tell us? (vi) relevance: What is the text for? (vii) intertextuality: What other texts does this one resemble? (i) Cohesion operates on the basis of formal surface structures (syntax and lexis) to interact with underlying semantic relations or underlying functional coherence to create textual unity. The major ways of creating cohesive relationships will be discussed in Chapter 3 of this book.