Discourse Analysis Chapter 1

In the Name of God
Islamic Azad University, West Tehran Branch

Faculty of Humanities
Department of English Language Teaching
Subject: Discourse Analyses

Widdowson, chapter1
Professor: Dr. Minoo Alemi

Presenter : Tahere Ensandoost
99/08/25
Titles
➢ Language in use
A sample of language
What is a text
Text and discourse
Spoken and written text
Illustration from a crowded train
Conclusion
Language in use
A sample of Language
A familiar public notice

✓ four words,
✓ All in capital letters
✓ Monosyllabic
Words combination
Grammatical unit ( Sentence)
Two main constituents of sentence
• Noun phrase: THE + GRASS
• Verb phrase:KEEP OFF

traditionally recorded form of languages in
analytic terms:
Grammars : display the range of possible structural
combinations in sentences.
Dictionaries: provide the meanings of words separated out and
listed in alphabet order.
Form and meaning that speakers know intuitively as they use it.
they do not see it as a sample of language they recognize its
purpose, and they treat it as a text.
What is text?
✓ An actual use of language
✓ A distinct from a sentence.
✓ Identifying a piece of language as a text as soon
as the recognition of communicative purposes
of production
✓ Identifying a text as a purposeful use of without
necessarily being able to interpret just what is
meant by it.
KEEP OFF THE GRASS
✓ Denotation of GRASS vs. the phrase THE GRASS.
✓ Establishing a reference by relating the text to the
context in which it is located.
✓ By relating text to context we infer not only what the
notice refer to, but also what its purpose is.

Text & Discourse
Not all texts but a great many of them extend beyond the
sentence :
➢ Travel guides, information leaflets, newspaper articles,
interviews, speeches, reports, poems , and so on by
either having an obvious utility function or meaning to
serve a range of different social purposes such as:
✓ Giving information
✓ Expressing a point of view
✓ Shaping opinion
✓ Providing entertainment
➢ whether simple or complex, use of language which is produced
with the intention to refer to something for some purposes.
❖ Texts are produced:
✓ To get a message across
✓ To express ideas and beliefs
✓ To explain something
✓ To get other people to do certain things or to think in a certain
way
We can refer to this complex of communicative purposes as the

discourse that underlies the text and motivates its production in
the first place.
➢ Out of our own experience, no matter how explicitly
we think we have textualized what we want to say,
there is always the possibility that it will be interpreted
otherwise.
Therefore, the term discourse refers to:
✓ what a text producer meant by a text,
✓ what a text means to the receiver.
producer receiver
Spoken & Written Text
Texts are the perceptible traces of the process, not itself
open to direct perception, of mediating a message.
✓ In conversation : fragmented traces which disappear as
soon as they are produced to serve their immediate discourse
purpose.
✓ Written text: which is designed and recorded unilaterally
in the act of production by one of the participants, the writer,
as a completed expression of the intended message.
The text is then taken up and interpreted as a separate process.
✓ In speech, people make use of both language and
paralanguage(tones of voice, varying stress, pauses
and so on which are accompanied by facial
expressions and gestures).
✓ In written communication, how a text is given a

particular shape by choice of typeface, or its
arrangement on a page, may suggest significance
over and above what it signifies linguistically, and it
may be multimodal in that the text is accompanied
by and related to , other modes of
communication(pictures, diagrams, charts, and so
on)..
Illustration from a crowded train
He has put it in a safe place and it will not be found
❖Grammatically speaking :
➢ a complete and well-formed sentence.
➢ Present perfect and future passive are produced in
conformity with grammatical rule.
➢ Agreement between singular subjective pronoun and the
following verb.
➢ Morphologically well-formed past tense
➢ Word order and so on
❖As far as lexis concerned all the words are quite
normal ones
❖Ability of decoding and assign a meaning(semantic
features)
❖By having the linguistic trace of their discourse, it
wouldn’t be possible to interpret what they mean by
what they say.
Conclusion
➢ When people communicate with each other, they draw on the
semantic resources encoded in their language to key into a
context they assume to be shared so as to enact a discourse, that
is, to get their intended message across to some second person
party.
➢ The linguistic trace of this process is the text.

✓ How Did You Find DA?
Real life communication, appropriateness, quite

practical and may be shedding new light into our
own teaching practice, in rich of teaching
practice when we know about this things we
treat the textbook materials in a new way, we
use language in a new way. We consider the
context, interlocutor, how relationships, formality
and many others things not being like
grammarians, using grammatical without
appropriateness.

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In the Name of God

Islamic Azad University, West Tehran Branch

Subject: Discourse Analyses

Professor: Dr. Minoo Alemi

A familiar public notice

Grammatical unit ( Sentence)

Two main constituents of sentence

• Noun phrase: THE + GRASS

• Verb phrase:KEEP OFF

✓ Establishing a reference by relating the text to the

context in which it is located.

✓ By relating text to context we infer not only what the

notice refer to, but also what its purpose is.

We can refer to this complex of communicative purposes as the

✓ In written communication, how a text is given a

➢ The linguistic trace of this process is the text.

Real life communication, appropriateness, quite

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