TOPIC 29. DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND THE SRTICULATION OF DISCOURSE.

COHESIÓN AND COHERENCE. ANAPHORA AND CATAPHORA. DISCOURSE

MARKERS. DEIXIS

1. INTRODUCTION

The terms discourse and discourse analysis are used to mean different things
by different researchers, however, all the definitions fall into three main categories:
anything beyond the sentence; language use; a broader range of social practice that
includes non-linguistic and non-specific instances of language.
When a discipline is hard to delimit, as in the case with discourse analysis, a
great deal can be learnt about its field of concern by observing what practitioners do.
If we look at what discourse analysts do, we will find they explore matters as different
as: turn-taking in phone conversations; the language of humour; the structure of
narrative; the use of linguistic politeness; legal discourse used in trials and a long et
cetera.
Pragmatics is an indispensable source for discourse analysis as well. It is
impossible to analyze any discourse without having a solid basic knowledge of
pragmatic phenomena and the ways in which they work and interact. Although
Pragmatics is a field of study that can be subject matter of a complete essay, we are
only covering the essentials and touch upon its basic tenets.

2. THE ARTICULATION OF DISCOURSE

2.1. SPEECH ACTS. WHAT DO WE DO WITH LANGUAGE?

Words are not just words. As speakers of a human language, we all know that
our words can praise, hurt, convince or disappoint, among numerous other things.
The observation that concrete actions can be carried out by means of words led
John Austin (1962) to develop a theory of speech acts.
The theory of speech acts is concerned with those acts that are not completely
covered under one or more major divisions of grammar - phonetics, phonology,
morphology, syntax, semantics - which means that speech acts do not refer to acts

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such as reducing the quality of a vowel or the construction of a complex clause, but
the force or intention behind the words.

2.1.1. TYPES OF SPEECH ACTS (AUSTIN 1962): LOCUTION, ILLOCUTION AND

PERLOCUTION

Austin noticed that there are three kinds of acts that are characteristic of all
utterances:
Locutionary acts are the acts involved in the construction of the utterance,
such as choosing certain words and pronouncing them, as well as arranging these
words according to the grammatical rules of a particular language.
Illocutionary acts are the acts done or performed in speaking. They convey
the force or intention behind the words, and for that reason, they are the central type
of acts in Austin’s theory. Illocutionary acts include both performatives and
constatives given that both of these can be said to contain an Illocutionary force of
some kind.

PERFORMATIVE: relating to or denoting an utterance by means of which the

speaker performs a particular act.
CONSTATIVE: denoting a speech act or sentence that is a statement declaring
something to be the case.

Perlocutionary acts are the by-product of the Illocutionary act, having to do

with the effect that the Illocutionary act causes on the hearer or other more or less
indirect participants, an effect which may or may not be in accordance with the
speaker’s intention. It is often said that the perlocutionary act is not performed in
saying it, but by saying it.
The following dialogue serves to exemplify each act: (1) John: Would you help
me with the dishes? Susan: Sure! No problem.
Locutionary act: it consists of saying and pronouncing the question uttered by John,
meaning by ‘help’ ‘help’, and by ‘dishes’ ‘dishes’ (semantic meaning), and referring
by ‘you’ to Susan and by ‘me’ to John.
Illocutionary act: John performs a request and Susan acceptance of the request.

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Perlocutionary act: the perlocutionary act intended by John seems to have been to
convince or persuade Susan to help him, and to judge by Susan’s answer, he
succeeded in his intention. But if Susan’s answer had been different, and she had
replied by saying something like ‘How can you be so inconsiderate?’, then the
perlocutionary act produced by John’s utterance would have been one of angering
or offending Susan, even if that was not the effect intended by John.

2.1.2. TYPES OF SPEECH ACTS (SEARLE 1969)

Alongside Austin’s foundational insights, it is John Searle’s work (1969) on

speech act theory that has been most influential on contemporary linguistics.
Searle offered a taxonomy of the five types of act he considered to be basic,
which is commonly understood to have been a refinement of Austin’s taxonomy and
which to date seems to have been the classification most widely used by linguists
and other scholars.

TAXONOMY: a system for naming and organizing things, especially plants and
animals into groups that share similar qualities.

The types of speech acts developed by Searle are called representatives,

directives, commissives, expressives and declarations each of which reflects
the speaker intention. The following sentences are cases in point:
He complained about the marks (representatives)
You urged her to come (directives)
I swear I didn’t do it (commisive)
We appreciate your business (expressive)
The king was anointed (declarative)

2.1.3. GRICE’S COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE

In Grice’s paper Logic and conversation (1975), he argued that in order for a
person to interpret what someone says, some kind of cooperative principle is
assumed to be in operation. The Cooperative Principle, proposed by Grice,

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maintains that people follow a pattern in conversation. There is a set of principles
which direct us to a particular interpretation of what is said.
The cooperative principle: make your contribution such as is required, at the
stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange
in which you are engaged.
The maxim of quantity: (1) make your contribution as informative as is
required (for the current purposes of the exchange); (2) do not make your
contribution more informative than is required.
The maxim of quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true,
specifically (1) do not say what you believe to be false; (2) do not say for which you
lack adequate evidence.
The maxim of relation: be relevant.
The maxim of manner: be clear, and specifically (1) avoid obscurity of
expression; (2) avoid ambiguity; (3) be brief (avoid unnecessary wordiness; (4) be
orderly.

3. COHESION AND COHERENCE

Cohesion and coherence are a system of relations which organize and create
a text. Cohesion refers to the links that hold a text together and give it meaning.
Coherence, on the other hand, refers to the general sense that a text makes sense
through the organization of its content. Both concern the way stretches of language
are connected to each other by virtue of lexical and grammatical dependencies.

4. ANAPHORIC AND CATAPHORIC REFERENCES

Every language has certain items which have the property of reference in the
textual sense. These reference items have the potential for directing readers to look
elsewhere for their interpretation.
There are seven types of reference that help us track the participants and
entities in discourse, however, only two of them, cataphora and anaphora, are
developed in this essay.

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 A cataphoric reference occurs when a word or phrase references a word or a
piece of information that will be mentioned later on in the text or discourse.
Cataphoric references can be compared to anaphoric references, which are words
or phrases that refer back to something that has already been mentioned in a text or
other form of discourse.
Whereas anaphoric references use antecedents (a word or phrase that is
represented by another word, such as a pronoun), cataphoric references use
postcedents.

5. DISCOURSE MARKERS

The use of discourse markers relate sentences, clauses and paragraphs to

each other. Unlike reference, the use of discourse markers do not instruct the reader
to supply missing information either by looking for it elsewhere in the text, instead,
discourse markers signal the way the writer or speaker wants the reader or hearer
to relate what is about to be said to what has been said before.
Discourse markers express one of a small number of general relations, they
are traditionally divided into the following groups: (1) additive; (2) adversative; (3)
causal; (4) temporal; (5) continuative.

6. DEIXIS

The relationship between language and context is clearly observed through

the phenomenon of deixis which are linguistic items such as demonstratives,
pronouns, tense, place and time adverbs such as now and here, some verbs like
bring and take, as well as other grammatical features which are tied directly to the
context of utterance, are prototypically deictic. These items have also been called
indexical expressions because they indicate or point to other entities within the text
or context of utterance, or shifters because their referential meaning shifts with every
new speaker or occasion of use.
The traditional division of deictic categories is person, place, and time; apart
from these traditional categories, social deixis has to be considered as well.

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7. CONCLUSION AND TEACHING IMPLICATIONS

Bringing discourse analysis into the language classroom cannot be reduced

exclusively to the adoption of a series of new categories and analytical techniques.
It requires the teacher, in the first place, and the students, subsequently, to look at
their teaching and learning task in a very different way: the main focus of study is
not language but communication.
Communicative language teaching involves developing language proficiency
through interactions embedded in meaningful contexts. This approach to teaching
provides authentic opportunities for learning that go beyond repetition and
memorization of grammatical patterns in isolation.
A central concept of the communicative approach to language teaching is
communicative competence: the learner’s ability to understand and use language
appropriately to communicate in authentic (rather than simulated) social and school
environment.
Because communication is vital to the organization of the legal framework that
establishes the curriculum for Secondary and Bachillerato levels, namely Royal
Decrees 217/2020 29 March and 243/2020 5 April and Decrees 65/2020 and
64/2020 20 July, providing students with opportunities for communication are
essential, which should have some duration, and students should be required to
practice in order to avoid mistakes that may disrupt communication.

8. BIBLIOGRAPHY

- Alba-Juez, Laura. Perspectives on Discourse Analysis. Theory and Practice.

Cambridge Scholar Publishing. 2009.

- Alba-Juez, Laura. Pragmatics: Cognition, Context and Culture. Marid: McGraw Hill.
2016.

-Chacón, Rubén. Sociolinguistics. Ed. UNED. 2015

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