ENGLISH

DISCOURSE
VANESA B. DUNGOG
1.1 Defining Discourse
There are various usages of the term discourse, but
we will begin here by defining it broadly as language
in its contexts of use. In considering language in its
contexts of use, the concern is also with language
above the level of the sentence. The emphasis on
contexts of use and the suprasentential level is
important, because for much of the history of modern
linguistics, under the influence of the generative
linguist Chomsky, language has been analysed as
separate from context, as decontextualized
sentences.
 More restricted in sense, the term ‘discourse’
can also be used to refer to a particular set of ideas
and how they are articulated, such as the discourse
of environmentalism, the discourse of neoliberalism
or the discourse of feminism. In this case, the term
refers to a type of specialized knowledge and
language used by a particular social group.
 The discourse analyst Gee (2011) memorably
refers to the first of the two meanings of discourse
considered thus far – discourse as language in the
contexts of its use and above the level of the
sentence – as little ‘d’ discourse and the second
meaning – discourse as ideas and how they are
articulated – as big ‘D’ discourses (note the first is
always singular, while the second can be pluralized).
1.2 DEFINING DISCOURSE STUDIES AND
D IS COURSE A NA LYSIS

Discourse Analysis refers to the actual analysis, and

Discourse Studies refers to the field, or discipline, in
general.
1 . 3 D I S C O U R S E A N A LY S I S M AY E m p h a s i z e
DISCOURSE STRUCTURE OR DISCOURSE
FUNCTION OR BOTH
As in physics, chemistry or biology, Discourse
Analysis may involve structural analysis. Here a
text or group of texts would be broken down into
their component parts. These parts (which are, in
fact, usually determined in terms of their functions,
or meanings) might be based on the topics or
turns at speaking, in spoken discourse, or the
paragraphs and sentences, or propositions, in
 Instead of, or in addition to, a structural
analysis, Discourse Analysis might take a
functional approach. Here the discourse analyst
considers the particular meanings and
communicative forces associated with what is
said or written. This approach to discourse
considers language as a type of communicative
action.
 It considers questions such as the following:
How is language used persuasively – e.g. to
request, accept, refuse, complain? What sort of
language is polite language? How do people use
language to convey meanings indirectly? What
constitutes racist or sexist language? How do
people exercise power through their use of
language? What might be the hidden
motivations behind certain uses of language?
Alternatively, in a functional approach, the
discourse analyst might look at particular
discourse genres. Here the discourse analyst asks:
How is language used in academic essays, in
research articles, in conference presentations, in
letters, in reports and in meetings? Here the
concern is again with communicative purposes or
communicative action, but the focus is on
particular contexts of use.
 Then again, in a functional approach to
discourse, the analyst might consider how
language is used by particular social groups. How
do teachers or politicians or business executives
use language? How do men and women vary in
their use of language? What is particular about
the language used by such people that it
identifies them as belonging to particular social
groups?
 Functional analysis suggests a qualitative
rather than a quantitative methodology and,
indeed, most Discourse Analysis is qualitative in
nature. The concern is not with measuring and
counting, but with describing.
 However, with the use of computers,
quantitative analysis has received more attention
and discourse analysts may also use computers to
derive quantitative findings; for example, on the
relative frequency of particular language
patterns by different individuals or social groups in
particular texts or groups of texts. This approach to
Discourse Analysis is known as Corpus Linguistics.
1. Differentiate Discourse Analysis and Discourse
Studies.
2. What are some of the ‘big D’ discourses you
come into contact with on a daily basis? What
are their distinctive features? What are the
ideas and attitudes they express? Can you
think of any particular linguistic features of
these discourses?
3. Think of someone you know. How do they
identify themselves through their use of language,
perhaps because of their age, their job, or some
other contextual factors?

4. Give an example of discourse based on

contexuality. Write the dialogue based on the
situation/ setting.
1.6 DISCOURSE ANALYSIS IS CONDUCTED IN
MANY FIELDS OF ACTIVITY

Discourse Analysis is conducted in many fields,

both informal and institutional. In informal fields,
Discourse Analysis has been used to analyze how
people interact in conversation and in service
encounters, as already mentioned, and to analyze
how they tell stories, how they gossip and how they
chat. In formal fields, Discourse Analysis has been
fruitfully employed in the political arena, in analyzing
the media, in the law, in healthcare, and in business
and other forms of bureaucracy.
1.7 DISCOURSE STUDIES FOCUS ON LANGUAGE IN ITS
CONTEXTS OF USE
In order to understand the meaning of an utterances,
one needs to know the particular features of the
situation in which it was uttered. In a very well-known
study, Hymes (1972) identified 16 features of situation,
or context, some of which are listed as follows:
• the physical and temporal setting;
• the participants (speaker or writer, listener or
reader); the purposes of the participants;
• the channel of communication (e.g. face to face,
electronic, televised, written);
• the attitude of the participants;
• the genre, or type of speech event:
poem, lecture, editorial, sermon;
• background knowledge pertaining to the
participants.
 Another element of context that needs to
be considered is the text surrounding an
utterance, what has come before and what
comes later. Consider the following exchange:
A.These bananas cost 3 dollars.
B. I’ll take them.
SENTENCE: I have a problem. I haven’t got
any money.
Problem, here, can be explicated by what
follows it, that is to say, the problem is that I
do not have enough money. This type of
context is commonly referred to as co-text
or linguistic context (in contrast to extra
linguistic context).
 In Discourse Analysis, as Blommaert (2001: 15)
has warned, the analyst’s selection of what is
relevant in the context in order to interpret a text
is crucial. An emphasis on a particular element
of the context is likely to affect the analyst’s
interpretation of the text.
1.8 DISCOURSE IS INTERTEXTUAL
One text cannot be understood except in
relation to other texts which have gone before
(and, indeed, which are likely to follow). Other
texts, of course, are one facet of context. The
intertextuality (Bhaktin, 1981) in this example –
how one text relates back to another text or
texts – is made explicit. Another example of
intertextuality, which is even more explicit, would
be direct quotation of one text in another,
indicated through the use of inverted commas.
 Very often, however, intertextual links are implicit.
Implicit intertextuality is extremely common in
newspaper headlines and various types of
advertisement. The following is an example of
language promoting the AXN television channel:
‘There’s a time to ask not what you can do for your
country, but what you can watch on AXN.’ The
intertextuality here is based on a famous statement
made by the US President, John F. Kennedy: ‘Ask not
what your country can do for you, but what you can
do for your country.’ The intertextuality with the AXN
promotion is created through the use of parallel
syntactic, semantic and prosodic structures.
1.9 DISCOURSE AND COMMUNICATIVE
COMPETENCE
Language educators are concerned with
encouraging learners to communicate in the most
effective ways possible. It is self-evident, therefore,
that an understanding of discourse and its role in
communication will be of value to such students or
professionals. In the 1960s, the leading theory of
language was that of Chomsky (1965), who made a
famous distinction between competence and
performance: competence, referring to the
underlying grammatical system that he claimed to be
intuitively known by all native speakers of a language
and performance, referring to actual language use in
real situations.
 In reaction to Chomsky, Hymes (1972) argued
that there was more to language than idealized
grammar, invoking the term communicative
competence to refer to the competence that is
required in real communication. Language use was
also worthy of study and had its own (situationally
defined) conventions and patterns, according to
Hymes. His famous dictum was ‘there are rules of use
without which, the rules of grammar would be
useless’. To investigate these situationally defined
conventions and patterns, Hymes developed his
model of contextual variables, referred to above in
section 1.7.
 The most commonly cited model of
communicative competence in language
teaching is that of Canale and Swain (1980)3,
who broke communicative competence down
into three subcomponents:
1. Grammatical competence: knowledge and
skill with regard to lexical items and rules of
morphology, syntax, sentence grammar
semantics and phonology.
2. Sociolinguistic competence: Hymes’s rules of
use; knowledge and skill regarding formality,
politeness and appropriateness of meaning to
situation.
3. Strategic competence: strategies to
compensate for breakdowns in communication
and to enhance language learning.
 Later, Canale (1983) added a fourth
component, discourse competence, which
referred to the knowledge of and skill in
combining linguistic elements to achieve a
unified textual whole. A problem with adding this
extra component, however, is that it seems to
be at a different level; it would seem that
grammatical competence, sociolinguistic
competence and strategic competence are all
component parts of overall discourse
competence.
CHAPTER III

COHESION
 With cohesion, we are concerned with the
formal (but at the same time semantic) links
between clauses, how an item – a pronoun, a
noun or a conjunction – in one clause may
refer backwards or forwards to another
clause.
A: That’s the telephone.
B: I’m in the bath.
A: OK.
 Cohesion occurs where the
INTERPRETATION of some element in the
discourse is dependent on that of another.
The one PRESUPPOSES the other, in the
sense that it cannot be effectively decoded
except by recourse to it. When this happens,
a relation of cohesion is set up, and the two
elements, the presupposing and the
presupposed, are thereby at least potentially
integrated into the text.
Wash and core six cooking apples.
Put them into a fireproof dish.
 Cohesion can occur both within the clause
and across clauses and sentences, although
most linguists focus their attention on the
interclausal or intersentential, as opposed to
the intraclausal, variety (Christiansen, 2011:
25). A sentence is understood here in the way
that Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) define
it, in the sense of one or more clauses. Thus,
in the following example:
(a), which is a single clause and at the same
time a sentence, the tie is intrasentential,
her referring back to Mary in this same
clause/sentence.
a. Mary put the money in her purse.
(b), which is a sentence consisting of two
clauses, it and her refer back to the money
and Mary respectively. The links are
interclausal, but not intersentential.
b) Mary took the money and put it in her
purse.
(c), where we have two simple sentences, each
consisting of one clause, we have two
intersentential links, between she and her, on
the one hand, and Mary and the money, on the
other.
c) Mary took the money. Then she put it in
her purse.
 Halliday and Hasan classify cohesive
devices into five categories: reference,
substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and
lexical cohesion, categories which have
been taken up by most other linguists. We
will deal with them below.
3.2 REFERENCE
3.2.1 Definition, forms and functions
The examples we have been discussing so far are
cases of reference. A reference item is a word or
phrase, the identity of which can be determined
by referring to other parts of the text or the
situation. Reference items in English include
personal pronouns, such as I, you, he, she, it;
possessive adjectives, such as my, your, his, her;
possessive pronouns, such as mine, yours, his,
hers; demonstratives, such as this, that, these,
those; and the definite article, the.
 As well as within the text – called endophoric
reference – as in our examples so far, reference
may also be outside the text – called exophoric
reference. An example of exophoric reference
would be when someone refers to something which
is part of the context of situation.
Example: That picture is beautiful.
 Within endophoric reference, there are two
categories: anaphoric (referring back) and
cataphoric (referring forward). The reference
system can thus be represented as shown in
Figure 3.1. We have already noted examples of
anaphoric reference (a–c above). In those
examples, it is easy to see the link to be made
between the reference item and its antecedent
and how the reference item presupposes that its
antecedent has already been mentioned. Here are
a few more examples:
a) Jocelyine Hampson read again the six words that had
been typed with a faint ribbon: ‘The Bangkok Secret
by Adam Hapson’. She breathed in slowly, flicked
over the page and read the first paragraph again.
b) Prapoth struggled frantically to tear himself from
my grip. His mouth was agape with fear and his eyes
were rolling.
c) And the allegations concerning a member of the royal
family. What about those?
 With regard to the cataphoric type, it must
be said that this pattern is much less frequent
than either the anaphoric or exophoric types. An
example of cataphoric reference would be the
following: Remember this. Never trust a stranger.
In this example, we can see how a reference item
can refer to a whole sentence (or, in many cases,
more), not just a single noun or noun phrase. This,
in this example, refers forward to the whole
following sentence, Never trust a stranger.
 In written text, cataphoric reference often occurs
after a colon, semicolon or dash following the reference
item, as in this next example: The following are the
winners: Susan, Christopher and Ali. Strictly speaking,
cases such as these are not interclausal at all, but they
are often treated as such. In fact, a case can be made
for such examples to be considered as interclausal, if
what comes after the colon is taken as ellipitical (that
is to say, reduced – see below on ellipsis). Thus in our
example, Susan, Christopher and Ali could be expanded
to [they are] Susan, Christopher and Ali.
3.2.2 Definite reference
We listed the definite article, the, as an item
that can be used as a referring item. This is a
less transparent type of reference, as many
learners of English, even very advanced ones,
have learned to their peril. Here is an
example:
d) In the centre of the dimly lit execution
yard a cross of wood had been erected. Close
to the cross stood a rectangular frame over
which a blue curtain was drawn.
 Thus, if I say ‘the tree’ or ‘the enemy’, or
‘the cross’ (as in example d, above), I am
presupposing that there is some tree or some
enemy or some cross in the context in which I
am using these expressions and that this tree
or this enemy or this cross can be identified.
 Probably the most frequent use of
definite reference is exophoric. Exophoric
definite reference may refer to something
which is specific to a community (referred to
by Martin [1992] as context of culture), for
example, the president, the baby, the piano.
This type of reference is also sometimes
called unique reference or homophora. Martin
(1992: 122) provides a set of examples of this
type of definite exophoric reference related
to the community, or context of culture,
 Exophoric definite reference may also
refer to a whole class of items: the
newspapers, the possibilities, the
differences; or an individual considered as a
representative of a whole class (referred to
also as generic reference): the lion, the
alligator, as in The lion (Panthera leo) is one
of the four big cats in the genus Panthera, or
The alligator is notorious for its bone-
crushing bites.