RIPHAH International University,

Faisalabad
MPhil English (Linguistics)
Discourse Analysis
Resource Person:

Dr. ADNAN TAHIR

Topic:

Key Concepts in Discourse Analysis

1
• Questions:
– Pragmatics context plays a very important role in discourse interpretation. Discuss
with special reference to reference, presupposition, implicatures & inference.

– Dell Hymes ethnographic features of the context of situation provide a detailed

list of situational elements which directly or indirectly influence the discourse
analyst interpretation. Discuss.

– Co-text is not less important than the non-verbal context of discourse. What is the
difference in both and how do they contribute to better interpretation of a text.

– “The further away in time the message is situated, the less likely the speaker is to
remember precisely the date and time.” If the statement is right, what expanded
context is about and how it influences the work of a discourse analyst?
1. PRAGMATICS AND DISCOURSE CONTEXT
• Reference:
– Lyons says reference is the relationship which holds between words and
things is the relationship of reference. In one sense, the words refer to
things but according to Lyons it is the speaker who refers by using some
appropriate expression: he invests the expression with reference by the
act of referring. Thus in discourse analysis, reference is treated as an
action on the part of the speaker/ writer.
 
• Presupposition:
– It is defined in terms of assumptions the speaker makes about what the
hearer is likely to accept without challenge. Presuppositions are what is
taken by the speaker to be the common ground of the participants in
the conversation. For example, the speaker chooses to say my uncle
means he assumes that the hearer already know it.
1. PRAGMATICS AND DISCOURSE CONTEXT
• Implicatures:
– The term implicature was used by Grice (1975) to account for what a speaker can
imply, suggest, or mean, as distinct from what the speaker literally says. There are
conventional implicatures which are determined by the conventional meaning of
the words used. For example ‘He is an English man; he is brave’. The other is the
notion of conversational implicature which is derived from a general principle of
conversation plus a number of maxims which speakers will normally obey. The
conversational conventions, or maxims, which support this principle are as follows:

• Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required. Do not make your contribution more
informative than is required.
• Quality: Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
• Relation: Be relevant.
• Manner: Be perspicuous. Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid ambiguity. Be brief. Be orderly.
•  
– Implicatures are pragmatic aspects of meaning and have certain identifiable
characteristics. They are partially derived from the conventional or literal meaning of
an utterance, produced in a specific context which is shared by the speaker and the
hearer, and depend on recognition by the speaker and the hearer of the Cooperative
principle and its maxims.
1. PRAGMATICS AND DISCOURSE CONTEXT
• Inference: When we are capable of deriving a specific conclusion
from specific premises, via deductive inference, but we are rarely
asked to do so in the everyday discourse we encounter. For
example, a. If it’s sunny, it’s warm. B. It’s sunny. C. so, it’s warm.

– For the moment, here is a view which claims that the terms reference,
presupposition, implicature and inference must be treated as
pragmatic concepts in the analysis of discourse. These terms are used
to indicate relationships between discourse participants and elements
in the discourse. Since the pragmatic use of these terms is closely tied
to the context in which a discourse occurs, it should be investigated
what aspects of context have to be considered in undertaking the
analysis of discourse.
2. THE CONTEXT OF SITUATION
• The task is to determine what we can know about the meaning and context of
an utterance given only the knowledge that the utterance has occurred.
Whenever we notice some sentence in context, we immediately find asking
what the effect would have been if the context had been slightly different.
•  
• J. R. Firth (regarded by many as the founder of modern British linguistics)
remarked “I suggest that voices should not be entirely dissociated from the
social context in which they function and that therefore all texts in modern
spoken languages should be regarded as having 'the implication of utterance',
and be referred to typical participants in some generalized context of
situation”. For example, ‘I do think Adam’s quick’.

• Hymes views the role of context in interpretation as, on the one hand, limiting
the range of possible interpretations and, on the other, as supporting the
intended interpretation:
2. THE CONTEXT OF SITUATION
• Hymes (1964) ethnographic features of the context of situation

• The roles addressor and addressee, audience is significant. Knowledge of the addressor in a given
communica­tive event makes it possible for the analyst to imagine what that particular person is
likely to say. Knowledge of his addressee constrains the analyst's expectations even further. If you
know, further, what is being talked about, Hymes' category of topic, your expectations will be
further constrained. If then you have information about the setting, both in terms of where the
event is situated in place and time, and in terms of the physical relations of the interactants with
respect to posture and gesture and facial expression, your expectations will be still further
limited. The remaining features of context which Hymes discusses (in 1964) include large-scale
features like channel (how is contact between the participants in the event being maintained —
by speech, writing, signing, smoke signals), code (what language, or dialect, or style of language is
being used), message-form (what form is intended — chat, debate, sermon, fairy-tale, sonnet,
love-letter, etc.) and event (the nature of the communicative event within which a genre may be
embedded — thus a sermon or prayer may be part of the larger event, a church service). Later,
Hymes adds other features, for example key (which involves evaluation — was it a good sermon,
a pathetic explanation, etc.), and purpose (what did the participants intend should come about
as a result of the communicative event).
2. THE CONTEXT OF SITUATION
• The more the analyst knows about the features of context, the more likely he is to be able to predict
what is likely to be said
•  
• Lewis (1972) Addition to the Hymes Model:

• possible-world co-ordinate: this is to account for states of affairs which might be, or could be supposed
to be or are
• time co-ordinate: to account for tensed sentences and adverbials like today or next week
• place co-ordinate : to account for sentences like here it is
• speaker co-ordinate: to account for sentences which include first person reference (I, me, we, our, etc.)
• audience co-ordinate: to account for sentences including you, yours, yourself, etc.
• indicated object co-ordinate: to account for sentences containing demonstrative phrases like this, those,
etc.
• previous discourse co-ordinate: to account for sentences including phrases like the latter, the aforemen­
tioned, etc
• assignment co-ordinate: an infinite series of things (sets of things, sequences of things . . .)
•  
• We have to have recourse to what Stenning calls 'abnormal' contexts, where the analyst reads the text
and then has to try to provide the characteristics of the context in which the text might have occurred.
3. CO-TEXT
• The previous discourse co-ordinate is what Lewis introduced as to take account of sentences which
include specific reference to what has been men­tioned before as in phrases like the
aforementioned. It is, however, the case that any sentence other than the first in a fragment of
discourse, will have the whole of its interpretation forcibly con­strained by the preceding text, not
just those phrases which obviously and specifically refer to the preceding text, like the
aforementioned. For instance, ‘The same evening I went on shore. The first landing
in any new country is very interesting.’
•  
• Just as the interpretation of individual lexical items is constrained by co-text, so is the interpretation
of utterances within a discourse. For instance, anaphoric reference is generally held to depend
crucially on co-text for interpreta­tion.

• For the moment the main point we are concerned to make is to stress the power of co-text in
constraining interpretation. Even in the absence of information about place and time of original
utterance, even in the absence of information about the speaker / writer and his intended recipient,
it is often possible to reconstruct at least some part of the physical context and to arrive at some
interpretation of the text. The more co-text there is, in general, the more secure the interpretation
is. Text creates its own context. As Isard (1975: 377) remarks: 'communications do not merely
depend on the context for their interpretation, they change that context'.
4. THE EXPANDING CONTEXT
• The further away in time the message is situated, the less likely the speaker is to remember
precisely the date and time at which it occurred, and the larger the time-span he is likely to make
available for it to have occurred in.

– But you just said he wasn't. (Place: maintained; time: only minutes ago)
– You said in the staff meeting yesterday that he wasn't.
– You said last week at the staff meeting that he wasn't.
– You said last year when we met in Toronto that he wasn't.
•  
– Clap altogether NOW. (gym mistress to class)
– I think you should begin the next chapter NOW. (supervisor to student)
– NOW I'm getting older I really do find policemen look younger.
– From the iron age till NOW, man has been making increasingly complex artifacts.

– We can see that the deictic centre is located within the context of utterance by the speaker, but that the
interpretation of the expression now as relating durativity or subsequently to the utterance, and the time-
span involved, must be determined with respect to the content of the utterance. Speakers, or writers, do
have the option of transferring the deictic centre to the hearer's, or reader's spatio-temporal situation in
which the text will be encountered.
4. THE EXPANDING CONTEXT
• we might say my friend Ellen Blair, or the former chairman Ellen Blair, or a
nurse in the ward called Ellen Blair, giving in some sense, 'credentials' for
her existence and for her relationship to the speaker who is responsible for
introducing her into the conversation. What can we infer about the
speaker's intentions from the fact that he has chosen this particular
description, rather than any of the others which would call to mind the
same referent? The variable which interests us most is that which is
concerned with the various roles played by the individual. Lyons (1977)
distinguishes between the deictic role of an individual (which assigns, for
instance, first, second and third person pro­nouns) and his social role or
'status'. Lyons points out that, for example, the terms of address used by a
social inferior to a social superior may be different from those used
between peers, as in vocative terms like 'Sir' or 'Doctor' or 'My Lord' (in the
court­room). In different social contexts, then, different terms of address will
be found.
4. THE EXPANDING CONTEXT
• One princi­ple which we can identify we shall call the principle of local
interpretation. This principle instructs the hearer not to construct a context any
larger than he needs to arrive at an interpretation. Thus if he hears someone say
'Shut the door' he will look towards the nearest door available for being shut. (If
that door is shut, he may well say 'It's shut', rather than consider what other doors
are potentially available for being shut.)

• He, too, is constrained in his interpretation by past similar experience, by

interpreting in the light of what we might call the principle of analogy.
• Discourse is interpreted in the light of past experience of similar discourse, by
analogy with previous similar texts.
• The principle of analogy will provide a reasonably secure framework for
interpretation for the hearer and for the analyst most of the time. Most of the
time, things will indeed conform to our expectations. However, conventions can be
flouted and expecta­tions upset, either deliberately for a stylistic effect, or by
accident or oversight.
5. Speech acts
• Speech act theory originates in Austin's (1962: How To Do Good
Things with Words) observation that while sentences can often be
used to report states of affairs, the utterance of some sentences, in
specified circumstances, be treated as the performance of an act:
•
– I declare you the captain of the team.
– I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth.
•  
• Such utterances Austin described as 'performatives' and the
specified circumstances required for their success he outlined as a
set of 'felicity conditions'. Performatives can be explicit
performatives and implicit performatives.
5. Speech acts
• A locutionary act, the performance of an utterance: the
actual utterance and its ostensible meaning, comprising
phonetic, phatic and rhetoric acts corresponding to the
verbal, syntactic and semantic aspects of any meaningful
utterance;
• An illocutionary act : the pragmatic 'illocutionary force' of
the utterance, thus its intended significance as a socially valid
verbal action;
• and in certain cases a further perlocutionary act: its actual
effect, such as persuading, convincing, scaring, enlightening,
inspiring, or otherwise getting someone to do or realize
something, whether intended or not (Austin 1962)
5. Speech acts
• By extension, it became possible to suggest that in uttering any
sentence, a speaker could be seen to have performed some act, or,
to be precise, an illocutionary act. Conventionally associated with
each illocutionary act is the force of the utterance which can be
expressed as a performative such as 'promise' or 'warn'. Austin also
pointed out that, in uttering a sentence, a speaker also performs a
perlocutionary act which can be described in terms of the effect
which the illocutionary act, on the particular occasion of use, has on
the hearer. Searle (1975) also introduces a distinction between direct
and indirect speech acts which depends on recognition of the
intended perlocutionary effect of an utterance on a particular
occasion. Indirect speech acts are 'cases in which one illocutionary
act is performed indirectly by way of performing another' (1975: 60).
6. Knowledge of the world

• Using knowledge of the world

• This general knowledge about the world
underpins our interpretation not only of
discourse, but of virtually every aspect
of our experience. As de Beaugrande
(1980: 30) notes,
• “the question of how people know what is going on in a text
is a special case of the question of how people know what is
going on in the world at all”.
6. Knowledge of the world
• Representing background knowledge
• In representations of this knowledge, conventional aspects of a situation, for
instance, talking about a restaurant, the tables and chairs, can be treated as
default elements. These default elements will be assumed to be present, even
when not mentioned, unless the reader / hearer is specifically told otherwise.
Thus, knowledge of a restaurant scene is treated as being stored in memory as a
single, easily accessible unit, rather than as a scattered collection of individual
facts which have to be assembled from different parts of memory each time a
restaurant scene is mentioned. Riesbeck (1975), for exam­ple, boldly asserts that
'comprehension is a memory process'. Understanding discourse is, in this sense,
essentially a process of retrieving stored information from memory and relating
it to the encountered discourse. It then became possible to think of knowledge-
of-the-world as organized into separate but interlinked sets of knowledge areas
which, taken together, would add up to the generalized knowledge that
humans, in comprehending discourse, appear to use.
7. Conversational principles: Co-operation

“There is cat stuck under the Gate at

number 67”
7. Conversational principles: Co-operation
• The idea that conversation proceeds according to a principle,
known and applied by all human beings, was first proposed in a
limited form by the philosopher Paul Grice (1975), who put
forward what he described as the co-operative principle.
According to this principle, we interpret language on the
assumption that its sender is obeying four maxims. We assume
he or she is intending to:
• · Be True (the maxim of quality)
• · Be Brief (the maxim of quantity)
• · Be Relevant (the maxim of relevance)
• · Be Clear (the maxim of manner)
“There is cat stuck under the Gate at number 67”
7. Conversational principles: Co-operation
• Quantity:
– Say no less than the conversation requires.
– Say no more than the conversation requires.
• Quality:
– Don't say what you believe to be false.
– Don't say things for which you lack evidence.
• Manner:
– Don't be obscure.
– Don't be ambiguous.
– Be brief.
– Be orderly.
• Relevance:
– Be relevant.
• Using this assumption, combined with general knowledge of the world, the receiver can
reason from the literal, semantic meaning of what is said to the pragmatic meaning – and
induce what the sender is intending to do with his/her words.

• When we talk about people following the co-operative principle, this does not mean that
they can consciously and explicitly formulate it to themselves. People act as though they
know the principle just as they act as though they know the rules of grammar- though very
few people can even begin to formulate them, and nobody can formulate them completely.
7. Flouting the co-operative principle

• `Queen Victoria is made of Iron´

7. Flouting the co-operative principle
• There are times when meaning derives from deliberate violations – or flouting
as Grice calls them – of the co-operative principle, always provided that the
sender intends the receiver to perceive them as such, and that this is how, in
fact, the receiver does perceive them. It is possible to flout the quality maxim
without lying.

• For example: `Queen Victoria is made of Iron´. Though it is not literally true, you
will perceive such remarks as figures of speech. These are Hyperbole, metaphor,
Irony and sarcasm and they will all depend upon the assumption that they will
be interpreted as deliberate flouting of the charge to be true rather than as
untruths intended to deceive. Just as the quality maxim can be flouted for
effect, so can the other three. The quantity maxim is violated in both directions:
creating prolixity if we say too much and terseness if we are too brief. We often
say more than we need, perhaps to mark a sense of occasion, or respect; and
we often say less than we need, perhaps to be rude, or blunt, or forthright.
7. Flouting the co-operative principle
• Sometimes we deliberately flout the charge to be relevant,
to sign embarrassment or a desire to change the subject.
Lastly, the maxim of manner is violated either for humour, as
in the case of puns and doubles entendres, where rival
meanings are deliberately tolerated, or in order to establish
solidarity bet speakers and exclude an over-hearer from the
conversation. The meanings created by these floutings are
often social, signaling the attitude of the sender to the
receiver of the message, and the kind of relationship which
exists or is developing bet them. Grice viewed these
attitudinal meanings as being created by departures from
the co-operative principle.
8. Conversational principle s: Politeness
• The politeness principle, like the co-operative
principle, may be formulated as a series of maxims
which people assume are being followed in the
utterances of others. As with the co-operative
principle any flouting of these maxims will take on
meaning, provided it is perceived for what it is.
Robin Lakoff formulated them as follows:
– · Don´t impose
– · Give options
– · Make your receiver feel good.
8. Conversational principle s: Politeness
• These maxims of the politeness principle explain many of those
frequent utterances in which no new information is
communicated. In English we often give orders, and make
requests and pleas (directives) in the form of elaborate
questions which give the option of refusal; we apologize for
imposing and add in praise to make our hearer feel good.
Clearly the politeness principle and the com-operative principle
are often in conflict with each other. Politeness and truth are
often mutually incompatible and so are politeness and brevity.
These conflicting demands of the two principles are something
of which people are consciously aware. In English, there is even
a term for the surrender of truth to politeness: `A white lie´.
9. Discourse as a process
• Ethnomethodology depicts conversation as discourse constructed and
negotiated bet the participants, following pre-established patterns,
and marking the direction they are taking in particular ways: with
pauses, laughter, intonations, filler words, and established formulae.
Culture specific rules and procedures of turn-taking provide ample
breeding ground for misunderstanding. Entering and leaving
conversation, bidding for a longer turn, refusing without appearing
rude, changing the topic, are all notoriously difficult for foreign
learners: tasks for which the language classroom, where turns are
patiently organised and controlled by the teacher, has hardly prepared
them. Indeed the teacher who constantly interrupts the students´
discourse to correct every grammatical mistake not only violates usual
turn-taking procedures but may also hinder the students´ acquisition
of them.
9. Conversation as a discourse type
• The term `Conversation´ is widely used, in a non-technical sense, usually
with the implication that the talk is less formal. We shall define the term
as follows: Talk may be classed as when: It is not primarily necessitated
by a practical task. Any unequal power of participants is partially
suspended. The number of participants is small. Turns are short. Talk is
primarily for the participants and not for an outside audience.

• Although these definitions are imprecise, they are useful. The boundary
bet conversation and other discourse types is a fuzzy one, and there are
many intermediate cases. A seminar, for example, might come
somewhere bet the two poles.

• Formal spoken discourse ------------------------- Conversation

 Assignment
• Read the Chapter Assigned and Make a Summary of
3-5 pages, comprising all the major points of the
Chapter.
• Introduction to Discourse Studies by Jan Renkema
Roll No. Ch. No. Roll No. Ch. No. Roll No. Ch. No.
• 1-2 1 11-12 6 21-22 11
3-4 2 13-14 7 23-24 12
5-6 3 15-16 8 25-26 13
7-8 4 17-18 9 27-28 14
9-10 5 19-20 10 29-30 15