Discourse Analysis

In the study of language, some of the most interesting questions arise in connection with the way language is ‘used’, rather than what its components are. One of the main questions is, “how is that the language users interpret what other language users intend to convey.” When we carry this investigation further and ask’ how it is that we, as language users, make sense of what we read in texts, understand what speakers mean despite what they say, recognize connected as opposed to jumbled or incoherent discourse, and successfully take part in that complex activity called conversation, we are undertaking what is known as discourse analysis.

INTERPRETING DISCOURSE

When we concentrate on the description of a particular language, we are normally concerned with the accurate representation of the forms and structures used in that language. However, as language users, we are capable of more than simply recognizing correct versus incorrect form and structure. We can cope with -w fragments such as Trains collide, two die, and a newspaper headline, and know, for example, that a causal relation exists between the two phrases. We can also make sense of notices like No Mask, no service, on shop windows in summer, understanding that a conditional relation exists between the two phrases (‘If you are wearing no mask, you will receive no service’).
Moreover, we can encounter examples of texts, written in English, which appear to break a lot of the ‘rules’ of the English language. The following example, from an essay by a Saudi Arabian student learning English, contains all kinds of ‘errors’, yet it can be understood.

My Town

“My natal was in a small town, very close to Riyadh capital of Saudi Arabia. The distant between my town and Riyadh 7 miles exactly. The name of this Almasani that means in English Factories. It takes this name from the people’s carrer . In my childhood I remmeber the people live. It was very simple, most the people was farmer.”

This example may serve to illustrate an interesting point about the way we react to language which contains ungrammatical forms. Rather than simply rejecting the text as ungrammatical, we try to make sense of it. That is, we attempt to arrive at a reasonable interpretation of what the writer intended to convey. (Most people say they understand the ‘My Town’ text quite easily.) It is this effort to interpret (and to be interpreted), and how we accomplish it, that are the key elements investigated in the study of discourse. To arrive at an interpretation, and to make our messages interpretable, we certainly rely on what we know about linguistic form and structure. But, as language users, we have more knowledge than that.

Cohesion

We know, for example, that texts must have a certain structure which depends on factors quite different from those required in the structure of a single sentence. Some of those factors are described in terms of cohesion, or the ties and connections which exist within texts. A number of those types of cohesive ties can be identified in the following text:

“My father once bought a Lincoln convertible. He did it by saving every penny he could.  That car would be worth a fortune nowadays. However, he sold it to help pay for my college education. Sometimes I think I’d rather have the convertible.”

There are connections present here in the use of pronouns, which we assume are used to maintain reference (via anaphora) to the same people and things throughout father _ he _ he _ he; my – my – I; Lincoln -it. There are lexical connections such as a Lincoln convertible – that car- the convertible, and the more general connections created by several terms that share a common element of meaning (e.g. ‘money’) bought – saving – penny – worth a fortune _ sold _ pay: (e.g. ‘time’) once – nowadays sometimes. There is also a connector, ‘however’, which marks the relationship of what follows to what went before. The verb tenses in the first four sentences are all in the past, creating a connection between those events, and a different time is indicated by the present tense of the final sentence.

Analysis of these cohesive links within a text gives us some insight into how writers structure what they want to say, and may be crucial factors in our judgments on whether something is well-written or not. It has also been noted that the conventions of cohesive structure differ from one language to the next and may be one of the sources of difficulty encountered in translating texts. However, by itself, cohesion would not be sufficient to enable us to make sense of what we read. It is quite easy to create a highly cohesive text that has a lot of connections between the sentences but remains difficult to interpret. Note that the following text has connections such as Lincoln the car, red _ that color, her, she, letters – a letter, and so on.

My father bought a Lincoln convertible. The car driven by the police was red. That color doesn’t suit her. She consists of three letters. However, a letter isn’t as fast as a telephone call.

It becomes clear from an example like this that the ‘connectedness’ that we experience in our interpretation of normal texts is not simply based on connections between the words. There must be some other factor that leads us to distinguish connected texts that make sense from those that do not. This factor is usually described as coherence.

Coherence

The key to the concept of coherence is not something that exists in the language, but something which exists in people. It is people who ‘make sense’ of what they read and hear. They try to arrive at an interpretation that is in line with their experience of the way the world is. Indeed, our ability to make sense of what we read is probably only a small part of the general ability we have to make sense of what we perceive or experience in the world. You may have found, when reading the last example text, that you kept trying to make the text ‘fit’ some situation or experience that would accommodate all the details.

If you work at it long enough, you may indeed find a way to incorporate all those disparate elements into a single coherent interpretation. In doing so, you would necessarily be involved in a process of filling in a lot of ‘gaps’ which exist in the text. You would have to create meaningful connections which are not expressed by the words and sentences. This process is not restricted to trying to understand ‘odd’ texts. In one way or another, it seems to be involved in our interpretation of all discourse.

It is certainly present in the interpretation of casual conversation. We are continually taking part in conversational interactions where a great deal of what is meant is not actually present in what is said. Perhaps it is the ease with which we ordinarily anticipate each other’s intentions that makes this whole complex process seem so unremarkable. Here is a good example, adapted from Widdowson (1978):

Her: That’s the telephone
Him: I’m in the bath
Her: O.K.

She makes a request to him to perform an action. He states the reason why he cannot comply with the request. She undertakes to perform action.

There are certainly no cohesive ties within this fragment of discourse. How does each of these people manage to make sense of what the other says? They do use the information contained in the sentences expressed, but there must be something else involved in the interpretation. It has been suggested that exchanges of this type are best understood in terms of the conventional actions performed by the speakers in such interactions. We can characterize the brief conversation in the following way:

If this is a reasonable analysis of what took place in the conversation, then it is clear that language users must have a lot of knowledge of how conversational interaction works which is not simply ‘linguistic’ knowledge. Trying to describe aspects of that knowledge has been the focus of research by an increasing number of discourse analysts.

Speech events

In exploring what it is that we know about taking part in conversation, or any other speech event (e.g. debate, interview, various types of discussions), we quickly realize that there is enormous variation in what people say and do in different circumstances. To begin to describe the sources of that variation, we would have to take account of several criteria. For example, we would have to specify the roles of speaker and hearer, or hearers, and their relationships, whether they were friends, strangers, young, old, of equal or unequal status, and many other factors. All of these factors will influence what is said and how it is said. We would have to describe what was the topic of the conversation and in what setting or context it took place. Yet, even when we have described all these factors, we will still not have analyzed the actual structure of the conversation itself. As language users, in a particular culture, we have quite sophisticated knowledge of how conversation works.

Conversational interaction

In simple terms, English conversation can be described as an activity where, for the most part, two or more people take turns at speaking. Typically, only one person speaks at a time and there tends to be an avoidance of silence between speaking turns. (This is not true in every culture.) If more than one participant tries to talk at the same time, one of them usually stops, as in this example, where A stops until B has finished:
A: Didn’t you [know wh
B: But he must’ve been there by two.
A: Yes but you knew where he was going.
(The symbol [is conventionally used to indicate where simultaneous talk occurred.)

For the most part, participants wait until one speaker indicates that he or she has finished, usually by signaling a completion point. Speakers can mark their turns as ‘complete’ in several ways: by asking a question, for example, or by pausing at the end of a completed syntactic structure like a phrase or a sentence. Other participants can indicate that they want to take the speaking turn, also in several ways. They can start to make short sounds, usually repeated, while the speaker is talking, and often use body shifts or facial expressions to signal that they have something to say.

Some of the most interesting research in this area of discourse has revealed different expectations of conversational style and different strategies of participation in conversational interaction. Some of these strategies seem to be the source of what is sometimes described by participants as ‘rudeness’ (if one speaker appears to cut in on another speaker) or ‘shyness’ (if one speaker keeps waiting for an opportunity to take a turn and none seems to occur). The participants characterized as ‘rude’ or ‘shy’ in this way may simply be adhering to slightly different conventions of turn-taking.

One strategy, which may be overused by ‘long-winded’ speakers, or those used to ‘holding the floor’ (like lecturers, and politicians), is designed to avoid having normal completion points occur. We all use this strategy to some extent, usually in situations where we have to work out what we are trying to say while saying it. If the normal expectation is that completion points are marked by the end of a sentence and a pause, then one way to ‘keep the turn’ is to avoid having those two indicators occur together. That is, don’t pause at the end of sentences; make your sentences run on by using connectors like and, and then, so, but; place your pauses at points where the message is incomplete; and preferably ‘fill’ the pause with hesitation markers such as er, em, uh, ah. Note the position of the pauses (marked by …) in this example, placed before and after verbs rather than at the end of sentences:

A:
that’s their favorite restaurant because they… enjoy French food and when they were … in France, they couldn’t believe it that … you know that they had… that they had had better meals back home.

In this next example, Speaker X produces filled pauses after having almost lost the turn at his first brief hesitation:

X: well that film really was… [ wasn’t what he was good at

Y:       when di-

X: I mean his other… em his later films were much more… Er really more in the romantic style and that was more what he was… you know… you are best at doing

Y: So when did he make that one?

These types of strategies, by themselves, should not be considered undesirable or ‘domineering’. They are present in the conversational speech of most people and they are, in a sense, part of what makes conversation work. We recognize these subtle indicators as ways of organizing our turns and negotiating the intricate business of social interaction via language. One of the most noticeable features of conversational discourse is that it is generally very cooperative. This observation has been formulated as a principle of conversation.

The co-operative principle

An underlying assumption in most conversational exchanges seems to be that the participants are cooperating. This principle, together with four maxims that we expect will be obeyed, was first set out by Grice (1975).

The co-operative principle is stated in the following way:

“Make your conversational 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.” Supporting this principle are the four maxims:

Quantity:

Make your contribution as informative as is required, but not more, or less, than is required

Quality:

Do not say that which you believe to be false or for which you lack evidence

Relation:

Be relevant

Manner:

Be clear, brief, and orderly

It is certainly true that, on occasion, we can experience conversational exchanges in which the cooperative principle does not seem to be in operation. However, this general description of the normal expectations we have in conversations helps to explain several regular features in the way people say things. For example, several common expressions like Well, to make a long story short and I won’t bore you with all the details seem to be indicators of awareness of the Quantity maxim. Some awareness of the importance of the Quality maxim seems to lie behind the way we begin some conversational contributions with expressions like As far as I know…

Consider this conversational fragment:

Carol: Are you coming to the party tonight?

Lara: I’ve got an exam tomorrow.

On the face of it, Lara’s statement is not an answer to Carol’s question. Lara doesn’t say “Yes” or “No.” Yet, Carol will immediately interpret the statement as meaning ‘No’ or ‘Probably not.’ How can we account for this ability to grasp one meaning from a sentence which, in a literal sense, means something else? It seems to depend, at least partially, on the assumption that Lara is being ‘relevant’ and ‘informative’. Thus, Lara’s answer is not simply a statement of tomorrow’s activities, it contains an implicature (an additional conveyed meaning) concerning “tonight’s activities”.

It is noticeable that to describe the conversational implicature involved in Lara’s statement, we had to appeal to some background knowledge (about exams, studying, and partying) that must be shared by the conversational participants. Investigating how we use our background knowledge to arrive at interpretations of what we hear and read is a crucial part of discourse analysis.

Background knowledge

A particularly good example of the processes involved in using background knowledge has been provided by Sanford & Garrod (1981). Their example begins with these two sentences:

John was on his way to school last Friday. He was really worried about the math lesson.

Most people who are asked to read these sentences report that they think John is probably a schoolboy. Since this piece of information is not directly stated in the text, it must be an inference. Other inferences, for different readers, are that John is walking or that he is on a bus. These inferences are derived from our conventional knowledge, in our culture, about ‘going to school’, and no reader has ever suggested that John is swimming or on a boat, though both are physically possible, if unlikely, interpretations. An interesting aspect of the reported inferences is that they are treated as likely or possible interpretations that readers will easily abandon if they do not fit in with some subsequent information. The next sentence in the text is as follows:

Last week he had been unable to control the class.

On encountering this sentence, most readers decide that John is, in fact, a teacher and that he is not very happy. Many report that he is probably driving a car to school. Then the next sentence is presented :

It was unfair of the math teacher to leave him in charge.

Suddenly, John reverts to his schoolboy status, and the, teacher, inference is abandoned. The final sentence of this text contains a surprise:

After all, it is not a normal part of a janitor’s duties. This type of text and the manner of presentation, one sentence at a time, is, of course, rather artificial. Yet the exercise involved does provide us with some insight into how we ‘build’ interpretations of what we read by using a lot more information than is actually in the words on the page. That is, we create what the text is about, based on our expectations of what normally happens. In attempting to describe this phenomenon, many researchers use the concept of a ‘schema’.

Schema

A schema is a general term for a conventional knowledge structure that exists in memory.
We have many schemata that are used in the interpretation of what we experience and what we hear or read about. If you hear someone describe what happened one day in the supermarket, you don’t have to be told what is normally found in a supermarket. You already have a “supermarket” schema (food displayed on shelves, arranged in aisles, shopping carts and baskets, checkout counter, and other conventional features).

One particular kind of schema is a ‘script’. A script is essentially a dynamic schema: in which a series of conventional actions takes place. You have a script for ‘Going to the Dentist’ or ‘Going to the Movies’. We all have versions of an ‘Eating in a Restaurant’ script, which we can activate to make sense of discourse like the following:

Trying not to be out of the office for long, Suzy went into the nearest place, sat down, and ordered a sandwich. It was quite crowded, but the service was fast, so she left a good tip when she had to rush back.

Based on our ‘Restaurant’ script, we would be able to say several things about the scene and events briefly described in this short text. For example, although the text does not have this information, we would assume that Suzy opened a door to get into the restaurant, that there were tables there, that she ate the sandwich, then she paid for it, and so on. The fact that information of this type can turn up in people’s attempts to remember the text is further evidence of the existence of scripts. It is also a good indication of the fact that our understanding of what we read does not directly come from what words and sentences are on the page, but from the interpretation we create, in our minds, of what we read.