KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSEGuy Cook (Discourse Analysis)

By:Morteza Mohammadi

KNOWLEDGE IN DISCOURSE

In recent years, the role of knowledge in discourse production and comprehension has been stimulated by findings in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence tries to understand how knowledge and language interact and reproduce the process in computers.

we need to look more precisely at the role of KNOWLEDGE and how it interacts with language to create a DISCOURSE.

Schemata: Schema theory suggests that people understand texts and experiences by comparing them

with stereotypical mental representations of similar cases.

Schema theory is a theory which attempts to explain how we comprehend and relate to a text.

Cook says;

The mind stimulated by key words or phrases, in the text, or by the content, activates a knowledge schema, and uses it to make sense of the schema.

Shortly,

A schema is the pre-existent knowledge of typical situations.

SCHEMATA

A witness in a court case

1. I woke up at seven forty. I had breakfast at 8 and left for work at about 8.30.

2. 2. I woke up at seven forty. I was wearing pyjamas. After lying still for a few minutes, I threw back the duvet, got out of bed, walked to the door of the bedroom, opened the door, switched on the light …

 

How does the witness know which detail is required or omitted?

 Schemata allow human communication to be economical.

1. I went to work.

2. I went to work in my clothes.

A sender needs only mention features which are not contained in it.

3. I went to work in my pyjamas.

EVIDENCE FOR SCHEMATA 1. Assumption is made to fill in details which were not actually given:

I go to bed at 11 p.m.

2. The use of definite article:

I was late and we decided to call a taxi . Unfortunately, the driver spent a long time finding our house.

3. Interpretation of words with more than one meaning:

The king put his seal on the letter.

COMPLEX SCHEMATA

All of us come to a text with different outlooks that colour our interpretation. Actual discourse is unlikely to be interpretable with reference to a single schema.

The mind must activate many schemata at once each interacting with the other:

But schemata need not to be limited to unordered catalogues of people and things within a stereotyped situation or stereotyped sequences of events telling us what is likely to happen next.

We might surmise the schema in a school lesson:

The roles of teacher and students

Responses to possibble events.

But what about the flat or house in which you live?

Is there a standardised schema of a ‘house’ ?

RELEVANCE Relevance Theory (RT) builds from Grice’s ideas that speakers make use of principles or

maxims in conversations. In this cognitive model, the effects of new information are worked out by the hearers

against the background of existing assumptions. Whilst a cognitive environment is shared by all members of a speech community, the work left for the hearers is to choose a context for an utterance so as to make the correct inferences about the speaker’s meaning.

RELEVANCE The Relevance theory tries to answer the question: What determines which schema gets activated? In short, Relevance theorists Sperber and Wilson consider that human mind have a long-

term aim: to increase their knowledge of the world. In each encounter with discourse, we start with a set of assumptions, whose accuracy we

seek to improve.

Information is relevant when it has a significant effect on our assumptions, that is, when it allows us to alter our

knowledge structures to give us a more accurate representation of the world.

According to the theory; Other things being equal, the greater the contextual effects, the greater the relevance. Other things being equal, the smaller the processing effort, the greater the relevance.

What is relevant information?

Information is relevant to you if it interacts in a certain way with your existing assumptions about the world. There are 3 types of interaction leading to contextual effects:

1) it produces new information 2) it strengthens our existing assumptions. 3) it contradicts and eliminates our existing assumptions.

DISCOURSE DEVIATIONMiscommunication may occur in a number of situations, such as:

When there are misjudgments and mismatches of schemata between the sender and the receiver. These are particularly likely when people try to communicate across cultures

Communication suffers when people make false assumptions about shared schemata

When one, steps outside the predictable patterns (discourse deviation)

language learners are social outsiders of a different community by virtue of belonging to another.

They may fail to understand or to make them understood because they lack the social knowledge to create the discourse.

As a result they may come with the oddities and we may judge this negatively and positively.

So, the success in communication depends as much upon the receiver as on the sender. And between speakers of different languages ; it depends as much upon the native

speaker as on the foreign learner.

Delete any information which you think the two children would have in common.: 

Peter: Do you like autumn Bob?

Bob: No I don’t. It’s a dull season. The grass is yellow. The leaves fall from the trees. It often rains. I like winter and summer. In summer the days are longer and warmer and the nights are shorter than in autumn.

Peter: But I like autumn. I think it’s a beautiful season. I like to go to the forest in autumn. It’s so beautiful.

Bob: And what about spring? Do you like it?

Peter: Oh yes, I like it very much, too. The leaves of the trees are small and green. The grass is green, too. It’s warm in spring. I think that all seasons are wonderful.

CONCLUSION

There is a lot to be needed in the creation and understanding of coherent discourse than knowledge of the language system alone.

Coherence is created by our interaction. Schema might differ from one person to another. We fill in the details using our background knowledge. We can connect some information with our existing knowledge even if the sender hadn’t

mention that. Communication suffers when people make false assumptions about shared schemata. When one steps outside the predictable patterns, miscommunication may occur.