Discourse AnalysisbyMichael McCarthy

Elizabeth Ruiz

DISCOURSE ANALYSISMain authors: Harris and Austin. British discourse with K. HallidayAmerican discourse Dell Hymes Conversation analysis

Linguistics, semiotics, psychology,

anthropology and sociology.

Interdisciplinary approach

Study of the relationship

between languageand the contexts in which it is used

Study of spoken and

written interaction

Factors: linguistic, purely situational and non-linguistic

Non-linguistic Factors: intonation -tone contour, pitch level, hesitations, gestures.

Form and Function

Doing with the language (e.g. requesting, instructing)

FUNCTIONS

SPEECH ACTSRole of participants

Role of settings

SPOKEN LANGUAGE

• Framing move: right, okay, so, • An exchange: question-

answer-comment (Transaction)• Patterns: opening –answering

and follow-up move (initiation, response, follow-up)

• Structured situation and predictable situations such as in the classroom

Patterns of interaction

Speech acts: elicitations, replies, comments

How people behave and how they cooperate in the management of discourse

Adjacency pairs, turn-taking, conversational openings and closings, acts of politeness

WRITTEN DISCOURSE

Writers have time to think about to say and how to say

it, sentences are usually well formed in a way that the utterances of natural spontaneous talk are not.

• It is possible to find regularities• In paragraphs and their progression of the

whole text. Links cohesion (pronominalization, ellipsis and conjunctions).

• Coherence is the feeling that a text hangs together, that it makes sense

• Assume cause-effect relationship

• Depends on what we as readers bring to the text as what the author puts into

• A set of procedures and the approach of analysis

• Role of the readers and their experience + activate knowledge to make inferences and constantly asses their interpretations

• Textural patterns= illocutionary acts• Textual segments: a clause, sometimes

a sentence, sometimes a whole paragraph

TEXT AND INTERPRETATIONPhenomenon-reason relationship

Clause-relational approachLogical sequence relations

Logical sequencing and matching are the two basic categories of the clause-relational approach.

Texts often contain strong clues or

signals. Relationships between segmentsSupporting evidence (deducing relations)

LARGER PATTERNS IN TEXTS

• Situation-problem-response-evaluation of the response

• Problem-solution pattern• Conjunctions: signaling

devices signposting the text

FOR TEACHERS:

Teacher should learn to evaluate their input and output in the teaching / learning process