Discourse analysis

The ways in which 'texts rely on other texts' is also discussed in

this chapter; that is the way in which we produce and understand texts
in relation to other texts that have come before them as well as other
~ts that may follow them. The chapter concludes with a discussion of
differences between spoken and written discourse. Examples are given
throughout the chapter to 11lustra~ of the points being made. This
chapter, then, introduces notions and lays the ground for issues that
will be discussed in greater detail in the chapters that follow.

1. 1 What is discourse analysis?

Discourse analysis focuses on knowledge about language beyond

flie-wbrG,Ctause, phrase and sentence that is needed for suc-
cessful communication: It looks at patterns of language across
1

texts and considers the relationship between language and the

social and cultural cont~xts in which it is used.Discourse analysis
also considers the ways'. that the use of language presents different
views of the world and different understandings.Jt examines how
the use of language is influenced by relationships between parti-
cipants as well as the effects the use of language has upon social
identities and relations.;Jt also considers how views of the world,
and identities, are constructed through the use of discourse. Dis-
course analysis examines both spoken and written texts.

The term discourse analysis was first introduced by _Zellig Harri~ in

1952 as a way of analysing connected speech and writing. Harris had
two main interests-:-the examination of language beyond the level of the
sentence and the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic
behaviour. He examined the first of these in most detail, aiming to
provide a way for describing how language features are distributed
within texts and the ways in which they are combined in particular
kinds and styles of texts. An early, and important, observation he made
was that:
connected discourse occurs within a particular situation - whether
of a person speaking, or of a conversation, or of someone sitting
down occasionally over the period of months to write a particular
kind of book in a particular literary or scientific tradition.
(Harris 1952: 3)
There are, thus, typical ways of using language in particular situations.
These discourses, he argued, not only share particular meanings, they
also have characteristic linguistic features associated with them. What

2
Discourse analysis

purpose of communication (Richards and Schmidt 2002). The view of

discourse analysis presented in this book will include work in the area
of pragmatics; that is, a consideratto_n of the ways in which people
mean more than what they say in spoken and written discourse.

iii. The discourse structure of texts

Discourse a~alysts are also inter~sted in how people organize w_hat
they say in the sense of what they typically say first, and what they say
next and so on in a conversation or in a piece of writing. This 1s
· something that varies across cultures and is by no means the same
across languages. An email, for example, to me from a Japanese aca-
demic or a member of the administrative staff at a Japanese university,
may start with reference to the weather saying, immediately after Dear
Dr Paltridge something like Greetings from a hot and sizzling Tokyo or
Greetings! It's such a beautifu-1 day today here in Kyoto. I, of course,
may also say this in an email to an overseas colleague but is it not a
ritual requirement in English, as it is in Japanese. There are, thus,
particular things we say, and particular ways of ordering what we say
in particular spoken and written situations an~ in particular languages
and cultures.
Mitchell (195 7) was one the first researchers to examine the dls-
course structure of texts. He looked al the ways in which people order
what they say in buying and selling interactions. He looked at the
overall structure of these kinds of texts, introducing the notion of
stages into discourse analysis; that is the steps that language users go
through as they carry out particular interactions. His interest was more
in the ways in which interactions are organized at an overall textual
.level tna:ri the ways in which language is used in each of the stages of a
text. Mitchell discusses how language is used as, what he calls, co-
operative action and how the meaning of language lies in the situa-
tional context in whicii it is used and in the context of the text as a
whole.
If, then, I am walking along the street in Shanghai near a market
and someone says to me Hello Mister, DVD, I know from the situati_on
that I am in that they are wanting to sell me (most likely fake) DVDs. If I
then go into a market and someone asks what seems to me to be a very
high price for a shirt, I know from my experience with this kind of
interaction that the price they are telling me is just a starting point in
the buying and selling exchange and that I can quite easily end up
buying the shirt for at least half the original price. I know, from my
experience, how the interaction will typically start, what language will
typically be used in the interaction, and how the interaction will

4
What is discourse analysis?

typically end. I also start to learn other typical characteristics of the

interaction. For example, a person will normally only say Hello Mister
DVD (or Hello Mister, Louis Vuitton, etc.) when I am between stalls, no~
when I am in a stall and have started a buying,and selling interaction
with someone.
Other researchers have also investigated recurring patterns in
spoken interactions, although in a ·'somewhat different way from
Mitchell and others following in that tradition. Researchers working in
the area known as conversation analysis have looked at how people
open and close conversatiens and how people ta~e turns and overlap
·their speech in conversations, for example. They have looked at casuaf
conversations, chat, as well as doctor-patient consultations, psychia-
tric interviews and interactions in legal settings. Their interest, in
particular, is in fine-grained analyses of spoken interactions, such as
the use of overlap, pauses, increased volume and pitch and what these
reveal about how people relate to each other in what they are saying
and doing with language. They might, for example, look at how people
'speak over' what someone else is saying and what they are aiming to
do in doing this. They may look at how thi&. varies in different speech
situations and what the speake~s understartd that this means in the
particular situation. In an ordinary conversation, for example, the
overlapping of speech may be an attempt by one speaker to take over
the conversation from the other person. If the other person does not
want them to take over the conversation, they may increase the volume
of what they are saying and just keep on talking, not letting the other
person interrupt them. In a different situation, however, overlapping
speech may just be a case of co-operative conversational behaviour
such as when one speaker gives feedback to another speaker, mirroring
what they are saying as they speak. In some languages, such as Italian
for exampl~, overlap is tolerated much more in spoken interactions
than it is in other languages, such as English.

iv. Cultural ways of speaking and writing

One useful way of looking at the ways in which language is used by
particular cultural groups is through the notion of the ethnography of
communication (Hymes 1964). Hymes started this work in reaction to
the neglect, at the time, of speech in linguistic analyses and anthro-
pological descriptions of cultures. His work was also a reaction to
views of language which took little or no account of the social ~nd
cultural contexts in which language occurs. In particular, he con-
sidered aspects of speech events such as who is speaking to whom,

5
Discourse analysis

about what, for what purpose, where, and wh~n, and how these impact
on how we say and do things in culture-specific settings.
There are, for example, particular cultural ways of buying and
selling things in different cultures. How I buy my lunch at a takeaway
shop in an English-speaking country is different, for example, from
how I might do this in Japan. In an English-speaking country there is
greater ritual use of Please and Thanks on the part of the customer in _
this kind of interaction than there is in Japan: How I buy something in
a-supermarket in an English-speaking country may be more similar to
how I might do this in Japan. The person at the cash register in Japan,
however, will typically say much more than the customer in this sort
of situation, who may indeed say nothing. This does not mean that by
saying nothing the Japanese customer is befng rude. It simply means
that there are culturally different ways of doing things with language in
different cultures. The se uence of events I go through may be the
same in both cultures, but the ways o using anguage in t ese events,
~d other sorts of non-linguistic behaviour, may differ.

v. Communicative competence and discourse

Hymes's notion (1972) of communicative compe.tenc_e_is an important
part of the theoretical background to the ethnography of communica-
tion as well as, more recently, communicative perspectives on lan-
guage teaching and learning. It is also an important notion for the-
discussion of spoken and written discourse. Communicative compe-
tence i:q.yolves not only knowing a language, but also what to say to
whom: and how to say it appropriately in a particular situation. That
is~- it includes not only knowing what is grammatically correct and
what is not, but also when and where to use language appropriately
and with whom. It includes knowledge of rules of speaking, as well as
knowing how to use and respond to different speech aqts; that is how,
for example, to apologize or make a request, as well as how to respond
to an apology~6r·a~request:,~!1 a particular language or culture.
All of this involves taking account of the social and cultural
setting in which the speaking or writing occurs, speakers' and writers'
relationships with each other, and the community's norms, values and
expectations for the kind of interaction, or speech event. When_I buy
something in a shop, for example, I take account of the cultural setting
I am in, the kind of shop I am in and the relationship between me and
the person working there as I carry out the particular interaction. I do
this at the level of language in terms of grammar, vocabulary, discourse
structures and politeness strategies, as well as how I behave physically
in the particular situation.

6
What is discourse analysis?

We can see, then, that discourse analysis is a view of language at

the level of text. Discourse analysis is also a view of language in use;
that is, how, through the use of language, people achieve certain
communicative goals, perform certain communicative acts, partici-
pate in certain communicative events and present .t_hemselves to
others. Discourse analysis considers how people manage interactions
with each other, how people communiGate within particular groups
and societies, as well as how they communicate w:ith other groups, and
with other cultures. It also focuses on ho~ people do things beyond
language, and the ideas and beliefs that they communicate as they
use language.

i. Discourse as the socip/ construction of reality

The view of discourse as the social construction of reality see texts as
communicative units w4ich are embedded in social .and cultural
practices. The texts we write and speak both shape and are shaped by
these practices. Discourse, then, is boJh shaped by the world as well as
shaping the world. Discourse is shaped by language as well as shaping
language. It is shaped by the people who use the language as well as
shaping the language that people use. Discourse is shaped, as well, by
the discourse that has preceded it as well that which might follow it.
Discourse is also shaped by the medium in which it occurs as well as it
shapes the possibilities for that medium. The purpose of the text also
influences the discourse. Discourse also shapes the range of possible
purposes of texts (Johnstone 2002). 1 '

Wetherell's (2001) analysis of th~ BBC Panorama interview with

Princess Diana (BBC 1995) provides an example of the role of language
in the construction (and construal) of the-social world. She shows how,
through the use of language, Princess Diana 'construes' her social .
world, presenting herself as a sharing person and Prince Charles as 'a
proud man who felt low about the attention his wife was getting'
(Wetherell 2001: 15). That is, as she speaks, the Princess creates a view
of herself, and the world in which she lives, in a way that she wishes
people to see. As Wetherell points out:

As Diana and others speak, on this and many other occasions, a

f9rmulation of the world comes into being. The world as described
comes into e:x;istence at that moment. In an important sense, the
social reality constructed in the Panorama interview and in other
places of Diana's happy marriage bucking under media pressure
did not exist before its emergence as discourse.
(Wetherell 2001: 16)

9
Discourse analysis

A further example of this social constructivist view of discourse can be

seen in the text on the cover of the December 2004 Asian edition of
Business Week:
The-three scariest words in U.S. industry: 'The ,China Price'

The feature story in t!iis issue discusses China's ability to undercut

production costs to the extent that, unless US manufacturers are able to
· cut their prices, they can 'kiss their customers goodbye'. This special
report states that for decades economists have insisted that the US
wins from globalization. Now they are not so sure. China, a former US
trade representative says, 'is a tiger on steroids'. A labour economist
from Harvard University says in this series of articles that the wages of
white collar workers in the US 'could get whacked' as a result of this
shift and that white collar workers in the US have a right to be scared
that they may lose their jobs as they are displaced by this 'offshoring'.
Ultimately, the report argues, more than half the 130 million US
workforce could feel the impact of this change in global competition
(Engardio and Roberts 2004). For someone reading about this for the
first time, the competitive edge China has, with its combination of low
prices and high tech, becomes not just part of their social stock of
knowledge but also part of their social reality, a reality constructed (in
part) through discourse.
In a further discussion of changes in contemporary China, Farrer ,
(2002) describes changes in the use and meaning of the expression 'I
love you' among young people in Shanghai. Whereas he says for
people in the West saying 'I love you' may mean the beginning of
commitment to each other, in the past, in China, the effect was just the
opposite. He says that the verbal expression of love for Shanghainese
before the reform era was looked upon with suspicion and suggested
that the person- who said it was unreliable. Nowadays, however,
younger people, he says, have a much more positive attitude towards
saying 'I love you' to each other, although sometimes using Cantonese,
English or J~panese ways of saying this to avoid the embarrassment,
still present for some, in talking romantically in everyday Shang-
hainese. Here we have an example of quite different social realities
being created in different cultures by the use of the same (or seeming! y
same) expression.
Cameron and Kulick (2003: 29) in their discussion of the history
of the terms 'gay', 'lesbian' and 'queer' provide a further example of
this. As they argue:
words in isolation are not the issue. It is in discourse - the use of
language in specific contexts - that words acquire meaning.

10
What is discourse analysis?

Whenever people argue about words, they are also arguing about
the assumptions and values that have clustered around those
words in the course of their history of being used. We cannot
understand the significance
.
of any word unless we attend closely
) /

to its relationship to other words and to the djscou1'Se (indeed, the

competing discourses) in which words are always embedded. And
we must bear in mind that discourse shifts and changes constantly,
which is why arguments about words and their meanings are never
settled once and for all.

ii. Discourse and socially situated identities

When we speak or write we use more than just language to display who
we are, and how we want people to see us. The way we dress, the
gestures we use, and the way/s we act and interact also influence how
we display social identity. Other factors which influence this include
the ways we think, the attitudes we display, and the things we value,
feel and believe. As Gee (2005) argues, the ways we make visible and
recognizable who we are and what we are doing always involves mQre
than just language. It involves acting, interacting and thinking 1n cer-
tain ways. It also involves valuing and talking (or reading and writing)
in appropriate ways with appropriate 'props' ,-at appropriate times, in
appropriate places.
Princess Diana, for example, knows in the Panorama interview,
not only how she is expected to speak in the particular place and at the
particular time, but also how she should dress, how she can use body
language to achieve the effect that she wants, as well as the values,
attitudes, beliefs and emotions it is appropriate for h-er to express (as
well as those it is not appropriate for her to express) in this situation.
That is, she knows how to enact the ciiscourse of a Princess being
interviewed about her private life in the open and public medium of
television. This discours{3, of course, may be different from, but related
to, the discourses she participated in in her role as mother of her
children, and the public and private roles and identities she had as
wife of the Prince of Wales. A given discourse, thus, can involve more
than just the one single identity (Gee 2004).
Discourses, then, involve the socially situated identities that we
enact and recognize in the different settings that we interact in. They
include culture-specific ways of performing and culture-specific ways
of recognizing identities and activities. Discourses also include the
different styles of language that we use to enact and recognize these
identities, that is, different social languages (Gee 1996). Discourses
also involve characteristic ways of acting, interacting and feeling, and

11
Discourse analysis

characteristic ways of showing emotion, gesturing, dressing and pos-

turing. They also involve particular ways of valuing, thinking, believ-
ing, knowing, speaking and listening, reading and writing (Gee 2005).

iii. Discourse and performance

As Gee explains:
a Discourse is a 'dance' that exists in the abstract as a coordinated
pattern of words, deeds, values, beliefs, symbols, tools, objects,
times, and places in the here and now as a performance that is
'recognizable as just such a coordination. Like a dance, the perfor-
mance here and now is.__never exactly the same. It all comes down,
often, to what the 'masters of the dance' will allow to be recognised
or will be forced to recognize as a possible instantiation of the
dance.
(Gee 2005: 19)

This notion of performance and, in particular, performativity, is taken

up by authors such as Butler (1990, 2004), Cameron (1999), and Eckert
and McConnell-Ginet (2003). The notion of performativity derives
from speech act theory and the work of the linguistic philosopher
Austin. It is based on the view that in saying something, we do it
(Cameron and Kulick 2003). That is, we bring states of affairs into
being as a result of what we say and what we do. Examples of this are J
promise and J now pronounce you man and wife. Once I have said J
promise I have committed myself to doing something. Once a priest, or
a marriage celebrant, says I now pronounce you man and wife, the
couple have 'become' man and wife.
Butler, Cameron and others talk about doing gender in much the
way that Gee talks about discourse as performance. Discourses, then,
like the performance of gendered identities, are socially constructed,
rather than 'natural'. People 'are who they are because of (among other
things) the way they talk' not 'because of who they (already) are'
(Cameron 1999: 144). Social identities are, thus, not pre-given, but are
formed in the use of language and the various other ways we display
who we are, what we think, value and feel, etc. The way, for example, a
rap singer uses language, what they rap about and how they present
themselves as they do this, all contributes to their performance and
creation of themselves as a rap singer. They may do this in a particular
way on the streets of New York, in another way in a show in Quebec,
and yet another way in a night club in Seoul. As they do being a rap
singer, they bring into existence, or repeat, their social persona as a rap
singer.

12
What is discourse analysis?

,v. Discourse and intertextua,lity

All texts, whether they are spoken or written, make their meanings
against the background of other texts and things th~t have been said on
other occasions (Lemke 1992). Texts may more or less implicitly or
explicitly cite other texts, they may refer to other te~ts, or they may
allude to other past, or future, texts. We thus 'make sense of every
word, every utterance, or act against the background of (some) other
words, utterances, acts of a similar kind' (Lemke 1995: 23). All texts
are, thus, in an intertextual relationship with other texts.
Umberto Eco (198 7) provides an interesting discussion of inter-
textuality in his chapter 'Casablanca: Cult movies and intertextual
collage'. Eco points out that the film Casablanc_a was made on a very
small budget and in a very short time. As a result its creators were
forced to improvise the plot, mixing a little of everjr'lhing they knew
worked in a movie as they went. The result is what Eco describes as an
'intertextual collage'. For Eco, Casablanca has been so successful
because it is not, in fact, an instance of a single kind of film genre but a
mixing of stereotyped situations that are drawn from a number of
different kinds of film genres. As the film proceeds, he argues, we
recognize the film genres that they recall. We also recognize the plea-
sures we have experienced when we have watched these kinds of
films.
The first few scenes of Casablanca, for example, recall film genres
such as the adventure movie, the patriotic movie, newsreels, war
propaganda movies, gangster movies, action movies, spy movies and
finally, with the appearance of Ingrid Bergman, a romance. The poster
for this movie suggests a number of these film genres, but people who
have seen the movie would most likely describe it as a romance. As
Brown (1992: 7) observes, the chemistry between its two stars Hum-
phrey Bogard and Ingrid Bergman 'was so thick it would make movie
history' and defines Casablanca as movie romance for all time. It is not,
however, just a romance. It is, rather, a mixing of types of film, in
which one of the major themes is the relationship between the two lead
players, set in a world of action, adventure, spies, gangsters and of
course, romance.

1.3 Differences between spoken and written

discourse
There are a number of important differences between spoken and
written language which have implications for discourse analysis. Biber
(1986, 1988) discusses a number of commonly held views on

13
Discourse analysis

the text qualifies the noun group 'several of his roles'. The second
highlighted section qualifies the noun group 'their turgidity'. This use
of qualifiers is also typical of much written scientific discourse (Con-
duit and Modesto 199()) and adds to the length of noun groups in
written discourse. -
Although Casablanca defines Bogey for all time as the existential-
hero-in-spite-of-himself, several of his roles just preceding this one
(notably High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon) had prepared his
fans for the misanthropy and climatic selflessness he would
embody as Rick Blaine ... their turgidity as sexual partners works,
intentionally or not, to the film's advantage.

The next extract, also frbm Casablanca (Koch 1996: 12 7), is an

example of the typically low level of nominalization and shorter noun
groups in spoken discourse. The noun groups, shown in italics in this
extract, are simpler and less dense than in the previous example. There
are no examples of grammatical metaphor, nor any examples of qua-
lifiers following a noun in this extract:
Ilsa: Can I tell you a story, Rick?
Rick: Has it got a wow finish?
Ilsa: I don't know the finish yet.
Rick: Well, go on, tell it. Maybe one will come to you as you
go along
(TM & © Turner Entertainment Co. (s06))

iv. Explicitness in spoken and wriffen discourse

A further commonly held view is that writing is more explicit than
speech. This depends on the purpose of the text and, again, is not an
absolute. A person can state something directly, or infer something, in
both speaking and writing, depending upon what they want the lis-
tener or reader to understand, and how direct they wish to be. In the
following extract from Casablanca (Koch 1996: 55), Yvonne asks if she
will see Rick that evening. Rick clearly wishes her to infer 'probably
not'. He has not said this explicitly, but it is most likely what he
means:
Yvonne: Will I see you tonight?
Rick: (matter-of-factly) I never make plans that far ahead.
(TM & © Turner Entertainment Co. (s06))

Yvonne has to work out Rick's intended meaning from the situation
she is in, what she knows about Rick, and the fact that she asked a 'yes/
no' question but has not been given a 'yes/no' answer. That is, she

16