Nama : Fitri Delviani

Npm : A1B022086
Class : 6C
Summary Discourse Analysis

Discourse and Society

This chapter will discuss, in more detail, important aspects of the social and cultural
settings of spoken and written discourse. It will start with a discussion of the notions of discourse
communities and communities of practice. It will then discuss the various ways we express our
social identity through discourse.

2.1 Discourse communities and communities of practice

Two key notions in the area of discourse analysis are the concepts of discourse community
and communities of practice. Swales (1990) provides a set of characteristics for identifying a group
of people as members of a particular discourse community. This might include meetings,
newsletters, casual conversations or a range of other types of written and/or spoken
communication. That is, the discourse community will have particular ways of communicating
with each other and ways of getting things done that have developed through time. There will also
be a threshold level of expertise in the use of the genres the discourse community uses for its
communications for someone to be considered a member of that community.
Swales (2016), more recently, has added two further features to his definition of discourse
communities. A discourse community, he argues, develops a sense of ‘silential relations’ (Becker
1995), in that there are things that do not need to be said or spelt out between members of the
group. A telephone call centre is an example of a discourse community. Cameron’s (2000) study
of telephone call centres in the UK suggests what some of the characteristics of this kind of
discourse community might be. She found, for example, that the telephone operators in the call
centres were trained to communicate with customers on the phone in very particular ways, often
following scripts.

2.2 Language as social and local practice

Speakers, then, often have a repertoire of social identities and discourse community
memberships. They may also have a linguistic repertoire that they draw on for their linguistic
interactions. That is, they may have a number of languages or language varieties they use to interact
in within their practicular communities.
An example of the connection between language variation and group membership that can
be seen is Qing Zhang’s research (2005, 2008) into the language of managers in state-owned and
foreign-owned businesses in Beijing. In her (2005) paper ‘A Chinese yuppie in Beijing’, she
identifies a number of pronunciation features in the use of language by managers of the foreign-
owned companies that, she argues, are signs of the development of a cosmopolitan variety of
Mandarin Chinese that is associated with a new transnational professional identity.
Zhang (2012) further discusses emerging varieties of Chinese in her study of the use of
language by Chinese television talk show hosts. She shows how, through the use of innovative
phonological, lexical and syntactic features, as well as a mixing of English and Mandarin, a new
cosmopolitan style of Mandarin is employed.
Dong and Blommaert (2009) and Dong (2011) examine language variation in China in the
context of mass internal migration and the way in which this sheds light on the construction of
migrant identities. They show how limitations in workers’ proficiency in Putonghua often present
obstacles for them, giving an example of a worker who developed a linguistic repertoire which
drew on a typical Beijing accent, near-Putonghua, and an accent from Southern China, in order to
navigate these obstacles, as well as to ‘avoid being misrecognized or silenced’ (Dong and
Blommaert 2009: 20).
Each of these examples highlights the point made by Litossoleti (2006), Eckert (2008) and
Pennycook (2010) that language is both a social (Litossoleti and Eckert) and a local (Pennycook)
practice, and the meanings that are made through the use of language are based in the ideologies,
activities and beliefs of what it means to be in a particular place, at a particular time and in a
particular setting. In the words of Eckert:
people fashion their ways of speaking, moving their styles this way or that as they move
their personae through situations from moment to moment, from day to day, and through
the life course. (2008: 463)

2.3 Discourse and gender

Early work in the analysis of gender and discourse looked at the relationship between the
use of language and the biological category of sex. This has now moved to an examination of the
ways language is used in relation to the socially constructed category of gender. Gender, then, is
not just a natural and inevitable consequence of one’s biological sex (Weatherall 2002). It is, rather,
‘part of the routine, ongoing work of everyday, mundane, social interaction’, that is, ‘the product
of social practice’ (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003: 5). Gender, further, as Swann (2002: 47)
has pointed out, has come to be seen as highly fluid, or less well defined than it once appeared. In
line with gender theory more generally, researchers interested in language and gender have focused
increasingly on plurality and diversity amongst female and male language users, and on gender as
performativity – something that is ‘done’ in context, rather than a fixed attribute.
2.4 Discourse and identity
A person may have a number of identities, each of which is more important at different
points in time. They may have an identity as a woman, an identity as a mother, an identity as
someone’s partner and an identity as an office worker, for example.
The earliest studies into the relationship between language and identity were based on a
variationist perspective, that is, they looked at the relationship between social variables such as
social class in terms of variation in the use of linguistic variables such as certain features of
pronunciation, or the use of non-standard grammar.
Thomas found that ‘the girls who gain and exercise power in their online worlds are those
who know how to use and manipulate words, images and technology’ (Thomas 2004: 359), which
gave them authority and a sense of belonging to the group. A boy who was a member of the group,
Face Off, spent days away from the palace preparing highly complex images for the site so that he
could project an identity as a highly capable online participant to new people in the group.

2.4.1 Identity and spoken discourse

A common way in which people create, express and establish social (and other) identities is
through the genre of casual conversation. As Eggins and Slade (2005: 6) argue: Despite its
sometimes aimless appearance and apparently trivial content, casual conversation is, in fact, a
highly structured, functionally motivated, semantic activity. Motivated by interpersonal needs
continually to establish who we are, how we relate to others, and what we think of how the world
is, casual conversation is a critical linguistic site for the negotiation of such important dimensions
of our social identity as gender, generational location, sexuality, social class membership,
ethnicity, and subcultural and group affiliations.

2.4.2 Identity and written discourse

Identity is as much an issue in written discourse as it is in spoken discourse. This is particularly
the case in student academic writing. Hyland (2002b) discusses the view that is often presented to
students that academic writing is faceless, impersonal discourse. Students are told, he says, ‘to
leave their personalities at the door’ when they write and not use personal pronouns such as ‘I’
which show what is being said is the student’s view or place in things. As Hyland (2002b: 352)
argues, ‘almost everything we write says something about us and the sort of relationship that we
want to set up with our readers’. Indeed, one of the ways that expert academic writers do this, in
some academic disciplines at least, is through the use of the pronoun ‘I’.
2.5 Second language identities
Kanno and Norton (2003) and Norton and Toohey (2011) discuss identity in relation to
second language learners’ imagined communities, arguing that their desired memberships of
imagined communities influence their motivation for learning and the investment they make in the
learning.
These imagined communities, Norton and Toohey (2011) argue, may have a greater impact
on their investment in language learning than the contexts in which they are currently engaged.
Teachers, however, need to learn more about their learners’ imagined communities and ‘who they
want to become’ – that is, their imagined identities – if they really want to help them achieve their
long-term, rather than just their short-term, language learning goals (Belcher and Lukkarila 2011).
English as a lingua franca, for many people, is their principal use of English whether the
communication is between two non-native speakers or native and non-native speakers of English.
Its use is the result of increased language contact between speakers of different languages as in the
examples described earlier. English as a lingua franca, however, is not the language of any
particular speech community in the traditional idea of a speech community described earlier in this
chapter. It is the language of ‘multifarious mobilities’ (Mauranen 2018: 108) that is a characteristic
of the contemporary world. English as a lingua franca communities are not based on physical
closeness between speakers nor are they close-knit communities.
The use of English as a lingua franca is common in international business settings where
boundaries between native speakers, second language speakers and foreign language users often
become blurred (Nickerson 2013).

2.6 Discourse and ideology

The values and ideologies which underlie texts tend to be ‘hidden’ rather than overtly
stated. As Threadgold (1989) observes, texts are never ideology-free nor are they objective. Nor
can they be separated from the social realities and processes they contribute to maintaining.
An area of research where this has been taken up is the examination of media discourse.
KhosraviNik (2005), for example, discusses discourses of refugees, asylum seekers and
immigrants in the UK press. He shows how while The Times refrains from explicitly reproducing
stereotypes in its discussion of these groups, the Daily Mail, in general, perpetuates existing
stereotypes, thus reproducing negative attitudes among its readers. In KhosraviNik’s view, while
the Daily Mail reflects existing prejudices, The Times creates and introduces newer versions of
prejudice.
Montgomery (2011) focuses on different representations of the ‘war on terror’, showing
how in UK newspapers the expression war on terror is often cited in quotation marks, suggesting
the newspapers treat the term as being somewhat problematic, attributing the term to leading
politicians rather than taking it on as part of their own discourse.
2.7 Summary
This chapter has looked at discourse analysis from a number of social and other
perspectives. It has introduced several notions that are important for discussions of language from
a discourse perspective. It has also aimed to show how some of these notions have changed since
they were first introduced (such as language and gender and language and identity) and how these
notions are currently viewed in discussions of the use of spoken and written discourse. The chapter
which follows looks at discourse from a pragmatics perspective and provides further detail on how
language does what it does and means more than it says in the context of our day-to-day
communications.