From Sentence to text

Chapter 7: Discourse Analysis

by Heidrun Dorgeloh

Discourse analysis is one of the disciplines that deals with the study of language use and it therefore in part overlaps with pragmatics. But it is also about how sentences, the most complex units within the language system, are actually put to use and combined with each other, i.e. are used as utterances. Most utterances we make do not come as isolated sentences, but as longer stretches of language use, i.e. as text and discourse. In fact, the term 'discourse' has come to be used to refer to all units of language use whatsoever (even discourse over longer stretches of time, such as a political or scientific discourse relating to one particular topic), and with that integrates many aspects of the situational and socio-cultural context of utterances. By contrast, it is the notion of 'text' that puts the emphasis on the linguistic unit that is larger than a single sentence and therefore studies more of the co-text of an utterance. In that sense text can be seen as a subcategory of discourse: "A text is a passage of discourse which is coherent with respect to the context of situation [...]; and it is coherent with respect to itself, and therefore cohesive" (Halliday & Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English). Many elements in a language mark this textual cohesion, while others contribute to its overall coherence with regard to its context, especially the background knowledge on the part of the hearer or established by prior co-text. In particular, this concerns the appropriate "packaging" of our messages within a text, also known as information-structuring. While the lexical and grammatical devices a language has to offer to establish cohesion and coherence apply to spoken as well as written discourse, other principles of textual organisation are only found in spoken, interactive discourse; their analysis is grounded in a separate discipline termed conversation analysis.
Cohesion

Cohesion refers to relationships between the linguistic elements in a text, i.e. between words, phrases, and clauses, and other, the so-called cohesive devices, such as pronouns and conjunctions (serving, then, as textual connectors), or other words and phrases that co-occur with or can be left out due to previous text. Cohesive relationships can thus take the form of co-reference, conjunction, collocation (more often referred to as lexical cohesion), substitution, and ellipsis. Cohesive devices may also reflect the semantic and pragmatic relations between sentences, paragraphs and even longer stretches of a text; typical discourse relations of this kind are additive, temporal, causal, and adversative.
Coherence

While cohesion (or internal coherence) is in most kinds of discourse a necessary condition for textuality, it is in principle never sufficient. In the first place a text has to have (external) coherence, i.e. it has to be consistent with the discourse situation in which it takes place. This implies:

* having a recognisable discourse topic
* having a recognisable discourse function, and
* having a plausible discourse structure.

If coherence of this kind does not show up overtly in the text (i.e. via cohesion), it usually comes about through mutual knowledge that both the speaker/writer and the hearer/ reader share; this knowledge constitutes a part of our general world knowledge, organised in structures such as frames, scripts, and schemata, and serves as background knowledge for the establishment of coherence.
Information structure

From a discourse and with that from a communicative perspective, sentences within a text consist of two pieces of information, i.e. one part of the sentence (more often than not its subject) is what the sentence is about, i.e. its topic, while what is said about this topic is the comment within the clause. The most important, i.e. the most informative, part of this comment is called the sentence focus. These categories therefore describe the communicative structure of an utterance; in part, they overlap with the information structure within a sentence, i.e. with the fact that certain parts of it contain information that is already familiar to the hearer/ reader and therefore given, while other parts are relatively new and then usually constitute the most relevant part of the utterance at a particular point of the discourse. In English, it is the unmarked organisational principle to put the given information first and the new information at the end of the sentence. In this way, the focus of a message usually occurs in end-position; this principle is referred to as principle of end-focus. Since this newer, more informative part of the sentence is usually also longer and syntactically more complex, it is also called the principle of end-weight.
Non-canonical constructions as discourse strategies

English being an analytic language with a fixed, canonical word order (SVO) leaves little room for marking textual coherence and information structure through word order variation. There are, however, certain syntactic constructions which help to follow the above-mentioned principles of communicative and information structure; their occurrence in a text is usually motivated by the discourse conditions in a text, which is why they can be said to function as discourse strategies. Notable constructions are the passive, clefting constructions, the fronting of sentence elements, as well as the inversion of the subject and the main verb.
Conversation analysis

Apart from these general principles of discourse organisation that apply to both spoken and written discourse, some organisational principles govern only in interactive, which is usually spoken, conversational discourse. Most notably, conversations follow a pattern whereby speakers regularly "take turns"; this principle is referred to as turn-taking in conversation. Within this overall conversational pattern, a range of other governing principles has been observed, such as strategies for getting and holding the (conversational) floor at adequate transition relevance places (TRPs), following the appropriate sequencing of verbal actions in various kinds of adjacency pairs (such as question/answer pairs, pairs of greetings, etc.), as well as the proper insertion of opening and closing sequences which indicate that and where conversations start and end. Other conversational devices that occur throughout most interactive discourse are repairs and re-starts, through which conversationalists respond to actual or potential upcoming difficulties, pausing, as well as a range of linguistic expressions that serve as hedges (i.e. mitigating the strength of an utterance, by using modal auxiliaries, for example) or politeness expressions rather than carrying proper information.
Reading

Finegan, Edward (2004). Language: Its Structure and Use. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers. Ch. 8.

Paltridge, Brian. (2006). Discourse Analysis. London: continuum, ch. 5+6.

Yule, George (2006). The Study of Language: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ch. 12.
Advanced Reading

Georgakopoulou, Alexandra-Dionysis Goutsos (2004). Discourse Analysis: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Renkema, Jan (2004). Introduction to Discourse Studies. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Schiffrin, Deborah (1994). Approaches to Discourse. Blackwell.

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02/10/2011, 17:43