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A1: Why people don’t say what they mean and mean what they say
One of the most important reasons why it is useful to learn about discourse analysis is the fact that people don’t always say what they mean, and people don’t always mean what they say. In fact, people quite frequently don’t say what they mean or mean what they say, and so social interaction is a complex process of ‘guessing’ about other people’s meanings and intentions.
For example, if I say to you ‘Let’s get together for lunch sometime’ I might be inviting you to lunch, or I might be just trying to end the conversation in a polite way. This invitation might be serious or casual. It might even be a command to have lunch with me. ‘Sometime’ might mean next week or some unspecified time in the distant future. It might mean that I have something important to discuss with you and having lunch is just an excuse to do this. I might be inviting you to lunch because I harbour some hidden romantic feelings for you, or I might be inviting you out of a sense of obligation.
The way you interpret this utterance depends a lot on our relationship, the context in which it is uttered and what was said in our conversation before it was uttered.
But why, you might ask, must we suffer through all of this ambiguity. If only we were clear and precise in our language we would avoid the need to do all of this guesswork and also avoid the need to study discourse analysis. And so, I should only say ‘Let’s get together for lunch sometime’ when I really want to have lunch with you, and if I want to do something else, I should say so, like ‘Let’s get together to discuss discourse analysis’.
There are several good reasons why we don’t say what we mean and mean what we say. The first is that would be much more difficult than being ambiguous. Imagine having to be exact and precise about everything thing you said, for example, having to say something like: ‘Let’s get together to have a meal which will serve as an opportunity to discuss our relationship and the fact that I fancy you. This meal will occur at midday and on some date in the near future which I prefer not to specify since I don’t want you to think me too pushy.’ The fact is that not saying what we mean is much more efficient, and we can often depend on the person we are talking to to be able to guess what we mean with minimal input.
Another reason we don’t always say what we mean or mean what we say is that it's dangerous. We may risk hurting someone else’s feelings or risking embarrassment. Not saying what we really mean allows us to be polite, and it also gives us some ‘wiggle room’ in potentially difficult situations. If I fancy you, and I say ‘I fancy you – please go on a date with me’ there is always the possibility that you will reject me, which will be embarrassing for both of us. By just saying ‘Let’s get together for lunch sometime’ I am able to express that I fancy you in an indirect way, and I avoid the possibility of being rejected. It is unlikely that you will reject ever having lunch with me, and even if you do, I can always rationalise it by saying that it's not me that you object to but something else – maybe you are on a diet and make it a habit of skipping lunch.
But the most important reason that people don’t say what they mean and mean what they say from the point of view of a discourse analyst is that meaning is not the most important thing about saying. When we say things, what we are trying to do (or get other people to do) is usually much more important than what we ‘mean’. In fact, very often, the best way to get something done is not to say what you mean. If I want to get you interested in going out with me, maybe the best way to do that is not to tell you how much I fancy you (which might scare you off), but to treat the whole thing in a rather casual way.
Finally, one of the main reasons that we don’t say what we mean or mean what we say is that life is more fun that way. One of the things that gives richness to human relationships is the space we create in our discourse for multiple meanings and multiple interpretations. Ambiguity allows us to joke and flirt and bargain and do many of the other things that make life worth living.
A2: Other perspectives on what makes a text a text
In Unit A2 I explained that the three main things that make a text a text are cohesion (the fact that different parts of the text are joined together in certain meaningful relationships), coherence (the fact that the text fits into some overall pattern that is recognisable to readers) and intertextuality (the fact that the text is related in some way to other texts).
Although these three ingredients are generally thought of as being fairly essential for ‘texture’, other scholars have pointed out other defining qualities that texts have. The text linguists Robert de Beaugrande and Wolfgang Dressler, for example, point out seven qualities that they believe to be essential if a collection of words and sentences is to be considered a text. Three of these, cohesion, coherence and intertextuality, we have already covered. The additional four are: intentionality, acceptability, informativity and situatationality. All of these aspects of texts are also extremely important to discourse analysts and are covered in great detail in later units of the book.
Intentionality has to do with the attitude or purpose on the part of a writer. Most people believe that some kind of intention to make a text is essential for something to be regarded as such. In other words, ‘accidental’ utterances like coughing fits cannot be considered texts. A focus on the intention of speakers is a very important part of speech act theory, which will be introduced in Unit B5. Others, however, might take issue with placing too much focus on the intentions of the text producer, pointing out that text receivers (hearers and readers) play a big role in imputing intentionality onto a text. You may have ‘not meant anything’ by your fit of coughing, but if I interpret it as an evasive technique to avoid answering an embarrassing question, then it becomes a text of sorts.
Acceptability, which might also be called ‘appropriateness’, has to do with how a collection of words or sentences fits into what speakers and hearers or readers and writers deem useful or relevant in particular situations. The text on a stop sign sitting in a warehouse somewhere may be a kind of a text, but since it is not useful or relevant to those outside of the context of the warehouse, they do not really consider it a text (see below). At the same time, most public places are full of discourse that most people who inhabit those places do not regard as texts –the writing on the underside of furniture or serial numbers on electrical equipment. Of course, whether you consider these pieces of text texts depends a lot upon who you are and what you are doing, a matter I will explore in some detail when we consider mediated discourse analysis in Unit A8.
Informativity refers to the amount or quality of new information that a group of words or sentences delivers to a hearer or reader. While we might not go so far as to say that a newspaper article containing ‘old news’ is no longer a text, we may not regard it as a text with as much value as one capable of informing us of something we do not already know. That's why we use yesterday's paper for non-communicative functions like wrapping fish. There is, however, a danger in thinking about texts only in terms of information. As we will see in Units A4, A6, B4 and B6, conveying information is only part of what texts do. Texts also play an important role in establishing and maintaining relationships among people. In fact, many of the most important texts in our daily lives like greeting sequences contain very little new information, but are very important in holding together our web of social relationships.
Situationality is probably the most relevant of de Beaugrande and Dressler’s categories for discourse analysts. As I discussed in Unit A1, discourse is always in some way situated, and much of its meaning and its effect on the world is a consequence of how words and sentences interact with situations. A recurring theme in this book is that ‘discourse’ results from the connections that are formed between language and the various elements that make up social situations (people, places, actions, objects, times of day, etc.).
Texts and situations
When we talk about texture being the result of connections being made between different elements in a text (such as words, sentences or pictures), we are implying that it is impossible to have a text which only has one element. Some people might point out that there are, in fact, a lot of texts that appear to only have one element. A stop sign, for example, only has one word, ‘STOP’, and it undoubtedly has meaning and so is undoubtedly a text.
Although there is only one word in this text, it does not mean that there is only one element. There are other features of this text that must be connected to the word ‘STOP’ in order for it to have the meaning: ‘stop your car here’. One element is the colour red, and the other is the octagonal shape. And so what makes a stop sign mean ‘stop’ is the relationship among the word, the colour and the shape of the sign.
There are other relationships that are also crucial if this text is going to have the meaning ‘stop your car here’. The most important is where the text is situated. If this text is on the wall of your bedroom or in the warehouse of the Highway Department, it is still a stop sign, but it does not have the meaning ‘stop your car here’. Another crucial ingredient is for a person inside a car to read the sign. In the absence of a car and a driver, the meaning ‘stop your car here’ cannot be made.
The point I’m trying to make is that it is impossible for just one word in the absence of any connection to other words, symbols, situations or people to be considered a text. On the most basic level, at least two elements need to be present to create meaning: a thing (such as an object, a person, a place or an idea) and an action. The word ‘milk’ does not make sense by itself. It is only when combined with an action (e.g. ‘We need to buy milk’) that it is meaningful. By the same token ‘stop’ does not make any sense unless you have something or somebody to do the stopping (a car and driver)
Useful links
Introduction to Text Linguistics by Robert de Beaugrande and Wolfgang Dressler
What Is a Text? by Joel Gilberthorpe (a more critical approach)
A3: Discourse communities, speech communities and communities of practice
The idea of ‘community’ is very important in helping us understand the relationship between discourse and the social groups that use it. The way the word community is used, however, is different for different schools of discourse analysis, and these different definitions of community help to illuminate different aspects of social organisation and the role of discourse in it.
As was discussed in Unit A3, genre analysts speak of ‘discourse communities’, groups of people who are united by their use of specific types of texts to reach shared goals. For genre analysts, genres are like ‘membership cards’ to discourse communities, ways of showing that you belong. Doctors use medical charts and prescriptions to do the work of curing people and to show other doctors and their patients that they are ‘qualified’ to do this. Solicitors use contracts and legal briefs to defend people’s rights to show judges and clients that they are capable of doing this. These different genres, then, not only help the people in these groups get certain things done; they also help to define these groups, to keep out people who do not belong in them and to regulate the relationships between the people who do belong.
You might also come across discourse analysts using the term ‘speech community’. This term is much more associated with sociolinguists and ethnographers of communication (see Units A7 and B7). The purely linguistic definition of ‘speech community’ is all the people who speak a particular language or dialect. The problem with this definition is that it shifts our focus away from people and makes the definition of a language (or dialect) the same as the definition of a community. This definition is taken to its extreme in the work of linguist Noam Chomsky who proposed a ‘completely homogeneous speech community’ (1965: 3–4) as one basis for his study of language. Of course, the ‘completely homogeneous speech community’ doesn’t really exist. It is an abstraction, a theoretical construct designed to facilitate a theoretical approach to language. Discourse analysts, on the other hand, prefer their ‘speech communities’ to exist in the real world.
Definitions of ‘speech community’ that are more relevant for discourse analysts focus not just on language but also on how people use language to conduct their day-to-day affairs. This is the approach taken by Labov, who emphasises not the shared language of members of a ‘speech community’, but their shared norms for using language. He writes (1972: 120–1):
The speech community is not defined by any marked agreement in the use of language elements, so much as by participation in a set of shared norms; these norms may be observed in overt types of evaluative behavior and by the uniformity of abstract patterns of variation which are invariant in respect to particular levels of usage.
This definition shifts the emphasis away from linguistic criteria to things that individuals themselves feel make them members of the same community.
A similar emphasis can be seen in the definition of ‘speech community’ promoted by Dell Hymes and used by those applying his model of the ethnography of communication. For Hymes, a ‘speech community’ is a group of people who share both a 'variety' of language and a set of expectations about how that variety will be used in day-to-day social life. Hymes defines ‘speech community’ as a group of people who share ‘rules’ for when and how to speak (1972: 54). In this formulation, people who speak American English would probably not be considered a ‘speech community’ since different people who speak American English may have very different ideas about how to speak it in different situations. A more likely candidate for the label of ‘speech community’ might be a group a skateboarders who not only share a common language but also share a common way of using that language to organise their skateboarding activities (see Unit C7).
Still other discourse analysts use the term ‘communities of practice’ when they refer to the groups that they study. The idea of ‘community of practice’ was developed by educational psychologists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) to describe the groups within which people learn. Their argument was that learning is not just about learning particular skills or knowledge, but learning how to become a part of a group of people who do things together.
This concept of ‘communities of practice’ was later taken up by sociolinguists Penny Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet (1992), especially in their work on gender in language. They define ‘community of practice’ as: ‘an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagements in some common endeavor. Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations – in short, practices – emerge in the course of their joint activity around the endeavor’ (1992: 87).
This particular definition of community highlights the situated nature of discourse mentioned in Unit A1. It also reminds us that discourse, power and social identity are all products of concrete actions that people take in the real world.
The idea of ‘communities of practice’ is particularly useful for discourse analysts interested in the relationship between language and what people do. Consequently, it was a concept that appears prominently in the work of Ron Scollon (1998) and others working in mediated discourse analysis.
References
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Eckert, P. and McConnell-Ginet, S. (1992). Communities of practice: Where language, gender, and power all live. In K. Hall, M. Bucholtz and B. Moonwomon (eds.) Locating Power: Proceedings of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference. Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group, 89–99. Available online at: www.stanford.edu/~eckert/PDF/Communitiesof.pdf
Hymes, D. (1972). Models of the interaction of language and social life. In J. Gumperz and D. Hymes (eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston.
Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scollon, R. (1998). Mediated discourse as social interaction. London: Longman
Useful links
A4: Discourses and cultural models
In Unit A1 I introduced James Paul Gee’s ideas of ‘Discourses’ (with a capital D) and ‘cultural models’. Discourses are combinations of ways of saying, ways of acting and ways of thinking that express certain ideologies or ‘versions of reality’.
Discourses include sets of (often unstated) rules and assumptions about what is good or bad, right or wrong, normal or abnormal as well as how people ought to treat other people in different kinds of situations. Since these rules are often unstated, they can have a powerful effect on us – rather than regarding them as ‘rules of a language’ we regard them as ‘rules of nature’. We forget that these rules were invented by human beings in societies and come to think of them as ‘absolutely true’. Gee calls these sets of rules ‘cultural models’.
Cultural models provide us with frameworks for how the world is ‘supposed to be’. When things or people we encounter fit into these models, we think of them as ‘good’ or ‘normal’. When they don’t fit into these models, we think of them as ‘bad’ or ‘abnormal’.
One of the biggest problems with ideologies and the models they provide is that they limit the way we look at reality. Another big problem is that they marginalise certain people or groups of people which do not fit into our models (marginalise means to push someone or something to the ‘margins’, to exclude them).
One way to make sure that we are controlling our models rather than the models controlling us is to try to make them explicit; that is, to try to clearly state the unstated rules and then to analyse them.
Gee gives as an example of cultural models the sets of rules and expectations that university-aged women on many American campuses use when they talk about and judge males, especially potential romantic partners. This cultural model, he says, includes the following rules:
- In the prototypical relationship, the two parties are equally attractive and equally attracted to one another.
- If the discrepancy in relative attractiveness is not great, adjustments are possible.
- A relatively unattractive male can compensate for his lesser standing by making extraordinary efforts to treat the female well and make her happy.
- A relatively unattractive female can compensate by scaling down her expectations of good treatment.
Gee goes on to observe that women often label males in terms of this model. For example, males who are attractive or popular with women and who take advantage of their attractiveness to gain affection and intimacy without having to give back the friendship or caring that would normally follow mutual attraction are called by such names as ‘Don Juans’, ‘jocks’, ‘chauvinists’, ‘hunks’, ‘studs’ and ‘playboys’, terms often, though not always, used as insults.
In contrast, males who are not attractive to females and who are not adept at pleasing them and pursue a female who is more attractive than they are, sometimes hanging around and becoming an embarrassment to the woman they are attracted to, lowering her prestige and forcing her to treat them badly are labelled by such terms as ‘jerks’, ‘turkeys’, ‘nerds’ and ‘wimps’.
What is a Discourse?
Watch this YouTube video by John Scott explaining what Gee means by ‘Discourses’.
Useful links
A5: Pragmatics and conversation analysis
As discussed in Unit A5, pragmatics and conversation analysis represent two different approaches to how we solve the problem of understanding what other people mean in conversations. These two different approaches are based on two fundamentally different ideas about what is most important in this process of sense making.
Scholars in the field of pragmatics, including speech act theorists, focus primarily on how the resources speakers have for expressing certain meanings and intentions interact with the social conditions in which the resources are used and the social identities of those who use them. For them, conversation is about ‘logic’. People make sense of other people by taking into account various factors (how certain meanings are usually made, what the probable intentions of speakers are, what is possible in particular situations) and coming to a conclusion about what they probably mean.
Conversation analysists, on the other hand, are more interested in order than in logic. They focus more on how people make and interpret meanings by exploiting the orderly structure of conversation, especially its sequential structure.
These two different approaches to conversation mean that discourse analysts in these different camps have different ideas about how to go about studying conversation and what constitutes appropriate data. While both use ‘naturally occurring’ conversations as data, those approaching the problem from the point of view of pragmatics might supplement that data with other things like interviews with the people involved, questionnaires, experimental or elicited conversations, and even conversations from literature or films. Conversation analysts, on the other hand, are very strict about what they consider valid data. They will only accept transcripts from naturally occurring conversations.
Why is pragmatics important?
Watch this YouTube video in which the famous linguist David Crystal explains why pragmatics is so important
‘Doing being ordinary’: conversation analysis and its ethnomethodological roots
Conversation analysis (CA) has its roots in a branch of sociology founded by a scholar named Harold Garfinkle called ethnomethodology. Perhaps the best way to describe ethnomethodology is that it is the study of how people act normal – in other words, how people use shared common-sense knowledge and reasoning to conduct their everyday affairs. We might think acting normal is not such a big deal, but it is actually a very complicated thing, and something that varies a lot from culture to culture. Understanding how people ‘do being normal’ (as Garfinkle put it) is an important basis for understanding how and why social interaction works (or does not work). Studying being normal is also a good way to remind yourself that ‘being normal’ is not something that you are, but something that you do, and something that you have to learn to do. Children are not as good at ‘doing being normal’ as adults.
Like ethnomethodology, the goal of CA is to determine the unspoken, shared understandings and methods of common-sense reasoning that guide and orient participants’ actions in a given context. Its focus, however, is much narrower, emphasising in particular the mechanics or procedural rules of everyday conversation.
Developed collaboratively by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, CA starts from the premise that conversation is not random, but has an underlying order. In fact, conversation analysts believe that the people use the rules of conversation to jointly construct an orderly world.
The main principles of CA are as follows:
- Conversation is a kind of activity with which people bring order to the world.
- This activity is made up of a sequence of orderly actions (utterances are ‘doings’ in which certain things are accomplished like greeting, asking, leave-taking, etc.).
- These actions are governed by rules or sets of expectations which people share with one another
- These rules determine things like how we begin and end conversations, who gets to talk about what and when, and how we know when it is our turn to talk and when it is not.
As I said in Unit A5, the core of conversation analysis is the exploration of the sequential structures of social action which shape the world, turn by turn. According to Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson social interaction is basically arranged in pairs of utterances – what one person says basically determines what the next person can say.
But conversation analysts are not just interested in adjacency pairs. They are also interested in other aspects of the mechanics of conversation. Two of the most difficult problems we encounter when we study conversations (and when we have them) is understanding how people manage to successfully start conversations and how they manage to successfully end them.
Openings
The most important thing about any conversation is beginning it. According to Schegloff, openings of conversations consist of three distinct moves:
- The opening of the ‘channel’ (consisting of a summons–answer sequence)
- An identification sequence
- A topic negotiation sequence
For example, a typical phone conversation might go something like this:
Summons–Answer Sequence |
Ring Hello? |
| Identification Sequence | Hi, Rodney, this is Iris. Oh hi, Iris ... |
| Topic Negotiation Sequence | What can I do for you? I’m calling to ask some questions about the assignment. |
Of course, often conversational openings are much more complicated than this. They must always, however, contain these three sequences in some form or another.
One thing that often complicates openings is that people often insert some kind of ‘facework’ in between the identification sequence and the introduction of the topic. This is especially true in situations where people are friends, one person has power over another person or the topic involves some kind of face threatening act.
Different forms of communication tend to come with different rules about who speaks first, how the identification sequence is managed and who is supposed to introduce the topic. In a phone conversation like that above, for example, the person who is called speaks first, but the caller is generally expected to identify themselves and to introduce the topic. These rules might be different for different forms of conversation (like mobile phones in which the identification sequence is often made unnecessary by caller display and replaced by a location sequence – ‘where are you?’ – or ICQ where a person who is summoned is just as likely to introduce the topic as the person who issues the summons). In face-to-face conversation between friends, the identification sequence is often very subtle, consisting of ‘recognising’ the other person and ‘ratifying’ the relationship
Closings
One of the hardest things about having a conversation is knowing how to end it. This is because ending a conversation works against the ‘pairwise’ organisation of talk (see Unit D5). Different kinds of conversations end in different ways. Conversations that are instrumental in nature (such as asking a teacher some questions about an assignment) are easier to end – they end naturally when the purpose of the conversation is fulfilled. Casual conversation between friends is much harder to end, as you probably know from you own experience. People usually start ending the conversation well before the actual closing, offering what we call ‘pre-closings’ – signals to the person they are talking to that they want the conversation to end. This is sometimes done rather directly (‘Well, I’ve got a lot of homework to do’) or in rather subtle ways with things like minimal responses (not elaborating too much or raising new topics), speed and intonation (slower, lower) and use of discourse markers (‘so’, ‘well’). One of the most common ways to end a conversation ‘politely’ is by making it seem like the other person wants to end it (‘I know you’re busy, so I won’t bother you anymore’). Ending a conversation abruptly creates the implicature that you are angry at the other person or do not feel very close to them (which is okay if you really are not very close to them).
Useful links
Pragmatics (from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Methodological Issues in Conversation Analysis by Paul ten Have
A6: Strategic interaction and the presentation of the self: Erving Goffman’s contribution to discourse analysis
As I said in Unit A6, the two most important analytical constructs used in interactional sociolinguistics – face and frames – come from the work of the American sociologist Erving Goffman. Goffman, however, contributed much more than these two concepts to the study of interaction. In his famous book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life he introduced a whole new way of looking at social interaction. Social interaction is, he argued, primarily a performance. Here I would like to give a short summary of some of the concepts Goffman discussed in that book in order to give you a wider framework in which to understand the ideas of face and frames described in Units A6 and B6.
In order to perform successfully, Goffman said, we need to have a stage, scenery, costumes and a collection of voices, facial expressions and movements. These are what Goffman calls our ‘front’. He says the front is the expressive equipment we use in performances, in other words, the equipment we use (including our clothes, our make-up, our laughs, smiles, frowns, our mobile phones, our restaurants, bars, karaoke boxes and classrooms) to create the kind of ‘impression’ (or ‘line’) that we want.
Goffman divides front into three parts. The first is the setting. Setting is all the things around you that you use to play the role. My university with its classrooms, offices and lecture theatres provides me with the equipment I need to play the role of a teacher and the equipment my students need to play the role of students. A restaurant is a setting that allows people to play the roles of waiters, cooks and customers.
The second part of front is appearance. Appearance includes the clothes you wear, your make-up and hairstyle. Of course, you put on different costumes to play different roles. When I play the role of a lecturer I wear a tie. But I have a very different appearance when I am shopping on Saturday afternoon. Waiters, police officers and secondary school students have their uniforms, but, when you think about it, we all have uniforms. If you look around you, you can see that there is a certain type of uniform that you wear when you are being a student, which is of course very different from the uniform you will wear when you get married.
The last part of front is manner. While setting and appearance are more constant, manner can change according to the situation. There are, however, certain set ways of acting when you perform certain roles, certain tones of voice, gestures and facial expressions. Notice the manner that a police officer has when he or she is directing traffic, when a teacher teaches, when a doctor has a consultation with a patient. You will notice that there are certain things these people are supposed to do when they perform these roles. These are what we call manner.
In a way, you can think of front as all of the ‘cultural tools’ you have available to you to play certain roles, the things (objects, places), ways of talking, ways of looking and ways of acting you use to project the impression that you want, to say, ‘Look, now I am being a teacher’ (or a father, or a shopkeeper, or a pop star, or a businessperson, etc.).
If you don’t have the proper expressive equipment available to you, then it is very difficult for you to play the role. A policeman without a badge is not a policeman. A teacher without a classroom would have a very difficult time getting people to listen to him or her. A businessman without an office would find it difficult to do much business.
Routines
Goffman says that we employ ‘fronts’ to perform ‘routines’. Routines are specific performances or kinds of performance. As we have said, a ‘performance’ is any activity that you do which takes place in front of an ‘audience’. So, performance is a more ‘generic’ (general) term. What we perform are routines. They are ‘strips of action’ that usually have some kind of internal logic or structure. It is usually pretty easy to tell when a routine begins and ends.
Most of the routines that we perform are routine; that is, they follow rather consistent and predictable patterns. You could even give names to the different routines that you perform: the ‘lecture routine’, the ‘riding the bus routine’, the ‘shopping routine’, the ‘eating at McDonald’s routine’. That is not to say that we always act in exactly the same way whenever we perform a particular routine. But, every routine has its own sets of expectations about how you should perform and limitations regarding how you should not perform. Routines are not something that come naturally – we have to learn routines just as actors have to study their lines, and if you are unfamiliar with a routine, you probably won’t be able to perform it very well. It is not uncommon for people who are about to perform an unfamiliar or particularly important routine to rehearse before they perform. Someone who is about to go out on their first date, for example, might spend some time in front of a mirror practising their facial expressions, and someone going for a job interview might prepare themselves by thinking about the questions that might be asked.
Different routines also have different fronts associated with them. I employ one front when I am performing the ‘teaching routine’, for example, and a different front when I am performing the ‘taking my dog for a walk routine’. Of course, it is possible also to employ the same front for different routines. I use more or less the same front when I am teaching and when I am having staff meetings with my colleagues.
So, if your life is like a play, your routines are like the different scenes you play.
‘What’s your line?’
In Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to interaction, we use fronts to perform roles. When we perform these roles, we try to maintain and promote a certain ‘line’. Our line is basically ‘our version of reality’, our idea about what’s going on.
It is easy to confuse the notion of role and the notion of line. Role is basically the general ‘type’ of character we are playing (such as a teacher, a soldier, a student or a pop singer). Line is much more specific. It includes the attitude we take up towards ourselves and our performance of this role, the attitude we take towards other people, and the attitude we take towards the situation.
The idea that we want to ‘promote’ our line is very important.
So we can say that the role that Donald Trump plays is that of the president of the United States. He uses his office, his aeroplane, his suit, his Twitter account, etc. as his front in order to play this role. The line that he is promoting includes what he believes is good or bad for the United States and the world, his policies, his ‘agenda’. As a politician, his main job is trying to sell his line to the people who elected him.
A similar situation can be seen with your boyfriend. He is playing the general role of a boyfriend. He may use flowers, candy, smiles, kisses and romantic words as his front. His line is basically the kind of relationship he is trying to promote. Some boyfriends may want to promote a very serious relationship with you, and others might want to promote a more casual one. The problem, of course, comes when your line is different from his.
So, to sum up, your line is the version of who you are, who the other person or people are, and what is going on that you try to ‘sell’ to the other people. If they ‘buy’ (accept) your line, then things go smoothly. But if they challenge your line, then you might have to either defend your line or change your line.
Regions
‘Regions’ are the places where we perform and where we prepare for our performances. The idea of ‘regions’ is easy to understand if you imagine a theatre. In a theatre you have the ‘stage’ where the performance takes place, and you have ‘backstage’ where the actors put on their costumes and make-up and rehearse their routines. In the same way, in real life, you can divide places into those where you are ‘performing’ and those where you preparing for your performance.
‘Onstage’ regions include public places like classrooms, restaurants, trains, shops, etc. Certain regions in your flat can also be onstage too (typically the living room) if people are visiting your home. Backstage places are more private, like toilets, your bedroom, etc. They are places where you let down your front and act more ‘natural’, where you get dressed, look at yourself in the mirror and check your appearance, put on your make-up, and so forth.
What makes a region an onstage or a backstage region is not so much the place itself but whether or not an audience is present. Even a very public place can be like backstage if you think nobody is watching you. Similarly, a private place can become onstage if an ‘audience’ enters it. It is also important to remember that not everybody counts as an ‘audience’. We sometimes perform in ‘teams’, and so a ‘team member’ is not really the same as an audience. A ‘team member’ is really a fellow actor in your performance who is cooperating with you to promote your line. So it is typical to invite other team members into our backstage regions, and we treat our team members differently when we are with them backstage. For example, we may criticise our team members backstage in ways that we might not when we are on stage.
Disturbances
According to Goffman, when we are ‘performing’ in social interaction, the goal is to maintain our ‘line’, to help others to maintain their ‘lines’, and to ensure that the interaction goes smoothly. When this happens, the ‘face’ of the people involved is preserved. When something goes wrong, that is, when the performance is ‘disrupted’ in some way as to cause the ‘loss of face’ for participants, this is called an incident. Incidents involve the discrediting of one or more of the participants (a challenge to his or her ‘line’ and/or ‘face’). Some incidents are intentional – that is, one or more participants try to challenge another’s ‘line’ or take away their ‘face’ on purpose. This can be called a scene, as in the well-known expression ‘making a scene’. A scene is when the performance is disrupted intentionally.
Often, however, the performance is disrupted unintentionally either by an unintentional action or an intentional action or statement whose significance is not appreciated by the person who says or does it. The first kind of disruption might occur when somebody, for example, reveals a secret ‘by accident’ or loses control of what they are saying or doing. The second kind of disruption, known as a faux pas, is when you say or do something on purpose, but you do not realise that what you are saying or doing will cause a disruption to the performance. Faux pas is a French word which literally means ‘false step’, and that’s a good way to remember what it means: a kind of misstep in social interaction. Goffman calls a faux pas an incident in which ‘a performer unthinkingly makes a contribution which destroys his own team’s image’. So faux pas specifically have to do with mistakes we make which jeopardise our own face or the face of our team members. When we mistakenly make a comment that jeopardises the image of the other team, this can be referred to by the English idiom ‘putting your foot in your mouth’.
Erving Goffman and the performed self
Watch this YouTube video from BBC 4 on Erving Goffman’s theories on self-presentation.
Useful links
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Introduction) by Erving Goffman
Erving Goffman, Dramaturgy, and On-Line Relationships by Nikki Sannicolas
A7: The text/context problem
Ever since Malinowski’s famous proclamation in 1947 that ‘utterance and situation are bound up inextricably with each other and the context of situation is indispensable for the understanding of the words’, scholars of language have been struggling to understand exactly how utterance and situation are bound up with each other. What is the relationship between text and context? This question, of course, brings us to an even more fundamental issue of how text and context are to be defined. Where does text end and context begin?
As I said in Unit A1, different schools of discourse analysis define context differently. I mentioned Halliday’s tripartite definition of context (field, tenor and mode), but this is just part of Halliday’s overall theory, describing what he referred to as the ‘context of situation’. Along with this he also talked about the larger ‘context of culture’, which includes the broader set of social relationships, beliefs, customs, ideologies and Discourses within which situations occur.
Other analysts take a much more limited view of context. Conversation analysts, for example, consider only the immediate context of a conversation, and in particular the context that participants create and manage through the sequential organisation of talk (Schegloff 1991, 1997) to be relevant. Issues that are not attended to in participants’ talk are not considered part of the context.
Whether we are considering the ‘context of culture’ or the more ‘micro-level’, ‘proximate’ context that is of interest to conversation analysts, one of the most important aspects of context that we must not lose sight of is that it is dynamic, not static. Context is not like an unchanging theatre set within which people interact. It is created, defined and altered through the interaction itself.
This is a point that Goffman made very strongly with his notion of framing (see Units A6 and B6). For him, context is made up of multiple and complex layers of reality and deceit through which people actively manage what they are doing and the alignment they are taking up to others.
One of the problems with approaches like Halliday’s tripartite model of field, mode and tenor and Hymes’s SPEAKING model is that by encouraging analysts to define different aspects of context they also encourage the illusion that context is stable and definable rather than fluid, contingent and negotiated.
Another problem with such approaches is that they tend only to consider things in the external, physical world and ignore the cognitive dimension of context. This is a concern that is taken up by the discourse analyst Tuen van Dijk in his book Discourse and Context (2008). For van Dijk, context is not limited to the physical reality surrounding the text, but also includes the ‘models’ that people build up in their minds about the kinds of situations they find themselves in, models with they use to make predictions about the kinds of meanings that are likely to be important.
Context in the digital age
The discussion in Unit A1 and above illustrates that the problem of context is still a matter of considerable debate and contention among discourse analysts. With increased use of digital media, this problem only promises to become more complex and contentious.
In a paper I wrote in 2004 called ‘The problem of context in computer mediated communication’ I discussed how digital media are altering the way we think about context. When we operate personal computers, for example, all of the windows we have open, all of the applications, all of the pages open in our web browser, all of the people on our instant messaging list create multiple contexts for our activities. As we work on documents, chat with friends and check our Facebook page, we move rapidly from context to context, so that a piece of discourse which at one moment might be considered ‘text’, at another moment might become part of the context that surrounds some other text. These ‘virtual’ contexts are also linked to multiple physical contexts in which the different people we are interacting are sitting in front of their computer screens.
Nowadays, with advances in mobile technology, we are able to carry this complex collection of contexts around with us. So when we are sitting in a coffee shop with our friend, the context of our interaction extends far beyond the walls of the coffee shop. With our mobile phones at our disposal, many other spaces, conversations and relationships can become part of the context of our cup of coffee. We can text or email our friends and include them in our conversation, or check out the details about a movie we’re discussing on our portable web browser, or take a picture of ourselves and our companion and upload it to Facebook, so that not only does the context of our cup of coffee expand across time and space, but it also becomes part of the context of other people’s activities.
From the point of view of computer mediated communication, most conventional models of context I have discussed simply don’t work because they begin from the basic assumption that communication takes place in the form of focused social interactions which occur in particular physical spaces and involve particular participants’ assumptions that do not hold true in much digitally mediated interaction. In the ‘digital surround’ created by new communications technologies, communication is more polyfocal, forcing us to rethink the traditional separation between text and context.
As I will discuss in Unit A8, mediated discourse analysis attempts to address this problem by beginning not with texts and contexts but with people’s actions and experiences around texts.
Useful links
The Problem of Context in Computer Mediated Communication by Rodney H. Jones
What is wrong with modern accounts of context in linguistics? by Roman Kopytko, Poznań
A8: What is a social practice?
Many contemporary approaches to discourse, including critical discourse analysis (see Unit A4), are concerned with the relationship between discourse and practice. Mediated discourse analysts, however, view the idea of ‘social practice’ a bit differently from other analysts.
As I wrote in Unit A8, mediated discourse analysts are interested in the relationship between discourse and action. But the actions that we do are not random and rarely unique. We tend to do the same actions or combinations of actions over and over again in our lives, appropriating the same or similar cultural tools to do these actions. For example, ‘having a cup of coffee with friends’ might be something that we do quite regularly. Whether we go to Starbucks or a small boutique coffee shop, the actions we engage in and the tools we appropriate to perform this practice will be the same.
So, mediated discourse analysis defines practices as actions or chains of actions which are recognised by a group of people as doing ‘a certain kind of thing’ that usually has some label like ‘having a cup of coffee’, ‘going out on a date’ or ‘attending a lecture’. Mediated discourse analysts are very interested in such practices because they help to define societies and, to some extent, exert control over the people in those societies.
But what keeps social practices going? What ensures that practices like ‘going shopping’ and ‘waiting in a queue’ are performed in the same way over and over again by the people in a particular ‘community of practice’?
The first thing is the community itself. People in communities of practice tend to maintain and enforce certain ways of doing things; they reward people who do things in the conventional way and often punish in some way people who do things differently. ‘Old timers’ in communities usually teach newcomers how to perform the practices that are important to the community, and learning how to perform these practices is a sign of successful integration into the community.
The second thing is the individual. As people learn how to perform practices, these practices gradual become ‘habitual’; that is, they become second nature to people to the extent that they can hardly imagine doing things any other way. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1977) used the term habitus to describe how social practices become part of the way people think, behave, even the way they move and experience their bodies.
Watch this YouTube video from Then & Now explaining Bourdieu’s concept of habitus.Perhaps the most important thing that sustains social practices from the point of view of a discourse analyst, however, is discourse. Discourse helps to maintain social practices in a number of ways. One way is through some kind of explicit description or set of rules governing the practice. Most practices, however, are not described explicitly in statutes or rulebooks. In this case they may be described or represented in more indirect ways.
In his book Discourse and Practice (2008), Theo van Leeuwen argues that nearly all discourse is in some way a representation of practice. For him and other critical discourse analysts the best way to understand social practices is to examine how they are represented, for example how certain participants and actions are made more or less prominent in discourse.
Mediated discourse analysts are less interested in the way practices are represented and more interested in the role of discourse in how they are actually performed. So, for example, certain forms of discourse or genres may help to sustain a social practice through making certain kinds of actions easier to perform and other kinds of actions harder to perform.
References
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Discourse and practice: New tools for critical discourse analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Useful links
Communities of Practice, a Brief Introduction by Etienne Wenger
A9: What is multimodality?
Watch this YouTube video produced by University College London Institute of Education in which Gunther Kress explains the concept of multimodality.
Multimodal cohesion
In Unit A2 I talked about what makes a text a text. One of the things I pointed out is that texts have cohesion. One of the main things that give a text ‘texture’ is the way different parts of the text are joined together through devices like repetition, reference, conjunction, etc. But what about texts that are not verbal such as images, films and musical compositions? How do they achieve texture? Do they also have cohesion?
In his book Introduction to Social Semiotics (2004), Theo van Leeuwen discusses the different ways that cohesion is achieved in multimodal texts. Two of the most important ways multimodal texts achieve cohesion are rhythm and layout. Rhythm is more associated with texts that are organised in time, and layout is associated with texts that are organised in space.
Rhythm
Rhythm provides coherence and meaningful structure to events unfolding over time. It plays a crucial role in everyday interaction as well as in time-based modes such as film, music and dance. Rhythm divides the flow of time in such texts into discernible units (measures), and organises measures into phrases that are often repeated throughout the text in the same way words or phrases might be repeated in a written text. In this way, the rhythm of a measure of music, for example, points backwards to previous measures and foreshadows subsequent measures.
Rhythm also helps to link up different modes in multimodal texts – the rhythm of the music on a skateboarding video, for example, synchronised to the movement of the skaters depicted in the video.
Van Leeuwen argues that the reason rhythm has such a powerful cohesive effect has to do with the underlying rhythms of the human body and of nature. Just as rhythm makes multimodal texts cohesive, the beating of our hearts, the rising and setting of the sun, and the regular changing of the seasons make our lives cohesive.
Layout
Whereas rhythm gives cohesion to texts that are organised in time, layout gives cohesion to texts that are organised in space. In Unit B9 I discuss a lot how the arrangement of elements in images and the use of ‘vectors’ helps to join elements together in a meaningful whole.
In spatial texts, cohesion is created primarily though balance. The elements arranged in the different parts of a picture or a webpages, for example, are often balanced in terms of their ‘visual weight’ (based on their size, colours, shapes and other aspects contributing to their prominence).
In two-dimensional images this balance is achieved along the three axes of left and right, top and bottom, and centre and margin. In three-dimensional texts like architectural structures, sculptures, parks and other built environments, the axes of front/back and top/bottom are also important.
Just as rhythm is related to the body, so is balance. Human beings are themselves symmetrical, and we rely on a sense of balance to stand, move and navigate our ways through the world
Of course, some kinds of texts make use of both rhythm and layout for cohesion. In films and videos, for example, the composition of shots and the arrangement of sets is organised spatially based on principles of layout whereas the movements of characters, the dialogue and the musical soundtrack unfold according to rhythmic principles.
Useful links
Key Terms in Multimodality, Centre for Communication
Bibliography of Multimodal Discourse Analysis by Jesse Pirini
A10: Using corpora in discourse analysis
In Unit A10 I considered the contribution tools from corpus linguistics could make to the analysis of discourse. The analysis of corpora is particularly useful for:
- Providing a ‘big picture’ perspective on discourse by revealing patterns in language across a range of texts
- Determining what grammatical patterns, lexical choices or generic structures are typical and unusual in given circumstances
- Analyzing how particular topics are ‘talked about’ in terms of grammatical patterns and lexical choices
- Analyzing the lexical and grammatical features of particular genres
- Mapping the occurrences of words or grammatical features in different parts of texts
Watch this YouTube video in which Professor Tony McEnery introduces corpus linguistics.
Ideology and corpora
Perhaps the most valuable contribution corpus assisted analysis can make to the study of discourse is in the area of ideology. As I said in Unit A4, ideology is expressed through the words they use and how they combine those words. These include things like grammatical ‘agency’ (which participants are portrayed as performing actions and which are portrayed as having actions performed to or for them), modality (how possibility and obligation are expressed), and collocation (the kinds of words that are associated with other words). These lexical and grammatical choices combine to create certain ‘versions of reality’ in texts.
Just noticing these choices in one text, however, does not really tell us much about how widespread or pervasive this ‘version of reality’ is. This is where corpus assisted analysis can be particularly useful. By examining these kinds of choices across a wider range of texts, we can understand better if and how much certain ideologies are being circulated through society.
Many analysts have employed corpora to do just that. One notable study was that of Stubbs (1996), who used corpus based techniques to analyse speeches to the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides in terms of grammatical structures and word collocations, showing how these two influential institutions promote particular ideologies regarding men and women's roles in society. Another example is Stubbs’s (2001analysis of keywords associated with the education policy of the UK Conservative Party during the 1980s and 1990s (for example, words like ‘grammar’ and ‘standards’). Yet another example is Tuebert’s (2000) analysis of the language of the euro-skeptic debate.
As I note in Unit C4, another important way ideology is expressed in texts is through the ways the ‘voices’ of different people are represented (through, for example, direct quotation, paraphrases, presupposition or different kinds of reporting verbs). Corpus based analysis can also be useful in understanding this aspect of discourse. Garretson and Ädel’s (2008), for example, investigated a corpus of newspaper reports relating to the 2004 US presidential election, examining how speech was reported with respect to the use of direct versus indirect speech, the explicitness of source identification, and the choice of reporting verbs.
Pragmatics and corpora
Corpora based analysis can also be useful in the study of spoken language, and there are a number of corpora of spoken language available, including the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English, which (Aijmer 1996) used to examine conversational routines, such as thanking, apologizing and making requests. Similarly, Deutschmann (2006) used the British National Corpus to investigate apologizing in British English. Using corpora to study pragmatics, of course, poses many methodological problems for the analyst since, as I discussed in Units A5 and B5, people often express speech acts indirectly, and their interpretation can be highly context dependant, whereas corpus based analysis is usually based on searching for clearly defined sets of lexical forms or grammatical patterns.
References
Aijmer, K. (1996). Conversational routines in English. Convention and creativity. London and New York: Longman.
Deutschmann, M. (2006). Social variation in the use of apology formulae in the British National Corpus, in A. Renouf and A. Kehoe (eds) The changing face of corpus linguistics. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 205–22.
Stubbs, M. (1996). Text and corpus analysis. Oxford: Blackwell.
Stubbs, M. (2001). Words and phrases: Corpus studies of lexical semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Garretson, G. and Ädel, A. (2008). ‘Who’s speaking?: Evidentiality in US newspapers during the 2004 Presidential Campaign’, in A. Ädel and R. Reppen (eds) Corpora and discourse: The challenges of different settings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Teubert, W. (2001). A province of a federal superstate, ruled by an unelected bureaucracy. Keywords of the Euro-sceptic discourse in Britain. In Musolff, A., Good, C., Points, P. and Wittlinger, R. (eds), Attitudes towards Europe. Language in the unification process, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp 45–88.
Useful Links
B
B1: Approaches to discourse analysis
This book covers most of the major approaches to the study of discourse. Below is a short summary of those approaches along with links to more information about them.
Textual analysis
I use the term ‘textual analysis’ to refer to approaches to discourse which focus on understanding how texts are structured beyond the level of the sentence. The focus is primarily on the contributions of M. A. K. Halliday to the analysis of cohesion and the organisation of information in discourse.
Genre analysis
Genre analysis examines the structure and communicative purpose of different types of texts (e.g. business letters, newspaper editorials, weblogs) and the way these texts function in the groups of people who use them. Genre analysis examines how texts are structured to fulfil communicative aims and how members of discourse communities use genres to claim and impute community membership. Major figures in genre analysis are John Swales and Vijay Bhatia.
Critical discourse analysis
Critical discourse analysis aims to uncover ideology and power in discourse by understanding the relationship between textural features and larger social practices. It draws on many other approaches to discourse, including Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics. Major figures in critical discourse analysis are Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak and Tuen van Dijk.
Pragmatics
Pragmatics grows out of the philosophy of language of Paul Grice, John L. Austin and John Searle. It examines how people ‘do things with words’ and how they interpret what others are ‘doing’ when they speak. Major contemporary figures in pragmatics include Jacob Mey and Jeff Verschueren.
Conversation analysis
Conversation analysis is an approach to the analysis of conversation that grew out of the sociological tradition of ethnomethodology. It was developed by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson and concerns itself with how people create order in their social interactions through the structure and procedural rules of conversation. Major contemporary figures in conversation analysis include Paul Drew, Paul ten Have, and John Heritage.
Interactional sociolinguistics
Interactional sociolinguistics is an approach to discourse analysis that focuses on how people manage social identities and social activities as they interact using such devices as contextualisation cues and conversational style. It is based largely on the work of Erving Goffman and John Gumperz. Contemporary scholars working in this tradition include Deborah Tannen and Heidi Hamilton.
The ethnography of speaking
The ethnography of speaking is an approach to discourse that grew out of linguistic anthropology, especially the work of Dell Hymes. It seeks to discover the knowledge speakers need in order to be competent participants in speech events within communities. Contemporary scholars working in this area include Gerry Philipsen, Muriel Saville-Troike, and Donal Carbaugh.
Mediated discourse analysis
Mediated discourse analysis grows out of the theories of Lev Vygotsky and Mikael Bakhtin as they were developed by the psychologist James Wertsch. It focuses on how concrete, real-time social actions are mediated through discourse. Scholars working in this area include Ron Scollon, Rodney Jones and Sigrid Norris.
Multimodal discourse analysis
Multimodal discourse analysis examines how people deploy different semiotic modes (such as images, gestures, music and architectural layout) in communication. Scholars working in this area include Theo van Leeuwen, Kay O’Halloran, Sigrid Norris, Carey Jewitt and the late Gunther Kress
Corpus-assisted discourse analysis
Corpus assisted discourse analysis uses techniques of corpus linguistics (such as word frequency counts, concordances and collocation analysis) in order to aid discourse analysis. Scholars working in this area include John Sinclair, Michael Stubbs and Paul Baker.
B2: More on cohesion and coherence
In Unit B2 I talked about the qualities that give a text texture: cohesion and coherence. Cohesion has to do with the way elements in a text are joined together. I introduced a number of cohesive devices, including:
- Conjunction (using ‘connecting words’)
- Reference (using a pronoun to refer to another word)
- Repetition (repeating the same word)
- Substitution (substituting one word or phrase for another word or phrase)
- Ellipses (leaving something out)
- Lexical cohesion (repeating similar types of words)
Some texts may make use of a lot of these devices, whereas others may use very few of them. Halliday and Hasan refer to the texture of a text as being either ‘tight’ – meaning that there are many cohesive devices – or ‘loose’ – meaning that there are fewer. What often determines the extent to which these devices are used is how much they are needed for readers to make the kinds of connections they need to make to understand the text.
Communication generally operates according to the principle of ‘least effort’. There is no need, for example, for me to insert the word ‘and’ after every item in my shopping list for me to know that I need to buy tomatoes in addition to buying milk. One of the challenges for people who are producing texts, therefore, is figuring out what kinds of connections readers can make for themselves by invoking what they already know about the world and about this particular kind of text (coherence) and what connections need to be spelled out explicitly in the text (cohesion).
Coherence is the way the overall structure of the text helps it to ‘hold together’. When you were in secondary school your teacher probably taught you how to produce coherent texts by paying attention to the order of the different parts (like the introduction, the body and the conclusion). Different kinds of texts have different elements and different standard orders. Many stories, for example, have the following basic structure:
- Orientation (setting and/or background)
- Rising action (in which some kind of problem is introduced)
- Complication (in which the problem becomes more complicated)
- Climax
- Resolution (like a ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ ending)
Some kinds of special stories have special structures. For example, the traditional ‘moral story’ in Chinese culture usually goes like this:
- Orientation (setting and/or background)
- Temptation
- Action (transgression)
- Consequences
- Lesson
Many texts have what we call a ‘problem–solution’ structure, which goes like this:
- A problem is introduced.
- A solution or solutions are suggested.
- The solution or solutions is/are evaluated.
Cohesion is something that we can find in the text. But coherence is not just in the text. It is also in our minds. It depends on the expectations we have about what kinds of elements texts should contain and what order they should come in. These expectations include:
- Expectations about people
- Expectations about places
- Expectations about events
- Expectations about logic or reasoning
- Expectations about what is good/bad, right/wrong, normal/abnormal
The most important thing to remember is that these expectations will be different in different cultures, groups and communities of practice. So, what seems coherent to one person from one culture/group/community may seem incoherent to someone from another culture/group/community. Sometimes our ideas about coherence can cause misunderstandings which might lead to stereotyping (thinking people from a certain culture/group/community are uneducated, illogical, unreasonable or impolite).
It is also important to remember that coherence has a lot to do with ideology. We accept these standard structures or formulae for texts as natural and seldom ask where these rules came from. These expectations about how texts should be put together can cause certain people or certain ways of communicating to be excluded.
Information structure
Another aspect of texture that we did not mention in this unit has to do with the way given and new information is ordered in texts. We can call this the ‘information structure’ of the text. This aspect of texture falls somewhere in between the notions of cohesion and coherence. Halliday, for example, notes that even though the following two sentences are joined by both grammatical and lexical cohesion, they cannot really be considered a text: ‘No-one else had known where the entrance to the cave was situated. What John discovered was the cave’ (Halliday 1968: 210).
The reason for this is that the information which begins the second sentence does not follow logically from information given in the first sentence. In order to explain how information is structured in texts, Halliday begins by looking at clauses. All clauses, he says, can be divided into two parts. The initial (first) element in a clause is called the topic or theme of that clause. This may be the subject of the clause, it may be the subject plus some other information, or it may be something else. The rest of the clause is called the comment or rheme. For example:
- The subjects in our study (topic/theme)
- were all healthy, adult males (comment/rheme)
The theme is the ‘jumping off’ idea. It usually contains given’ information, often linked to previous clauses or sentences. The rheme (or ‘comment’) usually contains ‘new’ or ‘newsworthy’ information. Ideas at the end of a clause are usually more prominent.
Sometimes we organise information in paragraphs by using the same (or similar) themes throughout. Notice how the author of the following paragraph repeats the theme ‘Hong Kong’:
- Hong Kong is a city of multiple and shifting identities. It is an international city, using the international language English, plugged into global communication networks, open to the fads and fashions of international consumerism and drawing on a range of international cultural symbols from white wedding gowns to Hello Kitty logos. It is at the same time a Chinese city, sharing with other parts of ‘Cultural China’ a written (and to some extent spoken) language, and other symbols of Chineseness such as lion dances, dragon boat races, temples and cuisine. And of course since July 1997, Hong Kong has also been Chinese in a political sense, as a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China.
Another way we sometimes organise information is to make the theme of a clause or sentence the same as the rheme of the previous clause or sentence, as in the following example:
- Lady Gaga was pleased to announce the release of her second album, The Fame Monster. This album featured her new hit single Bad Romance. The song talks about the difficulties involved in falling in love with one’s best friend. Love and friendship are common themes in Gaga’s music.
It is not necessary to use either of these two patterns, and few writers follow these patterns strictly. Sometimes we use other ways to organise information, especially when we want to create special effects in our writing (such as emphasising certain pieces of information or contrasting one piece of information with another).
The default (most common) thematic structure in English is to use the subject of the clause as the theme. There are many other choices as well, choices which can help you to emphasise certain parts of the sentence, make your text more organised or create other effects. All choices other than the default choice (subject as theme) are called marked themes. Marked means unusual. The most important point is that these choices are used to create particular effects, and when you use them at times when you do not want to create this effect you can confuse your reader. This is essentially what is wrong with the example given by Halliday that I referred to above:
- No-one else had known where the entrance to the cave was situated. What John discovered was the cave.
Here, the construction ‘What John discovered’ is a marked (unusual) theme (called a ‘cleft’). It is usually only used when we want to especially highlight the information that occurs after the linking verb (the cave) and to background information occurring before it (John). This, of course, does not make sense in the context of the previous sentence. A more logical arrangement of information might have been:
- No-one else had known where the entrance to the cave was situated. John discovered it before they did.
An example of the proper use of the marked theme might be:
- No-one else had known where the entrance to the cave was situated. It was John who discovered it before they did.
In other words, what this structure does is create a contrast between the other people and John.
Reference
M. A. K. Halliday (1968). Notes on transitivity and theme in English Part 3. Journal of Linguistics, 4, 179–215.
B3: Creativity: genre bending and genre mixing
Although genres normally seem to come with ‘rules’ you have to follow, and being considered a competent member in a discourse community requires following those ‘rules’, ‘expert’ genre users are often able to break the rules very effectively. In fact, using genres effectively sometimes means manipulating and sometimes confounding people’s expectations. But without the rules, without the expectations, creativity would be impossible.
One way of ‘playing with’ generic conventions, which Bhatia (1997) calls genre bending, involves flouting the conventions of a genre in subtle ways which, while not altering the move structure substantially, make a particular realisation of a genre seem creative or unique.
In Unit B3, for example, I talked about the generic structure of an internet campaign against bullying called ‘It Gets Better’. Below is a video in which this genre is ‘bent’ for the purposes of parody.
Another way of ‘playing with’ generic conventions is to mix the conventions of one genre with another, a process which Bhatia (1997) refers to as genre blending. In the video below, the genre of the ‘It Gets Better’ video is blended with the genre of the music video.
Tactical aspects of using genres such as bending and blending are common in nearly all communities and, indeed, are often markers of users’ expertise. Of course, in order for blending to be effective it must result in some sort of enhancement that contributes to the overall communicative purpose being achieved more effectively or more efficiently. Similarly, when bending a genre, one must be careful not to bend it to the point of breaking. Whether a particular use of a genre is considered a creative innovation or an embarrassing failure is ultimately a matter of whether or not the original communicative purpose of the genre is achieved.
B4: Ideology and Discourses: Big ‘C’ Conversations
In Unit A3 we introduced the idea of ‘capital D Discourses’ – combinations of ways of speaking and writing, ways of acting, and ways of relating that promote particular ideological agendas. There are lots of different Discourses in the world, and they are not all compatible with one another. The Discourse of Marxist, Leninist, Mao Zedong thought (which used to be the main Discourse in Mainland China) is in many ways at odds with the Discourse of Global Capitalism (which is now the main Discourse in Mainland China) and both of these are very different from the Discourse of Confucianism (which was the main Discourse in Mainland China during the dynastic period).
In complex societies like ours, most texts and situations are affected by more than one Discourse. Just as when two or more people come together they have ‘small c conversations’, when two or more Discourses come together in a particular text or situation, they have ‘capital C Conversations’. Understanding how these Conversations occur can help us to understand how texts exert ideological control over us.
An example of such a Conversation occurs in this McDonald’s ad.
In this ad there are at least two Discourses conversing with each other. There is what we might call the Discourse of Romance, which has its roots in the Discourse of Chivalry from medieval Europe as well as the Romantic Movement of the eighteenth century. This Discourse brings with it a whole system of beliefs, presuppositions and rules about how men and women are supposed to treat each other. The ideology of this discourse states, among other things, that human relationships should be governed by emotions, that a given person can only be ‘in love’ with one other person, and that ‘true love’ lasts forever. Practices in this Discourse include things like giving gifts or tokens of ones affection to prove ones love. This Discourse is so powerful that many people consider these beliefs and practices to be ‘natural’ rather than a matter of culture and history. But you don’t have to look very far to find cultures in which these beliefs are not considered natural, cultures where people marry for financial rather than emotional reasons, for example, or cultures in which a man can have several wives. In fact, this Discourse is in many ways at odds with both the Utilitarian Discourse (which believes that human relationships should be governed by rational self-interest) and the Confucian Discourse (which believes that human relationships should be governed by duty).
What is interesting about this ad is that it does not just contain the Discourse of Romance, but also the Discourse of Economics, which is about the ways resources (such as French fries) are distributed in society. The reason this ad is effective is that the advertisers create a Conversation between these two Discourses. In this way, they are able to make a connection between an economic practice in one Discourse – buying a meal at McDonald’s and sharing it with another person – and a romantic practice in the other Discourse – giving gifts or tokens of affection to prove one’s love. In other words, they are able to convince you that your boyfriend’s practices of distributing French fries is a measure of his love for you, and, by extension, your boyfriend’s willingness to take you to McDonald’s and purchase their products is also a measure of his love for you. Don’t believe it. If you have a boyfriend who only wants to take you to McDonald’s, dump him.
B5: The texture of talk
In Units A5 and B5 I talked about principles of pragmatics and conversation analysis and how they explain how we make sense of conversations and how conversations hold together as coherent and texts.
Pragmatics explain conversation coherence based on the kinds of expectations people bring to interaction, chief among them being that they expect people to be cooperative.
For example, although there is nothing grammatical or lexical that connects the two utterances below, most hearers would assume that they are somehow related and proceed to make inferences about their relationship (the most logical being that B is unwilling to answer the door).
- A: Someone’s at the door.
- B: I’m in the bath.
That is to say, when conversations do not seem coherent, people naturally try to make them coherent by making inferences about the relevance of one utterance to another.
‘Does your dog bite?’
There are times, however, when conversations may seem coherent, but the relationships between utterances that speakers assume turns out not to be true. In the book I gave the example of the conversation in The Pink Panther Strikes Again between Inspector Clouseau and a hotel clerk. You can watch a clip of this conversation below:
Indirect Speech Acts
As I mentioned in Unit B5, people often express speech acts indirectly. That is, the locutionary force of the utterance is very different from the illoucutionary force. In order to understand such indirect speech acts, we need to refer to the conditions under which they are produced. In the video below, Ben Loka give some possible interpretations of common indirect speech acts. Here are some of the examples he gives:
| Sentence Meaning | Possible Speaker’s Meaning |
|---|---|
| I’ve got a really sore throat and my head hurts. | I require sympathy. |
| Excuse me, do you know the time? | I really just want to talk to you, that’s why I’m asking. |
| Ha, ha. This video is really funny. | I didn’t really watch your video, but here’s a comment that showed that I tried. |
| It’s a really nice day out. Have you seen the sun? | I have nothing to talk about, but I can’t stand silence. |
Adjacency pairs and cultural scripts
It is important to remember that the way adjacency pairs work is very much a matter of culture: In Chinese culture, for example, the refusal of an offer may not be a real refusal, but just a way of being polite, and the host may be expected to offer the piece of cake two or three times before the offer is finally accepted
Within the framework of pragmatics, the existence of cultural scripts can also influence the way people interpret speech acts. In fact, after Austin and his colleague John Searle introduced their theory of speech acts, it was criticised by a French philosopher named Jacques Derrida, who argued that people often interpret speech acts not by referring to the context in which utterances are produced to check to see if the right conditions for that speech act exist, by recognising it as a particular kind of speech act based on the iterative nature of communication. Iterability basically means repeatablility. So, for example, once the question ‘Do you have a pen?’ has been used over and over again to signal a request within a particular cultural context; it is very difficult for people not to hear it as a request. The feminist philosopher Judith Butler drew on Derrida’s idea of iterability when she talked about the ‘performative’ nature of gender. She gives the example of the statement ‘It’s a girl’ uttered by a doctor, which she argues is not just a statement, but also a kind of performative speech act, which, like other performatives, serves not just to describe reality, but to create it. What being ‘made a girl’ means, however, she says is tied up with all sorts of other statements about girlhood that have been repeated over and over again in a particular culture, so that when we hear the statement ‘it’s a girl’ we cannot help but also think of all of the other statements about girls that make up the cultural scripts accompanying girlhood.
Of course, cultural scripts often go beyond statements or adjacency pairs to include longer exchanges such as the kinds of conversations you have when you order a coffee at a Starbucks or place a telephone call to a call centre to seek support when your computer is not working. These and many other conversations include predictable conversational gambits such as ‘May I help you? which are usually produced in predictable sequences. In fact, it is standard operating procedure in many call centres for employees to actually follow written scripts when they talk to customers.
Turn-taking
One of the most important aspects of the texture of talk from the point of view of conversation analysts is the mechanism of turn-taking in talk – how we decide who gets to talk and when. Turn-taking entails:
- who may speak (take the speaker role)
- when they can begin to speak
- how they can achieve this right
- how they can hold on to this right
- how they can relinquish this right (freely or otherwise)
We refer to the right to speak in interaction as ‘the floor’. Rules of turn-taking tell us how to ‘get the floor’, to ‘hold the floor’ and to ‘give up the floor’. Generally, the person who is speaking has the most rights over the floor. They usually can hold the floor for as long as they want, can select who will speak next and can constrain the next turn by controlling the topic. ‘Getting the floor’, ‘holding the floor’ and ‘giving up the floor’ involves a whole series of signals, some of which can be rather subtle. The most common signal that someone is ready to give up the floor is pausing. Other signals include falling intonation (in English) and looking at one’s interlocutor. People also have various signals for when they want to take the floor, including breathing in to show they are about to talk and making their bodies more tense.
Conversational coherence depends a great deal on the mechanics of turn-taking functioning properly. When it breaks down, confusion can occur. One example of this results from the fact that people from different cultures are used to pauses of different lengths. People from New York, for instance, tend to use very short pauses between turns, whereas people from most other parts of the United States use longer pauses. So, when a New Yorker is talking to, say, a Californian, the New Yorker might think that the other person is giving up the floor after a very short pause, when actually they may just be pausing to take a breath. This is why many people in the United States consider New Yorkers rude and aggressive.
Interruption is another important and often misunderstood part of interaction. Many people think that people interrupt in order to get the floor and that interrupting is rude. Actually, most interruptions are what we call ‘cooperative interruptions’ – they are not meant to take the floor away from the speaker but rather encourage the speaker to continue talking.
Repetition
In my discussion of cohesion in Unit B2 I noted that repetition of words or phrases is a common cohesive device in written texts. It is also common in spoken conversations. In fact, it is even more common.
In her book Talking Voices (2007), Deborah Tannen argues that in casual conversation people regularly and frequently repeat themselves and other people. An example of such repetition can be seen below:
Lori: Would you consider yourself a dog person or a cat person?
Michael: Oh, I’m a dog person, I can tell you straight away.
L: Really?
M: Absolutely, 100% confirmed, dog person. You bet.
L: [laughter] Dog person … Have you ever had a dog?
M: Yes, I have. Yes, I had—let me see, this would be about 10 years ago. I had my own doggy; I had a Norwegian Elk Hound.
L: Oh, was he cute?
M: He was very cute; he was painfully cute. He was great. But I don’t have a dog nowadays, but I have … I walk my neighbors’ dog.
L: Oh right, yeah, Bertie.
M: That’s right, I was telling you the other day. They’re a lovely old couple, who I’ve known for years, but they’re getting on a bit and they’re not so active, so I take their dog out for a walk quite often.
According to Tannen, such repetition serves to make conversations coherent not just because the meanings of words are repeated, but also because repetition sets up a kind of rhythm in conversation in which the phonological patterns produced by certain words or phrases are repeated. Other functions of repetition in conversations are:
- It aids production by giving people a chance to think about what to say next.
- It aids comprehension by making conversation less lexically dense.
- It helps to divide conversations into ‘chunks’.
- It gives you a sense that the other person is ‘with you’ (involvement) expanding on what was previously said.
- It can be used by speakers to hold on to the floor.
Reference
Tannen, D. (2007). Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Any act that has the potential to threaten somebody’s face (whether it be their negative face or their positive face) is called a ‘face threatening act’ (FTA). Actually, nearly every social action is potentially face threatening. If you insult somebody (or ignore them) you can threaten their positive face (their desire to be liked), and if you smile at someone, show them concern or invite them to the cinema, you can threaten their negative face (their desire to be left alone). So, every time we encounter someone we are faced with a number of decisions about how to manage our respective ‘face threatening acts’.
One choice we have is to not do the face threatening act at all (to avoid asking the girl to the party, to pretend that you didn’t hear when your friend asks you how you like her new hairdo). If we choose to perform some face threatening act, we are faced with another choice. Either we can do it ‘directly’ (baldly) (for example, ‘Your new hairdo is horrible!’ or, in the case of a threat to negative face, ‘Kiss me!’), or we can do it ‘off-record’ (pretend that we are not doing it), or we can use the kinds of politeness strategies like those in Unit B6.
It should be clear from the above that politeness is not just about ‘being nice’. It is about managing the power relationships you have with others, the degree of closeness you enjoy with them, and the way you exchange goods and services with each other. It should also be clear that within these systems and strategies which we have to figure out and choose from constantly in the ongoing flow of interaction there is a lot potential for error and misunderstanding.
Framing and face threatening acts
Face strategies also contribute to the management of conversational activities (especially those involving ‘face threatening acts’), and framing strategies are often central to the discursive construction of identity. Just as face strategies of involvement and independence, while primarily providing information about relationships, also give clues as to what we think we are doing and our attitude towards it, framing strategies, while primarily signalling what we think we are doing, also play an important role in managing relationships.
In an article called ‘Talking the Dog’ (2004) about how people use pets to frame and reframe their utterances in interaction, Deborah Tannen gives the following example of a conversation between a woman, Clara, and her husband, Neil, in the presence of their dog, Rickie:
Clara: You leave the door open for any reason?
((short pause, sound of door shutting))
→ <babytalk> Rickie,
→ he’s helpin burglars come in,
→ and you have to defend us Rick.>
(Tannen 2004: 413)
In this example, Clara shifts frames from talking to her husband to talking to the dog by altering her voice quality (adopting the high-pitched and playful tone of ‘baby talk’). In a sense, though, she is still talking to her husband, communicating to him ‘through’ the dog the potential seriousness of leaving the door open. By addressing her remarks to the dog, however, and by adopting a different tone of voice, she shifts the frame from scolding to playing, allowing her to get the message across without threatening her husband’s face.
Reference
Tannen, D. (2004). Talking the dog: Framing pets as interactional resources in family discourse. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 37(4), 399–420.
B7: The ethnography of communication
Watch the YouTube lecture by Professor Mark Peterson from Miami University in which he explains Hymes’s ethnography of communication
Examples of ethnographies: drug users
Ethnographic approaches to discourse have been used to study the language and communication practices of a wide range of different cultures, subcultures and speech communities. Some of this work has been done in communities outside the mainstream of society. Work with these groups can be interesting in showing how norms of communication function to regulate group membership and participation when it comes to speech events that are sometimes secretive or illegal. They also present ethnographers with difficult methodological dilemmas since access to such speech events is often difficult to negotiate and sometimes dangerous. Sometimes researchers are forced to rely on methods other than direct observation to obtain data.
One example of such research is Michael Agar’s ethnography of urban drug addicts reported in his book Ripping and Running (1973). During his research, Agar interviewed addicts in a rehabilitation centre and asked them to perform simulated situations of the various speech events associated with taking drugs. One thing he found was that speech events around the taking of heroin tended to be ‘ritual events’ in which participants focused a great deal on things like the sequence of acts, the key and the setting. He also found that different speech events were inseparably bound to each other so that competence in one required competence in others. The primary speech event in the lives of heroin addicts (‘junkies’) is ‘getting off’ or injecting heroin in a specific place in a specific ritualistic fashion. Successful participation in ‘getting off’, however, requires participation in another ritualised event known as ‘copping’ or buying drugs from a dealer. Obtaining the money (or ‘bread’) to purchase drugs depends on competence in yet another kind of speech event known as ‘hustling’.
Another example of such a study is my own research with adolescent drug users in Hong Kong (Jones 2005) in which I asked participants to make videos about their drug use and subsequent recovery. One of the things I observed was that just as the life of an active drug user involves the learning of a special language and the mastery of various rituals, so does participation in a recovery programme. One important genre in sharing sessions in recovery programmes is the ‘recovery story’, which involves its own specialised lexicon and sequence of events. Below is an example of such a story from one of my participants:
I’m (name). I’m now twenty-one years old. Well, I began to take drugs a long time ago and I’ve been doing it for about five years. However, I never thought that I could be here .. to learn some video techniques. Well, I never thought about it. As a drug addict, I just looked like a beggar who was always squatting on the roadside. Although I am young, only twenty-one .. I took drugs and at last my family, even my friends and relatives began to give me up. They just thought that I could not be saved. Meanwhile, I thank God for letting me have the chance to know him. He found me again and again although I had left him. God did not give up on me .. he loves me very much. As the Bible says, David left God many times. But David wrote in a Psalm: ‘You take me back anytime I leave you, please hide my tears into your leather bag.’ Now I ask God to hide my faults, my tears into his leather bag, so that I can be honest and brave enough to stand to face his judgment. Well ... I ... wish I can be ... although I don’t know tomorrow’s path, I deeply believe ... with the lead of God, I will not be afraid no matter what problem or things I face. Even if my friends and relatives lack the confidence in me, I will not be afraid since I know that God is my power and shelter. Well, I wish all my glory and praise belong to him. Is it one minute already? (OD1:175/263)1
Like the other recovery stories in my data, this one follows a particular format, beginning with an introduction followed by a description of the number of years the teller had used drugs and often what kinds of drugs he had used, followed by the portrayal of a ‘decline’, in which the increasingly negative consequences of drug use are depicted, a description of ‘hitting bottom’, a moment in which the teller’s drug use reached a crisis point, a description of ‘surrender’, involving a decision to seek help or ‘give their lives to God’, and, finally, an assessment of the future, marked by some degree of uncertainty and a strong dependence on outside forces (usually God or family members).
Membership in groups of ‘recovering drug users’ was in many ways contingent on participants’ competence in the speech event of the sharing session, which depended on their mastery of the genre of the ‘recovery story’. In a sense, then, drug use and recovery from drug use are not just a matter of physical behaviour and biological addiction, but also a matter of social identity and competence in the key speech events of various speech communities.
References
Agar, M. (1973). Ripping and running: A formal ethnography of urban heroin addicts. Seminar Press.
Jones, R. (2005). Mediated addiction: The drug discourses of Hong Kong youth. Health, Risk and Society, 7(1), 25–45.
Useful links
Erhknoworks by Michael Agar
Mediated Addiction: The Drug Discourses of Hong Kong Youth by Rodney H. Jones
B8: Affordances and constraints
Lately I’ve become fond of listening to audio books on my iPhone. One of the affordances of audio books is that they allow me to catch up on my ‘reading’ while I’m walking down the street or working out in the gym. But there are also some constraints involved. For example, it is much more difficult to search through an audio book to find important information in the same way I can do with a printed book (this affordance is even greater if I’m reading the printed book in PDF form on my computer and I can search through it by typing keywords). It is also impossible to highlight things with my yellow pen when I’m listening to my audio book.
Here’s a similar example. Lots of people like to read the newspaper on their iPad nowadays. There are a number of actions that iPads make easier. But there are some actions that paper-based newspapers make easier and which if you try to do with your iPad, you’ll regret it. The video below illustrates my point:
How to do mediated discourse analysis
Different kinds of discourse analysis have different purposes. The aim of conversation analysis, for example, is to understand how people make their interactions orderly, and the aim of genre analysis is to understand how different text types help to define and sustain different discourse communities. The goal of mediated discourse analysis is to help us to understand the role of discourse in social action and the extent to which different kinds of discourse make some actions and social identities more possible and others less possible. In other words, it helps us to understand how discourse can affect what we can do and who we can be.
Ron and Suzanne Scollon call the methodological procedures of mediated discourse analysis nexus analysis. They divided nexus analysis into three stages:
- Engaging the nexus of practice
- Navigating the nexus of practice
- Changing the nexus of practice
Engaging the nexus of practice involves choosing a site of engagement you are interested in and doing some preliminary research including informal observations, interviews, and reviews of documents and other textual artefacts. The purpose of this stage is to answer the most basic question that is at the heart of mediated discourse analysis: ‘What’s going on here?’ or, to put it another way:
- What are the important actions for this group of people in this particular site of engagement?
Navigating the nexus of practice involves exploring the role that discourse plays in these actions and how this affects things like power and social identity. The key questions for this stage of the research are:
- What is the role of discourse (and other cultural tools) in these actions?
- How do the affordances and constraints of these cultural tools amplify or constrain people’s participation in these actions?
- How do people use these actions to claim and impute membership in different social groups or communities of practice?
- How are these actions linked together to form social practices?
- How do these social practices help define group membership?
Like critical discourse analysis, mediated discourse analysis has an activist agenda. In other words, it sees its role as not just to describe the world, but also to make it better. One way to do this is to understand something about how people creatively engage with discourse, adapting and remixing it in ways that expand their scope of social action. Another way is to help people become more aware of their actions and the consequences of those actions moment by moment. The key questions for this stage of the research are:
- To what extent are the different cultural tools in the site unequally distributed and what are the consequences of this?
- How do people adapt and mix tools creatively to overcome constraints and change existing power relationships?
- How can people in this site be made more conscious of their actions and the way these actions are affected by cultural tools and by the social practices enforced by the communities they participate in?
B9 Analysing multimodal interaction
One problem with analysing multimodality in face-to-face interaction is that the spatial boundaries of interactions are not always as clear as the spatial boundaries of texts. While the frame of an image clearly marks what should be considered as belonging to the image and what should be considered external to it, a conversation in a coffee shop is not so clearly bounded. In analysing such an interaction, how much of the surrounding modes should be taken into account? Should the analyst consider, for example, the signs and posters on the walls, the conversations occurring at other tables, the ambient music playing over the PA system and the sounds of milk being steamed? What about the smell and taste of the coffee?
Sigrid Norris and her colleagues deal with this problem by taking an action-oriented approach to multimodal analysis. Modes themselves are seen as cultural tools that social actors deploy to accomplish specific actions. Deciding what modes to analyse is a matter of deciding what modes are important to social actors themselves.
Modal density
Central to this determination is the concept of modal density. In different interactions and at different moments in a single interaction, some modes are more salient than others. In other words, some modes are more important for performing the particular action that the people involved are engaged in.
According to Norris, modal density is achieved either through modal intensity (the degree to which a mode takes on primacy in an interaction to the extent that the action in question depends on the deployment of this mode) and modal complexity (the degree to which a mode is integrated and interdependent with other modes).
One way to visualise modal density is through what Norris calls modal density circles.
In the picture below, taken from the interaction I analysed in the book, the relative intensity of the different modes the actors are making use of are represented by circles of different sizes. As you can see, different modes are being deployed by the tutor (on the right) and the student (on the left). The most salient modes for the tutor are spoken language and object handling (her handling of a pen to make corrections on the student’s essay). In fact, these two modes are not only the most intense, but they are also interdependent upon one another as the tutor explains the corrections that she makes as she makes them. These two modes of working together, and in conjunction with other modes like gaze and head position, constitute for this tutor the higher-level action of ‘giving the student feedback on his writing’. That is not to say that this combination of modes always constitutes this higher-level action or that there are not other ways to perform this action (see below). The point is that this particular configuration of modes represents how the tutor sees teaching: teaching is a matter of explaining to a student what he has done wrong and correcting it.
The student deploys much fewer modes than the tutor in this situation, which tells you something about the amount of power and control he has. It also tells you something about how he understands the higher-level action of learning: learning is a matter of sitting quietly and listening to the teacher, deploying the modes of head position and gaze to display listenership.
In Figure 2, depicting a different tutor and a different student in the same writing centre, we can see a very different configuration of modal density. In this picture, the person on the left is the tutor, and the person on the right is the teacher. In this picture, the modes of written text and object handling which were so prominent in the example above and not so important. They are not absent – the student’s essay is on the table between the tutor and the student and the tutor is holding a pen – but they are not being deployed at this particular moment in the interaction. Instead, the dominant mode is spoken language, and this mode is being deployed by the student. The tutor, on the other hand, uses gaze and gesture (holding his hands together in a prayer like fashion) to display listenership.
The configuration of modes in this particular moment of interaction constructs the higher-level actions of teaching and learning in a very different way. In this case, teaching is constructed as listening and learning is constructed as an active process of explaining one’s ideas.
B10: Using AntConc
In the examples in this book I have used the free software AntConc to analyse my corpora. You might also want to try this software. It is available at: www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/
Watch this video by AntConc creator Laurence Anthony to see how the software works.
Other techniques in corpus assisted discourse analysis
It should be clear from the material in Unit B10 that corpus assisted discourse analysis always involves the strategic mixing and different analytical procedures and techniques. Most importantly, it always involves the combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. Researchers often start with the quantitative analysis (looking at frequency and distribution), then move to a more qualitative approach, examining concordances for patterns, and isolating sample texts or excerpts to analyse using more conventional tools of discourse analysis.
Making corpus comparisons
Some procedures in corpus assisted discourse analysis such as keyword analysis requires that the main corpus under consideration be compared to another corpus, known as a reference corpus. Some analysts, however, make the comparison between two corpora more central to their analysis in order to answer specific questions about discourse. There are many kinds of corpus comparisons one can make. For example:
- Comparing corpora of two different genres
- Comparing corpora of the production of two different speakers/writers or groups of speakers/writers in the same genre
- Comparing corpora of texts from two different groups with opposing views on a particular issue
- Comparing corpora from the same group of speakers/writers or on the same topic from different time periods
The Web as corpus
In a way, the World Wide Web is just like an immense corpus, and some scholars have considered ways it might be analysed in the same way other corpora are. There are, of course, problems associated with this. One is that search engines like Google operate using different kinds of algorithms than corpus analysis tools do. Another is that the web is in some ways like a giant echo chamber: people constantly cut text from one site and reproduce it on other sites. This phenomenon introduces problems for the accurate measurement of things like word frequency and ‘keyness’. Some scholars have tried to solve this problem by, rather than treating the web as a corpus, creating corpora from representative texts taken from the web.
Dispersion plots
In Unit B10 I mentioned dispersion plots but did not go into too much detail about how they are used. Generating dispersion plots for different words or phrases in texts can be an extremely good way to understanding something about the discursive structure of texts. With this technique, one or more features are tracked through a text to determine how the feature/s contribute/s to some aspect of discursive development such as the progression of topics, the arrangement of ‘moves’, the order of information, or the rhetorical organization. Most software packages produce a graphic representation of the occurrence of the feature through the text. With this method, multiple texts can be compared in order to search for consistent or divergent patterns.
Statistical analysis
Some people who use corpus assisted discourse analysis submit their results to various kinds of statistical analysis. One of the key statistical methods in corpus linguistics is called multidimensional (MD) analysis. This method uses factor analysis to analyse co-occurrence patterns of different features in a corpus. This form of analysis has been used to examine stylistic differences between texts of different genres or different registers.
C
C1: Additional activities
In the activities in Unit C1 you practised using some basic ideas about discourse to analyse texts. You looked at texts based on the three different perspectives on discourse I outlined in Unit B1:
- Discourse as language above the level of the sentence
- Discourse as language in use
- Discourse as social practice
As well as on the features of language that I described in Unit A1:
- Language is ambiguous.
- Language is always ‘in the world’.
- The way we use language is inseparable from who we are and the different social groups to which we belong.
- Language is never used all by itself.
In the activities below, you will be asked analyse different texts using these principles.
A Starbucks sleeve
Consider the text below that I found on the cardboard sleeve that came wrapped around the cup of coffee that I bought at Starbucks:
- Starbucks is committed to reducing our environmental impact through increased use of post-consumer recycled materials. Help us help the planet.
- _____
- First-ever 10% post-consumer fiber cup 60% post-consumer fiber sleeve
- _____
- Intended for single use only.
- © 2005 Starbucks Coffee Company All rights reserved
- US Patent no. 5.205.47S and no. 6.863.644 and related foreign patents pending
- Start by looking at how this text is put together in a formal way. First of all, why is it divided into different sections and how are the different sections different? Why do we interpret these three sections as going together, and how do we interpret the separate sentences in each section as relating to one another?
- What exactly are the authors of this text are trying to do? Are they trying to do just one thing or a number of things?
- How does this text reproduce different ideologies of ‘versions of reality’? Can you find different (‘capital D’) ‘Discourses’ mixed together in it? What is the effect of this mixing? What kind of company is Starbucks trying to get us to think it is?
K-pop
Different kinds of texts use language in different ways and construct different kinds of social relationships among the people involved in creating and reading those texts. Look at the following two texts:
Wikipedia entry on K-pop.
An online quiz entitled ‘How Will You Get to Work Beside Your Favorite K-pop Group?’
First read the texts carefully and try to answer the questions below:
- What are the purposes of these two texts? (What are the producers of these texts doing?) How are the different purposes reflected in the ways the texts are organised and kinds of language used?
- Both of these texts are cooperatively authored – in other words, different people worked together to create them. How does the cooperative nature of the texts affect how they are written. Are their differences in the two texts in terms of how people cooperate?
- How are the people who produced these texts trying to show what kind of people they are and what kind of social groups they belong to?
Now take a look at a text that you were involved in producing (such as a blog post, a Facebook conversation, an email or a WhatsApp chat). Answer the following questions:
- What were you trying to do with this text?
- How did you use this text to show your relationships with other people?
- What kind of social identity were you trying to project through this text?
Try to point to specific features of the language to explain your answers.
C2: Additional activities
1. Identify the cohesive devices in the following texts:
- Reference
- Conjunction
- Substitution
- Repetition
Despite having sold millions of records and becoming a household name through her (1) own will and creativity, the fact is, Lady Gaga is still a relatively “new” celebrity, so (2) I was somewhat skeptical about how informative (or necessary) a full-on biography could be at this point in her career. But intrigued as I am by her and her music, I picked it (3) up with an open mind in hopes of learning more about the woman (4) herself, getting behind the mystique she so carefully veils herself in publicly. Heavy with quotes and page after page of gorgeous color photographs, this is a great reference tool for fans. However (5), in the end I don’t feel like I necessarily learned anything new or came any closer to understanding the “meaning of Gaga (6),” so to speak.
from (http://www.ebooknetworking.com/ books_detail-1590204239.html)
2. Compare the following two texts about the same topic. Consider:
- What are the most common cohesive devices used in the texts? What kinds of relationships do these devices create among different parts of the texts? Are these relationships clear and logical?
- What kind of overall structures do the texts have? Is the order in which information is given in the texts important? Do you have to use any previous knowledge about this kind of texts or about the topic of the texts to understand them?
- How are the two texts different in the way they create cohesion and coherence? Can you explain the differences in terms of what the two texts are trying to achieve?
Text 1: Newspaper article
Lady Gaga’s meat dress voted most iconic outfit
Pop diva Lady Gaga’s meat dress which raised eyebrows at the recent MTV Video Music Awards has topped the list of the most iconic outfits of 2010.The eccentric ‘Poker Face’ hitmaker, who is known for her outrageous fashion sense, created ripples with her meaty outfit, which has swept a poll by website MyCelebrityFashion.com.“What’s everyone’s big problem with my meat dress? Haven’t they seen me wear leather? Next time, I’ll wear a tofu dress and the soy milk police will come after me,” said the 24-year-old singer who lashed at her critics for the controversy created by her meat ensemble.
Text 2: PETA webpage
Last night, Lady Gaga tried once again to shock the world, this time by wearing a “meat dress” during her acceptance of the Video of the Year award at MTV’s Video Music Awards. Lately, Lady Gaga has been having a hard time keeping her act “over the top.” Wearing a dress made out of cuts of dead cows is offensive enough to bring comment, but someone should whisper in her ear that there are more people who are upset by butchery than who are impressed by it—and that means a lot of young people will not be buying her records if she keeps this stuff up. On the other hand, maybe it was fake and she’ll talk about that later. If not, what’s next: the family cat made into a hat? Meat is the decomposing flesh of a tormented animal who didn’t want to die, and after a few hours under the TV lights, it would smell like the rotting flesh it is and likely be crawling in maggots—not too attractive, really. The stunt is bringing lots of people to PETA.org to download a copy of our vegetarian/vegan starter kit, so I guess we should be glad.
http://www.peta.org/b/thepetafiles/archive/2010/09/13/Lady-Gagas-Meat-Dress.aspx
C3: Additional activities
1. Choose a discourse community that you belong to and fill out the following chart with information about the shared goals of the community, the different kinds of texts that members of the community produce and consume, and the communicative purpose/s of these different kinds of texts. Discuss your answers with your classmates.
| Discourse Community | Texts/Genres | Communicative Purpose/s |
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People: |
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Shared goals: |
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Talk about the relationship between being able to produce or understand these texts and being considered a full or competent member of the community and how members of the community learn how to produce and understand these texts.
2. The genre of the business card. A business card has a certain communicative purpose – to allow someone to easily contact a particular person or business from whom goods or services are desired.
- What are the moves associated with this genre?
- How do these moves contribute to the overall communicative purpose?
- Do you expect these moves to be presented in a particular order or layout?
- What other expectations do you have about business cards (e.g. size, material)?
- What kinds of discourse communities use business cards?
- What kinds of discourse communities would you not expect to use business cards?
The card below is the business card of a divorce lawyer. It breaks the ‘rules’ we normally associate with this genre because it gives the contact information twice. This breaking of the rules, however, seems to perfectly suit the wider communicative purpose, since two people who may not wish to have contact with each other (the divorcing couple) need to have access to the information.
Look at the other creative business cards on the website below and discuss how the creators of these cards creatively break the ‘rules’ of the genre, and how, by breaking the rules, they are more able to reach their overall communicative purpose.
Creative Business Cards
http://www.allgraphicdesign.com/graphicsblog/2007/11/11/the-coolest-business-cards-use-of-cool-shapes-textures-creativity-talent/Snapchat ‘Stories’
One of the most popular features of social media platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook is that they allow users to post a series of images or videos in the form of a ‘story’. One of the problems of analysing these texts using genre analysis, however, is that they rarely follow the conventional ‘move structure’ of ‘stories’; instead, they often draw on other genres. Although these ‘stories’ consist of a large number of images or videos sent in succession, sometimes they just consist of one or two. Look at the ‘story’ below and answer the questions after it.
- What is the ‘move structure’ of this ‘story’ (what is the author doing in each of the snaps?)
- If you had to name the genre this text belongs to, what would it be? Can you think of other examples of this genre? How do they resemble or differ from this example?
- What sort of discourse community does this ‘story’ show membership in. Does it make a difference if these images were sent privately to another user or posted on the user’s ‘My Story’?
- Look at examples of ‘stories’ from your own social media feed and apply the same kind of analysis to them.
C4: Additional activities
1. Global warming
In his book Analyzing Public Discourse: Discourse in the making of public policy (2008),Ron Scollon presents two versions of a text about global warming produced by scientists during the Bush administration. The first version is the original text written by scientists. The second is the text after government officials had edited it.
Analyse the two texts, paying special attention to modality and the inclusion and exclusion of information. What is the difference in the impressions they give about the danger of global warming. Why do you think the Bush administration officials changed the text the way they did?
Global Warming Text 1 (Scientist’s Version)
Warming will also cause reductions in mountain glaciers and advance the timing of the melt of mountain snow packs in polar regions. In turn runoff rates will change and flood potential will be altered in ways that are currently not well understood. There will be significant shifts in the seasonality of runoff that will have serious impacts on native populations that rely on fishing and hunting for their livelihood. These changes will be further complicated by shifts in precipitation regimes and possible intensification and increased frequency of extreme hydrologic events.
(Scollon 2008: 138)
Global Warming Text 2 (Government’s Version)
Warming would also cause reductions in mountain glaciers and advance the timing of the melt of mountain snow packs in polar regions. In turn runoff rates would change and flood potential would be altered in ways that are currently not well understood.
Warming could also lead to changes in the water cycle in polar regions.
(Scollon 2008: 139)
2. Warning labels
In Unit B4 I briefly mentioned how different warning labels on cigarette packets present the danger of cigarette smoking differently.
Go to Google Images and search for cigarette warning labels.
Analyse the warning labels you find there in terms of:
- Processes, participants and transitivity (who’s doing what)
- Modality (degree of certainty or obligation)
- Social languages
- Reading positions (implied reader/implied writer
- Other elements (e.g. pictures, type)
Which labels do you think are the most/least effective in getting people to stop smoking? Why?
Reference
Scollon, R. (2008). Analyzing Public Discourse: Discourse in the Making of Public Policy. Abingdon: Routledge.
C5: Additional activities
1. Threats, warning and promises
Speech act theory is often an important tool in forensic linguistics, the kind of linguistics carried out by people who are called upon by courts and law-enforcement officers to make judgements about what people meant, in order to determine if they have committed a crime.
The famous forensic linguist Roger Shuy, for example, in his book Language Crimes (1996), relates the case of Don Tyner, who was accused of making threats to business associate Vernon Hyde, who resigned from his organisation after securing ownership of a number of shares in a racehorse. After Hyde’s resignation, Tyner repeatedly contacted Hyde and accused him of lying and swindling his company. Hyde interpreted these accusations as threats, though Tyner repeatedly denied threatening Hyde. On one occasion, after Hyde had accused Tyner of threatening him several times, the following exchange occurred:
Tyner: How’s David?
Hyde: Do what?
Tyner: How’s David?
Hyde: You mean my son?
Tyner: Yep.
Hyde: Don, don’t threaten my son. Do a lot of things but don’t ever threaten my son.
Tyner: I didn’t threaten anybody, I just said, ‘How’s David?’
(In Shuy 1993: 109)
In order to try to understand if this was a threat, Shuy tried to understand if the felicity conditions for a threat were fulfilled. In some ways the felicity conditions for threatening are quite similar to those for promising, warning and advising. All of these speech acts have to do with something that will or will not happen in the future, depending on whether or not certain conditions are met. In fact, very often words such as ‘promise’, ‘advise’ and ‘warn’ are used to issue threats, as in:
I’m warning you. If I see you around here again, I promise you, I’ll kill you.
and
If you value your life, I advise you to pay what you owe.
The main differences between a threat and these other three speech acts are that: 1) unlike a promise, what is threatened is harmful rather than beneficial to the addressee; 2) unlike a warning, the action requested is for the benefit of the speaker rather than the addressee; and 3) unlike advice, the speaker takes his or her own perspective, not the hearer’s, and he or she controls the outcome rather than the hearer.
Shuy summarises these differences in the following table:
Comparison of threatening, warning, advising and promising (adapted from Shuy 1993: 98)
| Threatening | Warning | Advising | Promising | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| To the speaker’s benefit | ✓ | |||
| To the hearer’s benefit | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| To the hearer’s detriment | ✓ |
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| From speaker’s perspective | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| From hearer’s perspective | ✓ | |||
| Speaker controls outcome | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Hearer controls outcome | ✓ | ✓ |
The problem is, in the example above Tyner didn’t use any language associated with warning, advising or promising, and he didn’t even talk about any future action, good or bad, occurring. He just said, ‘How’s David?’
- Why do you think Hyde interpreted this as a threat?
- Do you think you could prove that it was a threat in a court of law?
- How would you do so? (Hint: consider applying Grice’s Maxims to the utterance; does it follow or flout these maxims?)
2. Conversational Maxims and implicature
Look at the following utterances and decide which Maxim is being flouted and what kind of special meaning (implicature) is created:
The Maxim of Quantity
Be only as informative as required for current conversational purposes.
The Maxim of Quality
Say only what you believe to be true and adequately supported.
The Maxim of Relation
Be relevant.
The Maxim of Manner
Be clear: be brief and orderly and avoid obscurity and ambiguity.
| Example | Possible Situation/ Participants |
Maxim/s Flouted | Implicature |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. My phone never stops ringing. | |||
| 2. I love you when you forget to call and tell me you’ll be late. | |||
| 3. A; What’s on TV? B: (Checking the TV listing) Nothing. |
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| 4. A: How’s your hamburger? B: A hamburger’s a hamburger. |
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| 5. A; Has your boss gone crazy? B: Let’s get a cup of coffee. |
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| 6. A: If (Monica Lewinsky) told someone that she had an affair with you beginning in November 1995, would that be a lie? B: It’s certainly not the truth. It would not be the truth. |
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| 7. A; What did you do on that morning? B: I woke up in bed. I was in bed. I was wearing pajamas. After lying still for a few moments, I threw back the duvet, got out of bed, walked to the door of the bedroom, opened the door, switched on the hallway light, walked across the hallway, opened the bathroom door, went into the bathroom, put the basin plug into the plughole, turned on the hot tap, ran some hot water into the washbasin, looked in the mirror… |
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| 8. A: What’s the time? B: Three-thirty (it’s actually twenty-nine after three) |
3. Felicity conditions
List the felicity conditions for:
- A marriage proposal
- A bet
- A request
- An order
4. Preferred responses
Look at each of the conversational moves below and decide what you think the preferred response would be in different situations. What kinds of meaning would be implied if the preferred response were not given (i.e. heard as ‘officially absent’).
| Move | Preferred Response/Situation A (Specify) | Meaning if preferred response is absent or different | Preferred Response/Situation B (Specify) | Meaning if preferred response is absent or different |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ’Thank you’ | ||||
| ’I love you’ | ||||
| ’Hello, my name is Rodney’ | ||||
| ‘Sorry’ |
Reference
Shuy, R. (1996). Language Crimes: The Use and Abuse of Language Evidence in the Courtroom. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
C6: Additional activities
1. Situations
In Units A6 and B6 I discussed the two face strategies of involvement and independence, and how people decide which strategy to use based on power, distance and the importance of the topic being discussed (which we can refer to as weight of imposition). Try to imagine the situations below and rate them along the dimensions of power (P), distance (D) and W (weight of imposition). Write down what kinds of face strategies you might use in these situations.
| Situation | P +/– |
D +/– | W +/– Possible strategies |
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| You think your lectures in discourse analysis are boring and you want to tell you teacher so he can improve his lecturing style | ||||
| You suddenly realise you have lost your wallet and have no money to get home. You need to borrow some cash from a stranger. | ||||
| Your best friend has been gaining weight recently and you think he needs to go on a diet. | ||||
| Your boyfriend wants to have sex with you but you don’t want to. |
2. ‘The Girls Get Grounded’
Watch the video clip ‘The Girls Get Grounded’ and list the contextualisation cues (gestures, facial expression, intonation, voice quality) which signal the frames of ‘scolding’, ‘joking’, ‘showing remorse’ and ‘gloating’:
| Frame | Contextualisation Cues |
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| Scolding (Parents) |
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| Joking (Girls) |
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| Showing Remorse/Apologising (Girls) |
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| Gloating (Parents – after girls have left) |
Discuss:
- Why do the girls try to move the conversation into the ‘joking frame’?
- How do you know the mother is being sarcastic when she says, ‘We have this really crazy idea that you listen to us when we talk …’?
- What are the frames and contextualization cues of the final scene between the parents and the family friend? How does this also involve competing frames (e.g. serious and joking)?
C7: Additional activities
1. Krumping
Ethnographers of communication spend a lot of time hanging around with the people they are studying and observing them in order to gather enough information to describe and analyse culturally specific speech events accurately. It is difficult to do a proper analysis without putting in this kind of time and effort.
Documentary films and other media, however, can sometimes give us a partial window into the competencies people need to participate in speech events.
Watch the clip from the documentary Rize about urban dance culture and try to fill in the chart below with as much information as you can about ‘krumping’. Do your best to describe the kinds of cultural knowledge and communicative competencies you think might be necessary to participate in the kind of speech event depicted in the film.
You might also want to do some internet research on krumping. Here are some useful links:
| Setting and Scene What is the appropriate time and place for krumping? Are there places or times of the day when you think this activity would be inappropriate? |
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| Participants What kinds of people participate in the speech event of krumping? Are there people who are restricted from participation? What kinds of roles do participants take (e.g. performer, audience) and what kinds of behaviours, rights and responsibilities are associated with these roles? What kind of relationships do people in different roles have with one another? |
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| Ends What is the purpose of krumping? What are the outcomes people expect from participating in this speech event? |
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| Act Sequence Can you discern any pattern in the way the speech event unfolds? Is there any predictable order to the actions people take? What do you think would happen if actions were performed out of order? |
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| Key What is the tone, manner, mood and spirit of the speech event? Would outsiders be able to accurately interpret the key? |
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| Instrumentalities What forms and styles of speech, clothing and physical movement do people use in this speech event? What other kinds of media (e.g. music) are important to this speech event? |
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| Norms What are the social rules governing the ways people interpret other people’s actions in the context of this speech event? How do people know when others are being serious or playful, hostile or friendly? |
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| Genre How would you characterise the ‘genre’ of krumping. What is the move structure and overall communicative purpose? Can you think of comparable genres? Describe them. |
After you have filled out the chart, think about the relationships among the different components (e.g. does one component depend on or determine another?).
2. Your turn
Do a similar analysis for another speech event you are able to learn about through YouTube.
C8: Additional activities
1. Affordances and constraints. Consider the different features of Instagram listed below:
- Image editing
- Location tagging
- Private messaging
- Commenting
- @mentions
- Push notifications
- Group messaging
- Hashtags
- Filters
- Video editing tools
- Text and drawing tools
- Live video streaming
- Stories feature
- Disappearing photos & videos
- Search functionality
- User tagging
- User profiles
- Public and private profiles
Discuss the following questions:
- What kinds of actions do they make easier to do?
- What kinds of actions do they make harder to do?
- What actions are these people performing?
- What kinds of identities are they enacting through these actions?
2. Work in small groups. Each group should consider one of the following social practices:
- Participating in a political demonstration
- Taking an examination
- Taking the bus
Answer the following questions:
- What are the key actions involved in this practice?
- Which of these actions involve discourse? What kind of discourse is it?
- How does this discourse make certain actions easier and other actions more difficult?
- Are different pieces of discourse available to different people?
- At what stage in this practice does the chain of action become impossible to reverse?
- How do the different actions involved in this practice help people to claim certain identities for themselves and impute certain identities on other people?
C9: Additional activities
1. Writing centre interaction I
In Unit C9, a close analysis of a very short sample of interaction was given. It is also possible to analyse such interactions from a broader perspective by taking note of how many times (or how long) participants deploy particular modes.
Watch the longer video from which the example in the book was taken and fill in the chart below, making a tick mark every time the person engages in the behaviour mentioned.
| Behaviour | Tutor (woman) | Client (man) |
| Pointing | ||
| Other gestures | ||
| Speaking | ||
| Looking at other person |
Compare the behaviour of the tutor and the client. What does this tell you about their relationship? What does it tell you about the way they conceive of the higher-level actions they are engaged in?
2. Writing centre interaction 2
Look at the multimodal transcription of another interaction in the writing centre.
Discuss the following questions:
- How does the client (the person on the right) use gestures to express himself? How are his gestures related to and timed with the words he says?
- How does the tutor (the person on the left) use gesture and gaze to show that he is listening?
- How do the participants coordinate and ‘mirror’ each other's actions?
3. Writing centre interaction III
Watch the short video of another part of the interaction transcribed above. How would you make a multimodal transcription of this interaction? Which actions would you highlight?
4. Facebook photos
Choose some photos you or your friends have uploaded to Facebook and analyse them based on the functions discussed in the book.
Consider:
a. The ideational function
- Is it a conceptual (analytical) or narrative picture?
- Who are the participants?
- What actions are portrayed?
- What is the setting?
b. Interpersonal function
- What is the relationship between the characters and the viewer (expressed through gaze, distance)?
- What it the ‘reality status’ of the image (does it seem ‘true’ and ‘real’)? What gives you this impression?
- What does the author of the image want you to do?
c. Textual function
- How are the different elements of the image joined together?
- What is the relationship between the left side of the image and the right side?
- What is the relationship between the top of the image and the bottom of the image?
What does this analysis tell you about the message you or your friends were trying to convey when they uploaded the picture? Is it a more a message about an event (this is what happened) or a relationship (this is how these people feel about each other) or both?
5. Analysing video
Watch the following video and talk about how the speaker portrays different kinds of characters. Write down three characters he imitates and list the elements of posture, gesture, gaze and facial expression he uses to imitate them.
C10: Additional activities
List of publically available corpora:
American National Corpus
British National Corpus
A Collection of English Corpora
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)
International Corpus of English (ICE)
Project Guttenberg
Additional activity
1a. Changing Discourses in Time magazine
One good way to understand ‘Discourses’ is to examine how certain words are used in the media, and how the frequency of these words changes over time. The Time Magazine Corpus (http://corpus.byu.edu/time/) is a good tool to use to do this.
Choose a word that you think represents an important issue, debate or phenomenon. For example:
- Environment
- Hunger
- Immigration
- Gay
- Globalization
- Race
- Women
One good source for ideas for words to search for is:
Burgett, B. and Hendler, G. (2007). Keywords for American Cultural Studies. New York: New York University Press www.depts.washington.edu/keywords/forums/
Analyse the way the usage of the word you have chosen has changed over the nine decades represented in the corpus using the tools you learned about in Unit B10, including word frequency, concordances and collocation analysis. Can you identify one or more ‘Discourse’ that this word seems to be part of?
Search syntax
- You can make your search broader or more specific by using the query syntax of the corpus. For example:
- You can use * as a ‘wildcard’ for any other letters (e.g. s*ng will return sing, sang, song. sung)
- You can enclose your word in brackets [ ] to find all different forms of the word (e.g. [sing] will return sing, singing, sang).
- You can use [=word] to find synonyms of the search term.
- You can search for multiple words by separating them with | (e.g. gay|lesbian|homosexual).
Word frequency
You can find out how frequently your words was used in the pages of Time magazine in different decades by simply typing the word into the WORD(S) field and clicking SEARCH. Note, to show different decades, the SHOW box in the sections field should be ticked and IGNORE should be chosen from the drop down menu.
This corpus interface will allow you to visualise frequency results in the form of a bar chart by choosing the radio button. Below, for example, is the chart generated by searching for the word ‘gay’.
The numbers above the bars tell the absolute frequency along with the frequency per million words, which is actually a better measure of frequency since the total number of words published in Time has changed quite a lot over the years. As you can see from the chart above, the frequency with which the word ‘gay’ appeared increased dramatically in the 1990s and 2000s.
1b. Concordances
As you know from my discussion in A10 and B10 of the book, however, simple word frequency counts are just a starting point for discourse analysis. They are not entirely reliable measures since they can only tell us how frequently a word occurred rather than how it was used. Many words in the English language have multiple meanings, and the meanings of words sometimes change over time.
This is certainly the case with the word ‘gay’. The way this term was used in the 1990s and 2000s to refer to homosexuals was not the way it was used in the 1920s and 1930s. This can be investigated through looking at a concordance of the word.
Concordances can be generated in this corpus in a number of ways. One way is by simply clicking on the bar in the frequency chart corresponding to the decade you wish to generate a concordance for. Another way is to click the radio button KWIC under display and choose the decade you want from the drop down menu.
Figure 2 shows a section of the concordance of ‘gay’ form the 1920s, and Figure 3 shows a concordance of ‘gay’ from the 1990s. It is easy to see from these concordances that the word gay meant two entirely different things in these two decades.
As I mentioned in Unit B10, concordances are the first step to exploring the different collocates of a particular word or phrase which make up the textual environment in which this word or phrase is used. For more detailed information about collocation, a collocation analysis can be performed.
1c. Collocation
Clicking on COLLOCATES on the left side of the screen will open to collocation analysis window. Next to the search field are two drop down menus for setting the range of the search (X spaces to the left or right).
Under SORTING AND LIMITS there is also the option to sort collocates by RELEVANCE, which is often more useful than sorting them by FREQUENCY. RELEVANCE sorting uses an algorithm called the ‘mutual information score’, which measures how ‘tightly’ linked two words are.
