DISCOURSE ANALYSIS CHAPTER 1. LENGUAGE IN USE In this first chapther we want to analyze the linguage in is communicative pourpouse. For example the phrase "keep of the grass" forms a grammatical unit called SENTENCE: a unit of grammatical analysis usually consisting of a noun phrase + a verb phrase, it can be declarative or interrogative and it's composed by two main COSTITUENTS: component parts of the sentence as identified by grammatical analysis. The first part is a verb phrase "keep of" the latter is a noun phrase (the grass). It is a public notice and people don't analyze it into it's formal constituents, they recognize the pourpose of te statement actin upon it. The people treat it as a TEXT, it can be defined as an actual use of the lenguage, as distinct from a sentence which is an abstract unit of language analysis. We identify a text as a text as we soon as we recognize that it has been produce for a communicative purpose, even if we aren't able to understand it (if it is written in a unknow lenguage). We may know what the language means but still don't understand what is meant by it's use in a particular text. The text is the percepetible trace of P1's inteded message, the lenguage produced by P1 (I,we, first-person party or addresser, the text producer) in the communication process with the P2 (you, second-person party or addressee, the text receiver). Considering again the public note "keep of the grass", we may know well enough what the word grass DENOTES: that is the semantic meaning of a word encoded in a lenguage. But what the word denotes is not the same as knowing what it is meant to REFER to when it occurs here in the phrase the grass. The definite article the signals that the grass is a matter of shared knowledge. Which grass? Obviously! The grass nearby the notice. So what we do is to establish reference by relating the text to the CONTEXT (aspect of extra-linguistic reality that are taken to be relevant to communication) in which is located. The same point can be made about other daily life notices, handle with care, wet paint or keep away from children, these are simple texts and they all have a utilitarian purpose: notice, labels and instructions are designed to be directly acted upon and to get things done, but, of course, not all texts are so simple.Whether simple or complex, all texts are uses of lenguage which are produced with the intention to refer to something for some purpose. People produce texts to get a message across, to express ideas and beliefs, to explain something, and so on and the receivers, readers or listeners of this message have to make the meaning out of the text to make it a communicative reality. We can refer to this complex of communicative purposes as the DISCOURSE that is the meaning that a first person intends to express in producing a text, and that a second person interprets from the text. No matter how explicity we think we have to TEXTUALIZE what we want to say, so we all should give explicit linguistic expressions in text to intend meaning rather than leaving it implicit and to be inferred from the context. Spoken interactions are very different from the written texts, the spoken texts use not only lenguage but also PARALANGUAGE that are non-linguistic ways of signaling meaning that accompany and act upon the verbal text, for example tone of voice, varying stress, pauses, gestures and facial expression; while the written text use the FORMAT that is the size, the shape and placement of print and they may be MULTIMODAL in that the text is accompanied by, and related to, other modes of communication (pictures, diagrams, charts in written texts or visual effects or soundtracks in films). Every word have encoded meanings, they are SEMANTIC MEANINGS (what are described in dictionaries and grammar books) and to know a lenguage is to know what they are, but we can't only put this knowledge on display but also act upon this intentions: we always make this semantic meaning serve a PRAGMATIC purpose (what lenguage users make of lenguage use, a concrete use). If we consider the UTTERANCE (enunciato, usually short expressions in spoken lenguage, phrases who have pragmatic meaning) he steal it from the bank, we can observe that the LEXIS (total stock of words in a language as units of semantic meaning), is quite simple, but we aren't able to know who is he and what is it. These pronouns have an established denotation: he encodes the SEMANTIC FEATURES of singular and masculine, and it in the semantic features of singular and inanimate, they are elements of meaning encoded within a lexical item (he, it). (Woman→female/human/singular).
P1’s intention P2’s interpretation mediated through mediated through DISCOURSE DISCOURSE P1---------------------------------------------- TEXT ----------------------------------------------P2 speaker writer
encoding
decoding
listener reader
Successful communication is achieved when there is convergence of P1’s discourse and P2’s discourse. The text is not the message, but the perceptible trace of P1’s intended message, it activates P2’s conception of context. The spoken texts have an online regulation of P1’s and P2’s discourses and it may present forms of paralanguage; while the written texts don't have a collaborative process because P1’s intention and P2’s interpretation, are separated and it may present forms of various formats or multimodality. CHAPTER 2. COMMUNICATION Linguists have traditionally focused their attention primarily on the internal properties of lenguages, on how meaning is FORMALLY ENCODED on how a lenguage is encoded in linguistic form in lexis and grammar. This description is an account of people LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE that is the knowledge of a lenguage as a formal system, that enabled us to describe the grammatical features of an utterance. The linguistic competence focused on the difference between knowing a language (intuitive) vs know about a language, that is the explicit knowledge of ENCODING CONVENTIONS that are conventions that have established what aspects of reality are encoded by what linguistic forms in a particular lenguage. We have to know what is grammatically possible and what is impossible (it will not to find→it will not to be found). But our interpretation of a discourse involves more than our linguistic competence, provide it follow the standards of the GRAMMATICAL WELL FORMEDNESS that is the conformity to the established and accepted rules of grammar. We also consider what is APPROPRIATE in a utterance in a given situation, related to the context in a conventionally accepted way. Knowing whether and to what extent an expression is appropriate to the context is one of the four aspects of communicative competence as defined by Dell Hymes (antropologo statunitense). Acts of communication can be pragmatically effective in three ways. First the lenguage can be used to talk about something, to express a PROPOSITION of some kind (what is referred to in a utterance). This involves making a connection with context in sach a ways to make an appropriate REFERENCE, a pragmatic function, the use of lenguage to talk about things in context. The phrase "The taxi will be here in 10 minutes" that have a principal LEXICAL ITEM (separate unit of meaning usually, but not necessarily corresponding with a word) "taxi" with defined contextual co-ordinates, presents an ILLOCUTIONARY ACT because it might be a promise (I have arranged everything, the taxi...) or an advice (you should pick your bags, the taxi...). The utterance is intended as having a ILLOCUTIONARY FORCE so the speaker is not just talking, but acting upon the other person, to bring to he a certain state of mind, or course of action. In performing an illocutionary act, with the illocutionary force the P1 is also bringing about a PERLOCUTIONARY EFFECT that is the effect that has on the P2. The effect of a promise might be to reassure somebody, (Don't worry, I have arranged everything, the taxi...) or persuade them to act in a certain way (Hurry up! you should pick your bags, the taxi...). So the illocutionary act is what is done when something is said, is the use of lenguage to perform a recognized act of communication (promise, advice, warning) while the illocutionary force is a certain communicative value of what is said, the force of a promise ecc ecc. Examples: Boy: I think I’ll have another beer. Girl: You’re going to drive me home later. This is an INDIRECT SPEECH ACT, in this case grammatical form and communicative function (i.e. illocutionary force) correspond..
But the the girl could have expressed the same message with a DIRECT SPEECH ACT: Boy: I think I’ll have another beer. Girl: Don’t drink any more. In this case the grammatical form and communicative function do not correspond. Other examples.. Woman: This suitcase is really heavy for me to carry. Man: Oh, let me carry that for you. (I wanna help you) O r.. Man: I have a bad back. (I don't wanna help you). “Signora Bindi, lei è più bella che intelligente.” Silvio Berlusconi “Il Presidente del Consiglio è più alto che educato.” Giovanna Melandri. Man: You look exactly like my third wife! Woman: How many times have you been married? Man: Twice. Our ability to communicate, our COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE, therefore, incorporates both a knowledge of what is encoded as possible in the lenguage and a knowledge of how these encodings are used appropriately in context. As defined by Dell Hymes in"On communicative competence" (1972) the knowledge of what constitues the communicative use of lenguage and which enables users to make judgements about how far a particular use is possible, feasible, appropriate and performed. The first aspect of Hymes' account of communicative competence is the POSSIBLE aspect, conforming to the encoding conventions of the lenguage. Thus, every sentence generated by established grammatical rule is possible. The second is the FEASIBILE aspect that express the degree to which a linguistic form can be decoded or processed (the dog chased the cat is feasible while this is the corn the rat the cat the dog chase killed ate isn't). The point about feasibility can also be illustrated by kinds of structure that are by no means uncommon, namely those we recognize as ambiguous. AMBIGUITY occurs when two distinct grammatical structures converge into one to create a double meaning (the stolen painting was found by a tree). The third is the APPROPRIATE aspect that consist in knowing whether and to what extent an expression is appropriate to the context. The last is the PERFORMED or produced aspect, that actually produce lenguage behaviour. The lenguage code provides the basic resources for communication, but we don't, of course, make use of these resources in equal measures, for example we know the two different words walk and perambulate, we know that the first is of relatively common usage and the latter is relatively rare. There are other examples that aren't so simples, that they're frequency are less known, for example big and large and small and little, but, if we asked, we wouldn't be able to say which word in each pair is more frequently used, nor what other words they tend to keep company with. In the usage of any lenguage there is the COLLOCATION: a tendency for words and structures to co-occur in patterns of relatively probability in the text, some collacations are fixed and familiar (to and fro, ebb and flow, by and large ecc. and various proverbs) other aren't. We must know them in some subliminal sense and this must be a cover part of our competence in the lenguage. We have PROCEDURAL KNOWLEDGE of them, a know-how, a knowledge of how to do something without being able to explain it; and what linguistic description can now do is to make this an overt and DECLARATIVE KNOWLEDGE that is knowledge thatcan be made explicit and talked about. CHAPTER 3. CONTEXT We experience lenguage not as something separate but as an intrinsic part of our everyday reality, we prouduce lenguage when we have the occasion to use it, and the occasions for use occur in the continuous and changing contexts of our daily life. These contexts can be thought of as SITUATIONS that are the actual circumstances of time (now) and place (here) in which a use of lenguage is located. The CONTEXT is a selection of external sets of circumstances rapresented in the mind; it is the common knowledge of two people concerned, which will have been established in a previous conversation. Context, then is not what is percived in a situation, but what is conceived as relevant. In the spoken exchanges the SITUATIONAL FACTORS are more relevant, while in the written text the essential factor is the SHARED KNOWLEDGE because the reader ratifies his assumption by inferring a connection with his knowledge. If we write the in a sentence we assume that we already know the thing described by the article the. An example of error in shared knowledge and situation is the Battle of Balaclava (1854), that was an unshared context. In communication, what appens is that the P1 produces a text which keys the P2 into a context assumed to be shared. In their communication they express a POSITION that is the attitude or point of view taken up by P1 in producting a text, or by P2 in interpreting it.
EXAMPLES: Series of texts on context (who? what? where? when? why? How?) and shared knowledge and/or values. TEXT 1 (situation) Wife: Who was that? Husband: Mother. She’s at the station. Wife: Damn! I haven’t put the potatoes in yet. TEXT 2 (partially shared knowledge) Thousands sign petition to lower age on cervical screening after tragic death of teen Sophie Jones More than 46,000 supporters have signed the Sophie's Choice petition calling for the age of smear tests to be lowered to 16-years- old.The call comes after aspiring model Sophie Jones died from cervical cancer after being refused a potentially life-saving smear test.Sophie, 19, from Eastham, Wirral, was initially told she had Crohn's Disease and suffered from crippling stomach pain.But bungling medics ignored Sophie's pleas for a test and said she was too young to have cervical cancer, which is extremely rare in women under 25. (Daily Mirror, 17.03.14) TEXT 3 (context activated by headline) Obama’s Nobel surprise Alfred Nobel, like Mark Twain and Earnest Hemingway, had the unusual experience of reading about his own death in the newspapers. It seems he was so depressed by the emphasis that the obituarists laid on his pioneering work on dynamite – the WMD of his day – that he resolved at once to endow an award for international peace. (Newsweek, October 2009) TEXT 4 (headlines incomprehensible because of lack of shared knowledge) Cursed Corrie widow’s love killed (The Sun, 17.08.09) CARLY’S A £2M MAG WAG (The People, 08.02.09) TEXT 5 (shared values) The arrogance with which the Lisbon Treaty has been foisted on the public is quite breathtaking. In the view of Europe’s political elite, a “Yes” vote requires no confirmation, while a “No” vote simply means you have to ask the question again. Labour, for its part, has shamelessly reneged on its 2005 manifesto pledge to hold a referendum. (The Times, October 2009) TEXT 6 (presumed shared values) Why can’t we just let little girls be girly? […] it’s in all those offensive bits which have the temerity to suggest that girls are – or ought to be – especially interested in the following subjects: ponies, skincair, plaiting their hair, skipping, flowerpressing, dollies, ballet and knitting. “But girls generally do love those things. They do! They do!” any sane, disinterested observer of the human species might well protest. (James Delingpole, Mail Online, 17.08.2008)
CHAPTER 4. SCHEMATIC CONVENTIONS The context is an abstract rapresentation, a mental construct. If somebody asks me close the door! I can readily infer that what is being referred to is a particular door in the room we are in, because that is something that is directly percepetible by both parties in the interaction. This example is a case of what is called DEIXIS that is the use of a term to make an external reference to the immediate situation (that door there, this door here). But context is obviously not confined to what is situationally present in the here and now. A SCHEMA is a construct of familiar knowledge, schematic assumptions socially shared by a particular community, cultural costructs. Widdowson said “You cannot make sense of anything without bringing it into the confines of what is preconceived as familiar. Everything new has to be related to what is given” (the psychologist Frederic Charles Bartlett introduced the concept in his book Remebering with his accounts of various experiments; of one them was the british students re-interpretation of the north american indian story called The War of the Ghosts, they changed events in order of their own conventional reality). The interpretation of a text triggers off the recall of some familiar state of affairs, some schema, if we analyze the phrase last summer it took a disaster to bring the final of world cup in Brazil the lenguage here activates schematic knowledge about the word cup and how different cities bid to host it every four years. So it indicates a FRAME OF REFERENCE, a familiar rapresentation of reality, a coordinate system used to identify location of an object. SCHEMATA (plural schema) are rapresentation in the mind or what is familiar or customary, but all this is relative because what is familiar in one group of people may be unknow to another. (example of the church service). So what such schemata rapresent are culturally different ways of ordering the world, different versions of social reality. These schemata are cultural, taken-for-granted constructs, and they become so firmly entrenched in our consciousness that we often find it difficult to envisage any alternative ways of thinking. (example of the surgeon-nurse) Use schemata have various ADVANTAGES, because they provide us with a convenient frame of reference to facilitate the comprehension and understanding, without them we wouldn't be able to make sense of any text or of any circumstance of everyday life. At the same time they have their DISADVANTAGES in that they can impose a preconceived pattern on things and impede us from recognizing any alternative concept of reality. The schemata can be an IDEATIONAL, when they rapresent the costumary ways in which we engage with the thirs-person world, when they are mental constructs of reality or frame of reference which rapresent a customary ad predictable way of seeing things. The schemata can also be INTERPERSONAL, when they rapresent the costumary ways in which we engage with second persons, the conventions we take for granted that concern how people normally interact with each other, when they are accepted conventions for structuring communication generally and comprising both the routines of spoken interaction and the genres of written lenguage use. Examples of that schemata would be those that inform the everyday routines we follow when meeting or greeting people, or the different transactions we carry out in SERVICE ENCOUNTERS, that are the transactions we made everyday in which some kind of service is provided face personally, to face or voice to voice (buying a ticket, hotel checking in, making enquiries over the phone, ecc). In this encounters and more generally in all the spoken acts, we have to consider the importance of the TERMS OF ADDRESS, that are the terms used by P1 to address the P2 (mr, miss, professor, sir, lady ecc). In a conversation, the participants assume that they will take turns to speak and that there will be conventional signals that indicate when it is time to take a turn, and what kind of turn is expected (A-introduction, B-nice to meet you, C-my pleasure). A greeting conventionally requires a greeting in return. The two turns make up a minimal routine which has been called an ADJACENCY PAIR, that is a pair of utterances in conversation of which the second is a conventional response to the first (Greeting-Greeting, Question-Answer, Ask permission-Give permission, Invitation-Acceptance).
The interpersonal schemata we have been looking so far was relatively simple in structure, consisting of a few turns to talk, but there are also interpersonal schemata which are much more extensive like the SPEECH EVENTS which are familiar and routine kinds of lenguage use (a lecture, an interview, a service encounter; sermons are examples of speech events which are singleturn genres.) and the GENRES (meeting, cross-examination, debate, sermons ecc) that are uses of lenguage which conform to certain schematic and textual conventions, as agreed by a particul DISCOURSE COMMUNITY that is a group of people who subscribe to the conventions that define a particular kind of lenguage use or genre (if I open up my newspaper to read a football report I will have some idea of what to expect because I know how football reports are tipically written. CHAPTER 5. CO-TEXTUAL RELATIONS One of the things we don when we use lenguage is to formulate a proposition, to make reference to some state in affairs. For example The Romans (T) / conquest the Greece (R) is an active form, while The Greece (T) / was conquested by Romans (R) is passive with the Romans being the subjects of the first case and the demonstrators in the second. If we think of these expressions as utterances. They are textual variants, different ways of distributing the propositional information. Therefore we can say that the THEME is the first piece of information, te form of the first constituent of the sentence, which here takes the form of a subject noun phrase and the RHEME is the rest of the utterance, the second part of a proposition, it follows the first constituent. An item of inforation might be given the status of theme because the P1 assumes it to be given, that is to say, alredy known by the P2. In this case, the theme simply confirms common knowledge and sets the scene for the NEW that is the rheme interpreted as giving new information to P2. Conversely, the theme could signal the main TOPIC that P1 wants to talk about (theme interpreted as what P1 wants to talk about), with the rheme rapresenting COMMENT on that topic (the rheme interpreted as what P1 wants to say on a topic). If we analyze the phrase The taxi has been ordered, it will be here in a minute, the pronoun it copies the features of singular/inanimate from the noun taxi. That is an example of the PRO-FORM, a linguistic form that stands in for another expression in a text by coping some of its semantic features. This kind of text is the CO-TEXT that is the internal linkage of linguistic elements within a text. An example of co-textual connection is the ANAPHORA that is the use of a term as a pro-form to make a textual connection to something previously referred to. For example in the phrase The president arrived. He... the pronoun he makes anaphoric reference to the President because we can traced back to realize a reference in common with a previous mentione that encodes the semantic feature of singular and masculine. The identification on connections that are linguistically signalled, like those between a pronoun and previous noun phrase, enables us to recognize the COHESION of a text, it is the linking together of parts of a text by means of pro-form of various kinds. This process is implemented by the COHESIVE DEVICES that link together parts of a text. A. We went to Rome for holidays last summer. B. We did too. A. We thought it was a wonderful place. B. Well, we didn't. Here the verb form did, simply copies the features of action and past time to make the required cohesive link with the preceding verb phrase. So far we have been considering cohesive pro-forms that have an anaphoric retrospectively function, but we should note that pro-forms can also work prospectively like CATAPHORA, that is the use of a term as a pro-form to make a textual connection to what comes later (when he→ was on his flight to Romania, the President astonished his advisers). The cohesion is linking together parts of text while the COHERENCE is whether the text makes sense as discourse, an interpretation of a text so that it make sense. Often it include the use of the LEAST EFFORT PRINCIPLE which is the theory that explain that in the verbal communication, the distribution of word use was due to tendency to communicate efficiently with least effort to accomplish the task.
COHESIVE DEVICE
EXAMPLES
Reference
personal: she, her etc. demonstrative: that, those etc. comparative: the other girls
Substitution and Ellipses
Conjunction
Lexical cohesion
nominal: not this pen; that one verbal: Do you smoke? Yes, I do. clausal: Is everything ready? I think so. adversative: however, but etc. additive: and, furthermore etc. temporal: first, then etc. causal: because, since etc. REITERATION repetition: lorry/lorry synonym: lorry/truck superordinate: vehicle general word: thing, stuff COLLOCATION semantically related items: pen/paper/word/text/write/composition
CHAPTER 6: THE NEGOTIATION OF MEANING The process of communication involes the engagement of two kind of knowledge. People make sense of text, whether spoken or written, by relating it to what they know of the world they live in, the ideational and interpersonal schemata that rapresent the customary and conventional ways in which their socio-cultural reality is structured, this we can refer to as SCHEMATIC KNOWLEDGE that shortly is the knowledge of the schemata that are operative within a particular community of lenguage users. But people also need a knowledge of what is semantically encoded in the lenguage itself in order for this schematic knowledge to be pragmatically activated as appropriate, it is the SYSTEMIC KNOWLEDGE that shortly is the knowledge of a lenguage as an encoded system. During interpersonal routines both kinds of knowledge may be altered or updated in real time. P1 and P2 try to achieve a degree of correspondence between their individual systemic and schematic knowledge in order to establish COMMUNICATIVE CONVERGENCE. How much convergence is achieved will naturally depend on there being a measure of correspondance between P1 and P2 knowledge. They can negotiate an agreed meaning on-line (if they want to), the ON-LINE NEGOTIATION, where the P2 can ask for clarification, or additional informations, or let the problem pass in the hope that it will get sorted out as te conversation develops. P1, if is sensitive to the problem, may try to resolve it by subsequently elaborating on the message, or reformlating it in different terms. In written discourse P1 has to try to anticipate possible difficulties for P2, because there is no possibility of such reciprocal on-line adjustement. Convergence is always only partial, no matter how cohesive a text may be, whatever coherent sense we make of it is negotiable. The communication take place when the P1 and the P2 became parties to an agreement to co-operate in negotiating a convergence, a meetings of minds, a mutual understanding, whereby meaning is achieved as required by their purpose in communicating. The philosopher Paul Grice has proposed that when people converse they subscribe to what he calls the CO-OPERATIVE PRINCIPLE, that is shared assumption by the parties in a conversation that they will co-operate with each other for the purpose of their talk by keeping to certain conventional MAXIMS.
First of all we must say that we can have some VIOLATIONS in the co-operative principle. P1 may unintentionally flout (violate) one of the fourth Maxims, e.g. by assuming more shared knowledge than is really the case (quantity maxim). In this case P2 can negotiate by requesting additional details. If the flouting is deliberate, and P2 knows that, it means that P1 is using the communicative tactic of a CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE, meaning that is not explicity expressed but implied by the violation of the co-operative principle, meanings that are not explicitly conveyed in what is said, but that can nonetheless be inferred e.g. if I were to say My brother is a pig! You would recognize this as untrue, and suppose that was something else (Queen Elizabeth I was a virgin and a queen. As a queen she was a great success - this drink cost a fortune – I'm starving). They are the FOUR MAXIMS, which are the tenets of the co-operative principle: QUANTITY MAXIM 1.Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). 2.Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. The QUANTITY MAXIM relates to amount of information provided, do not provide more, or less, information than is necessary (last effort principle), to a correct form of conversation people don't have to over-textualize or under-textualize. QUALITY MAXIM 1.Do not say what you believe to be false. 2.Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence The QUALITY MAXIM relates to provided informations' truth, The Quality Maxim is frequently flouted for hyperbolic (this bag weighs a ton), ironic or comic effect. Without the flouting of this maxim, we wouldn’t have metaphors. If is raining outside, and I come out with a obvious falsehood like: Lovely weather today! We both know that it is an implicature. It have a double flouting with the addition of “literally” (I’m literally starving). RELATION MAXIM 1.Be relevant. The RELATION MAXIM relates to provided informations' relevance, make what you say relevant to the topic or purpose of the communication. Grice defines it as follows: "I expect a partner’s contribution to be appropriate to immediate needs at each stage of the transaction". In many cases the relevance of an answer needs to be inferred on the basis of information from the context. A: Where are my keys? B: Half past six! B’s answer appears not to be relevant to the question. MANNER MAXIM 1.Avoid obscurity of expression. 2.Avoid ambiguity. 3.Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). 4.Be orderly. MANNER MAXIM is related to how provided informations' are expressed. relates "not [...] to what is said but, rather, to HOW what is said to be said [...]" (Grice). Often it is victim of unintentional violations, usually related to the polysemic nature of content words. But also to syntactic imprecision e.g. shell found on beach. (bomba/granata-conchiglia). The advertising industry would be lost without it, they violate it intentionally (nokia-connecting people, subway eat fresh, nike ecc).
So, on the one hand, fr communication to take place at all, you have to co-operate, but, on the other, there is always the risk that this will compromise your own individuality. So this CO-OPERATIVE IMPERATIVE (the instinctive need for people to make contact and co-operate with others) is countered by another that acts against it - a TERRITORIAL IMPERATIVE, a need to preserve, secure and protect one's own space. P1 and P2 are not just parties seeking an impartial agreement about shared knowledge but individual personalities competing to establish their own POSITION (the attitude or point of view taken up by P1 in producting a text, or by P2 in interpreting it) in the area of convergence. These uncooperative floutings of the maxims are signs of the territorial imperative at work. Co-operation involves incursions into oher people’s territorial imperative may not be welcome. Consequently, we may flout a maxim of the co-operative principle in order not to threaten another’s FACE (personal self image made public) because it may cause offence, embarassment, a "loss of face". This is the basis of politeness. CHAPTER 7. CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS (CDA) Communication involves finding words that will have the desire effect, words which are tactically effective in regulating the POSITION (the attitude or point of view taken up by P1 in producting a text, or by P2 in interpreting it) of self in relation to the other. When some P1 says, or writes, something it is with the intention of getting the P2 to think, feel or act in a certain way, and the maxim volations can be seen as tactics that are used for the purpose. Every use of lenguage involves selection between the various TERMS OF REFERENCE that are the terms used by P1 to refer to a third person, e.g. (Obama→Barack Obama→Mr.Obama→The President of U.S.A). A lenguage will always provide the resource for alternative wordings: there will always be different grammatical structuresand different lexical items available to refer tothe "same" thing in a variety of ways. In some cases, suh expression is allowed by for different CONNOTATIONS (suggestive meaning: the associations that are called up by a word, e.g. lion→bravery, Wall Street→money, wealth) that are assigned to lexical items by convention. But what the worlds mean by convention and wat the people mean by them on a particular occason of use are two quite different things. People don't keep to te Gricean maxims, and they don't keep to semantic convention either. What they mean is not always apparent from what they say. It is just such a conviction that informs work that has been done in the name of CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS (CDA), that is a socio-politically motivated approach to the study of lenguage in use that generally assigns ideological significance to texts on the basis of their linguistic features. Those who follow this approach are particularly concerned with (and concerned about) the use (and abuse) of lenguage for the exercise of socio-political power. Critical discourse analysts enquire into the role played by schematic knowledge, but the schemata they focus on have to do more with socio-political values and beliefs, not only with ideational/ideological rapresentation of reality, not only with cultural constructs of how the world is, but also with political constructs of how it should be. The task that CDA sets itself is to discover traces of ideological bias in texts. CDA is critical in the sense that it calls into question ideas and assumptions that have become taken for granted as self-evidently valid on the grounds that they actually preserve a status quo which in effect sustains inequality and injustice by privileging the elite and the powerful at the expense of everybody else. So CDA is committed to a cause and puts its own ideological agenda up front. Its proponents are not simply analysts but activists.“The critical scholars make their social and political position explicit; they take sides, and actively participate in order to uncover, demystify or otherwise challenge dominance with their discourse analyses.”(Van Dijk 1997, cited by Widdowson 2007: 106).
CDA focus the attention on the textual choices that are ideologically motivated, and more particularly, when the ideology acts against the interests of the deprived and the oppressed. The CDA is used also to reveal to the unwary lenguage user the ideological influences they may be unwittingly subscribing to. A straightforward example of CDA can be this definition of a newspaper article about immigration: an army of refugees. Here, as indeed in any metaphor, we have a clear violation of the quality maxim (implicature run trough a metaphor). It is not true that these refugees are an army, so why the writer chosen this expressions rather than: a crows/large number of refugees, both indicant that there where a lot? One answer might be that in choosing the word army, the writer indicates that they are dangerous not only numerous, signalling a negative attitude to them. Clearly there are difficulties in inferring significance by focusing on grammar items too. Let us suppose that in our newspaper text on immigration we read the following: The refugees were driven back and many of them were injuried. Here we have a passie structure with deleted agents (where injuried (by?) why?). The use of this construction can be said to go agains the quantity maxim in that information has been withheld, but if we consider the text: The police drove back the refugees and injury many of them. Here the agent as grammatical subject becomes thematized. In that other article title of newspaper we can see the difference in the text with or without the adding of the phrase "by US troops", that twists the sense of the article. In the area of Fallujah in Iraq a huge increase in deformities in newborn children has been caused by toxic materials left over from fighting (( by US troops)) in 2004. CHAPTER 8. TEXT ANALYSIS With the advent of the computer, we are now in a position to provide exact descriptions of actual usage. Vast quantities of text can be called into a corpus and electronically analysed, the CORPUS is a collection, often on a very large scale, of actually occurring textual data, electronically stored and analysable by computer program. As a result, it is now possible to establish the relative frequency of occurrence of words and structures either in particulat domains of use or more generally across domains to provide profiles or frequency in the lenguage as a whole. If it is abnormally rare, we might then infer that its selection goes against the manner maxim and so creates an implicature e.g. Circumventing a hindrance VS Getting round a problem. Corpus analysis can tell us not only about the overall frequency of the words, but also about their RANGE, that is to say their distribution in different domains of use, the extent to which the occurrence of a word s distributed across different domains of use and kinds of text. The words circumventing and hindrance, for example, uncommon though they are, might well be found quite often in certain kinds of legal genre, they then would constitute a LOCAL NORM of appropriate usage. Thus the words customer, consumer, product, marketing, retailer, sales ecc ecc will be shown to have much higher concentration in business domains than in any other genre, and If these terms occurred in the discourse domain of clinical medicine, for example, one might infer that the writer's attitude to health care is that it is just kind of commodity to be produced and retailed in response to market forces like any other. The corpus analysis of text also reveal the the frequency and range of their patterns of co-occurrence with other linguistic items, thus certain items tend to keep company, or COLLOCATE, with others, there is a kind of mutual attraction that draws them together, that it's the COLLOCATION that is the cooccurrence of words in text. So the word unforeseen will attract the word circumstances, foregone→ conclusion, crying→shame, pious→hope ecc. But collocation goes beyond the relationship between two lexical items in a noun phrase to include the FORMULAIC PHRASES that are many other recurring combinations, they are frequently recurred collocations relatively fixed sentences and forms, like: as a matter of fact, all things considered, all things being equal and so on.
This formulaic phrases are easy enough for proficent speakers of English to cite: they are aware of them as familiar idiomatic features of their usage, and no corpus analysis is needed to reveal them. But there are innumerable other textual patterns and phrases that emerge from corpus analysis that the lenguage user is not aware of it. It is enough to demonstrate this by means of concordance, which displays all the occurrences of a particular word in lines of text so that one can see at a glance where co-textual combinations recur. The CONCORDANCE is the display of the different co-texts of occurrence of particular words, typically the result of the computer analysis of a corpus. In the precomputer era, it was an alphabetical list of all the words used in a book or set of books, with their immediate contexts, information about where they can be found and usually about how they are used. For example the words big and large and small and little, are shown not only to occur with different overall frequencies, but to have rather different collocational preferences. The SEMANTIC PROSODY describes the way in which certain seemingly neutral words can be perceived with positive or negative associations through frequent occurrences with particular collocations, it is the meaning that extends from one word in a COLLOCATION to another, e.g. the word cause usually COLLOCATES with words denoting unpleasant things like difficulty, distress, trouble, and so on, and is therefore said to have a NEGATIVE semantic prosody. Conversely, bring about, which collocates frequently with words like improvement, solution, success, and so on, is said to have a POSITIVE semantic prosody. So, as he have seen, the computer analysis of corpora provides us with the profiles of the occurrence and co-occurrence of textual features and these serve as a norm of what is customary against which any particular instance of usage can be compared. Instead, the textul analysis can tell us about texts, the lenguage that people produce in the process of communication.
