Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers
Michael McCarthy
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS 'I only said "if"!' poor Alice
pleaded in a piteous tone. The two Queens looked at each other, and the Red Queen remarked, with a little shudder, 'She says she only said "if"-' 'But she said a great deal more than that!' the White Queen moaned, wringing her hands.'Oh, ever so much more than that!' Lewis Carroll: 7?1tvugh the Looking 018m
1.1 A brief historical overview
Discourse analysis is concerned with the study of the relationship between language and the contexts in which it is used. It grew out of work in different disciplines in the 1960s and early 1970s, including linguistics, semiotics, psychology, anthropology and sociology. Discourse analysts study language in use: written texts of all kinds, and spoken data, from conversation to highly institutionalised forms of talk. At a time when linguistics was largely concerned with the analysis of single sentences, Zellig Harris published a paper with the title 'Discourse analysis' (Harris 1952). Harris was interested in the distribution of linguis- tic elements-in extended texts, and the links between the text and its social situation, though his paper is a far cry from the discourse analysis we are hsed to nowadays. Also important in the early years was the emergence of stmiotics and the French structuralist approach to the study of narrative. In the 1960s, Dell Hymes provided a sociological perspective with the study of speech in its social wmng (e.g. Hymes 1964). The linguistic philosophers sudr as Austin (1962), Searle (1969) and Grice (1975) were also influential in tbe study of language as social action, reflected in speech-act theory and the formulation of conversational maxims, alongside the emergence of 1 What is discourse analysis? pragmatics, which is the study of meaning in context (see Levinson 1983; Leech 1983). British discourse analysis was greatly influenced by M. A. K. Halliday's functional approach to language (e.g. Halliday 1973), which in turn has connexions with the Prague School of linguists. Halliday's framework emphasises the social functions of language and the thematic and infor- mational structure of speech and writing. Also important in Britain were Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) at the University of Birmingham, who developed a model for the description of teacher-pupil talk, based on a hierarchy of discourse units. Other similar work has dealt with doctor- patient interaction, service encounters, interviews, debates and business negotiations, as well as monologues. Novel work in the British tradition has also been done on intonation in discourse. The Bfitish work has principally followed structural-linguistic criteria, on the basis of the iso- lation of units, and kts of rules defining well-formed sequences of dis- course. American discourse analysis has been dominated by work within the ethnomethodological tradition, which emphasises the research method of close observation of groups of people communicating in natural settin~s. It examines types of speech event such as storytelling, greeting rituals and verbal duels in different cultural and social settings (e.g. Gumperz and Hymes 1972). What is often called conversation analysis within the American tradition can also be included under the general heading of discourse analysis. In conversational analysis, the emphasis is not upon building structural models but on the close observation of the behaviour of
participants in talk and on patterns which recur over a wide range of natural data. The work of Goffman (1976; 1979), and Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) is important in the study of conversational norms, turn- taking, and other aspects of spoken interaction. Alongside the conversation analysts, working within the sociolinguistic tradition, Labov's investi- gations of oral storytelling have also contributed to a long history of
interest in narrative discourse. The American work has produced a large number of descriptions of discourse types, as well as insights into the social constraints of politeness and face-preserving phenomena in talk, overlap- ping with British work in pragmatics. Also relevant to the development of discourse analysis as a whole is the work of text grammarians, working mostly with written language. Text grammarians see texts as language elements strung together in relationships with one another that can be defined. Linguists such as Van Dijk (1972), De Beaugrande (1980), Halliday and Hasan (1976) have made a significant impact in this area. The Prague School of linguists, with their interest in the structuring of information in discourse, has also been influential. Its most important contribution has been to show the links between grammar and d' iscourse. 1.2 Form andfktimk Discowse analysis has grown into a wide-ranging and heterogeneous discipline which finds its unity in the description of language above the sentence and an interest in the contexts and cultural influences which affect language in use. It is also now, increasingly, forming a backdrop to research in Appliod Linguistics, and second language learning and teachingdin particular. The famous British comedy duo, Eric Morecambe andErnie Wise, started one' of their shows in 1973 with the following dia,lqpe: (1.1) Ernie: Tell 'em about the show.
Eric (to the audience): Have we got a show for you might folks!
Have we got a show for you! (aside to Ernie) Have we got a show for them?
This short dialogue raises a number of problems for anyone wishing to do a linguistic analysis of it; not least is the question of why it is funny (the audience laughed at Eric's question to Ernie). Most people would agree that it is funny because Eric is playing with a grammatical structure that seems to be ambiguous: 'Have we got a show for you!' has an inverted verb and subject. Inversion of the verb and its subject happens only under restricted conditions in English; the most typical circumstances in which this happens is when questions are being asked, but it also happens in exclamations (e.g. 'Wasn't my face red!'). So Eric's repeated grammatical fom clearly under- goes a change in how it is interpreted by the audience between its second and third occurrence in the dialogue. Eric's inverted grammatical fom in its first two occurrences clearly has the hnction of an exclamation, telling the audience something, not asking them anything, until the humorous moment when he begms.to doubt whether they do have a show to offer, at which point he uses the same grammatical form to ask Ernie a genuine qucstion. There seems, then, to be a lack of one-to-one correspondence between grammatical form and communicative function; the inverted form in itselfdoes not inherently carry an exclamatory or a questioning function.
By the same token, in other situations, an' uninverted declarative form (subject before verb), typically associated with 'statements', might be heard as a question requiring an answer: (1 -2) A: You're leaving for London. Ek Yes, immediately. So how we interpret grammatical forms depends on a number of factors, some linguistic, some purely situational. One linguistic feature that may affect our interpretation is the intonation. In the Eric and Ernie sketch, Eric's intonation was as follows: 1 What is discourse analysis? (1.3) Eric (to the audience):
Have we got a SHOW for you tonight folks!
Have we got a SHOW for you! (aside to Ernie)
HAVE we got a show for them?
Two variables in Eric's delivery change. Firstly, the tone contour, i.e. the direction of his pitch, whether it rises or falls, changes (his last utterance, 'have we got a show for them' ends -in a rising tone). Secondly, his voice jumps to a higher pitch level (repr&ented here by writing have above the line). Is it this which makes his utterance a question? Not necessarily. Many questions have only falling tones, as in the following: (1.4) A: What was he wearing?
B: An anorak.
A: But was it his?
So the intonation does not inherently carry the function of question either, any more than the inversion of auxiliary verb and subject did. Grammatical forms and phonological forms examined separately are unreliable indica- tors of function; when they are taken together, and looked at in context, we can come to some decision about functign. So decisions about communica: tive function cannot solely be the domain of grammar or phonology. Discourse analysis is not entirely separate from the study of grammar and phonology, as we shall see in Chapters 2 and 4, but discourse analysts are intetested in a lot more than linguistic forms. Their concerns include how it is that Eric and Ernie interpret each other's grammar appropriately (Ernie commands Eric to tell the audience, Eric asks Ernie a question, etc.), how it is that the dialogue between the two comics is coherent and not gobbledy- gook, what Eric and Ernie's roles are in relation to one another, and what sort of 'rules' or conventions they are following as they converse with one another. Eric and Ernie's conversation is only one example (and a rather crazy one at that) of spoken interaction; most of us in a typical week will observe or take part in a wide range of different types of spoken interaction: phone
calls, buying things in shops, perhaps an interview for a job, or with a
doctor, or with an employer, talking formally at meetings or in classrooms,
informally in cafks or on buses, or intimately with our friends and loved
ones. These situations will have their own formulae and conventions which
we follow; they will have different ways of opening and closing the
encounter, different role relationships, different purposes and different
settings. Discourse analysis is interested in all these different factors and
tries to account for them in a rigorous fashion with a separate set of
descriptive labels from those used by conventional grammarians. The first
fundamental distinction we have noted is between language forms and
discourse functions; once we have made this distinction a lot of other 1.3 Speech acts and discourse stmctwra
conclusions can follow, and the labels used to describe discourse need not
clash at all with those we are all used to in grammar. They will in fact
complement and enrich each other. Chapters 2,3 and 4 of this book will
therefore be concerned with examining the relationships between language
forms (grammatical, lexical and phonological ones), and discourse func-
tions, for it is language forms, above all, which are the raw material of
language teaching, while the overall aim is to enable learners to use
language functionally.
Can you create a context and suggest an intonation for the forms in the
left-hand column so that they would be heard as performing the functions
in the right-hand column, without changing their grammatical structure?
1. did I make a fool of myself (a) question (b) exclamation
2. you don't love me (a) question (b) statement
3. youeatit (a) statement (b) command
4. switch the light on (a) command (b) question
1.3 Speedr acts and diawurse structures
So far we have suggested that form and function have to be separated to
understand what is happening in discourse; this may be necessary to
analyse Eric and Ernie's zany dialogue, but why discourse analysis? Applied
linguists and language teachers have been familiar with the term function
for years now; are we not simply talking about 'functions' when we analyse
Eric and Ernie's talk? Why complicate matters with a whole new set of
jargon?
In one sense we are talking about 'functions': we are concerned as much
with what Eric and Ernie are doing with language as with what they are
saying. When we say that a particular bit of speech or writing is a request or
an instruction or an exemplification we are concentrating on what that
piece of language is doing, or how the listenerheader is supposed to react;
for this reason, such entities are often also called speech acts (see Austin
1%2 and Searle 1%9). Each of the stretches of language that are carrying
the force of requesting, instructing, and so on is seen as performing a
particular act; Eric's exclamation was performing the act of informing the
audience that a great show was in store for them. So the approach to 1 What is discourse analysis?
communicative language teaching that emphasises the functions or speech
acts that pieces of language perform overlaps in an important sense with the
preoccupations of discourse analysts. We are all familiar with coursebooks
that say things like: 'Here are some questions which can help people to
remember experiences which they had almost forgotten: "Have you ever
. . . ?", "Tell me about the time you . . . ?", "I hear you once . . . ?",
"Didn't you once . . . ?', "You've . . ., haven't you?'"*. Materiab such as
these are concerned with speech acts, with what is done with words, not
just the grammatical and lexical forms of what is said.
But when we speak or write, we do not just utter a string of linguistic
forms, without beginning, middle or end, and anyway, we have already
demonstrated the difficulty of assigning a function to a particular form of
grammar and/or vocabulary. If we had taken Eric's words 'have we got a
show for you' and treated them as a sentence, written on a page (perhaps to
exemplify a particular structure, or particular vocabulary), it would have
been impossible to attach a functional lahi to it with absolute certainty
other than to say that in a large number of contexts this would most
typically be heard as a question. Now this is undoubtedly a valuable
generalisation to make for a learner, and many notional-functional lan-
guage coursebooks do just that, offering short phrases or clauses which
characteristicaily fulfil functions such as 'apologising' or 'making a polite
request'. But the discourse analyst is much more interested in the process by
which, for example, an inverted verb and subject come to be heard as an
informing speech act, and to get at this, we must have our speech acts fully
contextualised both in terms of the surrounding text and of the key features
of the situation. Discourse analysis is thus fundamentally concerned with
the relationship between language and the contexts of its use.
And there is more to the story than merely labelling chains of speech acts.
Firstly, as we have said, discourses have beginnings, middles and ends.
How is it, for example, that we feel that we are coming in in the middle of
this conversation and leaving it before it has ended?
(1.5) A: Well, try this spray, what I got, this is the biggest they come.
B: Oh.. . A: . . . tittle make-up capsule.
B: Oh, right, it's like these inhalers, isn't it? ,
A: And I, I've found that not so bad since I've been using it, and it
doesn't make you so grumpy.
B: This is up your nose?
A: Mm.
B: Oh, wow! It looks a bit sort of violent, doesn't it? It works well,
does it?
(Birmingham CoHcction of English Text)
L. Joncs: Functions of Enghh, Cambridge University Press, 1981 ed., p. 22. 1.3 Speech acts and discourse
Our immediate reaction is that conversations can often begin with well, but
that there is something odd about 'try this spray . . .'. Suggesting to
someone 'try X' usually only occurs in respcmse to some remark or event or
perceived state of affairs that warrants intervention, and such information
is lacking here. Equally, we interpret B's final ranark, 'It works well, does
it?' as expecting a response from A. In addition, we might say that we do
not expect people to leave the question of whether something is a fitting
solution to a problem that has been raised dangling in the air; this we shall
return to in section 1.10 when we look at written text.
The difficulty is not only the attaching of sph-act-labcls to utterances.
The main problem with making a neat analysis of extract (1.5) is that it is
clearly the 'middle' of something, which makes some katures difficult to
interpret. For instance, -why does A say well at the beginning of hislher
turn? What are 'these inhalers'? Are they inhalers on the table in front of the
speakers,?or ones we all know about in the shops? Why does A change from
talking about 'this spray' to that in a short space of the dialogue?
The dialogue is structured in the sense that it can be coherently inter-
preted and seems to be progressing somewhere, but we are in the middle of
a structure tather than witnessing the complete unfolding of the whole. It is
in this respect, the interest in whole discourse structures, that discourse
analysis adds something extra to the traditional concern with functionsl
speech acts. Just what these larger structures might typically consist of must
be the concern of the rest of this chapter before we address the detailed
questions of the vahe of discourse analysis in language teaching.
What clues are there in the following extract which suggest that we are
coming in in the middle of something? What other problems are there in
interpreting individual words?
A: I mean, I don't like rhis new emblem at all.
B: The logo.
A: Yeah, the castle on the Trent, it's horrible.
C: Did you get a chance to talk to him?
A: Yeah.
C: How does he seem?
(Author's data 1989) I What is discourse analysis?
1.4 The scope of discourse analysis
Discourse analysis is not only concerned with the description and analysis
of spoken interaction. In addition to all our verbal encounters we daily
consume hundreds of written and printed words: newspaper articles,
letters, stories, recipes, instructions, notices, comics, billboards, leaflets
pushed through the door, and so on. We usually expect them to be
coherent, meaningful communications in which the words and/or sentences
are linked to one another in a fashion that corresponds to conventional
formulae, just as we do with speech; therefore discourse analysts are
equally interested in the organisation of written interaction. In this book,
we shall use the term discourse analysis to cover the study of spoken and
written interaction. Our overall aim is to come to a much better under-
standing of exactly how natural spoken and written discourse looks and
sounds. This may well be different from what textbook writers and teach-
ers have assumed from their own intuition, which is often burdened with
prejudgements deriving from traditional grammar, vocabulary and into-
nation teaching. With a more accurate picture of natural discourse, we are
in a better position to evaluate the descriptions upon which we base our
teaching, the teaching materials, what goes on in the classroom, and the
end products of our teaching, whether in the form of spoken or written
output.
1.5 Spoken discourse: models of analysis
One influential approach to the study of spoken discourse is that developed
at the University of Birmingham, where research initially concerned itself
with the structure of discourse in school classrooms (Sinclair and
Coulthard 1975). The Birmingham model is certainly not the only valid
approach to analysing discourse, but it is a relatively simple and powerful
model which has connexions with the study of speech acts such as were
discussed in section 1.3 but which, at the same time, tries to capture the
larger structures, the 'wholes' that we talked about in the same section.
Sinclair and Coulthard found in the language of traditional native-speaker
school classrooms a rigid pattern, where teachers and pupils spoke accord-
ing to very fixed perceptions of their roles and where the talk could be seen
to conform to highly structured sequences. An extract from their data
illustrates this:
(1.6) (T = teacher, P = any pupil who speaks)
T: Now then . . . I've got some things here, too. Hands up. What's
that, what is it?
P: Saw. 1.5 Spoken discourse: models of analysis
T: It's a saw, yes this is a saw. What do we do with a saw?
P: Cut wood.
T: Yes. You're shouting out though. What do we do with a saw?
Marvelette.
P: Cut wood.
T: We cut wood. And, erm, what do we do with a hacksaw, this
hacksaw?
P: Cut trees.
T: Do we cut trees with this?
P: No. No.
T: Hands up. What do we do with this?
P: Cut wood.
T: Do we cut wood with this?
P: No.
T: What do we do with that then?
P: Cut wood.
T: We cut wood with that. What do we do with that?
P: Sir.
T: Cleveland.
P: Metal.
T: We cut metal. Yes we cut metal. And, er, I've got this here.
What's that? Trevor.
P: An axe.
T: It's an axe yes. What do I cut with the axe?
P: Wood, wood.
T: Yes I cut wood with the axe. Right . . . Now then, I've got some
more things here . . . (etc.)
(Sinclair and Coulthard 1975: 93-4)
This is only a short extract, but nonetheless, a clear pattern seems to emerge
(and one that many will be familiar with from their own schooldays). The
first thing we notice, intuitively, is that, although this is clearly part of a
larger discourse (a 'lesson'), in itself it seems to have a completeness. A bit
of business seems to commence with the teacher saying 'Now then . . .', and
that same bit of business ends with the teacher saying 'Right. . . Now then'.
The teacher (in this case a man) in his planning and execution of the lesson
decides that the lesson shall be marked out in some way; he does not just
run on without a pause from one part of the lesson to another. In fact he
gives his pupils a clear signal of the beginning and end of this mini-phase of
the lesson by using the words now then and tight in a particular way (with
falling,intonation and a short pause afterwards) that make them into a sort
of 'frame' on either side of the sequence of questions and answers. Framing
move is precisely what Sinclair and Coulthard call the funaion of such
utterances. The two framing moves, together with the question and answer
sequence that falls between them, can be called a transaction, which again
captures the feeling of what is being done with language here, rather in the 1 What is discourse analysis?
way that we talk of a 'transaction' in a shop between a shopkeeper and a
customer, which will similarly be a completed whole, with a recognisable
start and finish. However, framing move and transaction are only labels to
attach to certain structural features, and the analogy with their non-
specialist meanings should not be taken too far.
This classroom extract is very structured and formal, but transactions
with framing moves of this kind are common in a number of other settings
too: telephone calls are perhaps the most obvious, especially when we wish
to close the call once the necessary business is done; a job interview is
another situation where various phases of the interview are likely to be
marked by the chairperson or main interviewer saying things like 'right',
'well now' or 'okay', rather in the way the teacher does. Notice, too, that
there is a fairly limited number of words available in English for framing
transactions (e.g. right, okay, so, etc.), and notice how some people
habitually use the same ones.
Reader activity 3 d
1. How many other situations can you think of where framing moves are
commonly used to divide up the discourse, apart from classrooms,
telephone calls and job interviews?
2. Complete the list of what you think the most common framing words
or phrases are in English and make a list of framing words in any
other language you know. Do framing words translate directly from
language to language?
3. What is your favourite framing word or phrase when you are teach-
ing, or when you talk on the phone?
If we return to our piece of classroom data, the next problem is: does the
question-answer sequence between the teacher and pupils have any inter-
nal strumre, or is it just a string of language forms to which we can give
individual function or speech-act labels? Sinclair and Coulthard show
clearly that it does have a structure. Looking at the extract, we can see a
pattern: (1) the teacher asks something ('What's that?'), (2) a pupil answers
('An axe') and (3) the teacher acknowledges the answer and comments on it
('It's an axe, yes'). The pattern of (I), (2) and (3) is then repeated. So we
could label the pattern in the following way: ,
1. Ask T
2. Answer P
3. Comment T 1 .S Spoken discourse: models of analysis
This gives us then a regular sequence of TPT-TPT-TPT-TPT, etc. So we
can now return to our extract and begin to mark off the boundaries that
create this pattern:
T: Now then . . . I've got some things.h too. Hands up. What's
that, what is it? I
P: Saw. I
T: It's a saw, yes this is a saw. N What do with a saw? 1
P: Cut wood. I
T: Yes. You're shouting out though. I! QUltacd~ do with a saw?
Marvelette. I
P: Cut wood. I
T: We cut wood. 11 And, erm, what do we do with . . . etc.
We can now isolate a typical segment between double slashes (11) and use.it
as a bask unit in our description:
(1.8) T: /I What do we do with a saw? Marvelette. I
P: Cut wood. I '
T: We cut wood. 11
Sinclair and Coulthard call this unit an exchange. This particular exchange
consists of a question, an answer and a comment, and so it is a three-part
exchange. Each of the parts are giveri the name move by Sinclair and
Coulthard. Here are some other examples of exchanges, each with three
moves:
(1-9) A: What time is it?
B: Six thirty.
A: Thanks.
A: Tim's coming tomorrow.
B: Oh yeah.
A: Yes.
A: Here, hold this.
B: (takes the box)
A: Thanks.
Each of these exchanges consists of three moves, but it is only in (1) that the
first move ('What time is it?') seems to be functioning as a question. The
first move in (2) is heard as giving information, and the first move in (3) as a
command. Equally, the second moves seem to have the function,
respectively, of (1) an answer, (2) an acknowledgement and (3) a non-verbal
response (taking the box). The third moves are in all three exchanges
functioning as feedback on the second move: (1) to be polite and say
thanks, (2) to confirm the information and (3) ro say thanks again. In order
to capture the similarity of the pattern in each case, Sinclair and Coulthard 1 What is discourse analysis?
(1975: M7) call the first move in each exchange an opening move, the
second an answering moue and the third a follow-up moue. Sinclair and
Brazil (1982: 49) prefer to talk of initiation, response and follow-up. It does
not particularly matter for our purposes which set of labels we use, but for
consistency, in this book the three moves will be called initiation, response
and follow-up. We can now label our example exchanges using these terms:
Move Exchange 1 Exchange 2 Exchange 3 --
Initiation A: What time A: Tim's coming A: Here, hold
is it? tomorrow. this.
Response B: Six-thirty. B: Oh yeah. B: (takes the box)
Follow-up A: Thanks. A: Yes. A: Thanks.
In these exchanges we can observe the importance of each move in the
overall functional unit. Every exchange has to be initiated, whether with a
statement, a question or a command; equally naturally, someone responds,
whether in words or action. The status of the follow-up move is slightly
different: in the classroom it fulfils the vital role. of telling the pupils
whether they have done what the teacher wanted them to; in other situ-
ations it may be an act of politeness, and the follow-up elements might even
be extended further, as in this Spanish example:
(1.12) A: Oiga, pot favor, ~qui hora es?
B: Las cinco y media.
A: Gracias.
B: De nada.
Here A asks B the time, B replies ('half past five'), A thanks B ('gracias'),
and then B says 'de nada' ('not at all'). Many English speakers would feel
that such a lengthy ritual was unnecessary for such a minor favour and
would omit the fourth part, reserving phrases such as 'not at all' for
occasions where it is felt a great service has been done, for example where
someone has been helped out of a difficult situation. The patterns of such
exchanges may vary from culture to culture, and language learners may
have to adjust to differences. They also vary from setting to setting: when
we say 'thank you' to a ticket collector at a station barrier as our clipped
ticket is handed back to us, we would not (in British society) expect 'not at
all' from the ticket collector (see Aston 1988 for examples of how this
operates in Italian service encounters in bookshops).
In other cases, the utterance following a response may be less obviously a
follow-up and may seem to be just getting on with further conversational
business:
(1.13) A: Did you see Malcolm?
B: Yes. 1.5 Spoken discourse: models of analysis
A: What did he say about Brazil?
B: Oh he said he's going next month.
A: Did he mention the party?
B: No.
A: Funny . . . (etc.)
Different situations will require different formulae, depending on roles and
settings. The teacher's role as evaluator, for example, makes the follow-up
move very important in classrooms; where the follow-up move is withheld,
the pupils are likely to suspect that something is wrong, that they have not
given the answer the teacher wants, as in our extract from Sinclair and
Coulthard's data:
(1.14) T: What do we do with a hacksaw, this hacksaw?
P: Cut trees.
T: Do we cut trees with this?
P: No. No.
The pupils know that 'cut trees' is not the right answer; it is only when one
pupil says 'metal' that the full follow-up occurs ('We cut metal. Yes we cut
metal'); the question 'Do we cut trees with this!' is simply recycling the
initiating move, giving the pupils a second chance.
1. Can you put the moves of this discourse into an order that produces a
coherent conversation? The conversation takes place at a travel
agent's. What clues do you use to establish the correct order? Are
there any moves that are easier to place than others; and if so, why?
'You haven't no, no.'
'No . . . in LittIewoods is it!'
'I'm awfully sorry, we haven't . . . urn I don't know where you can
try for Bath actually.'
'Can I help you?'
'Okay thanks.'
'Yeah they're inside there now.'
'Urn have you by any chance got anything on Bath!'
'Urn I don't really know . . . you could try perhaps Pickfords in
Littlewoods, they might be able to help you.'
(Birmingham Collection of English Text)
2. Think of a typical encounter with a stranger in the street (e.g. asking
the way, asking for change). What is the minimum number of moves
necessary to complete a polite exchange in a language that you know
other than English? 1 What is discourse analysis?
The three-part exchanges we have looked at so far are fascinating in
another sense, too, which relates back to our discussion in section 1.3 on
speech am, in that, taken om of context and without the third part, it is
often impossible to decide exactly what the functions of the individual
speech acts in the exchange are in any completely meaningful way. Con-
sider, for example:
(1.15) A: What time is it?
B: Five past six.
A:
What could fill the third part here? Here are some possibilities:
1. A: Thanks.
2. A: Good! Clever girl!
3. A: No it isn't, and you know it isn't; it's half past and you're late
again!
'Thanks' suggests that A's question was a genuine request for information.
'Clever girl!' smacks of the classroom (e.g. a lesson on 'telling the time' with
a big demonstration clock), and 'No it isn't . . . etc.' suggests an accusation
or a verbal trap for someone who is to be reproached. Neither of the last
two is a genuine request for information; teachers usually already know the
answers to the questions they ask of their pupils and the reproachful parent
or employer in the last case is not ignorant of the time. These examples
underline the fact that function is arrived at with reference to the partici-
pants, roles and settings in any discourse, and that linguistic forms are
interpreted in light of these. This is not to say that all communication
between teachers and pupils is of the curious kind exemplified in (1.15);
sometimes teachers ask 'real' questions ('How did you spend the
weekend!'), but equally, a lot of language teaching question-and-answer
sessions reflect the 'unreal' questions of Sinclair and Coulthard's data
('What's the past tense of take?; 'What does wash basin mean!'). Nor do we
wish to suggest that 'unreal' classroom questions serve no purpose; they are
a useful means for the teacher of checking the state of knowledge of the
students and of providing opportunities for practising language forms. But
in evaluating the spoken output of language classrooms we shall at least
want to decide whether there is a proper equilibrium or an imbalance
between 'real' communication and 'teacher talk'. We would probably not
like to think that our students spent all or most of their time indulging in
the make-believe world of 'you-tell-me-things-I-alteady-know'. 1.6 Conversations outside the classroom
1.6 Conversations outside ths dassrom
So far we have looked at talk in a rather restricted context: the traditional
classroom, where roles are rigidly defined and the patterns of initiation,
response and follow-up in exchanges are relatively easy to perceive, and
where transactions are heavily marked. The dassmm was a convenient
place to start, as Sinclair and Coulthard discmend, but it is not the 'real'
world of conversation. It is a peculiar place, a placc .where teachers ask
questions to which they already know the answkr$, where pupils (at least
younger pupils) have very limited rights as speaker~and where evaluation
by the teacher of what the pupils say is a vital mechanism in the discourse
structure. But using the classroom is most beneficial for QW purposes since
one of the things a model for the analysis of classroom talk enables us to do
is evaluate our own output as teachers and that of our students. This we
shall return to in Chapter 5. For the moment it is more important to
examine the claim that the exchange model might be useful for the analysis
of talk outside the classroom. If it is, then it could offer a yardstick for the
kind of language aimed at in communicative language teaching and for all
aspects of the complex chain of materials, methodology, implementation
and evaluation, whatever our order of priority within that chain.
Conversations outside classroom settings vary in their degree of struc-
turedness, but even so, conversations that seem at first sight to be 'free' and
unstructured can often be shown to have a structure; what will differ is the
kinds of speech-act labels needed to describe what is happening, and it is
mainly in this area, the functions of the parts of individual moves, that
discourse analysts have found it necessary to expand and modify the
Sinclair-Coulthard model. Let us begin with a real example:
(1.16) (Jozef (J) is a visiting scholar from Hungary at an English department
in a British university. He has established a fairly informal and
relaxed relationship with Chris (C), a lecturer in the department. He
pops into Chris's room one morning.)
C: Hello Jozef.
J: Hello Chris . . . could you do me a great favour.
C: Yeah.
J: I'm going to book four cinema tickets on the phone and they
need a credit card number . . . could you give me your credit card
number . . . they only accept payment by credit card over the
phone.
C: Ah.
J: I telephoned there and they said they wouldn't do any
reservations
C: 1 without a card.
J: Yes and I could pay you back in cash.
C: Yes . . . sure . . . no problem at all.
J: Yes I What is discourse analysis?
C: Mm . . . I've got this one, which is an Access card.
J: And I just tell them your number.
C: [ You tell them my number. . . this one here.
J: And they tell me how much.
C: That's right . . . that's all . . . that's my name there and that
number.
J: Yes . . . and I can settle it.
C: Yes and bring it back when you're done.
J: Yeah . . . 1'11 just telephone then.
C: Right . . . okay.
j: Thanks Chris.
C: Cheers.
(Jozef leaves the room.)
(Author's data 1988)
This is not like the classroom. Jozef and Chris are more or less equals in
this piece of interaction, therefore each wiH enjoy the right to initiate,
respond and follow up in their exchanges. It is not merely a question-and-
answer session; sometimes they inform each other and acknowledge infor-
mation. But their talk is not disorganised; there are patterns we can
observe. The sequence begins and ends with framing mechanisms not
entirely unlike the 'right' and 'now then' of the classroom: after the initial
greeting, Jozef pauses and his voice moves to a higher pitch:
could you do me . . . (etc.)
(1.17) J: Hel.10 Chris . . . t
We shall return in greater detail to this use of pitch in Chapter 4. For the
moment it is sufficient to record it as a signal of a boundary in the talk, in
this case marking off the opening from the main business of the conver-
sation. Starting the main business, Jozef then begins a long sequence, all of
which is concerned with eliciting a favour from Chris. He does not
immediately ask his question but in his initiating move gives the back-
ground to it first ('I'm going to book four. . . etc.'). This speech act we shall
call a starter, after which comes the main part of the elicitation ('could you
give me . . . etc.'). Jozef expands his elicitation with several comments
('they only accept payment. . . etc.'), during which he is supported by a sort
of grunt from Chris ('ah') and an occasion where Chris completes Jozefs
words for him, as if he has predicted what Jozef wanted to say ('without a
card'). Jozef s long elicitation ends with 'and I could pay you back in cash'.
Chris then responds "Yes sure . . . etc.') and Jozef follows up with 'yes'.
The fact that Jozef says so much in asking the favour is because he is
potentially inconveniencing Chris, and he thus has to prepare the ground
carefully; this relationship between what is said and factors such as polite-
ness and sensitivity to the other person is taken up in section 5.2.
So, complex though it is, we have initiation-response-follow-up 1.6 Conversations outside the classroom
sequences here that form meaningful exchanges just like the classroom
ones. What we have here, which we would not expect in the classroom, are
Chris's verbal supports; we should be very surprised to hear in a classroom
of young children:
(1.18) T: Now . . . :[ have some things here.
Ps (in chorus): Oh yes . . . ah-ha.
T: Used for cutting things.
Ps: Oh, really?
But we can pare Jozef and Chris's exchange down to ia.bst"esc .
(1.19) J: // Could you give me your credit card number and I'B pay you in
cash. /
C: Yes sure no problem. /
J: Yes. /I
It now begins to look a little more manageable, and in it we can see the
difference in complexity between a simple speech act and elaborated ones
of the kind demanded by politeness, which can be difficult for the learner
with limited linguistic resources in an L2. We can also see the difference
between bare exchanges of the kind often found in coursebooks and the
way, in natural discourse, that speakers support and complete one
another's moves, how they follow up and acknowledge replies, and other
features that we have not yet discussed. It is in this way, by using descriptive
categories such as the exchange and its sub-components, that discourse
analysis enables us to describe actual performances, to delimit targets more
accurately in language teaching and to evaluate input and output in the
teaching/learning process.
This extract also serves as a reminder of the form and function problem
raised in section 1.2. Some of Jozef s declarative forms are heard by Chris as
questions requiring a confirmation (or correction if necessary):
(1.20) J: And l just tell them your number.
C : [ You tell them my number . . . this one here.
J: And they tell me how much.
C: That's right . . . that's all . . . (etc.)
They are heard as questions since Chris is the person with the knowledge
that Jozef is seeking to have confirmed (at least Jozef assumes that he is).
Chris will not suppose that Jozef is telling him something he (Chris) already
knows, and so will assume he is being asked to confirm.
Equally, we can observe the same kinds of exchange boundaries occur-
ring in the middle of speaker turns as we did in the classroom data:
(1-21) J: // And they tell me how much. /
C: That's right . . . that's all . . . that's my name there and that
number. /
J: Yes I/ . . . and I can settle it. / 1 What ?s discourse analysis?
C: Yes and bring it .back when you're done. /
J: Yeah // . . . I'll just telephone then.
The double slashes in Jozefs turns come after the follow-ups to Chris's
answers and before new initiating moves. The conversation finally ends
with a framing move similar to the teacher's ('right . . . okay'), and an
expression of thanks.
Obviously there are numerous other features in the conversation (into-
nation, gesture, etc.) which make us more confident in our analysis, and we
shall return to the most central of these later, but this short conversation
should at least serve to illustrate that even apparently loosely structured
talk adheres to norms and is regularly patterned. It is this type of patterning
that can be as useful to the language teacher as the regular patterns of
syntax are in clauses and sentences.
So far we have looked only at one model for the analysis of spoken
interaction, the Sinclair-Coulthard 'Birmingham' model. We have argued
that it is useful for describing talk in and out of the classroom; it captures
patterns that reflect the basic functions of interaction and offers a hier-
archical model where smaller units can be seen to combine to form larger
ones and where the large units can be seen to consist of these smaller ones.
The bare bones of the hierarchy (or rank scale) can be expressed as follows:
TRANSACTION
t
EXCHANGE
t
MOVE
2
ACT
The lowest rank is what we have referred to as 'speech acts'; Sinclair and
Coulthard simply call them acts, but for our general purposes, any fine
distinction the terminology might suggest is unimportant. Sinclair and
Coulthard's model is very useful for analysing patterns of interaction where
talk is relatively tightly structured, such as between doctors and patients
(see Coulthard and Ashby 1975), but all sorts of complications arise when
we try to apply the model to talk in more informal, casual, and spon-
taneous contexts.
Because of the rigid conventions of situations such as teacher talk and
doctor-patient talk, it is relatively easy to predict who will speak when,
who will ask and who will answer, who will interrupt, who will open and
close the talk, and so on. But where talk is more casual, and among equals, 1.7 Talk as a social activity
everyone will have a part to play in conuolhg and monitoring the
discourse, and the picture will look considerably more complicated.
Consider the problems which arise when we try twk&-&se rhe following
extract from the point of view of exchange a&an&m-hdaries. Are
there straightforward initiating, responding and foilmap Decide
where each move begins and ends and try to la be1 some o# tbc lsomabvious
speech am (e.g. elzcit~ttiom, replies, comments and so w). There are
complications here, not least because there are more than twu people
talking. Do you feel this extract is more or less tightly structured than the
classroom talk or the conversation between Jozef and Chris? What extra
problems does this sort of transcript raise for discourse analysts?
(1.2) (University lecturer (L) at a student bar where he has just ordered
drinks for a group of students (Sl, S2, etc.). The barman (B) is
attending to the order and the group are standing at the bar.)
L: Well, that should blow a hole in five pounds, shouldn't it?
S1: It's quite cheap actually.
L: (laughs)
S1: What's the urn lecturers' club like, senior, senior, you know.
L: L Ah it's very cosy and
sedate and, er, you know, nice little armchairs and curtains . . . there are some interesting characters who get there.
S2: Is that the one where they have the toilets marked with er
gentlemen, no, 'ladies and members'?
L: loh, oh,
S2: Yeah it was one
of the other lecturers who pointed it out, he ought it was quite
amusing.
L: Yeah, I hadn't
noticed that, yeah, might well be, yeah.
B: Four sixty-seven please.
r
L: Is that all, God, I thought it would cost more than that (pays)
. . . thank you . . . I thought it would cost more than that.
S1: It's quite cheap.
S2: I wouldn't argue with that one.
~3: I NO, it's quite good.
L: Now, how are we going to carry all these over?
(Author's data 1989) 1 What is discourse'analysis?
There are features which can be handled by the ' Sinclair-Coulthard
exchange structure model (the lecturer's 'now' at the end seems to be a
typical boundary marker, and his laugh at the beginning of the talk could
be seen as a follow-up to the student's remark), but there are many
complications. The student who asks about the toilets does not get a proper
answer from the lecturer, and, if anything, answers her own question; the
barman comes in and disrupts the continuity of the talk, and, at one point,
three people are talking at once. If this were a classroom, many would
consider that the lecturer had lost all control over the discourse, and that
people were behaving 'out of turn'.
Complications of this kind have led many discourse analysts to devote
their attention more to observing how people behave and how they
cooperate in the management of discourse, rather than to a concern with
building elaborate models of structure (see Levinson 1983: 286). Observ-
ing conversational behaviour close to has been the preoccupation of a
school of analysts roughly grouped under the name ethnomethodologists,
though sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists have also made
significant contributions. This approach has been largely, but not exclus-
ively, an American phenomenon, and it has concentrated on areas of
interest such as how pairs of utterances relate to one another (the study of
adjacency pairs), how turn-taking is managed, how conversational open-
ings and closings are effected, how topics enter and disappear from
conversation, and how speakers engage in strategic acts of politeness,
face-preservation, and so on. The emphasis is always on real data, and
observing how people orient to the demands of the speech event. We shall
look more closely at this kind of conversational analysis in Chapter 5, but
the student-lecturer data extract above exemplifies some of the ways in
which data can be dealt with.
Because the lecturer and his group are not in the classroom, students, as
well as lecturer, feel free to raise new topics. S1 asks about the staff club,
but he is hesitant, and stutters somewhat in his question; such hesitancy is a
significant detail, and is a typical signal of deference. The lecturer feels free
to overlap with his answer before the student has finished speaking.
urn-takbg rights are exercised, with people taking turns at talk when they
feel they have the right to say something. For example, the barman
considers his right to continue the purchasing transaction to override the
group's conversation, and the three students all feel they have an equal
right to comment on the lecturer's remark about the price of the drinks.
However, we might also observe that the talk is all directed at the lecturer,
rather than student to student. Is this because the lecturer is seen as
'dominant speaker', a hangover from the classroom, which the group have
only recently left? It is to answer such questions that ethnomethodologists
examine large amounts of data to observe regular patterns of behaviour
that might indicate adherence to underlying norms or 'rules' of conver- 1.8 Written discourse
sation. In Chapter 5 we shall look at some of their findings concerning the
issues our extract has raised, as well as others of a similar type. This is not
to say that such findings must automatically have any implications for
language teaching, but some of them may.
With written texts, some of the problems adad wi& spoken tran-
scripts are absent: we do not have to contend with people( all speaking at
once, the writer has usually had time to think about what to say and how to
say it, and the sentences are usually well formed in a way that the utterances
of natural, spontaneous talk are not. But the overall questions remain the
same: what norms or rules do people adhere to when creating written texts?
Are texts structured according to recurring principles, is there a hierarchy
of units comparable to acts, moves and exchanges, and are there conven-
tional ways of opening and closing texts? As with spoken discourse, if we
do find such regularities, and if they can be shown as elements that have
different realisations in different languages, or that they may present
problems for learners in other ways, then the insights of written discourse
analysis might be applicable, in specifiable ways, to languagk teaching.
In Chapter 2, we shall consider some grammatical regularities observable
in well-formed written texts, and how the structuring of sentences has
implications for units such as paragraphs, and for the progression of whole
texts. We shall also look at how the grammar of English ofkrs a limited set
of options for creating surface links between the clauses and sentences of a
text, otherwise known as cohesion. Basically, most texts display links from
sentence to sentence in terms of grammatical features such as pronominali-
sation, ellipsis (the omission of otherwise expected elements because they
are retrievable from the previous text or context) and conjunction of
various kinds (see Halliday and Hasan 1976). The resources available for
grammatical cohesion can be listed finitely and compared across languages
for translatability and distribution in real texts. Texts displaying such
cohesive features are easy to find, such as this one on telephones:
(1.23) If you'd like to give someone a phone for Christmas, there are plenty
to choose from. Whichever you go for, if it's to be used on the BT
[British Telecom] network, make sure it's approved - look for the
label with a green circle to confirm this. Phones labelled with a red
triangle are prohibited.
(Which? December 1989: 599)
The italicised items are all interpretable in relation to items in previous
sentences. Plenty is assumed to mean 'plenty of phones'; you in the first and
second sentence are interpreted as the same 'you*; whichever is interpreted I What is discourse amlysis?
as 'whichever telephone'; it is understood as the telephone, and this as 'the
fact that it is approved'. These are features of grammatical cohesion, but
there are lexical clues too: go for is a synonym of choose, and there is
lexical repetition of phone, and of label.
Reader activity 6 d
Pick out the cohesive items between clauses and sentences in this text
extract in the same way as was done for the telephone text:
(1.24) British men are a pretty traditional bunch, when it comes to shaving;
two out of three use a blade and soap, rather than an electric shaver.
Which? readers are more continental in their tastes; around half of
you use an electric shaver, about the same proportion as in the rest of
Europe.
For women, shaving is by far the most popular method of
removing body hait. 85 per cent of the Which? women readers who
removed body hair told us that they used a shaver.
(Which? December 1989: 613)
Notice that, when talking of cohesion in the telephone text, we spoke of
interpreting items and understanding them. This is important because the
cohesive items are clues or signals as to how the text should be read, they
are not absolutes. The pronoun it only gives us the information that a
non-human entity is being referred to; it does not necessarily tell us which
one. It could potentially have referred to Christmas in the phone text, but
that would have produced an incoherent reading of the text. So cohesion is
only a guide to coherence, and coherence is something created by the reader
in the act of reading the text. Coherence is the feeling that a text hangs
together, that it makes sense, and is not just a jumble of sentences (see
Neubauer 1983: 7). The sentences 'Clare loves potatoes. She was born in
Ireland.' are cohesive (Clarelshe), but are only coherent, if one already
shares the stereotype ethnic association between being Irish and loving
potatoes, or is prepared to assume a caus~ffect relationship between the
two sentences. So cohesion is only pan of coherence in reading and writing,
and indeed in spoken language too, for the same processes operate there.
1.9 Text and Interpretation
Markers of various kinds, i.e. the linguistic signals of semantic and dis-
course functions (e.g. in English the on the verb is a marker of pastness),
are very much concerned with the surface of the text. Cohesive markers are
26 1.9 Text ad interpretation
no exception: they create links across sentence boundaries and pair and
chain together items that are related (e.g. by daring to the same entity).
But reading a text is far more complex than that: we haveto interpret the
ties and make sense of them. Making sense of a =-is m act of interpreta-
tion that depends as much on what we as mad-trs'brhgtr,raext as what the
author puts into it. Interpretation can be seen asp set of pmeddures and the
approach to the analysis of texts that mph~5ises the-mental activities
involved in interpretation can be broadly cdM- wdi W.ocdural
approaches emphasise the role of the trader in arrialy bddierht world
of the text, based on hislhet experience of the wdd aild how stares and
events are characteristically manifested in it. The reader hwxu adarm such
knowledge, make inf&ences and coiist~n-hidhe intapretation in
the light of the situation and the aims and goals of-& texr as the reader
perceives them. The work of De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) is central
to this approach. If we rake a text which is cohesive in the sense described
above, we can see that a lot more mental work has to go on for the reader to
make it coherent:
The parents of a seven-year-dd Australian boy (l.Zo woke m find a giant python crushing and trying
to swallow him.
The incident occurred ia Cairns, Queengland
and the boy's mother, Mrs Kathy Dryden said:
'It was like a horror movie. It was a hot night
and Bartholomew was lying under a mosquito
net. He suddenly started screaming.
'We rushed to the bedroom to find a huge
snake trying to strangle him. It was coiled
around his arms and neck and was going down
his body.'
Mrs Dryden and bet husband, Peter, tried to
stab the creature with knives but the python bit
the boy several times before escaping.
(from The Birmingham Post, 12 March 1987, p. 10)
This text requires us to activate our knowledge of pythons as dangerous
creatures which may threaten human life, which strangle their prey and to
whose presence one must react with a certain urgency. More than this we
make the cognitive link between 'a hot night' and the time of the event (this
is implicit rather than explicit in the text). The boy's screaming must be
taken to be a consequence of the python attacking him (rather than, say,
prior to the arrival of the python). The 'creature' must be taken to be the
python rather than the boy (which 'creature' could well refer to in another
bcxt), since parents do not normally stab their children in order to save their
livcs. All this is what the reader must bring to any text. What we are doing
in making these cognitive links in the text is going further than just noting
cht semantic links between cohesive items (e.g. creature = general super-
ordinate, snake = genuslsuperordinate, python = specieslhypon y m); we are 1 What is discourse analysis?
creating coherence (see De Beaugrande and Dressler 1981: 6-12,3147). The
various procedures that mediate between cohesion and coherence will be
returned to in greater detail in sections 6.4-7, as this area of text analysis is
obviously crucial in any discourse-based approach to reading and writing.
Another level of interpretation which we are involved in as we process
texts is that of recognising textual pattern. Certain patterns in text reoccur
time and time again and become deeply ingrained as part of our cultural
knowledge. These patterns are manifested in regularly occurring functional
relationships between bits of the text. These bits may be phrases, clauses,
sentences or groups of sentences; we shall refer to them as textual segments
to avoid confusion with grammatical elements and syntactic relations
within clauses and sentences. A segment may sometimes be a clause,
sometimes a sentence, sometimes a whole paragraph; what is important is
that segments can be isolated using a set of labels covering a finite set of
functional relations that can occur between any two bits of text. An
example of segments coinciding with sentences are these two sentences
from a report on a photographic exhibition:
(1.26) The stress is on documentary and rightly so. Arty photographs are a
bore.
(The Guardian, 27 October 1988: 24)
The interpretation that makes most sense is that the relationship between
the second sentence and the first is that the second provides a reason for the
first. The two segments are therefore in a phenomenonleason relationship
with one another. An example of a segment consisting of more than one
sentence can be seen in extract (l.27), where the relationship between the
first segment (sentence 1) and the second segment (sentences 2-5) is one of
pbenomenonbxample; all of sentences 2-5 have to be read as part of the
act of exemplification for the text to make sense.
1.27) Naturally, the more people pay for their houses, the more they want
to rename their neighbourhoods. Suppose you've just coughed up
£250,000 for an unspectacular house on the fringe of Highgate - an
area with loads of cachet. The estate agent tells you it's Highgate.
You've paid a Highgate price. There's no way you're going to admit
that it's in Crouch End.
(Simon Hoggart, The Observn Magazine, 11 March 1990: 5)
The interpretation of relations between textual segments is a cognitive act
on the part of the reader, who might be supposed to be asking questions of
the text as it unfolds, such as (for extract 1.26) 'The stress is on documen-
tary; why?' In this sense, reading the text is like a dialogue with the author,
and the processing of two segments could be seen as analogous to the
creation of an exchange in spoken discourse. Whether this dialogue with
the author is a reality or an analytical construct is not a question that can be
easily answered here, but a model which suggests this kind of interaction 1.9 Text and intetpretation
between reader and text or author might be able to capture difficulties
readers experience in text processing and offer ways of attacking them.
The approach to text analysis that emphasises the interpretive acts
involved in relating textual segments one to the other through relationships
such as phenoneno~reason, causeconsequence, instmmmt-achievement
and suchlike is a clause-relational approach, and is-best exemplified in the
work of Winter (1977, 1978) and Hoey (1983). The pbmmenon-reason
relation which united the two sentences of extraa (1.261, along with
cause-consequmce and instrument-achievement, can be brought under the
general heading of logical sequence relations. When segments of a tat are
compared or contrasted with one another, then we may talk of matching
relations, which are also extremely common. Logical seqaettcing and
matching are the two basic categories of the clause-relational approach.
This view of text is dynamic; it is not just concerned with labelling what are
sometimes called the illocutionary acts (a bit like speech acts) which
individual clauses, sentences and paragraphs perform in a text, but is
concerned with the relationships the textual segments enter into with one
another.
It would of course be wrong to suggest that all texts are like the two
sentences from the photo exhibition text and that the whole operation of
reading was some sort of perverse guessing-game where authors made life
difficult for readers. Texts often contain strong clues or signals as to how
we should interpret the relations between segments; these are not absolutely
deterministic .but are supporting evidence to the cognitive activity of
dedwing the relations. For example, we may find in a text a sentence such
as: 'f;eling ill, he went home', and here we would note that the sub-
ordination of one element to another by the grammatical choloc-eftoining a
main clause to a subordinate one is a characteristic device of cause-
consequence relations; it is a signal of the likely relation, which would have
to be reinterpreted if the sentence were 'Going home, he felt ill'. Equally, an
author might help us with a conjunction: 'Because he felt ill, he went home',
or else use items of general vocabulary to signal the same relation: 'The
reason he went home was that he was feeling ill'. Other types of signals
include repetition and syntactic parallelism (using the same syntax in two
or more different clauses to draw attention to a comparison or contrast, for
example). In the sentence 'The politicians were in a huff, the industrialists
were in a rage, the workers were in the mood for a fight', the parallelism of
the 'subject + be + prepositional phrase' underlines the comparison
between the three groups of people. The clause-relational approach takes
all this evidence into account in its analyses. 1 What is discourse analysis?
Here are some extracts from real texts. Decide what kind of relation exists
between segments separated by a slash (1) in each case, and note any
supporting evidence such as syntactic parallelism.
1. The BBC has put off a new corporate advertising campaign due to be
aired this month, extolling the virtues and values of both television
and radio. / A BBC spokesman delicately suggests that this may not
be the most appropriate time to be telling the audience how
wonderful the Beeb is.
(The Obsc~ver, 16 November 1986: 42)
2. In Britain, the power of the unions added an extra dread, 1 which
made British politics a special case; 1 on the Continent, Margaret
Thatcher was regarded as something of a laboratory experiment,
rather like a canary put down a mine-shaft to see if it will sing,
(The Sundrty Times Magazine, 30 December 1979: 14)
The clause-relational approach to text also concerns itself with larger
patterns which regularly occur in texts. If we consider a simple text like the
following, which is concocted for the sake of illustration, we can see a
pattern emerging which is found in hundreds of texts in a wide variety of
subject areas and contexts:
(1.28) Most people like to take a camera with them when they travel
abroad. But all airports nowadays have X-ray security screening and
X rays can damage film. One solution to this problem is to purchase
a specially designed lead-lined pouch. These are cheap and can
protect film from all but the strongest X rays.
The first sentence presents us with a situation and the second sentence with
some sort of complication or problem, The third sentence describes a
response to the problem and the final sentence gives a positive evaluation of
the response. Such a sequence of relations forms a problem-solution
pattern, and problem-solution patterns are extremely common in texts.
Hoey (1983) analyses such texts in great detail, as well as some other
common text patterns, some of which we shall rmrn to in Chapter 6.
These larger patterns which may be found in texts (and indeed which
may constitute the whole text) are the objects of interpretation by the I. 1 Larger patterns in text
reader, just as the smaller clause-relation were, and in the same way, are
often signalled by the same sorts of grammatical andlexical devices such as
subordination and parallelism. In our concoctd*~k instance, we have
a conjunction (but) indicating an adversative ddmi backward lexical
reference to 'this problem' (damage caused. by X rays)-land a forward
reference to the solution (lead-lined puck), Jk& readm and writers
need to be aware of these signalling devicesand to be able to use them when
necessary to process textual relations that are notyi-diately obvious and
to compose text that assists the reaaer in the qct of irttvxprctatiop. The
larger patterns such as the problem-solution pam odklly
ingrained, but they are often realised in a sequence of t@ mgmmts
which is not so strarghtforward as our concocted text suggests, The
sequence situation-problem-response-evaluation may be varied, but we
do normally expect all the elements to be present in a well-formed text;
where the sequence is varied, signalling plays an even more important part
in signposting the text, that is, showing the reader a way round it.
Reader activity 8 dl
Identify the elements of the problemsolution pattern in these extracts from
advertisements and note any signalling devices.
I. DAMP WALLS, FIAKING PAINT,
RrmNGWAUPAPE&MUSrYSMaLS
: Rising Damp
Rising damp, if not treated effectlwly could in time cause extensive damage to the
rrbucture of your home, ruin decoration and fumfture. Damp also causes repugnant
mould and mildewy smells and could be a hazard to health.
Doulton Wallguard guarantee
cure rlslng damp
Doulton, ~ international
specialists in ceramic technology haw
developed a unique ceramic tube
that when installed In walls draws
moisture out and ensures it stays
out for good. This tried and tested
process requires no structural work
and is usually installed in just one day.
Guaranteed for 30 Years 1 What is discourse analysis?
In~jyoathaeira
pbcaoararon brown w N.V.H. It
~far~vibntiond~
You can easily tell how badly your
car suffers from N.V.H. by the volume
at which you have to play your radii
and the way that you feel after a long
journey. It's very tiring.
The rudimentary cure is to fill the
car with sound deadening material.
Everybody does this to some extent,
even Ford.
But we believe that prevention is
better than cure. After all, with the
technology that we have at our disposal,
there are more scientific ways of
reducing N .V. H.
At the Ford design and development
centre we have a room which is known
as the anechoic chamber. It's here, on
the rolling road, that our acoustics
engineers explore new techniques in
sound proofing.
The result is a car that never feels
as if it's uying. Even at Autobahn speeds,
with the smooth V6 engine and all
round independent suspension, the
performance is effortless.
(from The Sunday Times Magazine, 30 December 1979, pp. 42,49)
We have seen in this chapter that discourse analysis is a vast subject area
within linguistics, encompassing as it does the analysis of spoken and
written language over and above concerns such as the structure of the
clause or sentence. In this brief introduction we have looked at just some
ways of analysing speech and writing and just some aspects of those
particular models we have chosen to highlight. There is of course a lot more
to look at. For example, we have not considered the big question of
discourse in its social setting. In subsequent chapters we shall return to this
and mention the Hallidayan model of language as social action (see
Halliday 1978), looking at types of meaning in discourse and their relation-
ship with the notion of register, the linguistic features of the text that reflect
the social context in which it is produced. This and further discussion of the
approaches outlined here will form the background to a reassessment of the
basics of language teaching as they are conventionally understood: the
levels of language description (grammar, lexis and phonology) and the
skills of language use (reading, writing, listening and speaking). There will
also be suggestions concerning teaching materials and procedures whenever
it seems that discourse analysis has some direct bearing on these matters. 1.1 1 Concfusion
Furfher reading
Coulthard (1985) is an indispensable introduction to discourse analysis, as is Stubbs
(1983).
Brown and Yule (1983) is a thorough and detailed survey, but is harder going
because of its less obvious structure.
Van Dijk's (1985) collection of papers covers a vast ran-gc of ateas within discourse
analysis; the introduction sets the scene, and the papcat lcna be dipped into
according to area of interest.
Levinson (1983), although concerned with the broader fidd af 'ptagmaacs', pro-
vides a balanced criticism of the British, exchange-stnmure school as against the
American conversation analysis.
G. Cook (1989) is a more recent book at an introductory level.
For the original Birmingham discourse model, Sinclair and Coulthard (1W.5) is still
unsurpassed, though extensions and modifications as described in Coulthard
and Montgomery (1981) and Sinclair and Brazil (1982) should also be consulted.
Further extensions and modifications are to be found in Carter and Burton (1982),
Francis and Hunston (1987), and, specificaliy on the follow-up move, Hewings
(1 987).
More introductory reading on acts and communicative functions, as well as on
speech and writing may be found in Riley (1985).
Schenkein (1978) is a seminal collection of American conversational analysis.
On written text, Halliday and Hasan (1976) is essential for the notion of cohesion,
De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981), though difficult in places, expands on the
procedural approach, while Winter (1977 and 1978) and Hoey (1983) are the best
works for the clause-relational model.
Hewings and McCarthy (1988) offer a summary of the clause-relational approach
with some pedagogical applications.
Halliday (1978) contains much discussion on language in its social setting.
Widdowson (1979)' De Beaugrande (1980), Van Dijk (1980), Neubauer (1983) and
Tannen (1984) are all useful sources on cohesion/coherence.
Reddick (1986) argues for the importance of personal interpretation in the analysis
of text structure.
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