Discourse / discourse analysis / discourse structure
Calling a text a ‘discourse’ means to consider its original existence as a part of a real-world social context. This is central to linguistics – language is an act of communication between people, and without there being more than one person, i.e. an audience, there would be no worthwhile text because there is no communication of ideas through language occurring. So, the word ‘discourse’ means any and every social usage of language, e.g. a conversation, a piece of homework, a novel, a short story in a magazine, a newspaper ad, a business letter, a leaflet, a text book, a text message, an email, this glossary… In fact, all texts are examples of discourse when considered along with their original contexts of production and interpretation.
- Language is the expression in speaking, printing or writing of thoughts and ideas. The gap between the thought and the language, and indeed a consideration of what made the thought arise in the first place leads to the production of a discourse. Thus when you consider a text at the level of discourse, you are looking at the language to try to work out how it reflects all kinds of aspects related to context, which will include aspects of the texts creator, i.e. its writer or speaker as well as aspects of the text interpreter, i.e. its audience.
- To label a text as whatever type of discourse it is, is a very effective way to open any discussion of the text, e.g. “This text is an example of the kind of the instructional spoken discourse once used between teachers and their male students at public schools in the early years of the twentieth century?. Notice that this description covers the genre of the discourse, the participants in it and important aspects of it such as the purpose, place, time and situation in which it occurred, i.e. G-CAP: genre, context, audience and purpose.
To analyse a text at the level of discourse means taking account of the important aspects of context that came to bear on it at four points in time: its conception and production as well as its reception and interpretation.
- Can you recognise that, by their very nature, discourses must be, to a greater or lesser extent, context bound? This is why an appreciation of context is central to your work on this course.
When language is used, meanings are often created that are not immediately revealed by the surface meanings (i.e. the semantic value) of the words used; instead, fluent and experienced users of language are adept at creating meaning that exists ‘between the lines’. We don’t always ‘spell out’ what we mean; instead, we often choose to infer meanings, maybe to save time or to imply relationships, often of power. Thus, we are constantly on our guard for the inferred levels of meaning created by a text, meanings that are a part of its ‘social force’. This will become clearer if you think about what is happening in the following snippet from a conversation between a teenager and his mother (// = overlapping speech):
There is quite a bit more going on here than is revealed by the surface meanings of the words used. This is an example of domestic discourse and, quite typically in such a discourse, a full interpretation involves an understanding of the way family members communicate through what are called pragmatic meanings.
- Can you work out what some of these inferred or pragmatic meanings might be and point to parts of this discourse that suggest these?
- Analysed at the level of this representing a piece of ‘mother/son discourse’, can you work out some aspects of life that the text reveals and point to the language elements that suggest this?
Pragmatic inferences will be found regularly in discourses that occur when unequal power relationships exist. Imagine a policeman overhears you swearing and says, ‘That language of yours was very interesting just then.’ You would easily infer there is a pragmatic value to this utterance – that the phrase ‘very interesting’, for example, carries far more pragmatic weight than its semantic value would otherwise suggest.
The pragmatic force of language is often directly related to our subconscious awareness of the social power relationships that exist when a particular kind of discourse is being used (in the above example, we have a piece of ‘contemporary policeman/teenager discourse’). The power that exists in social relationships can be of two kinds: instrumental power (this is power supported by the law, rules or codes of practice, as in a headmaster’s right to expel a student) or influential power, which is the power of social position or personal persuasion.
- An important realisation is that many discourses are examples of ‘unequal encounters’ and, as such, can be analysed for the power relationships they show.
