Lecture no.

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1. Discourse Analysis – definition of the term
Discourse analysis is the examination of language use by members of a speech
community. It involves looking at both language form and language function and
includes the study of both spoken and written texts. It identifies linguistic features that
characterize different types of texts as well as social and cultural factors that help the
receiver of a text to interpret and understand different types of spoken and written speech.
An analysis of written texts includes the study of topic development, cohesion and
coherence across sentences and paragraphs, etc. The analysis of spoken language or
speech focuses on aspects like : the structure of the exchange, adjacency pairs, turn-
taking techniques, opening and closing sequences, a.s.o.
2. Different meanings of the term ‘discourse’
The term ‘discourse’ has several meanings in the literature on discourse analysis ,
but basically we can say that it has a) a general meaning and a specific, restricted
meaning.
a) discourse = communicative activity > discourse of a social domain > ideology
When we characterize discourse as a communicative event we refer to discourse
in general. In a similar but slightly different ways we may refer the term general also to
‘specific types of social domains of language use ‘, for example ‘the medical discourse,
the ‘political discourse’, a.s.o. An even more extended general use of the term discourse
can refer to the ideology, ideas that underlie communicative interaction in a society. In
this respect we encounter the term in phrases such as ‘the discourse of liberalism’, ‘the
discourse of power’, ‘the utilitarian discourse”.
b) discourse= genre, text type
The restricted meaning of the term refers therefore just to an instantiation of a
communicative event have a certain structure and a certain communicative purpose. In
this particular restricted sense, a conversation between friends, a news report, a scholarly
essay, a debate may be called discourse and analyzed according to the methodology and
principles of discourse analysis

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 .
3. Types of discourses
A more detailed classification of the various discourse types is based on the
following criteria:
I. Concerning to the channel of communication discourses may be oral or
written. Some researchers make the distinction discourse –text to delimit oral discourse
from written text. We shall however keep the term discourse for both oral and written
texts in the present series of lectures because for both these types the analyses of both
written and spoken instances have a common aim : i.e. to discover the same aspects: the
ordered structures, regularities . Moreover both oral and written discourses have an
underlying common feature , they are both communicative in nature , addressing their
message to someone.
II. According to their form /mode –i.e. what and how the contents of a
certain discursive instance is expressed- discourses can be classified as: narrative
discourse, classification, description and evaluation/argumentative discourse.
Each of these four modes of discourse is based on a principle of thought which permits
reality to be considered in a certain way. Therefore each of these four modes will exhibit
its own peculiar logic, it will have its own organizational structure and, to some extent, its
stylistic characteristics
In an instance of a particular discourse, forms or modes of discourse may overlap. It is
almost impossible to have pure narration, description, evaluation or classification. Still in
a give discourse we may have a dominant mode.
III. According to its aims , discourse may be classified into the following
types: expressive discourse, informative discourse , persuasive or rhetorical discourse.
Expressive discourse conveys feelings, attitudes and is centered around the
addressee. The most obvious example of such an expressive discourse is the literary
discourse.
The informative discourse is centered on the task of conveying information and
data. Examples of informative discourse are: the scientific discourse, the exploratory
discourse (interviews, inquiries, questioning)

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 The rhetoric or persuasive discourse aims at persuading the addressee of
something. Examples of such discourses are : debates, political speeches, sermons, etc.
The aim of the discourse determines everything else in the process of discourse-
the modes, the semantic and syntactic components, the generic structure.
For example , if a salesman wants to sell brooms, his speech will embody the
meaning and grammatical characteristics which will achieve his purpose. Here the aim is
persuasive. The generic structure is speech, the mode is partly classification(of the
qualities of his product) and partly evaluation (demonstrating the superiority of his
brooms over other similar products).The semantics involve the meanings of the words
and the grammatical structures used; the syntax consist of the structural combination of
sentences and word groups according to the grammatical rules of the language he is
using. And all of these features are determined by the aim of the discourse.
A theory of discourse analysis therefore will comprise an intelligible framework
of different types of discourse with a treatment of the nature of each type, the underlying
logic, the organizational structure of this type and the stylistic characteristics.
III. Another classification of discourse in text types/ genres is based on the
restricted meaning of the term and refers to particular cognitive events produced by social
or cultural institutions. These events are called either text types or genres. In what follows
we shall use the term genre. We consider it to be more suitable because it includes both
oral and written productions. Genres are conventional ways of expressing meanings :
purposeful, goal directed language activities, specially recognized as such having rather
well-established structures.
Genre, as a traditional category in literary studies includes short stories, novels,
plays, autobiographies, diaries, sonnets, epic and fables, a.s.o. However, the concept is
also relevant to broader forms of cultural analyses. Popular culture provides examples of
such genres: science fiction, detective fiction, romance, comic strip and the western.
Spoken genres have developed for use in television and radio: documentaries, quiz
shows, soap-operas, phone-ins, etc. Relatively recent genres also include: the blues, the
presidential press conference, the TV game-shows, etc. The concept applies to everyday
uses of spoken and written instances of language, such as jokes, stories, chat, gossip,
sermon, argument, debate, meetings, instructions, ads, etc.

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 Some genres evolve through the years and can go out of fashion or become less
useful .For example: the essay form no longer has the prestige it had in the eighteen
century. The pastoral and the epic poem are dead genres today.
The concept of genre is clear enough in general, but although many
categorizations have been proposed, none is comprehensive or generally accepted.
Genres are not categories with neatly defined boundaries, although the focal members of
genres are usually easy to identify. Genres, can , for example, be combined. The ability to
identify and compare different genres contributes top our ability to understand them.
Misunderstandings, and even dislike of different texts, can often be due to a lack of
understanding of the different conventions involved.
V. Another classification of discourses starts from the general meaning of the
term discourse explained under point 1. a. Social domains or institutions generate their
own discourse which has different general characteristics. Such discourses can be further
analyzed into genres specific to the respective domain. For example, we may have the
general discourse of law- the legal discourse – which in its turn can comprise a variety of
genres: witness hearings, expert testimonies, lawyer’s pledoaires, cross examination in
the court, mediation sessions, etc.
The public media discourse – the discourse of the radio, TV or newspapers-
includes both oral and written genres, such as : the interview, the talk show, the
commercial, the report, the political essay, the letter to the editor.
The corporate discourse refers to the discourse use din various communicative
events ion the field of business: business letters, agreements, memos, negotiations, bids,
workshops, advertising events, a.s.o.
A link between genres and institutions is also manifest in the professions which
specialize in discourse: priests, lawyers, teachers, administrators/managers. Priest, for
example, are specialists in particular types of discourse, such as prayers, sermons,
confessionals, baptisms, exorcism, excommunications, a.s.o. They are also experts in the
interpretation of particular types of written texts: the Scriptures and related genres. Some
professions write and sell texts: in the field of advertising or journalism. Other
professions reproduce texts and genres mediating them: teachers, actors, priests. A public
agency is paid to transform one text into another, to create new texts from different

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sources, in order to try to change people’s beliefs, persuade them of a point of view or
alter the actions of politicians.
4. The Emergence of Discourse Studies
Discourse analysis is a relatively new discipline with a strongly interdisciplinary
character. It ha sits roots in several disciplines and has emerged as an independent field
of research around the 60s of the last century.

5. Principles and Methodologies use din Discourse Analysis Studies

Despite a vast variety of approaches and methods, each discipline has a number of
norms and rules that scholars follow in order to do research in the respective domain.
The currently specializing principles in discourse analysis are the following :
I. Naturally Occurring Text and Talk
It represents the exclusive focus of research in discourse analysis. Invented or
constructed examples are avoided in favour of examples and corpora of ‘real data’, for
example tapes or video recordings of conversations , actual texts in the mass media or
education.
II. Contexts.
Discourse should be preferably studied as a constitutive part of its local and
global, social and cultural contexts.( v. Mey despre context si Saville Troike).
Context structures include: settings, participants, their communicative and social
roles, goals , relevant social knowledge , norms and values, institutional or organizational
structures.
III. Discourse as Social practice of Members
Both spoken and written discourse are forms of social practice in various social
and cultural contexts. Language users are engaged in discourse not merely as individual
persons, but also as members of groups, institutions, cultures. Through their discourse
language users may enact, confirm or even challenge more comprehensive social and
political structures and institutions.

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 I.V Sequentiality
The accomplishment of discourse is largely linear and sequential, in the
production and understanding both of talk and of text. The first characteristic implies that
at all levels, structural units (sentences, propositions, acts of speech) should be
interpreted and described relative to preceding ones, as is most obvious in various forms
of coherence. It implies that language users operate, both mentally and interactionally in
an ‘on-line’ fashion, that is, tentatively, possibly erroneously, but with the opportunity to
reinterpret and repair previous activities and understandings.

Lecture no.2 - Discourse structure

Linguists working in the field of discourse analysis tend to focus on the nature of
the language used in texts, particularly on those devices which provide a structural
framework to text and those which provide the cohesion which is necessary for a text to
be perceived as an organized whole.
Context cohesion and coherence
Linguistic behaviour is social behaviour. People talk because they want to
socialize, in the widest possible sense of the word: either for fun, or to express
themselves to other humans, or for some ‘serious purposes’ such as building a house,
closing a deal, solving a problem, a.s.o., correct understanding of the whole context in
which linguistic interaction takes place.
Consider the following example :
e.g. A: I have a fourteen years old son.
B: Well, that’s alright .
A : I also have a dog.
B: Oh, I’m sorry.
(Levinson,1983:292)
The knowledge provided by the non-linguistic context disambiguates and makes
the sequence coherent in the above mentioned example.
Therefore, for didactical purposes only, we have to divide the context of use for
speakers into a linguistic (grammatical) one and an extralinguistic (pragmatic) one.

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 The term ‘context’ in its broad sense consists of knowledge of: co-text
(knowledge about social situations and their requirements), paralinguistic features (e.g.
loudness or speed of speaking), other texts, the psychological situation, the social and
cultural situation, the interlocutors and their schemata (knowledge about other people’s
knowledge).
‘Discourse’ as opposed to text is a stretch of language in use, taking on meaning
in context for its users and perceived by them as purposeful , meaningful and connected.
This quality of perceived purpose, meaning and connection is known as
coherence.
Discourse analysis is the study and explanation of this quality of coherence. A
discourse is a coherent stretch of language.
Cohesion may be described as the formal linguistic realization of semantic
(meaning ) and pragmatic (purpose) relations between clauses and sentences in a text.
Elements used to render coherence and cohesion in a text
Discourse markers
In either spoken or written discourse, the utterer produces not only strings of
nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, but as well, makes use of forms called discourse
markers in order to provide structure.
Discourse markers are defined as “sequentially dependent elements which bracket
units of talk” (D. Schiffrin). These markers occur over the length of a bit of discourse,
separating one ‘unit of talk’ from a previous one.
Typical discourse markers in English are : well, y’know, there, I mean, anyway,
oh , coordinating conjunctions such as and, but, or ,etc.
e.g. Say, I saw Betty last week. Y’know, the woman who used to live across the
street? “
‘Y’know’ can be used to appeal to knowledge shared by speaker and hearer , to
involve the hearer more into the interaction, or to test whether the hearer really shares the
knowledge .
While discourse markers bracket off units of talk and provide some elements of
cohesion, there are other linguistic resources that are more typically thought of as the
primary cohesive devices in English , such as : reference, lexical cohesion, ellipsis, tense,

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junction. In long-range stretches of text, the major operation is discovering how already
used elements and patterns can be re-used, modified or compacted. These processes can
be accomplished via : repetition , substitution, omission and signaling relationships.
These devices are far-less obligatory than those which serve for closely-knit units: within
the latter, missing elements are more noticeable and disturbing in immediately active
storage. Failure to complete a clause or sentence would be more disorienting than failure
to use recurrence, pro-forms, junctives, and so on. The long –range devices are thus
contributors to efficiency rather being grammatical obligations: they render the utilization
of the surface text stable and economic.
But we will glance here only at lexical recurrence, that is, repetition of the same
words or expression s, as being the most noticeable sort.
e.g. There’s water through many homes – I would say almost all of them have water in
them. It’s just completely under water.
When there are more resources and time available for text production, recurrence
is customarily kept within limits. If unduly frequent, it lowers informativity. However,
recurrence is prominently used to assert and re-affirm one’s viewpoint, or to convey
surprise at occurrences that seem to conflict with one’s viewpoint. We have samples of
both uses here:
Marlow : What, my good friend , if you gave us a glass of punch in the
meantime….
Hardcastle: Punch, sir! A glass of warm punch, after our journey, will be
comfortable…
In a like manner, repetition can be used in repudiation . The material is repeated
to show exactly what is being rejected.
e.g. I think I told you my name is Burnside.
It might be Smith, or Hones or Robinson.
It is neither Smith, nor Jones not Robinson.
Another contextual factor eliciting recurrence is the need to overcome irrelevant
interruptions and get on with a statement.

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 Partial recurrence entails the use of the same basic word- components but shifting
them to a different word-class. In this fashion an already activated concept can be re-used
while its expression is adapted to various settings.
e.g. Governments are institutions among Men, deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed.
Recurrence has the disadvantage of reducing informativity of a text. Therefore,
techniques are often used in which forms recur with somewhat different content, or
content recurs with different forms . Parallelism entails using surface formats but filling
them with different expressions.
e.g. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns.
Here a series of similar though not identical actions, are expressed in parallel
clauses (verb- possessive pronoun- direct object) with a recurrent ‘our ‘ in the middle of
each.
Everyday communication does not demand this degree of certitude all the time.
More often, cohesive devices are used which shorten and simplify the surface text : pro-
forms, used as anaphora (the most common directionality device for co-reference- the
identity of the conceptual reference is made clear in advance) ; as cataphora (the use of
the pro-form before the co-referring expression ). Cataphora is also used to generate
uncertainty and therefore to intensify the receivers’ interest .
e.g. He was scarcely ten years old when he was first arrested as a vagabond. He spoke
thus to the judge : “I am called Jean Francois Leturc……
The verb ‘do’ is frequently employed as a ‘pro-verb’ to keep current the content
of a more determinate verb or verb phrase.
e.g. To this day I am ashamed that I did not spring up and opinion him, then and
there. Had I possessed one ounce of physical courage, I should have done so.
The so can stand for whatever modifiers were connected to the verb in the original
verb phrase.
Another pro-form would be the modifier ‘such’.
The pro-forms must fit into the grammatical settings where they are needed and
they sometimes have to be correlated with entire clauses (clausal substitution).

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 e.g. Are you to get in at all ? said the Footman. That’s the first question, you
know.
It was no doubt; only Alice did not like to be told so.
The so in the above example carries forward the entire content of what the Footman said.
The substitution of clauses is carried out by pro-forms which signal that the content of the
clauses is to be kept active, in their surface format.
Another cohesive device contributing to compactness and efficiency is ellipsis.
Usually, ellipsis functions via a sharing of structural components among clauses of the
surface text. The typical case is anaphoric, i.e. the complete structure occurs before the
elliptical one . Ellipsis occurs mostly in a new utterance unit rather than in the same one .
e.g. The daughter is said to be well-bred and beautiful; the son an awkward
booby, reared up and spoiled at his mother’s apron springs.
Ellipsis is most noticeable when follow-up structures lack the verb – a
relationship called gapping because in English at any rate, the verb is the least
dispensable element in a clause. The ellipsis of subjects in independent clauses is not
uncommon.
He’s always asleep. Goes on errands, fast asleep….I’m proud of that boy-
wouldn’t part with on any account.
The ellipsis of subjects and other dispensable elements illustrates the complexity
of interaction between cognition and syntactic conventions.
Utilizing texts with no ellipsis consumes time and energy. At the other extreme,
very heavy ellipsis cancels out any savings of time and energy by demanding intensive
search and problem-solving.
Cohesion is further supported by Tense and Aspect. Usually there are means to
distinguish : past, present and future times: continuity vs. single point actions; antecedent
vs. subsequent; finished vs. unfinished. Some of these distinctions arise mainly from the
perspective of the text users at that moment (past, present and future are relative to the
situation expressed in a certain stretch of discourse) and others from the organization of
text-world situations or events among themselves. When the verb systems do not make
the distinctions explicit , modifiers or junctives must be used.

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The same event can be expressed in different perspectives by the speaker or author of a
text:
e.g. The beacon flashed.
The beacon kept flashing.
The beacon flashed five times in a row.
A clear relationship for signaling the relationships among events or situations is
junction, i.e. the use of conjunctions (both coordinating and subordinating ones): ‘and’,
moreover’, ’however’, ‘furthermore’, ‘nevertheless’, ‘in addition’ , ‘because’, ‘for’, as,
etc.
Conjunctions can carry across the boundaries of the sentence: Except for disjunction, the
use of junctive elements as explicit signals of is rarely obligatory, because text users can
recover relations such as additivity, incongruity, causality, etc. by applying world-
knowledge. But the use of junctives help text producers to exert control over how
relations are recovered and set up by receivers. The producers can insert their own
interpretation into the monitoring of the situation described in the respective
discourse/text.
In this perspective, junction demonstrates how communicative interaction, not
just grammatically obligatory rules, decides what syntactic formats participants use.
Junctives can be simple tokens of courtesy to help make reception of a text efficient.
A subsidiary cohesive system available only for spoken language is intonation. In
English there is an interplay between rising and falling intonations. The falling tone is
normally used for informing and the falling-rising for invoking.
Though by no means complete or exhaustive , our survey should make it clear
why the notion of ‘text cohesion’ is substantially broader than usual notions of ‘text
syntax’ or ‘text grammar’. The broadening arises form two factors: the operationalization
of syntactic or grammatical structures as configurations utilized in real time; and the
interaction of syntax or grammar with other factors of textuality.

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 Modes and Aims of Discourse

Discourse study is the study of the situational uses of the potentials of the
language.. For instance we may consider instances of discourse the following: Faulkner’s
speech of acceptance of the Nobel prize; Hemingway’s “The Old Man and The Sea” or a
single sentence “Fire!” screamed by a hotel occupant running from a building , etc.
Discourse is characterized by individuals acting in a special time and place Therefore, it
has a beginning, a middle , a closure, and a purpose. It is a language process not a
system, it can establish a verbal context and it has a situational context and a cultural
context.
Discourse is determined by the existence of a complete text (whether written or
oral). Incomplete texts, such as a paragraph , or an interrupted conversation are
incomplete discourses.
Beyond text lies the context of the situation of which text is a part. This includes
such areas of investigation as psychological and social motivations for speaking and
writing or listening and speaking; proxemics; the study of space distances in
communication networks ; haptics , the variant uses of body contact in cultures in
communicative situations ; kinesics , the study of gesture and posture in the delivery of
speech. Anthropologists, linguists and even propaganda analysts have attempted to
highlight the importance of these contextual aspects.
Beyond the situational context lies the cultural context, the nature and
conventions of which make the situational context permissible It can hardly be denied
that cultural context and situational context determine text. In this large sense, no text is
autonomous – it exists within a biographical and historical stream.
However, discourse analysis does not primarily focus on cultural and situation
context but on the text proper. The justification for the autonomy of textual study is the
same as the justification for any scientific abstraction : by focusing on one aspect of a
reality, science can set up tools for isolated analysis which is possible only within this
particular vacuum. Then the object of investigation can be reinserted into the stream of
life , more intelligible for its academic isolation.(Kinneavy: 1971: 24).
The particular field of discourse study excludes merely semantic or linguistic
analyses as well as metapragmatic considerations. But whenever these aspects can
explain discourse they become relevantly subordinate to the process of discourse
analysis. Thus, without a linguistic analyses , a discourse may be merely an undeciphered
text, whereas without a situational and cultural context , the discourse may lead to
misinterpretations.
The various connections between linguistic and non-linguistic elements in the
study of language can be presented as a three-level schema starting from the classical
triangle of communication.

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 The Modes of Discourse
The modes of discourse represent an application of the triangle of communication
with a focus on discourse as reference to reality. In other words, classifications of kinds
of realities referred to by full complete texts represent the modes of discourse.
The kinds of realities referred to by full discourses could be grouped by many
different principles of classification. The kind of reality to which a discourse refers
answers a question like : “What is this text about?”. The answer to this question could be
given by categorizing the subject matter in one of the academic disciplines: “It is about
physics, or ethics, or psychology , or linguistics. Such categories would not appreciably
help a theory of discourse , for the problems of these sciences are not the concern of
discourse analysis proper. Nevertheless , some of these texts from physics for example,
are used in course books to exemplify classification as a mode of discourse.
More relevant to the domain of discourse as discourse is an answer to the question
of what a thing is about , like the following: “It’s a story about the wife of Napoleon’s
general” ;” It’s a study of the kinds of mental abnormalities”; “It’s a severe criticism of
Bush administration “; “It’s a description of Northern Italy”. Such formulations would
lead to categories like: a narrative, a series of classifications; a criticism or evaluation ,
and a description.
These categories are referred to as the modes of discourse . The literature has used
various terms to name the modes of discourse, the most generally used since the
nineteenth century ( in Bain’s English Composition and Rhetoric, 1867) are somewhat
changed , as follows: narration, exposition (classification) , argumentation (evaluation)
and description.
Modes are not to be find alone in an instance of discourse. In most cases complete
texts contain overlapping modes. It is impossible to have pure narration , description,
argumentation or exposition. However, in any discourse there tends to be a dominant
mode.
For the whole field of English the study of modes is important because when the
modes are scientific in aim , narration becomes history, description becomes analysis ,
evaluation (argumentation) becomes criticism and exposition (classification) becomes
theory,. There are consequently four basically different scientific approaches to any field
of English. Thus, we may have historical linguistics, descriptive linguistics, theoretical
linguistics and prescriptive linguistics. In literature, to give another example, there are:
literary history, literary analysis, literary theory and literary criticism.

The Aims of Discourse

The aims of language are the reason for the existence of all other aspects of
language. Sounds, morphemes, syntactic patterns , meanings of all kinds, skills in
speaking and the other arts of discourse, narratives and other modes of discourse – all
exist so that humans may achieve certain purposes in their use of language with one
another.
In establishing the aims of discourse one has to resort to the communication
triangle again. The process of language , because of its components and structures lends
itself to a variety of uses but it is not completely indeterminate to aim. The main
components of the language process are according to the triangle: an encoder, a language
signal, an ability of the signal to refer to reality, and a decoder. The process makes it

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possible for any or all of these components to be emphasized in a given situation.
Language can therefore be employed with the stress of the process on persons (encoder
or decoder) , or on the reality to which reference is made, or on the product (the text
which the discourse produces. There are, consequently person discourse, reference
discourse, and product discourse.
All of these kinds of discourse always incorporate all of the components of the
language process. The different uses of language are, therefore a matter of which element
of the process dominates the particular use under consideration.
Person discourse can stress either encoder or decoder. It seems fairly clear that
language can be used as the simple expression of some aspect of the personality of the
encoder. Such use is called an expressive use of language. Sometimes in these uses the
decoder and the referential components of the process become negligible. Diaries,
journals, cathartic interviews in psychology , some religious or political manifestoes,
myths of primitive societies are often primarily expressive uses of language whereby an
individual or a group expresses its intuitions and emotional aspirations.
Secondly, the discourse may be focused primarily on the decoder, the other
person involved in the process. In this use, the encoder may even purposely disguise his
own personality and purposely distort the picture of reality which language can paint in
order to get the decoder to do something or believe something ( as in dishonest
advertising or some political speeches). These distortions are not essential to this use of
language, however. What is essential is that encoder , reality and language itself all
become instrumental to the achievement of some practical effect in the decoder. Such a
use of language is called persuasion or rhetoric.
The reference use of language stresses the ability of the language to designate or
reproduce reality , in a manner of speaking. If the reality is conceived as known and the
facts about it are simply related to the decoder , there we have an informative use of
language. If this information is systematized and accompanied by demonstrative proof of
its validity there is a scientific use of language. If the reality is not known but being
sought , there is an exploratory use of language . Informative uses of language include
weather reports, news stories, much conversation, and telephone directories. Scientific
uses of language include much history, descriptive analysis of anatomy in medicine,
taxonomic categories of botany, some literary criticism, etc. Exploratory uses of language
include questionnaires, interviews, some seminars, and some panel discussions.
All of these are examples of reference discourse.
The product or text itself may be the focus of the process as an object worthy of
being appreciated in its own right. Such appreciation gives pleasure to the beholder. In
this use of language, language calls attention to itself , to its own structures, not as
references to measure or assess reality nor as expressions of personal aspirations , or
instruments of persuasion , but as structures worthy of contemplation in their own right.
Of course reference, author personality, and persuasion may and usually are involved.
But they are not rigidly relevant. The reality may be fictional or very distorted ; the
author may be hidden under dramatic projections and the persuasions may be quite trivial
on occasions. This last use of language is literature.
Each of these uses of language has its own processes of thought. The ways of
thinking of a scientist are not those of an artist, nor of a salesman. Each has its own logic.
Each has its own structure and patterns . Each uses stylistic particularities. This does not

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mean to imply that aims of discourse do not overlap. Soemtimes scientific discourse has a
tinge of persuasion , some other times literature is very expressive, and so on.
The aim of discourse determines everything else . “What “ is talked about , the
oral or written medium which is chosen, the words and grammatical patterns used- all of
these are largely determined by the purpose of the discourse.
How can aim be determined? it is partly determined by the cultural and situational
context in which it is produced or used. The intent of the author is also important , but
sometimes what the author (encoder) meant is not what the decoder understood. The
fallacy of judging the intent of a work by the intent of the author has been called the
“intentional fallacy”. Sometimes, the effect on any given decoder may be a clue to the
aim of a discourse, but sometimes even that can be misleading. The fallacy of judging the
intent of a work by the effect upon a certain decoder is called the “affective fallacy”.
Therefore, it seems better to find the aim which is embodied in the text itself-
given the situational and cultural factors mentioned above. The effect of the mode of
discourse, of its logic, meanings , grammatical patterns and style is to generate a reaction
of some kind of acceptance or rejection on the part of the normal decoder. The
characteristics of the text which generate these effects is the concern of discourse
analysis. They constitute the “intent of the work”

Language is like a window pane. I may throw bricks at it to vent my feelings

about something; I may use a chunk of it to chase away an intruder; I may use it to
mirror or explore reality; and I may use a stained glass windowpane to call attention to
itself. Windows can be used expressively, persuasively, referentially and artistically.
(Kinneavy, 1971: 40)

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The Concept of Genre and Its Evolution

The concept of genre as defined by various dictionaries of the English language

appears rather fuzzy or loose. Both the Webster and the Heritage dictionary defines it as
„a distinct type or category of literary composition ", the Oxford dictionary gives the
following explanation, even more restrictive for our purpose: " a particular kind or style
of art or literature".
According to these definitions the term belongs to literature, but in fact, today,
studies of genres have been carried out in various fields, such as folklore, literary studies,
linguistic and rhetoric. The meaning has been expanded and at present genre refers to a
distinctive category of any type, spoken or written, with or without literary aspirations.
According to Swales (1990) the generic approach aims at studying those features
of communicative events which “typically posses feature of stability, name recognition,
a.s.o.” (pg.9).
Generic approaches study texts both written and spoken from various
perspectives, such as their production, their decoding and understanding, the way they
can be acquired, and as such they view texts embedded in ‘a sociorhetorical network’
(Swales,1990).
If genres were typically considered to belong to the field of literary criticism, the
second half of the XXth century has witnessed a constant interest in the study of genres
and has focused more and more on speech and written text types used in non-literary
discourses. Thus, a recent bibliometric research (D. Duff,1999) found evidence of a
widespread use of the term and concept of genres between 1980 and 1995 in five social
science disciplines: education, history, political sciences, psychology and sociology. The
study has shown a marked increase in the use of the term since 1990.
Therefore, in order to give an appropriate description to genre and to generic
approach that we have used for our analysis we shall first of all give a brief outline of the
disciplines in which the generic approach has been used, with a special focus on the genre
conceived as a professional communicative activity (Bhatia, 1993, Swales, 1990, Scollon
and Scollon, 1995) because this is the perspective which is most suitable to the discursive
activity of negotiation.
The study of genre is indebted to: literary criticism, to sociolinguistics, to
discourse analysis, cultural anthropology, rhetorical studies (Swales, 1990) and we think
that the findings of the pragma-dialectical theory regarding the dialectics of
argumentation and the stages of the critical discussion may provide valuable
methodological insights for the study of the genre phenomenon.

Genre studies and literature

For modern literary criticism genre has been a problematic concept. Modern
literary criticism has evolved between two extreme positions. The first one in which
genre was considered an important object of study regards genre as a powerful concept
that shapes the literary work, as Martin Amis claimed: “I am a comic writer. You have to

16
submit to the huge power of the genre. Genre really does determine outcomes” (quoted in
D. Duff, 1999).
However, the modern period has been characterized by a steady corrosion of the
perception of genre and by the emergence of aesthetic programs which have sought to
dispense altogether with the doctrine of literary genres.
This second extreme position is that advocated by B. Croce and later J. Derrida in
which the genre is considered irrelevant for the study of the literary work.
This tendency to disregard genre in the evaluation of a work of art is due to the
fact that the term ‘genre’ carries associations of authority and pedantry and seems to deny
originality, spontaneity, self-expression, autonomy of the author, i.e. those features that
have become of great value for the modern writer and reader alike.
The emergence of postmodernism has marked the evolution of the term genre in
literature and in the arts in general, the tendency being that of re-evaluation , as shown by
D.Duff (1999: ) : “At the beginning of the XXIth century with the elevation of popular
culture which is a characteristic feature of postmodernism, and with the increasing
cultural dominance of the popular genres themselves (in literature, TV, film) , the term
genre now seems to have lost most of its negative charge, and to be operating as a
valorising term, signalling not prescription and exclusion, but opportunity and
communicative purpose: genre as the enabling device, the vehicle for the acquisition of
competence. Thus redefined and democratized, not only is the term enjoying renewed
currency in literary discourse, it also shows signs of becoming a general cultural
buzzword used I contexts increasingly remote from literary criticism, and applied to
forms of writing and speech that have little or no relation to literary genres”.
The term ‘genre’ is of Latin origin but in English has been borrowed from French
around the beginning of the XXth century although there are other words for genre and
the English usage of ‘genre’, like ‘type’ or ‘kind’. It is surely significant that it should
have been adopted in English to replace the older term ‘kind’ precisely at a time when the
concept was becoming all over Europe increasingly problematic.
Within modern literary criticism there are several important approaches to genre
which we shall further introduce chronologically because they have had a major
importance in the establishment and evolution of this term outside literary criticism in
other discourse types.
Formalism
a) An important approach to genre theory was that of the trend known as
‘formalism’ and which was mainly represented by Russian critics in the 20s and 30s.
The Russian formalists consider that genre is central to the study of literary
history, and that genre is defined mainly by function and form.

The representatives of the Russian formalism were among the first to apply the
structuralist synchronic methodology established by Ferdinand de Saussure to the study
of literature. For them, the literary text is seen as autonomous, separated form
circumstances and from its author, from the historical and social context in which a text is
received.
They introduced the concept of defamiliarization, ‘ostranie’ in Russian, which
means roughly ‘ making strange’ and which expressed the idea that the function of
literature is to restore freshness to perception that has become habitual and automated; to

17
make things strange, to make readers see them in a different light as being new and
original.
This process can be achieved intertextually, i.e. the expectations that are normally
aroused by a certain literary form are overturned by forms that are unusual for the
respective context. A new generation of writer rejects the old literary forms and elevates
lower genres or forms to a higher status. A new genre arises because the old form has
exhausted its possibilities and not because of a new content. The Russian formalists
claimed that the hierarchy of genres is always changing because in each literary epoch,
different literary schools and literary genres are in competition with one another, and
what often happens is that a genre which has previously been minor or marginal acquires
a new position of dominance – a process sometimes known as ‘ the canonization of the
junior branch. Thus Dostoevsky elevated the detective story in Crime and Punishment.
One of the important representatives of this trend in literary criticism, Y. Tynanov
introduced or elaborated some important concepts, including the idea of genre-
consciousness, the idea that genres cannot be studied in isolation, only in relation to one
another and the idea that genre has to be conceived of as a constructive principle, not as a
repertoire of devices, as it was claimed by earlier formalists.
Thus, the formalist school of literary criticism has had an important contribution
to the study of genres through some valuable achievements, such as the introduction of
the concept of intertextuality, internal discourse structure, or discourse function.
However they restricted their study of these concepts to literary genres, ignoring the same
phenomena occurring in non-literary texts. Their concepts have been further developed
by discourse analysts concerned not only with literature but with the power and impact of
discourse on social activities. (e.g. M.Foucault, N. Fairclough).

M. Bakhtin’s concept of genre

M. Bakhtin’s work is important because he pays attention to the generic study of
other types of discourse, besides the literary one and in particular for the postulation of
the concept of ‘speech genres’ and its characteristics.
In his essay The Problem of Speech Genres (1952-1953) Bakhtin calls for a
dramatic expansion of the field of genre theory to embrace the entire spectrum of verbal
activity. This idea is a further argument to the important part played by the ‘extra literary
‘ genres in the formation of the novel, a thesis which the author elaborates into the more
comprehensive account of the relation between the ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ genres.
Bakhtin calls ‘speech genres’ those subtypes of language or types of utterances (both
oral and written) which fall in between the structuralist dichotomy of langue and parole
and which are a pre-condition for meaningful communication. These utterances organize
our speech in almost the same way in which grammatical (syntactical) forms ‘convey
expectations of content, style and structure which help to shape any verbal exchange,
from the simplest conversational rejoinder to the most complex scientific statement’.
He defines speech genre as being “a type of oral utterance or speech situation
which is governed by recognizable conventions or ‘codes’, such as greetings, interviews,
committee meetings, conference speeches, proposals or marriage, etc. According to this
theory, every sphere of communication shows essential links with a wide range of
utterance types, some of which are therefore primary and simple, while others are

18
secondary or complex. These utterance types which he calls speech genres are relatively
stable in terms of thematic content, linguistic style and compositional structure.
For Bakhtin , the generic analysis comprised beside a linguistic analysis also the
compositional structure which depended on the type of communicative activity. These
compositional structures are in fact the most specific characteristic of a certain genre and
for the study of each unknown genre the outlining of the superstructure is regarded as the
most important step.
M. Bakhtin and some of the other Marxists critics that share his concepts like L.
Goldman, Franco Moretti, Raymond Williams, etc. were no longer so much concerned
with the difference between ordinary and literary language, they concentrated their
attention more on the relationship between what they called ‘primary ‘ and ‘secondary ‘
genres. The category of ‘primary genres ‘includes letters, diaries, everyday stories, the
‘speech genres’. The secondary genres include literary genres and more complex genres.
But all genres, of literature and speech, are not simply sets of devices and
conventions, but ‘forms of seeing and interpreting particular aspects of the world, ‘ways
of conceptualizing reality’ that are stored within ‘genre memory’, it being the role of the
great artist to awaken the ‘semantic possibilities ’that lie within a particular genre.
“Language is realized in the form of individual concrete utterances (oral and
written) by participants in the various areas of human activity. These utterances reflect
the specific conditions and goals of each such area not only through their content (
thematic ) and linguistic style, that is , the selection of the lexical, phraseological and
grammatical resources of the language, but above all through their compositional
structure. All three of these aspects- thematic content, style and compositional structure-
are inseparably linked to the whole of the utterance and are equally determined by the
specific nature of the particular sphere of communication. Each separate utterance is
individual, of course, but each sphere in which language is used develops its own
relatively stable types of these utterances. Those we may call speech genres.”
(Bakhtin…:83)

Structuralism

Structuralism regarded genres as group of texts having the same underlying

structure expressed by a variety of particular texts, thus applying the Saussurean
distinction of langue and parole to genre and the particular texts through which a certain
genre became manifest. Structuralists aimed at identifying the minimal parts of a genre
(mainly the narrative genres like fairy tales, thrillers, psychological novels) and to
elaborate rules of paradigmatic substitution and syntagmatic combination. The minimal
units of a genre were at the level of content various motives and schemes, and at the
formal, linguistic level the choice of discursive and cohesive markers.
The first structuralist analysis of narrative texts was performed by Vladimir Propp
in his book The Morphology of the Folk Tale (1927) in which he strove to uncover what
might be called a grammar of a genre, namely of the folk tale.
Propp classified folk tales based on some plot functions and invariants that he
identified by analyzing numerous Russian folk tales. He claimed that folk stories of this
kind were essentially constructed in the same way, out of a fixed set of actions and
character roles. The surface details vary from story to story but these elements or

19
‘functions’ remain constant, and always occur in the same order, though certain functions
may be omitted or repeated.
In his essay “Fairy Tale Transformations (1928), Propp uses the term
transformation (of genres) in both a synchronic and diachronic sense to enumerate the
different forms in which the same narrative motifs or functions can manifest themselves
across a range of texts, and to define the types of mutation or substitution which give rise
to those differences
The work of T. Todorov is considered as an important link between formalism
and structuralism. In his work he elaborated a ‘minimal schemata ‘of the Decameron and
of the detective story, drawing up a system which enabled him to define the difference
between this genre, ‘the thriller’ and the ‘suspense novel’.
In his essay “The Origins of Genres”(1976), he deals with the relation between
individual texts and genre, the process by which new genres are formed out of old ones,
the similarities and differences between literary genres and other ‘speech acts’.
Another important idea in his essay is that discourse is always and necessarily
constituted by speech acts. It is not made up of sentences but of uttered sentences. “The
identity of the genre comes from the speech act that is at its root, telling one’s own story;
however, this initial contact is not prevented from undergoing numerous transformations
in order to become a literary genre. (p.207).
For T. Todorov the study of genres must start with the historical evidence of the
existence of genres and has as its objective the establishment of the properties of genres.
He regards genres as entities that can be described from two different points of view, that
of empirical observation and that of abstract analysis. In a given society, the recurrence of
certain discursive properties is institutionalized, and individual texts are produced and
perceived in relation to the norm constituted by that codification. A genre, whether
literary or not, is nothing other than the codification of discursive properties.
Discursive properties are in the author’s vision those properties that can be found
at the semantic, syntactic or verbal level (according to Ch. Moris’s terminology). Thus,
the difference between one speech act and another, and between one genre and another
can be situated at any of these levels of discourse.
Another important idea to be found in Teodorov’ s work, is the idea that genres
become institutionalized if and when they become the expression of the epoch’s
dominant ideology : “ Each epoch has its own system of genres, which stands in some
relation to the dominant ideology, and so on. Like any other institution, genres bring to
light the constitutive features of the society to which they belong (..) a society chooses
and codifies the acts that correspond most closely to its ideology; that is why the
existence of certain genres in one society, their absence in another, are revelatory of the
ideology, and allow us to establish it more or less confidently.(200)
Another structuralist /formalist approach in which the question of genre remains
central is that of Hans Robert Jauss and the Konstanz school. In their work attention is
transferred from the point of product or the writer to the point of reception, i.e. to the
reader and the mechanisms by which the works of art are understood and evaluated. This
new orientation is signalled by Jauss’s well known phrase ‘horizons of expectations’ and
can be described as a shift from a morphology of genre concerned primarily with form to
a sociology of genre concerned primarily with function.

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 Linguistics and the concept of genre

An important feature of a linguistic study of genre, is that linguists (and discourse

analysts can also be included here) analyze genre functionally in terms of their social
purpose. Thus, different genres are different ways of using language to achieve different
socially and culturally established tasks and texts of different genres are texts which
achieve different purposes.
Communication in societies tends to be categorized into different kinds of events
with more or less well defined boundaries between them, with different behavioural
norms and sometimes even with different varieties of language.
The component parts of a communicative event in this approach are : a)the genre
or type of event (e.g. a story, a lecture, sermon, greetings, conversations); b) the topic; c)
the purpose or the function of the event; d) the participants and the relationships between
them; the setting; the message form and the language variety ; e) the content of the
message; f) the sequencing or ordering of the acts that make up an event; g) the rules of
interaction ; and h) the norms of interpretation “including the common knowledge, the
relevant cultural presuppositions, or shared understandings, which allow particular
inferences to be drawn about what is to be taken literally, what discounted, etc.” (Saville
Troike, 1978) .

Non-literary genres. Definition

"A genre comprises a class of communicative events , the members of which
share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert
members of the parent discourse community and thereby constitute the rationale for the
genre. This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and
constrains choice of content and style. Communicative purpose is both a privileged
criterion and one that operates to keep the scope of a genre as here conceived narrowly
focused on comparable rhetorical action. In addition to purpose, exemplars of a genre
exhibit various patterns of similarity in terms of structure, style, content and intended
audience. If all high probability expectations are realized, the exemplar will be viewed as
prototypical by the parent discourse community."
(Swales,1990 : 58)
The definition establishes the key elements that in the author's view define genre
: the discourse community, the communicative purpose, similar structural and content
patterns , as well as a common style. This definition was applied by Swales and others to
the study of written scientific genres (e.g the research article) but we shall further on
examine if the definition holds for the negotiation genre by analyzing each of the key
elements of the definition and how they relate to negotiations.
2.3.1The Communicative Purpose
The interaction of the key elements -communicative purpose, discourse
community and genre itself (schematic structural and content patterns) is summarized by
Swales in the following way :
" Discourse communities are sociorhetorical networks that form in order to work
towards sets of common goals. One of the characteristics that established members of
these discourse communities possess is familiarity with its particular genres that are used
in the communicative furtherance of those sets of goals. In consequence, genres are the

21
properties of discourse communities ; that is to say, genres belong to discourse
communities, not to individuals, other kind of grouping or to wider speech communities.
Genres themselves are classes of communicative events which typically possess features
of stability , name recognition, a.s.o. Genre-type communicative events (and perhaps
others) consist of texts themselves (spoken, written or a combination) , plus encoding
and decoding procedures as moderated by genre -related aspects of text-role and text-
environment . These processing procedures can be viewed as tasks . The acquisition of
genre skills depends on previous knowledge of the world, giving rise to content
schemata, knowledge of prior texts giving rise to formal schemata , and experience with
appropriate tasks."
(Swales, 1990: 9)
The cited passage shows that the relationship between the discourse communities
and the genres is based on common communicative goal which is prototypical for genre
identity , it determines the language activities of the discourse community and its
primary determinant task. It was nominated as the " privileged property" of a genre.
Other properties, like form, structure and expectations show the extent to which a
particular exemplar is prototypical of a certain genre. The underlying logic of a genre
establishes constraints on the contributions that can be made in terms of their content,
positioning and form. It determines the schematic structure, the lexical and syntactic
choices.
2.3.2 The Discourse Community
If the communicative purpose, although somewhat general can be easily
established for this genre , the concept of discourse community is more difficult to
define and differs in some respect from the concept as it was defined by Swales.
In his definition of discourse community , Swales delimits it from the speech
community. The latter contains shared linguistic forms, regulative rules and cultural
concepts and has predominantly socialization goals that aim at uniting its members.
In the discourse community , the sociorhetorical functions prevail, the
communicative needs of the goals predominate over the socializing goals. A discourse
community consists of a group of people who gather in order to pursue objectives that
are prior to those of socialization and solidarity.
The discourse community can be defined using six main characteristics :
1) a set of common public goals;
2) a common mechanism of intercommunication between its members ;
3) a discourse community uses its mechanisms primarily to provide information
and feedback ;
4) a discourse community uses and possesses more genres to promote its goals ;
5) a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis
6) a discourse community has a stable level of members that possess a suitable
level of expertise;
2.4 The Genre Analysis
The genre analysis will have to capture the stable and recurrent features at the
syntactic, semantic and content level which consciously or unconsciously are recognized
by a discourse community and used in order to achieve specific goals. Therefore the
analysis will have to highlight a schematic structure at the content and formal level.

22
 Instances of specific genres can vary in their prototypicality and the speech /
oral genres are characterized by an even greater variation than those belonging to the
written ones. Different approaches have been used in order to establish these common
features. Their review in Swales (1990) includes : a) the definitional approach which
postulates definitions for everyday categories of genres , such as lectures, staff meetings,
research papers, a.s.o. ; b) the " family resemblance " approach based on Wittgenstein's
theory of games according to which membership in a certain category doesn't necessarily
mean that all defining features have to be found in exemplars belonging to a genre. What
is important is that there should be a "certain relationship of a somewhat looser kind "
(Swales, 90:50).
If the definitional approach is too rigid and in practice it has been difficult to
determine the defining characteristics of many everyday categories (e.g. 'fruit', 'vehicle',
'vegetables') the " family resemblance" was criticized because of its looseness which
allows researchers to establish resemblance between really different things. Therefore
this approach was further refined by Rosch (1975, 1978) Mervis (1981), Armstrong and
Gleitman (1983) cited by Swales (1990) into the third approach : c) the prototype or
cluster theory. According to this approach a category has its own internal structure which
will assign features a certain probability for being included in the category membership .
Armstrong et.al. (1983) brings the resemblance theory and the prototype approach
together in the following excerpt cited by Swales (1990: 50):
" There are privileged properties manifest in most or even all examples of the
category, these could even be necessary properties. Even so, these privileged properties
are insufficient for picking out all and only the class members, and hence a family
resemblance description is required. "
Communication purpose has been nominated as the privileged property of a
genre. Other properties will be form , structure and audience expectations which together
with the purpose identify the extent to which one instance is prototypical of a certain
genre.

Institutional discourses such as the media discourse, the legal discourse, the
political discourse, the education discourse , each has its particular genres that will be
presented further on in this series of lectures.

23
 Persuasive discourse
Discourses such as political propaganda, religious preaching or advertising are clear
instances of persuasive discourse because their aim is to produce some sort of action into the
audience (intellectual, emotional or physical action).
The persuasive discourse has the following characteristics:
- The author takes an informed stand on an issue using persuasive reasons and elaborating on
those reasons.
- The author considers the state of the reader’s emotion, beliefs, desires, commitments. He
attempts to solve a problem by invoking change.
- The persuasive text focuses on a central purpose and sometimes relies on propaganda and
sarcasm.
- The author uses the appeal to reason, emotional appeal, and endorsement by an influential figure
(e.g., bandwagon approach, glittering generalities, testimonials, citing authority, statistics, other
techniques that appeal to reason or emotion) to make his point.
A persuasive discourse includes the following parts:
Introduction to the problem
Background to the problem
Proposal to remedy the problem
Argument for the proposal
Refutation of opposing sides
Call to action
The following genres are considered persuasive: Advertisements, book reviews,
brochures, business letters, charitable campaign appeals, commercials, debates (written),
editorials, essays, letters to the editor, movie critiques, political campaign literature, position
papers, posters, single editorials or letters, speeches, etc.
Persuasive discourse is predominantly argumentative in mood.
Argumentation
Argumentation is a predominant feature in discourses that have been classified as
persuasive based on their aims (Kinneavy, 1971).
Definition of argumentation
Modern argumentation theory defines argumentation broadly along one of the following
two lines of thought: a) argumentation is the set of discursive strategies meant to influence au
audience to adopt a certain opinion, idea or action;
or b) argumentation is a type of verbal communication and interaction which aims to resolve a
dispute.
Therefore it is either seen as a phenomenon that focuses on the persuasive aspect of
communication or one that tries to generate conviction. Modern argumentation theory has
developed along these two lines, stemming from the ancient art of rhetoric.

Definition of argument
Argument can be defined as a logical and discursive unit in which the speaker performs
several speech acts. In order to justify something, a speaker usually has to present his claim or
standpoint under the form of an assertion which is justified by means of another assertion. The
justifying assertions are called evidence, reasons or simply arguments and the justified assertions
are called in the literature either standpoints or claims or conclusions. Thus argument contains
three components: reasons, conclusions and a principle .The principle is the inference rule which
shows how the reasons can be linked to the conclusions. The way of reasoning surfaces through
these inference rules and shapes the form of the argument.
In ordinary discourse arguments appear under the form expressed in the example below::
“She ‘ d better not take driving lessons . She is already 61, she panics easily and she will
never be able to buy a car from her pension”.

24
 In this example we can distinguish:
a) The standpoint? Claim/Conclusion:
“She’d better not take driving lessons”
b) First argument
“she is already 61”
c) Second argument
“she panics easily”
d) Third argument
“she will never be able to buy a car out of her pension

Ways of reasoning
Arguers use different forms of reasoning, out of which the best known are the inductive,
the deductive and the abductive ways of reasoning.
Inductive reasoning
Inductive reasoning starts from several singular statements which describe specific
instances of some events or state of affairs and concludes with a general statement that is with an
opinion inferred from the particular statements.
The American philosopher Charles Peirce illustrates this type of reasoning in the
following excerpt:
“Suppose I enter a room and there find a number of bags, containing different kind of
beans. On the table there is a handful of white beans; and, after some searching, I find that one of
the bags contains white beans only. I at once infer as a probability, or as a fair guess, that this
handful was taken out of this bag. “
His reasoning is based on an inductive process of inference which can be represented as
follows:
Premise I : The beans are from this bag.
Premise II: These beans are white.
Conclusion: All the beans from this bag are white.
The inductive argument starts from particular cases and ends up in a general conclusion
which is however, not universal because it leaves open the possibility that some particular cases
that do not fit this patterns may exists. In our case, it is possible that white beans may be
discovered in the other bags too.
Deductive reasoning
The other way of reasoning, called deduction is the reverse of the inductive reasoning.
Here at least one of the premises must contain a general statement, while the other premise and
the conclusion contain a singular statement. Using the same example from C. Peirce we obtain
the following deductive argumentation:
Premise I: All men are mortal.
Premise II: Socrates is a man.
Conclusion: Therefore Socrates is mortal.
Premise I expresses a general statement, premise II a singular statement and the truth of
the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion.
Both inductive and deductive methods of reasoning are first of all used in sciences
because their main concern is with issues of truth .The deductive reasoning is analytic in
character because the truth of the conclusion is contained in the premises; it is the reasoning of
mathematics, while inductive reasoning on the other hand concludes rules from the observation of
a result in certain cases and is mainly used in empirical testing of theories.
In logic the deductive mode of arguing is commonly known under the form o syllogism, a
term invented by Aristotle to analyze and test deductive reasoning. It has the form :
If A is true and B is true , then C must be true.

25
 . Usually, the general statements that form the major premise are implicit because
speakers suppose they are too well known to be mentioned.
e.g. “He must be a socialist because he favors a graduated income tax “ (Corbett
In this example, the major premise, namely ‘Socialists favor a graduated income tax’ is
not expressed but it is considered as known and accepted as such by the audience. In many cases,
like in our example, the major unexpressed premise usually refers to a generally held opinion in a
certain culture, group or in a certain period of time.
In practice, in argumentative discourse people who put forward arguments do not have to
demonstrate that their conclusions or claims are logically derived from the premises. The choice
of arguments may be a matter of interests, experience, training of the respective arguer, or they
may be influenced by the topic discussed or the audience to whom the respective argumentation
is addressed.
Abductive reasoning
Abductive reasoning is an inference that goes from given data to a hypothesis that best
explains the data. Abductive reasoning is common in science and ordinary everyday life .
Consider the following examples:
e.g. :Joe: Why are you pulling into this filling station?
Tidmash: Because the gas tank is nearly empty.
Joe: What makes you think so?
Tidmash: Because the gas gauge indicates nearly empty. Also, I have no reason to think
that the gauge is broken, and it has been a long time since I filled the tank.
e.g.: Fossils are found; say, remains like those of fishes, but far in the interior of the
country. To explain the phenomenon, we suppose the sea once washed over this land.
This is another hypothesis.
e.g. : “I once landed at a seaport in a Turkish province; and as I was walking up to the
house which I was to visit, I met a man upon horseback, surrounded by four horsemen holding a
canopy over his head. As the governor of the province was the only personage I could think of
who would be so greatly honoured, I inferred that this was he. This was a hypothesis.”
Abductive reasoning combines the two functions of argument and explanation. An
abductive inference may be used as an argument to support a conclusion, but the basis of that
support utilises an explanation, or a series of explanations.
The general form of an abductive inference can be represented as follows:
D is a collection of data.
Hypothesis H explains D.
No other hypothesis explains D as well as H.
Therefore H is plausibly true.
Abductive reasoning is similar to induction in its synthetic nature, namely in the fact that
the conclusion does not logically follow from the premises. This reasoning involves making a
hypothesis which explains what has been observed, but unlike induction in which the conclusion
brings no new information, abduction produces new ideas based on the premises.
When we argue we reason therefore in three ways, deductively, inductively and
abductively, that is we draw conclusions from negative or affirmative statements, we make
generalizations and we set up hypotheses.

Argumentative Schemes and Assessment of Arguments

Argumentation schemes are the forms of arguments (structures of inference) that enable
one to identify and evaluate common types of argumentation in everyday discourse.
Various authors have postulated and analysed different argumentation schemes:
a) symptomatic argumentation in which the arguer tries to show that the relation between
the argument and the standpoint is one of concomitance. The argumentation is presented as if it is

26
an expression of, a phenomenon, a sign or some other kind of symptom of what is state in the
standpoint, like in the following example:
Tom is Scott therefore he must be a miser
b) argumentation by analogy, if the relation between the argument and the standpoint is
that of similarity. The argumentation is presented as if there were a resemblance, an agreement, a
likeness or other kind of similarity.
c) causality argumentation which signals that the standpoint and the argument are in a
relation of cause –effect to one another. Usually the argument is presented as something which is
a means, an instrument or other causative factor for the standpoint.
e.g. Because Tom has been drinking too much yesterday, he must have a terrible
headache now.
These basic types of argumentative schemes may , however, be further classified into
subtypes. Thus, the following subclasses of argumentative schemes have been identified for the
for the symptomatic argumentation, or argumentation from sign:
- Argumentation based on classification
- Argumentation based on evaluation criteria
- Genus-species argumentation
- Arguments based on a definition
- Argumentation based on identity relations
Argumentative schemes are useful because they are tools of evaluating argumentative
discourse. When advancing a certain argumentative scheme, the arguer knows what steps he
should take in order to justify his view and also knows what kind of criticism to expect.
The speaker may, for example, indicate which argumentation scheme he is using by
adding a proverb, in which the quintessence of the argumentation scheme is being expressed. He
may also make use of certain more or less standardized expressions for indicating a particular
argumentation scheme, such as:
“X is typical of Y “
“X corresponds to Y”
“X is comparable to Y”
“X is just like Y”
“X leads to Y”
“X is a means of getting Y”
“Y results from X”
Sometimes the listener has to detect the argumentation scheme without explicit indicators
from the part of the speaker. In such cases he has to try and to identify the premise which has
been left unexpressed, because probably this unexpressed premise is the one that states the
relation between the other argument and the conclusion.
Fallacies in argumentation
The study of argumentative schemes, i.e. of different types of inferences and ways of
reasoning, is closely linked to another important theme in argumentation, namely the fallacies.
Fallacies are faulty arguments and the interest in fallacies has accompanied the study of
argumentation ever since Antiquity as one of the main reasons for studying argumentation was
and still is to evaluate arguments and to improve argumentation techniques. Therefore the
classification and analysis of fallacies has been a major concern of argumentation scholars.
Classical rhetoric was mainly concerned with faulty arguments resulting from a defective
use of inductive and deductive reasoning. Examples of such fallacies are:
a) Equivocation – when the same term is used with more meanings
e.g. All draftsmen are designing men.
All politicians are designing men.
b) Undistributed middle term: a failure to supply a link in the chain of arguments.
e.g. All Communists are people.

27
 All Americans are people
Therefore all Americans are Communists.
c) The either/or fallacy – a fallacy of those who tend to judge life by a two-valued rather
than a multivalued system.
e.g “Either he voted for the candidate, or he didn’t vote for him”.
Inductive types of fallacies include faulty generalizations, faulty causal generalizations,
and faulty analogy.
A number of fallacies cannot be classified as being characteristic to either inductive or
deductive reasoning but they are “ a blend of material, formal and emotional fallacy” like :
begging the question, argumentum ad hominem , argumentum ad populum, etc.
The Red Herring : “is a term adopted from hunting and refers to the practice of dragging
a herring to lead the dogs astray from their pursuit of prey. The classical term for this fallacy is
ignoratio elenchi – i.e. ignoring or avoiding an issue that is under debate.
However, depending on the context in which arguments are used, even faulty arguments
can be appropriate. For example, in many instances of everyday life argumentation, the argument
from ignorance cannot be considered fallacious. This argument has the following simple form :
“It has not been shown that proposition A is true,
Therefore it may be presumed that A is false.”
This is a very common type of inference, frequently met in many social and
communicative interactions, like the one below:
Bob : Is Leona Helmsky still in jail ? She’s probably out by now.
Helen : Maybe she’s still there, because we’d probably hear about it, if she got out.
The argument from ignorance is commonly used in many cases of legal reasoning where
for example, it is reflected in the basic principle of criminal law that a person should be presumed
to be not guilty in the absence of proof of guilt.
However, if pressed too hard, to support a dubious conclusion, this argument can be
fallacious. Such an erroneous use can be exemplified by the following reasoning:
“Nobody has ever shown conclusive evidence that ghosts do not exist; therefore we can
conclude that ghosts exist”
Another type of argument traditionally considered fallacious is the appeal to emotions
(argumentum ad misericordiam). In a democratic system, political arguments often try to appeal
to popular opinion or sentiment through the use of opinion polls and the like. Such a tactic can be
fallacious in some cases, such as where it is used as an emotional appeal to cover up for failure to
decide an issue by examining or bringing forward relevant evidence.
The problem with emotional fallacies very often is that the appeal to emotion is used as a
tactic to steer the argument away from the real issue of a dialogue.
A case of non-fallacious use of ad misericordiam argument would be the appeal to
donations for medical research or different fund-raising appeals.
Threats (a variety of argumentum ad baculum in classical rhetoric) have been considered
as inappropriate in argumentations but in fact there is nothing illogical or fallacious about making
threats in the appropriate context. Such a context is provided for instance by the practical
arguments that are based on sanctions, like laws that impose harsh penalties for drunk driving. In
negotiations, threats mainly in the form of indirect arguments are commonly used tactics that are
often tolerated as a legitimate part of the bargaining process.
The ad hominem type of argument (personal attack) which refers to using the
commitment of the other party as a basis for trying to get him to accept a proposition is central to
the negotiation dialogue, but may be inappropriate in another type of dialogue.
The fallacy of many questions illustrated by the well known example “When did you stop
beating your wife?” is in fact inappropriate only if it is used in the wrong stage of conversational
exchange. If it is part of an inquiry and comes after questions that have established already the
fact that a person was in the habit of beating his wife, this question is no longer fallacious.

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 Examples of fallacies:
Description of Ad Hominem
Translated from Latin to English, "Ad Hominem" means "against the man" or "against
the person."

Bill: "I believe that abortion is morally wrong."

Dave: "Of course you would say that, you're a priest."
Bill: "What about the arguments I gave to support my position?"
Dave: "Those don't count. Like I said, you're a priest, so you have to say that abortion is wrong. "

Fallacy: Appeal to Authority

Also known as: Fallacious Appeal to Authority, Misuse of Authority, Irrelevant Authority,
Questionable Authority, Inappropriate Authority, Ad Verecundiam
This fallacy is committed when the person in question is not a legitimate authority on the
subject. More formally, if person A is not qualified to make reliable claims in subject S, then the
argument will be fallacious.
Dave and Kintaro are arguing about Stalin's reign in the Soviet Union. Dave has been
arguing that Stalin was a great leader while Kintaro disagrees with him.
Kintaro: "I don't see how you can consider Stalin to be a great leader. He killed millions of his
own people, he crippled the Soviet economy, kept most of the people in fear and laid the
foundations for the violence that is occurring in much of Eastern Europe."
Dave: "Yeah, well you say that. However, I have a book at home that says that Stalin was acting
in the best interest of the people. The millions that were killed were vicious enemies of the state
and they had to be killed to protect the rest of the peaceful citizens. This book lays it all out, so it
has to be true."

Fallacy: Ad Hominem Tu Quoque

Also known as: "You Too Fallacy"
Description of Ad Hominem Tu Quoque
This fallacy is committed when it is concluded that a person's claim is false because
1) it is inconsistent with something else a person has said or
2) what a person says is inconsistent with her actions. This type of "argument" has the following
form:

Peter: "Based on the arguments I have presented, it is evident that it is morally wrong to use
animals for food or clothing."
Bill: "But you are wearing a leather jacket and you have a roast beef sandwich in your hand! How
can you say that using animals for food and clothing is wrong!"

Fallacy: Appeal to Belief

Description of Appeal to Belief

Appeal to Belief is a fallacy that has this general pattern:
Most people believe that a claim, X, is true.
Therefore X is true.
This line of "reasoning" is fallacious because the fact that many people believe a claim
does not, in general, serve as evidence that the claim is true.

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 There are however cases in which what people believe actually determines the truth of a
claim. For example, the truth of claims about manners and proper behavior might simply depend
on what people believe to be good manners and proper behavior. Another example is the case of
community standards, which are often taken to be the standards that most people accept. In some
cases, what violates certain community standards is taken to be obscene. In such cases, for the
claim "x is obscene" to be true is for most people in that community to believe that x is obscene.
In such cases it is still prudent to question the justification of the individual beliefs.
Examples of Appeal to Belief
At one time, most people in Europe believed that the earth was the center of the solar
system (at least most of those who had beliefs about such things). However, this belief turned out
to be false.
God must exist. After all, I just saw a poll that says 85% of all Americans believe in God.
Of course there is nothing wrong with drinking. Ask anyone, he'll tell you that he thinks
drinking is just fine.
Fallacy : Begging the Question
Also Known as: Circular Reasoning, Reasoning in a Circle, Petitio Principii.
Description of Begging the Question
Begging the Question is a fallacy in which the premises include the claim that the
conclusion is true or (directly or indirectly) assume that the conclusion is true. This sort of
"reasoning" is fallacious because simply assuming that the conclusion is true (directly or
indirectly) in the premises does not constitute evidence for that conclusion. Obviously, simply
assuming a claim is true does not serve as evidence for that claim. This is especially clear in
particularly blatant cases: "X is true. The evidence for this claim is that X is true."
Some cases of question begging are fairly blatant, while others can be extremely subtle.
Examples of Begging the Question
1. Bill: "God must exist."
Jill: "How do you know."
Bill: "Because the Bible says so."
Jill: "Why should I believe the Bible?"
Bill: "Because the Bible was written by God."
2. "If such actions were not illegal, then they would not be prohibited by the law”
3. Interviewer: "Your resume looks impressive but I need another reference."
Bill: "Jill can give me a good reference."
Interviewer: "Good. But how do I know that Jill is trustworthy?"
Bill: "Certainly. I can vouch for her."
Fallacy : The Slippery Slope
Description of Slippery Slope
The Slippery Slope is a fallacy in which a person asserts that some event must inevitably
follow from another without any argument for the inevitability of the event in question. In most
cases, there are a series of steps or gradations between one event and the one in question and no
reason is given as to why the intervening steps or gradations will simply be bypassed. This
"argument" has the following form:
1. Event X has occurred (or will or might occur).
2. Therefore event Y will inevitably happen.
This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because there is no reason to believe that one event must
inevitably follow from another without an argument for such a claim. This is especially clear in
cases in which there is a significant number of steps or gradations between one event and another.
Examples of Slippery Slope
1. "We have to stop the tuition increase! The next thing you know, they'll be charging
$40,000 a semester!"

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 2. "The US shouldn't get involved militarily in other countries. Once the government sends
in a few troops, it will then send in thousands to die."
3. "You can never give anyone a break. If you do, they'll walk all over you."
4. "We've got to stop them from banning pornography. Once they start banning one form of
literature, they will never stop. Next thing you know, they will be burning all the books!"

Fallacy : False Cause

Also Known as: Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc, Questionable Cause, Confusing Coincidental
Relationships With Causes
A Post Hoc is a fallacy with the following form:
1. A occurs before B.
2. Therefore A is the cause of B.
The Post Hoc fallacy derives its name from the Latin phrase "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc."
This has been traditionally interpreted as "After this, therefore because of this." Not surprisingly,
many superstitions are probably based on Post Hoc reasoning. For example, suppose a person
buys a good luck charm, does well on his exam, and then concludes that the good luck charm
caused him to do well. This person would have fallen victim to the Post Hoc fallacy. Post Hoc
fallacies are typically committed because people are simply not careful enough when they reason.
Leaping to a causal conclusion is always easier and faster than actually investigating the
phenomenon. However, such leaps tend to land far from the truth of the matter. Because Post Hoc
fallacies are committed by drawing an unjustified causal conclusion, the key to avoiding them is
careful investigation.
Examples of Post Hoc
1. I had been doing pretty poorly this season. Then my girlfriend gave me this neon laces
for my spikes and I won my next three races. Those laces must be good luck...if I keep on
wearing them I can't help but win!
2. Bill purchases a new PowerMac and it works fine for months. He then buys and installs a
new piece of software. The next time he starts up his Mac, it freezes. Bill concludes that
the software must be the cause of the freeze.
3. Joan is scratched by a cat while visiting her friend. Two days later she comes down with
a fever. Joan concludes that the cat's scratch must be the cause of her illness.
4. The Republicans pass a new tax reform law that benefits wealthly Americans. Shortly
thereafter the economy takes a nose dive. The Democrats claim that the the tax reform
caused the economic woes and they push to get rid of it.

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 Discourse and Ideology
There are important historical and ideological reasons for the communication
philosophies people claim to follow. These communication philosophies tend to form
what are called discourse systems, which then become a major factor in both
organizational and intercultural communication.
In the meaning we use in the present lecture discourse can be defined as a system
of communication with a shared language or jargon, with particular ways in which people
learn what they need to know to become members of a certain social group, with
particular ideological position and with quite specific forms of interpersonal relationships
among members of the respective group.
By ideology we mean the worldview or governing philosophy of a group or
discourse system. The concept of power usually lies behind this word. This is to say, one
aspect of ideology of a group is whether or not it sees itself as more powerful or less
powerful than some other relevant group.
The governing ideology has a great impact on the relationships among members
of a group. It influences the way socialization takes place and it shapes politeness
strategies concerning the concept of face. The face concept originating from Chinese and
Oriental philosophy refers to the desire of people to be looked upon as positive,
valuable, respectable, even powerful people during their relationships with others. Face
preserving strategies encompass the linguistic and rhetorical strategies through which
people try on the one hand not to offend or hurt their interlocutor’s face and, one the
other hand, to preserve their own face , dignity , authority within a social encounter.
A discourse system could be represented as having four components : forms of
discourse, face systems, socialization and ideology. Out of these four components
ideology has the strongest influence upon the other three, although there is a continuous
interaction between all of them.

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 Thus, in point of ideology, members of the same social group will hold a common
ideological position and recognize a set of extra-discourse features which define them as
a group.
Socialization will be accomplished primarily through preferred forms of discourse
and linguistic strategies.
A set of preferred forms of discourse ( eg. The essay, the letter, the political
speech, the conference briefing, etc.) serves as symbols of membership and identity
within the social group.
Face relationships are prescribed for discourse members or between members and
outsiders.
The Utilitarian Discourse System
The preference for a clear, brief and sincere style in communication (in forms of
discourse therefore) in Western societies appeared around the XVIIth century when it
was considered as the most recommendable for academic scientific style. Later on, this
has become also the style for corporate(organizational) culture in its majority of
discourse forms (letters, press release, newspaper article, sales representatives, job
interviews, etc.).
The preference for this style has been preserved and enforced during the
Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason in the XVII th century. The central philosophers of
this movement emphasized the rise of science as the new authority (while the old
authority that of the Christian Church was declining in Western Europe) and in doing so
set the course for western and world development for the next two or three centuries.
Some seminal works appeared during this period in the field of philosophy and
economics which have had far reaching influence. For example, Adam Smith’s An
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations laid the foundation for the
modern concept of economic exchange , introducing the notion of free exchange of goods
within an open , unregulated market . The Spirit of Laws by Montesquieu laid the most
important concepts for the future constitutions of European and American nations.
Philosophers like John Locke considered the human being as a completely
independent, rational, autonomous entity who moves about through society according to
society’s laws , just like Newton’s physical entities move about according to natural laws.

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 In the light off this philosophical movement , it is not surprising that the thinkers
and writers would promote a clear, brief and sincere style as the most appropriate means
of communication on the pattern of scientific writing. Both the communication style and
the economic principles were laid out together at the same time in history , the eighteen
and nineteen centuries , and often by the same writers. They are the products of exactly
the same psychology , philosophy and worldview.
Utilitarianism
The English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) coined the term ‘utilitarianism’
which stemmed from the Enlightenment way of thinking rather oversimplified it.
Bentham;s problem was to find an ethical principle to replae the idea that good was
defined by the authority of God or the Christian Church. He argued that we should
consider good whatever followed ‘the principle of utility’.
By utility is meant that property of any object , whereby it tends to produce
benefit, advantage, pleasure, good or happiness, (all this in the present case comes to the
same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of
mischief, evel, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered.
( J. Bentham (, 1962: 32) quoted in Scollon (1995: 102))
The major ideological positions of the Utilitarian discourse system may be
summarized as follows:
1. “Good” is defined as what will give the greatest happiness for the greatest
number.
2. Progress (toward greater happiness, wealth, and individuality) is the goal of
society.
3. The free and equal individual is the basis of society.
4. Humans are defined as rational, economic entities.
5. Technology and invention are sources of social wealth .
6. Creative, inventive (wealth-producing) individuals are the most valuable for
society.
7. Quantitative measures such as statistics are the best means of determining
values.

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 These major positions of utilitarianism have had a large impact upon the other
components of the discourse system.
Thus, in respect to socialization, the utilitarianism places great value upon formal
education. Within the Utilitarian discourse system , education through formal procedures
(government supported public schools and educational institutions) has been considered
the only acceptable form of learning. The seven principles given about have become
governing principles of schools throughout Europe and in European –based societies of
the world. The emphasis on these schools is on the inventive and creative individual, on
competition. The goal is for them to become “productive members of society’.
Evaluation is based primarily upon numbers (grades, marks).
Quantitative and statistical measures have been used in all other forms of
enculturation . Thus, in 1904 Alfred Binet developed his famous IQ test , which was
further developed by Terman at Stanford University and became the Stanford-Binet IQ
test. This test or some variation is widely used to assess the creative or intelligence
potential of virtually each individual who falls within the purview of the Utilitarian
system.
Concerning the preferred forms of discourse in the Utilitarian system we may
mention memos, essays, commercial letter5s, reports, minutes of meetings. These forms
have become the preferred ones for the expression of the ideology of that system .
furthermore, these forms- the essay is the most typical example- are also among the main
ways in which new members are socialized into this discourse system. The six
characteristics of the utilitarian style used are : anti-rhetorical; positivist-empirical;
deductive; individualistic; egalitarian; public( institutionally sanctioned or controlled).
The use of a simple anti-rhetorical style in most forms of discourse reflects the
ideology’s opposition to the use of authority while at the same time emphasizing the
rational , scientific nature of human discourse.
Utilitarian discourse considers scientific thinking to be the best model for all
human thinking and for human discourse. Therefore, as its second characteristic, it
emphasizes the features of positivist-empirical psychology while at the same time it plays
down the contingent factors of human relationships.

35
 Due to the fundamentally anti-rhetorical and anti-authoritarian characteristic of
utilitarian discourse , the relationships between the members of this discourse system are
palyed down and the text itself comes to0 have primary authority. The result is that there
is a preference for the deductive rhetorical strategy for the introduction of topics.
As far as the individualistic feature is concerned , writer5s and speaker of this
discourse should avoid set phrases, metaphors, proverbs and clichés, trying to make their
statements fresh and original. ( author’s copyright, footnotes , references have to be
indicated whenever the author refers to other people’s writings).
A consequence of the ideological position that individuals are the basis of society
is that these individuals must be considered to be equal to each other. This egalitarianism
is not applied to all human beings but only to members of the utilitarian discourse (for
example, the Declaration of Independence of the USA does not include rights for the
Afro-American slaves existing at that time in the colonies).
The public characteristic of this discourse refers to the fact that constant checks
are placed upon discourses by institutionally authorized persons. Letters to the editor of a
newspaper are screened by the editorial staff before publishing , and then they are only
publishe din edited form. Academic articles and books are screened through a process of
reviews . Most institutions from supermarkets to schools have some process by which
any notices which are to be put up for display are first checked by some authority for
appropriateness. This characteristic of the Utilitarian discourse system is often ignored in
the enthusiasm for talking about the freedom of speech,. However, since the beginning of
the XVII th century freedom of speech has meant actually not absolute freedom in these
societies but the right for any individual to submit his ideas and communications to the
scrutiny of a very large array of institutionalized boards and review panels where they are
judged and if they meet the standards for public discoursed then they are allowed to pass
on to the public.
The institutions of the utilitarian discourse system are many. They include most
western governments, virtually all western and international corporations, schools,
private manufacturing and service businesses , professional associations, a.s.o.
Communication within such institutions has long been established as being hierarchical
or asymmetrical in point of power. However, there is a dual system for corporate

36
communications. There will be those for internal consumption `, which will largely
display patterns of involvement downward to lower echelons of the corporate structure ,
with some more limited amount of independence strategies communicated upward-
mostly in the form f ‘feed-back’ to higher level directives. There will be another system
of communication for outward consumption – for what we call ‘public discourse’. In
those communications a stance of egalitarian communication or symmetrical solidarity
will be displayed.
In communicating with people outside the utilitarian discourse the characteristic
of egalitarian and symmetrical solidarity is missing altogether. This aspect of Utilitarian
discourse system recapitulates an old theme in western and other cultures in which
members are treated as real, normal, and worthy of ‘civilized’ treatment , and non-
members are treated as ‘ethnics’ ‘barbarians;, and ‘pagans’. In more recent terminology,
members of the Utilitarian discourse system are judged to be ‘progressive’, ‘democratic’,
‘free’ and ‘developed’, and non-members are judged to lack these sasumed qualities.
The Utilitarian discourse system, while advocating equal rights for all members,
quite specifically denies those rights of equality to those who do not show themselves
willing to participate in the ideology of this discourse system. This attitude generates
difficulties in cross cultural relations both diplomatic and commercial between states with
different ideologies.

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Text Analysis Approaches – The Critical Discourse Analysis

Multiculturalism and Cultural Studies

The media culture (radio and TV. programmes, films, newspapers articles and
other media products) contributes significantly to the creation of human identities , to
one’s sense of the self. It contributes to our notions about what it means to be a man or a
woman, a member of a certain racial or ethnic group, as well as to our notions of class
and social status. Media products are those which provide the myths, symbols and ideals
of a certain society and culture. In our age when globalization phenomena are powerful
even in this field of media culture it is very important to be able to understand , interpret
and criticize the meanings and messages conveyed by the products of this globalized
media culture. According to Douglas Kellner “ the gaining of critical media literacy is an
important resource for individuals in learning how to cope with a seductive cultural
environment . Learning how to read, criticize, and resist socio-cultural manipulation can
help empower oneself in relation to dominant forms of media and culture. It can enhance
individual sovereignty vis-à-vis media culture and give people more power over their
cultural environment.”( 2006: 2)
The emergence of cultural studies in the last decades of the XXth century comes
to fulfill this aim of gaining critical media literacy. The University of Birmingham
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies initiated a project aiming at developing a
variety of critical methods for the analysis , interpretation and criticism of cultural
products. During the 60s and the 70s representatives of this group analyzed cultural
texts, mainly media texts trying to highlight the interplay of representation and ideologies
of class, gender, race, ethnicity and nationality. They were among the first to study the
effects of newspapers, radio, television, film and other popular cultural forms on the
audience.
Cultural studies consider that culture must be studied within the social relations
and systems through which culture is produced and consumed and therefore the study of
culture is closely interwoven with the study of society, politics and economics. Cultural
studies have pointed out to the fact that media culture products usually create and help
maintain the dominant values , political ideologies, and world views.
The importance of the critical studies undertaken by representatives of cultural
studies reside in the fact that their research enable people to read and interpret one’s
culture critically.
Cultural studies differ from other undertakings of the same kind because unlike
previous approaches to culture which tended to focus on the high culture, i.e. on the
literary and elitist product, this approach dismisses the classification into high and low
cultural products, claims that there is a continuum of cultural artifacts ranging from
novels to television programmes and refuses to set up cultural hierarchies of cannons.
They focus instead on the effect these products of popular culture have on the audience.
Cultural studies allow us to examine and criticize the whole range of culture without prior
prejudices towards one or another sort of cultural text. British cultural studies , for
example, analyze culture historically in the context of its societal origins and effects. It
analyzed society as a hierarchical and antagonistic set of social relations characterized by

38
oppression of subordinate class, gender, race, ethnic and national strata. The project of
the British cultural studies was aimed at social transformation and attempted to specify
forces of dominance and resistance in order to aid the process of political struggle and
emancipation from oppression and domination.
For cultural studies, the concept of ideology is very important and they consider
that the dominant ideology in a society reproduce social relations of dominance and
subordination. Ideologies make inequalities and subordination appear just and even
natural and cultural products through which the dominant ideologies make themselves
manifest induce in the audience the feeling of consent to the relations of power and
dominance. Contemporary societies are structured as opposing groups with different
political ideologies (liberal, conservative, radical, etc.) and cultural studies through the
analysis of the cultural artifacts specify what ideologies are present in the respective
artifacts.
The connection between multiculturalism and cultural studies resides in the fact
that cultural studies focus on representations of race, gender, and class and criticizes
ideologies that promote various types of oppression. Cultural studies demonstrate how
culture reproduces certain forms of racism, sexism and prejudice against members of
subordinate classes , social groups , or alternative life-styles. Multiculturalism claims that
different types of culture and cultural groups have their own validity and importance
(Latino, Asian, Black , gay and lesbian cultures, a.s.o. ) and that cultural artifacts should
not present these cultures in a distorted or oppressive way.
Cultural studies promote therefore a multiculturalist view and pedagogy that aims
to make people sensitive to how relations of power and domination are “encoded” in
cultural texts, such as those of television or film. But what is really important is that
these studies specify and learn people how to resist the dominant encoded meanings and
how to produce their own critical and alternative readings. Cultural studies can show how
media culture manipulates and indoctrinates people , but also how to resist the meanings
in media products and how to gain a more critical consciousness.
Cultural studies have developed along three major direction of analysis; one
direction discusses production and political economy, the second focuses on textual
analyses and the third studies the reception and use of cultural texts .

Critical Discourse Analysis – Outline and Major Representatives

Critical Discourse analysis is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of
discourse, which focuses on the way in which the social and political domination is
reproduced by text and received by the audience.
CDA is founded on the idea that there is unequal access to linguistic and social
resources, and that these resources are institutionally controlled. This approach to text
analysis has been developed by representatives of Birmingham and Lancaster University
in Great Britain, but later on, scholars from other countries have joined in ( e.g. from the
Netherlands, Austria, Brazil, Denmark, Australia, etc.). Among the most prominent
representatives of this approach we may mention: Norman Fairclough, Paul Chilton,
Teun A. van Djik, Theo van Leeuwen, Siegfried Jaeger, Christina Schaeffner, Ruth
Wodak, Roger Fowler, Gunther Kress, Mary Talbot, and Robert Hodge.
Discourse is a major instrument of power and control in social life and
representatives of Critical Discourse Analysis consider that it is part of their professional

39
role to investigate , reveal and clarify how power and discriminatory values are encoded
in discourse and mediated through the linguistic system. CDA is essentially political in
intent and aims at transforming the world and help creating a world where people are not
discriminated because of sex, colour, belief, age or social class. Therefore, it advocates
the values considered valid by multiculturalism and provides a methodology for the
analysis of discourses and the highlighting of all those aspects that may come against
these ideas of multiculturalism.
One of the major representatives of CDA is the British scholar Norman
Fairclough (University of Lancaster). His books Language and Power (1989) and
Critical Discourse Analysis (1995) introduce the methodology used by most CDA
scholars , namely a three dimensional framework for studying discourse , “where the aim
is to map three separate forms of analysis onto one another: analysis of (spoken or
written ) language texts, analysis of discourse practices (processes of text production,
distribution and consumption) and analysis of discursive events as instances of
sociocultural practice (1995: 2).
In terms of methodology, CDA can generally be described as hyper-linguistic or
supra- linguistic highly eclectic analysis of language , in that practitioners who use CDA
consider the larger discourse context or the meaning that lies beyond the grammatical
structure. This includes consideration of the political and even the economic context of
language usage and production. CDA has formulated an analysis of public discourse
(mainly political and media discourse) designed to unravel the ideology behind the overt
positions. The tools for this analysis are an eclectic selection of descriptive categories of
functional linguistics, especially those structures identified by Halliday as ideational and
interpersonal, but also speech acts and interactional transaction units which belong to the
realm of pragmatics.
It also makes us of the concept of schemata developed in cognitive psychology and
Artificial Intelligence, also known as ‘scripts’, ‘frames’, and ‘plans’ (Rumelhart, 1980;
Minsky 1975; Shank and Abelson, 1977; Cook, 1995). From cognitive semantics CDA
has adopted the concept of ‘prototype’ and from literary criticism that of genres and
metaphors. The text analyses carried out by CDA scholars also review the other rhetorical
means used by the respective text and the way they connect to the socio-economic beliefs
and ideology underlying it.
Language is seen by CDA as social practice in the sense that it can cause an
intervention in the social and economic order, producing and reproducing ideology. As
far as the philosophical background is concerned, CDA draws on sources like
Contemporary Marxist Theory, post-structuralist and deconstructionist criticism and the
Frankfurt School.
Discourse is understood mor ein “Foucaultian “ terms than in those of Halliday’s
functional linguistics: “Discourse relates to the more recent Hallidayan formulation of
register as “the configuration of semantic resources that the member of a culture
typically associates with a situation type. It is the meaning potential that is accessible to
a given social context.”(Halliday , 78: 111). But its status is crucially different. Whereas
register is a variety of language, a discourse system is a system of meanings within the
culture, preexisting language. Again, one speaks of a text as being ‘in’ some register R 1,
whereas several discourses D1 to Dn maz be [in[ the text. (Fowler, 1996: 7).

40
 Writers and readers are constituted by discourses that are accessible to them.A
writer can make texts only out of available discourses, and so is socio-culturally
constituted. Even if authors ‘own their texts’ (acc. to Kress, 1985) this does not mean that
they are not largely influenced by the discourses dominant or existent at a certain period
when these authors create and live.
CDA considers that readers, on the other hand , if possess critical consciousness,
are not simply passive recipients of the texts imbued with certain ideologies, but they can
reconstruct the text as a system of meanings which may be more or less congruent with
the ideology which is encoded in the respective text. This is possible if readers are
discursively-equipped, i.e. if they can decode and critically analyze the discursive
formations in the text and the ideology that generated them.
The text linguistic analyses aim at examining ideologies and power relations involved in
discourse. Thus, van Dijk (1998) considers ideology as the basis of the social
representations of groups, and more generally advocates for a sociocognitive interface
between social structures and discourse structures.
Ruth Wodak emphases the importance of a historical dimension in critical
discourse studies, as she also has shown in her work on racism and antisemitism. She
analyzed, for instance, the way in which the attitude towards Romanian and Jewish
immigrants is reflected in the Austrian press of the 90s.
Fairclough notes “that language connects with the social through being the
primary domain of ideology, and through being a site of, and a stake in, struggles of
power “ (1985 : 15) .
Fairclough’s line of study , also called TODA – textually oriented discourse
analysis – to distinguish it from philosophical enquires not involving the use of linguistic
methodology, is especially concerned with the mutual effects of formally linguistic
textual properties, sociolinguistic speech genres, and formally sociological practices.
Text analysis in his opinion comprises a multilevel undertaking organized under
the following headings: vocabulary analysis (e.g.why is sometimes terrorist used
,whereas in other texts the same person is called a freedom fighter), grammar structures
(e.g. how the passive voice in media articles may have different functions , like hiding the
agent , or avoiding to cast responsibility etc, how are headings shaped ), cohesion , text
structure, the force of the utterances (what sort of speech acts they constitute) , the
coherence of texts, the intertextuality. This analytical framework cover aspects of text
production and interpretation.
The main thrust of his analysis is that, if- according to Foucaultian theory-
practices are discursively shaped and enacted, the intrinsic properties of discourse, which
are linguistically analyzable, are to constitute a key element of of their interpretation. He
is thus interested in how social practices are shaped by discourses, as well as by the
subsequent discursive effects of social practices. His seminal work Language and Power
(1989) explored the connections between language and social institutional practices and
of ‘wider’ political and social structures. In the book, Fairclough developed some
important concept for his view upon discourse with far reaching consequences in CDA
literature. The author claims that there are some broad tendencies in discursive change
that affect societal order of discourse and relates these tendencies to more general
directions of social and cultural change. Fairclough discusses three such major tendencies

41
in contemporary discourse: technologisation of discourse, democratization of discourse
and commodification of discourse.
The concept of technologisation refers to the increasingly subtle technical
developments in the field of communication that aim to bring under scientifically
regulated practice, semiotic fields that were formerly not analyzed together , such as
patterns of intonation, the graphic layout of text in the page or proxemic data. Modern
societies are characterized by a tendency towards control over more and more parts of
people’s lives. Fairclough , like J. Habermas support the idea that ‘lifeworld’ is being
colonized by the systems of state and economy and this is reflected in the terminology
and vocabulary used in the dominant discourses. Techniques such as interviewing,
counseling, teaching, or advertising have taken on the character of transcontextual
techniques i.e. they are seen as resources or toolkits that can be used to pursue a wide
variety of strategies in many contexts and as such are handled by designated social agents
in specific institutional locations. These technologies establish a close connection
between knowledge about language, discourse and power. The technologisation of
discourse appears to be spreading from genres such as the interview (having a public
character) to conversation, the core genre of private sphere. Thus, he concludes that
technologization of discourse is associated with an extension of strategic discourse to
new domains. Teaching conversation control skills for instance, can contribute to
business success and profit, safety at work, motivation of employees and avoidance of
industrial dispute. In modern societies there is a close view between the technologization
of discourse and the process of teaching. The main idea is that discourses and
communication strategies are skills that can be appropriated.
Democratization of discourse is seen by Fairclough as the tendency to remove
inequalities and asymmetries in the discursive and linguistic rights, obligations and
prestige of various groups of people. Democratization has attained five areas of
discourse: relations between languages and social dialects (the latter are no longer viewed
as inferior to the language proper); access to prestigious discourse types for more and
more groups of people; elimination of overt power markers in institutional discourse (e.g.
forms of address showing higher respect, titles, honorary degrees, etc.) ; a tendency
towards informality in communication ; changes in gender-related practices.
The tendency to eliminate overt power markers from conversation is closely
associated with the tendency towards informality which is so obvious in modern English,
both British and American. A central manifestation of increasing informality is the way
in which conversational discourse has been and is being projected from the private
sphere of communication into the public sphere .Conversation is colonizing media
discourse, various types of professional/public discourses , even education. One
dimension of this manifestation of informality is a shift in the relationship between
spoken discourse and written discourse.
Commodification of discourse is a process whereby social domains and
institutions whose concern is not producing commodities in the narrower sense of goods
for sale , come nevertheless to be organized, conceptualized and presented in terms of
commodity production, distribution and consumption. An obvious example here lies in
the discourse of higher education. Universities in the UK and elsewhere (Romania
included) present themselves to prospective students under the form of commodities ,
competing for students like traders in the market, pointing out to the benefits and

42
advantages they can offer to students and avoiding the less commercialized aspects of
educational activity (effort to study, difficulty of subjects, asymmetric relations between
the teaching staff and the students, etc).
These tendencies in the modern discourses of today are manifest not only in the
English speaking societies. Scholars from various countries in Europe, America (both
North and South ), Asia and Australia have shown through analyses of real life texts and
spoken discourses that these tendencies are part of the globalization phenomena .
However they manifest themselves in slightly different ways depending on the
characteristics of different countries and area of the world.
In Romania CDA has still few practitioners. Some research has been done upon
newspaper articles concerning the image of the Roma community mainly , as well as
some studies were carried out upon the so called “wooden language “ of the communist
regime. (e.g.Preoteasa, I. Readings of Political and Literary Texts in Romanian Context,
in Lancdoc Working Papers, University of Lancaster with British Council Romania ,
Timisoara, 2000, ). However the methodology supplied by CDA could be much better
put to use in a society which resents powerfully the impact of globalization and struggles
to recover its sociocultural entities .
CDA offers a great potential for Romanian scholars wishing to study tendencies
and developments in contemporary Romanian discourses (media or other types of
institutionalized discourses) due to its interdisciplinary character , its scope which
surpasses a narrow value/free linguistic analysis. The aims of CDA go far beyond the
linguistic analysis , setting up connections with semiotics, sociology, philosophy ,
economy and politics. It is particularly useful for treating topics belonging to
multiculturalism , highlighting the permanent struggle between various social groups,
pointing out to asymmetrical power positions in society , as well as to manipulation
phenomena that so frequently occur in contemporary discourses.

43
Conversational Analysis

Why study talk?

Issues of the organization of talk come up more often than you might think:
 How do we tell if a politician is evading a question?
 What style of seminar question gets the best discussion?
 Why do patients feel the doctor isn't listening to them?
 Do men and women have different conversational styles?
 Are members of minority groups disadvantaged in job interviews, even if they
speak English well?

Conversation analysts are interested in talk for what it can tell us about the way
society is structured. They reject the kind of social analysis that assumes we already
know the categories into which society fits, such as class, gender, race, nation, and
profession. They say that we should instead look in detail at the way people actually
make society, moment to moment, in every interaction. We aren't just given the rules, we
work out the rules as a practical matter every time we meet someone. People may in fact
use such social categories as class, or teacher and student, or doctor and patient, but if
they do, we should be able to show them doing it.
To study these issues they could look at any sort of interaction -- queues, air-
traffic control, laboratory work, medical records -- and indeed there have been studies of
all these settings. But they have given the most sustained attention to ordinary
conversation. That is because this is something people do all the time, apparently
following very subtle patterns while unaware they are doing anything special. It is also a
kind of data we can document and discuss in detail, by taping and transcribing it. So the
basic idea of conversation analysis is that we shouldn't start with what we know about
talk -- what people might want to do, who has power and who doesn't, what is polite and
what's not. Instead, we should start with lots of examples of people talking, and look for
the kinds of patterns they take for granted. One way we do this is by looking cases where
the pattern breaks down, and seeing what they do."Conversation analysis" is a popular
approach to the study of discourse. It is a way of thinking about and analyzing the
pragmatics of ordinary conversation, focusing on the interactive, practical construction of
everyday interchanges.
What is Conversation Analysis?
Origins in Ethnomethodology
Conversation analysis (CA) has its origins in the "ethnomethodology" of Harold
Garfinkel and Harvey Sachs, which in turn built on the social phenomenology of Alfred
Schutz (e.g. Schutz & Luckmann, 1974). As a result CA has some distinctly
phenomenological characteristics. As Levinson puts it:
"Out of this background comes a healthy suspicion of premature theorizing and ad
hoc analytical categories: as far as possible the categories of analysis should be those
that participants themselves can be shown to utilize in making sense of interaction;
unmotivated theoretical constructs and unsubstantiated intuitions are all to be
avoided. In practice this results in a strict and parsimonious structuralism and a
theoretical asceticism -- the emphasis is on the data and the patterns recurrently
displayed therein" (Levinson, p. 295).

44
 What is a conversation?
A conversation is the impromptu, spontaneous, everyday exchange of talk
between two or more people.
"Conversation may be taken to be that familiar predominant kind of talk in which two
or more participants freely alternate in speaking, which generally occurs outside
specific institutional settings like religious services, law courts, classrooms and the
like" (Levinson, 1983, p. 284)
The participants in a conversation take turns and during their turn each makes a
conversational move of some kind. Conversation analysts adopt the view that when
people conduct a conversation it is an interactionally managed and locally managed
phenomenon. That is to say, people organize the construction of a conversation together,
cooperatively, and they deal with the organization at a "local" level, one utterance at a
time.
Conversation is a process in which people interact on a moment-by-moment, turn-
by-turn basis. During a sequence of turns participants exchange talk with each other, but,
more important, they exchange social or communicative actions. These actions are the
moves of conversation considered as a collection of games. Indeed, conversational
actions are some of the most important moves of the broader game of everyday life.
Not all kinds of verbal exchange operate this way: a formal speech is planned in advance,
and is managed primarily by the person giving it (though responses from the audience
play some part too). So not every kind of verbal exchange is a conversation. However,
interactions that are not conversations in this sense can still be analyzed using CA.

What is the method of CA?

CA seeks to describe conversation in a way that builds upon the way it is taken up
by the people who are participating in it. It does this by paying attention to the way each
utterance displays an interpretation of the previous utterance, and by paying particular
attention to hitches, misunderstandings, and repairs:
"The methodology employed in CA requires evidence not only that some aspect of
conversation can be viewed in the way suggested, but that it actually is so conceived
by the participants producing it. That is, what conversation analysts are trying to
model are the procedures and expectations actually employed by participants in
producing and understanding conversation.... We may start with the problem of
demonstrating that some conversational organization is actually oriented to (i.e.
implicitly recognized) by participants, rather than being an artifact of analysis. One
key source of verification here is what happens when some hindrance occurs -- i.e.
when the hypothesized organization does not operate in the predicted way -- since
then participants (like the analyst) should address themselves to the problem thus
produced. Specifically, we may expect them either to try to repair the hitch, or
alternatively, to draw strong inferences of a quite specific kind from the absence of
the expected behavior, and to act accordingly" (Levinson, p. 319)
For example, consider the following exchange between student (S) and teacher
(T):
1 S: So I was wondering would you be in your office after class this week?

45
 2 (2.0)
3 S: Probably not
4 T: Hmm no
[Modified from (39) in Levinson.]

Here the two-second pause after the student’s question -- a hitch in the
conversation -- is interpreted as a negative answer to the question. Although a silence has
no features on its own, conversational significance is attributed to it on the basis of the
expectations that arise from its location in the surrounding talk. (Below we shall
summarize the three main kinds of interpretation of silence.)
"A fundamental methodological point can be made with respect to [this example], and
indeed most examples of conversation. Conversation, as opposed to monologue,
offers the analyst an invaluable analytical resource: as each turn is responded to by a
second, we find displayed in that second an analysis of the first by its recipient. Such
an analysis is thus provided by participants not only for each other but for analysts
too" (Levinson, p. 321).
When we are trying to understand a particular utterance or conversational action it
is important to consider where and how that action is located in a sequence of other
conversational actions. When people speak in an ongoing conversation they do so in the
light of what has just been said, and in anticipation of what might take place in the future.
They "design" or "construct" their own speech, and understand the talk of other people,
accordingly. They also shape their utterances to take account of the identity of the
speakers and what their interests are. The meaning of an utterance -- the way it is
interpreted, and the way it was designed -- depends, then, on its context, both verbal and
non-verbal. This construction of utterances is called recipient design.
Every person involved in the conversation has their own interpretation of what is
going on, but although these interpretations are subjective in the sense that everybody has
their own, they are intersubjective in the sense that every person treats the adjacent
utterances in similar ways. People share a understanding of the "game" they are engaged
in, and its "rules."
Speech Acts
Utterances are used to do things; they are actions; what John Austin called
performatives. Speech acts can be grouped into several families, each containing similar
types of performative:
Commissives: their point is to commit the speaker to a course of action
promise "I’ll tell none what you’ve said."
offer "Shall I do that?"
make a vow
take a pledge
give a guarantee
Directives: their point is to get the recipient to do something
request "Please tell me more."
command "Tell me about that"
order
suggest "Why don’t you describe what happened."
give permission "You can share that if you wish."

46
 question "What’s your family like?"
Assertives: their point is to display the speaker’s belief in the propositional content of
the utterance
assert "This rain is heavy."
describe
state
predict "It will surely rain tomorrow."
speculate "I wonder whether it will rain tomorrow"
report
announce
Expressives: their point is to express the speaker’s psychological state
compliment "Great dress!"
apologise "I’m really sorry I did that."
welcome "Nice to see you."
thank "Thanks very much!"
greet "Hi!"
acknowledge "uh huh"
Declarations: done by an appropriately authorized speaker
fire "You’re fired!"
appoint "You’re in charge."
sentence "I sentence you to thirty days in jail"
The illustrations given here should be taken with caution. It is a central
insight of Conversation Analysis that the action that participants will interpret an
utterance to be will depend not just on its linguistic form, but also on its location in the
sequence, on the context, on the identity of the speaker, etc..
So it’s important to examine the structure of conversation in which speech acts are
produced. We consider next a central aspect of this structure.
Turn-taking
It is an evident fact about conversation is that it takes the form of turn-taking:
two or more participants take turns to speak. But how does this happen? How does
someone "get the floor"? It may seem that people simply wait for the speaker to stop, and
then talk, but the gaps between turns are generally too short for this to be the case:
sometimes they are just micro-seconds in length, and on average they are no longer than a
few tenths of a second.
Turn-construction
Turns can be made up of a single word, a phrase, a clause, or a full-sentence.
They are not syntactic or semantic units, but genuinely pragmatic units. The recognizable
potential end of a turn is called in CA a "transition relevance place" (TRP). A TRP may
be identified by "a change in the pitch or volume of the voice, the end of a syntactic unit
of language, a momentary silence, or some sort of body motion" (Nofsinger, p. 81).
Transition between speakers usually occurs at such a point, and it is at a TRP that
speakers employ the conversational techniques that CA aims to discover.
Turn-allocation
Sacks et al. (1974) suggest a handful of techniques that assign the rights and
responsibilities of the participants in a conversation. In simplified form, these techniques
are the following:

47
 1. The current speaker (C) can select the next speaker (N) while still talking, but must
then stop talking at the next TRP. (Current speaker selects next)
2. If N is not selected, anyone can jump in, and the first to do so gains rights to the
floor. (Self -selection)
3. If neither (1) nor (2) occurs, C may (but need not) continue talking. (Speaker
continuation)
4. If (3) happens, rules (1)-(3) apply again at the next TRP.
For example, technique 1 can be employed by pointing, using a name, making eye
contact, etc.. Another way the current speaker can select the next speaker is to use the
first part of an "adjacency pair," as described in the next paragraph.
Adjacency Pairs
Conversational actions tend to occur in pairs. We speak of an "exchange of
opinions" and "an exchange of greetings" because many conversational actions call for a
particular kind of conversational response in return. Greetings and farewells typically call
for another utterance of the same type. Other actions call for a different type of action:
invitations with acceptances (or rejections); congratulations with thanks; offers with
acceptances (or refusals). Such pairs of conventionally linked conversational actions are
said to have two "parts": a "first part" and a "second part." The pairs are said to have
"conditional relevance."
More formally stated, adjacency pairs are sequences of two utterances that are:
(i) adjacent (unless separated by an "insertion sequence"; see below)
(ii) produced by different speakers
(iii) ordered as a first part and a second part
(iv) typed, so that a particular first part requires a particular second (or range of
second parts) - e.g. offers require acceptances or rejections, greetings require
greetings, and so on.
...and there is a "rule" governing the use of adjacency pairs, namely:
Having produced a first part of some pair, current speaker must stop speaking, and
next speaker must produce at that point a second part to the same pair.
Adjacency pairs are often found linked together in closely integrated ways, and the next
two sections describe two of these. One pair may follow another (question, answer;
question, answer), or one pair may be embedded inside another pair . A "presequence" is
an example of the former, an "insertion sequence" is an example of the latter.
Presequence
A presequence occurs when some preliminary action is taken before initiating the
first part of an adjacency pair, and the preliminary action itself involves an adjacency
pair. Before making a request, for instance, it often makes sense to check whether the
other person has the item one wants. Here a question-answer pair (turns 1 and 2) prepares
for a request-agreement (or request-rejection) pair (initiated in turn 3).
1 A: Do you have the spanner? ) presequence
2 B: Yes. )
3 C: Can I have it please? ) R-A pair
4 B: [...] )
Another example:

48
 1 Teacher: Mike, do you think you know
the answer to question four? )presequence
2 Mike: Yes. )
3 Teacher: Can you tell the class, then, please? )R-A pair
4 Mike: [...] )
Insertion sequences
The person towards whom the first part of an adjacency pair has been directed
may want to undertake some preliminary action before responding with the second part.
A request for clarification by the recipient will take place after the first pair part, but
before the second pair part. This is an insertion sequence. Here turns 1 and 4 make up one
adjacency pair, and turns 2 and 3 make up a second adjacency pair inserted between the
two parts of the first pair:
1 P: Martin, would you like to dance? )
2 M: Is the floor slippery? )
3 P: No, itís fine. )
4 M: Then Iíd be happy to. )
Another example of this:
1 Teacher: Will you tell us the answer to question four? )
2 Mike: Is that one page six or seven? )
3 Teacher: Six. )
4 Mike: Oh, okay. The answer is factorial two. )
Silence
Depending on where silence occurs in a conversation, and its location in the
conversational structure, it will be interpreted as a gap between turns, a lapse in the
conversation, or a pause that is attributed to the designated speaker.
A gap is silence at the TRP when the current speaker has stopped talking without
selecting the next speaker, and there is a brief silence before the next speaker self-
selects. A gap does not "belong" to anyone.
A lapse is silence when no next speaker is selected, and no-one self-selects: the
conversation comes to an end for at least a moment. (N.b., a gap and a lapse can be
distinguished from one another only in retrospect.)
A pause is silence when the current speaker has selected the next speaker and stopped
talking, but the next speaker is silent. A pause is also silence that occurs within a
participant’s turn (i.e., before a TRP is reached). A pause "belongs" to the person
currently designated speaker.
Preference
When speakers have a choice between two conversational actions, one will
typically be considered more usual, more normal, than the other. This phenomenon is
called "preference." The term doesn’t refer to the psychological desires of a speaker, but
the norms of the intersubjective conversational system. These shared norms mean that

49
"any of the conversational tendencies and orientations that we commonly attribute to
participants ’personalities or interpersonal relationships derive (at least in part) from the
turn system" (Nofsinger, p. 89).
For example, in response to the first part of an adjacency pair some second part responses
are preferred, while others are dispreferred. Refusals of requests or invitations are nearly
always dispreferred, while acceptances are preferred. (See the table below.)
Conversationalists’ grasp of preference will influence their interpretation of
conversational actions. For instance, a silence in response to a request may be taken as
evidence of a likely upcoming dispreferred response (a refusal), so that further
inducements may be added (this was the case with the first example in this handout).
Conversational actions that are not the preferred response are often conducted in a
manner that displays this: "dispreferred seconds are typically delivered: (a) after some
significant delay; (b) with some preface marking their dispreferred status, often the
particle well; (c) with some account of why the preferred second cannot be performed"
(Levinson, p. 307).
Mutual Understanding as Alignments
For a conversation to run smoothly and effectively the organization of turns must
be managed, but in addition the conversation must also be kept on track.
How do participants in a conversation get a sense of understanding and being
understood? The response to an utterance often provides some kind of interpretation of
the prior utterance, and so indicates the alignment. Assessments ("That’s good"),
newsmarks ("Oh, wow!"), continuers ("uh huh"), formulations (giving the gist of whatís
been said), collaborative completions (finishing the speaker’s sentence), all provide
evidence to the speaker of how their talk is being understood.
Repairs are the things done to fix a conversational breakdown and restore
alignment. Breakdowns can be misunderstandings ("What did you say?"; "What do you
mean?") as well as disagreements ("I think you’re wrong"), rejections ("No, I won’t") and
other difficulties. Revisions may occur when the speaker can anticipate that trouble
is likely and reformulates talk accordingly.
Alignment is displayed and adjusted not only in responses to an utterance but
also in advance. Preventatives such as disclaimers ("I really don’t know much about this,
but...") are examples of such "pre-positioned alignment devices." Pre-sequences (see
above) do this too.
Alignment is especially important at the openings and closings of conversation.
Extended Discourse: Narratives and Arguments
Our examples have been of conversations where the turns are brief, but the
lengthy stories and substantial arguments that sometimes occur in conversations can be
examined with the focus and methods of conversation analysis, too. It turns out that,
counter to what we might expect, "Stories and other extended-turn structures in
conversation are not simply produced by a primary speaker, but are jointly or
interactively produced by a primary speaker together with other cooperating participants"
(Nofsinger, p. 94).
The same is true of argument. Researchers distinguish making an argument
from having an argument. "Roughly, the first involves using reasons, evidence, claims,
and the like to ëmake a case.í The latter involves interactive disagreement (for example,
"You canít," "I can," "Oh no you canít," "Well I certainly can"). Conversational argument

50
often consists of participants making arguments in the process of having one" (Nofsinger,
p. 146).
The dynamics of both narratives and arguments "can be understood by
applying our knowledge of ordinary conversational practices and structures such as the
turn-taking system, adjacency pair sequencies, the preference system, and repair"
(Nofsinger, p. 154).

Table: Preferred and Dispreferred Second Parts to various First Parts:

SECOND FIRST PARTS:
PARTS: Request Offer/Invit Assessment Question Blame
e
Preferred: acceptance acceptance agreement expected denial
answer
Dispreferre refusal refusal disagreeme unexpected admission
d: nt answer or
non-answer

Speech Genres:
A speech genre is a certain kind of spoken language, just as a horror novel and a
poem are two different genres of written language. The kinds of speech genres we are
seeking to collect are:
1) Natural Conversation: in this genre there is an exchange of dialogue back and forth.
The language use is focused on a casual, informal exchange between two or more people
in which the main goal of the linguistic interaction is language oriented (as opposed to
language use for putting together a computer, or for teaching, for example). Often
conversation occurs during dinner, when friends are hanging around chatting or at other
social gatherings.
2) Narrative: narratives differ from conversation in that the language is dominated by
one speaker for an extended period of time who is telling a story of some sort or telling
about an event which happened to her/him or someone they know.
3) Lecture/teaching: in a lecture, one speaker speaks for almost the entire interaction
while the other interactants listen. The purpose of a lecture is for someone with a certain
expertise to provide information to a larger number of people. A non-lecture teaching
situation is more interactive, yet one person is still in a position of attempting to instruct a
group of people.
4) Meeting: in a meeting people have gathered together for some official purpose which
has a structured agenda, but not necessarily for the purpose of learning. In a meeting
expertise is often shared by many participants, and one of the goals is often to reach a
consensus on issues on the agenda.
5) Language in action: this genre is centered around language used specifically to do
something non-linguistic. For example, the use of language to put something together, to
set something up, to build something, to give directions, to collectively figure out how to
work something or to figure out how to solve a problem (like a homework assignment.

51
The important part about language in action is the cooperative use of language to
accomplish a another task. (This is different from say, talking about your day while
preparing dinner or cleaning your room, which would be a conversation)
6) Service encounter: a service encounter occurs whenever one (or more) persons are
attempting to exchange goods or services with someone whose job it is to provide these
goods or services. For example, talking with a waiter or a waitress, ordering a sandwich
at a sandwich shop, going to the information center at Day Hall, paying for books you
have bought, etc. Often arrangements can be made with the service personnel at
establishments to record them for a few hours.

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Seminar handouts
Genres – examples and analyses
I. Ads
1) 39 years old, presently working south of Munich and looking for a partner. Interested
in music and art and nature and would like to meet a woman who also values
religious faith. (Die Zeit ,13 December 1990)
2) Prof with pep (34/1.84/fit) looking for a young pedalling partner with pizazz. Replies
with photo appreciated. (Die Zeit, 29 July 1984 )
3) Somewhere …into the setting sun. Why not live a love story `a la Courths-Mahler?
40 something, worldwide. (Die Zeit , 13 December 1990).
4) Women are the worst
Either they cling to you, or after a catastrophic affair they nurse their reluctance to get
involved in a relationship with an attitude of I-need- my- freedom, don’t want a
creative curly head (36) in a metropolitan area of DU-D-E, don’t like the mountains,
don’t play tennis nor go skiing, prefer soaking up the sun at sea, go for macho-Italians
(if only for their bodies), smoke like chimneys, prefer the opera to the comedy club ,
and they only read the personal columns for fun, but are too much of a coward to
answer for once an ad with their photograph.
As I said before: Women are the worst. Or are there any exceptions? (Die Zeit, 21
May 1993).

II. Scientific article introduction

In the recent past, Neelakantaswamy et al. (1993: 25) developed a class of

microwave radiators termed as ‘Gaussian –beam launchers’ to produce a focused
exposure filed in biological experiments for partial body irradiations. These compact
and simple structures with their ability to focus the microwave energy in a very small
region indicate their practical utility, in the areas of biological researches and medical
applications of microwaves, such as for selective heating of diseased/cancerous
tissues. These launchers can also be used in noninvasive beam-wave reflectometric
and spectrometric instrumentations for measuring complex permittivity of biological
material at microwave frequencies, as indicated by Neelakantaswamy elsewhere
(1995).
When compared to the microwave beam-launching system described in (8), which
consists of a plane-wave irradiated dielectric sphere (lens), the launcher formed by
combining a scalar horn and dielectric sphere is a more practical source of microwave
Gaussian beam. However, the use of a dielectric sphere as the focusing lens results in
a significant amount of spherical aberrations in the focal field.
In the present work, a Gaussian –beam launcher is formed by placing a dielectric
hemisphere (instead of a full sphere) at the aperture end of corrugated circular
waveguide (scalar horn). This enables a reduction in the path length of the ray in the
lens-medium, and hence the spherical aberration effects are relatively minimized.
Further, by using a hemisphere in the place of a full sphere, the launcher structure
becomes less massive and smaller.

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a) Referential discourse- The Research Article

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Persuasive text sample analysis

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Ideology and discourse – Sample analysis

Necessary Hints to Those That Would Be Rich

By Benjamin Franklin, 1736

THE use of money is all the advantage there is in having money. For six pounds a year
you may have the use of one hundred pounds, provided you are a man of known
prudence and honesty.

He that spends a groat a day idly spends idly above six pounds a year, which is the price
for the use of one hundred pounds.

He that wastes idly a groat's worth of his time per day, one day with another, wastes the
privilege of using one hundred pounds each day.

He that idly loses five shillings' worth of time loses five shillings, and might as prudently
throw five shillings into the sea.

He that loses five shillings not only loses that sum, but all the advantage that might be
made by turning it in dealing, which by the time that a young man becomes old will
amount to a considerable sum of money.

Again: he that sells upon credit asks a price for what he sells equivalent to the principal
and interest of his money for the time he is to be kept out of it; therefore, he that buys
upon credit pays interest for what he buys, and he that pays ready money might let that
money out to use; so that he that possesses anything he has bought pays interest for the
use of it.

Yet in buying goods it is best to pay ready money, because he that sells upon credit
expects to lose five per cent, by bad debts; therefore he charges on all he sells upon credit
an advance that shall make up that deficiency.

Those who pay for what they buy upon credit pay their share of this advance. He that
pays ready money escapes, or may escape, that charge.

"A penny saved is two pence dear;

A pin a day's a groat a year."

-- Thoughts by Benjamin Franklin from Poor Richard's Almanac, or from his letters, on
life and prosperity.

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 Advice to a Young Tradesman
By Benjamin Franklin

TO MY FRIEND, A. B.: -- As you have desired of me, I write the following hints, which
have been of service to me, and may, if observed, be so to you.

Remember that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour and goes
abroad or sits idle one-half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his
diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or
rather thrown away, five shillings besides.

Remember that credit is money. If a man lets his money lie in my hands after it is due, he
gives me the interest, or so much as I can make of it during that time. This amounts to a
considerable sum where a man has good and large credit and makes good use of it.

Remember that money is of the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and
its offspring can beget more, and so on. Five shillings turned is six; turned again it is
seven and threepence, and so on till it becomes a hundred pounds. The more there is of it
the more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise quicker and quicker. He that
kills a breeding sow destroys all her offspring to the thousandth generation. He that
murders a crown destroys all that might have produced even scores of pounds.

Remember that six pounds a year is but a groat a day. For this little sum (which may be
daily wasted either in time or expense unperceived) a man off credit may, on his own
security, have the constant possession and use of a hundred pounds. So much in stock
briskly turned by an industrious man produces great advantage.

Remember this saying, "The good paymaster is lord of another man's purse." He that is
known to pay punctually and exactly to the time he promises may at any time and on any
occasion raise all the money his friends can spare. This is sometimes of great use. After
industry and frugality, nothing contributes more to the raising of a young man in the
world than punctuality and justice in all his dealings; therefore never keep borrowed
money an hour beyond the time you promised, lest a disappointment shut up your friend's
purse for ever.

The most trifling actions that affect a man's credit are to be regarded. The sound of your
hammer at five in the morning or nine at night heard by a creditor makes him easy six
months longer, but if he sees you at a billard-table or hears your voice at a tavern, when
you should be at work, he sends for his money the next day; demands it, before he can
receive it, in a lump.

It shows, besides, that you are mindful of what you owe; it makes you appear a careful as
well as an honest man, and that still increases your credit.

Beware of thinking all your own that you possess and of living accordingly. It is a
mistake that many people who have credit fall into. To prevent this, keep an exact

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account for some time, both of your expenses and your income. If you take the pains at
first to mention particulars, it will have this good effect: you will discover how
wonderfully small, trifling expenses mount up to large sums, and will discern what might
have been and may for the future be saved without occasioning any great inconvenience.

In short, the way to wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the way to market. It depends
chiefly on two words, industry and frugality; that is, waste neither time nor money, but
make the best use of both. Without industry and frugality nothing will do, and with them
everything. He that gets all he can honestly and saves all he gets (necessary expenses
excepted), will certainly become rich, if that Being who governs the world, to whom all
should look for a blessing on their honest endeavours, doth not, in his wise providence,
otherwise determine.

AN OLD TRADESMAN.

-- Thoughts by Benjamin Franklin from Poor Richard's Almanac, or from his letters, on
life and prosperity.

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