Linguistics I 1 Valentina Cicerchia

Discourse
Discourse analysis is concerned with the study of language in use; written tests of all kinds and spoken data, conversations to highly institutionalized forms of talk. Studies the relationship between language and the context in which it is used. (In translation it is called lexical co-occurrence) -She made a story/She made up a story It is important to realize that although formal links re-enforce the unity of discourse they cannot on their own create it. Formal links between sentences are not enough to account for our feeling that the stretch of language is discourse. An elderly neighbor came to my door one day and said: Sorry, love. I saw you were home. Theres a cat stuck under the gate at number 67. One way of understanding language is to look behind the liberal formal meaning of whats said or written, and to consider what the sender of a message intends to achieve with it to try to understand its function. People are interpreting other peoples language and expecting other people to interpret their own in this way all the time, apparently with the surprising degree of accuracy. There have been many attempts to classify the main functions of language. One of the clearest and most influential was formulated by Roman Jacobson (1960) and further developed by Dell Hymes (1962) and Halliday (1978), among others. The British linguist Halliday considers language as having three main functions: I. The ideational function: Is to organize the speaker or writers experience of the real or imaginary world. I.e.: Language refers to real or imaginary persons, things, actions, events, stores, etc. II. Interpersonal function: Is to indicate, establish or maintain social relationships between people. It includes forms of address, speech functions, modality, etc. III. Textual function: Is to create written or spoken texts which cohere within themselves and which fit the particular situation in which they are used. A second classification of micro functions is the following: I. The emotive function: communicating the inner states and emotions of the addresser. For example: Oh, no! Fantastic! Ugh! And swear words used as exclamations. II. The directive function: seeking to affect the addresser. For example: Please, help me! Shut up! Im warning you! III. Fatic function: Opening the channel or checking that it is working either for social reasons (hello! Lovely weather! Do you come near often?) or for practical reasons (can you hear me? Can you see the blackboard from the back of the room Are you still there?) IV. Poetic function: the particular form chosen is the essence of the message. For example: the advertising slogan BEANZ MEANZ HEINZ. This ad slogan would lose its point if it were paraphrased as If you are buying beans you will naturally by Heinz. General Electric: A matchless match. V. Referential function: It carries information. VI. Metalinguistic function: Focusing attention upon the code itself to clarify or to renegotiate it. Ex: What does this word mean? This bone is known as the femur. Will and shall mean the same thing nowadays, etc. VII. Contextual function: Creating a particular kind of communication. Ex: right, lets start the lecture. Its just a game, etc.

Linguistics I 2 Valentina Cicerchia Pragmatics It is the branch of linguistics which study language in use and try to describe and understand how much more is communicated than said. It deals with how speakers use language in ways which cannot be predicted from linguistic knowledge, in a narrow sense it deals with how listeners arrive at the intended meaning of speakers. Pragmatics is concerned with four areas: The study of the speakers meaning (not what he says but what he means). Much more is communicated that actually said. The study of contextual meaning: How speakers organize what they want to say in accordance to whom they are talking to, when and under which circumstances. The study of how much more is communicated than said. According to the context we add special meaning to the utterance. The pragmatics competence implies 3 operations: discovering, uncovering and inferring. The linguistic trivium (John Williams)

Lets consider the mode or medium or the channel of communication. There are three different aspects: Is it spoken or is it written or is it both? Is it sometimes spoken but still having all the features of written discourse? Is it written intended for our internal ear? If the message is spoken it may act some paralinguistic signals such as pitch, gestures, intonation and tempo. Tone: how you say something inevitably affects what is being said. It is clearly connected with all the elements in the linguistic trivium. Classification: I. Factual: Just transmitting information. The day today is nice II. Impassioned: a. Restrained: serious, dignified, ironical, polite, respectful, etc. b. Unrestrained: polemical, insulting, sarcastic, etc. Felicity conditions Contextual elements which interlocutors must perceive to exist for a speech to function. E.g.: Teacher at FCE exam board saying to the student: Would you like to come in? the student answers no meaning that the felicity conditions have not been met. An act is felicitous when it is uttered by the appropriate speaker directed towards the appropriate hearer and uttered at the appropriate time and place. The cooperative principle The American philosopher Paul Grice emphasizes that human beings communicate efficiently because they are by nature helpful to one another. He attempted to specify the principles underlying cooperative behaviour and undergo for maxims or room of communication which can be jointly summarized by general principles: be cooperative. I. Maxim of quantity: Give the right account of information when you talk. If a person at a party ask Whos that person with Bob? A cooperative reply would be That is

Linguistics I 3 Valentina Cicerchia his new girlfriend, Allison And an uncooperative reply would be an over brief such as a girl or an even longer Thats Allison Margaret Jones, born in Kingston, on 4th July 1990, daughter of Peter and Mary Jones II. Maxim of quality: Be trustful. For example: If someone asks you the name of an unfamiliar animal; say what it is and if you dont know say that you dont III. Maxim of relevance: Be relevant if someone says Whats for supper give a reply which fits the question such as fish and chips and not table and choirs IV. Maxim of manner: Be clear and orderly and do not confuse your hearer. At this point the cooperative principle seems common sense, it becomes more interesting when we consider how often people apparently break it. In most cases the assumption of cooperation is so pervasive that it can be stated as a Cooperative principle of conversation and elaborated in four sub principles called maxims: quantity, quality, relevance and manner. We can conclude that the cooperative principle make your conversational contribution such as it is required at the state at which it occurs by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchanged in which you are engaged. There are times when meaning derives from deliberate violation or flouting of the Cooperative principle, always provided that the sender intends the receiver to perceive them as such. There are other cases in which the sender does not intend to flow the maxim of quality. For example: without lying. If I say There are thousands of mosquitoes It is a hyperbole. The same holds for metaphors such as Queen Victoria was made of iron And in the cases or irony and sarcasm. Politeness Showing awareness of another persons public self-image. The politeness principle like the cooperative principle may be formulated as a series of maxims which people assume are being followed in the utterances of others. The linguist Robin Lakoff (1973) has formulated these maxims as follows: Dont impose Give options Make your receiver feel good The cooperative principle: We usually assume that in a normal interaction speakers respect the four principles and so we assume that they are telling the truth, being relevant and trying to be as brief and clear as they can. However, there are certain kinds of expressions that speakers use to mark that they may be in danger of not fully adhering to the principles. These kinds of expressions are called hedges. Hedges The importance of the maxim of quality for cooperative interaction in English may be measured by the number of expressions we use to indicate that what we are saying may not be totally accurate. Examples: As far as I know, theyre married I may be mistaken, but I thought I saw a wedding ring on her finger Im not sure if this is right but I heard it was a secret ceremony in Hawaii He couldnt live without her, I guess When it comes to the maxim of quantity, the following examples illustrate the hedges: As you probably know, Im terrified of bugs So, cut a long story short, we grabbed our stuffs and run I wont bore you with all the details, but it was an exciting trip Hedges connected with the maxim of relevance: I dont know if this is important, but some of the bulks are missing This may sound like a dumb question but whose handwriting is that? Not to change the subject, but is this related to the

Linguistics I 4 Valentina Cicerchia The awareness of the expectations of manner may also lead speakers to produce hedges of the type shown during an account of a crash. This may be a bit confusing, I remember being in a car Im not sure if this makes sense but the car had no lights I dont know if this is clear at all, but I think the other car is reversing Dell Hymes Setting Participants Ends Act sequence Key Instrumentalities Norm Genre Context Discourse is heavily context dependent. There are two approaches to language; sentence linguistics and discourse analysis. Both have an invaluable contribution to make the understanding of language and both need of each other, Sentence linguistics data Discourse analysis data Isolated sentences Any stretch of language felt to be unified Grammatically well-formed Achieving meaning Without context In context Invented or idealized Observed Formal links In order to determine whether a sentence us grammatically correct or incorrect we use our knowledge of grammar without reference to outside facts. Text: a stretch of language interpreted formally, without context. FORMAL LINKS between sentences and between clauses are known as cohesive devices: I. Verb forms. II. Parallelism: It suggests a connection of meaning through an echo of form. III. Referring expressions: These are words whose meaning can only be discovered by referring to other words of the context which are clear to both sender and receiver. a. Anaphora: a relationship whereby the meaning of expression is recovered from previous mention b. Cataphora: a relationship whereby the meaning of expression is recovered from subsequent mention c. Exophora: a relationship whereby the meaning of expression is recovered from outside mention IV. Repetition and lexical chains: Repetition of words can create the same sort of chain as pronouns. English speakers also use a device known as Elegant repetition where synonymous or more general words or phrases are used. V. Substitution VI. Ellipsis VII. Conjunction: They draw attention to the type of relationship between phrases. a. Add more information: and, furthermore, add to that

Linguistics I 5 Valentina Cicerchia b. c. d. e. f. Elaborate or exemplify it: for instance, thus, in other words Contrast: or, on the other hand, however Relate new information: so, consequently, because, for this reason Time: formerly, then, in the end, next Summary: by the way, well, to sum up, anyway.

Speech acts and events Actions performed via utterances are generally called speech acts and are commonly given more specific labels, such as apology, complaint, compliment, invitation, promise or request. The speaker normally expects that his or her communicative intention will be recognized by the hearer. Both speaker and hearer are helped in this process by the circumstances surrounding the utterance. These circumstances are called the speech event. The action performed by producing an utterance will consist of three relates acts. There is first a locutionary act, which is the basic act of utterance, or producing a meaningful linguistic expression. We form an utterance with some kind of function in mind. This is the second dimension, or the illocutionary act/force. It is performed via the communicative force of an utterance. We do not simply create an utterance with a function without intending it to have an effect. This is called the perlocutionary act. We will utter on the assumption that the hearer will recognize the effect you intended. This is also known as perlocutionary force. One problem is that the same utterance can potentially have quite different illocutionary forces. In that case we should take into account two things: Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices and felicity conditions. IFIDs It is an expression where there is a slot for a verb that explicitly names the illocutionary act being performed. Such a verb is called performative verb (remind, warn, promise, perform, beg, employ) Most of the times there is no performative verb mentioned. Other IFIDs are word order, stress and intonation. I. You are going! I tell you II. You are going? I request confirmation III. Are you going? I ask you Felicity conditions There are certain expected or appropriate circumstances for the performance of a speech act to be recognized as intended. There are general conditions on the participants (that they can understand the language being used and that they are not play-acting or being nonsensical). Then there are content conditions (A further content condition for a promise requires that the future event will be a future act of the speaker) and preparatory conditions (when I promise to do something there are two preparatory conditions: the event will not happen by itself and the event will have a beneficial effect). Related to them is the sincerity condition (that the speaker genuinely intends to carry out the future action). Finally there is a the essential condition (the utterance changes my state from nonobligation to obligation) Speech act classification Declarations are those kinds of speech acts that change the world via their utterance. (The speaker changes the world via words) For example: I now pronounce you husband and wife Representatives are those kinds of speech acts that state what the speaker believes to be the case or not. (The speaker makes words fit the world of belief) For example: Chomsky didnt write about peanuts

Linguistics I 6 Valentina Cicerchia Expressives are those kinds of speech acts that state what the speaker feels. They express psychological states and can be statements of pleasure, pain, likes, dislikes, joy or sorrow. (The speaker makes words fit the world of feeling) For example: Im sorry! Directives are those kinds of speech acts that speakers use to get someone else to do something. They express what the speaker wants. They are commands, orders, requests, suggestions. (The speaker attempts to make the world fit the words via the hearer) For example: Dont touch that Commissives are those kinds of speech acts that speakers use to commit themselves to some future action. They express what the speaker intends. They are promises, threats, refusals, pledges. (The speaker undertakes to make the world fit the words via the speaker) For example: We will not do that Whenever there is a direct relationship between a structure and a function, we have a direct speech act. Whenever there us an indirect relationship between a structure and a function, we have an indirect speech act. Thus, a declarative used to make statements is a direct speech act, but a declarative used to make requests is an indirect speech act. A speech event is an activity in which participants interact via language in some conventional way to arrive at some outcome. Face means the public self-image of a person. It refers to that emotional and social sense of self that everyone has and expects everyone else to recognize. Politeness can then be defined as the means employed to show awareness of another persons face. People generally behave as if their expectations concerning their public self-image, or their face wants, will be respected. If a speaker says something that represents a threat to another individuals expectations regarding self-image, it is described as face threatening act (FTA). Given the possibility that some action might be interpreted as a threat to anothers face, the speaker can say something to lessen the possible threat. This is called a face saving act (FSA). Discourse analysis covers an extremely wide range of activities. Our ability to arrive automatically at interpretations of the unwritten and the unsaid must be based on preexisting knowledge structures. The most general term for a pattern of this type is a schema (plural schemata). A schema is a pre-existing knowledge structure in memory. We develop our cultural schemata in the contents of our basic experiences. Discourse analysis and vocabulary Vocabulary will still be the largest simple element in tackling a new language for the learner and it would be irresponsible to suggest that it will take care of itself in some ideal world where language teaching and learning are discourse-driven. The relations between vocabulary items in texts described by the Halliday-Hasan model are of two principal kinds: reiteration and collocation. Lexical cohesion is only the exact repetition of words and the role played by certain basic semantic relations between words in creating textuality, that property of text which distinguishes it from a random sequence of unconnected sentences. Reiteration means either restating an item in a later part of the discourse by direct repetition or else reasserting its meaning by exploiting lexical relations. Lexical relations are the stable semantic relationships that exist between words and which are the basis of descriptions given in dictionaries and thesauri: for example, rose and flower are related by hyponymy, eggplant and aubergine are related by synonymy. The superordinate need not to be an immediate superordinate in the family tree of a particular word; it can be a general word. In the case of reiteration by a superordinate, we can often see a summarizing or encapsulating function in the choice of words.

Linguistics I 7 Valentina Cicerchia Speakers reiterate their own and take up one anothers vocabulary selection. This is called relexicalization. A distinction is often made between grammar words and lexical words; it enables us to separate off those words which belong to closed systems in the language and which carry grammatical meaning, from those that belong to open systems and which belong to the major word classes of noun, verb, adjective and adverb. Discourse organizing words are those which job is to organize and structure the argument, rather than answer for its content or field.

GLOSSARY
Adjacency pair: a sequence of two utterances by different speakers in conversation. The second is a response to the first. Anaphor: the word used to maintain reference to someone or something already mentioned Antecedent: the initial expression used to identify someone or something for which an anaphor is used later Attributive use: using an expression to identify someone without being committed to the existence or an actual person or thing Cataphora: the use of a word to introduce someone or something that is fully identified later Coherence: the familiar and expected relationship in experience which we use to connect the meanings of utterances. Commissive: a speech act in which the speaker commit him or herself to some future action Content conditions: In order to count as a particular type of speech act, an utterance must contain certain features. Context: the physical environment in which a word is used. Cooperative principle: a basic assumption in conversation that each participant will attempt to contribute appropriately, at the required time, to the current exchange of talk. Cultural schemata: pre-existing knowledge structures based on experience in a particular culture. Declaration: a speech act that brings about a change by being uttered Directive: a speech act used to get someone else to do something Direct speech act: speech act where a direct relationship exists between the structure and communicative function of an utterance. Discourse analysis: the study of language use with reference to the social and psychological factors that influence communication. Ellipsis: the absence of a word or words from a structural slot Essential condition: in performing a speech act, a requirement that the utterance commits to the speaker to the act performed. Face: a persons public self-image. The physical, mental or social territory of the interlocutor Face saving act (FSA): utterance or action which avoids a potential threat to a persons public self-image Face threatening act (FTA): utterance or action which threatens a persons public selfimage Felicity conditions: the appropriate conditions for a speech act to be recognized as intended Hedges: cautious notes expressed about how an utterance is to be taken Ideational function: the use of language as a means of giving structure to though and experience

Linguistics I 8 Valentina Cicerchia Illocutionary Force Indicating Device (IFID): indication in the speakers utterance of the communicative force of that utterance Illocutionary act or force: the communicative force of an utterance Locutionary act: the basic act of uttering a meaningful linguistic form Manner: one of the maxims, in which the speaker is to be clear, brief and orderly Maxim: one of the four sub-principles of the cooperative principle Performative verb: a verb that explicitly names the speech act Perlocutionary act/effect: the effect of an utterance used to perform a speech act Politeness: show awareness of another persons public self-image face wants Pragmatics: the study of speaker meaning as distinct from word or sentence meaning Quality: one of the maxims, in which the speaker has to be truthful Quantity: one of the maxims, in which the speaker has to be neither more nor less informative than is necessary Representative: a speech act in which the speaker states what is believed or known Schema (plural schemata): a pre-existing knowledge structure in memory typically involving the normal expected patterns of things Semantics: the study of how words literally connect to things or more generally the investigation of meanings as encoded in language Speech act: an action performed by the use of an utterance to communicate Speech event: a set of circumstances in which people interact in some conventional way to arrive at some outcome.