Discourse Big D:
- Focuses on the idea.
- Everything that has been written, thought of or done that is related to a particular topic.
- Usually found in political or social topics.
Discourse Small d:
- Focuses on the text.
- Such as: newspaper text, novel or sticker.
Discourse analysis looks at:
- Who: The Agents - speakers, writers.
- How: Forms and functions of language is used.
- Why: Reason for language use.
- When: Specific context of language use.
- Aim of discourse analysis is to move beyond sentence grammar to study action and interaction.
The Agency:
- Agency refers to the individual, group or society.
- Sociolinguists study the individuals, the group and the societal contexts in which communication occurs.
Communities of communicative practice can be based on:
- Geographical factors (accents or dialects)
-Social factors (e.g. teenager slang) - Or can be develop from activities or professions (e.g. IT Jargon.
(Individual speaker is normally part of more than one community of practice).
The Speech Acts theory key terms:
- illocutionary act:
- perlocutionary act:
- locutionary act:
Two types of presupposition:
- Conventional presupposition
- Pragmatic presupposition
Conventional presupposition:
Less-context dependent. Linked to particular linguistic forms.
Pragmatic Presupposition:
Context dependent, centralised on the utterance of a particular context.
Pragmatics:
Focuses on the interaction of linguistic knowledge with our knowledge of the world, taking into account the context of use.
Pragmatics looks at:
-Conversational skills in social interaction.
Example: how does a conversation work in detail?
-Speech acts - doing things with words.
Example: Apologies, requests, declarations etc.
-References and presuppositions.
Example: styles or registers of speaking.
Cooperative Principle:
Developed by Grice (1975).
Politeness theory:
- Is the practice organising linguists so that it is seen as inoffensive and conforming to current social expectations.
- One must be culturally neutral.
- Based on assumptions.
- Use linguistic concept of face: negative and positive face.
- Face-threating acts
Linguistic politeness strategies:
- Indirectness,
- Passive Mode,
- Address,
- Greetings.
Example of register:
Informal, vulgar slang, formal, literary, dated, historical, humours, archaic, rare.
Genre:
-Conventionalised categories of texts as communicative events (spoken or written) that share a communicative purpose, structural features, words, phrases or abbreviations.
Genre Analysis:
- Looking at setting the text occurs
- Look at the focus and perspective of the text.
- The purposes of the text.
- The target audience for the text, their role am purpose in reading the text.
- The relationship between the writers and readers of the text.
- Expectations, conventions and requirements of the text.
- The background knowledge, values and understandings it is assumed the writer shares with the reader.
- The relationship the text has with other texts.
