Scribd
Upload
619 views

Discourse Analysis - Session 1 - The Scope of Discourse Analysis

This document discusses the scope of discourse analysis based on Widdowson (2007). It defines a text as a purposeful use of language that is distinct from a sentence. A text can be identified by its communicative purpose, but the meaning may not be clear without context. Discourse refers to both what the text producer intended to convey and what the receiver interprets from the text. Texts leave linguistic traces of the process of mediating a message between parties. Spoken texts are fragmented while written texts are designed unilaterally as a complete expression. Discourse analysis examines how people communicate by drawing on language resources to enact intended discourses through the linguistic traces left in texts.

Uploaded by

hossin karimi
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
619 views

Discourse Analysis - Session 1 - The Scope of Discourse Analysis

This document discusses the scope of discourse analysis based on Widdowson (2007). It defines a text as a purposeful use of language that is distinct from a sentence. A text can be identified by its communicative purpose, but the meaning may not be clear without context. Discourse refers to both what the text producer intended to convey and what the receiver interprets from the text. Texts leave linguistic traces of the process of mediating a message between parties. Spoken texts are fragmented while written texts are designed unilaterally as a complete expression. Discourse analysis examines how people communicate by drawing on language resources to enact intended discourses through the linguistic traces left in texts.

Uploaded by

hossin karimi
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

Discourse Analysis – Session 1 - The Scope of Discourse Analysis - Widdowson (2007: 3-10)

Prepared by: Fataneh Ghorbani

A sample of language
Look at a familiar public notice:
KEEP OFF THE GRASS
It consists of four words, all in capital letters, and all, we might more expertly add, monosyllabic.
The first is a verb phrase consisting of the two words keep off, the second a noun phrase which itself
consists of two constituents, a definite article the and a noun grass.
Languages are traditionally recorded for us in analytic terms:
Grammars: display the range of possible structural combinations in sentences.
Dictionaries: provide us with the meanings of words separated out and listed in alphabet order.

What is a text?
A text can be defined:
 As an actual use of language,
 As distinct from a sentence.
 We identify a piece of language as a text as soon as we recognize that it has been produced for a
communicative purpose.
BUT
Can identify a text as a purposeful use of without necessarily being able to interpret just what is meant by
it.

KEEP OFF THE GRASS


Denotation of GRASS is not the same as the meaning of it in the phrase THE GRASS.
What we do is to establish reference by relating the text to the context in which it is located. We relate
the text not only to the actual situational context in which we find it, but to the abstract cultural context
of what we know to be conventional.
We have to understand the mechanism under language in a text in addition to the real communication. It
is not the single sentence it’s a coherence stretch of sentences

Text and discourse


People produce texts to get a message across to:
 express ideas and beliefs,
 explain something,
 think in a certain way
We can refer to this complex of communicative purpose as the discourse that underlies the text and
motivates its production in the first place.
So the term discourse is taken here to refer both to:
 what a text producer meant by a text?
 what a text means to the receiver?

1
Discourse Analysis – Session 1 - The Scope of Discourse Analysis - Widdowson (2007: 3-10)
Prepared by: Fataneh Ghorbani

Spoken and written text


Texts are the perceptible traces of the process, not itself open to direct perception, of mediating a
message.
In conversation: these traces are fragmented, and disappear as soon as they are produced to serve their
immediate discourse purpose.
Written text: is not jointly constructed and construed online in this way. It is designed and recorded
unilaterally in the act of production by one of the participants, the writer, as a completed expression of
the intended message.

Conclusion
When people communicate with each other, they draw on the semantic resources encoded in their
language to key into a context they assume to be shared so as to enact a discourse, that is, to get their
intended message across to some second person party.
The linguistic trace of this process is the text.

You might also like