CONCEPT OF PRAGMATICS AND DISCOURSE

PAPER

By:

Aulia rizkya putri 2110203011

Dayang nurfaizah 2110203006

Lecture:
MUHAMMAD HUSAINI, M.Pd

ENGLISH EDUCATION
FACULTY OF TARBIYAH AND TEACHER TRAINING STATE
ISLAMIC INSTITUTE OF KERINCI

ACADEMIC YEAR 2024/2025

 FOREWORD

Praise be expressed to the presence of Allah SWT. for all His grace so that this
paper can be compiled to completion. We do not forget to express our gratitudefor the
assistance of those who have contributed by contributing both thoughts and materials.
The author really hopes that this paper can add knowledge and experience to
readers. In fact, we hope even further that this paper can be practiced by readers in
everyday life.
For us as the authors feel that there are still many shortcomings in the
preparation of this paper due to limited knowledge and experience. For this reason,we
really hope for constructive criticism and suggestions from readers for the perfection of
this paper.

Sungai Penuh, 17 Februari 2024

GROUP 1

i
 LIST OF CONTENS

FOREWORD.................................................................................................................................. i

LIST OF CONTENS ....................................................................................................................ii

Chapter 1 ........................................................................................................................................ 1

INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................ 1

A. BACKGROUND OF THE PROBLEM ............................................................................... 1

B. FORMULATION OF THE PROBLEM .............................................................................. 1
C. PURPOSE............................................................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER 2 .................................................................................................................................. 2

DISCUSSION ................................................................................................................................ 2

1.1 What is discourse analysis?.................................................................................................. 2

1.2 Form and function ................................................................................................................ 3
1.3 Speech acts and diacourse structures................................................................................... 4
1.4 The scope of discourse analysis ........................................................................................... 4
1.5 Spoken discourse: models of analysis ................................................................................. 5
1.6 Conversations outside the classrom..................................................................................... 5
1.7 Talk as a social activity ........................................................................................................ 6
1.8 Written discourse .................................................................................................................. 6
1.9 Text and Interpretation ......................................................................................................... 7
1.10 Larger patterns in text ........................................................................................................ 7
CHAPTER III ............................................................................................................................... 9

CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................. 9

REFERENCES............................................................................................................................ 10

ii
 Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

A. BACKGROUND OF THE PROBLEM

Discourse analysis is concerned with the study of the relationship between language
and the contexts in which it is used. It grew out of work in different disciplines in the
1960s and early 1970s, including linguistics, semiotics, psychology, anthropology and
sociology. Discourse analysts study language in use: written texts of all kinds, and spoken
data, from conversation to highly institutionalised forms of talk. At a time when
linguistics was largely concerned with the analysis of single sentences, Zellig Harris
published a paper with the title 'Discourse analysis' (Harris 1952). Harris was interested
in the distribution of linguistic elements-in extended texts, and the links between the text
and its social situation, though his paper is a far cry from the discourse analysis we are
hsed to nowadays. Also important in the early years was the emergence of stmiotics and
the French structuralist approach to the study of narrative. In the 1960s, Dell Hymes
provided a sociological perspective with the study of speech in its social wmng (e.g.
Hymes 1964).
B. FORMULATION OF THE PROBLEM
1.1 What is discourse analysis?
1.2 Form and function
1.3 Speech acts and discourse structures
1.4 The scope of discourse analysis
1.5 Spoken discourse: models of analysis
1.6 Conversations outside the classroom
1.7 Talk as a social activity
1.8 Written discourse
1.9 Text and interpretation
1.10 Larger patterns in text
C. PURPOSE
For know fill from material formulation the problem above

1
 CHAPTER 2

DISCUSSION

1.1 What is discourse analysis?

pragmatics, which is the study of meaning in context (see Levinson 1983; Leech
1983). British discourse analysis was greatly influenced by M. A. K. Halliday's functional
approach to language (e.g. Halliday 1973), which in turn has connexions with the Prague
School of linguists. Halliday's framework emphasises the social functions of language
and the thematic and informational structure of speech and writing. Also important in
Britain were Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) at the University of Birmingham, who
developed a model for the description of teacher-pupil talk, based on a hierarchy of
discourse units. Other similar work has dealt with doctorpatient interaction, service
encounters, interviews, debates and business negotiations, as well as monologues.

Novel work in the British tradition has also been done on intonation in discourse.
The Bfitish work has principally followed structural-linguistic criteria, on the basis of the
isolation of units, and kts of rules defining well-formed sequences of discourse. American
discourse analysis has been dominated by work within the ethnomethodological tradition,
which emphasises the research method of close observation of groups of people
communicating in natural settin~s. It examines types of speech event such as storytelling,
greeting rituals and verbal duels in different cultural and social settings (e.g. Gumperz
and Hymes 1972). What is often called conversation analysis within the American
tradition can also be included under the general heading of discourse analysis.

In conversational analysis, the emphasis is not upon building structural models but
on the close observation of the behaviour of participants in talk and on patterns which
recur over a wide range of natural data. The work of Goffman (1976; 1979), and Sacks,
Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) is important in the study of conversational norms,
turntaking, and other aspects of spoken interaction. Alongside the conversation analysts,
working within the sociolinguistic tradition, Labov's investigations of oral storytelling
have also contributed to a long history of interest in narrative discourse. The American
work has produced a large number of descriptions of discourse types, as well as insights

2
into the social constraints of politeness and face-preserving phenomena in talk,
overlapping with British work in pragmatics.

1.2 Form and function

The famous British comedy duo, Eric Morecambe andErnie Wise, started one' of their
shows in 1973 with the following dialogue:

(1.1) Ernie: Tell 'em about the show.

Eric (to the audience): Have we got a show for you might folks! Have we got a
show for you! (aside to Ernie) Have we got a show for
them?

This short dialogue raises a number of problems for anyone wishing to do a

linguistic analysis of it; not least is the question of why it is funny (the audience laughed
at Eric's question to Ernie). Most people would agree that it is funny because Eric is
playing with a grammatical structure that seems to be ambiguous: 'Have we got a show
for you!' has an inverted verb and subject. Inversion of the verb and its subject happens
only under restricted conditions in English; the most typical circumstances in which this
happens is when questions are being asked, but it also happens in exclamations (e.g.
'Wasn't my face red!'). So Eric's repeated grammatical fom clearly undergoes a change in
how it is interpreted by the audience between its second and third occurrence in the
dialogue.

Eric's inverted grammatical fom in its first two occurrences clearly has the hnction
of an exclamation, telling the audience something, not asking them anything, until the
humorous moment when he begms.to doubt whether they do have a show to offer, at
which point he uses the same grammatical form to ask Ernie a genuine qucstion. There
seems, then, to be a lack of one-to-one correspondence between grammatical form and
communicative function; the inverted form in itselfdoes not inherently carry an
exclamatory or a questioning function. By the same token, in other situations, an'
uninverted declarative form (subject before verb), typically associated with 'statements',
might be heard as a question requiring an answer: (1 -2) A: You're leaving for London.

3
Ek Yes, immediately. So how we interpret grammatical forms depends on a number of
factors, some linguistic, some purely situational. One linguistic feature that may affect
our interpretation is the intonation.

1.3 Speech acts and diacourse structures

So far we have suggested that form and function have to be separated to understand
what is happening in discourse; this may be necessary to analyse Eric and Ernie's zany
dialogue, but why discourse analysis? Applied linguists and language teachers have been
familiar with the term function for years now; are we not simply talking about 'functions'
when we analyse Eric and Ernie's talk? Why complicate matters with a whole new set of
jargon? In one sense we are talking about 'functions': we are concerned as much with
what Eric and Ernie are doing with language as with what they are saying.

When we say that a particular bit of speech or writing is a request or an instruction

or an exemplification we are concentrating on what that piece of language is doing, or
how the listenerheader is supposed to react; for this reason, such entities are often also
called speech acts (see Austin 1%2 and Searle 1%9). Each of the stretches of language
that are carrying the force of requesting, instructing, and so on is seen as performing a
particular act; Eric's exclamation was performing the act of informing the audience that a
great show was in store for them.

1.4 The scope of discourse analysis

Discourse analysis is not only concerned with the description and analysis of
spoken interaction. In addition to all our verbal encounters we daily consume hundreds
of written and printed words: newspaper articles, letters, stories, recipes, instructions,
notices, comics, billboards, leaflets pushed through the door, and so on. We usually
expect them to be coherent, meaningful communications in which the words and/or
sentences are linked to one another in a fashion that corresponds to conventional
formulae, just as we do with speech; therefore discourse analysts are equally interested in
the organisation of written interaction. In this book, we shall use the term discourse
analysis to cover the study of spoken and written interaction. Our overall aim is to come

4
to a much better understanding of exactly how natural spoken and written discourse looks
and sounds. This may well be different from what textbook writers and teachers have
assumed from their own intuition, which is often burdened with prejudgements deriving
from traditional grammar, vocabulary and intonation teaching. With a more accurate
picture of natural discourse, we are in a better position to evaluate the descriptions upon
which we base our teaching, the teaching materials, what goes on in the classroom, and
the end products of our teaching, whether in the form of spoken or written output.

1.5 Spoken discourse: models of analysis

One influential approach to the study of spoken discourse is that developed at the
University of Birmingham, where research initially concerned itself with the structure of
discourse in school classrooms (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975). The Birmingham model is
certainly not the only valid approach to analysing discourse, but it is a relatively simple
and powerful model which has connexions with the study of speech acts such as were
discussed in section 1.3 but which, at the same time, tries to capture the larger structures,
the 'wholes' that we talked about in the same section. Sinclair and Coulthard found in the
language of traditional native-speaker school classrooms a rigid pattern, where teachers
and pupils spoke according to very fixed perceptions of their roles and where the talk
could be seen to conform to highly structured sequences.

1.6 Conversations outside the classrom

So far we have looked at talk in a rather restricted context: the traditional classroom,
where roles are rigidly defined and the patterns of initiation, response and follow-up in
exchanges are relatively easy to perceive, and where transactions are heavily marked. The
dassmm was a convenient place to start, as Sinclair and Coulthard discmend, but it is not
the 'real' world of conversation. It is a peculiar place, a placc .where teachers ask questions
to which they already know the answkr$, where pupils (at least younger pupils) have very
limited rights as speaker~and where evaluation by the teacher of what the pupils say is a
vital mechanism in the discourse structure. But using the classroom is most beneficial for
QW purposes since one of the things a model for the analysis of classroom talk enables
us to do is evaluate our own output as teachers and that of our students.

5
 This we shall return to in Chapter 5. For the moment it is more important to examine
the claim that the exchange model might be useful for the analysis of talk outside the
classroom. If it is, then it could offer a yardstick for the kind of language aimed at in
communicative language teaching and for all aspects of the complex chain of materials,
methodology, implementation and evaluation, whatever our order of priority within that
chain. Conversations outside classroom settings vary in their degree of structuredness,
but even so, conversations that seem at first sight to be 'free' and unstructured can often
be shown to have a structure; what will differ is the kinds of speech-act labels needed to
describe what is happening, and it is mainly in this area, the functions of the parts of
individual moves, that discourse analysts have found it necessary to expand and modify
the Sinclair-Coulthard model

1.7 Talk as a social activity

Because of the rigid conventions of situations such as teacher talk and doctor-
patient talk, it is relatively easy to predict who will speak when, who will ask and who
will answer, who will interrupt, who will open and close the talk, and so on. But where
talk is more casual, and among equals, everyone will have a part to play in conuolhg and
monitoring the discourse, and the picture will look considerably more complicated.

1.8 Written discourse

With written texts, some of the problems adad wi& spoken transcripts are absent:
we do not have to contend with people( all speaking at once, the writer has usually had
time to think about what to say and how to say it, and the sentences are usually well
formed in a way that the utterances of natural, spontaneous talk are not. But the overall
questions remain the same: what norms or rules do people adhere to when creating written
texts? Are texts structured according to recurring principles, is there a hierarchy of units
comparable to acts, moves and exchanges, and are there conventional ways of opening
and closing texts? As with spoken discourse, if we do find such regularities, and if they
can be shown as elements that have different realisations in different languages, or that
they may present problems for learners in other ways, then the insights of written
discourse analysis might be applicable, in specifiable ways, to languagk teaching.

6
 In Chapter 2, we shall consider some grammatical regularities observable in well-
formed written texts, and how the structuring of sentences has implications for units such
as paragraphs, and for the progression of whole texts. We shall also look at how the
grammar of English ofkrs a limited set of options for creating surface links between the
clauses and sentences of a text, otherwise known as cohesion. Basically, most texts
display links from sentence to sentence in terms of grammatical features such as
pronominalisation, ellipsis (the omission of otherwise expected elements because they
are retrievable from the previous text or context) and conjunction of various kinds (see
Halliday and Hasan 1976).

1.9 Text and Interpretation

Markers of various kinds, i.e. the linguistic signals of semantic and discourse
functions (e.g. in English the on the verb is a marker of pastness), are very much
concerned with the surface of the text. Cohesive markers are no exception: they create
links across sentence boundaries and pair and chain together items that are related (e.g.
by daring to the same entity). But reading a text is far more complex than that: we haveto
interpret the ties and make sense of them.

Making sense of a =-is m act of interpretation that depends as much on what we as

mad-trs'brhgtr,raext as what the author puts into it. Interpretation can be seen asp set of
pmeddures and the approach to the analysis of texts that mph~5ises the-mental activities
involved in interpretation can be broadly cdM- wdi W.ocdural approaches emphasise the
role of the trader in arrialy bddierht world of the text, based on hislhet experience of the
wdd aild how stares and events are characteristically manifested in it.

1.10 Larger patterns in text

The clause-relational approach to text also concerns itself with larger patterns which
regularly occur in texts. If we consider a simple text like the following, which is concocted
for the sake of illustration, we can see a pattern emerging which is found in hundreds of
texts in a wide variety of subject areas and contexts: (1.28) Most people like to take a

7
camera with them when they travel abroad. But all airports nowadays have X-ray security
screening and X rays can damage film.

One solution to this problem is to purchase a specially designed lead-lined pouch.

These are cheap and can protect film from all but the strongest X rays. The first sentence
presents us with a situation and the second sentence with some sort of complication or
problem, The third sentence describes a response to the problem and the final sentence
gives a positive evaluation of the response. Such a sequence of relations forms a problem-
solution pattern, and problem-solution patterns are extremely common in texts. Hoey
(1983) analyses such texts in great detail, as well as some other common text patterns,
some of which we shall rmrn to in Chapter 6.

8
 CHAPTER III

CONCLUSION

We have seen in this chapter that discourse analysis is a vast subject area within
linguistics, encompassing as it does the analysis of spoken and written language over and
above concerns such as the structure of the clause or sentence. In this brief introduction
we have looked at just some ways of analysing speech and writing and just some aspects
of those particular models we have chosen to highlight. There is of course a lot more to
look at. For example, we have not considered the big question of discourse in its social
setting.

In subsequent chapters we shall return to this and mention the Hallidayan model of
language as social action (see Halliday 1978), looking at types of meaning in discourse
and their relationship with the notion of register, the linguistic features of the text that
reflect the social context in which it is produced. This and further discussion of the
approaches outlined here will form the background to a reassessment of the basics of
language teaching as they are conventionally understood: the levels of language
description (grammar, lexis and phonology) and the skills of language use (reading,
writing, listening and speaking). There will also be suggestions concerning teaching
materials and procedures whenever it seems that discourse analysis has some direct
bearing on these matters.

9
 REFERENCES

Coulthard (1985) is an indispensable introduction to discourse analysis, as is Stubbs

(1983).

Brown and Yule (1983) is a thorough and detailed survey, but is harder going

because of its less obvious structure.

Van Dijk's (1985) collection of papers covers a vast ran-gc of ateas within discourse

analysis; the introduction sets the scene, and the papcat lcna be dipped into

according to area of interest.

Levinson (1983), although concerned with the broader fidd af 'ptagmaacs', provides a
balanced criticism of the British, exchange-stnmure school as against the

American conversation analysis.

G. Cook (1989) is a more recent book at an introductory level.

For the original Birmingham discourse model, Sinclair and Coulthard (1W.5) is still

unsurpassed, though extensions and modifications as described in Coulthard

and Montgomery (1981) and Sinclair and Brazil (1982) should also be consulted.

Further extensions and modifications are to be found in Carter and Burton (1982),

Francis and Hunston (1987), and, specificaliy on the follow-up move, Hewings

(1 987).

More introductory reading on acts and communicative functions, as well as on

speech and writing may be found in Riley (1985).

Schenkein (1978) is a seminal collection of American conversational analysis.

On written text, Halliday and Hasan (1976) is essential for the notion of cohesion,

10
De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981), though difficult in places, expands on the

procedural approach, while Winter (1977 and 1978) and Hoey (1983) are the best

works for the clause-relational model.

Hewings and McCarthy (1988) offer a summary of the clause-relational approach

with some pedagogical applications.

Halliday (1978) contains much discussion on language in its social setting.

Widdowson (1979)' De Beaugrande (1980), Van Dijk (1980), Neubauer (1983) and

Tannen (1984) are all useful sources on cohesion/coherence.

Reddick (1986) argues for the importance of personal interpretation in the analysis

of text structure.

11