DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

Discourse Analysis Instructor: A. Tzanne

Week 2

DISCOURSE IN CONTEXT
1) Discourse linked to interpretation linked to context
Discourse analysis is concerned with the general principles of interpretation by which
people normally make sense of what they hear and read. Interpretation is not a
matter of individuals’ mental activity. In order to interpret discourse, language users
actually relate the text to context in which it is found.
Utterances involving deixis (i) and/or semantic or structural ambiguity (ii, iii) clearly
indicate the importance of context in interpretation.
(i) I’ll see you there soon. (person deictics, place deictics, time deictics)
(ii) My bat is bigger than yours.
(iii) Visiting professors can be boring.
Context is relatively easy to conceive and describe, but it is quite hard to delimit and
define in a precise, formal way.

A general definition considers ‘context’ to be

“a world filled with people producing utterances: people who have social, cultural,
and personal identities, knowledge, beliefs, goals and wants, and who interact with
one another in various socially and culturally defined situations”
(Schiffrin 1994: 364).

We can perceive this world as a frame that surrounds the text under analysis and
provides resources for its appropriate interpretation.
(iv) I do think Adam’s quick

2) Context and Co-text

Context may refer to the linguistic environment of an utterance, that is, the linguistic
material that precedes or follows the particular chunk of discourse. This has been
also called co-text to distinguish it from context, which is a more embracing term.
Context is interrelated with co-text, in a sense co-constructed with it or existing prior
to it and it also includes encyclopaedic, social and cultural knowledge shared or not
by interactants.

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[1] YANNIS : Το μπαστούνι το βάζεις τα βράδια;
‘The anti-theft lock, do you have it on at night?’
[2] ANGELIKI: Καμμιά φορά.
‘Sometimes.’
[3] YANNIS : Να το βάζεις. Τέσσερα τρακόσια το πήγανε.
‘You should have it on. They have raised its price to four [million]
three hundred [thousand drachmas].’
TROUBLE-SOURCE TURN (TST)
[4] ELENI: (Έκπληκτη) Το μπαστούνι;
‘(surprised) The anti-theft lock?’
[5] YANNIS : (γελώντας) Ποιο μπαστούνι βρε Ελενάκι; Το αυτοκίνητο.
‘(laughing) What anti-theft lock, vre EleniDIM, the car.’
[6] ELENI: Μα πώς τα λες έτσι μπερδεμένα; Τώρα για το μπαστούνι δε λέγατε;
‘But how do you put things so confusingly? Were you not talking
about the anti-theft lock just now?’
(Tzanne, 2000: 48-51)
In sum, context refers to the environment in which an utterance or a chunk of
discourse occur. This includes not only the linguistic environment, that is, the
utterances which precede and follow the particular utterance, but also the on-going
situation in which the particular text is produced, as well as the wider culture. All
these work together and determine the meaning of utterances.

3) The context of situation

• Malinowski
The first scholar to study context of situation was Malinowski (1923) who was an
anthropologist. Malinowski advocated that, in addition to linguistic context, context
should include the larger socio-cultural framework and the situation in which
utterances are produced. He introduced the terms context of situation and context
of culture. The former refers to immediate and observable aspects of context, while
the latter, which is broader and not easily observable has been interpreted in various
ways. Malinowski (1923)

• Firth
Firth (1957) developed his notion of contextual meaning, that is the idea that
meaning is function in context, including the context of both situation and culture.
Firth proposed the following framework for the description of context of situation:
A. The relevant features of participants: persons, personalities
(i) The verbal action of the participants.
(ii) The non-verbal action of the participants.
B. The relevant objects
C. The effect of the verbal action
(Firth, 1957: 182)
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 • Halliday and Hasan
Halliday and Hasan (1976) view the context of situation as belonging to the broader
social context. They propose three rather abstract components of the context of
situation,
(a) the Field of discourse, in other words, the total event in which the discourse
occurs. It includes the location of the interaction both in terms of inherent
features (e.g. participants’ race or gender) and in terms of social institutions.
Finally it includes the general subject matter or content which is drastically
determined by location and participants. For instance, if the location is the
classroom (institutional) and the participants are students and teacher(s), the
subject matter will be primarily of academic relevance.
(b) the Tenor of discourse, defined as the type of role interaction and the set of
relevant social relationships holding between interlocutors. While field refers
to inherent rather stable features of the situation, tenor refers to non-
inherent features, that is, features which vary depending on the social
interaction. For instance, levels of formality, focus on referential
(informational) or interpersonal (involvement) aspects of the interaction and
the social roles and relationships of interlocutors are included here. Elements
of tenor may vary according to participants’ perceptions. For instance, in a
classroom one teacher may demand higher levels of formality than another
who may also allow for more interpersonal focus than another. In effect,
participants use their knowledge of the specific situation and culture to
interpret features of field and construct their own variables of tenor.
(c) the Mode of discourse, which refers to the channel used (spoken, written,
etc.) and its rhetorical mode (didactic, persuasive, phatic, etc.).
These categories reflect the environment (i.e. the context of situation) in which a
text is actually functioning and are realized by means of three metafunctions or
components of knowledge: (a) the ideational, (b) the interpersonal, and (c) the
textual.
In addition to the context of situation, Halliday and Hasan (1976) identify:
(a) the context of culture, that is, the institutional background within which a text is
produced, through which it acquires its meaning and which constrains its
interpretation,
(b) the intertextual context, that is, the relations of a text to other texts and the
assumptions that are carried over from those and
(c) the intratextual context, that is, the coherence of a text evidenced in overt
linguistic markers of cohesion and also expressed through underlying semantic
relationships.

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 • Hymes
Another significant attempt to account for the components of context comes from
the Ethnography of Communication or Ethnography of Speaking and the work of Dell
Hymes. Hymes’ (1972) work revolves around speech situations, speech events and
speech acts.
Speech situations are recurrent institutions of a society. For example, a religious
service, a party, a departmental meeting, a family dinner and a host of others are
specific social activities in which speech can occur. When speech does occur within
these situations, we have speech events, like a sermon, an argument and a lecture.
These events are normally made up of recognized sequences governed by social
rules. These sequences are called speech acts and are seen as the minimal units of
communication. For example, a piece of advice is a possible speech act in the speech
event of a sermon produced as part of a speech situation, such as a religious service.
The term ‘speech act’ in the ethnography of communication should be distinguished
from that as used in pragmatics since a pair of greetings constitute a speech act in
the speech event of a conversation at a party (speech situation).
Speech acts usually have a certain linguistic form and, although sometimes a certain
function can be based on that form, we need to know the social norms in order to
produce and understand utterances as being of a particular kind.
“Are you really a senior citizen? But you look so much younger!”
Both speech situations and speech events constrain what can be said (as
appropriate) and facilitate the interpretation of what is said.
“Excuse me, my name is Angela Hughes, which is the best way to Constitution
square?”
In the ethnographic approach, context is viewed as comprising a number of
components or features of communicative events which extend beyond the linguistic
code used. Hymes lists them under the ingenious mnemonic acronym SPEAKING.
S Setting 1. setting 2. scene
P Participants 3. Speaker (lawyer, spokesperson) 4. Addressor (source) 5. hearer,
receiver, audience 6. addressee
E Ends 7. purposes-outcomes 8. purposes-goals
A Act sequences 9. message form 10. message content
K Key 11. key
I Instrumentalities 12. channel 13. forms of speech
N Norms 14. norms of interaction 15. norms of interpretation
G Genres 16. genres

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 • Lyons

Lyons (1977) suggests that one way of understanding what context involves is by
exploring the kinds of knowledge a fluent speaker must possess in order to be able
to produce and understand utterances in context. He distinguishes six such types of
knowledge:
o Participants must know their role and status.
o Participants must know where they are in space and time.
o Participants must be able to categorize the situation in terms of its degree of
formality.
o Participants must know what medium is appropriate to the situation.
o Participants must know how to make their utterances appropriate to the
subject-matter.
o Participants must know how to make their utterances appropriate to the
province or domain to which the situation belongs.
Lyons distinguishes between the deictic role of an individual and his/her social role
or ‘status’.

4) The context of interpretation

In actual fact, from the above pool of components, interactants choose to use the
ones they consider to be relevant for the production and interpretation of language
in the specific speech event. Those activated aspects of context interactants rely on
to interpret discourse constitute the topic framework, that is the contextual
framework within which the topic of communication emerges and develops. The
topic framework consists of elements derivable from the preceding co-text and the
context of situation.
The question which may be raised here is how interactants decide on which
contextual features are relevant for interpretation. Brown and Yule (1983) discuss
two principles available to hearers which facilitate interpretation: the principle of
local interpretation and the principle of analogy.
(Context: Angeliki has just entered Greg’s office for a supervision. On this particular
day the weather is very bad.)
[1] GREG: Hello. Come in.
[2] ANGELIKI: Hello. (Angeliki takes her jacket off and sits down while Greg goes to
his desk to fetch some papers.)
[3] GREG: (approaching Angeliki with the papers) How’s it going?
[4] ANGELIKI: (looking blankly out of the window) Oh, it’s horrible these days. One
day it’s clear, next day horrible again.
[5] GREG: (turning to look out of the window) Yes, it’s been pretty awful
recently, hasn’t it?
(Tzanne, 2000: 12-15)
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READINGS
Brown, Gillian and Yule, George (1983) Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. Chapter 3 (section 3.3.1, pages 73-79).
Sifianou, Maria (2006) Discourse Analysis: An Introduction. Athens: Hillside Press.
Chapter 3.
Tzanne, Angeliki (2000) Talking at Cross-Purposes. Amsterdam/New York. John
Benjamins Publishing Company. Pages 12-15, 48-51.