Interaction Analysis
Lecture 1
A1
Discourse analysts study the ways sentences and utterances go together to make texts and
interactions and how those texts and interactions fit into our social world.
But discourse analysis is not just the study of language, but a way of looking at language that focuses
on how people use it in real life to do things like joke and argue and persuade and flirt, and to show
that they are certain kinds of people or belong to certain groups. This way of looking at language is
based on four main assumptions. They are:
1) Language is ambiguous. What things mean is never absolutely clear. All communication involves
interpreting what other people mean and what they are trying to do.
2) Language is always ‘in the world’ (situated). That is, what language means is always a matter of
where and when it is used and what it is used to do (context-dependent). The meaning of an
utterance can change dramatically depending on who is saying it, when and where it is said, and
to whom it is said.
3) The way we use language is inseparable from who we are and the different social groups to
which we belong. We use language to display different kinds of social identities and to show that
we belong to different groups.
4) Language is never used all by itself. It is always combined with other things such as our tone of
voice, facial expressions and gestures when we speak, and the fonts, layout and graphics we use
in written texts. What language means and what we can do with it is often a matter of how it is
combined with these other things.
B1- 3 ways of looking at discourse
Formal – ‘Language above/beyond the level of the clause or sentence.’ Those working from this
definition often try to understand the kinds of rules and conventions that govern the ways we
join clauses and sentences together to make texts.
o Originated from linguist Zellig Harris, (1952). The idea was to identify particular linguistic
features and determine how they occurred in texts relative to other features, that is,
which features occurred next to other features or ‘in the same environment’ with them.
He was also interested in understanding how these features correlate with non-linguistic
behaviour beyond texts, that is, how the form that texts take is related to the social
situations in which they occur.
Functional – ‘Language in use’. This definition leads to questions about how people use language
to do things like make requests, issue warnings, and apologize in different kinds of situations and
how we interpret what other people are trying to do when they speak or write.
o But very difficult because of its context-dependency and the ambiguity
o H. Widdowson (1973) – approached the whole problem of language use from the
perspective of language learning, noting that learning a foreign language involves being
able to use the language to accomplish things in the world.
o Michael Halliday (1994): 3 functions of language
Ideational: how we represent/ construct the world (Transitivity: the objects related
to a verb => verb creates connection between processes and participants)
The terrorist died at the scene vs. The terrorist was killed by the police vs. The
police killed the terrorist
, Interpersonal: how we create/ratify/negotiate relationships between speaker and
addressee, e.g. Dear Mrs. Jones vs. hi Paula
Textual: how we create cohesion and coherence. The manager proposed to have a
meeting on the management plan. Therefore she booked a conference venue which
made it possible to discuss the text in small groups
Social – Discourse as a kind of social practice. What is meant by this is that the way we use
language is tied up with the way we construct different social identities and relationships and
participate in different kinds of groups and institutions.
o Language is seen not just as a system for making meaning, but as part of larger systems
through which people construct social identities and social realities.
o Philosopher Michel Foucault discourse is the main tool through which we construct
‘knowledge’ and exert power over other people.
o Gee 2010: Discourse is performance AND identity: Not just linguistic, but also other
elements
C1 – Doing discourse analysis: First steps
One way we are able to make sense of this text is because of certain grammatical features in it.
Another way we make sense of this text comes from our expectations about how texts like this are
put together. We’ve seen a lot so we know what they try to do with it. After considering the formal
features of the text, we might then go on to consider what exactly the authors of this text are trying
to do, such as informing us or telling us what to do. All in all, what the company is doing with this text
is rather complex and sometimes indirect. Sometimes multiple forms of Discourse are included in a
text, such as Discourse of Science or Discourse of Law, which can be useful because it not only helps
us to interpret the meanings the authors are trying to express and the actions they are trying to
perform with the text.
D1 – The three perspectives revisited
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A4 – (only intertextuality and transitivity)
An important aspect of transitivity when it comes to ideology has to do with which participants are
portrayed as performing actions and which are portrayed as having actions done to or for them. In
the same kinds of traditional church weddings described above, after pronouncing the couple ‘man
and wife’ the convener might turn to the man and say, ‘you may now kiss the bride.’ Anyone who has
attended such a wedding knows that this sentence is usually not an accurate description of what
happens next: it is not just the groom who kisses the bride; the bride also kisses the groom; they kiss
each other. Rather, it as an ideological interpretation of what happens. Making the male participant
the actor in the process (kissing) constructs him as the person ‘in charge’ of the situation, and the
woman as a passive recipient of his kiss.
We called the relationship texts create with other texts intertextuality. According to Bakhtin, all texts
involve some degree of intertextuality. We cannot speak or write, he argues, without borrowing the
words and ideas of other people, and nearly everything we say or write is in some way a response to
some previous utterance or text and an anticipation of some future one.
Lecture 2
A3 – Texts and their social functions
