Discourse fragments and the notion topic

We have already argued that the data used in discourse analysis will inevitably reflect the analysis particular interests. Moreover, the piece of data chosen for study can only be partially analysed. If the investigation is undertaken by someone primarily intersted in intonation, for example, the data selected has to meet certain requirements. It must be spoken, audible, and depending on the level of investigation involved, clear enough to allow instrumental analysis, and accompanied by additional information on the age, sex, and linguistic background of the speaker. In practice, any single investigation will have much stricter data requirement than this rather general list. Having selected the data, the investigator will study features such as the pitch, rhythm and loudness of syllables in the data, and spend relatively little or no time studyng the lexis or the morphology. In its most extreme form, this narrowing of the investigation in terms of data selected and the analysis undertaken can lead to a constructed text being carefully read aloud in a phonetics laboratory by speaker of standard Southern British English. The result of the investigation may then be used to make empirical claims about the intonation of English. Although this is an extreme example, it serves to illustrate the selectiveness which character linguistic investigation generally, and which is also present to a certain degree in most analysis of discourse.

The data studied in discourse analysis is always a fragment of discourse and the discourse analyst always has to decide where the fragment begins and ends. How does the analyst decide what constitutes a satisfactory unit for analysis?

There do exist ways of identifying the boundaries of stretches of discourse which set one chunk of discourse off from the rest. Formulaic expressions such as “Once upon a time......and they lived happily ever after” can be used explicitly to mark the boundaries of a fragment. Other familiar markers are “Have you heard the one about.......?” and various other forms which can be used to mark the beginning of a joke or anecdote. These markers can help the analyst decide where the beginning of a coherent fragment of discourse occurs. However, speakers often do not provide such explicit guidlines to help the analyst select chunks of discourse for study.

In order to divide up a lengthy recording of conversational data into chucks which can be investigated in detail, the analyst is often forced to depend on intuitive noyions about where one part of a conversation ends and another begins. There are, of course points where one speaker stops and another starts speaking, but every speaker-change does not necessarily terminate a particular coherent fragment of conversation. Which point of speaker-change, among the many, could be treated as, the end of one chunk of the conversation? This type of decision is typically made by appealing to an intuitive notion of topic. The conversationalist stop talking about ‘money’ and move on to ‘sex’. A chunk of conversational discourse, then can be treated as a unit of some kind because it is on a particular topic. The notion of topic is clearly an intuitively satisfactory way of describing ‘about’ something and the next stretch ‘about’ something else. For it is appealed to very frequently in the discourse analysis literature.

Yet the basic for the identification of topic is rarely made explicit. In fact, topic could be described as the most frequently used, unexplained, term in the analysis of discourse (Brown, Gillian and George Yule, 1983:68-70).

The linearisation problem

One the constraints on the speaker/writer is that he can produce only one word at a time. When he orders these single words into sentences, and those sentences into texts, he confronts what has come to be called the linearisation problem. He has to choose a beginning point. This point will inflience the hearer/reader’s interpretation of everything that follows in the discourse since it will constitute the initial textual context for everything that follows. Consider just two types of invented example. First of all consider the effect of on identical attributive description being preceded by different evaluative comments:

1.       a. I can’t stand Sally Binns.

    She’s tall and thin walks like a crane

b. I do admire Sally Binns.

     She’s tall and thin and walks like crane

In a the attributes tall and thin and walks like a crane must be assumed to be unattractive, awkward, ungainly. In b those same properties are now endowed with elegance and grace.

Consider next the effect of linear sequencing on the interpreation of event in time where the listener can be expected to derive different implicatures from different ordering’s (Levelt, 1981:91)

2.       a. She married and became pregnant

b. She became pregnant and married

There is, as Levelt reminds us an ordo naturalis, whereby it is assumsed that, if there is no cue to the contrary, the first-mentioned event happened first and the second-mentioned event followed it. It is, then, open to the heare/reader to draw implicature from that ordering , implicatures which will be constrained by both the content of what is said and stereotypical expectations based on previous experience.

We are familiar in the field of visual perception with effects produced by presenting the same stimulus in a different context. A block of colour produced in the centre of a light surround may be perceived as being much darker than that same block of colour presented in the centre of a dark surround. Similarly a line presented in a given context is perceived as being longer than a line of same length which is presented in a different context. In a similiar way, understanding of verbal input processed against the relevant background of the immediately precding co-text. The same sequence of word may take on a different value (Widdowson, 1978) when it is uttered in an different co-text. We shall consider this effect, first level, and then with respect to the organisation of large stretches of discourse (Brown, Gillian and George Yule, 1983:126).

Pragmatics and discourse context

In post forms and functions, we emphasised that the discourse analyst necessarly takes a pragmatic approach to the study of language in use. Such an approach bring into consideration a number of issues which do not generally receive much attention in the formal linguist description of sentential syntax and semantic. We noted, for example, that the discourse analyst has to take account of the context in which a piece of discourse occurs. Some of the most obvious linguistic element which requirecontextual information for their interpretation are the deictic forms such as here, now, I , you, this and that. In order to interpret these element in a piece of discourse, it is necessary to know who the speaker and hearer are, and the time and place of the production of the discourse. In this categories we shall discuss these and other aspects of contextual description which are required in the analysis of discourse.

There are, howewer, other ways in which the discourse analyst's approach to linguistic data differs from that of the formal  linguist and leads to a specialised use of certain terms, Because the analysis is investigating the use of language in context by a speaker, he is more concerned with relationship between the speaker and the utterance, on the particular occasion of use, than with the potential relationship of one setence to another, regardless of their use. That is, in using terms such as reference, presuposition, implicature and inference, the discourse analyst is describing what speakers and hearers are doing, and not the relationship which exists between on sentence of propotion and another.

The Functions of language

The analysis of discourse is, necessarily the analysis of language in use. A such, it cannot be restrieted to the description of linguistic forms independent of the purpose of functions which those forms are designed to serve in human affairs. While some linguists may concentrate on determining the formal properties of a language is used for. While the formal approach has a long tradition, manifested in innumerable volumes of grammar, the functional approach is less for the principal function of language have resulted in vague, and often confusing, terminology. 

We will adopt only only two terms to describe the major functions of language and emphasise that this division is an analytic conveniece. It would be unlikely that, on any aoccasion, a natural language utterance would be used to fulfil only one function, to the total exclusion of the other. That function which language serves in the expression of content we will describe as transactional, and that function involved in expressing social relations and personal attitudes we will describe as interactional. Our destinetion transactional, stand in general correspondence to the functional dichotomies, expresive, referential, ideational, and descriptive.