Analisis del Discurso

Posted on Mar 11, 2019 in Language

Scollon & Scollon, Discourse and Intercultural Communication

  1. Discourse analysis as a polysemic term: 
    Discourse analysis is considered as polysemic because on the one hand it makes reference to the close linguistic study, from different perspectives and focusing on the analysis and interpretation, of texts in use. On the other hand, discourse refers to socially shared habits of thought, perception and behaviour  reflected in different texts belonging to different genres. In this latter sense, discourse analysis grows out of critical, sociocultural, sociological, or historical analysis.

Intertextuality/interdiscursivity: All texts represent different voices engaged in implied relationships with each other.

    1. Interdiscourse is the implicit or explicit relations that a discourse has to other discourses. Interdiscursivity is the aspect of a discourse that relates it to other discourses. In any instance of actual communication we are positioned within an indefinite number of discourses systems (these systems include those of gender, generation, profession, corporate or institutional placement, regional ethnic, and other possible identities). As each of these discourse system is manifested in a complex network of forms of discourse.
    2. Intertextuality is the explicit or implicit relations that are present in a text related to another.  Intertextuality is a literary device that creates an interrelationship between texts.
  2. Contextualization cues: their relevance and purpose in discourse analysis:

Contextualization Cues are metacommunicative cues (Especially paralinguistic and prosodic features such as tone of voice and intonation) by which primary communication is interpreted.

Contextualization cues can be the cause of complementary schismogenesis, since they can express already established stereotypes.

Social stereotypes that are brought to the process of communication are major factors in the interpretation of contextualization cues, and therefore this work directed itself to the explication of the processes by which stereotypes are formed.

Complementary Schismogenesis: Processes in social interactions by which small initial differences can be amplified and produce a rapture in the interaction between two groups (As in white and black people in USA)

The production of social, economic, and racial discrimination in and through discourse is a social practice.

       Eso quiere decir que el discurso (entre dos grupos) es entendido en base a como se interpretan y se usan estas contextualization cues, que pueden ser malinterpretadas y causar una distancia entre dos grupos comunicándose (schismogenesis). Tambien esta interpretación genera ESTEREOTIPOS, los cuales también generan problemas y distancias entre los grupos.



  1. The concept and role of culture:

The concept of culture has been progressively restructured into other units or discourses which are seen as instantiations of social practices. In discourse analysis cultural units have been dissolved into boundaryless forms of intertextuality and interdiscursivity. Culture is considered a kind of array or complex of other discursive formations. All communication is constitutive of cultural categories (co-constructive aspects of communication). Identities and meanings are constituted in and through the interaction itself

  1. Interdiscursive communication: what is its aim?

It is important to understand how a particular person in a particular action comes to claim, say, a generational identity over  against other multiple identities also contradictorily present in her or his own habitus as it is to try to come to understand any two individuals as positioned as culturally or ethnically different from each other. An interdiscursive approach to intercultural communication has aimed researchers to prefer to not take into account a priori notions of group membership and identity and to focus on how and under what circumstances concepts like culture are produced by participants as relevant categories for exchange of interpersonal ideologies.

  1. Mediated discourse  and its relation to culture

The approach to intercultural communication as a discourse analysis has led to be referred as mediated discourse. A mediated discourse perspective shifts from a focus on the individuals involved in communication and from their interpersonal or intercultural or even interdiscursive relationship, to a focus on mediated action as a kind of social action. The central concern is not persons but social change.



Mantzoukas, Exploring ethnographic genres and developing validity appraisal tools

  1. The aims, methods of data collection and analysis of classical ethnography, critical ethnography and interpretive ethnography in qualitative research.
    1. Classical Ethnography:
      1. Aims: To accurately and objectively present the cultural reality of the social or ethnical group under study (the mantra is “telling it as it is”) to elucidate the pattern of real relations of connectedness between the various constituting parts that make up the whole of society in order to prove a thick and deep description about it.
      2. Method: The researcher must spend a high amount of time immersed in the group while conducting objective participant observation, the researcher must become a fly on the wall to avoid misinterpreting the reality. The study must be presented in an impersonal, impartial and dispassionate manner, where the culture reality is discovered, rather than created.
      3. Analysis: It must be carried out in such a way so as to constitute authoritative accounts. From these accounts the researcher can array a series of linear and hierarchical classifications and taxonomies, which are systematised into general statements producing theories and laws with regards the social phenomena under study.
    2. Critical Ethnography
      1. Aims: The aim is to unpack, interpret and analyse the culture reality so as to untangle the historical contingencies and reveal the cultural substratum disclose the underlying synergies that actually create that reality, it doesn’t seek to discover what is right or wrong but what is useful and practical and how daily reality can be transformed . The eventual aim is to emancipate, empower and transform the lived reality of participants. The mantra is “giving voice”.
      2. Method: Data collection is done by confrontational dialogical and reflective interviews are the principal data collecting method used to discover specific systems relationships and reveal hidden meanings ( participants are purposefully selected for what they know), culture is seen as a historically bounded formation. These can be complemented with non-participant observations and analysis  of historical documentations.
      3. Analysis: The data are analysed by invoking sociological and reflective imagination producing brief excerpts from interviews that are explained and interpreted (is sceptical of objective and value free research). The data analysis concludes with the creation of images and metaphors that re-frame the familiar in a new social light.


    1. Interpretive Ethnography:
      1. Aims: The aim is to construct and narrate the culture reality to provide accounts that possess depth, detail, emotionality, nuance and imagination of the participants’ worlds, which intends to find or create meanings or evoke reality and criticise how things are or imagine how things can be. The eventual aim is the personal engagement of the researcher with participants to excavate meaning and to speak clearly about the immediacy and intensity of some aspect of the researched world, these stories are not finalized but are in constant development. The mantra is “storytelling”.
      2. Method: Data collection is done by using multiple methods, e.g. interviews, observations, videos, pictures, etc. The data collection process begins with a personal moment or confession of the researcher, and continues at multiple sites, contexts and levels with the researcher focusing on specific moments of cultural activities where discourses and power relations produce themselves (rather than individuals) in order to extrapolate meaning, e.g. on a rare moment or moments of conflict or struggle
      3. Analysis: The data are analysed by juxtaposing sites and relationships, and comparing emergent issues or objects of study that were not known beforehand. The data analysis concludes by constructing a coherent narrative account of different, complex and connecting discursive issues. Finally, the analysis of the intended coherence of the narrative continues by the reader that deconstruct and eventually re-construct in a creative manner the narrative.

Smart, Ethnographic-based discourse analysis. Uses, issues and prospects

  1. Distinction between method and methodology: A method is a set of procedures for collecting and analysing research data. On the other hand, a methodology is broader: A methodology is a method plus an underlying set ideas about the nature of reality and knowledge
  2. Interpretative ethnography in the Geertzian tradition: It is used to describe a particular social group’s discourse practice’s (instantiated in writing, speaking or other symbolic action) in order to learn how members of the group view and operate within their mutually constructed conceptual world. The goal of this type of research is to achieve a quasi-insider’s understanding of how group members interact and communicate with one another, what they believe and value, how they define and solve problems, how they create and apply knowledge, and how they accomplish learning and work.
  3. Difference between the terms ethnography and case study: Case study focuses on a small number of informants in their everyday rounds of life or on a single significant event. Ethnography, looks at the local culture of a social group, which is viewed as a collective, and produces a holistic account of the shared conceptual world that is discursively constructed and maintained by the group.
  4. Thick Description: Is an account of the discursive system used by the members of a social group to construct a particular shared vision of reality, a unique conceptual work.
  5. Can ethnographic-based discourse analysis be combined with another approach within a single research project? Yes, under certain conditions. The methodologies of the approaches to be combined must share similar social-constructionist assumptions about the nature of reality and knowledge-building as occurring within a changing social world constructed through discourse.


Martin & Rose, Genre Relations

  1. What is a report, description, procedures,  just so stories, anecdotes, explanation, exemplum and  recount, according to Martin and Rose?
    1. Recount: Record of events unfolding through time, a running commentary
    2. Report: They are factual texts which generalize about experience, drawing on research of phenomena (for instance an experiments with an aim written out with to + infinitive, steps, results and conclusions)
    3. Description: Specific first hand observations, often expresses the feelings of authors towards what is described
    4. Procedures: for instance “how to” texts, sometimes adapted to suit the goals of scientific experimentation.
    5. Just so stories: These explain how the world came to the way it is.
    6. Anecdotes: It has an unexpected disruption, there’s also emotional empathy with the person telling the story.
    7. Explanation: Similar to Just so Stories, but more scientifical, they give reasons of how something came into being.
    8. Exemplum: It has an incident (remarkable event) and a reaction in the form of a moral judgement either from your own experience of from somebody else’s (for instance a fabula).


From Teacher’s ppt

  1. Discourse analysis: The study of spoken and written language in use beyond sentences boundaries in communication exchanges. It is not only the study of grammar (morphology, syntax and semantics), it studies larger chunks of language as they flow together, beyond the sentence.
    1. Discourse: All forms of oral and written communication, it’s not restricted to the description of linguistic forms (syntax, morphology, etc) and functions since we’re dealing with language in use. It’s not as abstract as language, it’s the source of knowledge and the result of it since people use what they know in order to create and interpret new discourse. It involves patterns of belief action and language (carries culture that conditions how you express yourself).
  2. What can be analyzed: Context,  participants, processes: Discourse analysis is about people participating at a certain time in a certain place, without these factors discourse would have no meaning. We can analyse discourse form each of these qualities, for instance.
    1. Context: is defined as non-linguistic non-textual factors which affect spoken or written communication. In discourse analysis we can study how certain contexts (either situational and cultural) are going to affect certain texts, since our discourse is configured by our context. 
    2. Participants: the ones who are involved in the process of communication, they are the ones producing and interpreting discourse. We may study how their characteristics affect discourse, such as gender, class, age, etc.
    3. Process: ???


  1. Textual characteristics of a text: adequacy, formality/informality, coherence, cohesion:
    A piece of text counts with:
    1. Adequacy or variety: Dialectal or Standard. A dialect variety which is accurate with the place where you live, your age, your gender, etc.  Standard variety is the one used in official contexts, such as media, education and government, the one understood in most contexts and considered as the “correct variety”.
    2. Register: It can be that the text is oral or written, objective or subjective, formal or informal
    3. Coherence: Relevant or irrelevant. It is what provides sense of understanding to a text, it is what permits to know what topic it is about.
    4. Cohesion: Cohesive resources that provide coherence:
      1. Lexical repetition (Hyperonymy, hyponymy, antonymy, synonymy, complementarity)
        1. Hyperonymy: Semantic relation between a more general word and a more specific word. Tree is a hyperonym of oak, because the set of trees includes the set of oaks .
        2. Hyponymy: A hyponym is a word or phrase whose semantic field is more specific than its hypernym. The semantic field of a hypernym, also known as a superordinate, is broader than that of a hyponym.
        3. Antonymy: Antonymy is oppositeness of meaning between a word and the other word or among words in the same part of speech, such as good-bad (adjective-adjective) and fast-slowly (adverb-adverb)
        4. Synonymy: Synonymy concerns the sameness of meaning
        5. Complementarity: Complementarity arises where one section is divided into two separate parts or conditions that cannot exist at the same time. (live-dead)
      2. Grammatical cohesion:
        1. Reference or Pronominalisation
        2. Ellipsis: Omit something (subject)
        3. Conjunction
  1. Requirements of a communicative interaction: In order to have communicate interaction we need someone who says: what, to whom, through what channel, with what effect, where and when. All of this must happen in a situational and cultural context at a certain time in a certain place.
  2. Genre : various definitions and also Martin & Rose’s:
    1. Martin & Rose’s: Different kind of texts enact different types of social contexts, they help to predict how the situation is likely to unfold, to manage new information, and learn how to interact appropriately and strategically in it. They characterised genres as staged, goal oriented social processes. Staged, because it usually takes us more than one step to reach our goals; goal oriented because we feel frustrated if we don’t accomplish the final steps; social because writers shape their texts for readers of particular kinds. In functional linguistics, genre is viewed as the how we use language to live and how we can mobilise these, dropping ones we don’t need anymore and creating new ones, we are always communicating in genres.
    2. Various: Swales defines genre as a recognizable communicative event characterized by a set of communicative purpose(s) identified and mutually understood by the members of the professional or academic community (conventionalized) in which it regularly occurs. Celce-Murcia & Olshtain say that genre has communicative purpose, audience, conventionalized style and a format.
  3. Metafunctions , register, tenor, field and mode:
    Every utterance works simultaneously in the realization of three metafunctions:
    1. Ideational: Representation of reality, who does what to whom, how, why and where. (Field)
    2. Interpersonal: Representation of people interaction through assertions, questions, orders, expression of level of possibility, of our feelings, judgement and appreciation. (Tenor)
    3. Textual: Organization of interpersonal and ideational meanings into a coherent discourse (Mode)
      The register is the main construct used by functional linguists to model context. Register is organized by metafunction into field, tenor and mode:
    4. Field: The nature of the social activity in which discourse takes place (Scientific, Medical, Law). Degree of generality (Specificity or generality of an instance of discourse)
    5. Tenor: The relationship between interactants (Roles and statuses. Proximity between them which will be represented in the level of formality.
    6. Mode: Role of language


  1. Requirements of a communicative interaction: In order to have communicate interaction we need someone who says: what, to whom, through what channel, with what effect, where and when. All of this must happen in a situational and cultural context at a certain time in a certain place.
  2. Genre : various definitions and also Martin & Rose’s:
    1. Martin & Rose’s: Different kind of texts enact different types of social contexts, they help to predict how the situation is likely to unfold, to manage new information, and learn how to interact appropriately and strategically in it. They characterised genres as staged, goal oriented social processes. Staged, because it usually takes us more than one step to reach our goals; goal oriented because we feel frustrated if we don’t accomplish the final steps; social because writers shape their texts for readers of particular kinds. In functional linguistics, genre is viewed as the how we use language to live and how we can mobilise these, dropping ones we don’t need anymore and creating new ones, we are always communicating in genres.
    2. Various: Swales defines genre as a recognizable communicative event characterized by a set of communicative purpose(s) identified and mutually understood by the members of the professional or academic community (conventionalized) in which it regularly occurs. Celce-Murcia & Olshtain say that genre has communicative purpose, audience, conventionalized style and a format.
  3. Metafunctions , register, tenor, field and mode:
    Every utterance works simultaneously in the realization of three metafunctions:
    1. Ideational: Representation of reality, who does what to whom, how, why and where. (Field)
    2. Interpersonal: Representation of people interaction through assertions, questions, orders, expression of level of possibility, of our feelings, judgement and appreciation. (Tenor)
    3. Textual: Organization of interpersonal and ideational meanings into a coherent discourse (Mode)
      The register is the main construct used by functional linguists to model context. Register is organized by metafunction into field, tenor and mode:
    4. Field: The nature of the social activity in which discourse takes place (Scientific, Medical, Law). Degree of generality (Specificity or generality of an instance of discourse)
    5. Tenor: The relationship between interactants (Roles and statuses. Proximity between them which will be represented in the level of formality.
    6. Mode: Role of language


Discurse Analysis and Narrative (Johnstone)

 Structuralist Narratology

Propp’s theory : tales

Labov: Oral versions of Personal experience (PEN)

CLAUSES WITH FUCTIONS : abstract/orientation/complicating action/evaluation/resolution/coda

 They have 2 approaches : making reference/ structure the interaction  

Abstract: consist of a aclause or two at the beginning of a anarrrative summarizing. ·danger of death· “Italked to a man out of… pulling the

Orientation :introduces chaaracters, temporal and physical setting, and situation.

– Complicaing actions: recapitulate a sequence of events leading up to thhei climax.; suspense.  Tension.

– The resolution: reases the tensions and thel what happened.

Evaluation:  stating or underscoring what is interesting or unusual about the story. 

Amarican narrateors.:: problems : ·”narrative” meaning// normative sound of some labov terminology.

Other worlk on the structure f narrative

Wtrorytellling is embedded.

Linguistics features.

Why people tell torues: autobiographical impulse”

 The development of narrative skil and style.;Children

 Variation in narrative: 

Diffrenet climaxs 

Narrrative research acros discsiplines: