Understanding Discourse and Textuality in Communication

Posted on Jan 8, 2025 in English, Linguistic and Literary Studies

Discourse and Language in Context

Discourse is language in context, given in a social context, and involves interaction.

  • Channel (Spoken, Written)
  • Agent (Monologue, Dialogue, Multilogue)
  • Register (Formal, Informal)
  • Social Context
  • Purpose (Transactional, Interactional)
  • Context
    • Embedded, Reduced
    • Setting: Physical interaction
    • Behavioral Environment: Kinesics
    • Language: Co-text
    • Extrasituational
  • Genre (Instructive, Narrative, Descriptive, Persuasive, Informative, Expository)

Text forms are the representation of text types.

Four Competences (M&S)

  • Grammatical: Lexical resources, structure knowledge
  • Sociolinguistic: Social-cultural context, verbal and non-verbal elements
  • Discourse: Sequencing structures to achieve a specific message
  • Strategic: Activates knowledge of other competences

Four Competences (B)

  • Organizational: Grammatical
  • Pragmatical: Illocutionary competence

Standards of Textuality

Textuality is what makes a text a text and not mere words.

Situationality

Ideal setting and audience for the discourse to be relevant.

  • Physical Settings: Physical interactional (when, where, who)
  • Language: Co-text, reflexive use of language, linguistically related
  • Epistemic/Behavioral Environment: Non-verbal
  • Extrasituational: Sociopolitical context

Intentionality

Speaker intention can be measured with illocutionary acts (speech acts – the function implied when talking) and perlocutionary acts (what the speaker expects the audience to do).

Example: “It’s raining outside” – I want you to take cover.

Felicity Conditions: Patterns to describe under what conditions discourse is appropriate.

H -> hearer, S -> speaker, A -> action

Intertextuality

Relationship between texts (references), lexical items.

Informativity

Information given in the text affects the reader beneficially. Connect new and old information; if both are present, it is informative.

Fronting Device: OSV, ASVO, it-theme, and pseudo-cleft

Example: “It is * what S # is O”

Theme (main idea, topic item typically in front) & Rheme (comment)

  • Constant +1: Common theme shared by rhemes, cohesive ties replace the subject
  • Linear: The rheme is the theme of the next one
  • Split Rheme (T – r1, r2), r1 -> t+r, r2 -> t+r
  • Derived Theme -> Essay

Acceptability

An accepted text reaches the audience, the ideal audience.

Lexical Cohesion

a) Parallelism: Parallel units, same syntactic and semantic level

b) Collocation: Words likely to appear in the text

c) Partial Recurrence: Change word class

d) Reiteration: General noun, hyponym, hypernym, synonym, repetition

Grammatical Cohesion

a) Reference: Endophoric and exophoric (outside the text) replacement of words and expressions with pronouns.

  • Cataphora: Referring forward
  • Anaphora: Referring back
  • Exophoric Reference
    • Personal
    • Demonstrative: This, that, those
    • Comparative

b) Ellipsis: Omission of nominal, verbal (echoing, auxiliary contrasting), or clausal elements.

c) Substitution: Nominal -> one, some; Verbal -> do; Clausal -> so, not

d) Conjunction: Relation between segments: additive, adversative, causal, temporal.

Coherence

Reflected in the use of words and utterances provided – causal, reason, purpose, and time enablement (general to specific), conflict resolution, sequence of events.

Four Maxims

Quantity, quality, manner, relation.

Double Cycle of Communication

Entailment (literal meaning) and Implicature (what you mean).