Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Discourse Analysis

Spring 2006

Week 9 - Johnstone (2002), Chapters 7 and 8, pp. 196-238 & PD, Chapter 8 - Answers

1. What are speech acts and how do they work in shaping discourse? (Jo7)

As we have mentioned already and a long time ago, there are three basic aspects of speech acts.

locutionary acts

illocutionary acts

perlocutionary force

We started talking about speech acts almost at the beginning of the class and this week we will go into some depth about some of the basic terminology related to speech acts. Basically speech acts consist of two different types of forces which wind up creating a third force. The first of these is the locution. When we speak of locutionary acts we are basically thinking about the specific form which the speaker is putting together. Locution basically has to do with movement and in this case the movement of muscles in the mouth to create specific linguistic forms. A locutionary act has a locutionary force, which is related of course to what the forms mean in the linguistic way (semantically). This locutionary force is matched up within the illocutionary force. The illocutionary force comes from an illocutionary act, which is basically the intent underlying the speech. In this way we can think of illocutionary force as being basically the function underlying the utterance.

            Every speech act has two levels or forces (locutionary and illocutionary) and the overall effect of the speech act is determined by an interplay between these two forces. The important thing for us here is that the interplay between these two forces (the perlocutionary force) can only be determined in context. It is only in context that a new listener can make a decision about the interplay between these two different levels within speech acts. So, for example, if somebody says something like, "Sit down." The perlocutionary force of this speech act is going to vary tremendously depending on whether the addressee is actually sitting down or not, for example. The context, in a very real sense, determines the meaning (pragmatic) or force of the utterance.

            As we create piece of discourse we are really using speech acts as one of the important building blocks of our overall strategy towards the creation of discourse. It should be obvious from the above description that direct speech is going to have a much stronger locutionary force which matches the illocutionary force. In situations where the illocutionary force does not match the locutionary act or force very well then we wind up with a strong perlocutionary force. As speakers go to create language they think about these things and in an unconscious way in this is how discourses created.

2. What are discourse markers and how are they related to context? (Jo7)

Discourse markers are forms which are used to highlight or overtly mark certain aspects or intentions in discourse! Discourse markers are used as signals which we insert within the discourse to give the listener lots of cues and clues as to how we are structuring our discourse. Discourse markers allow us to lead the listener and to get them to focus their attention on aspects of our discourse which we think are important. In this way discourse markers are in parity of two comprehension in speaking. Good speakers must use discourse markers in a very clear and patterned way.

            Discourse markers, or the actual shape the discourse markers hold, occur on basically two different levels which makes them somewhat confusing and tricky to most people. The first of these levels is the linguistic level. So, a discourse marker like 'so' has certain meanings associated with it as a linguistic unit. It is used as an intensifier as well as a causal clause connector. These linguistic meetings show that 'so' is a function word but of different types. It also occurs as a discourse marker in this case it is really hard to pin down all the different possible meanings of 'so'. Often the uses of discourse markers are idiosyncratic and always use of discourse markers are prey to contextual variables. In this way we can see that discourse markers really only acquire their particular use from the context. In a way we can think of discourse markers as being almost blank forms which simply acquire use from context and in many cases any kind of discourse marker form would actually fit in to a specific situation. In the text recall the example of 'and' being used not to connect or to conjoin ideas but actually this a disconnector used to limit ideas.

            In a way we can consider the development of discourse markers as a kind of evolutionary or developmental process related to how a particular language and languages in general develop. We could argue that all discourse markers at some point were content words and that they, with a high frequency or use, were shorted and turned into function words. At a later stage of development they also developed a discourse marking function based in part on their role as a functional unit of the language.

            For us as language teachers, discourse markers are particularly problematic. This is because their meaning is very much prey to context when we are speaking. The other major problem is that discourse markers are used very differently in speaking and writing. This should not come as a surprise us because the chief difference between speaking and writing is how each relates to context. In speaking we react to context and use context, but rarely do we create context entirely. Writing is quite the opposite. Writing basically, but not always, revolves around the creation of context. In this way we would expect the discourse markers in writing to be much more fixed than in speaking. Based on this they are actually used in different ways and there are even different types (Deictic expressions, for example, are used much more often in speaking than in writing). As teachers we need to know some of these main distinctions between speaking and writing and discourse markers are one of them. As a writing teacher myself I often find that my students make tremendous mistakes using discourse markers. They often write using certain discourse markers like they were speaking, and they will often speak using discourse markers in a way that is more suitable for writing. This obviously shows a high level of confusion in the student's mind. We, as teachers, need to clear this up and context, or the lack thereof, is the clue. I think we often send the wrong message by not clearly understanding the difference between spoken in written forms. We must and discourse markers are at the center of this.

3. How are strategies and styles in discourse related to rhetorical aims? (Jo7)

Rhetorical aims refers to the overall goal of our entire piece of discourse. In this way rhetorical aims exist at a level far above and far more general than individual speech acts. We generally use the term rhetorical aims to refer to longer, more formal types of discourse and often monologues. When creating a piece of discourse we need to think about what rhetorical aims are and, based on that, devise a strategy for how we possibly think we're going to achieve those rhetorical aims. The achieving of these aims often involves using different styles in our discourse or switching back and forth between different styles as a particular type a strategy. One thing that we need to remember about this is that it is highly culturally bound. Different cultures will use different types of strategies. So, a strategy which is appropriate in one cultural setting will not be appropriate in another. Another thing to remember is that styles often link a speaker to a certain speech community which may or may not be highly valued by listeners. So, the bottom line here is that any kind of style or any kind of strategy which a speaker uses in producing discourse must be made in relation to what they know about the listeners. If the listener is not able to interpret the speaker`s intention in the same way as the speaker actually intended then there there's going to be a mismatch in meaning.

            We need to think of speaking as an almost magical process where for speaking to actually be effective the speaker and the listener need to actually become almost one person. They need to share ideas and more. They become one person in that their minds need to be interpreting the output/input in the same way. This sounds almost impossible but it occurs to all of us thousands of times in the course of the day and for most people in the world it also occurs in several different linguistic codes or languages in that same day. And remember is that we're constantly shifting back and forth between using and being exposed to different styles and strategies. We don't seem to have too much difficulty with this most of the time because when we ourselves function as interlocutors, or when we are exposed to discourse and by some other interlocutor, their speaking is based on specific patterns which are normal to us. Again, the number of strategies and the number of different styles within a specific cultural group are highly limited. The people who use them and put them together is a little more varied, but the basic core is extremely limited.

4.How does performance relate to discourse? (Jo7)

Performance relates to the functions that we wish to fulfill. It is much larger or more inclusive idea than speech acts which generally refer to single utterances and their intention (illocutionary force) and their effect (perlocutionary force). The idea for performance comes from the Russian linguistic Roman Jakobsen and includes many different levels or areas which a speaker needs to focus on as they produce a piece of discourse. In Jakobsen's model there are basically three different levels or areas that a speaker needs to focus on. They are the basic level related to content or message, the interpersonal level which relates to how the speaker portrays themselves and how they think about the audience, and finally a level devoted to the actual communicative functions. These are shown below grouped to their different levels.

Content (referential function)

Message (poetic function)

Addresser (self-expressive function)

Addressee (rhetorical function)

Contact (phatic function)

Linguistic and discourse conventions (metalingual function)

5. Where does meaning come from in a text? (Jo8)

Everywhere - the author, the test itself and the audience.

            Traditionally there are three different places where meaning has been said to come from in a text. The first of these is the author itself. When people speak obviously they put together a text based on what is stored in their own internal system which is developed from their own personal situation and experiences. As we studied earlier in this course much of what we actually use to create a text is first gleaned from other people. Since everybody within a speech community actually is exposed to slightly different language than they also use slightly different language to put things together. Everything available for use comes as a result of as their own strategies and their own specific forms and certainly it is from them that the meaning in a text is going to be derived. The second source of meaning in a text is of course the text itself. But the argument for this is the fact that much of what authors do in creating texts occurs at a deeply subconscious level. Yes, people plan when they put together language, but much of what they do is also not planned. Many of the results of speaking are often the result of not accessible knowledge but available/active knowledge. When we are speaking there are tremendous time constraints which means most of the time we need to fall back on automatic processes to form the basis of our speech or text (here, a longer speech event). For most of us we don't have conscious control over these automatic processes. They simply occur which means the meaning doesn't necessarily come from the author in any kind of planned way. It comes from the text itself; from how the forms are put together in the text itself. Thus, the text has some sort of meaning outside of what the author attributed to it for the most part because so much of language use is subconscious. The third place that the meaning is said to come from in the text or in a text is the audience. Obviously this is the bottom line. Sometimes it really doesn't really matter what the author intended or what the text itself means. What really matters is what the audience thinks the text means. What matters is the effect the text has on that audience. Certainly when authors go to create texts they think about the audience (or they should) and they plan their text so that the text will have the intended effect on the audience that they wanted, but this doesn`t always work as per expectations. As the text itself is formed it has been created to have a certain effect on the audience. Despite all this planning and expectation, however, the audience really takes in the text the way they want to.

            In reality the meaning in the text comes from all three of these different areas. When we as teachers want to teach speaking, that is putting together texts, we need to make sure that our students understand these three different aspects of meaning in the text. They need to understand that authors must put together texts that show their intentions that show their background and reveal themselves and their motives to the world. Our students need to know that the forms in the text itself are also responsible for the meaning contained in the text and they need to know how to create meaningful forms. Lastly as listeners our students need to know that they have to interpret texts and hopefully in the way that the author intended.

6. What does a study of discourse tell us about the nature of language itself? (Jo8)

Language is not just about producing forms as a way of creating meaning and purpose, it is about interpreting and reacting to linguistic forms as well as extra-linguistic contextual cues.

            The study of discourse reveals some very important aspects of language itself which not only help us in teaching language to others but also help us understand the basic nature of language. What we find in studying discourse, first of all, is that language cannot ever be separated from context. When we are creating language we have to create language based on the context around us or (as in writing) we have to create context within the text. When we are interpreting language we have to interpret the language based on the context. This means that teaching forms alone is less than optimal and may not help students learn to use language at all. Extending our view of discourse we see that language is really creative in its very nature. What we find is that language is expansive and changeable. Part of the problem with an idea about language based on creativity as the basis of language is that for language to be created there need to be mechanisms for such creation. Language simply does not have fixed rules. Language is constantly changing. It should be obvious to us who have actually practiced this type of learning and teaching that fixed rules really don't apply to language and I don't believe that they necessarily help people learn language as well, not in the long run and not past a certain point. In fact, I would argue that fixed rules stop people from learning language particularly as regards use. What we find in studying discourse is that people learn language based on meaningful formulas and the same time they need to learn how to extend and personalize those formulas in ways that other people will understand. So obviously there is some creative system but grammar might not be the basis or the nature of language as it is often presupposed to be. How we teach language needs to vary also from language to language. English has an extremely tight word order system. Since word order in English is quite fixed in relation to word order in other languages, we need to focus attention on it. Word order is certainly one important way of showing different meanings. Since English cannot use word order in the same way that Russian or Finnish can, then English texts have to have different mechanisms for modifying meaning. For English meaning mechanisms are certainly closely related to vocabulary. English has a huge and diverse vocabulary and as teachers we have to let our students know that English is to a large extent a vocabulary-based coding system.

7. How and why do we study discourse and what can it tell us? (Jo8)

time, space = context controls

norms = no set rules

grammar = for meaning

culture = mediates and allows for interpretation

roles = are everywhere and constantly changing

Some of the major ideas that we can glean from a careful study of discourse as prescribed in the field of discourse analysis are shown briefly above as well as in the specific quotes I have chosen to include form the final chapter of the DA textbook. As I have already gone over many of the main points shown above I will restrict my comments to those areas not yet covered, which generally includes the last two; culture and roles.

            Culture (and here remember we are talking about Big C and not little c) is a necessary mediator of meaning in a text, or a piece of discourse. Both the creation and interpretation of a text is going to be based on cultural norms. A text reflects either directly or indirectly both the beliefs of the speaker and the norms of the society which uses the language in which she is speaking. A text has to make use of all these ideas. The basic idea is that many of the norms which are presented in the texts, albeit in a somewhat indirect way, are direct representatives of the norms of culture. They represent cultural knowledge and cultural understanding which the speaker presumes the listener is going to share.

            Another aspect of text which often is forgotten is the idea of roles. Any time anyone goes to produce a text they are adopting a certain role. This role does not have to be something that isn't them, but the bottom line is that as we move through our daily routine we adapt to the situation often by creating or choosing a different role. Every time we speak we're playing some sort of role. Students need to understand that they can't always be the same person in many different situations. Adopting different roles requires one to be more flexible in speaking, knowing when to be assertive and went to be passive. This all involves adopting different roles. And of course the roles that we use in speaking need to be based on cultural norms of what is allowed and what is not allowed. Children, for example, are somewhat limited in the roles they are expected to adopt. The same holds true for genders but thankfully this is no longer s pronounced in all cultures.

8.What cause some of the major differences in pragmatic development? (PD8)

In this class and certainly throughout your studies in this program we're constantly having our attention focused on learner variables. In the case of pragmatic competence while the variables might seem the same effect is somewhat different. In short will we really need to do is assess these variables not from an internal perspective but more from an external usage-based perspective. Here are a few of the main variables that have been studied to date.

Age

Age is one of the most studied variables in second language learning and indeed in language learning in general, but little attention has been played to how age actually works in a pragmatic sense. The idea here is that when we are examining age factors in relation to pragmatic competence or pragmatic development or a neurological perspective, it is the general perspective taken in second language acquisition studies that is not necessarily the most helpful. What we need to do is analyze the situations that children need to speak in and what is expected of them in those situations. It should be clear that as we age (get older) the scope of the world that we are expected to engage in and how we are expected to function within those situations change. In general, it can be said that our world expands as we get older and acquire more language. This doesn't mean that children get substantially different input necessarily than adults. It means that children are asked to respond in a very different way to the same input as adults and this is an important point to remember.

Gender

Gender effects are prevalent in all languages. The way in which these gender-based differences in language use manifest themselves, however, vary from language to language, based to a large extent on the norms of the society. Thus, in traditional Japanese society there was a large distinction held between the roles of men and women and this distinction reflects itself in the language that both are expected to use. The same distinction holds true in all human societies but in different ways and on different scales. Again, thinking about age related distinctions in pragmatics is much the same as for gender distinctions in that gender differences in language use are derived from the fact that women are expected to engage in different situations than men as well as behaving differently in the same situation. Since language is the most specific type of human behavior it should therefore not be surprising that genders should behave differently. Exactly how each gender is expected to behave in certain situations varies from culture to culture and language to language.

Motivation

The research on motivation is interesting here for a couple of different reasons. The first basic research finding is that motivation plays an important role in the subsequent language learning process, and this includes pragmatic learning. This of course should not come as a surprise to us. Positive correlations between motivation and success have long been identified. So this is not really the most interesting issue. What is interesting here is how motivation seems to have this effect. What the studies on motivation and pragmatic competence reveal it is that learners with higher motivation seem to be able to notice is cultures in the target language better than people with low motivation. This is easily explained when we think about what motivation basically is. Motivation is thought of as a mental state, a kind of equation that we need to make determining how much energy we want to put into a certain issue or area. The key about motivation this way we see that motivation is indeed a mental state but it is a mental state which has a strong physical effect. Learning requires energy. The more energy we free up to be used in the learning process the more aware we can be. So, motivation gives us more energy. Noticing requires energy. If we choose to make distinction, as I think we should, between noticing an attention focus, then we can say that attention focus requires even more energy. Attention focus requires more energy because it requires processing so that things can be connected inside the brain. When the focus attention on something we are drawing on information that we already have to link to the new information so that the new information can be made instantly comprehensible. All this requires a great deal of energy. Motivation seems to beat heat to getting students to be able to do this. Intrinsic motivation obviously does this in a better way to an extrinsic or instrumental motivation because the latter are very much short-term. A wax and wane depending on the situation and the moment which means they're very unreliable. Every interesting thing that they mentioned in relation to the research on motivation and noticing was that proficiency levels didn't seem to have an effect on what code and couldn't be noticed. This observation taken in an experimental situation would make this question the validity of the input hypothesis. Input may not need to be completely comprehensible to be noticed or even processed. This is an important idea to think about.

Social and psychological distance

We have already studied about social psychological distance and how this effects language learning a general sense within the context of general second language acquisition. In pragmatic development this becomes different. The difference here again is not in the psychological modeling of distance but in the effects of distance. From a pragmatic perspective, if a learner feels a high degree of distance between his or her own language/culture and language/culture of the target society than they are apt to make wrong decisions about that target language society. In addition to this they will often not be motivated to study or actually use the language. For these two reasons distance has a tremendous to affect on whether the learners will actually use the target language or want to use language and of course then ultimately how they're going to use the target language when forced, as often occurs in the classroom situation. Gnerally people think of distance as diminishing as the learner becomes more familiar with the target language and target language culture. The idea behind this is that familiarity makes things seem more normal. This is not always the case. Familiarity, as has been pointed out by Schumann, can often making seem less normal and cause greater social psychological distance (anomie). As teachers we need to be acutely aware of this particularly when we're following a pragmatic approach which forces students to engage the language and the target language culture through the language. Distance needs to be somehow limited from the very get go, and this limit of distance should also increase the possibility of positive transfer. Too much distance often kills transfer and I certainly think this occurs in Korea much to the detriment of Korean English language learners.

9.Why is social identity so important for pragmatic development? (PD8)

We all carry our identities around with us everywhere we go. The matter what role were playing we always had these underlying different roles which we are used playing and can play the conglomeration of which make up the overall state of our identity. As we begin to learn a new language we have to develop new and different roles which correlate more to what we do with that language and how we do them. Should be remembered, however, that even though we have these new roles associated with the new language we still have our own identity of brewing underneath the roles which are floating on the surface of the pot if you remember the drawing I did on the board in class. Our identity, as a subsequent language learner, is never going to be quite the same as native speaker. Our identity is created by our culture or the cultures that we can engage in. when we enter a new cultural setting is almost always the case at some point or another that our identity is going to be in conflict with the identity that that culture is trying to inflict upon us based on their own and different norms. This often leads to problems with language learning and also at language use. We can summarize three different kinds of effects that identity has on pragmatic development.

-It affects how well we notice things in the TL.

-It affects how we evaluate things in the TL.

-It affects the language forms that we use in the TL.

To explain this quickly it should be obvious that our identity will limit what we can and cannot normally notice. Attention focus is based on needs and wants. Our needs and wants are based on what we are interested in, what we like or dislike. There's no way that we are ever going to be able to focus attention on everything that is around us.(Remember when we are being exposed to language we also need to be able to evaluate contextual clues outside of the language as well.) For all the input we get really ever be able to really process a small percentage of it as learners. What we actually due process going to be determined to a large extent by our identities. Because we only process small amounts of the available total data or input we wind up making the wrong evaluations about how different elements of the language are used to create meaning. We come up with the wrong assumptions about how the language actually works. And of course our output is going to be based on these assumptions. This means that our output will probably varies in some ways from that of the native speaker norms which we started off hearing. Because this is a normal process of language learning, there is no way we can avoid identity, then feedback becomes an essential mechanism for dealing with this in the classroom.