Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Discourse Analysis (Spring 2004)

Week 2 - DA Chapter 2; PD Chapter 1 - Answers

1. How does discourse work to link language and the world? (DA)

There's a symbiotic relationship between discourse and the world. Language, and remember were talking about language as a system inside the brain and not a particular piece of language, functions as a kind of link between these two concrete manifestations. The world affects the discourse which people produce because, as will find out by setting pragmatics, discourse must suit the world into which it is created. Thus, discourse is only useful when it functions in the world. So, the world determines the type of discourse which a speaker or writer should produce. Now, the world affects this discourse and a sickly two different ways. Basically, their two different types of context and remember it's important for us at this point to link context to the world. One context is called linguistic context. This is basically the previous pieces of discourse or taxes which have been produced. So a speaker for example needs to take what has previously been sent into account in order to make a discourse fit the world. The other type of context is what is often called situational context and this involves context dealing with the physical world itself aside from discourse. So situational discourse includes things like where you are, we were talking to, what the functions are which are trying to use and many other things. So it is obvious how to the world affects discourse how discourse affects the world should also be obvious at this point. What I've introduced above is a very concrete way of talking about discourse and the world.

There is, however, also a more abstract linked between discourse and the world and it is in this abstract linked that linguistic systems are actually built and changed. The world into which we are born affects the language system which we end up creating inside our head. As a simple example, someone who grows up in a desert is going to end up encapsulating the physical world in a different way than someone who grows up in a rainforest. This is simply because their physical worlds are different. In this way the language in a way reflects both the world and the culture of the speakers. The structure of a person`s language (and they all differ to different degrees) is what gives them options for creating discourse. In this abstract way, the world does affect discourse though language. We will go into more detail about this in the next question.

2. How is thought reflected in language? (DA)

The theory that thought is reflected in language is a highly contested one among linguists. Everyone agrees that language and thought at some point merge in the developmental process but it is not clear the nature of that merge and the extent that merge. For us here we are going to take a more standard middle of the road view of trying to briefly introduce some of the other views in how thought is reflected in language. In order to this we need to go back to the very beginning of language development. The earliest stage of language development and child goes through what I call phase 1. In phase 1 a child basically needs to make sense of the world in one very important way of making sense of the world is by identifying and naming objects in the world. This meaning gets a child power over the objects in the world which they need in order to develop and use a linguistic system. Now it's interesting about this is that not all languages to lose to do behind or encapsulate/codify the physical world in the same way. Different languages in fact notice different things any outward manifestation of this noticing it is lexicalization or naming. It is from this initial naming in phase 1 that language is first built. Language is built-up through a system of categorization. So, once lexical items have been created through the naming process they need to be characterized. Categorization is basely process of taking items and putting them into different groups. For us his line which teachers many of these categories which exist in English should be familiar; general grammatical categories such as now the verb as well as lexical categories like food, animal, inanimate object etc.. The linguistic system uses these categories to create acceptable utterances according to sums of underlying grammatical system which were not going to talk about here. That we understand this we can begin to deal with the concept of linguistic relativity.

Linguistic relativity is an idea which basically claims that thought and language affect each other profoundly. How this happens is simply through attention and noticing. Since languages do not equally or often even similarly codify the world we only notice the things that are part of our language. This is certainly true particularly when we know a little bit about how the brain works. As a person lose to the real world they're constantly bombarded by all sorts of perceptual information coming in from five different circuits engaged through the hypothalamus, a part of the midbrain structure. Certainly there is way too much information coming in for all of it to be processed equally. The things that will be processed are the things that are familiar. Familiarity in the form of priming effects in the brain is extremely important concept for how language works but also how we think. Thus, the basic idea is best in our daily lives where we are busy and constantly bombarded by all this perceptual information we actually can't notice things that are not somehow encoded in our language. By coding things in language we are preserving them and strengthening their patterns of use. This is the main argument in linguistic relativity to the big question is the degree to which this actually happens.

While it is certainly true that language and thought would affect each other, it is certainly not clear whether our language limits our thought all the time. Certainly language will stop us from noticing things in the world which is because of other languages might notice but it doesn't mean we can't notice them if our attention is drawn to them. So, for us his teachers and important lesson to be derived from this is that we have to somehow control our students attention. Many control their tensions that they can actually notice new things which will allow them to pick up elements of, for us, English. The basic idea is that English speakers think in a certain way because of the waiting code the world and the resulting structures of their language. In order for Koreans to speak English and understand spoken English they also need to share in English speaker's thought processes and/or view of the world. I could go on for ever about his but I hope it is clear enough at this point.

3. How do the choices a language user makes reflect their view of the world? (DA)

In this class we're going to take the view that speaking is much more than simply trying to use knowledge to put together grammatically acceptable utterances. In our view may be the more important part is making decisions about how to manipulate language in order to make the precise point which we want and which also happens to fit the situation in which the speaker finds herself or himself. Thus, language production is all about making complicated decisions. Like any decision-making process these decisions can only be made if there is enough background knowledge. If you know absolutely nothing is going to be impossible to make any kind of decision. Ignorance limits us to inactivity. Thus, the discourse that a speaker produces is based on a complicated set of decisions which the speaker makes. The speaker needs to decide not only perform itself but what they actually want to say with that form. 'What they're trying to say' does not refer merely to the semantic content of the utterance but also be underlying pragmatic meaning. This pragmatic meaning is often hidden and exposed to the hearer through particular language uses. I think of the book they were pretty good example of a writer writing in what is clearly a child's style. A reader knows it's a child's style because they know how children speak. Thus, the way that we actually put together our pieces of discourse reveals our intent. Now, for the author of a book the intent is probably known and they spend a lot of time trying to code their intent. For us as speakers this often happens as an automatic process. We reflect our view of the world, for better for worse, often without really knowing that we are doing so.

4. How is silence an important element of texts and how does that relate to us? (DA)

In order to really understand silence and how it functions in discourse we need to take a very different approach to our analysis of discourse and how discourse works. Instead of thinking of silence as something which is interspersed between a flow of discourse, it is probably better to think of discourse is floating on a sea of silence. In this way silence is seen as being a natural and not entirely meaningless context. Discourse is created to alter and fine-tune the basic meaning of silence. Once we have done this we can begin to think of the role of silence plays in between some of the discourse which is created. Remember that in this the discourse is created to create much more specific patterns of meaning than silence would allow therefore there's some sort of residual effect of surrounding discourse and intruding on the silence. As with discourse itself different languages actually a deal with silence in different ways. That is the discourse which is created affects silence differently and in this effect silence actually comes to have different meanings in different languages. A simple example would be like the one I didn't class where I ask a question in English silence usually signifies noncompliance where as in Korean in the same situation silence as a response to the same question signifies compliance. What is really means for us is that not only do we have to get our students to produce discourse by making a series of decisions about how to produce the discourse they also have to think about the effects of discourse and how discourse affects a surrounding silence in that language. Basically at all revolves around building language but as we build language we also build a worldview that goes along with it.

5. What is pragmatics and why is it important? (PD)

We will try to give a simple of definition of pragmatics as possible and also try to differentiate pragmatics from discourse analysis. Basically pragmatics is this study of meaning created in context. This is a large area of study and many linguists avoid pragmatics because they think of it as a kind of undefined dumping ground for everything that doesn't fit into standard linguistic study. For us we are going to try to think about pragmatics is an active process. The pragmatics or knowledge of pragmatics is what allows a speaker to produce a piece of language which is appropriate to the context. This is important for the teaching of English particularly when speaking as a focus because contextual or situational appropriateness is often more important than creating grammatically acceptable utterances. The study of pragmatics incongruence with a discourse analysis approach should allow us to not only form a clear view of how acceptable utterances might actually be produced but hopefully will also allow us to teach our students how to do this in a somewhat effective way.

6. What are some of the questions that a study of pragmatics can help us answer as foreign language teachers? (PD)

The book that we're studying this class is a little bit different to many of the other books on pragmatics being that it focuses on how pragmatics skill develops. This is exactly what we want because this is our main concern. Sibley thinking of questions from a language teacher pointed to the main question we want to come up with it is how do I help my students to be better speakers. The simple answer is by familiarizing them with the processes and pragmatics and discourse analysis will help us do that. Only other questions and we can think of our probably in the list in the book and they referred to both developmental questions and teaching questions referring more specifically to how we actually need to go about doing this. It should be clear to everyone at this point that a pragmatic approach to language is relatively hard to do in a foreign language situation and particularly one in which the target language is not only physically faraway but psychologically and linguistically also quite distant. This makes our attempts that much harder at the same time although more important because without us our students would have no way of knowing these things. In the rest of the class will be slowly trying to answer these questions by thinking concretely about how to create mechanisms where the students can make decisions on their own about how to piece together effective utterances.