Introduction to

Discourse Analysis

Abdelmalek El Kadoussi

Assistant Professor
Department of English Studies
Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences
Ibn Toufail University
Kenitra, Morocco
 Week 1: Introduction to the Course
• This course is an introduction to the basic principles of discourse analysis

• It starts by locating discourse analysis in the large field of linguistics and

language-related studies and explains the importance of knowledge of language
structure (phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics,…) to knowledge of
language use (text, conversation, discourse, ...)

• After defining basic concepts like discourse, discourse analysis, context, genre,
organization, coherence, discourse community, it discusses how language varies
across subject areas, social contexts, cultures, communities, communicative
purposes, social roles, and identities of participants.

• Discourse and ideology helps the students to explore how discourse is used by
structures of power and domination in different contexts (political discourse,
media discourse, …)
Course Outline
• Week 1: Discourse analysis and linguistics
• Week 2: Defining discourse and discourse analysis (DA)
• Week 3: Text and context
• Week 4: Discourse and knowledge
• Week 5: Discourse and society: gender and identity
• Week 6: Discourse and pragmatics (1)
• Week 7: Discourse and pragmatics (2)
• Week 8: Discourse and genres
• Week 9: Discourse and conversation
• Week 10: Critical discourse analysis (1)
• Week 11: Critical discourse analysis (2)
• Week 12: Discourse analysis and research
 Bibliography
• Primary resource:
• Paltridge, B. (2012) Discourse Analysis: An Introduction. Bloomsbury Academic

• Secondary resources (available through Google search):

• Van Dijk, T. (2008) Discourse and Context: A Socio-cognitive Approach.
Cambridge University Press
• Van Dijk, T. (2014) Discourse and Knowledge: A Socio-cognitive Approach .
Cambridge University Press

• Visual resources (available through Youtube search):

• Obama’s victory speech 2008
• Linguistic analysis of Trump’s discourse
• Discourse and Knowledge (T. V. Dijk 2013)
• Discourse and Ideology (T. V. Dijk 2013)
 Discourse Analysis in Linguistics
• Linguistics is the systematic study of language

Conversati
on analysis
Phonetics Language

phonology Sociolinguis
Structure Use tics
Morphology
Historical
linguistics
Syntax
Psycholingu
Semantics istics

Discourse
Pragmatics
analysis
Basics of Linguistics for Discourse Analysis
• Levels of language analysis and their discursive implications
(Marcus Weaver-Hightower)
• Phonology (the sound system of language) => pronunciation,
dialects, stress, rhythm, intonation, emphasis,… imply meanings
about status, knowledge, psychology, ...
• Morphology (how words and meaningful word parts are
constructed in a language) the use of suffixes or prefixes may
imply specific meanings like: (unimportant/trivial, anti-
communist/capitalist, anti-war/pacifist, ....)
• Syntax (how stces are constructed in a lanuguage) there are lots
of discourses in sentence types (simple, compound, ) questions,
conditionals, the passive, .... Consider for example the difference
between: ‘She killed him’ and ‘He was killed’
Basics of linguistics for discourse analysis (cntd)
• Semantics (how meaning is made in a language) a word like
‘fast’ has different meanings and functions (verb, noun, adj.,
adv., ...) depending on its linguistic context (the words
surrounding it in a text)
• Pragmatics (how meanings in a language are determined by
social/situational context) participants, setting, formality,
occasion. Consider the meanings of: ‘You are fired’ => an
act not a statement; and ‘he is fired’ => a simple descriptive
statement. ‘Got a lighter?’ is not a question but a request,...
• Discourse (lanaguage use beyound the individual sentence)
how context fashions language and how text –spoken or
written- is understood in relation to its context.
 Morphology

The linguistic level of discourse

Phonolog
y

Discour
se
What is Discourse?
• Two main definitions corresponding to two directions in
discourse analysis
1. Discourse with capital ‘D’ refers to “a system of meaning or
ideology that is propagated through everyday language use”
• Eg. Marriage is between a man and a woman
• What ideology permeates this statement? (heteronormativity
and monogamy)
• Ideology is the way we think the world should be/ not how we
think it is
2. discourse with small ‘d’ refers to recordings are instances of
communicative action through language
• It is language (text or talk) beyond the sentence level
Week 2. What is discourse analysis
• The term discourse analysis was first introduced by Zellig Harris (1952) as the
examination of language beyond the level of the sentence and the relationship
between linguistic and non-linguistic behavior.

• Discourse analysis examines patterns of language across texts and considers

the relationship between language and the social and cultural contexts in
which it is used.

• Discourse analysis also considers the ways that the use of language presents
different views and understandings of the world.

• It examines how the use of language is influenced by relationships between

participants as well as the effects the use of language has upon social
identities and relations.

• It also considers how views of the world, and identities, are constructed
through the use of discourse. (Paltridge 2012)
What is Discourse Analysis?
• It is the analysis of language in use.

• Discourse analysis considers the relationship between language

and the contexts in which it is used and is concerned with the
description and analysis of both spoken and written
interactions.

• Its primary purpose, as Chimombo and Roseberry (1998) argue,

is to provide a deeper understanding and appreciation of texts
and how they become meaningful to their users.

• Discourse analysis takes us beyond description to explanation

and helps us understand the ‘rules of the game’ that language
users draw on in their everyday spoken and written interactions.
Context and Discourse Analysis
• Context is a subjective construct that accounts not only for
the uniqueness of each text but also for the common ground and
shared representations that language users draw on to
communicate with each other (van Dijk 2008)

• ‘[i]t is not the social situation that influences (or is influenced

by) discourse, but the way the participants define the
situation in which the discourse occurs (van Dijk 2008: x).

• In his view, contexts are not objective conditions but rather

(inter)subjective constructs that are constantly updated by
participants in their interactions with each other as members
of groups or communities.
 Language and context
• Context of situation and context of culture are fundamental to
understand meaning of language

• In order to understand the meaning of what a person says or

writes we need to know something about the situational and
cultural context in which it is located.

• Language should be studied in naturally occurring contexts

(authentic not made-up) and that the analysis of meaning should
be its key focus (Carter 2004).

• Eg. Notice how the sentence “the door is open” can bear
different meanings in different contexts: to explain, to inform, to
justify, to complain, to make a request,…
The discourse structure of texts
• Discourse analysts are also interested in how people organize what they say
in the sense of what they typically say first, and what they say next and so on
in a conversation or in a piece of writing.
• Discourse structure of texts varies across cultures (eg. Letter/email writing …)

• Mitchell (1957) was one the first researchers to examine the discourse
structure of texts. He looked at the ways in which people order what they
say in buying and selling interactions.

• He looked at the overall structure of these kinds of texts, introducing the

notion of stages into discourse analysis; that is the steps that language users
go through as they carry out particular interactions.

• Mitchell discusses how language is used as, what he calls, co-operative action
and how the meaning of language lies in the situational context in which it is
used and in the context of the text as a whole.
 Cultural ways of speaking and writing
• Different cultures often have different ways of doing things through language.

• This is something that was explored by Hymes (1964) through the notion of the
ethnography of communication.

• He considered aspects of speech events such as who is speaking to whom, about

what, for what purpose, where and when, and how these impact on how we say
and do things in culture-specific settings.
•
• There are culturally different ways of doing things with language in different cultures.

• The sequence of events we go through may be the same in different cultures, but the
ways of using language in these events and other sorts of non-linguistic behavior may
differ. For example:

• Speaking: compare the use of expressions like: please, sorry, excuse me, thank you, …
in Moroccan and English speech situations
• Writing: Compare a Moroccan letter to an English one
Different views of discourse analysis
• 2 most recurrent views: textually oriented and socially based
• How is the discourse of Obama’s victory speech analyzed
textually? (video)
• David Crystal (2008) notes the use of ‘parallelism’ and ‘the rule of
three’, where he repeats certain grammatical structures (eg ‘who
clauses’) for rhetorical effect:
• “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place
where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our
founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our
democracy, tonight is your answer. “ (CNNPolitics.com 2008)
• Obama also uses lists of pairs in his speech to rhetorical effect, as
in:
• “It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat
and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American,
gay, straight, disabled and not disabled.” (ibid.)
Discourse analysis as socially oriented
• How is Obama’s victory speech analyzed socially?

• Williams (2009) discusses Obama’s speech within the context of the

political (and economic) moment of his victory, highlighting the
central message of optimism in his speech captured in the repetition
of the refrain ‘Yes, we can’.

• Higgins (2008) also discusses how this ‘Yes, we can’ relates,

intertextually, to the call-and- response preaching of the American
church and the power that effective preachers have on their
congregations.

• Obama’s reference in his speech to previous leaders, thus, draws on

the social stock of knowledge (Luckmann 2009) he shares with his
audience and their social and cultural histories.
Views of discourse analysis in brief
• Discourse analysis is a view of language at the level of text.

• Discourse analysis is also a view of language in use; that is, how

people achieve certain communicative goals through the use of
language, perform certain communicative acts, participate in
certain communicative events and present themselves to others.

• Discourse analysis considers how people manage interactions

with each other, how people communicate within particular groups
and societies as well as how they communicate with other groups,
and with other cultures.

• It also focuses on how people do things beyond language, and

the ideas and beliefs that they communicate as they use language.
(Paltridge 2012:8)
Discourse as the social construction of reality
• The view of discourse as the social construction of reality sees texts as
communicative units which are embedded in social and cultural practices.

• The texts we write and speak both shape and are shaped by these practices.
• Discourse, then, is both shaped by the world as well as shaping the world.
• Discourse is shaped by language as well as shaping language.
• It is shaped by the people who use the language as well as shaping the language
that people use.

• Discourse is shaped, as well, by the discourse that has preceded it and that which
might follow it.
• Discourse is also shaped by the medium in which it occurs as well as it shapes the
possibilities for that medium.

• The purpose of the text also influences the discourse. Discourse also shapes the
range of possible purposes of texts (Johnstone 2007).

Discour
Reality Dialectic
se
Reflect
• Based on textual-oriented analysis and social-
oriented analysis of the discourse of both Obama and
Trump, what conclusions do you draw?
Remember
• Cameron and Kulick say:
• “Words in isolation are not the issue. It is in discourse – the
use of language in specific contexts – that words acquire
meaning. We cannot understand the significance of any word
unless we attend closely to its relationship to other words and
to the discourse (indeed, the competing discourses) in which
words are always embedded. And we must bear in mind that
discourse shifts and changes constantly, which is why
arguments about words and their meanings are never settled
once and for all.” (2003: 29)
Discourse and socially situated identities

• When we speak or write we use more than just language to

display who we are, and how we want people to see us.

• The way we dress, the gestures we use and the way/s we act
and interact also influence how we display social identity.

• Gee (2011) argues, the ways we make visible and recognizable

who we are and what we are doing always involves more than
just language.

• It involves acting, interacting and thinking in certain ways.

 Discourse and identity
• Discourses, then, involve the socially situated identities that we enact and
recognize in the different settings that we interact in.

• They include culture-specific ways of performing and culture-specific

ways of recognizing identities and activities.

• Discourses also include the different styles of language that we use to

enact and recognize these identities; that is, different social languages (Gee
1996).

• Discourses also involve characteristic ways of acting, interacting and

feeling, and characteristic ways of showing emotion, gesturing, dressing
and posturing.

• They also involve particular ways of valuing, thinking, believing,

knowing, speaking and listening, reading and writing (Gee 2011).
Discourse and performance

Gee explains:
• Discourse is a ‘dance’ that exists in the abstract as a
coordinated pattern of words, deeds, values, beliefs,
symbols, tools, objects, times, and places in the here and
now as a performance that is recognizable as just such a
coordination. Like a dance, the performance here and now is
never exactly the same. It all comes down, often, to what the
‘masters of the dance’ will allow to be recognized or will be
forced to recognize as a possible instantiation of the dance.
(36)
 Performativity
• The notion of performativity derives from speech act theory and the
work of the linguistic philosopher Austin.
• It is based on the view that in saying something, we do it (Cameron
and Kulick 2003).
• That is, we bring states of affairs into being as a result of what we
say and what we do.
• Examples: 1. I promise ( once pronounced, I have committed myself
to doing something)
• 2. I now pronounce you husband and wife ( once
pronounced, the couple ‘become’ husband and wife).
• Performance, thus, brings the social world into being (Bucholtz and
Hall 2003).
• Social identities, then, are not pre-given, but are formed in the use
of language and the various other ways we display who we are,
what we think, value and feel, etc.
Discourse and intertextuality

• All texts, whether they are spoken or written, make their

meanings against the background of other texts and things that
have been said on other occasions (Lemke 1992).
• Texts may more or less implicitly or explicitly cite other texts;
they may refer to other texts, or they may allude to other past, or
future, texts.
• We thus ‘make sense of every word, every utterance, or act
against the background of (some) other words, utterances, acts of
a similar kind’ (Lemke 1995: 23).
• All texts are, thus, in an intertextual relationship with other
texts.
Week 3: Discourse and Knowledge (video available
on Youtube: T. V. Dijk. A lecture at Saint Petersburg University, 2013)

• Knowledge of the world comes from three sources:

1. Experience and perception
2. Discourse (talk, text, image, media,..)
3. Inference (interpretation of both experience and discourse)
• In order to produce and understand discourse, we need a vast
amounts of knowledge (about the world and about discourse
principles)
• Texts are like icebergs
 What is knowledge?
• Knowledge is belief in justified truth
• The definition of knowledge is context specific (historical,
cultural, communicative,…
• Eg. What was true in Middle ages is no longer true nowadays
• What is true for Muslims is not true for Christians or
atheists
• => “Knowledge is beliefs justified by the knowledge criteria
of an epistemic community”
 Discourse and psychology
• An important notion in the relationship between discourse and
psychology in ‘mental models’
• A mental model is a subjective representation of world events
in our epistemic memory
• What we communicate is mental models
• In order to understand a text we need to construe a mental
model of (visualize) the situation the text is about
• A text is coherent only when all the participants in the
communicative situation are able to construe a mental model of
that discourse
• Coherence is not inherent in texts (syntax, semantics,…) but
interpreted out of subjective inferences about the world, context
and what the text is about
• => Subjective mental models are based on our knowledge of
the world
The social cognition/psychology of discourse
• How we share knowledge and ideologies within and across
epistemic communities (linguistic, epistemic, ideological,
geographic,…)
• What kind of interactions and conversations take place
• How people acquire, share and normalize knowledge about the
world
• In terms of what we share, we have to distinguish b/n:
1.Knowledge as justified true belief shared in an epistemic
community and
2.Ideologies as not justifies true beliefs shared between groups
(socialists, feminists, environmentalists,...)
• The sociology of knowledge has to do with ‘epistemic institutions’
(schools, universities, ...) whose aims are to produce, impart,
transmit, normalize, test, and reproduce knowledgeshared in
epistemic communities
 Common Grounds
• ‘Common grounds’ in interactions are important for
producing and understanding discourse
• Common grounds are presuppositions and implications on
‘what I think you know’
• How common grounds are calculated depends on 5 things:
1.People know because they belong to the same epistemic
community
2.Past communication: ‘what I told you yesterday’
3.What happens ‘here’ in the context of the conversation
4.What we are talking about
5.What I just said in the last sentence
Week 4: Discourse and Society: Gender and
Identity

• Discourse community
• Language as social and local
• Discourse and gender
• Discourse and identity
• Identity and casual conversation
• Discourse and ideology
• How to explore ideology in a text
• Framing and ideology
Discourse community
• A discourse community is a group of people who share
particular ways of communicating with each other.
• They generally have shared goals and may have shared values
and beliefs.
• A person is often a member of more than one discourse
community.
• As a university student, you may be a member of a sport club, a
volunteer organization , a political group, ...
• Do you have the same communicative styles, goals, values …
within different groups?
• There can be discourse communities within discourse
communities (university => departments + disciplines + classes
+ cafeteria + athletic club + …)
Three types of language users (Devitt 2004)
1. Communities ( with people we are with most of the time
like classmates, colleagues, …),
2. Collectives (occasional meetings for specific purposes
like voluntary initiatives, campaign, ..)
3. Networks (with people we never meet with like through
social networks)

• Speakers often have a repertoire of social identities and

discourse community memberships.
Example: a call center speech community
• All members need to display similar discourse features
including vocabulary, terminology, voice, pace, pitch,
sincerity, feedback, ….

• All of them need to have similar goals: to sell a product, to

provide a service, ....

• A member of a call center community may be a member of

other discourse communities (clubs, study groups, sports
groups, research team, ....)
Language as social and local

• As social beings, we use different languages in different social

and local situations (home, work, café, leisure,…)

• Social factors that determine the choice of language:

1. Who we are
2. Who we are speaking to
3. The social context of the interaction,
4. The topic,
5. Function and goal of the interaction,
6. Social distance between speakers,
7. Formality of the setting
8. Status of each of the speakers (Holmes 2008).
 Discourse and gender
• Sex is biological/natural, but gender is a social construct
• We are taught overtly or tacitly how to speak, dress, act, behave and
perform as males or females
• Simone de Beauvoir famously said: ‘One is not born, but rather
becomes a woman’.
• Performativity is based on the view that in saying something, we do, or
‘become’ it.
• People perform particular identities through their use of language
and other ways of expressing themselves in their interactions with each
other.
• Mostly, this is done unconsciously as we ‘repeat acts’ such as gestures,
movement and ways of using language that signify a particular identity.
• These acts are not, however, natural nor are they part of the essential
attributes of a person. They are part of what people acquire/learn in their
interactions with each other
Discourse and gender
• Gendered identities are ‘reaffirmed and publicly displayed by
repeatedly performing particular acts’ (Cameron 1999: 444) in
accordance with historically and socially constructed cultural
norms which define femininity.
• Gender identity is a complex construction. All levels of language
and discourse, as well as aspects of nonverbal and other kinds of
behavior are involved in doing gender (Butler 2004).
• Gender is only one part of a person’s social identity. It often
interacts with other factors such as social class, age and ethnicity
(Eckert 2011).
• Discussion: How do females and males differ in discourse (what do
they often talk about? What discursive patterns/structures do they
follow? How much talk do they produce? ….)
• Improvisation: casual conversation (a group of girls vs a group of
boys)
Reflect
• Compare boys’ and girls’ talks
• What language features (topics of discussion,
structure, coherence, talk ratio, participation, .
turn taking, overlapping, body-language,
involvement, …) characterize each?
Discourse and identity
• A person may have a number of identities, each of which is more
important at different points in time.
• They may have an identity as a woman, a mother, a partner and
an office worker, for example.
• The ways in which people display their identities includes the
way they use language and the way they interact with people.
• Identities are not natural, they are socially constructed, in large
part, through the use of discourse.
• Identity, further, is not something that is fixed and remains the
same throughout a person’s life. It is something that is constantly
constructed and re-constructed as people interact with each
other.
• Identity is a two-way construction. We perform it (through
discourse) and we need others to recognize it.
Discourse and identity
• It is through language, or rather through discourse, that identity
is principally forged (Swann et al. 2004)
• The information a person produces about oneself depends on the
context, occasion and purpose of the discourse.
• Eg. A group of male US college students construct heterosexual
masculinity through the talk that they engage in while watching
TV. (Cameron 1999)
• Identity needs not only to be performed but also to be recognized
by others.
• Blommaert (2005) says: ‘A lot of what happens in the field of
identity is done by others, not by oneself’.
• Place is an important shaper of discourse and identity.
• People speak both in and from a place. Place defines people,
both in their eyes and in the eyes of others (Blommaert 2005)
 Discourse and identity
• Identity operates as a repertoire of styles, or ways of doing
things that are associated with culturally recognized social
types’(Bucholtz 2010)
• Questions for discussion:
1. What language and discursive features (words, images, emoticons,
…) do you use on the internet in different places/spaces/contexts
(chatrooms, group discussions,…)?
2. What kind of identity aspects do you perform?
3. Do you keep or change essential characteristics like name, age,
look, occupation, ethnicity, race, interests,....
4. How do you know that your interlocutors recognize your
performed or authentic identity?
Identity and casual conversation
• Despite its sometimes aimless appearance and apparently trivial
content, casual conversation is, in fact, a highly structured,
functionally motivated, semantic activity.

• Casual conversation is a critical linguistic site for understanding

important dimensions of our social identity as gender, sexuality,
social class membership, ethnicity, and subcultural and group
affiliations. (Eggins and Slade 1997)

• Casual conversation is the type of talk in which people feel most

relaxed, most spontaneous and most themselves, ‘yet casual
conversation is a critical site for the social construction of
reality’.
 Identity and casual conversation
• The way in which language is used in casual conversations, like
all spoken interactions, is influenced by:
1. The relationship between the people speaking,
2. The frequency with which they come into contact with each
other,
3. The degree of involvement they have with each other and
4. Their sense of affiliation for each other. (Paltridge 2012: 26)

• When we speak (or write) we are telling other people ‘something

about ourselves’ (Cameron 2001: 170) and relating to people in
particular ways.

• There are different ways of doing identity with different people

in different situations.
Questions for discussion
• (1)  What discourse communities are you a member of? Do
any of these communities overlap? How similar, or different,
is your use of language in each these communities? Complete
the chart:
Discourse community Use of language
 Questions for discussion
• (2)  What factors influence the way you use language when you speak? For
example, is your use of language influenced by your ethnic identity, your
level (or kind) of education, your age, your gender or your occupation? How
do you think your use of language reflects these sorts of categories?
Complete the chart below as you carry out your discussion.

Factor Use of language

Education
Age
Gender
Social class
Discourse and ideology
• Texts (spoken or written) are never ideology-free nor are they
objective. Nor can they be separated from the social realities and
processes they contribute to maintaining. Threadgold (1989)

• For Threadgold, spoken and written genres are not just linguistic
categories but ‘among the very processes by which dominant
ideologies are reproduced, transmitted and potentially
changed’ (107).

• In her view, a spoken or written genre is never just the

reformulation of a linguistic model, but always the performance
of a politically and historically significant process.
How to explore ideology in a text?
• Looking at textual features in the text
• Interpretation of the analysis
• Relating the text to other texts
• Considering how the text is framed (Gee 2004, Blommaert
2005)
• Framing is about how the content of the text is presented, and
the sort of angle or perspective the writer, or speaker, is taking
• Foregrounding: what aspects are emphasized through
repetition and restatement (Huckin 1997)
• Backgrounding: what aspects are played down and relegated
(Ibid)
• Unpacking particular biases and
• Detecting ideological presuppositions
Framing
• Critical framing of texts can help us unpack some of the assumptions
underlying the use of language and what the text is aiming to do where we
stand back and look at them in relation to their social and cultural values.
• It also helps remind us of the importance of considering the social, political
underpinnings of spoken and written discourse, as well as helping us unpack
the ideological thrust of seemingly ordinary, everyday genres (Johns 2006).
• An area of research where this has been taken up in particular is in the
examination of media discourse.
• Question for discussion:
• In small groups, choose one event or issue and discuss how it is framed,
described and packaged; specify the choice of words, style and metaphors;
and identify the techniques used to transmit a specific representation.
• Choose from the following: demonstrations, a killing, the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, military intervention in a country, ‘war on terror’, ‘terrorism’,….
Question for discussion:

• In small groups, choose one event or issue and

discuss how it is framed, described and packaged;
specify the choice of words, style and metaphors; and
identify the techniques used to transmit a specific
representation.
• Choose from the following: Coronavirus , the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict, ‘war on terror’, ….