discourse analysis module

7/27/2019 Discourse Analysis Module

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UNIT I

PRAGMATICS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Pragmatics is a relatively new branch of linguistics. It appeared to satisfy the

need of dealing with linguistic problems that could not be explained by the alreadyexisting linguistic branches. Since unsolved problems were usually thrown up by

linguists in a sort of wastebasket, soon they become conscious that there were more

problems waiting for answers in the wastebasket than problems solved. As a

consequence, many of them began looking for and trying out different ways forfinding answers. In the following paragraphs well examine the field of study of some

of the traditional branches of linguistics and give some examples that could not be

explained by them.

Syntax studies how words combine to form sentences and the rules thatgovern the formation of those sentences. In this kind of study non-reference is madeto the users of the language or to the communicative functions that those words or

sentences are performing. For example, syntax explains us that in English adjectives

precede nouns as in a nice book and that any sentence must have a subject as in Itwas a nice book, but it can not explain why the speakers can eventually use and

understand constructions such as a childish adult where there seems to be a

contradiction between the meaning of the noun being qualified and the quality

attributed to it by the adjective, or Hungry?where the subject is omitted.

One would expect to find the solution or explanation of the examples

mentioned above in Semanticswhich studies meaning. It deals with the relations thatexist between words and the objects, person or events for which they stand for, with

the different kinds of meaning that a word or expression can have (connotation,

denotation) or with the semantic structure of the sentence, but again without anyreference to the users of the language or the communicative functions performed by

those words or expressions. However, the example Achildish adultalso represents

a problem for semantics because, even though it can explain the different features or

characteristics that conventionally define the word childish (relating to or typical ofa child) and the connotation it usually has, it can not explain which of those features

are being attributed to the word adultwhich it is qualifying (the adult behave like a

child but, in what sense? does he speak like a child, think like a child or cry easily

like a child). If one were to answer all these questions satisfactorily, it would benecessary to find the information about the speaker and the situation in which the

expression was uttered. Anyhow, since semantics does not deal with the user of thelanguage or the communicative situation, these kinds of problems were also thrown

up into the wastebasket.


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As the wastebasket became full of the many cases that remained unexplainedby syntax or semantics, it was necessary to use the multidisciplinary combination of

the information provided by different sciences. This is how pragmatic was created.

Pragmaticsis the branch of linguistics that deals with the study of the use oflanguage in communication, particularly the relationships that hold between

sentences and the contexts and situations in which they are used. Some of theproblems studied by pragmatics are: how the interpretation and use of utterances

depend on our knowledge of the real word, how speakers use and understand speech

acts and how the structure of the sentences that we produce during communication isinfluenced by the relationship between the speaker and the hearer.

PRAGMATICS

SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Who speaks?, About what?, To Whom?,When?, Where? and with which purpose?

ETHNOGRAPHY

Cultural information

about the speech

community

LINGUISTICS

Description of what

people say or write

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

How people learn, understandand produce language


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CASES FOR ANALYSIS: analyze the following cases and propose in order to reachan agreement about the information necessary for giving them a convenient

treatment:

1.

Alice speaks English very well in informal situations; the problem is thatwhen she is supposed to speak formally she keeps using colloquial

expressions that make her look uneducated.

2. I think Im quite competent in speaking and reading in English but Im a

terrible writer.

3. My teacher is very good at literature; the problem is in any situation where

she speaks or writes she sounds like a poet.

4. My students are tired of learning English grammar; they say that what they

really want to learn is English.

5. I dont know how to explain my students why American and Venezuelan

jokes are different.

6. Henry cant understand Shakespeare even though he is very good at English

and reads The New York Times everyday.

7. Lauras students are very good at answering syntactic exercises but theirwriting is terrible.

8. Mary cant understand why she failed her reading comprehension test sinceshe knew all the words included in the text.

9. I dont have any problem in understanding the texts I write but my teachersays she cant understand them.

10. I explained my mother as clear as possible the problems I had answering myphonetics test; however se couldnt understand anything.

11. When Bob came home, he told his wife Josefa that he was tired to death and

she took him to the hospital.

12. How can I explain my students the difference between small and little. I

already tried using grammar information but it didnt worked.


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DISCOURSE, CO-TEXT AND CONTEXT: a hierarquical relation

Many types of linguistic analysis use invented sentences. Even though that

might be are sometimes necessary or justified, it is artificial because they leave out

of consideration the language that we actually use in real communication. Ourmessages may be composed by one or more well formed grammatical sentences but

can also have grammatical mistakes. This is because even though we normally use

grammar rules as resources for communicating meanings, what really matters in acommunicative situation is not that our expressions conform to the rules of grammar,

but that they communicate messages that are recognized by their receivers as

coherent discourse. Discourse is so defined as the use of language in realcommunication, within a specific context, with a given intention and with a

determined audience in mind. Lets analyze the following example:

A-Looks good, doesnt it? B- Hungry?

This is an exchange that can be characterized as having a lot of mistakes

from the linguistic point of view, but it is coherent and understandable when we areinformed that it was hold between two guests at a dinner, a woman (A) and a man

(B), while looking at the food. That is, those speakers are no trying to conformstrictly to grammar rules but using them as resources for conveying the meaning that

they want to express. This example illustrates how important the contextualinformation is in understanding discourse.

CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION RELEVANT FOR DISCOURSE

UNDERSTANDING

Speakers characteristics: their sex, age or nationality

Speakers relationship: father and son, just friends, two politicians, schoolssecretary and schools principal

Social context: a party, a class, a TV interview, a restaurant

The channel: speech, writing, signing, smoke signs

The communicative purpose: to entertain, to teach, to defend ones ideas

The speakers knowledge about the topic: totally unknown, very familiar

CO-TEXTCONTEXTDICOURSE


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In any piece of authentic discourse words, phrases, sentences or paragraphsco-occur with other units of the same type that modify or compliment their meaning.

Those units form what is called co-textand are very important in the understanding

and creation of meaning. Consider the following examples where the meaning of the

underlined words depend on its co-text:

- What they got from the store was a can- Can you get a can from the store

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Grammar refers to the rules used in a language to form grammatical units such

as clauses, phrases, and sentences, whereas discourse analysis is the study of howsentences in spoken or written language are used to form larger meaningful units such

as paragraphs, conversations or interviews in real communicative situations. Some of

the problems studied by discourse analysis are:

What are the resources used to achieve coherence in a discourse,

How the choice of articles, pronouns, and tenses affects the structure ormeaning of the discourse,

The relationship between the utterances in a discourse or the moves made byspeakers to introduce a new topic, change the topic or assert a higher role

relationship to the other participants.

The information gathered through discourse analysis is very important for

language teaching, since it serves as a guide for:

The selection of the content, the texts, the examples and the activities to beincluded in the classroom in order to develop the communicative competence

of the students.

The prediction of students possible difficulties for understanding orproducing different types of discourse.

The demonstration that it is the messages function which determines its

form

Putting the emphasis of English teaching on the communicative function of

the language rather than its form


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UNIT II

THE THEORY OF SPEECH ACTS

We usually think that what people say or write is the same as what they mean but

most of the time what happens is the opposite. Whatever the language is people tendnot to speak literally all the time. This is a universal phenomenon, which requires

from speakers or readers an effort to guess what their interlocutors messages are.

The frequency with which the lack of coincidence between what is said andwhat is meant occurs, the amassing number of times that we spend guessing our

interlocutors messages or reading between lines during our speaking or reading

hours in our lives, has make us unconscious of this phenomenon. As a consequence,we tend to believe that what we understand is exactly the same as what we listen or

read.

Another consequence of this belief in the field of linguistics has been the

excessive attention that linguists have put on the study of language form ignoring the

study on how those forms function in real communicative situations. The explanationbetween language form and language function has become one of the main objectives

of pragmatics and one of the central theories for attaining this objective is The

Speech act Theory which well study in this unit after we analyze the differences

between four basic concepts: correctness and appropriateness and signification andvalue.

CORRECTNESSAND APPROPRIATENESS

Correctness [ ] is a concept that refers to the correct use ofgrammar rules in language without considering any other fact from the context or

situation in which that language is used. Appropriateness [ ], on

the contrary, refers to whether what we say or write is appropriate according to thecontext where the communication is taking place taking also into consideration the

respect for the language rules involved.

It is obvious that knowing a language implies having the ability or theintuition to recognize whether the sentences we are exposed to are correct or not;

also for using a language we need the ability or knowledge to construct andunderstand grammatically correct sentences; otherwise we would not be understood

by those who do know that language. However, it is important to recognize that using


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grammar rules is not the only ability we need in order to acquire communicativecompetence in using a language. We also need to develop the ability to judge,

recognize and use words, expressions, phrases, sentences and utterances which are

contextually appropriate.

The following examples illustrate different situations in which the concepts of

correctness and appropriateness operate in communication. Analyze them andexplain each applying both concepts. Then create similar examples of your own.

CASE 1 CASE 2 CASE 3

*a. How is you? a. How are you? a. How are you?

*b. Me eated late b. Im sitting on a chair, my b. Not bad, and

hands are resting on my you?legs and

There is another pair of concepts which are related to the concepts ofcorrectness and appropriateness and have equal importance but are more semantic.

They are the concepts of signification and value.

SIGNIFICATION AND VALUE: two different kinds of meanings

Widdowson (1978) uses the term Signification to refer to the meaning that

words, phrases, sentences or expressions take when they are used in isolation, that is

decontextualized, and Value to design the meaning that those words, phrases,

sentences or expressions adopt when they are used in context. That contextualmeaning can change as the context changes which implies that the meaning they can

adopt is infinite.

The following examples illustrate different situations in which the concepts of

signification and value operate in communication. Analyze them and explain eachapplying both concepts. Then create similar examples of your own.

CASE 1 CASE 2 CASE 3

a. Lets go dancing a. What time is it? a. May I come in?

b. Its too late b. Itstoo late b. Its too late

The previous examples illustrate that if we want to understand language used

for communication rather than only language used for illustrating grammar rules, we

have to go far beyond the linguistic analysis of what is said or written. We need to


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take into consideration all the information relevant for understanding the contextualvalue of what we listen or read.

The understanding of that need is the basis of the theory of speech act. This is

a very important theory since it is the theoretical foundation of the communicativecompetence concept and the communicative and functional approach for language

teaching.

THE SPEECH ACT THEORY

Nowadays it is understood that discourse is a social phenomena rather than a

linguistic one and that communicative behavior is constructed, acquired and learnt in

social interactions. So, it is widely accepted that it is only by analyzing language usein natural contexts that we can draw reliable conclusions about what is grammatically

possible, feasible, appropriate and really used in a language.

The theory of speech acts explains how communication functions in social

interactions, how is it that we come to understand what people mean when they say

something. Before this theory the communicative process was considered as a linearprocess made up by three components:

THE L INEAR COMMMUNICATION MODEL

THE THE THE

SPEAKER MESSAGE LISTENER

That linear model has been strongly criticized since it oversimplifies the

communication process by implying that every massage said or written by thespeaker/writer would be easily and perfectly understood by the listener/reader.

Everybody knows that that is not always the case in many communicative

interactions where frequently misunderstandings occur due to many different reasons.

A more realistic and illuminating model is presented in the theory of speech

acts which was created by Austin (1962) and Searle (1981). This theory states that

anything that we say or write constitutes an speech act and that in every speech actwe utter, three different acts are simultaneously performed: a locutionary, an

illocutionary and a perlocutionary act.


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I LLOCUTIONARY ACT

PERLOCUTIONARY ACT

The locutionary actis the act of saying or writing something in a language.

That llocutionary act should be constructed in conformity to the rules of the language

that we are speaking if we want to be understood; otherwise, the act would not be areal locutionary act but just a noise without any meaning. That act has a signification

or a literal meaning which is conveyed by its particular syntactic structure and

wording; it can be analyzed syntactically, morphologically, phonetically, etc. For

example a locution such as I dont have any moneycan be understood as someonegiving information about his/her financial actual condition, it can be classified as an

active and simple negative sentence conjugated in the present tense. But if

communication is to be successful we need to know more than that; we need to gobeyond its signification; we need to know the contextual illocutionary value of that

illocution.

The Illocutionary Act is the intention that we have when we utter something,

the real value that it takes because of the context where it is uttered. The locutionary

act I dont have any moneycan be understood in different ways depending on the

context where it was produced. For example, it could be taken 1) as a fathersnegative answer to his sons request for money, 2) as a boyfriends excuse to his

girlfriends invitation to the movie or, 3) as someone asking a classmate to pay herbreakfast at the school cafeteria. This illustrates how the same language form canacquire different interpretations and how context makes this possible and helps to

disambiguate the value of the speakers illocution or intention.

The Perlocutionary Actis the effect produced in the listener or reader when

they listen or read a locutionary act. The three possible illocutionary forces given to

the locution I dont have any moneyin our example could produce different effectsin the listener. In case 1, the son could get angry with his father, could try to get the

money he needs from his mother or could just decide not to do what he had planned

with the money he was asking for. In case 2, the girl could forget about going to the

movie, decide going for a walk instead or offer his boyfriend to pay the ticket forhim. Similarly, the third case could give rise to different possibilities.

It is very important to understand that what this theory proposes is theexistence of three separate acts existing simultaneouslyin every piece of language

that we produce no matter what its extension, form or topic are. Every act of language

is then a speech act involving three different acts and, as such, every act of language

LOCUTIONARY

ACT


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can be analyzed from those three different perspectives. This theory is then muchmore realistic than the traditional linear model of communication since it permits us

to explain more acceptably the difficulties that typically occur in natural

communication at different levels: at the locutionary level which is the message level,

at the illocutionary level which is the speakers level and at the perlocutionary level,which is the listeners level, or at a combination of some or all of them.

THE NON LINEAR COMMMUNICATION MODEL

LOCUTION ILLOCUTION PERLOCUTION

SPEAKER CONTEX MESSAJE CONTEXT LISTENER

CLASSIFICATION OF ILLOCUTIONARY SPEECH ACTS

For the understanding and production of coherent discourse it is necessary to

infer the function of what is said. This is done by considering the form of what has

been said or written and the contextual information relevant for its understanding.

In speech act theory it is supposed that when we speak or write we do things

with words (we suggest, describe, define, apologize, etc.). This is obvious in someritualized expressions where saying is equivalent to doing. Some examples of such

expressions are:

I sentence you to death

I pronounce them Man and Wife

I name this building Arai

I absolve you from all your sins

I declare him elected to Parliament

I confess all my faults

I recognize my mistakes

I swear at God

I order you to clean the house

The use of such ritualistic utterances operates properly only in situations were

certain conditions are given and when the one who speaks is socially or academically


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invested with the authority necessary for saying them, like is the case of a judge, apriest or a lawyer. But in ordinary life situations they are never or seldom used.

In colloquial language use what is more common to use instead are utterances

that express indirectly what we mean. In these cases our listeners or readers have toinfer our illocutionary acts taking into account the morphosyntactic characteristics of

the message and the context where it is produced, since the meaning is not directlyexpressed in our utterances. The philosopher Searle (1965) established a classification

which is useful for inferring the possible illocutionary force or value of an utterance

in a given discourse. He classified them into commisive, declarative, expressive andrepresentative acts.

Commisive Illocutionary Acts: They are utterances in which the speaker

commits himself to do something in the future, for example a promise or athread:

If you dont pay the bill well call the police

Ill bring you a bunch of flowers on your birthday

Declarative: They are utterances whose function is to get the listener to do

something. Examples of declarative acts are suggestions, requests or a

commands:Please come in

Would you please close the window?

Why dont you read the text throughout before discussing it?

Expressive: An expressive speech act is one in which the speaker expressesfeelings and attitudes about something; for example an apology, a complaint,

when we thank or congratulate someone:The letter was so beautifulIm sorry for being late

I hate fish

Representative: A representative speech act is on in which the speaker or writerdescribes states or events from the real world; for example a claim, a report:

This is a German car, The rain destroyed the crops

DIRECT AND INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS

Any speech act. Can be direct or indirect. It is the speaker or the writer theone who decides to between on for or the other. Direct speech actsare those where

the locutionary act and the illocutionary act coincide, such as in:

A. Alice, come here and sit down in front of meB. I feel very upset because of his reactionC.I shall phone you tomorrow at ten


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In all this examples the structure used expresses almost literally the illocutionaryintention of the speaker: in A a declarative illocutionary act has been expressed by

means of an imperative sentence; in B and C declarative sentences has been chosen to

express an expressive and a commisive speech acts respectively.

With extraordinary frequency, however, speakers and writers chose not to

code their messages directly but indirectly. An indirect speech act is one wherethere is no coincidence between the type of illocutionary act and the syntactic

structure of the message. The following examples illustrate this point:

A. Could you open the window? PleaseB. Dont you see I love you?

C. Its too late for watching TV

In these examples different types of illocutionary acts have been expressedindirectly: in A a declarative speech act has been coded as a question, while in B and

C two expressive illocutionary acts have been coded indirectly using a question and a

declarative sentence respectively.

It is very important for English teachers to keep in mind that most of our

illocutionary acts in normal communication are indirect. This is why it is not enoughto teach our students grammar; it is our obligation to teach them the multiple and

surprising ways in which the grammatical structures that they study in class are used

in real life communication.


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UNIT III

DISCOURSE COOPERATION

DIFF ERENCES BETWEEN SPEECH AND WRITING

The two main channels for language interaction are speech and writing.

Speech is a natural faculty of normal human beings while writing is a humaninvention that appeared later in time. That is why if there is any abnormal condition

that impedes so, oral language is acquired first and unconsciously by most human

beings (Krashen, 1992), while written language must be learned formally. Theprocesses of construing and processing speech and writing also vary in different ways

and using any of them in stead of the other brings different consequences in how ourspeech acts are organized, produced and understood.

It is important to keep in mind that nowadays speech and writing should not

be seen as two completely different and opposing channels of communication butrather as two ends of a continuum. That is so because nowadays we frequently find

language samples that can hardly be classified as either oral or written. As an

example of this fact consider an informal note or an e-mail where what we find is a

kind of speech written down; or a scientific lecture where the lecturers usually writedown everything that will be said and then presents it orally.

English teachers should be aware of the differences that exist between speechand writing if they are to help their students to communicate properly through both

channels, to understand their different characteristics, the contexts in which each is

used and the consequences that different contextual features might have on them. Thefollowing are some of the most determinant differences between them.

S P E E C H

1. It is transient.

2. Speakers are bound to take turns to speak. Otherwise, because of physical

constraints they could not hear each other.3. It is usually improvised so it frequently contains false starts, hesitations or

mistakes which can be corrected immediately.4. As the listener is present it is easier to have direct information of his

understanding of the message and take the necessary steps in accordance.


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5. Immediate context and paralinguistic features help the speaker to express themessage without much cohesion.

6. Speech tends to be redundant. Because speakers are never quite sure whether their

listeners are paying attention, understanding or remembering what they are saying

or not, they tend to make frequent use of repetitions, paraphrases andrestatements.

7. It is usually linguistically informal and less organized which is mainly due to itsimprovisation, its transience and to the interlocutor presence.

W R I T I N G

1. It is permanent so it can be stored and carries more prestige.

2. It is planned and can be analyzed and corrected after its production.3. As the readers are absent and usually unknown it is difficult for the writer to

predict and take the necessary steps to guide their understanding.

4. The absence of paralinguistic features is somehow supplied by drawings,graphics, letter type, titles. Subtitles, punctuation marks, connectives and cohesive

devises.

5. It tends to avoid redundancy so it becomes more grammatically structured andlexically dense.

6. It has to be more formal from the linguistic point of view because of its

permanence, of the possibility to plan it ant of the absence of the interlocutor.

7.

DISCOURSIVE COOPER TIONAny real speech act requires mutual cooperation from those who participate in it. Thespeaker/writer should take all the necessary steps in order that the listener/reader

understands what s/he means; that is, the illocutionary force of his/her locutionary

acts. We have already seen how frequent it is in normal communication that we useindirect speech acts. In other words, what we frequently say is totally different to

what we mean. Anyhow in most of the communicative situations in which we get

involved daily our messages are understood and the communication circle is

satisfactorily completed by the perlocutionary responses that our messages generatein our interlocutors.

There is a theoretical principle proposed by Paul Grice in 1975, whichfunctions as an implicit agreement among speakers and helps us to understand how

they cooperate to one another during communication:


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THE COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE

This principle includes four maxims that govern tacitly humancommunication. They are not to be taken as rules but as suggestions that implicitly

guide our interactions and help us in understanding each others. These maxims are:the quality maxim, the quantity maxim, the manner maxim and the relevance maxim.

The quality maxim

It states that we should try to make our contributions in any oral or written

language interaction as sincere as possible. Otherwise, we can loose our

listener/reader attention or be taken as a fool.

The quantity maxim

It recommends not to include in our interactions more information than

necessary; that is it suggests us to be brief. This is because if we are not brief

enough we can also loose our listeners attention because s/he can getimpatient or bored.

The manner maxim

It says that our messages should be as clear as possible in order to be

understood more easily.

The relevance maxim

It which states that we should tray to make our messages as relevant aspossible according to the contextual situation; this means saying what is

appropriate according to the situation, the topic of conversation, the relation

we have with the person we are speak to.

As everything we have studied so far, the respect for these maxims depends

on contextual factors such as the type of relation between the speakers, the formality

of the situation, the place where they are interacting, etc. For instance,

two close friends at the movie might violate the quality and the mannermaxims when speaking to each other during the film in order to avoid

perturbing the rest of the public,

teachers tend to violate the quantity maxim to reinforce their explanations andto increase their students understanding;


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two doctors speaking in front of their patient about his/her terminal healthcondition will violate the manner maxim by filling their discourse withtechnical vocabulary in order to avoid their patients concern.

The frequent violation of the cooperative maxims implies that when we acquire alanguage we also acquire the knowledge about when the cooperative maxims can be

violated; that is, we know when we are socially allowed to do so. Some of the

language resources most frequently used for doing so are what we call The Figures ofSpeech. In any language, we can find a multiple variety of figures of speech; some of

them be explained and illustrated below.

THE FIGURES OF SPEECH

A figure of speech is a word, phrase or sentence or paragraph which is usedwith the intention of producing a special effect on the listener or reader. The language

that is used in a figurative way does not have its usual signification because it

acquires in its context of use a special value or connotation. Many teachers see thefigures of speech as resources which are only used in literature, but that is not the

case since they are used very frequently in our everyday language: academic

discourse, jokes, newspapers and in many other contexts. The most common types:

Simile [ ]

A simile is an expression in which something is compared to something else

and the comparison is made explicit by the use of a function word such as like or as.

For example:

My hands are as could as ice

She sleeps like a beard in winter

Robert eats like a horse

Metaphor [ ]

A metaphor is an imaginative way of describing something by referring tosomething else which has the qualities that you want to express. Its similar to the

simile in which it is also a kind of comparison but in a metaphor the comparison is

implicit since the function word used in the simile does not appears. Examples:

Tony is a rat

Margaret Tacher is made of iron


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Mother Teresa is made of love

Hyperbole [ ]

A hyperbolic expression is an exaggeration used in order to make something

seem more impressive than it really is. Examples:

Ive got millions of friends in my class

Henrys cars breads down every minute

Im starving since I had breakfast too early

Irony or Sarcasm: [ ] [ ]

These figures of speech are used as subtle forms of humor. They imply sayingthe opposite of what we really mean. Examples:

What a nice surprise! Youre late again

I love when you snore all night

Your continue interruptions are so stimulating

Metonymy [ ]

Metonymy is a figure of speech that consists on using the name of one thing

to for that of another associated with or suggested by the first one. Examples:

A home is what everybody needs to be happy Man has invented technology

Give me a hand and Ill change the worldThere are many reasons why English teachers should try to teach their

students how to understand, interpret and use different types of figures speech. The

most important ones are: 1) As they are so frequently used, our students will findthem every time they are exposed to oral or written English; 2) Given the fact that

their signification is always different to their contextual value, they are a potential

common cause of misunderstandings, and 3) If they develop the ability to use English

in a figurative way, their communicative competence will be increased since theproductivity of their linguistic repertoire will be multiplied.


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UNIT IV

DISCOURSIVE COHERENCE

Our discussion in previous units makes clear that the use of language in

communication requires much more than mere linguistic information; contextualinformation is necessary in order to make sense out of the linguistic input or

locutionary acts that we receive. We have also studied how that input usually means

something different to its signification. In this unit well study the process through

which we attribute value or illocutionary force to those oral or written locutionaryacts that are directed to us, so as to react perlocutionary to them; that is, the process

through which we attribute coherence to discourse. The basic concepts that will bedealt with here are: inference, explicature, implicature, background knowledge,coherence, discourse markers, punctuation marks and adjacency.

INFERENCE [ ]

Language can never be totally explicit. This is so because any time we uselanguage we do not say everything that we know but only the information that we

consider necessary for helping our interlocutors to understand what we mean. In other

words, whenever we use language, we unconsciously apply the cooperative principle:we try not to violate the quantity maxim or the manner maxim in order to be relevant.

This lacks of explicitness that characterizes human language implies that in anycommunicative interaction the listener/reader must make a cognitive inferential effortto complete our discourse in order to get its real illocutionary value. Inferenceis then

defined as a comprehension strategy that consists on providing any missing

information in discourse in order to understand it. the following example illustrateshow inference functions in discourse understanding.

Contextual situation: The family has just had dinner. Albert is sitting

comfortably in his favorite armchair enjoying a cigarette and reading the

newspaper when the door bell rings.Albert:Darling, theres someone at the door.

Carol:Im washing the dishes.


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If we analyze this exchange, we can easily understand what has happened.First, Albert didnt inform Alice that the door bell was ringing since she must have

heard it, so including that information would be a violation to the maxims of quantity

and relevance. Third, Albert used an indirect act since though his locution is an

informative sentence, he is not informing Alice but asking her to go and open thedoor. Carols answer let us know that she understood Alberts illocutionary intention

but she refuses to obey his request because she is busy at the moment. She also usedan indirect locutionary act; that is, an informative and affirmative sentence instead of

a negative one such as I cant open the door now,but that informative sentence is

function as an excuse:I cant go and open the door becauseIm washing the dishes.

As the example above shows, when inferring, we make use of the contextual

information and the co-text available. Within co-text we find linguistic explicit

information, basically provided by the vocabulary and structures of the oral or writtentext; within the contextual environment we find different types of information needed

to infer the implicit information necessary for the understanding of the illocutionary

value on the text. That explicit information is referred to as explicature while theimplicit information derived by the listener/reader from the contextual information is

called implicature (Yule y Brown, 1983). It is important to understand that, no

matter how polarized the terms might seem from the theoretical point of view, mostof the time it is difficult to separate an implicature from its corresponding explicature,

since most of the words of a language have several meanings; that is, they can have

different implicatures. Therefore, the processing of language always require an

inferential contribution from the part of the listener/reader; it requires the activationof their background knowledge in order to supply the information needed for

discourse understanding.

BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE

The term background knowledgerefers to all the knowledge, experiences andinformation that we acquire during all our live and store in our memory waiting to

be used when needed. It is within our background knowledge that we store

information about the vocabulary and structure of the language, about the way howthat linguistic information is pragmatically used in communication, about different

topics and the relations that exist among them, about the culture we belong to as well

as about other cultures, about the different social conditions and situations where

language is used and the way in which it should be used; in sum, it is in ourbackground knowledge that we store the information about how the world functions.

In order to illustrate the concept of background knowledge, lets consider somefamiliar situations in which all of us are frequently involved: when we read a book

about a subject we do not know without understanding it, when we listen to a song in

a foreign language about which we have very few knowledge, when we are in a


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conversation about an incident that everybody knows except you or when someonetells a joke for which understanding some cultural information that you do not have is

necessary. In all these situations the potential cause of the comprehension problems is

the lack of background knowledge of different types.

If we connect the concepts that we have studied so far in this unit, we can see

that for understanding discourse we need to infer the information that is missing in it,and that we do so by activating our previous knowledge in order to establish

appropriate connections between the co-text and the context; between the explicatures

and the implicatures. English teachers should be aware of their role in helping theirstudents to know develop and apply the strategy of inference because it is by

performing this complex process that they can perceive the coherence of discourse.

COHERENCE

Coherence is a quality of discourse that depends not on the discourse itself but

on the listener/reader ability to assign a meaningful interpretation to it (Widdowson,

1984). The relation between the concept of coherence and all the concepts we havestudied so far is obvious: if the students dont have enough background knowledge

about the topic being dealt with in a conversation or in a text, they wont be able to

establish the necessary and appropriate connections between the co-text and the

context between the explicatures and the implicatures- in order to infer theillocutionary force of the locutionary acts expressed by the speaker/reader in his/her

discourse. Sometimes the connections between the sentences included in a piece ofdiscourse are not made explicit by the author; in such cases it is the receiver whomust infer them. Sometimes the author makes such connections explicit by using

what we call Discourse Markers.

DISCOURSE MARKERS

Discourse markers, as their name implies units which are attributed the

function of marking explicitly the relations that the author establishes between

different parts of his or her discourse. Those parts can vary in their extensions: theycan be two sentences, two paragraphs or two chapters in a book.

For understanding the function that discourse markers perform in discourse, itis very important to understand that they are not syntactic units since they do not

accomplish any syntactic role within the sentence; that is, they never function as

subjects, verbs or objects. They do not have an identifiable grammatical function


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either, since a discourse marker can be a word (Since), a phrase (As a result) or evena complete sentence (This is the reason why), which implies that they can not be

classified as nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs or preposition. Another distinguishing

characteristic of discourse markers is the different positions that they can occupy in

the text: they can appear at the beginning of a sentence, in the middle of it or at itsend. Anyhow, their most frequent position is at the beginning.

Also, discourse markers can express different types of semantic relations:

Time:Before, during, after, yet*, at the time of, at the same time, as soon as,

then*, once, while*, since*, as*, nowadays, sometimes, generally, at present,as a rule, eventually, suddenly, etc.

Comparison/similarity:as*, like, while*, equally, similarly, likewise.

Purpose:so that, in order to, in order for, so as, for.

Result, consequence or conclusion: so, hence, as a result, consequently,therefore, then*, in short, in sum, for that reason, in conclusion.

Order:next, then*, finally, second, at the end, at last, at the beginning, later,earlier, at first.

Addition:and, moreover, even, besides, not only but, as wellas*, also, in

addition to, furthermore, including, bothand, still.

Cause:because, for that reason, since*, because of, owing to, due to, thanksto.

Explanation/paraphrase: thus, that is, that is to say, in other words, i.e.,

what is the same.

Illustration:for example, for instance, as an example, to illustrate, such as.

Agreement:in accordance with, according to, concerning, as to, with regard

to.

Emphasis:in fact, actually, really, as a matter of fact.

Condition:if, provided (that),unless, whether, as long as.

Contrast:although, however, but, in spite of, even though, on the other hand,

whereas, unlike, otherwise, anyway, yet*, while*.


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Alternative:eitheror, neither nor, or, instead of, rather, in place of, noneof them, one of them only.

English teacher should never underestimate the importance of teaching

discourse markers use and understanding, given the importance this unit have inorienting the listener/reader understanding, specially in written discourse where the

respect of the cooperative maxims is more necessary due to the distance between theinterlocutors and the lack of common contextual information. Dealing with these

units appropriately in class requires much more than memorizing them and knowing

their signification; it is mandatory that the students know how to use them in context,which implies knowing how to use them to express their ideas as well as being able to

recognize their function in context and the different types of relations that they

establish between the sentences, paragraphs or larger units of language that they

connect.

It is important to recognize that in spite of the importance of discourse

markers, they are not used all the time since a text where all the sentences areconnected to one another by a discourse marker would be unnatural at least. As an

alternative, we have punctuation marks, which are used also as resources for

connecting written language. This is why, though handling discourse markersappropriately is of great help in discourse production and comprehension, it is not

everything that we need: we also need to know how to use or interpret punctuation

marks.

PUNCTUATION MARKS

The main function of punctuation marks is to indicate the intonation with

which written texts should be read aloud. A second but no less important function is

to indicate the way in which two contiguous words, phrases, sentences of paragraphsare connected. There are many different punctuation marks, but we concentrate

mainly in those most frequently used in discourse, giving an example for each:

The period [.]:I think that we can solve this problem. The best way of doing

so is by

The comma [,]: He didnt say that, as can be seen in the video tape, but heimplied; Sheila brought eggs, cheese, milk and cereal for breakfast.

The semicolon [;]Bert deserved better grades this semester; she studied varyhard. This use of the semicolon is very important since in this case it is

replacing a connective; so if the proper inference is not made by the reader,

the relation between the two sentences can be ignored or changed.


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The colon [:]: there are many different ways in which this disease can be

approached: surgery, treatment or therapy; I prefer the first one.

The question mark [?]: How can we avoid pollution? Mainly by makingpeople become aware of their responsibility and of the dangerous

consequences of pollution in health..

The quotation marks [ ..]: Im sorry, he said, but I dont believe you.

The dash [-]: I was surprisedno, offended would be more accurate- by his

actions.

ADJACENCY [ ]

So far we have analyzed two different resources for connecting ideas in a textwhich exhibit different grades of explicitness: discourse markers and punctuation

marks. But there are many cases in which the connection between the sentences must

be inferred contextually.

English is know as a language with a very strong tendency towards linear

argumentation where one idea leads to the next; where one sentence stands next to the

other without explicit connection. This phenomenon is called adjacency and thesentences put together by this method are called adjacent sentences. The following

examples are illustrative of this phenomenon:

1. There is considerable evidence to support the claim that l2 learners who

begin learning as adults are unable to achieve a native-like competence in

either grammar or pronunciation. Studies of immigrants in the UnitedStates show that if they arrive before puberty they go on to achieve much

higher levels of grammar proficiency than if they arrive later.

2. The poorer countries in the world are called the developing countries.

They have special problems: sometimes the land is too poor to grow

anything on, the land can be improved by introducing new farming

methods, the people must be educated and water must be found.


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UNIT V

COHESION IN ENGLISH TEXTS

A speaker of English can normally decide without much difficulty whetherwhat he hears or reads is a real text or is just a collection of unrelated sentences. This

is because a TEXT is as a recognizable semantic unit that has TEXTURE,

something that is provided by the cohesive relations that exists between the differentparts of the text. COHESION is a semantic relation that is established by linguistic

devises that express the continuity that exists between one part of a text and another,

functioning as a guide for its understanding.

Those devises help the reader or listener to cooperate mutually in the

communication process by supplying information about where to find all the partsthat are missing in a text but are necessary for its interpretation. There is a very closerelation between cohesion and the pragmatic structure of discourse since it is

basically with cohesive relations that Given information is coded and New

information is signaled as new.

TEXT A semantic unit

TEXTURE The effect caused by cohesion

The effect produced by the connections that

COHESION exist between function and content words in

Texts

CLASIFICATION OF COHESION

Cohesion is expressed partly through the grammar and partly through thevocabulary of the language. Only for pedagogic or practical purposes we can divide

cohesion into grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion because the distinction

between these two types of cohesion is really only a matter of degree, since cohesionis not a purely formal relation but a semantic one.


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GRAMMATICAL COHESION

This type of cohesion is realized through certain items that do not have value

or can not be given a semantic interpretation but have to be interpreted by referenceto other items or to an information that must be found somewhere else inside or

outside the text. Such items have the property of REFERENCE, the item or theinformation needed for the understanding of a second item is called its REFERENT

and they become COREFERENTIAL ; that is, they mean contextually the same. The

function of these items is to function as a signal to indicate the listener or the readerthe place where the referent is to be found; for that reason they are classified

according to the place where the referent is to be found as indicated in the following

diagram.

R E F E R E N C E

EXOPHORA: ENDOPHORA:Outside the text Inside the text

ANAPHORA: CATAPHORA:Forward Back

in the text in the text

Grammatical cohesion is further subdivided into 6 types. They are personals,

demonstratives, comparatives, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction.

1. Personals: This category includes all the grammatical items that make possible

the identification of who speaks to whom, who acts, etc. here we find personalpronouns (I/me, you/you, he/him, she/her, it/it, you/ you, we/us, they/them, one),

possessive adjectives (my, your, his, her, its, your, their, our, ones), possessive

pronouns (mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs), reflexive pronouns (myself,

yourself, himself, herself, itself, yourselves, ourselves, themselves, oneself), andother extended personal kinds of reference.

Example:

It is important for us to know that a child who tells his teacher animaginative story, which she subsequently writes down for him, is notengaged in creative speaking. So one should ask the students to write

down their own stories themselves if what we want is to develop their

writing skills.


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Personal grammatical cohesion is very frequent mainly in narrative anddescriptive texts because in those kind of texts the authors need to refer back to

the actions of a character or the characteristics of the object being described

without being too repetitive or redundant. So, once the character or object are

introduced in the text the are referred back by means of different anapforicalpersonal cohesive devices.

2. - Demonstratives: This type of grammar cohesive device helps us in the

identification of relevant contextual information such as time, place, and

proximity. Here we include demonstrative adjectives and pronouns (this, these,that, those), the definite article (the) and some adverbs (here, there, now, then).

Examples:

A- This is what Ive ordered: two turkeys, a leg of this lamb here,these red apples, two pounds of that beef and some cooked ham.

B- Ok, here you have everything. And this is the bill.The use of demonstrative reference is very common different types of texts: in

narrations, descriptions and dialogues they provide information to thelistener/reader about the locations of different items or characters in the scenes.

They are also found in argumentative texts where they can have the additional

function of signaling the author attitude towards the arguments that s/he is using.

3.- Comparatives: General: identity (some, equal, equally good, identical,

identically); similarity (such, so/very similar, likewise); difference (other,different, differently, otherwise, opposite to). Particular numerative (more +

adjective or adverb. fewer, less, further, additional, so/as...as, more...that,

less...than).

Examples:

A- This is the same report as the one we received from him last week.B-No, I think differently. Notice that it contains more information

than that one. I think that this report is different and better in the

sense that it includes more concrete data and has a position to

justify everything.A- You always take such a position to justify everything.B- You should imitate me. Otherwise youll act unfairly.

Comparatives are a very useful cohesive device when we are describing

something since they help us to express similarities or differences between itemsor characters. In argumentative tests they also accomplish an important function

since by comparing we can emphasize or diminish the force of an argument in

order to persuade the listener or reader to accept our view points


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4.- Substitution: nominal substitution (one/ones, the same); verbal substitution(auxiliaries and modals), and clausal substitution (the same, so).

Examples:1. Ive heard some strange stories from our parents. But this one is

perhaps the strangest one.

2. We asked Mary to bring a guest and she said she would.3. Read the instructions. Then do the same with the text.

Substitutions are very frequent in oral discourse where the manner and quantitymaxims are usually violated due to the fact that the presence of the speakers and the

immediate context will help in the solution of any understanding problem.

5.- Ellipsis: Nominal ellipsis, verbal ellipsis, clausal ellipsis.

Examples:

1. I have many books. I can lend you one 0 if you want.2. The parents enjoyed the play but the children didnt 0.

3. This was a nice novel but his first novel was the best 0.4. Now that she was closer 0 she looked more attractive 0.

5. What was he reading? Of course, 0 the sport news.

The same as substitution and by identical reasons, ellipsis is very frequent in oral

discourse. It is also used in written discourse but with less frequency, again because of

contextual reasons: the reader and the author do not share the same immediate context

since they are usually far from each other.

3.- Conjunctions: additive (and, and also, or, nor, furthermore, in addition, besides);

adversative (though, yet, but, however, nevertheless, despite this, in spite of this, on

the other hand, instead, by contrast); causal (so, then, as since, therefore, consequently,because of this, for this reason, as a result, for this purpose, for, so that), and temporal

(then, next, first, since, at the same time, as, while, meanwhile, previously, before,

briefly, to resume, to conclude).


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Examples:

1. Se was never really happy here. So she is leaving.2. Perhaps she missed her train. Or elseshes changed her mind

and isnt coming.

3. The text was very difficult to read. However I couldunderstand it because of your help.4. We have advanced a lot since you arrived.

LEXICAL COHESION

Lexical cohesion is the cohesive effect that is produced by the vocabulary usedin a text. The understanding of the connections that exist between the lexical items on

a text can help us to accomplish the following objectives:

1. To avoid redundancy in writing.

2. To learn new vocabulary contextually, without using the dictionary.3. To infer the meaning of some words by making reference to other familiar

words used on the text to refer back to the words that we dont know, and4. To identify the position of an author in relation o a given topic being dealt

with.

CLASSIFICATION OF LEXICAL RELATONS

1. ReiterationReiteration is a form of lexical cohesion which involves the repetition of the

meaning of the word that was previously used. It is realized through:

1. Pure repetition: The same lexical item

Most parents have an incredible influence on their children. New research has

identified how parents can use that influence to prevent their children from

getting involved with drugs.

2. The use of a general worldWhen my brother Samuel was transferred to Xkrftp his wife got very upset

because the place is too far from their home. To resolve the problem they

decided to move together and are now living happily there.

3. The use of a synonym or a near-synonym


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Arriving at the scene, the policeman learned that the nun had been knocked to

the floor in the street, and the thief had run away with her bag. Then the cop

realized that the mugger had left something on the pavementhis wallet.

4. The use of a or a superordinateMemory loss? Asking repeated questions?, Having troubles using words?. If

these sings are beginning to affect you everyday life, they may not be part of

the normal aging process. They may be sings of Alzheimers disease, an

incurable health problem that rods patients and their families of a lifetime of

memories.

2. CollocationIt is a type of lexical cohesion that is achieved through any recognizable lexico-

semantic association of lexical items that regularly co-occur in a text. This includes theuse of pairs of words that are opposite in different senses:

a. Complementaries: These are pairs of words that are mutually exclusive. Forexample: boy...girl, stand up...sit down;

b. Antonyms: like...hate, wet...dry;

c. Converses: They share a sense of reciprocity. For example: order...obey,

give...take; buy...sell);

d. Pairs or words drawn from the same ordered series: For example, if Tuesday

occurs in one sentence and Thursday in another, the effect will be cohesive;

similarly will occur with words such as dollar...cent or north...south;e. Hyponyms of the same superordinate term: Car and bus in relation to means of

transportation; apple and orange in relation to fruits;

f. Members of unordered lexical sets: These are words that stand in somerecognizable semantic relation to one another. They may be related as part to

whole (car...brake; house...roof), or as part to part (mouth...chin).


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THE COHESION - COHERENCE RELATIONSHIP

Though the concepts of cohesion and coherence can be difficult to distinguishand are sometimes used as synonymous, there are conceptual reasons that make them

different. Cohesion is seen as a property of the text that makes evident the syntax-discourse connection while coherence is considered a property of the readers

response that can be induced by cohesion.

As can be seen from the previous paragraph, cohesion and coherence are two

distinct but complementary concepts: cohesion refers to the use that speakers and

writers make of explicit grammatical and lexical devices as an important aid for text

construction and understanding. There is not doubt that this function turns cohesioninto an extremely useful text condition, an objective condition of the text while

coherence comes from the subjective evaluation of the reader (Hatch, 1992). This

becomes evident when we find texts that are not coherent in spite of exhibitingcohesive relations or texts that without including any single cohesive mark can be

coherently interpreted (Widdowson, 1978).

In conclusion, cohesion and coherence are not synonymous; instead they may

be considered as ends of a bi-directional relation established between the writer and

the reader through the text. It is true that the readers judgments about coherence can

be induced by the cohesive relations present in the text, but the inevitable variabilitythat exists between the background knowledge of different readers turns coherence

into a relative condition that can be only graded according to the readers assessment.

The cohesion coherence relationship has many implications in EFL

teaching. EFL teachers should try:

to raise their students awareness and ability to use cohesive devices asresources for writing cohesive texts that help their readers finding them

coherent,

to exploit cohesion in their daily pedagogical activities for helping theirstudents to process texts flexibly and for activating and using their content,

linguistic, rhetoric and strategic background knowledge,

to widen their students vocabulary by inducing them to become aware thatwords do not have fixed meanings but instead that their meaning can be

inferred by making use of cohesive relations and contextual information, to reduce the stunedts tendency to think that the main way to figure out the

meaning of unknown words is the dictionary.


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Even though now a days it is well accepted that vocabulary is one of the mostdeterminant features for effective language use, everybody knows that it is impossible

to teach all the vocabulary that students need for reading or writing. A question to

take into consideration is whether the meaning of words such as concept, relation,

notionor belief, which are frequently used to refer anaphorically to chunks of texts,can be directly taught given their contextual dependence. Here again developing

students capacity to discover contextual meaning is a solution.

It is necessary that teachers become aware that problems with vocabulary

knowledge vary so widely that it is important to offer the students a variety ofstrategies for dealing with vocabulary problems in context, without putting aside

completely more traditionally word attack strategies such as morphological analysis

or dictionary use. It is important to understand that there may be different kind of

vocabulary problems since students can find:1) Unknown words with unknown meanings;

2) Unknown words with familiar meanings;

3) Known words expressing familiar concepts, or4) Known words expressing new meanings.

All these different and frequent possibilities should be considered by theteacher when selecting teaching resources as well as when planning and applying

teaching activities.

PRAGMATIC STRUCTURE IN TEXTS

There is considerable agreement among authors in their understanding of

coherenceas an abstract condition of the text that is not found in the text itself but iscreated by the speaker or the reader through their interaction with the listener or

reader, which is mediated by the text. That is, it is a subjective evaluation of the

reader in relation to how easy it was for him/her to process and understand the text(Hatch, 1992). The fact that coherence is not in the text becomes evident when we

find:

a) texts that are not coherent in spite of exhibiting some cohesive relations:

Yesterday I discussed with a party. The party was very funny

but they could not dance it because she was dancing so

loudly that I could not hear the class.

b) texts that are coherent in spite of lacking explicit cohesive relations:


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- The phone is ringing

- Im in the bathroom

These examples show that coherence depends on the ability of thereader/listener to identify the relations between the illocutionary acts (the intention of

the author, what he means) and the locutionary acts (the literal expression, what hesaid) found in the text (Widdowson, 1978) by activating his/her previous knowledge

about the language, the topic being dealt with and the information provided by the

cotext and the context where the text is or was produced.

One of the main ways in which coherence is promoted is by providing

continuity to the information included in the text (de Beaugrande and Dressler, 1997).

This continuity is provided by the Pragmatic Structure of Discourse, which includesthe Thematic structure and the Information Structure.

THEMATIC STRUCTURE

The thematic structure of a sentence is given by the order in which its elements are

organized. What comes at the beginning is called the Themeand what comes next is

known as the Rheme. It is important not to confuse the Theme with the subject andthe Rheme with the predicate since they are different concepts that correspond to

differet levels of analysis: the subject and predicate concepts correspond to the

syntactic level of the language while the Theme and Rheme concepts operate at thepragmatic level. The following examples illustrate the differences between these two

levels of analysis.

THEME RHEME

The teacher

We

A new text

This morning,

Who

Give Please,

gave us a new text this morningwere given a new text by the teacher this morning

was given to us by the teacher this morning

a new text was given to us by the teacher

gave us a new text this morning?us a new text this morning, please

give us a new text


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When creating isolated sentences, we are free to use the structure we want; butwhen sentences are used in oral or written discourse the way in which they are

structurally organized depends on what is before them and what is to be after them.

This is so because when organizing discourse we usually take steps to help the

receiver in the comprehension process. One of those steps is oriented to providingcontinuity to the message that we want to communicate. In order to be successful in

doing this, the speaker or listener need to structure the information in such a way thatit flows smoothly; s/he must balance the quantity of information presented at a time,

avoiding ambiguity without being redundant or irrelevant. Lets see how this is done.

INFORMATION STRUCTURE

In discourse, information is segmented and organized in sentences. The

information structure is given by the order in which Given and New information are

distributed in the sentence. Given information is the information that has alreadybeen mentioned or is inferable from information already mentioned in previous parts

of the text or from the contextual information shared by the interlocutors. On the

contrary, New informationrefers to information that has not been mentioned or cannot be inferred from the text or context. This articulated flow of New and Given

information requires of the strategic use of language and is very related to the

Thematic Structure of the sentence, since Given information usually coincides with

the Theme position and New information with the Rheme position, as shown in thenext figure.

Given Information New information

Theme position: Rheme position:At the beginning At the end of

of the clause the clause

As shown in this figure, Given information usually occupies the Themeposition, that is at the beginning of the clause, while New information is most

frequently found in the Rheme position, at the end of the clause. This is the most

common distribution of the information flow in English, but not the only one since


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because of stylistic reasons it is difficult to keep the same structure in texts of aconsiderable extension.

The organizational patterns of Given and New information can also vary

according to the whether the communicative function adopted for the organization ofdiscourse is narrative, descriptive, argumentative, conversational and so on. There are

three main types of thematic patterning: the constant pattern, the linear pattern andthe complex combined pattern.

1) The constant pattern is one where the same Theme is repeated overseveral clauses or sentences and it is coded through different cohesive devices.

The information flow in this patterns might be felt as rigid or static if kept

through but works well with descriptive, classifying or narrative texts where

keeping the same topic is important. This thematic flow can be represented asfollows and is exemplified in the text about urea:

T1 R1

T2 R2

T3 R3

Urea is a very important chemical because which is used in manyindustrial and biological processes. I t is excreted in the urine as an

end product of protein metabolism. I tis produced on large scale and 0used as a fertilizer and raw material in the manufacture of someplastics and drugs. I t can be extracted from natural processes or 0

artificially prepared in laboratories.

2) The linear thematic patternis one where the Theme of every sentence is

chosen from the Rheme of the previous clause or sentence. This pattern looks

more dynamic than the constant one since it allows writers to add one newidea to a given one. It is very common in explanatory and argumentative texts.

The following diagram and text represent and illustrate this pattern

respectively:

T1 R1

T2 R2

T3 R3


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The early feminist movement was greatly influenced by the work onMary Wollstonecraft. She proposed a feminist agenda whose aims

were to expose the exclusion of women from traditionally male

spheres like politics, economics, education and religion. These aims

became a main focus for religious women in particular in the UnitedStates.

3) The complex combined pattern results from the combination of two ormore of the patterns already described.


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UNIT VI

DISCOURSE ORGANIZATION

RHETORICAL ORGANIZATION

Rhetoric deals with the study of how different pieces of discourse areorganized according to their communicative function. It tells us how narration,

descriptions, conversations and other communicative functions are typically initiated,

continued and ended. This information is important in communicative languagelearning and teaching because:

communication is an interactive process where speakers or writers have tomake decisions;

these decisions consist in choosing and organizing information with aspecific communicative purpose and a specific audience in mind, so thatthe resulting discourse is cohesive and coherent;

rhetorical information helps the students to perceive the communicativeusefulness of the language structures they have already studied, practicedand used.

When we listen or read a piece of discourse in our native language, it is

regularly easy for us to identify it as either a narration, a description or a dialogue.We can even predict its type after listening or reading its first or second sentences.

This means that we know, at least unconsciously, how discourse is organized in L1.

Since this information helps us to produce and understand discourse, it is necessarythat teachers:

make foreign language (FL) students conscious of how discourse is

organized in the language they are learning; make foreign language (FL) students conscious of the fact that discourse

organization is similar among languages;

help their students to take advantage of the knowledge they already haveabout how discourse is organized in their native language to improve their


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production and understanding of discourse in the language they arelearning.

We have already said that discourse is the study of language use in

communication and that its units of analysis are usually units larger than the sentence.This does not mean that discourse units dont have a regular and predictable structure.

What it means is that their structures are different. The main differences betweendiscourse and sentence structures are:

discourse has rhetorical structure while sentences havegrammatical (syntactic or semantic) structure;

the rhetoric structures of discourse are determined by thecommunicative needs of those who interact through language whilesentence structure is governed by grammatical rules;

discourse structure is flexible because it depends on thecommunicative needs of the speakers which vary according to the

contextual situation. On the contrary, sentence structure is rigidbecause it depends on rules which were established before the

communicative interaction.

Since the human systems for information processing (ears, eyes, brain) have

certain limitations, normal communication proceeds in a way conventionally

organized to avoid overlapping and misunderstanding. That is why writers andspeakers organize their discourse into units larger than the sentence which differ in

writing and speaking. Such units become patterns followed as routines for sequencing

the information according to communicative conventions. The identification of thosepatterns and those conventions helps us to understand the relation that connects a

group of sentences in a given piece of discourse.

In normal conversations speakers do not speak at the same time but taketurns for regulating their participation. That is, in order to avoid overlapping, one

speaker says something while the rest listens. In writing the information is not

presented at the same time either but is organized hierarchically in paragraphs,sections, chapters and so on depending on the extension of the written text.

There are rhetorical techniques that help us to organize the information withinthe oral turn and the written paragraph. They are also useful in the identification,

understanding and production of different communicative functions in oral or written

discourse.

RHETORICAL TECHNIQUES


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Trimble (1985) classifies rhetorical techniques into two types: natural patterns

and logical patterns. It is important to have in mind, however, that the use of one

rhetorical technique does not exclude the simultaneous use of the others. In fact, it

would be difficult to find in natural communication pure examples of each type. Forinstance, a paragraph or turn that uses a time order organization to describe a process

usually requires the use of causality and result to justify the steps of the process. Wecan also find two or more logical patterns working together, with one usually being

dominant or a paragraph where details are organized according to their importance,

compared or contrasted.

NATURAL PATTERNS

They are called natural because they reflect the real nature of the information

itself. The most frequent natural patterns are time order, space order and causality and

result.

A.- Time Order:The pattern followed in this case is chronological and it is

shown linguistically through dates, clock times or through markers such asfirst, second, finally, next, now, then, after, during,

immediately, at the same time, simultaneously, once, etc.

B.- Space Order: It shows measurements and spatial relationships through

prepositional phrases (in the box, out of the plane, in the center, to the left,next to, etc.) or by using expressions such as surrounding, not far away, at

a 45 angle, 1mm directly above.C.- Causality and Result:It is often called cause and effect. We say that acausality and result order is natural in cases such as birds fly because they

have wings, where the cause and the effect are natural. This type of order is

marked by lexical items (thus, because, as a result, so that, causing, since, asa consequence of, etc.) or by juxtaposition of information using adjacent

sentences; that is, sentences put together without any signal of the kind of

relation that connects them. The difficulty for non-native speakers of Englishwhen faced with this implicit way of expressing relationships between pieces

of information (adjacency) is that the only clues they have for inferring the

kind of relationship are to be found in the logic of the context, and the ability

to see this kind of logic is not easily developed. It must be taught.

LOGICAL PATTERNS


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They are so-called because they reflect the logical interpretation that the writeror the speaker gives to the information they are referring to. They are not determined

by the real nature of the information but are chosen deliberately to make clear the

relationships between the units of information that they want to present. According to

Trimble (1985), the most commonly occurring logical patterns are causality andresult, order of importance, comparison and contrast, analogy and, exemplification

and illustration. Logical patterns can appear either mixed with one another (two ormore logical patterns combined) or in conjunction with natural patterns, but with one

of them receiving more prominence.

A.- Causality and Result: This pattern is presented linguistically by the same

recourses used in the causality and effect natural order. That is, by cause and

effect connectives and adjacency.

B.- Order of Importance: This order is shown linguistically by some of thefollowing expressions: first, second, third, most important, of primary

importance, least important, the main interest, the most frequent, etc.

C.- Comparison and Contrast: When we compare we refer to the

similarities of things that are basically alike by using expressions such as: in

comparison, similarly, in like fashion, as does X, so does X, is/are alike, in thesame way, equal, etc. When we contrast we relate differences with

expressions such as: in contrast, on the other hand, however, nevertheless, by

way of difference, is/are different/opposing, while, but, etc.

D.- Analogy: We establish an analogy when we refer to the similarities

between objects, facts or ideas that are basically different. It is expressedlinguistically by: analogically, by analogy, by way of analogy.

E.- Exemplification and Illustration:For example, for instance, as an

example, a typical case of this, that is, as can be seen in Figure 2, see Fig. 5,to illustrate this, etc. are common linguistic signals used to announce

something that illustrates what has been said previously.

All these different ways of paragraphs or turn organization are techniques we

have for organizing discourse. As all of them can appear in any communicative

function, well find many examples of them in the following section.

COMMUNICATIVE FUNCTIONS

The rhetorical structure of discourse is given by the way in which its

constituent parts are organized and sequenced. This constituent units of information


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can be paragraphs, sections or chapters (in writing) or turns (in speech) which have anidentifiable communicative function. The most common communicative functions are

conversation, description, definition, classification, instructions, narration and

argumentation. Within each type, there can be many different subtypes. For example,

there are many different types of conversation: dialogues, interviews, phone calls ordoctor-patient conversations; many different types of narrative texts: sport news,

novels, short stories or biographies; many varieties of instructions: cooking recipes,manual or a doctors prescription. Each of these subtypes has specific social

functionswhich influence their grammatical and lexical characteristics and the kind

and amount of information each contains.

Conversation

In a conversation there can be two or more participants who will take turns to

express their ideas, ask for others ideas or respond to others questions, comments orrequests. This does not mean that while one speaker has his/her turn, the rest must be

silently and indifferently waiting theirs. In authentic dialogues, listeners tend to act

cooperatively. That is, they tend to show the speaker their understanding, sympathy,interest or attitude towards what is being said by using gestures, exclamations (oh!

dont tell me, tell me more, so? really?), nodding, smiling, laughing or so on.

Any conversation has a beginning, a development and an ending. All of themare easily recognized in spite of the fact that sometimes they are not expressed

verbally. For instance, a greeting is very commonly the starting step of aconversation. After the greeting, there will be a development that can be made up bytwo or more turns through which the speakers will exchange different kinds of

information. Of course, the turns number and extension will depend on the

situational context (at home, at the office, in the street, at a party). The ending is alsoeasily identified: there is frequently a closure of the topic of the conversation and

some comment usually announces the end (my God! Its too late; sorry I must leave

now; What about having lunch tomorrow)

Authentic dialogues are characterized by incomplete sentences (I wan to

visitI mean, why don we go and visit), mispronunciations (I wanna), slips ofthe tongue (..my institution, sorry, my intuition), violation of grammar rules (He

came?), frequent use of general (stuff, thing) and referential words (over here, that

one) whose meaning is clarified by the immediate context or paralinguistic resources(pointing, touching, gestures).

Description


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We can subcategorize it into types: physical descriptions function or process

descriptions and emotional descriptions.

Physical descriptionshave to do with the physical description of an object, a

person, a place, an animal, etc. The thing being described can be real or unreal(fictional). The physical characteristics most frequently described are

dimension, shape, weight, material, volume, color, and texture. Commonly theinformation they include follows a natural spatial order since they are clearly

tied together: when the main communicative function of a paragraph is to

describe the physical properties of something, the writer needs to refer tospatial relations. In this kind of description we find many prepositional

phrases, adverbs of place, nouns and adjectives.

Function or process description is concerned with the use or purpose of

some device and how its parts function separately and as a whole. This type ofdescription usually contains causality and result orders, time orders,

imperatives and modals.

Emotional descriptions include the characteristic of ones personality:feelings, attitudes, preferences, reactions, etc. They usually contain abstract

nouns and adjectives, as well as sense verbs (feel, see, perceive, consider, etc.)

and causality and result order.

Narration

This is one of the most common communicative functions. By narrating wedescribe our (or others) real or imaginary experiences; that is, we tell people whatothers or we did or what we imagined we did. Narratives usually include a description

of the setting or the state of equilibrium, a conflict (the initial equilibrium is lost) and

an eventual solution of the conflict, which is optional. This elements can follow adifferent order depending on the writers or the speakers style. The quantity of

information included in each one of these elements also varies. This is the main

difference between lets say a short story and a novel. This communicative function ischaracterized by the use of past tense, though the use of other tenses are permitted,

physical and emotional descriptions including lots of adjectives (specially in the first

part when the setting and the characters are introduced) and time, spatial and

causality and result orders.

Definition

They can be formal, semiformal or non-formal.

Formal definitionsusually identify the following information: (T) the term

being defined = (C) the class to which it belongs and, (D) the differences


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between the term being defined and the rest of the members of the same class.Example: An arachnid (T) is an invertebrate animal (C) having (or, which has)

eight legs extending at equal intervals from a central body (D). Formal

definitions can describe the physical characteristics or the functioning the

term being defined.Semi formal definitionsare very similar to the formal ones but they provide

the reader with less informat

discourse analysis module

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