Passi City College

Passi City, Iloilo

SCHOOL OF TEACHER EDUCATION

Stylistics

PART-TIME ENGLISH INSTRUCTOR

EVENZER A. DIOSANO, MILE Page |1

CGN 101- Stylistics and Discourse Analysis Module No: 7
 Passi City College
Passi City, Iloilo

SCHOOL OF TEACHER EDUCATION

MODULE 7 | OTHER CONCEPTS ON DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Module Overview:
This module focused on transcription, cataloguing and analyzing discourse data, identity,
subjectivity, power and discourse, pragmatics and corpus linguistics.

Module Outcomes
At the end of the module the learner should have:
• applied knowledge in transcription, cataloguing, analyzing discourse data
• discussed identity, subjectivity, power and discourse
• valued the knowledge about other concepts on discourse analysis
 familiarized with other concepts on discourse analysis
Module Content
A. Transcription
B. Cataloguing and Analyzing Discourse Data
C. Identity, Subjectivity, Power, and Discourse
D. Pragmatics and Corpus Linguistics

Read

Discourse Transcription
Transcription is an open-ended process. A transcript changes as the researcher’s
insights become progressively refined (Ehlich 1993; Ehlich and Switalla 1976; Gumperz and
Berenz 1993). To ensure that significant but subtle factors are not left out, it is important to listen
to recordings repeatedly throughout the course of a study and to update the transcript to reflect
developing insights.

Encoding Processes
Transcripts contain basically three types of encoding, termed here transcription,
coding, and markup. Transcription is the process of capturing the flow of discourse events in
a written and spatial medium. This includes primarily: who said what, to whom, in what manner,
and under what circumstances. It involves the kinds of information found in the script of a play,
only with more systematic and detailed specification. Many categories found useful in discourse
research are interpretive in nature, rather than being tied strictly to objective physical
measurements. Interpretive categories are necessary because the goal of discourse research is
to capture aspects of interaction as they are perceived by human participants, and these are not
yet specifiable by means of physical parameters.

For example, perceived pause length depends not only on physically measurable time,
but also on speech rate, location of the pause (e.g. within a clause, between clauses, between
speaker turns), and other factors. There are many distinctions of interest to discourse
researchers which have less obvious relationships to physically measurable properties. This is
not a problem, so long as they can be applied reliably by human observers, on the basis of
clearly specified criteria. At a certain level of abstraction and complexity, transcribing shades
into coding (also called “annotation” or “tagging”), which is even more interpretive and more
closely tied to particular theoretical frameworks. Some examples of coding include: syntactic

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CGN 101- Stylistics and Discourse Analysis Module No: 7
 Passi City College
Passi City, Iloilo

SCHOOL OF TEACHER EDUCATION

categories (such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.), semantic distinctions (e.g. motion verbs,
manner verbs), or pragmatic acts (e.g. directive, prohibition, claim). Coding establishes
equivalence classes which expedite analysis and computer search by enabling otherwise
dissimilar items to be efficiently brought together for closer examination. Mark-up concerns
format-relevant specifications rather than content. It is intended to be interpreted by a typesetter
or computer software for such purposes as proper segmentation of the text and cataloging of its
parts, in the service of formatting, retrieval, tabulation, or related processes. It also plays a
central role in data exchange and emergent encoding standards.

Principles of Category Design

Transcription and coding systems are divided into subdomains (e.g. pause length,
intonation contour, syntactic category). The categories used in describing a particular
subdomain (e.g. “short” or “long” pause) function as alternatives to one another. That is, they
constitute a “contrast set.” To be descriptively useful, the categories within each contrast set
must satisfy three general principles: 1They must be systematically discriminable. That is, for
each portion of the interaction it must be clear whether or not a given category applies.
Category membership can be based on either defining characteristics or similarity to
prototypical exemplars. 2 They must be exhaustive. That is, for each relevant aspect or event in
the data, there must be a category which fits (even if, in hopefully rare cases, it is only
“miscellaneous”). 3 They must be usefully contrastive. That is, they must be focused on
distinctions of importance to the research question. For example, a “short” pause in information
flow in monologues might be 0.2 seconds, whereas a “short” pause in research on turn-taking
might be 0.5 seconds. The categories within a contrast set usually cannot be interpreted without
knowledge of the number and type of other categories in that set. Firth (1957: 227) expressed
this property as follows: “The ‘meaning’ of the grammatical category noun in a grammatical
system of, say, three word classes, noun, verb, and particle, is different from the meaning of the
category noun in a system of five classes in which adjective and pronoun are formally
distinguished from the noun, verb, and particle.” This is true also when interpreting symbols in a
transcript. Punctuation marks are convenient and hence ubiquitous in transcripts, but may not
serve the same purposes in all projects. They may be used to delimit different types of units
(e.g. intonational, syntactic, pragmatic) or to signify different categories of a particular type. For
example, a comma might denote a “level” utterance-final contour in one system and “nonrising”
utterance-final contour in another. The only guarantee of comparability is a check of how the
conventions were specified by the original sources.

Principles of computational tractability

For purposes of computer manipulation (e.g. search, data exchange, or flexible
reformatting), the single most important design principle is that similar instances be encoded in
predictably similar ways. Systematic encoding is important for uniform computer retrieval.
Whereas a person can easily recognize that cuz and ’cause are variant encodings of the same
word, the computer will treat them as totally different words, unless special provisions are made
establishing their equivalence. If a researcher searches the data for only one variant, the results
might be unrepresentative and misleading. There are several ways of minimizing this risk:
equivalence tables external to the transcript, normalizing tags inserted in the text, or generating
exhaustive lists of word forms in the corpus, checking for variants, and including them explicitly
in search commands. (Principles involved in computerized archives are discussed in greater
detail in Edwards 1992a, 1993a, 1995.) Systematic encoding is also important for enabling the
same data to be flexibly reformatted for different research purposes.

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CGN 101- Stylistics and Discourse Analysis Module No: 7
 Passi City College
Passi City, Iloilo

SCHOOL OF TEACHER EDUCATION

This is an increasingly important capability as data become more widely shared across
research groups with different goals.

Principles of visual display

For many researchers, it is essential to be able to read easily through transcripts a line
at a time to get a feel for the data, and to generate intuitive hypotheses for closer testing. Line-
by-line reading is often also needed for adding annotations of various types. These activities
require readers to hold a multitude of detail in mind while acting on it in some way – processes
which can be greatly helped by having the lines be easily readable by humans. Even if the data
are to be processed by computer, readability is helpful for minimizing error in data entry and for
error checking. In approaching a transcript, readers necessarily bring with them strategies
developed in the course of extensive experience with other types of written materials (e.g.
books, newspapers, train schedules, advertisements, and personal letters). It makes sense for
transcript designers to draw upon what readers already know and expect from written The
Transcription of Discourse 325 media, both because readers are good at extracting information
in these ways, and because strategies based on reading habits and perceptual predispositions
may be difficult to suspend even if it is desired to do so. Written materials often make systematic
use of two cues in particular: space and visual prominence. For example, chapter titles are
expected to be printed in a large font, possibly centered or ruled off, and placed above the body
of the text at some vertical distance, rather than, say, being embedded in the body of a text and
in the same font size and type. In looking across transcripts of various types, one notices some
recurring strategies using these two cues for highlighting information and indicating relationships
of interest. Six of them are summarized here. Some of these overlap with properties discussed
by Du Bois (1991) and Johansson (1991). These are discussed with examples in Edwards
(1992b, 1993b).

1. Proximity of related events: Events or types of information which are more closely related
to each other are placed spatially nearer to each other than those which are less closely related.
For example, prosodic information, such as prominent syllable stress, is often indicated by a
mark (e.g. an apostrophe or an asterisk) placed immediately before the relevant syllable (cf.
Svartvik and Quirk 1980; Gumperz and Berenz 1993).

2. Visual separability of unlike events: Events or types of information which are qualitatively
different from each other (e.g. spoken words and researcher comments, codes, and categories)
tend to be encoded in distinctly different ways. For example, codes may be enclosed in
parentheses, or expressed as nonalphabetic characters (rather than alphabetic) or upper case
letters (in contrast to lower case). This enables the reader to know what kind of information is
about to be read before actually reading it, and thereby speeds reading and minimizes false
attributions (e.g. perceiving a word as having been part of the speech stream, when it was really
part of a metacomment or code).

3. Time-space iconicity: Temporally prior events are encountered earlier on the page (top to
bottom or left to right) than temporally later events. This can include utterances, gestures, door
slams, laughs, coughs, and so forth.

4. Logical priority: Logically prerequisite information for interpreting utterances tends to be

encountered earlier on the page than the utterance(s) for which it is relevant.

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CGN 101- Stylistics and Discourse Analysis Module No: 7
 Passi City College
Passi City, Iloilo

SCHOOL OF TEACHER EDUCATION

Information concerning the circumstances of data gathering and the relationships among the
speakers tends to be given at the top of the transcript, whereas changes in circumstances or
activities during the course of the interaction tend to precede the utterances they contextualize
or potentially influence.

5. Mnemonic marking: Coded categories are encoded either in directly interpretable

abbreviations or in symbolically iconic ways in order to expedite recovery of their meaning
during rapid reading. An example of this is the use of a slash (/) for rising intonation and a
backslash (\) for falling tone, rather than vice versa or instead of an arbitrary numerical code
(e.g. “7”),

Pragmatics
Study the picture below. Think and try to understand what pragmatic is and then try to
answer silently these questions:
1. How do people communicate more than what the words or phrases of their utterances might
mean by themselves, and how do people make these interpretations?
2. Why do people choose to say and/or interpret something in one way rather than another?
3. How do people's perceptions of contextual factors (for example, who the interlocutors are,
what their relationship is, and what circumstances they are communicating in) influence the
process of producing and interpreting language?

What is Pragmatics?
The science of the relation of signs to their interpreters (Morris 1938:30) Concerned not
with language as a system or product per se, but rather with the interrelationship between
language form, (communicated messages and language users)

Code-Model of Communication
"…communication is seen as an encoding-decoding process, where a code is a system that
enables the automatic pairing of messages (that is, meanings internal to senders and receivers)
and signals (that is, what is physically transmitted (sound, smoke signals, writing) between the
sender and the receiver).
According to this view, communication is successful to the extent that the sender and the
receiver pair signals and messages in the same way, so that the message broadcast in the form
of a given signal is identical to the one received when that signal is decoded."

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CGN 101- Stylistics and Discourse Analysis Module No: 7
 Passi City College
Passi City, Iloilo

SCHOOL OF TEACHER EDUCATION

Expansion of Code-Model of Communication

“human communicative behaviour relies heavily on people's capacity to engage in reasoning
about each other's intentions, exploiting not only the evidence presented by the signals in the
language code but also evidence from other sources, including perception and general world
knowledge.”

Sample Dialogue
[1] Kiki: Where are you going tonight?
[2] Sharon: Ministry.
[3] Kiki: Ministry?
[4] Sharon: Ministry of Sound. A club in London. Heard of it?
[5] Kiki: I've been clubbing in London before.
[6] Sharon: Where to?
[7] Kiki: Why do you want to know?
[8] Sharon: Well, I may have been there.
[9] Kiki: It was called 'The End'.
[10] Sharon: Nice one!
[11] Kiki: I hope you have a good time at the Ministry.
(Contributed by Kelly-Jay Marshall)

It shows that the meaning of an utterance is not fully determined by the words that are
used: there is a gap between the meaning of the words used by the speaker and the thought
that the speaker intends to represent by using those words on a particular occasion. More
technically, the linguistic meaning of an utterance underdetermines the communicator's
intended meaning.
This gap is filled by the addressee's reasoning about what the communicator (may have)
intended to communicate by his or her utterance. Hence, pragmatics plays a role in explaining
how the thought expressed by a given utterance on a given occasion is recovered by the
addressee.”
Cooperative Principle of Conversation
“Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it
occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.
(Grice, 1989: 26)"

Pragmatics and Language Learning and Teaching

• Possibility (or likelihood) of pragmatic transfer
• Pragmatic proficiency and the value of language instruction
• Materials and methods for developing pragmatic proficiency
• Pragmatic performance and learner identity

Corpus Linguistics
Corpus – a collection of pieces of language that are selected and ordered according to
explicit linguistic criteria in order to be used as a sample of the language. (Sinclair, 1996)
These are sampled texts, authentic, in machine readable form which may be annotated with
various forms of linguistic information as a representative of a particular language.

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CGN 101- Stylistics and Discourse Analysis Module No: 7
 Passi City College
Passi City, Iloilo

SCHOOL OF TEACHER EDUCATION

Below is a picture example of corpus from British National Corpus. Try to observe the
picture.

Characteristic of Corpus-Based Analysis

• It is empirical, analyzing the actual patterns of use in natural texts.
• It utilizes a large and principled collection of natural texts, known as a “corpus”, as the
basis of analysis.
• It makes intensive use of computers for analysis, using both automatic and interactive
techniques.
• It depends on both quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques.

Characteristics of a Good Corpus

• Large (in number)
• Systematically assembled
• Principled
• Collection
• Of natural texts
• Often available to other researchers
• Spoken and/or written language
• Usually in electronic form
• Can be tagged
• For use with text manipulation programs

Types of Corpora
1. General Corpus- Balanced, wide range of registers or genres; fiction and non-fiction
2. Specialized Corpus- register-specific; technical
3. Learner’s Corpus- non-native speakers

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CGN 101- Stylistics and Discourse Analysis Module No: 7
 Passi City College
Passi City, Iloilo

SCHOOL OF TEACHER EDUCATION

Issues in Corpus Design
• Must reflect the goals – provide reliable information
• Should be representative of the types of language included – registers; discourse
modes; topics
• Based on production vs reception – formal vs informal

What can you do with a corpus?

1. List of all known words in a language
2. Word counts, frequency of use
3. Types of usage in different registers (contexts)
4. Analysis of patterns of language which may be unnoticed
5. Lexical phrases – word bundling

Tagged Texts

• Each word in the corpus is given a grammatical label

• Finding the different uses of a word
• By tagging a text, researchers can experiment on the different language issues of the
word

Selected Well-Known Corpora

 British National Corpus (BNC)
 Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)
 Brown Corpus
 Lancaster/Oslo-Bergen (LOB) Corpus
 Helsinki Corpus of English Texts
 CANCODE (Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of
 Discourse in English (“spoken discourse”)
 ICE (International Corpus of English (“for the study of national varieties of English”)

Corpus Studies and Language Teaching

1. Provides a basis for deciding which language features and structures are important.
2. Provides data about how various features and structures are used.
a. Range of the features
b. Lexical and pragmatic co-occurrence patterns

Wrap Up
To sum up with our discussion in our module in discourse analysis, we have come to a
realization on how this lesson implicates in language teaching in the future as soon to be
teachers? Well, we’ve chunks the information into tidbits and come to have this summary.

Discourse analysis enables language practitioners to precisely delineate in materials the

different genres of language with which learners will need to engage and to select discourses
relevant to learner's needs.

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CGN 101- Stylistics and Discourse Analysis Module No: 7
 Passi City College
Passi City, Iloilo

SCHOOL OF TEACHER EDUCATION

Discourse analysis can help teachers to explain the underlying features of the text types
associated with different type of writing (academic paper, business letters...)

Discourse analysis may serve to raise awareness of the nature of teacher-leaner

interaction. It can help teachers consider their own interaction practices in a more systematic
manner and offer a full-rich context for learners to engage in the genuine interaction.

Discourse analysis provides teachers with more insight to evaluate their own learners‟
performance in classroom task in terms of its proximity to or distance from the real-world
discourse.

Conversation analysis offers the possibility of systematic teaching of features such as

the language of openings and closings, discourse markers and common adjacency pairs.

Discourse analysis provides the descriptive information which come in the form of
pedagogical grammars and learners dictionaries which are more sensitive to context.

Activity No. 1 Write it on!

Direction: In our discussion you’ve tried to answer these questions silently before going to a
deeper understanding of our lesson. Now, write on your answer about these questions.
(10 points each)

1. How do people communicate more than what the words or phrases of their utterances might
mean by themselves, and how do people make these interpretations?

2. Why do people choose to say and/or interpret something in one way rather than another?

3. How do people's perceptions of contextual factors (for example, who the interlocutors are,
what their relationship is, and what circumstances they are communicating in) influence the
process of producing and interpreting language?

Rubric for Scoring your Activity

Content---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5 pts
Organization of Ideas---------------------------------------------------------------------3 pts
Conventions (grammar, punctuations, spelling etc.-------------------------------2 pts
__________________________________________________________________

Total------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------10pts

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CGN 101- Stylistics and Discourse Analysis Module No: 7
 Passi City College
Passi City, Iloilo

SCHOOL OF TEACHER EDUCATION

Evaluate

Test I-Alternate Response

Direction: Write TRUE if the statement is correct and FALSE if otherwise. Write your answer in
your answer sheet.
1. Transcription is an open-ended process.
2. The transcripts contain three types of encoding-the transcription, coding and mark-up.
3. Mark-up concerns format-relevant specifications rather than content.
4. The science of the relation of signs to their interpreter is called pragmatics.
5. Communication is seen as an encoding-decoding process.
6. A word is a system that enables the automatic pairing of messages between the sender and
the receiver.
7. Human communicative behavior relies heavily on people’s capacity to engage in non-verbal
actuations.
8. Cooperative principle of conversation states that the speaker must contribute more than what
is expected/ asked.
9. Linguistics is a collection of pieces of language that are selected and ordered according to
explicit linguistic criteria.
10. Corpus design shouldn’t be representative of the types of language like register, discourse,
modes and topics.

Test II Enumeration
Direction: Enumerate the following. Write your answer in your answer sheet.
1
2
3
4
5 Characteristics of Good Corpus
6
7
8
9
10

References:
Book:
Reppen, Randi & Rita Simpson. 2010. Corpus Linguistics. In Norbert Schmitt, editor,
Chapter 6, pp. 89-105. An Introduction to Applied Linguistics, 2nd edition, pp. 53-
69.London: Hodder Education, pp. 101-103

Spencer-Oatey, Helen & Vladimir Zegarac. 2010. Pragmatics. In Norbert Schmitt,

editor, An Introduction to Applied Linguistics, 2nd edition, Chapter 5, p. 70

In the midst of chaos, remember you’re not alone. Trust HIM!

Break a leg!

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CGN 101- Stylistics and Discourse Analysis Module No: 7