Build Bright University

Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Languages

Discourse Analysis in English 1

Topic 4
Schematic Conventions
Lecturer: Prof. Bede O.C. Uwalaka
 Context and Situation
• We have earlier noted that language use is a matter
of constructing and construing texts by keying them
into contexts so as to realize discourse meaning, i.e.
the message in the mind as intended by the text
producer on the one hand, and as interpreted by the
text receiver on the other.
• Context is an abstract representation or a mental
construct.
• It may be abstracted from the immediate situation of
utterance, as when reference is made to something
that is directly perceptible by both parties in an
interaction.
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• For instance, if someone asks me to close the door, I
can readily infer that what is being referred to is a
particular door in the room we are in.
• This is known as deixis – the pointing out of
something immediately and perceptibly present in
the situation of utterance: that door there, this door
here.
• Context is obviously not confined to what is
situationally present in the here and now.
• The language we produce or receive in the process of
communication does not come unexpectedly out
from nowhere.

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• It is part of the community of our individual and
social lives, and so always related to the contexts in
our heads of what we know and believe.
• This context in the head is referred to as the
schematic structures of knowledge.
• We engage these schematic structures of knowledge
to make sense of language, when we realize
discourse from the text.

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 The Concept of The Schema
• A schema is a construct of familiar knowledge.
• Our ability to arrive automatically at interpretations
of the unwritten and the unsaid must be based on
pre-existing knowledge structures.
• These structures function like familiar patterns from
previous experience that we use to interpret new
experiences.
• The most general term for a pattern of this type is a
schema (plural, schemata).
• A schema is a pre-existing knowledge structure in
memory.

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• If there is a fixed, static pattern to the schema, it is
sometimes called a frame.
• A frame shared by everyone within a social group
would be something like a prototypical version.
• For example: within a frame for an apartment, there
will be assumed components such as kitchen,
bathroom, and bedroom.
• The assumed elements of a frame are not generally
stated, as shown in the advertisement below:
Apartment for rent $500. 023-998975
• A normal (local) interpretation of the small fragment
of discourse above will be based on not only an
‘apartment’ frame as the basis of inference -
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• If X is an apartment, then X has a kitchen, bathroom,
and bedroom, but also an ‘apartment for rent’
advertisement frame.
• Only on the basis of such a frame can the advertiser
expect the reader to fill in ‘per month’ and not ‘per
year’ after $500 here.
• If the reader of this discourse expects that it would
be ‘per week’ , for example, then the reader has a
clearly different frame ( i.e. based on a different
experience of the cost of apartment rental!)
• The pragmatic point will, nevertheless, be the same:
the reader uses a pre-existing knowledge structure to
create an interpretation of what is not stated in the
text.
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• When more dynamic types of schemata are
considered, they are more often described as scripts.
• A script is a pre-existing knowledge structure
involving event sequences.
• We use scripts to build interpretations of accounts of
what happened.
• For example, we have scripts of what normally
happens in all kinds of events, such as going to a
doctor’s office, going to the dentist’s, at a movie
theater, a restaurant, or a grocery store as below.
• I stopped to get some grocery but there weren’t any
baskets left, so I had to stack my shopping in my
hands. By the time I arrived at the check-out counter,
I actually looked like a juggler having a bad day.
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• Part of the speaker’s normal script for ‘getting
groceries’ obviously involves having a basket and
going to the check-out counter.
• Everything else that happened in this event
sequence is assumed to be shared background
knowledge (e.g. she went through a door to get
inside the store and she walked around picking up
items from shelves.
• The concept of a script is simply a way of recognizing
some expected sequence of actions in an event.
• Because most of the details of a script are assumed
to be known, they are unlikely to be stated.

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• For members of the same culture, the assumption of
shared scripts allows much to be communicated that
is not said.
• However, for members of different cultures, such an
assumption can lead to a great deal of
miscommunication.

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 Frames of Reference
• What happens in text interpretation is that
language triggers off the recall of some state of
affairs , some schema or other, and this sets up an
expectation of what is to follow.
• Consider this example from the first sentence of an
article from a British news magazine:
In the past, it took a disaster to bring the Olympics
to London.
• The language here activates schematic knowledge
about the Olympic Games and how different cities
bid to host them every four years.
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• This indicates a frame of reference and at the same
time projects the reader’s attention forward to what
is to come next.
• In this case, readers will anticipate that they are told
more about previous occasions when the Olympic
games were held in London, and the text continues:
In 1908, the city stepped in after Vesuvius erupted,
leaving Rome bereft. In 1948, it was called upon to
rescue the Olympics ideal for a Europe ravaged by
fascist dictatorship.
• Again, readers can only understand all thus about
London rescuing the Olympic ideal if they can call up
the frame of reference of the Second World War in
Europe.
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• This process of keying the language into an
appropriate frame of reference to make sense of text
comes so naturally to us that we take it for granted,
and it is easy to suppose that the meaning is actually
from the text itself and not derived from it by this
kind of schematic inference.
• However, it is not difficult to demonstrate how much
our interpretation depends upon it.
• Suppose you overheard the following remark:
The service left much to be desired.
• You will find that the word service has several
semantic meanings in the dictionary (religious
ceremony, public assistance, set of crockery, etc.)

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• The question is which of them is pragmatically
appropriate in this text.
• Here, we lack a frame of reference, and so we cannot
anticipate what is to come next.
• Now let us modify the text a little:
The service last Sunday left much to be desired.
• We would tend to interpret the word as meaning a
church service because in our familiar world such
services are customarily held on Sundays.
• Once the church service schema is invoked, then we
would anticipate that what follows would fit into the
frame of reference.
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 The service last Sunday left much to be desired. The
hymns were badly chosen, the prayers
inappropriate, and the sermon too long. And what
is more, the organ was too loud.
• Notice that once a frame of reference is
established, the use of definite articles becomes
appropriate (the hymns, the prayers, etc.) because
the phrases refer to what is common schematic
knowledge: a church service conventionally
includes prayers, hymns, a sermon, and there is a
choir, organ, and so on.

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• There could be some deliberate misconceptions, e.g.
The service last Sunday left much to be desired. Most
of the staff had taken the day off, and we had to wait
ages between courses.
OR
The service last Sunday left much to be desired. So
we lost the game.
• Having been induced at the beginning of the text to
think of a church service, readers now have to shift
the frame of reference and adjust their expectations.
• Consider the following text that might have two
different but possible interpretations:
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 Rocky slowly got up from the mat, planning his
escape. He hesitated a moment and thought. Things
were not going well. What bothered him most was
being held, especially since the charge against him
had been weak. He considered his present situation.
The lock that held him was strong, but he thought he
could break it.
• What is being described here in the text is ambiguous
in that it admits two interpretations.
• One refers to Rocky as a prisoner thinking about
escaping from his cell.
• In that case, we could add:
But he would have to wait until the warder had
finished his rounds.
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• The other refers to Rocky as a wrestler and his
thoughts about how to get the better of his
opponent.
• This would require a quite different but schematically
suitable textual extension:
Then the bell rang for the end of the round.
• The ambiguity of the text here is sustained by the
use of words which call up two possible and
competing frames of reference.
• Notably, word forms encode more than one semantic
meaning, and these are recorded in a dictionary.
• If you know nothing about wrestling, there will be no
wrestling schema to invoke, and words like escape
and lock are then likely to bring only prisons to mind.
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