Frères Mentouri University – Constantine 1

Discourse Analysis /First Year Master (Applied Linguistics)

Objective of the Module:

This module is an introduction to discourse analysis and it aims at making students familiar

with the basic notions, concepts and approaches in this interdisciplinary area of study.

Contents:

Lecture One: The Scope of Discourse Analysis

References Used in the Lectures:

Brown, G. and Yule, G. (1983) Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Celce- Murcia, M. and Olshtain, E. (2000) Discourse and Context in Language Teaching.
Cambridge University Press

Crystal, D.(1987) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge University Press

McCarthy, M.(1991) Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge

Paltridge, B. (2012) Discourse Analysis: An Introduction. BLOOMSBURY

Rossi, G. (2021) “Conversation Analysis”-The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic

Thornbury, S. and Slade,D. (2006) Conversation: From Description to Pedagogy. Cambridge

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Frères Mentouri University – Constantine 1
Discourse Analysis /First Year Master (Applied Linguistics)
Amel SOUCHA 2024- 2025

Lecture One: The Scope of Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis can be simply defined as the study of language in use. Discourse analysis

deals with how real people use real language as opposed to studying artificially created

sentences. In other words, discourse analysis refers to the study of naturally occurring spoken

and written data.

Discourse analysis is an interdisciplinary field of study; discourse analysis is used to describe

activities at the intersection of different disciplines such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics,

linguistics and philosophical linguistics (Brown and Yule, 1983). Scholars working centrally

in these different disciplines tend to concentrate on different aspects of discourse.

Sociolinguists are particularly interested in the nature and structure of social interactions such

as those occurring in conversations, interviews and other forms of talk in interaction.

Psycholinguists are concerned mainly with issues related to language comprehension; they

typically employ methods derived from experimental psychology in order to examine

comprehension problems in spoken or written texts. Linguists and the philosophers of

language maintain that discourse analysis is basically grounded on the notion that discourse is

only significant and meaningful in context. Linguistic features, whether phonological,

grammatical or semantic cannot be interpreted out of their context of their context of

occurrence.

Discourse analysis is often defined as the study of language use above and beyond the

sentence. For a long time, linguistics perceived the sentence as the upper unit of linguistic

description. Linguists focused mainly on the forms of language (phonemes, morphemes,

words and sentences); how language was used in context was not explored. That is to say,

speakers, hearers and situations were outside the realm of analysis. It is by examining units

larger than sentences that discourse analysts go above the sentence, and it is by examining

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Frères Mentouri University – Constantine 1
Discourse Analysis /First Year Master (Applied Linguistics)
Amel SOUCHA 2024- 2025

aspects of the world or setting in which language is used that discourse analysts go beyond

the sentence. Discourse analysis is not only concerned with the description and analysis of

spoken language; discourse analysts are interested in all human interaction whether spoken

or written. In addition to all our verbal encounters, we are daily exposed to hundreds of

written and printed words (written data): newspaper articles, emails, messages, notices,

billboards, leaflets, and so on. The terms discourse and text can be used in a much broader

sense to include all language units with a specific communicative function, whether spoken

or written. The discourse analyst is committed to an investigation of what language is used

for. The term discourse analysis is usually to cover the study of spoken and written

interaction. Some scholars talk about ‘spoken and written discourse’; others about ‘spoken

and written text’. Discourse analysts regard language as a dynamic interactive phenomenon.

The overall aim of discourse analysis is to come to a much better understanding of how

natural spoken and written discourse looks and sounds. Roughly speaking, it can be said

that discourse analysis attempts to analyze language above and beyond the sentence level

and it is, therefore, concerned with the study of larger linguistic units such as conversational

exchanges or written texts.

Language cannot be interpreted outside the communicative contexts in which it occurs.

Discourse analysts are interested in REAL instances of language in use. Here are the basic

differences between sentence linguistics data and discourse analysis data (Cook, 1989: 12)

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Frères Mentouri University – Constantine 1
Discourse Analysis /First Year Master (Applied Linguistics)
Amel SOUCHA 2024- 2025

Sentence linguistics’ Data Discourse analysis’ Data

Isolated sentences Any stretch of lg felt to be unified

Grammatically well –formed Achieving meaning

Without context In context

Invented or idealized Observed

All in all, it can be said that discourse analysis is concerned with language use above and

beyond the boundaries of the sentence level. Discourse analysts are concerned with the

interrelationships between language and situational context in which it occurs as well as the

interactive or dialogic properties of everyday communication.