Tannen (nd) Discourse analysis

This is a short entry in the Linguistic Society of America’s website introducing the reader to the subject of Discourse Analysis (DA). If you are interested in linguistics, click on the link at the top "What is linguistics" where you can find many other interesting articles in the field.

In this particular article, I particularly like the explanation that says that DA is the analysis of language “beyond the sentence”. While language has been analysed primarily from a bottom-up approach: the smallest parts of language studying sounds (phonetics and phonology), parts of words (morphology), meaning (semantics) and sentence construction (syntax), DA focuses on meaning conveyed through larger “chunks” of language.

Tannen refers to “reframing”, or the process of returning to and re-interpreting the meaning of sentences in the context of the activity speakers are carrying out, in other words, pragmatics. Tannen also introduces the concept of “turn-taking”, which can be signalled through intonation, pausing and phrasing. She uses the expression “listenership” (the art of listening) which can be demonstrated in different ways such as gestures (nodding), making sounds (e.g. mm, etc.). In my context of foreign language teaching and learning, turn taking and listenership are skills that students often struggle with but once mastered, make a huge difference in achieving communicative purpose. Tannen also introduces the term “discourse markers” (e.g. well, oh) that break chunks of speech into sections and communicate meaning as they can prime the listener to what is going to be said, or indicate relationships between what has been said. However, discourse markers don’t always mean what the dictionary says they mean; Tannen gives examples (but, and) but I would add another example of the use of the word “like” (possibly one of the most commonly discourse markers in use today!).

Finally Tannen talks about “speech acts” which refers not to the form of an utterance, but the function of the utterance. Understanding cultural differences between what speech acts “do” can improve intercultural relationships (in the same way that understanding the different meaning of hand gestures in different cultures can!).

For anyone interested in accessible texts about linguistics, I highly recommend Scott Thornbury’s blog here: https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/ Scott has also published many books, including one called “Beyond the sentence” (!) which is an introduction to discourse analysis for language teachers. The book not only helps the reader improve their discourse analysis skills, it also provides examples of how students can be taught to use DA to improve their own language competences. 

Jackie Robbins