Discourse Analysis—What Speakers Do in Conversation

The professor illustrates four terms about discourse. The first one is reframing, which is re-interpreting the meaning of first sentence at a specific text.. For example, for the same passage, the consequence on the reader is different when they read it as a news from they consider it as a novel. Second, turn-taking is talking about that speakers has a system to determine when one person's turn is over and the next person's turn begins. However, for diverse person, the signal is different, and sometimes it would cause inadvertently interrupt or feel interrupted. And the similar situations are frequently occurs in the conversation between person with diverse cultural background. The third one is discourse makers, which is the little words like 'well', 'oh', 'but', and 'and' that break our speech up into parts and show the relation among parts. Although these words has general meaning, however person may have their specific way to use these words. And recognize this words’ function is important. The last is speech act analysis ask to identify the utterance’s function. Obviously, for individuals from different culture, sometimes, it is difficult to understand the purpose of others’ words, that is where the speech act analysis works.