Analysing language

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Analysing language

• Lesley Jeffries and Dan McIntyre
• University of Huddersfield

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Introduction Linguistics

• General Linguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Pragmatics
• Discourse analysis
• Stylistics

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General Linguistics

• Theories of language e.g. structuralism
• Description of language
• Phonetics, phonology - sounds
• Morphology word structure
• Grammar sentence structure
• Semantics word meaning
• Neutral approach to linguistic value

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Sociolinguistics

• Variation in language across
• Gender
• Age
• Geographical area
• Time
• Social background
• Register and oral narrative structure

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Pragmatics Contextually-based meaning

• e.g. Its cold in here turn heating up!
• Paul Grice the co-operative principle
• Maxims
• Quality be truthful
• Quantity dont say more or less than needed
• Relation be relevant
• Clarity dont be obscure or vague

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Pragmatics inferencing

• When the co-operative principle goes wrong
• A Whats for tea?
• B There was a lovely concert on the radio today
  Beethoven I think.
• Quantity too much said
• Relation not relevant
• Inference tea is not (yet) planned?!

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Pragmatics other issues

• (Im)politeness studies based on the related
  concepts of positive and negative face.
• Conversation Analysis (CA) the structure of
  talk.
• Cross-cultural pragmatics how not to offend
  people in other cultures!

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Context Discourse analysis

• Discourse difficult word to define
• In linguistics it includes text and context (cf.
  literary/cultural studies)
• Most interesting for you CDA (Critical Discourse
  Analysis) more on this later.
• CDA intended as political act not purely
  descriptive.

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Context Stylistics

• Text analysis originally associated with literary
  style but not limited to literature now
• Includes cognitive, social and political contexts
• More text-based than CDA
• Can use corpus tools
• Based on notion of linguistic choices

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Recap Linguistics

• How our examples fit in
• General Linguistics
• Sociolinguistics e.g. narrative analysis
• Pragmatics e.g. C.A.
• Discourse analysis e.g. C.D.A.
• Stylistics e.g. cognitive metaphor, opposite
  construction, corpus studies.

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NARRATIVE ANALYSIS
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Labov and Waletzkys six-part narrative schema

• ABSTRACT
• What is the story about?
• ORIENTATION
• Who, when, where?
• COMPLICATING ACTION
• What happened and then what happened?
• EVALUATION
• So what? How or why is this interesting?
• RESULT OR RESOLUTION
• What finally happened?
• CODA
• End of story effects of events on narrator

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CONVERSATION ANALYSIS
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Conversation Analysis

• ethnomethodological approach to analysing spoken
  language, pioneered by Harvey Sacks in the 1970s
  (see Sacks 1995)
• Uses orthographic transcription with pauses and
  overlaps marked
• In strict form is not explanatory and ignores
  all contextual information
• As a tool for other purposes, works with
  contextual information

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Conversation Analysis

• Turn-taking norms
• Turns only one speaker at a time
• Speaker has the floor until a
• Transition Relevant Place (TRP)
• At which point there is speaker-selection
• Priorities current speaker self-selects, selects
  other speaker or other speaker self-selects.

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Conversation Analysis

• Overlaps may occur at TRPs
• Overlaps at other points are interpreted as
  interruptions
• E.g.
• A I was only going to say that
• B you never listen, do you?

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Conversation Analysis

• Adjacency pairs preferred responses
• request - accept
• offer - accept
• assessment - agree
• blame - deny
• question - answer

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Conversation Analysis

• Adjacency pairs dispreferred responses
• request - refuse
• offer - refuse
• assessment - disagree
• blame - admit
• question non-answer or surprise answer!

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Conversation Analysis

• What about apparent non-responses
• A Fancy going to the cinema?
• B Well, er, Ive got an essay to write.
• Need context to work out inference.

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CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS (CDA)
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C.D.A.

• Concerned with educating readers to be more
  critical of texts
• Explicitly left-wing viewpoint
• Critical of dominance of media and government
• Interested in exposing the hidden ideologies in
  texts by close analysis

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C.D.A.

• Ideology in all texts
• Hidden and repeated ideologies may become
  naturalised as common-sense.
• Uses concepts from pragmatics and functional
  grammar as tools
• Concerned with context of text production and
  reception.

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C.D.A. Nominalisation

• A verb may become a noun
• construct construction
• pollute pollution
• The factory polluted the stream.
• There was pollution in the stream.
• The relationship between the process and the
  agent is lost.

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C.D.A. presuppositions

• What a sentence says proposition
• What it assumes presupposition
• What it implies implicature
• The first is arguable, and explicit, the second
  and third are not.
• Presuppositions may be created by a number of
  means

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C.D.A. presuppositions

• Definite noun phrases
• e.g. The evil bankers who caused the global
  credit crisis went to Parliament.
• e.g. Those incompetent social workers should be
  sacked.
• e.g. I hate the aggressive way you speak to me.

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COGNITIVE METAPHOR THEORY
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Metaphor

• Talking (and thinking) about X in terms of Y, on
  the basis of some similarity between X and Y

But, soft! what light from yonder window
breaks?Tis the east, and Juliet is the
sun! (William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act
II Scene ii, 2-5)
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Conventional metaphors

• public spending is planned to rise at a faster
  rate than the overall growth of the economy. (BBC
  News 21/05/01)
• Mr Blair was attacked by the Liberal Democrats
  for hypocrisy (BBC News 05/07/02)
• Britain will attempt to derail moves led by
  France to build an EU defence force outside the
  command structure of Nato (Irish Independent
  25/08/03)

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Cognitive Metaphor Theory

• Metaphor is a pervasive phenomenon in language in
  general and is not just restricted to particular
  discourse types.
• Metaphor is not just a matter of language but a
  matter of thought, which is central to our
  conceptual system and the way we make sense of
  ourselves and the world we live in.

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Some conventional linguistic metaphors

• I feel as if Im going nowhere.
• Youll get there, I promise you!
• She overcame a lot of hurdles to gain her degree.

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and the conceptual metaphor behind them
LIFE IS A JOURNEY
target domain
source domain
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Mapping between domains
LIFE IS A JOURNEY

• The person living the life is a traveller.
• I feel as if Im going nowhere.
• Purposes are destinations.
• Youll get there I promise you.
• Difficulties are obstacles on the journey.
• She overcame a lot of hurdles to gain her degree.

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Cognitive Metaphor Theory and Discourse Analysis
Mr Blair was attacked by the Liberal Democrats
for hypocrisy (BBC News 05/07/02)
ARGUMENT IS WAR
target domain
source domain
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ARGUMENT IS WAR

• Commons leader Robin Cook has come under fire
  from John Prescott for attempting to use
  politicians families to score political points.
• Leaping to Mr Blairs defence, Mr Prescott said
  he deplored members of the media or other
  politicians who brought family members into
  politics in this way.
• (BBC News 05/07/02)

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ARGUMENT IS WAR
Many of the things we do in arguing are partially
structured by the concept of war. (Lakoff and
Johnson 1980 4)
the militarization of discourse is also a
militarization of thought and practice. (Faircloug
h 1992 195)
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WARFARE IS MUSIC
During the cold war, he Air Marshal Brian
Burridge knew where he would be fighting, the
weather, the name of his enemy. He compared his
job then to the second violin of the London
Symphony Orchestra. You had a sheet of music with
clear notation. Now, he said, it's jazz,
improvising. (The Guardian 11/03/03)
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CRITICAL STYLISTICS
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Critical Stylistics

• More use of technical analysis (than in CDA) to
  expose ideological assumptions.
• Focus on what a text is doing in constructing a
  version of the world
• A number of basic local textual functions

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Critical Stylistics

• Naming
• Describing
• Presenting actions, events etc
• Representing others words
• Assuming and implying
• Constructing time and space
• Equating and contrasting

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Critical Stylistics - opposition

• Although we recognise conventional opposites
  (hot-cold etc) texts also invent them
• Labour say hes black
• Tories say hes British
• The parallel structures and the opposition
  between Labour and Tory set us up to interpret
  black and British as opposites.

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Critical Stylistics - opposition

• Other triggers of contextual opposition
• Negation X, not Y
• e.g. If you are not with us, you are with the
  terrorists. (Bush 2001)
• Try it out It was X, not Y.

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Syntactic triggers of opposition

• Negated opposition - X not Y
• Transitional opposition - Turn X into Y
• Comparative Opposition - More X than Y
• Replacive opposition - X instead of Y
• Concessive opposition - Despite X, Y
• Explicit oppositions - X by contrast with Y
• Parallelism - He liked X. She liked Y
• Contrastives - X, but Y.

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Opposition Example 1

• let the professionals remember that the
  politicians that the public likes best are not
  the aloof ones but the human ones.
• standard negated opposition structure of not X
  but Y
• negation tends to produce the mutually-exclusive
  kind of opposite, complementarity

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Opposition Example 2

• The precision and lethality of future weapons
  will lead to increased massing of effects rather
  than massing of forces.
• parallel structure (massing of X, massing of Y)
  and explicit opposition trigger, rather than
• Resulting opposition effects and forces
• Ideology acceptable/unacceptable deaths

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CORPUS LINGUISTICS
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Collocation

• You shall know a word by the company it keeps.
  (Firth 1957 11)
• The meaning of a word is not inherent in it but
  comes about in part as a result of the meanings
  of nearby words
• The collocates of a word are the words that turn
  up in close proximity to it
• So, for example, you may find that light and hot
  turn up in close proximity to the word red
• If so, light and hot are collocates of red

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Semantic prosody

• The habitual collocates of a word colour it
  with a particular meaning so that it takes on a
  particular semantic prosody
• A semantic prosody is a form of meaning which is
  established through the proximity of a consistent
  series of collocates (Louw 2000 57)

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What does MONUMENTAL mean?

• Big, gigantic, grand?
• Statistically significant collocates of
  MONUMENTAL
• INCOMPETENCE, SCULPTURES, SCULPTURE, MASON,
  ARCHITECTURE, REPUTATION, DISASTER, ADAM, TASK,
  ART, WORKS, STYLE, FINE, BUILDING, FORM

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A concordance of MONUMENTAL

• European farming policy to save the Barn Owl,
  it's going to be a monumental task. Read in
  studio Police have issued a picture of a man who
  stole
• side, has a practical veto on progress, Sir
  Patrick's task is a monumental one. He will try
  to lead the discussion, this time, instead of
  acting
• redness can be turned into an absolute distance.
  It is a monumental task, performed through
  thousands upon thousands of finicky observations
  and
• Vegas , in the heart of the Nevada Desert. This
  isn't such a monumental task but for the arrival
  of another 150,000 visitors who have exactly
• long enough to see through what was in some ways
  the most monumental task he had yet set himself?
  It was to prove a wretchedly difficult period
• If you don't know who that audience is then you
  really do have a monumental task in front of you.
  The design of any document should be
• the stone wall nearby that adorns the eight-mile
  ridge between Dent and Ireby, a monumental task
  undertaken by rough men long before the coming
• would shame a banana republic. In the'80s
  Scottish football was confronted with the
  monumental task of coming to terms with a new
  financial era.

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What relevance does this have for CDA?

• The collocates of a particular word or phrase can
  often indicate an accompanying ideology
• Deviating from conventional collocations can
  generate semantic prosodies that convey
  particular ideologies

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WIFE AND?

• Stephen intends to spend more time with his wife
  and __________.
• Top 10 collocates of wife and
• CHILDREN
• DAUGHTER
• FAMILY
• MOTHER
• CHILD
• SON
• HUSBAND
• KIDS
• DAUGHTERS
• BABY
• Stephen intends to spend more time with his wife
  and caravan.

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(No Transcript)
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IN DANGER OF

• Hes in danger of getting a distinction if hes
  not careful
• Top 10 statistically significant collocates
• COLLAPSING
• LOSING
• FORGETTING
• DISAPPEARING
• BECOMING
• SLIPPING
• FALLING
• DYING
• COLLAPSE

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ON THE VERGE OF

• To its supporters, intelligent design heralds a
  revolution in science and the movement is fast
  gaining political clout. Not only does it have
  the support of the President of the United
  States, it is on the verge of being introduced to
  science classes across the nation. However, its
  many critics, including Professor Richard Dawkins
  and Sir David Attenborough, fear that it cloaks a
  religious motive to replace science with god.

(http//www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizo
n/war.shtml)
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ON THE VERGE OF

• To its supporters, intelligent design heralds a
  revolution in science and the movement is fast
  gaining political clout. Not only does it have
  the support of the President of the United
  States, it is on the verge of being introduced to
  science classes across the nation. However, its
  many critics, including Professor Richard Dawkins
  and Sir David Attenborough, fear that it cloaks a
  religious motive to replace science with god.

(http//www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizo
n/war.shtml)
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ON THE VERGE OF

• Statistically significant collocates
• EXTINCTION
• BANKRUPTCY
• COLLAPSE
• TEARS
• BREAKDOWN
• DEATH
• WAR
• COUNTRY
• Strong negative semantic prosody
• Associated with failure and finality