Han 8 Flashcards
S
Setting
Time, place, and other physical conditions surrounding the speech act.
S
Scene The psychological counterpart to setting. What is meant here is that a setting can be changed, for example, the formal to informal, by the participants
The discourse situation
The form ‘announcement’ can function as order, request, etc. Obviously, this does not adequately describe the term function. Function here means the objective and effect in a given situation.
Example:
(1) A: Do you smoke?
B: Well, if you’ve got a cigarette.
The interpretation of possible objectives and effects can be strongly influenced by the situation in which the utterance takes place. For example, if the question “Do you smoke?” is asked by a physician, it does not function as a means of starting a conversation, but as a medical question.
The situation in which discourse is produced and processed can be analysed and defined using a large number of factors that can have an influence on possible objectives and effects of discourse.
Dell Hymes (1972) summed up the components of ‘speech events’ on the basis of ethnographic (a systematic study of people and cultures) research. Hymes distinguished 16 components, which he grouped using the word SPEAKING as an acronym (an abbreviation used as a word and is formed from the initial components in a phrase or word).
Important
Do you know Hamus?
It is a delicious Palasteinien dish
Do you know Hymes?
Yes he created Hymes’s SPEAKING model:
P Participants
The Speaker or Sender, the Addresser, the Hearer, Receiver or Audience, and the Addressee
E ends
The purpose- outcomes and purpose- goals.
A act sequences
The form and the content of the message.
K Keys
The tone of the conversation (e.g. serious or mocking)
I Instrumentalities
The channels; written, telegraph, etc., and the forms of speech; dialect, standard language, etc.
N Norms
The norms of interaction, e.g., interruption and norms of interpretation (e.g. how a listener’s suddenly looking away must be interpreted).
G genres
Fairy tale, advertisement, etc.
This model became popular because of the handy grouping using the letters SPEAKING. However, it is unclear what the influence of the different components is. The outline is not complete. Background knowledge shared by speaker and the listener, and possible differences in background knowledge, can influence discourse. The same holds true for posture or attitude.
Though the model is fairly general, by using it, the factors comprising the discourse situation can be clarified.
The differences between two comparable situations can be highlighted. For example:
The discourse situation in a classroom where a student and a teacher have a conversation and on the other hand the situation in which the same student talks with his roommate in the dormitory. By using a few letters from the model, possible differences can be explained.
2
The discourse situation can be defined using elements from the components S, P and N: from setting the place of occurrence, and the scene, the psychological occurrence, from the participants their societal role, and from norms those that are bound by place.
It is obvious that this student finds himself in two different settings: in a classroom and in a student dorm.
The scene is different as well under the influence of the different roles that the participants take: the student-teacher conversation will be more formal than the student-student conversation in the dorm. This student has to act according to varying norms as well, when talking with a teacher or with a fellow student.
The remaining factors comprising the SPEAKING model clarify the discourse situation as well. These factors deal with the relationship between function and form. For example, the student- teacher conversation will be of a different genre than the conversation between the student and his roommate: at school he asks a question, at home he tells a joke.
Perhaps the student uses dialect when is at home, whereas he will probably use standard language in a conversation with his teacher.
The student’s conversations will serve different ends too: in a class the purpose is to have a question answered; in the dorm the goal is to amuse his roommate.
Discourse is not only a part of the situation, but it can change the situation or even create a context as well. The way in which discourse can change the situation can be observed in the classroom example. Suppose that one of the students knows the teacher as a neighbor and wants to let him know that last night’s party, which the teacher organised, was too noisy. This changes the situation in a classroom from a student-to-teacher conversation into a neighbor-to-neighbor conversation.
An example of discourse creating a context is the opening sentence of a conversation. This activates a mental mapping for both speaker and listener. If two strangers are sitting on a park bench, a context is created when one asks the other “Could you perhaps tell me the time?” or “I think it’ll be raining soon”. Both persons have an idea of the situation that enrolls and about the way it may evolve.
The term context is often used instead of situation or discourse situation. However, this term can cause some confusion as the word context is also used to denote the piece of discourse surrounding an element in discourse. For example, the context of a word, a sentence, or a paragraph.
For this reason, the word context is often qualified: the ‘verbal context’ or ‘textual environment’ as opposed to the ‘social context’ or ‘pragmatic context’. The social context is often divided into the context of situation and the context of culture. The word context can also be used to denote verbal context, thereby distinguishing it from context in the sense of discourse situation.
The socio-semiotic approach
So far, we have seen that discourse cannot be studied adequately without taking into account the addresser and addressee who use discourse for all the purposes communication can be used for.
Also, we have established that the main aim of studying discourse can be formulated as to detect the rules that underlie this “symbolic interaction”. Within this approach, two related aspects are important:
i. An addressee is not just a receiver of the message; in fact receivers are active, cooperating participants in the communication.
ii. Discourse is always situated in a social context and in a specific situation.
Which theory or approach offers a good general framework for analyzing all the different aspects of discourse?
The best candidate seems to be the so-called socio-semiotic approach (Halliday, 1978 and Hasan). Their approach is generally labeled functional grammar because it focuses on the function of discourse in context. It is also called systematic functional linguistics because it studies the functions in a systematic whole. However, the term socio-semiotic seems more precise as it explains the roots in semiotics.
The prefix socio: the social context is meant, in which the context of culture and the context of situation can be distinguished.
Semiotic: the act of conveying meaning with symbols (discourse) is meant.
4
The central claim of this approach is that every (piece of) discourse has to be studied in its social context, in the culture and situation in which it appears.
Halliday and Hasan (1985) describe three aspects of social context: field, tenor and mode. These concepts make it possible to interpret the social context of a discourse, the environment in which meanings are exchanged.
Filed
The field of discourse refers to what is happening and to the nature of the social action that is taking place. More specifically, it answers questions about what the participants are engaged in, in which the language figures as some essential component. In general it is the gist of what the discourse is about. The field refers to all different kinds of social actions, from doing the dishes to a parliamentary debate. Field is mostly restricted to institutional settings like lectures, visits to a doctor, etc.
Tenor
The tenor of discourse refers to who is taking part, to the nature of the participants, to their statuses and roles. It says something about the kinds of role relationship that exist between the participants. It clarifies both the types of speech role that participants assume in dialogue and the whole cluster of socially significant relationships in which they are involved.
Tenor can be analysed using categories such as power and social distance. Tenor also refers to affect, the degree of emotional charge in the relationship between the participants, the attitudes and emotions that play a role in communication.
يشير فحوى الخطاب إلى من يشارك، وطبيعة المشاركين، وإلى أوضاعهم وأدوارهم. يقول شيئا عن أنواع علاقة الدور الموجودة بين المشاركين. يوضح كلا من أنواع دور الكلام التي يضطلع بها المشاركون في الحوار والمجموعة الكاملة من العلاقات ذات الأهمية الاجتماعية التي يشاركون فيها.
يمكن تحليل المدة باستخدام فئات مثل القوة والمسافة الاجتماعية. يشير التينور أيضا إلى التأثير، ودرجة الشحنة العاطفية في العلاقة بين المشاركين، والمواقف والعواطف التي تلعب دورا في التواصل.
Mode
يشير نمط الخطاب إلى الجزء الذي تلعبه اللغة والمشاركين
توقعات حول ما يمكن أن تفعله اللغة لهم في هذه الحالة.
• يتعلق الأمر بالتنظيم الرمزي للنص ووضعه ووظيفته في السياق،
بما في ذلك القناة (منطوقة أو مكتوبة أو مزيج من الاثنين) والخطابة
الوضع.
• كما أنه يقول شيئا عما يحققه النص من حيث الإقناع والتفسير و
الفئات التعليمية.
Mode
The mode of discourse refers to what part the language plays and the participants’
expectations about what language can do for them in that situation.
• It is about the symbolic organization of the text, its status, and its function in the context,
including the channel (spoken, written or a combination of the two) and the rhetorical
mode.
• It also says something about what the text achieves in terms persuasive, expository and
didactic categories.
The three aspects of the social context correlates with three aspects of discourse:
(Situation
Components of discourse)
Field
(Discourse
Aspects of meaning)
The three aspects of the social context correlates with three aspects of discourse:
(Situation
Components of discourse)
(Discourse
Aspects of meaning)
The three aspects of the social context correlates with three aspects of discourse:
(Situation
Components of discourse)
