Possible exam questions for the Discourse Analysis exam

1. Which are the four main discourse dimensions?

The four main discourse dimensions are:

 The means of production (the number of speakers who produced the discourse)

 The type of content (the text genre)

 The manner of production (style and register)

 The medium of production (oral versus written)

2. Give four examples of conversational turns and moves in a conversation of your own.

1) Three conversational turns⟶ Two by speaker A and one by speaker B, and in terms of
moves, speaker A’s second utterance has one turn, but two moves: an evaluation of speaker B’s
utterance( To keep you healthy, yes, to keep you healthy) and a further question( Why do you want to
be healthy?).Both questions posed by speaker A are initiating moves.

A: Can you tell me why you eat all that vegan food?

B: To keep you healthy.

A: To keep you healthy, yes, to keep you healthy. Why do you want to be healthy?

2) Chunk⟶ begins with an initiating move and ends with a corresponding resolving move.
This chunk is sometime called an Adjacency Pair.

A: Can you tell me why you eat all that vegan food?

B: To keep you healthy.

3) Countering move⟶ which delays the resolution or closure. In the following dialogue we
have three countering moves (which represent new initiatives), which result in four levels of resolution:

A: I’m inviting you to my birthday party tomorrow at 8 pm.

B: Can I bring one of my brothers with me?

A: Richard or Edward?

B: Does it matter which?

A: Yes, of course it matters.

B: Okay, Richard, the eldest.

A: Very well.
 B: Okay, thanks, we’ll be there.

4) Since not all dialogues have such symmetrical closure, in the following dialogue for
instance, what the final utterance resolves is A’s immediately preceding utterances. A’s original initiating
move remains unresolved, as does B’s continuing/initiating move:

A: Where are you going tonight?

B: Why do you want to know?

A: You always get mad when I ask you something.

B: Liar!

3. Define text genres and give examples.

Genre is culture-specific and each language and culture will have a bewildering variety of
specific genres which are distinctive to it. Therefore, a text genre is a type of written or spoken
discourse.

Examples: NARRATIVE Discourse (Stories), PROCEDURAL Discourse, BEHAVIORAL Discourse

(exhortation, eulogy, some speeches of political candidates, etc.), EXPOSITORY discourse
(budgets, scientific articles).

4. Define and discuss communicative intent.

The combination of purposes underlying a text is called the speaker’s communicative intent.
Communicative intent is diverse and generally layered. The choice of genre itself has a
communicative intent. So, the communicative intent has to do with reasons that lie behind the
linguistic action. People don’t tell stories or talk for no good reason. They are offering something
of an interactional nature that does something such as describing or explaining or accounting for
the current circumstances in some way.

5. Define individual style and give examples.

When the same story is told by different speakers, differences typically show up. Even if the
speakers include the same content, they package things in different ways. This is called
individual style and it refers to “those features of a text… which identify it as being the product
of a particular author” (or speaker) and which represent his or her choice as regards manner or
expression. For example, we can contrast the style of Hemingway and Dickens in literary texts.
Agatha Christie for example is considered to be the master of contemporary detective novels
and has her own style of writing.
6. Define register and give examples.

The term register is used to refer to “the fact that the language we speak or write varies
according to the type of situation”, with other words according to “the social context of
language use”. There are formal and informal registers in spoken and written language. Formal
registers can include everything from an academic essay to wedding vows, while informal
registers can be used when two or more people who know each other well are speaking without
trying to be 'proper' or when they speak in slang for example.

7. Which are the three kinds of English we use in the oral & written aspect according to Chafe?

According to Chafe, the English lexicon consists of three kinds of items: COLLOQUIAL
VOCABULARY, that is used predominantly in speaking (e.g., guy, stuff, scary), LITERARY
VOCABULARY that is used predominantly in writing (e.g., display, heed), and VOCABULARY THAT
IS NEUTRAL with respect to this distinction (neutral equivalents of the above colloquial and
literary words are man, material, frightening, show, pay attention to).

8. What are some of the paralinguistic signals we use in both written and spoken English?

The spoken language relies on prosody (pitch; pause; tempo; voice quality; etc. ) and body
language for deixis , respect, interpropositional relations and a host of other categories. Written
language relies on punctuation and description. While certain deixis such as the indefinite “this”,
may also be restricted to oral material in English.

9. When do we consider a text to be coherent?

We consider a text to be coherent if for a certain hearer on a certain hearing/reading, he or she

is able to fit its different elements into a single overall mental representation.

10. What is internal and what is external contextualization?

Internal contextualization is when the hearer attempts to construct a mental representation for
the content of the text itself, while external contextualization is when the hearer tries to
understand what the speaker is trying to accomplish by producing the text.

11. What is cohesion?

The cohesion is when the author plants linguistic signals in the text as clues to assist the hearers
in coming up with an adequate mental representation. With other words, it can be defined as
the use of linguistic means to signal coherence.

12. Define cohesive ties types and illustrate four of them.

 Cohesive ties are signals of cohesion that indicate how the part of the text with which they
occur links up conceptually with some other part. The most common types of cohesion are:
descriptive expressions alluding to entities, identity, lexical relations, morphosyntactic patterns,
signals of relations between propositions and intonation patterns.

. DESCRIPTIVE EXPRESSIONS such as the following day, in the next room, the girl’s brother, etc.
Such expressions allude to entities that were mentioned earlier in the text, or at least to entities
that the speaker assumes the hearer already has in his or her mental representation. The earlier
entities could be the preceding day, a certain room, the girl, etc. The cohesion lies in the fact
that the new entity is explicitly linked to the earlier entity, thus contributing to coherence.

.IDENTITY-Cohesive ties under the broad heading of IDENTITY link to identical forms, identical
meaning, or identical reference or denotation. One example would be the repetition (The Prime
Minister recorded her thanks to the Foreign Secretary. The Prime Minister was most eloquent.)

.LEXICAL RELATIONS-Many pairs of lexical items are related in ways that do not involve identity.
An example of lexical relation would be the hyponymy (one thing is a subtype of another. For
example, roses are a subtype of flower; rose is a hyponym of flower: Flowers have always been
interesting to me. Roses are my favorite. Another important relationship is the PART-WHOLE
one: The human body is amazing. The heart for example, pumps blood through the blood
vessels of the circulatory system.

.INTONATION PATTERNS-the importance of intonation as a cohesive device should not be

underestimated. One can often tell from intonation alone when a speaker is “winding down” his
or her talk. That involves cohesion, since it places an utterance within the overall scheme (e.g.,
near the end) of the discourse. On a more local scale, parenthetical information is often signaled
by means of a low-key intonation pattern. (Example: Well I saw Jim the other day // incidentally
/ he’s just got married again // and he said ...)

13. Define and discuss thematic grouping and chunking.

Within most oral narratives a speaker pauses longer than normally and the interlocutor is likely
to contribute some encouraging noise or remark; in written we commonly find paragraph
intentation and chapters and in plays we find scenes and acts. Consciously or not, the speaker is
grouping sentences into units of text which are known as Thematic Groupings.

Chunking is when you group together (connected items or words) so that they can be stored or
processed as single concepts. It is necessary so that people can handle large amouts of
information.

14. State the four main thematic dimensions in narratives.

The four main thematic dimensions in narratives are time, place, action and participants.

15. What do mental representations do?

 They play a central and unifying role in representing objects, states of affairs, sequences of
events, the way the world is, and the social and psychological actions of daily life. A mental
representation can be thought of as a representing “a state of affairs”.

16. Define bottom-up and top-down processing.

Bottom-up and top-down processing are two general strategies for arriving at mental
representations. Bottom-up processing begins with “unique perceptual events” and constructs
successive generalizations to make sense of the data. The top-down processing begins when we
have a range of facts and jump to a hypothesis.

17. What are definite and indefinite referents according to Chafe?

A definite referent is one which the speaker assumes that the hearer will be able to identify, i. e.
,to locate in his or her current mental representation.

An indefinite referent is one for which the speaker is instructing the hearer to create a slot.

18. Which are the three kinds of activation status as discussed by Chafe?

The three kinds of activation status as discussed by Chafe are active, accessible and inactive.

19. State the three types of focus as suggested by Lambrecht.

The three types of focus as suggested by Lambrecht are sentence focus, predicate focus and
argument focus.

20. Discuss some general signals of focus in written and oral English.

1. The unmarked position for the intonation nucleus in English is on the final lexical item of the
utterance. Expressions are sometimes maneuvered to final position in order for the intonation
nucleus to fall on them, thus being clearly indicated as the focus proper .This seems to be the
motivation for (b) as opposed to (a):

a. I gave a book to JOHN.

b. I gave John a BOOK.

2. All languages appear to have modifiers that collocate with, hence help to signal, argument
focus. This is the case with the English noun modifier even:

Even Mary didn’t care to eat it.

3. Cleft construction (it has two clauses, the first of which contains the focused concept):
 ----Focus---- ------Presupposition-----

It was a BEAR that your daughter killed.