Name : Devi Selfiani Sabri

Nim : 40300120095

CHAPTER - 7
CORPUSES APPROACHES TO DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
1. Corpus is the collection of data usually stored and analyzed electronically. They look at
the occurrence and re occurrence of particular linguistic features to see how and where
they occur in the discourse.
2. There are following eight kinds of corpora:
a) General corpora
b) Specialized Corpora. .
c) The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English.
d) The British Academic Spoken English.
e) The British Academic Written English Corpus.
f) The TOEFL Spoken and Written Academic Language Corpus
3. Design and Construction of Corpora. Data for general research is always available in
abundance. However if answer to a specific questions is required then we have to design
our own corpora to suit our requirements.
4. Issues to consider in constructing a Corpus. While designing a Corpus many factors
need to be considered, like the size of corpus, form of expression like written or spoken
genre or in the form of monologue, dialogic and multi-party etc.
a. Authenticity, representativeness and Validity of the Corpus. In the construction of
corpus authenticity, representativeness and validity are also important issues, that need
due attention of the researchers.
b. Kinds of Texts to Include in the Corpus. According to (Hunston2002), the kind of
Corpus depends on the availability of texts as well as the validity. He means to say that,
for how much time it will be available for the purpose of updating.
c. Size of the Texts in the Corpus. It depends that, some corpora aim for an even sample
size of an individual texts.
d. Sampling and representativeness of the Corpus. The important issue in this regard to
define what section of the society is being considered as the population being researched
on.
5. The LSWE (Longman Sspoken and Written English) corpus represents four major
discourse types, conversation, fiction, news and academic prose.
6. Discourse Characteristics of Conversational English Following are the major
characteristics as noted by Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English:
a. Non clausal units in conversational discourse Conversational discourses make wide use
of non-clausal units i.e. utterances which do not contain an explicit subject or verb.
b. Personal Pronouns & Ellipsis in Conversation Wide usage of personal pronouns and
ellipses in conversational discourse. It is because of shared context in which conversation
take place.
c. Situational Ellipsis in Conversation Speakers at times intentionally skip certain words as
they take it for granted that the listener understands the immediate context.
d. Non-clausal Units as Elliptic Replies in Conversation In the shared social situation in
which the conversation is taking place both speakers know what is being talked about.
e. Repetition in Conversation In order to give added emphasis to a point the spoken
discourse has abundant repetitions in conversation.
f. Lexical Bundles in Conversational Discourse There is frequent use of lexical bundles in
conversational discourse such as “in addition to”, “in order to”, “it is going to be”, “If
you want to”, etc.
7. Performance Phenomenon of Conversational Discourse
Following are the important points of Performance Phenomenon of
Conversational Discourse:
a. Silent and Filled Pauses in Conversation The individuals fear to lose their turn if they
pause in the end. To retain their turn the speakers tend to pause in the middle giving the
impression of speaking the very next moment.
b. Utterance launchers and filled pauses In conversational discourse people use utterance
launchers such “as well as”, “all right”, “okay”, “fine”, “lets” etc. to take the turn and to
fill pauses.
c. Attention Signals In Conversation Speakers often use other persons’ names as an
attention signal to make it clear to whom they are speaking to.
d. Response Elicitors In Conversation a question tag is an example of response elicitors in
conversation.
e. Non Clausal Items as Response Forms Uh, Huh, Mum, Yeah, Okay, are the examples of
non-clausal items.
f. Extended Coordination Of Clauses In conversational discourse one clausal unit is
added to another clausal unit with such items “as, and, but etc.”
8. Constructional principle of conversational discourse.
There are key principles which underlie the production of conversational
discourse, which are following. The principle of keep talking, the principle of limited
planning ahead and the principle of qualification of what has been said.
a. Prefaces and Conversation. In conversation, the main part of speakers’ message is often
preceded by a preface including fronting of clausal units, noun phrase, discourse markers,
linking adverbs, utterances launchers, interjection etc.
b. Tags in Conversation.Speakers add tags in many ways to a grammatical unit in
conversational discourse by use of question tag at the end of a sentence to reinforce what
has just been said.
9. Corpus Studies of the Social Nature of Discourse.
As Swales found spoken discourse to be unpretentious in terms of vocabulary
choice while using the MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English) he also
 found that spoken discourse avoided name dropping and the use of obscure references.
He concluded that from the language point of view there are few barriers to cross -
disciplinary oral communication than there perhaps might be in written academic
communication.
10. Collocation and Corpus Studies
Corpus studies are also used to examine collocation in spoken and written
discourses for example Hyland and Tse’s 2004 study of dissertation acknowledgement of
collocation “special thanks”, Sincere thanks” and “deep thanks”. They found that through
this corpus how the writers expressed gratitude in their conversation.
11. Criticism of Corpus Studies Corpus study has been severely criticized by linguists
saying that it is machine based orientation of Corpus Studies that leads to atomized and
misleading investigation of language use. Another criticism is that corpus studies do not
take into account the contextual aspects of text. However, these arguments have been
negated by Tribble saying that corpus studies enable contextual features such as the
social context of the text, communicative purpose of the text, roles of the readers and
writers of the text shared culture etc.
 Chapter 8
Summary of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

A. Multimodal Discourse

Definition: Multimodal discourse analysis considers how texts draw on modes of

communication such as pictures, film, video, images and sound in combination with words to
make meaning. It has examined print genres as well as genres such as web pages, film and
television programmes. It considers how multimodal texts are designed and how semiotic tools
such as colour, framing, focus and positioning of elements contribute to the making of meaning
in these texts.
Cosmopolitan: Machin and Thornborrow argue, is not just about selling magazines to its
readers. It is also about selling values of independence, power and fun. The multimodal use of
discourse in the magazine highlights this.
Halliday (2009) describes three types of social meanings, or functions that are drawn
on simultaneously in the use of language. These are ideational (what the text is about),
interpersonal (relations between participants) and textual meanings (how the message is
organized).
Jewitt ( 2009 ) describes four theoretical assumptions that underlie multimodal discourse
analysis.
The first is that language is part of an ensemble of modes, each of which has equal
potential to contribute to meaning. Images, gaze and posture, thus, do not just support
meaning, they each contribute to meaning.
The second is that each mode of communication
realizes different meanings and that looking at language as the principal (or sole) medium
of communication only reveals a partial view of what is being communicated.
The third assumption is that people select from and configure these various modes in order to
make meaning and that the interaction between these modes and the distribution of meanings
between them are part of the production of meaning.
The fourth assumption is that meanings that are made by the use of multimodal resources are,
like language, social. These meanings, further, are shaped by the norms, rules and social
conventions for the genre that are current at the particular time, in the particular context.

B. Genre, speech acts and multimodality

Van Leeuwen ( 2005a , 2005b ) discusses speech acts and genre in relation to multimodality,
using these two notions to capture the ‘how’ (vs. the ‘what’) of multimodal communication.
A key point he draws from speech act theory is how a speech act is both an illocutionary
act (what the speech act is aiming to do) and a perlocutionary act (the effect it has on the
thoughts and actions of people).
 C. Multimodality and global media discourse
Machin and van Leeuwen ( 2007 ) discuss genre and multimodality in relation to global
media discourse. Taking the example of advertisements in Cosmopolitan magazine, they
show how their representations aim to create a certain perlocutionary effect on readers;
that is, to use or purchase a particular service, or product.
D. A genre and multimodality framework
a genre and multimodality framework that provides several layers of description for multimodal
texts. These are the content structure :
The genre structure , the rhetorical structure , the linguistic structure , the layout structure and
the navigation structure of the text.
Areas of analysis in Bateman’s Genre and Multimodality framework (Bateman 2008 : 19)
Content structure The content-related structure of the information to be communicated –
including propositional content
Genre structure The individual stages or phases defi ned for a given genre: i.e., how the
delivery of the content proceeds through particular stages of activity
Rhetorical structure The rhetorical relationships between the content elements: i.e., how the
content is ‘argued’, divided into main material and supporting material and structured
rhetorically
Linguistic structure The linguistic details of any verbal elements that are used to realize the
layout elements of the page/document
Layout structure The nature, appearance and position of communicative elements on the page,
and their hierarchical inter-relationships
Navigation structure The ways in which the intended mode(s) of consumption of the document
is/are supported: This includes
all elements on a page that serve to direct or assist the reader’s consumption of the document
E. Multimodality and newspaper genres
Caple ( 2009 , 2010 ) and Knox ( 2007 , 2010 ) discuss newspaper genres from a multimodal per-
spective and how new technologies are leading to evolutions in these genres. Newspapers often
draw on the strength of visual images in image-nuclear news stories to capture and retain the
interest of their readers (Caple 2009 ). In the majority of the texts Caple collected she found the
headings that accompanied the images were an idiomatic expression that fitted with the subject
matter of the photograph.
F. Multimodality in film and television genres
Multimodality has also been discussed in relation to film and television genres. Iedema
( 2001 ) provides a framework for the analysis of films and television by drawing on work
in film theory and genre theory. The levels of analysis he proposes are frame , shot , scene ,
sequence (from film theory), generic stage and work as a whole (from genre theory).
G. Multimodality and film trailers
Maier ( 2011 ) discusses multimodality in relation to film trailers. She describes trailers
for comedies as typically having the stages shown in Table 8.3 . The first stages she lists are
implicitly promotional.
 H. Carrying out multimodal discourse analysis
The steps involved in carrying out multimodal discourse analysis are similar to those of any
discourse analysis project (see Chapter 10). A difference does lie, however, in how the data
is analysed and what aspects of the data are seen to contribute to the meaning of the text.
Whether it is spoken or written data, it first of all needs to collected. The data then needs to
be logged; that is, the data needs to be summarized in some way, with accompanying notes
that will help to give a contextual understanding of the data. Additional commentary can
be added here where first thoughts, or ideas, about the data can be recorded that can be
pursued in greater depth in the analysis.
I. Limitations of multimodal discourse analysis
Iedema ( 2001 ) discusses limitations of multimodal discourse analysis. Among these is the
amount of time it takes to do this kind of analysis. Also, he points out, while the analysis
may at some stages be quite technical, it can also, like all discourse analysis, be very inter-
pretative. Multimodal analyses also, less often, looks at readers’ or viewers’ readings of texts.
McHoul ( 1991 ), for example, has pointed out that analysts’ readings are not always the same
as actual readings of text. Multimodal texts, further, are often examined on the basis of the
final product alone and are not considered in relation to the people who were involved in
its creation.
 CHAPTER NO 9
CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

The chapter “Critical Discourse Analysis” explains that texts are no longer
constructed just by words but by combinations of other modalities such as pictures,
videos, and sound. The author argues that the use of these modalities make the reader
more of a ‘witness’ of the events. The chapter gives background information on critical
discourse analysis. Paltridge outlines some steps for carrying out critical discourse
analysis and some of the limitations of such analysis.
1. Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis
Paltridge reproduces certain principles for critical discourses propounded by
Fairclough and Wodak which are as under:
a. Social and political issues are constructed and reflected in this course Critical discourse
analyses address social and political issues and examines ways in which these are
constructed and reflected in the use of discourse.
b. Power relation are negotiated and performed through discourse. This principle suggests
that it can be looked at through an analysis of who controls conversational interaction,
who allows a person to speak and how they do this.
c. Discourse reflects and reproduces social relation. Discourse not only reflects but also
produces social relation. Both are established and maintained through the use of
discourse.
d. Ideologies are produced and reflected in the use of discourse. Another principle of CDA
is that ideologies are produced and reflected in the use of discourse. This includes ways
of representing and constructing society such as relation of power, relation based on
gender, class ethnicity etc.
2. Doing Critical Discourse Analysis CDA
“includes not only a description and interpretation of discourse in context, but
also offers an explanation of why and how discoursed work” (Rogers). The analysis
considers the framing of the text, fore grounding and back grounding in the text. The
analysis may also consider who is doing what to whom i.e. agent - patient relation in the
discourse and who has the most authority and power in the discourse.
3. Critical Discourse Analysis AND Genre.
The consideration of genre in achieving a particular discourse goal is an important
in approaching a critical perspective as Flowerdew discusses the various genre that were
involved in constructing the view of Hong Kong as a world class city. These included
committee meeting, policy speeches, commission report and inception report, public for
a, exhibition, consultation digest and videos.
4. Critical Discourse Analysis & Framing
A further way of doing CA is to examine the way in which the content of the text
is framed, Huckin looks at a newspaper report on demonstration at nuclear test site in US
in this way. The Demo described in this report, framed as a confrontation between the
group of protesters and law officials. The report does not discuss the issues that
motivated the protest.
5. Critical Discourse Analysis And Multi-Modality
 Many readers of the text are constructed not just by the words but by the
combination of words with other modalities such as pictures, films or video images and
sounds. The ways in which people reacted to the events of 11 Sep. for example were very
much affected by the images they saw on TV.
6. Criticism of Critical Discourse Analysis Critical Discourse Analysis has been criticized
vehemently maintaining that it is very similar to earlier stylistic analysis, the area of
literary criticism. Some critics believe that Critical Discourse Analysis does not always
consider the role of reader in consumption and interpretation of a text. Some of the critics
want Critical Discourse Analysis to be more demanding in tools of analysis.