Discourse Analysis

Discourse Analysis provides an essential and practical introduction for students

studying modules on the analysis of language in use. It explores the ways in
which language is used and organised in written and spoken texts to generate
meanings and takes into account the social contexts of production, and the social
roles and identities of those involved.
Investigating the ways in which language varies according to subject, social
setting, and communicative purpose, this book examines various forms of
speaking and writing, including casual conversation, speeches, parliamentary
debate, computer-mediated communication, and mass media articles. It discusses
topics including how we convey more than we actually say or write, the role of
politeness and impoliteness in communication, and what makes texts cohesive
and coherent. It also shows how particular aspects of discourse analysis can be
assisted by corpus methods and tools.
Taking students through a step-by-step guide on how to do discourse analysis
that includes the collection of data and presentation of results, the book also
documents a text analysis project from start to fnish. Featuring a range of
examples and interactive activities, as well as additional online support material,
this book is key reading for those studying discourse analysis modules.

Patricia Canning is an assistant professor at Northumbria University, Newcastle

(UK). Her recent publications include journal articles on the linguistic construction
of domestic abuse police reports (2022; and with Nick Lynn, 2021). She is
co-author of an independent report into what went wrong at the Champions
League Final in Paris (2022) and has published research on the narrative evidence
following the Hillsborough Football Stadium disaster (2018; 2021; 2023). She
is author of Style in the Renaissance: Language and Control in Early Modern
England (2011).

Brian Walker is a visiting scholar in the School of Arts, English and Languages at
Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast (UK). His published research focuses on corpus
stylistics and using corpus linguistic approaches in the analysis of discourse.
LEARNING ABOUT LANGUAGE

Series Editors:
Brian Walker, Queen’s University Belfast, UK; Willem Hollmann, Lancaster University,
UK; and the late Geoffrey Leech, Lancaster University, UK

Series Consultant:
Mick Short, Lancaster University, UK

Learning about Language is an exciting and ambitious series of introductions to fun-

damental topics in language, linguistics and related areas. The books are designed for
students of linguistics and those who are studying language as part of a wider course.

Also in this series:

Analysing Sentences
An Introduction to English Syntax, Fourth Edition
Noel Burton-Roberts

The History of Early English

An Activity-based Approach
Keith Johnson

An Introduction to Foreign Language Learning and Teaching, Revised Third Edition

Keith Johnson

The History of Late Modern Englishes

An Activity-based Approach
Keith Johnson

Analysing Sentences
An Introduction to English Syntax, Fifth Edition
Noel Burton-Roberts

An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Sixth Edition

Janet Holmes and Nick Wilson

Critical Discourse Analysis

A Practical Introduction to Power in Language
Simon Statham

Introducing Linguistics
Edited by Jonathan Culpeper, Beth Malory, Claire Nance, Daniel Van Olmen, Dimitrinka
Atanasova, Sam Kirkham, and Aina Casaponsa

Discourse Analysis
A Practical Introduction
Patricia Canning and Brian Walker

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/series/PEALAL

Discourse Analysis
A Practical Introduction

PATRICIA CANNING AND BRIAN WALKER

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To Simon and to Jacqui; enjoy – there’ll be a test later.
 Contents

Acknowledgements xi
List of fgures xiii
List of tables xv
List of activities xvii
List of QR codes xix
IPA chart xx

1 Discourse: language, context, and choice 1

Introduction 1
What is discourse? 1
The nuts and bolts of language and discourse 3
Text 13
Understanding context 16
Spoken and written discourse 20
Standard English (or the issue of convention) 22
Sociolinguistic variables 24
Conclusion 26
Further reading 27
Resources 28
2 Organising discourse: thematic and information structure 31
Introduction 31
Organising discourse 31
Structure of the English clause 32
Thematic structure 38
Information structure: Given and New 48
Given injustice: the case of Derek Bentley 53
Conclusion 56
Further reading 56
Answers to activities 56
3 Organising information in discourse: cohesion 62
Introduction 62

vii
CONTENTS

Coherence and Cohesion in discourse 62

Reference 63
Ellipsis and substitution 68
Conjunction 70
Reiteration (lexical cohesion) 76
Conclusion 79
Further reading 80
Answers to activities 80
4 Analysing spoken discourse 84
Introduction 84
How spoken discourse is analysed 84
Spoken Interactions 85
Prosody in spoken discourse 87
Turns, turn taking, and turn transition 93
Functional analysis of turns 96
Sequencing 99
Backchannels 104
Overlapping talk 105
Summary of transcription conventions 105
Conclusion 107
Further reading 107
Resources 107
Answers to activities 108
5 Analysing meaning in discourse 113
Introduction 113
What do we mean by meaning? 113
Working out meaning in discourse: co-text and context 121
Entailment 122
Presupposition 125
Conclusion 132
Further reading 132
Answers to activities 133
6 Meaning and context 137
Introduction 137
Implicature 140
Doing implicatures in real discourse: memes 149
Conclusion 153
Further reading 154
7 Politeness 158
Introduction 158
Face 160

viii
 CONTENTS

Using politeness strategies to mitigate face-threatening acts 164

Non-linguistic considerations 170
A short analysis of a football press conference 172
Conclusion 174
Further reading 175
Answers to activities 175
8 Metaphorical meanings in discourse: metaphor and metonymy 179
Introduction 179
What is a metaphor? 179
The conceptual basis of metaphors 181
Novel metaphors 186
Extended metaphors 191
Metaphors in political discourse 194
Metonymy 197
Metaphors and metonymies 200
Conclusion 201
Further reading 202
Answers to activities 202
9 Representing experience in discourse 209
Introduction 209
Different ways of telling 210
The transitivity model 214
The discourse situation 221
Case study: a case of domestic violence 223
Conclusion 231
Further reading 231
Answers to activities 232
10 Presenting other people’s speech, writing, and thought 235
Introduction 235
What is discourse presentation? 236
Different types of discourse presentation 240
Attribution of source of original discourse 252
Faithfulness 253
Conclusion 255
Further reading 256
Answers to activities 256
11 Corpus linguistics and discourse analysis 263
Introduction 263
Corpus linguistics 263
Corpus linguistics and discourse analysis 264
Using corpus methods to analyse corpora 267

ix
CONTENTS

Conclusion 293
Further reading 294
Corpus tools 294
Corpora 295
Answers to activities 296
12 Doing a project in discourse analysis 301
Introduction 301
Systematicity and the three Rs of research 301
Ethics 302
Copyright 308
Developing a research project 309
Data 314
Writing up your research – doing academic discourse 315
Conclusion 317
Further reading 317
Answers to activities 318
Appendices 319

Index 323

x
 Acknowledgements

Writing a book is hard. It can also be lonely but it’s never a lone effort. In this
case, there were two of us but there were more people behind the glossy cover
who helped. Friends and colleagues advised us and offered invaluable feedback
on chapters and we would especially like to thank Billy Clark, Dan McIntyre,
Sarah Duffy, Robert McKenzie, and Michael Burke for giving up their time and
lending us their expertise. Their constructive feedback improved the book. You
should’ve seen it before. That said, any errors or anomalies are our own and
we’ll pass the blame for each one to the other.
Getting timely permission to use copyrighted material is always a challenge.
Also, paying for permission to use a text snippet can be costly. And we quite like
living in houses and, you know, eating. So, a big thanks to Eve Canning whose
original artwork got us out of a potential legal quagmire. Viva la Absorbent
Andy. If we go down for that, we are taking Eve with us. We are also sincerely
grateful to Sebastian Hoffman for granting us permission to use screenshots
from BNCweb in our supplementary online materials.
We would also like to thank the many staff at Routledge for their help and
infnite patience, in particular Nadia, Bex, Sarah, and the rest of the team that
helped us get this book into your hands (or on your screens).
Nobody writes a book between the hours of 9am and 5pm. There were many
weekends and evenings and Christmases and Easters that were lost to writing
this one. Thanks are due to our friends and families − particularly Jacqui, Simon,
and Eve − for supporting and patiently suffering with us during the writing,
editing, editing, editing, and editing of this book.
Finally, Patricia would like to thank Brian for being a writer, a reader, a critic,
and a mate. It’s been a blast (emotions are events1). I’ll let you go now2. Brian
would like to say ‘Ight Imma head out’3.
PC and BW
May 2023

Notes
1 See Chapter 8
2 Not really
3 See Chapter 6

xi
 List of figures

1.1 Relationship between language and discourse 2

1.2 The levels of language 4
1.3 Free and bound morphemes in ‘books’ 4
1.4 An example of Hiberno-English: ‘power shower’ 7
1.5 Vegan propaganda poster 11
1.6 Conventional and unconventional syntax 12
1.7 HAVE YOU SHEETED? 14
2.1 Clausal and grammatical terminology 32
2.2 Simple example of Theme and Rheme 39
2.3 Given and New information 51
3.1 Summary of reference 65
5.1 This is a chair 114
6.1 ‘Did you keep the receipt?’ 139
6.2 An artist’s representation of the ‘Imma head out’ meme featuring
Absorbent Andy 151
6.3 The absent dad variant 151
6.4 The Halsey variant 152
6.5 The student variant 153
7.1 Approaches to FTAs 166
7.2 Doing the FTA ‘turn your music down’ 166
8.1 Metaphorical relationship between source and target domains 181
8.2 Mapping between conceptual and lexical metaphors 184
8.3 The different levels of metaphor production for ‘knowledge
is light’ and ‘knowledge is vision’ 185
8.4 Metaphoric mapping for ‘hiving’ 188
8.5 WhatsApp message 198
8.6 The ‘moo point’ metaphor/metonymy 201
9.1 Nominalisation vs clause 213
9.2 Passive constructions 214
9.3 Transitive and intransitive verbs 215
9.4 Grammatical roles vs Transitivity roles 218
9.5 Existential process 219
9.6 Verbal process constituents 221

xiii
LIST OF FIGURES

9.7 The trajectory of a DV case (England and Wales) (Lynn and

Canning 2021) 224
10.1 The prototypical situation for speech presentation 236
10.2 Elements of discourse presentation 237
11.1 Sampling 266
11.2 Frequency of ‘shall’ over time in COHA 269
11.3 KWIC view of ‘was’; frst 20 concordance lines out of 65,807 273
11.4 KWIC view of ‘was’ sorted alphabetically 275
11.5 Examples of ‘the’ as right- and left-hand collocates of ‘was’ 290
12.1 Refning a research question 310

xiv
 List of tables

1.1 The 20 vowel sounds in standard pronunciation (RP)

of British English 6
1.2 Lexical word classes 8
1.3 Function or grammatical word classes 8
2.1 Clause types and Subject position 33
2.2 English clause structure and typical grammatical realisations 37
2.3 Summary of unmarked and marked Themes in declarative clauses 42
2.4 Unmarked and marked Themes in interrogative and
imperative clauses 43
2.5 Theme and Rheme, Given and New 52
3.1 Categories and subtypes of conjunction based on the hierarchy
presented in Halliday and Hasan (1976: 244) 76
4.1 Pitch movements and symbols 90
4.2 Selected list of Acts after Francis and Hunston (1992) and
Stenström (1994) 97
4.3 Examples of Acts that can form adjacency pairs 100
4.4 Summary of transcription symbols 106
5.1 Leech’s seven meaning types (after Leech 1981: 23) 114
5.2 Some signifers for ‘chair’ 115
7.1 Some politeness strategies 162
9.1 The different Material Processes 216
9.2 Confgurations of Material Processes and their clause
constituent elements 217
9.3 Different formulations of Mental Processes and their
constituent elements 218
9.4 Relational Processes 220
9.5 The transitivity model: Process types and participants 222
9.6 The OIC’s account of the witness’s story 226
9.7 Material Processes in the OIC’s reformulation of the
at-issue event 227
9.8 Relational processes of ‘being’ from the OIC’s MG3 form 228
9.9 Relational processes from the gatekeeper’s input on the
OIC’s MG3 report 230

xv
LIST OF TABLES

9.10 Material processes in the gatekeeper’s review of the OIC’s

MG3 report 230
10.1 Three parallel clines of discourse presentation 240
11.1 Raw and relative frequencies of ‘shall’ by decade in COHA 269
11.2 Top 50 most frequent words in the mystery corpus 270
11.3 Constituent word totals for London Hotels Review
Corpus (LHRC) 272
11.4 ICE-FLOB reference corpus 279
11.5 Top 20 words by frequency in LHRC and ICE-FLOB 280
11.6 Scale of frequency difference between research and reference
corpora based on log ratio of relative frequencies
(after Hardie 2014) 284
11.7 Log-likelihood critical values (based on Rayson et al. 2004) 286
11.8 Keywords in LHRC when compared against ICE-FLOB 287
11.9 The most frequent collocates of ‘was’, 4L-4R 290
11.10 The most frequent 4L-4R collocates of ‘was’ with an
MI above 3 and an LL above 3.84 291
11.11 The top 20 3-grams in the LHRC 293

xvi
 List of activities

1.1 Making sense of neologisms 9

1.2 HAVE YOU SHEETED? 14
1.3 G-droppin’ 23
2.1 Label the clausal elements 37
2.2 Theme and Rheme in declarative clauses 42
2.3 Theme and Rheme in imperative clauses 44
2.4 Theme and Rheme in a news report 48
2.5 Given-New in a spoken interaction 50
2.6 Given and New in a news report 55
3.1 Personal, demonstrative, and comparative reference 68
3.2 Substitution 70
3.3 Conjunctive cohesion 76
3.4 Collocation 79
4.1 Punctuation in spoken discourse 87
4.2 Pause relocation 88
4.3 Okay 92
4.4 Try saying this at home 93
4.5 ‘I’d like a pie, please’ 99
4.6 Adjacency pears 103
5.1 Social meaning and synonyms 118
5.2 Collocation 120
5.3 What’s in a word? 122
5.4 Pinning the entailment on the Prime Minister 125
5.5 Presuppositions and the negation test 131
6.1 ‘Did you keep the receipt?’ 139
7.1 Politeness in real discourse 163
7.2 Mitigation strategies 164
8.1 Orientational metaphors – positive or negative evaluation? 182
8.2 Metaphor in literary fction 185
8.3 Real examples of the ‘hiving’ metaphor 186
8.4 Making meanings through metaphoric mappings 190
8.5 Extended metaphors 192
8.6 Metaphorical extension and elaboration in BBC TV’s
Dragon’s Den 193

xvii
LIST OF ACTIVITIES

8.7 Making meanings through metaphors 196

9.1 Rendering experience in language 209
9.2 SPOCA spotting 212
9.3 A case of domestic violence (male perpetrator, female victim) 225
10.1 Transpose Direct Speech into Indirect Speech 244
10.2 Discourse presentation in naturally occurring conversation 245
10.3 Josh gives his opinion 250
10.4 Discourse presentation from news story on the BBC website 251
10.5 Fake news! 254
11.1 The top 50 most frequent words 270
11.2 Copular and auxiliary ‘was’ 276
11.3 Comparing subsets of the London Hotels Reviews Corpus (LHRC) 289
12.1 Testing hypotheses 311
12.2 Hypothesis and research questions 313

xviii
 List of QR codes

1.1 Link to E. E. Cummings’s poem 5

1.2 Received Pronunciation 6
1.3 Link to G-droppin’ discussion on mumsnet 24
4.1 Victor Borge sketch 87
4.2 Key and Peele ‘Okay’ sketch 92
4.3 SBCSAE link 107
4.4 BNC link 107
4.5 Web-based interface link 108
6.1 Jose Mourinho post-match interview 145
7.1 Liddia and Ryan’s X-Factor audition 164
7.2 Jose Mourinho interview 173
8.1 Comedic effect from extended metaphor 192
8.2 Match the metaphor group to the entrepreneurial pitch 193
8.3 A ‘moo point’ metonymy 200

xix
 IPA chart

THE INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET (revised to 2015)

CONSONANTS (PULMONIC) © 2015 IPA

Bilabial Labiodental Dental Alveolar Postalveolar Retroflex Palatal Velar Uvular Pharyngeal Glottal

Plosive

Nasal

Trill

Tap or Flap

Fricative
Lateral
fricative
Approximant
Lateral
approximant
Symbols to the right in a cell are voiced, to the left are voiceless. Shaded areas denote articulations judged impossible.

CONSONANTS (NON-PULMONIC) VOWELS

Clicks Voiced implosives Ejectives Front Central Back

Close
Bilabial Bilabial Examples:

Dental Dental/alveolar Bilabial

Close-mid
(Post)alveolar Palatal Dental/alveolar

Palatoalveolar Velar Velar

Open-mid
Alveolar lateral Uvular Alveolar fricative

OTHER SYMBOLS
Open
Voiceless labial-velar fricative Alveolo-palatal fricatives Where symbols appear in pairs, the one
to the right represents a rounded vowel.
Voiced labial-velar approximant Voiced alveolar lateral flap

Voiced labial-palatal approximant Simultaneous and SUPRASEGMENTALS

Voiceless epiglottal fricative Primary stress

Affricates and double articulations
Voiced epiglottal fricative can be represented by two symbols Secondary stress
joined by a tie bar if necessary.
Epiglottal plosive Long
Half-long
DIACRITICS Some diacritics may be placed above a symbol with a descender, e.g.
Extra-short
Voiceless Breathy voiced Dental
Minor (foot) group
Voiced Creaky voiced Apical
Major (intonation) group
Aspirated Linguolabial Laminal
Syllable break
More rounded Labialized Nasalized
Linking (absence of a break)
Less rounded Palatalized Nasal release
TONES AND WORD ACCENTS
Advanced Velarized Lateral release LEVEL CONTOUR
Extra
Retracted Pharyngealized No audible release or high or Rising

Centralized Velarized or pharyngealized High Falling

High
Mid rising
Mid-centralized Raised ( = voiced alveolar fricative)
Low
Low rising
Syllabic Lowered ( = voiced bilabial approximant) Extra Rising-
low falling
Non-syllabic Advanced Tongue Root
Downstep Global rise
Rhoticity Retracted Tongue Root Upstep Global fall

Typefaces: Doulos SIL (metatext); Doulos SIL, IPA Kiel, IPA LS Uni (symbols)

IPA Chart, http://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa-chart,

available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License.
Copyright © 2015 International Phonetic Association.

xx
 1 Discourse
Language, context, and choice

Introduction
In this frst chapter we explain what we mean by discourse and discourse ana-
lysis and introduce some of the key concepts and linguistic terminology that we
will use throughout this book. We will discuss the notions of text, context, and
co-text, before going on to explore the differences between spoken and written
discourse. We will also examine the idea of a standard language and that some
language varieties hold more prestige than others. We will discover that when
analysing discourse, analysts consider the form of language (see levels of lan-
guage in Figure 1.2), its function (e.g. the purpose to which it is put; how it
works to achieve certain goals), and the context in which the language event
occurs (e.g. a conversation between friends; a political debate, an opinion piece
in the press). Our starting point, perhaps unsurprisingly, is ‘discourse’.

What is discourse?
Discourse does not have one single defnition and has different meanings even
within linguistics. According to the Oxford English Dictionary online edition
(‘Discourse’ 1989), discourse can mean:

• a detailed and lengthy spoken or written discussion of a particular topic;

• spoken communication, interaction or conversation;
• a connected series of utterances by which meaning is communicated.

Although non-technical, these defnitions nonetheless provide important infor-

mation about what discourse is. Discourse is connected chunks of spoken or
written language (e.g. utterances; sentences) used in interactions for meaningful
communication. Discourse, then, is language being used in all its forms (including
signed languages) to communicate, interact, inform, and get things done. Simply
put, and to quote two pioneers of discourse analysis, discourse is “language in
use” (Brown and Yule 1983: 1). Consequently, discourse analysis is not the study
of linguistic forms in isolation; it is, as Brown and Yule explain, the study of how
linguistic forms function when they are used in different contexts. Simpson and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003351207-1 1
DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

Mayr (2009: 5) echo this distinction between linguistic forms and the function
of forms in use when they contrast language (as a system) with discourse (as
language in use):
Whereas language refers to the more abstract set of patterns and rules which
operate simultaneously at different levels in the systems [. . .] discourse refers
to the instantiation of these patterns in real contexts of use.
Importantly, they go on to say that:
discourse works above the level of grammar and semantics to capture what
happens when these language forms are played out in different social, political
and cultural arenas.
The defnition above chimes with that of another discourse pioneer, Mike
Stubbs, who described discourse as “language above the sentence or above the
clause” (Stubbs 1983:1). Therefore, while discourse is, of course, made up of
the building blocks of language, it is greater than the sum of its parts. It is what
results when these language forms combine and connect in different ways in
different contexts.
Figure 1.1 captures the preoccupations of language and discourse and their
relationship to each other. Discourse concerns all of that which pertains to lan-
guage (such as syntax, lexis, and morphology – see Figure 1.2) but, in addition,
it involves the context in which language is used (we will say more about context

Figure 1.1 Relationship between language and discourse

2
 DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

later in this chapter), the people using the language, and the purpose served by
the language in that context. Discourse, then, is structural because it involves the
linguistic building blocks set out in Figure 1.2, cognitive because it incorporates
the mental representations language users hold about the world (we explore this
further in Chapter 8), and social because “language users engaging in discourse
accomplish social acts and participate in social interactions [that are] embedded
in social and cultural contexts” (van Dijk 1997: 2, original emphasis) (we say
more about acts in Chapter 4).

What is discourse analysis?

As we established in the previous section, discourse analysis is not the study
of language rules and components in isolation; it is not just about considering
clauses and other structures and establishing what words or phrases go where.
Instead, discourse analysis studies how language is used in real-life, everyday
settings. When we ‘do’ discourse analysis we are looking at how meaning is
conveyed between those producing the language and those receiving the lan-
guage. However, that is not to say an understanding of the language system is
not essential for analysing discourse, because it is! Discourse analysis concerns
analysing language forms and appreciating their function in the context in
which they occur. Moreover, it involves investigating whether forms combine to
create larger units of language, whether these have their own structural patterns,
and whether any such patterns relate to meaning. In short, discourse analysis
examines how meanings are made and interpreted through linguistic and non-
linguistic behaviour in a given situational context. As you might imagine, given
the almost endless number of different situational contexts, this makes discourse
analysis a broad area of study. Indeed, in the preface to his 1997 edited volume,
Discourse as Social Interaction, Teun van Dijk acknowledges that given the
vast number of discourse genres (e.g. argumentation, storytelling), modes (e.g.
spoken, written, imagistic), and social domains (e.g. medical, legal, political),
the remit for discourse analysts is so wide that “even two volumes [of his edited
collection] are unable to cover everything” (xi). Twenty-fve years on, the infor-
mation and communication technology revolution has increased the scope of
‘everything’ still further, with online interactions and social media now a com-
monplace way of ‘doing’ discourse.

The nuts and bolts of language and discourse

In this section, we introduce some of the ‘nuts and bolts’ of a language. This
is because for us to be able to analyse discourse in linguistic detail, we need to

3
DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

know how language is constructed. This section will also provide a vocabulary
that will enable us to describe language and discourse. Language operates on
several levels from the smallest units through to discourse. Figure 1.2 below
shows these structural levels, which we describe below.

Figure 1.2 The levels of language

Morphology
Morphology is the study of the smallest units of meaning in language, known
as morphemes. Words comprise one or more morphemes. For example,
‘books’, contains the morphemes ‘book’ and ‘s’ (see Figure 1.3). The mor-
pheme ‘book’ is what’s known as a free morpheme because it can stand on
its own as a word. The morpheme ‘s’ that is attached to ‘book’ is known as
a bound morpheme because even though it carries meaning (in this case, it
means ‘plural’) it cannot stand alone and have meaning; it must be bound to
another morpheme. For example, we would not say ‘s’ to answer the question
‘what are libraries full of?’

Figure 1.3 Free and bound morphemes in ‘books’

The addition of the bound morpheme ‘s’ to the free morpheme ‘book’ is an
example of affxation. In the example in Figure 1.3, the morpheme ‘s’ is a suffx
because it attaches to the end of ‘book’. This specifc type of suffx is known as
an infectional suffx because it carries grammatical information (in this case

4
 DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

‘number’). Infectional suffxes can also signal tense, possession, or comparison

(e.g. ‘-est’). Bound morphemes can also function as derivational suffxes. For
example, the verb ‘assassinate’ is created by adding the bound morpheme ‘-ate’
to the free morpheme ‘assassin’ (a noun). When the suffx is added, there is
a change in grammatical class from noun to a verb, so a new verb (‘assas-
sinate’) is derived from a noun (‘assassin’). Some bound morphemes attach to
the front of a free morpheme and are known as prefxes. These carry a variety
of meanings but nonetheless cannot stand on their own as words. For example,
the bound morpheme, and prefx, ‘dis’ means ‘not’ or ‘the opposite of’ so when
attached to, say, ‘respect’, a new word is derived (‘disrespect’) that means the
opposite.
Morphological rules can be manipulated in discourse for a range of different
effects. For example, the poetry of E. E. Cummings often plays with morph-
ology in creative ways. For instance, in the poem ‘Love is more thicker than
forget’,1 Cummings describes love as ‘moonly’ and ‘sunly’ which are unusual
constructions that, through the addition of the suffx ‘-ly’, change the word
class of ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ from nouns to
adjectives (you can fnd the full poem at
the Poetry Foundation website). QR 1.1 Link to E. E. Cummings’s poem
New words can also be formed by
the merging of two free morphemes to
form compound words. For example, ‘bookworm’ is a combination of ‘book’
+ ‘worm’. In 2020, the Oxford Dictionary’s ‘word of the year’ was expanded
to account for an “unprecedented” year and introduced new compounds that
included ‘bushfres’, ‘Covid-19’, ‘lockdown’, ‘circuit-breaker’, ‘support bubble’,
and ‘keyworker’. As you can see, the words of the year can tell us much about
how we use existing language for new concepts, but it can also tell us about the
events of that year!

Phonology
Phonology is the study of the sound system of a language and is concerned
with the different sounds that carry meaning, known as phonemes. A phoneme
is a distinctive sound in any language that, when uttered, makes a difference
to meaning and therefore contrasts with other sounds. For example, the vowel
sound in the word ‘pip’ is different to the vowel sound in ‘pup’; indeed, it is the
only difference between those two words, and it is that difference that affects
the meaning of the words. In phonology, ‘pip’ and ‘pup’ are an example of a
minimal pair, which is a pair of words that differ in one sound only. Therefore,
‘pip’ and ‘pat’ are not a minimal pair because they differ by two sounds. The
idea of a minimal pair is to contrast particular sounds to show that they
make a difference to meaning. Phonologists aim to identify and quantify the
phonemes that comprise a language. For example, with Received Pronunciation

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DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

of English (see below), there are said to be 20 vowel sounds (Cruttenden 2001: 91)
and 24 consonants (Cruttenden 2001: 149). There are, therefore, many more
sounds in spoken English than there are letters in written English, which
has just fve vowels (aeiou) and 21 consonants (bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyz).
Consequently, phonologists use an expanded set of symbols (including the
letters we know and recognise) to represent the sounds of a language which
together make up the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). You can fnd a
copy of the IPA at the start of this book.
Table 1.1 presents a series of words and aims to demonstrate the 20 different
vowel sounds in English (assuming Received Pronunciation!) along with the IPA
symbol that represents that sound. The IPA symbol is placed between slashes,
which is the convention for phonemic transcription.

Table 1.1 The 20 vowel sounds in standard pronunciation (RP) of British English

pap /æ/ Parp /ɑː/ poser /ə/ poise /ɔɪ/

pep /e/ Perp /ɜː/ pun /ʌ/ pope /əʊ/
pip /ɪ/ Peep /iː/ pain /eɪ/ pow /aʊ/
pop /ɒ/ Paw /ɔː/ peer /ɪə/ pair /eə/
pup /ʊ/ Poop /uː/ pipe /aɪ/ poor /ʊə/

When we talk about speaking ‘standard’ English, we mean the variety of the
language that is conventionally accepted as the ‘norm’. In the IPA, the ‘norm’
is Received Pronunciation of British English or ‘RP’ for short. The ‘received’
in RP means ‘accepted’ or ‘approved’ and it is therefore the version of spoken
English approved by arbiters of the language (in this case, those policing it in
the late 1800s). RP then is the point of reference or model that the IPA is based
on. This might seem odd given that very few people actually use RP (around 3
per cent of the UK population). In other words, RP’s approval or acceptance is
more to do with perceived social status than correctness (we say more about
this later). Use QR code 1.2 to fnd out more
about RP at the British Library website and
QR 1.2 Received Pronunciation hear what it sounds like (think 1950s English
TV/radio announcer at the BBC and you are
there).
Of course, English is spoken in many different regional accents across the
world and different accents have a slightly different inventory of phonemes
(due to differences in pronunciation) and differ in which phonemes contrast
in meaning. For example, with some accents it is doubtful that the difference
between /ʌ/ and /ʊ/ is meaningful – e.g. in parts of the North of England, /pʊb/
and /pʌb/ are both places to buy and consume beer (among other things).

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According to Crystal (1995: 239), the most frequent vowel sound in English
is /ə/, which is known as schwa and represents a sort of short ‘uh’ sound. The
frst 12 vowel sounds in Table 1.1 are known as monophthongs (or pure vowels)
because their sound remains fairly constant when they are spoken. The remaining
eight vowels are diphthongs because there is perceivable movement (known as a
glide) between two different sounds. It is also possible to have triphthongs (e.g.
words such as ‘power’, ‘prior’ and ‘player’). Such triphthongs involve a diph-
thong with the addition of a schwa (/ə/) at the end. For example, ‘power’ is
pronounced /paʊə/ in standard (RP) English.
In Hiberno-English such as that spoken in the north of Ireland, some
triphthongs are spoken as monophthongs. For example, ‘power’ is often
pronounced in Belfast as ‘par’ /pɑ:r/. Irish humour can often be self-refexive and
has given rise to many books on what is affectionately called the language of
‘Norn Iron’, itself a non-standard phonological rendering of standard ‘Northern
Ireland’. You cannot go far in Belfast without seeing some form of this rich
Hiberno-English variant marketed as T-shirts, mugs, and more, as the following
example in Figure 1.4 from T-shirt retailer Norn Iron Tees shows.

Figure 1.4 An example of Hiberno-English: ‘power shower’

Lexis
This is the linguistic term given to the words (or vocabulary) of a language and
their different forms. Words can be divided into two general types: lexical words
that refer to things in the world (ideas, concepts, entities); and function words
(also known as grammatical words) that help to link the lexical words together
to make clauses and sentences (Freeborn 1995: 36). Lexical words are known

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as open class, because they are being added to all the time as new words are
coined to encode new experiences and new ‘things’. Function words are known
as closed class because they are static (but not totally fxed – consider the more
recent introduction of ‘Mx’ as a substitute for the more conventional ‘Ms’ pro-
noun for women). Words are traditionally assigned to what are known as word
classes (also known as Parts of Speech) based on what task they are performing
in the text they occur. The different word classes with some examples are shown
in Tables 1.2 and 1.3. There are four open word classes: verbs, nouns, adjectives,
and adverbs, and six closed word classes: prepositions, pronouns, determiners,
demonstratives, conjunctions, and modal verbs. Note that the same word can
perform a different role in different texts and so can be assigned to different
word classes. For example, ‘fower’ can be a noun (as in ‘what a lovely fower’),
but if you ask, ‘has your agapanthus started to fower yet?’, then ‘fower’ is doing
the job of a verb.

Table 1.2 Lexical word classes

Nouns thinker, book, worm, shelf, case . . .

Verbs think, book, saw . . .
Adjectives sunny, bookish, booky, quick . . .
Adverbs gingerly, bookishly, hurtfully, quickly . . .

Table 1.3 Function or grammatical word classes

Pronouns her, they, it, we, them, his, Mr, Mx . . .

Prepositions in, at, above, on, beside . . .
Determiners a, an, the, some, any, all . . .
Conjunctions for, and, but, so . . .
Demonstratives this, that, those, them . . .
Modal verbs should, shall, would, could, can, may, might, must, ought

Lexical creativity
New concepts require new words, known as neologisms. Neologisms are typic-
ally achieved by compounding and blending existing words or by novel affx-
ation. For example, the new word ‘staycation’ (meaning to go on holiday without
going abroad) is a blend of ‘stay’ and ‘vacation’; ‘crowdfunding’ is a compound
of ‘crowd’ and ‘funding’; and ‘metaverse’ (meaning a virtual meeting space), is
formed by replacing the prefx ‘uni’ (meaning ‘one’) in ‘universe’ with ‘meta’
(meaning ‘beyond’ or ‘higher order’2). An alternative to neologising is to give

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existing words new, additional meanings. It was not so long ago that ‘mouse’
and ‘virus’ referred only to living organisms, yet now they refer to inanimate
objects or concepts as well. If we said to you ‘We cannot get our mouse to work’,
we doubt you would think we were exploiting our pet rodent for material gain.
Poets and writers are often creative with language and will neologise willy-
nilly to suit their needs. An extreme example is the poem ‘Jabberwocky’ by Lewis
Carroll, in which there are so many neologisms that the poem seems totally
nonsensical (at frst). However, linguistic conventions are being adhered to, par-
ticularly word-class conventions. In Activity 1.1 below, the frst activity in this
book, see if you can tell what word classes (noun, verb, adjective, adverb) the
neologisms belong to. What do you base your guesses on? How does what you
know about language help you to interpret the poem?

Activity 1.1 Making sense of neologisms

‘Jabberwocky’, by Lewis Carroll

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand;

Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffsh thought he stood,

The Jabberwock, with eyes of fame,
Came whiffing through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?

Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

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DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”

He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

There are linguistic patterns in ‘Jabberwocky’ that indicate that the conventions
of English are being followed. Your knowledge of how sentences are constructed
(syntax) might help you to interpret ‘toves’ as a noun (and perhaps a material
thing), whereas your knowledge of morphology might lead you to conclude
that ‘slithy’ is an adjective that is constructed from ‘slith+y’ (much in the same
way that ‘curl’ becomes ‘curly’). To take another example, you might have never
heard of ‘The frumious Bandersnatch’ but it will not take much effort to discern
that ‘frumious’ is an adjective that describes the noun following it, and that the
noun is in fact a noun because it follows a determiner (the defnite article ‘the’).
You might also have deduced that the ‘Bandersnatch’ is a specifc name/has a
specifc referent as it is capitalised (and so graphologically marked – we intro-
duce graphology below). These are just some of the consistent patterns in this
neologistically rich text.
One neologism that gained traction in 2017 was the word ‘covfefe’, used in a
viral tweet on 17 May 2017 by the then president of the United States, Donald
Trump. The full tweet read “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”. Widely
acknowledged as a typo for ‘coverage’, Trump refused to confrm his error and
instead deleted the tweet. When probed by reporters about the nonsensical ref-
erence, Trump’s spokesperson, Sean Spicer, replied “I think the president and a
small group of people know exactly what he meant” (Estepa 2017). Sometimes
discourse communities are *really* small, it seems.

Graphology
Written language exists as marks on a page (or some other medium). This is
known as graphology and refers specifcally to such things as typography, punc-
tuation, and the arrangement of any marks that constitute the discourse. The
word *really* in the preceding paragraph is graphologically marked as it is
enclosed within asterisks. Some fonts, for example, carry meaning and/or are
associated with particular discourse types. For instance, this book is written
using Times New Roman font because this is seen as a ‘serious’ font that is suit-
able for this sort of text. The Comic Sans MS font, however, with its comic
book associations would probably be seen as not suitable for a serious academic
book. In some discourses, such as social media and other computer-mediated

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communication, upper-case letters can be meaningful where they communicate

SHOUTING and/or anger. When we refer to the way the text is arranged visu-
ally, we are also talking about graphology, and this includes all the meaningful
elements of that text (images, colour, space, etc.). The poster in Figure 1.5 is an
artistic representation of one that appeared on a few online vegan sites in 2015.

Figure 1.5 Vegan propaganda poster

Writing about the projected equivalence between racism and ‘speciesism’,

Twitter user and blogger, Claire Heuchan, shares the poster (citing @veganoso
Twitter account as the source) in her article condemning the use of “slavery as a
tool to promote vegan values” (2015). Heuchan argued that such comparisons
were akin to “vegan activists mak[ing] clear that vegan spaces are frequently
racist spaces”. The poster uses graphology to promote a relationship of semantic
equivalence between two disparate practices to persuade non-vegans to go
vegan or in Heuchan’s terms, to “trigger a dietary epiphany”. The division of the

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DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

space into two equal parts sets up a parallel between the two images, the two
dates, and the two concepts ‘racism’ and ‘speciesism’. This nudges the reader to
tease out a connection between them (regardless of whether or not it exists in
reality). By making the perceived connection implicit through the graphological
arrangement, the text producer relies on the reader picking up the inferential
connection. After all, we are more likely to be persuaded by an argument we
have helped construct than one that we have invested no time in formulating.

Syntax
This is the linguistic term for clause structure. A clause is an organisational unit
of language that is made up of a subject and predicator. ‘We write’ is an example
of a clause. The linear line that comprises most European modern languages, as
well Southeast Asian, Indian, North American, and South American, is written
from left to right, syntactically speaking. Syntax refers to the different structural
slots occupied by language tokens such as nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and
grammatical words like conjunctions and so on. Conventionally, these syntactic
slots follow a conventional order, so a clause like ‘the dog ate the bone’ follows
the conventional Subject-Predicator-Object pattern in English. Sometimes, the
syntactic order switches, and we get constructions like that in Figure 1.6 ‘the
bone, the dog ate’.

Figure 1.6 Conventional and unconventional syntax

Both constructions in Figure 1.6 mean the same thing. However, when we
encounter construction (b), it seems to communicate more than simply its prop-
ositional meaning, which is the basic meaning of the clause relating to the entities
involved and their relationship to each other (see Chapter 5). Indeed, it implies
that the addressee already knows that the dog ate something, just not what it
was. We explore syntactic ordering and its effects in Chapter 2.

Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. An important concept in semantics is denota-
tion, or the thing, idea, action or concept that a word refers to. The denotive
meaning of a word is sometimes called its primary, core or literal meaning.
A word may have a set of possible denotive meanings one of which may be
triggered by the surrounding co-text and/or the context in which a word is
produced. So, returning to our sentence, ‘the dog ate the bone’, ‘dog’ refers to

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 DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

a domesticated canine animal, ‘bone’ refers to part of an animal skeleton and

‘ate’ refers ingesting (chewing and swallowing) food via the mouth. A word can
also come with associated meanings, which are to do with the feelings or psy-
chological connections a word (or the concept it refers to) evokes. For example,
‘dog’ is sometimes associated with concepts such as loyalty and devotion or
companionship. Another aspect of meaning is literal and non-literal (fgurative)
meanings a word can have. For example, a person can be ‘dogged’ by bad luck,
and you might need to ‘bone up’ before an exam. With these uses, ‘dog’ and
‘bone’ no longer refer to their primary meanings but to metaphorical meanings.
In Chapter 5, we talk more about semantics including presuppositions and
entailments, and in Chapter 8 we deal with fgurative meaning.

Discourse
This brings us back to where we started this chapter – discourse. We defned
discourse as ‘language in use’. It concerns meaning above the level of the clause
and sentence (syntax). This sentence is a piece of discourse. This book is a bigger
piece of discourse characterised by academic writing, with an instructional pur-
pose, with a high percentage of domain-specifc lexis (the phrase ‘domain-specifc
lexis’ being a case in point). In fact, we are actively trying to avoid an overly
academic register, and so we hope that this chapter and the rest of this book
is NOT characterised by long, embedded sentences, passive structures, third-
person pronouns, and lots of what are known as ‘logical operators’ (Sinclair
2004: 7), which include, for example, ‘therefore’, ‘so’, and ‘consequently’. (Okay,
apart from that overly long embedded sentence.) Our purpose is to inform, not
impress. We failed at the latter long ago.

Text
When we analyse discourse, we inevitably study texts because, as Halliday and
Matthiessen (2014: 3) point out, “[w]hen people speak or write, they produce
text”. Halliday and Matthiessen (2014: 3) go on to defne text as “any instance
of language, in any medium, that makes sense to someone who knows the lan-
guage”. Text, then, is a single language artefact or “unit of language” that can
be spoken, written, signed or otherwise (e.g. image) that is defned by “meaning”
(i.e. it makes sense to someone) rather than “form” (i.e. there are no formal
restrictions on what counts as a text) (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 1–2). Texts
in written form are the typical object of analysis for discourse analysts, which
means to study and analyse spoken and signed texts, we must record them in
some way and create written transcriptions to allow repeated scrutiny. Audio
and video recordings can also be analysed using special software, such as Praat
(Boersma and Weenink 2023; ‘praat’ means ‘speak’ in Dutch), but this is not

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DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

something we will deal with in this book. Text, then, is the object of study but,
as Bloor and Bloor (2013: 8) point out, as discourse analysts we must also appre-
ciate that language is used within a particular context and texts emerge from
language events.
Language event is a general term often used (but less often defned) by linguists
(‘speech event’ and ‘communicative event’ are also sometimes used). A language
event is any event where language has a fundamental role or any event where
language happens. For example, chatting to a friend is a language event; it is
diffcult to chat without using language (in whatever form it might take). Giving
a speech is a language event because it would be very diffcult to give a speech
without using any language. Going for a run, however, is not a language event

Activity 1.2 HAVE YOU SHEETED?

Consider the example in Figure 1.7, which is a photograph of a real sign board situated
somewhere in the UK. Think about the words on the sign and consider their meaning in
combination. Do you understand the meaning (or message) that the sign is aiming to
convey? What do you need to know to understand the sign? Have you ever sheeted?

Answer these questions before reading on.

Figure 1.7 HAVE YOU SHEETED?

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 DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

because it does not require language, just working legs, ftness, and a certain
amount of willpower. Language events might well occur during a run though.
If you run with a friend, you might chat (in which case, kudos), or if you get lost
you might stop to ask someone for directions.
A discourse can involve one or more texts and, importantly, other factors
including the producer and intended receiver of the text, the location and date
of production, and purpose. Essentially, discourse is text and context. When
we do discourse analysis, we combine detailed linguistic analyses of formal
features of text(s) with an examination of context. By considering both language
and its context of use we can gain a greater understanding of how meaning is
communicated in everyday settings. To illustrate this point, try Activity 1.2.

‘HAVE YOU SHEETED?’ – discussion

This text forms part of a discourse. Indeed, to understand the text, we need to
know about the discourse it is part of. Moreover, we need to understand some-
thing about the context in which the discourse occurs (we discuss context in
more detail later in this chapter). This text is printed on a sign at the exit of a
quarry in the north of England. The sign, which is made up of white words on
a blue background with a white border, contains a single sentence in the form
of an interrogative. It is asking whether the intended recipient of the text has
done something. However, the text might not make much sense, or communi-
cate very much to readers who are not the intended recipients. It is probably
the word ‘sheeted’ that is hard to understand because it might not be clear
what action it refers to. The sign uses the word ‘sheet’ as a verb, but what is ‘to
sheet’ and what does it mean in this context? Quite simply, it means to cover
the back of tipper-trucks that leave the quarry fully loaded with gravel with a
tarpaulin sheet.3 The sheet is stretched taut over the back of the trucks to keep
the gravel in the hopper. Sheeting is therefore an important safety measure that
all truck drivers should do before they drive out of the quarry and on to the
public highway.
Notice that the text is an interrogative and as such it asks a question prob-
ably on the behalf of the quarry owners. However, the question is not intended
to elicit a verbal response from the truck driver. That is, the truck driver is not
meant to go and fnd the quarry owner and reply: ‘yes, I have sheeted’/‘no I have
not sheeted’. Instead, the interrogative functions as a reminder for the driver
leaving the quarry with a fully loaded truck to pause and check that their truck is
sheeted. The presence of the sign at the quarry exit might be because in the past
some drivers left the quarry without sheeting and this caused a problem, or that
there is a legal obligation on the quarry to remind drivers to sheet. Whatever the
reasons that led to the placing of the sign, it is a text that is part of a discourse
between quarry owner and driver, and to understand the text we need an appre-
ciation of the context and the place the sign takes in the discourse.

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DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

Discourse communities
The positioning of the text at a quarry exit and its lexically specifc terminology
might have led you to conclude, correctly, that it is directed towards a particular
group of people (quarry workers/truck drivers) who know what it means ‘to
sheet’. Such groups of people are known as a discourse communities (Swales
1988) because members participate in and communicate through similar textual
practices such as specialist lexis (e.g. ‘sheeting’), and pragmatic meanings (e.g.
‘reviewer 2’ in academia).4 Although some scholars argue that discourse commu-
nities share common goals or are “unifed by a common focus” (Porter 1992),
this is slightly misleading because there are many examples of discourse commu-
nities (e.g in academia or government) where people frequently have different
goals and are often not unifed! We can, of course, be members of many different
discourse communities, which means we adopt different language practices
depending on which community we are interacting with (and therefore part of)
at any particular time.

Meaning potential
The example in Figure 1.7 serves to demonstrate that as discourse analysts, we
are interested in how people use language in different settings to make meaning.
Indeed, meaning-making and meaning potential5 (Allwood 2003) is a topic we
will deal with in some detail over the course of this book. The example helps to
show that context is crucial to the notion of discourse and its analysis. The aim
of our next section, therefore, is to understand better what we mean by context
and how we can incorporate it into discourse analysis.

Understanding context
Language – and, by extension, meaning – does not exist in a vacuum. Language
is used by people in different locations, at different times, involves different
participants and is used for different purposes. In short, language occurs in
different contexts. Context refers to the various situational parameters that coin-
cide with language and which work together with language to create meaning.
Language and context are inseparable components in meaning making. J. R.
Firth (a key fgure in linguistics) made the following observation about the
importance of context: ‘meaning’ is to do with “the function of a complete locu-
tion in the context of situation, or typical context of situation” (Firth 1935: 72).
In other words, the intrinsic meaning of an utterance (i.e. locution) only means
what it means in relation to its context.
Brown and Yule (1983) discuss context at considerable length and in this
section, we summarise some of their main points. Citing Hymes (1962) and
Lewis (1972), they set out several situational parameters that help to delimit
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 DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

context. These parameters can be thought of as answers to a set of questions that

we can ask about the discourse under analysis.
What is happening?
This question concerns the activity or event that the discourse is part of. The
answer might be, for example, a conversation with a friend, a university lec-
ture, an advertisement, a political speech, a celebrity interview.
Where is it happening?
The location of the discourse can be an important contextual factor and
includes, for example, the geographic location (e.g. country, town, street), the
building or physical space (e.g. university lecture theatre, conference hall, tele-
vision studio), or the virtual space (e.g. Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram).
When is it happening?
This question concerns the time of the discourse: hour, minute, second, year,
month, day.
What is being talked about?
This question refers to the topic of the discourse: medicine, shampoo, state
health provision, ‘my latest movie’.
What job is the language doing?
The purpose of the discourse: e.g. teaching, informing, selling, persuading,
entertaining.
Who is involved?
The people or participants involved: the addressor/speaker/producer, addressee/
hearer/receiver, and any observers or overhearers (audience). Also, the social
relationship between participants (e.g. friends, family, colleagues), and power
relations (is one participant more institutionally powerful?) e.g. lecturer and
students, advertisers and social media users, politician and delegates, inter-
viewer, interviewee and audience.
How is it happening?
This question considers the mode of the discourse – whether it is spoken
(produced orally by vocal cords and received aurally by ears), written (produced
graphically and received visually), or signed (produced gesturally and received
visually) or a combination (multimodal). The question also includes the means
of conveyance, or the medium of communication (e.g. phone message, email,
webpage, print). There might not be any media involved, of course, such as
with face-to-face communication.

A further possible consideration relating to how the discourse is happening is

whether spoken or signed discourse is happening spontaneously or involves
some level of planning. For example, political speeches are typically carefully
prepared and written out prior to their delivery whereas naturally occurring
conversations tend to be unplanned and spontaneous.

Examples of how discourse is happening include: face-to-face spoken con-

versation, spoken telephone conversation, video lecture via (say) Zoom or
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DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

Microsoft Teams, printed handouts, slides projected on-screen, on-screen

advert with words and pictures, speaking from a script, participating in a
face-to-face spoken Q&A, participating in an online written Q&A.
Which language (variant) is being used?
For this aspect of context, Hymes (1962) uses the term code, which includes
language varieties and dialects such as, for example, American English, Haitian
Creole, British Sign Language, Hiberno-English, Yorkshire dialect.

These questions and their answers help to pin down contextual factors that
are potentially important for meaning making. For example, different contextual
factors infuence our language choices including the words we use (lexis), the
way we say them (phonology) and the way we arrange them (syntax). These
choices, which are made both consciously and subconsciously, help to tailor
our language according to what it is being used for, where it is being used, who
is involved, and how the communication is being mediated. Context is also
important because it infuences our understanding of language.

Expanding context (the role of background knowledge)

Consider this language event based on the experience of one of the authors,
whom we will refer to in the third person as person B.

On Wednesday 18 May 2022, at 06:45, B embarked on a train journey from

Inverness to Edinburgh (both in Scotland). B travelled alone and sat at one
end of a carriage. There were other people in the carriage. In particular, there
were four people travelling together who were sat at the opposite end of
carriage being very loud. Two were wearing bright orange sunhats (which is
quite unusual for Scotland). The conductor of the train entered the carriage to
check people’s tickets. He spoke to the four loud people and then came to the
end of the carriage where B was sat and addressed the people sat there. The
conductor said that he had asked the loud people not to be too loud; to let
him (the conductor) know if they got too rowdy; and that the train was quite
empty so people could move to another quieter carriage if they wished. The
conductor fnished by saying: “Oh dear. I feel sorry for Seville.”
B was confused. What did he mean by that? Clearly, B was lacking essential
information which the conductor seemed to be assuming his hearers shared.
B asked his close friend, Professor Google, for help and soon all became clear.
He simply typed in ‘seville’ on Google search on his telephone, and the frst
result was a news story headline: “Rangers in Seville: Police say 100,000 fans
expected”.

All became clear: “Oh dear, I feel sorry for Seville” was said in the context of
the 2022 UEFA Europa cup fnal that was to be played in Seville on the evening
of Wednesday 18 May 2022 between German club, Eintracht Frankfurt, and
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 DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

(importantly) Scottish football club, Rangers. This was a Big Deal for Rangers
fans (apparently) and more generally for Scottish football, and Scotland. B is
not a football fan and is not Scottish – a perfect storm for non-understanding
in this context. However, once B had this important missing piece in the dis-
course jigsaw, he understood that the loud people were Rangers fans and the
signifcance of their orange hats (Rangers are strongly associated with the colour
orange). Notice though that the search for meaning had to go beyond the local
context (location, time, participants, mode, purpose) of the train. The sentence
was uttered in a national and international context that relied on shared know-
ledge outside the carriage of the train. In this instance, B did not share the know-
ledge of the football discourse community ordinarily required to enable him to
correctly interpret the reference to Seville.

Context and relevance

One issue with context that Brown and Yule (1983) highlight is how analysts
(and indeed language users) narrow down the particular contextual factors
that are important for understanding discourse. For relevance theorists (see, for
example, Sperber and Wilson 1986; Clark 2013) this issue is addressed by the
notion of – yes, you’ve guessed it – ‘relevance’ and the crucial role it plays in
constraining contextual factors and analysing discourse. Relevance theory posits
that we make sense of discourse largely through adhering to a principle of local
interpretation, which basically means that we only use what is relevant in the
discourse situation to derive meaning. Where local interpretation is insuffcient
(as we saw in the train example above), we might need to draw on a wider con-
text to fll gaps in local knowledge. So, we may use our own background know-
ledge in determining what is meant. We also draw on our experience of discourse
in different situations that develops over time and use that to delineate basic
patterns in discourse, which help us make sense of interactions.

Co-text
Co-text is a specifc type of context that is not covered by any of the questions
set out above. It refers to the immediate linguistic environment of an utterance
and concerns how the meaning of a particular unit of discourse (word, phrase,
sentence, utterance) is infuenced by the rest of the discourse. Co-text constrains
or infuences meaning of lexical items and is particularly important for the inter-
pretation of utterances in time and space. The following sentences relate to the
football event we mentioned above. Consider the meanings of the words ‘teams’
and ‘goal’ in the following invented sentences.

(i) Football fans arrive in Seville to support their teams.

(ii) Seville’s citizen security commissioner, Juan Carlos Castro Estevez, set his
teams the goal of calmly dealing with any problems that might emerge.
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DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

(iii) Joe Aribo scored a goal in the 57th minute putting Rangers ahead.
(iv) Rangers did not achieve their goal of winning the Europa League cup.

Hopefully, you will have noticed that ‘teams’ and ‘goal’ refer to different
things in the sentences above. In (i) the word ‘teams’ refers to ‘football teams’,
and we reach that conclusion because of the mention of ‘football fans’ at the
start of the sentence. In (ii) however, ‘teams’ refers to ‘security teams’ rather than
‘football teams’ and we reach that conclusion because these are the teams of
Seville’s security commissioner. The pronoun ‘his’ in front of ‘teams’ references
the security commissioner (see Chapter 3 for more on reference) and signals
belonging. It would make no sense for multiple football teams to belong to the
commissioner; the logical conclusion therefore is that he has within his control
some other sorts of teams relating to security. Similarly, the word ‘goal’ in (ii)
does not refer to getting a ball between two posts; rather, it means ‘objectives’ or
‘desired outcomes’. However, in (iii), the co-occurrence of ‘scored’, ‘57th minute’
and ‘Rangers’ leads us to read ‘goal’ as the ‘getting-the-ball-into-the-net’ type.
Additionally, if you know the names of the people playing for football teams,
then ‘Joe Aribo’ might also be a clue. In (iv), however, we understand ‘goal’ to
mean ‘objective’ once again, and this is because of its co-occurrence with the
verb ‘achieve’ and its post-modifcation by the prepositional phrase ‘of winning
the Europa League cup’, which identifes the goal. We can see then that the
words ‘teams’ and ‘goal’ have different meanings in the sentences and co-text
helps us to discern those meanings.

Spoken and written discourse

Discourse is often divided into two modes – either spoken or written – or a
combination of both (i.e. multimodal). The spoken/written division characterises
our ability to physically produce language either orally using our vocal cords6
or, with the right tools and materials, graphically. With the latter, combinations
of symbols (graphemes) convey meaning by representing the sounds of lan-
guage visually (a system referred to as orthography). Signs and symbols convey
meaning in language systems, including pictures. Additionally, we can communi-
cate visually using gestures and facial expressions, both of which are crucial for
sign languages.
The spoken/written division also marks other important differences. For
instance, we learn to speak before we write and, certainly, human beings evolved
to speak frst. We are able to acquire spoken language through exposure to speech,
but we must be instructed on how to read and write. Naturally occurring speech
is produced dynamically and spontaneously and when in conversation, we must
listen and comprehend and plan our next turn. We cannot look back at what was
said earlier, we cannot fick forward to see what is coming up and we cannot back-
space or delete because we produce and transmit simultaneously – the words are

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 DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

out there as soon as we have said them. Unless recorded in some way, they exist
only in the moment they are produced, disappearing as soon as the air molecules
set in motion by our vocal cords cease to vibrate, surviving only in the (imperfect
and limited) memories of the discourse participants.
Following Miller and Weinert (1998), we can summarise the features of
unplanned, spontaneous spoken language as follows:

• produced in real time, so without any planning and without editing;

• typically face-to face communication, so production and reception synchronous
with interlocutor;
• involves changes in voice pitch, amplitude (loudness), rhythm, speed of delivery,
shortening/lengthening of words and voice quality;
• also involves gestures, gaze, facial expressions, and body posture;
• infuenced by the limitations of our short-term memory.
(Adapted from Miller and
Weinert 1998: 22–23)

According to Miller and Weinert (1998), these features of speech production set
out above result in:

• information being produced in small chunks;

• low information density; for example, short phrases;
• a limited range of vocabulary and lexical repetition;
• simple embedding of clauses, one after another;
• interactive markers, back channels, fllers, discourse markers (see below);
• grammatically incomplete utterances;
• constructions and organisational features that are particular to unplanned
speech.
(Adapted from Miller and
Weinert 1998: 22–23)

In contrast to (non-recorded) spoken discourse, written discourse is not transient;

its production immediately creates a record which can be referred to (albeit not
indefnitely). For this reason, written discourse is traditionally the object of study,
and the point of reference on which grammars of English are written and against
which spoken language is compared. If we wish to study spoken discourse, we
must frst record it and then transcribe it into written form (see Chapter 4).
There are marked differences between spoken and written discourse. Consider
the following made-up examples A and B below which contain phonological
markers (explained below).

A. So (.) I says to °her° eh, like, are YOU g-gonna, like, pick me up this avo
or what like?
B. So I said to her, “are you going to pick me up this afternoon or not?”

21
DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

It’s not diffcult to tell which is which. The frst example (A) shows character-
istic markers of spoken discourse including false starts (g-gonna), pauses which
are signalled with a standard notation of parenthesis with a period in between
(.), non-standard contractions (‘avo’ for ‘afternoon’), fllers (a type of discourse
marker) (‘eh’ and ‘like’), emphasis (YOU) and quiet pitch signalled by degree
signs (°her°), all of which can all be marked in written format using transcrip-
tion notations (see Chapter 4). In contrast, the written version (B) contains
standard English grammar and lexis. None of the prosodic features apparent in
A are discernible in B.

Discourse markers
One of the defning features of spoken communication, and which are present
in the above speech example, is the use of fllers or ‘discourse markers’ (Schiffrin
1987; McCarthy 2004) such as ‘er’ and ‘um’ or ‘so’, ‘right’, ‘yeah’. Although such
lexical items may not carry much semantic meaning, they serve the pragmatic
function of showing our addressee or interlocutor that we are, in fact, listening
to them (we deal with pragmatics in Chapters 6 and 7). The linguistic term for
this is ‘backchannelling’ and these little markers are more broadly understood as
a type of language that is used to maintain social connection (known as ‘phatic
communion’, Malinowski 1923). Next time you are chatting with a friend on
the phone try not to ‘backchannel’ and see how quickly your interlocutor asks
‘Are you still there?’

Standard English (or the issue of convention)

Earlier we introduced the notion of a ‘standard’ form when it comes to thinking
about a language. In written, spoken, and multimodal texts, linguistic behaviour
is varied and ranges from strict adherence to conventional grammatical and lex-
ical forms, to non-conventional grammar and lexis that incorporates vernacular
forms, dialectal markers and, in recent years, emoji, gifs, memes, and more. The
choices we make are context-dependent. This raises the issue of a reference point
in terms of which form of a language is considered the ‘norm’ or ‘standard’
against which different variants of that language are assessed. That is to say,
what do we mean by ‘standard form’? When we speak, we often use language
that suits the discourse situation we are in. For example, suppose you are giving
a talk in class for one of your courses. You are likely to be more aware of the
‘correct’ forms of pronunciation and strive to adhere to the ‘rules’ of language
in front of an audience, particularly one that may be judging your intelligence!
Therefore, you might make more effort to enunciate your words.
The issue over what counts as ‘standard’ is typically one of prestige masquer-
ading as ‘correctness’. The advent of print in the 1400s meant that (English)

22
 DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

language producers needed linguistic uniformity or a standard form of the lan-

guage in order to decode written texts. The area of England that was chosen as the
‘standard’ form was the southeast of England, named ‘Estuary English’ after the
river Thames and its estuary. ‘Estuary English’ was adopted as the new ‘normal’
as far as language was concerned. The reason for this geographical variant was
simply that London and the surrounding area was the location of the courts,
the government, and other socially and politically important institutions, and
garnered prestige based solely on this connection to its learned users. The stand-
ardisation process took years of elaboration and implementation but once codi-
fed, the notion of a normative standard variant stuck (Haugen 1972). Estuary
English involved pronunciation that is now known as ‘Received Pronunciation’
(‘RP’), which we introduced earlier in the chapter. More colloquially, RP referred
to as ‘BBC’ or ‘Queen’s English’ (or now King’s), but in reality, not many people
talk like that.
In casual conversation, which is less rule-governed, adherence to Standard
English (SE) is less expected and non-standard forms abound. For instance, take
the use of ‘-ing’ in spoken words like ‘having’, we may well shift from a voiced
velar nasal [ŋ] to a voiced alveolar nasal [n] and say, for example, ‘havin’ [hævin].
The social situation you are in might encourage you to use more non-standard
forms as a way of socially bonding to the people with whom you are interacting
(this is known in linguistics as ‘covert prestige’). In such interactions we may use
more slang terms, or omit grammatical elements, include expletives, and so on.
Here is a complete spoken exchange between two English speakers who come
from the same family:

A: Lift’ll be in fve minutes, K?

B: Are you ACTUALLY?

The second speaker (B) appears to have asked an unfnished question, but the
utterance is complete as B’s intention is to convey surprise at the timing of the
‘lift’ in A’s message. Note also that A uses non-standard grammar by omitting
some elements of the message. If it were SE, it would read ‘Our/Your/The lift will
be here in fve minutes, OK?’ (bold elements are omitted in the actual example).
Social attitudes underpin linguistic notions of prestige. Activity 1.3 asks you
to consider the ideological or attitudinal responses to how people use language
in certain situations and whether you consider their version of the language to
be appropriate (or not) in the context.

Activity 1.3 G-droppin’

To get a sense of how ingrained rules about standardisation are and the social snobbery
that exists among prescriptivists and language pedants in the UK, consider the criticisms
levelled at Priti Patel (the UK Home Secretary in the early part of 2022) on a popular

23
DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

internet forum, mumsnet, because of her ‘G-dropping’ (conventionally known as ‘-ing

dropping’) during national briefngs and interviews (or should that be ‘briefns and
interviews’?). You can fnd the thread here,
QR 1.3 Link to G-droppin’ discussion https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/pedants_
on mumsnet corner/2077339-Priti-Patel-and-her-
dropped-Gs, or use QR code 1.3).

To give you a favour of what is written on the forum, here are a few isolated comments from
the ‘reviews’ of Patel’s speech: “intensely irritatin’”, “absolutely awful”, “Gordon Bennett!”,7
“causing me much stress”, “idiot”.

Do you think these criticisms of Patel’s linguistic behaviour are justifed? If so, why? On
what linguistic grounds? What might your response say about your own attitudes to lan-
guage variants? Our discussion below will help you to think about how you might answer
some of these questions.

Having considered Patel’s speech style, you might be interested to know that
popular British television presenter, Alex Scott, was criticised on Twitter in 2021
by businessman and politician Digby Marritt Jones for habitually using the same
non-standard form in her broadcasts of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic games. Jones
bemoaned that Scott’s -ing-dropping (more specifcally, /ŋ/) “ruins the Olympics”
and further claimed – incorrectly – that -ing dropping was “wrong”.8 Simply
put, ‘correct’ language is synonymous with SE or the standard variant of a
given language. This ‘correct’ variant is the one that is used in offcial situations
or situations where conventions dictate that the language matches the agreed
standard. It will be characterised by strict adherence to standard grammatical
structures and lexis. It is important to note that what counts as standard can
vary geographically. Indeed, if we consider English, we would be more correct
to think about different Englishes based on their geographical location: British
English, American English, Australian English, Indian English, Hiberno-English,
for example. Informal language usually includes some non-standard forms and
is what we use in everyday situations where social conventions do not dictate
that we adhere to the standard forms.

Sociolinguistic variables
While SE may garner more prestige on the whole than non-Standard variants,
there are times when the latter is preferred. Therefore, different sociolin-
guistic variables (also known as situational factors) infuence linguistic choices.
Interpersonal distance, for example, can be a motivating factor in the decision to
use non-standard or standard forms. For instance, you might say ‘gimme me that
book’ to your mate, but ‘would you mind handing me that book’ to a stranger or
a more socially powerful interactant (see Chapter 7).

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 DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

To offer another example, if you are chatting to friends over a messaging

forum such as WhatsApp, your linguistic choices are likely to refect, among
other things, the equal nature of your social relationship including your rela-
tive social proximity, your generational status, and very likely your current
mood. This might be manifested linguistically via responses such as ‘K’ for
‘okay’ or acronyms with multiple punctuation marks such as ‘WTF??!!!’, and
orthographic duplication, e.g. ‘see yaaaaaaa’ or ‘niiiiiiiiice’, or misspellings like
‘noice’ for ‘nice’. Non-Standard examples like these would be well-received by
your friends and indicate a high degree of familiarity between you and them.
However, email messages to, say, your teacher are likely to adopt standard
forms and be much less familiar; after all your teacher would probably not take
kindly to being addressed: ‘hiiiiiiii P-Dawg’. This is because the power relations
between friends and peers are usually equally distributed, whereas between
you and your teacher they are asymmetrical, and this has an impact on what
is conventionally expected in interactions (we return to this in Chapter 7).
In messages to your friends, politeness markers like ‘thanks’, non-standard
lexis, like ‘gimme’, or even the length or share of the conversational ‘turns’ (see
Chapter 4) need not be so important because, to use a term from sociology,
you are on an equal footing. However, you are not on an equal footing with
your teachers and so politeness will be more important (student readers please
take note!) as will standard lexis. So, instead of saying ‘gimme (more time to
complete my essay)’ you might opt for the more standard form ‘give me’ when
communicating with your teacher.
Age is another sociolinguistic variable that impacts how we communicate.
Your lexis may also show generational differences, so ‘spill the tea’, ‘boomer’,
or ‘woke’ may mean very different things to a much older teacher than to your
fellow students (unless, of course, your teacher is woke). And as one of our own
students taught us, even micro-features such as punctuation can carry social
or contextual (pragmatic) meaning as well as grammatical meaning. One of us
gave lengthy positive feedback to a student during a face-to-face tutor meeting
where they thought they had not done so well in their other classes. Their
misunderstanding was fuelled by another teacher’s answer to an online question
on how they were progressing in that teacher’s course. The teacher had answered
(positively) with the following:

Fine.

The student was horrifed. When asked why, their response was ‘because it
says “Fine PERIOD”!’ Clearly, the presence of a period (full stop) at the end
of a message shows that the sentence has been completed (grammatically
speaking), yet pragmatically, it can signal displeasure or anger, depending on
the context (we return to the punctuated period in Chapter 6). For what it’s
worth, this was not the intended meaning! The student was indeed fne (no
period needed).

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DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

Professional occupation is yet another sociolinguistic variable that can deter-

mine what language choices we make. Where we work can determine what
way we use language. Profession-specifc lexis, such as ‘sheeted’ in Activity
1.2, is one such example. Some socioeconomic domains are more likely to
adhere to a standard form of the language than others. For example, univer-
sity and educational websites are likely to use standard forms because the
social and cultural context demands greater adherence to standard linguistic
conventions, not least so that they are uniformly understood by most people
in a wide geographical area. Because there is also a higher level of social value
or prestige attached to the standard form, its use in education is advocated
over non-standard or slang forms. So much so, that some schools and educa-
tional organisations have taken to a form of language policing, proscribing
what students can and cannot say. One example is the policy (or should that
be ‘policing’) of preferred and dis-preferred language choices at Ark All Saints
Academy, a high school in southeast London which was the subject of a fea-
ture in the Guardian newspaper in the UK (Booth 2021) for proscribing its
students’ language choices. The school banned such phrases as ‘he cut his eyes
at me’, which means ‘throwing a bit of shade’ and ‘giving side-eye’ (for the
Boomers, this roughly translates as dismissing a person by lowering the eyes
and turning the head to the side).

Conclusion
In this chapter, we have touched on some of the important elements of discourse
analysis in everyday examples of communication. We have shown how the dis-
course situation can impact on the language used, its meaning, and its meaning
potential. We also introduced the idea that what works in one discourse situ-
ation does not always work in another and that part of our linguistic compe-
tence is knowing when to use what and with whom. We also highlighted some
of the differences and commonalities between spoken and written discourse and
acknowledged that the boundaries between both modes are not so absolute, as
our WhatsApp example showed.
Throughout this book we will highlight the key fact: language is choice. When
we choose to say something in a particular way, we are choosing from a varied,
socially, ideologically, and politically infected set of possible words and gram-
matical structures to say it. Such choices are not always consciously made, but
nonetheless we have access to several ways of saying something, and how we say
it is governed by what we know about the world, our social expectations, and so
on, all of which motivates those selections. This knowledge of the world includes
knowledge of interpersonal relationships (e.g. friend vs teacher), age, and the
discourse context. As we will show in upcoming chapters, power relationships
also have a lot to do with how and why we make such choices. It is the remit of
discourse analysis to tease out these relationships between language and choice

26
 DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

and to explore to what extent, and to what effect the factors noted above shape
discourse, and how discourse can shape our knowledge of the world.
The remaining chapters present a toolkit for analysis that incorporates rele-
vant theories and methodological frameworks from linguistics that are instru-
mental for analysing discourse. To help you practice discourse analysis, there will
be activities and tasks that explore the concepts, models, and frameworks we
introduce. Answers to activities will be either in the text immediately following
the activity or at the end of the chapter.

Notes
1 Cummings’s poems usually don’t have titles, so the frst line of the poem often becomes the
proxy title.
2 We’re not actually sure what ‘meta’ means in this context – we’d need to ask Mark
Zuckerberg.
3 Thanks to Simon Garner of Hanson Aggregates for confrming the meaning of the sign and
giving us permission to use it as an example.
4 The phrase ‘reviewer 2’ sends fear through the bones of academics. When submitting an
article or other academic publication for review prior to it being accepted for publication,
the author usually receives two ‘blind’ and anonymous reviews from academics. Think of
this like ‘good cop, bad cop’. One will invariably be constructive and kind (known affec-
tionately as ‘reviewer 1’) whereas the other will trash the fruits of your hard labour, destroy
any hope or self-worth left in your fragile ego-trodden soul, making you question your very
existence in your academic discourse community. Hello, reviewer 2.
5 While we prefer Allwood’s term ‘meaning potential’, Croft and Cruse (2004) use the term
‘purport’ but this sounds like somewhere you’d park your cat.
6 Also referred to as vocal folds.
7 Gordon Bennett is a phrased commonly used instead of a curse in some discourse
communities.
8 In fact, he called it ‘g’ dropping. The correct term is ‘-ing dropping’. Jones is not a linguist.
You might be interested in Peter Trudgill’s (2021) piece on this specifc example. Peter
Trudgill is a linguist.

Further reading
Leech, Deuchar, and Hoogenraad (2006) provide an accessible introduction to
the model of grammar we use in this book.
For more on J. R. Firth, see Chapman and Routledge (2005: 80–86).
For more on language policing, see Cushing (2020) and Lampropoulou and
Cooper (2021).
Clark (2013) is a good place to fnd out more about relevance theory.
Nørgaard (2010) provides a useful introduction to graphological analysis of
texts.
For an analysis of forensic discourse through relevance theory, see Lynn and
Canning (2021).

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DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

Resources
International Phonetic Alphabet with sounds: https://www.international
phoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds

References
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Bloor, T. and Bloor, M. (2013) The functional analysis of English: A Hallidayan
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Booth, R. (2021) ‘Oh my days: linguists lament slang ban in London
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29
DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, CONTEXT, AND CHOICE

Sinclair, J. M. (2004) ‘Written discourse structure’. In G. Fox, M. Hoey, and

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30
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