Discourse and social dimensions
(social class, social network)
Social class is very difficult to define as its identification could be very subjective. Factors which help to identify your class include occupation, education, income, housing, religious affiliation, activities and membership of community organization.
A social network is an abstract mechanism that denotes the social relationships, an individual communicates with other individuals in a society.
The character of a social network is defined by the contact patterns between its members (How many members know each other and how well do they know each other?). These patterns then construct different types of network structures which can reveal an individual’s integration into a network. The structure of a network can be determined by the factors of density and multiplexity. The former indicates the number or quantity of social ties within a network (= how many members know each other); the latter denotes the quality of social ties (= how well the members know each other). Multiplexity refers to any factor or link that can deepen a social relationship, e.g. if two girls are not only sisters but also close friends and if they also work together, their relationship can be said to be in three ways multiplex: by their kinship, their friendship and their workplace connection. Their social ties are multiplex in character.
Social class accounts for the hierarchy structure of society and social network deals with the dimension of solidarity at the level of individual and his/her everyday contacts.
Literary and non-literary discourse
The nature of the context of literary discourse is quite different from that of non-literary discourse. It is dissociated from the immediacy of social content. A non-literary text makes a connection with the context of our everyday social practice. A literary text does not. Any literary text is self-enclosed (contained). The alternative realities represented by a literary text do not offer neat or tidy substitutes for the reality. This does not mean that literary texts have no relation to the real world. Of course, they do. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to construct some meaningful discourse.
In literary discourse social reality is represented in a different way, that’s why it is fictional.
Other differences:
1) Peter Vertong: The function of literature is not socializing, but individualizing. Its essential function is to create an imaginary alternative world. Our response to literary discourse is more creative.
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2) Structuralists and formalists: literary text is considered to be deviant.
Deviations: grammatical metaphor, metonymy.
Cook: what literature does is schema-changing. Other texts are schema-enforcing. Schema is some kind of structure, the most important linguistic and composition characteristics.
A prototypical literary text, being fictional, is less medium dependent than a non-literary one. It is polysemic rather than monosemic and the interaction between the author and the reader is more deeply embedded or displaced than the context-bound interaction between the discourse participants in non-literary discourse, which projects direct interaction. Literary discourse is characterized by reregistration, fully exploiting all the available linguistic resources. Th is is because literary discourse is not a subset of discourse defined by purpose, setting or field, unlike occupational registers, and thus it is not restricted lexically and/or grammatically. Non-literary discourse on the whole does not contain reregistration. What transpires from this view is that while style is difference, it is not an absolute and it is internal to language.
It is not quite correct to differentiate (polarize) the language of literature and that of non-literary texts. This idea was taken up by Carter, who offered his gradation system. That prototypical approach demonstrates the overlapping but not identified forms and functions (e.g. biography and advertising, fiction and drama).
The prototypical approach demonstrates some very important features and some minor ones. Still, the prototypical features of literature could be discussed in a different way and some other properties can be assigned to literary discourse:
a) Formal distinctiveness and a focus on the language of the text (i.e. foregrounding through deviation and parallelism)
b) Representational distinctiveness (defamiliarisation through foregrounding)
c) Specific competence of readers in understanding the fictional world of the text
d) High status in the society where it is produced and read
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e) A focus on the message for its own sake
+ See Literary discourse
Mass Media discourse
Mass Media claims to be the most important textual system of contemporary time because of its continuous productivity, the depth and the daily penetration in some popular consciousness.
3 areas (newspapers&magazines, radio, TV) are considered to be knowledge-producing institutions. The central prototypical output of Mass Media is news. Its dominant platform now is the Internet in addition to broadcasting and print. News is what news organizations have selected for inclusion and what gets printed or broadcast.
Ekstrom (American scholar): news – reliable, neutral, current, factual information that is important and valuable for citizens.
Another scholar (Schudson) offers a broader definition: News is information and commentary on contemporary affairs taken to be publicly important, though he admits that in any day’s presentation of news there is a great deal of information, which may be interesting but not important (related to our time).
Another point of view (Martin Montgomery): news - information about current or recent events, happenings or changes taking place outside the immediate purview of the audience and which is considered to be of likely interest or concern to them. (In the lecture: … taking place in the world and … to the public)
News can be printed or broadcast. Differences:
1) different channels of perception
2) different modality
Broadcast news consists of the mediated and regular presentation of the material to a mass public.
Broadcast news in connection with discourse analysis
The goal of analyzing the discourse of broadcast news is like everywhere else, to construct the meaning, which will cover: identifying the structure of that discourse as situated communicative action in the specialized domain of news broadcasting. This goal resembles the long-established socio-linguistic concern with who speaks, what is being spoken, to whom, when and how. But in this case everything is researched or described in relation to a communicative situation, which involves much more than a text, but certain graphic or visual elements, which play a powerful role as well as integrating role.
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In that case we have at the heart of our analysis a speech act, which consists of visual and language elements, and at the same time we should take a look and identify one very important factor, which somehow is revealed not only to language characteristics of discourse, but also to social factors.
For more information: see Multi-modal discourse
Multi-modal discourse
Multi-modality seems to be the focus of attention these days. The last decade observes the explosion of interest in the issue of multi-modality.
Images have always been a part of human cultures and have been the subject of much interest over centuries. We also observe a great change of technology in communication. And this is one of the reasons of the appearance of a number of factors, which should be taken into account in the process of discourse analysis. These are intertwined factors: social, economic, cultural and technological. New technology brought about a shift from the dominance of writing to the mode of image. New technologies have an impact on how linguists collect, transcribe and analyze discourse data. Possibly, more important is the impact on social interactions and discourses themselves.
Discourse analysis itself is a product of technological changes in many ways. One of the problems elated to multi-modal discourse is how we should understand multi-modality or simply modality.
Multi-modality has a double focus: socio-semiotic and linguistic. Meaning of any discourse arises in social environment and in social interactions. That makes te social source an origin and generator of meaning.
Discourse analysis is the meaning construction. We should bring together social and linguistic factors.
The core unit of semiotics is the sign, a fusion of form and meaning. Signs exist in all modes. But the notion of multi-modal discourse analysis unfortunately varies from one linguist to another, from one paradigm to another. Some linguists focus primarily on technological media, others – on non-verbal communication.
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Why should we study Multi-Modality?
1) The basic argument: multi-modality covers practically any discourse. Linguists should discover a fuller view of how humans communicate. We must bring together all means of making meaning under one theoretical roof.
2) There are new forms of discourse, which appeared not long ago. E. g. Many scholars point to the proliferation of new forms of discourse on the Internet and in “chat” settings.
The framework for multi-modal discourse analysis is based on linguistic and some other modal elements that is semiotic, linguistic and socio-semiotic signs. In this case the communicative mode can be defined as a set of signs with meanings and regularities attached to those signs. It is quite a different system of presentation (e.g. pictures on TV are dynamic).
When we analyze multi-modal texts, we should take into account how the components are blended. We should try to concentrate only on the picture and only after that – on the text.
1) Jot down your ideas, impressions
2) Read the text (at least 2 times) – search for evidence
3) The ideas either change or get confirmed.
Multi-modal discourse analysis
Multi-modal discourse is considered to have a combination of words and other modalities, such as pictures, films, video images, sound, colours, gestures. It is considered that the use of multi-modal discourse establishes the proximity of the viewers to the events described in the texts or pictured. Sometimes it makes people engaged in multi-modal discourse. Multi-modal discourse is typical not only of print-texts, but of television, films, video.
Multi-modal discourse analysis considers how a text draws on modes of communication, such as films, pictures, video, images and sound in combination with words to make meaning. It considers how multi-modal texts are designed and how semiotic tools such as colour, framing, focus, positioning of elements contribute to meaning construction in those texts.
M. Halliday described 3 types of social meanings that are drawn simultaneously in the use of language:
1) Ideational (What the text is about) – nowadays this function is called representational
2) Interpersonal (Relations between the participants)
3) Textual (How the message is organized)
In multi-modal texts these meanings are realized visually, in how the image conveys aspects of the real world
The image that we get from multi-modal discourse is created also through means of different modality. Multi-modal discourse, as it is being developed, is identified as some part of a number of modes. And each of those modes has a great meaning potential. Another researcher (Jewitt) puts forward the idea that these days we cannot find discourse that is not multi-modal. Gibson wrote that every kind of semiotic things might have different meanings or exercise different functions in multi-modal discourse. This fact depends on the context. The meaning potential (according to Leewin) of particular mode is shaped by how that mode has been used and what it has repeatedly used to mean and the social conventions that perform this use in the context. Particular attention was paid to images (photographs, diagrams, maps, cartoons). Some common ideas were offered by semiotitians. E.g. one person is sitting and the other is standing (their position), their gaze and the level of the eyes matter.
Framework of analysis:
1) What meaning is being made?
2) How is meaning being made?
3) What resources have been drawn to produce that kind of meaning?
4) In what social environment is that meaning being made?
5) Whose interest and agency is at work in the making of that meaning? (the ideology of the text)
Genre and multi-modal framework
Genre plays a central role in our accounting for the range of possibilities: why and how this multi-modal text is realized. Almost all linguists identify genre as one of the most important characteristics of multi-modal texts in particular. Genre should come first. The text organization depends on genre.
Mode is an organizing and shaping meaning resource. It is shaped by and carries the deep ontological, historical and social orientations of a society and its cultures into every sign (word).
Resources of multi-modality in discourse are images, writing, layout, music, gesture, speech or writing, moving images, soundtrack and 3D objects. The graphic resources are font, size, spacing frame, colour. To frame its units it has syntactic, textual and socio-semiotic resources (sentences, paragraphs, textual blocks and genre). The frames use graphic resources such as punctuation marks, visual means, spaces (between sentences, paragraphs), writing in different colours. Multi-modal texts are studied in pragmatics and in many other forms of sociolinguistics. Pragmatics tells viewers (readers) about social circumstances, participants and the environment of use. It is also a matter of interest in social semiotics. Social semiotics usually tells viewers (readers) about the process of sign-making in certain social environment.
While analyzing multi-modal texts, we should bring together the picture and the text.
57) Politeness principles
Robin Lakoff (1973) proposed three maxims of politeness:
1. Don’t impose
E.g. “I’m sorry to bother you but … “
2. Give options (by mitigating phrases)
E.g. “Do you think you could possibly …”
3. Make your hearer feel good (+ not only what you say, but also how you say it, e.g voice, intonation)
“You’re better at this than me”
A polite utterance is a speaker’s intended, marked and appropriate behavior which displays face concerns. The motivation for it lies in possible but not necessary in desire of the speaker to show positive concern to the addressee, and/or respect the addressee and the speaker’s own need for independence. Addressee will interpret the utterance as polite when it is perceived as appropriate and marked.
Geoffrey Neil Leech ( 1936 –2014) was a specialist in English language and linguistics. Politeness maxims by G. Leech:
- the tact maxim – minimize cost, maximize benefit to other
Can be observed in commissives, directives/ impositives - expressions that influence the hearer to do action. The example of the tact maxim is as follows:
“Won‘t you sit down?”
The speaker uses indirect utterance to be more polite and minimizing cost to the hearer. This utterance implies that sitting down is benefit to the hearer.
- The generosity maim – minimize benefit, maximize cost to self
“You must come and dinner with us.”
It is an advice utterance that is involved in directive illocutionary act. In this case the speaker implies that cost of the utterance is to his self.
- The approbation maxim requires to minimizing dispraise of other and maximizing praise of other.
- the modesty maxim - the participants must minimize praise of self and maximize dispraise of self.
“Please accept this small gift as prize of your achievement.”
- the agreement maxim - maximize agreement between self and other people and minimize disagreement between self and other.
The disagreement usually is expressed by regret or partial agreement.
A: “English is a difficult language to learn.”
B: “True, but the grammar is quite easy.”
- the sympathy maxim explains to minimize antipathy between self and other and maximize sympathy between self and other
This maxim is applicable in assertives/ representatives. “I’m terribly sorry to hear about your father.”This expression shows the solidarity between the speaker and the hearer.
Politeness strategies depend on your relations with the interlocutor as well as on one’s age, social position etc; how much power the hearer has over you; significance of what you want and how much emphasis both speakers place on involvement and independence.
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