Textuality Standards and Discourse Analysis Fundamentals

Posted on Oct 31, 2025 in English Studies

De Beaugrande & Dressler’s Text Standards

De Beaugrande and Dressler’s standards for text analysis include:

  • Intentionality, Acceptability, Informativity, Situationality, Intertextuality, Appropriateness, Effectiveness, and Efficiency.
  • Related linguistic features: Modality, parallelism, partial repetition, the use of conjunctions, frequency adverbs, repetition, and pronouns.

Fries Framework for Text Analysis

  • Contextual configuration
  • Generic structure
  • Cohesive harmony
  • Social values

Seven Standards of Textuality

  1. Cohesion: The network of lexical, grammatical, and other relations that provide links between various parts of a text (surface relations linking words and expressions).
  2. Coherence: A network of relations which organize and create a text (underlying meaning structure).
  3. Intentionality: A text producer normally seeks to achieve a goal.
  4. Acceptability: Affected by the reader’s social and cultural background.
  5. Informativity: A text is informative if it transfers new information.
  6. Situationality: Related to real time and place; relevant to a particular social context.
  7. Intertextuality: A text is related to other texts; the relationship between a given text and other relevant texts.

Fundamentals of Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis is the investigation of knowledge about language beyond the word, clause, phrase, and sentence. It considers the relationship between language and the social and cultural contexts in which it is used. The term was first introduced by Zellig Harris in 1952. Discourse analysis studies language in context.

Differences Between Spoken and Written Discourse

  1. Grammatical Intricacy and Lexical Density: Written discourse tends to be more lexical dense and complex than spoken discourse. Lexical density refers to the ratio of content words to grammatical or function words within a clause.
  2. Nominalization: Where actions and events are presented as nouns rather than as verbs. Halliday calls this phenomenon grammatical metaphor. Spoken discourse has a low level of nominalization.
  3. Explicitness: Writing is generally more explicit than speech, though this depends on the purpose of the text.
  4. Contextualization: Writing is often more decontextualized than speech. This view is based on the perception that speech depends on a shared situation.
  5. Spontaneous Nature: Spoken discourse is produced spontaneously, so it is sometimes more disorganized in comparison to writing.
  6. Repetition, Hesitation, and Redundancy: Spoken discourse, produced spontaneously and without pre-planning, contains abundant repetition, hesitation, and pauses because it is produced in real time.
  7. A Continuum of Differences: Speaking and writing draw on the same grammatical system but encode meaning in different ways depending on what they wish to represent. There is no single absolute difference between speech and written English.

Unit 2: Social Contexts of Language Use

Discourse and Speech Communities

  • Discourse Communities (DC): A group of people who work or live together. Members of a DC have shared goals, values, and beliefs, and they share some kind of activity (e.g., Cameron’s study of telephone call centers).
  • Speech Communities: A group of people that speak the same language.
    • Linguistic View: Refers to people who not only use the same language but also have the opportunity to interact with each other.
    • Sociolinguistic View: Language alone does not define a speech community; factors like society, culture, politics, and ethnicity must be considered.

Devitt’s Three Types of Language User Groups

  • Communities: Groups of people who share a substantial amount of time together.
  • Collectives: Groups of people that form around a single repeated interest without the frequency of contact of a community.
  • Networks: Groups of people that are not as tightly knit as speech communities, defined by connections.

Related Sociolinguistic Concepts

  • Social Class: Difficult to define; factors include occupation, education, etc.
  • Social Networks: May be based on kinship ties, religious affiliations, employment, etc.

Discourse and Gender

Two main approaches: the Dominance Approach (DA) and the Cultural Approach (CA).

  • The DA maintains that there are clear differences in language use resulting from male dominance.
  • The CA believes that boys and girls learn different ways of using spoken discourse.

This topic includes the notion of desire: gender is socially constructed, but sexual desires are often viewed as not constructed.

Discourse and Identity

A person may have multiple identities, each becoming more important at different times. The way people display their identities includes their language use and interaction style. Identities are not natural; they are constructed.

  • Identity and Casual Conversation: People establish social identities through conversation.
  • Identity and Written Academic Discourse: Everything we write reflects our identity and the relationship we aim to establish with others.

Discourse and Ideology

Texts are never ideology-free. A spoken or written genre is never created without an objective; it always intends to convey a message to the readers or listeners.

Unit 5: Conversational Analysis (CA)

Core Concepts in CA

Conversational Analysis is an approach to the analysis of spoken discourse that examines:

  • How spoken discourse is organized.
  • How conversations develop as people conduct everyday interactions.

Transcription

Spoken texts are transcribed into written form. Transcription involves the analysis of particular features such as the use of pitch, intonation, and the length of sentences.

Sequence and Structure in Conversation

  • Opening Conversation: Typically involves summon/answer/identification sequences.
  • Closing Conversation: Includes archetypal closings (“OK,” “Alright”), pre-closing sequences, and referring back to something previously said.

Key Mechanisms of Conversation

  • Turn-Taking: The basic rule in English conversation is that one person speaks at a time, after which they may nominate another speaker. The end of a turn can be signaled by falling intonation or pauses.
  • Overlaps: A strategy for taking the turn.
  • Adjacency Pairs: Utterances produced by two successive speakers where the second utterance is identified as related to the first one (an expected follow-up).
  • Feedback: The way listeners show they are attending to what is being said (e.g., response tokens like “mmm,” “yeah”).
  • Repair: The way speakers correct things they or someone else has said, and check what they have understood in a conversation (e.g., self-repair, other-repair).