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LECTURE EIGHT

DISCOURSE AND CULTURE
DEIXIS.
REFERENCE AND INFERENCE.
PRESUPPOSITION AND ENTAILMENT.
COOPERATION AND IMPLICATURE

DISCOURSE AND CULTURE
The emphasis in the preceding chapter was on the sequential structure of conversation,
particularly on aspects of the turn-taking procedures for control of the floor, with less attention
paid to what speakers had to say once they got the floor. Having gained the floor, speakers
have to organize the structure and content of what they want to say. They have to package
their messages in accordance with what they think their listeners do and do not know, as well
as sequence everything in a coherent way. If those speakers decide to write out their
messages, creating written text, they no longer have listeners providing immediate interactive
feedback. Consequently, they have to rely on more explicit struc-tural mechanisms for the
organization of their texts. In this expanded perspective, speakers and writers are viewed as
using language not only in its interpersonal function (i. e. taking part in social interaction), but
also in its textual function (i. e. creating well-formed and appropriate text), and also in its
ideational func-tion (i. e. representing thought and experience in a coherent way). Investigating
this much broader area of the form and function of what is said and written is called discourse
analysis.

Discourse analysis
Discourse analysis covers an extremely wide range of activities, from the narrowly
focused investigation of how words such as 'oh' or 'well' are used in casual talk, to the study of
the dominant ideo-logy in a culture as represented, for example, in its educational or political
practices. When it is restricted to linguistic issues, dis-course analysis focuses on the record
(spoken or written) of the process by which language is used in some context to express
intention.
Naturally, there is a great deal of interest in the structure of dis-course, with particular
attention being paid to what makes a well-formed text. Within this structural perspective, the
focus is on topics such as the explicit connections between sentences in a text that create
cohesion, or on elements of textual organization that are characteristic of storytelling, for
example, as distinct from opinion expressing and other text types.
However, within the study of discourse, the pragmatic perspective is more specialized. It tends
to focus specifically on aspects of what is unsaid or unwritten (yet communicated) within the
discourse being analyzed. In order to do the pragmatics of dis-course, we have to go beyond
the primarily social concerns of interaction and conversation analysis, look behind the forms
and structures present in the text, and pay much more attention to psychological concepts
such as background knowledge, beliefs, and expectations. In the pragmatics of discourse, we
inevitably explore what the speaker or writer has in mind.