Discourse Analysis In Discourse

Discourse communities are all around us—we all belong to a discourse community. A discourse community is a body of persons who share common and unique modes of communication or discourse (“Discourse Community”). In order for a community to identify as a discourse community, the community must possess six defining qualities that categorize it as a discourse community. As defined by John Swales, a researcher and professor of linguistics, discourse communities “have a broadly set of common public goals, mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, participatory mechanisms to provide information and feedback, one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims, an acquired lexis, and a threshold level of members with a

A discourse community is said to be resistant to internal criticism and self-scrutiny because all ideas that severely contrast the values and beliefs within the community are defined as being on the outside, as demonstrated in the texts. “The Discourse itself defines what counts as acceptable criticism” (Gee 162). All of the articles use similar rhetorical strategies by describing a problem in shared thinking; the common conception that the

Life is like a massive highway that have infinite routes anyone can choose take to reach some type of designated goal. Those various routes lead to distinct exits, where one can discover a group or groups that share similarities dealing with viewpoints, beliefs, or understanding towards a particular goal. These groups can be identified as discourse communities. According to, “The Concept of Discourse Community,” in the textbook, Writing About Writing, John Swales stressed that in order to be classified as a discourse community the group has to have all six defining characteristics. Swales emphasized, “A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals, mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback, utilities and hence processes one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims, acquires specific lexis, and has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discourse expertise” (Swales, 221-222). Keeping this key detail in mind, there is numerous type of discourse out there.

Present a clear picture of your discourse community. Who are its members? What specialized language/texts/rituals are associated with it? Why should it be studied at all? You should have discussed these ideas in your research proposal. Here is where you realize them with materials you gathered from your discourse community.

The second level grammatical-rhetorical analysis aims to investigate the relationship between grammatical choice and rhetorical function in written English for science and technology. Discourse analysis as interaction represents the third level of language description. Most importantly, interactional analysis outlines the concept of interpretation of discourse by the reader or listener. Discourse analysis appears to have steadily moved from surface-level analysis to a deeper description of language use. However, in the context of language teaching for specific purposes, applied discourse analysis seems to represent a rather narrow description of language in use and is inadequate in its explanation. In order to introduce a thick description of language in use, it is necessary to combine socio-cultural and psycholinguistic aspects of text-construction and interpretation with linguistic insights to answer the question: why are specific discourse-genres written and used by the specialist communities the way they are? Genre analysis as an insightful description of English for specific purpose texts has become a useful and powerful tool to arrive at significant form-function correlations which can be utilized for a number of applied linguistic purposes.

Two definitive works done by Swales and Porter has helped established on the definition and criteria of a discourse community. While Swales was the primary source of information for Porter’s own piece, Porter can develop a more in-depth view on discourse communities.

Discourse communities are everywhere. Everywhere we and go and almost everything we do relates or falls into a discourse community of some sort. Whether it’s a long, pointless conversation on the phone with a best friend or being part of a school croquet club, it’s part of a unique discourse community in some way. Every discourse has it’s own distinct qualities and almost all have a different way of communicating. These discourses are strong influences on all of our personalities. The way every human in the world acts and communicates is influenced by one or multiple discourse communities.

Belonging to the Japonic language family, the Japanese language exclusively belongs to the Japanese people. Unlike languages such as English and Spanish, where their languages have been adopted by other countries such as New Zealand and Mexico and therefore isn’t just spoken in their home countries of England and Spain. Japanese is a unique and distinct Asian language used only in Japan. Japanese language is also a prime example for discourse analysis because it is a refined and complex language. Discourse analysis studies the overall larger aspect of language and how the language flows and connects. In some aspects of discourse analysis, it studies how the language is understood and how the meaning of sentences is affected.

When Discourse is broken up, it has various different elements to it. Some of those are dominant Discourses, non dominant Discourses, mushfaking, and apprenticeship. “Dominant Discourses are secondary discourses the mastery of which, at a particular place and time, brings with it the acquisition of social “goods” (money, prestige,

Discourses are the “social and cultural practices through which individuals and groups use language to establish their identities…they provide ways of being, thinking, acting and using language so that people can identify themselves in social and cultural networks” Discourses affect peoples views on all things, for example, two different

Discourse acts as walls that constrain actions and speeches which can take the form of power (Raby, 2002, pg 430). The

An example of a major discourse operating in the contemporary world is a medical discourse. Frow states that ‘discourse is a mode of organization of knowledge in relation to material institutions’ (2005, pg. 93); some of these institutions include hospitals, government health care, and the World Health Organization.

According to Fairclough (1989, 1995), Critical Discourse Analysis is used to analyze communicative events by analyzing the relationship between three dimensions, including the micro dimension, the meso dimension, and the macro dimension.

According to Fairclough (1995), critical discourse analysis is discourse analysis which aims to systematically observe causality between discourse practice and wider socio-cultural structure. Besides, it also aims to seek how the relation is influenced and how the ideology is formed by power in society (p.132). In short, a result of a critical discourse analysis exposes an implicit message or meaning beneath a discourse. In this research, the implicit meaning is how Indonesia is represented in a tourism advertisement. In critical discourse analysis, there are theorists who have focused and systematic frameworks on genre and socio-semantic representation within a discourse, but there are also those who combine various kinds of research methodologies (Blommaert & Bulcaen, 2008). In this research, the method utilized is communicative event analysis, which is part of Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis framework. Communicative event analysis observes a discourse as a social practice which is composed of three dimensions: text, discourse practice, and social

Van Dijk, T.A. (1993): ”Principles of critical discourse analysis“. In: Discourse & Society, 4(2), 249-283.