PREVIEW

In the last four decades, the focus of linguistic studies has changed from the description of formal properties of language as a code to the description of how people communicate through semiotic systems. This chapter will introduce some of the most important developments in language studies that contributed to a new approach to the analysis of interaction called discourse analysis. Key notions about communication will be presented so that the concepts of text, genre and discourse can be discussed. Since all discourse is multimodal, in other words, we communicate our meanings through different semiotic modes, some of the differences between these modes will be addressed, especially between the oral and written modes. Another important topic in the area of discourse analysis is the question of how interactants exchange meanings. We will be discussing therefore how participants and roles are realized linguistically.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter introduces you to important aspects of recent research in the areas of discourse analysis and suggests practical applications to the interpretation and production of texts. The main purpose of this chapter is to consider the relationship between language, other semiotic signs, and society. You will be introduced to theories of discourse analysis and spend time doing textual analysis. This chapter will enable you to develop a critical understanding of some key concepts involved in discourse analysis and to understand how language reflects, mediates and creates our everyday reality. The first objective of the chapter is, then, to make you aware of communicative processes. The second objective is to review some different approaches to communication, written and oral. We will also be mentioning the important issue of how we communicate through other means that do not involve the linguistic expression.

The final aim is that by being exposed to current approaches to the analysis of interaction, you should improve your own production, both oral and written, and become more aware of what is involved when we use our linguistic resources to communicate our meanings.

How do we communicate?

Language is only one of the ways we communicate meanings in our daily lives. We use the resources of our bodies and the environment we are placed in at the moment of communication to send a message to somebody else.

PREVIEW

This chapter looks at media discourse – that is, how the media use language and images to construct meaning in society. We are interested in how media discourse can influence the way we think and we emphasize the need for greater critical awareness of the messages we are exposed to daily by analysing discourse found in media texts. The concept of investigating media discourse is closely linked with discourse analysis and we recommend that this chapter should be read in conjunction with Caldas-Coulthard's comprehensive examination of this topic in Chapter 9. We provide some context for the emergence of media discourse within the field of discourse analysis, as well as describing some theoretical approaches and methods that have been used to study media texts whether news reports, advertisements or broadcast interviews. But as former journalists, and now academics whose main body of research lies in the study of media texts, we focus in particular on the language of the news to exemplify how critical analysis and interpretation are crucial in becoming media literate. This chapter will give you a greater appreciation and understanding of media and their significance.

INTRODUCTION

Discourse surrounds us. It is the meaning that lies behind everyday conversations, letters, signs in shop windows, speeches, paintings, photographs, a tweet, a slogan on a t-shirt, a television programme, a product brand, a website or even a car's personal registration plate. The text is what we actually read, see or hear – in other words the ‘observable product’ that carries meaning (Talbot 2007: 9). Discourse is ‘a form of knowledge’ (Devereux 2003: 158) that is conveyed through text. One way to grasp the concept of discourse is to think of the commonly used phrase ‘reading between the lines’ where we seek to understand what is being implied rather than explicitly said.

Although media discourse can relate in today's terms to any form of medium of communication such as weblogs or social networking sites, in this chapter we are concerned specifically with the discourse that is constructed and conveyed through news organizations.

PREVIEW

This chapter builds upon the basics of language structure and functions (Chapters 2–9) to demonstrate how texts (spoken or written, long or short) present a particular view of the world which reflects the ideological position of one (or more) of the perceived producers of the text. The chapter takes a neutral view of what ideology means, seeing it as referring to sets of values (and also, in some cases, beliefs) that are held by a group of people, often a society as a whole. You will be introduced to the framework of critical stylistics, which allows you to analyse the hidden and implicit ideologies inherent in textual construction. The basis of this framework is the ‘textual-conceptual function’ which demonstrates how the text is constructing different aspects of the world of the text by processes such as naming, negating, hypothesizing and enumerating. This approach shares with critical discourse analysis (CDA) the idea that ideology is present in all texts, but unlike CDA it is politically neutral rather than taking an explicitly socialist or Marxist stance in itself.

INTRODUCTION

Although we tend to assume that there is some kind of abstract linguistic system in place, underpinning the things we say and write, linguistics has long recognized that there are also discrepancies between this ‘idealized’ system which is made up of items (phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases, clause elements etc.) and the rules for how they combine into texts (the phonological rules and the grammar) – and the way in which the system is ‘realized’ when it is used. Famously, Saussure (see also Chapter 1), often seen as the founder of modern linguistics, labelled this distinction (in French) langue (language) and parole (speech) and much of the effort of early linguistic description went into describing how the langue worked. Later, when it became evident that there was regular patterning even in the apparently messy reality of parole, subdisciplines of linguistics (e.g. sociolinguistics, pragmatics, conversation analysis) grew up to try and map out the regularities in usage as much as in the system itself. Later, the cognitive approach to human language represented in Chomsky's transformational-generative grammar recognized a similar distinction between the abstract underlying system of the language – here seen as part of human cognition and therefore labelled ‘competence’ – and the usage of the system which was labelled ‘performance’ (see also Chapter 1).

PREVIEW

This chapter provides an introduction to semantics, which we define as the study of meaning in language. The chapter begins by drawing a fluid boundary between semantics and pragmatics, characterizing the former as knowledge of the linguistic system and the latter as its use in real-life situations. An important distinction is made between reference, the act of using language to identify items in the world, and sense or meaning, which allows the link to be made between sounds and reality. The chapter discusses meaning at the levels of word and sentence. At the word or lexical level, a number of semantic relations are identified, such as synonymy, antonymy and hyponymy. These relations structure a language's vocabulary. We will see how some relations, such as hyponymy, have effects at both word and sentence level. At the sentence level, the chapter introduces some of the rich repetoire of semantic systems which allow speakers a choice in characterizing situations, including situation type, aspect, tense and semantic roles. A central theme will be construal, the choice of semantic options made by a speaker when talking about a situation or event. The discussion moves on to examine the proposal that the philosophical notion of truth should be used to characterize sentence meaning. The chapter closes with the distinction between literal and non-literal language, looking briefly at the cognitive semantics position that questions this traditional and longstanding distinction. By the end of the chapter you will have been introduced to a range of semantic systems that are embodied in speakers’ knowledge of their native language.

Introduction

Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. It shares this interest with pragmatics, which is the subject of the next chapter. The dividing line between the two areas is fluid and depends in part on the type of linguistic theory we employ. However, in advance of both chapters we can say that in studying semantics we try to model what speakers implicitly know about the meanings of words, phrases and sentences in their native languages. A primary concern of pragmatics, on the other hand, is how speakers integrate contextual and non-linguistic knowledge in the communication of meaning. Another way of making the distinction is to say that semantics is concerned with language as a system, while pragmatics is concerned with how speakers use language.

PREVIEW

Phonetics describes the sounds and melodies of the spoken word – how they are made (articulatory phonetics), their physical reality (acoustic phonetics) and how they are perceived (speech perception). Articulatory phonetics is a long-established discipline and the rudiments of general phonetic theory are relatively uncontentious. Phonetics impacts on many areas of linguistics including morphology (e.g. English plural and past tense endings), syntax (e.g. distinguishing between certain word classes, statements and questions), semantics (e.g. homographs, homophones) and pragmatics (e.g. context-sensitive intonational focus), also sociolinguistics (e.g. regional accents, styles of speech), psycholinguistics (e.g. speech errors, speech perception) and so forth. It makes sense, therefore, for students of language and linguistics to know something about the nature of the spoken word. Accordingly, against a background of examples drawn mainly (but not exclusively) from English, this chapter summarizes speech sound production, demonstrates key features in the speech waveform and in spectrograms, looks briefly at types of transcription, and introduces the contributions made by tone and intonation.

INTRODUCTION

The interconnected combination of mouth, throat and lungs is the vocal tract. The ‘power’ for speech is supplied by a stream of air from the lungs. To speak, we make deliberate movements of our throats and mouths (particularly the tongue and/or the lips) which act on the moving airstream to alter the way it flows. All speech sounds involve some kind of narrowing or approximation between active and passive organs in the vocal tract – the active/moveable tongue tip, for example, rising to touch the passive/immovable upper front teeth. This chapter aims to explain the nature of such gestures.

Phonetics is also inextricably linked with phonology (sometimes called linguistic phonetics). Phonology tells us which particular sounds are used with significance in the speech of different languages, contributing to the meanings of words – for example, ‘s’ and ‘z’ are different sounds in English (represented in phonetic transcription as [s] and [z]) and distinguish word pairs like bus~buzz, Sue~zoo, racer~razor. Phonetics, however, tells us exactly how each sound is produced and about their physical characteristics. Phonology tells us that English also contrasts [ʃ] (e.g. in sheep or mission) and [ʒ] (in vision). Again, notice how the phonetic transcription of sounds isn't always like the spelling letters.

PREVIEW

‘Grammar’ is a word that is known to almost everyone, but it is clear that people have different attitudes towards and preconceptions about it. This chapter tries first of all to tease these out before attempting to identify what grammar really ‘is’. A definition is offered which emphasizes the role of grammar as a resource for creating meaning. A number of approaches to grammar, which help to conceptualize it, are then discussed. This is followed by a description of some of the most important aspects of English grammar: word classes, clause elements and clause combination. Grammar is not treated as a monolith, however, and several dimensions of variation are examined. There is then a section showing how all this can be applied to solving problems. Finally, a revised set of attitudes is put forward for consideration.

INTRODUCTION

‘Grammar’ is a troublesome and emotive word, with many meanings and implications for different groups of people. It is more in the public domain than any of the other chapter titles in this book. Few people can come to the study of grammar without preconceived notions. Here are just some of the potential attitudes to the discipline.

For some linguists,‘grammar’ is a cover term for syntax and morphology (see Chapters 4 and 6, this volume). But grammar is more than just a combination of these two areas. Its function and purpose are what counts, as the rest of this chapter will demonstrate. Indeed, it is clear that most people's conception of grammar is at odds with that of linguists.

For some teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL), grammar is a crutch to rely on in difficult circumstances. For others, it is a distraction from the real task of learning languages. For still others, grammar is a tool to be used occasionally to make generalizations. And for yet others – though they are a dying breed – grammar is an inseparable part of learning a foreign language.

For learners of foreign languages, grammar is a collection of separate rules (‘rules of thumb’), given by their teachers and textbooks (and usually simplified, though they do not know it), which may occasionally be helpful (though there is the danger, long recognized, that learners may take the learning of such rules as a substitute for learning the language – see the distinction between primary and secondary grammar below).

PREVIEW

Linguistics is the study of the structure, functions and acquisition of human language. This introductory chapter will introduce you to the enormous complexity of language and to the fact that our understanding of grammar depends on our world knowledge and on the context. This is followed by a discussion of the characteristics of human language and some ways of defining it. In comparing attempts to teach an ape human language with the language acquisition of small children, we ask whether human language has evolved from some shared, pre-existing communication system, or whether it is unlike anything that already exists in the animal world. The chapter discusses the views of Noam Chomsky on this question; we introduce evidence of native-speaker intuitions and children's errors in language acquisition which might support his argument that language is innate to humans. We then go on to discuss the approach and concerns of linguistics: that it is descriptive, and that it can be studied in its social context. The chapter ends by considering the rigorous and evidence-based methods, as well as the analytical tools, which linguists use to investigate language. Lastly, the chapter will introduce you to some of the uses and applications of linguistics. As you go through this chapter, and through the book, you will find exercises that allow you to practise these techniques of analysis.

INTRODUCTION

Any introductory textbook in linguistics will reveal to students that language is much more complex than speakers think it is, as they unself-consciously use it in their daily communication. As you work through this book, you will become aware that the different levels of language (discussed in Section 1.9 below) interact. You will learn that human language shows marked differences from animal communication systems. As speakers of English, or whatever our first language is, we all use it with a huge degree of proficiency. Some of us are able to use language in several different modes: speech, writing, email, or sign. Despite that, few of us could define what human language is. At the outset, it is important to make one clear distinction between the universal human faculty of language, which we all have, and the fact that different languages exist, and are used by different ethnic or national groups.

PREVIEW

This chapter examines the question of what limits there are in the ways in which languages can differ from each other structurally. Whenever we utter a sentence in any language, the words come in a particular order and are grouped into phrases in a particular way. While it is obvious that words in a sentence are ordered, the organization into phrases is less obvious, often imperceptible. This chapter argues that the variation between languages is largely confined to perceptible properties of word order, while the imperceptible organization into phrases is the same – or very nearly so – in all languages. Whether this view is true and, if so, why, is at the heart of some of the most fundamental debates in linguistics with implications for all of cognitive science. The chapter starts by motivating the existence of abstract phrase structure and by outlining what kinds of facts the syntactic description of a language must account for. A sufficiently explicit discussion requires some technical tools and notions, which will be introduced. The chapter then explains the goals of a general syntactic theory: to delimit and explain the range of variation found in human languages. This is followed by a case study of the word order found in noun phrases across languages. The case study focuses on the idea that languages differ in word order but resemble each other in phrasal organization.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter introduces you to a problem that has driven research in theoretical linguistics since the middle of the twentieth century. This problem and its potential solutions have shaped the field of theoretical syntax, giving rise to some of the most important debates within linguistics and with neighbouring disciplines.

The problem arises from tension between two basic observations: Firstly, human languages differ immensely in how words are arranged into sentences and ordered. Secondly, children pick up the language spoken in their environment quickly, at a young age; they end up with remarkably complex and largely similar grammars in the absence of explicit instruction.

The first observation suggests that grammars are very different from each other. The second observation suggests the exact opposite; if children acquiring a language had to sift through a vast space of radically different grammars in order to acquire their language, the process should be slow and error prone and it should require explicit instruction.

The aims of the criminal justice system

The ‘criminal justice system’ is not a structure which has been planned as a system. Nor is it so organized that the several interlocking parts operate harmoniously. In England and Wales, as in many other jurisdictions, the administration of criminal justice has grown in a piecemeal way over the years, with separate phases of development leaving their mark. To refer to a ‘system’ is therefore merely a convenience and an aspiration. It should not be assumed that the various arrangements were planned or actually operate as a system, although it remains necessary to recognize the interdependence of the different parts and to incorporate this into any planning.

It is important to distinguish the aims of the criminal justice system from the aims of sentencing, which merely relate to one element. As we saw in Chapter 1.4, the system encompasses a whole series of stages and decisions, from the initial investigation of crime, through the various pre-trial processes, the provisions of the criminal law, the trial, the forms of punishment, and then post-sentence decisions concerned with, for example, supervision, release from custody, and recall procedures. It would hardly be possible to formulate a single meaningful ‘aim of the criminal justice system’ which applied to every stage. It is true that one might gather together a cluster of aims: for example, the prevention of crime, the fair treatment of suspects and defendants, due respect for the victims of crime, the fair labelling of offences according to their relative gravity, and so on. But to combine these into some overarching aim such as ‘the maintenance of a peaceful society through fair and just laws and procedures’ would surely be to descend into vacuity, since it gives no hint of the conflicts that arise and the priorities that need to be determined. Thus the cluster of aims for different stages of the system needs to be stated in such a way as to maximize coherence and also to ensure compliance with international obligations such as the European Convention on Human Rights and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The principle and its challengers

The constitutions of many countries proclaim a principle of equality before the law or non-discrimination, or at least a general principle of equality. There is no British Constitution as such, but (as we saw in Chapter 2.7 above) the Human Rights Act 1998 brings into UK law most articles of the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 14 declares that the enjoyment of all the rights declared in the Convention shall be secured ‘without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status’. This is not a general principle of non-discrimination, since it applies only to discrimination in respect of rights declared in the Convention, but it is nevertheless important.

In English law the Equality Acts 2006 and 2010 establish a general legal anti-discrimination framework, monitored by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The protected characteristics are age, disability, gender, gender reassignment, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation. Section 149(1) of the 2010 Act requires public authorities to a) eliminate discrimination or harassment on any of these grounds, b) advance equality of opportunity for those with a protected characteristic, and c) foster good relations between those persons and others. While duty a) is negative, duties b) and c) require public authorities to take positive action – an important feature of the law, since the criminal justice system alone cannot hope to bring about changes in social attitudes or opportunities. It can be argued that a sentencing system that places emphasis on proportionality should leave no room for discrimination, since courts should focus on the seriousness of the offence in each case. However, we have seen in Chapter 3 that s. 142 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 appears to allow courts to pursue other purposes apart from proportionality; in Chapter 5 that some of the recognized aggravating and mitigating factors are not linked to proportionality principles; and in Chapter 6 that previous convictions and predictions of dangerousness can play a prominent part in sentencing. Moreover, although there are sentencing guidelines for many offences, a margin of discretion has been preserved, especially in respect of mitigation and aggravation, and discretion raises the possibility of discriminatory practices.

Courts and crimes

Although some common law crimes remain, most of the offences in English criminal law were created by statute and have a statutory maximum penalty. For the purposes of trial, offences were divided into three categories by the Criminal Law Act 1977 – offences triable only on indictment, offences triable only summarily, and offences triable either way. The most serious offences (e.g. murder, rape) are triable only on indictment, at the Crown Court. A large mass of less serious offences is triable only summarily, in magistrates’ courts. The middle category of offences triable either way comprises most burglaries, thefts and frauds. The first question in these cases concerns the defendant's intended plea: if the defendant indicates a plea of guilty, the magistrates must assume jurisdiction and proceed to sentence, unless they decide that their sentencing powers are insufficient. If the intended plea is not guilty, the defendant will be tried at a magistrates’ court unless either the magistrates direct or the defendant elects to have the case tried at the Crown Court.

The Crown Court sits with a judge and jury. There are three levels of Crown Court centre: first-tier centres, where both civil and criminal cases are tried and where High Court judges and circuit judges preside; second-tier centres, where High Court judges or circuit judges preside but only deal with criminal cases; and third-tier centres, where circuit judges or recorders deal with criminal cases, being mostly offences triable either way. The types of criminal offence are divided into four classes, according to their gravity, and some can only be tried by a High Court judge (of whom there are around 105), whereas others can be tried by circuit judges or recorders. Circuit judges (around 650) are full-time judges, although they may divide their time between civil and criminal work. Recorders and assistant recorders (around 1,200) are part-time judges, whose main occupations are barristers, solicitors or (in a few instances) academics; most full-time judges start their judicial careers in this way. Appeals against sentence from the Crown Court go to the Court of Appeal and, if there is no point of law involved, the appeal requires that Court's leave if it is to be heard. Applications for leave are dealt with by individual High Court judges.