Discourse Analysis | Cohesion definition & Coherence Meaning in Linguistics
What is Discourse?
Discourse is a verbal or written communication between people that goes beyond a single sentence. Discourse is more than just language. Discourse looks at the overall meanings conveyed by language in context. Discourse is a behavioral unit. It is a set of utterances that constitute a recognizable speech event for example a conversation, a joke, a sermon, an interview, etc. Discourse is written as well as spoken: Every utterance assumes a speaker and a hearer as Discourse.
The word “Discourse” is usually defined as “Language beyond the sentence” and so the analysis of discourse is typically concerned with the study of language in text and
Conversation.
What is Discourse Analysis?
Discourse analysis focuses on the structure of naturally spoken language as found in conversation interviews, commentaries, and speech. It is an effort to interpret what the writer or speaker intended to convey in a sensitive social context.
Discourse analysis is a process in which the reader and listener’s minds are working up on the linguistic feature of the utterance to grasp the intended meaning of the writer or speaker.
Even if the utterance or sentences are ungrammatical the discourse analysis makes us grasp the intent and meaning.
We can even cope with the text, written in English, which we could not produce ourselves and which appears to break a lot of rules of the English language. Yet we can build an interpretation. The following example provided by Eric Nelson contains all kinds of errors, yet it can be understood.
My Town
My natal was in a small town, very close to Riyadh capital of Saudi Arabia. The distance between my town and Riyadh 7 miles exactly. The name of this Almasani that means in English factories. It takes this name from the people’s carrer.
The above paragraph is full of grammatical mistakes since by discourse analysis of this text we can understand what is the information the writer wants to convey.
Devices for discourse analysis
we use different tools for discourse analysis some of them are as under:
Cohesion Definition
Cohesion refers to the ties and connections which exist within texts that link different parts of sentences or larger units of discourse.
It is actually a gum or glue that holds the paragraph together. It is the connectedness of structure. One sentence should be connected with the other sentence. It is actually a micro level of text. it has two types :
- Lexical Cohesion
- Grammatical Cohesion
A number of those types of Cohesion ties can be identified in the following paragraph:
“My father once bought a Lincoln Convertible. He did it by saving every penny he could. That car would be worth a fortune nowadays".
These are connections here in the use of words to maintain a reference to the same people and things throughout: “Father-he-he”, “Lincoln-it”. This is the perfect example of Cohesion.
Coherence Meaning
Her: That's the telephone
Him: I’m in the bath
Her: Ok
We can interpret the above dialogue with the help of conventional action and by our background knowledge that someone in the bathroom cannot attend to the phone.
Speech Events
Speech events are mainly concerned with what people say in different environments for example debates, interviews, discussions, quizzes, etc are different speech events. Speakers may have different speech roles as friends, strangers, young or old of equal or unequal status.
The background knowledge about the personality and environment gives a better comprehension for better interpretation of this discourse.
Clearly, our understanding of what we read is not only based on what we see in language structure, but also on other things that we have in mind (knowledge structure) as we go about making sense of discourse.
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