TUGAS DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

The context of situation

     Since the beginning of the 1970 linguists have become increasingly aware of the importance of context in the interpretation of sentences. The implications of taking context into account are well expressed by Sadock (1978: 281):

There is, then, a serious methodological problem that confronts the advocate of linguistic pragmatics. In order to make appeal to this methodology, which is very commonly used in linguistic and philosophical discussion, we need to know what it would mean for the context to be 'slightly different'.

The role of context in interpretation Features of context Consider two invented scenarios in which an identical utterance is produced by two distinct speakers.

(a) Speaker : a young mother, hearer: her mother-in-law, place: park, by a duck pond, time: sunny afternoon in September 1962. They are watching the young mother's two-year-old son chasing ducks and the mother-in-law has just remarked that her son, the child's father, was rather backward at this age. The young mother says:

(b) I do think Adam's quick speaker: a student, hearers: a set of students, place:

sitting round a coffee table in the refectory, time: evening in March 1980. John, one of the group, has just told a joke. Everyone laughs except Adam. Then Adam laughs.

One of the students says : I do think Adam's quick. Is it possible to determine in any principled way what aspects of context of situation are relevant to these different interpretations f the same 'utterance' on two occasions? J. R. Firth (regarded by many as the founder of modern British linguistics) remarked :

Logicians are apt to think of words and propositions as having 'meaning' somehow in them, apart from participants in contexts of situation.

Speakers and listeners do not seem to be necessary. I suggest that voices Should not be entirely dissociated from the social context in which they function and that therefore all texts in  modern spoken languages should be regarded as having 'the implication of utterance', and be referred to typical participants in some generalized context of situation.

Hymes (1964) sets about specifying the features of context which may be relevant to the identification of a type of speech event in a way reminiscent of Firth's. Like Firth, he seizes first on the 'persons' participating in the speech event. Generalizing over speech events, he abstracts the roles addressor and addressee.

The addressor is the speaker or writer who produces the utterance. The addressee is the hearer or reader who is the recipient of the utterance. (Later Hymes also distinguishes audience, since the presence of over hearers may contribute to the specification of the speech event).

Knowledge of the addressor in a given communicative event makes it possible for the analyst to imagine what that particular person is likely to say.

Hymes intends that these contextual features should be regarded rather as general phonetic features are regarded. Just as a phonetician may select, from the general phonetic features available, the features voiced, bilabial and stop, but not lateral, to characterize a [b], so, he suggests, the analyst may choose from the contextual features, those necessary to characterize a particular communicative event.

Co-text

In our discussion so far we have concentrated particularly on the physical context in which single utterances are embedded and we have paid rather little attention to the previous discourse

Co-ordinate. Lewis introduced this co-ordinate to take account of sentences which include specific reference to what has been mentioned before as in phrases like the aforementioned. It is, however, the case that any sentence other than the first in a fragment of discourse, will have the whole of its interpretation forcibly constrained by the preceding text, not just those phrases which obviously and specifically refer to the preceding text, like the aforementioned.

Just as the interpretation of the token q in the child's representation of 'without to disturb the lion' and the token [p] in [greipbritn] are determined by the context in which they appear, so the words which occur in discourse are constrained by what, following Halliday, we shall call their co-text.

Consider the following lexical items in a number of verbal contexts cited almost at random from DarwinYsJournal during the Voyage of HMS Beagle round the World:

 a. The children of the Indians are saved, to be sold or given away as servants, or rather slaves for as long a time as the owners can make them believe themselves slaves. But I

believe in their treatment there is little to complain of.

b. The same evening I went on shore. The first landing in any new country is very interesting.

The point we wish to make here should be an obvious one and can of course be made with respect to many of the other items which we have not italicized in the cited texts. However, consider the sort of lexical content you would expect to find associated with the forms treatment, landing, party and basin in a dictionary entry, and note how finding the forms embedded within a co-text constrains their interpretation.

The reader must interpret the woman sitting reading quite happily as the 'woman' already mentioned, hence must construct an interpretation which has her 'sitting reading quite happily in the ing room'. Similarly the window which the man approaches must interpret as 'the window of the living room'.

At the time of utterance, four months before the time I am writing of, the beneficent lady speaks of the future, shall have her chance. In the following sentence the narrator comments on what happened a week later than the time of the lady's speech, from the point of view of his context at the time of writing his contribution to the novel, In a week afterwards . . . This brief introduction does scant justice to the interest of the temporal structure of this passage. It does, however, indicate the complexity of nested contexts established by co-text which, as hearers 1 readers, we are capable of interpreting.

For the moment the main point we are concerned to make is to tress the power of co-text in constraining interpretation. Even in the absence of information about place and time of original utterance even in the absence of information about the speaker / writer and his intended recipient, it is often possible to reconstruct at the least some part of the physical and to arrive at some interpretation of the text.

The expanding context In our discussion so far, we have been concerned to impose some sort of analytic structure on the lumped mass of context. We have abstracted away from particular contexts, across communicative contexts in general, to arrive at a set of features, some of which seem relevant to the identification of a speech event as being of a particular kind, to the ability of the hearer to predict what sort of thing the speaker is likely to say in a given type of Context, and to the constraining of interpretation in context.

The observant reader will have noticed that we have helped ourselves to the content of the features proposed by Hymes and the co-ordinates proposed by Lewis in a fairly arbitrary way. So we have given variable amounts of information about the speaker or the hearer or the time or the place as we have discussed different fragments of discourse.

This behavior is consistent with Hymes' own expectations about how his framework would be used. You will remember that he thought that contextual features might be considered in the way that general phonetic features are considered: sometimes, but not always relevant, and specifiable to variable degrees of delicacy for different purposes.

A problem for the discourse analyst must be, then, to decide when a particular feature is relevant to the specification of a particular context and what degree of specification is required. Lyons (1977: 570) suggests that there might, in principle, be such standard procedures:

Every actual utterance is spatiotemporally unique, being spoken or written at a particular place and at a particular time; and provided that there is some standard system for identifying points in space and time, we can, in principle, specify the actual spatiotemporal situation of any utterance act.

The principles of 'local interpretation' and of 'analogy'

How is he to determine the relevant span of time in the interpretation of a particular utterance of 'now' or the relevant aspects of a character referred to by the expression 'John'? We must assume that the problem for the discourse analyst is, in this case, identical to the problem for the hearer. There must be principles of interpretation available to the hearer which enables him to determine, for instance, a relevant and reasonable interpretation of an expression 'John' on a particular occasion of utterance. One principle which we can identify we shall call the principle of local interpretation.

This principle instructs the hearer not to construct a a context any larger than he needs to arrive at an interpretation.

Thus us if he hears someone say 'Shut the door' he will look towards the nearest door available for being shut. (If that door is shut, he may well say 'It's shut', rather than consider what other doors are potentially available for being shut.) Similarly if his host says come early', having just invited him for eight o'clock, he will interpret 'early' with respect to the last-mentioned time, rather than to some previously mentioned time.

 Context

Pragmatics is definitely more than just a linguistic waste-basket, an extension of linguistics on its own terms. Rather, linguistics will have to be extended on “extralinguistics” terms by breaking away from the strict, local paradigm of grammar; this is where the notion of context comes in.

a.       The dynamic context

Context is a dynamic, not a static concept: it is to be understood as the continually changing surroundings, in the widest sense, that enable the participants in the communication process to interact, and in which the linguistic expression of their interaction become intelligible.

Context also considers in user oriented, context can be expected differ from user to use, context can be depend on the viewer. For example the instruction guide in household appliances, where the same instruction appear side by side in different language, depending on the reader.

Context is more than just reference. Context is action. Context is about understanding what things are for; it is also what gives our utterances their true pragmatic meaning and allows them to be counted as true pragmatic acts, for example :

Ø  It is a long time since we visited your mother.

This sentence , we can see has totally different in meaning when we look into the place when this sentence has been uttered , if he say it in coffee table, indicates this is an ordinary talk between husband and wife, but if this sentence utterance in front of the hippopotamus enclosure in local zoo, indicates the “mother-in-law bashing”.

By register, one understands the linguistic resources that speaker have at their disposal to mark their attitude towards their interlocutor. Thus we have formal vs. the informal register, often expressed by different  forms of address, for example :

In pragmatic perspective, the most interesting feature of this conversation was that at a given point, the two friends started addressing each other by the formal See for ‘you’, whereas they before had used the familiar du (as they probably had been doing all their lives) this sudden change due to the context: from a relaxed one, in which the two friends, to the matter of (literally)  life and death.

           

b.      Context and convention

The context looms large, and has to be taken into account whenever we formulate our thoughts about language.

Meaning can be natural, as expressed in the old Scholastic saying Urina est. signup sanitaria (urine is a sign of health); that is, from a person urine it is possible to conclude about the person’s health.

In contrast to such a natural sign, language is conventional: that is, there is no immediate, natural connection between a word and what is expressed. The general paradox of language is that is natural only in as much the desire to communicate, and the need to express themselves, are natural for all humans.

In contrast, linguistic meaning also called “sentence meaning” is purely conventional and the context of a given society. Acquiring the linguistic and social communicative conventions is a task that language user acquire gradually, and many of them only imperfectly. The specific paradox of pragmatic the user must employ socially conventional, linguistic means to express their individual intentions.

Thus one and the same utterance can obtain completely different, even diametrically opposed effects, depending on convention and context. Such phenomenon like, irony, hyperbole, show us the diversity of the life behind the linguistic scene.

For example, “great!” to the air line agent who just has told me that – due to double booking – I cannot get a seat on my plane. Indicates this words can means everything for those who listen.

The following conversation offers some striking example of the context importance in understanding utterances :  

(a & b are on telephone, talking over the arrangements for the next couple of days).

A : so can you please come over here again right now.

B : well, I have to go to Edinburgh today sir.

A : hmm… how about this Thursday?

          It does not take us long to realize many presuppositions, implicatures, references and other factual and contextual condition have to drawn upon in this exchange in order for it to make sense.

          Pragmatically speaking, the decisive importance of context is that it allow us to use our linguistic resources to the utmost, without having to spell out all the tedious details every time we use a particular construction.