CHAPTER I PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF SPEECH ACT THEORY Theory of Discourse Interpretation
In linguistics, analysts often define discourse in one of two ways: as structure or as process5. Auxiliary definitions center on what constitutes a unit of discourse: "dialect over the sentence or over the clause" ."6. To linguists interested in the structure of language, discourse analysis is the search for units of language that demonstrate a relationship, that occur in predictable patterns, and have rules that govern the occurrence of these elements.
In other branches of linguistics, discourse is defined as “any aspect of language use” and “the study of language use”7 or as a process of using language to accomplish a purpose or action. These etymologists are inquisitive about the way dialect capacities to achieve objectives or exercises in people's lives; subsequently, discourse is the examination of dialect because it is associated to “meanings, activities, and systems outside of itself”8.
Inside this viewpoint, the structures or shapes of dialect cannot be isolated from the way individuals utilize dialect in their every day lives to accom¬plish a reason or work. So abundant are definitions of discourse that many linguistics books on the subject now open with a survey of definitions. In their collection of classic papers in discourse analysis, for example, Jaworski and Coupland include ten definitions from a wide range of sources. They all, in any case, drop into the three fundamental categories famous over: (1) anything past the sentence, (2) dialect utilize, and (3) a broader run of social hone that includes nonlinguistic and nonspecific occurrences of language. The definitional issues related with talk and talk investigations are by no implies special. It must seem to those slightly familiar with the term ‘discourse’that terms are used interchangeably. Its companion term, discourse analysis, seems to be used especially frequently, even randomly, so that it is difficult to know exactly what is meant by the term. One reason is that a number of different academic disciplines use the term to describe the methods and models they develop to understand language and human behavior. "
"Included are not fair disciplines in which models for understanding, and strategies for analyzing, talk to begin with created (i.e., phonetics, an¬thropology, human science, logic), but too disci¬plines that have connected (and (and thus often extended) such models and methods to problems within their own particular academic domains, e.g., communication, social psychology, and artificial intelligence.
The use of the concept is that developed in linguistics where a central goal of most discourse approaches is to discover and demonstrate how participants in a conversation make sense of what is going on (how they both create meaning and understand others' meanings) within the social and cultural context of face-to-face interaction.
The notion ‘speech event’ is closely related with the notion of discourse, because the notion of discourse refers to a continuous stretch of language larger than a sentence constituting a speech event. Although ‘discourse’ is often regarded as a spontaneous realization of language where no linguistic structuring can or should be discovered, it seems essential to adopt a broader perspective view of it as a dynamic process of expression and comprehension governing the performance of people within linguistic interaction.
There exists a variety of rules, conventions and linguistic regularities which determine the features and functions of speech events. Among them are pragmatic and psychological parameters, the purpose and function of discourse, its communicative characteristics, etc.
Discourse examination recognizes between diverse utilitarian assortments of discourse occasions, such as monologs and discoursed, speech, story, and so on. All these assortments or sorts show up to be in connection to each other especially as respects the choice of etymological units, as well as rules and traditions overseeing their use in speech. The contrasts of the informative and the imaginative, formal and informal, spoken and written media in communication make us think of the mutual dependencies between discourse functions as an important parameter in establishing their essential features. In other words, the contrast of linguistic regularities in each case gives us a clue to a better understanding of their properties. For example, spoken discourse is probably best described by contrasting it with what is known as written discourse and vice versa. Hence an attempt to regard ‘discoursal’ peculiarities as sufficiently systematic features which have a direct bearing on the functioning of discrete lexical units. 9 The notion ‘speech’ should not be understood literally as ‘perceptible speech’, but, rather, as ‘potential speech’, as it were. Thus, ‘speech event’ in the relevant sense here and in the following is not limited to actual speech or utterance situations; instead, it should be understood as ranging over events of ‘language activity’, irrespective of whether it is externalized or merely internal. In other and simpler words: ‘speech’ in the notion ‘speech event’ refers to not only the act of speaking but also to the linguistic act of thinking (and hence attitude predicates like ‘think’, ‘believe’, ‘wish’, ‘feel’, etc., introduce a secondary speech event.10 Discourse analysis is a method of seeking in any connected discrete linear material, whether language or language-like, which contains more than one elementary sentence, some global structure characterizing the whole discourse (the linear material), or large sections of it. The structure is a pattern of occurrence (i.e. a recurrence) of segments of the discourse relative to each other; such relative occurrence of parts is the only type of structure that can be investigated by inspection of the discourse without bringing into account other types of data, such as relations of meanings throughout the discourse. It turns out that the segments of a discourse which occur in a regular way relative to each other arc not whole sentences but morpheme sequences such as words, parts of words, and phrases, or the equivalent in mathematics and other non-language material. More exactly, such a segment is a whole constituent or a sequence of constituents; where a constituent, for language, is a segment of a sentence resulting from any grammatical analysis of the sentence. These segments do not themselves occur so often and so regularly as to constitute a pattern. Therefore we group certain of them into classes, which do recur regularly.
Discourse analysis, then, finds the recurrence relative to each other of classes of morpheme sequences, given segmentation into morpheme sequences by a suitable grammar, and having the intention that the classes set up are such that their regularity of occurrence will correspond lo some relevant semantic interpretation for the discourse.
The problem is to set up separately for each discourse such classes as have the greatest relevant regularity of occurrence relative to each other within it; and if possible to find a general way of solving this problem for any discourse.