discourse analysisi and vocabulary

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND VOCABULARY

INTRODUCTION

Formal linguists have tended to focus on syntax; they have long maintained that human language is a rule-governed innate system and that those who acquire a natural language apply its rule in original and creative ways by producing utterances they have never heard before (Chomsky 1965). This perspective believes in context-free aspects of syntax. In contrast to this perspective, linguists who focus on vocabulary and grammar (e.g. Hoey, 1992; Nattinger and DeCarrico 1992; Sinclair, 1966) believe that a significant proportion of social, professional and everyday language use is formulaic, routine and fairly predictable. This perspective believes that words derive much of their meaning from context.

Vocabulary knowledge can be viewed in terms of both top-down and bottom-up strategies. The top-down pragmatically drive strategies include the speaker’s background knowledge of the topic or speech situation at hand and the knowledge shared with the interlocutors. Vocabulary items tend to group or associate around topics (lexical collocation). For example, if we know an oral discussion is dealing with the topic “Art Museums,” we can expect words like painting, sculptor, artist, curator, exhibit and the like to occur as part of the discourse. Likewise in any language, speech activities have typical steps or moves, often in a predictable sequence, with highly conventionalized used of words or phrases associated with each step or move. For example, a person who apologies will say something like “I’m (very, really, terribly) sorry” which will be responded by phrases such as “never mind”, “don’t mention it”, “it’s okay”. Knowing the vocabulary and set phrases associated with a topic or speech activity is thus a large part of being able to talk or write about the topic or perform speech activity in target language.

Bottom up strategies related to vocabulary knowledge are used when a speaker doesn’t know a word. He may ask interlocutors for assistance (“what’s the word for the thing that ...?”) or use a circumlocution or a gesture to get the meaning of the target language across. Writers normally have more time than speakers, so they can look up the target words in their dictionary.

There are several notions we need to explore these include the following: a discussion of receptive vocabulary versus productive vocabulary, Content words versus functions words, the differences among the language skills in terms of vocabulary requirement, the literal versus figurative vocabulary distinction, the qualitative differences between vocabulary, one the one hand, and grammar and phonology on the other and the use of vocabulary knowledge to analyze a discourse.

Receptive Versus Productive Vocabulary

Users of any language have much more receptive than productive vocabulary. English readers may understand words like catastrophe, and rudimentary, yet they may well be unlikely to use these words in their speech or writing. This because they have receptive but not productive control of these words; productive control implies receptive control, but the reverse is not necessarily true.

Some applied linguist feel that the major challenge in teaching is to teach more receptive language, so that learners become more efficient readers. This is no doubt because there is an enormous discrepancy between vocabulary used in everyday conversation and number of words needed for extensive academic reading.

There do seems to be ways of teaching large amounts of receptive vocabulary fairly quickly and efficiently by having learners simply associate words with meanings out of context using word lists, vocabulary cards, and so forth. Such strategies, even if they turn out to be effective for improving receptive knowledge and reading comprehension, are not necessarily effective for teaching productive use of lexis. However, it must be noted that receptive knowledge of vocabulary is a first step toward achieving productive use, i.e. toward learners’ becoming skillful speakers and writers in their second language.

Content Words Versus Function Words

The distinction between content words and function words is a useful one in analyzing vocabulary. Most vocabulary items are content words and belong to the large, open word classes, i.e word classes that readily accept new words and discard old ones that are no longer useful: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and some adverbs. Function words are those vocabulary items that belong to closed words classes, i.e. word classes that do not readily admit new items or lose old ones: pronouns, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, determiners, and may adverbs.

How Much Vocabulary for Each Skill?

With reference to the four language skills, the fewest vocabulary items are needed for speaking, while more words are needed for writing and for listening comprehension, with the largest number of words are needed for reading. However, while listening and reading require receptive understanding of vocabulary, speaking and writing require productive use of vocabulary. In other words, if listening and reading only require the ability to know the general meaning of the words and phrases in a text, to get the gist of the message, speaking and writing, in addition to that, require the ability each word’s pronunciation, spelling, it’s part of speech, its syntactic restriction, any morphological irregularities, its common collocation (other words with which it is likely to co-occur), and its common context (texts in which it is likely to occur).

Different Modality or register, Different Vocabulary

The vocabulary used by skilled speakers and writers changes according to modality and register. For some language such as Arabic, modality differences may be highly marked since the vocabulary of the local spoken variety and the vocabulary of the more classical written variety can be very different. This makes learning the literate skills (reading and writing) more of a challenge than in a language like English where there is a significant overlap between the vocabulary of the spoken and the written variety.

Sociocultural Variation in the Use of Vocabulary

Vocabulary is an obvious area for language variation. Gender is pointed out as one dimension along which vocabulary use tends to vary. In English, women are said to use more elaborate color than men. Women tend to be able to mention more precise color term than men such us to say magenta, mauve, scarlet. In addition, in American teenage girls –less often boys- use totally as intensifier, as in sentences “She is totally crazy!”. Gender-based choices also happen in other language, like in Portuguese to say “thank you”, women say obrigada and men say obrigado

Geographical dialects often reflect vocabulary differences. For example vocabulary use in British and American like the following:

British American

The cinema the movies

A film a movie

A lift an elevator

A flat an apartment

Sometimes within one countries, there may be further dialect distinction. For example two villages in North Bali which is only about 15 km away, Bondalem and Bungkulan, each has their own distinctive culturally vocabulary to describe the same thing as the following:

Bondalem Bungkulan meaning (in english)

Nare talam tray

Kalung kencrik belt-like piece of clothes

Some vocabulary variation is due to the age of speakers (Hatch and Brown, a995 in Murcia and Olshtain, 2000) such that expression of positive assessment by the speakers by the speaker have changed from generation to generation in the United States.

1940s -1950s – keen, in the groove

1960s -1970s – cool, groovy

1980s-1990s – rad, awesome

The selection of euphemism (word that is considered less direct) often reflects one or more of these factors. For example, when asking where the toilet is, there are many possible lexical items one can use as euphemism in English:

British : the loo, the W.C

American : the John (informal), the bathroom (general)

Female/ Upper middle class : the powder room

Children : the potty

Public establishment : the ladies’ room, the men’s room

Literal Versus Figurative Use: A Matter of Context (or co-text)

Vocabulary can be literal and figurative. A sentence such as “he got the axe” may mean literally that some male person went and fetched a tool for chopping wood, or it may mean figuratively that some male person was fired from his job. The interpretation that one arrives at may depend on the co-text. If the discourse continues “and he chopped down the tree,” the literal impression takes hold. If the subsequent discourse is “so now he’s looking for another job” the figurative interpretation is the coherent one. The physical context also can give the hint of the meaning. If the utterance takes place in the forest, then the literal interpretation is favored, but if it happens in an office, the figurative reading is. Therefore, a great deal of meaning of any words comes from the larger cultural context and/or the immediate co-text or situational context in which the word occurs.

Creating Vocabulary

Words are formed as creatively as sentence. In fact, new words that no one used before (and perhaps no one will ever use again) can be invented for specific communicative purpose. An example for this comes in the following story. Two tourist buses are heading to some restaurant in Bali, some of the tourists want to have pork menu and some of the tourists want to have seafood menu. The tourist guide then arrange the tourist by saying “For those who want to have pork please go to pork bus, and those who prefer seafood please go to seafood bus”. The creating of new vocabulary such as pork bus and seafood bus is done to serve a particular communicative purpose, and may probably never be used again. Vocabulary changes faster than syntax or phonology. It is the part of language that can respond immediately to changes in environment, experience, or culture. If something new is discovered or invented, language users will create a new word, borrow a word, or extend the meaning of an existing word to express the new phenomenon. On the other hand, words expressing objects or ideas no longer in use will be discarded and fall out of use.

Productive Processes of Word Formation

Every language has one major or several alternative ways of creating new words. The new word can be one that is invented or created for a particular purpose of communication, that do not last or new words that might be adopted and promoted or spread by the agents of changes such as TV, radio, the press, etc.

In English, there are three productive word formation:

1. Compunding: mailman, fifty-one, blackbird
2. Affixation : rewind, uncool, sisterhood
3. Conversion: I’d rather office here (the noun ‘office’ serves as verb)

His grass has greened ( the adjective ‘green’ serves as verb)

If a second or foreign language learner can perform the mastery of such word production processes, it indicates a gradual approximation of native-like productive lexical knowledge.

Lexical Borrowing

Words are different from grammatical and phonological systems. Native speakers of one language can readily borrow a word from another language, but they are much less likely to borrow structures or sounds from other language. However, when the speakers of one language borrow words, they often change the meaning or limit the meaning in interesting ways. For example, Indonesian speakers borrow an English word ‘tape’ which is routinely used to refer only to ‘tape recorder’. Whereas the words ‘tape’ in English has several literal meanings such as ‘a long narrow strip to record,’ ‘a cassette,’ ‘a strip that is usually sticky’, etc.

Words are slippery, they are created, die off, borrowed and change meanings. Words need to be interpreted and reinterpreted in terms of the cultural contexts and discourse context in which they are being used at any given point of time.

VOCABULARY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Lexical Collocation and Lexical Cohesion

At the level of sentence, words come together to form collocation, i.e. they form semantic and structural bounds that become routines or chunks that native speakers can access for comprehension or production. When native speakers of English are asked to fill the blank in the following sentence, ‘ John ______ money’, they will spontaneously produce verbs from a very small set: earns, makes, has, likes, saves and needs (Seal 1981, in ....). Such collocations reflect both local word-combining tendencies and also more general content schemata or information structures that native speakers share for the word ‘money.’

Ideally, the L2 users also form the same word-combination (lexical chunks), but often this does not happen because of interference from the first language or because insufficient exposure of local collocation. For example L2 user may say ‘bridging the hole’ rather than ‘bridging the gap.’ Even though it is understandable but from the local collocation point of view it is a collocation error.

At the level of discourse (Hasan, 1984 in .... ) there are some different types of lexical relationships which collectively constitutes lexical cohesion. For example:

Ø Repetition/reiteration:

a. same word/stem minus inflections, part of speech: teeth-tooth

b.Synonym : tooth-dental

Ø Antonym : good/bad, black/white

Ø Part-whole: room-house, steering wheel-car

Ø General-specific (either direction) animal-dog; city-Reno

Ø Member of the same set: dog-cat; green-yellow

One can examine any given piece of discourse to see what lexical chain occurs in order to determine which lexical relationships are obtained. The lexical relationship of the text will form cohesive and coherent discourse. Consider the following text:

The town of Sonoma, California, launched the Salute to the Arts in 1986 as a one-day event held in a single quadrant of Sonoma plaza with some thirty restaurants and wineries, a few art displays, and one mariachi trio. Today the festival is a wine country tradition consisting of an opening-night gala and two full days of food, wine, and art featuring more than 100 restaurants, wineries, and art galleries. It benefits seventeen nonprofit arts, cultural, and educational organization.

In this short text there are several interrelated lexical chains:

Ø Salute to the arts, festival, tradition, gala, benefit

Ø Town, Sonoma, Sonoma Plaza, Wine coutry, California

Ø 1986 (a one-day event), today (two full days)

In addition, “the Salute to the art” chain has three subchains:

Ø Food, restaurant

Ø Wine, wineries

Ø Art, art displays, art galleries

Without these cross-clausal lexical relationships the text would not be as cohesive and coherent as it is. Each lexical chain can be further analyzed in terms of the semantic relationship. For example, the lexical chain town, Sonoma, Sonoma Plaza, Wine country, California can be further analyzed in that town is more general than Sonama, a specific town. Sonoma Plaza is one part of the whole town, which in turn is a part of wine coutry, which is in California.

Rhetorical Demands, Discourse Communities, and Individuals

It’s important to be aware that specific vocabulary items tend to be associated with certain rhetorical text patterns. For example: the problem-posing portion in an expository text is likely to contain words like difficulty, hinder, hamper while the solution/result portion of the same text will contain words like resolve, outcome and address (McCarthy, 1991 in ...). People who are strategically aware of such pattern will be more effective readers and writers than those who are not.

Sometimes vocabulary items used in a particular way reflect a specific discipline and the preference of insiders of that discipline. Leech (1995) in ...detect lexical-choice differences among the four discourse communities. Among the result, he uncovered that authors publishing in Memory and Cognition (M&C) and Linguistic Inquiry (LI) used different lexical phrase for what seemingly the same semantic purpose. Leech found that when making or rejecting knowledge claims either by citing previous research or by presenting one’s own research, M&C tended to use the verb “suggest” (prior research would suggest........;the data we cite strongly suggest...) whereasLI authors tended to use the verb “explain” (X’s account doesn’t explain....; the rule presented above explains.....) Leech accounts for this lexical differences by referring to the distinct research tradition of the cognitive psychologist (M&C) and the formal MIT-schools linguist (LI).

Sometimes certain low-frequency words get associated with a particular individual who have a predisposition to use them with unusual frequency.

More typically, such characteristic use of vocabulary develops in groups. Leech examples are not a matter of personal preference or style, such examples are a matter of group membership.