Discourse analysis refers to language beyond sentence. It concentrates on the study of language in texts and conversation.

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Cohesion: cohesion is closely concerned with a number of those types of cohesive ties. There are connections in the use of words to maintain the reference to the same people and things like: my father – he – he; Lincoln convertible – it – that car – it – the convertible. There is also a connector. The verb tenses in the first four sentences are in the past whereas the final one is present tense. Cohesion can clearly demonstrate the highly-connected structure and precise reference to the same person and thing.

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Coherence: although there is no cohesive tie in the text or conversation, they still manage to make sense of what the other says. This is the role of coherence on the basis of their experience of the world, influenced by their culture and community.

HER: Your phone is ringing!

HIM: I’m in the bath.

HER: OK.

She makes a request of him to perform action.

He states reason why he cannot comply with request.

She undertakes to perform action.

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Speech events: various types of discussion like interview, debate…

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Turn-taking: two or more interlocuters communicate with each other. One speaker says and the other stop. It may possibly reduce the simultaneous or overlapping speech. Meanwhile, they exchange their speech roles between a speaker and a listener. It is known as turn-taking. General speaking, one speaker indicates he or she has finished by signaling a pause at the end of phrase or sentence. It is called a completion point. Besides, speakers can mark their turns by asking a question, or by pausing at the end of a completed syntactic structure. If other participants can indicate that they want to take the turn, they can start to make short sounds, usually repeated and often use facial expression or body shifts to signal that they have something to say.

If one speaker indicates that he or she wants to go on speaking, it has four ways to avoid the completion points: don’t pause at the end of sentences; use some connectors like and, but; fill the pause with a hesitation marker such as er, em; place the pauses in the clearly incomplete parts.

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The co-operative principle

The most crucial feature of conversational discourse is to co-operate with each other. It has four maxims that we expect our conversational partners to obey.

The quantity maxim: make your contribution as informative as in required.

The quality maxim: do not say what you believe to be false; do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

The relation maxim: be relevant.

The manner maxim: be brief, clear and orderly.

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Hedge can be defined as words or phrases used to indicate that we are not really sure what we are saying is sufficient complete or correct. We are inclined to use the expression such as a sort of or a kind of. For example, the book is a sort of yellow.

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Implicature

Boys are boys

This sentence is superficially valueless because it seems to lack some information. However, in fact, it is informative. This is the result of the violation of the quantity maxim. It may convey implicatures like boys are naughty and mischievous by nature.

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Background knowledge

It is based on our minds towards the world. We possibly use more knowledge that is presented in the words on the page.

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Schema: it is a general term for a conversational knowledge structure existed in memory.

We don’t have to be told what is found in the supermarket because we already have a “supermarket schema” such as shopping carts, baskets, a lot of vegetables and fruits and so on.

Script: it is the dynamic schema. For example, we are going to the movies. We can activate to make sense of this sentence, imagining what is the name of the movie, what is the main content, and so on. We don’t need to get information from words and sentences on the page. The interpretations we create come from our minds.

Words and sentences on the page are called language structure.

Interpretations in our minds are called knowledge structure.