Understanding Discourse, Speech Communities, and Pragmatics

Discourse and Society

Discourse Community

It is a group of people involved in and communicating about a particular topic, issue, or in a particular field.

Characteristics:

• Well-established or closed networks
• Made of several overlapping groups of people
• Belonging to different discourse communities can be very different
• Genres and the social relations can also vary
• Interact with wider speech communities

Common Goals:

Common objectives or public goals.

Intercommunication:

Mechanisms of communication. (Conversations, Facebook posts, face-to-face at meetings, speeches)

Participation:

Participatory mechanisms to provide information and feedback. In other words, the exchange of knowledge.

Genres:

One or more genres in the communicative utterance of its aim. (Public Facebook group, newsletters, group handbook, the bible, songs, emails, Instagram account)

Lexis:

Specific lexis unique to a community but also required by the members, it includes specialized terminology, abbreviations and acronyms.

Expertise:

A threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise.

Speech Community

It is a group of speakers who share a language and patterns of language use.

Characteristics:

• Members of the community speak more often with each other than with members outside the community
• Speech characteristics are of interest and can be described
• Speech community members do not need to know or use all the language varieties
• Factors to define a speech community: social, geographical, cultural, political, ethnic, racial, age and gender

Discourse and Language

Characteristics:

• Speakers may have a number of languages or language varieties that they use to interact in those particular communities
• Speakers can have a repertoire of social identities and discourse community memberships
• Choice of language or language variety determined by: domain, social factors, social context, topic, function of the interaction, social distance between speakers, formality, type of interaction, status of each of the speakers

Discourse and Identity

Characteristics:

• People may have different identities at different points in time
• Identity is constantly displayed through language use and interaction
• Identity will depend on the context, occasion, purpose, space and place of the interaction

Discourse and Pragmatics

Introduction to Pragmatics

It is a subfield of linguistics that discusses the relationship between language and context.

Language, Context and Discourse

Relationship between what is said and what is understood in spoken and written discourse is critical to understand how language functions in context.

Speech Acts and Discourse

A speech act is a minimal functional unit in human communication.

Cooperation Principles

Pragmatic rules that govern speech and how they are understood in a conversation.

Implicatures

What is suggested or inferred from an utterance, even though neither expressed nor implied.