2.2.

Discourse
Our attention has been so far devoted just to the questions of pragmatics. In the following chapter
and sub-chapters, the focus is shifted to the question of discourse and its methods of analysis.
The term discourse is sometimes attributed to any kind of communicated information. This
description is not so far from the truth; however, attention should be paid to all of premises which
influence real discourse. All of the meanings which accompany the act of communication are joined
in order to form clauses, sentences and utterances. Nevertheless, these structures have sense as a
well-formed discourse only in particular situational context (Dontcheva-Navrtilov; ch. 5). It
means, for its analysis, not only syntactic and semantic features are important but also the pragmatic
features of particular situation, as it has been stressed in the previous chapter.
Nevertheless, the discourse includes all of its possible forms i.e. spoken or written and also the
monologue or the dialogue. The first pair is distinguished under the heading of the medium; the
second pair, on the other side, is the result of the nature of the participation during a concrete
communicative event and may be bring together under the heading of various aspects of modality.
All of these four types have their typical features; nevertheless, it sometimes happens that features
that are usually associated with informal dialogic speech are part of a written text, or, on the
contrary, when some formal features usually ascribed to writing are incorporated into a public
speech (Crystal 69).
Crystal elsewhere tells that "any piece of discourse contains a large number of features which are
difficult to relate to specific variables to in the original extra-linguistic context even though the may
be felt to have some kind of stylistic value" (63). The analysis thus should be done very carefully in
order to catch all contextual features as much as it is possible.

2.2.1 Discourse Analysis

It is not surprising to say that there are various kinds of discourse which may be characterized by
various features. However, more intriguing is the question how to recognize these features and how
to analyze them. In the following sub-chapter, there are examples of some of the methods of critical
discourse analysis.

2.2.2 Critical Discourse Analysis

The word "Critical" prompts that an analyst should be truly careful when he is trying to decode the
particular discourse. Various analyses of different kinds of discourse (such as of the
misrepresentation of political demonstrations, as "violent riots", or of bias in favor of the
authorities) has proved that such detailed critical analyses bring the analyst to the wider context of
the authorities and their power as a core for political action (Handbook of Discourse Analysis 3: 7).
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a helpful method in multiple areas, such as education, literacy,
gender, racism, ideology, economic, advertisements, institutional and media language, and, most
importantly for this thesis, political discourse. In all these areas CDA focuses on issues like power
asymmetries, manipulation, structural inequalities and exploitation (Blommaert 451-452).
Each critical discourse analysis usually consists of 3 steps. The first one is the descriptive stage
which examines the basic formal properties of the discourse. It is also the pre-step for the next two
steps. The second stage, interpretation, endeavors to link the discourse with interaction, i.e. to see

the discourse as a result of process of production and also as a resource in the act of interpretation.
And the third stage, explanation, which is the most important but which would not probably
possible without previous two steps, attempts to find the relationships between interaction and
social context i.e. which social determinants are necessary in the processes of interaction,
production and their social effects (Fairclough 26).

2.2.3 The Role of Cohesion

The term reference has been explained so far with regards to pragmatics features of the discourse. It
has, moreover, also a connection with the cohesive devices that join the text together and as thus
they are a part of syntax which, as it has been demonstrated as well, is an aspect of language studies
by CDA.
Cohesion has to be, above all, distinguished from coherence. These two features of discourse are
loosely related one to another and one may predetermine the other. Nevertheless, coherence
encompasses the unity of the whole discourse, i.e. the unity in the sense of meaning and
communicative purpose which the reader or hearer perceives through discourse in a context of use;
cohesion, on the other side, is connected with semantic and formal relations between all discourse
elements which are dependent one to another because the interpretation of the meaning of one
element is possible only with regards to the interpretation of the meaning of the other (DontchevaNavrtilov; ch. 5). Or as Halliday and Hasan have explained "we can interpret cohesion in practice
as the set of semantic resources for linking a sentence with what has gone before (Halliday and
Hasan 10).
It follows from what has been told that coherence relies just on the reader's/hearer's interpretation
and that the coherence is, in this sense, a bit subjective; on the other hand cohesion is explicit and
may be, with the help of its devices, thoroughly traced through the piece of text or discourse. This is
always an objective task because there are always concrete elements to be defined. Moreover, to
define cohesive devices helps also to define whether and how much the discourse is coherent.

2.2.3.1 Discourse, Context and Co-text

It has been stressed several times so far that the important element of the practical discourse
analysis is the reference to the context in which the discourse is appearing. On the top of that it
should be referred not only to the general context but also to so-called co-text. How may be these
two terms distinguished one from the other?
Basically, everything that is referred to in the discourse is considered to be a context; nevertheless,
if the referred item is inside the text or the discourse it has a linguistic reference and as that it is
marked as a co-text or linguistic context. The context in its broader meaning, i.e. everything outside
the text, is marked as the context of situation or extra linguistic context (Dontcheva-Navrtilov;
Glossary). The co-text, moreover, helps to interpret the meaning because it simply narrows the
possible interpretative meanings for particular word or sentence (Yule; ch. 3). These words or
sentences would be misguiding for the analyst unless they are placed in the discourse environment;
only then the analyst is able to decode their correct meaning and he may feel to be deceived
otherwise (Halliday and Hassan 301).
The extra linguistic context operates within the domains of field, tenor and mode. The field, also
referred as the domain, helps to narrow the interpretative meanings according to the activity (e.g. in
our case political speech). The tenor defines the relations between the speaker/writer and
hearer/reader, e.g. their statuses predetermine whether the discourse will be polite or familiar,

formal or informal etc. And finally, the mode is predefined by variation according to the part the
language is playing and according to the participants expectations in this situation; in other words,
the key elements are the rules of written and spoken, interactive or non-interactive communication,
but also the text structure and organization and communicative purpose of the writer/speaker (i.e. to
deliver a speech). It is worth to point out that the identification of registers and styles is to a large
extent dependent on domain. However, tenor and mode are highly important for both stylistics and
discourse analysis (Dontcheva-Navrtilov; Ch. 2).
The context of situation, or the meaning which is gained from this context, furthermore, belongs to
the culture rather than to the language (Caldas-Coulthard 35). It is not thus surprising that such
analysis may be a hard task to do but responsible sociolinguistic researchers have proved that the
order and structure may be found even in the situations where these phenomena had been perceived
to be messy and on the periphery of previous analyses. Pragmatic rules, beside the fact that they
deal with cultural standards such as formality or distance, point to more general assumptions about
the social and culture environment. If they would not do this, they would seem to be meaningless
(Keesing 28).