Basic Discourse Analysis for Secondary English Teachers in the Philippines

BASIC DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
by Mark Angelo S. dela Peña

This time we will discuss what DISCOURSE ANALYSIS is, discuss an example of DISCOURSE ANALYSIS and figure out why we have misunderstandings.

Discourse Analysis is a branch of Linguistics that deals with the study of language in use and in context. Its main purpose is to reveal that words and groups of words could mean differently when used in different situations.

To put it in a smaller box, imagine yourself and your friend walking to the gates of the school after your last class in the afternoon. Of course, you and your friend would ride the taxi to go home. Suddenly, your friend acted strange, looking for something in her bag. She then said "I lost my wallet."

Now, there are many possible responses for this and they could be: "Where did you put it?" or "Do you think you left it somewhere?" but these responses are very unlikely. The most common response for this is "It's okay. I got you."

The surrounding circumstances -- that you're both going home, that you both need to ride the taxi, that you have to pay the taxi and that a wallet is a thing where people keep their money -- affected your hearing and perception.

One proof related to this is the McGurk effect. The McGurk effect states that our auditory perception is affected by visual information. What we hear may change by what we see. Imagine more senses involved to change what you heard.

In the above example, we don't perceive that our friend is saying "I lost my wallet." In our perception, she is actually saying "May I borrow some money?"

As humans, we don't only have instincts and when we say "instincts," we refer to the basic drives. As humans, we also have consciousness and perception. This is the reason why misunderstandings commonly occur among us -- because we have perception. We all have different perceptions of all different things under the Sun.

Imagine a person who thinks that another person has grudges against him. This person always gives meaning to everything that the other person says. And so, this is misunderstanding: he always thinks that there is a "context" between them.