22 INTRODUCTION: KEY BASIC CONCEPTS
Jill has been talking on the topic of her mobile hairdresser.
1 Sue: bit of pocket money isn’t it for her
2 Sue: [you know]
3 Jill: [she only ] lives in Green Lane but she said she’s eh
4 emigrating
In line 3, Jill invokes their shared background knowledge of local geography, exter-
nal to the preceding text, by uttering the proper noun referent ‘Green Lane’, a road
which is about a twenty-minute walk away from their homes (Jill and Sue live within
a five-minute walk of each other).
The category of textual cohesion can be perceived as a component of coherence,
but this has to be accompanied by the receiver having a global, unified sense of a lan-
guage system. So, as well as having a set of identifiable linguistic features, coherence
is a broader category which also has a cognitive dimension. Texts may have cohesion
but not coherence – just because a text is made up of clauses and phrases that give
cohesion does not by default make a text coherent. Deciding upon textual coherence
depends to a large extent upon pragmatics, in particular upon the pragmatic princi-
ples of co-operation and politeness (B3). These principles can help discourse analysts
understand how the unity of the English language system is perceived.
More examples of cohesive devices in action, along with illustrations and dis-
cussions of coherence are given in D5. This includes further consideration of how
discourse and pragmatics are linked with one another.
Varieties of discourse analysis
As mentioned above, there are several different paradigms that exist within the over-
arching category of discourse analysis. We will give a brief introductory overview of
the most influential of these in the remainder of this unit.
The first paradigm is conversation analysis, which has its roots in the work of
Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974). Conversation analysts focus on establishing pat-
terns such as turn-taking in conversation and researchers have examined features such
as interruptions and topic transitions within this approach. We will focus on conversation
analysis in more detail in B5.

Genre: type of utterance (lecture, formal speech, etc.)
Yet another paradigm of discourse analysis is known as critical discourse analysis
(CDA), most prominently associated with the work of Norman Fairclough (1995).
Researchers who follow a CDA approach have the overall aim of revealing hidden
ideological power structures which are contained within discourse. Critical discourse
analysts aim to do this by conducting close textual analyses of spoken and written data
which are then analysed as part of the constraints of the wider socio-cultural context
where the texts are produced. CDA researchers often have a clearly stated, overt polit-
ical purpose for conducting their research, such as revealing racist discourses within
particular texts. They often utilise techniques from systemic functional linguistics
(detailed in B4) to help reveal hidden ideological meanings within the language system.
This brief overview has presented a range of different areas of discourse analysis,
emphasising that it is a wide and varied discipline – dedicated researchers have also
used a number of different tools and techniques to investigate a plethora of spoken
and written texts. Some researchers mix together different elements of the above
approaches, whereas others stick quite rigidly to the specifics of their chosen
approach. We will develop these issues in B5 and C5.
EARLY LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
We human beings are all born too early. To be at a comparable stage relative to the
adult state of other mammals, human pregnancy should be anything up to double the
nine months that it has been for thousands of years. Human babies are born unable to
walk, unable to see very far, unable to manipulate our own bodies much at all, and
unable to speak or comprehend other humans. We remain in this dependent state for
several years, except for the rapid speed with which we acquire language. Babies’ large
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24 INTRODUCTION: KEY BASIC CONCEPTS
evolved brains are housed in large skulls, which would kill their mothers during birth
if gestation were much longer, but these large brains are what allow us to learn lan-
guage, and language serves to create culture and civilisation to compensate for our
dangerously weak physical capacities in the early years.

the tongue.
As the initial occasional cooing gives way to more extensive babbling, babies pro-
duce playful strings of sounds. At first these range over all the possible sounds that a
human mouth can make, but gradually those sounds that are not part of the phono-
logical system of the community’s language fall away, and the baby babbles only with
the sounds that will be used in her native language. Babbling sequences will often take
on the intonation contour of the native language too, so babies sometimes sound like
they are asking questions, making assertions, complaining, telling a story or engaging
in question-and-answer with an adult. In all these cases, they are simply modelling
the extended sound pattern on what they hear, without any understanding.
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EARLY LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 25
Six to eighteen months
Babbling gradually develops into holophrastic speech consisting of one-word utter-
ances. By around 12 months old, a baby seems to be able to understand some words
spoken by others, especially if they are often-repeated words attached to familiar phys-
ical objects. Their own production ability, though, lags far behind their capacity for
comprehension. The single-word utterances do at least count as language production,
as the child gradually realises that certain words in the right context produce desired
effects. Sounds have thus become attached to meanings, in the child’s mind, and words
are no longer just playful sounds but are labels.
By the end of the holophrastic period, a child’s vocabulary might be as large as
150 words, with many of these words having extended meanings and covering whole
domains. For example, ‘hot’ might refer to any dangerous object or situation, includ-
ing ovens, open fires, radiators, knives and implements in general; ‘button’ might not
only refer to a button on a shirt, but also the shirt itself, and clothes in general; an
unusual word that has become a vocabulary item might stand for a particular every-
day object (‘monkey’ as a word for ‘banana’, for example).
The process of establishing the appropriate range of a word is its packaging.
This can happen because new vocabulary terms are learned that cover part of the

a rapid period of expansion. By two years old, a child will typically have a vocabulary
of around 500 words. It is at this stage that regular inflectional endings will be
acquired too. Plural ‘-s’ and past tense ‘-ed’ will begin to appear as the child moves
on from the two-word sequence. These are often generalised across irregular forms
(‘bringed’,’ ‘runned’, ‘sheeps’, ‘mouses’), and are even back-formed on principle (so
a single item of ‘clothes’ is a ‘clo’, a single chunk of ‘cat-mix’ food is a ‘cat-mic’).
Children’s pronunciation also develops rapidly. Almost all the vowel sounds that
a child will need in her language are available by the age of two, though the acquisi-
tion of the complete consonant set is often not finished until age five or more.
Specific patterns can be observed, for example omitting final consonants, especially
dentals (/ka/ for ‘cat’, /fu£/ for ‘food’); omission of unstressed syllables (/ape/ for ‘apple’,
/nane/ for ‘banana’); /w/ and /j/ variably for /l/ and /r/ (/wεd/ for ‘red’, /jεgek/ for
‘lego’, /kkdew/ for ‘cuddle’), and other systematic mismatches in consonant usage.
However, around two-thirds of all the child’s utterances in this phase will be articu-
late enough to be intelligible to an adult.
Two to five years
Through these years, the child’s language develops to the point at which it is more
or less fully formed. The remaining consonants and clusters are perfected. The
appropriate intonations for different speech acts such as questioning, commanding,
pleading, being sarcastic, and so on are all mastered. Accent features of the speech
community (see A9) are accurately performed. Active vocabulary rises towards 2,000
words, and keeps accelerating throughout later childhood towards the adult norm of
around 40,000 words.
Once the two-word phrase period has passed, a child’s syntactic ability becomes
highly complex. The ability to form questions by reversing the verb and auxiliary, the
ability to form passives by deleting the subject as agent, the ability to form negations,
the ability to create complex phrases using adjectival modifiers and adverbials, the
ability to form subordinate and relative clauses, the ability to conjoin clauses to
articulate complex reasoning all appear very rapidly in these years. While they are
still not perfected by age six, the basics are usually there.

especially language acquisition (A6) and syntax (strand 4). Of course, for much of its
history, linguistics has been implicitly psychological and cognitive, in the sense that
researchers have tried to formalise rules that are interior in individuals’ minds.
Psycholinguists have attempted to test out some of the theoretical models
hypothesised in linguistics, by using test exercises with small groups of people, by
observing physical analogues of mental activity using techniques such as eye-tracking
and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, and by deducing the workings of normal
behaviour on the basis of mental disorders or brain damage.
The brain and language
For example, on the basis of evidence from people with lesions or injuries to certain
parts of the brain, it is clear that certain areas in the brain are predominantly respon-
sible for different aspects of language. The brain is divided into two hemispheres –
the slightly larger left and the right – connected by a bundle of nerve fibres called the
corpus callosum. The left hemisphere controls the right side of the body, and the right
hemisphere controls the left. For most people, the left hemisphere predominantly gov-
erns most aspects of language, though rhythm and intonation seem to be produced
and processed in the right hemisphere.
In the mid-nineteenth century, two areas of the left hemisphere were found to be
particularly important for language, both about half an index-finger’s length in from
your left ear. These are Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area (named after their discov-
erers, Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke). Damage to Broca’s area seemed to result in an
inability to form proper syntactic sequences, and damage to Wernicke’s area seemed
to result in problems grasping after specific vocabulary. These two sorts of aphasia
A7