DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Discourse Analysis

Discourse Analysis

Discourse Analysis

In the case of metacommunication the action verb has to be a speech act verb. Unlike a speech act's illocutionary point, which is only rarely indicated by a speech act verb, the metacommunicative character is mostly indicated by a speech act verb. One has to take into account that speech act verb here does not necessarily mean performative verb as is customary in speech act theory. Participants in a discourse do not refer to tokens of speech act patterns as they are defined in speech act theory, but to situations the types of which are represented in their (tacit) lexical knowledge (Bublitz, 1988, 15).

The approach to the dialogues of this interview is clearly one of a critical stance against the current state of protection and welfare services that we have in this country. They make it very clear that they do not feel that the correct procedure was followed in the cases given as if they had been carried out properly it would not have taken so long for the issues to come to light and be dealt with. As such the writer feels that an independent review is necessary to investigate the way the cases were handled to find any possible problems that need resolving to make sure that the people that require the help are not allowed to suffer unnoticed and are able to receive the help that they require.

The writer presents the situation as an outsider which means the article is not as effective as it could be in the sense that it does carry the emotional weight it would if it were written from an inside point of view. Another point to notice is that the article is written passively, there is no active agent; it is a formal and distanced account of events, although it is not without feeling as it is clearly written to persuade the reader of the problems with the current system in place for these types of situations. The writer does not present the total facts of the situation only those which are sensational enough that they intensify the feelings that they set about causing in the reader; this is done in a number of ways. The language used is direct, it focuses on the issue or at least the viewpoint on the issue that the writer is taking leaving no room for doubt about what stance that is.

From the first sentence of the article the writer sets the tone by making emotive statements which easily bias' the reader's mind to that of the writer's opinion. They do so by making statements such as 'The Sheffield tyrant who repeatedly raped his own daughters' instead of presenting the facts as 'The father who had raped his daughters on more than one occasion'. The use of the dysphemism 'tyrant' creates an unfavourable opinion in the readers mind despite not having presented all the facts yet such as whether or not the man in question was ...