How can you identify a speaker's attitude using discourse analysis?

2 Why is attitude important?

Attitude is important because it reveals the speaker's position and relationship to the topic, the audience, and the context. It can also influence the listener's response and opinion, and create different effects, such as persuasion, agreement, disagreement, or conflict. By analyzing the speaker's attitude, you can gain a deeper insight into the meaning and purpose of the discourse, and how it relates to the social and cultural norms and expectations. You can also compare and contrast different attitudes and how they shape and are shaped by different discourses.

3 How to identify attitude?

To identify the speaker's attitude, one must pay attention to the linguistic and paralinguistic features that convey evaluation. These can include lexical items with positive or negative connotations, grammatical structures that suggest certainty, commitment, or modality, pragmatic devices that relate to the use and function of language in context, discourse markers that signal the speaker's attitude, and prosodic features like pitch, volume, speed, or intonation. All of these elements can help to better understand how the speaker is conveying their attitude.

4 How to analyze attitude?

Analyzing the speaker's attitude requires taking into account not only the linguistic and paralinguistic features, but also the context and co-text of the discourse. The context includes the situation, participants, purpose, and genre of the discourse. The co-text refers to the surrounding text or speech that provides clues to the interpretation of the attitude. To gain an understanding of the speaker's attitude, you should ask yourself questions such as what is the topic of the discourse and how does the speaker evaluate it? Who is the audience and how does the speaker relate to them? What is the purpose and genre of the discourse and how does the speaker adapt to them? What is the tone and mood of the discourse and how does the speaker express them? How does their attitude change or develop throughout? And how does it compare or contrast with other speakers or discourses?

5 How to apply attitude analysis?

Attitude analysis can be applied to various types of discourses, such as conversations, interviews, speeches, texts, or media. It can help you understand, evaluate, or produce discourses that are relevant to your field of interest or study. For instance, you can use attitude analysis to identify the speaker's point of view and bias in a political speech or news article, assess the speaker's credibility and reliability in a testimonial or review, detect the speaker's sarcasm or irony in a joke or satire, enhance the speaker's persuasiveness or attractiveness in an advertisement or pitch, and express the speaker's appreciation or criticism in a feedback or comment.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?