DA In Linguistics

It is important to see how the emergence of DA as a discipline in linguistics. DA grew out of work in different disciplines in the 1969s and early 1970s, including linguistics, semiotics, psychology, anthropology, and sociology (McCarthy, 1991, p. 5).

Dijk (1985, p. 1) indeed states that DA is both an old and new discipline. Its origin can be traced back to the study of language, public speech, and literature more than 2000 years ago. It was started when Sellig Harris published a paper with the title DA, in which he was interested in the distribution of linguistic elements in extended texts. In that article, Harris initiated a search for language rules to explain the connection between sentences within a text by using an extended grammar (Harris,

Austin (1962), Searle (1969), and Grice (1975) were also influential in the study of language as social action. These are reflected in the theories of speech acts and conversational maxim (McCarthy, 1991, p. 5). In British, the work of DA is mainly influenced by Halliday which emphasizes the “social functions of language and the thematic and informational structure of speech and writing”. In America, DA has been dominated by work within ethnom-ethodological tradition. This categorizes on the examination of the types of speech acts such as storytelling, greeting rituals, and verbal duels in different cultural and social settings. This can be seen by the work of Hymes and Gumperz (1972) (McCarthy, 1991, p.

Therefore, in studying linguistics, the main focus is to study the language in communication.

In studying the language, there are some parts of linguistics that need certain understanding. Starting from the study of sound system, language learners are directed to learn Phonetics and Phonology. Later, learners need to go one level up to the word level, that is studying the word formations, known as Morphology. After word formation, sentence construction is learned in the subject of Syntax. Later, language learners will study about Semantics or Pragmatics with their own concerns. When learners study on the text, they then come to the high level of analysis of the language, called DA.

Therefore, in doing DA, level of understanding and analysis is not only on sound, or word, or sentences only, but also what is beyond the sound, word, or sentences. High level of interpretation, elaboration, analysis is needed in doing DA, which can be obtained from the previous level of understanding in linguistics.

For students to learn DA, it is highly recommended that they had been through the previous studies of linguistic aspects. The important reason is that understanding on lower linguistic levels is needed to acquire deeper understanding of discourse and also to be able to analyze the