Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Discourse analysis is a term that has come to have different interpretations for scholars working in different disciplines. For a sociolinguist, it is concerned mainly with the structure of social interaction manifested in conversation; for a psycholinguist, it is primarily concerned with the nature of comprehension of short written texts; for the computational linguist, it is concerned with producing operational models of text-understanding within highly limited contexts. In this textbook, first published in 1983, the authors provide an extensive overview of the many and diverse approaches to the study of discourse, but base their own approach centrally on the discipline which, to varying degrees, is common to them all - linguistics. Using a methodology which has much in common with descriptive linguistics, they offer a lucid and wide-ranging account of how forms of language are used in communication. Their principal concern is to examine how any language produced by man, whether spoken or written, is used to communicate for a purpose in a context.

An Effective Learning of Exposition Text Writing with Sequential Jigsaw Method

“…The text must meet these seven criteria or standards: (1) cohesion (the relation of grammatical text components and form), (2) coherence (integrated meaning configuration, (3) intentionality (a first speaker's great intention to message and objective, (4) acceptability (a second speaker's acceptability to the intention, (5) informativity (easily readable message), (6) situationality (event or situation factor), and (7) intertextuality (useful factor dependent on another text. Brown and Yule [9] states that text is a communicative event or situation. In other words, text is a language event in a communication process.…”

Of babies and bath water: Is there any place for Austin and Grice in interpersonal pragmatics?

“…The second refers to the more functionalist approach taken within pragmatics, sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication. Brown and Yule (1983) also identify these two definitions of discourse in suggesting that "discourse analysis on the one hand includes the study of linguistic forms and the regularities of their distribution and, on the other hand, involves a consideration of the general principles of interpretation by which people normally make sense of what they hear and read" (p. x). Fasold (1990:65), on the other hand, defines discourse analysis as simply "the study of any aspect of language in use".…”

The structure and function of intonational paragraphs in native and nonnative speaker instructional discourse

“…Rounds does not consistently specify values in her discussion of pauses, and Brazil does not elaborate on pause patterns apart from noting that they may and frequently do coincide with tone unit boundaries. For the purposes of this study, I have used a model identifying pause defined units developed by one group of researchers (Brown, 1977;Brown, Currie, & Kenworthy, 1980;Brown & Yule, 1983). They identify three major groups: ''topic pauses'' of 0.8 s and longer which ''clearly coincide with major semantic breaks'' (p. 56); ''substantial pauses'' of between 0.6 and 0.8 s which tend to coincide with single contours; and ''very short'' pauses which vary between 0.2 and 0.4 s and frequently co-occur with incomplete syntactic structures.…”

“…Brown and Yule (1983) suggest that a speech paragraph is likely to begin with a topic expression which coincides with the high pitch onset, i.e. ''an introductory expression to announce what (the speaker) specifically intends to talk about' ' (p. 101).…”