Discourse Analysis is concerned with the description of written and spoken language in use. It aims to identify systems and patterns within discourse and to relate these features to the context in which the language is produced. This course will focus on English language data and will introduce some principal issues in the description of discourse, such as conversation structure, exchange structure, coherence and cohesion in text, and the organization of information.
Topics to be introduced and discussed include:
meaning in interaction,
the organisation of interaction,
conversation analysis and ethnographic approaches to discourse,
critical discourse analysis,
genre and discourse patterning,
contrastive rhetoric.