文档介绍：Chapter 7 Discourse analysis
Discourse and discourse analysis
In everyday life, we often produce several sentences at a time, which form a larger coherent whole. In an interview from the manager of pany, you may reply like this:“I will be happy to attend for an interview on Monday next at 10 . I will bring with me the full details of my testimonials as you suggest…” these are usually called discourse.
Discourse is “language above the sentence or above the clause”(Stubbs, 1983: 1). 1960s grammarians became convinced of the usefulness of considering stretches longer than individual sentences in their analyses, at least two terms came to be used in parallel fashion: text linguistics and discourse analysis.
Originally, some people preferred to use text to refer to written language and kept discourse strictly for oral production.
In this chapter, we do not make any distinctions between text linguistics and discourse analysis, and between discourse and text, because they are now often used interchangeably.
Discourse analysis is also called discourse linguistics and discourse studies, or text is more concerned with meaning, discourse is more concerned with the formal and information structure.
Discourse analysis is the study of how sentences in spoken and written language form larger meaningful units such as paragraphs, conversations, interviews, etc.
(1) a. Pick up a handful of soil in your garden. Ordinary, unexciting earth. Yet it is one of Nature’s miracles, and one of her plex products. Your ess as a gardener will largely depend upon its condition, so take the first bold step in gardening—get to know your soil. (text)
b. Fertilizers put back what the rain and plants take away. Plastic pots are not just substitutes for clay ones. Pears are a little more temperamental than apples. Supporting and training are not quite the same thing. (nontext)
tasks in discourse analysis is to explore the linguistic features which characterize discour