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What is discourse analysis and its importance
A passage of analysed discourse analysis
Discourse Analysis Essay
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ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES (ESP) MPhil English Linguistics Programme 2011-2013 Lahore Leads University ASSIGNMENT 3 Register, Discourse & Genre Analysis Name: Zulfiqar Ahmad ID # 4025 Submitted to: Dr Zahid Javed Chaudary 1. Introduction 2. Register The concept of special language: register analysis • This concept departed from the principle that English of a specific science differs from each other in terms of its grammatical and lexical features of the registers. • Register analyses in ESP was tailored for the pedagogic purpose, i.e. making the ESP course more relevant to learners’ needs, not intended for the purpose to discuss the nature of registers of English per se. • The main purpose of an ESP course was to produce a syllabus which gave a high priority to the language forms students would meet in their field and in turn would give low priority to forms they would not meet. Beyond the sentence: rhetorical or discourse analysis • Stages of ESP development: 1st stage focused on language at the sentence level, 2nd phase shifted attention the level above the sentence (putting into play discourse or rhetorical analyses). • Thus, the main focus of register analysis is on how sentences were combined in discourse to produce meaning. 3. Discourse discourse (n.) A term used in linguistics to refer to a continuous stretch of (especially spoken) language larger than a sentence – but, within this broad notion, several different applications may be found. At its most general, a discourse is a behavioural unit which has a pre-theoretical status in linguistics: it is a set of utterances which constitute any recognizable speech event (no reference being made to its linguistic structuring, if any), e.g. a conver... ... middle of paper ... ...eport. Similarly, recount can be used with report and discussion. Likewise, narrative, discussion, and report can combined with recount, and recount can be blended with report and explanation. Different genres and registers employ a range of cohesive devices and for varying communicative functions. For instance, the use of reference, substitution and ellipsis in legal texts is minimal and, synonyms and super-ordinates are generally scanty in scientific and technical texts. While Halliday and Hasan (1976) and other researchers primarily use literary texts, Cook (2001) and Huang (2001) deal with cohesive devices in advertisements, and Yu (2004) investigates cohesive devices in academic introductions from the perspective of genre. Nevertheless, the study of cohesive devices in non-literary texts is still a neglected area which needs further explorations. 5. Conclusion
In the article “The Concept of Discourse Community” John Swales touches a few very important main ideas about what discourse community really is. I found it to be refreshing that he is able to express his feelings how he does in this article. Swales talks about discourse community and how our world today really isn 't that good at being apart of them. He discusses the six qualities or characteristics of being apart of a discourse community. You have to be active in communicating and wanting to be apart of that community and if you 're not that type of person than maybe it 's not your thing.
Discourse communities are groups of people with a unique point of view. There are many discourse communities around your everyday life. These communities are part of the entire human environment. Many discourse communities are distinctly large due to all the societies wanting the same things. My discourse communities are mostly Facebook.
As put by Jen Waak in regarding the human need for community, “By surrounding yourself with others working toward a similar goal, you’ll get...yourself a bit further than you would have done on your own,” (Waak). By being able to see and participate in these different communities centered around different objectives, the goal becomes easier to achieve and bonds the group into something more through trying to reach it. This new unit is called a discourse community and is defined by John Swales as containing six specific characteristics: having a common goal, showing intercommunication and using lexis, having participation within the group, being defined by genres of texts, and having members with areas of expertise for the community. When looking
In his article “The Concept of Discourse Community,” John Swales describes a discourse community as a group of people that “have a broadly agreed set of common goals, contain certain mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, have acquired a specific lexis, and have a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content discoursal expertise” (Swales #). An example of such a discourse community is the legal profession. The legal profession has the common goal of understanding and applying general principles to particular factual situations. In doing so, lawyers use language, concepts, and methods that are unique to their community. In order to become a recognized member of the legal community, a person must graduate from law school and pass the bar exam thereby demonstrating an in depth knowledge concerning all areas of the law and the specialized rules, methods, and jargon used by lawyers to communicate about legal principles.
Discourse communities play a big role in life and how humans interact in general. A discourse community refers to a group of people who have language, life patterns, culture, and communication in common with each other. The idea of a discourse community has also been used to bring people of different orientations together, like family members, students, or committees. All of these types of people might have different standards of living, like their level of income, education, and work abilities. Discourse community can also refer to a speech community, because the main feature of a discourse community is communication. A discourse community can include groups of different regional areas that may or may not share norms and living patterns
Cerjak ,The English Journal, Vol. 76, No. 5 (Sep., 1987), pp. 55-57 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Language, according to Owens (2012, p. 6), “can be defined as a socially shared code or conventional system for representing concepts through the use of arbitrary symbols and rule-governed combinations of those symbols”. Language is thought to be a complex system; however, it can be broken down into three different components. These three components consist of content, form, and use. Within these three components, language has five main components which includes semantics, morphology, phonology, syntax, and pragmatics (Owens, 2012, p. 18).
Jan blommaert and Chris Bulcaen makes a brief introduction to the study of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). CDA intends to use social-theoretical method in discourse analysis and is primarily linguistically based (Blommaet & Bulcaen, 2000, p.447). It intends to analyze the structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control through a textual study (Blommaet & Bulcaen, 2000, p.448). Based on the assumption that social discourse is constructed and socially conditioned, CDA explores the power dynamics in this process.
In the field of ESP, genre analysis has been a widely recognized concept concerning linguistic analysis of language. Since the early 80s, interest in genre-centered approaches to the analysis of written and spoken discourse has been motivated by the need to provide satisfactory models and descriptions of academic and scientific texts and to enhance the ability of non-native speaker students to understand and to produce them (Holmes, 1997).
The Register of a discourse is divided into field, tenor and mode. As Halliday notes these functional dimensions are the metafunctions of language which enact interpersonal relationships as interpersonal metafunctions, ‘construing experience as the ideational metafunction or organising discourse as the textual
Miller, T. P, & Faigley, L. (1982). College English. National Council of teachers of English, 44(6). Retrieved from http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0010-
CDA considers language as a social phenomenon. Not only individuals, but also institutions and social groupings have specific meanings and values that are expressed in language in systematic ways. In CDA, texts are seen as the relevant units of language in communications, readers and hearers are not passive recipients in their relationship to texts, and there are similarities between the language of science and the language of institutions, and so on. However, a clearer and more general approach to CDA can be found in the work by Fairclough & Wodak (1997). According to them, CDA regards language as social practice and takes consideration of the context of language use to be crucial.
In order to describe the form of the linguistic expressions (phrases, sentences, texts) in a language, we must describe how those complex expressions are built from smaller parts, until ultimately we which the atoms of linguistic form. The term morpheme is used to refer to an atom of linguistic form.
At this level, the investigation specifically targets the linguistic dimension of discourse: phonological (stress, pitch, volume, intonation) or graphical structures (headlines, bold characters, layout); syntactic structures (word order, topicalization, clausal relations, split constructions); semantic structures (explicit vs. implicit, implications – insinuations, vagueness, presuppositions, allusions, symbolism, collective symbolism, figurativeness, metaphorism); pragmatics (intention, mood, opinion, perspective, relative distance); formal structures (idioms, sayings, clichés, set phrases, language patterns); logic and composition of the discourse (argumentation – strategy, types, cohesion,
Text linguistics is a “discipline which analyses the linguistic regularities and constitutive features of texts” (Bussmann, 1996: 1190). According to this definition, text linguistics is mainly concerned with studying the features that every piece of writing should have in order to be considered as a text. It is also defined by Noth (1977 in Al-Massri, 2013:33) as “the branch of linguistics in which the methods of linguistic analysis are extended to the level of text.” This means that text linguistics aims at producing rules and methods that can be used to analyze the whole text. This approach has been put forward by the two scholars Robert-Alain de Beaugrande and Wolfgang U. Dressler in their seminal book “Introduction to Text Linguistics”, in 1981. The study of texts in linguistic studies starts in