Summary
Contents
Subject index
“An outstanding introduction to discourse analysis of written language in an age that is more and more characterized by multilingual, digital, and generically hybrid texts. In an accessible style, Working with Written Discourse illustrates how these texts can be analyzed employing a wide variety of approaches that are critical, multidisciplinary, and productive.”
Discourse and Discourse Analysis
Discourse and Discourse Analysis
One important preliminary to the study of anything is defining your object, the phenomenon you are studying. In this first chapter we will consider some definitions of discourse, and how they are related to different analytic approaches.
If you look up the word discourse in a general-purpose dictionary, you will probably find something like the following (taken from the Concise Oxford Dictionary (COD)):
Discourse, n[oun] & v[erb]: a. conversation, talk; b. a dissertation or treatise on an academic subject; c. a lecture or sermon.
This entry tells us that the word discourse is used in ordinary English to talk about language—both speech, as in sense (a), and writing, as in (b). (Sense (c) names two ‘mixed’ genres, ‘lecture’ and ‘sermon’, which are delivered ...
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