Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
The MPhil in English and Applied Linguistics (2011/12)
Course in Discourse Analysis
This course offers theoretical discussion of the issues raised by the practical application of a range of topics, some of which have been introduced in other courses, notably Semantics, Syntax and Psychological Processes. The course begins with a brief overview of approaches to Discourse Analysis and proposes a broad approach, drawing on many perspectives of how we understand the cognitive content of spoken or written discourse. We move on to discuss the nature of text and the nature of context. The next four lectures are all concerned with information packaging. The general topic of reference and anaphora is discussed with respect to issues which include definiteness, presupposition, and given-new information structure. And then we move on to look at shared beliefs, sentential and text organisation and the issue of coherence in discourse. The final four lectures explore further issues of deixis, and the ways in which children learn to construct narratives, looking at the overarching structure of conversation and the ways in which participants signal to each other how what they say should be related to what was said earlier.
Each session is organised into a lecture together with a practical session where the theoretical implications of the lecture are examined with respect to a range of discourse types.
Reading for this course will include:
- Brown, G. and Yule, G. 1983. Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Brown, G. 1995. Speakers, Listeners and Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Brown, P. and Levinson, S.C. 1987. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Davison, A. and Green, G. eds. 1988. Linguistic Complexity and Text Comprehension. Lawrence Eribaum.
- Gernsbacher, M.A. and Givon, T. eds. 1995. Coherence in Spontaneous Text. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Hawkins, J.A. (1991) 'On (in)definite articles: implicatures and (un)grammaticality prediction'. Journal of Linguistics 27: 405-442.
- Hawkins, J.A. (2004) The grammaticalization of definiteness marking. In: J.A. Hawkins. Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 82-93.
- Hickmann, M. 1995. Discourse organization and the development of reference to person, space and time. In: P. Fletcher and B. MacWhinney, eds. The Handbook of Child Language. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 194-218.
- Lambrecht, K. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Levinson, S. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
