1. Pls find the definition of discourse as many as possible, don't 4get 2giv the source (reference).
2. Explain the relation between grammar, discourse, n social activity.
1.
- A discourse analysis that is not based on grammar is not an analysis at all, but simply a running
commentary ofthe text. (Halliday, 1985: xvi).
Discourse is generally used to designate the forms of representation, codes, conventions and habits of
language that produce specific fields of culturally and historically located meanings. Michel Foucault's
early writings ('The Order of Discourse', 1971; The Archaeology of Krlowledge, 1972) were
especially influential in this.
Van Dijk (1997a) mentions that discourse is usually identified as a form of spoken language, what is said
in public speeches for example, or it could also refer to the ideas of certain schools of thoughts, for
instance the discourse of contemporary philosophies.
Discourse is the creation and organization of the segments of a language above as well as below the
sentence. It is segments of language which may be bigger or smaller than a single sentence but the
adduced meaning is always beyond the sentence. The term discourse applies to both spoken and written
language, in fact to any sample of language used for any purpose. Any series of speech events or any
combination of sentences in written form wherein successive sentences or utterances hang together is
discourse. Discourse can not be confined to sentential boundaries. It is something that goes beyond the
limits of sentence. In another words discourse is 'any coherent succession of sentences, spoken or written'
(Matthews, 2005:100).
Discourse analysis is a broad term for the study of the ways in which language is used
in texts and contexts. Also called discourse studies. Developed in the 1970s, the field of discourse
analysis is concerned with "the use of language in a running discourse, continued over a number
of sentences, and involving the interaction of speaker (or writer) and auditor (or reader) in a specific
situational context, and within a framework of social and cultural conventions"
(Abrams and Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 2005).
"Discourse analysis is concerned with language use as a social phenomenon and therefore necessarily
goes beyond one speaker or one newspaper article to find features which have a more generalized
relevance. This is a potentially confusing point because the publication of research findings is generally
presented through examples and the analyst may choose a single example or case to exemplify the
features to be discussed, but those features are only of interest as a social, not individual, phenomenon."
(Stephanie Taylor, What is Discourse Analysis? Bloomsbury,2013)
"Discourse analysis is not only about method; it is also a perspective on the nature of language and its
relationship to the central issues of the social sciences. More specifically, we see discourse analysis as a
related collection of approaches to discourse, approaches that entail not only practices of data collection
and analysis, but also a set of metatheoretical and theoretical assumptions and a body of research claims
and studies."
(Linda Wood and Rolf Kroger, Doing Discourse Analysis. Sage, 2000)
The first linguist to refer to discourse analysis was Zellig Harris. In 1952, he investigated the
connectedness of sentences, naming his study 'discourse analysis'. Harris claimed explicitly that discourse
is the next level in a hierarchy of morphemes, clauses and sentences. He viewed discourse analysis
procedurally as a formal methodology, derived from structural methods of linguistic analysis: such a
methodology could break a text down into relationships (such as equivalence, substitution) among its
lower-level constituents.
A definition as derived from formalist assumptions is that discourse is 'language above the sentence or
above the clause' (Stubbs 1983:1).
Michael Stubbs says, 'Any study which is not dealing with (a) single sentences, (b) contrived by the
linguist, (c) out of context, may be called discourse analysis.' (Stubbs 1983:131).
Widdowson, also criticizes the well familiar definition of discourse analysis that discourse is the study of
language patterns above the sentence and states; If discourse analysis is defined as the study of language
patterns above the sentence, this would seem to imply that discourse is sentence writ large: quantitatively
different but qualitatively the same phenomenon. It would follow, too, of course, that you cannot have
discourse below the sentence. (Widdowson, 2004: 3)
In other words, the discourse information is crucial to a complete theory of language. Smith and Kurthen
also argue that 'the existence of arbitrary and language-specific syntactic and referential options for
conveying a proposition requires a level of linguistic competence beyond sentential syntax and semantics'
(Smith and Kurthen 2007:455).
Discourse analysis is necessarily the analysis of language in use. The functionalist view of discourse
analysis asserts that 'the study of discourse is the study of any aspect of language use' (Fasold 1990:65).
