UNDERSTANDING TEXT & DISCOURSE

The study of discourse, both in its written and spoken forms, is of growing interest across a number of disciplines, including linguistics, psychology, literary studies and anthropology.

Discourse is defined as anything that extends beyond the boundaries of one sentence or utterance.

It is the structure of discourse that is the focus of this text.

The authors take a broad approach to the subject, and look at discourse from many perspectives, including those of text linguistics, discourse analysis, and conversation analysis.

The book is divided into sections which examine the different types of methodological approaches to discourse.

Each section contains at least one "real-life" text/piece of discourse to be used as the "data source" through which concepts and theories can be illustrated.

Discourse analysis is an increasingly interdisciplinary field with different disciplines approaching the subject in different ways.

This book presents the basics of these different approaches to analyzing text and discourse within a linguistics context.