This course provides an introduction to discourse analysis and the different approaches used
in the analysis of discourse. Discourse here is defined as the study of the organization of
language above the sentence level, but also as any manifestation of language in context. The
course starts with a general overview of the phenomena included in the study of discourse,
and then proceeds on to how a number of schools have approached those problems. Both
spoken and written discourse will be studied.

Course Contents:

  • What is discourse?
    • Discourse and the sentence
    • Grammar within and beyond the sentence
    • Language in and out of context
    • Spoken vs. written discourse
  • Formal & contextual links
    • Parallelism
    • Referring expressions
    • Repetition and lexical chains
    • Substitution
    • Ellipsis
    • Conjunction
  • Conversational principles
    • Cooperative Principle
    • Politeness Principle
    • Speech Act Theory
    • Constatives and performatives
    • Pragmatics, discourse analysis and language teaching
  • Views on Discourse Structure
    • Discourse as product
    • Discourse as process
    • Discourse as a Dialogue
    • Discourse in communicative development o Information structure in discourse

Recommended Readings:

    1. Brown, G. and Yule, G. (1983). Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: CUP
    2. Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. Roultledge.
    3. Gee, J. P. (214). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method (4th Ed.).

London: Routledge.

    1. Johnstone, B. (2007). Discourse Analysis (2nd Ed.). Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
    2. Schiffrin, D. (2001). Approaches to Discourse. Oxford: Blackwell.