Discourse Analysis / Edition 1

by Gillian Brown, George Yule

Overview

Discourse analysis is a term that has come to have different interpretations for scholars working in different disciplines. For a sociolinguist, it is concerned mainly with the structure of social interaction manifested in conversation; for a psycholinguist, it is primarily concerned with the nature of comprehension of short written texts; for the computational linguist, it is concerned with producing operational models of text-understanding within highly limited contexts. In this textbook, first published in 1983, the authors provide an extensive overview of the many and diverse approaches to the study of discourse, but base their own approach centrally on the discipline which, to varying degrees, is common to them all - linguistics. Using a methodology which has much in common with descriptive linguistics, they offer a lucid and wide-ranging account of how forms of language are used in communication. Their principal concern is to examine how any language produced by man, whether spoken or written, is used to communicate for a purpose in a context.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521284752
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/28/1983
Series:	Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	302
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.67(d)

Table of Contents

Preface; Acknowledgements; Transcription conventions; 1. Introduction: linguistic forms and functions; 2. The role of context in interpretation; 3. Topic and the representation of discourse content; 4. 'Staging' and the representation of discourse structure; 5. Information structure; 6. The nature of reference in text and in discourse; 7. Coherence in the interpretation of discourse; References; Subject index; Author index.

Editorial Reviews

'This book makes for absorbing reading. It is very well-written, inspiring and clear. It is indispensable literature for anyone working in the field of discourse analysis.' Journal of Semantics

From the Publisher