Discourse Analysis

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.