1. Discourse Analysis

2. What is Discourse Analysis?
Life is a constant flow of discourse of language
functioning in one of the many contexts that
together make up a culture.
The study of discourse is absolutely central to
the concerns of applied lingistics, and as a
language student of language teacher it is very
helpful to learn to attend to the different
strands of and frequent interruptions.

3. Not only is the formality of the vocabulary
usually different between spoken and written
discourse but the amount of content that the
words carry also differs.
Spoken discourse typically has a far lower lexical
density and it is partly because of this lexical
scarcity that some people believe that spoken
language ‘lack contents’.

4. Turning-taking
The basic unit of speech is the indicidual speaker
‘turn. A turn is each occasion that a speaker
speaks and a turn ends when another speaker
takes a turn.
In any ordinar there is hardly any overlap or
interruption and only minimal silences
between turns if there is any silence at all.

5. Variation Theory
Variation theory was developed by Labov and has
make a major contribution to the analysis of
discourse his description of the structure of spoken
narratives. Labov argued that the ‘overall
structure’of a fully formed narrative of personal
experience is:
o Abstract
o Orientation
o Complication
o Evaluation
o Resolution
o Coda

6. Critical Discourse Analysis
Critical discourse analysis is concerned with the
relationship between language, ideology and
power and the relationship between discourse
and sociolcultural change.
This new conception of genre in critical of genre in
critical discourse analysis sees genres as both
social an textual categories and no longer as fixed
an immutable but critical discourse anaylsis are
seen not only as a reflection of social reality.

7. Courpus Linguistics and Variation in
Discourse
Corpus linguistics sprang from a desire to be
more objective bout language and to free
description from subjective intuition.
Corpus linguists believe that external
evidence, looking at language use, is a better
source for description than internal evidence
or native speaker intuition.

8. Corpus linguistics may be performed in
two ways:
Quantitative
Qualitative