...Overview1 Discourse Analysis………………………………………………………………………………………………….2 Alternative Discourse…………………………………………………………………………………………….3 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..4 1.1 Introduction Discourse analysis is both an old and a new discipline. Its origins can be traced back to the study of language, public speech, and literature more than 2000 years ago. (Schiffrin, 2001) Much of the structural analysis of the term can be said to have resulted from books such as the archaeology of knowledge, discipline and punish and the history of sexuality which were written by the famous sociologist Michael Foucault. Foucault defines discourse as ways of constituting knowledge, together with social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations, which inhere in such knowledge, and relations between them. (Quinby, 1999) Putnam and Fairhurst [2001: 79] use the term 'discourse analysis' to refer to 'the study of words and signifiers, including the form or structure of these words, the use of language in context, and the meanings or interpretation of discursive practices'. Discourses are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning (this meaning could be in form of language, speech, text etc.). They constitute the ‘nature’ of the body, unconscious and conscious and conscious mind and emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern (Weedon, 1987) 1.2 Extract Overview The extract to be assessed is from figure 8.1-8.4.1.The case study written by...
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...ICOM101 Major Essay Does Media Discourse Reproduce Social Inequality? Student Name : Pratama Robin Rachel Discourse denotes to the various forms of representation, codes, habits, conventions associated with language are responsible for producing specific culturally and historically located meanings. Media discourse can be described as an interaction through a media platform with the help of verbal or non-verbal communication. It has been found that media can potentially influence the public. The objective of this essay is to find out the role of media discourse in reproducing social inequality. In order to meet this objective, in the following sections the concept of discourse is explained vividly along with its style of operations. A relationship between media discourse and social inequality will be established in this essay. Discourse can be referred to the manner or way of communication between individuals or group. Discourse plays a major role in determining how an individual will understand and interpret a specific thing based upon ideas, thoughts and beliefs. According to Michel Focault, discourse is an entity of sequences, codes and signs in that they are enouncements. Media discourse includes various media outlets such as radio, television, newspaper, magazine, internet etc. The inevitable power of media has been discussed in discourse studies. Many research studies have shown that media plays an important role in influencing the thought process of individuals...
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...Lexical cohesion and the organization of discourse First year report PhD student: Ildikó Berzlánovich Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Gisela Redeker Dr. Markus Egg Center for Language and Cognition Groningen University of Groningen 2008 Table of contents 1 Introduction.........................................................................................................1 2 Lexical cohesion...................................................................................................2 2.1 Lexical cohesion and discourse organization................................................2 2.1.1 Introduction.............................................................................................2 2.1.2 Lexical cohesion and genre.....................................................................2 2.1.3 Lexical cohesion and coherence .............................................................3 2.2 The role of lexical cohesion in the segmentation and centrality of discourse units......................................................................................................................5 2.2.1 Introduction.............................................................................................5 2.2.2 Discourse segmentation ..........................................................................6 2.2.3 Central discourse units............................................................................8 2.2.4 Conclusion .........................................
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...Construction to a Discourse Marker Abstract: This study investigates the various uses of a kind of, ranging from a noun construction equivalent to a type of to a discourse marker with interpersonal or textual meaning, and special emphasis is laid on the differences between its nominal qualifying and adverbial uses and its peculiarity as a discourse marker. Grammaticalization underlies the different uses and their co-existence. There is a close correspondence between its form and meaning, and on the other hand, the proper interpretation of the different uses depends on the context. Key words: a kind of, grammaticalization, nominal qualifier, adverbial, discourse marker 1. Introduction (A)kind of/sort of occurs with a significantly high frequency in spoken English. There...
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...media Anne O’Keeffe Historical overview of media discourse ‘The media’ is a very broad term, encompassing print and broadcast genres, that is anything from newspaper to chat show and, latterly, much more besides, as new media emerge in line with technological leaps. The study of ‘the media’ comes under the remit of media studies from perspectives such as their production and consumption, as well as their aesthetic form. The academic area of media studies cuts across a number of disciplines including communication, sociology, political science, cultural studies, philosophy and rhetoric, to name but a handful. Meanwhile, the object of study, ‘the media’, is an ever-changing and ever-growing entity. The study of ‘the media’ also comes under the radar of applied linguistics because at the core of these media is language, communication and the making of meaning, which is obviously of great interest to linguists. As Fairclough (1995a: 2) points out, the substantively linguistic and discoursal nature of the power of the media is a strong argument for analysing the mass media linguistically. Central to the connection between media studies and studies of the language used in the media (media discourse studies) is the importance placed on ideology. A major force behind the study of ideology in the media is Stuart Hall (see, for example, Hall 1973, 1977, 1980, 1982). Hall (1982), in his influential paper, notes that the study of media (or ‘mass communication’) has had a chequered...
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...Human Relations http://hum.sagepub.com/ 'Cultural diversity' at work: 'National culture' as a discourse organizing an international project group Ester Barinaga Human Relations 2007 60: 315 DOI: 10.1177/0018726707075883 The online version of this article can be found at: http://hum.sagepub.com/content/60/2/315 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of: The Tavistock Institute Additional services and information for Human Relations can be found at: Email Alerts: http://hum.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://hum.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://hum.sagepub.com/content/60/2/315.refs.html >> Version of Record - Mar 6, 2007 What is This? Downloaded from hum.sagepub.com at Univ of Newcastle upon Tyne on October 26, 2011 Human Relations DOI: 10.1177/0018726707075883 Volume 60(2): 315–340 Copyright © 2007 The Tavistock Institute ® SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore www.sagepublications.com ‘Cultural diversity’ at work: ‘National culture’ as a discourse organizing an international project group Ester Barinaga A B S T R AC T Research to date concurs in maintaining that performance of nationally homogeneous workgroups differs if compared to heterogeneous ones. Yet, results are mixed on the relationship between cultural diversity and workgroup outcomes. The article argues that cultural...
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...paradigms in the social sciences and humanities. I also discuss the role of triangulation and capturing participants’ insider or emic perspectives in qualitative research and highlight various data collection methods and ways of combining macro-level and micro-level analyses, particularly in ethnographic research. Ethical issues, difficulties obtaining informed consent in classroom research, and criteria for evaluating qualitative research are then considered. Three qualitative studies that have been deemed exemplary and meritorious by scholars in English language education are then presented and some common themes in current qualitative classroom research with ELLs are identified. The chapter concludes with directions for future qualitative research. Introduction Over the past 2 decades, research in language education, as in other academic disciplines, has witnessed a major shift in the types and methods of research that are accepted as valid, important, and useful. Whereas quantitative studies of a psychometric nature or involving (quasi-) experimental designs might previously have been viewed as more legitimate forms of research within education and the social sciences, rigorous...
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...social responsibility (CSR). I make use of Jacques Derrida’s theorizing on contested meaning to argue that CSR’s ambiguity is actually necessary in light of its functional role as a ‘‘supplement’’ to corporate profit-seeking. As a discourse that refuses to conclusively resolve the tension between profit-seeking and prosociality, CSR expresses an important critical perspective which demands that firms act responsibly, while retaining the overall corporate frame of shareholder supremacy. CSR does this by ambivalently affirming both profit-seeking and prosociality, a necessary contradiction. Attempts to reduce CSR’s ambiguity can thus only succeed by undermining its viability as a normative discourse that captures how certain elements of society understand how firms should act. The analysis suggests that greater scholarly attention is needed with regard to the material discursive environments within which discourses such as CSR are deployed. A discursive approach to research could thus benefit future practitioners, who have to act according to fluid standards of responsibility that cannot be authoritatively defined, but which can be better understood than they are at present. ´ Keywords Corporate social responsibility Á Differance Á Discourse Á Jacques Derrida Á Supplementarity Á Undecidability C. Sabadoz (&) Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, 100 St. George St., Toronto, ON M5R3G3, Canada e-mail:...
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...So what is a discourse community? When you google discourse community, you read, “It is a group of people sharing a common goal using communication to reach that common goal.”Getting more into detail what exactly is a discourse community, we have John Swales’ academic essay, ‘The Concept of Discourse Community’, which breaks it down into six characteristics: “1. A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals. 2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members. 3. A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback. 4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims. 5. In addition...
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...An Approach to Corpus-based Discourse Analysis: The Move Analysis as Example THOMAS A . UPTON AND MARY ANN COHEN Abstract This article presents a seven-step corpus-based approach to discourse analysis that starts with a detailed analysis of each individual text in a corpus that can then be generalized across all texts of a corpus, providing a description of typical patterns of discourse organization that hold for the entire corpus. This approach is applied specifically to a methodology that is used to analyze texts in terms of the functional/communicative structures that typically make up texts in a genre: move analysis. The resulting corpus-based approach for conducting a move analysis significantly enhances the value of this often used (and misused) methodology, while at the same time providing badly needed guidelines for a methodology that lacks them. A corpus of ‘birthmother letters’ is used to illustrate the approach. Biber et al. (2007) explore how discourse structure and organization can be investigated using corpus analysis; they offer a structured, seven-step corpusbased approach to discourse analysis that results in generalizable descriptions of discourse structure. This article draws on the themes in this book, but focuses in particular on analyses that use theories on communicative or functional purposes of text as the starting point for understanding why texts in a corpus are structured the way they are, before moving to a closer examination and description of...
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...A Comparative Study of Metaphor in British and United States of America (US) Political Discourse Student’s Name University Affiliation Comparative Study of Metaphor in British and United States of America (US) Political Discourse Abstract This study offers a research on the application of metaphor in the discourse of cultural and political aspects between these two countries; The United States of America and Great Britain. As a result, this is an analysis of the various factors related to the perspective in terms of the cultural and socio-political phenomenon, in which a lot of attention is placed on the elements ascertaining the pragmatic, variable, and cognitive details of the British and US's political discourses: The inaugural speeches of four US presidents and party political manifestos of two British political parties during the period between 1974 and 1997 are analysed. The main purpose of undertaking this kind of comparative study of the British and the American political discourses is quite evident, these discourses symbolize intriguing and complex methods of cultural values and political differences as depicted in the respective linguistic contexts. The key findings are that metaphors from the domains of conflict, journey and buildings are general across the divide. However, the British corpus contain metaphors that draw on the source domain of plants whereas the American corpus hugely draws on source domains like fire and light and the physical environments that are...
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...Communication barriers in public discourse Document Design 4(1), 22–41 © 2003 by John Benjamins Publishing Co. 23 Inger Askehave and Karen Korning Zethsen Communication barriers in public discourse The patient package insert Keywords: Public communication, asymmetrical communication, target group, genre, patient package inserts The production of expert-to-layperson documents in private and public companies is an area of research that is gradually gaining ground in research communities throughout the world. This article discusses the nature of public communication written by experts or semiexperts and aimed at a large and heterogeneous audience, often potentially the entire population of a country. The article analyzes common barriers to this kind of communication, and considers topics such as the implications of very broad target groups, expertto-layperson communication and the legislative introduction of mandatory genres as opposed to genres which have evolved naturally over time. The case of the patient package insert is outlined as a prototypical example of ‘public communication’ su¬ering from the problems brought about by the existence of these common barriers. Introduction Public documents have long been considered problematic and have attracted the interest of document designers and discourse analysts, not to mention entire movements such as the Plain English Movement. Numerous organizations, committees, and boards have been set up at national and international...
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...available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0953-4814.htm “Flexibility” as the rationale for organizational change: a discourse perspective Richard Dunford, Suresh Cuganesan and David Grant “Flexibility” as the rationale for change 83 University of Sydney Business School, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia Ian Palmer College of Business, RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) University, Melbourne, Australia, and Rosie Beaumont and Cara Steele Faculty of Business and Enterprise, Swinburne University, Hawthorn, Australia Abstract Purpose – The concept “flexibility” is ubiquitous as a rationale for organizational change. However, its broad application is accompanied by a general lack of definitional agreement or theoretical cohesion. The purpose of this paper is to propose the merits of an alternative approach – applying a discourse perspective to the use of flexibility as a rationale for organizational change. Design/methodology/approach – This paper first illustrates the broad referencing of flexibility as a desired organizational characteristic. It then discusses the associated lack of theoretical coherence associated with the use of the concept “flexibility” before arguing the merits of a discourse perspective on flexibility as a rationale for organizational change. Findings – This paper identifies a set of questions to frame a discourse perspective on the use of “flexibility” as a rationale for organizational change. Research limitations/implications...
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...add that political situation played a significant role in shaping the drama in restoration era. The discourse in restoration drama has an extreme change and has not followed the discourse of the renaissance drama. In Shakespeare's The Tempest when Prospero told Miranda to go to the Orient character Caliban she tried to escape "'Tis a villain, sir, I do not love to look...
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...fulfilment of the degree of Masters of Arts in Applied English Language Studies. 2007 ABSTRACT This research report engages with the concern that African learners attending English medium, multiracial schools are losing their proficiency in African languages. In so doing, the report explores the language practices of four multilingual Grade 9 learners at a desegregated private high school in Gauteng. In a school environment that does not overtly support the use of African languages, I explore the extent to which multilingual learners use African languages in the school context, to position themselves and others, as an identity building resource, and the extent to which the use of African languages is implicated in their identities. I also explore the possible influence of the learners’ cultural and ethnic backgrounds on their language practices, and related to this, the expression of their identities. I look at how their language practices help them shift identities with space and purpose, and the contradictions therein. The study draws on poststructuralist theories of language and identity (Weedon, 1997; Zegeye, 2001), in considering how language constitutes identity (Pennycook, 2004) and self and other ‘positioning’ (Davies and Harre`, 1990) It also draws on Bourdieu’s (1991) theorizing of language and power and language as a form of cultural capital. I draw on two traditions in qualitative research: case study and ethnography. In my analysis of the data, I argue that...
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