Concepts Of Discourse Analysis

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The concept of Discourse
Jonestone (2002) states that the term ‘Discourse 'originally goes back to the Latin word ‘discursus’ which refers to ‘conversation’, speech’. According to McCarthy (1991) the concept of discourse grew out of the work in the different disciplines of linguistics, semiotics, ipsychology, anthropology and sociology during the late 1960s. Jonestone (2002) refers to discourse as "actual examples of communication in social and cultural practices.” There is a total range of context in which people engage in communication (Akmajian, et al 2001). According to Fasold (1990) discourse is" the study of any features of language use". Parker (1992) defines discourse as consistent set of texts that bring a particular version of social …show more content…

Differences in lexico-grammatical and rhetorical structures occur between spoken and written language, depending on the genre. Sinclair and Coulthard (1992) proposed that spoken discourse consists of at least two people taking turns who interact in an initiation and response structure. According to McCarthy (1993) written discourse analysis is a basically different way of looking at language compared with sentence-dominated models" (p. 170). Donnell (1973) proposed that written style has a higher degree of syntactic complexity than spoken form. Jahandarie (1999) determined an excellent place for beginning communication education. Jahandarie provided a systematic critical view towards the recent studies about the differences between written and oral traditions. Therefore, Jahandarie carried out a unique multidisciplinary work with lots of theories and evidences from different disciplines. There are several general differences between spoken and written discourse analysis. Discourse analysis includes spoken, written, and sign language. Although both written and spoken forms are types of social acts, and what is applicable to oral speech is also applicable to written language. The general differences between spoken and written English has divided into eight significant aspects: Grammatical intricacy, lexical density, nominalization, explicitness, contextualization, spontaneity, …show more content…

Grammatical Intricacy
Written discourse is more multifaceted and more complicated than spoken discourse. According to Halliday (1989) speech is not less organized. He argues that spoken discourse has its own kind of complexity. Paltridge (2006) suggests that as to written discourse, written mode is more complex.
2. Lexical Density
Lexical density measures the ratio of content words over grammatical or function word within a clause. Spoken discourse significantly is less lexically dense than written discourse (Halliday 1989; Ure 1971; Stubbs 1986). According to Biber (1988) content words refer to nouns and verbs, while grammatical words refer to article, pronouns and prepositions.
3. Nominalization
Here, nominalization refers to actions and events that are presented as nouns rather than verbs. Paltridge (2006) states written discourse has a higher level of nominalization. Written discourse have longer noun groups than spoken discourse.
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