Discourse Analysis

Discourse Analysis is a comparatively new area within the field of English linguistics. It regards language as closely connected to social, political, and cultural aspects – and therefore overlaps with many other academic disciplines, such as anthropology or sociology. The course aims to give an introduction to this multifaceted field of investigation and will cover a wide range of aspects: having approached the concept of “discourse” as such, we will look into different ways of analysing linguistic units higher than the sentence. We will deal with approaches such as text linguistics and Conversation Analysis (How are texts and narratives structured? How are texts referring to each other? Are conversations orderly?), Speech Act Theory and Gricean pragmatics (How do we interpret texts or utterances?), Critical Discourse Analysis (How can our understanding be influenced or even manipulated?), and corpus linguistics (How can corpus linguistics help us discover resistant or changing discourses?). Furthermore, the course will also address the concepts of face, politeness, and power (How are social relationships negotiated through language?), and the question of language and gender (Is there something like “male” or “female” talk?).

Requirements and background texts will be discussed in the first session.