Week 2

"The Study of Discourse" Teun van Dijk
3
phenomena
language use
general, abstract use
4
specific social areas certain discourses are used

concrete instance - story on a news page, for example
 also refer to ideologies (even more fuzzy)

situations in which it is difficult to see beginning and end
5
compnents
structures
order
structural descriptions
"common sense....no longer sufficient to answer the more specific and technical questions of ...discourse"
"properties of sentences...mutual relations....rules that govern the way they may or should be combined or other conditions or constraints that may be involved"

many dimensions "communication of beliefs", "form of social interaction", "ways language use, communication or interaction are related to social context"

Makes distinction:
Language use, communication (cognition), and interaction
6
levels of utterances - superficial observable to underlying levels of form/ meaning/ action -- communicative & interactional dimensions
observable - sounds, marks
to phonology (abstract) - pronunciation, emphasis, intonation, volume etc.
visual
semiotics
7?
noverbal activity - gestures, face-work, body position, proximity, applause
(angry)
modes of discourse - talk and text
typology - define sets or classes of discourse types
natural discourse types - genres (conversations, ads, poems, and news,
Syntax - word order
relative meanings in sentences (sequences of sentences)
8
order/ functions sentences (makes me think of other countries)
"One of the phenomena most studied in discourse syntax is how sentence forms signal the distribution of information throughout a discourse" (woman, lawyer, she, her)

discourse forms connected to "information conveyed by those sentences, what or who they refer to, what the recipients are assumed to know already, or what they focus their attention on"
(Obama, speeches through time)

Semantics - meaning (abstract)
"semantic representations
psychologists/ cognitive linguists - meaning assigned to discourse by language users.

 interaction - creates meaning (sure - see meaning of "gay" through time)

 discourse semantics might look at relations between prepositions and meaning
 discursive relativity - propositions influenced by previous use

coherence - how does all of this 'hang together'?
 micro - propositional - functional - specification, generalization, illustration, contrast to previous proposition
/ macro levels
10
items being placed in or out of focus
references/ referents "one ...rul for the local coherence of a discourse is that its propositions must refer to (be about) events or situations that are related (to the speaker at least). Jean was late. Her plane was delayed. She had to wait for hours." (reminds me of use of word "green")
macro -  topics/ themes
11
styles
choice - Bosnian fighters can be referred to as "fighters", "rebels", "insurgents" etc. etc. -- depends on who is writing this -- variation is a function of the context
expression level -
12
distinguishes between: genre, speaker, group, social situation, literacy period, culture
rhetorical analysis

choices a narrative will make:
"schematic organization, accounts and explanations of actions, character and situation descriptions, temporal organizations and variable style and perspective" (dependent on context, narrative genre)
13
action

fascinating - messiness - derivations - find specific functions

14/15
speech act - locutionary act
15?

17
Cognition
sociocultural beliefs, opinions, ideologies
consider various "mental processes and representations"
personal variation vs. socially shared rules
strategic processes applied by users
18
recursive - adaption
mental models

19?
20
lexical differences - 'terrorist' vs. 'freedom fighter"
dialectic relation in context - changing
gender (sharing)
culture (ethnic groups)
21
Social discourse analysis - engaged within a framework of understanding
22?
23
critical scholars - not just observe, but agents of change
24
theroretical/ descriptive vs. applied/ critical
 25
ethnography - discourse in context
structuralism/ semiotics - media (lacking - cognitive/ social integration)
discourse grammar
26?
27
communication studies- mass media

Interdisciplinarity 
28
integration
29
Principles
1. Naturally Occuring text and talk
2. contexts
3. discourse as talk (verbal)
30
4.  discourse as social practice of members
5. social members will categorize world in their own way
6. sequence - functionality/
7. custructive - heirarchical
8. levels and dimensions
31
9. Meaning and function - what they are trying to figure our
10 rules (can be ignored)
11. strategies
12. social cognition - shared sociocultural representations (knowledge, etc, etc)