Discourse analysis is a wide ranging area of study that examines the features of language beyond the limits of a sentence — including vocal, written and sign language, along with any significant semiotic events. It has been employed from a number of interdisciplinary perspectives in an attempt to reveal a person’s socio-psychological characteristics through the practical analysis of naturally-occurring language rather than artificially created examples. Routledge Library Editions: Discourse Analysis brings together an extensive collection of scholarship that reflects the broad scope of the subject area, examining the relationship of discourse to a number of closely related fields including stylistics, pragmatics, speech, conversation, context, anaphora, grammar and psychology. This set, published between 1979 and 1993, provides a thorough grounding in this key discipline for students of linguistics and psychology, and social sciences in general.

Discourse Analysis in Adults With and Without Communication Disorders: A Resource for Clinicians and Researchers provides state-of-the-art information about discourse analysis with sections on Aging, Aphasia, Cognitive Communication Disorders, and Neurodegenerative Diseases. The three renowned editors are actively engaged in the area of discourse. Expert clinical researchers introduce and organize each section, and chapters are authored by leaders involved in discourse research worldwide. Discourse is considered the most natural unit of language. Effective production of discourse requires complex interactions among linguistic, cognitive, and social abilities that are sensitive to even mild disruption in any one of these elements. This book covers the examination of discourse in adults with acquired communication disorders, including selecting elicitation tasks, streamlining transcription processes, expanding analysis methods, and translating findings for treatment application. Key Features * Provides a global perspective on discourse assessment for clinicians * Dedicated chapters on aging, aphasia, traumatic brain injury, right hemisphere disorder, primary progressive aphasia, Alzheimer’s dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis Disclaimer: Please note that ancillary content (such as documents, audio, and video, etc.) may not be included as published in the original print version of this book.

The volume Questions in Discourse - Vol. 2 Pragmatics collects original research on the role of questions in understanding text structure and discourse pragmatics. The in-depth studies discuss the effects of focus, questions and givenness in unalternative semantics, as well as the role of scalar particles, question-answer pairs and prosody from the perspective of Questions under Discussion. Two contributions compare the discourse-structuring potential of Questions under Discussion and rhetorical relations, whereas another adds a perspective from inquisitive semantics. Some contributions also look at understudied languages. Together, the contributions allow for a better understanding of question-related pragmatic and discourse-semantic phenomena, and they offer new perspectives on the structure of texts and discourses.

Our knowledge and understanding of organizations is both enabled and constrained by invisible relationship of power that are embedded in the ways in which we act and speak. The notion of discourse has been used by many authors to describe and study these phenomena, and this volume offers a succinct but comprehensive introduction to the vast field of critical organizational discourse analysis. Targeted at graduate and doctoral students, and at non-specialist academic who need to familiarize with the academic debate on the subject, the book harnesses the power of metaphors to describe the many faces of discourse.

′This volume is the most comprehensive overview to date of sociologically orientated approaches to text and discourse analysis and is worth reading even for those who are interested only in purely linguistiv approaches to text and discourse. Its main merit, I think, is that it intorduces approaches which up to now have hardley been admitted into the universe of scientific discourse′ - Discourse Studies Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis provides the most comprehensive overview currently available of linguistic and sociological approaches to text and discourse analysis. Among the 10 linguistic and sociological models surveyed in this book some of the more important are Grounded Theory, Content Analysis, Conversation Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis. The book presents each approach according to a standardised format, which allows for direct systematic comparisons. The fully annotated lists of sources provide readers with an additional means of evaluation of the competing analytical methods. Interdisciplinary and international in its aims, Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis suggests the benefits both linguists and sociologists will derive from a more intimate knowledge of each others′ methods and procedures.

Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse presents a novel framework and analysis of the ways we refer to abstract objects in natural language discourse. The book begins with a typology of abstract objects and related entities like eventualities. After an introduction to `bottom up, compositional' discourse representation theory (DRT) and to previous work on abstract objects in DRT (notably work on the semantics of the attitudes), the book turns to a semantic analysis of eventuality and abstract object denoting nominals in English. The book then substantially revises and extends the dynamic semantic framework of DRT to develop an analysis of anaphoric reference to abstract objects and eventualities that exploits discourse structure and the discourse relations that obtain between elements of the structure. A dynamic, semantically based theory of discourse structure (SDRT) is proposed, along with many illustrative examples. Two further chapters then provide the analysis of anaphoric reference to propositions VP ellipsis. The abstract entity anaphoric antecedents are elements of the discourse structures that SDRT develops. The final chapter discusses some logical and philosophical difficulties for a semantic analysis of reference to abstract objects. For semanticists, philosophers of language, computer scientists interested in natural language applications and discourse, philosophical logicians, graduate students in linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and artificial intelligence.

This book explores linguistic and philosophical issues presented by sentences expressing personal taste, such as Roller coasters are fun, and examines how truth-theoretic semantics can account for expressions of this type. It provides a detailed and explicit formal grammar paired with semantic analysis and pragmatic theory.