Discourse and spoken discourse

Course Description

The course introduces students to the analysis of naturally connected discourse, spoken and written by providing them with some theoretical basis (i.e. exposing students to the different approaches to the analysis of the communicative functions of language), and more importantly providing students with tools to analyze a wide variety of discourse types.

Course Aims

Students should be able to:

1. Compare between written discourse and spoken discourse.
2. Define different terms of discourse analysis, pragmatics, conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, etc.
3. Discuss speech act theory and politeness principle.
4. Analyse the four Gricean Maxims.
5. Apply the Maxims of Grice on short utterances.
6. Discuss main aspects of conversation with examples.
7. Identify different cohesion devices with examples.
8. Explains main  utterances of speech act theory .
9. Define corpus linguistics.
10. Discuss in details main criteria for developing a discourse  analysis project
11. Discuss main types of  corpora .
12. Understand issues to consider in constructing a corpus.
13. Develop a discourse analysis project.

Learning Outcomes

1. Knowledge of the features characterizing spoken discourse vs. those characterizing
2. written discourse, but they also should know that the differences depend largely on genres of texts.
3. Knowledge of speech act theory and politeness principle.
4. Knowledge of how discourse analysis is related to pragmatics .
5. Knowledge of main criteria for developing a discourse  analysis project
6. Knowledge of definition of stylistics, and what it means to do stylistic analysis