Discourse Analysis

By Barbara Johnstone

Book Overview

A new edition of the bestselling textbook on discourse analysis, ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in linguistics and the broader humanities and social sciences Discourse Analysis explains how to collect and analyze spoken, written, and multimodal language. Now in its fourth edition, this popular textbook encourages students to think systematically and critically about different sources of discourse to better understand why spoken utterances and written texts have the meanings and uses they do. Throughout the book, the authors offer real-life examples of what discourse analysis can reveal about language, individuals, groups, and society. Student-friendly chapters describe discourse analysis with a goal of helping students master the fundamental concepts of this important area of linguistic research. Each chapter contains discussion questions that encourage students to relate the material to their own experiences, perform their own analyses, and consider important issues in research design and research ethics. The new edition of Discourse Analysis includes new discussion questions and ideas for research projects, up-to-date supplementary readings, and expanded discussions of corpus analysis methods, rhetorical legitimation, and social identities. This textbook: Teaches students to apply discourse analysis to answer research questions in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences Explains the complex relationships between discourse and various aspects of context, such as linguistic structure, participants, and prior discourse Provides instructors with the flexibility to re-order chapters to meet the needs of their students Features exercises that incorporate extensive data from a variety of languages and situations, including discourse in electronic media Contains discussion questions, activities, research projects suggestions, further readings, chapter summaries, and other pedagogical features Discourse Analysis, Fourth Edition, remains the ideal primary text for undergraduate and graduate courses in language and linguistics, language pedagogy, rhetoric and composition, and linguistic ethnography.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1394185162
• ISBN13: 9781394185160
• Release Date: January 2024
• Publisher: Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, John
• Length: 320 Pages

Customer Reviews

Probably your best bet for understanding Discourse Analysis

Generally in the field of linguistics and translation, terms like 'Discourse analysis','Text analysis' 'Genre analysis' are scattered round arbitrarily with nebulous definitions and hard-to-relate-back examples. However this book does arm one with the tools needed to analyse discourse - a major practical help.

Theory & Practice Together

I'm currently in a discourse analysis seminar, and Dr. Johnstone is my teacher, so I get the interesting experience of having the textbook author at hand. That being said, I don't think it makes much of a difference in the utility of the textbook. It is an emminently clear, very readable introductory work that allows the reader to jump into practice with each aspect of theory introduced. As a discourse analysis practitioner I will want to go deeper into the primary texts that are introduced in this work, but I have still been able to understand and apply methodologies that are intorduced, in practice, on selections of discourse I've chosen. I really like that aspect of the textbook--here's some theory that can be grouped in some way, here are some methodologies that are amenable to this approach, and here's soem examples that you can model off of. As a student coming from an entirely literary critical background--no linguistics, communication, semiotics, even grammar in my background--I was really worried at the start of the seminar. The textbook has been a huge help in allowing me to feel comfortable and make a large jump from what I already knew to what is very new territory for me. Highly recoomend this as the base text for a seminar in DA.