Case Studies In Discourse Analysis

Discourse permeates human life, manifesting itself in all kinds of speech acts, from conversations to clinical dialogues between a patient and practitioner. While discourse has been studied within specific disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, and psychology, over the last few decades an autonomous approach, known as Discourse Analysis, has emerged to develop its own theoretical and research agendas aimed at penetrating the nature and role of discourse in human life. This collection of case studies in discourse aims to examine these agendas in specific situations, and thus to contribute to the growing significance of this exciting field of inquiry. It thus presents a composite picture of what discourse analysis is and what it allows us to do in the area of speech analysis. The chapters deal with the kinds of discourses that characterize medical communication, media and public discourse, conflict resolution and reconciliation, juridical communication, gastronomical language, text messaging, education, and others. Written by active researchers in the fields of discourse analysis proper and its correlative field of argumentation theory, both the expert and the neophyte will be able to glean from the various chapters how this new discipline is evolving and what it can achieve in shedding light on the complexities of human interaction.0.