Discourse And Genre

A translation of recent essays by the eminent literary critic, Tzvelan Todorov.

This accessible guide to discourse employs an innovative, inductive approach, with a clear focus on genre that allows students to examine language in context. Using real texts, students are shown how each dimension of discourse links together and are offered practical guidance on how to carry out a discourse analysis project.

This book extends the scope and coverage of genre theory, giving more emphasis to what is known as pragmatic space; in other words it integrates the study of discourse at the textual level with the study of how that discourse operates in its social context.

Discourse is language as it occurs, in any form or context, beyond the speech act. It may be written or spoken, monological or dialogical, but there is always a communicative aim or purpose. The present volume provides systematic orientation in the vast field of studying discourse from a pragmatic perspective. It first gives an overview of a range of approaches developed for the analysis of discourse, including, among others, conversation analysis, systemic-functional analysis, genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus-driven approaches and multimodal analysis. The focus is furthermore on functional units in discourse, such as discourse markers, moves, speech act sequences, discourse phases and silence. The final section of the volume examines discourse types and domains, providing a taxonomy of discourse types and focusing on a range of discourse domains, e.g. classroom discourse, medical discourse, legal discourse, electronic discourse. Each article surveys the current state of the art of the respective topic area while also presenting new research findings.

This volume contributes to filling a gap in corpus-based research by investigating the ways in which linguistic features vary across genres/registers cross-linguistically. It brings together insightful chapters by leading scholars in the field, fruitfully exploiting genre- or register-controlled multilingual parallel and comparable corpora to: (i) problematize cross-register variation in a multilingual perspective, (ii) address methodological and theoretical issues raised by register-oriented contrastive and translation studies, (iii) investigate the cross-linguistic and cross-genre variation of specific linguistic features, such as lexical bundles, sentence-initial adverbials and tag questions, (iv) identify cross-cultural and cross-linguistic dissimilarities in expressing a functional category, viz. Appraisal, in the field of opinion mining. The book offers new cutting-edge research that should be of interest to specialists in contrastive linguistics, translation studies and cross-cultural studies. Originally published as a special issue of Languages in Contrast 14:1 (2014).

The tension between the real world of written discourse and its representation in applied genre-based literature is the main theme of this book. The book addresses this theme from the perspectives of four rather different worlds: the world of reality, the world of private intentions, the world of analysis and the world of applications. Using examples from a range of situations including advertising, business, academia, economics, law, book introductions, reports, media and fundraising, Bhatia uses discourse analysis to move genre theory away from educational contexts and into the real world.

"Genre theory in the past few years has contributed immensely to our understanding of the way discourse is used in academic, professional and institutional contexts. However, its development has been constrained by the nature and design of its applications, which have invariably focused on language teaching and learning, or communication training and consultation. This has led to the use of simplified and idealised genres. In contrast to this, the real world of discourse is complex, dynamic and unpredictable. This tension between the real world of written discourse and its representation in applied genre-based literature is the main theme of this book. The book addresses this theme from the perspectives of four rather different worlds: the world of reality, the world of private intentions, the world of analysis and the world of applications. Using examples from a range of situations including advertising, business, academia, economics, law, book introductions, reports, media and fundraising, Bhatia uses discourse analysis to move genre theory away from educational contexts and into the real world."--Bloomsbury Publishing.