Discourse Analysis (PDF)

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.