An interdisciplinary introduction to situated language use, especially natural, spontaneous dialogue. Students will identify discourse events and interactionally important linguistic features using recordings and transcripts. Focus will be placed on how speakers across cultures mobilize linguistic resources to regulate information flow and implement social actions.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students: Graduate students will be held to higher standards on the course papers, requiring the application of course concepts to create novel research. Specifically, graduate students:
a. Will learn additional theoretical and methodological issues pertaining to course concepts through supplementary readings and videos, and demonstrate awareness of such issues in additional guided writing tasks that undergraduates need not complete;
b. Will formulate mid-term and final paper topics based on their own research interests, rather than following pre-set topics;
c. Will produce a longer, more polished (~eight-page) final paper based on their own research interests and a larger dataset.
Athena Title
Discourse Analysis
Prerequisite
LING 2100 or LING 2100E or LING 2100H
Semester Course Offered
Offered every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
Students will be able to identify key aspects of communicative events, such as contexts, settings, communicative projects, and interactional style.
Students will be able to interpret conversational transcripts presented in standard formats.
Students will be able to visually annotate conversational transcripts to support their description and argumentation.
Students will be able to describe the types of conversational actions performed by conversational participants (e.g. question-answering, stance-taking) and relationships between actions within a conversation.
Students will be able to identify cohesive ties within a conversation (e.g. conjunctions, coreference, ellipsis, dialogic resonance) and describe how they help achieve cohesion.
Students will be able to identify linguistic features of interactional import (e.g. discourse markers, grammatical constructions, prosodic features, and pragmatic context) and describe how speakers mobilize them to implement conversational actions.
Topical Outline
1. Introduction to discourse: discourse as language in context; communicative events; interactional frames; participation frameworks; communicative projects; language use as choice; introduction to transcription; discourse markers
2. Turn-taking: turns and turn-constructional units; cues to turn completion; the backchannel; turn allocation; turn expansion; co-construction; silences and interruptions
3. Reference: coreference; accessibility and referential choice; identifiability; specificity and referentiality; intersubjectivity and common ground
4. Action, initiation and response: social action; adjacency pairs; question-answer pairs; action formation and ascription; sequence-closing thirds; sequence expansions; repair
