Discourse analysis

About: Discourse analysis is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 16055 publications have been published within this topic receiving 515384 citations. The topic is also known as: DA & discourse studies.

Defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy

Abstract: Academic literacies research has developed over the past 20 years as a significant field of study that draws on a number of disciplinary fields and subfields such as applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociocultural theories of learning, new literacy studies and discourse studies. Whilst there is fluidity and even confusion surrounding the use of the term ‘academic literacies’, we argue in this paper that it is a field of enquiry with a specific epistemological and ideological stance towards the study of academic communication and particularly, to date, writing. To define this field we situate the emergence of academic literacies research within a specific historical moment in higher education and offer an overview of the questions that the research has set out to explore. We consider debates surrounding the uses of the singular or plural forms, academic literacy/ies, and, given its position at the juncture of research/theory building and application, we acknowledge the need for strategic as well as epistemological and ideological understandings of its uses. We conclude by summarising the methodological and theoretical orientations that have developed as ‘academic literacies’, conceptualised as a field of inquiry, has expanded, and we point to areas that merit further theoretical consideration and empirical research.

The Theory and Practice of Discourse Parsing and Summarization

Abstract: From the Publisher: Until now, most discourse researchers have assumed that full semantic understanding is necessary to derive the discourse structure of texts. This book documents the first serious attempt to construct automatically and use nonsemantic computational structures for text summarization. Daniel Marcu develops a semantics-free theoretical framework that is both general enough to be applicable to naturally occurring texts and concise enough to facilitate an algorithmic approach to discourse analysis. He presents and evaluates two discourse parsing methods: one uses manually written rules that reflect common patterns of usage of cue phrases such as "however" and "in addition to"; the other uses rules that are learned automatically from a corpus of discourse structures. By means of a psycholinguistic experiment, Marcu demonstrates how a discourse-based summarizer identifies the most important parts of texts at levels of performance that are close to those of humans. Marcu also discusses how the automatic derivation of discourse structures may be used to improve the performance of current natural language generation, machine translation, summarization, question answering, and information retrieval systems.

Academic Attribution: Citation and the Construction of Disciplinary Knowledge.

Abstract: In this paper I explore the ways in which academic citation practices contribute to the construction of disciplinary knowledge. Based on the analysis of a computer corpus of 80 research articles and interviews with experienced writers, the study investigates the contextual variability of citations in eight disciplines and suggests how textual conventions point to distinctions in the ways knowledge is typically negotiated and confirmed within different academic communities. Clear disciplinary differences are identified in both the extent to which writers refer to the work of others and in how they depict the reported information. Writers in the humanities and social sciences employed substantially more citations than scientists and engineers, and were more likely to use integral structures, to employ discourse reporting verbs, and to represent cited authors as adopting a stance to their material. It is argued that these differences in citation practices are related to the fact that academics actively participate in knowledge construction as members of professional groups and that their discoursal decisions are influenced by, and deeply embedded in, the epistemological and social conventions of their disciplines.

Social Constructionist Psychology: A Critical Analysis of Theory and Practice

Abstract: Preface: what's wrong with social constructionism? Part 1 A critical analysis of theory: critical reflexive humanism and critical constructionist psychology beyond appearances - a critical realist approach to social constructionist work a paradigm shift? connections with other critiques of social constructionism. Part 2 Materiality and embodiment: between the dark and the light - power and the material contexts of social relations "discourse or materiality?" impure alternatives for recurrent debates discourse and the embodied person the extra-discursive in social constructionism realism, constructionism and phenomenology taking ourselves seriously. Part 3 A critical analysis of practice: whose construction? points from a feminist perspective social constructionism - implications for psychotherapeutic practice that's all very well, but what use is it? Conclusion: reconstructing social constructionism.

Feminist poststructuralism and discourse analysis: Contributions to feminist psychology.

Abstract: In this article I suggest that feminist poststructuralism (Weedon, 1987) is of great potential value to feminist psychologists seeking more satisfactory ways of theorizing gender and subjectivity. Some key elements of this theoretical perspective are discussed, including an understanding of knowledge as socially produced and inherently unstable, an emphasis on the importance of language and discourse, and a decentering of the subject. Discourse analysis is discussed as one way of working that is consistent with feminist poststructuralist theory. To illustrate this approach, an example is presented from my work on the sexual coercion of women within heterosexual relationships.