Barbara Johnstone

Fully revised and updated throughout, the new edition of Discourse Analysis is a user-friendly textbook for students taking their first course in linguistic approaches to discourse. Second edition of a popular introductory textbook, combining breadth of coverage, practical examples, and student-friendly features Includes new sections on metaphor, framing, stance and style, multimodal discourse, and Gricean pragmatics Considers a variety of approaches to the subject, including critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, interactional and variationist sociolinguistics, ethnography, corpus linguistics, and other qualitative and quantitative methods Features detailed descriptions of the results of discourse analysts’ work Retains and expands the useful student features, including discussion questions, exercises, and ideas for small research projects.

Discourse Analysis

Jennifer Andrus

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.

An engaging exploration of the history of Pittsburghese, one of the most recognizable urban "dialects" in the United States today.

The Story of a Dialect

Speaking Pittsburghese

Professor of Rhetoric and Linguistics Barbara Johnstone

In recent years, many humanists and social scientists have rejected the notion that understanding is a simple matter of encoding and decoding. Current theory in linguistic pragmatics, in rhetoric, in cultural anthropology, and in literary theory, stresses the situated, interactive, rhetorical nature of understanding. Various approaches to the ways understanding is constructed in the process of interaction--such as interactional sociolinguistics, epistemic rhetoric, ethnography of communication, functionalist poetics, and reader response theory--make reference to the crucial role of repetition in this process. Linguists have examined repetition in conversation and in language acquisition. Anthropologists and folklorists have studied the role of parallelism as a feature of performance and as a recurring characteristic of ritual forms of talk. Students of poetics discuss repetition as a key feature of artistic language. Literary theorists and rhetoricians discuss "intertextuality," or the ways in which the authors of new texts make use of old texts. Clearly, anyone interested in a comprehensive theory of understanding must pay close attention to the mechanisms and functions of repetition. -- Preface.

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Repetition in Discourse

In this examination of expository prose in contemporary Arabic, structural and semantic repetition is found to be responsible both for linguistic cohesion and for rhetorical force. Johnstone identifies and discusses repetitive features on every level of analysis. Writers in Arabic use lexical couplets consisting of conjoined synonyms, which create new semantic paradigms as they evoke old ones. Morphological roots and patterns are repeated at close range, and this creates phonological rhyme as well. Regular patterns of paraphrase punctuate texts, and patterns of parallelism mark the internal structure of their segments. Johnstone offers an explanation for how repetition of all these kinds can serve persuasive ends by creating rhetorical presence, and discusses how the Arabic language and the Arab-Islamic cultural tradition especially lend themselves to this rhetorical strategy. She suggests, however, that discourse repetition serves a crucial function in the ecology of any language, as the mechanism by which speakers evoke and create underlying paradigmatic structure in their syntagmatic talk and writing.

Paradigms, Syntagms, and the Ecology of Language

Repetition in Arabic Discourse

This book explores the history of Pittsburghese, the language of the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area as it is imagined and used by Pittsburghers. Pittburghese is linked to local identity so strongly that it is alluded to almost every time people talk about what Pittsburgh is like, or what it means to be a Pittsburgher. But what happened during the second half of the 20th century to reshape a largely unnoticed way of speaking into this highly visible urban "dialect"? In this book, sociolinguist Barbara Johnstone focuses on this question. Treating Pittsburghese as a cultural product of talk, writing, and other forms of social practice, Johnstone shows how non-standard pronunciations, words, and bits of grammar used in the Pittsburgh area were taken up into a repertoire of words and phrases and a vocal style that has become one of the most resonant symbols of local identity in the United States today.

Barbara Johnstone

About

Books

Join the club