Seminar 2. Text Structure and composition

I. Get ready with the report or presentation on the following issues:

1. Text structure and composition.

2. Discourse structure and composition (Current Trends in Textlinguistics/ ed. W.U. Dressler. P. 104-122 - Moodle).

3. Discourse and society (Discourse analysis. B. Paltridge. P. 23-51 (2-3 persons may prepare) - Moodle).

4. Discourse grammar (Discourse analysis. B. Paltridge. P. 127-154 (2-3 persons may prepare) - Moodle).

II. Practice

1. (in class) Listen attentively to all reports, especially “Discourse and society” and complete the charts below:

2. (At home. For those who are not involved in the preparation of reports).

Seminar 3. Discourse and media. E-discourse.

Speak on the following questions:

Discourse structure (The Handbook of discourse analysis. P. 265-281 - Moodle).

Discourse and media (The Handbook of discourse analysis. P. 416-431 - Moodle).

Modality in discourse (Discourse variation across communities, cultures and times. P. 59-79 - Moddle).

Practice

1. (at home)

Get ready with presentations or reports on the following topics:

TV discourse

Radio discourse

Newspaper discourse

Internet discourse

Hints on how to prepare a presentation/ report

E.g.: you have chosen TV discourse to make a presentation:

- you choose 1 channel and speak about it in general (types of programs: talk-show, game, news, interview, etc.)

- you choose 1 or 2 programs and present a thorough description of the program (language peculiarities: syntagmatic/ paradigmatic relations between linguistic units, valency, semantic roles, standards of textuality, lexical and grammatical features of discourse, structure and composition of text/ discourse, type of text/ discourse, genre and register of text/ discourse, text style, etc.; social characteristics: producer and recipient of the text, age, social status, sex, occupation, interests, etc.)

Your own ideas are very welcomed J J

2. (in class)

Task 1

In many countries, a criminal trial has the following stages: indictment, prosecution case, defence case, summing up, verdict, sentence. The defence and prosecution cases are each made up of an introduction, testimonies of witnesses and a summary. Each testimony consists if examination and cross-examination, and each of these consists of questions and answers.

Draw up a typical tree diagram for the discourse type: academic discourse, political discourse, IT (information technology) discourse, trade (commerce) discourse.

How much do you think the structure of discourse types varies between cultures?

Task 2

What is given and new information for the reader? What problems do you encounter?

Yorkshire born climber Alan Hinks leaves for the Himalayas next week to take part in a historic assault on the Tibetan peak, Shishapangma. Alan, 33, will join renowed Polish mountaineer Jerry Kukuckza as he attempts to complete a remarkable sequence of conquests of the world’s highest mountains. For the Polish climber, Shishapangma is the only mountain over 8,000 metres which he has yet to climb. There are fourteen in all. The only person to achieve the feat of all 14 8,000-metre peaks is the Austrian superman Reinhold Messner.

(Yorkshire Evening Post, 7 August 2010)

Describe the peculiarities of the monologue. Present the text as a dialogue and describe its peculiarities as of the dialogue.

Task 3

Read the following extract. How do you react to it? How do you think the advanced learner would react? Which of the questions below will reveal most about the reader’s communicative competence?

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 1438