Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The term 'discourse analysis' has come to be used with a wide range of meanings which cover a wide range of activities. It is used to describe activities at the intersection of disciplines as diverse as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, philosophical linguistics and computational linguistics. Scholars working centrally in these different disciplines tend to concentrate on different aspects of discourse. Sociolinguists are particularly concerned with the struc- ture of social interaction manifested in conversation, and their descriptions emphasise features of social context which are particu- larly amenable to sociological classification