DA, CDA, Text linguistics, Sociolinguistics... Newbie questi

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Daniel Watts
Posts: 14
Joined: July 20th, 2013, 6:14 am

DA, CDA, Text linguistics, Sociolinguistics... Newbie questi

Post by Daniel Watts »

Hey all. Just found this site and its incredible. Wish I'd known about it during my BA.
Anyway, I'm starting my MA in September and am interested in pushing my interests in languages further, particularly in the area of pragmatics. Obviously DA is the big dealio at the minute, but as a newcomer to the field, there seems to be a lot of terminology which overlaps and causes confusion.
From what I gather, pragmatics is the major category (like semantics/syntax) and DA is a category within that, closely aligned with things like Speech-act Theory and SFG. DA itself then seems to contain a range of perspectives from the more Foucautian tradition of Discourse as power-play (is this were CDA comes in?) to an approach that is more focused on the relation of sentences and paragraphs within a discourse (text linguistics? Composition studies?).

I also read an article by Nida who was talking g about sociolinguistics in a way that I understood pragmatics, I.e the overall field of studying language in use. Isn't sociolinguistics primarily concerned with the effects of ones social status an situation on speech?

Overall I'm very confused and am trying to find a path into a field that doesn't yet seem to have clearly defined boundaries. From what I pick up on tips forum, DA is more concerned with the micro level of discourse markers and pragmatic reasons for certain syntactic structures. Is that correct?
Thanks
Stephen Carlson
Posts: 3351
Joined: May 11th, 2011, 10:51 am
Location: Melbourne
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Re: DA, CDA, Text linguistics, Sociolinguistics... Newbie qu

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Discourse analysis is a rather broad topic with many different approaches. In fact, it is so broad that it's hard to say much about them but a lingering feeling that there's more to what's being said than the sentence. Nevertheless, since the topic is still very much wide open, there are a lot of potential interesting things you could do with it.

For the kinds of questions I'm interested in, I've found Steve Runge's Discourse Grammar to be a nice entry into this big field, though it does not purport to be a "state of the question" work. I had encountered some forms of discourse analysis almost two decades earlier, but I have to admit that they had left me cold.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
TimNelson
Posts: 61
Joined: October 17th, 2014, 11:04 pm
Location: Australia, Victoria, Geelong

Re: DA, CDA, Text linguistics, Sociolinguistics... Newbie qu

Post by TimNelson »

https://sites.google.com/a/sheffield.ac ... e-analysis

Discourse Analysis has (at least) 3 meanings, which are defined at the link above. I tend to use the first meaning, but that's because my interests lean that way. It seems to me that use 1 could align with syntactics, and use 2 with pragmatics.
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Tim Nelson
B. Sc. (Computer Science), M. Div. Looking for work (in computing or language-related jobs).
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