Introduction to Discourse Analysis
This course introduces the study of discourse analysis, involving the analysis of language above the level of sentence as well as the investigation of language in context. The course will explore a wide range of phenomena included in the study of discourse from linguistic, psycholinguistic and computational points of view. Students will read original and recent work in these areas, and will engage themselves in collecting, analyzing and describing different forms of discourse. At the end of the course, students will be familiar with the basic aspects of the study of discourse. Assignments and the final exam will focus on the analysis of spoken and written discourse from different perspectives. Students will learn about different strategies for identifying patterns and labelling of discourse structures. Another goal of the course is to enable students to write descriptive accounts of their analyses of texts/dialogues, and to explain how discourse analysis contributes to a better understanding of language phenomena.