Perspectives on Discourse Analysis: Theory and Practice

420 Pages·2009·3.12 MB·English

by  Laura Alba-Juez

Perspectives on Discourse Analysis:
Theory and Practice

Perspectives on Discourse Analysis:
Theory and Practice
By
Laura Alba-Juez
Perspectives on Discourse Analysis: Theory and Practice,
by Laura Alba-Juez
This book first published 2009
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2009 by Laura Alba-Juez
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-0597-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0597-1
For Gustavo, Joaquín and Julian

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements....................................................................................ix
Introduction.................................................................................................1
Chapter One.................................................................................................5
Introducing Discourse Analysis
Chapter Two..............................................................................................25
The Data
Chapter Three............................................................................................45
Pragmatics
Chapter Four..............................................................................................79
Interactional Sociolinguistics
Chapter Five............................................................................................109
Conversation Analysis
Chapter Six..............................................................................................133
The Ethnography of Communication
Chapter Seven..........................................................................................155
Variation Analysis and Narrative Analysis
Chapter Eight...........................................................................................177
Functional Sentence Perspective: Thematic and Information Structures
Chapter Nine............................................................................................207
Post Structuralist theory and Social Theory
Chapter Ten.............................................................................................235
Critical Discourse Analysis and Positive Discourse Analysis
viii Table of Contents
Chapter Eleven........................................................................................265
Mediated Discourse Analysis
Chapter Twelve.......................................................................................289
Further Issues in Discourse Analysis
References...............................................................................................323
Key to Self-Evaluation Questions...........................................................347
Practice Key............................................................................................355
Conceptual Index.....................................................................................393
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
No present book on Discourse Analysis can boast of not having drawn on
previous works on the subject. In this respect, I owe a special debt to all
the authors whose work is cited or discussed in this book, and I hope not to
have misrepresented any of them. In particular, my personal consultation
with some of these researchers was of the greatest value and assistance.
Thus my thanks go to:
1) Bruce Fraser, for generously sharing his work on discourse
markers with me and for sending me his unpublished manuscripts.
2) Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, Robin Lakoff, Heidi
Hamilton, William Labov, Wallace Chafe and John Gumperz for
clarifying many of my doubts about their approaches to discourse
while I was a Visiting Researcher in the Linguistics Department
at Georgetown University (U.S.A.).
3) Angela Downing, for being such a good teacher, and for
generously giving and discussing with me some of her articles on
coherence, thematic progression, topicality and discourse
markers.
4) JoAnne Neff, for her perennial openness and her willingness in
sending me her articles on political discourse, as well as for
shedding light on my understanding of Critical Discourse
Analysis during our conversations and discussions.
5) Teun van Dijk, for clarifying many of my doubts about Critical
Discourse Analysis and the topic of ideology, by gently
answering all my questions after one of his talks at my university,
the UNED.
6) Irene Madfes, for sending me her articles on medical discourse.
My students of Discourse Analysis along the years have helped me
with their comments and suggestions to try to provide clearer and more
detailed explanations of certain topics, as well as to include a wider variety
of sample analyses of the different phenomena discussed in the book. My
sincere thanks go to them too.
I am especially grateful to my friend and colleague Gretchen Dobrott,
for her thorough, detailed and invaluable work in proof-reading the
manuscript. María Teresa Gibert also revised the manuscript and I