Discourse And Discourse Analysis

ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES (ESP)

MPhil English Linguistics Programme

2011-2013

Lahore Leads University

ASSIGNMENT 3

Register, Discourse & Genre Analysis

Name: Zulfiqar Ahmad

ID # 4025

Submitted to:

Dr Zahid Javed Chaudary

1. Introduction

2. Register

The concept of special language: register analysis

• This concept departed from the principle that English of a specific science differs from each other in terms of its grammatical and lexical features of the registers.

• Register analyses in ESP was tailored for the pedagogic purpose, i.e. making the ESP course more relevant to learners’ needs, not intended for the purpose to discuss the nature of registers of English per se.

• The main purpose of an ESP course was to produce a syllabus which gave a high priority to the language forms students would meet in their field and in turn would give low priority to forms they would not meet. Beyond the sentence: rhetorical or discourse analysis

• Stages of ESP development: 1st stage focused on language at the sentence level, 2nd phase shifted attention the level above the sentence (putting into play discourse or rhetorical analyses).

• Thus, the main focus of register analysis is on how sentences were combined in discourse to produce meaning.

3. Discourse discourse (n.) A term used in linguistics to refer to a continuous stretch of (especially spoken) language larger than a sentence – but, within this broad notion, several different applications may be found. At its most general, a discourse is a behavioural unit which has a pre-theoretical status in linguistics: it is a set of utterances which constitute any recognizable speech event (no reference being made to its linguistic structuring, if any), e.g. a conver...

... middle of paper ...

...eport. Similarly, recount can be used with report and discussion. Likewise, narrative, discussion, and report can combined with recount, and recount can be blended with report and explanation.

Different genres and registers employ a range of cohesive devices and for varying communicative functions. For instance, the use of reference, substitution and ellipsis in legal texts is minimal and, synonyms and super-ordinates are generally scanty in scientific and technical texts. While Halliday and Hasan (1976) and other researchers primarily use literary texts, Cook (2001) and Huang (2001) deal with cohesive devices in advertisements, and Yu (2004) investigates cohesive devices in academic introductions from the perspective of genre. Nevertheless, the study of cohesive devices in non-literary texts is still a neglected area which needs further explorations.

5. Conclusion