3.2 Beyond sentences: Discourse analysis (optional)

The purpose of analyzing sentence structures is to prepare for discourse analysis (discourse is a stretch of written or spoken text).

You can analyze the pragmatic (meaning in context), semantic (literal meaning), and syntactic (structure) features of sentences and phrases in a discourse, either in a single text or a number of different texts differing in register (written vs. spoken; English spoken in a bar vs. in a court ), source (Chaucer vs. Shakespeare), style (Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald)etc.

In addition, you can also analyze morphological (words), phonological (phonemes), and phonemic (speech sounds) features of a discourse (like in poems).

After completing this course, you should be prepared for discourse analysis, which is the focus of another course, LING505 Corpus Linguistics, that I taught. You should have the grammar knowledge to be an English teacher.

In this foundation course, we have learned the basic concepts in grammatical analysis and a way to draw tree diagrams to illustrate the internal hierarchical structures of basic sentence types. You may still wonder the practical value of what you have learned. After all, everything seems abstract!

However, to be able to do anything fun, big, and practical, you have to go through the initial painstaking stage to lay a solid foundation. With such as knowledge base, you now have the tool to carry out your own lexical-grammatical analysis of various text types, including but not limited to literary texts (fiction, nonfiction, and poetry), your future students' writing, and even the stylistic characteristics in your own writing and speeches!

Other professional disciplines that require grammatical knowledge include forensic linguistics (e.g., to analyze the linguistic features of a ransom note to pin down the geographic origin, gender, educational background, and age, etc. of a suspect), critical discourse analysis (e.g., to analyze how journalism writing moulds public opinions), and speech pathology (e.g., to analyze aphasia patients speech to identify problematic areas and create a treatment plan).

Please check out the texts below to learn about how these fields look like.

The table below summarizes Leech and Short's (2013) recommended lexical, grammatical, and textual features to include in stylistic analysis of fictions. Hope that by now, you have no trouble in understanding its content as this course has covered everything except figures os speech and textual features (cohesion and context). These same features can also be used in analyzing other text types.

Have fun applying your grammar knowledge and skills to improve your speech and writing and helping other people accomplish the same goal!

A relevant course: LING 505 Special Topics: Corpus Linguistics

In this course, students will learn how to to build a corpus (a electronic collection of written texts or transcripts of spoken discourses) or to use existing corpora (e.g., COCA/Corpus of Contemporary English) to conduct a research study and write a research paper to report the results. Students can choose literary, legal, business texts or other text types of your interest. Students will also learn how to use a concordance tool AntConc to conduct lexical-grammatical analysis of the corpus.

Check out this webpage to learn an example comparing Amazon and Google in regard to pay perception.