Discourse & Pragmatics

Discourse analysis attempts to study the organization of language above the sentence or above the clause, and therefore to study larger linguistic units, such as conversational exchanges or written texts. In addition to essential ideas such as turn-taking, preference organization in conversational structure, and cohesion, coherence, grounding, theme & rheme, tense & aspect in text analysis, current interests in discourse analysis at NTNU include the use of corpora data to study sequential organization of talk-in-interaction and how grammar, as well as socio-ideological meanings, emerge from interactive contexts. Pragmatics is concerned with how speaker’s/writer’s meanings, especially intentions, assumptions, beliefs, and actions, are conveyed or performed through language in use. The making of meaning involves a dynamic negotiation of meaning between the language users and their interactants/readers. Topics that are of interest to researchers at NTNU include speech acts, implicature, conversation and politeness principles, grammaticalization, constructionalization and contrusctional changes, multimodality of implicature, and metapragmatics. The analysis focuses on how language is used in appropriate ways in the socio-cultural contexts in which the interaction takes place.

Miao-Hsia Chang specializes in Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics. She has published works in journals and books about the discourse and grammaticalization of discourse/pragmatic markers, adverbial expressions, formulaic expressions, speech acts, and recurrent lexical bundles and the roles they play in textuality and in the speaker’s management of information in Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese spoken and written discourse. She is also interested in the application of linguistic research in discourse analysis and pragmatics to English and Chinese language teaching.

Hsi-Yao Su specializes in Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis. She is interested in how social and ideological meanings are produced and reproduced in a variety of face-to-face and mediated contexts and how identities are constructed in discourse.

Instructor(s):

• Dr. Chang, Miao-Hsia
• Dr. Su, Hsi-Yao

Related Courses Provided:

• ENC2037 Language and Cognition
• END2021 Theories in Language and Cognition
• END2028 Cognitive Psychology
• ENM2026 Discourse Analysis
• END2036 Seminar on Discourse Analysis
• ENC3041 Discourse Analysis and English Teaching
• ENC2017 Studies in Pragmatics
• END2011 Seminar in Pragmatics
• ENC3013 Pragmatics and English Teaching