Evolving Communication

Winter quarter: Discourse Analysis

Each week you should read the chapter assigned in Johnstone's Discourse Analysis prior to class.  Weeks 4, 6, & 8 you will have a project to complete including a paper. These will be attached below.  Project #1 is due Jan. 28.  Each of your papers will indicate your learning as will your work in class on exercises and your final exam. When writing the final exam you may use your book and notes.

Weekly assigned exercises will be listed here.  

Jan 7: you should be prepared to discuss exercise 1.8 pp. 24-26. You do not need to submit any work.

Jan 14: read chapter 2 and be prepared do discuss exercises 2.5 pp. 35-6; 2.6 pp. 41-2.  You will have only a few moments to share your ideas in small groups and then report out, so do these exercises before class.  They can be in note form, responses will not be collected.

Jan. 24: Class reduced to one hour lecture on Nonverbal Behavior.

Jan. 28: We will finish discussing chapter 2, so review the notion of the agent and patient (active and passive voice), epistemic forms (indicating levels of certainty), and language ideology. Be prepared to discuss exercises 2.14 on pp 63-65; and 2.22 p. 70. Read CH. 3.

Feb. 4: We will finish discussing chapter 3, pp 101-127. 

Feb. 11:  Your discourse project #2 has been postponed for two weeks due to difficulties accessing the Stanford website.  For those of you who were able to find a way to do the original assignment, you have a choice of continuing with your analysis or doing the new assignment.  Please read chapter 4. Write a short esssay (150 words or fewer) in response to exercise 4.5 on p. 136.  Instead of discussing several discourse communities, respond to the questions as they regard the seminar.  Try to think of indexical forms of language which establish the social meanings your identify.  You might think of the phrases we use or you have heard in seminar first and then think of what it is that they index if that's easier.  At any rate, you will want to be descriptive here, not general.

Project_2Revised is now attached below. The clips you will be analyzing were recorded as final projects in another program, Art of Conversation. They were attached to that website so they are very small in size, but good quality video and audio.  Please let me know if you have difficulty accessing these clips.  Your report is due Monday, Feb. 25.

Feb. 21: Read chapter 5 on prior texts (pp 162-194) and reflect on game theory and conversation.

Feb 25: Read chapter 7: Intention and intrpretation. 

Study Guide for the Discourse Exam:

• Look at the 5 heuristics we have been studying (p. 10) and make sure you understand 1-2 ways they operate. (We did not examine the way discourse is shaped by its medium and how discourse shapes the possibilities of its medium.)
• What is the goal of discourse analysis?
• Why have we been studying conversation in this program?
• How do speakers reveal their stance towards their own utterances?
• What does it mean to say that we perform our identities? What are other ways of thinking about identity?
• How are solidarity and power realized in conversation?
• Review concepts such as intertextuality, indexicality, appropriation, footing, politeness theory, register, code switching, cohesion, speech acts, etc.
• Consider the functions of repetition
• As you review the analyses of the transcriptions in the text, look carefully at how concepts are applied.  For example, you may see repetition. Then ask yourself, how does it function?  What is the speaker accomplishing by repeating?

How will the exam be organized?

• There will be short essays on topics drawn from the text.

• You will be asked to analyze transcriptions with some indications of what to look for and with no guidelines, so you can look through some transcriptions and try to find concepts you have been studying as practice.  For example, you should recognized narration when it occurs and be able to analyze its structure.

Bring your text, assignments, and notes!  These are suggestions for studying. Reviewing what we discussed in class is the best preparation.