Holistic Discourse Analysis

About this book

The title Holistic Discourse Analysis is chosen to highlight the conviction that linguistic analysis properly deals with wholes and not with fragments. Discourse analysis, properly developed and practiced, implies analysis of the lower-level concerns that may be collectively referred to as the morphosyntax. Discourse analysis cannot be carried out in any language without knowledge of the morphosyntax. On the other hand, the morphosyntax itself demands the insights discoverable in discourse analysis as its rationale. We claim that the whole determines the part and that most of the whys are found in consideration of discourse context. So the title Holistic Discourse Analysis simply affirms this mutual dependency of grammatical structure from morpheme to discourse. What our title specifically denies is that discourse analysis can be bundled off and shifted to an area of semi-autonomous concerns such as pragmatics, with the implication that it is a good thing to do some day if one ever gets around to it. - Preface. The central idea of this volume is the insistence that the structure of a part of a text must be explained in light of the structure of the whole. This needs to be repeated anew to every generation of linguistics students as a warning against analytic nearsightedness-the fixation on parts of a text without regard to the whole. Holistic Discourse Analysis is not a plea to abandon the analysis of lower levels of grammar, but to enrich the study of them by putting them in broader perspective. The book addresses discourse analysis and its purpose, text typology, and constituent-based charting with an analysis of a story in terms of peak and profile. It discusses functions of different verb types and their tense/aspect/modality, of noun phrases, and of clause combining in discourse. It includes a chapter with a layman's introduction to discourse analysis, and another with ways to represent combinations of sentences in a paragraph. The last three chapters deal with nonnarrative discourses: procedural, hortatory, and expository. This Second Edition has significantly improved the usability of the volume by employing color-coding in illustrative texts so the reader can more easily visualize multiple levels of prominence in these texts. This book offers itself both as a classroom text and a field manual for discourse analysis. It can also serve as an introduction to the more theoretically oriented volume, Longacre's The Grammar of Discourse (1996). - Publisher.