Seminar 1

Writting activities
1.You have observed the development of the term ‘discourse’ in the modern
theory of discourse. Draw a Mind-Map, including the following items:
Prerequisites -> Linguistics of Text -> The aim of the study -> The language+ text
-> the independent interdisciplinary area
School or system leaders who progress through this book with colleagues
will develop a shared vision for ambitious teaching and learning anchored in the
instructional core; organize the work of the leadership and teacher teams to
advance this vision; and build psychologically safe team, school, and system
cultures to support the risk taking and constructive challenges necessary to move
schools or systems to the next level of performance.
When you do discourse analysis, you might focus on:
• The purposes and effects of different types of language
• Cultural rules and conventions in communication
• How values, beliefs and assumptions are communicated
• How language use relates to its social, political and historical context

2. Give the brief information about the discourse as an object of linguistic

research. Fulfil the following scheme or make table that shows its important
items:
Discourse -> internal coherence-> Discourse analysis
Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of
communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning
fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse
analysis. Following pioneering work by Michel Foucault, these fields view
discourse as a system of thought, knowledge, or communication that constructs our
experience of the world. Since control of discourse amounts to control of how the
world is perceived, social theory often studies discourse as a window into power.
Within theoretical linguistics, discourse is understood more narrowly as linguistic
information exchange and was one of the major motivations for the framework of
dynamic semantics, in which expressions' denotations are equated with their ability
to update a discourse context.
Internal coherence is defined as the ability of educators in a school or
system to connect and align resources to carry out an improvement strategy,
engage in collective learning, and use that learning to provide students with richer
educational opportunities. The internal coherence framework featured in the book
brings together three important domains of research: leadership for learning,
organizational improvement, and instructional efficacy.
Discourse analysis is a research method for studying written or spoken
language in relation to its social context. It aims to understand how language is
used in real life situations.
3. You have observed, that in the course of linguistic research constantly have
been appeared new interpretations of the discourse. M. Sushko-
Bezdenezhnuh, determines three main approaches to the definition of
discourse. Fulfil the following table:
Approach to the definition of discourse Definition

the Anglo-Saxon linguistic tradition (D.  discourse - is actually a dialogue, an

Schifrin, D. Cristal, G. Cook)
the T. van Dijk's conception of the
communicative nature of text
French semantic school (A. Grames, G.  discourse is a crosss-point of many
Curte, G. Lakan, M. Foucault)
interaction between the speaker and the
listener; an authentic daily
communication, mainly oral, included in
the wide communicative context.
 discourse- is a communicative
phenomenon, which is of procedural
character, occurs in a certain out-of-
lingual context and is fixed in speech as
a formal structure - text (written or oral).
intercorrelated texts; as a whole of texts,
which are thematically, culturally or
anyhow connected and function within
the certain communicative sphere and
admit the development and
supplementation by other texts.

4.You have studied the terms between discourse, text and context.  Now fulfill
the following task. Give your definitions of these very terms.
Text and discourse are two terms that are commonly used in linguistics,
literature, and language studies. There are many debates about the
interchangeability of these two terms. Some linguistics view text and discourse
analysis as the same process whereas some others use these two terms to define
different concepts. Text can refer to any written material that can be read.
Discourse is the use of language in a social context.
The main difference between text and discourse is that the text does not
specify an agent whereas the discourse specifies the agent of the information.
Thus, a text is necessarily non-interactive while discourse is necessarily
interactive.
A text includes some information, specifically in the written form or printed
form. Thus, it is noteworthy that the agent of a text is not crucial: there may or may
not be an agent. And the agent has no direct impact of the content to the reader. For
example, consider the text in a subject textbook, an essay, or a press release where
the information is merely reported with or without an agent or the speaker. The
information present in a text is usually non-interactive, or it does not contain an
indication of conversational speech. Thus, the reader only reads and becomes
aware of the facts presents. As defined by the Linguistic glossary terms, text is “a
sequence of paragraphs that represents an extended unit of speech.” Therefore, the
grammatical cohesion is a fundamental factor in a text.
A discourse is necessarily interactive, which means there is always an agent
to the information in discourse. In simple terms, discourse is often conversational
communications between people. Therefore, under linguistics and literary theory,
discourse is defined as “a social event of multi-layered communication in a variety
of media: verbal, textual, visual and audial, that has an interactive social purpose.”

5. Make a scheme that shows the main problem in the theory of discourse.
Include in your scheme linguistis (psycholinguists), who examined this
problem, their viewpoints and outcomes of their works.
Psycholinguistics (PL) is the study of the relationship between language and
the brain.
• Psycholinguists view the study of human language as inseparable part from the
study of the working of the brain.
• Psycholinguists examine the most crucial issues about the interaction between the
brain and language in relation to how language is acquired, processed and stored.
Psycholinguistics is the study of the mental aspects of language and speech.
It is primarily concerned with the ways in which language is represented and
processed in the brain. A branch of both linguistics and psychology,
psycholinguistics is part of the field of cognitive science. To investigate what
psycholinguistics examine and define the search for an understanding of how
humans. develop, perceive and produce a language. Psycholinguistics is adjoining
of psychology and linguistics. Being the research. object of psycholinguistics
speech is not only biological, but also a psychological factor and which
characterized the person. Psycholinguistics explores the mental mechanisms of
basic language processing (cognitive); how to comprehend words and. intend them
in the mind, how to understand a sentence, how to learn to read, how language and
writing systems influence. mental organizations.

6. Make up your own concrete definition of discourse and text.

The term discourse has many meanings and definitions. Discourse was first
interpreted as dialogue – an interaction between a speaker and a listener. Thus,
discourse referred to authentic daily communications, mainly oral, included in the
wide communicative context. The term discourse was then also used to refer to the
totality of codified language used in a particular field intellectual inquiry and of
social practice (e.g. medical discourse, legal discourse, etc.)
A text can be defined as an object that can be read, whether it is a work of
literature, a lesson written on the blackboard, or a street sign. It is a coherent set of
signs that transmits some kind of informative message. In literary studies, text
usually refers to the written material. We use the term text when we are discussing
novels, short stories, and dramas. Even the content of a letter, bill, poster or similar
entities that contain written material can be called a text.

7. Analyze the three main approaches in the linguistics of the text.

Three main approaches to definition of meaning:
1) Referential (ссылочный)
2) Functional (contextual)
3) Operational (действенный)
In general, at the current level of development of text linguistics in this field
of linguistics, several main areas of research can be distinguished, which are
considered by different linguists either separately or in interrelation. This is
1) the study of the text as a system of the highest rank,
2) the definition of the units that make up the text,
3) the construction of a typology of texts,
4) the identification of special text categories.

8.Make a glossary the following approaches to text-analysis:

a) structural approach - is an approach in the study of language that emphasizes the
examination of language in very detailed manner. This strategy, which is
considered a traditional approach, examines language products such as sounds,
morphemes, words, sentences, and vocabulary, among others. It also facilitates the
process of learning language on the basis of structures.
b) communicative approach - is a learner centred approach. This approach gives
the learner not only grammatical competence but also a social skill as to what to
say. How to say, when to say and where, in order to satisfy his daily needs as
larger aim. In this approach, apart from fluency, accuracy and appropriateness are
equally important.
c) functional-pragmatic approach - sees language as a social instrument with which
we perform social communicative functions, such as greeting each other, asking
questions, giving commands, providing information and linguistically acting in the
world. In this approach the meaning of an utterance is equivalent to its use. This
view of meaning has given rise to the domain of pragmatics, in which theories
such as speech act theory view utterances as speech acts with various types of
forces.