Università Roma Tre

The module offers an introduction to Discourse Studies as a comprehensive frame for research into the relationship between form and function in language use. Sitting at the interface of disciplines like linguistics, pragmatics, stylistics and rhetoric, Discourse Analysis can enhance students’ analytic capacities and metalinguistic awareness, both from an intra- and an interlinguistic perspective. After outlining general theories that have laid the foundations for an understanding of language as communication, the course will present some fundamental notions for the study of discourse, focusing on different aspects of the discourse situation. These will include the concepts of text type, genre, register, and style, all accounting for the variety of discourse forms as an effect of their function, and concepts related to the presentation of information (foreground vs background, given-new management, explicit vs implicit, evaluation). Special attention will be given to two types of texts: narration and argumentation. Narration will be approached mainly from a stylistic point of view, while argumentation will be addressed drawing in particular on the Pragmadialectical model.

The texts in the reading list are collected in a reader (dispensa), which is made available at the Copiando copy center