Page 264 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes interim year. He tried to publish a paper Shipibo Paragraph Structure, but it was delayed until
1970. In the meantime, Dr. Kenneth Lee Pike, a professor at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
taught the theory, and one of his students, Robert E. Longacre, was able to disseminate it in a
dissertation.
Harris's methodology was developed into a system for the computer-aided analysis of natural
language by a team led by Naomi Sager at NYU, which has been applied to a number of sublanguage
domains, most notably to medical informatics. The software for the Medical Language Processor
is publicly available on SourceForge.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, and without reference to this prior work, a variety of other approaches
to a new cross-discipline of DA began to develop in most of the humanities and social sciences
concurrently with, and related to, other disciplines, such as semiotics, psycholinguistics,
sociolinguistics, and pragmatics. Many of these approaches, especially those influenced by the
social sciences, favor a more dynamic study of oral talk-in-interaction.
Mention must also be made of the term "Conversational analysis", which was influenced by the
Sociologist Harold Garfinkel who is the founder of Ethnomethodology.
In Europe, Michel Foucault became one of the key theorists of the subject, especially of discourse,
and wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge. In this context, the term 'dicourse' is no longer referred
to formal linguistic aspects, but to institutionalized patterns of knowledge, that become manifest
in disciplinary structures and operate by the connection of knowledge and power. Since the 1970s,
Foucault´s works have had an increasing impact especially on discourse analysis in the social
sciences. Thus, in modern European social sciences, one can find a wide range of different
approaches working with Foucault´s definition of discourse and his theoretical concepts. Apart
from the original context in France, there is, at least since 2005, a broad discussion on socio-
scientific discourse analysis in Germany. Here, for example, the sociologist Reiner Keller developed
his widely recognized 'Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD)'. Following the
sociology of knowledge by Peter L. Berger und Thomas Luckmann, Keller argues, that our sense
of reality in everyday life and thus the meaning of every objects, actions and events are the
product of a permanent, routinized interaction. In this context, SKAD has been developed as a
scientific perspective that is able to understand the processes of 'The Social Construction of Reality'
on all levels of social life by combining Michel Foucaults theories of discourse and power with the
theory of knowledge by Berger/Luckmann. Whereas the latter primarily focus on the constitution
and stabilisation of knowledge on the level of interaction, Foucaults perspective concentrates on
institutional contexts of the production and integration of knowledge, where the subject mainly
appears to be determined by knowledge and power. Therefore, the 'Sociology of Knowledge
Approach to Discourse' can also be seen as an approach to deal with the vividly discussed micro-
macro problem in sociology.
19.1 Linguistic Discourse Analysis

The following are some of the specific theoretical perspectives and analytical approaches used in
linguistic discourse analysis. Although these approaches emphasize different aspects of language
use, they all view language as social interaction, and are concerned with the social contexts in
which discourse is embedded.
Often a distinction is made between 'local' structures of discourse (such as relations among sentences,
propositions, and turns) and 'global' structures, such as overall topics and the schematic organization
of discourses and conversations. For instance, many types of discourse begin with some kind of
global 'summary', in titles, headlines, leads, abstracts, and so on.
A problem for the discourse analyst is to decide when a particular feature is relevant to the
specification is required. Are there general principles which will determine the relevance or nature
of the specification.
The practical part of this paper describes the study conducted on a group of Polish learners of
English. The focus of this component was brought to finding lexical chains in texts - a type of

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