Discourse Analysis

Generally in the field of linguistics and translation, terms like 'Discourse analysis','Text analysis' 'Genre analysis' are scattered round arbitrarily with nebulous definitions and hard-to-relate-back examples. However this book does arm one with the tools needed to analyse discourse - a major practical help.

I'm currently in a discourse analysis seminar, and Dr. Johnstone is my teacher, so I get the interesting experience of having the textbook author at hand. That being said, I don't think it makes much of a difference in the utility of the textbook. It is an emminently clear, very readable introductory work that allows the reader to jump into practice with each aspect of theory introduced. As a discourse analysis practitioner I will want to go deeper into the primary texts that are introduced in this work, but I have still been able to understand and apply methodologies that are intorduced, in practice, on selections of discourse I've chosen. I really like that aspect of the textbook--here's some theory that can be grouped in some way, here are some methodologies that are amenable to this approach, and here's soem examples that you can model off of. As a student coming from an entirely literary critical background--no linguistics, communication, semiotics, even grammar in my background--I was really worried at the start of the seminar. The textbook has been a huge help in allowing me to feel comfortable and make a large jump from what I already knew to what is very new territory for me. Highly recoomend this as the base text for a seminar in DA.