two models?
Trevor Peterson
06PETERSON at cua.edu
Thu Oct 24 10:48:37 EDT 2002
>===== Original Message From Mark Wilson <emory2oo2 at hotmail.com> =====
>For some reason I don't think of Discourse Analysis
>when I think of writing a "letter" to someone.
>
>What comes to my mind with DA is related to larger
>literary works, books for example, but not a PERSONAL letter from
>a guy named Paul to a UNIQUE group of loved ones in a small town
>in Galatia....especially letters designed to offer correction
>and admonition on several, perhaps even unrelated, problems.
A couple of thoughts on this. First, the NT epistles tend to be somewhat more
than personal letters. A lot has been recognized in terms of their literary
features that show a higher style than, say, a typical e-mail. Second, there's
a legitimate problem of ambiguity in the term "discourse analysis." For one
thing, "discourse" can be used in a more limited sense to refer to an oral
speech situation. By extension, it can refer to a written communication
situation, but that starts to blur the meaning. Further blurring comes when
the issues being analyzed in communication extend beyond those factors that
pertain directly to the speech (communicative) situation. As the term tends to
be used, it has become something of an umbrella category to include basically
any analysis that exceeds the level of the sentence. I've also seen the term
applied to the whole task of reading, which IMO is something quite different.
I think it's good that all of these features are coming under consideration,
but it probably wouldn't hurt to clean up the terminology a bit.
Discourse analysis, then, is particularly suitable for analyzing features of
informal, unstructured speech. Like other facets of linguistics, it is
concerned with how language is naturally used, not so much the careful (and
artificial) structuring of a rhetorically complex composition.
Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics
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