Workshop in Analysis of Discourse

The Interdisciplinary Committee on Linguistics at Arizona presents this workshop by Edward Finegan, professor emeritus of linguistics and law at the University of Southern California. ASU graduate students and advanced undergraduates are invited to register.

Discourse analysis (DA) is distinguished from other kinds of linguistic analysis chiefly by its focus not on structure itself but on the relationship between language structure and situated meaning. Discourse analysis takes many forms, some qualitative and others quantitative. This workshop includes a brief and broad survey of several DA methods, with examples. The major part of the workshop involves hands-on analysis of texts chosen from political discourse, scholarly (linguistic) discourse, supermarket tabloid reports alleged to be defamatory, and markers of stance in U.S. Supreme Court opinions. Texts will be viewed through several lenses, including register, social situation, purpose, and audience.

About the presenter

Edward Finegan researches language variation and change, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics. As a forensic linguist, he has served as an expert consultant in scores of state and federal cases and is a past president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists.

Finegan has taught at four Linguistic Society of America's summer institutes. Among his publications are "Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register" (co-edited with D. Biber) and "Language in the USA" (co-edited with J. R. Rickford). His "Language: Its Structure and Use" appeared in its seventh edition in 2015. He and Douglas Biber compiled ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers), now an ongoing project managed by participants across seven countries. He is the founding general editor of Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics. He currently serves the Dictionary Society of North America's delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies, as editor of its journal, Dictionaries, and will soon begin a term as its vice-president/president-elect.

This ICOL event is presented with support from the Department of English and the School of International Letters and Cultures, both academic units in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.