Discourse Analysis

This paper presents a method for the analysis of connected speech (or writing). The method is formal, depending only on the occurrence of morphemes as distinguishable elements; it does not depend upon the analyst's knowledge of the particular meaning of each morpheme. By the same token, the method does not give us any new information about the individual morphemic meanings that are being communicated in the discourse under investigation. But the fact that such new information is not obtained does not mean that we can discover nothing about the discourse but how the grammar of the language is exemplified within it. For even though we use formal procedures akin to those of descriptive linguistics, we can obtain new information about the particular text we are studying, information that goes beyond descriptive linguistics.

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