ABSTRACT
Language is often researched at two broad levels. The first level lies “within the sentence” and describes the more stable rules and properties of a language such as its speech sounds, word meanings and grammar. The second level is about how people use language to achieve various objectives in everyday life. The study of pragmatics, for example, considers how usage contexts contribute to meaning. Another closely related area is the study of discourse. In general, discourse research goes “beyond the sentence” to examine the dynamic ways in which language influences and gets influenced by various aspects of social life. There are many examples of basic linguistic “building tasks” (Gee, 2005) to create everyday social reality such as the enactment of activities, construction of identities and establishment of connections between people and objects. They are manifest in a diverse range of contemporary settings from newspaper articles to social media, and doctor–patient communication to university lectures. The forms and structures of discourse that enable and are shaped by these tasks are likewise diverse. A cursory list of widely studied examples includes anaphora, coherence, speech acts, turn-taking, topics, syntactic structures, politeness, metaphor, rhetoric and so on (Van Dijk, 2011). Some discourse analysts limit themselves to documenting and describing these phenomena and their functions, while others take a more critical approach to explore how language is linked to wider sociopolitical issues like sexism, racism and environmentalism. The advent of new media technologies that enable multiple and often simultaneous modes of meaning making such as images, film and music has also significantly expanded the scope and complexity of discourse research (Bateman, 2014; O’Halloran, 2011). Painting an integrated picture of the multiple branching pathways of discourse research has itself proven to be a challenging endeavor (Johnstone, 2008; Van Dijk, 2011; Wetherell, Taylor, & Yates, 2001).
