ABSTRACT
This chapter explains a brief discourse analysis of the first-year departmental handbook of Department S, as a typical handbook within the Social Sciences, focusing on the section on referring to and plagiarism. A departmental handbook is a text which represents a particular point of communication between staff and students, often mediated by tutors. The discourse practice refers to the wider social practice of the discourse under analysis, its particular social function or role. Here one needs to examine the 'social practices of text production and consumption associated with the type of discourse the sample represents'. In terms of production, it is interesting to consider Goffman's 'animator, principal and author' divisions. Intertextual chains denote how a discourse sample is distributed, and from which texts it is transformed or into which it transforms itself. It is interesting that there is no mention here of the usual definition of plagiarism as the intention to deceive.
