COURSE DESCRIPTION:

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The purpose of this course is to show some of the dimensions and structures of discourse theory and analysis that are usually used to describe different types of oral and written texts. Unlike other courses that we will be offering this year (2024), this particular course focuses on different textual structures (syntax, pragmatic semantics, rhetoric, argumentation), including the semiotic or multimodal dimension. Since cognitive and social dimensions are fundamental in discourse analysis, we will refer to them throughout the course. However, this will only be in a tangential way. We will focus on these dimensions of discourse with more depth in subsequent courses.

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The course is aimed at students, researchers or professionals who study or are interested in discourse theory and analysis as a research tool or source of studies on language, communication, and society. The course will be given by Dr. César Rojo, researcher and professor at the Centre of Discourse Studies, and Dr. Teun van Dijk, director of the Centre, will offer a master class on Introduction to Discourse Studies at the end of the course.

The course consists of 22 hours of class. The course will be held online and in-person at the Centre of Discourse Studies in Barcelona* (*in-person format subject to participation).

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PROGRAM:

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3 Feb (Saturday), 16:00 to 18:00 (CET time zone): Background of discourse theory: sociolinguistics, pragmatics, textual linguistics, cognitive psychology, social psychology, artificial intelligence, ethnography of communication, ethnomethodology, microsociology, narratology, poetics, rhetoric, style and semiotics, among others. From Discourse Analysis to Critical Discourse Analysis.

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10 Feb (Saturday), 16:00 to 19:00 (CET time zone): Text grammar I. Syntactic level. Microstructures: sentence structure and sentence sequence (textual cohesion). Macrostructures: textual schemes and superstructures. Discursive genres or textual typology. Some text types according to their superstructure:  news, editorials, stories and slogans in social protests.

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17 Feb (Saturday), 16:00 to 19:00 (CET time zone): Text grammar II. Semantic level. Microstructures: the meaning of words and sentences. Intensional meaning (concepts) and extensional meaning (referents). The concept of proposition. The notion of truth and the concept of possible worlds in the proposition. The structure of propositions: the fact. The arguments and predicates of a proposition. The theory of semantic roles: the function of arguments (agent, patient, etc.) and types of predicates (actions: material, mental, existential, etc.). Presuppositions (linguistic and about the knowledge of the world) to explain the meaning of words and the relation between propositions. Examples of semantic role analysis in some texts: news headlines and slogans of social protests.

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24 Feb (Saturday), 16:00 to 19:00 (CET time zone): Text grammar II. Semantic level. Macrostructures: the sequence of propositions, semantic macrostructures (or discourse themes) and the coherence of the text. The construction or derivation of a semantic macrostructure: the referent of the text, the notion of recurrence, and the rules of derivation: elimination, selection, generalization, and construction. The recursivity of macrostructures. Example of analysis of semantic macrostructures in some texts: news headlines, slogans of social protests and political party campaigns.

 

2 March (Saturday), 16:00 to 19:00 (CET time zone): Text grammar III. Pragmatic level. The Microstructures: language use, social interaction and communicative context. The social function of language: speech acts (plan: intention, strategy and objective). The notion of truth and the concept of success or failure in speech acts. Types of speech acts and the principles of cooperation. The transgression of the principles of cooperation and the concept of implicature. Macrostructures: the sequence of speech acts and the macro speech act. The macro speech act in relation to the social, political, and cultural context of discourse. Example of speech act analysis in social protest slogans and political campaign texts.

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9 March (Saturday), 16:00 to 19:00 (CET time zone): Rhetoric and arguments in discourse. Rhetorical resources: metaphor, personification, zoomorphism, rhetorical questions, hyperbole, synecdoche, among others. Types of arguments: authority, fact, morality, tradition, probabilistic, personal experience, among others. Examples of rhetorical and argumentative resources in some texts: manifestos, organizations and politicians' statements.

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16 March (Saturday), 16:00 to 19:00 (CET time zone): Multimodal discourse analysis. Image analysis: journalistic photographs. The content or semantic structure of the image: transitivity. The formal structure of the image: the organization of the elements and the focus or perspective. The function of the image: confirm, deny, allude, etc. The presuppositions and/or implicatures of the image. Example of analysis of some journalistic photographs from the press.

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22 March (Friday), 17:00 to 19:00 (CET time zone): Lecture by Teun van Dijk. Introduction to Discourse Studies.

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