DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Life is a constant discourse, of language functioning in one of the many context that together make up a culture. Consider an ordinary day. It will very likely, start with discourse before individuals rush off to go to work or school.

Discourse analysis is the analysis of language in its social context. Discourse analysis are just as interested in the analysis of spoken discourse as they are in the analysis of written discourse. 

Turnt Taking

A turn is each occasion that a speaker speaks and a turn ends when another speaker takes a turn. This is based on social interaction in the first place rather than on any phonological, lexico-grammatical or semantic considerations. Conversation analysts are interested in hoe speakers achieve smooth turn taking, and what the ‘rules’ are for who speakers when.

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According to Fillmore, each verb selects a certain number of deep cases which form its case frame. Thus, a case frame describes important aspects of semantic valency, of verbs, adjectives and nouns.
Case frames are subject to certain constraints, such as that a deep case can occur only once per sentence.
Some of the cases are obligatory and others are optional. Obligatory cases may not be deleted, at the risk of producing ungrammatical sentences.

A fundamental hypothesis of case grammar is that grammatical functions, such as subject or object, are determined by the deep, semantic valence of the verb, which finds its syntactic correlate in such grammatical categories as Subject and Object, and in grammatical cases such as Nominative, Accusative, etc. 

Case grammar is an attempt to establish a semantic grammar. (Most grammars by linguists take syntax as the starting-point).

Charles J. Fillmore

Charles J. Fillmore (born 1929) is an American linguist, and an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

 Dr. Fillmore has been extremely influential in the areas of syntax and lexical semantics. He was a proponent of Noam Chomsky's theory of generative grammar during its earliest transformational grammar phase. He was one of the founders of cognitive linguistics, and developed the theories of Case Grammar (Fillmore 1968), and Frame Semantics (1976).

He was one of the first linguists to introduce a representation of linguistic knowledge that blurred this strong distinction between syntactic and semantic knowledge of a language. He introduced what was termed case structure grammar and this representation subsequently had considerable influence on psychologists as well as computational linguists.

Grammatical Cases

Grammar Case is a system of linguistic analysis, focusing on the link between the valence, or number of subjects, objects, etc., of a verb and the grammatical context it requires.

The system was created by the American linguist Charles J. Fillmore, in the context of Transformational Grammar. This theory analyzes the surface syntactic structure of sentences by studying the combination of deep cases (i.e. semantic roles) -- Agent, Object, Benefactor, Location or Instrument -- which are required by a specific verb.

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Syntax

Grammar deals with constructions under morphology and syntax, syntax takes as its construction those in which noone of the immediate constituents is a bound form. The free forms (words and phrases) of a language appear in larger free forms (phrases), arranged by taxemes of modulation, phonetic modification, selection and order.

Free forms combining can be said to produce a resultant phrase, of which the form-class of one member may be determinative of the phrase’s grammatical behavior: in such a case, the construction is called endocentric, otherwise, it is exocentric when the phrase or construction does not follow the grammatical behavior of either constituent.

Is most important in languages, grammatically and/or stylistically.

Most languages show a smaller number, and in such languages, syntactic form classes tend to appear in phrases rather than words.

Syntax

Grammar deals with constructions under morphology and syntax, syntax takes as its construction those in which noone of the immediate constituents is a bound form. The free forms (words and phrases) of a language appear in larger free forms (phrases), arranged by taxemes of modulation, phonetic modification, selection and order.

Free forms combining can be said to produce a resultant phrase, of which the form-class of one member may be determinative of the phrase’s grammatical behavior: in such a case, the construction is called endocentric, otherwise, it is exocentric when the phrase or construction does not follow the grammatical behavior of either constituent.

Is most important in languages, grammatically and/or stylistically.

Most languages show a smaller number, and in such languages, syntactic form classes tend to appear in phrases rather than words.

Stable States

Synchronic linguistic description proceeds on the counter-factual assumption of constant and stable forms paired with meanings within an unchanging speech-community, some forms are never observable in isolated utterance. This justifies the distinction of free and bound forms, when both are established as linguistic forms. Constructed linguistic forms have at least two, so A’ linguistic form which bears a partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to some other linguistic form is a complex form and the common parts are constituents or components, while A’ linguistic form which bears no partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to any other form is a simple form or morpheme .

The meaning of a morpheme is a sememe (the meaning of a morpheme), constant, definite, discrete from all other sememes: the linguist can only analyze the signals, not the signalled, so that is why linguistics must start from the phonetics, not the semantics, of a language. The total stocks of morphemes is a language’s lexicon.