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.

Linguistic Relativity (Sapir-Whorf Hypotesis)

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Linguistic relativity is a general term used to refer to various hypotheses or positions about the relationship between language and culture.  

For Sapir, linguistic relativity was a way of articulating what he saw as the struggle between the individual and society. In order to communicate their unique experiences, individuals need to rely on a public code over which they have little control.

Whorf —believed that ways of thinking may develop by analogy with ‘fashions of speaking,' a concept that was later revived by Hymes's notion of `ways of speaking.'

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Sapir and Whorf's ideas about the unconscious aspects of linguistic codes continued to play an important part in the history of linguistic anthropology, and reappeared in the 1980s in the context of a number of research projects, including the study of language ideology.  

Edward Sapir

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—Edward Sapir (1884–1939) was a German-born American anthropologist-linguist and a leader in American structural linguistics. His name is borrowed in what is now called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. He was a highly influential figure in American linguistics, influencing several generations of linguists across several schools of the discipline.

—While a graduate student at Columbia, Sapir met his mentor, anthropologist Franz Boas. The latter was likely the person who provided the most impetus for Sapir's study of indigenous languages of the Americas. He suggested that the vast number of Indian languages of the United States and Canada and certain of those of Mexico and Central America could be classified in six major divisions.

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Sapir's classifies all the languages in North America into only 6 families:

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• Eskimo–Aleut 

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• Algonkin–Wakashan 

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• Nadene 

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• Penutian 

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• Hokan–Siouan 

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• and Aztec–Tanoan. 

Franz Boas

Franz Boas was one of the principal founders of modern American Anthropology and Ethnology. He was born in Minden, Germany, west of Hannover, and studied physics, geography, and geology at various universities, finishing his Ph.D. in Kiel in 1881. In the holistic tradition established by Franz Boas in the USA at the beginning of the twentieth century, anthropology was conceived as comprising four subfields: archaeology, physical (now `biological') anthropology, linguistics (now `linguistic anthropology'), and ethnology (now `sociocultural anthropology'). Boas contributed to all four of his named branches of anthropology, in studies ranging from racial classification to linguistic description focusing primarily on the languages and the peoples of northwestern U.S. and Canada.

Anthropological Linguistics

Anthropological linguistics is the study of the relations between language and culture and the relations between human biology, cognition and language.  This strongly overlaps the field of linguistic anthropology, which is the branch of anthropology that studies humans through the languages that they use.

Ethnography

This is a branch of anthropology that provides scientific description of individual human societies.

It is us used to collect empirical data on human societies and cultures through observation, interviews and questionairies and it aims to describe the nature of those who are studied.

Ethnography of Communication

• The Ethnography of communication (EOC) is a method of discourse analysis in linguistics, which draws on the anthropological field of ethnography. Unlike ethnography proper, though, it takes both language and culture to be constitutive as well as constructive.
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• This term is intended to indicate the scope of ethnographic studies in basis  and communicative in the range and kind of patterned complexity with which they deal.
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• For the scope it is needed fresh kinds of data, it is needed to investigate directly the use of language in contexts of situation in order to distinguish patterns of speech activity, from different patterns that deal with grammar, personality, social structure, etc.

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The London School

England is a country in which certain aspects of linguistics have an unusually long history. Linguistic description decomes a matter of practical importance to a nation when it evolves a standard of 'official' language for itself out of the welther of diverse and conflicting local usages. England was remarkable for the extent  to which various aspects of 'practical linguistics'flourished here, by which term refers to such activities as orthoepy (the codification and teaching of correct pronunciation), lexicography, invention of shorthand systems, spelling reform, and the creation of artificial 'philosophical languages' such as those of George Dalgano amd John Wilkins. One consequence of this tratidion for the pure academic discipline of linguistics which emerged in Britain in our time was an emphasis on phonetics.
Phonetic study in the modern sense was pioneered by Henry Sweet.
Sweet was the greatest of the few historical linguistswhom Britain produced in the nineteenth century to rival the burgeoning of historical linguistics in Germany, but unlike the German scholars, Sweet based his historical studies on a detailed understanding of the workings of the vocal organs. Sweet's general approach to phonetics was continued by Daniel Jones , who took the subject up as a hobby that they ought to consider teaching phonetics of French, was taken on as a lecturer there in 1907 and built up what became the first university department of phonetics in Britain.

The formalism based on Noam Chomsky

The formalism of context-free grammars was developed in the mid-1950s by Noam Chomsky, and also their classification as a special type of formal grammar (which he called phrase-structure grammars).

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Roman Jakobson

Roman Osipovich Jakobson  was a scholar of Russian origin;  he was a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century. Influenced by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jakobson developed, with Nikolai Trubetzkoy, techniques for the analysis of sound systems in languages, inaugurating the discipline of phonology.

He went on to apply the same techniques of analysis to syntax and morphology, and, controversially proposed that they be extended to semantics (the study of meaning in language).

The Prague School

The Prague school is the school of linguistic thought and analysis established in Prague in the 1920s by Vilém Mathesius. 

It included among its most prominent members the Russian linguist Nikolai Trutbezkoy and the Russian-born American linguist Roman Jakobson; the school was most active during the 19020's and 30's. Linguists of the Prague School stress the function of elements whithin language, the contrast of language elements to one another, and the total pattern or system formed by these contrasts, and they have distinguished themselves the study of study systems. They have developed distinctive-feature analysis of sounds; by this analysis, each distinctive sound.
Prague linguists, looked at languages as one might looked at a motor, seaking to understand what jobs the various components were doing and how the nature of one component determined the nature of others. 
One of the characteristics of the Prague approach to language was readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include a range of alternative "systems" ,"registers" or "styles" ,where American Descriptivist tended to insist on treating a language as single unitary system.