National open university of nigeria school of arts and social sciences
Download 0.49 Mb. View original pdf
|
- Navigate this page:
- Textlinguistics
| 3.6 Written Discourse A written discourse is any discourse in which the thoughts of the producer are represented graphically on a surface, such as paper and other media. Initially in the study of discourse analysis, written discourse was not considered. The attention then was on the spoken discourse. Written discourse as we have seen earlier is quite different from spoken discourse. It is more carefully constructed and gives a lot of room for correction and possible reconstruction. Written discourse is organized in such away that similar ideas are put together in sections of the writing called paragraph and each paragraph can usually be summarized 25 in one sentence, which is generally called the topic sentence. Also, each paragraph is linked with the one directly before it and the one after, and all the paragraphs can be seen as a unified whole, which can also be summarized in a sentence. To make written language easy to read, certain marks are used to punctuate it. These marks are used to indicate where the reader needs to pause fora period of time (full stop and comma, raise the tone of their voice to either show that they are asking a question or that they are surprised. These marks are called punctuation marks. They make the written discourse readable in a meaningful way. When punctuation marks are not used in any written discourse, such discourse loses the full meaning that it ought to convey to the reader. A group of linguists, who developed interest in the study of written discourse in the tradition of Systemic Linguistics refers to the study of written discourse as Textlinguistics. They believe written discourse has certain characteristics, which make them essentially different from spoken discourse. They focus on the textuallity of the discourse, which is marked by its cohesion and coherence. They also look at the elements that are thematized in a written discourse and how one paragraph relates to the other thematically (thematic progression. Examples of written discourse are newspaper stories, letters, novels, articles in magazines, editorial in newspapers, etc. Download 0.49 Mb. Share with your friends:
|