CHAPTER ONE
1.0 Introduction
1.1 Background to the Study
There is no discourse without communication. Communication is said to be a social activity requiring coordinated efforts of two or more individuals. It is only when a move has elicited a response that one can say that communication has taken place (John Gumperz, 3), In other words, mere talk to produce sentences, no matter how well formed or elegant the outcome, does not by itself constitute communication. To participate in such verbal exchanges, that is to create and sustain conversational involvement, one requires knowledge and abilities which transcend grammatical competence. In other words, one needs to decode short isolated messages.
When we communicate, we do so by means of texts and discourses. For some linguists, for instance, Jackson and Stockwell (75), the term ‘discourse’ includes both spoken and written ‘discourses,’ Discourse, therefore, for many scholars, is regarded as an extended verbal expression in speech or writing. According to Gumperz (5), it is one of the natural units into which linguistic messages can be analyzed.
An approach in which data from talk exchanges and written texts are collected and closely analyzed, with the aim of shedding light on the ways people do things with words is the focal concern of Discourse Analysis. Discourse analysis studies the use of language as a social practice or a set of social practices. Nicholas Allot is credited with the view that “practitioners of discourse analysis see participants in discourse as constructing it through their speech acts. He also sees discourse as a way that social arrangements are constructed” (65). To understand the role of language in public life and the social process in general, there is need for a closer understanding of how linguistic knowledge and social factors interact in discourse interpretation (5). In other words, how does one begin to make sense of the array of discourses that one encounters all the time?
According to Jackson and Stockwell, texts and discourses are usually divided into those that are interactional fundamentally and those that are primarily transactional (76). In interactional discourse, the focus is on promoting the relationship between participants, whereas the focus of the transactional discourse is on the content of message whether that is to convey information, to complete a piece of business, to tell someone how to do something, or to tell a story. A text or discourse can convey some information like establishing the level of relationship between interactants, that is, showing whether one speaker is rich or poor, privileged or not, educated or not, and other levels of relationship that may exist.
Apart from transactional and interactional categories of discourse mentioned above, one can also categorize discourse by means of a number of other criteria and parameter, according to Wallwork (8). This categorization could be done by register, which is a term that describes a variety of language according to who is using it, and the uses to which it is being put; according to function, that is, whether they are telling a story, describing something or getting someone to do something; then, according to structure, this is concerned with how conversations work, how multimodal texts that contain images as well as text integrate the two and what kind of structure can create coherent texts.
| Project details | Contents |
|---|---|
| Number of Pages | 60 pages |
| Chapter one | Introduction |
| Chapter two | Literature review |
| Chapter three | methodology |
| Chapter four | Data analysis |
| Chapter five | Summary,discussion & recommendations |
| Reference | Reference |
| Questionnaire | Questionnaire |
| Appendix | Appendix |
| Chapter summary | 1 to 5 chapters |
| Available document | PDF and MS-word format |
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