Customer Reviews

Approaches to Discourse (Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics)

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I am writing this ostensibly in order to counter the unsubstantiated views of the previous reviewer. I have used this book to teach undergraduates about the range and relevance of the various methods used in analysing discourse - spoken and written. Deborah Schiffrin has provided a very useful addition to the study of discourse for students who might feel overwhelmed by the various - often mutually exclusive - approaches.

The book starts with a well presented look at different definitions of Discourse - essential if we are to establish the relevance of competing methods.

Part 2 of this textbook offers us 6 chapters covering 6 different methods - from the purist CA approach to Pragmatics - 1. Speech Act Theory; 2. Interactional Sociolingusitics; 3. The Ethnography of Communication; 4. Pragmatics; 5. Conversation Analysis; 6. Variation Analysis.

As a springboard into the field of Critical Discourse Analysis, there is a lot to gain in terms of establishing the underlying principles of descriptive analysis in Schiffrin's work. Despite this being fairly old now by academic standards, I would certainly recommend the addition of this textbook to the reading lists of first year, and possibly second year undergraduates who are studying Text and Discourse Analysis.

This book is written in abstruse academese and is a closed loop: terms are defined in the jargon of the field. To an expert in the field, useful, to a novice, incomprehensible. The writing style is dull, opaque, verbose, and redundant. (She constantly says, "put another way" and the 'other way' is as incomprehensible as the first way). Also, she misrepresents formal grammar.

Every chapter is worst than the last in this terribly written book. We can only hope that the new edition will be better, but I seriously doubt it as the author is a hack.