The present paper upholds the possibility, or, indeed, necessity to approach context from the perspective of the 'cognitive properties' of the participants in a communicative situation. It claims that the generally-accepted viewpoint on analysis should be reversed and the cognitive constructs, or mental models, used by the participants should not be simply added to the context; it is the context which should be seen as part of the cognitive constructs processed by the participants. After all, context exists to humans only because they see it as such. An objective reality may or may not exist outside human perception and contextual information need not be seen as a special case of 'real-ness'. In a way, and that can be argued to be quite a crucial way, we can only study our human-specific perceptions of the world (and contexts) and not the world (or a context) itself.

This introductory textbook presents a variety of approaches and perspectives that can be employed to analyze any sample of discourse. The perspectives come from multiple disciplines, including linguistics, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology, all of which shed light on meaning and the interactional construction of meaning through language use. Students without prior experience in discourse analysis will appreciate and understand the micro-macro relationship of language use in everyday contexts, in professional and academic settings, in languages other than English, and in a wide variety of media outlets. Each chapter is supported by examples of spoken and written discourse from various types of data sources, including conversations, commercials, university lectures, textbooks, print ads, and blogs, and concludes with hands-on opportunities for readers to actually do discourse analysis on their own. Students can also utilize the book’s comprehensive companion website, with flash cards for key terms, quizzes, and additional data samples, for in-class activities and self-study. With its accessible multi-disciplinary approach and comprehensive data samples from a variety of sources, Discourse Analysis is the ideal core text for the discourse analysis course in applied linguistics, English, education, and communication programs.

This text analyzes the context in which text and discourse are perceived. It examines how we make sense of complex sentences which we read and hear, and how we, as writers and speakers, put together sentences in order to express certain concepts. It discusses the existence of text worlds, mental constructs which we build up in the form of conceptual scenarios. These enable us to make sense of complex sentences which relate to the concepts contained within them. The use of numerous examples of text and discourse and the diversity of the areas discussed, should make this topic accessible to a wide audience.

This work originates from the need to develop an integrated dynamic model of negation in discourse that is adequate for understanding the role of negation in an extensive and complex piece of discourse. Most work on negation is strongly influenced by traditional philosopical problems, but little work has been carried out in the area of discourse. Approaches to negation within the functional-cognitive tradition tend to focus of specific agents of negation, its function as a speech act, or its cognitive model. Few attempts have been made to propose an integrated discourse model, studies of negation with few exceptions tend to be limited to brief selections or isolated sentences. This book fills the gap in studies of negation in discourse by providing an up-to-date critical review of the state of the art in negation and by proposing a model that brings together the semantic, cognitve, and pragmatic features of negation, which are crucial for an understanding of its role in disourse.