Topics in Discourse and Language Use

This course equips students with essential knowledge and methodological skills relevant to the study of discourse, focusing on how linguistic meanings are organized and connected into larger communicative units such as texts. Students will explore key areas of discourse interpretation and processing, examining how meaning is constructed, interpreted, and conveyed within various contexts. We will focus on psycholinguistic research methods as well as text-analytic methods.

 

By the end of the course, students will be proficient in formulating specific research questions and operationalizing research that advances the understanding of language use, discourse processing, and representation. They will be able to connect their research to practical applications, addressing issues like optimal communication.

Additionally, students will enhance their ability to tackle theoretical and empirical research questions, analyze and evaluate partial answers, and develop new hypotheses and methodologies for testing. The course also aims to further develop students' academic presentation and writing skills.

A 'topics' course is a course where students acquire specialized knowledge concerning a specific topic within a wider theme and where they acquire the specific skills needed to conduct research concerning this topic. 
 

“Topics in Discourse and Language Use” examines how language users communicate through discourse. A prerequisite for communication is that language users process and represent discourse structures. The course focuses on topics pertaining to the intrinsic connectedness of discourse. In particular, we investigate how cognitive categories, such as causality and subjectivity, influence how we process and mark relations in discourse, how these markers vary and how children acquire them. All this will require a variety of research methods, such as corpus research and eye-tracking experiments. Finally, we discuss the implications for communication. For instance, how can we design texts that are comprehensible for the target audience? And how do new media influence how we process and represent text?  
 

Representative topics include: referential coherence, relational coherence, causation, contrast, salience, subjectivity.