Discourse Analysis & Vocabulary

Bottom up and Top down approaches to discourse analysis: Based on the different basis of the analysis, the two approaches were differently preceded. While top-down approach viewing genre move as purpose relies on identification of communicative purposes, bottom-up processing concerns content and function. Bottom up approach see language as a whole. Taking the so call lower level elements of language to some extent for granted, it is to be proceeded from the most detailed features of discourse towards the most general. We looked first of all at the relationships of grammar to discourse and the extent to which formal cohesive ties operate across sentence boundaries. With that behind us we moved on to the interaction of language and context which defines language function; to the possibility of establishing overall structures of discourse related to particular discourse types; and to conversational mechanisms. In bottom up approach, lastly we looked at the way in which the form of words is affected by the sender’s knowledge and idea of the receiver’s knowledge. All these levels may be seen as controlled by the relationship of the people involved in the discourse which we may regard as the highest level. The bottom up approach may well be a very fruitful way of trying to understand what language is and how it works, but that does not mean that it is the best way to teach a language or that it is the way we use language when we do know it.
In a top-down approach to discourse analysis, the first step is to develop the analytical framework, determining the set of possible discourse unit types based on an a priori determination of the major communicative functions that discourse units can serve in these texts. That framework is then applied to the analysis of all texts in the corpus. Thus, when texts are segmented into discourse units it is done by identifying a stretch of discourse of a particular type – that is, that serves a particular communicative function. Once