Discourse in Context

This collected volume offers a survey of contemporary applied linguistics, showing how the discipline is rethinking the notion of context. Discourse is approached here as language above the level of the sentence, studied within the circumstances where it is used, and also as a body of shared knowledge and belief. Context is examined in two ways: as the varied situations in which discourse is produced, and as the frameworks analysts bring to bear when they interpret those situations.

The chapters work on two levels. Some examine language in use, what the editor calls little d discourse, while others focus on specific discourses, or big D discourses, as they appear in particular settings. Each contributor writes from personal familiarity with a different context, including business, education, ethnicity and race, gender and sexuality, history, intercultural exchange, lingua franca settings, the media, place, politics, and online spaces. The authors also draw on different analytic traditions, among them conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, ethnographic and mediated discourse analysis, multimodal analysis, and systemic functional linguistics. Although the approaches differ, all the contributors are committed to studying language in its context, and readers are encouraged to weigh the contexts and methods against one another.