Примењена лингвистика у част Ранку Бугарском - Језик у

Igor Lakić: WHAT IS ACTUALLY DISCOURSE ANALYSIS?
Several exchanges form a transaction, while two or more transactions
make a functional unit (i.e., lesson in school, medical check-up in hospital, or
purchase in a shop). It is possible to see here that discourse is above, but also
below sentence level.
Let us now go a bit further into the lower levels of the language hierarchy.
If we look at any text, we can see that it is not just a linear ordering of sentences.
There is always a certain link between them, where one sentence appears as a
logical continuation of the previous one. There are clear links among sentences
that contribute to the text’s cohesion. This is where discourse markers play a
crucial role. Discourse markers can be phrases or words that create logical links
between or among sentences. In the sentence below, it is a prepositional phrase
that functions as a discourse marker, creating a cause -consequence relation:
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He didn’t come to the meeting. As a consequence, no decision was made.
It is possible here to use the adverb consequently instead of the prepositional
phrase, which means that discourse markers can be phrases or individual
words. In any case, they are not considered only from the syntactic point of view,
but as language units important for creating discourse.
McCarthy (2008: 34–63) mentions three types of grammatical cohesion in
English. Conjunctions, including discourse markers, are one of them. Another group
is reference (anaphoric, cataphoric, exophoric), where anaphoric and cataphoric references
are present in the text. Anaphoric (backward looking) reference includes personal
pronouns, demonstrative pronouns or adjectives, articles, or expressions like
“such a”. Cataphoric (forward looking) reference is achieved by using the same language
units. However, we do not consider these individual words as belonging to
grammar only. In a text, they have a much more important role – to create discourse
by referring to the concepts or ideas expressed earlier or later in the text.
On the other hand, exophoric reference lies outside the text but is linked to
its immediate context. This is where discourse analysis goes in the opposite direction
from the language hierarchy (words, phrases, clauses, sentences). It is the
area which the speaker and the receiver of the information bring into discourse.
This reference is very much knowledge bound and culture bound, but is equally
important in building up discourse.
Ellipsis and substitution belong to the third type of reference that McCarthy
(2008: 43–46) mentions. Let us consider the following sentence:
I will take the big boxes, you two the small ones.
The first clause contains the verb phrase will take the big boxes, while the
second one does not contain the verb at all. Ellipsis is defined as omitting gram-