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The notion of discourse: - includes use of spoken, written and visual/signed language; - it is a mode of organizing human knowledge, ideas and experience; - it is part of a shared cultural world. 2. a.) discourse meaning : The meaning of a sentence is primarily a function of the meaning of its constituents. But the same sentence may have different meanings, different discourse positions, in variable contexts. In addition, there are sentences whose meanings in discourse are totally different from the pure grammatical and lexical sense. Obviously, "meaning", as a communicative phenomenon, cannot be divided into independent and single meaning units. Sentences/utterances form a text. Texts, again, are combined in fanciful ways: different texts are put together in a newspaper, a magazine, in a book of selected texts, in a library or bookshop where many books containing different texts are placed side by side. b.) The information provided by some speech act may contribute to the information available in the discourse in different ways. First of all, incoming information may be compatible with the information available in the discourse and increase the specificity towards a goal. A typical case would be the answer of a clarification question. Second, new information may be compatible with the intention of the speaker, but incompatible with the information established in the discourse. A speech act of this kind constitutes a repair. Third, information may be incompatible with the intention of the speaker and possibly the information in the discourse which indicates a subdialogue. In other words, the informational relation between the speech act and the dialogue state determines partly the way of updating the discourse. Since the representations of the speech acts are constructed by unification of feature structures in function of the parse tree, lexical information can be projected up to the speech act level in case where lexical information already constrains the type of the speech act. c.)The term coherence has been defined in various ways. Some researchers apply the term cohesion to the surface structure of the text and the term coherence to the concepts and relations underlying its meaning. Cohesion has sometimes been applied to smaller units of language in the text, and coherence, to some general overall interrelatedness in the text. Other researchers have defined cohesion as continuity in word and sentence structure, and coherence as continuity in meaning and context. d.) Quite often in making an utterance, a speaker in some way brings our attention to an entity that is relevant at that point in the discussion, in order to tell us something about it. The relevant entity may be an individual or it may be a situation or event. In any such case, we say that the entity to which our attention is drawn is the Topic of the utterance. Let us say that the constituent of the utterance which denotes or otherwise indicates the Topic is thereby Topical. Depending on the language in use, a Topical constituent may be an N(oun) P(hrase) or an adverbial element of some sort. 3. Argument is a type of discourse in which the writer or speaker attempts to convince an audience that his or her opinion is correct through logic. Argumentative discourse includes essays, lectures, sermons and political speeches. In an argument, the writer or speaker begins with a thesis, which is a clear, explicit statement of beliefs or opinions. The writer or speaker must then present evidence to support the thesis. If a listener accepts the evidence, he or she should agree with the thesis. An argument is not the same as persuasion. In an argument, the writer or speaker presents evidence to get the audience to logically agree with his or her point of view. Persuasion, however, is designed to get an audience to both accept a particular point of view and act on that belief. For example, a successful argument might make the audience like a particular political candidate, but successful

persuasion should make the audience vote for that candidate. With narrative discourse, an audience is told a story. The story is designed to make the audience feel differently about a certain topic. Narrative discourse might take the form of a play, novel, folk tale, personal narrative or myth. In description, something is described based on the five senses. As discourse, description is designed help the audience visualize people and places, but it also can put the audience in a particular mood or create a certain type of atmosphere. The writer or speaker uses nouns and adjectives to give the audience a sense of what something is like materially. Description might be found in a descriptive part of a novel or in a descriptive essay. Exposition is designed to inform the audience about a topic. There are several different types of exposition, including definition, analysis, compare-and-contrast, problem-and-solution and causeand-effect. There are many strengths and weaknesses associated with each type of exposition, and each type has a completely different purpose. For example, giving someone the definition of a word provides one type of information, whereas comparing and contrasting two differing opinions provides an entirely different type of information. 4. The media genre should, theoretically, be based on factuality, meaning that facts should play an important part in elaborating the mediatic discourse, as opposed to the realm of imagination.Moreover, media discourse needs to hold the attention of the reader, it has to be of interest at the present time. Also, the discourse must be written in such a manner in which it can be undrestood by a broad category of listeners. 5. a.) Informative b.) information c.) serial murders, missing person, doomed world d.)Headline is attractive and catchy, anticipates the police finding more bodies.

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