Name: ‫عمر سطام العتيبي‬

Professor: ‫ عبدالفتاح مفتاح‬.‫د‬

Subject: Discourse Analysis
Assignment: No. 3 Summary of Chapter 2 (Pages 15, 17, 18)
Date: 2/6/2024

Discourse and Society Summary

1) Discourse communities
A discourse community is a group of people who share some kind of activity and use
their own language (way of communicating). An individual can belong to several
communities such as belonging to a football community or a business community. This
is a “Discourse community”.

2) Language as social and local practice

Social factors such as who we are speaking to, the social context of the interaction, the
topic (Genre) determines the way or the choice of language we choose to use. For
instance, when talking to a professor in the university we tend to use more formal
language then when talking to a colleague or a friend. Therefore, speakers have a
repertoire of languages with different linguistic features.

3) Discourse and Gender

In the book it talked about how discourse and gender is a socially constructed category,
meaning that the way a gender talks is not because of their biological sex but rather the
individuals routine, social interaction, household, culture and many other factors that
are not related to the biological sex of a person. In class, we also talked about how a girl
who is born without any sisters and grew up only interacting with her brothers can
influence the way she talked. In addition, what this means is that discourse and gender
is a socially constructed category.