Discourse Semantics and Ideology

Discourse Relations, Discourse Structure, Discourse Semantics

It is generally accepted that a discourse connective expresses a semantic and/or pragmatic relation between its matrix sentence or clause and something in the previous discourse. Usually the sense of this relation is expressed as a label, often within a hierarchy of sense labels. But the meaning of these labels may vary from system to system, and the same connective may be assigned different la...

Anaphora and Discourse Semantics

We argue in this paper that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to be discourse connectives signalling discourse relations between adjacent discourse units are instead anaphors. We do this by (i) demonstrating their behavioral similarity with more common anaphors (pronouns and definite NPs); (ii) presenting a general framework for understanding anaphora into which they nicely fit; (ii...

Ideology, Hegemony, dIscourse: A crItIcAl revIew

A Separation, an Ideological Rift in the Iranian Society and Culture: Media, Discourse and Ideology

Media can be a good representation of dominant ideologies in society. The analysis of such discourse can shed light on the mental and social structures of people in society. Adopting van Dijk’s (1995) layout of discourse ideology and his (2000) practical and general outline of ideological analysis, this study analyzes the Iranian movie A Separation, the winner of the 84th An...

Information Structure and Discourse Semantics

Information structure has been assumed to be an autonomous part of grammar for more than 100 years. It is represented as a partition of the sentence into two units, e.g., focus background, topic comment, focus topic, focus presupposition etc.1 Even though information structure is sometimes understood as textual or discourse structure, its organizational level is still defined with respect to th...