122229 SE Linguistics Seminar / MA applied linguistics & TEFL (2016S)

Retextualisation. Discourse analysis in practice.

This seminar is intended to involve participants in an exploration of how English is used in the design of a variety of written texts. All kinds of texts will be possible cases for treatment: serious and not-so-serious ones, polemical, political, poetical ones, newspaper articles, advertisements, public notices, cooking recipes, works of fiction, and so on.

The purpose of the seminar is to develop awareness from analysis, to get participants to consider what motivates the different features of textual design and what effect these have on interpretation, and in general to think critically about how language is used to influence and persuade.

Participants will be divided into groups and each group will be asked to find examples for themselves of texts in English of a particular type and to demonstrate to their fellow students how they can be analysed and compared, and what differences in interpretative effect they suggest. This is done by making linguistic changes of one kind or another so as to as to produce an alternative 'retextualised' version. The result might be either a variant of the original text or a different kind of text altogether; it might, for example, be a simplification, a parody, a film script, a translation, and so on.