Pragmatics, discourse structure and register

Learning objectives

Analyse pragmatics in a text or transcript, identifying implicature, presupposition, deixis, speech acts and politeness strategies, and explain the meaning carried beyond the literal words

Analyse discourse structure by tracking how a text opens, develops its topic, shifts focus and closes, and explain how that shape serves the writer's purpose

Analyse spoken and multimodal data using turn-taking, adjacency pairs, interruption, overlap, repair, fillers and non-fluency features, and explain what they reveal about the relationship between speakers

Define register and analyse how field, tenor and mode combine to produce it, and explain how a shift in register changes the reader's relationship with the writer

Explain how a writer constructs a persona and positions an audience, and support the claim with evidence from more than one level of language