Approaches to Discourse Author:Deborah Schiffrin This is a guide to the various frameworks, concepts, and methods available for the analysis of discourse within linguistics. It compares six dominant approaches to discourse analysis: speech act theory, pragmatics, ethnomethodology, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, and variation theory. The author not only considers... more » each approach from several standpoints but she also illustrates them through extensive applications to a variety of concrete social and linguistic problems facing discourse analysts.« less