Discourse Analysis

The assignment will consist of an essay, 2500 to 3000 words (excluding examples and bibliography)

Please read the assignment instructions carefully before answering. For this assignment, you will need the review corpus, which is released along with the final assignment. Make sure you are using that corpus and not one of the previously released corpora. The review corpus contains both Yelp reviews and IMDB reviews . If you are unfamiliar with these genres, please have a look at the websites first to familiarize yourself with them. Note that the corpus contains 200 reviews in total .

Part 1 [9 points]
Find the following in the review corpus:
• 3 colloquialisms (from 3 different reviews; may be the same reviews as for the formalisms or narratives)
• 3 formalisms (from 3 different reviews; may be the same reviews as for the colloquialisms or narratives)
• 3 narratives (from 3 different reviews; may be the same reviews as for the colloquialisms or formalisms)
Please give (a) the review number, (b) the line numbers (report both start and ending line number if the example spans multiple lines), and (c) copy-paste the example. In total, you should have 9 examples. You do not need to explain your choices or motivate them.

Part 2 [9 points; between 400-600 words]
Take three reviews from the Yelp part of the review corpus and three reviews from the IMDB part of the review corpus.
First, copy and paste the six reviews into your document and give them line numbers.
Second, do a genre analysis for these two genres. That is: determine the essential or typical content and the essential or typical structure of each genre individually. Illustrate each item of essential/typical content or structure with references to the reviews (you could use the line numbers, or use colour-coded highlighting in the text).
Finally, compare the genres: do they have differences in their essential/typical contents and structures? Describe what the differences are, and provide an explanation (however speculative or tentative) of the differences: why does one type of review have essential content/structure that the other doesn’t have?

Part 3 [9 points; between 400-600 words]
Answer one of the following thee essay questions. In each case, copy-paste the reviews into your document and give them line numbers. For each of the three questions, use the line numbers to refer to elements in the text.
• Identify three cases (from different reviews) of writers expressing an identity that they affiliate with. Describe the identity that is expressed, and discuss whether these identities are indexed or explicitly expressed, and why you think the writer indexes or explicitly expresses that identity.
• Identify three cases (from different reviews) of interdiscursivity. Describe what different genres and registers the language indexes and what you think the effect is the writer is trying to achieve.
• Identify three narratives (from different reviews). Analyze them according to the basic patterns of the structure of a narrative as discussed in class. Describe what the writer is trying to achieve by incorporating the narrative in their review.

Part 4 [3 points; between 200-400 words]
Free observation! Find something in one of the reviews (a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a full review, a structure, a content, a pattern) that is interesting from a discourse analytic perspective, and present it to me. Copy and paste the relevant fragment, specify which review it is from, and make a case for why it is interesting. You will be marked on (1) the correct application of the concepts you learned in this course, and (2) the originality of the finding.