The fundamental problem in discourse is "What structure is there in discourse above the level of the sentence?" This question can be asked in terms of text versus dialogue. Is there a kind of structure that is exhibited in text but not in dialogue, or in dialogue but not in text? What are the appropriate structural descriptions of text and of dialogue? The question can also be asked from the pe...

This paper explores a discourse of war against HIV/AIDS evident in the Daily Dispatch, a South African daily newspaper, from 1985 to 2000, and discusses the implications of this in terms of the way in which HIV/AIDS is constructed. The discursive framework of the war depends, fundamentally, on the personification of HIV/AIDS, in which agency is accorded to the virus, and which allows for its co...

This study uses discourse, ideology and hegemony as a theoretical foundation to investigate the development of the polarised discourses of management accounting and the medical profession during the introduction of a NPM reform in the public health care debate, using Denmark as a case study. 194 newspaper articles and 73 medical profession articles from 2002 to 2008 are analysed, using critical...

In languages such as Japanese, the use of zeros, unexpressed arguments of the verb, in utterances that shift the topic involves a risk that the meaning intended by the speaker may not be transparent to the hearer. However, this potentially undesirable conversational strategy often occurs in the course of naturally-occurring discourse. In this chapter, I report on an empirical study of 250 utter...