ABSTRACT
Although discourse analysis (DA) is sometimes described broadly enough to encompass most if not all of what we have mapped as the arena for LSI work, we find conceptual utility in narrowing off a subset that focuses on a particular set of concerns. Within the rubric of discursive practices through which persons construct or produce the realities of social life, the chapters in this section share, first, an interest in the phenomena through which fragments or pieces of discourse are joined into connected texts. Early DA focused on linguistic devices that connected parts into wholes, such as grammatical cohesion devices, topical markers, and semantic principles through which words and sentences became recognizable as connected texts. More recent work has looked beyond language itselfinto institutional frameworks, culture, and ideology to discern and define that which connects discursive parts into wholes. This work examines ways in which personal and social premises are tacitly encoded in, and validated and reinforced by, the way sentences, utterances, or turns are formed and interconnected as components of wholes.
