Invited Lecture on `Discourse Analysis: An Overview’ organized at Central University of Punjab
The keynote speaker for the event was Dr. Gurupdesh Singh, former Head of the Department and Professor (retd.), Department of English, GNDU, Amritsar
Bathinda, December 24, 2021: The Department of English, Central University of Punjab, Bathinda hosted an invited lecture on 'Discourse Analysis: An Overview'. The keynote speaker for the event was Dr. Gurupdesh Singh, former Head of the Department and Professor (retd.), Department of English, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar.
While addressing the participants, Dr. Gurupdesh Singh stated that discourse analysis is the study of spoken or written language in relation to its social context in order to comprehend how individuals interact and communicate their message to others. He discussed how discourse analysis is becoming more popular as a subject of study in language departments, alongside humanities and social science disciplines. He emphasized that discourse as a linguistic identity has two crucial components: cohesion and coherence, which can only be assessed by identifying discourse’s reference, conjunction, substitution, parallelism, staging, representation, and style. To grasp the interactional text of a discourse, he stressed on the importance of knowing speech acts, conversation maxims (clarity, quality, quantity, and relevance of content), cooperative principles, tone indication, chain of signs, and word knowledge. Furthermore, he gave an extensive overview of different approaches to discourse analysis using examples from an array of literary, conversational, and theoretical texts. The lecture was followed by a question-and-answer session.
The programme commenced with a welcome note by Dr. Shahila Zafar, Associate Professor and Head, Department of English, Central University of Punjab, which was followed by an introduction to the keynote speaker. At the end, Dr. Vipan Pal Singh, Associate Professor, English, delivered a vote of thanks. The online programme was attended by more than a hundred participants from the Central University of Punjab and other institutions.