I have, like Sanda, been reading and reading and reading... I'm trying to keep on top of things this year, and it's working so far. I'm done all the reading for this week and through about half of it for next week, which is an accomplishment. I think every Arts student gets to a point about six weeks into the semester when they* realise that they've gotten behind and they've just got to try to get SOME of the reading done, and keep up with essays, assignments, tests, etc.

Most of what I've been reading about has been discourse analysis in one form or another. The only exception would be my Psycholinguistics class, which is a little bit boring because I know all the linguistics stuff already, and the prof is a linguist, not a psychologist, so who knows how much psych stuff we'll actually get done?

Advanced Topics in Discourse Analysis is my super-cool one-person invented class, where I get to read a billion books about different ways that people analyse discourse. Discourse is sort of a tricky thing to define, and that's actually what I've been reading about in the last couple of weeks -- what the hell IS discourse? Answers range from "language in use" (so, actually interacting, rather than making up sentences for examples in textbooks), to "language above the level of the sentence" (so, how utterances interact with each other), to Foucault's idea of "a range of ways of talking about something." Foucault's idea is very interesting. He's talking about our collective idea about something. So, when it comes to sexual desire/experience, we have this binary idea about women where they're either chaste/pure (good) or sluts (bad). A lot of our vocabulary and grammatical usage about women and sex reflects this idea about female sexuality. Discourses (in this sense) can change, and there are always competing discourses (in this case, a feminist discourse would challenge the madonna/whore discourse), so it's interesting to look at how they duke it out.

So, that's discourse as an idea, whereas a more linguistic definition of discourse talks about it as a practice. So, it's language in a social context, being influenced by and influencing the world around it. It's not always just language either. For instance, when we say, "Could you pass the salt?" it's kind of snarky and mischevious to say "Yes" and not actually do it. It's funny because we're acting like the question is actually what is said -- inquiring as to your ability -- rather than an indirect order. It's looking for salt, not "Yes." However, there's nothing in the question that really indicates that, except for our cultural knowledge that we usually ask for salt indirectly. It's a formalized use, sort of like phoning and saying "Is Kathy home?" rather than "Put Kathy on the phone." A direct order would be rude for certain cultural reasons, so we ask indirectly and the underlying order is understood. Discourse analysis tries to break that down and see how it works.

*On the singular they: I learned last week that this usage actually goes back to the 1500s or farther back, but in the 19th century, some fucking prescriptivist decided to outlaw it and that generic people are "he". This GUY also decided that in order to align with the "natural order" of things, men must come first in expressions, i.e. "man and wife," "Mr. and Mrs.," etc. Sometimes I can't decided if the men who decide these things are full of themselves or just reeeeeeally insecure. Anyways, there's no grammatical reason why it's bad, as it's been used for so long. It's just a language change that got interrupted by someone's obsession with their penis. Example:

Singular 2nd person: thou
Plural 2nd person: you
Singular 3rd person: he/she/it
Plural 3rd person: they

Thou has disappeared. It's okay, there there, ssh. We can deal with it juuuuust fine. P.S. Jane Austen used singular they all the time. P.P.S. If we get y'all to distinguish plural you from singular you (a former plural), are we going to get th'all someday? HOW AWESOME WOULD THAT BE?