Discourse and Pragmatics

Discourse analysis is a subfield of linguistics that is focused on conversation and the interaction of speech and large amounts of language. This is quite different from a focus on formalized, abstract grammars like generative syntax. Complexity science can provide more options in the researcher’s toolbox for analyzing language in use in terms of both the fractal properties of grammar, showing prevalent usage and also how this works in terms of the discourse analyst view of language as a social practice. This can be applied to any situation of speech or speech event and also used to determine prevalent sense of meaning in context based on the available asymptotic curves for a given conversation or example. Similar applications can be made in pragmatics, a subfield of linguistics that focuses on speech act theory and meaning in context as well. The frequencies of content words and their collocational patterns form A-curves when there is enough available language data. These can be analyzed in terms of the most frequent ways of use and least frequent, which appear in the bottom of the curves. These types and tokens found in the fractal property of a complex system show different possibilities of meaning when using collocational patterns in this way and can be analyzed at different levels of scale.