A Discourse Construction Grammar Approach to Discourse Analysis: Microblog Parody and Instant Messaging

On the basis of Goldberg’s (1995) Construction Grammar (CxG) and Östman’s (2005) Construction Discourse perspectives, and by incorporating the theories of genre, register and cohesion from Systemic Functional Grammar, this research attempts to set up a construction grammar framework for discourse analysis, namely the discourse construction grammar (dcg) model. With dcg, we see a discourse first as an overarching abstract discourse construction, which consists of and integrates a number of ever smaller schematic constructions. Moreover, in order to account for the nexion of clauses into sentences and sentences into cross-sentential discourse chunks from a dcg perspective, this paper also resorts to clause conjunct construction and inter-sentential conjunction construction conceptions. Alongside establishing our dcg model, we have analyzed a trendy microblog templatic parody as well as a piece of dialogic instant messaging to exemplify our multi-layered and multi-faceted construction treatment of a piece of discourse.