John Swales: The Concept Of A Discourse Community

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“The Concept of A Discourse Community” by John Swales is to tell the reader the true definition of a discourse community and it characteristics and goes over the six requirements for it to be considered a true discourse community. He also goes over speech community versus discourse community and argues that they are truly different. In his argument he goes over many definitions of what a discourse community is, such as when Swales says it is “a union of people that have similar motives that communicate with one another in an attempt to accomplish something”(468). Swales also mentions “that discourse is a means of maintaining and extending the group's knowledge and of initiating new members into the group, and that discourse is epistemic …show more content…
This particular discourse community is mainly to have the knowledge about stamps and is an excellent example of a discourse community as it follows all six requirements.

Swales then moves onto the difference between discourse and speech community.As there is many definitions of a speech community such as Fishman's definition “seen as being composed of those who share functional rules that determine the appropriacy of utterances(470). Then others as Hymes argues multiple criteria as he believes “A speech community is defined, then, tautologically but radically, as a community sharing knowledge of rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech.”(470). Now Swales definition breaks down into three parts:

The first is concerned with medium; not so much in the trivial sense that 'speech' just will not do as an exclusive modifier of communities that are often heavily engaged in writing, but rather in terms of what that literary activity implies.
A second reason for separating the two concepts derives from the need to s distinguish a sociolinguistic grouping from a sociorhetorical

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