Discourse Subsystem

[Chazef]

Hey does anybody know the basic features which come under discourse in englang? I'm struggling to find which ones fit. Also, how does deixis aid the cohesion of a text?

[Rish_007]

Some of the features of the discourse would be like, the grammatical cohesion of the discourse, where you could talk about conjunctions, clefting,emphasis on sentences. Is that what you are referring to?

Deixis I think relates to terms which refer to a personal or locational thing of a context. And the meaning only makes sense in that context or situation

Eg 'here' and 'there' and 'this' only make sense when taken into context
 
Please correct me if I am wrong.
Hope this helps 

[Bananas8338]

Discourse features are things such as coherence (aka the logical connections of ideas in the text), cohesion (language features that bind the text together, for example substitution, ellipsis, diexis, and anaphoric/cataphoric reference), as well as sentence type, sentence structure and subordination/co-ordination.

Diexis aids the cohesion of text because diexis creates connections between ideas in the text. It is binding the text together which ultimately creates coherence. 

Edit: Right now I'm studying discourse features/stylistic features/conversation features for a Language SAC I have tomorrow. I'm actually going to email my teacher to clarify my understanding of cohesion/coherence, cos it's related to what we're doing atm.

Her reply - Essentially you are correct. The various cohesive devices help to create overall cohesion which enhances coherence but coherence is also marked by implicature, logic and lay-out . A text can be both cohesive and coherent!!!

[teletubbies_95]

According to the VCAA metalang thingo , it includes :

factors that contribute to a text’s coherence:
 cohesion, inference, logical ordering, formatting,
consistency and conventions
• factors that contribute to a text’s cohesion: information flow including clefting, front focus and
end focus; anaphoric and cataphoric reference; deictics; repetition; synonymy, antonymy and
hyponymy; collocation; ellipses; substitution; conjunctions and adverbials
• features of spoken discourse: pauses, false starts, repetition, repairs, openings and closings,
adjacency pairs, overlapping speech, interrogative tags, and discourse particles
• strategies in spoken discourse: topic management, turn-taking, holding the floor, minimal responses
• conventions for the transcription of spoken English.