discourser

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Related to discourser: Discourse analysis

dis·course

(dĭs′kôrs′)

1. Verbal expression in speech or writing: political discourse.

2. Verbal exchange or conversation: listened to their discourse on foreign policy.

3. A formal, lengthy treatment of a subject, either written or spoken.

4. Archaic The process or power of reasoning.

v. (dĭ-skôrs′) dis·coursed, dis·cours·ing, dis·cours·es

v.intr.

1. To speak or write formally and at length. See Synonyms at speak.

2. To engage in conversation or discussion; converse: "The two men walked around the city and discoursed on its antiquities" (Michael Wood).

v.tr. Archaic

To narrate or discuss.

[Middle English discours, process of reasoning, from Medieval Latin discursus, from Latin, a running about, from past participle of discurrere, to run about : dis-, apart; see dis- + currere, to run; see kers- in Indo-European roots.]

dis·cours′er n.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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discourser

noun

One given to conversation:

confabulator, conversationalist, conversationist, talker.

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References in periodicals archive ?

The speech function in utterance 26 expresses discourser offer in the interrogative form.

Interrogative questions as device for the representation of power in selected texts of Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo

First, they have moved to the level of rhetorical performance--in the form of the speaker's "craving of the mind." For the act of speaking described here, volition occurs not as an exercise of will (not as "volition in the common acceptation," as Darwin put it) but in those seemingly involuntary-voluntary, or automatic-voluntary, motions, discharges of desire that outpace "restraint" or "deliberation." Coleridge's later acidic comment about "The Thorn"--" It is not possible to imitate truly a dull and garrulous discourser, without repeating the effects of dullness and garrulity"--imputes the spreading contagion to a haplessly prosy "Mr.

"Uncertain disease": nostalgia, pathologies of motion, practices of reading

Here the novelist and a contemporary discourser are linked not only by direct contacts but also by shared responsiveness to a historical predicament, the exhaustion and mourning after the first modern holocaust that were expressed in wide questioning of the civilized values invoked in the war's justification.