Discourseinternal

Discourseinternal is a term used in discourse studies to refer to elements of a text or dialogue that address the discourse itself rather than the world described by the discourse. It functions as meta-commentary about the act of communication, its genre conventions, or the social conditions of the exchange. The term is more often encountered in annotation schemes, corpus labeling, and theoretical discussions than in everyday usage.

In practice, discourseinternal features include statements about the purpose of the discourse, evaluations of its credibility, audience orientation, references to the act of communication, and notes on genre conventions and style. It overlaps with metadiscourse and metapragmatic notes, and its interpretation is highly dependent on theoretical orientation and context. In narratology, discourseinternal content can include metafictional commentary or narrator remarks about the storytelling process, signaling commentary on the discourse rather than the narrative world.

Discourseinternal is distinguished from external discourse, which concerns entities, events, or states outside the discourse frame. It may also be contrasted with direct speech, where utterances are embedded, rather than commentary about the discourse's form or function.

Applications and challenges: researchers annotate discourseinternal segments to study how authors shape reception, authority, or voice. In computational text analysis, markers of discourseinternal can contribute to analyses of stance, self-reflection, or discourse-level coherence. Because terminology varies by field, the precise definition of discourseinternal remains context dependent.