A Discoursal Approach to Analysing English Nursery Rhymes

Nursery rhymes are simple poetry written in nature, in a particular language that children can understand and enjoy. The present study investigates nursery rhymes in English from a discoursal point of view. The study aims at making a discoursal analysis of nursery rhymes in English through examining their thematic, schematic and linguistic features. To achieve these aims, the study hypothesizes that 1) English shows various discourse principles in their composition of nursery rhymes. 2)English nursery rhymes have macrostructural, superstructural and microstructural organization. To attain the data relevant to the topic of the study, five English nursery rhymes have been selected to be investigated. Data analysis is conducted on the basis of Van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach of discourse analysis. The study has revealed the following main findings. First, English nursery rhymes vary in their themes. They concentrate on social and emotional issues. Second, at the microstructural level, English nursery rhymes show differences in their semantic, syntactic, stylistic and rhetorical features. Such differences are represented either in the type of the used discoursal elements or in the frequency of their occurrence.