Discourse is not a string of propositions or theme statements. The author of a discourse had a purpose in mind as he wrote and he arranged his material accordingly. Before the nuclear concept of a unit can be determined, the relationships between the concepts, propositions, or paragraphs of the unit must be determined. Addition relationships between propositions or larger units develop the author's argument. These propositions are of equal weight semantically.
Associative relations serve to support and clarify material already presented within the discourse.
Discourse analysis then aims at determining the universal semantic meaning of a text and displays that meaning in the form of concepts, propositions, paragraphs, and so forth, in their relationships to one another. Thus far the details of semantic structure and its analysis have been discussed. However in an analysis of a text, one begins with a large section of text and works in reverse order. The discourse is divided into sections and the sections into paragraphs and then the more detailed propositional analysis is undertaken. 43 Chart III lists the basic procedure which is followed in discourse analysis.