Discourse is a set of utterances that constitute a recognizable speech event such as a conversation, joke, sermon, or interview. Discourse analysis attempts to discover linguistic regularities in discourse using grammatical, phonological, and semantic criteria to interpret what a speaker or writer intends to convey within a social context. There are various tools and devices used for discourse analysis, including cohesion, coherence, parallelism, speech events, background knowledge, and conversational interaction principles.