Discourse analysis
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Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is an approach to the analysis of written, spoken, or sign language, including any significant
The objects of discourse analysis (
Discourse analysis has been taken up in a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, including linguistics, education, sociology, anthropology, social work, cognitive psychology, social psychology, area studies, cultural studies, international relations, human geography, environmental science, communication studies, biblical studies, public relations, argumentation studies, and translation studies, each of which is subject to its own assumptions, dimensions of analysis, and methodologies.
History
The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with the United States and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. (December 2010) |
Early use of the term
The ancient Greeks (among others) had much to say on discourse; however, there is ongoing discussion about whether Austria-born Leo Spitzer's Stilstudien (Style Studies) of 1928 is the earliest example of discourse analysis (DA). Michel Foucault translated it into French.[3] However, the term first came into general use following the publication of a series of papers by Zellig Harris from 1952[4] reporting on work from which he developed transformational grammar in the late 1930s. Formally equivalent relations among the sentences of a coherent discourse are made explicit by using sentence transformations to put the text in a canonical form. Words and sentences with equivalent information then appear in the same column of an array.
This work progressed over the next four decades (see references) into a science of sublanguage analysis (Kittredge & Lehrberger 1982), culminating in a demonstration of the informational structures in texts of a sublanguage of science, that of Immunology (Harris et al. 1989),[5] and a fully articulated theory of linguistic informational content (Harris 1991).[6] During this time, however, most linguists ignored such developments in favor of a succession of elaborate theories of sentence-level syntax and semantics.[7]
In January 1953, a linguist working for the American Bible Society, James A. Lauriault (alt. Loriot), needed to find answers to some fundamental errors in translating Quechua, in the Cuzco area of Peru. Following Harris's 1952 publications, he worked over the meaning and placement of each word in a collection of Quechua legends with a native speaker of Quechua and was able to formulate discourse rules that transcended the simple sentence structure. He then applied the process to Shipibo, another language of Eastern Peru. He taught the theory at the
In the humanities
In the late 1960s and 1970s, and without reference to this prior work, a variety of other approaches to a new cross-discipline of DA began to develop in most of the humanities and social sciences concurrently with, and related to, other disciplines. These include semiotics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics. Many of these approaches, especially those influenced by the social sciences, favor a more dynamic study of oral talk-in-interaction. An example is "conversational analysis" (CA),[12] which was influenced by the sociologist Harold Garfinkel,[13] the founder of Ethnomethodology.
Foucault
In Europe,
Perspectives
The following are some of the specific theoretical perspectives and analytical approaches used in linguistic discourse analysis:
- Applied linguistics, an interdisciplinary perspective on linguistic analysis[15]
- Cognitive neuroscience of discourse comprehension[16][17]
- Cognitive psychology, studying the production and comprehension of discourse.
- Conversation analysis
- Critical discourse analysis
- Discursive psychology
- Emergent grammar
- Ethnography of communication
- Functional grammar
- Interactional sociolinguistics
- Mediated Stylistics
- Pragmatics
- Response based therapy(counselling)
- Rhetoric
- Stylistics (linguistics)
- Sublanguage analysis
- Tagmemics
- Text linguistics
- Variation analysis
Although these approaches emphasize different aspects of language use, they all view language as social interaction and are concerned with the social contexts in which discourse is embedded.
Often a distinction is made between 'local' structures of discourse (such as relations among sentences, propositions, and turns) and 'global' structures, such as overall topics and the schematic organization of discourses and conversations. For instance, many types of discourse begin with some kind of global 'summary', in titles, headlines, leads, abstracts, and so on.
A problem for the discourse analyst is to decide when a particular feature is relevant to the specification required. A question many linguists ask is: "Are there general principles which will determine the relevance or nature of the specification?[18]"[citation needed]
Topics of interest
Topics of discourse analysis include:[19]
- The various levels or dimensions of discourse, such as sounds (interaction
- Genresof discourse (various types of discourse in politics, the media, education, science, business, etc.)
- The relations between discourse and the emergence of syntactic structure
- The relations between text (discourse) and context
- The relations between discourse and power[20]
- The relations between discourse and interaction
- The relations between discourse and cognition and memory
- Lexical density
Prominent academics
Political discourse
Political discourse is the text and talk of professional politicians or political institutions, such as presidents and prime ministers and other members of government, parliament or political parties, both at the local, national and international levels, includes both the speaker and the audience.[21]
Political discourse analysis is a field of discourse analysis which focuses on discourse in political forums (such as debates, speeches, and hearings) as the phenomenon of interest.
Political discourse is the formal exchange of reasoned views as to which of several alternative courses of action should be taken to solve a societal problem.[24][25]
Corporate discourse
Corporate discourse can be broadly defined as the language used by corporations. It encompasses a set of messages that a corporation sends out to the world (the general public, the customers and other corporations) and the messages it uses to communicate within its own structures (the employees and other stakeholders).[26]
See also
- Actor (policy debate)
- Critical discourse analysis
- Dialogical analysis
- Discourse representation theory
- Frame analysis
- Communicative action
- Essex School of discourse analysis
- Ethnolinguistics
- Foucauldian discourse analysis
- Interpersonal communication
- Linguistic anthropology
- Narrative analysis
- Pragmatics
- Rhetoric
- Sociolinguistics
- Statement analysis
- Stylistics (linguistics)
- Worldview
References
- ^ "Discourse Analysis—What Speakers Do in Conversation". Linguistic Society of America. Retrieved 2019-11-25.
- ^ "Yatsko's Computational Linguistics Laboratory". yatsko.zohosites.com. Retrieved 2019-11-25.
- ^ Elden, Stuart (2016-11-10). "When did Foucault translate Leo Spitzer?". Progressive Geographies.
- ^ Harris, Zellig (1952). "Discourse Analysis". JSTOR.
- ISSN 1535-0665.)
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link - ISSN 1535-0665.)
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link - ^ John Corcoran, then a colleague of Harris in Linguistics at University of Pennsylvania, summarized and critically examined the development of Harris’s thought on discourse through 1969 in lectures attended by Harris’ colleagues and students in Philadelphia and Cambridge.
Corcoran, John (1972). Plötz, Senta (ed.). "Harris on the Structures of Language". Transformationelle Analyse. Frankfurt: Athenäum Verlag: 275–292. - ^ "SIL International". SIL International. Retrieved 2020-12-03.
- ^ "University of Pennsylvania |". www.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2020-12-03.
- JSTOR 25000427.
- ^ "University of Michigan". umich.edu. Retrieved 2020-12-03.
- ^ "Conversational Analysis | Encyclopedia.com". www.encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 2020-12-03.
- ^ Lynch, Michael (2011-07-13). "Harold Garfinkel obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 2020-12-03.
- S2CID 143674874.
- ISSN 0802-6106.
- PMID 24293267.
- ^ Yates, Diana. "Researchers map brain areas vital to understanding language". news.illinois.edu. University of Illinois. Retrieved 2019-11-25.
- PMID 19556336.
- ISBN 978-0-470-75346-0.
- S2CID 255654982.
- )
- ISBN 978-3-319-02242-0.
- OCLC 905699853..
- ISSN 1532-7949.
- S2CID 255654982.
- OCLC 852898361.
External links
- DiscourseNet. International Association for Discourse Studies
- The Discourse Attributes Analysis Program and Measures of the Referential Process Archived 2023-03-16 at the Wayback Machine.
- Linguistic Society of America: Discourse Analysis, by Deborah Tannen
- Discourse Analysis by Z. Harris
- Daniel L. Everett, Documenting Languages: The View from the Brazilian Amazon Statement concerning James Loriot, p. 9
- A discourse analysis related international conference You can find some information and events related to Metadiscourse Across Genres by visiting MAG 2017 website