Discourse analysis

Part of a series on
Linguistics
Outline History Index
General linguistics Diachronic Lexicography Morphology Phonology Pragmatics Semantics Syntax Syntax–semantics interface Typology
Applied linguistics Acquisition Anthropological Applied Computational Conversation analysis Corpus linguistics Discourse analysis Distance Documentation Ethnography of communication Ethnomethodology Forensic History of linguistics Interlinguistics Neurolinguistics Philology Philosophy of language Phonetics Psycholinguistics Sociolinguistics Text Translating and interpreting Writing systems
Theoretical frameworks Formalist Constituency Dependency Distributionalism Generative Glossematics Functional Cognitive Construction grammar Functional discourse grammar Grammaticalization Interactional linguistics Prague school Systemic functional Usage-based Structuralism
Topics Autonomy of syntax Compositionality Conservative/innovative forms Descriptivism Etymology Iconicity Internet linguistics LGBT linguistics Origin of language Orthography Philosophy of linguistics Prescriptivism Second-language acquisition Theory of language
Portal
v t e

Part of a series on
Research
Research design Research proposal Research question Writing Argument Referencing
Research strategy Interdisciplinary Multimethodology Qualitative Art-based Quantitative
Philosophical schools Antipositivism Constructivism Critical rationalism Empiricism Fallibilism Pancritical rationalism Panrationalism Positivism Postpositivism Pragmatism Realism Critical realism Subtle realism
Methodology Action research Art methodology Critical theory Grounded theory Hermeneutics Historiography Narrative inquiry Phenomenology Pragmatism Scientific method
Methods Analysis Case study Content analysis Descriptive statistics Discourse analysis Ethnography Autoethnography Experiment Field experiment Social experiment Quasi-experiment Field research Historical method Inferential statistics Interviews Mapping Cultural mapping Phenomenography Secondary research Bibliometrics Literature review Meta-analysis Scoping review Systematic review Scientific modelling Simulation Survey
Tools and software Argument technology Geographic information system software Library and information science software Bibliometrics Reference management Science software Qualitative data analysis Simulation Statistics
Philosophy portal
v t e

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. You may improve this article, discuss the issue on the talk page, or create a new article, as appropriate. (December 2010) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

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 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,

• 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
• Genres
  of 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

References