Discourse analysis

Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse

studies, is an approach to the analysis of
written, vocal, or sign language use, or any
significant semiotic event.

The objects of discourse analysis

(discourse, writing, conversation,
communicative event) are variously
defined in terms of coherent sequences of
sentences, propositions, speech, or turns-
at-talk. Contrary to much of traditional
linguistics, discourse analysts not only
study language use 'beyond the sentence
boundary' but also prefer to analyze
'naturally occurring' language use, not
invented examples.[1] Text linguistics is a
closely related field. The essential
difference between discourse analysis and
text linguistics is that discourse analysis
aims at revealing socio-psychological
characteristics of a person/persons rather
than text structure.[2]

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
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 Learn
not more

Early use of the term

The ancient Greeks (among others) had
much to say on discourse; however, some
scholars consider Austria-born Leo
Spitzer's Stilstudien (Style Studies) of 1928
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 reporting on work from which he
developed transformational grammar in
the late 1930s. Formal equivalence
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) and a fully articulated theory of
linguistic informational content (Harris
1991). During this time, however, most
linguists ignored such developments in
favor of a succession of elaborate
theories of sentence-level syntax and
semantics.[4]

In January 1953, a linguist working for the

American Bible Society, James A.
Lauriault/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 Summer
Institute of Linguistics in Norman,
Oklahoma, in the summers of 1956 and
1957 and entered the University of
Pennsylvania to study with Harris in the
interim year. He tried to publish a paper
Shipibo Paragraph Structure, but it was
delayed until 1970 (Loriot & Hollenbach
1970). In the meantime, Kenneth Lee Pike,
a professor at University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor, taught the theory, and one of his
students, Robert E. Longacre developed it
in his writings. Harris's methodology
disclosing the correlation of form with
meaning was developed into a system for
the computer-aided analysis of natural
language by a team led by Naomi Sager at
NYU, which has been applied to a number
of sublanguage domains, most notably to
medical informatics. The software for the
Medical Language Processor is publicly
available on SourceForge.

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, such as 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", which was
influenced by the Sociologist Harold
Garfinkel, the founder of
Ethnomethodology.

Foucault

In Europe, Michel Foucault became one of

the key theorists of the subject, especially
of discourse, and wrote The Archaeology
of Knowledge. In this context, the term
'discourse' no longer refers to formal
linguistic aspects, but to institutionalized
patterns of knowledge that become
manifest in disciplinary structures and
operate by the connection of knowledge
and power. Since the 1970s, Foucault's
works have had an increasing impact
especially on discourse analysis in the
social sciences. Thus, in modern European
social sciences, one can find a wide range
of different approaches working with
Foucault's definition of discourse and his
theoretical concepts. Apart from the
original context in France, there is, at least
since 2005, a broad discussion on socio-
scientific discourse analysis in Germany.
Here, for example, the sociologist Reiner
Keller developed his widely recognized
'Sociology of Knowledge Approach to
Discourse (SKAD)'.[5] Following the
sociology of knowledge by Peter L. Berger
and Thomas Luckmann, Keller argues, that
our sense of reality in everyday life and
thus the meaning of every object, actions
and events are the product of a permanent,
routinized interaction. In this context, SKAD
has been developed as a scientific
perspective that is able to understand the
processes of 'The Social Construction of
Reality' on all levels of social life by
combining Michel Foucault's theories of
discourse and power with the theory of
knowledge by Berger/Luckmann. Whereas
the latter primarily focus on the
constitution and stabilisation of
knowledge on the level of interaction,
Foucault's perspective concentrates on
institutional contexts of the production
and integration of knowledge, where the
subject mainly appears to be determined
by knowledge and power. Therefore, the
'Sociology of Knowledge Approach to
Discourse' can also be seen as an
approach to deal with the vividly discussed
micro–macro problem in sociology.

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[6]
Cognitive neuroscience of discourse
comprehension[7][8]
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 is required. A question
many linguists ask is: "Are there general
principles which will determine the
relevance or nature of the specification?"

Topics of interest
Topics of discourse analysis include:[9]

The various levels or dimensions of

discourse, such as sounds (intonation,
etc.), gestures, syntax, the lexicon, style,
rhetoric, meanings, speech acts, moves,
strategies, turns, and other aspects of
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
The relations between discourse and
interaction
The relations between discourse and
cognition and memory

Prominent academics
Jan Blommaert

Teun van Dijk

Michel Foucault

Heidi E. Hamilton

Barbara Johnstone

Sinfree Makoni

Jonathan Potter

Deborah Schiffrin

Deborah Tannen

Margaret Wetherell
Ruth Wodak

Political discourse

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. Policy analysis
requires discourse analysis to be effective
from the post-positivist perspective.[10][11]

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.[12]
An example of an analysis of political
discourse is Roffee's 2016 examination
into speech acts surrounding the
justification of the legislative processes
concerning the Australian federal
government's intervening in the Northern
Territory Aboriginal communities. The
intervention was a hasty reaction to a
social problem. Through this analysis,
Roffee established that there was, in fact,
an unwillingness to respond on behalf of
the government, and the intervention was,
in fact, no more than another attempt to
control the Indigenous population.
However, due to the political rhetoric used,
this was largely unidentified.[13]
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).[14]

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
1. "Discourse Analysis – What Speakers
Do in Conversation | Linguistic Society
of America" .
www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved
2016-02-20.
2. Yatsko V.A. Integrational discourse
analysis conception
3. "When did Foucault translate Leo
Spitzer?" . 2016-11-10.
4. 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. "Harris on the
Structures of Language", in
Transformationelle Analyse, ed. Senta
Plötz, Athenäum Verlag, Frankfurt,
275–292.
5. Keller, Reiner (2011): The Sociology of
Knowledge Approach to Discourse
(SKAD), in: Human Studies 34 (1), 43–
65.
6. James, Carl (1993-06-01). "What is
applied linguistics?". International
Journal of Applied Linguistics. 3 (1):
17–32. doi:10.1111/j.1473-
4192.1993.tb00041.x . ISSN 1473-
4192 .
7. Barbey, Aron K.; Colom, Roberto;
Grafman, Jordan (2014). "Neural
mechanisms of discourse
comprehension: a human lesion
study" . Brain. 137 (1): 277–287.
doi:10.1093/brain/awt312 .
PMC 3954106 . PMID 24293267 .
8. Yates, Diana. "Researchers Map Brain
Areas Vital to Understanding
Language" . University of Illinois News
Bureau. University of Illinois.
9. Van Dijk, Teun. Critical Discourse
Analysis. pp. 352–371.
10. Hult, F.M. (2017), "Discursive
approaches to policy", in Wortham,
S.E.F.; Kim, D; May, S (eds.), Discourse
and education, New York: Springer,
pp. 111–21.
11. Hult, F.M. (2015), "Making policy
connections across scales using
nexus analysis", in Hult, F.M.; Johnson,
D.C (eds.), Research methods in
language policy and planning: A
practical guide , Malden, MA: Wiley,
pp. 217–31, ISBN 9781118308387.
12. Johnson, David W.; Johnson, Roger T.
(May 2000), Civil Political Discourse in
a Democracy: The Contribution of
Psychology,
CiteSeerX 10.1.1.459.5411 .
13. Roffee, James A. (2016). "Rhetoric,
Aboriginal Australians and the
Northern Territory Intervention: A
Socio-legal Investigation into Pre-
legislative Argumentation".
International Journal for Crime, Justice
and Social Democracy. 5 (1): 131.
doi:10.5204/ijcjsd.v5i1.285 .
14. Ruth, Breeze (2013-10-10). Corporate
discourse. London. ISBN 978-1-
44112718-1. OCLC 830837491 .

External links
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up for the international and
interdisciplinary portal in discourse
analysis: conferences, publications,
people...
Daniel L. Everett, statement concerning
James Loriot, p. 9
The Discourse Attributes Analysis
Program and Measures of the
Referential Process .
 Linguistic Society of America: Discourse
Analysis, by Deborah Tannen
Discourse Analysis by Z. Harris
A discourse analysis related
international conference: You can find
some information and events related to
Metadiscourse Across Genres by visiting
MAG 2017 website

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