Discourse analysis - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.

org/wiki/Discourse_analysis

Discourse analysis
Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is the approaches to analyze 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, communication studies, biblical studies, and translation studies, each of which is subject to its own
assumptions, dimensions of analysis, and methodologies.

Contents
Topics of interest
Political discourse
Corporate discourse
History
Perspectives
See also
References
External links

Topics of interest
Topics of discourse analysis include:[3]

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

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.[4][5]

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.[6]

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.[7]

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).[8]

History
Although the ancient Greeks (among others) had much to say on discourse, 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.

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.[9]

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 (http://mlp-xml.sourceforge.net/) is
publicly available on SourceForge.

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

1 of 3 24/01/2019 12:41
Discourse analysis - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_analysis

Ethnomethodology.

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)'.[10] 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[11]

Cognitive neuroscience of discourse comprehension[12][13]
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?"

See also
Actor (policy debate) Linguistic anthropology
Critical discourse analysis Narrative analysis
Dialogical analysis Pragmatics
Discourse representation theory Rhetoric
Frame analysis Sociolinguistics
Communicative action Statement analysis
Essex School of discourse analysis Stylistics (linguistics)
Ethnolinguistics Worldview
Foucauldian discourse analysis

References
1. "Discourse Analysis – What Speakers Do in Conversation | Linguistic Society of America"
(http://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/discourse-analysis-what-speakers-do-
conversation). www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved 2016-02-20.
2. Yatsko V.A. Integrational discourse analysis conception (http://yatsko.zohosites.com
/integrational-discourse-analysis-conception.html)
3. Van Dijk, Teun. Critical Discourse Analysis. pp. 352–371.
4. Hult, F.M. (2017), "Discursive approaches to policy", in Wortham, S.E.F.; Kim, D; May, S,
Discourse and education, New York: Springer, pp. 111–21.
5. Hult, F.M. (2015), "Making policy connections across scales using nexus analysis", in Hult,
F.M.; Johnson, D.C, Research methods in language policy and planning: A practical guide
(https://books.google.com/books?id=lOc_CQAAQBAJ), Malden, MA: Wiley, pp. 217–31,
ISBN 9781118308387.
6. Johnson, David W.; Johnson, Roger T. (May 2000), Civil Political Discourse in a
Democracy: The Contribution of Psychology, CiteSeerX 10.1.1.459.5411
(https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.459.5411).
7. 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
(https://doi.org/10.5204%2Fijcjsd.v5i1.285).
8. Ruth, Breeze (2013-10-10). Corporate discourse. London. ISBN 978-1-44112718-1.
OCLC 830837491 (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/830837491).
9. 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.
10. Keller, Reiner (2011): The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse
(https://link.springer.com/10.1007%2Fs10746-011-9175-z?LI=true&from=SL) (SKAD), in:
Human Studies 34 (1), 43–65.
11. 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 (https://doi.org
/10.1111%2Fj.1473-4192.1993.tb00041.x). ISSN 1473-4192 (https://www.worldcat.org
/issn/1473-4192).
12. Barbey, Aron K.; Colom, Roberto; Grafman, Jordan (2014). "Neural mechanisms of
discourse comprehension: a human lesion study" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
/pmc/articles/PMC3954106). Brain. 137 (1): 277–287. doi:10.1093/brain/awt312
(https://doi.org/10.1093%2Fbrain%2Fawt312). PMC 3954106
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3954106). PMID 24293267
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24293267).
13. Yates, Diana. "Researchers Map Brain Areas Vital to Understanding Language"
(http://news.illinois.edu/news/13/1121brain_language_AronBarbey.html). University of
Illinois News Bureau. University of Illinois.

External links
http://www.discourseanalysis.net sign up for the international and interdisciplinary portal in discourse analysis: conferences, publications, people... (http://www.discourseanalysis.net)
Daniel L. Everett, statement concerning James Loriot, p. 9 (https://web.archive.org/web/20081217104207/http://www.llc.ilstu.edu/dlevere/docs/soas.pdf)

2 of 3 24/01/2019 12:41
Discourse analysis - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_analysis

The Discourse Attributes Analysis Program and Measures of the Referential Process (http://www.thereferentialprocess.org/the-discourse-attributes-analysis-program-daap).
Linguistic Society of America: Discourse Analysis, by Deborah Tannen (https://web.archive.org/web/20101125032435/https://lsadc.org/info/ling-fields-discourse.cfm)
Discourse Analysis by Z. Harris (http://waucondastore.com/discourse-analysis-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
(http://metadiscourseacrossgenres.com)

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discourse_analysis&oldid=876132679"

This page was last edited on 31 December 2018, at 10:55 (UTC).

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a
registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

3 of 3 24/01/2019 12:41