Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken, signed language use or any significant semiotic event.

The objects of discourse analysis — discourse, writing, conversation, communicative event, etc.—are variously defined in terms of coherent sequences of sentences, propositions, speech acts 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, and not invented examples. This is known as corpus linguistics; text linguistics is related. The essential difference between discourse analysis and text linguistics is that it aims at revealing socio-psychological characteristics of a person/persons rather than text structure.

Discourse analysis has been taken up in a variety of social science disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, anthropology, social work, cognitive psychology, social psychology, international relations, human geography, communication studies and translation studies, each of which is subject to its own assumptions, dimensions of analysis, and methodologies. Sociologist Harold Garfinkel was another influence on the discipline.[citation needed]

History

Some scholars which consider the Austrian emigre Leo Spitzer's Stilstudien [Style Studies] of 1928 the earliest example of discourse analysis (DA); Michel Foucault himself translated it into French. But the term first came into general use following the publication of a series of papers by Zellig Harris beginning in 1952 and 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 decided a succession of elaborate theories of sentence-level syntax and semantics.

Although Harris had mentioned the analysis of whole discourses, he had not worked out a comprehensive model, as of January, 1952. 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. He took Harris's idea, recorded all of the legends and, after going over the meaning and placement of each word with a native speaker of Quechua, was able to form logical, mathematical rules that transcended the simple sentence structure. He then applied the process to another language of Eastern Peru, Shipibo. He taught the theory in Norman, Oklahoma, in the summers of 1956 and 1957 and entered the University of Pennsylvania 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, Dr. Kenneth Lee Pike, a professor at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, taught the theory, and one of his students, Robert E. Longacre, was able to disseminate it in a dissertation.

Harris's methodology 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 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.

Mention must also be made of the term "Conversational analysis", which was influenced by the Sociologist Harold Garfinkel who is the founder of Ethnomethodology.

In Europe, Michel Foucault became one of the key theorists of the subject, especially of discourse, and wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge on the subject.

Until fairly recently, discourse analysis focused upon language but gave scant or no consideration to languages. That is to say, the language within which a writer or speaker takes his or her stand was not considered to be of any relevance. I recent years, multilingual or cross-lingual discourse analysis has been developing. James W. Underhill makes a contribution to this new field (2011 & 2012). Underhill's studies look at the language-specific constraints with which individuals are working as they struggle to express themselves by resisting dominant discourse. This involves investigating how Klemperer resisted Nazi-language, Hitlerdeutsch, and how Czech communists resisted communist paradigms of thought. Cross-lingual discourse analysis takes us into the way individuals handle personification, objectification, prepositions and conceptual metaphors. Love, truth, hate and war all turn out to be political at a linguistic and at a discourse level. And as Underhill insists (2012), resisting dominant ideologies means refusing to assimilate the spread of those ideologies via language and translation. The War-on-Terror rhetoric which spread to Spanish, German, French, Russian and Czech is only one case in point.

Topics of interest

Topics of discourse analysis include:

1. 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
2. Genres of discourse (various types of discourse in politics, the media, education, science, business, etc.)
3. The relations between discourse and the emergence of syntactic structure
4. The relations between text (discourse) and context
5. The relations between discourse and power
6. The relations between discourse and interaction
7. 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.

Political discourse is the informal exchange of reasoned views as to which of several alternative courses of action should be taken to solve a societal problem. It is a science that has been used through the history of the United States. It is the essence of democracy. Full of problems and persuasion, political discourse is used in many debates, candidacies and in our everyday life.

Perspectives

The following are some of the specific theoretical perspectives and analytical approaches used in linguistic discourse analysis:

1. Emergent grammar
2. Text grammar (or 'discourse grammar')
3. Cohesion and relevance theory
4. Functional grammar
5. Rhetoric
6. Stylistics (linguistics)
7. Interactional sociolinguistics
8. Ethnography of communication
9. Pragmatics, particularly speech act theory
10. Conversation analysis
11. Variation analysis
12. Applied linguistics
13. Cognitive psychology, often under the label discourse processing, studying the production and comprehension of discourse.
14. Discursive psychology
15. Response based therapy (counselling)
16. Critical discourse analysis
17. Sublanguage 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. Are there general principles which will determine the relevance or nature of the specification.

Prominent discourse analysts

Marc Angenot, Robert de Beaugrande, Jan Blommaert, Adriana Bolivar, Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard, Robyn Carston, Wallace Chafe, Paul Chilton, Guy Cook, Malcolm Coulthard, James Deese, Paul Drew, John Du Bois, Alessandro Duranti, Brenton D. Faber, Norman Fairclough, Michel Foucault, Roger Fowler, James Paul Gee, Talmy Givón, Charles Goodwin, Art Graesser, Michael Halliday, Zellig Harris, John Heritage, Janet Holmes, David R. Howarth, Paul Hopper, Gail Jefferson, Barbara Johnstone, Walter Kintsch, Richard Kittredge, Adam Jaworski, William Labov, George Lakoff, Jay Lemke, Stephen H. Levinsohn, James A. Lauriault/Loriot, Robert E. Longacre, Jim Martin, Aletta Norval, David Nunan, Elinor Ochs, Gina Poncini, Jonathan Potter, Edward Robinson, Nikolas Rose, Harvey Sacks, Svenka Savic Naomi Sager, Emanuel Schegloff, Deborah Schiffrin, Michael Schober, Stef Slembrouck, Michael Stubbs, John Swales, Deborah Tannen, Sandra Thompson, Teun A. van Dijk, Theo van Leeuwen, Jef Verschueren, Henry Widdowson, Carla Willig, Deirdre Wilson, Ruth Wodak, Margaret Wetherell, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Judith M. De Guzman, Cynthia Hardy, Louise J. Phillips.