Discourse analysis


Discourse analysis, or discourse studies, is an approach to the analysis of written, spoken, or sign language, including any significant semiotic event.
The objects of discourse analysis 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. 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.
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 studies, 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

Early use of the term

There is ongoing discussion about whether Austria-born Leo Spitzer's Stilstudien of 1928 is the earliest example of discourse analysis. 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. 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 into a science of sublanguage analysis, culminating in a demonstration of the informational structures in texts of a sublanguage of science, that of immunology, and a fully articulated theory of linguistic informational content. During this time, however, most linguists ignored such developments in favor of a succession of elaborate theories of sentence-level syntax and semantics.
In January 1953, a linguist working for the American Bible Society, James A. Lauriault, 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. In the meantime, Kenneth Lee Pike, a professor at the University of Michigan, 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.

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", which was influenced by the sociologist Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology.

Perspectives

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

Topics of interest

Topics of discourse analysis include:
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.
Political discourse analysis is a field of discourse analysis which focuses on discourse in political forums as the phenomenon of interest. Policy analysis requires discourse analysis to be effective from the post-positivist perspective.
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.

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 and the messages it uses to communicate within its own structures.