Discourse Theory and Analysis

Historical Developments

One of the greatest achievements of the earliest forms of discourse analysis was a departure from the traditional linguistic approach that started from invented or written data. Zelig Harris, a prominent linguist in the 1950s and founder of the first linguistics department in the United States, is probably also the first person to have used the term discourse analysis. He launched a research program aimed at unraveling general principles in language production by looking at regularities in actual usage. In practice, however, the focus on empirical data was still limited, in part because of the program's taxonomic ambitions.

Some 25 years later, John Sinclair and Malcolm Coulthard developed a model of teacher-student interaction that started from a prototypical three-part sequence of teacher initiation, student response, and teacher feedback (evaluation). They found that departures from this sequence were “noticeably absent” for students. A missing feedback was, for example, treated as a clue for having given the wrong answer. The comparative work of Coulthard and Sinclair was designed to provide insight into structures of interaction across different institutional settings. Although they drew on simplified transcripts, their approach put forward a substantial argument for the importance of studying real-life interaction. At the same time, this and related approaches were criticized for their urge to characterize everyday verbal interaction in terms of quasi-syntactical rules. Introductions on discourse analysis from that period, for example from Gillian Brown and George Yule, display the same emphasis on formal rule seeking.