Discourse Analysis

The Emergence of Discourse Studies between 1964 and 1974

Discourse analysis, or discourse studies, is a cross-discipline that emerged between 1964 and 1974 in most of the disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences.

In anthropology, arguably the first discipline explicitly focusing on discourse (besides traditional literary studies and classical rhetoric), the ethnography of speaking, most notably represented in the work of Dell Hymes, examined “communicative events”—before the recent development of linguistic anthropology as such.

In linguistics, its main aim was to go beyond the sentence boundaries of structural and generative grammars, with the argument that real language use [Page 207]takes place in the form of text and talk and not as isolated sentences.

The sociology of everyday life, and especially ethnomethodology, developed the very successful study of conversational interaction, soon also broadly represented in neighboring disciplines.

At the same time, in the early 1970s, cognitive psychology began its first experimental studies of discourse comprehension, while in the field of artificial intelligence, automatic processing of discourse began to be explored together with the representation of knowledge, crucially necessary in all production and comprehension of discourse.

Finally, in the 1980s, social psychology, especially in the United Kingdom, developed its own constructivist “discursive psychology.” More recent are developments in communication studies, for instance, of media discourse analysis as well as the study of organizational discourse. Strangely, besides its traditional accounts of political rhetoric, political science has been among the few disciplines in the social sciences in which the explicit and systematic study of text and talk has not yet been introduced successfully. Parallel to these widespread empirical and concrete studies of text and talk in various disciplines, philosophy in the 1960s also knew various (obviously more conceptual) approaches to discourse, most notably represented in the work of Michel Foucault.

Neighboring Developments

It is interesting to observe that in the same period other inter- or cross-disciplines also emerged from within the humanities and the social sciences, often overlapping with discourse studies. Thus, semiotics, at first especially in literature, films, and the arts, was one of the developments in structural linguistics and related disciplines, later more broadly concerned with sign systems and semiosis, especially of nonverbal, multimodal messages. Whereas traditional, structural, and generative grammars and linguistics were limited to phonology, syntax, and (later) semantics, the philosophy of language proposed the study of speech acts and illocution, in what soon would be called pragmatics—closely related to discourse and conversation analysis, as was the case with the work of the philosophers John Austin, John Searle, and Paul Grice. The more empirical social and cognitive approaches to language use were the object of studies in the quickly developing interdisciplinary fields of sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. Even formal (logical, etc.) grammars finally turned to the study of some properties of discourse, such as coherence and coreference, influenced, for example, by the work of the logician Richard Montague on grammar.

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