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Discourse Analysis

Not simply a method, discourse analysis (DA) is an umbrella term that encompasses considerable variation in subject matter and approach. DA may be defined as (a) a method for doing social research, (b) a body of empirical knowledge about how talk and text are organized, (c) the home of various theories about the nature and workings of human communication and theories about the construction and reproduction of social reality, and (d) related to language and life. DA is concerned with both spoken and written discourse. It can deal with almost any socially situated language use in any channel or medium ranging from advertising of cosmetics to medical record keeping. Discourse analysts might work with written data (e.g., articles in teen magazines), data from sign languages (e.g., the interweaving of grammatically structured arrangements of signs and meaningful gestures as sources of meaning), and textual graphics and images (e.g., advertisements and magazine layouts). Discourse can be analyzed as an end in itself by addressing how turn-taking works in conversation, whether the form of the question affects the form of the answer, and why people misunderstand each other. This type of analysis is affiliated with linguistics. Other approaches are interested in discourse as evidence of other aspects of people’s lives. A key word in relation to discourse is interdisciplinary. DA is characterized by disciplinary diversity: linguistics, anthropology, cognitive psychology, social psychology, philosophy, literary criticism, artificial intelligence, and so on. Furthermore, a wide variety of disciplines, while not necessarily investigating discourse as an end in itself, use methods that generate discourse data. For instance, social psychology, sociology, education, cultural studies, and media studies draw upon interviews, focus groups, and participant observation which all involve talk between the researcher and participants; this talk is listened to, transcribed, and reflected upon. This entry provides a description of the purpose of DA, its principal approaches, and a general overview of the field.

Purpose

Generally speaking, when linguists and other social scientists analyze discourse, the aim is to make explicit what normally gets taken for granted; it is also to show what discourse accomplishes in people’s lives and in society at large. A distinctive feature of DA, as opposed to the study of syntax, is its overt concern with what and how language communicates when it is used purposefully in particular instances and contexts.

DA could be considered as a qualitative research method for investigating social phenomena such as everyday sexism, attitudes toward the government, and youth subcultures such as skateboarding communities.

Many social researchers today would argue that people’s understandings of the world are not merely expressed in their discourse but actually shaped by the ways of using language which people have available to them. Reality is seen as being discursively constructed, made, and remade as people talk and write about things using the discourses to which they have access.

Principal Approaches

The multitude of discourse analytic approaches can be loosely grouped into three main strands:

  • language beyond the clause or sentence,
  • language use, and
  • a broader range of social practice that includes nonlinguistics and nonspecific instances of language.

The conceptualization of discourse adopted, whether explicitly defined or left implicit to emerge from the data gathered and analyzed, depends on the research question asked, which in turn is constrained by the theoretical or analytic framework within which a researcher works. Furthermore, the approaches can be thought of as existing along a continuum from direct, detailed linguistic descriptions of texts (spoken and written) to more indirect, abstract approaches.

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