Discourse analysis

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (January 2008)

Sociolinguistics

Areas of study

Accent Dialect Discourse analysis Language varieties Linguistic description Pragmatics Variation
Related fields

Applied linguistics Historical linguistics Linguistic anthropology Sociocultural linguistics Sociology of language
Key concepts

Code-switching Diglossia Language change Language ideology Language planning Multilingualism

Prestige
People

Sociolinguists

Category:Sociolinguistics Portal:Linguistics

vde

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 analysisdiscourse, writing, talk, 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. 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: see below.

Contents
[hide]

1 History 2 Topics of interest 3 Perspectives 4 Prominent discourse analysts 5 Further reading 6 See also 7 External links

[edit] History
The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with USA and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article and discuss the issue on the talk page. Some scholars consider the Austrian emigre Leo Spitzer's Style Studies of 1928 the earliest example of discourse analysis (DA); it was translated into French by no less than Michel Foucault. 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-ininteraction.

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.

[edit] Topics of interest

Topics of discourse analysis include:

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 Genres of discourse (various types of discourse in politics, the media, education, science, business, etc.) The relations between discourse and the emergence of syntactic structure The relations between text (discourse) and context The relations between discourse and power The relations between discourse and interaction The relations between discourse and cognition and memory

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

Emergent grammar Text grammar (or 'discourse grammar') Cohesion and relevance theory Functional grammar Rhetoric Stylistics (linguistics) Interactional sociolinguistics Ethnography of communication Pragmatics, particularly speech act theory Conversation analysis Variation analysis Applied linguistics Cognitive psychology, often under the label discourse processing, studying the production and comprehension of discourse. Discursive psychology Response based therapy (counselling) Critical discourse analysis 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 analysys 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.