discourse analysis - Topics of interest, Perspectives

The systematic study of stretches of language, whether in speech or writing, to discover the regularities which govern them. An example is the use of grammatical criteria to link certain sequences of text, creating cohesion, as in the use of pronouns He and it in the sequence John went to the play last night. He didn't think much of it. This approach is usually distinguished from conversation analysis, the study of the sequential structure of real-life conversations, to understand the strategies used to link different strands and themes, and the ways in which people interact.

Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken or signed language use.

The objects of discourse analysis--discourse, text, talk, conversation, communicative event, etc.--are variously defined in terms of coherent sequences of sentences, propositions, speech acts or turns-at-talk.

Discourse analysis has been taken up in a variety of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, sociology, cognitive psychology, social psychology and communication studies, each of which is subject to its own assumptions and methodologies.

Whereas earlier studies of discourse, for instance in text linguistics, often focused on the abstract structures of (written) texts, many contemporary approaches, especially those influenced by the social sciences, favor a more dynamic study of (spoken, oral) talk-in-interaction.

Topics of interest

Topics of interest to discourse analysts 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 sentence syntax 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

Perspectives

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

Text grammar (or 'discourse 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 Critical discourse analysis

Although these approaches emphasizes 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 between sentences, propositions or turns), and 'global' structures, such as the overall topics and the schematic organization of the discourse or conversation as a whole.