Discourse analysis


Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, vocal, or sign language use or any significant semiotic event.
The objects of discourse analysis—discourse, writing, conversation, communicative event—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. Text linguistics is related. The essential difference between discourse analysis and text linguistics is that it aims at revealing socio-psychological characteristics of a person/persons rather than text structure.[1 ]
Discourse analysis has been taken up in a variety of social science disciplines, including linguistics, education, 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.
Contents
• 1 Topics of interest
1.1 Politica l discourse
• 2 History
• 3 Perspectives
• 4 See also
• 5 Further reading
• 6 External

links

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
Political discourse


Political discourse analysis is a field of discourse analysis which focuses on discourse in political forums (such as debates, speeches, and hearings) as the phenomenon of interest.
Political discourse is the informal exchange of reasoned views as to which of several alternative courses of action should be taken to solve a societal problem.[2]
History

The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with the United States and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article and discuss the issue on the talk page. (December 2010)

Although the ancient Greeks (among others) had much to say on discourse, some scholars[which?] consider the Austrian emigre Leo Spitzer's Stilstudien [Style Studies] of 1928 the earliest example of discourse analysis (DA); Michel Foucault himself translated it into French. 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-in-interaction .
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. In this context, the term 'discourse' is no longer referred to formal linguistic aspects, but to institutionalized patterns of knowledge, that become manifest in disciplinary structures and operate by the connection of knowledge and power. Since the 1970s, Foucault´s works have had an increasing impact especially on discourse analysis in the social sciences. Thus, in modern European social sciences, one can find a wide range of different approaches working with Foucault´s definition of discourse and his theoretical concepts. Apart from the original context in France, there is, at least since 2005, a broad discussion on socio-scientific discourse analysis in Germany. Here, for example, the sociologist Reiner Keller developed his widely recognized 'Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD)'.[3] Following the sociology of knowledge by Peter L. Berger und Thomas Luckmann, Keller argues, that our sense of reality in everyday life and thus the meaning of every objects, actions and events are the product of a permanent, routinized interaction. In this context, SKAD has been developed as a scientific perspective that is able to understand the processes of 'The Social Construction of Reality' on all levels of social life by combining Michel Foucault's theories of discourse and power with the theory of knowledge by Berger/Luckmann. Whereas the latter primarily focus on the constitution and stabilisation of knowledge on the level of interaction, Foucault's perspective concentrates on institutional contexts of the production and integration of knowledge, where the subject mainly appears to be determined by knowledge and power. Therefore, the 'Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse' can also be seen as an approach to deal with the vividly discussed micro-macro problem in sociology.
Perspectives

The following are some of the specific theoretical perspectives and analytical approaches used in linguistic discourse 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 analyst 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.[4]
f an immunology sublanguage. Preface by Hilary What is discourse analysis?
Discourse analysis is about studying and analysing the uses of language. Because the term is used in many different ways, we have simplified approaches to discourse analysis into three clusters (table 1⇓) and illustrated how each of these approaches might be used to study a single domain: doctor-patient communication about diabetes management (table 2⇓). Regardless of approach, a vast array of data sources is available to the discourse analyst, including transcripts from interviews, focus groups, samples of conversations, published literature, media, and web based materials.

Three approaches to a specific research question: example of doctor-patient communications about diabetes management 
What is formal linguistic discourse analysis?
The first approach, formal linguistic discourse analysis, involves a structured analysis of text in order to find general underlying rules of linguistic or communicative function behind the text.4 For example, Lacson and colleagues compared human-human and machine-human dialogues in order to study the possibility of using computers to compress human conversations about patients in a dialysis unit into a form that physicians could use to make clinical decisions.5 They transcribed phone conversations between nurses and 25 adult dialysis patients over a three month period and coded all 17 385 words by semantic type (categories of meaning) and structure (for example, sentence length, word position). They presented their work as a “first step towards an automatic analysis of spoken medical dialogue” that would allow physicians to “answer questions …