Discourse Analysis

"Discourse analysis is not only about method; it is also a perspective on the nature of language and its relationship to the central issues of the social sciences. More specifically, we see discourse analysis as a related collection of approaches to discourse, approaches that entail not only practices of data collection and analysis, but also a set of metatheoretical and theoretical assumptions and a body of research claims and studies."

(Linda Wood and Rolf Kroger, Doing Discourse Analysis. Sage, 2000)

In the end, discourse analysis is one way to engage in a very important human task. The task is this: to think more deeply about the meanings we give people's words so as to make ourselves better, more humane people and the world a better, more humane place.

(J. P. Gee, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. Routledge, 2005)

Within linguistics, discourse is often described as “language-in-use” or “socially situated text and talk”, i.e., analysts ask how written, oral and visual texts are used in specific contexts to make meanings, as opposed to analysing language-as-an-abstract-system

One way of conceptualising these two sets of approaches is to ask the question “Which is bigger – language or discourse?” (as Alistair Pennycook did in 1994). In linguistics, language is bigger: discourses occur within language. Zellig Harris (one of Chomsky’s teachers) paved the way for linguists to analyse language above the sentence level, calling this unit of analysis ‘discourse’ (e.g., paragraphs, essays, interviews). Analysis therefore focuses on language in use, the relation of language to context and the relations of cohesion within a text.

In socio-political approaches, discourse is bigger than language: Michel Foucault is often referred to; discourse is seen as a system of power/knowledge, situated in a specific time and space. Analysis focuses on the production of knowledge, i.e., that which is understood to be truth or reality. It asks what is sayable (natural, normal, unquestioned) and how is it sayable in this particular context. These approaches share a social constructionist orientation with analysts referring to, among others, Michel Foucault, Alfred Schutz, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ludwik Fleck and Edward Said as inspiration.