Discourse analysis
Encyclopedia
Discourse analysis 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 analysis — discourse
, writing
, talk, conversation
, communicative event
, etc.—are variously defined in terms of coherent sequences of sentences
, proposition
s, 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. 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.
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.
'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
on the subject.
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. It is a science that has been used through the history of the United States. It is the essence of democracy
. Full of problems and persuasion
, political discourse is used in many debates, candidacies and in our everyday life.
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.
, Robert de Beaugrande
, Jan Blommaert, Adriana Bolivar, Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard, Robyn Carston, Wallace Chafe
, Paul Chilton, Guy Cook
, Malcolm Coulthard, James Deese
, Paul Drew, John Du Bois, Alessandro Duranti
, Brenton D. Faber, Norman Fairclough
, Michel Foucault
, Roger Fowler
, James Paul Gee
, Talmy Givón
, Charles Goodwin, Art Graesser, Michael Halliday
, Zellig Harris
, John Heritage
, Janet Holmes
, David R. Howarth, Paul Hopper
, Gail Jefferson
, Barbara Johnstone, Walter Kintsch, Richard Kittredge, Adam Jaworski, William Labov
, George Lakoff
, Stephen H. Levinsohn, James A. Lauriault/Loriot, Robert E. Longacre, Jim Martin, Aletta Norval
, David Nunan
, Elinor Ochs
, Gina Poncini, Jonathan Potter
, Edward Robinson, Nikolas Rose
, Harvey Sacks
, Svenka Savic Naomi Sager, Emanuel Schegloff
, Deborah Schiffrin, Michael Schober
, Stef Slembrouck, Michael Stubbs, John Swales
, Deborah Tannen, Sandra Thompson
, Teun A. van Dijk
, Theo van Leeuwen
, Jef Verschueren, Henry Widdowson
, Carla Willig, Deirdre Wilson, Ruth Wodak
, Margaret Wetherell
, Ernesto Laclau
, Chantal Mouffe
, Judith M. De Guzman, Cynthia Hardy, Louise J. Phillips.
The objects of discourse analysis — discourse
Discourse
Discourse generally refers to "written or spoken communication". The following are three more specific definitions:...
, writing
Writing
Writing is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and non-symbolic preservation of language via non-textual media, such as magnetic tape audio.Writing most likely...
, talk, conversation
Conversation
Conversation is a form of interactive, spontaneous communication between two or more people who are following rules of etiquette.Conversation analysis is a branch of sociology which studies the structure and organization of human interaction, with a more specific focus on conversational...
, communicative event
Symbolic interactionism
Symbolic Interaction, also known as interactionism, is a sociological theory that places emphasis on micro-scale social interaction to provide subjective meaning in human behavior, the social process and pragmatism.-History:...
, etc.—are variously defined in terms of coherent sequences of sentences
Sentence (linguistics)
In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...
, proposition
Proposition
In logic and philosophy, the term proposition refers to either the "content" or "meaning" of a meaningful declarative sentence or the pattern of symbols, marks, or sounds that make up a meaningful declarative sentence...
s, 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
Corpus linguistics
Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples or "real world" text. This method represents a digestive approach to deriving a set of abstract rules by which a natural language is governed or else relates to another language. Originally done by hand, corpora are now largely...
; text linguistics
Text linguistics
Text linguistics is a branch of linguistics that deals with texts as communication systems. Its original aims lay in uncovering and describing text grammars. The application of text linguistics has, however, evolved from this approach to a point in which text is viewed in much broader terms that go...
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.
Discourse analysis has been taken up in a variety of social science disciplines, including linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, sociology
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
, anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
, social work
Social work
Social Work is a professional and academic discipline that seeks to improve the quality of life and wellbeing of an individual, group, or community by intervening through research, policy, community organizing, direct practice, and teaching on behalf of those afflicted with poverty or any real or...
, cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....
, social psychology
Social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...
, international relations
International relations
International relations is the study of relationships between countries, including the roles of states, inter-governmental organizations , international nongovernmental organizations , non-governmental organizations and multinational corporations...
, human geography
Human geography
Human geography is one of the two major sub-fields of the discipline of geography. Human geography is the study of the world, its people, communities, and cultures. Human geography differs from physical geography mainly in that it has a greater focus on studying human activities and is more...
, communication studies
Communication studies
Communication Studies is an academic field that deals with processes of communication, commonly defined as the sharing of symbols over distances in space and time. Hence, communication studies encompasses a wide range of topics and contexts ranging from face-to-face conversation to speeches to mass...
and translation studies
Translation studies
Translation studies is an interdiscipline containing elements of social science and the humanities, dealing with the systematic study of the theory, the description and the application of translation, interpreting or both these activities....
, each of which is subject to its own assumptions, dimensions of analysis, and methodologies. Sociologist Harold Garfinkel was another influence on the discipline.
History
Some scholars consider the Austrian emigre Leo SpitzerLeo Spitzer
Leo Spitzer was an Austrian Romanist and Hispanist, and an influential and prolific literary critic. He was known for his emphasis on stylistics....
's Stilstudien [Style Studies] of 1928 the earliest example of discourse analysis (DA); Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
himself translated it into French. But the term first came into general use following the publication of a series of papers by Zellig Harris
Zellig Harris
Zellig Sabbettai Harris was a renowned American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis and for the discovery of transformational structure in language...
beginning in 1952 and reporting on work from which he developed transformational grammar
Transformational grammar
In linguistics, a transformational grammar or transformational-generative grammar is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in the Chomskyan tradition of phrase structure grammars...
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
Sublanguage
-In Natural Language:In Informatics, natural language processing, and machine translation, a sublanguage is the language of a restricted domain, particularly a technical domain...
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
SourceForge
SourceForge Enterprise Edition is a collaborative revision control and software development management system. It provides a front-end to a range of software development lifecycle services and integrates with a number of free software / open source software applications .While originally itself...
.
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
Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
, psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
, sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society...
, and pragmatics
Pragmatics
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the...
. 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
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
became one of the key theorists of the subject, especially of discourse, and wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge
The Archaeology of Knowledge
The Archaeology of Knowledge is a book by philosopher Michel Foucault published in 1969. This volume was Foucault's main excursion into methodology, providing an anti-humanist excavation of the human sciences, particularly but not exclusively psychology and sociology...
on the subject.
Topics of interest
Topics of discourse analysis include:- The various levels or dimensions of discourse, such as sounds (intonationIntonation (linguistics)In linguistics, intonation is variation of pitch while speaking which is not used to distinguish words. It contrasts with tone, in which pitch variation does distinguish words. Intonation, rhythm, and stress are the three main elements of linguistic prosody...
, etc.), gestures, syntaxSyntaxIn linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
, the lexiconLexiconIn linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut...
, styleStylistics (linguistics)Stylistics is the study and interpretation of texts from a linguistic perspective. As a discipline it links literary criticism and linguistics, but has no autonomous domain of its own...
, rhetoricRhetoricRhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
, meanings, speech acts, movesMovesMoves may refer to:* Moves , by Jerome Robbins* Moves , a periodical...
, strategies, turns and other aspects of interactionInteractionInteraction is a kind of action that occurs as two or more objects have an effect upon one another. The idea of a two-way effect is essential in the concept of interaction, as opposed to a one-way causal effect... - Genres of discourse (various types of discourse in politics, the media, education, science, business, etc.)
- The relations between discourse and the emergence of syntactic structureEmergent grammarEmergent grammar is an approach to the study of syntax, originally proposed by Paul Hopper, which postulates that rules for grammar and syntactic structure emerge as language is used...
- The relations between text (discourse) and context
- The relations between discourse and powerPower (sociology)Power is a measurement of an entity's ability to control its environment, including the behavior of other entities. The term authority is often used for power perceived as legitimate by the social structure. Power can be seen as evil or unjust, but the exercise of power is accepted as endemic to...
- The relations between discourse and interactionInteractionInteraction is a kind of action that occurs as two or more objects have an effect upon one another. The idea of a two-way effect is essential in the concept of interaction, as opposed to a one-way causal effect...
- The relations between discourse and cognitionCognitionIn science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
and memoryMemoryIn psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing 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. It is a science that has been used through the history of the United States. It is the essence of democracy
Democracy
Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...
. Full of problems and persuasion
Persuasion
Persuasion is a form of social influence. It is the process of guiding or bringing oneself or another toward the adoption of an idea, attitude, or action by rational and symbolic means.- Methods :...
, political discourse is used in many debates, candidacies and in our everyday life.
Perspectives
The following are some of the specific theoretical perspectives and analytical approaches used in linguistic discourse analysis:- Emergent grammarEmergent grammarEmergent grammar is an approach to the study of syntax, originally proposed by Paul Hopper, which postulates that rules for grammar and syntactic structure emerge as language is used...
- Text grammar (or 'discourse grammar')
- Cohesion and relevance theory
- Functional grammarFunctional grammarFunctional theories of grammar include a range of functionally based approaches to linguistics, the scientific study of language. The grammar model developed by Simon Dik bears this qualification in its name, functional grammar, as does Michael Halliday's systemic functional grammar.Role and...
- RhetoricRhetoricRhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
- Stylistics (linguistics)Stylistics (linguistics)Stylistics is the study and interpretation of texts from a linguistic perspective. As a discipline it links literary criticism and linguistics, but has no autonomous domain of its own...
- Interactional sociolinguisticsInteractional sociolinguisticsInteractional sociolinguistics is a subdiscipline of linguistics that uses discourse analysis to study how language users create meaning via interaction. Interactional sociolinguistics was founded by linguistic anthropologist John J. Gumperz...
- Ethnography of communicationEthnographyEthnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...
- PragmaticsPragmaticsPragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the...
, particularly speech act theorySpeech actSpeech Act is a technical term in linguistics and the philosophy of language. The contemporary use of the term goes back to John L. Austin's doctrine of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts... - Conversation analysisConversation analysisConversation analysis is the study of talk in interaction . CA generally attempts to describe the orderliness, structure and sequential patterns of interaction, whether institutional or in casual conversation.Inspired by ethnomethodology Conversation analysis (commonly abbreviated as CA) is the...
- Variation analysis
- Applied linguisticsApplied linguisticsApplied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems...
- Cognitive psychologyCognitive psychologyCognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....
, often under the label discourse processing, studying the production and comprehension of discourse. - Discursive psychologyDiscursive psychologyFor other uses of the word, see discursive.Discursive psychology is a form of discourse analysis that focuses on psychological themes....
- Response based therapyResponse based therapyResponse-based therapy is a relatively new psychotherapeutic approach to treating psychological trauma resulting from violence, based on the theory that whenever people are treated badly, they resist. Incorporating elements of Solution focused brief therapy, Narrative therapy, and discourse...
(counselling) - Critical discourse analysisCritical discourse analysisCritical discourse analysis is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse that views language as a form of social practice and focuses on the ways social and political domination are visible in text and talk....
- SublanguageSublanguage-In Natural Language:In Informatics, natural language processing, and machine translation, a sublanguage is the language of a restricted domain, particularly a technical domain...
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.
Prominent discourse analysts
Marc AngenotMarc Angenot
Marc Angenot is a Belgian-Canadian social theorist, historian of ideas and literary critic. He is a professor of French literature at McGill University, Montreal, and holder of the James McGill Chair of Social Discourse Theory there...
, Robert de Beaugrande
Robert de Beaugrande
Robert-Alain de Beaugrande was a text linguist and discourse analyst, one of the leading figures of the Continental tradition in the discipline. He was one of the developers of the Vienna School of text linguistics, and published the seminal Introduction to text linguistics in 1981, with Wolfgang...
, Jan Blommaert, Adriana Bolivar, Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard, Robyn Carston, Wallace Chafe
Wallace Chafe
Wallace Chafe is an American linguist.Chafe was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He graduated from Yale University, where he obtained his doctorate in 1958. From 1975 to 1986 he was the director of the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages at the University of California, Berkeley...
, Paul Chilton, Guy Cook
Guy Cook
Guy W. D. Cook is a leading applied linguist. He is currently Professor of Applied Linguistics at The Open University in the UK and is also Chair of The British Association for Applied Linguistics for the period 2009-2012...
, Malcolm Coulthard, James Deese
James Deese
James Earle Deese was an American psychologist. He joined the faculty of the University of Virginia in 1980 after having served for an extended period with Johns Hopkins University. He advanced to become the Chairman of the Psychology Department where he served until 1980...
, Paul Drew, John Du Bois, Alessandro Duranti
Alessandro Duranti
Alessandro Duranti is Professor of Anthropology and Dean of Social Sciences at UCLA.-Books:* 1981 - The Samoan Fono: a sociolinguistic study - Canberra: The Australian National University, Pacific Linguistics Monograph B80* 1992 - Etnografia del parlare quotidiano - Rome: La Nuova Italia...
, Brenton D. Faber, Norman Fairclough
Norman Fairclough
Norman Fairclough is emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Lancaster University. He is one of the founders of critical discourse analysis as applied to sociolinguistics. CDA is concerned with how power is exercised through language...
, Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
, Roger Fowler
Roger Fowler
Roger Fowler is a world-renowned and long-serving British Linguist and professor of English and Linguistics at the University of East Anglia. He is well-known for his works in stylistics. Together with Bob Hodge, Gunther Kress and Tony Trew, he authored the influential book Language and Control,...
, James Paul Gee
James Paul Gee
James Gee is a researcher who has worked in psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, bilingual education, and literacy. Gee is currently the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University...
, Talmy Givón
Talmy Givón
Thomas Givon is a linguist and writer. He is one of the founders of functionalism in linguistics...
, Charles Goodwin, Art Graesser, Michael Halliday
Michael Halliday
Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday is a British linguist who developed an internationally influential model of language, the systemic functional linguistic model. His grammatical descriptions go by the name of systemic functional grammar .-Biography:Halliday was born and raised in England...
, Zellig Harris
Zellig Harris
Zellig Sabbettai Harris was a renowned American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis and for the discovery of transformational structure in language...
, John Heritage
John Heritage
John Heritage is Professor of Sociology at University of California at Los Angeles. He is one of the key figures in the approach known as conversation analysis....
, Janet Holmes
Janet Holmes
Janet Holmes is an American poet, professor, and the director of Ahsahta Press. She is author of six poetry collections, most recently, The ms of m y kin , and has had her poems published in literary journals and magazines including American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Boulevard,...
, David R. Howarth, Paul Hopper
Paul Hopper
Paul J. Hopper is an American linguist of British birth. In 1973, he proposed the glottalic theory regarding the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European consonant inventory, in parallel with the Georgian linguist Tamaz Gamkrelidze and the Russian linguist Vyacheslav V. Ivanov...
, Gail Jefferson
Gail Jefferson
Gail Jefferson was, along with Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, one of the founders of the area of research known as Conversation Analysis . She is particularly remembered today for the methods and notational conventions she developed for transcribing talk...
, Barbara Johnstone, Walter Kintsch, Richard Kittredge, Adam Jaworski, William Labov
William Labov
William Labov born December 4, 1927) is an American linguist, widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics...
, George Lakoff
George Lakoff
George P. Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972...
, Stephen H. Levinsohn, James A. Lauriault/Loriot, Robert E. Longacre, Jim Martin, Aletta Norval
Aletta Norval
Aletta Norval is a South-African born political theorist. A prominent member of the Essex School of discourse analysis, she is mainly known for her deconstructionist analysis of Apartheid discourse, for her methodological contributions to discourse analysis and for her work on democratic...
, David Nunan
David Nunan
David Nunan is an Australian linguist who has focused on the teaching of English. His ELT textbook series "Go For It!" is the largest selling textbook series in the world with sales exceeding 2.5 billion copies....
, Elinor Ochs
Elinor Ochs
Elinor Ochs is an American linguistic anthropologist, and professor of Anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles. Ochs is married to Alessandro Duranti, faculty member at UCLA and current Dean of Social Sciences at UCLA.-Works:...
, Gina Poncini, Jonathan Potter
Jonathan Potter
Jonathan Potter is Professor of Discourse Analysis and, from February 2010, Head of the Department of Social Sciences, at Loughborough University and one of the originators of discursive psychology.-Life:...
, Edward Robinson, Nikolas Rose
Nikolas Rose
Nikolas Rose is a prominent British sociologist and social theorist. He is currently the James Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and acting director of LSE's BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society.-Life and work:Before...
, Harvey Sacks
Harvey Sacks
Harvey Sacks was an American sociologist influenced by the ethnomethodology tradition. He pioneered extremely detailed studies of the way people use language in everyday life. Despite his early death in a car crash and the fact that he did not publish widely, he founded the discipline of...
, Svenka Savic Naomi Sager, Emanuel Schegloff
Emanuel Schegloff
Emanuel Abraham Schegloff is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was born in 1937 in New York. With Harvey Sacks and Gail Jefferson, Schegloff was one of the principal creators of the field of Conversation Analysis...
, Deborah Schiffrin, Michael Schober
Michael Schober
Michael Schober, Ph.D. is currently the dean of the New School for Social Research in New York City. He began teaching at The New School in 1992 as an assistant professor....
, Stef Slembrouck, Michael Stubbs, John Swales
John Swales
John Malcolm Swales is a linguist best known for his work on genre analysis, particularly with regard to its application to the fields of rhetoric, discourse analysis, English for Academic Purposes and, more recently, information science....
, Deborah Tannen, Sandra Thompson
Sandra Thompson (linguist)
Sandra Annear Thompson is an American linguist specializing in discourse analysis, typology, and interactional linguistics. She has published numerous books and her research has appeared in many linguistics journals...
, Teun A. van Dijk
Teun A. van Dijk
Teun Adrianus van Dijk , is a scholar in the fields of text linguistics, discourse analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis ....
, Theo van Leeuwen
Theo Van Leeuwen
Theo Van Leeuwen is the dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney.Van Leeuwen studied linguistics at the University of Sydney, and taught communication theory at Macquarie University and the London College of Printing. He is one of the main...
, Jef Verschueren, Henry Widdowson
Henry Widdowson
Henry Widdowson is an authority in the field of applied linguistics and language teaching, specifically English language learning and teaching....
, Carla Willig, Deirdre Wilson, Ruth Wodak
Ruth Wodak
Ruth Wodak is Distinguished Professor and Chair in Discourse Studies at Lancaster University. She moved from Vienna, Austria, where she was full professor of Applied Linguistics since 1991...
, Margaret Wetherell
Margaret Wetherell
Margaret Wetherell is a prominent academic in the area of discourse analysis. Her 1987 book, Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour, cowritten with Jonathan Potter, was very influential, particularly in social psychology, though also in other fields...
, Ernesto Laclau
Ernesto Laclau
Ernesto Laclau is an Argentine political theorist often described as post-Marxist.He studied History in Buenos Aires, graduating from the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires in 1964, and received a PhD from Essex University in 1977.Since the 1970s he has been Professor of Political Theory at the...
, Chantal Mouffe
Chantal Mouffe
Chantal Mouffe is a Belgian political theorist.-Work:Chantal Mouffe studied at Louvain, Paris and Essex and has worked in many universities throughout the world . She has also held visiting positions at Harvard, Cornell, Princeton and the CNRS...
, Judith M. De Guzman, Cynthia Hardy, Louise J. Phillips.
Further reading
- Blommaert, J. (2005). Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Brown, G., and George Yule (1983). Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Carter, R. (1997). Investigating English Discourse. London: Routledge.
- Gee, J. P.James Paul GeeJames Gee is a researcher who has worked in psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, bilingual education, and literacy. Gee is currently the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University...
(2005). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. London: Routledge. - Deese, James. Thought into Speech: The Psychology og a Language.Century Psychology Series. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1984.
- Halliday, M.A.K., and Greaves, W.S. (2008). Intonation in the Grammar of English, London, Equinox.
- Halliday, M.A.K., and C.M.I.M. Matthiessen (2004). An introduction to functional grammar, 3d ed. London, Arnold
- Harris, Zellig S. (1952a). "Culture and Style in Extended Discourse". Selected Papers from the 29th International Congress of AmericanistsInternational Congress of AmericanistsThe International Congress of Americanists is an international academic conference for research in multidisciplinary studies of the American Continent. Established August 25, 1875 in Nancy, France, the scholars' forum has met regularly since its inception, presently in three year increments. Its...
(New York, 1949), vol.III: Indian Tribes of Aboriginal America ed. by Sol Tax & Melville J[oyce] Herskovits, 210-215. New York: Cooper Square Publishers. (Repr., New York: Cooper Press, 1967. Paper repr. in 1970a, pp. 373–389.) [Proposes a method for analyzing extended discourse, with example analyses from Hidatsa, a Siouan language spoken in North Dakota.] - Harris, Zellig S. (1952b.) "Discourse Analysis". Language 28:1.1-30. (Repr. in The Structure of Language: Readings in the philosophy of language ed. by Jerry A[lan] Fodor & Jerrold J[acob] Katz, pp. 355–383. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964, and also in Harris 1970a, pp. 313–348 as well as in 1981, pp. 107–142.) French translation "Analyse du discours". Langages (1969) 13.8-45. German translation by Peter Eisenberg, "Textanalyse". Beschreibungsmethoden des amerikanischen Strakturalismus ed. by Elisabeth Bense, Peter Eisenberg & Hartmut Haberland, 261-298. München: Max Hueber. [Presents a method for the analysis of connected speech or writing.]
- Harris, Zellig S. 1952c. "Discourse Analysis: A sample text". Language 28:4.474-494. (Repr. in 1970a, pp. 349–379.)
- Harris, Zellig S. (1954.) "Distributional Structure". Word 10:2/3.146-162. (Also in Linguistics Today: Published on the occasion of the Columbia University Bicentennial ed. by Andre Martinet & Uriel Weinreich, 26-42. New York: Linguistic Circle of New York, 1954. Repr. in The Structure of Language: Readings in the philosophy of language ed. by Jerry A[lan] Fodor & Jerrold J[acob] Katz, 33-49. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964, and also in Harris 1970.775-794, and 1981.3-22.) French translation "La structure distributionnelle,". Analyse distributionnelle et structurale ed. by Jean Dubois & Françoise Dubois-Charlier (=Langages, No.20), 14-34. Paris: Didier / Larousse.
- Harris, Zellig S. (1963.) Discourse Analysis Reprints. (= Papers on Formal Linguistics, 2.) The Hague: Mouton, 73 pp. [Combines Transformations and Discourse Analysis Papers 3a, 3b, and 3c. 1957, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. ]
- Harris, Zellig S. (1968.) Mathematical Structures of Language. (=Interscience Tracts in Pure and Applied Mathematics, 21.) New York: Interscience Publishers John Wiley & Sons). French translation Structures mathématiques du langage. Transl. by Catherine Fuchs. (=Monographies de Linguistique mathématique, 3.) Paris: Dunod, 248 pp.
- Harris, Zellig S. (1970.) Papers in Structural and Transformational Linguistics. Dordrecht/ Holland: D. Reidel., x, 850 pp. [Collection of 37 papers originally published 1940-1969.]
- Harris, Zellig S. (1981.) Papers on Syntax. Ed. by Henry Hiż. (=Synthese Language Library, 14.) Dordrecht/Holland: D. Reidel, vii, 479 pp.]
- Harris, Zellig S. (1982.) "Discourse and Sublanguage". Sublanguage: Studies of language in restricted semantic domains ed. by Richard Kittredge & John Lehrberger, 231-236. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
- Harris, Zellig S. (1985.) "On Grammars of Science". Linguistics and Philosophy: Essays in honor of Rulon S. Wells ed. by Adam Makkai & Alan K. Melby (=Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 42), 139-148. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
- Harris, Zellig S. (1988a) Language and Information. (=Bampton Lectures in America, 28.) New York: Columbia University Press, ix, 120 pp.
- Harris, Zellig S. 1988b. (Together with Paul Mattick, Jr.) "Scientific Sublanguages and the Prospects for a Global Language of Science". Annals of the American Association of Philosophy and Social Sciences No.495.73-83.
- Harris, Zellig S. (1989.) (Together with Michael Gottfried, Thomas Ryckman, Paul Mattick, Jr., Anne Daladier, Tzvee N. Harris & Suzanna Harris.) The Form of Information in Science: Analysis of an immunology sublanguage. Preface by Hilary Putnam. (=Boston Studies in the Philosophy of, Science, 104.) Dordrecht/Holland & Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, xvii, 590 pp.
- Harris, Zellig S. (1991.) A Theory of Language and Information: A mathematical approach. Oxford & New York: Clarendon Press, xii, 428 pp.; illustr.
- Jaworski, A. and Coupland, N. (eds). (1999). The Discourse Reader. London: Routledge.
- Johnstone, B. (2002). Discourse analysis. Oxford: Blackwell.
- Kittredge, Richard & John Lehrberger. (1982.) Sublanguage: Studies of language in restricted semantic domains. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
- Loriot, James and Barbara E. Hollenbach. 1970. "Shipibo paragraph structure." Foundations of Language 6: 43-66. The seminal work reported as having been admitted by Longacre and Pike. See link below from Longacre's student Daniel L. Everett.
- Longacre, R.E. (1996). The grammar of discourse. New York: Plenum Press.
- Miscoiu, S., Craciun O., Colopelnic, N. (2008). Radicalism, Populism, Interventionism. Three Approaches Based on Discourse Theory. Cluj-Napoca: Efes.
- Renkema, J. (2004). Introduction to discourse studies. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
- Sager, Naomi & Ngô Thanh Nhàn. (2002.) "The computability of strings, transformations, and sublanguage". The Legacy of Zellig Harris: Language and information into the 21st Century, Vol. 2: Computability of language and computer applications, ed. by Bruce Nevin, John Benjamins, pp. 79–120.
- Schiffrin, D., Deborah Tannen, & Hamilton, H. E. (eds.). (2001). Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell.
- Stubbs, M. (1983). Discourse Analysis: The sociolinguistic analysis of natural language. Oxford: Blackwell
- Teun A. van DijkTeun A. van DijkTeun Adrianus van Dijk , is a scholar in the fields of text linguistics, discourse analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis ....
, (ed). (1997). Discourse Studies. 2 vols. London: Sage. - Potter, J, Wetherall, M. (1987). Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond attitudes and behaviour. London: SAGE.
See also
- Critical discourse analysisCritical discourse analysisCritical discourse analysis is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse that views language as a form of social practice and focuses on the ways social and political domination are visible in text and talk....
- DiscourseDiscourseDiscourse generally refers to "written or spoken communication". The following are three more specific definitions:...
- Dialogical analysisDialogical analysisDialogical analysis, or more precisely Dialogical Interaction Analysis, refers to a way of analyzing human communication which is based on the theory of dialogism...
- PragmaticsPragmaticsPragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the...
- RhetoricRhetoricRhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
- SociolinguisticsSociolinguisticsSociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society...
- Stylistics (linguistics)Stylistics (linguistics)Stylistics is the study and interpretation of texts from a linguistic perspective. As a discipline it links literary criticism and linguistics, but has no autonomous domain of its own...
- Analysis of subjective logicsAnalysis of subjective logicsAnalysis of subjective logics is an original method of discourse analysis developed and taught by the French psychoanalyst Jean-Jacques Pinto.- Definition :A.S.L...
- Essex School of discourse analysisEssex School of discourse analysisThe Essex School constitutes one of the most dynamic and promising varieties of discourse analysis, one that combines theoretical sophistication – mainly due to its reliance on the post-structuralist and psychoanalytic traditions and, in particular, on the work of Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, Derrida,...