Discourse analysis

by abdo Wed Apr 06, 2011 2:23 pm

Discourse analysis

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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] event.

The objects of discourse
analysis—[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
communicative [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], etc.—are variously defined in terms
of coherent sequences of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
speech
acts or [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. 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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]; [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] is
related.

Discourse analysis has been
taken up in a variety of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] disciplines, including [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
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.

History

Some scholars^{[[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]} consider the
Austrian emigre [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]'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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] 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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] 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. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
a professor at University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor, taught the theory, and one of his students, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], 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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] at [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], 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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. 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,
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
became one of the key theorists of the subject, especially of discourse, and
wrote The
Archaeology of Knowledge on the subject.