Sociology Plus
Discourse Analysis Definition
Discourse analysis is the empirical study of discourses, examining the ways in which people express themselves through standardised and often institutionalised methods of talking and writing. It operates on the assumption that the influence of discourse itself is greater than what speakers consciously recognise, focusing instead on the underlying norms, practices, and reasoning that shape the construction and interpretation of social interaction within specific contexts.
Scope and Methodology
Discourse analysis encompasses the study of language use beyond the level of individual sentences or utterances, situating it within broader social or societal contexts. This approach treats both spoken interactions and written texts as objects of analysis. For instance, it examines how linguistic choices shape social roles, such as the shift from referring to train passengers as ‘passengers’ to ‘customers’. Furthermore, analysts often focus on specific discourses, such as those used by teachers to describe children or surgeons to describe patients, investigating the explanatory significance embedded within these linguistic practices.
Theoretical Foundations
Much of Anglophone discourse analysis draws upon the “ordinary language philosophy” developed by John L. Austin and John Searle. Austin introduced the distinction between ‘constative utterances’ (statements representing states of affairs) and ‘performatives’ (utterances that perform social actions). This focus evolved into ‘speech act analysis’, which examines how language performs actions, contingent upon satisfying specific normative conventions. Related concepts, such as H. Paul Grice’s theory of conversational implicature, provided frameworks for understanding the implicit meaning derived from context in cooperative communication.
Interdisciplinary Connections
The development of discourse analysis has been informed by various intellectual disciplines. In anthropology, Dell Hymes expanded on speech acts to develop a model for the ethnography of speaking, focusing on the relationship between language, culture, and the use of speech acts within communities. Similarly, sociology contributed concepts regarding social interaction, notably Erving Goffman’s work on face wants, which influenced conversational analysis and Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson’s analysis of politeness and face-threatening behaviour.
Critical and Narrative Applications
A significant application of discourse analysis is critical discourse analysis, which investigates texts and interactions in relation to power structures and ideologies, examining how race, gender, and other forms of disadvantage are perpetuated or excluded. This method has been successfully applied to analysing written materials like political directives. Moreover, the field has intersected with poststructuralist thought, particularly through the work of Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, and Fredric Jameson, especially in its focus on cultural production. Discourse analysis also converges with narrative analysis, examining how narratives function as vehicles for communicating human understanding, linking micro-analyses of storytelling to macro-cultural narratives of political decision-making.