Discourse Analysis

Social research and discourse analysis

In the past fifteen years, DA has introduced new methods of research, new ways of conceptualising research questions, and new ways of understanding the nature of other disciplines. For an increasing number of academics, discourse analysis is the prime way of doing social research. We are part of this discursive turn within social research if we have approached social and/or psychological issues through studying the use of language. As the discursive turn has grown, there has been a proliferation of forms of discourse analysis about fundamental topics such as method, theory, the nature of discourse, the nature of cognition, and the nature of social structure.

Different approaches to discourse analysis

There is a long tradition extending back to the work of Walter Kintsch in cognitive psychology, which explores the cognitive substrate of discourse. Kintsch and Van Dijk worked together on several articles and finally produced a book, Strategies of Discourse Comprehension, that would have a tremendous influence on the psychology of discourse. The important notion of strategic understanding was introduced, which tried to account more realistically for what language users actually do when they speak or understand discourse. Real language users already start with the (tentative) interpretation of the first words of a sentence before it has been fully heard or read. That is, understanding is ‘online’ or linear. Also, language users may use information from both text and context at the same time, or operate at several text levels (phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) at the same time to interpret the text. The same is true in discourse production: language users may start to speak or write without a fully developed structure of sentences, paragraphs, turns, or whole discourses ‘in mind’. Language users represent sentences and their meanings in memory. The result of such a process of understanding is a Text Representation in Episodic Memory. A macrostructure is constructed by the language user to organize a text representation in memory. To understand a text, vast amounts of social-cultural ‘world’ knowledge need to be presupposed. It is impossible to define coherence relations between sentences, or indeed to construct macrostructures, without such knowledge.

About the same time Kintsch and Van Dijk were writing, Schank and Abelson published their famous book about ‘scripts’, taken as the abstract ways people organize their knowledge about stereotypical events such as shopping or eating in a restaurant: to understand a text, language users activate one or more scripts and use the relevant information in the construction of a Text Representation in Episodic Memory.

Models

Kintsch and Van Dijk introduced another crucial notion, that of a (situation) model. Language users do not merely construct a (semantic) representation of the text in their episodic memory but also a representation of the event or situation the text is about, in terms of their mental models. Implicit information and inferences in discourse processing are represented in mental models, which thus also explain the notion of presupposition, namely as the propositions in a model that are not expressed in discourse. Models also provide an explanation for the fact that when people recall a text, they will usually ‘falsely’ recall information that was never expressed in the original text at all. Models explain how general knowledge is related to text processing: whereas models are personal and subjective, knowledge may be seen as a generalization and abstraction from such models. Language users also build models of the communicative event in which they participate. These so-called ‘context models’ (or ‘pragmatic models’) explain how language users manage the fundamental task of adapting their discourses to the assumed knowledge of the recipients. Van Dijk’s later work on ideology further assumed that models also feature evaluative beliefs, that is, opinions about social and communicative events. These opinions are partly personal, and partly based on socially shared opinion-structures, such as attitudes and ideologies.

In 1980 Van Dijk’s work took a rather different orientation. Also because of a long stay in Mexico, he decided it was time to do something serious, for example racism, a fundamental issue especially in Europe: Van Dijk became interested in the ways racism is expressed, reproduced, or legitimated through text and talk. He recorded, transcribed, and analyzed hundreds of spontaneous interviews in various neighborhoods in Amsterdam and San Diego, finding that at all levels of structure, such conversations are rather typical. At the level of topics, only a very limited number of topics tend to come up when people talk about ‘foreigners’. Typically, such topics are about cultural difference, about deviance (crime, violence, etc.), and about threats (economic, social, cultural). At the local level of semantic relations, Van Dijk found that people typically make use of specific semantic ‘moves’, such as the disclaimers of apparent denial (“I have nothing against Blacks, but...”) and apparent concession (“Not all Blacks are criminal, but...” ). Pronouns and demonstratives may be selected: “them” or “those people”.

What is discourse analysis?

The term discourse analysis was first introduced by Zelling Harris (1952) as a way of analyzing connected speech and writing. DA examines patterns of language across texts and considers the relationship between language and the social and cultural contexts in which it is used. It also considers the ways that the use of language presents different views of the world and different understandings. It examines how the use of language impacts social identities and relations. DA also considers how views of the world, and identities, are constructed through the use of discourse.

DA: The analysis of spoken and written language as it is used to enact social and cultural perspectives and identities. (Gee) An analysis of language integrated with all the other elements that go into social practices, for example, ways of thinking or feeling.

The relationship between language and context

The basic consideration of DA is the relationship between language and the situations wherein it is produced, both spoken and written interactions. In the broader context, it’s not only the conversation that is taken into account in discourse analysis, but also the societal customs and practices as well that make the entire web of social behaviors.

The discourse structure of texts

Discourse analysts are interested in how people organize what they say to others in a conversation or in a piece of writing. For example, there are cultural differences in greetings in Japan and the USA. In the USA, they are very short, while in Japan they include other details. Example: “Greetings! It’s such a beautiful day today here in Kyoto” (very long). Mitchell (1957) was one of the first researchers to examine the discourse structure of texts. He looked at the ways in which people order what they say in buying and selling interactions, introducing the notion of stages, that is, the steps that language users go through as they carry out particular interactions.

Cultural ways of speaking and writing

Different cultures often have different ways of doing things through language. This is something that was explored by Hymes (1964) through the notion of the ethnography of communication. His work is a reaction to views of language that took little or no account of the social and cultural contexts in which language occurs. The analysis of communication within the wider context of the social and cultural practices and beliefs of the members of a particular culture or speech community.

Discourse as the social construction of reality

The view of discourse as the social construction of reality sees texts as communicative units that are embedded in social and cultural practices. Wetherell’s analysis of the BBC Panorama interview with the late Diana, Princess of Wales, provides an example of the role of language in the construction of the social world. She doesn’t only talk about herself, but while she is talking, she also constructs her social world in a way that she wants people to see. In effect, Eggins and Slade (1997) argue that people don’t engage in casual conversations just to 'kill time', but rather to negotiate, clarify, and extend interpersonal relations. Despite its sometimes apparently trivial content, casual conversation is a highly structured and motivated activity that lets us establish who we are, so our social identity, sexuality, social class, ethnicity, and so on.

Different views of discourse analysis: Textually oriented discourse analysis and socially oriented discourse analysis

Discourse and socially situated identities, discourse and performance

A Discourse is a “dance” that exists in the abstract as a coordinated pattern of words, deeds, values, beliefs, symbols, tools, objects, times, and places in the here and now as a performance that is recognizable as just such a coordination. Like a dance, the performance here and now is never exactly the same. (Gee) Performativity (Butler, 1990) is based on the view that in saying something, we do, or ‘become’ it. Discourses are socially constructed rather than ‘natural’. Social identities are not pre-given, but are formed in the use of language and the various other ways we display who we are, what we think, value, and feel, etc.