Discourse (L. discursus, “running to and from”) means either “written or spoken communication or debate” or “a formal discussion of debate. Discourse encompasses the use of spoken, written and signed language and multimodal/multimedia forms of communication, and is not restricted to ‘non-fictional’ (eg. stylistics) nor verbal (eg. gesture and visual) materials. Although early linguistic approaches judged the unit of discourse to be larger than the sentence, phenomena of interest can range from silence, to a single utterance (such as “ok”), to a novel, a set of newspaper articles or a conversation. Discourse is a term that can be described in a number of ways. In language studies, it refers to the speech patterns and how language, dialects, and acceptable statements are used in a particular community. Discourse is a subject of study particularly in peoples who reside in secluded areas and share the same speech conventions. Sociologists and philosophers use the term discourse in a different way. They use it to describe the conversations and its underlying meanings by a group of people who have common ideas. This is one definition forwarded by the philosopher Michel Foucault. He maintains that discourse is the acceptable statements that are formed by a particular kind of discourse community.
The Term Paper on English Language Teaching
... different aspects of language in various contexts such as field of discourse, modes of discourse, style of discourse and discourse domain. It is ... is the knowledge of the sociocultural rules of language and of discourse. This type of competence requires an understanding ... to new uses and forms of their own language. 6.3 Manglish Discourse Materials, which have features of ‘Manglish’ such as ...
A discourse community is explained as people who have the same thoughts and ideas. The fans of a particular book series can be considered as what might constitute a discourse community. Within this group there will be some attitudes that will be seen as unacceptable and considered contradictory to what the community believes in. The ideology defines what is allowed to be discussed.
Discourse seen in this light is able to exist over time and represent all of the thoughts that the community has adopted or is attributed to it. When the discourse is applied to a more expansive philosophical ideal, all of the exchange of ideas, systems of thought, analysis and history will become part of the community.
Discourse is flexible only to a degree that is based on how the community allows it.
Many papers submitted to this journal are rejected because they do not, or insufficiently, engage in what we call ‘discourse analysis’, a requirement that is the first on which all articles are being evaluated.
We are aware that there are many ways of “doing” discourse analysis (conversation analysis, narrative analysis, etc.), and that also different scholars may have different opinions about what is or is not (good, adequate or simply acceptable) DA.
But still, there are some criteria most discourse analysts will recognize, so that they can tell apart discourse analysis from other kinds of analysis (like content analysis, or social analysis), or indeed from no analysis at all.
One such criterion is the special attention paid to STRUCTURES of any kind. That is, couched in terms of some THEORY, analysis may focus on –for instance– structures of expression (sounds, image, movement, etc., including those of words, word order or sentence structure), on the one hand, and structures of meaning and (inter)action, on the other.
Thus, structures of meaning may involve such diverse ones as overall topics and their organization in text or talk, local patterns of coherence between propositions or the functions of propositions in a sequence, as well as implication or entailment, presupposition, vagueness, allusions, more or less detailed descriptions, the ways acts or actors are being described, and so on.
The Research paper on Discourse Analysis Mini Research
This chapter presents an introduction consisting of background of study, problems of study, objective of the study, and significance of the study. 1.1 Background of the Study Language has a social function as a tool to make connection between human beings. Without language, it seems impossible for people to interact with others in their daily life because language can express people’s feeling, ...
Similar observations hold for the analysis of action and interaction in talk, for instance in terms of turn taking, interruptions, hesitations, pauses, or the overall organization of a conversation (beginnings/endings, conventional categories that appear in a specific type of talk, such as greeting and leave taking at the beginning and end of a conversation, or formulas being used when opening or closing a session or meeting, but also typical categories of telling a story, and so on).
Indeed, many other forms of (inter)action may thus be identified in discourse, such as promises and threats, agreements and disagreements, mitigating and exaggerating, attacking others or defending oneself, and so on.
Such attention to ‘structure’, ‘form’, ‘organization’, ‘order’, or ‘patterns’, is characteristic of virtually all contemporary approaches to discourse or conversation analysis. Some of these approaches are very sophisticated and detailed, and may be very technical — as is the case of much work on the grammatical structures of sentences and sequences of sentences in discourse, or studies of narrative or conversational organization. Contributions to this journal should of course be aware of the current literature about the different types of structural patterns text or talk may exhibit.
Note that such a “structural” analysis need not be limited to “fixed” or “abstract” structures, but may also focus on the more ‘dynamic’ aspects of discourse organization, such as the mental, interactional or social STRATEGIES participants engage in. Thus, we may analyze the abstract structures of a story or news report, but also moves and strategies of credibility enhancement, persuasion, impression formation, derogation, legitimation, and so on. And each of such more global strategies that may characterize a discourse as a whole, may again be analyzed in smaller, functional components, that is, in terms of moves, as we also know from a game of chess. For instance, a journalist may locally enhance the credibility of a news report by recurring to the semantic moves of mentioning numbers or statistics or quoting credible sources.
The Essay on DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
To truly understand what discourse analysis is, it is important to first understand what discourse is. There are three ways in which we can describe discourse; each of which are of equal importance: Firstly, discourse can be described as language beyond the level of the sentence. By this we mean that it is a type of language that extends past features such as sounds (phonetics), structures ( ...
And finally, especially in a more psychological perspective, an analysis may not only focus on structures or strategies but also on PROCESSES, such as those of production and comprehension of discourse, the activation of knowledge or opinions during such processing, the way discourse or its meanings are represented in memory, or how mental models of events are formed or activated during production or comprehension. Such a process analysis may very well be combined with an analysis of structures or strategies. Indeed, processes involve structures or strategies of mental representations.
In other words, typical of discourse analysis is an explicit, systematic account of structures, strategies or processes of text or talk in terms of theoretical notions developed in any branch of the field.
It is difficult to give a single definition of Critical or Discourse Analysis as a research method. Indeed, rather than providing a particular method, Discourse Analysis can be characterized as a way of approaching and thinking about a problem. In this sense, Discourse Analysis is neither a qualitative nor a quantitative research method, but a manner of questioning the basic assumptions of quantitative and qualitative research methods. Discourse Analysis does not provide a tangible answer to problems based on scientific research, but it enables access to the ontological and epistemological assumptions behind a project, a statement, a method of research, or – to provide an example from the field of Library and Information Science – a system of classification. In other words, Discourse Analysis will enable to reveal the hidden motivations behind a text or behind the choice of a particular method of research to interpret that text. Expressed in today’s more trendy vocabulary, Critical or Discourse Analysis is nothing more than a deconstructive reading and interpretation of a problem or text (while keeping in mind that postmodern theories conceive of every interpretation of reality and, therefore, of reality itself as a text. Every text is conditioned and inscribes itself within a given discourse, thus the term Discourse Analysis).
The Research paper on Running Head Foucaultian Discourse Analysis As The Ideological Underpinning
Running head: FOUCAULTIAN DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AS THE IDEOLOGICAL UNDERPINNING OF JAMES FERGUSON'S 'THE ANTI POLITICS MACHINE' Foucaultian Discourse Analysis as the Ideological Underpinning of James Ferguson's 'The Anti Politics Machine' August 07, 2009 Foucaultian Discourse Analysis as the Ideological Underpinning of James Ferguson's 'The Anti Politics Machine' Introduction In The Anti Politics ...
Discourse Analysis will, thus, not provide absolute answers to a specific problem, but enable us to understand the conditions behind a specific “problem” and make us realize that the essence of that “problem”, and its resolution, lie in its assumptions; the very assumptions that enable the existence of that “problem”. By enabling us to make these assumption explicit, Discourse Analysis aims at allowing us to view the “problem” from a higher stance and to gain a comprehensive view of the “problem” and ourselves in relation to that “problem”. Discourse Analysis is meant to provide a higher awareness of the hidden motivations in others and ourselves and, therefore, enable us to solve concrete problems – not by providing unequivocal answers, but by making us ask ontological and epistemological questions.
