What is discourse? Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any
form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning
fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis.
Following pioneering work by Michel Foucault, these fields view discourse as a system of
thought, knowledge, or communication that constructs our experience of the world. Since
control of discourse amounts to control of how the world is perceived, social theory often
studies discourse as a window into power.
Discourse analysis means examining how language functions and how meaning is created
in different social contexts. It can be applied to any instance of written or oral language, as
well as non-verbal aspects of communication such as tone and gestures
Discourse is understood as a way of perceiving, framing, and viewing the world.
For example: A dominant discourse of gender often positions women as gentle and men as
active heroes. A dominant discourse of race often positions whiteness as the norm an
coloured bodies as 'others'.
In other words, it involves the examination of how the 'ways of speaking about things'
normalizes and privileges some frames of thinking about things while marginalizing others.
As a simple example, if movies consistently frame the ideal female as passive, silent, and
submissive, then society comes to think that this is how women should behave and makes
us think that this is normal, so women who don't fit this mould are abnormal.
We are going to examine three groups of theorists each of which defines discourse slightly
differently: discourse analysis; social psychologists; critical discourse analysists. Each of
these fields of study as approached the question of how to analyse communicative acts in
context, using form of analysis which is rigorous and based on scientific principles.
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Discourse analysis can be seen as a reaction to traditional linguistics which is focused on
the constituent units and structure of the sentence and which does not concern itself with
an analysis of language in use
Since it is rare for anyone to communicate with others through single sentences alone,
discourse analysists critic the tendency for linguistic to concentrate solely on sentence
structure, has Michael Hoey states: Conversation involves an interchange between two or
more people in which each contributor may produce more than one utterance and each
contribution builds upon the previous contributions either directly or indirectly.
This type of discourse analysis has developed out of a desire to analyse these larger units
and structures. These larger structures may be more difficult to analyse, exactly because of
their largely unanalysed and taken for-granted nature. However conversations can be seen
to be structured, and can be analysed in terms of the moves which participants make to
signal that, for example, they are initiating a new topic of conversation or thar they
are reviving an older topic of conversation; these moves are signalled clearly by the use of
discourse markets such as “well”; “OK” and “anyway”.
