What is discourse analysis?
Discourse analysis is the study of language. Many people would define discourse analysis as a subfield of linguistics,
which is the scientific study of language. Discourse analysts study the ways sentences and utterances go together to
make texts and interactions and how those texts and interactions fit into our social world.
Language is ambiguous. What things mean is never absolutely clear. All communication involves interpreting what
other people mean and what they are trying to do. Language is always ‘in the world’. That is, what language means is
always a matter of where and when it is used and what it is used to do. The way we use language is inseparable from
who we are and the different social groups to which we belong. We use language to display different kinds of social
identities and to show that we belong to different groups. Language is never used all by itself. It is always combined
with other things such as our tone of voice, facial expressions and gestures when we speak, and the fonts, layout and
graphics we use in written texts. What language means and what we can do with it is often a matter of how it is
combined with these other things.
When we speak of discourse, we are always speaking of language that is in some way situated. Language is always
situated in at least four ways. First, language is situated within the material world, and where we encounter it, whether
it be on a shop sign or in a textbook or on a particular website will contribute to the way we interpret it. Second,
language is situated within relationships; one of the main ways we understand what people mean when they speak or
write is by referring to who they are, how well we know them, and whether or not they have some kind of power over
us. Third, language is situated in history, that is, in relation to what happened before and what we expect to happen
afterwards. Finally, language is situated in relation to other languages, utterances and texts always respond to or refer
to other utterances and texts; that is, everything that we say or write is situated in a kind of network of discourse.
Partially because of its roots in linguistics, discourse analysts used to focus almost exclusively on written or spoken
language. Now, people are increasingly realizing not just that we communicate in a lot of ways that do not involve
language, but that in order to understand what people mean when they use language, we need to pay attention to the
way it is combined with these other communicative modes.
According to the linguist Halliday, meaning is the most important thing that makes a text a text; it has to make sense.
A text, in his view, is everything that is meaningful in a particular situation. And the basis for meaning is choice.
Whenever I choose one thing rather than another from a set of alternatives (yes or no, up or down, red or blue), I am
making meaning. ‘A language is interpreted as a system of meanings, accompanied by forms through which the
meanings can be expressed’. The context of these choices and the relationships between them, which form the basis
for what we will be calling texture, that quality that makes a particular set of words or sentences a text, rather than a
random collection of linguistics items. A language speaker’s ability to discriminate between a random string of
sentences and one forming a discourse is due to the inherent texture in the language and to his awareness to it.
According to this formulation, there are two important things that make a text a text. One has to do with features
inherent in the language itself (things, for example, like grammatical ‘rules’), which help us to understand the
relationship among the different words and sentences and other elements in the text. It is these features that help you
to figure out the relationship between the various sets of choices (either lexical or grammatical) that you encounter.
All texts are somehow related to other texts, and sometimes, in order to make sense of them or use them to perform
social actions, you need to make reference to these other texts. The main thing that makes a text a text is relationships
or connections. Sometimes these relationships are between words, sentences or other elements inside the text. These
kinds of relationships create what we refer to as cohesion. Another kind of relationship exists between the text and the
person who is reading it or using it in some way. Here, meaning comes chiefly from the background knowledge the
person has about certain social conventions regarding texts as well as the social situation in which the text is found
and what the person wants to do with the text. This kind of relationship creates what we call coherence. Finally, there
is the relationship between one text and other texts in the world that one might, at some point, need to refer to in the
process of making sense of this text. This kind of relationship creates what we call intertextuality.