Definition of Discourse Analysis from Experts

Discourse is generally used to designate the forms of representation, codes, conventions and habits of language that produce specific fields of culturally and historically located meanings. Michel Foucault's early writings ('The Order of Discourse', 1971; The Archaeology of Krlowledge, 1972) were especially influential in this.

Van Dijk (1997a) mentions that discourse is usually identified as a form of spoken language, what is said in public speeches for example, or it could also refer to the ideas of certain schools of thoughts, for instance the discourse of contemporary philosophies.

Discourse is the creation and organization of the segments of a language above as well as below the sentence. It is segments of language which may be bigger or smaller than a single sentence but the adduced meaning is always beyond the sentence. The term discourse applies to both spoken and written language, in fact to any sample of language used for any purpose. Any series of speech events or any combination of sentences in written form wherein successive sentences or utterances hang together is discourse. Discourse can not be confined to sentential boundaries. It is something that goes beyond the limits of sentence. In another words discourse is 'any coherent succession of sentences, spoken or written' (Matthews, 2005:100).

The definition of analysis is the process of breaking down a something into its parts to learn what they do and how they relate to one another.

Analysis is a careful study of something to learn about its parts, what they do, and how they are related to each other.

Van Dijk (1997a) mentions that it is generally thought that discourse analysis can only be done with spoken language since there is an evident interaction between the speakers; nevertheless, written materials can also be analyzed because readers assimilate what they are reading in spite of what may seem a passive interaction between the reader and the text.

Discourse analysis is a broad term for the study of the ways in which language is used in texts and contexts. Also called discourse studies. Developed in the 1970s, the field of discourse analysis is concerned with "the use of language in a running discourse, continued over a number of sentences, and involving the interaction of speaker (or writer) and auditor (or reader) in a specific situational context, and within a framework of social and cultural conventions" 

(Abrams and Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 2005).

"Discourse analysis is concerned with language use as a social phenomenon and therefore necessarily goes beyond one speaker or one newspaper article to find features which have a more generalized relevance. This is a potentially confusing point because the publication of research findings is generally presented through examples and the analyst may choose a single example or case to exemplify the features to be discussed, but those features are only of interest as a social, not individual, phenomenon."

(Stephanie Taylor, What is Discourse Analysis? Bloomsbury,2013)
 

"Discourse analysis is not only about method; it is also a perspective on the nature of language and its relationship to the central issues of the social sciences. More specifically, we see discourse analysis as a related collection of approaches to discourse, approaches that entail not only practices of data collection and analysis, but also a set of metatheoretical and theoretical assumptions and a body of research claims and studies."

(Linda Wood and Rolf Kroger, Doing Discourse Analysis. Sage, 2000)

The first linguist to refer to discourse analysis was Zellig Harris. In 1952, he investigated the connectedness of sentences, naming his study 'discourse analysis'. Harris claimed explicitly that discourse is the next level in a hierarchy of morphemes, clauses and sentences. He viewed discourse analysis procedurally as a formal methodology, derived from structural methods of linguistic analysis: such a methodology could break a text down into relationships (such as equivalence, substitution) among its lower-level constituents.

A definition as derived from formalist assumptions is that discourse is 'language above the sentence or above the clause' (Stubbs 1983:1).

Michael Stubbs says, 'Any study which is not dealing with (a) single sentences, (b) contrived by the linguist, (c) out of context, may be called discourse analysis.' (Stubbs 1983:131).

Widdowson, also criticizes the well familiar definition of discourse analysis that discourse is the study of language patterns above the sentence and states; If discourse analysis is defined as the study of language patterns above the sentence, this would seem to imply that discourse is sentence writ large: quantitatively different but qualitatively the same phenomenon. It would follow, too, of course, that you cannot have discourse below the sentence. (Widdowson, 2004: 3)

In other words, the discourse information is crucial to a complete theory of language. Smith and Kurthen also argue that 'the existence of arbitrary and language-specific syntactic and referential options for conveying a proposition requires a level of linguistic competence beyond sentential syntax and semantics' (Smith and Kurthen 2007:455).

Discourse analysis is necessarily the analysis of language in use. The functionalist view of discourse analysis asserts that 'the study of discourse is the study of any aspect of language use' (Fasold 1990:65).