Construct · 6 fields · 10 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
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Connected stretches of language longer than a sentence, and the regularities that hold them together. Harris coined "discourse analysis" in 1952 as a distributional method for finding recurring equivalence classes across a whole text, extending the same procedure he used for morphemes. Brown and Yule fixed the modern textbook meaning: the analysis of language in use, where the object is what a speaker or writer does with sentences, not the sentences themselves. What distinguishes this meaning is that discourse remains a linguistic object (cohesion, reference, topic) and nothing about institutions or power is built into it.[1][2]
Naturally occurring talk, examined for the machinery participants use to organise it turn by turn. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson described a turn-taking system (turn-constructional units, transition-relevance places, rules for who speaks next) that operates locally and is managed by the parties themselves. The unit is the sequence, not the text, and the evidence is what the next speaker does, which shows how the prior turn was understood. Conversation analysts are wary of the word "discourse" precisely because it invites the analyst's categories in over the participants'.[3]
A formal structure over the spans of a text that explains why it reads as one thing rather than a list. Mann and Thompson's Rhetorical Structure Theory represents a text as a tree of nucleus–satellite relations (Elaboration, Contrast, Evidence, Cause) each defined by the effect the writer intends. Grosz and Sidner built discourse from three interacting components: the linguistic structure of segments, the intentional structure of purposes, and the attentional state that tracks what is salient. In both, discourse is something a parser can output and an annotator can score, which is the point.[4][5]
A historically specific body of statements, together with the rules that govern what can be said, by whom, and about what. Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge defined discursive formations by their regularities in objects, enunciative positions, concepts, and strategies, and argued that discourses are practices that form the objects of which they speak, madness, sexuality, delinquency exist as objects because a discourse constituted them. This is not language above the sentence; it is a unit of history, and the individual text is only a trace of it.[6]
A form of communication in which validity claims that have been questioned are redeemed by argument alone, under conditions where only the better argument counts. Habermas separated discourse from ordinary communicative action: action proceeds on claims taken for granted, discourse suspends action to test them. His earlier study of the bourgeois public sphere describes the historical space (coffee houses, the press) where private persons came together to reason publicly, and its later transformation. Discourse here is normative: a standard that real exchanges approximate or fail.[7][8]
The talk and text of political actors (parliamentary debate, speeches, party programmes, media coverage) analysed for how it does political work. Van Dijk fixed political discourse analysis by its context: what makes a text political is who produces it, in what institutional setting, for what political function, not its topic. Critical discourse analysis, as Fairclough set it out, treats each text as simultaneously a piece of language, a discursive practice of production and consumption, and a social practice tied to ideology and power, and reads across all three at once. The distinctive commitment is that language use constitutes social relations rather than merely describing them.[9][10]
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