 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
Home | More Articles | Join as a Member! | Post Your Job - Free! | All Translation Agencies | |
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|
Discourse analysis
Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken or signed language use. The objects of discourse analysis—discourse, writing, talk, conversation, communicative event, etc.—are variously defined in terms of coherent sequences of sentences, propositions, speech acts or turns-at-talk. Contrary to much of traditional linguistics, discourse analysts not only study language use 'beyond the sentence boundary', but also prefer to analyze 'naturally occurring' language use, and not invented examples. This is known as corpus linguistics; text linguistics is related. Discourse analysis has been taken up in a variety of social science disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, sociology, cognitive psychology, social psychology, international relations communication studies and translation studies, each of which is subject to its own assumptions, dimensions of analysis, and methodologies.
HistoryThe term discourse analysis first entered general use in a series of papers published by Zellig Harris beginning in 1952 and reporting on work from which he developed transformational grammar in the late 1930s. Formal equivalence relations between sentences of a coherent discourse are made obvious and explicit by using sentence transformations to regularize the text to a canonical form. Words and sentences with equivalent information then appear in the same column of a binary array (table). This work continued over the next four decades (see references) into a science of sublanguage analysis (Kittredge & Lehrberger 1982), culminating in a demonstration of the information structures in texts of an immunology sublanguage of science (Harris et al. 1989) and a fully articulated theory of linguistic information content (Harris 1991). During this time, however, most linguists pursued a succession of elaborate theories of sentence-level syntax and semantics. Though Harris had mentioned the idea of analyzing whole discourses, he had not worked out a comprehensive model as of January 1952. A linguist working for the American Bible Society, James A. Loriot/Lauriault needed to find answers to some fundamental errors in translation of Quechua in the Cusco area of Peru. He took the idea, recorded all of the legends and, after going over the meaning and placement of each word with a national; he was able to form logical, mathematical rules that transcended the simple sentence structure. He then applied the process to another dialect of Eastern Peru: Shipibo. He taught the theory at Norman, Oklahoma in the summers of '56 and '57, and entered University of Pennsylvania in the interim year. He tried to publish a paper Shipibo Paragraph Structure, but it was not published until 1970 (Loriot & Hollenbach 1970). In the meantime, Dr. Kenneth L. Pike, a professor at University of Michigan Ann Arbor, taught the theory. and one of his students Robert E. Longacre was able to disseminate it in a disertation. Harris's methodology was developed into a system for computer analysis of natural language by a team led by Naomi Sager at NYU which has been applied to a number of sublanguage domains, most notably to medical informatics. The software for the Medical Language Processor has been made publicly available on SourceForge. In the late 1960s and 1970s, and without reference to this prior work, a variety of other approaches to a new cross-discipline of DA began to develop in most of the humanities and social sciences more or less concurrently with, and in relation to, other new (inter- or sub-) disciplines, such as semiotics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics. Many of these approaches, especially those influenced by the social sciences, favor a more dynamic study of (spoken, oral) talk-in-interaction. In Europe, Michel Foucault was one of the key theorists on the subject, mainly referring to discourse in his book The Archaeology of Knowledge. Topics of interestTopics of interest to discourse analysts include:
PerspectivesThe following are some of the specific theoretical perspectives and analytical approaches used in linguistic discourse analysis:
Although these approaches emphasize different aspects of language use, they all view language as social interaction, and are concerned with the social contexts in which discourse is embedded. Often a distinction is made between 'local' structures of discourse (such as relations between sentences, propositions or turns), and 'global' structures, such as the overall topics and the schematic organization of the discourse or conversation as a whole. For instance many discourse types begin with some kind of 'summary', for instance in titles, headlines, leads, abstracts, and so on. Some prominent discourse analystsRobert de Beaugrande, Jan Blommaert, Adriana Bolivar, Diana Boxer, Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard, Wallace Chafe, Paul Chilton, Guy Cook, Malcolm Coulthard, Paul Drew, Alessandro Duranti, Brenton D. Faber, Norman Fairclough, Talmy Givón, Charles Goodwin, Art Graesser, Michael Halliday, Zellig Harris, John Heritage, Janet Holmes, Paul Hopper, Gail Jefferson, Barbara Johnstone, Walter Kintsch, Richard Kittredge, Adam Jaworski, William Labov, George Lakoff, Stephen H. Levinson, James A. Loriot/Lauriault, Robert E. Longacre, Jim Martin, Elinor Ochs, Jonathan Potter, Harvey Sacks, Naomi Sager, Emanuel Schegloff, Deborah Schiffrin, Michael Schober, Stef Slembrouck, John Swales, Deborah Tannen, Sandra Thompson, Teun A. van Dijk, Theo van Leeuwen, Jef Verschueren, Henry Widdowson, Carla Willig, Ruth Wodak, Michel Foucault, Margaret Wetherell, Ernesto Laclau,Chantal Mouffe among many others. References
See alsoExternal links
Published - November 2008 Information from Wikipedia
is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation
License
E-mail this article to your colleague! Need more translation jobs? Click here! Translation agencies are welcome to register here - Free! Freelance translators are welcome to register here - Free! |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |||
Legal Disclaimer Site Map |
