Talk:Discourse analysis

James A. Loriot / Lauriault
I've entered the second paragraph to explain a behind the scenes story about the development of the linguistic theory. I would appreciate input to give my father, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from U of Penn in 1963, credit for developing a model in '52 and teaching it in '56. This theory was necessary for speech activated typing, computer translation of languages and social changes that were needed. He was 15 when he first started being a linguist and studied one summer at age 18 (1946), but was otherwise home-schooled until he entered the U of Penn in '56, testing out of a year and graduating in 3 years working in Peru in the intervening time. He got a BA in Linguistics with the program being in the Master's level. I'll try not to be offended, but his story has gone a long time without being told. --Smlauriot (talk) 05:40, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

link rot
I get the dreaded 404 message when I try to access the Daniel Everett link about James Loriot. 4.248.217.243 (talk) 13:04, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Edit on Harvey Sacks
I've substituted "research of Harvey Sacks" for "theories of Harvey Sacks" because Sacks didn't focus on theory and, in fact, rejected theory building as a way of going about the study of talk-in-interaction.

1st para changes
I deleted "above the sentence or clause level" because it defines DA's phenomenon in terms of syntax, which contradicts the nearly immediately following notes about Harris and how folks haven't followed his lead. I merged "The language in question can be written or spoken texts or systems of texts" into the preceding sentence to shorten things up. Finally, I added another sentence (viz., "Thus, most discourse analysts following Harris have conducted work that falls under the heading of “pragmatics” in modern linguistics, rather than “syntactics” though many discourse analysts would reject linguists’ tripartite division of the main characteristics of language--the third characteristic being "semantics.") in order to set DA in context for linguists, since so many come to DA from linguistics. Xianknelson 16:13, 9 February 2006 (UTC)xianknelson

Added material on Harris's continued work on discourse. It is unfortunate that Noam by his own acknowledgement never understood the methods or motivation of discourse analysis, and as a consequence it remained invisible to his students and followers. In the 1960s, Jim Munz tried to develop algorithms for formal DA using a phrase-structure formalism such as is the norm in most of linguistics, but was unable to, due to its inherent separation of (abstract) syntactic form from semantic information. Naomi Sager and others have had great success with systems using an adjunction grammar formalism, and work with Joshi's tree-adjoining grammars (TAGs) could be fruitful. The MLP system cited in the article automatically generates an XML tagging of sublanguage texts. Stephen Johnson at Columbia has been developing a computer formalization of operator grammar. Richard Kittredge has developed automated analysis and synthesis systems such as are used to generate reports of weather, stock markets, and sports, and has formed a company, CoGenTex, to market it. This stuff is now being rediscovered.

User:bn 21:55, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

list division
Hi, I took political discourse analysis out of the list of methodological/theoretical approaches because its not such a thing. Rather, it identies work done using a few of the preceding methods on a specific phenomenon. Thus, I put "political discourse" in a new list of DA "fields" (here understood as areas defined by phenomenon of interest). I linked "political discourse" the PDA page, and altered that, as well, to reflect the fact that PDA is DA analysis of a particular phenomenon rather than a particular DA method.Xianknelson 16:36, 9 February 2006 (UTC)xianknelson


 * I tend to disagree with you that PDA it is not a method. While it does focus on a specific area of discourse, the methodologies behind PDA are very much different than those of, for instance, CDA. Additionally, I don't think it is very practical or useful to list the different discourse phenomena, as discourse analysts should be interested in all discourse, regardless of its origin. TheCharlie 22:43, 1 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi Charlie, there are two issues here I'd like to address. First, while I agree that DAists should be interested in all discourse, I think it is extremely practical to list different discourse phenomena. In fact, from my vantage point, that's what much of DA is about--listing identified discourse phenomena so that future research can build on previous observations. If we didn't list, wouldn't we be in danger of re-discovering the wheel constantly, etc. Second, I'm not aware of any research on political discourse that is not easily classified as either basic DA or CDA. In fact, at least some of the folks who analyze political discourse are the founders of CDA, e.g., Teun van Dijk. Indeed, one of the journals van Dijk has founded, Discourse and Society, is full of articles that are not just CDA articles or articles about political discourse, but both. Further, most folks I know would classify the analyses of political discourse conducted by O'Barr and his colleagues--some of the earliest non-CA folks to focus on political discourse-- as a type of everyday DA, and the CA stuff on political discourse falls under the DA umbrella as most people have come to use that term (DA, that is), hence, e.g., Jonathan Potter's description of his very CAish research as DA. (Of course, this wasn't always the case--Levinson, 1983, contrasted CA with DA, but that was before most DAists abandoned what he found objectionable in DA.) So, unless you're using "PDA" to refer to a particular set of political discourse analyses by a particular set of analysts of whom I'm not aware, I have to disagree with you on this. But perhaps you are using PDA (in capitals) in a different way than I am. Let me know.Xianknelson 17:38, 4 March 2006 (UTC)xianknelson

Discursive processing
Is there such a thing? Personally I've never heard of any literature attempting to reconcile social constructionist psychology with cognitivist perspectives. If it exists then I would like to know about it! Stu1mcf 19:23, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

General use
"The term discourse analysis first entered general use in a series of papers published by Zellig Harris" I contend that no matter how often Zellig Harris used the term, or how widely his papers were published, that could hardly be considered "general use." Unfree (talk) 00:06, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

French Discourse Analysis
I strongly suggest you to include a section about the french discourse analysis. Since it's a very particular form, based upon the Foucault's and Althusser's ideas. The main theorists are Michel Pêcheux and Dominique Maingueneau and their works have influenced many theorists in France and also in Brazil, setting an important branch of linguistics and other humanity studies in both countries. I also miss a mention of Mikhail Bakhtin work, since is one of the first works in discourse analysis. Bakhtin has a marxist aproach of the language, wich he calls 'language filosofy' where he criticizes Ferdinand Saussure's work on linguistics, accusing him of undersanding language as an abstraction. Bakhtin has a social/ideological approach where he understand language as form of social interaction where ideology takes form.

My best regards, greetings from Brazil. --Rickartur (talk) 23:05, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

making use of this content came to a simple conclusion, the DA is the explanation of words, phrases and horaciones within a text or oral speech, for goblal interpretation thereof, taking different subjects, political and others, too, that the interpretation is subjective.

correct me so I hope I'm wrong. adding that this is as simple for a basic comprencion on this great theme. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 189.130.180.222 (talk) 23:08, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

Re History
I thought it was vital to mention that much work on discourse was carried out in the past and that it was not just a recent development. Peter Balfour (peteb@doctors.org.uk).86.177.210.237 (talk) 08:10, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Should there maybe be a "criticisms" section?
Discourse analysis has been heavily criticized by numerous sources, maybe such a section should be added? 88.114.154.216 (talk) 11:49, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE PAGE
This page is very poorly written, and the talk page highlights a number of concerns that should be addressed. It is largely useless as a resource as it does not provide you with a basic understanding nor does it provide much further reading. Compare this to the Conversation Analysis page which is splendid. I don't have the time to fix it myself, but wanted to leave this here as a plea to anyone who might have a couple hours on their hands to spruce this page up. It's an injustice to the ever-growing field of researchers using discourse analysis in psychology, linguistics and sociology! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.215.5.255 (talk) 15:05, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

Comment from IP editor January 5 2016
The following text was added to the article by an IP editor at address 74.105.147.253, but doesn't belong within the article. I have therefore moved it to the talk page.  PK T (alk)  18:53, 6 January 2016 (UTC)
 * "What you are describing here is Critical Discourse Analysis; your idea of actual Discourse Analysis comes close to what you are calling Text Analysis;  Tex Analysis + Speech Analysis = Speech and Text Analysis.  That is, breaking down the structure of text beyond sentence as used in natural communication by speakers and writers in accordance with the situation.  Often, this leads to manipulating the whole structure of a langauge.  For example speakers of an OV language often, when the situation requires, use a VO structure in their sentences"

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