Society, James A. Lauriault/Loriot, needed
to find answers to some fundamental errors
in translating Quechua, in the Cuzco area
of Peru. Following Harris's 1952 publications,
he worked over the meaning and placement of
each word in a collection of Quechua legends
with a native speaker of Quechua and was able
to formulate discourse rules that transcended
the simple sentence structure. He then applied
the process to Shipibo, another language of
Eastern Peru. He taught the theory at the
Summer Institute of Linguistics in Norman,
Oklahoma, in the summers of 1956 and 1957
and entered the University of Pennsylvania
to study with Harris in the interim year.
He tried to publish a paper Shipibo Paragraph
Structure, but it was delayed until 1970 (Loriot
& Hollenbach 1970). In the meantime, Kenneth
Lee Pike, a professor at University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, taught the theory, and one of his
students, Robert E. Longacre developed it
in his writings.
Harris's methodology disclosing the correlation
of form with meaning was developed into a
system for the computer-aided 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 is publicly available on
SourceForge.
In the humanities
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
concurrently with, and related to, other 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 oral
talk-in-interaction. An example is "conversational
analysis", which was influenced by the Sociologist
Harold Garfinkel, the founder of Ethnomethodology.
Foucault
In Europe, Michel Foucault became one of the
key theorists of the subject, especially of
discourse, and wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge.
In this context, the term 'discourse' no longer
refers to formal linguistic aspects, but to
institutionalized patterns of knowledge that
become manifest in disciplinary structures
and operate by the connection of knowledge
and power. Since the 1970s, Foucault's works
have had an increasing impact especially on
discourse analysis in the social sciences.
Thus, in modern European social sciences,
one can find a wide range of different approaches
working with Foucault's definition of discourse
and his theoretical concepts. Apart from the
original context in France, there is, at least
since 2005, a broad discussion on socio-scientific
discourse analysis in Germany. Here, for example,
the sociologist Reiner Keller developed his
widely recognized 'Sociology of Knowledge
Approach to Discourse (SKAD)'.[5] Following
the sociology of knowledge by Peter L. Berger
and Thomas Luckmann, Keller argues, that our
sense of reality in everyday life and thus
the meaning of every object, actions and events
are the product of a permanent, routinized
interaction. In this context, SKAD has been
developed as a scientific perspective that
is able to understand the processes of 'The
Social Construction of Reality' on all levels
of social life by combining Michel Foucault's
theories of discourse and power with the theory
of knowledge by Berger/Luckmann. Whereas the
latter primarily focus on the constitution
and stabilisation of knowledge on the level
of interaction, Foucault's perspective concentrates
on institutional contexts of the production
and integration of knowledge, where the subject
mainly appears to be determined by knowledge
and power. Therefore, the 'Sociology of Knowledge
Approach to Discourse' can also be seen as
an approach to deal with the vividly discussed
micro–macro problem in sociology.
Perspectives
The following are some of the specific theoretical
perspectives and analytical approaches used
in linguistic discourse analysis:
Applied linguistics, an interdisciplinary
perspective on linguistic analysis[6]
Cognitive neuroscience of discourse comprehension[7][8]
Cognitive psychology, studying the production
and comprehension of discourse.
Conversation analysis
Critical discourse analysis
Discursive psychology
Emergent grammar
Ethnography of communication
Functional grammar
Interactional sociolinguistics
Mediated Stylistics
Pragmatics
Response based therapy (counselling)
Rhetoric
Stylistics (linguistics)
Sublanguage analysis
Tagmemics
Text linguistics
Variation 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
among sentences, propositions, and turns)
and 'global' structures, such as overall topics
and the schematic organization of discourses
and conversations. For instance, many types
of discourse begin with some kind of global
'summary', in titles, headlines, leads, abstracts,
and so on.
A problem for the discourse analyst is to
decide when a particular feature is relevant
to the specification is required. A question
many linguists ask is: "Are there general
principles which will determine the relevance
or nature of the specification?"
Topics of interest
Topics of discourse analysis include:[9]
The various levels or dimensions of discourse,
such as sounds (intonation, etc.), gestures,
syntax, the lexicon, style, rhetoric, meanings,
speech acts, moves, strategies, turns, and
other aspects of interaction
Genres of discourse (various types of discourse
in politics, the media, education, science,
business, etc.)
The relations between discourse and the emergence
of syntactic structure
The relations between text (discourse) and
context
The relations between discourse and power
The relations between discourse and interaction
The relations between discourse and cognition
and memory
Prominent academics
Jan Blommaert
Teun van Dijk
Michel Foucault
Heidi E. Hamilton
Barbara Johnstone
Sinfree Makoni
Jonathan Potter
Deborah Schiffrin
Deborah Tannen
Margaret Wetherell
Ruth Wodak
Political discourse
Political discourse analysis is a field of
discourse analysis which focuses on discourse
in political forums (such as debates, speeches,
and hearings) as the phenomenon of interest.
Policy analysis requires discourse analysis
to be effective from the post-positivist perspective.[10][11]
Political discourse is the formal exchange
of reasoned views as to which of several alternative
courses of action should be taken to solve
a societal problem.[12]
An example of an analysis of political discourse
is Roffee's 2016 examination into speech acts
surrounding the justification of the legislative
processes concerning the Australian federal
government's intervening in the Northern Territory
Aboriginal communities. The intervention was
a hasty reaction to a social problem. Through
this analysis, Roffee established that there
was, in fact, an unwillingness to respond
on behalf of the government, and the intervention
was, in fact, no more than another attempt
to control the Indigenous population. However,
due to the political rhetoric used, this was
largely unidentified.[13]
Corporate discourse
Corporate discourse can be broadly defined
as the language used by corporations. It encompasses
a set of messages that a corporation sends
out to the world (the general public, the
customers and other corporations) and the
messages it uses to communicate within its
own structures (the employees and other stakeholders).[14]
Comparative linguistics (originally comparative
philology) is a branch of historical linguistics
that is concerned with comparing languages
to establish their historical relatedness.
Genetic relatedness implies a common origin
or proto-language and comparative linguistics
aims to construct language families, to reconstruct
proto-languages and specify the changes that
have resulted in the documented languages.
To maintain a clear distinction between attested
and reconstructed forms, comparative linguists
prefix an asterisk to any form that is not
found in surviving texts. A number of methods
for carrying out language classification have
been developed, ranging from simple inspection
to computerised hypothesis testing. Such methods
have gone through a long process of development.
Methods
The fundamental technique of comparative linguistics
is to compare phonological systems, morphological
systems, syntax and the lexicon of two or
more languages using techniques such as the
comparative method. In principle, every difference
between two related languages should be explicable
to a high degree of plausibility and systematic
changes, for example in phonological or morphological
systems are expected to be highly regular
(i.e. consistent). In practice, the comparison
may be more restricted, e.g. just to the lexicon.
In some methods it may be possible to reconstruct
an earlier proto-language. Although the proto-languages
reconstructed by the comparative method are
hypothetical, a reconstruction may have predictive
power. The most notable example of this is
Saussure's proposal that the Indo-European
consonant system contained laryngeals, a type
of consonant attested in no Indo-European
language known at the time. The hypothesis
was vindicated with the discovery of Hittite,
which proved to have exactly the consonants
Saussure had hypothesized in the environments
he had predicted.
Where languages are derived from a very distant
ancestor, and are thus more distantly related,
the comparative method becomes impracticable.[1]
In particular, attempting to relate two reconstructed
proto-languages by the comparative method
has not generally produced results that have
met with wide acceptance. The method has also
not been very good at unambiguously identifying
sub-families and different scholars have produced
conflicting results, for example in Indo-European.
A number of methods based on statistical analysis
of vocabulary have been developed to try and
overcome this limitation, such as lexicostatistics
and mass comparison. The former uses lexical
cognates like the comparative method but the
latter uses only lexical similarity. The theoretical
basis of such methods is that vocabulary items
can be matched without a detailed language
reconstruction and that comparing enough vocabulary
items will negate individual inaccuracies.
Thus they can be used to determine relatedness
but not to determine the proto-language.
History
The earliest
