Sneak Peek of What Discourse Analysis is all about:
Discourse Analysis is the study of the ways sentences and utterances are put together to make texts and interactions and how those texts and interactions fit into our social world. It is also the study of semantics, syntax, morphology which makes it, an interdisciplinary study. But, discourse analysis is not just the study of language. It is a way of looking at language that focuses on how people use it in real life which has various purpose such as joke and argue and persuade and flirt, and to show that they are certain kinds of people belong to certain groups. This way of looking at language is based on four main assumptions and they are:
1. Language is ambiguous
What things mean is never absolutely clear. All communication involves interpreting what other people mean and what they are trying to do.
2. Language is 'always in the world'
Means, what language means is always a matter of where and when it is used and what it is used.
3. The way we use language is inseparable from who we are and the different social groups to which we belong
We use language to display different kinds of social identities and to show that we belong to different group.
4. Language is never used all by itself.
It is always combined with other things such as our tone of voice, facial expressions and gestures, when we speak, and the fonts, layout and graphics we use in written texts. What language means and what we can do with it is often a matter of how it is combined with these other things.
So, what good is discourse analysis?
We already engage in discourse analysis all the time when we try to figure out what people mean by what they say and when we try to express our multiple and complicated meanings to them.
Discourse analysis can help us to understand how the societies in which we live are put together and how they are maintained through our day-to-day activities of speaking, writing and making use of other modes of communication.
It can help us to:
1. Understand why people interact with one another the way they do
2. How people exert power and influence over one another
3. Understand how people view reality differently and why they view it that way
The study of discourse analysis, then, is not just the study of how we use language. It is also indirectly the study of politics, power, psychology, romance and a whole lot of other things! :)
For a brief visual overview of what Discourse Analysis is all about, please click to the video below.
