The 21st Meeting of RoL

Wednesday, 23 November of 2022

Qualitative Linguistic Research Methods

Discourse-Analytic Approaches to Text and Talk

There has been a change in the field of linguistc research in
recent years. Today, speech and wrting as evidence of the way
in which people in the world use language in a social contexts is
manifestly the bussiness of linguistic research. So, linguistics
research is considered as an empirical research. In the past, the
study of texts (written discourse) and or talk (spoken discourse)
was not considered worthy of serious research.
A key strand of linguistic research evolved from the writings of
Noam Chomsky who argued that the goal of linguistics should
be to study underlying ‘linguistic competence’,(the rules that
inform the the production of grammatical sentences). Later,
‘linguistic performance’ (speaker’s actual utterances) becomes
a serious ttention of linguists.
Over the years ‘discourse’ has become a great concern of
linguists with the following approaches.
The term ‘discurse’ itself is still debatable about what it means,
and it evolves.
1
The first definiton is ‘language above sentence’ and refers to a
sequence of entences or utterances that constitutes a text.
The second definition is a more functional and sociolinguistic
definition as ‘a language in use’, or ‘ language in social context’
(media discourse, legal discourse, educational discourse,
political discourse, cultural discourse and so on).
Fairclough defines discourse as the situational context of
language use involving the interaction between reader/ writer/
and text.
Michel Foucault defines discourse as practices that
systematically form the objects of which they speak. Discourses
are more than just linguistic use: they are social, and ideological
practices which can govern the ways in whch people think,
speak, interact, and behave.
There are four approaches to discourse analysis:
1. Conversation Analysis (CA)
Ethnomethodology with its interest in the study of methods
used by a group people is a the inspiration of CA.
2. Discourse Analysis (DA)
DA focuses on studying language in its own right. DA puts
the emphasis on the orderliness, logic, and meaningfulnes
of linguistic performance.
3. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)
CDA analizes real, and often extended samples of spoken
and written discourse. CDA considers how language works
wkithin institutional and political discourses (e.g. in
education, organizations, media, governement) as well as
2
 specific discourse (around gender and class), in order to
uncover inequalities in social relationship.
4. Feminist Post-Structuralist Discourse Analysis (FPDA)
FPDA is more exclusive on feminist perspective and
considers that gender differentiation to be a dominat
discourse among competing dsicourses when analysing all
texts.