Soc (2016) 53:597–602
DOI 10.1007/s12115-016-0071-z
SYMPOSIUM: WORLDS OF REPRESENTATION
A Discourse on Discourse Studies
Arthur Asa Berger 1
Published online: 26 October 2016
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Abstract Discourse analysis can be said to have evolved
out of the desire linguists had to move beyond the sen-
tence and be able to analyze all kinds of texts, from
conversations to advertisements and texts with written or
spoken language, images, video and music. As it evolved,
some ideologically centered discourse analysts developed
what is called CDA: Critical Discourse Analysis and then,
to deal with the complex nature of mass mediated texts,
MultiModal discourse analysis and, for some, Critical
Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Two examples of how
discourse analysis can be used are offered: the first is a
discussion of the way language in speed dating shapes
decision making by speed daters. The second is an analysis
of a Fidji perfume advertisement.
Keywords Linguistics . Discourse analysis . Critical
discourse analysis . Multimodal discourse analysis . Critical
multimodal discourse analysis . Speed dating . Metaphor
According to Teun A. Van Dijk, one of the more prominent
discourse analysis scholars (1997:1), Bthe notion of discourse
is essentially fuzzy.^ He wrote that in the first chapter of a
book of essays on discourse studies he edited, Discourse as
Structure and Process. In the preface to the book he describes
* Arthur Asa Berger
arthurasaberger@gmail.com
1
Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts, San Francisco State
University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA
discourse analysis or discourse studies as Ba new cross
discipline that comprises the theory and analysis of text
and talk in virtually all disciplines of the humanities and
social sciences.^ The volume contains chapters on topics
such as semantics, grammar, styles, rhetoric, narrative, ar-
gumentation, genres, semiotics and social cognition. The
second volume he edited, Discourse as Social Interaction,
contains chapters on topics such as discourse interaction,
conversation, institutional dialogue, gender, organizational
discourse, politics, and culture.
Irina F. Oukhvanova-Shymgova, a Belarusian discourse
scholar, adds an important insight. She writes in a book she
edited (in Perspectives and Methods of Political and Text
Research, Volume 2), and I am modifying the English a bit,
that the Bintegration processes in the modern humanities are
based on the assumption that…knowledge is text-centered
(discourse-centered.)
So discourse analysis focuses upon texts of one kind or
another. These texts can be conversations, textual material in
advertisements, written texts, texts found in social media and
mass-mediated texts.
In short, discourse analysis/studies is a multidisciplinary
enterprise that deals with qualitative approaches to communi-
cation of all kinds in many disciplines. If Van Dijk is correct,
many scholars are—whether they realize it or not—function-
ing as discourse analysts. I discovered, to my surprise, that I
was a discourse analyst in 1964—and a very special kind,
too–a critical multimodal discourse analyst, when I wrote
my Ph.D. dissertation on the comic strip Li’l Abner. (More
on critical multimodal discourse analysis later.) I always
thought that semiotics was an imperialistic metadiscipline,
but semiotics, we find, according to discourse analysts like
van Dijk, is a part of discourse analysis. If you Google
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discourse analysis, you find that there are 5,680,000 sites de-
voted to the subject. I accessed Google on August 27, 2015, to
get this information. If you search on Amazon.com for books
on the subject, you find there are more than 45,000 books on
discourse analysis and 31,000 books on discourse studies.
One publisher, Routledge, has something like forty books on
discourse analysis.
The Evolution of Discourse Analysis
Discourse analysis evolved from linguistics and many
discourse analysts are linguists who have moved on
from a focus on sentences to more complex form of
communication such as conversations and written texts.
In their book, Working With Written Discourse, Deborah
Cameron and Ivan Panovic offer a dictionary definition
of discourse:
Discourse. n[oun] & v[erb]: a. conversation, talk. b. a
dissertation or treatise on an academic subject. c. a lecture
or sermon.
Then they offer three definitions of discourse:
1) Discourse is language Babove the sentence,^
2) Discourse is Blanguage in use.^
3) Discourse is a form of social practice in which language
plays a central role.
An earlier book by Cameron entitled Working with
Spoken Discourse, offers an insight into the way dis-
course studies has evolved. It started with linguists
Bleaping over the wall^ and moving from a focus on
sentences to the study of conversation. From there, dis-
course analysis started dealing with written texts. And
eventually they became interested in the kind of texts
found on social media sites such as Facebook. So dis-
course analysis focuses on how people use language and
the role that this language plays in social and political
life and in culture.
CDA: Critical Discourse Analysis
As discourse analysis evolved, some analysts in the
1980s and 1990s became interested in the way language
is used to spread ideological messages. Discourse ana-
lysts such as Van Dijk, Norman Fairclough and Ruth
Wodak did work on Bhow power relations are exercised
and negotiated in discourse.^ (Fairclough and Wodak,
BCritical Discourse Analysis^ in T. Van Dijk, ed. Discourse
Soc (2016) 53:597–602
as Social Interaction. 1997: 272.) In their book, How to Do
Critical Discourse Analysis, David Machin and Andrea Mayr
discuss the ideas of Fairclough found in his book Language
and Power. They write (Machin and Mayr 2012:5):
Fairclough (1989:5) sums up the idea of Bcritical^
language study as the process of analyzing linguistic
elements in order to reveal connections between lan-
guage, power and ideology that are hidden from
people. When a researcher draws on CDA for the
first time, what they will realize is that it is often the
smallest linguistic details where power relations and
political ideology can be found. In texts we may be
aware of what the speaker or author is doing, but
not so much as how they are doing this.
With their focus on the ideological content of language, we
might ask what is the difference between the kind of analysis
discourse analysts make of an ideological text and political
scientists make? The difference is, and this is something of a
simplification, that political scientists tend to focus on the
content of the ideological texts while discourse analysts focus
on how these texts shape people’s beliefs; on the style as well
as the content.
Multimodal Discourse Analysis
When discourse analysts started analyzing complex texts such
as Facebook, they had to deal with words, images, photo-
graphs and videos. The term they use for this kind of analysis
is Bmultimodal^ discourse analysis—dealing with different
modes of communication. Rodney H. Jones offers a good
explanation of what multimodal discourse analysis attempts
to do. He writes, in Discourse Analysis: A Resource Book for
Students:
Multimodal discourse analysts see discourse as involving
multiple modes which often work together. In
face-to-face communication, for example, people
do not just communicate with spoken language.
They also communicate through their gestures,
gaze, facial expression, posture, dress, how close
or far away they stand or sit from each other, and
many other things. Similarly, Bwritten texts^ rarely con-
sist only of words, especially nowadays. they often in-
clude pictures, charts or graphs. Even the font that is used
the way paragraphs are arranged on a page or screen
can convey meaning.
Soc (2016) 53:597–602
The point of multimodal discourse analysis is not
to analyze these other modes instead of speech
and writing, but to understand how different
modes, including speech and writing, work together in
discourse….Multimodal discourse analysis can general-
ly be divided into two types: one which focuses on
Btexts^ such as magazines, comic books, web pages,
films and works of art and the other which focuses more
on social interaction.
We can see, then, that multimodal discourse analysis
covers a lot of territory and that the work that many
media scholars and communication scholars do, when
they analyze mass-mediated texts and various kinds of
social interactions, can be considered multimodal discourse
analysis.
CMDA: Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis
or CDA + MDA = CMDA
When you combine CDA, Critical Discourse Analysis with
MDA, Multimodal Discourse Analysis, you get CMDA:
Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis. CMDA is needed
because texts such as those found on social media such as
Facebook have so many modes such as print, color, photo-
graphs, and videos. The focus, always, is to examine the way
these different modes transmit ideological messages to people,
who generally are not aware that there is an ideological as-
pects to the texts they are watching and hearing. When I wrote
my dissertation on Al Capp’s comic strip, Li’l Abner, in 1964, I
had chapters on the graphic elements of the strip, on Capp’s
use of language, on the narrative structure of the strip, on his
satire on various aspects of American culture and society, and
other topics that would be commonplace nowadays to any
critical multimodal discourse analyst. At the time I wrote my
dissertation, in 1964, I’d not heard of discourse analysis but I
was analyzing my text—it turns out–in the tradition of critical
multimodal discourse analysis.
Much of the work that critical multimodal discourse
analysts do can be thought of as falling under the umbrella
of cultural studies or can be thought as being similar in
nature to cultural studies. And many of the theorists whose
ideas inform critical multimodal discourse analysis are the
ones who inform cultural studies. I’m talking about theorists
such as M.M. Bakhtin, V.I. Volosinov (who may have been
Bakhtin?), L. Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, Jurgen Habermas,
Stuart Hall (from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies at the University of Birmingham in the UK), Michel
Foucault and the Frankfurt School. To my mind, if you have a
cultural studies scholar interested in the style found in
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multimodal ideological texts like the videos found on
YouTube or postings on Facebook (especially the way lan-
guage is used) as well as the contents, you have someone
who is doing multimodal critical discourse analysis.
Discourse Analysis in Thought and Action: Speed
Dating
Now that I have offered a brief overview of discourse analysis
and how it has evolved over the years it is time to offer an
example or two of how discourse analysis has been used. I
begin with the work of a psychologist at the University of
Texas at Austin, James Pennebaker. He found that the lan-
guage people use during speed-dating sessions is a reliable
indicator of who will go out on a date with whom.
Pennebaker distinguishes between what he calls Bfunction
words^ and Bcontent^ words. In an interview with Katherine
Streeter on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Sept. 1,
2014, he explained that words such as the, this, though, I, and,
and am are Bfiller^ words that we use between Bcontent
words^ such as Bschool,B Bfamily,^ and Blive.^ They are re-
lated to the substance of what we are talking about and con-
jure, in our minds, specific images. Thus, a person who works
at a university uses different Bcontent^ words when talking
about his or her work than someone who is a taxi driver, but
they use similar Bfunction^ words.
Pennebaker transcribed conversations between people who
were participating in speed-dating meetings and also obtained
information about the way people involved in speed-dating
Bperceived^ how they were progressing. After analyzing his
data he discovered that, BWe can predict by analyzing their
language who will go on a date—who will match—at rates
better than the people themselves.^ What was key to his
research was the way the people involved in speed dating
used Bfunction^ words—that is, prepositions, pronouns
and articles. If they used function words in a similar
way, they were more likely to go on a date.
This is because, he suggests, when two people are interest-
ed in one another, there are subtle shifts in the way they use
language. When they find themselves paying close attention
to one another, although they are not conscious of what they
are doing, they tend to use language the same way. Then
Pennebaker makes an important point. He concludes that
changing your language doesn’t change who you are, but,
on the contrary, changing who you are changes the way you
use language. Our language, then, is a reflection of our
identities. He concludes, then, that language plays a much
more important role in our lives than we might imagine.
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As Pennebaker points out, our language use reflects our
character and personality.
In this advertisement, we see a naked woman, her legs
folded beneath her, on abeach. She is holding a very large
bottle of Fidji—larger than her head. We only see the tips of
her breasts. Her head is resting on the bottle of perfume which
she grasps with her right hand under the bottle and her
left hand grasping it with her fingers. Her eyes are closed.
The black cord around the bottle leadsour eyes to her
head, which is resting on the bottle of Fidji. The text is
all in French: BThe woman is an island, Fidji is her
perfume.^ In the right hand corner, in vertical type, we
see the name of the perfume maker, Guy Laroche. Under
that, in a horizontal line, in tiny type, we read BParis.^
The woman is on sand on a beach by the sea. The text is
all in French, but the text is simple enough that people who
don’t know French can probably figure out what it means.
Paris (and France) is a signifier of style and sophistication in
the popular mind in America.
What is the significance of the metaphor BThe woman is an
island?^ Islands are surrounded by water and are their own
little worlds. It calls to mind John Donne’s famous line BNo
man is an island,^ though many people who look at the Fidji
ad are probably not familiar with Donne’s poem. Discourse
analysts would recognize this Fidji statement as an example of
intertextuality—borrowing ideas, themes, and language from
other creators—in this case, Donne’s poem.
The idea of creating a perfume with the characteristics Fidji
came to some managers of Guy Laroche when they were
Soc (2016) 53:597–602
Discourse Analysis in Thought and Action: Fidji:
La femme est une ile
vacationing there. As we read on the website on http://www.
fragrantica.com/perfume/Guy-Laroche/Fidji-2068.html:
Fidji stands for the name of the islands located in south-
ern part of the Pacific. Just there, on one of the Fidji
islands (where the managers of the house were at their
vacation), the idea of first Guy Laroche perfume was
born. Fidji has become incredibly popular, because it is
the perfume from the sunny islands, far and attractive.
The fresh wave of galbanum, hyacinth, lemon, berga-
mot meet the floral heart across rose, jasmine, violet,
ylang-ylang. Spicy floral nuance of carnation gives its
harshness and makes the character of the composition
stronger. The base is combined of: musk, patchouli, san-
dal, amber, vetiver, moss. The perfume was made by
Josephine Catapano in 1966.
So Fidji is an old fragrance—49 years old–and is popular
because of its aura—the sunny pacific, distant, remote and a
place where fantasies people have of passionate and uninhib-
ited love can flourish. But what does it mean to say that BThe
woman is an Island?^ And why is she naked? And what are
we to make of her hairdo. It is tied behind her back and not
loose and flowing, as we would imagine in our notions about
the way women in a remote Pacific island should look.
The denotation of Fidji is a moderately expensive perfume
with a Bspicy floral nuance of camation.^ The connotations
Soc (2016) 53:597–602
are passion in distant lands, or a magic love potion (the per-
fume) that will enable us to bring that passion, connected in
the popular mind, to France and elsewhere. Many people
know the term Bla femme or the woman^ from the French
phrase Bcherchez la femme,^ or Bchase/find the woman.^
The woman in the Fidji ad is an exemplar of Botherness,^
the opposite of Bthe man,^ and someone to be desired
sexually.
The term Bisland^ brings to mind isolation, separation, a
kind of world unto itself. The nakedness of the women calls to
mind Eve, before she had eaten the apple in the Garden of
Eden. Nakedness then has a suggestion of innocence about it.
And using a metaphor, BThe woman is an island^ is much
stronger than using a simile, BThe woman is like an Island.^
The language is also a bit curious. Why not say BWomen are
islands?^ BThe woman is an Island^ has a curious ring to it, as
if it is a prophetic statement from the Bible. The phrase is
meant to attract our attention and make us curious—we have
to think about what it means. And on that island all we see is
the woman and her very large bottle of Fidji perfume, that she
holds lovingly. Her breasts direct our attention to the bottle of
Fidji.
This advertisement is not as symbolically interesting as the
famous Fidji perfume advertisement of a Polynesian woman
with an orchid in her hair and a snake around her neck. She is
holding a bottle of Fidji in a curious way—with her fingers
crossed.
This Fidji advertisement plays into fantasies of sexual
abandon in the topics much better than the BThe woman is
an island^ advertisement. The snake and the text, BFidji the
perfume of paradise regained^ have allusions to Adam and
Eve in the Bible. Some have seen the snake as forming an
BS,^ the three horizontal planes in the bottle as forming an
601
E, and the fingers forming an BX,^ so you have the word
BSEX^ hidden in the image, and sex is what perfumes are
all about. I have written a long chapter on this advertisment
in my book Ads, Fads & Consumer Culture.
In the BThe woman is an island Badvertisement, we look at
the woman in the image from above, giving us a sense of
superiority. The male gaze at this image shows a woman
who is the object of desire and maybe even lust—a valuable
trait for a perfume meant for women. For women, the figure in
the advertisement may represent an ideal in her fantasy. The
size of the bottle draws our attention on the product being
sold. There are other variations of this advertisement that
show her from a different angle and even one that shows her
clothed. We can see, then, that images have a great deal of
content and offer insights into gender relationships, attitudes
towards sexuality, notions about Paris and French culture that
are widespread, all of which are reinforced by the langage
found in the advertisement.
Greg Rowland, an English semiotician who has worked in
advertising campaigns for perfumes, offers a critical perspec-
tive on this advertisement. He writes (person communication):
We owe Guy Laroche a debt of gratitude. True kitsch, an
unintentionally mawkish adaption of high art signifiers,
is hard to find these days. Since the late 1920s, and the
growth of self-reflexive post-modernism, kitsch has
generally announced itself with a fanfare, if a knowing
smirk can ever be described as a fanfare. This is kitsch
without the smirk, without the ideological get-out-
clause of 1990s tiki pop art, and it’s all the scarier for
this epistemological lack.
Here we have a direct quotation of the innocent natives
of Gauguin, called into service for M. Laroche. Indeed,
it is quite a service. The prospect of real world physics is
a terrifying one. The bottle is stupidly large. It would
weigh more than a sack of potatoes. It would be virtually
impossible to hold it in this pose for more than a couple
of seconds. Where else have we recently seen the naked
exotic Other forced to endure the ravages of brute grav-
ity in forced allegiance to some dispersed and desperate
ideological purpose?
I suppose the difference here, and this represents Guy
Laroche’s great triumph, is that redacted CIA prisoners
were never asked to assume an expression of adulation
towards their objects of torture.
The woman is being tortured unnecessarily of course.
She is, after all, an island. There’s no chance of her
conspiring against imperialist oppression. There’s no
chance of her having contact of any kind with anyone,
as she’s land mass surrounded by sea. The ad is pretty
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inconsistent even of the level of hoary patriarchal anal-
ogy. A man can be a mountain, a woman a volcano — but
who is an island? What does that mean, even vaguely? Is
the phrase little more than nicely art directed version of
those platitudinal inspirational Facebook posts?
Well, perhaps Guy was hoping to express the ultimate
dream of the bourgeois individual. Railing against the
English poet John Donne’s oppositional view (Bno man
is an island^) he prefers to assert the pristine atomization
of women, discretely sequestered across the high seas,
imbued with untrammelled purity and innocence, but
full of ripe potentiality should any happy sailor be
washed up on her shores, and decide to land on her.
If imperialism is first time tragedy (horror, unironic
motivations of power), the second as farce (tiki sunny
irony) then perhaps we had better convene a third term
for M Laroche? He has managed to evoke the torture of
the body, imprisoned in total isolation, graceful for the
horrific exertions required to fetishize the crazily exag-
gerated object. Has Guy Laroche expanded on Marx and
given us a vision of Neo-Kistch, an unintended quota-
tion of Ironic Tragedy?
We can see from Rowland’s analysis that advertisements
have the power to generate powerful emotions in people who
are exposed to them and to people who analyze them.
Discourse analysis may be a Bfuzzy^ concept but practi-
tioners of discourse analysis offer a language-focused critical
approach to everything from conversations, written texts, ad-
vertisements, images, photographs and social media such as
Facebook which require a number of different approaches
including linguistics and semiotics. It can tell us interesting
things about gender relations, ideologies, consumer lust, race
relations and a host of other topics in the United States and in
any other country where discourse analysts are doing their
research. We find that discourse analyst are able to predict
who is more likely to go out on dates with whom in speed
Soc (2016) 53:597–602
dating sessions more accurately than people actually involved
in the speed dating. And we see that advertisements, such as
the Fidji Bthe Woman is an island,^ which seem so simple, can
have more ideological significance and generate more emo-
tional passion than we might imagine.
Further Reading
Berger, A. A. 1970. Li’l Abner: A Study in American Satire. New York:
Twayne.
Berger, A. A. 2015. Ads, Fads & Consumeer Culture (5th ed., ). Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield.
Cameron, D., & Panovic, I. Working With Written Discourse. Thousand
Oaks:Sage.
Fairclough, N., & Wodak, R. 1997. Critical Discourse Analysis. In T. Van
Dijk (Ed.), Discourse as Social Interaction, 272.
Machin, D., & Mayr, A. 2012. How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis.
Thousand Oaks:Sage.
Oukhvanova-Shymgova, I. (Ed.) 2001. Perspectives and Methods of
Political Discourse and Text Research (vol. 2). Minsk:Belarusian
State University Press.
Rowland, G. 2015. Personal correspondence.
van Dijk, T. (Ed.) 1997a. Discourse as Structure and Process. Discourse
Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction (vol. 1). Thousand Oaks:
Sage.
van Dijk, T. (Ed.) 1997b. Discourse as Social Interaction: Discourse
Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction (vol. 2). Thousand Oaks:
Sage.
Arthur Asa Berger is professor emeritus of Broadcast and Electronic
Communication Arts at San Francisco State University. He has published
more than 100 articles in publications such as The Journal of
Communication, Society, Rolling Stone, The San Francisco Chronicle
and The Los Angeles Times, more than 70 books on media, popular
culture, humor, and tourism. Among his books are Media Analysis
Techniques, What Objects Mean, Bloom’s Morning, Pop Culture,
Messages: An Introduction to Communication, An Anatomy of Humor,
Ads, Fads and Consumer Culture and Discourse Analysis and Popular
Culture. He has also written a number of darkly comic academic murder
mysteries, one of which, Durkheim is Dead, deals with sociological the-
ory. He has lectured in many countries, most recently Belarus and Iran.
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