What is discourse analysis?

 

Discourse analysis is something that gets confusing and curious for many people. From its name, this discipline generates a lot of discussions and reflections, taking into account that generally people do not understand what the main focus of discourse analysis is. From the word discourse and language, there are many possible conceptions that people may arrive to have. For some people, language is thought as the systematic and organized group of rules that are used to communicate, for others it is more related to the intention and it implies much more than only words and letters. Discourse analysis is such a complex but absolutely interesting field. It works in a similar way to chemistry, the experts generally have to take elements apart and study them deeply in order to understand what they could mean when they are together.

Discourse analysis has become a powerful strategy in order to understand better what humans are and how they behave. This discipline helps a lot at the time to answer many questions that people have in the language area. Discourse needs to be analyzed under the light of many different aspects. It is crossed for intentions, attitudes and positions, the speaker’s ideas or beliefs are generally evidenced in her/his discourse. The order in which something is said, why one word and no other, why a specific intonation, a specific speed… Everything consciously or not, is saying a lot about the speaker and about what this person maybe aims to say.

Discourse analysis permeates and is permeated for many aspects in society, like the limitations of language, the interpersonal relationships, the familiar discourse among others. The principal point here is that of course language is limited by the people who are speaking it but it also limits them. For example, when we as adults are trying to explain something to a child, generally we adapt the language and the discourse to the way in which we think and consider that the child is going to understand us. However, the discourse that is produced is not the one that the child is going to understand, is the one that we think and idealize to be clear for a child. We as speakers are being limited and shaped by the language because we are using it in a particular way in order to be understood but the language is also limited by us, because we somehow determine the way in which we use it in order to express our message.

One of the most relevant aspects at the time to talk about discourse analysis is the data, it means the discourse that is going to be analyzed. It needs to be carefully chosen, behind every analysis there is a set of conscious and deep decisions that the researcher has had to make in order to focus the research in the correct direction. It is very different for example to analyze a short part of a book than analyzing a text written in a blog. The scenarios in which these texts appear make a huge meaning and the implications that it may generate are big and transcendental. Additional to the source, the quantity of the data is also very important, generally when a big amount of discourse is being analyzed, it is handled through a qualitative inquiry. However, generally it is not about the quantity of the data that we have, it is about the quality of it and mainly, about the decisions that we have made in order to get to analyze the most appropriate information.

As it was mentioned before, discourse analysis is much about decisions and the methods that will be used for the research are part of these important decisions that need to be made. One of the first ones for example, when the text that will be analyzed is oral, is the decision about the method to use in order to transcribe this text. This method is going to be determinant at the time to get the results and it is in the researcher to choose the best one for the particular study. Generally, some researchers opt for using methods in which all the discourse is transcribed and written. However, others state that a method in which only the relevant parts for the researcher must be taken into account would be a better idea. It is not about good or bad methods, it is about the most appropriate decisions that the person in charge of inquiry can make.

To sum up, it is very relevant to recognize the huge importance of discourse analysis, not only in the linguistic field, but in knowledge in general, taking into account that it helps to solve or at least try to solve many questions that people generally have. Discourse analysis is a field that has still a lot to show and to study and there is a lot to be found by researchers, it is just a matter of decision making, from the decision to start to the decision of how to handle any research.