Discourse analysis

About: Discourse analysis is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 16055 publications have been published within this topic receiving 515384 citations. The topic is also known as: DA & discourse studies.

Repositioning Documents in Social Research

Abstract: In matters of social research sociologists and other social scientists have tended to view documents primarily as sources of evidence and as receptacles of inert content.The key strategies for data exploration have consequently been associated with various styles of content or thematic analysis. Even when discourse analysis has been recommended, there has been a marked tendency to deal with records, files, and the like, primarily as containers — things to be read, understood, and categorized. In this article, however, the author seeks to demonstrate that by focussing on the functioning of documents instead of content, sociology can embrace a much wider range of approaches to both data collection and analysis. Indeed, the adoption of such a programme encourages researchers to see documents as active agents in the world, and to view documentation as a key component of dynamic networks rather than as a set of static and immutable `things'.

Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence

Abstract: Charlotte Linde. Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. xiv and 242 pp. $49.95 cloth. This book takes a broadly sociolinguistic approach to the life story, which the author characterizes as a discourse unit crucial for the presentation of self in everyday life. Life Stories is a richly innovative study, packed with insights into the way we use stories to create and maintain an identity over time. Like other groundbreaking works, the book outlines problems that warrant further investigation, sometimes raising as many questions as it resolves. Describing the life story as a social unit exchanged between people, an oral unit that can be contrasted with written autobiographies, and a discontinuous unit shaped through a series of tellings over an extended duration (4), Charlotte Linde goes on to offer a more precise definition of life stories: A life story consists of all the stories and associated discourse units, such as explanations and chronicles, and the connections between them, told by an individual during the course of his/her lifetime that satisfy the following two criteria: 1. The stories and associated discourse units contained in the life story have as their primary evaluation a point about the speaker, not a general point about the way the world is. 2. The stories and associated discourse units have extended reportability; that is, they are tellable and are told and retold over the course of a long period of time. (21) Linde's study focuses on life stories in which issues of profession play a preeminent role (53-57), but her more particular concern is the creation of coherence by tellers as well as listeners of such stories. For Linde, coherence is not only a property of texts, deriving from the way the parts of the text relate to the whole and from the way the text relates to other texts of its type, but also a "cooperative achievement" of the speaker and the addressee (12). In her account of how we build up coherent discourse units in telling the story of our lives, the author draws on a number of subfields within (socio)linguistics, including discourse analysis, the lexicogrammatical study of discourse cohesion initiated by M. A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, and the ethnomethodological school of conversation analysis. As Life Stories proceeds, the book displays a special indebtedness to the method of narrative analysis developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by William Labov and Joshua Waletzky. Following an overview of the problems connected with the life story in chapter 1, chapter 2 ("What is a Life Story") spells out the technical definition of life stories quoted above and contrasts this discourse unit with other modes of self-presentation in other research contexts, including autobiography and biography, journals and diaries, and the life history in psychology and anthropology (37-50). In discussing extended reportability as a criterion for the life story, Linde makes the point that The reportability of a given event or sequence of events is not fixed; it depends not only on the nature of the events, but on the relation of the speaker and addressee(s), the amount of time that has passed between the event and the telling of the story, and the personal skills of the speaker as narrator. (22) Hence the life story is at once structurally and interpretively open; it is subject to expansion and contraction by the addition of new stories and the loss of old ones, and furthermore the reinterpretation of old stories continually produces new evaluations of self (31). Such considerations prompt Linde to pose a question that may already have occurred to the reader at this stage of the analysis: namely, "whether it is meaningful to treat as a unit an entity that is so fluid, and so subject to constant reinterpretation and revision, that it can never be completed" (35-36). Unfortunately, Linde fails to address this problem adequately here, using only the analogy of a cloud of butterflies to suggest that the life story, too, is a sort of composite entity (36). …

Re‐imagining and rescripting the future of education: global knowledge economy discourses and the challenge to education systems

Abstract: Using critical discourse analysis as a methodology for analysis, this paper sets out the nature and form of the challenges directed to the compulsory schooling sector by the knowledge economy that is contained in key policy and related documents put out by the OECD, the World Bank and the UK government. The OECD and the World Bank’s policy agendas are increasingly important in setting policy and programme agendas for the developed and developing countries respectively; however there are important differences between the two institutions regarding how education should be redesigned. The World Bank’s redesign of education favours the market and individualism as the means for developing knowledge and skills for the knowledge economy. The OECD, however, while concerned with human capital formation, rejects the market model in favour of an institutionally embedded liberalism to overcome the problems posed by tacit knowledge. The UK, on the other hand, has promoted the idea of personalized learning. The paper s...

Dialogue Games: An Approach to Discourse Analysis

Abstract: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1982.