Talk:Discourse analysis

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I've substituted "research of Harvey Sacks" for "theories of Harvey Sacks" because Sacks didn't focus on theory and, in fact, rejected theory building as a way of going about the study of talk-in-interaction.

[edit] 1st para changes

I deleted "above the sentence or clause level" because it defines DA's phenomenon in terms of syntax, which contradicts the nearly immediately following notes about Harris and how folks haven't followed his lead. I merged "The language in question can be written or spoken texts or systems of texts" into the preceding sentence to shorten things up. Finally, I added another sentence (viz., "Thus, most discourse analysts following Harris have conducted work that falls under the heading of “pragmatics” in modern linguistics, rather than “syntactics” though many discourse analysts would reject linguists’ tripartite division of the main characteristics of language--the third characteristic being "semantics.") in order to set DA in context for linguists, since so many come to DA from linguistics. Xianknelson 16:13, 9 February 2006 (UTC)xianknelson

[edit] list division

Hi took political discourse analysis out of the list of methodological/theoretical approaches because its not such a thing. Rather, it identies work done using a few of the preceding methods on a specific phenomenon. Thus, I put "political discourse" in a new list of DA "fields" (here understood as areas defined by phenomenon of interest). I linked "political discourse" the PDA page, and altered that, as well, to reflect the fact that PDA is DA analysis of a particular phenomenon rather than a particular DA method.Xianknelson 16:36, 9 February 2006 (UTC)xianknelson

I tend to disagree with you that PDA it is not a method. While it does focus on a specific area of discourse, the methodologies behind PDA are very much different than those of, for instance, CDA. Additionally, I don't think it is very practical or useful to list the different discourse phenomena, as discourse analysts should be interested in all discourse, regardless of its origin. TheCharlie 22:43, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Hi Charlie, there are two issues here I'd like to address. First, while I agree that DAists should be interested in all discourse, I think it is extremely practical to list different discourse phenomena. In fact, from my vantage point, that's what much of DA is about--listing identified discourse phenomena so that future research can build on previous observations. If we didn't list, wouldn't we be in danger of re-discovering the wheel constantly, etc. Second, I'm not aware of any research on political discourse that is not easily classified as either basic DA or CDA. In fact, at least some of the folks who analyze political discourse are the founders of CDA, e.g., Teun van Dijk. Indeed, one of the journals van Dijk has founded, Discourse and Society, is full of articles that are not just CDA articles or articles about political discourse, but both. Further, most folks I know would classify the analyses of political discourse conducted by O'Barr and his colleagues--some of the earliest non-CA folks to focus on political discourse-- as a type of everyday DA, and the CA stuff on political discourse falls under the DA umbrella as most people have come to use that term (DA, that is), hence, e.g., Jonathan Potter's description of his very CAish research as DA. (Of course, this wasn't always the case--Levinson, 1983, contrasted CA with DA, but that was before most DAists abandoned what he found objectionable in DA.) So, unless you're using "PDA" to refer to a particular set of political discourse analyses by a particular set of analysts of whom I'm not aware, I have to disagree with you on this. But perhaps you are using PDA (in capitals) in a different way than I am. Let me know.Xianknelson 17:38, 4 March 2006 (UTC)xianknelson