Being acquainted with discourse analysis. Types of discourse. What (Exactly) Is Discourse Analysis?

Discourse Analysis: The main approaches
There are two main approaches to discourse analysis. These are the language-in-use (also referred to as socially situated text and talk) approaches and the socio-political approaches (most commonly Critical Discourse Analysis). Let’s take a look at each of these.
Approach #1: Language-in-use
Language-in-use approaches focus on the finer details of language used within discourse, such as sentence structures (grammar) and phonology (sounds). This approach is very descriptive and is seldom seen outside of studies focusing on literature and/or linguistics.
Because of its formalist roots, language-in-use pays attention to different rules of communication, such as grammaticality (i.e., when something “sounds okay” to a native speaker of a language). Analyzing discourse through a language-in-use framework involves identifying key technicalities of language used in discourse and investigating how the features are used within a particular social context.
For example, English makes use of affixes (for example, “un” in “unbelievable”) and suffixes (“able” in “unbelievable”) but doesn’t typically make use of infixes (units that can be placed within other words to alter their meaning). However, an English speaker may say something along the lines of, “that’s un-flipping-believable”. From a language-in-use perspective, the infix “flipping” could be investigated by assessing how rare the phenomenon is in English, and then answering questions such as, “What role does the infix play?” or “What is the goal of using such an infix?”
Approach #2: Socio-political
Socio-political approaches to discourse analysis look beyond the technicalities of language and instead focus on the influence that language has in social context, and vice versa. One of the main socio-political approaches is Critical Discourse Analysis, which focuses on power structures (for example, the power dynamic between a teacher and a student) and how discourse is influenced by society and culture. Critical Discourse Analysis is born out of Michel Foucault’s early work on power, which focuses on power structures through the analysis of normalized power.