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

3.2.Defining discourse analysis (activity -1)
The study of naturally occurring connected sentences, spoken or written, is one of the most promising and rapidly developing areas of modern linguistics. Traditional linguistics has concentrated on sentence-centred analysis. Now, linguists are much more concerned with the way language is ‘used’ than what its components are. One may ask how it is that language-users interpret what other language-users intend to convey. When is carried this investigation further and asked how it is that people, as language-users, make sense of what they read in texts, understand what speakers mean despite what they say, recognize connected as opposed to jumbled or incoherent discourse, and successfully take part in that complex activity called conversation, then one is undertaking what is known as discourse analysis. The first linguist to refer to discourse analysis was Zellig Harris. In 1952, he investigated the connectedness of sentences, naming his study ‘discourse analysis.’ Harris claimed explicitly that discourse is the next level in a hierarchy of morphemes, clauses and sentences. He viewed discourse analysis procedurally as a formal methodology, derived from structural methods of linguistic analysis: such a methodology could break a text down into relationships (such as equivalence, substitution) among its lower-level constituents. Structural was so central to Harris’s view of discourse that he also argued that what opposes discourse to a random sequence of sentences is precisely the fact that it has structure: a pattern by which segments of the discourse occur (and recur) relative to each other.
Michael Stubbs says, ‘Any study which is not dealing with (a) single sentences, (b) contrived by the linguist, (c) out of context, may be called discourse analysis.’


3.3. Historical view of discourse analysis.
Discourse analysis deals language in use: written text of all kinds and spoken data. It received attention in different disciplines in the 1960s and early 1970s, including linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, psychology and sociology. At a time when linguistics was largely concerned with the analysis of single sentences, Zelling Harris published a paper with the title ‘Discourse analysis’ in 1952. Harris was interested in the distribution of linguistic elements in extended texts, and the links between the text and its social situation. Also important in the early years was the emergence of semiotics and the French structuralist approach to the study of narrative. In the 1960s, Dell Hymes provided a sociological perspective with the study of speech in its social setting. The linguistic philosophers such as Austin (1962), Searle (1969) and Grice (1975) were also influential in the study of language as social action, reflected in speech-act theory and the formulation of conversational maxims, alongside the emergence of pragmatics which is the study of meaning in context.
British discourse analysis was greatly influenced by M. A. K. Halliday’s functional approach to language, which in turn has connexions with the Prague School of linguists. Halliday’s framework emphasizes the social functions of language and the thematic and informational structure of speech and writing. Also important in Britain were Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) at the University of Birmingham, who developed a model for the description of teacher pupil talk, based on a hierarchy of discourse units. Other similar work has dealt with doctor-patient interaction, service encounters, interviews, debates and business negotiations, as well as monologues. Novel work in the British tradition has also been done on intonation in discourse. The British work has principally followed structural-linguistic criteria, on the basis of the isolation of units, and sets of rules defining well-formed sequences of discourse.
American discourse analysis has been dominated by work within the ethnomethodological tradition, which emphasizes the research method of close observation of groups of people communicating in natural settings. It examines types of speech event such as storytelling, greeting rituals and verbal duels in different cultural and social settings. What is often called conversation analysis within the American tradition can also be included under the general heading of discourse analysis. In conversational analysis, the emphasis is not upon building structural models but on the close observation of the behaviour of participants in talk and on patterns which recur over a wide range of natural data. The work of Goffman (1976; 1979), and Sacks Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) is important in the study of conversational norms, turn-taking, and other aspects of spoken interaction. Alongside the conversation analysts, working within the sociolinguistic tradition, Labov’s investigations of oral storytelling have also contributed to a long history of interest in narrative discourse. The American work has produced a large number of descriptions of discourse types as well as insights into the social constraints of politeness and face-preserving phenomena in talk, overlapping with British work in pragmatics.
Also relevant to the development of discourse analysis as a whole is the work of text grammarians, working mostly with written language. Text grammarians see texts as language elements strung together in relationships with one another that can be defined. Linguists such as Van Dijk (1972), De Beaugrande (1980), Halliday and Hasan (1976) have made a significant impact in this area. The Prague School of linguists, with their interest in the structuring of information in discourse, has also been influential. Its most important contribution has been to show the links between grammar and discourse.