DISCOURSE ANALYSIS TO ME

 DISCOURSE ANALYSIS TO ME

People from different disciplines use the term "discourse analysis" for what they do, how they do it, or both. Even when It might appear that they have nothing in common, one way or another, they all involve studying language and its effects. So, could we say that discourse analysis is simply the study of language and its effects? For example,  (Tannen, 1989: 6) suggests that "the name for the field 'discourse analysis' ... says nothing more or other than the term 'linguistics': the study of language". 

And this is exactly correct: discourse analysis is the study of language, in the everyday sense, in which most people use the term. What most people mean when they say "language" is talk, communication, and discourse. (In formal language study, both descriptive and prescriptive, the term "language" is often used differently, to refer to structures or rules that are thought to underlie talk.) Even if discourse analysis is, basically, "the study of language," however, it is useful to try to specify what makes discourse analysis different from other approaches to language study. One way to do this is by asking ourselves what we can learn by thinking about what "discourse" is, and about what "analysis" is.

To discourse analysts, "discourse" usually means actual instances of communicative action in the medium of language, and "discourses" In this sense involve patterns of belief, habitual action, and patterns of language. In other words, discourses are ideas as well as ways of talking that influence and are influenced by the ideas. Discourses, in their linguistic aspect, are conventionalized sets of choices for discourse or talk. 

Linguistic analysis is also sometimes a process of taking apart. Discourse analysts often find it useful to divide longer stretches of discourse into parts according to various criteria and then look at the particular characteristics of each part. But analysis can also involve taking apart less literally. One way of analyzing something is by looking at it in a variety of ways. An analysis in this sense might involve systematically asking a number of questions, and systematically tests. In this sense, discourse analysis can help in answering any question that could be asked about humans in society. The procedures of a heuristic do not need to be followed in any particular order, and there is no fixed way of following them. A heuristic is not a mechanical set of steps, and there is no guarantee that using it will result in a single definitive explanation.

Discourse is shaped by and shapes many aspects of our reality as they are: the world,  language, participants, their relationships, the possibilities for future discourses, the possibilities of its medium, their purposes, texts, and interpretations of those texts, among others.  Aspects will constantly generate more possibilities and questions for discourse analysts,

Every choice about what to count as a text for analysis is a choice not only about what to include but also about what to exclude.No matter what the overarching research question is, all discourse analysis results in description: describing texts and how they work is always a goal along the way. To do purely descriptive work presupposes two beliefs: first, it is possible to describe the world - in other words, there is not an infinite number of possible descriptions. Second, the proper role of a scholar is to describe the status quo first, and only later, if at all, to apply scholarly findings to the solution of practical problems.

The roots of discourse analysis are in the analysis of traditional texts like classical philology, literary criticism, and hermeneutics - and the controlling metaphor behind this approach to research, explicit or not, has often been that analyzing human life is a matter of open-ended interpretation rather than fact-finding, so there are always many right answers to any question we ask about humans and language.

Discourse analysis typically starts with a  relatively small amount of data. And many discourse analysts use this data to make qualitative claims. In other words, the claims they make on the basis of their analyses are not about how often something occurs in a language, in a genre,  or in interaction in general, but about why or how it occurs in the data at hand, and any suggestions they make about the likelihood that the same thing will occur in other data are simply suggestions.

Discourse analysis has increasingly, though by no means exclusively;  come to be used in the service of critical goals. This is to say that many  researchers throughout the humanities and social sciences have come to be: first, critical of the possibility of producing a single, coherent, scientifically valid description, and second, critical of the social status quo and concerned about  having  their work used in changing things for the better

Taking into account that discourse analysis can be considered the study of language in its different shapes,  forms, and uses. Then, for people who spend more than five years in learning a second language, but not only learning it to be able to interact with others instead of studying its structure and knowing how it works and even sometimes why it works like it works, to finally be able to teach properly a language that is not their first language. Then these people can be considered linguists too.

Finally, in conclusion, we can see that to linguistics or language teachers, discourse analysis could imply a whole process of critical thinking around every single fragment that they want to include in their work because as we saw in the previous paragraphs this process must be permeated and enrich by many different aspects of the reality as they are:  the world,  language, participants, their relationships, the possibilities for future discourses, the possibilities of its medium, their purposes, texts and interpretations of those texts, among others.   All of this as a consequence of the deep relation that has the contexts, the individuals, and its work.