What Is Discourse Analysis?

Researchers use discourse analysis to efficiently study the relationships between spoken or written language and the social context. Therefore, it can show how language functions in real-life environments.

Discourse analysis usually highlights the following:

• communicative rules and conventions related to cultures
• impact of various language types and their purposes
• relations between language and its historical, social, or political context
• use of language to convey assumptions, beliefs, and values

Many humanitarian and social fields of study use discourse analysis as their basic research method. With it, it is possible to conduct high-quality research in sociology, cultural studies, linguistics, or anthropology.

Why Do We Use Discourse Analysis?

You need discourse analysis to have an in-depth look at the ways of language functioning in various social contexts. You can apply it to any extract of oral or written communication, as well as to tone, gestures, and other non-verbal means of communication.

You can apply discourse analysis to the following materials and texts:

• governmental and business documentary
• posts and comments on websites, social media, and forums
• periodicals, newspapers, and books
• talks and interviews
• brochures, adverts, and other types of marketing materials

These are the main and most widely used types of discourse in the modern world, so your aim as a researcher is to understand the interrelations between different social groups with their help and how they support the main purposes of communication.

Does Discourse Analysis Differ from Other Methods?

If you do purely linguistic research, you concentrate on the rules of language. However, discourse analysis makes focuses on the language’s contextual meaning. The main factor in this research is considering the social aspects of communication. It involves understanding how people manage to obtain desired results with the help of language. Such results are usually socially meaningful, like building trust, revealing emotions, or managing conflicts.

Discourse analysis never deals with small language units, like sounds, phonemes, words, or word combinations. It is applied to larger language clusters, such as conversations, texts, or sets of specific texts in one chunk. Let’s consider how the selected sources can be analyzed at different language levels.

1. Vocabulary. Here, you need to analyze words and phrases for formality, metaphors, euphemisms, or ideological associations.
2. Grammar. You can research how the sentences are built, meaning the use of verb tenses, questions, imperatives, active or passive patterns, etc. All of these grammar aspects can demonstrate different parts of the intended meaning.
3. Structure. By this analysis, you will see how the structure can place emphasis on something specific and lead the narrative in a necessary direction.
4. Genre. Every genre, like tabloid newspaper articles, blog posts, or political speeches, has its own communicative aims and conventions. Your task is to reveal them in the texts and detect the relationships between such conventions.
5. Non-verbal communication. It includes gestures, tone of voice, pauses, and intermediary sounds like “um” or “oh.” They can demonstrate speakers’ attitudes, emotions, and intentions.
6. Conversational codes. They are related to people’s interactions within the process of communication, like listener responses, interruptions, or turn-taking. Such codes reveal different parts of social roles or cultural conventions.

How to Make Discourse Analysis

You need to know that you can use this qualitative method to analyze and interpret different texts. It is more systematic than, for instance, content analysis. Your interpretations will be based on both the knowledge of the context and specific details of the material itself.

You can use a wide variety of approaches and techniques while using this method. However, we have compiled several steps that will show you the basic structure of the method and help you conduct discourse analysis without any difficulties or obstacles. They will also help you avoid the risk of confirmation bias that can distort the results of your analysis.

1. Defining the Research Question and Content Selection

Start with defining a clear and understandable research question. It will allow you to choose materials that will help you answer it. Discourse analysis is applicable both to large volumes of sources and small samples. This choice is up to you, and it depends on the timescale and objectives of your research.

2. Collecting the Information about the Context and Theories Supporting It

As the next step, you need to decide on the historical and social context in which the chosen material for discourse analysis was released. You have to pay attention to factual details of the time and location where this content was made, who the authors were, who published it, and who that content was aimed at.

Remember that a clear understanding of this real-life context will help you make literature reviews and formulate the theoretical framework for your analysis.

3. Analyzing the Content and Detecting Its Themes and Patterns

You have to have a closer look at different parts and elements of the collected material, like words, sentences, word combinations, structural patterns, and paragraphs. You need to find out how they relate to the attributes, patterns, and themes assumed for your research question.

Therefore, you will analyze the selected materials for all the words and phrases related to the improvements in the companies’ communication with authorities and their clients connected to the implementation of the state-of-the-art technologies and the companies’ advancements. These sentences and communication patterns can also relate to the companies’ missions, goals, and objectives they advertise via social media and in their leaflets and billboards, as well as to the customer reviews on independent websites and forums.

4. Reviewing the Results and Making Conclusions

When all the important elements of the material have got their attributes, look through the obtained results and examine the language meaning and functions in them once again. You need to relate this analysis to a broader context you have examined and analyzed earlier. After that, you can make conclusions that will become answers to your research question.

Final Thoughts

Discourse analysis is an efficient research and analysis method that can be used in different fields of study. Its main advantages include:

• Transparency.
• Simplicity of application.
• The potential to be applied to large bulks of material and its smaller samples.
• The ease of making conclusions based on such analysis.

You can save a lot of time and effort on research if you follow the steps highlighted in this article. The results you can obtain will be quite satisfactory if you care about avoiding bias and making your conclusions more reliable and valid. Combining this research method with other approaches and techniques will allow you to get even better results.