Introduction to Discourse Analysis PDF

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4th February 2020- Becoming a Psychological Researcher

Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Definitions: - Discourses are inter-related sets of texts (including the practices of production, dissemination and reception: i.e. language) that bring an object into being - Discourses are embodied and enacted in texts - Discourse Analysis (DA) is the systematic study of texts to ascertain the constructive effects of discourse - Tests are meaningful only through their connection to other texts. Therefore, we must refer to bodies of texts - Discourses DO NOT “possess” meaning: to understand their effects, we must understand their context DA as a Method and Methodology: - DA involves a “strong” social constructivist view of the social world - DA is not simply a set of techniques for conducting research; it also involves a set of assumptions concerning the constructive effects of language - Reflexivity and the role of the researcher is central DA Compared to Other Qualitative Methods: - Traditional qualitative approaches tend to assume a social world and then understand its meaning for participants - DA tries to:  Explore how the socially produced ideas and objects that populated the world are created in the first place  Explore how they are maintained and held in place - Traditional qualitative approaches try to understand or interpret social reality as it exists - DA tries to uncover the way in which it is produced

Approaches: -

“Discourse analysis” means many things to many people One thing they all agree on is that the analyst’s first focus must be on language, and what it does in the world The next thing they agree on is that the analyst must ‘go beyond’ the data itself. The analysist has to interpret by appeal to a theory (e.g. a theory about society, or power, or culture)

Traditions: - DA then starts to divide into various traditions - The most general is a Linguistic Approach to talk and text that tries to see how the speakers’ or authors’ choice of words “constructs” a social object - When the data are spoken, this approach is sometimes called “interactional sociolinguistics” - Critical DA people explicitly look for the workings of ideology, or power Two Basic DA Principles: 1. One of language’s functions is to “do things” at the societal level (i.e. above the merely interpersonal):  What things does it do? o It Is ‘Constitutive’: some things, at least, are set up and constructed out of language. A good example is The Law: the law in any one society is

4th February 2020- Becoming a Psychological Researcher constituted by all the statutes that Parliament has passed, all the regulations that are written in the Constitution, and so on. All these are ‘just words’, but they constitute something very real o It Promotes Someone’s (or some group’s) Interests: The law is a good example again- discourse analysts want to say that the Law is actually not neutral or impartial (although it claims to be). The language in which it is set up is good for some, and bad for others. The debate over how the law treats women’s ‘murder’ of abusive partners is a good example. The question raised by discourse analysts was whether the language of the laws on murder and manslaughter was systematically biased against women’s (alleged) style of reaction to provocation 2. People use ‘discourse practices’ to do these things:  What are discourse practices? o Discourse analysts (of whatever kind) look for how things are constituted by what they call ‘discursive practices’. If you set out on an investigation into a certain social phenomenon, you’ll find an identifiable set of things that go together – e.g. particular words, phrases, terms of reference, metaphors, rhetorical styles, systematisations of knowledge (e.g. rule books, catechisms, manuals, style guides … ) – which, together, construct that phenomenon as a certain kind of social object (e.g. ‘sex’, ‘gender’, ‘Muslim’, etc). In each of those cases, the social object is being constructed by the discourse’s choice of description and the associations it implicitly makes Methods: Three Examples: - How do you identify a “set of linguistic practices” which do things?  There is no one, single, universally agreed answer in the literature on DA. In fact, many people who do DA resist the notion that there is a simple way of identifying discourses or repertoires.  The work of Michael Billig is an especially good example of analysis that explicitly avoids any one ‘method’. But there is a range of views, and we can start with those analysts who do base their work on something approaching a systematic, theorybased method Linguistic Features: - There is a tradition among some analysts, especially those who come from linguistics, of basing their work on the systematic grammatical and pragmatic features of the material. A good example of this would be the early work of Gunther Kress. For example, he pointed out that a very powerful discursive practice in political argument was to change verbs into nouns (“nominalisation”) and to use passive rather than active forms of verbs. So politicians don’t say “we are going to privatise the railways”. They say “there will be a privatisation of the railways”. - Kress argues that this choice of grammatical form is a discursive practice. Its effect is to constitute the transfer of public goods into private hands as ‘agentless’. That promotes the interests of certain groups in society. Identification of “Repertoires”: - Other analysts, usually those who come from sociology or other social sciences, are less reliant on linguistics. - Many analysts will use their skill and erudition to take us through a text and persuade us how it works to constitute its object by the deployment of what areas sometimes called “interpretative repertoires”, or “discourses”, or “ideological dilemmas”.

4th February 2020- Becoming a Psychological Researcher -...