Discourse analysis

Abstract

The term discourse analysis is widely used but seldom clearly defined. It is also used in apparently contradictory ways. This chapter clarifies different uses of the term, addressing both the origins of the field, and its contemporary practices. Incommensurable uses of the term may stem from its two main but separate progenitors: formal linguistics on the one hand and social theory on the other. The chapter then discusses how discourse analysis both overlaps with and differs from a range of contemporary approaches to the study of language in use, such as pragmatics, schema theory, communicative language teaching, conversation analysis, linguistic ethnography, genre analysis, corpus linguistics, and the study of digital communication. In conclusion, it asks whether the term discourse analysis continues to have any meaningful and distinctive identity or whether it is now so general and all-inclusive that it embraces every study of language in use and permeates all of applied linguistics. Perhaps the term is now so all-encompassing that it is no longer useful.