Perspectives
The following are some of the specific theoretical perspectives and analytical approaches used in linguistic discourse analysis:
- Applied linguistics
- Cognitive psychology, studying the production and comprehension of discourse.
- Conversation analysis
- Critical discourse analysis
- Discursive psychology
- Emergent grammar
- Ethnography of communication
- Functional grammar
- Interactional sociolinguistics
- Pragmatics
- Response based therapy (counselling)
- Rhetoric
- Stylistics (linguistics)
- Sublanguage analysis
- Variation analysis
Although these approaches emphasize different aspects of language use, they all view language as social interaction, and are concerned with the social contexts in which discourse is embedded.
Often a distinction is made between 'local' structures of discourse (such as relations among sentences, propositions, and turns) and 'global' structures, such as overall topics and the schematic organization of discourses and conversations. For instance, many types of discourse begin with some kind of global 'summary', in titles, headlines, leads, abstracts, and so on.
A problem for the discourse analyst is to decide when a particular feature is relevant to the specification is required. Are there general principles which will determine the relevance or nature of the specification.
Read more about this topic: Discourse Analysis