It strikes me as if discourse analysis is concerned with all that is taking place or is implicated in discourse; that is, all that ‘lies hidden’, as Michel Foucault would say, in the depths and in fact all levels of discourse, to enable it ‘to emerge and become clearly visible’. In this case, discourse analysis is to proceed in two stages: exploration, for example by means of philology, and secondly by description. But quite other tools and procedures than these are probably called for in approaches to discourse where the guiding principle is to point out the item of communication, whether intended or not, which is received consciously or subliminally, showing how the transmission and reception are achieved. Which of these two approaches describes adequately the task of discourse analysis; or should we rather be searching for a practice that combines the explanation of all that is going on in discourse with focus on information content that is passed across or garnered?
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Dear Prof.
My humble take is that there are different levels (exploration, description and explanation) and approaches (traditional, pragmatic, interactional socio-linguistic, critical, etc) to the analysis of the different manifestations of discourse (structures, practices and processes), which different scholars have tried to systematize into different analytical models, albeit with different disagreements, criticisms, and modifications. While I doubt the possibility of a single study subsuming all the levels and approaches to discourse analysis or be interested in all discourse manifestations, I believe it may be worthwhile combining complementary levels and approaches or even different manifestations of discourse, but with strict respect to the research problem and hence, of course, objective(s) of the study in question.
I tend to think of these specialization areas as discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and so on as projects, each with a task it aims to address, and the tool or tools it has fashioned or selected from other spheres of knowledge for the task. The tool’s appropriateness and effectiveness are premised on clarity about the nature of the task. So while tools may be selected from neighbouring areas, one must maintain focus on the task that prompted the assembling of tools. And so my problem is that the tools sometimes seem to be pursued as if they were the issue. What discourse analysis does is not the same as the tools it uses, whether fashioned internally or borrowed from neighbouring spheres. To put it another way, what does discourse analysis enable us to know, which is not the same as what sociolinguistics or communication studies or meaning analysis enables us to know?
A very insightful question. You have astutely observed the functional role of discourse analysis in demystifying the byzantine complexities underlying the argumentation models dominating acts of communication.
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