Discourse Analysis

In the 1980s, a range of approaches labeled “discourse analysis” spread within and across many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, including communication research. By 2000, these approaches had formed a well-established and widely used cross-disciplinary tradition of research on communication, culture, and society. The main body of discourse analytic approaches adhere to the social constructionist premises that social phenomena are, at least to some extent, created in social interaction and that all knowledge is a contingent, socially and historically specific, product of our ways of categorizing the world through meaning-making in language. This entry examines this body of approaches but excludes forms of discourse analysis in linguistics that do not subscribe to these premises.

Central discourse analytic approaches employed in communication research are critical discourse analysis (in particular, Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, the discourse-historical approach, Teun van Dijk’s sociocognitive approach, mediated discourse analysis, social semiotics, and multimodal analysis); discursive psychology; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory; and Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis, which is often described as Foucauldian discourse analysis. Although discourse analysis is, to some extent, interdisciplinary, each discourse analytic approach has grown out of scholarship within a particular field of study. Critical discourse analysis emanated from the work of scholars with a disciplinary background in linguistics and, in particular, sociolinguistics. Discursive psychology emerged in social psychology as part of a social constructionist challenge to cognitivism. Discourse theory has its original base in political studies. In many of these fields, seminal monographs were authored in the second half of the 1980s and early 1990s. Examples are Fairclough’s Language and Power (1989) and Discourse and Social Change (1992), which set out the programmatic platform for Fairclough’s hugely influential form of critical discourse analysis; Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell’s Discourse Analysis and Social Psychology (1987), which paved the way for discursive psychology; and Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985), which laid the foundations for discourse theory.

There is sufficient commonality in terms of metatheory, theory, and research methods across the different strands of discourse analysis to be able to identify and delineate a field; at the same time, metatheoretical, theoretical, and methodological differences between the strands render it a highly heterogeneous, as opposed to unitary, entity. The remaining sections of this entry examine different discourse analysis approaches’ shared features; the differences that account for the field’s diversity; and finally, the contribution of discourse analysis to communication research methods.