Developing Discourse Analysis

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Discourse analysis and its validity criteria are critically discussed in this article. Discourse analysts replace traditional validity criteria with coherence, participant orientation, generation of new problems, and fruitfulness, yet these are not consistently observed in practice. Sociolinguistic phenomena such as accommodation and asymmetric topic management underline the importance of the interviewer's part in constructing discourse, yet the participant orientation of interviewers is not included in discourse analysis. Interpersonal process recall procedures could retrieve both participants' orientations in interviews. Discourse analysis could be developed by using linguistic concepts in a more principled way, and by seeking independent evidence for the claimed social psychological causes and effects of specific linguistic choices by speakers. Bourdieu's (1984) concept of habitus is proposed as a model for such a linguistic and social psychological interface. The habitus is a fundamental generative metaphor, arising from a participant's social world and expressed in all behavior including speech.

This publication has 5 references indexed in Scilit: