Year: 2016
Type: book
Abstract: Discourse analysis is a qualitative research method that examines social action through the prism of language use.Rooted in a European tradition of critical linguistics, discourse analysis provides empirical evidence about what people accomplish when they communicate.Discourse analysis bears on language use in the broadest possible sense: when researchers analyze transcripts of spoken interaction ('talk') between two speakers or more, they may do so to understand what explicit and implicit meanings are being expressed (Weizman 2008).When discourse analysts examine written language ('text'), they may do so to gauge its ideological slant (Van Dijk 1998) or to qualify the knowledge claims the text makes (Bednarek 2006).And when researchers examine two or more modes of communication ('multimodality') such as gesture and gaze, or image and language, they try to understand how these modes operate together to construct meaning (Oddo 2013).Underlying this research method is the assumption that discourse is implicated in people's actions, viewpoints, and beliefs.When journalists decide which stories to run on a news website, they do so with a particular commitment to their audience and to their craft (Cotter 2010).And when people talk about the news they consume, they not only express ideas about the world they live in, but also about the role and quality of journalism in society and how they see themselves (Peterson 2015).Agreeing with Mellado (2015: 597) that "expanding the scope of research on professional roles by including the dimension of performance is an important contribution to the field", this chapter
Source: Routledge eBooks
Authors: Van Hout, T., De Smedt, E.
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4299563511