Discourse analysis: what it is, its approaches, and how to do one
Discourse analysis is the discipline that studies language in use: not the isolated sentences of a grammar book, but what people actually do with words in concrete situations. If you have ever wondered why a politician answers without answering, or why one newspaper headline says the same as another but sounds like its opposite, you have already brushed against this discipline.
What discourse analysis studies
Its starting point is simple: a text never means only through its words. It also means through who produces it, whom it addresses, in which institution it appears, and what effects it achieves. Discourse analysis examines those layers: the choice of vocabulary, who appears as responsible for the actions (and who disappears from the sentence), what is taken for granted, which voices are quoted and which are silenced.
The materials it analyzes are very varied: parliamentary debates, news, advertising, everyday conversations, interviews, trials, social media posts, and school textbooks.
Main approaches
Conversation analysis
It studies everyday talk under a magnifying glass: how speakers take turns, how conversations open and close, how a misunderstanding gets repaired. It reveals that even the most spontaneous conversation follows orderly patterns.
Critical discourse analysis (CDA)
This is the best-known approach, associated with authors such as Teun A. van Dijk and Norman Fairclough. It examines how language reproduces — or questions — relations of power and inequality: how social groups are represented in the press, how political decisions are legitimized, or how stereotypes are built. Its central question is not only “what does the text say,” but “who benefits from it being said this way.”
The pragmatic approach
It deals with what we do when we speak: promise, threaten, apologize, insinuate. It studies the difference between what is said literally and what is communicated, and why we understand more than the words contain.
Political and institutional discourse analysis
It applies the tools above to specific fields: parliaments, companies, hospitals, courts or the media. Our article on political speech develops one of these fields.
How to do a discourse analysis, step by step
- Delimit the corpus: choose the texts you will analyze (for example, the headlines of three newspapers about the same event) and justify the selection.
- Describe the context: who produces the texts, for what audience, in what medium, and at what moment.
- Analyze the textual level: the vocabulary chosen, passive or active constructions, metaphors, pronouns (“we” versus “they”), what information comes first.
- Analyze the interpretive level: what is presupposed, what is suggested without being said, which voices appear quoted.
- Explain the social level: connect all of the above with the broader context: interests, ideologies, power relations.
- Conclude with examples: every claim in the analysis must be supported by concrete quotations from the corpus, not by general impressions.
Frequently asked questions
What is critical discourse analysis?
It is the approach within discourse analysis that studies how language relates to power and social inequality: how journalistic, political or institutional texts represent social groups and legitimize certain ideas.
What do I need to do a discourse analysis at university?
A delimited corpus (the texts), a brief theoretical framework (the approach you will use), and an analysis organized by levels: context, text, and social interpretation. The key is to quote concrete examples for every claim.
Is discourse analysis the same as literary analysis?
No. Literary analysis focuses on artistic works and their aesthetic value; discourse analysis works with any text in use — news, conversations, advertising — and asks about its social and communicative functioning.
Who are the reference authors?
Among the most cited are Teun A. van Dijk, Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak in the critical approach; the pragmatics work of John L. Austin and Paul Grice, and Harvey Sacks’s conversation analysis, are also fundamental.
Keep learning
Before analyzing, it helps to have the basics clear: what a speech is and the types of speech you may come across in a corpus.