3 Approaches in Discourse Analysis

Discourse is a particular way of talking about and understanding the world (or an aspect of the world).

• True

• False

What are the 3 approach of Discourse Analysis?

• Discourse Theory by Laclau and Mouffe, Critical Discourse Analysis by Fairclough, and Discursive struggle

• Discourse Theory by Laclau and Mouffe, Multimodality Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis by Fairclough

• Discourse Theory by Laclau and Mouffe, Critical Discourse Analysis by Fairclough, Discursive Psychology

• Discourse Theory by Laclau and Mouffe, Social semiotics, Discursive Psychology

The 3 approaches of discourse analysis share certain key premises.

Choose 3 answers.

• They aim of carrying out critical research to investigate and analyze power relations in society.

• They are based on social constructionism.

• They have a range of philosophical and theoretical premises, including particular understandings of discourse, social practice and critique.

• They are based on post-modernism perspectives.

What is social constructionist's theories?

• Theories about culture and society from shared assumptions about reality.

• Theories about culture and society understood by way of their relationship of boarder system or structure.

How does social constructionist approach critic taken-for-granted-knowledge?

• Our knowledge of the world should be treated as objective truth.

• Knowledge and representations of the world are products of our ways of categorising the world, or, in discursive

  analytical terms, products of discourse.

How does the social constructionist approach see historical and cultural specificity?

Choose 2 correct answers.

• Our views of, and knowledge about, the world are the ‘products of historically situated interchanges among people’.

• This view of all knowledge is the foundationalist-view that

  knowledge can be grounded on a solid, meta-theoretical base that transcends contingent human actions.

• The ways in which we understand and represent the world are historically and culturally specific and contingent. Therefore, our worldviews and our identities could have been different, and they can change over time.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's discourse theory starting point is the post-structuralist idea, that is later called 'discursive struggle'. What can you understand by 'discursive struggle'?

• Discourse constructs the social world in meaning, and that owing to the fundamental instability of language, meaning can never be permanently fixed.

• Discourse constructs the social world in meaning, and that owing to the fundamental stability of language, meaning will always be permanently fixed.

Critical Discourse Analysis focuses on concrete language use that always draws on earlier discursive structures as language users build on already established meanings.

• True

• False

Critical Discourse Analysis focuses on the concept intertextuality - how an individual text draws on elements and discourses of other texts.

• True

• False

Discursive psychology's main focus is internal psychology conditions.

• True

• False