Terminological preliminaries

‘Discourse analysis’ is without a doubt one of the most widely used and loosely defined terms in the entire field of linguistics. At least two reasons for this come to mind, one a positive one, the other a negative one. The positive one is that discourse, in all its many aspects, is a salient and important object of study in a large number of domains: it is hard to imagine a full account of human cognition, development, language, behavior, culture, interaction, creativity, pathology, or simulation that does not attend to discourse. The negative reason for the looseness of the term is that no one theory or account of discourse has had a wide or strong enough acceptance to have an imperialistic monopoly on it.

Not surprisingly then, the term ‘discourse analysis’ does not denote a unitary field of inquiry. That is, on the assumption that a field is defined by a common set of beliefs, a common methodology, and a common set of goals, ‘discourse analysis’ denotes many fields; the term has been and no doubt will continue to be used in different ways by sociolinguists, ethnomethodologists, ethnolinguists, psycholinguists, literary theorists, and computational linguists, among others, as long as they find the study of stretches of language relevant.