DISCOURSE

This research is grounded on a discursive theoretical approach. That is to say that it is interested in how discourses become a central element of personal and group identities. A variety of Russian-speaking discourses from Latvia have been selected for analysis from a wide range of sources including newspaper articles, focus-group discussions, survey data, news articles from political parties, and interviews with Latvian politicians. This analysis traces how various discourses are socially constructed, altered, and challenged over time, and how they relate to personal and group identities.

Narrowly defined the term ‘discourse’ can be understood in purely linguistic terms. By this definition discourses are instances of language use, either verbally or in written form, or even as gestures. Without question these verbal, written, and gestural ‘texts’ constitute central elements of discourse. Discourse, however, encapsulates more than just language. Fairclough (2003: 3), for example, distinguishes between lexical units and discourse in general. ‘Discourse in general’ is used to acknowledge that language is only ever meaningful within a social context. When, for example, one reads the words ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘Russian’ and so on, these particular lexical units are only meaningful because the reader has had social experience of these concepts. The reader has a subjective idea of what ‘men’, ‘women’, and ‘Russians’ are, how they act, and even what they look like.

For this reason many theorists of discourse refer to lexical units as ‘signifiers’. The individual letters that are put together to create a word do not provide any meaning. Instead signifiers are given meaning by the social context that surrounds them. In this respect words do not simply create social realities, but are also constructed by them. For Saussure (1966) a clear distinction is therefore drawn between the signifier and the signified. While the signifier is the linguistic construct which is used to document a concept (R-u- s- s- i- a, for example), the signified refers to the meanings that individuals give to this signifier (the images that are produced by the human mind in response to seeing/ hearing the signifier).