Structural and Social Uses of Discourse Analysis
If the informal use of discourse analysis is essentially the time in which the discourse takes to count words, the essential structural use is the permanence or invariance combining relational logic and gives meaning to words and/or propositions put together in speech.
The main idea of structural use of discourse analysis is to know the code or set of relational rules mandating any text. Collect synthetically different languages from which subjects express ourselves through objects:
- System (Elements of the system)
- Syntagma (combination of elements)
Examples
- Clothes: Group of parts and details that cannot be carried simultaneously on the same body part and whose variation corresponds to a change of dress sense: touch, cap, hat, etc. Juxtaposition of a single array of different elements: skirt, blouse, jacket.
- Food: Food group and the like, including choosing a dish based on a sense: selection of entrees, roasts, desserts. Effective linkage of the dishes chosen to over dinner: Menu.
- Furniture: Group stylistic varieties of the same furniture. Simultaneous juxtaposition of different furniture in one space (mesa-silla-armario…).
- Architecture: Change style of an element of a building, different forms of roofing, balconies, entrances… Chaining the details on the level of whole buildings.
In this structural sense, social discourse is always the expression of relations existing system of 2 q deduce analytical moments:
- The dissection of the text into smallest units of meaning or semes.
- Secondly, the search system of relations which give unity to the text in terms of positions and oppositions between the subunits from which it makes sense.
The analyst’s function is to decode, since in many cases implicit structures using the same subjects unknown and that is the way to find meaning in common usage might be called metaphors of orientation (meaning that we take for granted).
It is the unconscious nature of structures that makes understanding the subject of discourse as a mere executor or actant and updates the code.
All social and contextual text seeks to serve the privileged language as expressive structure.
The speech not only expresses but expresses for something or someone, which means that the limit of what is a linguistic one frontea with what was said and who says what he says, the social relationship that hermeneutics (the art of interpreting texts) tries to understand through discourse analysis to clarify the meaning of it.
The Social/Hermeneutic Use of Discourse Analysis
We use a cartoon of Watson and Holmes go to a beautiful campground English where after dinner to bed and sleep, after a time, Holmes nudges his comrade and says, look at the sky and tell me you see… Watson replied: I see millions and millions of stars. Holmes: Would that you say? And Watson replies, astronomically it tells me there are millions of galaxies, astrologically that Saturn is in Leo, that God is all powerful, etc… and finally asks Holmes what he says? And Holmes replies: You’re a perfect fool, because we have stolen the tent.
This gives us the idea that we recognize, Holmes has a goal in his speech or in his question that Watson does not understand and which gives multiple meanings that has nothing to do with the idea to broadcast.
Thus, in discourse analysis, what matters most is knowing how the text fits in the social and historical context in which subjects express exchange their claims according to their own positions in the network of social relations.