Studies of business discourse examine how the work of a business institution gets accomplished through talk and texts. Academic and practitioner interest in business discourse has emerged in a social context where business institutions, notably corporations, have a powerful presence in the world. Close attention to business discourse is predicated on the following suppositions: that
Action-implicative discourse analysis (AIDA) is an approach to analyzing talk or text in a social context. It is a relatively new method of discourse analysis, developed by Karen Tracy in 1995. AIDA views communication as composed of different practices in which communicators are problem-solvers. People reflect on what they did do (or would do) in
The “truth-bias,” the expectation that, normally, one tells the truth, is proposed to be the cornerstone of humanity (Bok 1978). Yet, it is the skill of displacement – speaking of things which are not present – and thus also the ability to deceive that is the basis of human language (Aitchison 1996). A society of
Discourse comprehension is the act of interpreting a written or spoken message by integrating the incoming information into the memory or knowledge structures of the interpreter. As such it involves social and pragmatic knowledge as well as grammatical and logical knowledge. Consider an example from Schank and Abelson (1977): (1) “John went into a restaurant.
Development discourse refers to the process of articulating knowledge and power through which particular concepts, theories, and practices for social change are created and reproduced (Escobar 1995; 1999; 2000; Crush 1996). Historically, the approach to development in terms of discourse has evolved out of debates on modernization and Marxist dependency theory rooted in social evolutionism.
As a common term in English, discourse means any extended verbal communication, such as Jesus’s discourse with the people (John 6: 22 –71) or, “The Disinherited Knight then addressed his discourse to Baldwin” (Scott, Ivanhoe). Discourse is lengthy but targeted speech between individuals or between an individual and a group. As a theoretical term, it
Like qualitative content analysis and Grounded Theory, discourse analysis can be conceived as a qualitative empirical method of analyzing mostly recorded human communication. The term itself was first introduced to the public by Zellig Harris in the early 1950s, but used rather unsystematically. In general terms, discourse analysis serves for analyzing written or spoken language
In general usage, political discourse comprises all forms of communication in and by political institutions or actors and all communication with reference to political matters. Thus, political public relations, both internal and external, news, commentary, film, talk shows, citizens’ everyday talk about politics etc. are all sites of political discourse. Different sites follow different rules
“News as discourse” marks a theoretical framework for the analysis of news. News is considered as a complex communicative event – as discourse – including the social context of news reports. Rather than exclusively focusing on text properties such as the thematic structure of news reports, the actors, and the opinions addressed in the reports