2. Criteria Used to Qualify a Written Text as a Discourse.

Seven criteria, which have to be fulfilled to qualify either a written or a spoken text as a discourse, have been suggested by Beaugrande (1981). These include:

• Cohesion - grammatical relationship between parts of a sentence essential for its interpretation;

• Coherence - the order of statements relates one another by sense.

• Intentionality - the message has to be conveyed deliberately and consciously;

• Acceptability - indicates that the communicative product needs to be satisfactory in that the audience approves it;

• Informativeness - some new information has to be included in the discourse;

• Situationality - circumstances in which the remark is made are important;

• Intertextuality - reference to the world outside the text or the interpreters' schemata.

Nowadays, however, not all of the above mentioned criteria are perceived as equally important in discourse studies, therefore some of them are valid only in certain methods of the research.

Taking into consideration the sociolinguistic features, the scholars distinguish between various types of discourse: scientific, business, mass media, religious, pedagogical, medical and conversational, etc.

Discourse analysis has been taken up in a variety of social science disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, anthropology, social work, cognitive psychology, social psychology, international relations, human geography, communication studies and translation studies, each of which is subject to its own assumptions, dimensions of analysis, and methodologies.

The story of the emergence of the study of discourse may be summarized as follows.

3. Historical Backgrounds of Discourse Analysis

In the mid-1960s, the humanities and the social sciences witnessed a remarkably synchrónous paradigm shift with the birth of several new but mutually related ‘interdisciplines’ such as semiotics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics as well as the study of discourse.

Despite their common backgrounds in different mother disciplines, and despite a large diversity of methods and objects of study, these new disciplines had several things in common. We may summarize this methodological common ground as follows:

• Interest in the properties of ‘naturally occurring’ language use by real language users, instead of the study of abstract language systems and invented examples.

• A study of larger units rather than isolated words and sentences, and new basic units of analysis: texts, discourses, conversations or communicative events.

• Extension of linguistics beyond grammar towards a study of action and interaction.

• Extension to non-verbal (semiotic) aspects of interaction and communication: gestures, images, film and multimedia.

• Focus on dynamic cognitive or interactional moves and strategies.

• Study of the role of the social, cultural and cognitive contexts of language use.

• Analysis of a vast number of hitherto largely ignored phenomena of language use: coherence, anaphora, topics, macrostructures, speech acts, interactions, turn-taking, signs, politeness, mental models, and many other aspects of discourse.

It might be speculative to relate this renewal in the humanities and social sciences to the more general revolutionary spirit of the end of the 1960s, as we also know it from the Civil Rights Movement in the USA, the feminist movement worldwide, as well as the student movements both in the USA and Europe. Yet, it is probably no coincidence that against the broader background of Afro–Americans rebelling against racism, of women opposing patriarchy, and students protesting against traditional university hierarchies, the end of the 1960s also saw the emergence of new scholarly paradigms. Not seldom, these were also defined by young scholars rejecting the theories and methods of their teachers and of the traditional orientations in literature, linguistics, sociology, anthropology and psychology. Note though, that the social and political nature of the changes in society did not (yet) lead to similar changes in the disciplines. Indeed, initially many of the changes of the new disciplines were formal and only defined by a broader object of study, rather than inspired by a revolutionary spirit aiming to change society. There are (generally European) exceptions to this general ‘apolitical’ beginning of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, especially in Germany and Austria, such as the work by Dittmar (1976) on sociolinguistics, by Leodolter (1975) on language in the courtroom, Wodak (1986) on therapy groups and Wodak & Schulz (1986), on the Language of love and guilt – discourses between mothers and daughters. In the social sciences especially frequent reference was made to the ‘Critical Theory’ of the Frankfurt School and the new studies of signs, speech acts, language variation, stories, communicative events, conversation, film, text processing or discourse structures seldom took place within a broader socio-political movement of dissidence and opposition against social inequality.

The term discourse analysis (DA) first came into general use following the publication of a series of papers by Zellig Harris beginning in 1952 and reporting on work from which he developed transformational grammar in the late 1930s. Formal equivalence relations among the sentences of a coherent discourse are made explicit by using sentence transformations to put the text in a canonical form. This work progressed over the next four decades into a science of sublanguage analysis, culminating in a demonstration of the informational structures in texts of a sublanguage of science, that of immunology, and a fully articulated theory of linguistic informational content. During this time, however, most linguists pursued a succession of elaborate theories of sentence-level syntax and semantics.

Although Harris had mentioned the analysis of whole discourses, he had not worked out a comprehensive model, as of January, 1952. A linguist working for the American Bible Society, James A. Lauriault/Loriot, needed to find answers to some fundamental errors in translating Quechua, in the Cuzco area of Peru. He took Harris's idea, recorded all of the legends and, after going over the meaning and placement of each word with a native speaker of Quechua, was able to form logical, mathematical rules that transcended the simple sentence structure. He then applied the process to another language of Eastern Peru, Shipibo. He taught the theory in Norman, Oklahoma, in the summers of 1956 and 1957 and entered the University of Pennsylvania in the interim year. He tried to publish a paper Shipibo Paragraph Structure, but it was delayed until 1970. In the meantime, Dr. Kenneth L. Pike, a professor at University of Michigan, taught the theory, and one of his students, Robert E. Longacre, was able to disseminate it in a dissertation.

In Europe, Michel Foucault became one of the key theorists of the subject, especially of discourse, and wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge. Published in 1969, this volume was Foucault's main excursion into methodology, written as an appendix of sorts to Les Mots et les choses. It makes references to Anglo-American analytical philosophy, particularly speech act theory. Foucault directs his analysis toward the "statement" (énoncé), the basic unit of discourse. "Statement" has a very special meaning in the Archaeology: it … makes propositions, utterances, or speech acts meaningful. In contrast to classic structuralists, Foucault does not believe that the meaning of semantic elements is determined prior to their articulation. In this understanding, statements themselves are not propositions, utterances, or speech acts. Rather, statements constitute a network of rules establishing what is meaningful, and these rules are the preconditions for propositions, utterances, or speech acts to have meaning. However, statements are also 'events', because, like other rules, they appear at some time. Depending on whether or not it complies with these rules of meaning, a grammatically correct sentence may still lack meaning and, inversely, a grammatically incorrect sentence may still be meaningful. Statements depend on the conditions in which they emerge and exist within a field of discourse; the meaning of a statement is reliant on the succession of statements that precede and follow it. Foucault aims his analysis towards a huge organised dispersion of statements, called discursive formations. Foucault reiterates that the analysis he is outlining is only one possible procedure, and that he is not seeking to displace other ways of analysing discourse or render them as invalid.

According to Dreyfus and Rabinow, Foucault not only brackets out issues of truth, he also brackets out issues of meaning. Rather than looking for a deeper meaning underneath discourse or looking for the source of meaning in some transcendental subject, Foucault analyzes the discursive and practical conditions for the existence of truth and meaning. In order to show the principles of meaning and truth production in various discursive formations he details how truth claims emerge during various epochs on the basis of what was actually said and written during these periods of time. He particularly describes the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, and the 20th century. He strives to avoid all interpretation and to depart from the goals of hermeneutics. This does not mean that Foucault denounces truth and meaning, but just that truth and meaning depend on the historical discursive and practical means of truth and meaning production. For instance, although they were radically different during Enlightenment as opposed to Modernity, there were indeed meaning, truth and correct treatment of madness during both epochs (Madness and Civilization). This posture allows Foucault to denounce a priori concepts of the nature of the human subject and focus on the role of discursive practices in constituting subjectivity.

Dispensing with finding a deeper meaning behind discourse appears to lead Foucault toward structuralism. However, whereas structuralists search for homogeneity in a discursive entity, Foucault focuses on differences. Instead of asking what constitutes the specificity of European thought he asks what constitutes the differences developed within it and over time. Therefore, as a historical method, he refuses to examine statements outside of their historical context: the discursive formation. The meaning of a statement depends on the general rules that characterise the discursive formation to which it belongs. A discursive formation continually generates new statements, and some of these usher in changes in the discursive formation that may or may not be adopted. Therefore, to describe a discursive formation, Foucault also focuses on expelled and forgotten discourses that never happen to change the discursive formation. In this way one can describe specific systems that determine which types of statements emerge. In his Foucault (1986), Deleuze describes The Archaeology of Knowledge as "the most decisive step yet taken in the theory-practice of multiplicities."