Diskursanalyse

Diskursanalyse, or discourse analysis, refers to a family of qualitative and sometimes quantitative methods for studying how language is used in real contexts to construct social reality. It treats texts and talk as social practices that produce and reproduce power relations, identities, knowledge, and norms. The field draws on linguistics, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies, and includes several strands with different emphases.

Several strands are widely used: broad discourse analysis focusing on how discourse shapes social processes across genres; Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which examines how discourse sustains power and ideology; the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), a CDA variant emphasizing historical context and intertextual links; Conversation Analysis (CA) and related interactional approaches that study the organization of talk in interaction; and corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), which combine qualitative interpretation with large text corpora.

Typical data come from political speeches, media articles, interviews, policy documents, and online content. Analysts transcribe as needed, identify discourses and genres, and examine intertextuality, rhetorical devices, stance, modality, and presupposition. Interpretations are usually grounded in relevant theory and, increasingly, in methodological transparency and reflexivity.

Applications span political communication, media studies, education, sociology, gender studies, and health communication. Critiques of diskursanalyse point to debates about objectivity and replicability, the interpretive nature of analysis, and disagreements over the scope and political implications of the concept of discourse.