ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the general theoretical standpoint of my research. It first presents the main criticisms to an over-determinant conception of discourse which is usually identified with Critical Discourse Analysis, but also with the French School of Discourse Analysis. Then it develops three areas of interest which seem to be left out of the current agenda of mainstream discourse analysis: singularity and difference, as features which explain the emergence of the unexpected in everyday communication; voice, as a form of understanding the articulation of individual biographies with social structures and institutions in the making of every person’s communicative repertoire; and emergent discourse, as a term which enables meaning-making to be understood without resorting to structural, over-deterministic concepts such as “discursive formation”. In the final section, I develop the notion of “linguistic inequality” as a phenomenon which requires the combination of both sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.
