ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides systematic guidance on how to combine within-event and cross-event analyses to do discourse analysis across speech events. It illustrates discourse analysis beyond the speech event using ethnographic data—face-to-face participant observation with living people in context. The book shows how discourse analysis beyond the speech event can be done on archival data, in which researchers analyze discursive artifacts that illuminate broader sociohistorical processes. It also shows how discourse analysis beyond the speech event can be applied to new media data, in which researchers trace digital forms of communication that began emerging in the late 20th century. The book presents tools for doing discourse analysis within and across speech events through the five tasks of selecting linked events/mapping narrated events, selecting indexicals/relevant cross-event context, construing indexicals/tracing pathways, configuring indexicals, and inferring social action/broader social processes.
