ABSTRACT
Discourse analysis is a qualitative research method that examines social action through the prism of language use. Rooted in a European tradition of critical linguistics, discourse analysis provides empirical evidence about what people accomplish when they communicate. Discourse analysis bears on language use in the broadest possible sense: when researchers analyze transcripts of spoken interaction (“talk”) between two speakers or more, they may do so to understand what explicit and implicit meanings are being expressed (Weizman, 2008). When discourse analysts examine written language (“text”), they may do so to gauge its ideological slant (Van Dijk, 1998) or to qualify the knowledge claims the text makes (Bednarek, 2006). And when researchers examine two or more modes of communication (“multimodality”) such as gesture and gaze, or image and language, they try to understand how these modes operate together to construct meaning (Oddo, 2013). Underlying this research method is the assumption that discourse is implicated in people’s actions, viewpoints, and beliefs. When journalists decide which stories to run on a news website, they do so with a particular commitment to their audience and to their craft (Cotter, 2010). And when people talk about the news they consume, they not only express ideas about the world they live in, but also about the role of journalism in society and how they see themselves (Peterson, 2015).
