ABSTRACT
One of the chief concerns of mediated discourse analysis (MDA) is how, through mediated actions, discourse is submerged into the ‘historical body’ of the individual social actor as social practice, and how this discourse reemerges from the ‘historical body’ through subsequent mediated actions. In their description of nexus analysis, the Scollons (2004) argue that all social actions take place at a nexus of:
the ‘interaction order’ (the social roles and relationships in a situation) the ‘discourses in place’ (including both discourse in the surroundings like signs and public broadcast announcements and those introduced by participants as speech, writing or other forms of communication) and the ‘historical body’ (the storehouse of discourse sedimented in the history and memory of the individual and manifested in ‘habitual’ practices: ways of speaking, of making bodily movements, and of generally living in the world).
