ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the approach proposed in this book, which is the result of empirical data collected by the author for over 30 years on Latin American political discourse, particularly Venezuela and its international relations. Contrary to approaches that focus mainly on social representations, this approach proposes a change in focus, from texts in contexts to people in events, so the main attention is on the participants in dialogues. The approach is characterized as linguistic, interdisciplinary, interactional and critical, and the basic theoretical assumptions about dialogue and the categories of discourse as interaction are presented. The methodology is described, with attention to the socio-political, interactional and linguistic levels. General procedures that depend on the extent and aim of the analysis are provided. Examples are presented for the analysis of dialogue in a continuum, which at one end focuses on the text itself and, on the other, in the social dialogue which brings to the surface the changes in the dialogue due to the tensions between the dominant power and the resistance to it.
