Definition of terms

[Zouhair Maalej]

Happy New Year to All,

Sandra's query is interesting. Although all the methods she mentioned
involve some form of analysis, they do differ in terms of their focus. To
begin with, it seems to me (I may be wrong!) that discourse analysis and
content analysis are known in the linguistics literature as theories or
research methodologies while sociolinguistic analysis is not.

I will offer to look at discourse analysis through the following quote from
Widdowson (1975: 6), who makes a distinction between the job of a linguist,
a literary critic, and a stylistician: "The linguist, then, directs his
attention primarily to how a piece of literature exemplifies the language
system. We will say that he treats literature as text. [...] The literary
critic searches for underlying significance, for the essential artistic
vision that the poem embodies and we will say that he treats literary works
as messages.  Between these two is an approach to literature which attempts
to show specifically how elements of linguistic text combine to create
messages, how, in other words, pieces of literary writing function as a form
of communication. Let us say that this approach treats literature as
discourse." Presumably, discourse analysis does not treat texts in isolation
from their users.

As its name indicates, sociolinguistic analysis has another focus. Roughly,
it treats language in close connection with the social variables that
determine it. Such social variables may include class, gender, age,
dominance, power, politeness, etc. A word of caution is useful here: unlike
sociolinguistics, sociolinguistic analysis is not a theory or method of text
analysis. As mentioned earlier, discourse analysis is a theory, as discussed
in Schiffrin, and has sub-methodologies such as ethnomethodology, pragmatic
analysis, conversation analysis, etc. I hope this will not sound confusing,
but one can conduct a discourse analytical study of a sociolinguistic kind,
whereby the variables will be the focus of the analysis of a given text.

Content analysis is a research methodology that is concerned with the
presence of certain concepts within a text. Once these concepts are
quantified, they are  analyzed for their meaning and the relationships that
they entertain with one another. As a final step, content analysts can make
inferences about the contribution of these concepts to the meaning of the
text, its author, its potential audience, and maybe its cultural background.
To conduct a content analysis on any text, the text is coded and broken down
into manageable levels such as word, word meaning, phrases, sentences, or
themes. Content analysis uses two basic tools: conceptual analysis and
relational analysis. In conceptual analysis, a concept is chosen for
examination, and its presence is quantified. Obviously, the analysis gets
very complicated if the concept is implicit in the text. Like conceptual
analysis, relational analysis begins with identifying concepts present in a
given text. However, it seeks to go beyond presence, and investigates the
relationships between the concepts isolated. In other words, the concern of
relational analysis is semantic relationships. Such relational/semantic
analysis could be read in Halliday and Hasan's (1976) _Cohesion in English_,
where concepts are looked at from the many ways they relate to each other
(e.g, similarity, contrast, hyponymy, repetition, meronymy, etc.) to make a
text cohesive.

I hope this will help.
Best

***************************
Dr Zouhair Maalej
Senior Fulbright Scholar
University of New Mexico
Department of Linguistics
Humanities Building 112
Albuquerque, NM 87131-1196

E-mails: zmaalej at unm.edu / zmaalej at gnet.tn / zmaalej at mail.fulbrightweb.org
URL: http://simsim.rug.ac.be/ZMaalej
http://zouhair_maalej0.tripod.com/cognitivemetaphorwebsite (under
construction)

Home phone: 505 / 764-6693
Office phone: 505 / 277-0928
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