Discourse Analysis: Its Development and Application to the Structure of News

Developments in the last decade within such areas as text linguistics and, more generally , within the growing interdisciplinary study of discourse, have potential applications for the systematic analysis of mass media messages. Discourse analysis can make more explicit the classical approaches to "content analysis." It can also stimulate a research paradigm within mass communication that sees textual analysis not only as a method of research—for example, in the study of media effects—but also as an autonomous endeavor toward the construction of a sound theory of media discourse. Because the study of discourse has become a large field in the past ten years, my discussion here must be limited to those aspects of discourse analysis that seem most relevant for the study of media discourse. Thus, I will pay little attention to those properties of discourse that can be characterized in terms of linguistic grammar in the strict sense, such as the syntax and semantics of (isolated) sentences. Rather, I will be concerned with more specific textual structures that have been neglected in linguistics. Similarly, I cannot go into the details of stylistic and rhetorical analysis of media discourse, although much work in this área still needs to be done. Finally, I will also limit my application to news discourse in the press, thereby neglecting TV, film, and radio discourse, the role of images in audiovisual forms of discourse, and other types of newspaper discourse such as advertisements and commentaries.