Media Discourse

discourse

The prevailing sense of "discourse" is defined by the OED as "A spoken or written treatment of a subject, in which it is handled or discussed at length; a dissertation, treatise, homily, sermon, or the like." While previous, archaic definitions of discourse have been "process or succession of time, events, actions, etc." or "the act of understanding," discourse is most simply understood today as a sort of unit of language organized around a particular subject matter and meaning. This can be contrasted to other ways in which language has been broken down into much smaller units of analysis, such as into individual words or sentences in studies of semantics and syntax. Furthermore, as opposed to the linguistic conception of language as a generally stable, unified, abstract symbolic system, discourse denotes real manifestations of language--actual speech or writing.

In addition, the idea of discourse often signifies a particular awareness of social influences on the use of language. It is therefore important to distinguish between discourse and the Saussurean concept of the parole as a real manifestation of language (Saussure, 11-17). Saussure's distinction between langue and parole is such: langue is a linguistic system or code which is prior to the actual use of language and which is stable, homogenous and equally accessible to all members of a linguistic community. Parole is what is actually spoken or written, and varies according to individual choice. Thus while discourse is also what is actually spoken or written, it differs from parole in that it is used to denote manifestations of language that are determined by social influences from society as a whole, rather than by individual agency.

Because the form that discourse takes cannot be solely the product of individual choice, the word entails a meaningful ambiguity between generality and specificity (Fairclough, 24). Discourse can refer either to what is conventionally said or written in a...