Eclecticism in Discourse Analysis

Abstract

If discourse analysis were represented pictorially by a tree, I see it as a tree with many branches—each shaped by different pioneers (from Searle to Schegloff, Gumperz to Grice), disciplines (linguistics to philosophy, anthropology to sociology to psychology), and perspectives (theoretical to methodological). Discourse researchers occupying these different branches have a history of maintaining their own set of aims and, in so doing, drawing clear lines between one another’s work. As Lakoff (2001) writes, each domain of language study has advanced its own way of talking, with such boundaries both “guarded jealously and justified zealously” (p. 200).