HOW TO DO CDA Criteria for Doing Discourse Analysis

A discourse analyst, while analyzing a particular discourse, must:

I. Possess an idea about a piece of discourse and that idea should be stated in the form of a question(s);
II. Know the importance and practical value of the question in a larger context;
III. Know the appropriate discourse analytic techniques and their usage;
IV. Be familiar with and have access to the location from where the data is to be collected
V. Be able and competent enough to collect the required data and analyze it;
VI. Have sufficient time to collect and analyze the data and write the results

The stages of Doing Discourse Analysis

1. Choosing a Research Topic
2. Posing a Research Question
3. Establishing the Context
4. Preparing and Coding the Source Materials
5. Preliminary Reading/Action Orientation
6. Collecting and examining linguistic and Discursive Devices
7. Understanding and interpreting the data
8. Presenting the data
9. Stating conclusions

Choosing a Research Topic

• Theories.
• Personal experience
• Replication
• Suggested Research Posing a Research Question
• How is our understanding of health shaped by various medical and psychological discourses?
• In what do the Geo TV Channel and the ARY TV Channel differ to (re)produce their ideologies?
• What discursive strategies do the anchor persons of these TV channels use (re) their opposing ideologies?

Establishing the Context

1. Collect information about the producer of the discourse, including his personal, educational, regional, political and ideological backgrounds.
2. Where the data is produced, when, where and why is it produced and for whom is it meant to be consumed?
3. The sociopolitical, socioeconomic and socio-historical backgrounds of the discourse.
4. The production process of the discourse.
5. The genre of the discourse.

Preparing and coding the source materials

1. Transcribing oral/visual materials into written text.
2. Printing the text on paper.
3. Digitizing or giving numbers to paragraphs, sentences or lines, etc.
4. Generating a corpus (For Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis).

Preliminary Reading/ Action Orientation

• Read and re-read the text in order to get familiar with it
• Give special attention to what is most relevant to your research questions Collecting and Examining Linguistic and Discursive Devices

Some Discursive Devices/Strategies:

1. Word Groups (Nominal, Verbal, prepositional and Adverbial Groups)
2. Grammatical Features: Pronouns (us vs them), adjectives and adverbs, passivization; “we are under economic pressure” vs “X puts us under economic pressure…..”
3. Rhetorical, Figurative and Literary Features: Similes, metaphors, allegories, proverbs, idioms, parallelism, synecdoche, metonymy, hyperbole, rhetorical questions and anaphora etc.
4. Evidentialities: Facts and figures and phrases like ‘as everyone knows’, this is crystal clear’, ‘in fact’, ‘of course’, ‘obviously’, ‘certainly’ etc. Collecting and Examining Linguistic and Discursive Devices
5. Ways of Speaking: Tone, mood, attitude and prosody, etc.

I. “if your child is taking fluoride treatment, seek professional advice concerning daily intake.”
II. “If your child is taking fluoride treatment, seek professional advice concerning daily intake.”

Understanding and interpreting the Data
1. The linguistic analysis: What does all this mean?
2. Relate the linguistic devices with your concerned concept/theme
3. Support your major themes/concepts with the help of arguments, examples and facts (the linguistic and rhetorical devices used in the text).

Presenting the Data
1. Present the major arguments, concepts and ideologies.
2. Support the arguments with the help of examples and evidences of the linguistic and rhetoric features.
3. Answer the questions addressed in the initial steps.
4. Draw a conclusion.