DISCOURSE The object of Discourse Analysis (DA) is discourse. This assertion places the concept of discourse in the core and at the basis of theoretical and analytical devices of the Discourse Analysis circumscribing its goal and range in a wider frame of the Language Sciences. It is the concept of discourse and its choice as an object of investigation that distinguishes DA from other areas of Linguistics or from the Human and Social Sciences, in which discourse is also used to name, to refer to distinct things, such as sentence organization, inter-sentence connection, the exposition of ideas, the text, the result of interaction, the result of mental schema etc.
This use of the word 'discourse' to refer to different and distinct science objects, causes a certain instability in the acknowledgement of DA as a study field, as a specific field of knowledge. This use of the concept of discourse to refer to different or distinct science objects, of different fields of Linguistics of the Human and Social Sciences, causes a certain instability in the acknowledgement of DA as a specific domain of knowledge production, as a theory and a method that build their own object: discourse. In view of the discursive processes, of the signification processes, DA defines its study object as effects of meanings between speakers.
Discourse is meaning. It is produced in-between, it is produced in the relations of meaning that constitute the subjects in their language practices, conformed by ideology and the unconscious. Defined as an effect of the relations of meaning that constitute the subject-positions inscribed in ideological discursive formations and as an effect of the unconscious, discourse has no beginning nor end.
The speaker is not the source of discourse, nor is discourse contained in language production, such as music, painting, dancing, sculpture etc. , as something to be deciphered or discovered. This materialistic concept of discourse, which binds signification to its production conditions, which binds the subject to his historicity, moves Discourse Analysis away from logicisms and sociologisms, both empiric or idealistic, found in the field of Linguistics and it also moves DA away from the ideology of information that conforms meaning to communication theories.
Discourse is not information. It is meaning historically constituted by the updating of the discursive memory. The speaker is not a bio-psychophysiological individual, an end of a communicative setting.
The speaker is subject-position constituted by meaning. Meanings that repeat, move and displace themselves in the imaginary relations of the subject with his material conditions of existence. Financial support Project management LAS management Image editing Film crew Translated by LABESTRAD/UFF Subtitles: Virginia Nogueira and Sandra Monteiro Revn: B.
Leivas, M. Magalhães, G. Campos and B.
Caldas Transl. Coord. S.
Monteiro and G.
