The term ‘discourse analysis’ has become really current only recently. But its concerns and methods have been pursued for considerably longer. So to understand what discourse analysis is all about, we might review some directions of study that could contribute their resources and outlooks to a programme of discourse analysis.
1. Fieldwork linguistics
One obvious contributor is the fieldwork linguistics that developed methods for describing previously undescribed languages. There, you ‘analyse discourse’ as it is encountered in human interaction, a principle emphasised by American tagmemics. Also, you benefit from being ‘defamiliarised’ away from your own culture and meeting ‘strange’ ways of saying and doing things. Evelyn Pike told a story about one culture whose language she was studying, where locations are expressed by the points of the compass rather than the sides of the body. At the approach of a poisonous snake, somebody yelled ‘jump to the east!’ For a Westerner, not a big help!
Fieldwork also reveals differing notions about what a language needs to express. For example, Mumiye, a Niger-Congo language, has special forms to indicate when an action is ‘progressive’ (is continuing) or ‘durative’ (goes on for a longer time), such as ‘-yi’ in [1-2] and ‘naa’ in [3] (data reported by Danjuma Gambo). The piece-by-piece translations indicate what the morphemes contribute, while the idiomatic translations suggest what an English speaker might say:
[1] kpanti nwang kn sha-yi
chief sat food eating-durative
‘the chief sat eating and eating’
[2] sombo da-yi diya bii ka jaa gbaa
squirrel go-durative go take focus child hoe
‘the squirrel was going to go take a small hoe’
[3] kura gbãa yuu naa
tortoise returning road progressive
‘the tortoise was returning on the road’
English has no special form for ‘durative’; and its ‘progressive’ form with ‘‑ing’ need not indicate that something went on for long time. Often, it indicates an action going on when something else happened (e.g., ‘the tortoise was returning when he met the squirrel’). For some actions, we can use repetition (e.g., ‘eating and eating’) but for others it would sound odd (e.g., ‘returning and returning’ might suggest several different returns rather than one long one). Yet we can rely on our world-knowledge, e.g., that tortoises take a long time to travel — just as the world-knowledge of Mumiye speakers grasps a small hoe as a ‘child hoe’ although nobody saw hoes bear children.