Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis examines how language is used to structure and convey meaning beyond individual sentences, focusing on the relationships between utterances and their overall communicative effect. Current research emphasizes computational approaches, leveraging large language models like BERT and GPT, along with techniques such as topic modeling and dependency parsing, to analyze large corpora of text and social media data. These advancements enable quantitative analysis of discourse structures across various languages and contexts, offering insights into diverse areas such as public opinion, disinformation detection, and historical representations of marginalized groups. The resulting methodologies improve our understanding of communication patterns and have implications for fields ranging from learning analytics to political science.