Abstract
After a short overview of theories that have influenced discourse studies, this contribution presents a general model of how social reality is being analysed with text processing methods. By highlighting strengths and weaknesses of qualitative and quantitative methods, the text advocates an integrative mixed methods approach. The text shows that scientific interpretation is bound to specific explanatory operations that pave the way for a particular understanding of the world. Any scientific process, no matter if qualitative or quantitative, is based on a common ground mobilising research operations for the identification of units, their description, and their analysis. While the analytical paradigms differ in their epistemological and methodological assumptions, they are facing the same problem of reducing and restoring complexity.
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Notes
- 1.
It has to be noted that both traditions are not hermetically closed. For instance, the French school of discourse analysis initially was inspired by Zellig Harris (1952) distributional approach to language.
- 2.
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We are thankful to Beltz Juventa Publishing House for allowing to reprint this text, which originally was published in the Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung (2014/2).
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Duchastel, J., Laberge, D. (2019). Beyond the Quantitative and Qualitative Cleavage: Confluence of Research Operations in Discourse Analysis. In: Scholz, R. (eds) Quantifying Approaches to Discourse for Social Scientists. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97370-8_2
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