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My interest in discourse studies begins with the general understanding that meaning is neither entirely encapsulated in parts of words, words themselves, nor in the structural limitations of the sentence.  In linguistic terms, there are kernels of meaning in morphemes, semantic units, and syntactic classes, but this approach to meaning tends to be reductive.  That is, Linguistics, at the structural level, takes a bottom-up approach.  It proposes that meaning is incremental and thus, in the root or basic components—once they’re identified—we find the foundations of meaning.

This approach is insufficient because it fails to account for the inferences that are drawn in stretches of text or utterances whose meaning is not the sum of its parts.  Once we acknowledge that an utterance such as “I could use a hand” means—in a particular context—“I need help,” we have to take into account the figurative and social aspect of language, which leads us to the domain of “discourse”—or as I define it for myself: language analysis beyond the structural limits of the sentence.

By taking into account context (by which we mean anything that has an impact on meaning / interpretation: social, historical, cultural, environmental and personal factors), we move away from a bottom-up model of meaning-making to one that is more akin to a top-down approach. This approach takes into consideration how a complex network of factors contributes to the meaning that gets manifested in particular communicative expressions or texts.

It is this orientation that leads me to consider the work of the following when I analyze the relationships between discursive practices of people of Mexican-origin and the discursive and literacy practices favored in mainstream academic settings:

• Dell Hymes and John Gumperz on the ethnography of communication (which considers the variety of ways of communicating—and what can be considered communication—across cultures), and Richard Bauman on the ethnography of speaking (which focuses more particularly on the verbal ways of communicating particular to cultural groups)
• John Gumperz, Erving Goffman, Deborah Tannen, and Brown & Levinson on interactional sociolinguistics (which takes social context into consideration in discursive analysis)
• John Austin and John Searle on speech act theory (which considers the nature and function of utterances, and how they convey meaning and are used to carry out actions).