The Thickness of Discourse
This text aims at showing the interest, if not the necessity, for social sciences to comprehend discourse as an object among others that, consequently, may be split, de-constructed and analyzed positively. In fact, the “linguistic materiality” of discourse is both thick and opaque and the analyst needs technical tools (linguistic, narrative, stylistic, computational,etc.) to describe it. We have given a brief survey of the diverging traditions, anglo-saxon and linguistic, of discourse analysis, and their common concern for its “materiality”. We have then presented a few analytic tools, and lastly in a third part, we have reintroduced the choice of these tools depending of subject matter and the researcher’s aims.