Que cherchent les analystes du discours ?

The purpose of this article is to propose an overview of the field of discourse analysis. Firstly, it considers the meaning of the term “analysis” by taking into account the main trends of French discourse analysis in the late 1960’s. . Then it reflects on the diversity of the field of discourse studies by making a distinction between “discourse studies” and “discourse disciplines”, with each having a specific viewpoint on discourse. The scholars who work on discourse are divided into three groups: those whose approach is “paraphilosophical”, those who consider discourse analysis as a mere “qualitative method” for Human and Social Sciences, and those who – as a rule they draw on linguistics – try to keep a balance between conceptualization and empirical analysis. The corpora these specialists of discourse work with can be divided into two main categories: “topical units”, which have been divided up by social activity (particularly discourse genres) and “non-topical” units; the latter can be “transverse” (in this case they are “registers”) or “constructed” by the researcher. The last two sections of the article focus on the attitude of discourse analysts: it can be “hermeneutical” or not, “critical” or not; but by its nature discourse analysis always has a critical dimension