Jasper John M.

Roque AB English - III

Difference Between Content Analysis and Discourse Analysis

The studying or retrieving meaningful information from documents is called content

analysis. And it is by determining the occurrence of certain words or concepts within
texts or sets of texts. The concept of text here can be broadly defined as books,
newspaper headlines and articles, essays, conversations, discussions, speeches,
advertising, theater, historical documents, audio-visual texts, etc. While the study of the
ways in which language is used in texts and contexts is called discourse analysis. This
always refers to the analysis of real-life discourse or naturally occurring language; the
data for discourse is taken from written texts or tape recordings. Where it involves
examining various dimensions of discourse such as style, syntax, tone, intonation,
idioms, and gestures, analyzing various genres of discourse, the relationship between
discourse and context, the relationship between discourse and syntactic structure, etc.