A SOCIOLOGICAL PRAGMATICS? ON THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE ANALYSIS OF DISCURSIVE PRACTICES FROM BOURDIEU

Abstract

This article aims to reduce the existing lack of systematizations of what Bourdieu called “sociological pragmatics” that can be understood as a discourse analysis approach. To that end, two analytical dimensions are developed seeking a construction of a conceptual analytical chart: (i) a review of the specialized literature on Discourse Analysis (DA) that confirms a wide diffusion of poststructuralist approaches (e.g., Foucault and Pêcheux), made from the bibliometric analysis of 159 academic papers on DA, in the SciELO platform published between 1997 and 2020; (ii) a survey of the central categories in Bourdieu’s works, considering the book Language and Symbolic Power as central. As a main result, this work outlines a useful conceptual framework for those interested in analyzing the discursive practices from this sociological point of view.

Keywords:
Pierre Bourdieu; Methodology; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics; Discourse analysis