Journal of Danubian Studies and Research, Vol 8, No 2 (2018)

Abstract

The category of discourse is currently at the center of the attention of the human sciences. The growing interest in the study of discourse and its wide use in different contexts can be seen as a distinctive feature of research directions of humanities of the late twentieth - the first decades of the twenty-first century. We investigate the reasons of the primal place of discourse analysis in the modern human sciences. The discourse is not only the language in use, but also the reflection of mental processes, and it is this component which play a decisive role in the contemporary European communication space. Studying not texts but discourses makes it possible to grasp the articulation of linguistic analysis with the mental and social, to reflect a discursive culture specific to a society or its social group.