First, a terminological point. Discourse is commonly used in various senses including (a) meaning-making as an element of the social process, (b) the language associated with a particular social field or practice (e.g. “political discourse”), and (c) a way of construing aspects of the world associated with a particular social perspective (e.g. a “neo-liberal discourse of globalization”). It is easy to confuse them, so to at least partially reduce the scope for confusion, I prefer to use semiosis for the first, most abstract and general sense (Fairclough et al., 2004), which has the further advantage of suggesting that discourse analysis is concerned with various “semiotic modalities” of which language is only one (others are visual images and “body language”).