Discourse analysis is the study of how language, when used in communication, acquires meaning, purpose and becomes coherent. The meaning of linguistic expressions derive not only from linguistic forms and propositional content, but from the interplay between the text, the situation and the cultural context in which the utterance is produced.

The French discourse analysis deals particularly with political texts and is focused on how "voices" are textually reproduced via different forms of reported speech and deictic elements (I, me, we, us you, etc.), how they are quoted, incorporated, reformulated and sometimes deformed (e.g. in the media). The focus lies on enunciation linguistics and all units (shifters, modal expressions, declarative verbs, quotation marks etc.) referring to the speaking subject (s). The studies have often aimed to investigate how rhetorically efficient texts are, based on these parameters.