[citation needed] There is ongoing discussion about whether Austria-born Leo Spitzer's Stilstudien (Style Studies) of 1928 is the earliest example of discourse analysis (DA).
[3] However, the term first came into general use following the publication[citation needed] of a series of papers by Zellig Harris from 1952[4] reporting on work from which he developed transformational grammar in the late 1930s.
This work progressed over the next four decades (see references) into a science of sublanguage analysis (Kittredge & Lehrberger 1982), culminating in a demonstration of the informational structures in texts of a sublanguage of science, that of immunology (Harris et al. 1989),[5] and a fully articulated theory of linguistic informational content (Harris 1991).
[citation needed] In the meantime, Kenneth Lee Pike, a professor at the University of Michigan,[10] taught the theory, and one of his students, Robert E. Longacre, developed it in his writings.
Harris's methodology disclosing the correlation of form with meaning was developed into a system for the computer-aided analysis of natural language by a team led by Naomi Sager at NYU, which has been applied to a number of sublanguage domains, most notably to medical informatics.
[11] In the late 1960s and 1970s, and without reference to this prior work, a variety of other approaches to a new cross-discipline of DA began to develop in most of the humanities and social sciences concurrently with, and related to, other disciplines.
[20][21] Political discourse is the formal exchange of reasoned views as to which of several alternative courses of action should be taken to solve a societal problem.