James Paul Gee takes on a sociocultural approach to discourse analysis in What is Discourse Analysis? as he explains the levels of identities within social groups. Gee believes that in a discourse one must “say, do and be something”(93) in regards to identity and language. Individuals make items symbolic by creating the context around them. Through the text, Gee uses examples of sentences with the same context and explains how the sequence of the words can affect the meaning of the sentence. Gee explains how discourse is the language-in-use and the study of it entails the relationship between language and context. He uses a clear example of the phrase “clean it up” and how the meaning can vary depending on the context such as if it was dirty
