The phrase "discourse means" is grammatically correct and can be used in written English.
It is typically used to introduce or define what something means in a particular discourse or conversation. An example of using this phrase in a sentence could be: "In the context of this political discourse, 'democracy' means a form of government in which power is held by the people."
In the time of Clay, Webster and Calhoun, political discourse meant political oratory.
When she says that "the new tax schedule Mellon's men drew up was a beauty to behold," those are her wide-eyed words, not some bit of indirect discourse meant to echo Coolidge.
Skittish at the best of times, he set off at once on a rambling and wholly libellous discourse meant to "out" a score of his fellow rock stars as gay.
To the New Critics, poetry was a special kind of discourse, a means of communicating feeling and thought that could not be expressed in any other kind of language.
The third category points to the fact that worldviews can be built by discourse by means of certain cultural expressions or milestones legitimizing social order.
We shall leave this question open for the time being but suggest that it may be worthwhile to view names such as 'Oscar' as instantial terms — terms introduced into discourse by means of existential instantiation.
The agreement that the participants in the conversation find is based on respect for the others and on the insight that religious differences, even though they can be meaningfully discussed, cannot be resolved in a philosophical discourse by means of reason alone.
In this land of constant chatter, the one remaining bastion of silence is the Church, where discourse is meant to be of a spiritual nature, and never more so than during the current Holy Year when tens of millions of pilgrims are expected to visit.
By "fictional discourse" we mean here and in what follows discourse about fictitious objects.
This recovery of a republican discourse was meant to counterbalance the canonical view, most clearly and forcefully expressed in Louis Hartz's Liberal Tradition in America (1955), of an American consensus of Lockean derivation, centered on the defense of property rights and animated by liberal individualism.
