Q: What is a discourse?
WOW: A set of meanings related to a particular topic. In different discourses, words have different denotations (what the word means by itself) and connotations (the field of associations that the word calls).
Q: And in Russian?
Let’s take the word "ya". For somebody, the logical continuation will be "krivedko", for somebody "das is fantastic", and for somebody "Ktolhu" or "Shub-Nigurrat". Or this will be associated with a ball of fertilizer.