Critical Discourse Analysis Notes

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

Introduction

  • Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) emerged in the late 1980s, spearheaded by Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, and Teun van Dijk.
  • CDA is an influential branch of discourse analysis that examines power and inequality in language.
  • The goal is to show that the critical perspective in language studies is a broader trend involving convergence in research theories and practices.

The CDA Program

  • CDA analyzes the relationships of dominance, discrimination, power, and control as manifested in language.
  • CDA studies social interactions that take linguistic form.
  • Discourse is viewed as socially constitutive and socially conditioned.
  • Discourse is an opaque power object, and CDA aims to make it more visible.
  • The economic, social, and cultural changes of late modernity exist both as discourses and as processes outside discourse, with the latter being shaped by the former.
  • Fairclough's Discourse and Social Change (1992a) is a key attempt to theorize the CDA program, providing a social theory of discourse and a methodological blueprint.
Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Framework:

  1. Discourse-as-text:

    • Analysis of linguistic features and organization of discourse.
    • Includes vocabulary, grammar, cohesion, and text structure.
    • Example: Passive verb forms in news reporting can obscure the agent of political processes.
    • Distinguishes CDA from approaches like Foucault’s by focusing on concrete textual features.

  2. Discourse-as-discursive-practice:

    • Discourse as produced, circulated, distributed, and consumed in society.
    • Focuses on the circulation of linguistic objects.
    • Attention is given to speech acts, coherence, and intertextuality.
    • Two types of intertextuality:
      • Manifest intertextuality: Overtly drawing upon other texts.
      • Constitutive intertextuality (interdiscursivity): Texts made up of heterogeneous elements (generic conventions, discourse types, register, style).
    • Discourse representation: How quoted utterances are selected, changed, and contextualized.

  3. Discourse-as-social-practice:

    • Focuses on the ideological effects and hegemonic processes in which discourse is a feature.
    • Draws on theories of Althusser and Gramsci.
    • Hegemony is power achieved through constructing alliances and integrating groups through consent.
    • Discursive change reflects changes in hegemony, especially through intertextuality.
    • Discourse representation and rewriting reveal new orders of discourse and struggles over normativity.
    • Fairclough develops a model of discourse framed in a theory of ideological processes in society.
    • Identifies large-scale hegemonic processes like democratization, commodification, and technologization.
CDA's Locus of Critique
  • The nexus of language/discourse/speech and social structure.
  • Uncovers how social structure affects discourse patterns, relations, and models (power relations, ideological effects).
  • Treats these relations as problematic.
  • Aims to empower the powerless, give voices to the voiceless, expose power abuse, and mobilize people to remedy social wrongs.
  • CDA advocates interventionism and proposes changes to particular discourses: should make proposals for change and suggest corrections to particular discourses.
  • CDA is committed to change, empowerment, and practice-orientedness.

Methodology

  • CDA employs a diverse range of methodologies.
  • Systemic-functional linguistics is prominent, but concepts are also borrowed from various fields such as discourse analysis, text linguistics, stylistics, social semiotics, social cognition, rhetoric, and conversation analysis.
  • Wodak's discourse-historical method traces the history of phrases and arguments through original documents, ethnographic research, and data analysis of news reporting and political discourse.
Diversity vs. Systematic Frameworks
  • Some practitioners welcome methodological diversity.
  • Others strive for a systematic and focused framework based on genre, field, and the sociosemantic representation of social actors.
  • Kress and van Leeuwen emphasize the importance of incorporating visual images into discourse concepts.
  • The general bias in CDA is toward linguistically defined text-concepts.
  • Linguistic-discursive textual structures are attributed a crucial function in the social production of inequality, power, ideology, authority, or manipulation.

Preferred Topics

CDA focuses on the intersection of language and social structure in various domains:

  1. Political discourse

    • Analysis of political rhetoric and communication.

  2. Ideology

    • Discourse as a means of reproducing ideologies.
    • Van Dijk developed a sociocognitive theory of ideology.

  3. Racism

    • Particular emphasis on the study of racism in discourse.
    • Interest in the discourse on immigration.

  4. Economic discourse

    • Focus on globalization as an important issue for CDA.

  5. Advertisement and promotional culture

    • Examination of language use in advertising and marketing.

  6. Media language

    • Analysis of language in media contexts.

  7. Gender

    • Representation of women in the media.

  8. Institutional discourse

    • Language in institutional practices such as doctor-patient communication, social work, and bureaucracy.

  9. Education

    • Education as a major area for the reproduction of social relations.
    • Critical language awareness (CLA) approach to stimulate critical awareness among students.

  10. Literacy

    • Literacy as situated practices in local communities and education.

Issues of power asymmetries, exploitation, manipulation, and structural inequalities are highlighted..

Social Theory

  • CDA conceives discourse as a social phenomenon and seeks to improve the social-theoretical foundations for discourse analysis.
    The starting point is rooted on social theory.
Two Main Directions:

  1. Theories of Power and Ideology:

    • Use of Foucault’s “orders of discourse” and “power-knowledge”.
    • Gramsci’s notion of “hegemony”.
    • Althusser’s concepts of “ideological state apparatuses” and “interpellation”.
    • These theories are translated linguistically and projected onto discourse objects and communicative patterns.

  2. Overcoming Structuralist Determinism:

    • Inspiration from Giddens’ theory of structuration, which proposes a dynamic model of the relationship between structure and agency.
Relation Between Language and Social Structure
  • Linguistic-communicative events can be formative for larger social processes and structures.
  • Reference to the work of Bourdieu and Habermas.
  • The use of these theories can be traced back to cultural studies, particularly the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies of the University of Birmingham.
  • CDA engages with new research trends in postmodern, feminist, postcolonial, and globalization studies.
  • CDA is primarily positioned in a linguistic milieu and should be measured primarily with the yardstick of linguistics and linguistically oriented pragmatics and discourse analysis.

Conversationalization

  • Many fields of contemporary public life are characterized by the appropriation of discursive practices of ordinary life in public domains.
  • The new economic model of “flexible accumulation” is implemented through organizational changes and managerial discourse.
  • Flexible workforms involve new uses of language, such as “the routinized simulation of conversational spontaneity”.
  • Critical analysis of discourse becomes important in marketing, social welfare work, and political discourse.
Political Field Example
  • Shift from formal interviewing styles to modes resembling ordinary conversation.
  • Recent political interviews show a casual manner, colloquial speech forms, reciprocal address forms, and repetitions.
  • Margaret Thatcher’s speech style crossed social class lines, while Harold Macmillan projected a consistent class-specific conversational voice (Fairclough & Mauranen 1997:117).
Three Categories of Developments:

  • Democratization

  • Commodification

  • Technologization (Fairclough 1992a: 200–24).

  • Discourse genres from one sphere of life impinge on others for functional purposes against a background of changes in power relationships in society.

  • Advertising language has moved into the conversational domain using direct address (“Did YOU get YOUR Barclay’s card?”).

  • Government and other professions have adopted more conversational styles to communicate more effectively, but it blurs the boundaries between information and persuasion.

  • Empirical data analysis is directly fed into a larger picture of what discourse and discourse modes do in society.

Situating CDA

Critical linguists focused on language in social institutions, the relationships between language, power, and ideology, and proclaimed a critical, left-wing agenda for linguistics.

Systemic-Functional Linguistics
  • Crucial to CDA practices because it offers clear and rigorous linguistic categories for analyzing the relationships between discourse and social meaning.
  • Analysis of transitivity, agency, nominalization, mood, information flow, and register have been adopted by CDA.
Landmark Publication
  • Fairclough’s Language and Power (1989) is commonly considered the landmark publication for the start of CDA,
  • Offered a synthesis of linguistic method, objects of analysis, and political commitment.
Core CDA
  • Work of Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, and Teun van Dijk.
  • Related approaches include discursive social psychology, social semiotics, systemic-functional linguistics, and political discourse analysis.
  • The influence of Halliday’s work is acknowledged, but references to other discourse-analytic precursors (such as Michel Pˆecheux) are post hoc.
  • The universe of mobilized sources invoked to support the CDA program is selective.
Boundaries of the CDA Movement
  • Scholars identifying with CDA are united by common domains and topics of investigation, a commitment to social action and the political left wing, integrating linguistic analysis and social theory, and a preference for empirical analysis within paradigms such as Hallidayan linguistics and conversation analysis.
  • There is some tendency within CDA to identify itself as a “school”.
  • Boundary-shaping practices, such as qualifying other approaches as “noncritical,” can create divisions within discourse analysis.
Institutionalization
  • CDA has a major forum of publication in the journal Discourse & Society.
  • A European interuniversity exchange program devoted to CDA is in place, and various Web sites and electronic discussion forums offer contacts and information on CDA projects and viewpoints.

Critical Reception

Critical reactions to CDA center on issues of interpretation and context.

Widdowson’s Criticisms
  • Blurring of important distinctions between concepts, disciplines, and methodologies.
  • Vagueness of many concepts and models.
  • CDA interprets discourse under the guise of critical analysis.
  • CDA does not analyze how a text can be read in many ways or under what social circumstances it is produced and consumed.
  • The predominance of interpretation raises questions about representation, selectivity, partiality, and prejudice.
  • CDA collapses together signification and significance, semantics and pragmatics.
  • Texts are found to have a certain ideological meaning that is forced upon the reader.
  • This deterministic view of human agency has also been criticized by Pennycook (1994).
Schegloff’s Critique
  • Tendency to assume the a priori relevance of aspects of context in CDA work.
  • Analysts project their own political biases and prejudices onto their data and analyze them accordingly.
  • Stable patterns of power relations are sketchy and projected onto discourse.
  • Relevant context should be restricted to that context to which participants in a conversation actively and consequentially orient.
Problematic Status of Context
  • Observed by Blommaert (1997a), who qualified the use of context in some CDA work as narrative and backgrounding.
  • Noted the “uncritical” acceptance of particular representations of history and social reality as “background facts” in analyses.

A New Critical Paradigm

The premise that critique derives from investigating the connection between language and social structure is not restricted to CDA.

Elements Characterizing the New Critical Paradigm
  • Ideology
  • Inequality and Power
  • Social Theory
Ideology
  • Development of ideology into a crucial topic of investigation and theoretical elaboration.
  • Silverstein’s work on linguistic ideologies has been seminal.
  • Wider views of linguistic-ideological phenomena were developed and were used to analyze patterns of language use and interlanguage/intervariety relationships.
  • New inquiries into aspects of mediation, intertextuality, and representation led to insights into authority and hierarchies of genres and ways of speaking.
  • Traditions were reviewed in light of reformulated questions.
  • Reflexive research into analytical practices was provided by Goodwin’s (1994) work on “professional vision”.
  • Ideology has become a crucial concern outside linguistic anthropology too.
Inequality and Power
  • Renewed attention to inequality and power in relation to language in society.
  • Linguistic anthropologists broke ground with studies on political discourse genres in non-Western societies.
  • Studies of political discourse are pragmatic in approach and objective.
  • Professional settings in which power asymmetries occur have been explored by various discourse-analytical traditions within pragmatics.
  • The issue of inequality and the positioning of individuals and groups in contemporary social and political hierarchies has gained prominence in research.
  • Hymes’ reedition of critical essays on education and narrative reopened debates on the allocation of speaking rights and linguistic-communicative resources.
  • Power depends not only on access to resources but also on access to contexts in which resources can be used.
  • Detailed attention to narratives also provided a fertile ground for investigating history and the historical power relationships.
  • Concerns of language and social history have yielded an innovative body of work in sociolinguistics, in which languages and language varieties are described in terms of politicized indexicalities.
  • Work of Rampton (1995) addresses the ways in which local subcultural identities are being formed and manipulated by means of a variety of communicative styles among multi-ethnic adolescent groups in Britain.
  • The connection between language and social structure is sought in the practical interplay between concrete actions and group- or society-level forces and patterns.
Social Theory
  • Common desire to find social-theoretical support for analytical treatments of language.
  • Language is studied for what it tells one about society, and linguistic method should be open to theoretical insights into the structure of societies.
  • Materialist approaches to questions of linguistic resources are advocated.
  • Goodwin (1994) demonstrates how professional expertise can be viewed as a Foucaultian “power-knowledge.”
  • Historical theory has so far hardly been used as a resource for critical studies of language, despite the obviously relevant contributions of scholars.
  • The idea of metacommunicative levels and the functional relativity of languages, styles, and genres have a potential for becoming important critical tools.

Assessing CDA

CDA should be situated within a wider panorama of common concerns, questions, and approaches developing among a much wider scholarly community.

Methodological Weaknesses
  • Treatments of context in CDA.
  • At the micro-level, concrete instances of talk or concrete features of text could be analyzed more satisfactorily if a more dynamic concept of context—contextualization—were used.
  • More attention to ethnography as a resource for contextualizing data could remedy some of the current problems with context and interpretation in CDA.
  • At the macro-level, CDA seems to pay little attention to matters of distribution and resulting availability/accessibility patterns of linguistic-communicative resources.
  • Only the texts become objects of a political economy; the conditions of production of texts and the way in which the resources that go into text are being managed in societies are rarely discussed.
  • The way in which CDA treats the historicity of text could benefit from genuinely historical theoretical insights.
  • CDA is still burdened by a very “linguistic” outlook, which prevents productive ways of incorporating linguistic and nonlinguistic dimensions of semiosis.