critical discourse

1. Critical Discourse Analysis:
Major Approaches and Methods of Analysis

2. What is Critical Discourse Analysis?
 systematically explores often opaque relationships of causality and determination
between
(a) discursive practices, events and texts, and
(b) wider social and cultural structures, relations and processes;
to investigate how such practices, events and texts arise out of and are ideologically
shaped by relations of power and struggles over power' (Fairclough 1995)
 Critical Discourse analysis is a type of discourse analysis research that primarily
studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted,
reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in social and political contexts. (van Dijk
2004)

3. What is Critical Discourse Analysis?
 Analyzes hidden and visible structures of dominance, discrimination, power and control
as manifested in language
 Critically examines the relationship between language, ideology, power and social
structure, for example, social inequality as it is constructed, re-produced, legitimized, and
resisted in language and other modes of communication

4. Text and Discourse
 Fairclough (1989) explains the text and discourse as two different terms where text
is either written or spoken discourse
 Discourse is the interaction in the whole social process (production and
interpretation)where text is also present as a product (production) and resource
(interpretation).

5. Critical Discourse Analysis
 Addresses social problems
 Power relations are discursive
 Discourse constitutes society and culture
 Discourse does ideological work
 Discourse is historical
 The link between text and society is mediated
 Discourse analysis is interpretative and explanatory
 Discourse is a form of social action

6. Approach with an agenda
It judges what is right and what is wrong and “addresses social wrongs in their
discursive aspects and possible ways of righting or mitigating them” (Fairclough, 2010)

7. Some Concepts
 Discourse
 Ideology
 Power
 Hegemony
 Intertextuality
 Interdiscursivity
 Genre

8. Critical Discourse Analysis
 Textual analysis (micro)
 Discursive practices (meso)
 Social practices (macro)

9. Major Approaches
 Dialectical Rational Approach (social relations)
 Socio Cognitive Approach(cognition)
 Discourse Historical Approach(historical subjects)

10. Common Features
 an interest in the properties of ‘naturally occurring’ language use by real language
users (instead of a study of abstract language systems and invented examples)
 a focus on larger units than isolated words and sentences, and hence, new basic
units of analysis: texts, discourses, conversations, speech acts, or communicative
events
 the extension of linguistics beyond sentence grammar towards a study of action
and interaction
 the extension to non-verbal (semiotic, multimodal, visual) aspects of interaction
and communication: gestures, images, film, the internet and multimedia a focus on
dynamic (socio)-cognitive or interactional moves and strategies

11. Cont.……
 the study of the functions of (social, cultural and cognitive) contexts of language
use.
 an analysis of a vast number of phenomena of text grammar and language use:
coherence, anaphora, topics, macrostructures, speech acts, interactions, turn-
taking, signs, politeness, argumentation, rhetoric, mental models and many other
aspects of text and discourse.

12. Data
 Political discourse of various genres
 Mass media tests
 Historical and official documents
 Various type of internet data
 Ethnographic data collected by means of observations, interviews, focused groups
 Size of data varies

13. Analysis
 Qualitative
 Expository

14. Questions???