Critical Discourse Analysis

Anna Bączkowska, University of Gdansk, Poland
anna.baczkowska@ug.edu.pl

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is an already well-established transdisciplinary, heterogenous, discourse-analytical approach to discourse which views language in terms of social practice. It combines research conducted in linguistics, social sciences, and political and media sciences. The goal of CDA is to seek, raise awareness, and de/legitimise social issues of discrimination, patterns of dominance, power imbalance, or ideology with the view to improve social injustice by analysing language used in opinionated, persuasive, and manipulative texts, primarily in the media. Media discourse, on the one hand, reflects the social structures, political situations, and institutions and, on the other, invokes changes in this sphere. The language thus reflects social reality; but at the same time, it moulds it and can impose patterns of power and dominance. While uncovering social issues, CDA is not confined to language, as it also explores semiotic symbols and multimodal resources (visual and auditory elements). There are several CDA schools, which rely on distinct theoretical frameworks and resort to various methodologies. Within the main approaches, there are also: Discourse-Historical Approach by Reisigl and Wodak, socio-cognitive by van Dijk, cognitive science by Chilton, or the dialectical-relational approach by Fairclough. Van Leeuwen proposed a schema of various so-called social actors, which situate subjects in the social-political-economic reality and label them according to the role they play in society, e.g., genericisation, functionalisation, nomination, predication (the last two are also elaborated by Reisigl and Wodak), etc.

Keywords: discourse-analytical approach, media discourse, multimodal

Related Entries: Bias, Discourse (1), Discourse (2), Multimodality/Semiotics

References:
Blommaert, J., & Bulcaen, C. (2000). Critical discourse analysis. Annual Review of Anthropology, 29(1), 447–466.
Chilton, P. (2004). Analysing political discourse: Theory and practice. Routledge.
Dispy, M. (2011). Pour étayer l'apprentissage de l’implicite. Presses universitaires de Namur.
Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the way of words. Harvard University Press.
Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. Longman.
Reisigl, M., & Wodak, R. (2001). Methods in critical discourse studies. SAGE.
Van Dijk, T. (2008). Discourse and context: A Socio-cognitive approach. Cambridge University Press.
Van Leeuwen, (1996). The representation of social actors. In C. Rosa Caldas Coulthard & M. Coulthard (Eds.), Texts and practices: Readings in critical discourse analysis (pp. 32–70). Routledge.