Critical discourse analysis

Critical discourse analysis

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a theoretical approach to studying the role of language in society that originated within linguistics but has found widespread application across the social sciences.

M. A. K. Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics, which provides an important foundation for current CDA theory and methodology as well. Although the specific research areas and methods of analysis within CDA are by no means homogeneous, what unites all scholars engaged in CDA is a critical perspective that is geared toward examining the subtle ways in which unequal power relations are maintained and reproduced through language use.

The term discourse is generally understood to refer to any instance of signification, or meaning-making, whether through oral or written language or nonverbal means. In this sense, a dinner table conversation and a newspaper article on globalization are instances of discourse, and so is an advertisement in a fishing magazine, although most CDA analyses rely on written texts or transcripts of oral interactions as data.

Much of the early work within CDA targeted the political domain. This remains a very active line of research to date, and studies typically scrutinize speeches by key politicians or critique documents published by government agencies, institutions, or international organizations. Many scholars have engaged in researching and critiquing media texts from a CDA perspective, pointing to systematic biases and discriminatory tendencies in news reporting.

In addition to methodological and conceptual diversity, CDA as a mode of investigation lacks a unitary theoretical framework, although it is by no means a theoretical.

Norman Fairclough was one of the leading developers of CDA’s theoretical grounding, and his writings have become standard reference points for many who pursue critical textual analysis. One of the theoretical challenges for CDA as a socially and politically sensitive model of language use has been to explicate the relationship between discourse and social formations while attending to the layered nature of social existence.

A second theoretical strand within CDA concerns itself with the role of cognition in maintaining oppressive social practices and reproducing ideologies, and the works of Teun van Dijk and Paul Chilton are relevant in this regard. Cognition within CDA is always socially rooted and encompasses shared group norms, beliefs, attitudes, and ideologies. Researchers studying social cognition emphasize that individual or group discriminatory practices, such as acts of race related violence or anti-immigrant legislation, need to be studied in conjunction with the social cognitions (attitudes and ideologies) that are necessary to produce and maintain them.