Critical Discourse Analysis Norman Fairclough

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Critical discourse analysis is concerned to analyze how social and political inequalities are manifest in and reproduced through discourse. It is associated with researchers such as Norman Fairclough, Teun A. ven Dijk, and Ruth Wodak. Critical Discourse Analysis provides theories and method for the empirical study of the relation between discourse and social and cultural developments in different social domains. Critical Discourse Analysis is used as a label in two different ways: Norman Fairclough uses it both to describe the approach that he has developed and as the label for a broader movement within discourse analysis of which several approaches, including his own, are parts. Fairclough’s approach consists of a set of philosophical premises, …show more content…

There is disagreement among theorists as to whether the view that discourse is fully constitutive amounts to this form of idealism. Laclau and Mouffe, for example, argue strongly against the accusation of idealism on the grounds that the conception of discourse as constitutive does not imply that physical objects do not exist but, rather, that they acquire meaning only through discourse. Critical discourse analysis engages in concrete, linguistic textual analysis of language use in social interaction. This distinguishes it from both Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory which does not carry out systematic, empirical studies of language use, and from discursive psychology which carries out rhetorical but not linguistic studies of language …show more content…

He emphasis that discourse and orders of discourse can operate across institutional boundaries. Interdiscursivity occurs when different discourses and genres are articulated together in a communicative event. Through new articulations of discourses the boundaries change both within the order of discourse and between different orders of discourse. Creative discursive practices in which discourse types are combined in new and complex ways, in new ‘interdiscursive mixes’, are both a sign of and a driving force in discursive and thereby socio-cultural change. On the other hand, discursive practices in which discourses are mixed in conventional ways are indications of, and work towards, the stability of the dominant order of discourse and thereby the dominant social order. Discursive reproduction and change can thus be investigated through an analysis of the relations between different discourses within an order of discourse and between different orders of discourse. (N. Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language

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