Examples Of Critical Discourse Analysis

Being a distinctive approach of researching advertising discourse and the major analytical approach concerned in this study, Critical Discourse Analysis is a “research program” (Wodak, 2012: xix) unified by very distinctive features and principles, notably in aims and orientations which can be very interdisciplinary and comprises a bundle of approaches with multiplied and varied theoretical assumptions and research methods. Right as Van Dijk (2012) puts it, CDA “is discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse and inequality are enacted, reproduced, legitimated and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context”.

Dating back to as early as 1970s when a group of linguists at the University of

The book Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis edited by Wodak & Meyer (2009) has presented a detailed and comprehensive introduction to most prominent approaches and research strategies of CDA. It (2009: 28) states that actors, mode, time, tense, argumentation etc. are core linguistic concepts that the operationalization of CDA depends on, whereas choice of relevant linguistic devices in a specific research is mainly dependent on its specific research question. Though there are no established cannon of data collection and fixed research methods, CDA normally draws its data from naturally-produced texts. Among salient CDA approaches, Van Dijk’s Sociocognitive Approach takes a socio-psychological perspective while the Discourse-Historical Approach relatively emphasizes a linguistic orientation. The Corpus Linguistic Approach introduces into CDA an additional linguistic device for analysis, and Van Leeuwen’s Social Actors Approach places a primary focus on

Fairclough (2012: 2), inheriting Marxist traditions, understands CDA as “a form of critical social science” aimed at uncovering “the nature and sources of social wrongs, the obstacles to addressing them, and possible ways of overcoming those obstacles” (Fairclough, 2012: X). While Critical Social Analysis (CSA) is simultaneously “normative” and “explanatory”, being a branch of CSA, CDA aims at not only a description of existing realities but also an explanation of them and does this through what Fairclough (2012: 2) refers to as a “material-semiotic”