Examples Of Discourse Analysis

2.4 Critical Discourse Analysis: An Overview

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 East Anglia develops a new type of “critical linguistics” which applies Halliday’s systemic functional view of grammar into text analysis (Fowler et al. 1979), the start of CDA can be marked by Van Dijk’s first launch of his journal Discourse and Society. A group of CDA analysts was then formed after the 1991 meeting and discussion of Teun van Dijk, Norman Fairclough, Gunther Kress, Theo van Leeuwen, and Ruth Wodak in Amsterdam. A four-volume collections of research articles edited by Wodak (2012) with the title of Critical Discourse Analysis offers a comprehensive presentation of the fundamental concepts, epistemological assumptions, academic interests, research agendas, methodology, and