Critical Discourse Analysis

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a variety of discourse analyses associated particularly with Norman Fairclough, in which the central focus is on the connections between discourse as social action and other facets of social life. More specifically, researchers using CDA are interested in the ways in which power produces and is produced by certain discourses. Broadly, critical discourse analysis allows contextual factors to be taken into account when analyzing text.

All discourse analytic approaches begin with the assumption that spoken and written language is a social practice. Language is action—speech, text, and image are not empty in themselves; they are active and used purposefully and with intent. They persuade, argue, deny, command, and question, among other outcomes. Additionally, a discursive perspective on action assumes that the discourse itself is the focus of analysis, rather than the thing to which the discourse refers. Finally, discourses [Page 226]are recognized to be variable in their meaning, both between and within individuals. There is a wide variety of discourse analytical approaches and within this, a number of approaches to critical discourse analysis that apply theory, data, and methodological techniques differently.

The primary concern of all CDA is the historical and ideological production of social structure and power relations through language. Fairclough pointed out that the relative social positions of those engaged in semiosis results in different discursive representations of social practices. These different discursive representations, or orders of discourse, are both constructed by and constructive of social hierarchies. In this, CDA recognizes that legitimacy is both created and sustained through the meanings produced by language; it adheres to a relational understanding of the world, since the relative positions of individual agents in a field have to be considered in order for their discursive actions to be understood.

Fairclough is perhaps the scholar most widely associated with critical discourse analysis. He argued that texts are both social events in themselves as well as products of social practices. Discourse “figures” in social practice as genres, discourses, and styles. Genres, Fairclough reasoned, are ways of acting; discourses are ways of representing; while styles are ways of being. These are semiotic ways of acting and interacting, which transcend individual texts and reveal “intertextual relations” that characterize sets of related texts. These relations operate at the social level and are relatively stable over time.

Both structures of individual texts as well as discursive themes across texts are illustrative of the three aspects of discourse; therefore analysis addresses the composition of texts, grammatical structures, and semantic constructions. Fairclough pointed out that, although the distinction between genre, discourse, and style is analytically useful in practice, the three are related. Understanding the function of multiple connected texts—for example, a range of press releases focused on different types of a single product, such as a mobile phone— therefore requires a perspective that can address the specific dynamics of each, while also exploring how they work together to create a particular holistic social practice. Fairclough's ideas on the ways hegemony is produced through discourse have been quite widely used by researchers to underpin critical analyses of campaigns and other forms of professional communication.

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