Critical Discourse Analysis

Background and Key Tenets

CDA became known through the writings of a group of primarily European linguists during the late 1980s, most prominently Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, and Teun van Dijk. Similar but largely independent developments emerged in the United States around the same time through the work of James Paul Gee. The intellectual origins of CDA reach back to British and Australian critical linguistics of the 1970s that researched the intersection of discourse, ideology, and power. Critical linguists were greatly influenced by 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. Many CDA scholars reject the idea that CDA is an established “school” or “paradigm” and prefer to characterize their work as an explicitly critical and political orientation to studying discourse.

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. In CDA, discourse is assumed to be a central vehicle in the construction of social reality. Because different ways of using language are thought to produce different social outcomes, close attention to linguistic properties of texts can shed light on how different outcomes may come about. Most CDA research operates within a moderate version of social constructivism that acknowledges the enabling and constraining effects of existing structural arrangements.

CDA scholars also advocate situating linguistic investigations within social analysis. Their emphasis on interdisciplinarity has resulted in an engagement with a variety of theories outside of the linguistic canon, most often in sociology, cultural studies, and political economy. This fusion has entailed a significant expansion in the conceptual toolkit of the CDA analyst because the goal is no longer linguistic description but rather an understanding of how language-inuse (discourse) contributes to and reproduces social inequality. Concepts such as globalization, power, ideology, and hegemony often figure in CDA studies that attempt to capture the interconnections among discourse, power, and social organization.

Areas of Research and Application

Much of the early work within CDA targeted the political domain. This remains a very active line of research [Page 146]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. Examining media images such as advertisements constitutes an important area of visual semiotics, a line of inquiry that has taken CDA tenets beyond the verbal realm. A considerable number of feminist researchers have relied on CDA to produce illuminating analyses of gender-based discriminatory practices in a variety of discourse genres. CDA has been widely applied within research in education, an area not only rife with social problems but also where discursive practices are central and salient. Recently, more CDA studies analyze face-to-face interaction, examining various service encounters or personal narratives produced in research interviews.

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