Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD)

By 'critical', it is understood that analysts explicitly object to inequality in social relations. According to Billig (2003: 38):

Critical Discourse Analysis does not claim to be 'critical' because of a technical or methodological difference from other approaches to the study of language. It is claimed that Critical Discourse Analysis . . . is critical because it is rooted in a radical critique of social relations.

Given this critical perspective and the insight into the power of discourse, 'critical' social theory which has concerned itself with discourse has provided a major theoretical ground for CDA to tread. Amongst the most influential of scholars here is the French post-structuralist philosopher, Foucault (Fairclough 1989, 1992, 1995, 2003). Another influential school of thought that has been an important source for CDA is the Marxist-influenced Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, in particular that of Adorno and Horkheimer, later followed by Habermas (Fowler et al. 1979; Fairclough 1989; Wodak 1996; Wodak and Meyer 2001). Quoting Habermas (1977: 259), Wodak (2001: 2) asserts that:

most critical discourse analysts would endorse Habermas's claim that ‘language is also a medium of domination and social force. It serves to legitimise relations of organised power. In so far as the legitimations of power relations . . . are not articulated . . . language is also ideological'.

Pioneered by Roger Fowler and other socially concerned linguists at the University of East Anglia in the late 70s, Critical Linguistics is the earliest and one of the most influential linguistically-oriented critical approaches to discourse analysis. It is the foremost proponent of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar as an analytic methodology, although very early works appropriated transformational grammar. Such is the influence of Critical Linguistics, that its analytic methodologies have been inherited by other important approaches to CDA, most notably, Fairclough's Sociocultural analysis (1995a) situated at the description stage. Drawing principally on the ideational function of language - to represent people, objects, events, and states of affairs in the world - Critical Linguistics is primarily concerned with 'mystification' analysis of hard news texts. Mystification, it is argued, occurs with the use of certain grammatical structures which are thought to obscure certain aspects of reality, thus encoding ideology, which Hodge and Kress (1993: 15) contend involves "a systematically organised presentation of reality".

The (agentless) passive construct is the grammatical structure to have received most attention. The agentless passive construction is said to be mystifying as a function of the extra 'reader effort' required to 'recover' the information given only contextually which many readers will be unwilling to 'invest'. Nominalisations are another grammatical structure to have come under the Critical Linguistics microscope. Readers should be made aware, however, that Critical Linguistics' claim that agentless passive constructions and nominalisations are mystifying is problematised by more pragmatic theories of communication and theories of psycholinguistic processing - see O'Halloran (2003) for a detailed treatment.