Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD)

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a multidisciplinary discourse-analytical practice which, assuming a critical stance, explores, broadly speaking, the relation between discourse and social inequality. In revealing the ways in which inequality is enacted and reproduced in discourse, researchers place themselves and hope also to place their readers in a position from which to resist social inequality and ultimately to strive for social change.

CDA is not a single school of thought, discipline or paradigm. Rather, it is an umbrella term covering a number of distinct but related approaches to the analysis of talk and text that has to do with the social or political. We may identify five main approaches:

Critical Linguistics

Sociocultural analysis

Discourse-historical analysis

Socio-cognitive analysis

Critical metaphor analysis

What unites these under the CDA banner and distinguishes them from post-structuralist, discourse-oriented critical theory is the appropriation of linguistics in microlevel critical analysis.