Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD)

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.