Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD)

Predominantly associated with Norman Fairclough, sociocultural CDA maintains that discourse is social practice, that is, discourse and the social order are held to be in a dialectical relation with each other. Fairclough (1995a: 131) states that:

viewing language as social practice implies, first, that it is a mode of action (Austin 1962; Levinson 1983) and, secondly, that it is always a socially and historically situated mode of action, in a dialectical relationship with other facets of 'the social' (its 'social context') - it is socially shaped, but it is also socially shaping, or constitutive.

Fairclough illustrates this conception with a three-dimensional model in which "the connection between text and social practice is seen as being mediated by discourse practice" (Fairclough 1995a: 133).

For Fairclough, then, "each discursive event has three dimensions or facets" (Fairclough 1995a: 133), which are interconnected but analytically separable:

1. It is a spoken or written language text;

2. It is an instance of discourse practice involving the production and interpretation of text;

3. And it is a piece of social practice.

Correspondingly, there is a three-tiered method of discourse analysis, where for Fairclough (1995a: 97):

the method of discourse analysis includes linguistic description of the language text, interpretation of the relationship between the (productive and interpretative) discursive processes and the text, and explanation of the relationship between the discursive processes and the social processes.

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.

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.