Discourse Analysis and CDA: Unveiling Power Dynamics
Discourse Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)
Discourse Analysis is widely used for the study of language usage in texts and its contextual meaning.
Critical Discourse Analysis (usually abbreviated as CDA) views discourse as a form of social practice. It’s used in research to study the social perpetuation of dominance and power abuse through text and talk in a socio-political context.
Three Dimensions of Discourse
The first dimension is discourse-as-text. This refers to the linguistic features and organization of concrete instances of discourse. Choices and patterns in vocabulary (e.g., wording, metaphor), grammar (e.g., transitivity, modality), cohesion (e.g., conjunction, schemata), and text structure (e.g., turn-taking system) should be systematically analyzed. For instance, the use of passive verb forms in news reporting can obscure the agent of political processes.
The second dimension is discourse-as-discursive-practice. This means that discourse is something that is produced, circulated, distributed, and consumed in society. Fairclough primarily views these processes in terms of the circulation of concrete linguistic objects (specific texts or text-types).
The third dimension is discourse-as-social-practice. This refers to the ideological effects and hegemonic processes in which discourse is a feature. Hegemony concerns power that is achieved through constructing alliances and integrating classes and groups through consent. Therefore, “the articulation and rearticulation of orders of discourse is correspondingly one stake in hegemonic struggle” (Fairclough 1992a: 93).
Critical Analysis of CDA
Ruth Breeze states that, at the same time, linguists and others who position themselves outside the borders of CDA have maintained a barrage of informed criticism, pointing to many of the inconsistencies within the field. These critics have highlighted problems with the epistemology and theoretical framework, most particularly the instrumentalization of theory and the failure to establish an objective standpoint for research. They have also criticized the type of linguistic methodology that is often applied, as well as the underlying theories of language and communication. Furthermore, they have shown how CDA researchers may fail to integrate context and audience satisfactorily into their analytical framework, leading to naively deterministic assumptions about the workings of discourse and social reproduction.
Methodological Diversity in CDA
On a methodological level, CDA presents a diverse picture. For historical reasons, the use of systemic-functional linguistics is prominent. However, categories and concepts have also been borrowed from more mainstream discourse analysis and text linguistics, stylistics, social semiotics, social cognition, rhetoric, and, more recently, conversation analysis. Wodak and her associates have developed a discourse-historical method intent on tracing the (intertextual) history of phrases and arguments.