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Abstract This paper provides a survey of critical discourse analysis (CDA), a recent school of discourse analysis that concerns itself with relations of power and inequality in language. CDA explicitly intends to incorporate social-theoretical insights into discourse analysis and advocates social commitment and interventionism in research. The main programmatic features and domains of enquiry of CDA are discussed, with emphasis on attempts toward theory formation by one of CDA's most prominent scholars, Norman Fairclough. Another section reviews the genesis and disciplinary growth of CDA, mentions some of the recent critical reactions to it, and situates it within the wider picture of a new critical paradigm developing in a number of language-oriented (sub) disciplines. In this critical paradigm, topics such as ideology, inequality, and power figure prominently, and many scholars productively attempt to incorporate social-theoretical insights into the study of language.
Key Words linguistics, social theory, power, ideology, critique
INTRODUCTION
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) emerged in the late 1980s as a programmatic development in European discourse studies spearheaded by Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, Teun van Dijk, and others. Since then, it has become one of the most influential and visible branches of discourse analysis (as can be seen in the anthology by Jaworski & Coupland 1999). We provide an overview of the main thrusts of this movement, discuss critically its main foci of attention, and situate it in a wider panorama of developments in linguistics. In so doing, we hope to show that the critical turn in studies of language is by no means restricted to any single approach but represents a more general process of (partial) convergence in theories and practices of research on language. CDA provided a crucial theoretical and methodological impetus for this paradigm, but it could benefit from a closer integration with new developments.
CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
The CDA Program
The purpose of CDA is to analyze "opaque as well as transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control as manifested in language" (Wodak 1995:204). More specifically, "[CDA] studies real, and often extended, instances of social interaction which take (partially) linguistic form. The critical approach is distinctive in its view of (a) the relationship between language and society, and (b) the relationship between analysis and the practices analysed" (Wodak...