UNIT 6.1 – Critical Discourse Analysis

What is critical discourse analysis (CDA)?

• Hyland (2005:4) acts of meaning are always engaged in that:
  
  • They realize the interests
  • The positions
  • The perspectives
  • The values

Of those who enact them

The aim of CDA is help reveal some of the hidden values, positions, and perspectives.

CDA examines the use of discourse in relation to social and cultural issues, such as race, politics, gender, identity.

And asks why the discourse is used in particular way and what the implications are of this kind of use.

What is Critical Discourse Analysis? Critical discourse analysis is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way

Social power abuse

Dominance

Inequality

Are enacted by language in the social and political context.

It studies the relationship between linguistic choices and effects in persuasive uses of language.

It studies how these – i.e., choices and effects – indoctrinate or manipulate (for example in marketing or politics) and the counteracting of this through analysis.

Control of public discourse

Most people have active control only over every day talk with family members, friends or colleagues, and passive control over, e.g., media usage.

On the other hand, members of more powerful groups or institutions, have more or less exclusive access to, and control of, more types of public discourse: professors control scholarly discourse, teachers’ educational discourse, journalist’s media discourse, lawyers’ legal discourse, politicians’ policy and other public political discourse. Manipulation is everywhere, we are surrounded by that.

If discourse is described in terms of communicative events, access and control may be achieved through:

• The context or setting, ongoing actions (Situationality)
• The participants, their purposes, and attitudes (Intentionality and Acceptability)
• The language (Coherence and Cohesion)
• The topic and the subtopics (Informativity)
  

These strategies used to persuade are called: constructions of legitimacy, used to convince the addressee that what you are saying is true.

1. Authorization: personal, expert, role model, authority of tradition, and of conformity. E.g., “because that’s what most people do”. Link what you say to some kind of authority, e.g., “experts from the University of Cambridge say that COVID will not be a problem for humanity anymore” has more chances to convince someone than saying “COVID won’t be a problem to humanity anymore”.
   
2. Moral evaluation: using evaluative adjectives (‘normal’, ‘useful’, ‘wrong’), or by abstraction or analogy with situations of positive or negative connotations, e.g., “This looks like Venezuelan style”. The number of adjectives depends on how much you want your idea to stand out. You can have both negative and positive adjectives.
   
3. Rationalization: instrumental (starting the goal, means or effect) or theoretical (e.g., giving definitions, explanations, predictions, etc.). E.g.: 1) “Many immigrants are coming to Spain”, 2) 1.7 million immigrants have come to Spain in the last five years”: the stronger option is the second one because it gives specific data. Predictions can be used as if something is going to happen for sure, we do that with the use of modal verbs, e.g., “unemployment will be less next year”: it is a rationalized prediction. Another way of rationalizing is by explaining what something is: “many immigrants, people who are starving in Africa, are coming to Spain.”.
   
4. Mythmaking: telling moral tales to legitimize or delegitimize someone or something straightforwardly or by inversion (inverted mythmaking). “It was the dictator who saved the republic”, if you tell that idea frequently enough, people will believe it.
   
5. Transitivity, Agency, Modality: all texts contain participants and processes for the construction or reality. Processes always construct a certain kind of relationship between participants, a relationship which Halliday calls transitivity. Participants may be portrayed as performing actions or as having actions performed to on them.
   
   1. Examples of transitivity: in a text about nationalism, the text will always be addressed to the people from that country. If you read a text about the United States Constitution, it is addressed for those living them only (We the people…).
   2. Agency is about doing the action, who is the one doing the action in the text and who is receiving the action. To play with agency, you have to focus on the agent rather than to the receiver.
   3. Modality: the use of modal verbs.
      

CDA focuses on how persuasive language is used to affect mental representations

1. Topicalization: focusing on part of the information:
   
   1. Headlines in bold for news reports
   2. New-given patterns of sentence organization
   3. Passivization (some cases) and Nominalization
   4. Other sentence rearrangements (clefts, pseudo-clefts, etc.)
   5. Rhetorical questions
      
2. Presupposition: using implicit premises: assuming receivers will take for granted the validity of social labels: based on schemas. E.g.: referring to refugees as “illegal” to restrict immigration. It is (very much) related to mythmaking.
   
3. Lexical cohesion devices.
   
   1. Deviant use of specific words as synonyms or antonyms.
   2. Careful choice of classifying and qualifying evaluative adjectives.
   3. Several types of Reiteration. If you repeat words a lot, you emphasize an idea.
   4. Lexical chains, group of words of a particular topic.
   5. Intertextuality
      

Example: Discuss how legitimacy is constructed in the text below. In doing so, consider the construction and the cohesive and topicalizing devices used.

• Authorization: the British Crime Survey, the BBC
• Rationalization: 1.4 per cent, since 1998, six per cent
• Prediction: it is estimated that some two million people
• Moral evaluation: controversial, little, new, illegal
• Transitivity: who is the author? A news reporter / Who is the addressee? The reader / the government, and consumers
• Agency: who is the agent? The government is the one doing the action / young people would be the receivers.
• Modality: there are no modal verbs in this text
• Topicalization:
  
  • the use of bold capital letters (COCAINE USE)
  • cleft sentence: it is the Home Office that… /fronting: among young people, …
  • Passivization: there has been an increase in…
  • No rhetorical questions
• Lexical cohesion
  
  • Synonyms and antonyms: increase-decline, drug-illicit substances
  • Evaluative adjectives: controversial, little, new
  • Reiteration: cocaine, drugs, government, people
  • Lexical chain: cocaine, drug, substances, cannabis, illegal, illicit, possession, reform, government
    
    • Topic: drugs