Critical Discourse Analysis

(CDA)
0. What is Discourse?

1. Foundational ideas for CDA (Language-Power-Ideology)

2. What is CDA?

3. Steps in doing CDA

4.Common CDA research topics

 0. Discourse
• “Discourse” means different things to different
scholars in different fields.
(1) anything beyond the sentence (text = discourse)

(2) language use

(3) broad range of social practice (non-lingusitic + lingusitic) that constructs
and reinforces power/racism (discourse of power, discourse of racism) (social
theory in DA)

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 Language use/language in use

• Language use: language in its context

• A single word in its context can be a discourse

=> Discourse refers to the communicative process in which text is the

product of that process.

• There are 2 processes involved: that of text production and of text

interpretation)

• Text is seen as the product of the production processes and as the

resource for the interpretation process 3
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A conversation: police officier-witness (after a robbery)
(Fairclough, Language & Power)

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 1. Foundational ideas (tenets/principles)
1.1. Language use is socially conditioned
• How language is used (language use) is determined by social
conditions (here, the nature of the unequal relationship
between the police and members of the public)

• That way of talking (compliance with the conventions already

set) reproduces/sustains the unequal relationship of power

=> Discourse refers to the communicative process in which

language in the form of texts is produced and interpreted in a
social communicative setting

• 3 dimensions of discourse: text, processes, social context

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 1.2. Language use functions idelogically
• Beliefs and viewpoints are embedded in language selections. (Our
language is far from neutral)

• Therefore, language use reflects the interest of certain social groups,

based on age, gender, power, etc. (Discourse functions ideologically)

• Eg: “Bare name/ hắn/thằng/ đối tượng + name” instead of ông, cụ

• Expansion - Invasion,
• Illumination - Imperialism,
• hero - terrorist,
• contrai-quý tử,
• thảm họa môi trường- sự cố môi trường
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 1.2=> 1.3. Language is power
• We do not suggest that power is just language. Language is
just one aspect of power. Power exists in various modalities,
including physical force

• It is important to distinguish the exercise of power through:

- Coercion/violence
- The manufacture of consent (Ideologies are the main means
of manufacturing consent - Ideologies as a mechanism of
power)

• Ideology is pervasively present in language.

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 What is “ideology”?
• “Common-sense” assumptions in a social/professional doctor-
patient encounter (implicit, people are generally not consciously
aware):

- The doctor have knowledge about medicine, the patient doesn’t.

- The doctor is in the position to determine how health problems
should be dealt with, the patient isn’t.
- It is right/natural that the doctor should control the course of the
consultation and treatment and the patient should comply

=> These assumptions are ideologies!

=> It is possible to find these sorts of assumptions embedded in
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language
 Power-Ideology-Language
• Ideologies and power are closely linked because the
ideological assumptions embedded in a particular
convention depend on the power relations which
underlie the convention.

• Ideologies and language are closely linked. Using

language is a common social behavior where most
common sense assumptions lie.

• Ideology is pervasively present in language.

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2. What is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)?

• CDA is an approach to discourse to reveal these hidden

and often “out-of-sight” ideologies, values, positions and
perspectives. (bias or angles of representations in text)

• CDA pays particular attention to the relation between

language and power, aiming to unearth the ideologies
underlying discourse.

• “Critical” is used in the sense that aims to show up

connections that may be hidden from people. (Critical is to
be understood as having distance to the data)
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 Aim of CDA
• Uncover how power relation is reproduced,
maintained and changed by language (Fairclough)
• Increase the consciousness/awareness of how
language contributes to the domination of some
people (Fairclough)
• Make people more socio-politically aware of the way
language is used to manipulate them’ (Widdowson,
2000: 9).
“How do we recognize the shackles that tradition has
placed upon us?
For if we can recognize them, we are also able to break
them.” (Franz Boas) 12
 CDA vs. other DA approaches
Approaches in DA:

- Bottom-up approach: starting from fine-grained analysis of

language use, assembling evidence of language use -> make
generalisations about communication, culture, society. (CA)

- Top-down approach: beginning with larger structures and

working top-down (CDA, genre analysis)

•CDA tries to connect the micro structure of conversation/text to

the macro structrure of society.

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 3. Steps in doing CDA
• There are 3 aspects/dimensions of discourse: text,
processes, social context
=> correspondingly, 3 steps/ stages in analyzing discourse:
• Description: describe formal properties of text
(vocabulary, grammatical structures, coherence, etc.)
• Interpretation is concerned with the relationship
between text and interaction (2 processes)
• Explanation is concerned with the relationship
between interaction and social context - with the social
determination of processes of production and
interpretation and social effects.
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 4. Research topics in CDA
• CDA looks at different data sources ranging from
media discourse, political discourse, textbooks to
everyday discourse, etc.

• The issues of concern are often racism, gender

inequality or any forms of unequal power relations
enacted in discourse

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 Reference
• Language and Power, Fairclough
• The Routledge Handbook of Applied
Linguistics
• Nguyen Thi Thu Ha, Critical Discourse Analysis

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 Other explanations
• Social practices are mechanisms by which action unfolds in
situ: (
“By ‘social practice’, I mean a relatively stabilised form of social
activity (examples would be classroom teaching, television news,
family meals, medical consultations). Every practice is an
articulation of diverse social elements within a relatively stable
configuration, always including discourse.” (Fairclough)

• The term ‘social practice’ refers to human activity when

emphasizing the conventional aspect of activity and its
relation to social structure

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 Other explanations
• How language, in its everyday life and professional
usages, enables us to understand social concerns.

• Language is not simply a system of sentences but

language as discourse and as action.

• Society is not a mosaic of individual existences looked

in a stratified structure but a dynamic formations of
relationships and practices

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