Critical Discourse Analysis and Discourse of Power: CDA in Practice

Scientific Essay from the year 2012 in the subject Speech Science / Linguistics, grade: Excellent with honor, course: Critical Discourse Analysis, language: English, abstract: The present paper has shown the practical part of CDA according to three scholars, namely they are Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, and Teun van Dijk. Their approaches are somehow different in method and way of interpretation. While Fairclough is brought up on the systemic-functional model of theory and thus often concentrates on rather limited amounts of research material, Wodak turns to sociolinguistics and ethnography with an emphasis on corpus-based research and on work with different approaches with a variety of empirical data as well as background information. However, the notion that language is inherently social remains a key assumption in both approaches. On the other hand, similarly to Fairclough, van Dijk acknowledges three different perspectives; text, discourse practice and sociocultural practice, and emphasizes on the link between textual analysis and sociocultural analysis. However, van Dijk differentiates himself from both Fairclough and Wodak in his understanding of social events or of social institutions and power relations. To van Dijk, social cognitions mediate between micro- and macro-levels of society, between discourse and action, between the individual and the group. Therefore, the focus on social cognition governs the process of analysis.