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CRITICAL DISCOURS ANALYSIS
It’s a sort of evolution of rhetoric. Rhetoric describes, persuades, gives you toolkits to create a good speech, critical discourse analysis does a similar sort of operation but it has different purposes, different goals.
We are going to mention the text all this comes from, that is How To Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Introduction by David Machin and Andrea Mayr.
It’s a combination of processes, that is not especially really tied together (=it’s lots of different people walking together on generally similar topics with generally similar approach). It is founded in linguistics, so it has to do with language and we normally associated it with the research/study of several, very important people: Kress, 1985; Fairclough, 1989; Wodak, 1989; Van Dijk, 1991; Van Leeuwen, 1996; Caldas Coulthard,
This is a thorough and systematic analysis of language, meaning we don’t only try to get the general sense, we try to understand how this general sense is created it in the text (=written, videos,…) or on the picture. It has points of contact with cultural studies. So, it has points of contact with cultural studies , a big umbrella term that covers pretty much anything that has to do with how culture impacts society and vice versa. What differentiates critical discourse analysis from cultural studies is that the approach is systematic, it truly looks at language, instead cultural studies has more an literature approach.
CDA applies to any medium: written and visual communication.
CRITICAL LINGUISTICS
CDA starts in Critical Linguistics , that is very similar as a group of people (Roger Fowler, Robert Hodge, Gunter Kress and Tony Trew). It’s not an old discipline, the first writings were in the 70s at the University of East Anglia in the UK. This can be found in their classic publication Language and Control (Fowler et al., 1979). Critical Linguistics sought to show how language and grammar can be used as ideological instruments, how they can transmit/perform an ideology.
EXAMPLE: The large size of the farms is needed because of the land’s poor carrying capacity. This comes from a school book of geography. It’s about the productivity of the land, how much you can grow on it. Explained in other words: we need a lot of land because it’s not productive and therefore farms need to be very big.
- Who needs the farm to be large? We don’t know. This is taken out of context, but that’s the point; taken out of context we just don’t know because they have used a passive voice.
- What do we know of the land? We just know it’s not productive. We have only a negative attribute connected to the land. The text only tells us what the land is good or bad for, it’s about what the land can do for us, how productive it can be. We don’t have any sort of comments on how the land is in terms of non-productivity (desert, good environment for animals), we only know that is not very good for production, implied extensive, intensive production.
- What we get for this geography text? Is that we can only talk about the land in terms how productive it is, we don’t need to talk about it in geographical terms.
This example helps to understand the operation that CDA carries out. It looks at a text, a word, a picture,…and tries to understand what it is not saying or what it is implying. It’s not only about the explicit meaning that you get. CDA looks at what isn’t there, what is missing (the emptiness) and it’s not always easy. The key of Critical Linguistics here is that these things are never communicated directly in the text but can be revealed by looking for absences. Plus, it’s really used for political and economical language, but not only.
Why do we move from CL to CDA? Because, CL still was lacking in terms of activism. CL wanted to identify these unsaid things, these relations between powerful ideology and what is written, BUT it was just a sort of descriptive approach. CDA has a very intense connection with activism, with social intervention change. Most of the scholars of linguistics limit the scope of their research to analyzing, describing, reporting, they never really want to move too much to true activism. CDA actually wants to inspire change, so that’s why you say that it’s about developing methods and theories that could better capture this interrelationship between language, power and ideology. Plus, it also tries to draw out and describe the practices and conventions in and behind texts that reveal political and ideological investment, but it is also openly committed to political intervention and social change.
THE KEY POINT OF CDA
It is the assumption that the power relations are discursive. The way we relate to each other, the way that power moves to one person to another is convened through language and language modifies it.
CDA typically analyses news texts, political speeches, advertisements, school books, etc., exposing strategies that appear normal or neutral on the surface but which may in fact be ideological and seek to shape the representation of events and persons for particular ends.
WHY DO WE CALL IT “CRITICAL”?
Applying criticism to something, in this case to discourse, means to have a look at how neutral works and say “it’s not actually neutral”, in other words is “denaturalizing” the language to reveal the kinds of ideas, absences and taken for granted assumptions in texts.
WHAT “DISCOURSE” IS FOR?
Discourse is the word we tend to use these days to talk about language in the context, in which it’s used, in the real context. So, when we talk about discourse we want to talk about the ideas being communicated though a text.
From the fact that language shapes the society, the society shapes language, that language helps us to understand the world in a certain way, exc., we can deduce that
The title is quite clear. There’s an important word in it: deluge, that means a huge quantity (avalanche). This word is important because it connotes the immigration wave in its negatives terms; it gives the idea of something enormous that can’t be stopped, that is coming to take over the nation. Immigration is described using the term ‘deluge’, a metaphor that draws on the idea of masses of rainfall that overspill, creating floods and damage.
What do you expect? It’s going to complain about immigration and not in a neutral way. We already know that this article will be partisan (a clear political orientation).
The image it’s clear. Plus, it’s a stereotypical representation of immigration.
At the end of the first page there are important sentences:
- “projections by government statisticians” he doesn’t tell where he got the information
- “shared by reputable academics” who are they? And who says they are reputable?
- “popular consent” how does he know? We are not given specific sources, they are ambiguous.
Even in the second part, where the author starts talking about culture rather than political arguments, exc., there are ambiguous things.
The author uses words pertaining to the field of invasion. He also talks about a threat, about defense. He uses aggressive language, that is pertaining to the semantic field of war conquest.
‘we’ need to ‘defend’ our ‘indigenous culture’. → Who ‘we’ are remains unspecified, as does the nature of our ‘indigenous culture’. In Britain’s evolving multicultural make-up and the diversity of ways of life and cultural values that have long been present based around social class, regional and other groupings, so how can we pin such factors down?
While the author of this text is at pains to point out that they are not racist, everything else they say suggests that they are.
POWER IN CDA
Whenever we do critical discourse analysis and we are talking about power relations , we are talking about a dominant actor element/category and a discriminated set of people. We are talking about somebody who has power, somebody who needs to be identified as the actor that has power.
Power derives from privilege; the more you have access to education, money, welfare, the more you can exercise or power, the more you can grow it and the more you can use it. So, when we have privileged actors, acquiring more and more power, and then exercising that power on those that do not have the same privileges, we are talking about relationships based on domination, coercion and control.
Whenever we talk about CDA, we talk about making power relations clear. It’s power fueled most of the times by an ideology; power and ideology go hand in hand, so you have the power to disseminate an ideology. If you control the media, you can transmit your ideology. If you have access to knowledge, you can inform and form your ideology and then you can spread it. This means that whoever gets the power imposes their ideology on the rest. This is why we talk about dominant discourse, because it’s discourse based on the power of the dominant class that imposes its ideology on the rest. The goal/The mission of CDA is to reveal the dynamics of power, who is in charge, who is imposing their ideology on the rest and how they are doing so.
MULTIMODAL CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
It’s a spinoff of CDA that includes the other semiotic modes (pictures, sounds and so on).
In Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) we are interested in showing how images, photographs, diagrams and graphics also work to create meaning, in each case describing the choices made by the author. We want to place these meanings next to those we have found in the accompanying texts.
Both text and image can be thought of as being composed of communicative choices by authors that seek to do certain kinds of work for them. The job of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis is to identify and reveal these choices through a careful process of description guided by the tools provided. But what is central to Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis is the sense of being critical , as described by Fairclough and Wodak (1997).
Texts will use linguistic and visual strategies that appear normal or neutral on the surface, but which may in fact be ideological and seek to shape the representation of events and persons for particular ends. So in Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis we will also seek to ‘denaturalise’ representations on other modes of communication.
Also in common with CDA, MCDA views other modes of communication as a means of social construction. Visual communication, as well as language, both shapes and is shaped by society.
EXAMPLE: Picture: Woman in Cosmopolitan magazine she an officer person. She’s smart dressed (=professional office oriented type). She’s strongly sexualized (for the posture). She’s doing nothing, she’s just posing for a picture. They want to transmit the idea of professional dressed like this. There’s a purse instead of a chair. She seems don’t especially happy. She has standards to respect. This is a telling picture. Text: The text is about fitness, keeping fit. The two key words are: bikini body and sport that flat tummy. A body that looks good to other people.
The only thing that ties the picture with the text is only work.
The implied message : if you have a bikini body you will have success professionally.
“Brexit: Warning Dover could see 17-mile tailbacks due to new EU checks” (BBC, 2021) BBC is not neutral
SOCIAL SEMIOTIC APPROACH vs TRADITIONAL SEMIOTIC APPROACH Semiotic approach study how signs connote or symbolize. The traditional semiotic approach is tied to the fact that we try to see how one thing symbolize something else. Social semiotic instead go a bit deeper; it doesn’t stop at the symbol, it asks how is this symbol transmitted. (it’s another way to say it’s multimodal critical discourse analysis).
EXAMPLE: the flag
Traditional semiotic approach would say that a flag symbolizes the nation and then you can add things: For patriotic people the flag is a symbol of unity, strength, for something to fight for, exc. For anarchist people the flag is a symbol of something to be destroyed. So you connote the flag according to the group of people you’re considering
Social semiotic approach the feeling you get from the flag on the left pure, clear, bright, free. It’s a very saturated picture. The message it transmit is that it is waving proud standing behind a beautiful background (clear sky). Plus, the photo is taken from the bottom up, this remind the idea of supremacy. The feeling you get from the flag on the right dark, dirty, obscure. It’s wasted away. It’s like this flag is something not to be proud of and that it’s hiding something. Also, it transmits the idea of the war. We get different feelings out of these pictures, but they are the same symbol.
So, at a very traditional approach we would just have to say that they both symbolize nations and one nation is powerful the other nation is not. But in social semiotic we go very deep into the analysis of the picture (colours, angle of the picture, background, movement,…) to convey a message of strength, power, justice and for the second one represent a sense of injustice, sacrifice and so on.
ANALYSINIG SEMIOTIC CHOICES: WORDS AND IMAGES
THE WORDS AND THE CONNOTATION
Concretely speaking when we are not just looking at the macro level of the text, how do we identify ideology, how do we identify power imbalances? We have lots and lots of ways
- what words are being used in the text? Ex: youths attack local buildings / youths attack local addresses / youths attack family homes. in family homes there’s a stronger reaction.
- what is the connotation?
EMDA “mission statement” East Midlands Development Agency uses: Corporate-speak for their mission statement Repeated use of: dynamic, innovation, competing, creativity, strategic, goals… No direct mention of unemployment nor of potential solutions No clear reference to social actors (poor, unemployed people, or those who need to find solutions) just to partners or stakeholders Poverty becomes a “challenge” to be solved with “creativity” and “innovation” Corporate-speak conceals the actual responsibility (which lies with the government)
OVERLEXICALIZATION Next to the word choice itself we have something called overlexicalization : it is when you find a list of words that are very similar to each other, being used as a set of adjectives for example. It’s like saying “the very beautiful pretty cute and fluffy cat I saw yesterday was adorable”, it’s all the same word essentially just putted in different ways. This is sadly common whan we make the gender explicit (es: male nurse/ female doctor).
Article from El Soldado, April 1989 The overlexicalization is in “unpatriotic forces of Marxist subversion”. We don’t need all that, but overlexicalization almost always is used to highlight the very negative or very positive features of something. Overlexicalization is used very often to convince to persuade the reader to stand with one side and against the other side of the conflict in this case.
SUPPRESSION or LEXICAL ABSENCE There’s another technique and it’s called suppression or lexical absence : what’s missing.
APTN feed as received by IRN, 18 September 2003 The article is about a trial, and we have just a little description. The first is the complete article, the second is the rewrite for a radio. The things that have changed are:
- They don’t say it was the prosecutor that asked for a reduction;
- There’s more national take;
- The focus is on the Britons, meaning that the IRN rewrite is most probably addressed to British people;
- The number: 20 years he’s been jailed for life. In the first part they say that the man was risking the death penalty, the prosecutor asked for 20 years, but they don’t say he got life. However, in the second part the reporting is: a man has been jailed for life.
There are many reasons this could happen (=changing the articles). It certainly is tied to the news outlet to kind of radio disease (national radio or British radio), to the format (shorter news stories) and to the ideological setting.
Right: technical scientifical terms
We need to be aware of our own perspective on things : one of the most difficult things to do is analyze critically texts with which we agree. This means that we have to be aware of our own opinions, our own point of view, because one of the most difficult things to do is analyze critically when we are naturally driven to believe something we agree with. So we have to be critical even on the things we agree with.
ICONOGRAPHY CDA can be carried out on pictures as well, on multimedia texts ( iconography ). When we analyze a picture, we have to be pretty precise, analytical. When we try to understand what sort of message a picture is trying to send to the audience, we have to consider these things: Attributes : how does the picture look, what sort of objects do we see in the picture, are these objects in focus, out of focus and so on. The setting Salience : what’s the first thing you notice in a picture, what draws your attention, because the things that you notice first are normally the most important and the ones that carry more symbolic meaning.
- Potent cultural symbols
- Size
- Colour
- Tone
- Focus
- Foregrounding
- Overlapping (when two things cover a bit each other)
Vogue UK , 18 March 2022 The core of the message: she’s pregnant, she’s losing her friends and she’s worried. She looks great, not like a mum (the article is published in Vogue). She looks very young, fit and there’s no bag for the kids (impossible for a normal mother). The kids look like dolls. Picture: vintage atmosphere and modern. What’s the relationship with the article and the picture the babies in the strollers. What’s sort you would chosen? A woman with a big belly, a group of friends on a side (=different setting).
QUOTING VERBS There’s another thing to pay attention to: the quoting verbs. They are the verbs that explains the way we report things that people have been said, because sometimes the way we report things is very telling. We are touching our personal opinion, so these verbs express the attitude of the speaker.
EXAMPLES “My flatmates never clean the kitchen” She said, “My flatmates never clean the kitchen” neutral
She complained, “My flatmates never clean the kitchen” it transmits her “personal evaluation” about this situation She muttered, “My flatmates never clean the kitchen” it’s complaining in a quiet way, because maybe she doesn’t her flatmates to hear her.
Jack Monroe (she’s quite famous because she carried out a very public and successful campaign against the rising prices of fundamentals).
BBC row Telegraph demands ITV pressure FT listen M/P/G campaign Five different ways to report the same thing.
This is a list of some quoting verbs and their “meaning”
(metapropositional: they report the author’s impression of the speaker)
‘You’re a liar and murderer’: Blair booed after telling Iraq inquiry he has no regrets ( The Daily Mail 29 Jan 2010) No regrets: Tony Blair said Britain would ultimately be able to look back on the Iraq War with ‘immense pride’ This article is about a very controversial moment: the entry into the Iraq War by the UK. The quoting verbs are: heckled; refused to express; insisted; cries; rejected; had to tell; conceded but continued; replied; erupt and cry; booed; shouted; chimed in.
VISUALING A SPEAKER’S ATTITUDE
When choosing a picture to go with a text, we must choose carefully – even when we use stock pictures consider:
The youths hung around outside the shop.
Reporting sexual assault: Where a man is considered guilty, he will be referred to as a ‘sex fiend’, ‘monster’ or ‘pervert’. In this case, he will attack innocent women who will be referred to as ‘mother’, ‘daughter’ or ‘worker’. where the man is considered innocent, the woman will be referred to as a ‘divorcee’ or through physical features such as ‘blonde’ or ‘busty’. In this case, she will have provoked an innocent man, referred to as ‘hubby’, ‘father of four’ or ‘worker’.
CLASSIFICATION OF SOCIAL ACTORS You have a big question to ask: who gets humanized? (or who do we sympathize with?). When you ask this question you can think about several elements:
- personalization and impersonalization Professor John Smith requires academic staff to give notification of strike action. The university requires academic staff to give notification of strike action.
- individualization vs collectivization Two soldiers, privates John Smith, and Jim Jones, were killed today by a car bomb. Militants were killed today by a car bomb. Collectivization is a strong to bury the tragedy of death.
- specification and genericization (typified characterization) A man, Mazar Hussein, challenged police today. A Muslim man challenged police today.
- nomination of functionalization (=the role) George Bush said that democracy would win. The American president said that democracy would win.
- use of honorifics (=the titles) A government spokesperson said yesterday that there was no official involvement in the affair. The Minister of Foreign Affairs said yesterday that there was no official involvement in the affair. When Joe Biden became president last year, his wife was titled with Doctor. People went crazy.
- objectivation ‘A ball of fun’ for a baby ‘A beauty’ for a woman
- anonymisation A source said today that the government would be focusing on environmental issues. Some people believe that globalisation is a bad thing.
- aggregation Many thousands of immigrants are arriving in...
Scores of Muslim inmates at a high security prison are set to launch a multi- million pound claim for compensation after they were offered…
- pronoun vs noun (us vs. them) We live in a democracy of which we are proud. They shall not be allowed to threaten our democracies and freedom. We have to decide to be strong and fight this global terrorism to the end.
- suppression (lack of agent) nominalization we don’t use a verb, we use a noun instead. Globalisation is now affecting all national economies. Market-based economies are establishing themselves in all areas of life.
EXAMPLE: EMDA “mission statement”
- The participants in this text are: ‘East Midlands Innovation’, ‘innovative, knowledge based companies’, ‘we’, ‘organisations’, ‘individuals’, ‘I’, ‘partners’, ‘the strategic driver of economic development
- There is a high level of abstraction that does not allow us to understand what processes are being carried out with what kind of causality, by which social actors and in which times and places, if relevant.
- Texts like this are designed to avoid any kind of specificity. Occasionally the use of buzzwords can be seen to clash with reality, for example when abstraction meets with actual everyday issues.
VISUAL REPRESENTATION OF PEOPLE (The things already written work also for pictures). Positioning the viewer in relation to people inside the image (distance, angle) In the foreground there’s a soldier and in the background there’s a Taliban (possibly) the soldier gets humanized In the foreground there’s a girl who looks sad; in the background blurred we have a group of people talking about her the girl gets humanized
VISUAL REPRESENTATION In a picture, the most important thing is what we don’t see. It’s called lack of representation or non-representation. The issue is that we are missing specific things, like people of colour and men and women respectively. Disney princesses there aren’t people of colour (these days it has been more inclusive, for example The princess and the frog) Billionaires women don’t feature.
ANALYSINIG SEMIOTIC CHOICES: REPRESENTING ACTION
The most important concept tied to the idea of representing action is transitivity or how they are represented as acting (agent) or not acting (patient) who does the action, to whom and how. It’s really a way to show if we are more interested on who’s doing the action or on who’s receiving the action (the agent or the patient). It’s a way to show if we want to hide something, if we are omitting who’s doing the action. It’s one of the easiest way to find suppression.
o verbal processes are expressed through the verb ‘to say’ and its many synonyms. They imply a sayer, a receiver and a verbiage. o relational processes are processes that encode meanings about states of being, where things are stated to exist in relation to other things. They are expressed through the verb ‘to be’, which is the most frequent, but synonyms such as ‘become’, ‘mean’, ‘define’, ‘symbolise’, ‘represent’, ‘stand for’, ‘refer to’, ‘mark’ and ‘exemplify’ are also classed as relational processes. To ‘have’ in the sense of possessing something is another relational process, as in ‘She has a car’. Relational processes allow us to present as ‘facts’ what could be classed as opinion, as in ‘A lot of people have worries about immigration’. o existential processes represent that something exists or happens, as in ‘There has been an increase in enemy activity’. Existential processes typically use the verb ‘to be’ or synonyms such as ‘exist’, ‘arise’ or ‘occur’, and they only have one participant, as in ‘There was an attack’. This participant, which is usually preceded by there is or there are, may be any kind of phenomenon and often denotes a nominalised action.
It is important that agency is directly tied of material processes, so the acts of doing. The more I am portrayed as somebody who does things, the more I am an agent, the more agency I have. I speak, I move around and study and portray these topics as fascinating. The agent tells us what to do. This is not purely grammatical, we are not talking about me being the subject of the sentence, but often it’s me being the subject of a sentence in which the verb represents a material process, because it’s very common to find, for example, women in an active role but the verbs for which we are the active subjects tends to be behavioral processes, or mental processes, or material processes with no outcome whatsoever.
EXAMPLES: Machin and Thornborrow, 2006 in women’s magazines women are highly active but in terms of behavioural processes, mental processes and material processes which have no goal or outcome. So the women might be busy ‘hoping’, ‘worrying’, ‘walking’, ‘watching’, ‘reading’. This is even though the magazine is branded as for the ‘Fun, Fearless, Female’, which would suggest a woman that indeed is ‘out there’ accomplishing things in the world. The same kinds of process patterns have been noted of the way that women behave in romantic fiction (Ryder, 1999): She trailed through life in that red dressing-gown. She moved languidly about. She was so full of understanding. She sat upright and quiet, with wide-open eyes. The protagonists in these novels are not involved in material processes which bring about changes in the world or those which have beneficiaries. We can say, therefore, that they are ‘passivated’ rather than ‘activated’. It is often the male hero who is activated.
Our boys blitz Taliban bash, The Sun , 31 December 2007 British soldiers are represented as agents in the text.
All these verb processes suggest a clear attempt at representing warfare as an adventure performed by precisiontrained troops.
We are given access to their mental state through the behavioural verb ‘grinned’.
The Taliban are represented as passive. Verbs position them as receivers, as in where they were ‘targeted’ and ‘pounded with mortars’.
One process has been BACKGOUNDED (placed in the background) in this text. The effects of the missile are absent from the text. There are no verb processes, such as ‘being dismembered’, ‘maimed’, or horrifically wounded’.
CONCEALING AND TAKEN FOR GRANTED: NOMINALIZATION
Nominalization : verb processes are replaced with a noun construction. It is the technique to obscure/hide agency and responsibility for an action, what exactly happened and when it took place. It’s a thee step process: you start with an active verb, then you passivate it (you remove agency) and last the step towards nominalization. When with do this, the action is not an action anymore, it’s not a process anymore, it’s a thing. We don’t have a subject, a patience, we don’t have a tense, there is no reference to time.
EXAMPLE: The civilians were killed during a bombing raid (by the American bombers) → The killing of civilians during the bombing raid (by whom? WHEN? There is no verb tense in nominalization!!)
Nominalization can have 8 effects :
- people are removed and therefore responsibility for the action has also been removed. The student lost his course work and was rather upset. → The student was upset about the loss of his course work.
- nominalization can clearly hide both the agent and the affected since our vision has been cancelled and narrowed. Fighting has affected the supply of services to rural areas.
- nominalization can remove any sense of time. The Prime Minister rejected a call to carry out an inquiry into allega-tions of corruption. He announced that the tightening of sanctions was a decision that had been made through all the legal channels.
- since actions become a thing, it can be counted, described, classified and qualified through the resources of the nominal group, but this means that causality is now of secondary concern.
PADDING
Often we “pad” our language with words like “sometimes, often, and little” to dilute the message: We sometimes see irritation in customers who have to wait for a long time We see irritation in customers who have to wait for a long time
