HOW TO DO CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
CDA are the tools for analysing texts and spoken language. Such detailed analysis can allow
us to reveal more precisely how speaker and authors use language and grammatical features
to create meanings, to persuade people to think about events in particular way. The aim of
this book is to present a set of tools often used by critical discourse analysists and show how
these can be used to analyse a range of media texts.
CDA has its origins in “critical linguistics” which appear in the late 1970s. the key concept of
critical linguistics is that things are never communicated directly in the text but can be
revealed by looking for absence. One of the main criticisms of Critical Linguistics has been
its lack of development of the nature of the link between the language, power and ideology.
CDA tried to develop methods and theory that could better capture this interrelationship and
especially to draw out and describe the practises and conventions in and behind texts. What
all CDA authors have in common is the view of language as a means of social construction:
language both shapes and is shaped by society. CDA in not so much interested in language
use itself, but in the linguistic character of social and cultural processes and structures. For
CDA analysts the primary focus in on how power relations are exercised and negotiated in
discourse in order to reveal connections between language power and ideology that are
hidden from people.
In the late XX century a number of authors who had been working in linguistics began to
realise that meaning is generally communicated not only through language but also through
other semiotic modes. These authors believed that some of principles of linguistic analysis
could be equally applied to visual communication. What was needed was a set of tools that
would allow us to study the choices of visual features just as CDA allowed us to study lexical
and grammatical choices in language. Many authors began to work on a number of concepts
and tools that would allow the analysist to describe not only the features and elements of
images but also how these worked together in order to demonstrate that Images can be used
to say things that we cannot say in language . In multimodal critical discourse analysis we are
interested in showing how images, photographs, 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 text. But what is central to MCDA is the sense
of being critical. Obviously the toolkit we present only allow us to show what semiotic
resources have been used in texts, what meaning potential these have. We cannot say hoe
readers will receive these texts nor make any conclusions about the intentions of the authors.
In linguistics there have been a number of positions regarding the relation between language
and thoughts. One of the best known is the Sapir Whorf hypothesis. They argued that humans
do not live in an objective world but rather that this world is shaped for them by the
language. This extreme form is called linguistic determinism where our thinking is
determined by our language. Few linguists accept this strong view but rather think about how
the way we see the world might be influenced by the kind of language we use rather than be
