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HOW TO DO CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
1. MAKING ACTIVE CHOICE: LANGUAGE AS A SET OF RESOURCES
In linguistics there have been a number of positions on the relationship between language and thought. One of the best known positions on language use is based on the Spir-Whorf hypothesis, named after the two American linguists. They argued that humans don't live in a objective world but that this world is shaped for them by the language that has become the medium of expression in their society. Language is therefore not just a way by which we describe the world, but rather comes to comprise what we thing of as “the real world”; according to this view, different languages will shape the world differently. Few linguists accept this strong view, but rather thin bout how the ray we see the world might be influenced by the kind of language we use rather than be determined by it. Linguists have also focused on the importance of social context in language use, that we use certain types of language in certain settings due to social pressures rather than through linguistic determination. What is considered as appropriate language use exists both in everyday conventions and in institutionalized or specialist ones. Until 1970s, Structuralist views of language deriving from the work of Saussure were prevalent and still are popular today. The idea here is that we can study the features of language, the lexical and grammatical choices, as building blocks. Communication in language is based on the idea that everyone agrees to use the same words to mean the same thing. Language is seen as a kind of code whose parts are therefore relational rather than referential: they have meaning by their difference from each other rather than their similarity to objects and phenomena, such as in hieroglyphics. Saussure argued that language could be studied in terms if its use, which he called “parole” , and which would allow us o establish the underlying system, which he called “langue”. This approach to language is different as it is interested particularly in the way it's used in social context and the way we use language to “create” society. What is the key to this theory is the shift from looking at language as system to one where we think about language as a set of resources. A Social Semiotic approach to communication is interested in describing the available choices of signs and Multimodal Social Semiotics is interested not just in the means for making meanings, but in what these means are, so whether we choose to use language, images, gestures, sounds, etc. Individuals are aware of the way words and visual elements have particular affordances or potentials to mean. This approach to communication and society draws on the work of Halliday- He thought that language creates dispositions in people while at the same time allowing the possibility of more open interpretations of the world. Halliday argues that the speakers can see through and around the words and concepts hat they have in language. This is why we are able to explain what we mean to people if they don't initially understand what we say and can argue over definitions. Halliday was first and foremost concerned with the social uses of language. When we code events in language this involves choices among options which are available in grammar. Kress points out that all such choices among options which are available in grammar. Kress points out that all such choices can be viewed as ideologically significant. In the 1970s and 1980s, linguists like Fowler, Hodge, Kress and Trew began a tradition of Critical Linguistics which sought to begin to explore the way that language can be used not just to represent the world but to constitute it. This was also influenced by Chomskyan linguistics and work in French semiotics. Singe language shapes and maintains a society's ideas and values, it can also serve to create, maintain and legitimize certain kinds of social practices. It can become more or less common practice to thing that “knowledge” and “understanding” are indeed sufficient to prevent
conflicts. A Social Semiotic view of visual communication such as sound and music is based on the same set of principles. Social Semiotics assumes that we must understand that all processes of communication are to some extent rule-based although the nature of these rules can vary immensely. In a Social Semiotic approach we are concerned with the underlying available repertoire of signs and their use in context to communicate wider ideas, moods and attitudes and identities and we are interested in why specific means were used to create these. In a Social Semiotic view of visual communication, choices of visual elements and features don't represent the world, but constitute it. Like language, visual communication plays its part in shaping and maintaining a society's ideologies and can also serve to create, maintain and legitimize certain kinds of social practices. One final point to emphasize regarding a Social Semiotic approach is its difference from traditional semiotic approaches, which addressed the way that individual signs connote or symbolize. The point here is that in Social Semiotics, in both the study of language and images, we must be able to describe and document the precise semiotic choices made and view these in the context of the observed available resources. Through the individual semiotic choices that they make, authors and designers are able to encourage us to place events and ideas into broader frameworks of interpretation that are referred to as “discourses”. Once on of these frameworks is activated, they bring with them different kinds of association and shape how we are encouraged to thing about events. The term “discourse” is central to CDA: it is language in real contexts of use. In other words, discourse operates above the level of grammar and semantics to “capture what happens when these language forms are played out in different social, political and cultural arenas”. These discourses can be thought of as models of the world, in the sense described by Foucault. The process of doing CDA involves looking at choices of words and grammar in texts in order to discover the underlying discourses and ideologies. A text's linguistic structure functions, as discourse, to highlight certain ideologies, while downplaying of concealing others. Van Leeuwen and Wodak suggest that we should think about discourses as including or being comprised of kinds of participants, behaviors, goals, values and location. Fairclough explains that these discourses, such as of national unity or racial and cultural superiority, project certain social values and ideas and in turn contribute to the reproduction of social life. In other words, it's through language that we constitute the social world, or how we talk about the world influences the society we create, the knowledge we celebrate and despise and the institution we build. We often thing of news as informing us about events in the world. Journalists are often described as the eyes and ears of the public: they tell us about important things that are going on so that we can remain informed. In fact, sociologists of news have long established that this is rarely what news actually does, due to a complex range of factors, related to sourcing, the pressures of filling news space, the need to make events newsworthy. Rather, news is a very peculiar social construction of reality. The question of power has been at the core of the CDA project. Basically, power comes from privileged access to social resources such as education, knowledge and wealth, which provides authority, status and influence to those who gain this access and enables them to dominate, coerce and control subordinate groups. The aim in CDA has been to reveal what kinds of social relations of power are present in texts both explicitly and implicitly. Since language can reproduce social life, what kind of world is being created by texts and what kinds of inequalities and interests might this seek to perpetuate, generate or legitimate? Here language is not only a vehicle of communication or persuasion, but a means of social constructions and domination. As Fairclough and Wodak state, the discursive event is shaped by situations, institutions and social structures, but it also shapes them. It's also important to note that power can be more than simple domination from above; it can also be jointly produced when people believe or are led to believe that dominance is legitimate in some
Another way to overemphasize something is through OVERLESICALISATION, a strategy which consists in giving a particular emphasis on a term through the addition of adjectives and synonimes in order to persuade the reader in a certain ideological address. Overlexicalisation gives a sense of over-persuasion and is normally evidence that something is problematic or of ideological contentions. We can find it in “male nurse” or “female doctor”: the specification of the gender signals a deviation from social convention or expectation. As we can find overlexicalisation in texts, we can also find suppression where certain terms that we might expect are absent. Suppression is not always referred to the means, but it's often ideological. Usually, things like medical or legal terms are suppressed because the journalist, author or translator may have believed that they're not interesting for the listeners/readers. Halliday's theory of Social Semiotics explains that words meant not only on their own but as a part of a network of meanings. Vocabulary also makes distinctions between classes of concepts. So we find structural oppositions in texts, where the meaning is shown by two opposite categories and concepts. In language, these oppositions are opposing concepts such as young/old, good/bad,democracy/communism. Often only one of these ma be mentioned, which can imply differences from qualities of its opposites without these being overtly stated,. So I Oppositions narrow the attention to a single aspect of the subject; n this case we can talk of IDEOLOGICAL SQUARING, which means that opposing classes of concepts are built up around participants. Often texts can use lexical choices to indicate levels of authority and co-membership with the audience. Authors will often seek t influence us through claims to having power over us. This may be through legal or hierarchical means or through claiming specialist knowledge. In the first case a text might simply tell us we cannot act in a particular may because of the law In the second, scientist might tell us that we should understand the world in a particular way due to their knowledge of facts. They will use specific, official-sounding terms that help to convey authority. Alongside the “expert” language, there is the street vocabulary, made by the slang expressions used by the young and trendy. What can be more difficult in carrying out Critical Discourse Analysis is the critical analysis of texts we agree with, which are in accord with our own ideological viewpoint. The lexical choices can tend to appear as neutral to the analysis, but a closer look at these choices nevertheless helps us to reveal the way the author selects from a range f possible language choices to represent the situation. The texts we come across often communicate not only via word choices but also through non- linguistic features and elements On one level, images can be said to document; in other words, they show particular events, particular people, places and things. In semiotic terminology, they denote. Other images will still depict particular people, places, things and event, but denotation is not their primary or only purpose. They depict concrete people, places, things and events to get general or abstract ideas across. They use them to connote ideas and concepts, so asking what an image connotes is asking “what ideas and values are communicated through what is represented and the way it is represented. Of course we could argue that there is no neutral denotation and that all images connote something for us, but they are saying what is connoted but not exactly how. There are a few other points of relation between denotation and connotation that we also need to make: the importance of these will become clearer shortly. First, the more abstract the image, the more overt and foregrounded its connotative communicative purpose is. Secondly, whether the communicative purpose of an image is primarily denotative or connotative depends to some extent on the context in which the image is used. Thirdly, what an image connotes may, in some contexts, be a matter of free
association, but where image makers need to get a specific idea across, they will rely on established connotators, carries of connotations, which they feel confident their target audiences will understand. -While the concept of connotation is one we use in our analysis, we also use the term “meaning potential”; in language we have a range of communicative resources that we can use in contexts to communicate, like choosing a word over another. We therefore have a range of choices that we can use to create particular meanings. However, these meanings can change depending on on the context in which they are used. So words have meaning potential that can be realized n different contexts and which is sensitive to that context. Visual semiotic resources also have the potential to mean that is realized in specific contexts. The term “meaning potential” has the advantage over “connote” as it suggests not something field. The ideas can be expressed bu objects and hot they are represented, bu the settings in which they are placed and the light used,by its salience, which is where certain features in compositions are made to stand out, to draw the attention to foreground certain meanings. Such features will have the central symbolic value in the composition. There are a number of ways that salience can be achieved in images; certain elements carry much cultural symbolism; the size can shot the ranking of importance; the color can underline which is the most salient element, the tone can attract the receivers; different levels of focus can be used to give salience to an element, exaggerating details or blurring them; foregrounding creates importance cause element that are further back may become subordinate and with overlapping, that is the effect of placing elements in front of others, the first one is seen as the most important.
- PRESENTING SPEECH AND SPEAKERS: QUOTING VERBS In both texts and in speech it's extremely revealing if we look closely at the words chosen to represent how someone has spoken. The verb “to say” sounds really neutral, while verbs like “to whinge” are telling this to as to the mood, attitude or even character. Such choices of quoting verbs can lead to make evaluations of the situations. This simple word choices, describing how someone has spoken, can have a considerable impact on the way that authors can shape perceptions of events. Coulthard offers a systematic breakdown of verbs of saying that allows us to direct our attention more precisely to the implicit evaluation and connotation that is taking place through their use. What is important I that through analysis we are able to draw out more precisely just what is connoted through the use of each kind of quoting verb. NEUTRAL STRUCTURING VERBS: introduce a saying without evaluating it explicitly. ES: SAY METAPROPOSITIONAL VERBS: mark the author's interpretation of a speaker. ES: DECLARE – URGE – GRUMBLE METALINGUISTIC VERBS: are where the kind of language used by a speaker is specified. ES: NARRATED. DESCRIPTIVE VERBS: categorize the interaction. ES: WHISPER – LAUGH TRANSCRIPT VERBS: mark the development of the discourse or relate the quotation to other parts of the discourse. ES: REPEAT – PAUSE
omit. In any language there exists no neutral way to represent a person. All choices will serve to draw attention to certain aspects of identity that will be associated with certain kinds of discourses. Van Dijk has shown has shown that how the news aligns us alongside or against people can be thought of as what he calls “ideological squaring”. H shows how texts often use referential choices to create opposites, to make event and issues appear simplified in order to control their meaning. Representational choices will always bring associations of values, ideas and activities such as whether we describe a group of 18 year-old as “young people”, “youths” or “students”. A number of writers have shown how such referential strategies in newspapers reveal some important ideological means through which women are represented in the press, demonstrating they are not considered as individuals. To help us to be more systematic when describing referential choices Van Leeuwen offers a comprehensive inventory of the ways that we can classify people and the ideological effects that these classification may have. PERSONALISATION AND IMPERSONALISATION: we can ask to what extent the participant is personalized or personalized. Impersonalisation is used to give extra weight to a particular statement, concealing certain issues.
- Professor John smith requires academic staff to give notification of strike action.
- The university requires academic staff to give notification of strike action. INDIVIDUALISATION AND COLLECTIVISATION: it's also useful to consider how participants are described as individuals or as a part of a collectivity. Individualization bring us closer to the social actors, making us feel empathy.
- Two soldiers, private John Smith and Jim Jones, were killed today by a car bomb.
- Militants were killed today by a car bomb. SPECIFICATION AND GENERICISATION: we can also look at whether participants are represented as specific individuals or as a generic type.
- A man, Mazar Hussein, challenged police today.
- A Muslim challenged police today. NOMINATION AND FUNCTIONALISATION: participants can be nominated in terms of who they are or functionalised by being depicted in terms of what they do. Use of functionalisation can sound official, whereas nomination can sound more personal. Functionalisation can also reduce people to a role which may in fact be assigned by the writer or be generic. Functionalisation can also connote legitimacy. Machin and Mayr in their analysis of representations of multiculturalism in a British regional newspapers, showed that functionalisation, in the form of people's occupation, served to positively evaluate people as legitimate and “decent” members of local community. Those who weren't so legitimate were represented in generic terms such as “local”. USE OF HONORIFICS The way people are represented throughout what they do can also be achieved through the use of “functional honorifics”. These are terms that suggest a degree of seniority or a role that requires a
degree of respect “President”, “Lord”, Judge” signal the importance of a social actor or specialization. We might find that different ideological accounts of the same set of events will see honorifics ascribed or withheld. OBJECTIVATION Here participants are represented through a feature, like “a beauty” for a woman. This means that participants can be reduced to this features. In this case, we might argue that the woman is reduced to her physical appearance and her “womanness” becomes the key part of who she is. This can be found often in ideological squaring, where a female participant, whether she is involved in a legal or personal matter, is represented only through being a woman. ANONYMISATION: participants in texts can often be anonymised (a source, some people). AGGREGATION: it means that participants are quantified and treated as “statistics”. Van Dijk sows that this kind of statistics can be utilized to give the impression of objective research and scientific credibility, when in fact we are not given specific figures. PRONOUN VERSUS NOUN: US AND TEM: pronouns like us, we, them, are used to align us alongside or against particular ideas. Texts produces can evoke their own ideas as being our ideas and create a collective other” that is in opposition to these shared ideas. The concept of “we” is slippery: this fact can be used by tax producers and politicians to make vague statements and conceal powers relations. SUPPRESSION what is missing from a text is just as important as what is in a text. When we say “globalization” the agent is missing. In pictures as in real life, distance signifies social relations. We “keep our distance” from people we don't want to “be in touch with”. In images, distance translates as “size of frame”, which can be close, medium or long shot. In pictures, the social actor can look right at the viewers, engaging with us, or look away and off-frame, encouraging us to observe participants more “objectively” and consider what their thoughts are. Women tend to be photographed in close or medium shot. Closeups are used when we are meant to imagine the woman a the agent of the feelings expressed in the text; medium shots whtn0 it's important to see what she is wearing and to connote her acting in modernist settings. In pictures as in real life, there re different ways we can engage with people. Becoming involved I with people mean, literally, “confronting” them, coming “face to face” with them. In certain interactions we many not come face to face, but merely observe the others. The side on view is more detached and combined with closeness it can index togetherness. In images where we see people from behind, this can serve to offer us their point of view and their perspective on the world. In photographs we may also engage with the participants from the vertical angle, looking down on or up to people to various degree. Often looking down on someone can give a sense of their vulnerability, looking up at them can give a sense of their power. People can be depicted as individuals or as a group, If they're depicted as a group, they can be “homogenized” that is they are made to look like and/or act or pose like each other to different degrees, creating a “they're all the same” impression. When they're seen as individuals, they can be very specific too: black, Jewish, Muslims, and other stereotypes represented by dress, hairstyles, physical features and other. If the connotation is negative, stereotypes can become derogatory and racist. Other people are not represented in a picture, even when they are there in the scene.
EXISTENTIAL PROCESSES: they represent that something exists or happens; they use the verb to be or synonyms like exist, arise, occur and they only have one participant, which is usually preceded by “there is!or “there are” and can be any kind of phenomenon or nominalised action. When we look at these processes it's not clear what ideological function they have as such. However, things are very different when transitivity is embodied as discourses. Another way of characterizing transitivity is in terms of the way that participants in a clause can be activated or passivated. Activated social actors are represented as the active, dynamic forces in an activity (the ones who do things and make things happen. Van Leeuwen uses this kind of analytical framework to describe the way children are represented textually in contrast to teachers. Other information added to the social agents are adjuncts, which are simply lexical items that can be used to modify circumstances. A further linguistic strategy for representing social action is within a circumstance, such as within a prepositional phrase or subordinate clause. These circumstances are useful for backgrounding certain acts and for foregrounding others. Prepositional phrases begin with a preposition such as “for”, “to” “after. Richardson argues that prepositional phrases can be used to provide context for dominant clauses; for example, in newspaper headlines, prepositional phrases are often used to reduce responsibility for certain actions. Van Dijk has also discussed the way that actions can be played down when placed later in a sentence or embedded in a clause. Events may be strategically played down or in extra prominence according to their position.
- CONCEALING AND TAKING FOR GRANTED: NOMINALISATION AND PRESUPPOSITION In this chapter we look at two linguistics strategies of concealment: nominalisation and presupposition. Nominalisation typically replaces verb processes with a noun construction, which can obscure agency and responsibility for an action. Presupposition is one skillful way by which authors are able to imply meanings without overtly stating that if present things as taken for granted and stable when in fact they may be contestable and ideological. Nominalisation: in a passive sentence, those responsible for the action may be either backgrounded or left out completely. If we want to make explicit who is behind the action, we have to turn the sentence into an active sentence. An active verb would reveal the agents. The passive verb form is useful for backgrounding who performed the action represented by the verbal process. A verb process is transformed into a noun construction, creating further ambiguity which can be intentional. The nominalisation obscures the people responsible for the action, but it's different from the simple removal of the agent. In the first case the utilization of a passivized verb conceals the agent of the change, the second presents it as a noun, a thing In summary, changing a verb or process into a nominalisation can have 8 important effects:
- people are removed and therefore responsibility for the action has also been removed.
- Nominalisation can clearly hide both the agent and the affected since our vision has been channeled and narrowed..
- Nominalisation can remove any sense of time.
- 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. The addition of words that evaluate the noun or nominalisation creates nominal groups, a noun surrounded by other words that characterize or evaluate that noun. Within any clause this nominal group works as thought it were a single noun.
- Nominalisation can function as a new participant in new constructions.
- Nominalisation can themselves become sable entities that will enter common usage.
- The process is still in the sentence, so the text accumulates a sense of action but avoids agents, times and specificity through simplification.
- The text is becoming more dense or compressed. Details of events are reduced Learning how to make nominalised sentences is one good way to get used to identifying them in other texts. This process is made up bu the identification of the active verb in the cause and its change to the nominalised word. We can expand, modify or describe the information contained in a nominalisation through the addition of a clause containing further nominal groups. A type of clause common to nominal groups is a relative clause. These are dependent clauses, meaning that they can't stand alone without the main or independent clause. They are linked to the main clause by relative pronouns such as which, who, or by relative adverbs like where, when or why. PRESUPPOSITION is to do with what kinds of meanings are assumed as given in a text, what Fairclough calls the “pre-constructed elements” In fact, all language use is filled with presupposition. Much of how we process test is of course subconscious. We are not continually monitoring what people mean, although in some contexts we may come to be aware that someone is using a slightly different meaning from the one we would normally use for something. Normally, people have to rely on shared presuppositions. Presuppositions can be used in order to build a basis for what sounds kike s logical argument. Fairclough discusses the way that language can reconstitute the social world. If the fact that there is a global economy becomes accepted as a given, as it has for the most part in the western news media, then we sideline the fact that it's open for contestation, that it's part of political decisions and choices that are being made right now.
- PERSUADING WITH ABSTRACTION: RHETORIC AND METAPHOR There is a widely shared assumption that metaphor is about flowery language, tat it's something associated with poetry and creative writing: linguists have shown that metaphor is fundamental to human thought and that metaphorical thinking underlies all of our statements about the world. The study of metaphor and other rhetorical tropes has been closely aligned to the study of political rhetoric. Since the time of Aristotle, there has been as interest in how to persuade people in the contest of public speaking. It was possible during his time to train in rhetorical skills that would include hyperbole, metaphor, metonymy and puns. Cameron notes that such metaphors are useful for pedagogical purposes as they appeal to kinds of knowledge the reader may already have What is important here is to grasp that metaphor is an everyday part of language and an important way of how we grasp reality. But metaphors can be of ideological significance. Which metaphors become accepted can have implications not only of how we thing about and understand the world, but also for how we act, the institutions we build and how we organize our societies. Fairclough points out that metaphors have hidden ideological loading due to the way that they can conceal and shape understandings, while at the same time giving the impressions hat they reveal
about that information, how certain we are about it. Since language is about concealing as well as revealing, to deceive as well as inform, there are components of grammar that will help to facilitate this without being to obvious.
- I will have a beer tonight.
- I my have a beer tonight. In the first sentence, the speaker indicates much more commitment than in the second sentence. Modality has been categorized in many ways, but we can distinguish three forms: EPISTEMIC DOMALITY: this is to do with the speaker's or author's judgment o the truth of any proposition. If I say “I may have a beer tonight”, I am expressing uncertainty about the proposition. DEONTIC MODALITY; this is to do do with influencing people and events. Must is more influencing than may. DYNAMIC MODALITY; this is related to possibility and ability, but is not subjective in the manner of the first two modalities. Modals expressing high degrees o certainty might be used in order to convince people. Fairclough points to the way that modality plays an important role in the “representation of identities”- What you commit yourself to, what you show caution about, is one way that we communicate about the kind of person we are Language must only be able to convey information, but must also allow us to gauge how speakers relate to this information. The use of modals tells us something about the author's identity and crucially, therefore, how much power they have over others and over knowledge. If we read a document from some employers saying the employee “sill” do something rather than they “should or that the employer “thinks we should do it”, these will five us a very different sense of the power that they believe they have over us- If we assume that language has the role to deceive as well as inform, then grammar will contain forms that allow us to avoid making certain kind of distinctions. Modals encode probabilities and certainties, but conceal time and power. As well as modal verbs, authors can use hedging in order to create a strategic ambiguity within their claims. Hedging means that a speaker avoids directness or commitment to something, although as we will see, this can often be used to give the impression of being detailed and precise. Hedging can be used to distance ourselves from what we say and to attempt to dilute the force of our statements and therefore reduce chances of any unwelcome responses. Sunoo demonstrates that terms such as “some”, many and others can be used to gloss over the lack of concrete evidence. Without hedging, however, the speech would lose the elements that serve to soften its contents. Hedges can also serve the important role of giving the impression that the opposite is taking place, that they are increasing the level of explanation and clarification, rather than obfuscating it. We can identify the features of hedging:
- long noun phrases;
- modal verbs and adverbs such as may, perhaps, and auxiliary verbs such as seems to and verbs such as especially
- approximators like some, somewhat, and the compounding of these to a somewhat lesser extent..
- Non-factive verbs such as report or suggest.
- Comparative forms of adverbs suck as “more concerned than before” which suggest precision.
- Specific times and referral to history sch as “since last year”, or previously.
- Reference to an official body, report, person or expert.
- Connectors such as while, although, nonetheless, moreover are import to convey that the speaker is covering all the options and alternative explanations. This can be important when speakers are required to appear cautious.
- Excessive defining of concepts and terms. In visual communication, modality can be used to convey the realness or unrealness of pictures, starting from the background, to the details, colors and other elements. Some ways of visual expression indicated to express modality are:
- degrees of the articulation of detail, the scale from the simple line detail to the sharpest and most finely framed photograph.
- Degrees of articulation of the background, ranging from a blank background via lightly sketches in or out-of-focus backgrounds, to maximally sharp and detailed backgrounds.
- Degrees of depth articulation, ranging from the absence of any depth to maximally deep perspective, with other possibilities in between.
- Degrees of articulation of light and shadow, ranging from zero articulation to the maximum number of degree of “depth” of shade, with other options in between.
- Degrees of articulation of light and shadow, ranging from zero articulation to the maximum number of degree of depth of shade, with other options in between.
- Degrees of articulation of tone, ranging from just two shades of tonal gradation, black an white, to maximum tonal gradation.
- Degrees of color modulation, ranging from flat, unmodulated color to the representation of all the fine nuances of a given color.
- Degrees of color saturation, ranging from black and white to maximally saturated colors.
