Lecture (9)

Critical Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis covers severaldifferent approaches.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)is a perspective which studies therelationship between discourseevents and sociopolitical andcultural factors especially the waydiscourse is ideologicallyinfluenced by, and can itselfinfluence, power relations insociety.

Q.1

CDA aims to help reveal some of the hidden and ‘out of sight’values, positions, and perspectives

CDA explores the connection between the use of language andthe social and political contexts in which it occurs

CDA studies how social power abuse, dominance andinequality are enacted, reproduced and resisted by textand talk in social and political contexts.

CDA deals with the relationship between discourseand power (with the aim of understanding, exposingand resisting social inequality).

CDA focuses on how discourse structures enact,confirm, legitimise, reproduce or challenge relationsof power and dominance in society.

Q.2

“…is discourse analysis with an attitude” (van Dijk, 2001)

awareness of the seen and unseen connection of structuresof power to discursive or communicative activities/events

The basic assumption is that the relationship between the formand content of discourse is not arbitrary.

There are strong connections between linguistic structure andsocial structure, to the extent that linguistic meaning isinseparable from ideology.

Fundamentally interested in not only analyzing opaque butalso transparent structural relationships of dominance,discrimination, power and control as manifested in language.

Fundamentally interested in not only analyzing opaque butalso transparent structural relationships of dominance,discrimination, power and control as manifested in language.

• Critical theories, thus also CDA, afford special understandingof human actions.

• They are aimed at producing both enlightenment andemancipation.

• CDA aims to “demystify” discourses by decipheringideologies.

Macro vs. Micro Levels of Analysis Macro-analysis: Power, Dominance, Inequality Micro-analysis: Language Use, Discourse, Verbal Interaction

& Communication

These two levels form one unified whole in everydayinteraction and experience.

Power as Control Source of Power: Privileged Access to Scarce Social

Resources; e.g. Fame? Types of Power: Coercive Force, Money, Knowledge,

Information, Authority. Types of Responses: Resist, Accept, Condone, Comply,

Legitimise (Indoctrination?)

Q.3

CDA comes from:

Marxism: ideology, hegemony

Foucault: discourse, discursive formation, power

Critical linguistics: ‘…linguistic meaning is inseparablefrom ideology’ (Fowler & Kress 1979)

CDA as a label: established in 1995 by Fairclough’sCritical Discourse Analysis: The critical study of language(Billig 2007)

Norman Fairclough: Three dimensions of acommunicative event

Ruth Wodak: Discourse-historical approach

Teun van Dijk: Socio-cognitive approach

The 1970s saw the emergence of a form of discourse andtext analysis that recognized the role of language instructuring power relations in society.

The works of Kress and Hodge (1979), Fowler, Kress,Hodge, and Trew (1979), Van Dijk (1985), Fairclough(1989), and Wodak (ed.) (1989) serve to explain andillustrate the main assumptions, principles and proceduresof what had then been known as Critical Linguistics (CL).

Kriss indicates that the term CL was “quite self-consciously adapted” (1990, 88) by the group of scholarsat the university of East Anglia in 1970s.

Kress (1990, 94) shows how CDA by that time “emergingas a distant theory of language, a radically different kindof linguistics”.

Fairclough and Wodak (1997) established 10basic principles of a CDA program.

(1) The approach is interdisciplinary. This entailsdifferent dimensions of interdisciplinarity.Teamwork consists of different researchers fromdifferent traditionally defined disciplines workingtogether. The methodologies are also adapted to thedata under investigation.

(2) The approach is problem-oriented, rather thanfocuses on specific linguistic items. Social problemsare the items of research, such as “racism, identity,social change”.

(3) The theories as well as methodologies are eclectic;i.e., theories and methodologies are integrated whichare adequate for an understanding and explanation ofthe text under investigation.

(4) The study always incorporates fieldwork andethnography to explore the object underinvestigation.

(5) The approach is abductive: a constant back and forthmovement between theory and data is necessary.

(6) Multiple genres and multiple public spaces arestudied, and intertextual and interdiscursiverelationships are investigated.

(7) The historical context is always analyzed andintegrated into the interpretation of discourse andtexts.

(8) Different approaches in CDA use differentgrammatical theories.

(9) Grand theories (highly abstract theorizing) mightserve as a foundation, in the specific analysis,middle-range theories (aiming at integrating theoryand empirical research) serve the aims better.

(10) Practice and application are aimed at. The resultsshould be made available to experts in differentfields, and, as a second step, be applied, with thegoal of changing certain social and discursivepractices.

Main principles of CDA:1. Social and political issues are constructed and reflected in

discourse2. Power relations are negotiated and performed through

discourse3. Discourse both reflects and reproduces social relations4. Ideologies are produced and reflected in the use of discourse

CDA includes not only a description and interpretation ofdiscourse in context, but also offers an explanation of whyand how discourses work

CDA might commence by decidingwhat discourse type or genre of the text

The analysis may consider the framing of the text

CDA, then, takes us beyond the level of description to adeeper understanding of texts

Continue…

For instance, at the sentence level, the analyst mightconsider what has been:

a) “topicalized” in each of the sentences in the textb) “agent patient relations” in the discourse

22

Doing Critical Discourse Analysis

CDA has never attempted to be or to provide one single orspecific theory

Methodologies differ greatly on account of the aims of theresearch

Small qualitative case studies as well as large data corpora,drawn from field work and ethnographic research are used.

Studies in CDA are multifarious, derived from quite differentbackgrounds, oriented towards very different data andmethodologies.

CDA and CL “ are at most a shared perspective on doinglinguistic, semiotic or discourse analysis” (Van Dijk 1993,131).

In English speaking world “Discourse” is often used bothfor written and oral texts (Schiffrin 1992)

Lemke (1995) defines “text” as the concrete realization ofabstract forms of knowledge

“Discourse” as a form of knowledge and memory, whereas“text” illustrates concrete oral utterances or writtendocuments (Reisigl and Wodak 2001).

The practical linking of “social and political engagement” with“a sociologically informed construction of society” (Krings etal., 1973, 808).

“in human matters, interconnections and chains of cause –and-effect may be distorted out of vision. Hence “critique” isessentially making visible the interconnectedness of things”(Fairclough 1995, 747).

Basically, “critical” could be understood as:o having distance to the data,o embedding the data in the social context,o taking a political stance explicitly,o having a focus on self reflection as scholars doing research.

Q.4

• ideology refers to social forms and processes within which,and by means of which, symbolic forms circulate in thesocial world (Thompson 1990) .

• Thompson (1990) sees the study of ideology as the study of“the ways in which the meaning is constructed andconveyed by symbolic forms of various kinds”.

For Eagletoon (1994), the study of ideology has to bear inmind the variety of theories and theorists that have examined therelationship between thought and social relation.

All the theories assume “that there are specific historicalreasons why people come to feel, reason, desire and imagine asthey do.” (1994, 15)

Q.5

Texts are often sites of struggle in that they show traces ofdiffering discourses and ideologies all contending andstruggling for dominance.

Defining features of CDA are to be seen in its concern withpower as a central condition in life, and in its efforts to developa theory of language which incorporates this as a majorpremise.

Power is about relations of difference, and particularly aboutthe effects of differences in social structures.

Language indexes power, expresses power, is involved wherethere is contention over power and where power is challenged.Power does not derive from language but language can beused to challenge power, to subvert it, to alter distributions ofpower both in the short and long term.

CDA takes interest in the ways in which linguistic forms areused in various expressions and manipulations of power.

Q.6

Example of CDA

the following three headlines appeared in The Observer, TheSunday Times, and The Sunday Telegraph on 12 December,1976:

A. NUS regrets fury over Joseph.B. Student leaders condemn insult to Keith Joseph.C. Students chiefs ‘regret’ attack on Sir Keith.

Context…

The headlines reported a sequence of events involving the

conference of the National Union of Students (NUS) and Sir

Keith Joseph, a prominent right-wing member of the British

Conservative opposition party in Parliament. On Friday, 10

December 1976, Keith Joseph had attempted to attend the

conference as an observer, was spotted, abused, and asked to

leave after a voted decision by the delegates that he should not

be allowed to stay.

Context…

All but two members of the NUS executives had voted for his

expulsion. The next day, the executives issued a rather tongue-

in-cheek statement which might hint an apology to Keith

Joseph. The newspaper reports give a brief account of the

scene at the conference, and more space to the Saturday

statement and to comments by various protagonists and

interested parties.

Ostensibly, these three headlines all seem to say the same

thing.

Yet they have different connotations, which are consistent

with the political “lines” taken by the three newspapers

on close examination, appear ultimately to offer different

analyses of the “reality” they report.

The different ways in which the participants are named are

significant: naming conventions are regular in English.

The Observer’s “Joseph” suggests formality and distance;

the Sunday Telegraph’s “Sir” connotes respect while the first

name “Keith” suggests intimacy.

The connotations are exactly consistent with the papers’

political characters:

the Observer claims to be liberal and is not likely to be in

sympathy with Keith Joseph;

The Sunday Time’s “Keith Joseph” seems to be neutral and

non-committal.

The Sunday Telegraph is a right-wing paper likely to admire

such a politician.

Nowadays, critical discourse analysis is practiced within

disciplines such as social psychology, law, and politics;

interdisciplinary research is growing in, e.g., medical,

educational, media, and political discourse.

In-Class Exercise

Lee (1992: 91–2) comments upon a hard news report from theBritish newspaper, The Guardian, on 4 August 1976,concerning events in Soweto in South Africa. Here is theheadline and first paragraph of the article which Leereproduces:

Police open fire as Soweto erupts againFrom STANLEY UYS, Cape Town, August 4

The black township of Soweto, which hasbeen simmering with unrest since the riotson June 16 and the shooting of 174Africans, erupted again today.

Police open fire as Soweto erupts againFrom STANLEY UYS, Cape Town, August 4

The black township of Soweto, which hasbeen simmering with unrest since the riotson June 16 and the shooting of 174Africans, erupted again today.

Arguments such as these are used by critical discourseanalysts to suggest that common ways of saying somethingcan have the effect of presenting an issue from a particularpoint of view.

Lee’s argument, quoted by O’Halloran, is that a newspaperarticle written about multi-racial South Africa presents a‘white’ point of view because it uses words such as simmerand erupted to describe the actions of the (black) inhabitantsof Soweto.

The words, as simmer and erupted, Lee argues, represent theSowetans not as human beings but as a destructive naturalforce, such as a volcano.

Volcanoes are, of course, not human, and they cannot becontrolled.

Note, too, that the emotions of individuals and the actions thatthey give rise to are transferred onto the place where they live.It is 'the township' that has been simmering and that nowerupts, rather than the Sowetans experiencing feelings ofanger and deciding to march.

The effect of these processes of metaphor . . . is arguably todistance the reader from the subjects of the report . . .

The situation is seen as resulting from some kind of inevitableset of natural laws rather than from human feelings anddecisions.

This tendency to downplay the agentive element in eventsinitiated by relatively powerless groups is a general one.

by: Teun Van Dijk

Manipulation as intended here is a communicative andinteractional practice, in which a manipulator exercises controlover other people, usually against their will or against theirbest interests.

In everyday usage, the concept of manipulation has negativeassociations – manipulation is bad – because such a practiceviolates social norms.

Manipulation not only involves power, butspecifically abuse of power, that is,domination.

More specifically, manipulation impliesthe exercise of a form of illegitimateinfluence by means of discourse:manipulators make others believe or dothings that are in the interest of themanipulator, and against the best interestsof the manipulated.

Without the negative associations, manipulation could be a form of (legitimate) persuasion (see, e.g., Dillard and Pfau, 2002; O’Keefe, 2002).

The crucial difference in this case is that inpersuasion the interlocutors are free tobelieve or act as they please, depending onwhether or not they accept the arguments ofthe persuader, whereas in manipulationrecipients are typically assigned a morepassive role: they are victims ofmanipulation.

This negative consequence of manipulative discourse typicallyoccurs when the recipients are unable to understand the realintentions or to see the full consequences of the beliefs oractions advocated by the manipulator.

This may be the case especially when the recipients lack thespecific knowledge that might be used to resist manipulation(Wodak, 1987).

Obviously, the boundary between (illegitimate) manipulationand (legitimate) persuasion is fuzzy, and context dependent:some recipients may be manipulated by a message that isunable to manipulate others.

Also the same recipients may be more or less manipulable indifferent circumstances, states of mind, and so on.

Manipulation is a:o social phenomenon – especially because it

involves interaction and power abuse betweengroups and social actors.

o a cognitive phenomenon becausemanipulation always implies the manipulationof the minds of participants,

o a discursive–semiotic phenomenon becausemanipulation is being exercised through text,talk and visual messages.

power dimension: involves an account of the kind of controlthat some social actors or groups exercise over others.

We also have assumed that such control is first of all a controlof the mind, that is, of the beliefs of recipients, and indirectly acontrol of the actions of recipients based on such manipulatedbeliefs.

In order to be able to exercise such social control of others,however, social actors need to satisfy personal and socialcriteria that enable them to influence others in the first place.

the kind of social manipulation we are studying here is definedin terms of social domination and its reproduction in everydaypractices, including discourse.

In this sense, we are more interested in manipulation betweengroups and their members than in the personal manipulation ofindividual social actors.

A further analysis of domination, defined as power abuse,requires special access to, or control over, scarce socialresources. One of these resources is preferential access to themass media and public discourse, a resource shared bymembers of ‘symbolic’ elites, such as politicians, journalists,scholars, writers, teachers, and so on (Van Dijk, 1996).Obviously,

We see that manipulation is one of thediscursive social practices of dominantgroups geared towards the reproductionof their power.

Such dominant groups may do so inmany (other) ways as well, e.g. throughpersuasion, providing information,education, instruction and other socialpractices that are aimed at influencingthe knowledge, beliefs and (indirectly)the actions of the recipients.

We assumed that manipulation isillegitimate because it violates thehuman or social rights of thosewho are manipulated, but it is noteasy to formulate the exact normsor values that are violated here.

A more pragmatic approach to such norms and principles arethe conversational maxims formulated by Grice (1975), whichrequire contributions to conversations to be truthful, relevant,relatively complete, and so on.

In actual forms of talk and text, however, such maxims areoften hard to apply: People lie, which may not always be thewrong thing to do; people tell only half of a story for all kindsof, sometimes legitimate, reasons and irrelevant talk is one ofthe most common forms of everyday interaction.

In other words, manipulation is not (only) ‘wrong’ because itviolates conversational maxims or other norms and rules ofconversation.

Manipulation is illegitimate in a democraticsociety, because it (re)produces, or mayreproduce, inequality: it is in the best interestsof powerful groups and speakers, and hurts theinterests of less powerful groups and speakers.

Thus, manipulation, socially speaking, is adiscursive form of elite power reproduction thatis against the best interests of dominated groupsand (re)produces social inequality.

Manipulating people involves manipulating their minds, thatis, people’s beliefs, such as the knowledge, opinions andideologies which in turn control their actions.

MANIPULATING SHORT TERM MEMORY (STM)-BASEDDISCOURSE UNDERSTANDING

First of all, discourse in general, and manipulative discourse inparticular, involve processing information in short termmemory (STM), basically resulting in ‘understanding’ (ofwords, clauses, sentences, utterances and non-verbal signals)for instance in terms of propositional ‘meanings’ or ‘actions’.

Such processing is strategic in the sense of being online, goal-directed, operating at various levels of discourse structure, andhypothetical: fast and efficient guesses and shortcuts are madeinstead of complete analyses.

MANIPULATING SHORT TERM MEMORY(STM)-BASED DISCOURSEUNDERSTANDING

Manipulation in such a case may reside in thefact that by drawing attention to information Arather than B, the resulting understanding maybe partial or biased, for instance whenheadlines emphasize irrelevant details, ratherthan expressing the most important topics of adiscourse – thus impairing understanding ofdetails through top-down influence of topics.

EPISODIC MANIPULATION STM-based manipulation takes place online and affects

strategic processes of the understanding of specific discourses. However, most manipulation is geared to more stable results,

and hence focuses on long term memory (LTM), that is,knowledge, attitudes and ideologies, as we shall see in amoment.

Also forming part of LTM, however, are the personalmemories that define our life history and experiences (Neisserand Fivush, 1994), representations that are traditionallyassociated with ‘episodic’ memory (Tulving, 1983).

EPISODIC MANIPULATION If manipulators are aiming for

recipients to understand a discourse asthey see it, it is crucial that therecipients form the mental models themanipulators want them to form, thusrestricting their freedom ofinterpretation or at least theprobability that they will understandthe discourse against the best interestsof the manipulators.

EPISODIC MANIPULATION Blaming the victim is one of the forms of manipulation in

which dominant groups or institutions discursively influencethe mental models of recipients, for instance by the re-attribution of responsibility of actions in their own interests.

manipulation of social cognition may also involve the very basisof all social cognition: general, socioculturally sharedknowledge. Indeed, one of the best ways to detect and resistmanipulation attempts is specific knowledge (e.g. about thecurrent interests of the manipulators) as well as generalknowledge (e.g. about the strategies of maintaining themilitary budget at a high level).

It will thus be in the best interests of dominant groups to makesure that relevant and potentially critical general knowledge isnot acquired, or that only partial, misguided or biasedknowledge is allowed distribution.