Fairlcough and Critical Discourse Analysis

Norman Fairclough – Language and Power Theory (discourse)

Norman Fairclough shows that many communications are ‘unequal encounters’. This means that language choice is created and controlled by certain social ‘power’ situations or ‘power type’ discourse of kinds accepted as ‘normal’ for that kind of encounter. Fairclough also shows how texts are persuasive due to the ideologies which they rely on to create an effect. For example, when the text makes ‘natural’ assumptions about its reader’s values and beliefs, about what is ‘normal’ or ‘common sense’.

SYNTHETIC PERSONALISATION (only in advertising)

Critical Discourse Analysis

Critical discourse analysis is a discourse analytical research that focuses on the way that social power abuse, dominance and inequality are portrayed, reproduced and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context.

Critical discourse analysis needs to please a number of requirements in order realize its aims to successfully:

-CDA research has to be ‘better’ than other research in order to be accepted.

-It focuses mainly on social problems and political issues, rather than on current models and fashions.

-Provisionally sufficient critical analysis of social problems is usually combining.

-Rather than just describing discourse structures, it tries to explain them in terms of properties of social interaction and especially social structure.

-More specifically, CDA focuses on the ways in which discourse structures portray, confirm, legitimate, reproduce or challenge relations of power and dominance in society.

Fairclough and Wodak (1997: 271-80) summarize the main views of CDA as the following:

1. CDA addresses social problems

2. Power relations are discursive

3. Discourse constitutes society and culture

4. Discourse does ideological work

5. Discourse is historical

6. The link between text and society is mediated

7. Discourse analysis is interpretative and explanatory

8. Discourse is a form of social action.

Critical discourse analysis is the use of a collection of techniques of the study of textual practice and language use as social and cultural practices (Fairclough 19992b). This is created from three broad theoretical orientations. First is poststructuralism which is that discourse progresses logical across local institutional sites and also texts have a beneficial function in forming and shaping human identities and actions. Then there is Bourdieu's sociology which is assuming that the real textual practices and interactions with texts become personified forms of cultural capital with substituted value in certain social fields. Finally, there is neomarxist cultural theory which assumes that these discourses are created and used within political economies and they create and articulate wider ideological interests, social stricture and movements within those fields. The practical techniques of CDA are copied from a variety of penalizing fields. Within pragmatics, narratology and speech act theory; this disputes that texts are forms of social action which arise in complex social contexts.