Abdelmalek El Kadoussi
Assistant Professor
Department of English Studies
Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences
Ibn Toufail University
Kenitra, Morocco
Course outline
Two levels of CDA
Theoretical foundations of CDA
Normative (the ideal features) characteristics of CDA
Power and ideology in discourse
The critical/oppositional dimension of CDA
CDA and power/dominance
Forms of power abuse in discourse
Discourse as a resource of power
How to do CDA
Textual analysis questions to ask
Strategies of persuasion
Frame analysis
The CDA process
exercises
Two levels of CDA
Micro-analytical level focuses on language use,
discourse, verbal interaction and communication
(Fairclough 1995, Wodak 2001) => last week’s course
Macro-analytical level focuses on power, dominance
and inequality between social groups (Van Dijk, 2003)
=> this week’s course
Theoretical foundations of CDA
CDA specifically, draw on distinct schools of social inquiry:
The neo-Marxism of the Frankfurt school,
Foucaultian archaeology (M. Foucault)
Poststructuralist deconstruction (J. Derrida, J. Cristiva,…)
Postmodernism (Deleuze, Bordieu, Baudrillard, …).
CDA is founded on multi-disciplinarity and an account of
intricate relationships between text, talk, social cognition,
power, society and culture.
Its adequacy criteria are not merely observational, descriptive or
even explanatory (Fairclough, 1985).
Its success is measured by its effectiveness and relevance, that is,
by its contribution to (social) change.
Normative Characteristics of CDA
CDA’s main characteristics are:
1. It is issue-oriented: inequality, racism, political
manipulation …
2. It is a critical approach, not a method
3. It is multi-disciplinary
4. It considers all aspects of discourse: grammar,
phonology, syntax, semantics, style, rhetoric,
organization, pragmatics, speech acts, conversation,
…
Normative Characteristics of CDA
5. It studies verbal, nonverbal and multimodal discourse
(image, film, music, body language,…)
6. It focuses on relations of power, dominance and
inequality and how these are reproduced and revisited in
discourse.
7. It studies how discourse enacts and legitimates structures
and strategies of dominance and resistance in social
relationships across class, gender, ethnicity, race, sexual
orientation, language, religion/worldview, age,
nationality, geography,…
8. It aims to disclose/unveil the underlying ideologies that
play a role in the reproduction or resistance of dominance
and inequality.
Normative Characteristics of CDA
9. It aims to uncover, reveal, disclose, unveil what is
implicit, hidden and concealed
10. It takes a critical/oppositional stance against power
and power abuse
11. It sustains a perspective of solidarity with
dominated groups
12. It contributes to the development of counter-
ideologies in practices of challenge and resistance.
Power and ideology in discourse
Van Dijk’s approach to CDA is based on understanding
ideological structures and social relations of power embedded in
discourse.
He defines social power in terms of control and views ideologies
as "the basis of the social representations of groups" (Van Dijk,
2006).
He therefore argues that "groups have power if they are able to
control the acts and minds of other groups" (Van Dijk, 2003).
Furthermore, he emphasizes that ideological discourse is
generally organized by a general strategy of positive self-
presentation (boasting) and negative other-presentation
(derogation)
The critical/oppositional dimension in CDA
It is the oppositional study of structures and strategies of elite
discourse and their cognitive and social conditions and consequences
It is also the study of the discourse of resistance against structures and
strategies of dominance
CDA goes beyond traditional methodologies of analysis: observation,
description and explanation and adds ‘critical adequacy’ to them
It introduces social and political ethics (what is right and what is
wrong)
CDA considers that traditional methodologies normalize and serve the
status quo and are always biased for the powerful elites.
Unlike implicitly critical studies in sociology, political science,…, CDA
explicitly formulates its oppositional stance
CDA and power/dominance
Social power is based on privileged access to socially valued resources,
such as wealth, income, position, status, force, group membership,
education or knowledge. (Van Dijk 1993)
Power involves control, namely by (members of ) one group over (those
of) other groups.
Control may pertain to:
1. Action (as in police violence against demonstrators, or male violence
against women), and
2. Cognition (by persuasion, dissimulation or manipulation, among
other strategic ways to change the mind of others in one’s own
interests)
It is at the 2nd point where discourse and critical discourse analysis
come in: managing the mind of others is essentially a function of text
and talk.
Dominance may be enacted and reproduced by subtle, routine, forms
of text and talk that appear natural and acceptable .
Hence, CDA focuses on the discursive strategies that legitimate control,
or otherwise naturalize the social order, and especially relations of
inequality
Discourse and forms of power abuse
CDA is specifically interested in power abuse, that is, in breaches of
laws, rules and principles of democracy, equality and justice by those
who wield power.
Van Dijk distinguishes b/n:
1. Dominance exercised overtly or covertly by powerful over powerless
groups (like male dominance over women, White over Black, rich
over poor,…)
2. Hegemony experienced when the dominated groups are influenced
in such a way that they accept dominance, and act in the interest of
the powerful out of their own free will, we use the term hegemony
(Gramsci, 1971; Hall et al., 1977).
One major function of dominant discourse is to manufacture such
consent/consensus, acceptance and legitimacy of dominance (Herman
and Chomsky, 1988).
Discourse as a resource of power
One of the social resources on which power and dominance are
based is the privileged access to discourse and communication.
Access to discourse is about who is allowed to
say/write/hear/read what to/from whom, where, when and how
Politicians and corporate businesses rely on discourse genres and
channels (press conferences, parliamentary debates, mass media,
…) to exercise, maintain or contest power.
Therefore, they select context, genre, participants and audiences,
set their own agenda, organize, prioritize, frame, downplay,
overplay, foreground, background, …
Control of knowledge through discourse crucially shapes our
interpretation of the world
The powerless and (lack of) access to discourse
Lack of power is also measured by its lack of active or controlled
access to discourse: ordinary people have 3 forms of access to
discourse:
1. Most ordinary people only have active access to conversations
with family members, friends or colleagues.
2. They have more or less passive access to bureaucrats in public
agencies or to professionals (e.g. doctors, teachers, police
officers).
3. In other situations they may be more or less controlled
participants, onlookers, consumers or users, e.g. as media
audiences, suspects in court, or as a topic in the news media.
How to do CDA?
Analysis have to distinguish (within the discursive reproduction of
dominance) b/n 2 dimensions:
1. Production: the enactment, expression or legitimation of
dominance in the (production of the) various structures of text and
talk
2. Reception: the functions, consequences or results of such structures
for the (social) minds of recipients.
They need to explore which structures and strategies of text and talk to
attend in order to discover patterns of elite dominance or manipulation
in‟ texts”.
In other words, they should “detail how such forms of inequality are
expressed, enacted, legitimated and reproduced by text and talk”.
Textual analysis questions analysts need to
ask: (Fairclough 1995) (see last week’s course)
1. Transitivity: what patterns of transitivity are found? Who is
depicted as Agent (and therefore empowered), and over whom
(the affected)? What is the degree of nominalization? How does
it background the process itself by omitting information about
agents of power? Do passive verbs also delete agents of power?
What is the ideological function?
2. Mood and Modality: How is mood enacted? Declarative,
imperative, or interrogative? Which values express choices of
modality?
3. Vocabulary: How are words used to show ideology? What
aspects of reality are overworded? How are overwording,
synonymy, antonymy and hyponymy used to construct ideology?
Are there euphemisms or metaphors? What connotations do
they convey?
Textual Analysis Questions
4. Interactional control features: Which are the interactional
control features of the text? Turn-taking? Control of topics?
Topic change? Opening and closing of interactions?
5. Topicality: Which topics are chosen to fill theme position in
the clause (initial position) or which are fore-grounded?
6. Presuppositions: Are there presuppositions or assumptions
made by a speaker or writer which are not explicitly stated and
which the author appears to take for granted?
7. Vagueness: Which expressions are unclear because they do
not give enough information or they do not say exactly what they
mean?
8. Implication: Which implicit information can be deduced or
inferred from discourse on the basis of pragmatic contexts?
Discursive strategies of persuasion
Analysts need to pay attention to how discourse inscribes
positive frames about WE/US (the dominant group) and
negative frames about THEY/THEM (the dominated group)
through:
Argumentation: the negative evaluation follows from the facts .
Rhetorical figures: hyperbolic enhancement of their negative
actions and our positive actions; euphemisms, denials,
understatements of our negative actions.
Lexical style: choice of words that imply negative (or positive)
evaluations.
Story telling: telling above negative events as personally
experienced; giving plausible details above negative features of
the events.
Structural emphasis of their negative actions, e.g. in headlines,
leads, summaries, or other properties of text schemata (e.g. those
of news reports), transactivity structures of sentence syntax (e.g.
mentioning negative agents in prominent. topical position).
Quoting credible witnesses, sources or experts, e.g. in news
reports.
Frame analysis and CDA?
A further way of doing a critical analysis is to examine the
way in which the content of a text is framed; that is:
1. The way in which the content of the text is presented to
its audience,
2. The perspective, angle and slant the writer or speaker is
taking.
3. The types of descriptors or metaphors used
4. The symbols and cultural allusions use
5. What concepts and issues are fore-grounded
(emphasized)
6. What concepts and issues are back-grounded (played
down) in the text. (Huckin 1997 ).
7. Decide what assumptions (enacted social cognitive
models and ideologies) the text presupposes
The CDA Process
6. Deconstruct 7. Challenge
1. Read text them them
5. Spot 8. Produce
2. Understand ideological counter-
meaning
assumptions ideologies
4. Relate
3. Analyze discourse
discourse meaning to SCP
context
Exercises: analyze …
1. How D. Trump speaks about immigrants.
2. How US mainstream media (CNN, The Washington
Post,…) talk about Trump’s handeling of the
Coronavirus crisis.
Refer to pp 201 and 202 in Paltridge (2012) for more
exercises
