Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

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1. Introduction

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is primarily inspired by Halliday’s (1985) Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) which describes language as ‘social semiotic’. According to Fowler et al. (1979), “language is social act and it is ideologically driven”. van Dijk (1988) also views language as being not only based on linguistic structures but also on a set of ‘complex communicative events’ which are embedded in social context. He introduces the socio-cognitive model of CDA where social and personal cognition mediates between society and discourse. Wodak (1995) understands CDA from a historical perspective, and according to her, “discourse is always historical, that is, it is connected synchronically and diachronically with other communicative events which are happening at the same time or which have happened before” (p. 12). Fairclough’s (1989) sociocultural approach to CDA aims at contributing to the “general raising of consciousness of exploitative social relations, through focusing upon language" (p. 4).

SFL views language as having ideational, interpersonal, and textual functions commonly referred to as metafunctions. The ideational function is further subdivided into the experiential and the logical. The former constructs a version of or gives meaning to our experience while the latter according to Halliday and Hassan (1985 p. 17), defines “the relationship between one process and another, or one participant and another, that share the same position in the text”. The interpersonal function identifies, develops, or sustains social relationships between people and is inclusive of forms of address, speech function, modality, etc. Fairclough (1992a) subdivided the interpersonal function to include identity funct...

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van Dijk. (1988). News as Discourse. New Jersey: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates Publication

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van Dijk, T.A. (1996). Discourse, Opinions and Ideologies. In Christina Schaffner &

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Wodak, Ruth (1995). Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. In Jef

Verschuren, Jan-Ola Ostman, and Jan Blommaert (eds.). Handbook of Pragmatics- Manual. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Pp.204-210.

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