Language, Ideology and Power

Lecture 1:

Language, Discourse and CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis)

• Helps us understand how language works as a social semiotic i.e resource for making meaning in social context

• We can analyse language to solve social problems (work, school and home)

• Language is the primary semiotic resource

• Discourse = language use in social context

• Discourse = Text (language) + Context (social situations)

What’s “discourse” about?

• Discourse is: ‘language above the sentence level or above the clause.’

» Stubbs 1998

• The study of discourse is the study of any aspect of language use.

» Fasold 1990

• The analysis of discourse is the analysis of language in use…it cannot be restricted to the description of linguistic forms independent of the purposes or functions that they serve in human affairs.

» Brown and Yule 1983

‘Discourse’

• ‘Discourse’ is for me more than just language in use: It is language use, whether speech or writing, seen as a type of social practice.

» Fairclough 1992

• Discourse constitutes the social…Discourse is shaped by relations of power, and invested with ideologies.

» Fairclough 1992

‘Discourse’

Big D and Little d

• Discourse (non-count) vs. ‘discourses’

• Saying, Doing, Thinking, Behaving, Believing, Valuing, and Interacting combinations that show who we are

(Gee 1996) • The ‘Discourse of medicine’• The ‘Discourse of romance’

Discourse is…

• How language reflects social reality

• How language creates reality

• How language shapes our identities and interactions

• How language is used as a tool to control people (Michel Foucault)

What is the meaning of this sentence?

Meaning depends on…• How (it happened)…

• Where…

• When…

• To whom…

• Why…

Discourse Analysis

Critical Discourse Analysis

ConversationAnalysis

Pragmatics

GenreAnalysis

Ethnography Of

Speaking

MultimodalDiscourseAnalysis

DiscourseAnalysis

MediatedDiscourseAnalysis

Storybook Reading…

sharing meanings in discourse

discourse of learning (conference)

discourse as project…

Questions

• Who are these people?• What is going on here? What are these people doing? • What kinds of tools/language are they using to do it?• Are they being successful/doing it well? • Who has more power in the conversation? How can

you tell? • What do they want to do? What strategies are they

using to get what they want? • Who controls the discourse?

Discourse analysis: some assumptions

• Discourse analysis = the analysis of texts in context.

• Discourse is language in use• Discourse is necessarily situated in a context. • No practice detached from a social context,

and no social context is ever wholly ‘neutral’• Constituted/Constitutive: “language

simultaneously reflects reality (‘the way things are’) and constructs (construes) it to be a certain way” (Gee, 1999: 82).

CDA: a critical approach to discourse

• Language plays a major part in (re)producing social inequalities

• In response, “CDA sees itself as politically involved research” (Titscher et al, 2000: 147).

• CDA investigates, and aims at illustrating, “relationships between the text and its social conditions, ideologies and power-relations” (Wodak, 1996: 20)

Fairclough: three-site analysis

For Fairclough, CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis) means:

• ‘…the analysis of relationships between concrete language use and the wider social cultural structures. […] He attributes three dimensions to every discursive event. It is simultaneously text, discursive practice - which also includes the production and interpretation of texts - and social practice. The analysis is conducted according to these three dimensions.’ (Titscher et al, 2000: 149-50)

Text-as-discourse

• Analysis should be

critical and creative

• View texts as the result of a series of many choices

• We should ask: how could this text have been different?

Text

Representations (ideational function);

Identities & social relations (interpersonal

function);

Cohesion and coherence (textual function)

Social Reality and POV

• What do you see…

Bushatron