A Review of Critical Discourse Analysis Studies in China

Jun Chen,Lei Wang

doi:10.13189/lls.2016.040605

Abstract

The paper provides a review of critical discourse analysis (CDA) studies in China from the 1990s. It starts with the origin, definition, and research scope of CDA in America and Europe. Although Chinese scholars began to show interest in CDA studies in 1995, about two decades later than their western counterparts, they have made considerable achievements in the field. On the review research level, quite a few independent studies indicate that CDA studies are attracting increasing attention from the field of linguistics, media studies, politics, and philosophy; theoretical and methodological research reveals that Chinese scholars are endeavoring to yield original research results on the basis of CDA studies abroad; practical research shows that CDA has been applied to the investigation of various discourses to disclose social reality, especially the inter-relationship between discourse, power and ideology.

Highlights

The term, “Discourse Analysis”, was first proposed by American structural linguist Zellig Harris in his research article entitled Discourse Analysis in 1952
critical discourse analysis (CDA) was formally considered as a branch of discourse analysis and accepted by the linguistic field in 1991 when Kristen Malmkjer listed it as the counterpart of textual analysis and conversational analysis in The Linguistics Encyclopedia
Xin (1996) [13] comprehensively reviewed major theoretical achievements of CDA studies abroad in 1980s and 1990s and the major findings are as follows: (1) Fowler’s Language and Control (1979) is served as the cornerstone for critical linguistics in that it reveals the influence that ideology exerts on discourse and the interaction between social structure and power relations

Summary

Introduction

The term, “Discourse Analysis”, was first proposed by American structural linguist Zellig Harris in his research article entitled Discourse Analysis in 1952. From the above interpretations of “discourse,” it is clear that “discourse” is an extremely broad term involving both linguistic and social factors It does include texts or words in written and spoken forms, and penetrates into the relationship between language and power that constructs the social ideology. Teun A. van Dijk defined CDA as “a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance and inequality are enacted, reproduced and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context” (van Dijk: 1999) [7] With such dissident research, critical discourse analysts take explicit position, and want to understand, expose and to resist social inequality. Academic research has attracted considerable attention in the linguistic circle and plentiful accomplishments have been achieved

Review Research

Theoretical and Methodological Research

Practical Research

Summary