Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective Research Articles

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Government Spokesman’s Identity Construction: A Case Study

How people’s identity is constructed in language has been an interesting field for linguists. For a spokesman who speaks for the government, his identity and image have to conform to his duty and responsibilities. In this paper by analyzing the improper linguistic strategies of the spokesman and his position in the news conference of 723 Motor Train collision in China, the author tries to show how a negative image and identity are constructed with the perspective of critical discourse analysis.

El discurso hegemónico ambiental a través de organismos de cooperación y su influencia en las relaciones internacionales

Este ensayo se sitúa en torno a los organismos de cooperación internacional del sistema de Naciones Unidas que están bajo la influencia de los países occidentales que los lideran a través de la teoría del realismo. Desde una perspectiva del Análisis Crítico del Discurso (ACD) se pretende abordar la hegemonía del norte respecto al sur en temas ambientales, porque se utiliza la lógica del ambientalismo superficial o reformista, que solo perpetúa los intereses económicos sobre la explotación de la naturaleza. Esta dinámica industrializada se presenta como desarrollo sustentable y ejerce un discurso predominante en las relaciones internacionales.

Gender representation in ‘Top-Notch’ series: A critical discourse analysis perspective

This study sought to investigate aspects of gender as represented in one of the currently used English language series, namely, Top Notch Series from a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) perspective. This series is widely used for adult language learners from beginner to advanced levels in numerous Iranian language institutes. In effect, the study analyzed the series in terms of three major aspects of gender (relations, positions, and content). To this end, Fairclough’s (2001) three-dimensional model, as a well-established CDA model, which emphasizes the importance of language/power relationship, was adopted in order to extract the ideologies comprising the foundation of this series. The findings revealed that the series represents both genders in a somewhat balanced way. In addition, the series presents both genders equally in such a way that stereotypical norms ingrained into learners are nearly removed. Furthermore, this textbook is argued to have adopted the discourse of marketing and advertising by exploiting both genders, especially the females.

A construção do SUS-problema no jornal Folha de S. Paulo

The article examines the process of discursive construction of the 'SUS problem' in reports published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo in 2008. Through an online search of the Folha archives, 667 news items were selected and then studied from the perspectives of critical discourse analysis and contributions from social constructionism. In methodological terms, at the text practice level of analysis, the investigation sought to determine what linguistic resources had been used to construct the SUS problem. At the discursive practice level of analysis, it further explored how the newspaper medium and the journalistic style influenced the production of these meanings. The article concludes that as this production constructs the SUS problem, it fosters a limited, negative view of the the Sistema Único de Saúde (Unified Healthcare System, or SUS) based on mistrust and on the notion that it is impossible to improve the system.

Argument, Deliberation, Dialectic and the Nature of the Political: A CDA Perspective

We are grateful to Alan Finlayson, Colin Hay and Stephen Coleman for their challenging responses to Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) and we hope to give a satisfactory answer to their main arguments. Both Hay and Finlayson argue that, in focusing on argumentation and deliberation, we misunderstand the nature of the political. Second, Finlayson thinks that there is a discontinuity between critical discourse analysis (CDA), in its previous versions, and our present framework. Third, Finlayson claims that CDA's focus on representations should not be displaced by a focus on action, that conflict over representations is fundamental in politics, and a rhetorical (not dialectical) perspective is best suited to analysing political discourse. Fourth, Coleman argues that important features of political discourse cannot be addressed by our approach, which should be supplemented by ‘dramatistic’ methods.

Beauty Product Advertisements: A Critical Discourse Analysis

This study examined beauty advertisements in local English magazines from a Critical Discourse Analysis perspective. This study mainly focused on the use of language in beauty advertisements and strategies employed by advertisers to manipulate and influence their customers. The analysis is based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework. It demonstrates how the ideology of ‘beauty’ is produced and reproduced through advertisements in popular local women’s magazines. A qualitative research was conducted on beauty product advertisements in two popular local women’s magazines, Cleo and Women’s Weekly. The findings indicated that advertisers used various strategies to manipulate women. The advertisements promote an idealised lifestyle and manipulate readers to a certain extent into believing whatever that is advertised is indeed true. This study revealed how the ideology of beauty is constructed and reconstructed through magazines by stereotyping how beauty products are synonymous with a better life. Advertising language is used to control people’s minds. Thus people in power (advertisers) use language as a means to exercise control over others.

A Linguistic Analysis of "Products Information Reportage": From the Perspectives of Genre Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis

A Linguistic Analysis of "Products Information Reportage": From the Perspectives of Genre Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis

The ‘Jasmine Revolt’ has made the ‘Arab Spring’: A critical discourse analysis of the last three political speeches of the ousted president of Tunisia

The current article addresses person deixis in the last three speeches of the ousted president of Tunisia (OPT) from the perspectives of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and cognitive-pragmatics. It takes deixis to be individuated in the ‘indexical field’ by the deictic center, who fills them from within the social field at his/her discretion with ‘social roles’. The way the filling takes place is a function of social proximity to or distance from the deictic center, which manipulates the constructed categories either closer to the CENTER or to the PERIPHERY of the image schema. In particular, it is argued that the OPT as a deictic center has constructed in the first two speeches two deictic categories, which would be called ‘wandering WE’ after and a peripheral THEY, through which he tried to maintain the political status quo and blame responsibility for the events on others. However, in the last speech, the OPT constructed two indexical dyads, namely I-YOU and WE-THEY. This shift is explained as an effort on the part of OPT to reproduce social power abuse, dominance, and inequality by way of making political concessions. Despite this, the shift is not felt to have created communality and closeness with the addressees since the policy of exclusion, authority, and domination precluded these concessions from being persuasive enough for the ‘Jasmine Revolt’ in Tunisia not to resist this power and go for regime change.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Images of Iranians in Western Movies: The Case of Iranium

The significant role of the media, in general, and the movies, in particular, in disseminating information and creating images of the real life by use of the language as a powerful social tool is totally irrefutable. Although critical analysis of the movie discourse is a fashionable trend among the critical discourse analysts, there is a paucity of research on movie discourse in Iran. Besides, the increasing number of the anti-Iranian movies produced in the last decade and the growing tendency among the English students to watch American movies, have established the need for conducting a research to investigate the images of Iranians represented in the Western movies. Thus, in this article an anti-Iranian movie called Iranium , allegedly labeled as documentary, has been critically analyzed using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). For this purpose, Van Dijk’s framework (2004) has been utilized to uncover the ideological manipulations and misrepresentations of this movie. The analysis revealed that the dichotomy of in-group favoritism vs. out-group derogation is a very effective discursive strategy at the disposal of the movie makers who have used language as a weapon to attack Iran by representing a distorted and unrealistic image of the Iranians’ history, culture and ideologies. The findings of the present study imply that adopting a critical discourse analysis perspective in the EFL classes is a necessity which needs the development of the required materials, by the curriculum developers, that raise the students’ critical awareness as well as their language skills and proficiency.

Childhood in Children's Eyes: Analysis of a Discourse among Middle‐Income Sectors in Santiago, Chile

This article describes the results of a qualitative study, based on the perspective of critical discourse analysis, which explores the discourse on childhood of 10‐ and 11‐year‐old boys and girls from a middle‐income socioeconomic sector in Santiago, Chile. Among the findings, a complex and relational notion of childhood is highlighted. The children perceive themselves as overwhelmed and subjected to excessive demands by grown‐ups, and conceive of adulthood as a state without real freedom due to the excessive demands of work and family.

ADC E LSF: UM SUPORTE PARA A DESCONSTRUÇÃO DE REPRESENTAÇÕES EXCLUDENTES


 Este trabalho buscou compreender a construção discursiva de identidades xerentes em textos construídos em um espaço escolar multicultural por estudantes não índios. Com base nos pressupostos teórico-metodológicos da Análise de Discurso Crítica (ADC) (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999; Fairclough, 2001; 2003) e da Lingüística Sistêmica Funcional (LSF) (Halliday, 1994; 2004), este trabalho tem como objetivo analisar o papel da metafunção interpessoal tomando como instrumento de análise textual a categoria de avaliação. Os atributos e valores destinados aos xerentes revelam, em grande parte, a construção de uma identidade legitimadora que ofusca, nega, apaga as diferenças. Os textos analisados revelam, assim, a presença de uma voz hegemônica que visa assegurar que não haja diferença entre as representações, visto que “diferentes representações podem legitimar maneiras particulares de ação e ser inculcadas em modos de identifcação” (Fairclough, 2003).

Religion, Ideology and Discourse

This paper intends to examine religious ideology and discourse conventions of majlis-e-Hussain; i.e. the speech to commemorate the martyrdom of Hussain, the grandson of Prophet Mohammad; from a critical discourse analysis (henceforth CDA) perspective. The analysis involves identification of multiple linguistic devices such as pronominalization, recontextualization, resemantisization, implicatures, interactional strategies and cohesive links; which serve to perpetuate the religious ideologies in Shi‘ah Muslims of Pakistan. In this way, this paper makes an attempt to highlight the way majlis discourse delegitimizes and deconstructs sectarian prejudice still prevalent in Pakistani society; and hence argues for a broader interpretation of majlis-e-Hussain than merely associating it with Moharram mourning rituals.

Nostalgia, emprendedorismo y redención: modelos discursivos sobre la universidad

In this work we maintain that upon making the decision to support or reject certain policies on higher education, people tend to use archetypal ways of thinking that go beyond mere Cartesian rationality, also applying archetypal forms of understanding. Recent studies in a variety of disciplines support that in order to understand decision-making processes, attention must be paid to those aspects controlled consciously, as well as those that do not reflect Cartesian rationality models. This research uses the notion of “Prototypes” (Lakoff, 1987) and the perspective of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995a y 1995b) to identify and understand the conceptual category “university”, published in three influential newspapers in the United States of America during a period pf 26 years. More than 1000 editorials and opinion articles were analyzed and made it possible to identify three prototypes about universities: academic nostalgia (which still exists but is not predominant), educational entrepreneurship (prevails, in positive as in negative mentions), and redeeming educational consumerism (emerging trend).

La “visibilidad feminista” de Flora Ossette en su traducción de Woman and Labour de Olive Schreiner

The visibility of the translator has become a pervasive topic of discussion in translation studies ever since it was explicitly approached by Lawrence Venuti in his well known 1995 The Translator’s Invisibility. In Flora Ossette’s translation into Spanish of Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner we cannot only appreciate the voice of the “implicit translator” (Hermans 1996) but also the “explicit” voice. Indeed, the translator actively participates in the text by adding, omitting, reorganizing or emphasizing Schreiner’s ideas. Moreover, led on by the feminist ideals shared by both writer and translator, no less than by her fervent admiration for the South African authoress, she actually becomes an active writer herself by writing a prologue and a critical essay. Both her intrusion in the text and her critique undoubtedly reveal her doubly visible character. In our attempt to identify and interpret the main strategies employed by Ossette in the translation process of a work that deals with social, labour and gender relations, we find it relevant to follow the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995, Martin & Wodak 2003, van Dijk 2008, Wodak & Meyer 2009...), as it is particularly interested in unveiling the hidden ideological beliefs or values in discourse

The discursive construction of (a)moral names: Religion versus language

Bangla, as spoken in Bangladesh, is inseparable from the nation itself. The language movement of 1952, where several people died, played a significant role in the independence and the birth of Bangladesh. In fact, on 17th November 1999, UNESCO immortalized the movement by proclaiming 21st February as the International Mother Language Day. Bangla, the national and official language of Bangladesh, is unique to the people of its country because it embodies the spiritual, the cultural, and, above all, the historical nature of the nation. Despite its significance to the people of Bangladesh, giving a meaningful Bangla name to a child may be considered amoral. On the contrary, keeping an Arabic name, irrespective of its meaning, is honorable, ethical, and, as some Mollahs would have it, a moral duty of Muslim parents. The justification is simple, because Arabic is the language of the Quran, any Arabic name is acceptable. Anayetullah (Aadhunik muslim namer Sreshtha Sankalon, Sarsina Library, 2008) suggests that Bangla names are meaningless and go against Islamic tradition. The influence of religion when selecting a name in Bangladesh needs to be investigated from a critical discourse analysis (CDA) perspective, because people need to be made aware of why Bangla names are considered amoral.

Ciência em debate: uma análise do gênero notícia de popularização da ciência

This paper presents an analysis of voices presented in science popularization (PC) news. Thirty exemplars of PC news from the BBC News International and Scientific American sites were analyzed based on a Critical Discourse Analysis perspective (VAN LEEUWEN, 1996; 2008) and a Systemic-Functional perspective (HALLIDAY, 1994; 2004). The results show that these texts have a multiplicity of voices, which can be grouped into different enunciative standpoints (researcher, colleague, government, public and the journalist him/herself). However, the analysis indicates that the government and the public participation is timid in these texts.  

Southern African Pentecostal Discourse and the Construction of a New Spiritual Order: The Case of a Shift in the "World of Life International Ministries Discourse" about God

This discussion reveals and examines the intense dynamism of a highly unstable social practice in Southern Africa – the Modern African Pentecostal Movement (MAP) – as reflected in the discursive practice of a key actor, a Word of Life International Ministries (WoLIM) Senior Pastor, M.B. Shana. One of her prayer texts is examined from a perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). It is shown that, much as WoLIM teach strict adherence to Biblical text (Maxwell, 2006; Togarasei, 2007), Shana’s text represents a milestone in the evolution of the definition of the Christian divinity from a cult of a Trinity dominated by God the Father to a virtually exclusive relationship of believers with the Holy Spirit. The latter appears to be gradually assuming the superior rank of the Father and playing more roles than the Father and the Son together. This is achieved through an infusion of new semantic values into the concept of the Holy Spirit while the semantic values of the other two persons of the Trinity are diminished. This infusion is not only aided but also prompted by the Southern African context in which WoLIM operates.

The role of language in negotiating power in the Sudan

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of language in negotiating power between Sudanese Arabists and Sudanese Africanists from a critical discourse analysis perspective (henceforth CDA). The aim is to demonstrate how extreme political discourse can jeopardise national unity. The article begins by summarising the basic tenets of the CDA theory and proceeds to examine Sudanese power-related discourse. Particularly, the article assumes both top-down and bottom-up approaches to analyse the discourses corresponding to the two groups, Sudanese Arabists and Sudanese Africanists. The top-down approach examines the discourse of the ruling Arab elites who have exclusive access to institutional discourse and communication. By contrast, although the Sudanese Africanist discourse was once considered illegal and could not be conveyed through public channels, in more modern times it has found the Internet, television and radio (among others) as avenues for dissemination. A number of socio-political groups, generally referred to as marginalised affiliations, are now initiating resistance discourse (henceforth RD) which goes hand in hand with their armed struggle against the ruling elites.

Modern African Pentecostal Discourse: A Textual Analysis of Prayer Texts of a Word of Life Church Senior Pastor

As the rampant forces of global capitalism relentlessly turn the world into a global village where the socio-economically weak are mercilessly marginalised, Southern Africa experiences a return to spiritualism as a strategy to ensure a sense of security and prosperity despite a gloomy material prognosis. Modern African Pentecostalism flourishes in Lesotho thanks to a discourse that seeks to portray the spirit world as real, tangible and controllable by the ‘anointed’ human being. This paper looks at the prayer text of a Word of Life Church Senior Pastor and co-founder from a perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis. The paper finds that her text depends heavily on contextualisation through the use of indexical meanings to “naturalise” Modern African Pentecostal discourse.

El análisis crítico del discurso como herramienta de investigación psicosocial del mundo del trabajo: discusiones desde América Latina

Este artículo presenta la perspectiva teórico-metodológica del Análisis Crítico del Discurso, y dentro de ésta, el modelo tridimensional de discurso desarrollado por Norman Fairclough. Se destaca el modo en que dichos enfoques pueden enriquecer el campo de la investigación psicosocial sobre el trabajo en América Latina, arrojando luces sobre las dimensiones discursivas de los procesos de reestructuración productiva y flexibilización laboral implementados en diversos países de la región. Se argumenta que a pesar del importante desarrollo y renovación de dicho campo en América Latina en la última década, aún es escasa la incorporación de las herramientas conceptuales del análisis del discurso, lo que ha dificultado el estudio de las emergentes modalidades de uso del lenguaje que caracterizan al nuevo capitalismo.