Critical Discourse Analysis
TEUN A. VAN DIJK
1. Introduction: What Is Critical Discourse Analysis?
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is 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.
Some of the tenets of CDA can already be found in the critical theory of the
Frankfurt School before the Second World War (Agger 1992b; Rasmussen 1996).
CDA is not so much a direction, school, or specialization next to the many other
“approaches” in discourse studies. Rather, it aims to offer a different “mode” or
“perspective” of theorizing, analysis, and application throughout the whole field.
Critical research on discourse needs to satisfy a number of requirements in order to
effectively realize its aims:
• As is often the case for more marginal research traditions, CDA research has to be
“better” than other research in order to be accepted.
• It focuses primarily on social problems and political issues, rather than on current
paradigms and fashions.
• Empirically adequate critical analysis of social problems is usually multidisciplinary.
• Rather than merely describe discourse structures, it tries to explain them in terms of
properties of social interaction and especially social structure.
• More specifically, CDA focuses on the ways discourse structures enact, confirm,
legitimate, reproduce, or challenge relations of power and dominance in society.
Fairclough and Wodak (1997: 271–80) summarize the main tenets of CDA as follows:
1. CDA addresses social problems
2. Power relations are discursive
3. Discourse constitutes society and culture
4. Discourse does ideological work
5. Discourse is historical
6. The link between text and society is mediated
7. Discourse analysis is interpretative and explanatory
8. Discourse is a form of social action.
1 Conceptual and Theoretical Frameworks
Since CDA is not a specific direction of research, it does not have a unitary theoretical
framework. Within the aims mentioned above, there are many types of CDA, and
these may be theoretically and analytically quite diverse. Critical analysis of conversation
is very different from an analysis of news reports in the press or of lessons and
teaching at school.Thus,
the typical vocabulary of many scholars in CDA will feature such notions as “power,”
“dominance,” “hegemony,” “ideology,” “class,” “gender,” “race,” “discrimination,”
“interests,” “reproduction,” “institutions,” “social structure,” and “social order,” besides
the more familiar discourse analytical notions.1
In this section, I focus on a number of basic concepts themselves, and thus devise a
theoretical framework that critically relates discourse, cognition, and society.
1.1 Macro vs. micro
Language use, discourse, verbal interaction, and communication belong to the microlevel
of the social order. Power, dominance, and inequality between social groups are
typically terms that belong to a macrolevel of analysis.This means that CDA has to
theoretically bridge the well-known “gap” between micro and macro approaches, which
is of course a distinction that is a sociological construct in its own right (Alexander
et al. 1987; Knorr-Cetina and Cicourel 1981). In everyday interaction and experience
the macro- and microlevel (and intermediary “mesolevels”) form one unified whole.
There are several ways to analyze and bridge these levels, and thus to arrive at a
unified critical analysis:
1 Members–groups: Language users engage in discourse as members of (several)
social groups, organizations, or institutions; and conversely, groups thus may act
“by” their members.
2 Actions–process: Social acts of individual actors are thus constituent parts of group
actions and social processes, such as legislation, newsmaking, or the reproduction
of racism.
3 Context–social structure: Situations of discursive interaction are similarly part or
constitutive of social structure; for example, a press conference may be a typical
practice of organizations and media institutions. That is, “local” and more “global”
contexts are closely related, and both exercise constraints on discourse.
1.2 Power as control
A central notion in most critical work on discourse is that of power, and more specifically
the social power of groups or institutions. Summarizing a complex philosophical
and social analysis, we will define social power in terms of control.
Closing the discourse–power circle, finally, this means that those groups who control
most influential discourse also have more chances to control the minds and
actions of others.
Simplifying these very intricate relationships even further for this chapter, we can
split up the issue of discursive power into two basic questions for CDA research:
1 How do (more) powerful groups control public discourse?
2 How does such discourse control mind and action of (less) powerful groups, and
what are the social consequences of such control, such as social inequality?
- Control of public discourse
- Mind control
2 Research in Critical Discourse Analysis
Although most discourse studies dealing with any aspect of power, domination, and
social inequality have not been explicitly conducted under the label of CDA, we shall
- nevertheless refer to some of these studies below.
- Gender inequality
One vast field of critical research on discourse and language that thus far has not
been carried out within a CDA perspective is that of gender.
- Media discourse
The undeniable power of the media has inspired many critical studies in many disciplines:
linguistics, semiotics, pragmatics, and discourse studies. Traditional, often
content analytical approaches in critical media studies have revealed biased, stereotypical,
sexist or racist images in texts, illustrations, and photos.
- Political discourse
Given the role of political discourse in the enactment, reproduction, and legitimization
of power and domination, we may also expect many critical discourse studies of
political text and talk (see Wilson, this volume).
- Ethnocentrism, antisemitism, nationalism, and racism
The study of the role of discourse in the enactment and reproduction of ethnic and
“racial” inequality has slowly emerged in CDA. Traditionally, such work focused on
ethnocentric and racist representations in the mass media, literature, and film (Dines
and Humez 1995; UNESCO 1977; Wilson and Gutiérrez 1985; Hartmann and Husband
1974; van Dijk 1991). Such representations continue centuries-old dominant
images of the Other in the discourses of European travelers, explorers, merchants,
soldiers, philosophers, and historians, among other forms of elite discourse (Barker
1978; Lauren 1988). Fluctuating between the emphasis on exotic difference, on the
one hand, and supremacist derogation stressing the Other’s intellectual, moral, and
biological inferiority, on the other hand, such discourses also influenced public opinion
and led to broadly shared social representations. It is the continuity of this sociocultural
tradition of negative images about the Other that also partly explains the
persistence of dominant patterns of representation in contemporary discourse, media,
and film (Shohat and Stam 1994).
Later discourse studies have gone beyond the more traditional, content analytical
analysis of “images” of the Others, and probed more deeply into the linguistic, semiotic,
and other discursive properties of text and talk to and about minorities, immigrants,
and Other peoples (for detailed review, see Wodak and Reisigl, this volume).
Besides the mass media, advertising, film, and textbooks, which were (and still are)
the genres most commonly studied, this newer work also focuses on political discourse,
scholarly discourse, everyday conversations, service encounters, talk shows,
and a host of other genres.
Many studies on ethnic and racial inequality reveal a remarkable similarity among
the stereotypes, prejudices, and other forms of verbal derogation across discourse
types, media, and national boundaries.
- From group domination to professional and institutional power
We have reviewed in this section critical studies of the role of discourse in the
(re)production inequality. Such studies characteristically exemplify the CDA perspective
on power abuse and dominance by specific social groups.6 Many other studies,
whether under the CDA banner or not.
3 Conclusion
We have seen in this chapter that critical discourse analyses deal with the relationship
between discourse and power. We have also sketched the complex theoretical
framework needed to analyze discourse and power, and provided a glimpse of the
many ways in which power and domination are reproduced by text and talk.
First, the cognitive interface
between discourse structures and those of the local and global social context is
seldom made explicit, and appears usually only in terms of the notions of knowledge
and ideology (van Dijk 1998).
Second,there is still a gap between more linguistically oriented studies of text and talk and
the various approaches in the social. The first often ignore concepts and theories in
sociology and political science on power abuse and inequality, whereas the second
seldom engage in detailed discourse analysis. Integration of various approaches is
therefore very important to arrive at a satisfactory form of multidisciplinary CDA.
