Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 26

Theresa Catalano
Linda R. Waugh

Critical Discourse
Analysis, Critical
Discourse
Studies and
Beyond
Perspectives in Pragmatics,
Philosophy & Psychology

Volume 26

Editor-in-Chief
Alessandro Capone, University of Messina, Italy

Consulting Editors
Keith Allan, Monash University, Australia
Louise Cummings, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
Wayne Davis, Georgetown University, Washington, USA
Igor Douven, University of Paris-Sorbonne, France
Yan Huang, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Istvan Kecskes, State University of New York at Albany, USA
Franco Lo Piparo, University of Palermo, Italy
Antonino Pennisi, University of Messina, Italy
Francesca Santulli, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy

Editorial Board Members

Noel Burton-Roberts, University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia
Brian Butler, University of North Carolina, Asheville, USA
Marco Carapezza, University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy
Felice Cimatti, Università della Calabria, Cosenza, Italy
Eros Corazza, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Marcelo Dascal, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
Michael Devitt, City University of New York, New York, USA
Frans van Eemeren, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Alessandra Falzone, University of Messina, Messina, Italy
Neil Feit, State University of New York, Fredonia, USA
Alessandra Giorgi, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy
Larry Horn, Yale University, New Haven, USA
Klaus von Heusinger, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany
Katarzyna Jaszczolt, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Ferenc Kiefer, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
Kepa Korta, ILCLI, Donostia, Spain
Ernest Lepore, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA
Stephen C. Levinson, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The
Netherlands
Fabrizio Macagno, New University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
Jacob L. Mey, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
Pietro Perconti, University of Messina, Messina, Italy
Francesca Piazza, University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy
Roland Posner, Berlin Institute of Technology, Berlin, Germany
Mark Richard, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA
Nathan Salmon, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Stephen R. Schiffer, New York University, New York, USA
Michel Seymour, University of Montreal, Montreal, Canada
Mandy Simons, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA
Timothy Williamson, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Anna Wierbizcka, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
Dorota Zieliñska, Jesuit University of Philosophy and Education Ignatianum,
Kraków, Poland

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11797

Theresa Catalano • Linda R. Waugh

Critical Discourse Analysis,

Critical Discourse Studies
and Beyond
Theresa Catalano Linda R. Waugh
Department of Teaching, Learning and Departments of French, English,
Teacher Education Linguistics, Anthropology; Language,
University of Nebraska-Lincoln Reading and Culture; and Interdisciplinary
Lincoln, NE, USA Doctoral Program in Second Language
Acquisition and Teaching
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ, USA

ISSN 2214-3807     ISSN 2214-3815 (electronic)

Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology
ISBN 978-3-030-49377-6    ISBN 978-3-030-49379-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49379-0

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

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To our students and all those fighting for
social change and justice.
Acknowledgments

First and foremost, we would like to thank Luigi Catalano and Ron Breiger for their
loving, patient, and tireless support throughout the writing process. Theresa would
also like to thank her parents Jacqueline Bifano Scholar and Eric Scholar for their
support and for always taking pride in what she does. We are also grateful for our
children’s support—Isabella Catalano, Lorenzo Catalano, and Valentina Catalano
and David Waugh-Breiger. Monique Monville-Burston also deserves much grati-
tude for her patience and understanding. We want to acknowledge Khaled Al
Masaeed, Tom Hong Do, and Paul Renigar for their original contributions to the
chapter from which this book was drawn (Waugh et al., 2016).1 We would also like
to express our great appreciation to David Machin, Andreas Musolff, Teun van Dijk,
Theo van Leeuwen, and Ruth Wodak for their advice, the time they took to converse
with us about various issues and topics in the book regarding their own work, the
way they helped connect us to other CDS scholars, their feedback on the first draft,
and their general support, all of which have helped in making the book better than
it would have been. In addition, we would like to acknowledge the input from two
anonymous reviewers of our book whose advice prompted us to make needed
changes. Our gratitude also goes to Helen van der Stelt and Jolanda Voogd for their
work with us for most of the time it took us to write this book, to Anita Ramchat and
Malini Arumugam for seeing us through the rest, to the other editors and production
team at Springer, as well as to Alessandro Capone and Jacob Mey for encouraging
us to write this book in the first place and to Alessandro for including it in his book
series and waiting patiently for it to be done. We also want to extend heartfelt thanks
to all of the contributors to Chap. 7 who took the time to think about the way they
connect their work to the world and send a description to us to be published here (in
the order they appear in Chap. 7): Ruth Wodak, Teun van Dijk, Andreas Musolff,
Leticia Yulita, David Machin, Felicitas Macgilchrist, Marcus Otto, Riem Spielhaus,
Richard Jackson, Paul Chamness Iida, John Richardson, Theo van Leeuwen,
Rebecca Rogers, Paul Renigar, Emily Suh, Katelyn Hemmeke, Ian Roderick,
Timothy Reagan, and Grace Fielder—and ourselves. We also appreciate the help
with references and formatting that Aiqing Yu and Uma Ganesan gave us. And
finally, thanks to you, our readers, who purchased this book. It means a lot to us that
you are reading it, and we hope that after you do, you will be inspired to do CDA/
CDS work of your own.

1
 Waugh, L.R., Catalano, T., Al Masaeed, K., Hong Do, T., & Renigar, P. (2016). Critical discourse
analysis: History, approaches, relation to pragmatics, critique, trends and new directions. In
A.  Capone. & J.  Mey (eds.). Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society.
(pp. 71–136). Berlin: Springer Verlag (in the series “Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy and
Psychology”).

vii
Contents

1 Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA),

Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), and Beyond ������������������������������������    1
1.1 General Definition of CDA, CDS and CDA/CDS����������������������������    1
1.2 Three Recent Examples of CDA/CDS����������������������������������������������    4
1.2.1 “Fabricating the American Dream in US media
Portrayals of Syrian Refugees: A Discourse Analytical
Study” (Bhatia & Jenks, 2018) ��������������������������������������������    4
1.2.2 “Traces of Neoliberalism in English Teaching
Materials: A Critical Discourse Analysis”
(Babaii & Sheikhi, 2018)������������������������������������������������������    5
1.2.3 “The Selfie as a Global Discourse”
(Veum & Undrum, 2018)������������������������������������������������������    6
1.3 What is in this Book��������������������������������������������������������������������������    7
References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   11
2 Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts����������������   13
2.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   13
2.2 British Linguistics: John R. Firth and Bronislaw Malinowski����������   14
2.3 Michael A. K. Halliday and the Systemicists ����������������������������������   15
2.3.1 Introduction: Systemic Functional Linguistics
(SFL), Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG),
Language as Social Semiotic (SocSem) ������������������������������   15
2.3.2 Stratal-Functional Model, System, Structure and SFG��������   19
2.3.3 Text and Context: Register and Genre����������������������������������   20
2.3.4 The Three Metafunctions: Ideational, Interpersonal,
and Textual����������������������������������������������������������������������������   23
2.3.5 Grammatical Metaphor ��������������������������������������������������������   28
2.3.6 ‘Appliable Linguistics’ and Social Action����������������������������   29
2.4 Critical Linguistics (CritLing)����������������������������������������������������������   31
2.4.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������   31
2.4.2 CritLing and Other Approaches to Linguistics ��������������������   32

ix
x Contents

2.4.3 Definition of CritLing; Fowler et al. (1979a):

‘Language and Control’, and Other Work����������������������������   34
2.4.4 Kress and Hodge 1979: ‘Language as Ideology’������������������   39
2.4.5 CritLing: Interdisciplinarity and a ‘Useable’ Approach ������   40
2.4.6 Kress 1989: ‘Linguistic Processes
in Sociocultural Practice’������������������������������������������������������   42
2.5 Hodge and Kress 1988: ‘Social Semiotics’ and Other Work������������   45
2.6 Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996: ‘Reading Images:
The Grammar of Visual Design’ ������������������������������������������������������   49
2.6.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������   49
2.6.2 General Overview ����������������������������������������������������������������   52
2.6.3 The Three Metafunctions in Visual Design��������������������������   53
2.6.4 Other Facets of the Visual ����������������������������������������������������   59
2.7 Kress and van Leeuwen 2001: ‘Multimodal Discourse:
The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication’��������������   61
References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   63
3 Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work
of the Founders����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   71
3.1 Introduction: Discourse Analysis (DA) and van Dijk 1985:
‘Handbook of Discourse Analysis’ ��������������������������������������������������   71
3.2 Start of CDA ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   73
3.2.1 Symposium in Amsterdam in 1991: Similarities
and Differences in the Original CDA Group������������������������   73
3.2.2 CDA: Consolidation and Development��������������������������������   78
3.3 Gunther Kress: Multimodal Learning and Education����������������������   82
3.4 Introduction to Norman Fairclough, Teun Van Dijk,
Ruth Wodak, and Theo van Leeuwen ����������������������������������������������   83
3.5 Norman Fairclough ��������������������������������������������������������������������������   83
3.5.1 Introduction and Early Work������������������������������������������������   83
3.5.2 Fairclough 1989a: ‘Language and Power’,
i.e., Discourse, Power, and Ideology������������������������������������   85
3.5.3 Critical Analysis of Discourse Samples:
Description, Interpretation, Evaluation��������������������������������   89
3.5.4 Fairclough 1992a: ‘Discourse and Social Change’
and 1995a: ‘Media Discourse’����������������������������������������������   90
3.5.5 Fairclough 1995b: ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’
and Early CDA����������������������������������������������������������������������   93
3.6 Teun A. van Dijk ������������������������������������������������������������������������������   94
3.6.1 Introduction and Early Work������������������������������������������������   94
3.6.2 Project on Racism and Discourse;
Discourse-Cognition-­Society Triangle ��������������������������������   97
3.6.3 van Dijk 1984: ‘Prejudice in Discourse’������������������������������  100
3.6.4 Other work on Ethnic Prejudice and Racist Ideologies��������  103
3.6.5 Media Discourse and Racism�����������������������������������������������  104
3.6.6 van Dijk 1993: ‘Elite Discourse and Racism’
and Other Work ��������������������������������������������������������������������  107
Contents xi

3.7 Teun van Dijk and Ruth Wodak: Productive

Professional Collaboration����������������������������������������������������������������  109
3.7.1 Shared Intellectual and Social Justice Interests��������������������  109
3.7.2 Consequences of Research on Racism
and Antisemitism������������������������������������������������������������������  112
3.8 Ruth Wodak��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  113
3.8.1 Introduction and Early Work������������������������������������������������  113
3.8.2 Wodak 1989: ‘Language, Power and Ideology:
Studies in Political Discourse’����������������������������������������������  115
3.8.3 Wodak 1996: ‘Disorders of Discourse’: Discourse
Sociolinguistics and Early CDA ������������������������������������������  116
3.8.4 Discourses of Antisemitism: Waldheim, Haider
and Discourses of National Identity��������������������������������������  119
3.8.5 Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) in 2000 ������������������  121
3.8.6 Discourse, Politics, Identity (DPI) Wittgenstein
Research Centre��������������������������������������������������������������������  127
3.8.7 Wodak 2015: ‘The Politics of Fear’ and Research
on Populism��������������������������������������������������������������������������  129
3.8.8 Biographer and Historian of CDA/CDS ������������������������������  130
3.9 Theo van Leeuwen����������������������������������������������������������������������������  131
3.9.1 Introduction and Early Work������������������������������������������������  131
3.9.2 Van Leeuwen 2005: ‘Introducing Social Semiotics’������������  133
3.9.3 van Leeuwen 2008a: ‘Discourse and Practice’;
Toys as Discourse�����������������������������������������������������������������  135
3.9.4 Joint Work on Multimodality, Global Media
Discourse and Semiotic Software: Machin,
and Djonov and Zhao������������������������������������������������������������  138
References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  141
4 The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS������������������������������������������������������  155
4.1 Introduction: CDA, CDS and CDA/CDS������������������������������������������  155
4.2 Panoply of Work in CDA/CDS: Criteria for the Main
Approaches ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  158
4.2.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������  158
4.2.2 Issues with the Main Approaches to CDA/CDS ������������������  159
4.2.3 Synthesis of our Analysis of the Major Approaches������������  161
4.2.4 What the Approaches Have in Common������������������������������  163
4.3 Dialectical-Relational Approach (DRA)������������������������������������������  164
4.3.1 The Major Properties of DRA����������������������������������������������  164
4.3.2 The Values of DRA ��������������������������������������������������������������  166
4.3.3 Changes in Fairclough’s Approach ��������������������������������������  167
4.4 Sociocognitive Approach (SCA)������������������������������������������������������  170
4.5 Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA)��������������������������������������������  173
xii Contents

4.6 Social Semiotics (SocSem) and Multimodal

Approaches (MCDA)������������������������������������������������������������������������  178
4.6.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������  178
4.6.2 SocSem Tools������������������������������������������������������������������������  180
4.6.3 SocSem and Classification����������������������������������������������������  182
4.6.4 SocSem and Multimodality��������������������������������������������������  183
4.6.5 Multimodality, SocSem and Other Approaches��������������������  185
4.7 Dispositive Analysis Approach (DPA)����������������������������������������������  187
4.8 Corpus Linguistic Approach (CorpLingA) ��������������������������������������  190
4.9 Cognitive Linguistic Approaches (CogLingA) ��������������������������������  194
4.9.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������  194
4.9.2 Critical Metaphor and Metonymy Analysis��������������������������  196
4.9.3 Hart’s Approaches to CogLing���������������������������������������������  200
References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  202
5 Critiques of CDA/CDS and Responses��������������������������������������������������  219
5.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  219
5.2 Widdowson vs. Fairclough����������������������������������������������������������������  221
5.3 The ‘Critical’ Aspect������������������������������������������������������������������������  223
5.4 Methodological and Theoretical Shortcomings��������������������������������  224
5.5 Context����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  225
5.6 Relationship with Readers of Texts��������������������������������������������������  228
5.7 Paying Attention to Other Fields and Modalities������������������������������  228
5.8 Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA)��������������������������������������������������  231
5.9 The Move (from PDA) to Generative Critique ��������������������������������  234
5.10 Attention to Culture in the Construction of Discourse ��������������������  235
5.11 Researcher Reflexivity����������������������������������������������������������������������  236
5.12 Redefining CDA/CDS����������������������������������������������������������������������  237
References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  240
6 CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections ��������������������������������  247
6.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  247
6.2 CDA/CDS and Critical Applied Linguistics ������������������������������������  248
6.3 CDA/CDS and Education ����������������������������������������������������������������  252
6.3.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������  252
6.3.2 Norman Fairclough ��������������������������������������������������������������  253
6.3.3 Rebecca Rogers: Primary and Secondary Education������������  258
6.3.4 James Paul Gee ��������������������������������������������������������������������  260
6.3.5 CDA/CDS, Education and the Media ����������������������������������  262
6.4 CDA/CDS and Sociolinguistics��������������������������������������������������������  266
6.5 CDA/CDS and Anthropology/Ethnography��������������������������������������  271
6.6 CDA/CDS and Culture����������������������������������������������������������������������  276
6.7 CDA/CDS and Gender Studies ��������������������������������������������������������  285
6.8 CDA/CDS and Queer Linguistics/Theory/Studies ��������������������������  290
6.8.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������  290
6.8.2 Queer Theory/Queer Studies������������������������������������������������  291
Contents xiii

6.8.3 Queer Linguistics and Queer Discourse Studies������������������  291

6.8.4 Special Issue of ‘Discourse & Society’
on Queer Linguistics/Queer Discourse Studies��������������������  293
6.9 CDA/CDS and Pragmatics����������������������������������������������������������������  294
6.9.1 Introduction: Definition of Pragmatics ��������������������������������  294
6.9.2 Pragmatics Concepts in CDA/CDS Scholarship������������������  297
6.10 CDA/CDS and Ecolinguistics����������������������������������������������������������  301
References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  306
7 What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference
in the World����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  325
7.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  325
7.2 Ruth Wodak��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  327
7.2.1 Short Biography��������������������������������������������������������������������  327
7.2.2 Attempting to Make a Difference ����������������������������������������  328
7.3 Teun A. van Dijk ������������������������������������������������������������������������������  331
7.3.1 Short Biography��������������������������������������������������������������������  331
7.3.2 Practical and Social Applications of van Dijk’s Work����������  331
7.4 Andreas Musolff ������������������������������������������������������������������������������  333
7.4.1 Short Biography��������������������������������������������������������������������  333
7.4.2 Reaching the Public through CDA����������������������������������������  334
7.5 Leticia Yulita ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  334
7.5.1 Short Biography��������������������������������������������������������������������  334
7.5.2 Using CDA to Inform Teaching��������������������������������������������  335
7.6 David Machin������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  336
7.6.1 Short Biography��������������������������������������������������������������������  336
7.6.2 Fostering the Development of Critical Citizens
and Challenging Injustice ����������������������������������������������������  337
7.7 Felicitas Macgilchrist, Marcus Otto, and Riem Spielhaus����������������  338
7.7.1 Short Biography of Felicitas Macgilchrist����������������������������  338
7.7.2 Short Biography of Marcus Otto������������������������������������������  339
7.7.3 Short Biography of Riem Spielhaus ������������������������������������  339
7.7.4 Shaping and Changing How Discourse Unfolds������������������  339
7.8 Richard Jackson��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  340
7.8.1 Short Biography��������������������������������������������������������������������  340
7.8.2 How CDA Informs my Teaching, Public Engagement,
Activism and Politics������������������������������������������������������������  341
7.9 Paul Chamness Iida (Known earlier as Paul Chamness Miller) ������  342
7.9.1 Short Biography��������������������������������������������������������������������  342
7.9.2 Using CDA to Model how to Dialogue about
and Advocate for Social Justice��������������������������������������������  342
7.10 John Richardson��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  344
7.10.1 Short Biography��������������������������������������������������������������������  344
7.10.2 Taking the Emancipatory Agenda of CDS out
‘Into the World’��������������������������������������������������������������������  345
xiv Contents

7.11 Theo van Leeuwen����������������������������������������������������������������������������  346

7.11.1 Short Biography��������������������������������������������������������������������  346
7.11.2 For my Students��������������������������������������������������������������������  346
7.12 Rebecca Rogers��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  347
7.12.1 Short Biography��������������������������������������������������������������������  347
7.12.2 From Describing Educational Inequities
to Creating Space for Social Justice: The Interventionist
Promise and Potential of Critical Discourse Analysis����������  348
7.13 Paul G. Renigar ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  358
7.13.1 Short Biography��������������������������������������������������������������������  358
7.13.2 Moving CDA/CDS Beyond the Boundaries
of Academia��������������������������������������������������������������������������  359
7.14 Emily Suh and Katelyn Hemmeke����������������������������������������������������  363
7.14.1 Short Biography of Emily Suh����������������������������������������������  363
7.14.2 Short Biography of Katelyn Hemmeke��������������������������������  364
7.14.3 Unmasking Ideology Underlying Adoption Discourse��������  364
7.15 Ian Roderick��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  366
7.15.1 Short Biography��������������������������������������������������������������������  366
7.15.2 Teaching against Employability��������������������������������������������  366
7.16 Timothy Reagan��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  368
7.16.1 Short Biography��������������������������������������������������������������������  368
7.16.2 Infusing a Critical Perspective on Linguistics
Topics in the Educational Domain����������������������������������������  368
7.17 Grace E. Fielder��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  369
7.17.1 Short Biography��������������������������������������������������������������������  369
7.17.2 CDA/CDS and Community Outreach����������������������������������  370
7.18 Linda R. Waugh��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  370
7.18.1 Short Biography��������������������������������������������������������������������  371
7.18.2 Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign ��������������������������������������������  372
7.19 Theresa Catalano������������������������������������������������������������������������������  373
7.19.1 Short Biography��������������������������������������������������������������������  373
7.19.2 CDA/CDS and My Community��������������������������������������������  373
7.20 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  381
References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  382

Epilogue������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  389

Reference����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  390

Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  391
Preface

We did not just decide one day that what the world needed most was one more book
about Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA1) or Critical Discourse Studies (CDS).
Rather, the idea for this book came from the chapter about CDA (“Critical Discourse
Analysis: History, approaches, relation to pragmatics, critique, trends, and new
directions”) we had written (along with co-authors Khaled Al Masaeed, Tom Hong
Do, and Paul Renigar) for the volume Interdisciplinary studies in pragmatics, cul-
ture and society, edited by Alessandro Capone and Jacob Mey (see Waugh et al.,
2016).2 In that chapter, our primary goal was to describe CDA and its relation to
pragmatics, but soon after we began to write it, we realized that there was so much
to talk about and describe that we could not possibly fit them all into one chapter
(even a very long one, as that chapter became). Capone and Mey agreed with us and
suggested that we do a book on CDA. Our original aim was to include the history of
Critical Linguistics (CritLing), which was the main source for CDA, and also to
make the book broader than just CDA and its relation to pragmatics. We then
decided to include a discussion of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)
which CritLing—and some scholars in CDA—were influenced by, more about
Social Semiotics (SocSem), as well as a larger discussion of the relation between
CDA and CDS, which would be signaled by the title of the book and by more atten-
tion to CDS in the text, since they are both part of the same research domain/pro-
gram, which we are calling CDA/CDS, as will be discussed later in the book.
In the long run, it was not just a matter of taking the chapter and expanding on
it—we made many changes, left out or shortened some discussions, added or
lengthened others, and reconceived others, etc. In essence, the book became its own

1
 For information about the acronyms and abbreviations used in this Preface and in the rest of the
book, see the “List of Acronyms and Abbreviations.”
2
 Waugh, L.R., Catalano, T., Al Masaeed, K., Hong Do, T., & Renigar, P. (2016). Critical discourse
analysis: History, approaches, relation to pragmatics, critique, trends and new directions. In
A.  Capone. & J.  Mey (Eds.). Interdisciplinary studies in pragmatics, culture and society
(pp. 71–136). Heidelberg: Springer Verlag (in the series “Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy
and Psychology”).

xv
xvi Preface

creature, going in its own direction, and forging its own path, which means that it is
now both similar to and different from the 2016 chapter. At the same time, both
CDA and CDS have changed between 2014, when we finished writing the chapter,
and February 2018, our “cut-off” point for including anything new about the remark-
able growth and evolution of this research domain.
We also noted in our research the differing views and perspectives on CDA,
especially the different categorizations of the main approaches to CDA/CDS. There
were also the ways in which the field was changing in order to address new tech-
nologies and their influence and the role in areas of importance to CDA/CDS and
also to forge interdisciplinary connections with many other research domains. That
is, we realized the importance of describing in detail the development of this
dynamic field, the work of its founders and its progression through the years, as well
as the overlapping variety of theoretical foundations from which CDA/CDS schol-
ars draw. As a result, we decided that there was a need for some synthesizing in
order to show more general patterns in terms of definitions, terminology, approaches,
and interdisciplinary connections. And, finally, we wanted to provide emerging and
well-established scholars with a point of reference for different approaches and con-
nections to disciplines as well as specific examples they can use to guide their own
CDA/CDS scholarship. Hence, the book attempts to do all of this—synthesize defi-
nitions, recognize contributions by major scholars in the field, document its origin
and development over time, describe major frameworks and interdisciplinary con-
nections, and provide some recent examples of each. As a result, besides the text
itself, we hope the reference sections at the end of each chapter will be a valuable
resource for anyone interested in this area.
Additionally, during the course of writing this book, many major political and
social events have occurred, e.g., the vote for Brexit in the UK, the election of
Donald Trump as President of the USA, evidence of Russian interference in the UK
and the US elections, the rise of populist governments in Europe and worldwide, the
(re)emergence of white-supremacist and neo-Nazi movements, the ongoing issue of
refugees and (im)migrants, evidence of racism, antisemitism, bigotry and hate—
and so forth—all of which are still continuing and have an enormous influence on
the world we live in. These events have made us think harder and more deeply about
the point of doing “critical” work. As we describe in our introductory chapter, CDA/
CDS is aimed at examining social inequality and how it is produced and reproduced
through many different types of communication, including those that were estab-
lished in the twentieth century as well as social media such as Twitter, TV news
sources, and the myriad other new and emerging modes in the twenty-first century.
At the same time, we began to see in the USA, Turkey, Brazil, and elsewhere (see,
e.g., the online version of The Guardian for a more extensive list3) the continued
weakening of the free press, as well as the mass awakening of women (e.g., Women’s
March) and youth (e.g., the rise of the 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg

3
 See also “The global slump in press freedom: Illiberal regimes are clamping down on independent
media across the world”(2018, July 23), in The Economist. Retrieved from: https://www.econo-
mist.com/graphic-detail/2018/07/23/ the-global-slump-in-press-freedom.
Preface xvii

about climate change), and the recent emergence of activism among people of color,
especially ‘blacks’, and so forth—and so we began to question why we do this work
at all, if not to spur, or support in some small way, social change toward social jus-
tice. As a result, we decided to add a final chapter (Chap. 7) in which we feature the
voices of both prominent and emerging CDA/CDS scholars who have agreed to tell
readers of the book what they are doing to connect to the world and to address the
issue of why CDA/CDS matters—what CDA/CDS scholars are doing to make a
difference in the world.
We hope our readers will find this book informative, useful, and thought-­
provoking, and that it will help by continuing, and creating, many conversations and
much dialogue about CDA/CDS as well as by inspiring our readers to use their
knowledge to do something good in the world.

Lincoln, NE  Theresa Catalano

Tucson, AZ   Linda R. Waugh
List of Acronyms and Abbreviations

CDA Critical discourse analysis

CDS Critical discourse studies
CDA/CDS Critical discourse analysis/Critical discourse studies
CCDA/CCDS Cultural approach to CDA/CDS
CL Critical linguistics (in the writing of the critical linguists and oth-
ers quoted in this book)
CLA Critical language awareness
CLS Critical language study
CogLing Cognitive linguistics
CogLingA Cognitive linguistic approach
CorpLing Corpus linguistics
CorpLingA Corpus linguistic approach
CritLing Critical linguistics (in the text of this book)
DA Discourse analysis
DHA Discourse-historical approach
DPA Dispositive analysis approach
DRA Discourse-relational approach
DS Discourse studies
FCDA Feminist critical discourse analysis
MCDA Multimodal approaches to CDA/CDS [Multimodal CDA]
SAA Social actors approach
SocSem Social Semiotics
SCA Sociocognitive approach
SFG Systemic functional grammar
SFL Systemic functional linguistics

xix
xx List of Acronyms and Abbreviations

Other Abbreviations

Chap. X refers to another chapter in this book (e.g., see Chap. 3 means “see
Chap. 3 in this book”).
Sect. x.y.(z) refers to another section in this book (e.g., see Sect. 3.6.1 means “see
chapter 3, section 6.1 in this book” and 3.6.1 (without Sect.) means
the same thing.
A short note about the acronyms and abbreviations in the book (including the
Preface, the Contents, the chapter, section and subsection titles, and the texts of all
the chapters): we have tried to use only a few acronyms and abbreviations since we
know that too many would be difficult for the reader. Some of the acronyms and
abbreviations are used in the texts we cite, but others are not—we created them for
use in the context of this book. Since we assume that some readers will not read the
chapters in their order in the book, each of the acronyms or abbreviations listed here
(in alphabetical order) is first presented in each chapter in its full, written out form,
and then given in its acronymic or abbreviated form. The only ones for which this
isn’t true are CDA, CDS, and CDA/CDS, which are presented in full at the begin-
ning of the book and then used throughout the book.
Note that these acronyms change when translated (e.g., CDA becomes ACD in
Spanish).
Foreword: Critical Discourse Analysis/Studies—
Challenges, Concepts, and Perspectives

Ruth Wodak
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

Challenges

This comprehensive overview is both timely and topical—and very important. In

our fast changing, globalized and globalizing world, the systematic and critical,
qualitative and quantitative analysis of text, talk, and image, of gestures, habitus,
and performance, of interaction on front- and backstage provides entry points to
understanding and explaining the many complex aspects of the rapid developments,
the tensions, and contradictions, which involve all of us in different and context-­
dependent ways. This is why discourse studies (DS) and critical discourse analysis
(CDA)/studies (CDS) have become ever more relevant, not only in linguistics, but
also in neighboring social science fields.
It is important, for example, to understand how and why demagogues still suc-
ceed in mobilizing large audiences after the terrible histories and experiences of the
twentieth century—does this mean that one cannot learn from past failures, crises,
and catastrophes (e.g., Forchtner, 2016)? Why are some people able to transgress all
norms and conventions of dialogue, break taboos, and disrupt interaction—and oth-
ers not; which challenges do social media pose; which positive and negative conse-
quences does the use of social media imply and for whom, when, and where; which
messages resonate in which way and why? And how are discrimination and exclu-
sion legitimized in democratic societies; how are counter-discourses established,
and so forth? The manifold transgressions and the normalization of the hitherto
unsayable have multiple effects in and on our democratic and pluralist societies
which should be carefully investigated (Wodak, 2018, 2020a): changing or even
abolishing specific (communicative) institutional procedures may lead to discursive
struggles and discursive shifts (Krzyżanowski, 2020) which might imply the

xxi
xxii Foreword: Critical Discourse Analysis/Studies—Challenges, Concepts, and Perspectives

h­ ollowing out of such institutions, not abruptly but step by step (Wodak, 2019a);
discourses enable, accompany, and manifest such developments.
One of the huge challenges critical researchers are confronted with is the current
rejection of academic elites and scholarly expertise by far-right populist parties and
by their followers, i.e., parties which are governing or supporting governments in
many countries in Europe and beyond. This leads to a rejection of fact-based knowl-
edge. Facts are being degraded to the status of opinions, the so-called alternative
facts. Manifold lies are disseminated by powerful people, without any consequences
or sanctions, even without the need to apologize if such untruths are uncovered.
Simple solutions naturally allow for rapid successes, yet they frequently turn out to
be shortsighted, ineffective, or even false. Moreover, the performance of politics is
gaining the upper hand at the expense of differentiated as well as complex content.
Slogans have taken over the function of arguments; and superficial consensus—the
function of a plurality of opinions and of discussion (e.g., Wodak, 2020b).
CDA/S are not only concerned with analysis, interpretation, and explanation—
but also with application. Apart from academic relevance, many practical applica-
tions have been achieved and implemented, especially in the fields of inter alia
education, politics, medicine, advertising, social work, and journalism. Insights into
power relationships, into the power of discourse, and power in discourse support
awareness of hegemonic struggles and the creation of counter-discourses in such
struggles. Accordingly, Holzscheiter (2010) distinguishes three modes of exercising
power in discourse which should be considered when designing applications of the
results of in-depth studies: power in discourse is defined as actors’ struggles with
different interpretations of meaning. Power over discourse is defined as possessing
general “access to the stage” in macro- and micro-contexts, i.e., processes of inclu-
sion and exclusion. Finally, power of discourse relates to “the influence of histori-
cally grown macro-structures of meaning, of the conventions of the language game
in which actors find themselves.”

Some Important Concepts

Nowadays, DS involves scholars from a range of disciplines. Many actually contest

the idea that it is derived from linguistics, even in the larger sense of the term. To
this extent, DS could be considered to be not only a transdisciplinary or even post-­
disciplinary project but rather one which runs counter to the division of knowledge
into specialized disciplines and subdisciplines (e.g., Angermuller, Maingueneau, &
Wodak, 2014). Generally, “discourse” is used in two ways: (a) as a pragmatic under-
standing, predominant among linguistic and micro-sociological discourse analysts,
who consider discourse as a process of contextualizing texts, language in use, the
situated production of speech acts, or a turn-taking practice; (b) a socio-historical
understanding, preferred by more macro-sociological discourse theorists interested
in power, for whom “discourse” refers to the ensemble of verbal and non-verbal
practices of large social communities (Wodak, 2019b).
Foreword: Critical Discourse Analysis/Studies—Challenges, Concepts, and Perspectives xxiii

In order to have some meaning for somebody, texts need to be contextualized

(Wittgenstein, 1967). For discourse analysts, therefore, meaning is a fragile and
contested construction of the discourse participants. While discourse may take place
between the physically present participants of an interaction in an institutional set-
ting, it can also be produced in and by large communities mediated through
­newspapers, a range of online genres, social movements, and television. Embedded
in larger socio-historical configurations and structures, discursive practices can
operate with various types of media—oral, written, multimodal, allowing large or
small numbers of participants to communicate over shorter or longer distances.
The significant difference between DS and CDA/S lies in the constitutive
problem-­oriented interdisciplinary approach of the latter. CDA/S does not study a
linguistic unit per se (such as sentence structure, metaphors, pronouns, and so forth)
but rather social phenomena which are necessarily complex and thus require a
multi-/inter-/transdisciplinary and multi-method approach. In contrast to much
common-sense understandings, the objects under investigation do not have to be
related to negative or exceptionally “serious” social or political experiences or
events; indeed, this is a frequent misunderstanding of the aims and goals of CDA/S
and of the term “critical” which does not necessarily mean “negative” (Chilton,
Tian, & Wodak, 2010). Any social phenomenon lends itself to critical investigation,
to be challenged and not taken for granted, not to be essentialized.
Also, in contrast to many beliefs, CDA/S has never been and has never attempted
to be or to provide one single or specific theory (Wodak & Meyer, 2015a, 2015b).
Indeed, Van Dijk (2008: 82) has pointed to “the lack of theory about the norms and
principles of its [CDA’s] own critical activity.” More specifically, what is needed—
Forchtner (2011: 2) argues—is an “extensive elaboration of why one’s critique is
particularly reliable.” Furthermore, it is important, in my view, to distinguish
between ideology (and other frequently used terms such as stance/beliefs/
opinions/Weltanschauung/position) and discourse (Purvis & Hunt, 1993: 474ff).
Quite rightly, Purvis and Hunt state that these concepts “do not stand alone but are
associated not only with other concepts but with different theoretical traditions”
(1993: 474). Thus, “ideology” is usually (more or less) closely associated with the
Marxist tradition, whereas “discourse” has gained much significance in the linguis-
tic turn in modern social theory “by providing a term with which to grasp the way
in which language and other forms of social semiotics not merely convey social
experience but play some major part in constituting social objects (the subjectivities
and their associated identities), their relations, and the field in which they exist”
(1993: 474). The conflation of “ideology” and “discourse” might thus lead to an
inflationary use of both “ideologies” and “discourses,” in which both concepts tend
to simultaneously indicate texts, positioning, and subjectivities as well as belief
systems, structures of knowledge, and social practices.
xxiv Foreword: Critical Discourse Analysis/Studies—Challenges, Concepts, and Perspectives

Perspectives

Critical scholarship can make a significant contribution to enlightenment, yet

“scholarship” needs to take a stance and express itself in comprehensible ways, in
many different public spheres, many languages, and via different genres of text and
talk. Obviously, academics and intellectuals, of all people, belong to the so-called
elites. Academia and academics must therefore seek to enter into dialogue with
­different groups of people, to answer questions, to listen, without a moralizing fore-
finger while at the same time indicating clear boundaries of the acceptable based on
the principles of our pluralistic democracies, of human rights, and our
constitutions.
Theresa Catalano and Linda Waugh have produced a much-needed book—a
book which helps answer some of the questions posed at the outset. It allows tracing
the history of the discipline of CDA/S; and by so doing, it points to important new
approaches to confront the major challenges our societies will have to cope with.
This is why I hope that this book reaches and inspires many readers, inside aca-
demia and beyond.
References
Angermuller, J., Maingueneau, D., & Wodak, R. (2014). The discourse studies
reader: An introduction, in: Angermuller, J., Maingueneau, D. & Wodak, R.
(Eds.): The discourse studies reader: Main currents in theory and analysis.
(pp. 1–14). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
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Chapter 1
Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis
(CDA), Critical Discourse Studies (CDS),
and Beyond

“To draw the consequences for political action from critical

theory is the aspiration of those who have serious intentions,
and yet there is no general prescription unless it is the necessity
for insight into one’s own responsibility.”
(Horkheimer quoted in O’Neill, 1979, from Wodak, 2001: 1)

1.1  General Definition of CDA, CDS and CDA/CDS

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA1), along with Critical Discourse Studies (CDS),
is a problem-oriented interdisciplinary research movement, school, or field
(Wodak & Meyer, 2009b: 3) which studies language and other semiotic systems in
use and subsumes “a variety of approaches, each with different theoretical models,
research methods and agenda” (Fairclough, Mulderrig, & Wodak, 2011: 357). It is
interested in “analyzing hidden, opaque, and visible structures of dominance, dis-
crimination, power and control as manifested in language” (Wodak & Meyer,
2016b: 12). Its objective is to examine critically the relationship between lan-
guage, ideology, power and social structure, for example, social inequality as it is
constructed, re-produced, legitimized, and resisted in language and other modes of
communication.
CDA emerged after a small symposium in Amsterdam as a loosely networked
group of scholars in the 1990s and has since then developed into a broadly based
international program with a set of approaches that explores the relationships
between discourse (language use) and the people who create and use it, and the
social and political contexts, structures, and practices in which it occurs. It aims
(Flowerdew and Richardson (2018: 1) “to advance our understanding of how dis-
course figures in social processes, social figures, and social change”. By critically
studying discourse, it emphasizes the way in which language is implicated in issues

 See the List of Acronyms and Abbreviations.

1

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 1

T. Catalano, L. R. Waugh, Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse
Studies and Beyond, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 26,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49379-0_1
2 1  Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Critical Discourse Studies (CDS)…

such as power and ideology that determine how language is used, what effect it has,
and how it reflects, serves, and furthers the interests, positions, perspectives, and
values of those who are in power. From this point of view, discourse perpetuates
social patterns like domination, discrimination, exploitation, dehumanization, natu-
ralization, and (ideologically driven) ‘common sense’—unless its usually hidden
effects are exposed so that awareness, resistance, emancipation and social action
can bring about social change and social justice. Thus, CDA typically is ‘norma-
tive’, in that it judges what is right and what is wrong and “addresses social wrongs
in their discursive aspects and possible ways of righting or mitigating them”
(Fairclough, 2010: 11).
While we have been using CDA up to now in this introduction, we must note
briefly that some scholars have begun to use the acronym CDS (for Critical
Discourse Studies) for various reasons, such as to denote the expansion of CDA into
a larger transdisciplinary/cross-disciplinary research domain, and/or to convey a
rejection of language or language-based analysis as its major focus (see further
discussion in Sect. 4.1). This means that CDS has recently replaced CDA for some
(but not all) major scholars in the field in their most recent publications. In this book
(see below Sect. 1.3 and Chaps. 2 and 3) we are taking a historical look at CDA,
starting from its origins in Critical Linguistics (CritLing) in the 1970s to its devel-
opment into CDA in the 1990s and early 2000s, to currently, when it is referred to
as either CDA or CDS or both (and we use either one in our discussion, depending
on the scholar or approach). And when we talk about general trends in this research
area, we use our own acronym ‘CDA/CDS’, which recognizes the historical and
intellectual ties between them and at the same time is a more inclusive way of refer-
ring to all the scholars and all the approaches in this domain.
As we will see, many of the statements in these three opening paragraphs (and
not just the issue of CDA vs. CDS) are highly contested, not only by those who have
had sometimes very strong critiques of CDA/CDS (see Chap. 5), but also by those
who practice it. There are many different approaches to CDA/CDS and not all their
adherents agree with others on basic questions or even recognize their affinity with
each other. As said above, scholars differ on whether or not language (or linguistics)
should be central and, as a result, some bring in semiotic and multimodal approaches
which deal with the meaning potential of modes besides language and analyze them
differently. Furthermore, scholars differ in their definitions of the terminology they
use (e.g., ‘discourse’, ‘critical’, ‘context’). These, and other differences will be dis-
cussed in Chap. 4 and elsewhere, but for a more detailed description see Wodak and
Meyer (2016a).
As for the commonalities across the approaches to CDA/CDS, Wodak and Meyer
(2009b: 2) provide a helpful list of seven dimensions (see van Dijk, 2007; Wodak,
2008) of discourse studies (DS, and DA, in Wodak, 2001), which “some parts of the
new fields/paradigms/linguistic sub-disciplines of semiotics, pragmatics, psycho-
and sociolinguistics, ethnography of speaking, conversation analysis” (Wodak &
Meyer, 2009b: 2) that deal with discourse with a non-critical approach have in com-
mon. The seven dimensions are (italics, single quotes, and bullet points in the
original):
1.1  General Definition of CDA, CDS and CDA/CDS 3

• an interest in the properties of ‘naturally occurring’ language use by real lan-

guage users (instead of a study of abstract language systems and invented
examples)
• a focus on larger units than isolated words and sentences, and hence, new basic
units of analysis: texts, discourses, conversations, speech acts, or communicative
events
• the extension of linguistics beyond sentence grammar towards a study of action
and interaction
• the extension to non-verbal (semiotic, multimodal, visual) aspects of interaction
and communication: gestures, images, film, the internet and multimedia
• a focus on dynamic (socio)-cognitive or interactional moves and strategies
• the study of the functions of (social, cultural, situative [situated] and cognitive)
contexts of language use.
• an analysis of a vast number of phenomena of text grammar and language use:
coherence, anaphora, topics, macrostructures, speech acts, interactions, turn-­
taking, signs, politeness, argumentation, rhetoric, mental models and many other
aspects of text and discourse.
They also go on to say that “the significant difference between DS and CDS (or
CDA) lies in the constitutive problem-oriented, interdisciplinary approach of the
latter, apart from endorsing all of the above points” (Wodak & Meyer, 2009b: 2)—
as well as its critical stance. These will be discussed throughout this book, but we
would like to note here that some scholars also refer to this approach as “multidis-
ciplinary” (e.g., van Dijk, 1998, 2009, 2016), “cross-disciplinary” (Wodak, 2001) or
“transdisciplinary” (see Fairclough, 2009, 2015) when referring to CDA/CDS, or at
least their own approach to CDA.  In addition, Wodak and Meyer (2009a,
2009b/2016a, 2016b) distinguish between “interdisciplinary” as characteristic of
the “theoretical framework” as a whole vs. its application to “the collection and
analysis of data” (see Sect. 4.5 for more on this in relation to Wodak’s discourse-
historical approach). We have decided to use inter-/multi-/cross-/trans-­disciplinary
interchangeably, in relation to the way that scholars we discuss use the terms them-
selves, without differentiation and without attempting to take sides. In this case, we
adhere to the adage “let a thousand flowers bloom”.
In principle, CDA/CDS can be used in relation to any type of topic, in any type
of discourse, in any type of medium (discourse modality), adopting a variety of
types of methodology—although a given CDA/CDS scholar or group of analysts
will prefer/focus on one or more of these, according to their own predilections. With
these provisos in mind, we can say that many of the topics that CDA/CDS takes up
include the unjust or biased treatment of people based on differences (e.g. religion,
race, sexual orientation, gender, social (or socioeconomic) class/status,
nationality/citizenship status and stereotyping) and the related use of language, dis-
course and other semiotic phenomena by groups (e.g. Wall Street CEOs, corpora-
tions, Mafia, politicians, governments, media) to gain power, stay in power, or
oppress minority groups. In addition, much CDA/CDS work often focuses on capi-
talism, globalization, and/or neoliberalism (which are all highly inter-connected), as
well as nationalism, language planning/policy and pedagogy, including the analysis
4 1  Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Critical Discourse Studies (CDS)…

of teaching materials and policy documents, and more recently, environmental (cli-
mate change) discourse. These are treated in a wide variety of discourse contexts
including media discourse of all types (e.g. film, newspapers, TV news broadcasts,
internet, email, social media—e.g., Twitter and other social media), as well as elite,
literary, and narrative discourses, government policy meetings, advertising, legal/
courtroom, medical, cross-/inter-/transcultural, parental/family discourses and con-
versational interaction. The discourse modalities studied are equally wide: e.g.,
written texts, monomodal and multimodal texts, visual, oral/aural/spoken, musical,
natural/mechanical, etc.—although the majority of work in CDA/CDS is on linguis-
tic and visual modalities.

1.2  Three Recent Examples of CDA/CDS

In order to grasp more concretely what CDA/CDS is and does, we begin by giving
brief synopses of three recently published articles, which in no way represent all
approaches; rather, they provide a quick glance at both how CDA/CDS works and
three different trends in the field. In doing so, our intention is not to restrict the
description of the field to only these specific applications of CDA, but rather to aid
readers in understanding the range of research being done that calls itself CDA or
CDS. Furthermore, the examples illustrate CDA/CDS and its use and need in soci-
ety as well as the different types of topics and issues covered and the range of coun-
tries and disciplines of CDA/CDS scholars. The articles were chosen as suitable
examples of CDA/CDS based on the following criteria: (1) The article specifically
mentions CDA or CDS and clearly fits within our definitions of what CDA/CDS is
and does; (2) The article was published in 2018, the year much of this book was
written in order to show the most recent trends and issues, and in a well-regarded
journal; (3) The three examples together represent different topics, as well as gen-
ders, nationalities and locations of the authors; (4) The articles vary in theoretical
framework and disciplines of interest; and (5) The articles represent high-quality
research that poses important and interesting questions for our readers to ponder. In
our discussion below we use some technical terminology that is contained in the
articles and which we will define later in the book.

1.2.1  “ Fabricating the American Dream in US media

Portrayals of Syrian Refugees: A Discourse Analytical
Study” (Bhatia & Jenks, 2018)

This first example by two associate professors of English from Hong Kong
Polytechnic university—Aditi Bhatia and Christopher J. Jenks—investigates media
portrayals of refugees within the context of the ‘American Dream’ and argues that
1.2  Three Recent Examples of CDA/CDS 5

the political climate in the era of President Trump of the US (2017-present) demands
a new understanding of “how the refugee construct is connected vis-à-vis the politi-
cal rhetoric of the Trump Administration, as well as to the Syrian refugee crisis”
(2018: 221). The authors analyze opinion, editorial, and news pieces from American
mainstream media as well as independent news sources from both liberal and con-
servative perspectives. Selected data focuses on Syrian refugees or refugees in the
context of the Syrian war and is examined in terms of: (1) Historicity (e.g., how
events are recontextualized based on how participants connect actions to the past);
(2) Linguistic and semiotic action (e.g., conceptualisations of the world via critical
metaphor analysis); and (3) Social impact (e.g., the categorizations of people
according to the way they are represented in the text).
The analysis reveals how the American Dream is used as a rhetorical tool to
inform the media’s respective audiences as to how individuals come to understand
policy decisions. Furthermore, Syrian refugees are shown to fit within two largely
opposing narratives: they are (a) hardworking victims of war in need of protection,
or (b) a threat to American life that must be feared. Bhatia and Jenks carefully reveal
the rhetorical tools by which these narratives are portrayed, demonstrating how in
the case of (a), the media acts as “social educator”, evaluating the crisis through the
frame of past war experiences and reminding Americans of the consequences of
war; but at the same time, it invokes in audiences “not only a sense of guilt, but also
the need for White saviourism” (2018: 227). This narrative represents a “humanistic
perspective on the crisis while at the same time exploiting a banal understanding of
the American dream” (2018: 221). In the case of (b), the authors show how the
opposing narrative fits within the Trump campaign discourse of ‘Make America
Great Again’ by positioning Syrian immigrants as “not great” and as a result,
Americans must meet Syrians with “disdain, anger, and fear” in order to protect the
“American way of life” (2018: 234). Bhatia and Jenks come to a revealing and fore-
boding conclusion about the value of the media in general, noting that, regardless of
political affiliation, media sources compete to project their story (which typically
differs from the opposing political view) and do an excellent job of persuading read-
ers to support their viewpoint. Yet, even though they make it easy for readers to align
with their view, this obviously does not mean that the media sources are trustworthy.

1.2.2  “ Traces of Neoliberalism in English Teaching Materials:

A Critical Discourse Analysis” (Babaii & Sheikhi, 2018)

This study by Esmat Babaii, an associate professor of applied linguistics at Kharazmi

University in Iran, and Mohammad Sheikhi, who has an MA in Teaching English as
a Foreign Language, is one of many CDA/CDS articles that take up Fairclough’s
call (2015: 252, see Sect. 3.5.5) to expose neoliberal ideologies and fight back
against them. Here they study those ideologies as manifested in English language
6 1  Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Critical Discourse Studies (CDS)…

textbooks used in Iranian private language institutes. Rather than taking a sweeping
approach that condemns all “Western” values seen in English teaching, Babaii and
Sheikhi (2018) use systematic and careful analysis to show exactly how neoliberal
thinking is manifested in textbooks and how it shapes (or attempts to shape) learn-
ers’ views of the world2. In an informative discussion of neoliberalism and the way
that multicultural competence is viewed as another type of human capital in a world
where market values reign, the authors show how English is commonly portrayed as
a commodified skill and teachers are the providers of this skill to learners. On the
basis of a corpus consisting of 67% of the English language teaching materials in
the language institutes of Tehran, the authors use Fairclough’s approach to analyze
the constraints that are put on Iranian learners by American and British publishers
on content (e.g., type or category of information provided in the books) and the rela-
tions/subjects (e.g., type of social relationships and roles ascribed to the people—
aka ‘social actors’—depicted in the material). Their findings expose language
examples that convey high value placed on competition among individuals, hypo-
thetical scenarios that give importance to economic concerns over healthcare and
well-being, and that in highlighting a cosmopolitan and globalized world, English-­
speakers are valued over non-English speakers and Anglo-American cultures/loca-
tions are shown in more positive ways and are advocated for over “Eastern” ones.
The authors conclude by calling for teachers to utilize critical pedagogy to counter
the “inculcation” found in the textbooks that naturalizes “partial and interested
practices to facilitate the exercise and maintenance of power” (2018: 261). Hence,
by teaching critical thinking and sensitizing students to the “overt as well as covert
messages they encounter in the media and teaching materials”, teachers can use the
textbooks they are given while employing critical pedagogy to counter the neolib-
eral thinking expressed in them.

1.2.3  “ The Selfie as a Global Discourse” (Veum & Undrum,

2018)

This final example of recent CDA/CDS work, by Aslaug Veum, an associate profes-
sor in Text and Communication Studies at the University College of Southeast
Norway, and Linda Victoria Moland Undrum (2018), who holds a Master’s degree
in Text and Communication Studies and is a critical multimodal discourse analysis
(CMDA, see Sect. 4.6)3 of meaning-making as it occurs through digital self-­portraits
known as ‘selfies’.

2
 See Chap. 4 for a more detailed discussion of neoliberalism and CDA/CDS’s role in resisting it.
3
 Our readers will see in Chaps. 2, 4, and elsewhere that we refer to this approach as MCDA or
Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, but as we note in that chapter, some scholars also refer to
it as Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis (e.g., CMDA) as is the case with Veum and Undrum.
Nevertheless, both acronyms refer to the same approach, which examines not only language but all
elements of communication; in this particular case, the main focus is on image and text (including
1.3 What is in this Book 7

Utilizing CDA/CDS, social semiotics, and multimodality, and drawing on a

number of scholars from these areas, the authors examine the meaning potential of
the selfies with regard to Halliday’s (1994) “meta-functions” of language (discussed
in Sect. 2.3.4). Additionally, their study frequently draws on Kress and van
Leeuwen’s work (1996, 2001, which we discuss in detail in Sect. 2.6, especially
Sect. 2.6.3). With a corpus of 100 selfies published on Instagram, the authors exam-
ined interaction with viewers via gaze and camera shot/angle, whether the person
was represented within a contextualized setting and as performing an action (or
not), and whether or not the images appeared to be digitally edited. The findings
show that the majority of selfies are of single individuals who are largely under the
age of 30 and that more women than men were selfie producers. Interestingly, most
of the selfies were images of the subject in passive positions, although the few self-
ies that showed the subjects to be participating in an ongoing act or in essence,
doing something, were of men. Typically, the selfies were shown in settings that
don’t indicate time or place and are highly de-contextualized; moreover, they were
also “designed, calculated and generalized” through digital editing (2018: 93).
The authors also found that the majority of the images were “demanding images”
in which the person gazes directly at the viewer, and most of the images had high
angles, communicating power on behalf of the viewer, and they presented them-
selves horizontally and frontally, with no intent of expressing power for the person
in the image, but rather constructing themselves as friends. Additionally, the mean-
ing potential of the texts balanced between making the statement of “this is me” to
“this is how I want to be” (2018: 93). Text analysis revealed the common use of
hashtags as well as slang and abbreviations (e.g., #wbu? [what about you?]), and a
“style of the street” that conveyed a particular identity and resembled “advertising
style”, as discussed by Fairclough (1992, 1995, see Sects. 3.5.4 and 3.5.5) (2018:
97). The authors conclude that image banks have influenced the visual norm of
social media, leaving traces of globalization and the marketization of discourse. In
essence, even though selfie-makers do not have to fulfill commercial targets such as
in advertising, they seem to adapt a homogenized multimodal language co-opted
from commercial venues, thereby “spreading values and interests of global corpora-
tions” (2018: 100). As a consequence, social media users receive a limited view of
how people (especially young women) should behave and look.

1.3  What is in this Book

As we mentioned in our Preface, this book aims to help scholars and students under-
stand what CDA/CDS is and what it does. As such, we synthesize many major
publications that take up this topic, comparing and contrasting definitions and

hashtags, slang and abbreviations).

8 1  Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Critical Discourse Studies (CDS)…

categorizations, demonstrating patterns and overall tendencies in terms of how

scholars define the field and what they do, as well as discussing different (and often
overlapping) approaches to CDA/CDS. Because our goal is to inform readers about
what the field consists of and what has been published in it, we do not provide our
own critique of particular approaches or trends (but we do highlight critiques by
others in Chap. 5) nor do we take sides in disagreements about terminology,
approaches or aims. Rather, we highlight what we believe each school of thought/
approach and each interdisciplinary connection contribute to scholarship in this area.
CDA/CDS as a field is growing very fast, and new publications that touch on
various issues within the field seem to be coming out continuously. As such, as our
readers digest the contents of this book, we would like to note that it is impossible
to cover everything, or mention everyone, and if we have overlooked anyone’s work
in the process, it is not intentional. In addition, in February 2018, we had to stop
collecting new studies in order to finish the book and prepare it for the publication
process, and so in this regard, we invite new and well-established scholars alike to
write about what we have missed, as well as new frontiers of the future. Before we
outline the other chapters in this book, we would like first to say a few words about
the Foreword written by Ruth Wodak, since it is an important addition that puts our
book into context and underscores the importance of CDA/CDS in the current polit-
ical/social climate of tensions, contradictions, and challenges, such as the rejection
of fact-based knowledge and the people who produce it. She also provides her own
up to date version of CDA/CDS: the definitions of ‘discourse’, the difference
between DA and DS and critical DA, concern with explaining in detail how one’s
critique is “reliable” (Forchtner 2011: 2), and also the difference between ‘dis-
course’ and ‘ideology’. She encourages CDA/CDS scholars to have conversations
with, and listen to, different groups of people, while at the same time insisting on
principles of pluralistic democracies and human rights. We now turn to the other
chapters in this book in order to provide readers with a road map to what they will
find as they continue to read.
In Chap. 2, we provide the foundation for understanding CDA/CDS by first tak-
ing a brief look at British linguistics in the 1970s, especially Bronislaw Malinowski’s
and Firth’s ideas. We then discuss Michael Halliday’s Systemic Functional
Linguistics (SFL), Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), and Language as Social
Semiotic (SocSem), including his stratal-functional model, notions of text and con-
text (and register and genre), the three metafunctions, grammatical metaphor and
‘appliable linguistics’, as well as some ideas originated by James Martin. Next, we
consider critical linguistics (CritLing): its definition, its relation to other approaches,
its interdisciplinarity, important works such as Language and Control (Fowler
Hodge, Kress, and Trew (1979) and Language and Ideology (Kress and Hodge
1979), its practicality and applicability as an approach, and its elaboration in the
later work by Gunther Kress (1985/1989) on Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural
Practice. We then focus on the complex relationship between CritLing and SocSem,
especially the further development of SocSem in Robert (Bob) Hodge and Kress’s
book, Social Semiotics (1988) and, especially in Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s
work on the three metafunctions of visual design in Reading Images (1996). We
1.3  What is in this Book 9

conclude by reflecting on the development of multimodality in their book,

Multimodal discourse (2001) and on the relationship between CritLing, SocSem
and CDA.
In Chap. 3, we introduce the general domain of discourse analysis (DA) (includ-
ing text linguistics) and discuss van Dijk’s role in propagating DA and discourse
studies (DS) as well as his (1985) Handbook of Discourse Analysis, which helped
pave the way for the development of CDA. We then describe a small symposium in
Amsterdam in January 1991 about DA and a ‘critical’ approach to DA—which
eventually became critical discourse analysis (CDA). We describe briefly the events
that led up to the symposium and what was achieved there followed by the consoli-
dation and development of CDA. Next, we describe the five participants in the sym-
posium, beginning with a short description of Kress’s work in the late 1980s/early
1990s, before he decided to pursue his interests in education. We then continue with
a discussion of the work of Norman Fairclough, van Dijk, and Ruth Wodak, which
includes detailed descriptions of their most important contributions before 1991,
their work in the 1990s, in general their relation to what is now CDS/CDA, the pro-
ductive professional collaboration of van Dijk and Wodak, and special attention to
Wodak’s role as promoter, biographer and historian of how CDA has developed and
changed over the years. We complete the chapter with a look at van Leeuwen’s work
in SocSem, multimodality, and its relation to CDA.
Chapter 4 further discusses the relationship between CDA and CDS and then
describes the seven most common and best known approaches that are frequently
cited in the literature, are used in the most publications, have appeared in major
journals in the field and are currently commonly used by scholars. The approaches
(their acronyms in this book and one or more of the major scholars who are associ-
ated with the approach) are: discourse-historical (DHA, e.g., Wodak), dispositive
analysis (DPA, e.g., Siegfried Jäger and Florentine Maier), sociocognitive (SCA,
e.g., van Dijk), dialectical-relational (DRA, e.g., Fairclough), social semiotic/multi-
modal (MCDA, e.g., Kress and van Leeuwen, David Machin), corpus linguistic
(CorpLingA, e.g., Paul Baker and Gerlinde Mautner) and cognitive linguistic
(CogLingA, e.g., Paul Chilton and Jonathan Charteris-Black). We compare them
and discuss how widely they are known and listed as ‘approaches’ across CDA/
CDS scholarship as given in Table 4.1 (which also lists a few others). We then
explain their origins and development over time, as well as the scholars associated
with founding them or doing significant work in them and we include central con-
cepts and distinguishing features. We also note the differing definitions of important
terminology (such as ‘discourse’, ‘critical’, ‘context’, ‘power’ ‘history’, and ‘ideol-
ogy’) since it varies widely across approaches. We end each section of this chapter
by providing citations of articles so that readers interested in any particular approach
to CDA/CDS can easily find some of the most recent work in that area.
Chapter 5 describes the critiques of CDA/CDS, especially those which have been
well-documented through the years. Although we use CDA/CDS in this discussion,
we note that much of the critique was published when CDA was the only designa-
tion used, but we also recognize that many, but not all, of the critiques are applicable
to CDA/CDS or, in a few cases, were addressed by work in CDS. We begin with a
10 1  Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Critical Discourse Studies (CDS)…

discussion of Widdowson’s well-known critique of CDA and Fairclough’s (and

later, Wodak’s) response to it, followed by critiques of what ‘critical’ in ‘critical
discourse analysis/studies’ means, as well as the need for reflexivity within the field,
particularly in terms of what it actually accomplishes outside academia. Additionally,
we address methodological and theoretical shortcomings, the need for more contex-
tually oriented analyses that attend to cultural influences, relationships between
readers, text producers, researchers and texts, and the initial lack of attention paid to
other fields and modalities. In addition, we address the various responses to differ-
ent problems with CDA including recent changes (in CDA or CDS) in focus and
direction, the emergence of Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA), the move toward
‘generative critique’, more attention to culture in the construction of discourse,
researcher reflexivity, and how the field continues to redefine itself.
In Chapter 6 we clarify and underscore the importance of interdisciplinarity in
CDA/CDS research and then describe the most salient and best known connections
between CDA/CDS and many other disciplines or areas. This means that, on the one
hand, we focus on CDA/CDS work that makes a connection to other disciplines
and/or the integration of perspectives, etc. of other disciplines into CDA/CDS
research, and on the other hand, we discuss areas of research that note their connec-
tion to CDA/CDS and the integration of CDA/CDS perspectives, theories, methods,
etc. into their own scholarship. These connections include the following fields: criti-
cal applied linguistics, education, anthropology/ethnography, sociolinguistics, gen-
der studies, queer linguistics, pragmatics and ecolinguistics. For each section, we
describe the major focus of research as well as important concepts and how they
connect to, or derive from, CDA/CDS. We then provide examples of work in each
of these areas including a detailed list of references for each section for those inter-
ested in knowing more.
Finally, Chap. 7 asks the important question of how and why CDA/CDS matters
in the world. It documents some of the ways in which well known CDA/CDS schol-
ars, as well as emerging scholars in the field, see their work as connected to the
world around them outside of academia. This includes (in many cases), ways in
which scholars reach their students (who in turn, take action) through CDA/CDS
scholarship. In particular, the chapter describes, in the words of 21 CDA/CDS
scholars, the ways they attempt to make social change through many different types
of actions, such as (to name just a few), writing political books, creating blogs,
being an expert witness, consulting for activist organizations and anti-racist associa-
tions, writing and singing songs, analyzing discourse practices as a member of a
public school board, being a consultant on legal texts, writing Op Ed’s about politi-
cal discourse, and advising NGO’s on refugee issues related to xenophobic climates.
We then encourage scholars to reflect on why and how their CDA/CDS work mat-
ters. We conclude the book with our Epilogue, which re-frames our work in light of
the global pandemic, worldwide protests against systemic racism and many political
challenges at this time (midway through 2020).
First, we begin with the history of CDA.
References 11

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Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press.
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1989, 2001). London: Longman.
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Discourse studies: A multidisciplinary introduction (2nd ed., pp. 357–378). London: Sage.
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(2009). (Ed.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (2nd ed., pp. 62–86). London: Sage.
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Chapter 2
Precursors to CDA and Important
Foundational Concepts

2.1  Introduction

This chapter and the next are devoted to the precursors to, and the beginnings of,
CDA. CDA did not arise all at once, since the originating work was developed at
different times in various different academic communities and, in some cases, with-
out their knowing about similar work until later. It is widely agreed that Critical
Linguistics (CritLing1), which was developed in the UK and Australia in the 1970s,
was the earliest founding stone of CDA from within linguistics. It culminated in two
important books at the end of the 1970s (Language and Control, Fowler, Hodge,
Kress, & Trew, 1979a ; Language and Ideology, Kress & Hodge, 1979) and then
others in the 1980s (especially Kress, 1989, Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural
Practice)—all of which we will discuss below. CritLing came out of the line of
British functionalist linguistics begun by John R. Firth, which was infused with the
ideas of his anthropological colleague Bronislaw Malinowski, and was quite differ-
ent from the formalist and structuralist approaches to linguistics at that time. Firth’s
most eminent successor was generally recognized to be Michael A.  K. Halliday,
who developed Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), Systemic Functional
Grammar (SFG) and Social Semiotics (SocSem). CritLing “was closely associated
with ‘systemic’ linguistic theory (Halliday, 1978, 1985a)” (Fairclough & Wodak,
1997: 263), and thus many critical linguists and many of those—but by no means
all—in CDA have used SFL and SFG as their main linguistic source. As a result, “an
understanding of the basic claims of Halliday’s grammar and his approach to lin-
guistic analysis is essential for a proper understanding of CDA” (Wodak, 2001: 8),
as developed not only by Halliday himself but also other ‘systemicists’ who have
“not only applied the theory, but also elaborated it” (e.g., Kress, 1976; Martin &

1
 For this and other acronyms used in this chapter, see the List of Acronyms and Abbreviations.
And for CDA/CDS see also (Chap. 4), Sect. 4.1.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 13

T. Catalano, L. R. Waugh, Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse
Studies and Beyond, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 26,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49379-0_2
14 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

Hasan, 1989; Martin, 1992). Halliday’s approach is very different from other lin-
guists of the time (and now), and therefore, we will discuss those facets that are
most important for an understanding of CritLing and CDA/CDS.  However, we
should also say here that other approaches in linguistics, such as discourse analysis
(DA) and text linguistics and also sociolinguistics, and/or in other disciplines (e.g.,
ethnography and linguistic anthropology in anthropology; speech act theory in phi-
losophy and then pragmatics; microsociology in sociology) and the interdisciplin-
ary area of pragmatics are important both as precursors to or developing at the same
time as CDA/CDS and were used in CDA/CDS. We will define those very briefly
below as they become relevant. But first, we set the scene briefly, with a few words
about Firth and Malinowski.

2.2  B
 ritish Linguistics: John R. Firth and Bronislaw
Malinowski

John Rupert Firth (Firth, 1957a; Bazell, Catford, Halliday, & Robins, 1966; Palmer,
1968a) was seen by many as the ‘father’ of British linguistics and founder of the
London School (aka Firthian linguistics) at the University College of London
(UCL). While he was familiar with the European and American approaches to lin-
guistics at that time, he was very different from them, since he embraced many of
the ideas of his well-regarded colleague at UCL, the British social anthropologist
(of Polish origin) Bronislaw Malinowski (1923, 1935), the “father of modern eth-
nography” (Duranti, 1985: 196; see Sects. 4.5, 6.4, and 6.5), who worked on the
“primitive” languages and cultures of the South Pacific. Malinowski declared that
language is “an instrument of action” (Malinowski, 1935); thus, language is not
self-contained; rather, it is dependent on the society and culture in which it is used
(Kress, 1976: viii). In this way, language and culture are “bound up inextricably
with one another and the context of situation is indispensable for the understanding
of the words” (Malinowski, 1923: 306; see Firth, 1957b), where ‘context of situa-
tion’ is often understood as the speech event, generally defined (Jakobson, 1960;
Hymes, 1964, 1972; see Sects. 6.4 and 6.5). Malinowski emphasized that the mean-
ing of a word is its use, defined meaning as function in (social) context and declared
that “the meaning of any particular instance of everyday speech is […] deeply
embedded in the living processes of persons maintaining themselves in society”
(1952: 13). He also pioneered the study of (types of) situational meaning (1957a:
179–180).
Firth developed his theory of language based on these ideas and established his
“functional” approach (see Firth, 1934, 1935, 1957c), which accepted Malinowski’s
idea of context of situation, his “view of the relation between language and society”
and his “definition of meaning as function in context” (Kress, 1976: x). He extended
the latter to all linguistic units (e.g., sounds, words, sentences), and thus he didn’t
consider the study of meaning (semantics) as a separate area of linguistics, since for
2.3  Michael A. K. Halliday and the Systemicists 15

him linguistics is ultimately concerned with the meaning of linguistic items in con-
text. He also developed the notion of system as a set of choices in a given context;
and eventually he characterized the language system as polysystemic, composed of
several systems, including the systems of sound (for which he developed prosodic
analysis, which many see as his major achievement—see Palmer, 1968b: 8; Kress,
1976: xv).

2.3  Michael A. K. Halliday and the Systemicists

2.3.1  I ntroduction: Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL),

Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), Language
as Social Semiotic (SocSem)

The British-born linguist, Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (aka M.A.K. or

Michael Halliday) had some of his education in China and the rest in the UK, wrote
his dissertation under Firth, taught at various universities in the UK, and ultimately
became Professor and head of the Department of General Linguistics at UCL. After
spending some time away from UCL at other places (including in the US), he went
to Australia in early 1976 as the Foundation Professor and head of the Department
of Linguistics, University of Sydney, from which he retired in 1987. Starting with
his writings in the early 1960s, he was productive until well into the 2000s (he
passed away in April 2018). He developed his own wide-ranging functional theory
of language and grammar—Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL, aka Systemic or
Functional Linguistics) and Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG, aka Systemic or
Functional Grammar), and language as Social Semiotic (SocSem)—with an empha-
sis on language purpose, language system and language use in social and cultural
(i.e., semiotic) contexts. The systemic linguists (systemicists) who generally fol-
lowed this theory and agreed with Halliday on many (but not all) points suggested
various additions, emendations, and elaborations to his approach, especially his
wife, Ruqaiya Hasan (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, 1985; Martin & Hasan, 1989) at
Macquarie University and his University of Sydney colleague James Martin starting
in the 1980s (see Martin, 1992), Robin Fawcett (Fawcett, 2000) at Cardiff University,
and his colleague and biographer Jonathan Webster, Director of the Halliday Centre
for Language Studies at the City University of Hong Kong. We will pay special
attention to SFL/SFG as it was defined from the 1970s until well into the 1990s in
Australia, since it was during this time period when it was influential on CritLing,
SocSem, and also (to a certain extent) on the beginnings of CDA; we will also iden-
tify proposals by Hasan and Martin in particular which are cited by others (see in
particular Eggins, 2004, which we have used as our major source for description
and exemplification of SFL).
Halliday called his approach ‘functional’, that is, he viewed language as being as
it is for the expression and exchange of meaning (having to do with purpose and
16 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

meaning); and eventually, he and his co-author and former student, Christian
Matthiessen, said that “functionality is intrinsic to language […] the entire
­architecture of language is arranged along functional lines” (Halliday & Matthiessen,
2004: 31, bolding in the original)2. Due to this, he saw language as connected with
all the areas that make human beings what we are, and he (and his colleagues, stu-
dents, and followers) explored the overlapping areas of linguistics with other disci-
plines, such as sociology, anthropology/ethnography, psychology, history, politics,
education (Halliday, 2002a: 5). In other words, one of the foundational ideas in SFL
was that, rather than seeing linguistics as autonomous (independent) according to
“the prevailing ideology of the 60s and 70s” (1978: 4, i.e., of the American linguist
Noam Chomsky among others), Halliday believed that linguistics should be inter-
disciplinary, since each perspective for viewing language “is equally valid and lan-
guage looks somewhat different from each of these vantage points” (2002a: 6) and
an understanding of language needs to take all of this into account. Systemicists
have looked at language in terms of, e.g., grammar, text and discourse analysis,
stylistics, register variation, phonology (especially intonation and prosody), compu-
tational linguistics, language education, cognition, machine translation, and so on.
However, Halliday favored the sociocultural angle and thus his major focus was on
language use as an activity that takes place in sociocultural contexts3. He also
believed that language system and language use are in a dialectic relationship; thus
he disagreed with Chomsky and others, who divided abstract competence from con-
crete performance and viewed linguistics as the study of competence only (Halliday,
1978: 4; 1970: 145; see also Martin, 2013).
For Halliday, SFL “provides something to think with, a framework of related
concepts that can be drawn on in many different contexts where there are problems
that turn out to be, when investigated, essentially problems of language” (2009:
viii). It makes available what is necessary in order to “say sensible and useful
things” (1994a: xv) about language (spoken or written) and understand the purposes
it serves. This was based on four fundamental and intertwined theoretical claims
about language use in the systemic approach (see Eggins, 2004: 3): (1) that it is
functional: the form of language is determined by the functions it has evolved to
serve; (2) that its function is semantic: it is “a system for making meanings”
(Halliday, 1994: xvii); (3) “that these meanings are influenced by the social and
cultural context in which they are exchanged” (Eggins, 2004: 3) and thus it is situ-
ationally and socioculturally contextual; and (4) “that the process of using language
is a semiotic process, a process of making meanings by choosing” (2004: 3)—all of
which Eggins summarized as a “functional-semantic approach to language”
(2004: 3).

2
 From now on, in all cases where there are italics or bolding in a quotation, those come from the
original.
3
 He made no separation between ‘society’ and ‘culture’ and so we will use both nouns inter-
changeably or together, as well as the adjectives ‘social’, ‘cultural’, and, especially,
‘sociocultural’.
2.3  Michael A. K. Halliday and the Systemicists 17

This functional-semantic approach is the backdrop for understanding how lan-

guage operates in society. It “has developed as it has, both in the functions it serves,
and in the structures which express these functions, in response to the demands
made by society and as a reflection of these demands” (Kress, 1976: xx), as a means
by which people can accomplish everyday social life (Eggins, 2004: 3) and thus,
there is no separation between language and society. Halliday worked on “an inter-
pretation of the functioning of language in socially significant contexts” (1973a: 8),
including the deepest patterns of culture and social structure, as “the principle
whereby the culture regulates the range of meanings […] that is typically associated
by its members with particular social contexts” (Kress, 1976: xxi). He cited the
British sociologist Basil Bernstein’s social-cultural theory of codes (1971, 1973,
1977), including restricted and elaborated codes, and the general principles of
“sociological semantics” for relating meaning to “the social contexts in which lan-
guage operates” (Halliday, 1973a: 8). His point was that meanings are “themselves
the expression, or realization, of options in behavior, and some of these options have
a broad socio-cultural significance”. And since the function of language is to make
meanings, language is an “infinitely complex network of meaning potential”
(1978: 5).
For Halliday, this meant that language is a ‘social semiotic’ (SocSem, see
Halliday, 1978; see also Halliday & Hasan, 1985; Hasan, 2015). He insisted on the
term ‘social’ “to indicate that language is an evolved system arising from the
exchange of meanings between the members of a community as they lead their daily
lives. Language constructs social life, just as social life is constructed by language”
(Steele, 1987: xxii). He also used the formulation ‘social semiotic’ to refer to “inter-
preting language within a sociocultural context, in which the culture itself is inter-
preted in semiotic terms” (1978: 2), since the context of situation is a “semiotic
structure whose elements are social meanings” (Kress, 1976: xxi) and culture is “an
edifice of meanings—a semiotic construct”.
For Halliday’s SocSem approach, “semiosis”—“the making and understanding
of meaning” (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004: 5)—is done by social practices in a
community. In this, he was influenced by the ideas of the American anthropologist-­
linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956), especially his insistence on the link between
language, culture, and thought and his “view of language as the embodiment of a
conceptual system” (Kress, 1976: x) and grammatical categories as providing what
he called a “world view” (Whorf, 1956). Halliday (1973a, 1973b) credited Bernstein
(1967, 1971, 1973) with showing that many interesting questions about language
have to do with meaning differences and their different functions in different con-
texts. He also stressed “how the semiotic systems of the culture become differen-
tially accessible to different social groups” (1978: 2), as in Bernstein’s notion of
restricted vs. elaborated codes and that, in order to explain words like AIDS, macho,
or privatization, one needs to “refer to their social origins and uses” (Fowler, 1991a:
91). Halliday lauded the American sociolinguist William Labov (1966, 1970a,
1970b) for having shown “how variation in the linguistic system is functional in
expressing variation in social status and roles” (Halliday, 1978: 2) and advocated
asking and answering such sociolinguistic questions as “How and why do people of
18 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

different social classes or other subcultural groups develop different dialectal

­varieties and different orientations towards meaning?” (1978: 108)4 for which he
would have a SocSem answer.
Furthermore, Halliday adopted “a perspective on language that is grounded in
how we actually use language to construe reality and enact social relationships”
(Webster 2009: 1), influenced again by Whorf (1956). For him, both language in
general and the particular language(s) we learn, especially early in life, inform the
way we see and understand the world, which means that our view of that world is
the result of the social process by which children learn language (1978: 1; see also
Halliday, 1975; Halliday & Hasan, 1976; Halliday, 1977a). In particular, the child is
Learning how to mean (Halliday, 1975/1977), i.e., constructing the “functional
semantic system of the mother tongue” (Kress, 1976: xxi) for use in future social
interactions of meaning-making; at the same time, the child is building up an under-
standing of reality that is “inseparable from the construal of the semantic system in
which the reality is encoded” (Halliday, 1978: 1). Indeed, “language (and other
semiotic systems) has developed and is as it is because of the meanings that people
have needed to create in order to communicate; semiotic systems (such as language)
reflect, construe and enact our reality” (Andersen, Boeriis, Maagerø, & Tønessen,
2015: 2). In addition, in Halliday’s view, language use is in a dialectic relationship
with society which it both reflects and creates, since language not only transmits the
social order, it also potentially modifies it. And, since speakers have the possibility
of creating new meanings and of acting upon and shaping the social world, language
can change in order to adapt to the particular needs and interests of the society in
which it is used and/or it can create or change those needs and interests (and thus he
took exception to the strict separation of synchrony and diachrony/history in most
other linguistic approaches).
And finally, Halliday also used the formulation ‘language is a social semiotic’ to
mean that “language, like other semiotic systems, is a systemic resource for making
and exchanging meaning” (Webster, 2015b: 316), and it also refers to “interpreting
language within a sociocultural context, in which the culture itself is interpreted in
semiotic terms” (1978: 2), since culture (including society) is “an edifice of mean-
ings—a semiotic construct”. And since language is one of the semiotic systems that
both constitutes and is constituted by a given society, this enables members of that
society to understand each other, act out social structure, affirm their statuses and
roles, establish and transmit shared systems of value and knowledge, and so forth.
This integration of language into a larger, SocSem framework (see Halliday,
1978; Halliday & Hasan, 1985; Hasan, 2015) started a robust intellectual trend in
the field which still exists today in various forms (see Sects. 2.5, 2.6, and 3.9) and is
connected with CDA/CDS (see Sect. 4.6); we view this as the SFL/SFG version
of SocSem.

4
 He included in this language in urban society vs. ‘antilanguages’, which are generated by an
‘antisociety’, i.e., criminal gangs, the underworld, subcultures, etc., which have their own distinct
social structure and thus an alternative social reality, a different social world (see Halliday, 1978:
164–182).
2.3  Michael A. K. Halliday and the Systemicists 19

2.3.2  Stratal-Functional Model, System, Structure and SFG

For his functional-semantic approach, Halliday developed a coherent and explicit

framework “within which it is possible to state the relationship of units on all levels
to each other” and which “provides a statement of the context of all linguistic units”
(Kress, 1976: xvi). He proposed a “stratal-functional” (aka “scale-and-category”)
hierarchical model of levels of language (1973a, 1976a, 1976b, 1978; inspired by
Hjelmslev, 1953; Firth, 1957a; Lamb, 1966)—and later he used a set of concentric
circles (Halliday, 1985a, 1994a). In both of these models he visualized language as
going from meaning to form (and not the reverse, as in many other approaches). The
highest stratum (outermost circle) is ‘semantics’, the meaning related to the clause
or clause complex in the sentence. The other meaning-oriented units go (downward
or inward) from clauses to phrases, then to words and morphemes, and then to form-­
oriented units, such as sounds and their combinations, at the bottom (the innermost
circle). For the meaning- (or content-) oriented units (i.e., clause complexes, clause,
phrase, word, morpheme) Halliday used Firth’s term, ‘lexicogrammar’ (or just
‘grammar’), which combines syntax, morphology and lexis (lexicon) and which he
defined in terms of meaning potential, i.e., its capacity to be used for meaning-­
making. And since for him, all form carries meaning, he rejected the strict separa-
tion of meaning and form in many twentieth century linguistic approaches. But lexis
is not a separate component since it includes not only vocabulary (words), but also,
e.g., unanalyzed phrases, lexical/syntactic patterns (e.g., greeting formulas) and col-
locations. Thus lexis is the “delicate” end of (lexico)grammar, where “delicacy”
means depth in detail (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2006: 6; see also Halliday, 1961;
Hasan, 1996). In other words, lexis and grammar are at different ends of a cline and
are therefore “different ways of looking at the same phenomenon” (Halliday &
Mathiessen, 2006: 6). And lexicogrammar is a ‘natural’ symbolic system because
“both the general kinds of grammatical pattern that have evolved in language, and
the specific manifestations of each kind, bear a natural relation to the meanings they
have evolved to express” (Halliday, 1994a: xviii; see also Kress, 1993).
Inspired by Malinowski’s ideas about language as a range of possibilities (its
potential), Prague School notions of the paradigmatic axis and Firth’s vision of
language as polysystemic, Halliday defined system as a paradigmatic array of
options (1973a: 51–52), of choices; for example, a clause may be imperative or
indicative, and if indicative, declarative or interrogative, and if interrogative then
either a yes/no question or a wh- question. Choices like these carry the meaning
potential that lies behind every instance of text, i.e., what the speaker can do, say
and mean in an act of communication; and the “power of language resides in its
organization as a huge network of interrelated” and meaningful choices, which are
“terms in systems, with interrelated systems represented in the form of a system
network” (Webster, 2015b: 317). Language users select from those options for
forming their texts and thus semantics includes the study of both the meaning poten-
tial of units in the system and the “realized” meaning in a specific instance of use
(“instantiation”). In other words, in SFL there is no separation between ‘semantics’
(the study of meaning) and ‘pragmatics’ (the study of meaning in use) that other
linguists make.
20 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

Once the language user makes the choices, they are arrayed in what Halliday
called ‘structure’; this includes the syntactic (syntagmatic) arrangements and com-
binations, as in the clause; they are typically hierarchical in (semantic) organization
but linear in (syntagmatic) realization. However, the ‘systemic networks’ that lie
behind the structural array free the grammar from the restrictions imposed by struc-
ture since they precede it. In other words, Halliday construed the nature of language
as going not only from meaning and function to form but also from system to struc-
ture; as a result, meaning and system have priority over, and determine, form and
structure. This meant that his approach was very different from other contemporary
approaches, since most of them were “primarily syntagmatic in orientation”
(Halliday, 1994a: xxviii) and structuralist, with form at their foundation (‘formal-
ist’), while he, in contrast, allied himself with primarily paradigmatic and
functional(ist) ones, such as the Prague School (see Vachek, 1966), which takes
semantics as its foundation and focuses on text (see Martin, 2013).
In contrast with other approaches to language, Halliday wrote a detailed (although
not complete) (multi)functional grammar of English that would provide a concrete
example of his SFL/SFG approach and serve the needs of, e.g., linguistic, stylistic,
educational and semiotic research into language (use). His An Introduction to
Functional Grammar (IFG, Halliday, 1985a, 1994a; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004,
Matthiessen, 2014) is “an introduction both to a functional theory of the grammar
of human language in general and to a description of the grammar of a particular
language, English, based on this theory” (Matthiessen, 2014: xiii); and more spe-
cifically it is an explicit and detailed description of the meaning-making resources
of English (see also Eggins, 2004). In Halliday’s view his functional grammar of
English, as detailed in IFG, is “functional in three distinct although closely related
senses” (1994a: xiii), i.e., in its interpretation of: (1) texts, (2) the system, and (3)
the elements of linguistic structures. What is detailed in IFG, however, is not the
systemic, but rather “the structural portion which determines how the options are
realized” (Halliday, 1994a: xv) in their syntagmatic (syntactic) combinations (e.g.,
phrases, clauses, clause complexes). As a result, IFG is meant to account for how
(the English) language is used; and thus “the aim has been to construct a grammar
for purposes of text analysis; one that would make it possible to say sensible and
useful things about any text, spoken or written, in modern English” and show “how,
and why, the text means what it does” (1994a: xv).

2.3.3  Text and Context: Register and Genre

In SFL, text (or discourse5) is a spoken or written instance of language use, an

instantiation (realization) of the system and structure of a language “in any medium,
that makes sense to someone who knows the language (cf. Halliday & Hasan, 1976:

5
 Halliday occasionally uses the term ‘discourse’ and ‘discourse analysis’ in addition to ‘text’ and
‘text analysis’; but he doesn’t use ‘discourse’ in the sense proposed by Michel Foucault and
adopted by many in CritLing and CDA/CDS (see Chaps. 3 and 4).
2.3  Michael A. K. Halliday and the Systemicists 21

Chap. 1)” (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004: 3). As we will see, systemicists refer to
text either with the mass noun ‘text’ (without an article), thereby giving it a more
abstract meaning, or with the count noun ‘a/the text’ (with an article), which has a
more concrete meaning. We will follow these conventions for the use of ‘text’, ‘a/
the text’6 (and a few other nouns) in our discussion below. Given the different per-
spectives in the SFL approach, text is both process, e.g., speaking, which is dynamic
and unfolding in time, and product, e.g., what has been said, which may be present
to us in memory as product, or a written text which is presented as product (Halliday,
1994a: xxii). (Spoken) text as process is at the same time (an) intersubjective activ-
ity, sociocultural event, semiotic encounter, act of meaning making, exchange of
meaning in context of situation, semantic process of social dynamics, and so forth
(Halliday, 1977b). At the same time text is the primary channel of the transmission
of culture, and as such may be long-lasting or ephemeral, momentous/memorable or
trivial/soon forgotten, spoken or written, prose or verse. As well, in Halliday’s view,
the system and its realization in text are the same thing seen from different points of
view, since they display deep complementarity. And since text takes place, and is
realized, in a socioculturally defined context, it is the meeting point of that context
and linguistic expression (Eggins, 2004: 21); indeed, Eggins (2004: 2) stated that
Halliday’s interest was in “the meanings of language in use in the textual processes
of social life, the ‘sociosemantics’ of text” (2004: 2). It should be underscored here
that from systemicists’ point of view, “there is no single meaning ‘in’ a text which
can be ‘uncovered’/‘discovered’ by analysts” (Birch & O’Toole, 1987a, 1987b: 11).
Thus, textual meaning is not the sole property of the speaker/writer nor the hearer/
reader; and how a text is received (and understood) is not a passive process, since
meaning is constructed and/or interpreted by writer and reader, speaker and hearer.
Therefore, what SFL does is to offer a way for textual analysis and criticism to show
“how, why and where those interpretations come from” (1987a, 1987b: 11).
Halliday and other systemicists have participated in the analysis of both spoken
and written highly valued literary texts and mundane everyday texts and insisted
that no new branch or separate level of linguistics (e.g., stylistics) is needed for
analyzing literary texts, scientific ones, a mystery novel, a fund-raising letter, or a
dissertation (see Halliday, 2002b) since SFL/SFG should handle all types of text.
Halliday described an (oral) defense of a dissertation that he participated in as a
lexicogrammatical event (since it used lexical items/grammar to build the text of the
defense), which exemplified the power of discourse to change the environment that
engendered it (Webster, 2015b: 326), since at the end a Ph.D. was awarded and was
thus an expanded performative. However, he also conceded that the latter “would

6
 We think that this creative use of English by using ‘text’ (and other technical terms such as
‘clause’, ‘theme’, ‘subject’, ‘actor’) in the generic sense, without any article in a context where a
speaker/reader of one of the versions of standard English would expect an article, expands the
meaning making potential of English. But it is also one of the many reasons why some have found
SFL/SFG difficult to understand. We also want to recognize the creative use of ‘mean’ in a generic
sense, in ‘learning how to mean’ (and to a certain extent in ‘meaning-making’, ‘meaning poten-
tial’, etc.).
22 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

obscure a more fundamental point, which is that every text is performative in this
sense. There can be no semiotic act that leaves the world exactly as it was before”
(Halliday, 1994b: 254).
The basic unit of text is clause, a lexicogrammatical unit which is made up of
smaller units (phrases, words) and at the same time is part of higher units, such as
clause complexes or complex sentences, which combine in various ways to create
text. Clause contributes to the overall meaning of a text in three different ways. (1)
It is a representation and conveys some type of information: a way of understanding
since it construes ongoing experience with some type of meaning; thus, e.g., the
‘actor’ of the clause functions as the active participant in the process, the element
portrayed by the speaker as the one who “did the deed” (Halliday, 1994a: 34). (2) It
is an exchange: a transaction between speaker and hearer; thus, e.g., the ‘subject’ of
the clause functions as the element the speaker makes responsible for the validity of
what s/he is saying. (3) It is a message, which is construed by the way it functions
in the overall text; thus, e.g., the ‘theme’ of the clause selected by the speaker func-
tions as the point of departure for the message, as the ground(ing) for what s/he is
going to say. And, according to Halliday, “Theme, Subject and Actor do not occur
as isolates: each occurs in association with other functions from the same strand of
meaning” (1994b: 34).
The fact that Halliday discussed on the one hand lexicogrammar and semantics
in terms of clause and on the other hand text in terms of cohesion and coherence
(see below) was seen early on as a problem in his approach, which then led to a
series of proposals by others in SFL/SFG about semantics at the text/discourse
level, see, e.g., Martin’s proposal (1985, 1992; Martin & Rose, 2003, 2008; see
Andersen et  al., 2015) for “discourse semantics”, which is higher level or outer
concentric circle after (lexicogrammatical) semantics and thus the place where
theme and rheme are located, among others. Halliday also insisted that an under-
standing of the text as a whole rests on the connection between it and its context
since the actual choice among the various possibilities (options) takes place in a
given context: the context of situation (situational configuration), which is the
immediate (linguistic and situational) context (the context of the speech event) in
which a given text is situated, to which it contributes and from which it gets (part of)
its meaning. For some in SFL, there is another level or type of context: the (more
variable and larger) sociocultural context, which encompasses all facets that are
relevant for a text in a particular society.
Halliday proposed that there are three aspects of the context of situation (the
immediate context of the speech event) that are relevant collectively for understand-
ing how we use language: field, tenor and mode (as in Halliday, 1985a, 1994b,
although there has been some controversy about how they should be defined, which
we can’t detail here). For Halliday, ‘field’ refers to characteristics of the social pro-
cess and the subject-matter being treated—for instance, a discussion about
Bernstein’s ideas in a classroom, based on a reading of some of his work. ‘Tenor’
touches on the social characteristics of the participants, their status(es), their social
roles, their relationship (power or solidarity), etc.—for instance, one teacher and
many postgraduate students engaged in discussion in a classroom. ‘Mode’ refers to
2.3  Michael A. K. Halliday and the Systemicists 23

the role language plays in the interaction, the kind of text that is being made by the
interaction, the part it plays in the immediate context and various aspects of the
channel of communication—for instance, a very complex monologic and dialogic,
partly unscripted and partly prepared, classroom discussion. The values of the three
variables of field, tenor, mode taken together help language users trace situational
context, identify it and predict the meanings to be communicated, and thus make
language efficient and understandable in communication. For some systemicists,
field, tenor and mode together determine the ‘register’ of a text, the functional vari-
ety of language that corresponds to the specific situation, “the configuration of
semantic resources that the member of a culture typically associates with a situation
type” (Fowler, 1991b: 37).
The other facet of context, culture/society, enables participants, for example, to
understand each other, act out social structure, affirm their statuses and roles, and
establish and transmit shared cultural systems of value and knowledge (Halliday,
1978: 2). With regard to text, the dimension at issue here, according to some sys-
temicists, especially Martin (1986, 1992; Martin & Rose 2008) and the “Sydney
School”, is ‘genre’, “which has to do with the social relevance of a text” (Birch &
O’Toole, 1987b: 1). It is the product of recognizable and recurrent social activity
types, which “become habitualized and, eventually, institutionalized as genres”
(Eggins, 2004: 58; see Bakhtin, 1994: 83)—e.g., ordinary conversations, (spoken
and written) narratives, job interviews, medical pamphlets, textbooks, etc. Members
of a society develop genres as models since they can reproduce them easily in order
to accomplish their goals and because doing something in almost the same way over
and over again saves time and energy (see Berger and Luckmann, 1967: 71; Eggins,
2004: 57). Genres also make communication with, and understanding by, the lis-
tener possible or at least more efficient (Bakhtin, 1994: 84). Genre is another con-
tentious area of SFL and has been given other definitions; for example, in a SocSem
context, genre is a reflection of the semiotic structures which mediate between the
cultural context (institutions and ideologies) and the sayings and doings of the com-
munity (Threadgold, 1986: 5, 35; see also Lemke, 1985; Thibault, 1991). At the
same time, since genres are social in nature, they are fluid, dynamic and subject to
change as social patterns change in speaking and/or in writing.

2.3.4  T
 he Three Metafunctions: Ideational, Interpersonal,
and Textual

Halliday developed very early the notion of ‘metafunction’ and defined it as the
organization of the functional framework around three major, and interconnected,
kinds of meaning in (adult) language use: “firstly, the ideational function through
which language lends structure to experience”, and construes reality and our under-
standing of the world; “secondly, the interpersonal function which constitutes rela-
tionships between the participants; and thirdly, the textual function which constitutes
24 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

coherence and cohesion in texts” and texture (Wodak, 2001: 8). They permeate the
whole view of language in SFL, for instance, they occur every time we use language
and are “intrinsic to language as both system and process” (Hasan, 2015: 123); they
are “each equally essential in the formation of the semantic and grammatical units”,
including clauses, sentences and texts, which contain features of meaning which
come from all three; and “each is nonhierarchical” (2015: 123). That is, “our utter-
ances overwhelmingly display all metafunctional strands of meaning-wording”
(Hasan, 2015: 132) continuously and simultaneously, and in principle, each clause
contains features of meaning which come from each of the three metafunctional
areas and every text encodes meaning on these three levels simultaneously. One
general way to understand them is that the ‘ideational’ and the ‘interpersonal’
strands are woven together by the ‘textual’ metafunction into a unified text (or dis-
course); and the task of the analyst is to disentangle them in order to identify them.
In the ideational metafunction, language is used to transmit information between
members of a society (Kress, 1976: xix) about the world around them; it also makes
sense of or construes our experience in both our outer and inner (thought) worlds
and is akin to what others have called the propositional content, cognitive meaning
or referential function of sentences (early on it was separated into the ‘informa-
tional’ or ‘logical’ vs. ‘experiential’ functions, but then the two were coalesced). It
also has a dialectical relationship with social structure—reflecting, creating and
influencing it. Moreover, in this view, the world is not a fixed, objective reality rep-
resented neutrally through language (as assumed by many linguists, philosophers,
and cognitive psychologists), since the world we talk about can differ depending on
who is speaking, which language is being used, how it is used, what its socio-­
cultural context is, who is using it, and so forth—and also because language (use)
lends structure to experience and thus can change it.
At the level of context of situation, in Halliday’s view, ideation has to do with
‘field’, what the text is about; at the semantic level, it has to do with “how we repre-
sent reality in language” (Eggins, 2004: 206). The clause, which is the main resource
provided by the grammar of English for ideation, is made up of two components of
(lexico)grammar: experiential meaning and logical linkage. With regard to the for-
mer, the role of the clause is to represent “some process—some doing or happening,
saying or sending, being or having—with its various participants and circum-
stances” (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004: 29). Transitivity is the major system
involved in this: “Transitivity patterns represent the encoding of experiential
­meanings: meanings about the world, about experience, about how we perceive and
experience what is going on. By examining the transitivity patterns in text, we can
explain how the situation is being constructed, i.e., we can describe ‘what is being
talked about’ and how shifts in the field are achieved” (Eggins, 2004: 249). While
the classification of process types expressed by verbs is not entirely agreed upon by
all systemicists, we can say, following Halliday (1994a: 106–175, Halliday &
Matthiessen, 2004), that there are three major types in English. (1) Material pro-
cesses of doing-and-happening in the physical world, with the basic meaning “that
some entity does something, undertakes some action” (Eggins, 2004: 215) at some
time or place, under certain circumstances; (2) Mental processes of sensing, think-
2.3  Michael A. K. Halliday and the Systemicists 25

ing, feeling, seeing, etc. in the world of consciousness, typically with a conscious
human participant and a non-active participant; (3) Relational processes where
things are stated in relation to other things (they are assigned attributes or identi-
ties). And, there are three minor process types, e.g., physiological or psychological
behavior; verbal actions; and existential processes (e.g., there is). As for the logical
linkage of clauses, they can put clause complexes into “coherent, semantically
sequenced packages” (Eggins, 2004: 295), e.g., according to whether they are either
equal and independent, as in coordination (parataxis, with and, or, but) or unequal
with one dependent on the other, as in subordination (hypotaxis, with if, while, since).
In the ideational metafunction, the structural mechanisms create a grid through
which the view of the (social and natural) world is mediated (Halliday & Mathiessen,
2004: 28). In addition, ideational structure, both experiential and logical, is in a
dialectical relationship with social structure—it both reflects and influences it.
Hence, a “text, under social pressures, offers a mediated, partial, interpretation of
the objective reality of which it claims to speak” (Fowler, 1991a: 91). Language
constructs “human experience. It names things, thus construing them into categories
[…] and the fact that these differ from one language to another is a reminder that the
categories are in fact construed in language” (Halliday & Mathiessen, 2004: 29). As
well, “there is no facet of human experience which cannot be transformed into
meaning. In other words, language provides a theory of human experience, and
certain of the resources of the lexicogrammar of every language are dedicated to
that function”.
In the interpersonal metafunction, i.e., language is used to establish, maintain
and specify relations between members of society and thus between the participants
in an interaction; every text addresses someone and enacts our personal and social
relations. When we question, offer something, or express our attitude about what we
are saying, we are utilizing the interpersonal metafunction, which expresses inter-
subjective meanings (i.e., shared by the participants in an interaction) about roles
(social relationships with other language users) and attitudes. This kind of meaning
is quintessentially associated with “‘language as action’” (2004: 30); and since “one
of the main purposes of communicating is to interact with other people: to establish
and maintain appropriate social links with them” (Thompson, 1984: 38), it has to do
with the way relations between speaker and hearer (or writer and reader) are estab-
lished through, or expressed by, language.
In the context of situation, the interpersonal metafunction has to do with who the
participants are, what relation they have with one another, and what they are doing
with each other, and thus it is related to, e.g., “politeness”, a complex concept based
on a number of linguistic, contextual and cultural factors (see Brown & Levinson,
1987). At the lexicogrammatical (clause) level, it has to do with text as an exchange
between the participants, who make statements, ask questions or give commands,
by using the mood structure of the clauses. It also has to do with modality, a very
complex area of English grammar which allows language users to express attitudes
or judgments and is typically divided into two different kinds of meanings (Eggins,
2004: 172–174): on the one hand, probability, where the speaker expresses judg-
ments as to the degree of likelihood of something happening or being (e.g., possibly,
26 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

probably, certainly, i.e., low, median, and high likelihood), and on the other hand,
usuality, “where the speaker expresses judgments as to the frequency with which
something happens” or exists (low: sometimes, median: usually, or high: always).
Modality is also involved in conveying (degrees and types of) “obligation, neces-
sity”, e.g., You should/must/are obliged to/are required to read ‘Harry Potter’ (see
Eggins, 2004: 179; cf. Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004: 147).
It is through these highly complex systems of mood and modality that speakers
of English make meanings about “the power or solidarity of their relationship; the
extent of their intimacy; their level of familiarity with each other; and their attitudes
and judgments” (Eggins, 2004: 184) and so forth. Thus, there is a direct link between
the clausal patterns, the semantics of interpersonal meanings and the context of situ-
ation; therefore, “in studying the grammar of the clause as exchange we are actually
studying how interpersonal meanings get made […] we have a way of uncovering
and studying the social creation and maintenance of hierarchic, socio-cultural roles”
(2004: 187).
The ideational and interpersonal metafunctions are usually combined in mes-
sages as the two basic functions of language: (1) “every message is both about
something and addressing someone”; and, (2) the two metafunctions can be “freely
combined—by and large, they do not constrain each other” (Halliday & Matthiessen,
2004: 30). However, the successful “negotiation” of a text involves more than these
two types of meaning; they have to be combined in a way that is understandable and
reliable. This is the task of the textual metafunction, where language is used to pro-
vide textual meaning, “texture, the organization of discourse as relevant to the situ-
ation” (2004: 30). Thus in this metafunction, actual discourse (text) is created. It
facilitates the construction or composition of text for communication by building up
sequences of sentences and by “organizing the discursive flow and creating cohe-
sion and continuity as it moves along” (2004: 30), such that the ideational meanings
and the interpersonal ones are woven together into a unified text.
Since the textual metafunction relates to how (the) text is organized as a message
so that it can be negotiated, Halliday described it early on as the “relevance” or
“enabling” metafunction (Halliday, 1975/1977: 95, 97; see also Halliday &
Matthiessen, 2004: 30): it enables the connecting of facets of ideational meaning
with interpersonal meaning so that the resulting text is effective (has textual mean-
ing), given its purpose and context. The textual metafunction is thus of “crucial
ideological ­significance … it undoubtedly ‘breathes relevance into the other two’”
(Birch & O’Toole, 1987b: 11). It is also concerned with communicating both infor-
mation and aspects of interpersonal relations as efficiently as possible through the
overall organization of the text and through making it relevant to both the context of
situation and the culture/society of which it is a part. This means that the content
associated with the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions must be constructed
in such a way that it “signals to us which part of the text is more/less important to
an understanding of the overall text” (Eggins, 2004: 295) and that it enables listen-
ers and readers through clauses to interpret the speaker’s or writer’s priorities and
direction.
2.3  Michael A. K. Halliday and the Systemicists 27

Thus, the textual metafunction brings together the construction of a text, its inter-
nal organization, its composition, the way in which bits of text are related to each
other semantically, and so forth, so that they have the property of textual unity (tex-
ture). This is the result of the interaction of two components: ‘cohesion’ and ‘coher-
ence’. Cohesion ties the elements of the text together and creates connectedness of
its linguistic forms and patterns and continuity between one part of text and another
(Halliday & Hasan, 1976, 1985). It can be seen as the ‘glue’ of the text. At the same
time, it “is fundamentally about the ongoing contextualization of meanings”
(Eggins, 2004: 51) and can be divided into three main types (2004: 33–53; Halliday
& Matthiessen, 2004: Chap. 9): “reference”, which has to do with the introduction
of participants (people, places, and things) and keeping track of them; “lexical cohe-
sion”, concerned with how words in a text relate to each other through classification
or composition or word chains (lexical strings); and “conjunction”, focused on
“how the writer creates and expresses logical relationships between the parts of a
text” (Eggins, 2004: 47), as in textual coordination and subordination. The other
component of texture, ‘coherence’, refers to the way a group of sentences relates to
the context (Halliday & Hasan, 1976: 23). For some systemicists (but not all),
coherence can be broken down into the two types discussed above: registerial coher-
ence in relation to the context of situation (Eggins, 2004: 29) and generic coherence
in relation to the context of culture. In very effective texts, contextual coherence and
internal (organizational) cohesion act together and reflect each other.
The textual metafunction also deals with the system of theme (vs. rheme), the
topic of one of Halliday’s first major series of articles (1961, 1967–1968; see also
1985), based on work in the Prague School. The general assumption is that there is
a major configuration of clauses “into the two functional components of Theme
(point of departure for the message) and Rheme (new information about the point of
departure)” (Eggins, 2004: 296). The system of theme “contributes very signifi-
cantly to the communicative effect of the message” (2004: 298) since it is concerned
with what the clause is going to be about (theme has sometimes been called the
‘psychological’ subject of the clause, but not necessarily the grammatical subject)
and with what is going to develop the theme, i.e., the rheme. The thematic structure
of the clause is typically signaled by the order of the constituents of the clause, with
the theme coming first (in English, but not necessarily in other languages), and is
often analyzed as given, or familiar, information. Rheme is everything after that in
the clause (and is often new, or unfamiliar, information about the theme). Given and
new are analyzed as part of information structure and typically realized through
intonation, as well as other elements in spoken English (see Halliday, 1967) and still
other, different elements in written English (and this seems to differ across varieties
of English); given this complexity, they will not be treated in depth here (see
Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004: 87–205; Halliday & Greaves, 2008). Work on the
theme/rheme structure of the clause is merely the first (micro) level of textual orga-
nization since theme or rheme may be related to the topic and/or the subject, and
may be associated with other elements of the clause. In addition, as proposed by
Martin, texts are made of sentences, paragraphs, phases, etc. and include other ele-
ments, such as hyperTheme or macroTheme, etc. (Martin, 1992a; Martin & Rose,
2003, 2008; see also Eggins, 2004: 326).
28 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

2.3.5  Grammatical Metaphor

Halliday’s definition of what he called ‘grammatical metaphor’ was associated with

the ideational and interpersonal metafunction, his work on the difference between
spoken and written language, and his (controversial) claim (1985/1989: 95; see also
1994a) “that written language is associated with the use of grammatical metaphor”7
and spoken language isn’t or is less so. While the notion of metaphor is often found
in, e.g., rhetoric, literature, and cognitive linguistics, and in CDA/CDS (see Sect.
4.9) for, e.g., the use of a lexical item that normally means one thing to mean some-
thing else, Halliday’s notion is quite different. From his point of view, there are typi-
cal ways of saying things in (lexico)grammar, which he calls “congruent”, and there
are “others that are in some respect ‘transferred’ or metaphorical” (1994a: 342) or
‘non-congruent’. In some cases, they become so frequent that they may not be rec-
ognized as metaphors (a point also made in cognitive linguistics and in CDA/CDS).
In grammatical metaphor, according to Halliday, there is first the decoupling and
then the recoupling of lexicogrammar and semantics. Thus, in the lexicogrammar of
everyday English, nouns typically encode things and people, while verbs typically
encode happenings and processes, as with the verb discuss. However, a grammatical
metaphor is used when, e.g., that same process is represented with different gram-
mar, e.g., a noun such as discussion, which is non-congruent, i.e., metaphorical,8
because in this case the noun is used to encode a process. Thus, one of the major
ways grammatical metaphor arises is through nominalization (e.g., a noun is used
instead of a verb, or an adjective). The grammatical metaphor of nominalization can
also be used to express a particular attribute of a person or thing: e.g., ambivalence
which can be used to mean ‘people are ambivalent towards/about’ something (see
Thompson, 1984: 167). There are of course types of grammatical metaphors that are
not nominalizations, e.g., the verb shows that with discussion as its subject (as in
e.g., ‘this discussion shows that …’) can be interpreted to mean ‘as a result of dis-
cussing, people find out …’.
More important than understanding what nominalizations are is knowing the
consequences of using them. Nominalizations often lead to condensation and
encapsulation, in which there is a reduction and/or loss of various types of informa-
tion, e.g., the doer of the process (and details of the process) is unknown, as in the
use of ambivalence or discussion where it’s unknown who is ambivalent (the word
people can be used in the more congruent version, but that is still vague) or what it
entails. These types have been the focus of much work first in CritLing and then in
CDA/CDS since nominalization can lead to avoiding naming the doer of a process

7
 According to the strict definition of metaphor vs. metonymy, this is actually a case of meton-
ymy—however we will not go into that issue here.
8
 He rejected the term ‘applied linguistics’ (and also ‘applicable linguistics’), since he felt that for
some it was too narrow in scope, and used instead ‘appliable linguistics’, since it denoted applica-
tion to some specific task; since his approach was very wide and embraced anything having to do
with language, it had wide scope.
2.3  Michael A. K. Halliday and the Systemicists 29

(which is also the case in the use of passive constructions). Nominalization can also
make it more difficult for the reader or hearer to disagree with a point because it is
expressed as if it were an objective, factual description of the event/activity, as in,
e.g., David’s failure to apply common sense led to…—in the sense of ‘it is a fact that
David failed to apply common sense and therefore…’—even if it is only a claim on
the part of the speaker or writer). However, in some cases, it is almost impossible to
give a complete, congruent rewording “which adequately reflects the meanings
encoded in the metaphorical wording” and this “opens a potentially bottomless pit
of possible rewordings” (Thompson, 1984: 177). In other words, the concept of
grammatical metaphor “is essential in explaining how the language works, but it is
a dangerously powerful” concept (1984: 177). Despite that issue, it has become an
important part of CDA/CDS analyses, although they don’t often used the term
‘grammatical metaphor’ nor do they recognize the importance Halliday gave to it.

2.3.6  ‘Appliable Linguistics’ and Social Action

Halliday called his approach to language part of ‘appliable linguistics’, by which he

meant that, given the interdisciplinary and functional orientation of his model of
language, it could be applied to a variety of domains and uses. In IFG, Halliday said
that “a theory is a means of action, and there are very different kinds of action one
may want to take involving language” (1994a: ix; see also 1969). More generally,
given his commitment to social justice from his earliest days as a student with a
commitment to Marxim, he wanted to create a linguistic theory that would be
“socially accountable” in two senses: “that it put language in its social context, and
at the same time it put linguistics in its social context, as a mode of intervention in
critical social practices” (Halliday, 1993: 73). In other words, he envisioned linguis-
tics as an “ideologically committed form of social action” (1985b: 5; see also 2015)
and he imagined the possibilities from a functional and social perspective of making
the world better. Thus, he devoted his career—as have other systemicists—to the
development of an approach that could be used to address productively many differ-
ent human and societal concerns, most notably his “concern with language in rela-
tion to the process and experience of education” (1978: 5).
For instance, very early on, he searched for new ways of teaching language (see
Halliday, McIntosh, & Stevens, 1964) in order to improve literacy rates, including
programs for primary and secondary school students. In 1973b, Halliday argued for
talking about reading readiness in social-functional terms, taking spoken language
seriously in education, reappraising the significance of both reading and writing and
seeing them in the context of the learning of language as a whole. He also worked
with teachers at all levels (primary, secondary, tertiary) in various aspects of lan-
guage teaching and learning, including developing one’s native language (mother
tongue), studying foreign languages, and learning about the nature of language
(1978: 5). He eventually became “convinced of the importance of the sociolinguis-
tic background to everything that goes on in the classroom”, including the linguistic
30 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

patterns found in the family, neighborhood, school and community, as well as the
child’s specific experiences of language from infancy (1978: 5). He argued that we
should build educational contexts on what children already know (including what
they know about language), by starting from what is common knowledge to all,
thereby creating continuity between the culture children come from and that of
school. He also explored the sociolinguistic aspects of mathematical education in
light of e.g., the relation between mathematics and natural language and the issue of
levels of technicality; these were accompanied by a “‘checklist’ of possible sources
of linguistic difficulty facing a learner of mathematics” (1978: 204). In all of this he
greatly influenced many different scholars in SFL and in other approaches.
Halliday also said that knowledge of the standard language should not be a pre-
condition of success by school children, but learning the standard language could be
“a natural consequence of the process of learning to read and write” (1978: 210). He
argued for “a milieu that is child-centred but in which the teacher functions as a
guide, creating structure with the help of the students themselves” (1978: 210). His
argument was that our societies need to change our cultural attitudes towards lan-
guage (and education, learning and teaching)—we need to be “a lot more serious
about language, and at the same time a great deal less solemn about it” (1978: 210).
And he also suggested topics, each one accompanied by points to consider, that
could be explored by “linguists of all ages” (1978: 211), such as teachers in their
study groups, pupils in class or students in their families, regarding: language devel-
opment in young children; language and socialization; a neighbourhood language
profile; language in the life of the individual; language and the context of situation;
language and institutions (e.g., family, school, factory); language attitudes (see
Halliday et al., 1964) (1978: 211–235); and so forth.
The applications of his approach by himself and others are too many to list here,
but we can give an overall sense of their breadth by saying that they ranged from
“research applications of a theoretical nature to quite practical tasks where prob-
lems have to be solved” (1994a: xxix) in a number of domains, e.g., theoretical,
historical, developmental, textual, variational, aesthetic, evolutionary, societal/cul-
tural, educational, medical, communicational, computational, legal, etc. domains.
“Underlying all these very varied applications is a common focus on the analysis of
authentic products of social interaction (texts), considered in relation to the cultural
and social context in which they are negotiated” (Eggins, 2004: 2) and the most
generalizable application of SFL, is “to understand the quality of texts: why a text
means what it does, and why it is valued as it is” (Halliday, 1994a: xix) and why it
is or is not effective. In the 1990s through to the current decade, SFL has been
“increasingly recognized as a very useful descriptive and interpretive framework for
viewing language as a strategic, meaning-making resource” (Eggins, 2004: 2) and
has been used by systemicists to say ‘sensible and useful’ things about texts not
only in language education and child language development, but also in the study of
computational linguistics, media discourse, casual conversation, history, adminis-
trative language, among others (see Eggins, 2004: 2 for specific references). Some
have adopted SFL as a whole, with many aspects agreed upon and only a small list
of others open to debate (e.g., genre, register, syntax), leading some to say that it is
2.4  Critical Linguistics (CritLing) 31

a ‘closed system’ in the sense of Chomsky’s theory. And, yet, many of the ideas that
Halliday and the systemicists incorporated into SFL have inspired scholars in a
variety of other intellectual and (inter)disciplinary areas. As a result, others, like
ourselves, have found it ‘useful to think with’ and have been inspired by certain
SFL/SFG ideas, such as: language (system) as resource and a set of options, mean-
ing as central, meaning potential, meaning making, language system and language
use as related to each other, language as social semiotic, metafunctions (especially
the interpersonal and textual), the social nature of grammar, grammatical metaphor,
sociocultural significance of meaning choices, grammar and lexicon as linked with
each other, etc. As a linguistic and functional approach to meaning in text,
systemic linguistics has (or has had) common ground with text grammarians and discourse
analysts from a range of perspectives […] points of connection with research in areas such
as sociolinguistics […] and the ethnography of speaking […] exploring ways in which
social and cultural context impacts on language use. As a semiotic approach, it has common
ground with semiotic theoreticians and those, following Fairclough, working in what has
become known as the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach (Eggins, 2004: 21)

In 2008, The Halliday Centre for Intelligent Applications of Language Studies

was launched at the City University of Hong Kong (directed by Jonathan Webster,
see Webster, 2015a) “to apply our knowledge about how language works” in order
to “construe our experience and enact social relationship; apply linguistic insight in
such areas as education, and computer processing of language, i.e. practicing ‘appli-
able linguistics’”. SFL/SFG as a theory of language is practiced world-wide, par-
ticularly in language education, where it is associated with work in applied
linguistics, linguistics, educational linguistics, education, second language acquisi-
tion, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, natural language generation and
processing, and so forth. SFL has led to, e.g., the International Systemic Functional
Linguistics Association (ISFLA), which puts on an annual conference that rotates
between Australia, Asia, the Americas and Europe, has two highly informative web-
sites (with many pages of information and lists of publications, conferences,
­publishers, software, etc.), and has published many volumes of collected or selected
papers. And there are many other resources, too numerous to list here.
We will now turn to the discussion of CritLing.

2.4  Critical Linguistics (CritLing)

2.4.1  Introduction

Critical Linguistics (CritLing) began in the (mid-) 1970s and continued into the
1980s and 1990s (and beyond); the Critical Linguists were also called the East
Anglians, since they were at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Great Britain
during a very formative period of their joint work. They were a group of “socially
directed” (Fowler, 1991a: 89), “and politically aware” (Wodak & Chilton, 2005: xi)
32 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

scholars, who, through very productive collaboration, proposed and developed

“systematic ways of analyzing the political and social import of text” (2005: xi).
They drew their “theoretical support from the intellectual interests and social
engagements of a group of co-writers/co-workers (David Aers, Roger Fowler, Bob
[aka Robert] Hodge, Gunther Kress, Tony Trew) whose disciplinary interests ranged
from Literary Criticism, Sociology, Politics, Philosophy to Linguistics, and who all
had a theoretical and practical commitment to different forms of Marxism” (Kress,
1991: 166). During that time, being critical, Marxist and activist was very much in
the air in the UK, intellectually and politically, and thus they were dealing with the
issue of what linguistics could offer scholars in the humanities and social sciences
that would be meaningful in that context.
While members of the group developed many of their ideas in papers with each
other (and a few others) that were published in the local UEA Papers in Linguistics,
they are best known for two major books which together have been called the
CritLing manifesto: first, Language and Control (Fowler, Hodge, Kress, & Trew,
1979a), chapters of which were co-authored by one or more of them (and in one
case, Gareth Jones); this book is known as the foundational text of CritLing. And,
secondly, Language as Ideology (Kress & Hodge, 1979), which was seen by some
as a more advanced version of CritLing, given its more interdisciplinary, program-
matic and theoretically explicit account with sharper focus on ideology (Kress,
1991: 166, 172). It was also characterized (Hodge & Kress, 1993: 159) as “a hand-
book” for CritLing9, and “as the first comprehensive account of the theory of lan-
guage that underpinned the critical discourse enterprise” (1993: ix), i.e., CDA. During
the 1980s and early-mid 1990s, there were modifications and extensions of CritLing
by Fowler (in the UK) and especially by Hodge and Kress (in Australia and the UK
in the case of Kress), and others. The most important other CritLing publications,
from the point of view of their influence on and impetus towards CDA, were Kress
1985a and Hodge and Kress 1988 (on SocSem); we will discuss them below, after
our general discussion of CritLing.

2.4.2  CritLing and Other Approaches to Linguistics

According to Kress (1990: 88), CritLing had two aims: (1) “to use the tools pro-
vided by linguistic theories […] to uncover the structures of power in texts, and (2)
to make the discipline of linguistics itself more accountable, more responsible, and
more responsive to questions of social equity”. For their linguistic approach,
CritLing borrowed many ideas from many linguists, although Halliday’s approach,
which was “the most fully developed” (Fowler, Hodge, Kress, & Trew, 1979b: 3) of
the functionalist theories of language, was “the major inspiration behind the model”

9
 Hodge and Kress 1993 is the 2nd edition of Kress and Hodge 1979, with the same title (Language
as Ideology), in which there is a new, long chapter on “Reading Power” (1993: 153–213) about
‘language and the war in the Arabian Gulf’ and other topics, including CDA.
2.4  Critical Linguistics (CritLing) 33

of CritLing (Fowler, 1991a: 91) since it used “chiefly concepts and methods associ-
ated with the ‘systemic-functional’ linguistics developed by M.A.K.  Halliday”
(Kress, 1990: 89). However, it needs to be understood that, on the one hand, there
were some of Halliday’s (and systemicists’) ideas that they rejected explicitly or
implicitly, and on the other hand, they combined Halliday’s approach with ideas
from other approaches, so that it became an “eclectic” (Fowler, 1991b: 243) “com-
posite of a number of sources” (Fowler et al., 1979b: 3), as we will see below. As we
know from the discussion above, Halliday was actively working on his ideas and
publishing them in the 1970s through the 1990s, including his contribution to the
first issue of the UEA papers (1976b); as well, Kress had studied under Halliday and
finished editing Halliday’s book on function and structure (Halliday, 1976a) after
his arrival at UEA. They were also attracted by the fact that Halliday insisted that
there are “strong and pervasive connections between language structure and social
structure” (Fowler & Kress, 1979: 185) and that he “propose[d] that the structures
of language have developed in response to the communicative needs that language
is called upon to serve” (Fowler, 1991a: 90). For them, this “implied a demand for
a thorough-going account of social structure in order to make sense of linguistic
structurings” (Kress, 1991: 163), and therefore they rejected “theorizing ‘language’
and ‘society’ as separate entities” (Fowler, 1991a: 92), as was widespread at the
time (and to this day) in much of ‘mainstream’ linguistics.
They took text “as the relevant linguistic unit, both in theory and in description/
analysis” (Kress, 1990: 88). They selected and adapted certain parts of Halliday’s
model for their own use, “drew largely on categories from sentence and below-­
sentence grammar” and used many Hallidayan concepts, such as metafunctions,
transitivity types, modality, theme, and so forth. They worked on, e.g., the many
lexico-grammatical resources of ideational and interpersonal meaning and cohesive
and other devices for textual structuring. They ultimately “worked to make the
model less ‘narrowly linguistic’ and more integrated with general theories of soci-
ety and ideology” (Fowler, 1991a: 91; see also Kress, 1985a; Threadgold, 1986) and
also better suited to the analysis of text. They were also influenced by Chomsky’s
early work in transformational(-generative) grammar (TG, 1957, 1965; see also
Smith & Wilson, 1979), especially as “reinterpreted in the direction of the earlier
formulations of Zellig Harris” (Kress, 1991: 166), but they were careful to say that
they did not agree with post-1965 Chomskyan theory. On the one hand, they were
in accord with Halliday that there were many flaws in Chomsky’s work; indeed,
they used the term ‘autonomous linguistics’ (a negative evaluation) to group
Chomsky with the earlier American descriptivists (influenced by Bloomfield) and
the European structuralists, since they all separated language from society and cul-
ture. On the other hand, they endorsed Chomsky’s acceptance of Harris’ extension
of linguistics to the sentence (i.e., not just sound and word structure), but they dis-
agreed with his claim that the sentence is an abstract structure and the highest unit
of language, since they analyzed actual, concrete language use and included dis-
course and text as an essential part of the scope of linguistics. And they also argued
that what seems to be the same sentence could have different meanings in different
34 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

contexts and thus that context and contextualization also had to be treated in depth
in any linguistic approach.
As a result, they accepted Chomsky’s claim that an active sentence and its cor-
responding passive are (closely) related to each other through transformations,
which Trew (1979a: 94; 1979b: 117; also Kress & Trew, 1978a, 1978b) character-
ized as a “departure […] from the more familiar notion of transformation”, since
they were in total disagreement with Chomsky, who also said that the active and
passive have the same meaning. For example, Trew analyzed two newspaper head-
lines—Rioting Blacks Shot Dead by Police [as ANC Leaders Meet] vs. Police Shoot
11 Dead in Salisbury Riot (1979a: 94)—as different in meaning and thus in need of
an in-depth analysis according to the character of the discourse, its context(s),
purpose(s), ideology, and so forth. That is, they (van Leeuwen, 2006: 292–293):
took the fundamental step of interpreting grammatical categories as potential traces of ideo-
logical mystification, and broke with a tradition in which ways of saying the same thing
were seen as mere stylistic variants, or as conventional and meaningless indicators of group
membership categories such as class, professional role, and so on.

They also used Chomsky’s concept of surface vs. deep (or underlying) structure
(Chomsky, 1965; see also 1970, 1971, 1972) as inspiration for their technique of
starting from the surface of the text and attempting to “recover the forms which
were the starting point of the utterance” (Kress & Hodge, 1979: 17) in their quest to
uncover hidden meaning and ideologies and provide demystification. This was not
at all what Chomsky meant by the relationship between deep and surface structure
(since he didn’t include in that relationship hidden meaning, ideology or demystifi-
cation), and he and his followers objected strongly to what they saw as a redefinition
of his terminology (see Kress & Trew, 1978a, 1978b; Fowler, 1972, 1977).
The critical linguists referenced as well Chomsky’s writings on political and
social issues and his condemnation of the war in Vietnam (e.g., Chomsky, 1969).
Given their commitment to social change (discussed below), they found the political
side of Chomsky’s thinking attractive, but they disagreed with his rigid separation
of linguistic theory from political theory and his refusal to see any relationship or
connection between his political writings and his linguistic work (see Caldas-­
Coulthard & Coulthard, 1996: xi). In the long run, the critical linguists continued to
use the term transformation (and deep structure, although less often) according to
their own definition.

2.4.3  D
 efinition of CritLing; Fowler et al. (1979a): ‘Language
and Control’, and Other Work

What differentiated CritLing from other linguistic approaches of that time the most
clearly was announced boldly and unequivocally by the use of the term ‘critical’ in
the name of their approach. The term ‘critical linguistics’ was “quite self-­consciously
adapted” (Kress, 1990: 88) from Critical Sociology (the title of Connerton, 1976;
2.4  Critical Linguistics (CritLing) 35

see now Cook, 1987), and was used in the title of “the synoptic and programmatical
concluding chapter” (Fowler, 1991a: 89), their code of practice, by Fowler and
Kress (1979), titled “Critical Linguistics”, of their co-authored book (Fowler,
Hodge, Kress & Trew, 1979a, 1979b: Language and Control10). It was also used in
the title of Part IV “Towards a Critical Linguistics” of (Chilton, 1985a). Critical
(and critique) were associated with a set of assumptions that are important in under-
standing their point of view, since many of them were different from many other
approaches at that time and were carried into CDA. It meant an approach to linguis-
tics “which is aware of the assumptions on which it is based and prepared to reflect
critically about the underlying causes of the phenomena it studies, and the nature of
the society whose language it is” (Fowler & Kress, 1979: 186). It critiqued both
existent social forms and the discipline of linguistics, since the latter was dominated
by asocial, apolitical approaches in which language was autonomous from society,
including European and American linguistics (but not, as we saw above, SFL). It
also positioned CritLing in the context of its more general socio-philosophical
counterpart, critical theory, e.g., contemporary (neo)Marxist, post-structuralist,
post-modernist and deconstructionist theories of the 1970s and the 1980s, as well as
the “cross-fertilization between linguistics and the social sciences […] a remarkably
interdisciplinary and international project” (Wodak & Chilton, 2005: xi). As a
result, CritLing was responsive to the “major questions put by post-modernist writ-
ing, especially in its post-structuralist mode, without, at the same time, adopting
headlong many of its major tenets” (Kress, 1991: 171). Thus, their goal “was to
provide an illuminating account of verbal language as a social phenomenon, espe-
cially for use of critical theorists in a range of disciplines—history, literary and
media studies, education, sociology—who wanted to explore social and political
forces and processes as they act through and on texts and forms of discourse”
(Hodge & Kress, 1979: vii), and “to relate forms of thought to the existence of the
producers of those thoughts, as individuals living in a material world under specific
conditions in specific societies at given times” (1979: ix).
The critical linguists stated that their approach was motivated by the fact that “so
much of social meaning is implicit” (Kress, 1990: 196), even when it is conveyed by
language, so that what is needed is the activity of unveiling, or demystifying, a text’s
(hidden) meaning. CritLing was also devised in response to problems of fixed,
invisible ideology permeating language. As Kress said, they were ultimately critiqu-
ing “the structures and goals of a society which has impregnated its language with
social meanings many of which we regard as negative, dehumanizing and restrictive
in their effects”. They also aimed at developing a social, and socially directed, appli-
cation of linguistic analysis which would expose the “strong and pervasive connec-
tions between language structure and social structure” (Fowler & Kress, 1979: 185),
including structures of power. They sought, “to display to consciousness the pat-

10
 It is important to note that while this book was co-authored, each chapter is attributed to specific
authors; while “all were submitted to the other authors for criticism, and most were extensively
revised as a result” (1979: 4), we have decided to specify the chapters and their authors in our
discussion and in the list of references.
36 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

terns of belief and value which are encoded in the language—and which are below
the threshold of notice for anyone who accepts the discourse as ‘natural’” (Fowler,
1991b: 67). In this respect, they endorsed the ideas of the American linguists/anthro-
pologists Edward Sapir (1921) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956) about ‘linguistic
relativity’ (in ways similar to Halliday), i.e., that the language we use “embodies
specific views—or ‘theories’—of reality” (Fowler et al., 1979b: 1), they accepted
the ‘weak’ (non-deterministic) version of Whorf’s view as ‘influence’ of language
upon thought and agreed that “syntax can code a world-view without any conscious
choice on the part of a writer or speaker” (Fowler & Kress, 1979: 185)—but they
rejected the strong/extreme position of linguistic determinism also attributed to
Whorf. They went on to argue that “world-view comes to language-users from their
relation to the institutions and the socio-economic structure of their society. It is
facilitated and confirmed for them by a language use which has society’s ideological
impress”. Thus, they argued for an ideological point of view in research, “since any
aspect of linguistic structure, whether phonological, syntactic, lexical, semantic,
pragmatic or textual, can carry ideological significance” (Fowler, 1991b: 67) and
society (including culture) is neither innocent nor neutral nor natural.
In doing their version of social linguistics and their social theory of the function-
ing of language, they rejected “the dichotomy between the grammatical structures
of a language and the ways in which these are employed in actual instances of com-
munication” (Thompson, 1984: 118). Thus, they were pleased to see that sociolin-
guists (and others) were breaking with the structuralist and generativist tradition
that regarded language as monolithic and were documenting various types of socio-
linguistic variation. However, they were dismayed by conventional, or “correla-
tional”, sociolinguistics (as exemplified by Labov, 1972a, 1972b; Trudgill, 1974),
which studied language and society as two independent phenomena that can be
separately described and quantified, “so that one is forced to talk of ‘links between
the two’, whereas for us language is an integral part of social process” (Fowler &
Kress, 1979: 189). As such, language “serves to confirm and consolidate the organi-
zations that shape it, being used to manipulate people, to establish and maintain
them in economically convenient roles and statuses, to maintain the power of state
agencies, corporations and other institutions” (1979: 190). Thus, terms like correla-
tion are “too weak an account of the relationship. Sociolinguistic variation is to be
regarded as functional rather than merely fortuitous” (Fowler, 1991a: 92). Social
groupings influence linguistic behavior, which in turn influences and manipulates
(unconsciously, automatically) non-linguistic behavior, since “variation in types of
discourse is inseparable from social and economic factors” (Fowler et al., 1979b: 1).
As a result, “linguistic variations reflect and, what is more, actively express the
structural social differences which give rise to them. They express social meanings”
and should be studied in this light (Fowler et al., 1979b: 1).
The critical linguists also rejected the sociolinguists’ claim that their description
of linguistic variation of various types and its circumstances was done “objectively
and scientifically, without evaluation of the phenomena described” (Fowler &
Kress, 1979: 192). As an example, they stated that Labov’s notion (1966, 1972a) of
upward social mobility as the reason why certain individuals in a stratified class
2.4  Critical Linguistics (CritLing) 37

system use certain linguistic elements, “should be regarded not as a generally appli-
cable concept in sociological theory but as a product of the academic ideology of a
particular society” (Fowler & Kress, 1979: 192), i.e., the US. They also said that the
idea that forms of language are “freely chosen” (1979: 194) hides the fact that they
are selected not just because they are appropriate in the given situation, but also
because that “appropriateness is established by socio-economic factors outside the
control of the language-user” and which are often unconscious, learned through
socialization and sanctioned by the “social norms” established by those in power. In
addition, while they agreed that language is an instrument of social communication,
they insisted that language usage is “a part of social process. It constitutes social
meanings and thus social practices” (Fowler et al., 1979b: 1). What speakers say “is
interconnected with the life of individuals in social formations” (Chilton, 1985b:
xv), and, since language is “one of the mechanisms through which society repro-
duces and regulates itself” (Kress, 1991: 93), it is also “an intervention in social
processes. Critical linguistics invites a view of language that makes ‘intervention’ a
general principle: language is a social practice, one of the mechanisms through
which society reproduces and regulates itself. Hence, language is ‘in’ rather than
‘alongside’ society” (Fowler, 1991a: 93) and society is ‘in’ language.
The critical linguists set out to “describe the social, interpersonal and ideological
functions” (Fowler et al., 1979b: 3) of many linguistic constructions in a wide vari-
ety of actual examples of “ordinary texts”, including the media and popular culture,
as well as literary texts (of “high” or “low” culture), and so forth11 (see Fowler,
1981: 24–45). For them, all of these “show how linguistics structures are used to
explore, systematize, transform, and often obscure, analyses of reality; to regulate
the ideas and behavior of others; to classify and rank people, events and objects; to
assert institutional or personal status” (Fowler et al., 1979b: 3). In other words, as
stressed in the title of the book—Language and Control—language, language use
and language structure (patterning) are employed for control or limitation of behav-
ior, thought, belief, ideologies, etc. An early, much cited and admired, example of
work in this area was Trew’s comparison (1979a, mentioned above; see also Kress
& Trew, 1978a, 1978b) of headlines from different British newspapers that covered
the same event of civil disorder in what is now Zimbawbwe (formerly Rhodesia).
Trew argued that the choice of certain linguistic devices (e.g. the passive rather than
the active) could affect the meaning and force of the text as a whole. Therefore,
linguistic analysis could expose the potential ideological significance of using con-
structions in which agents of the verbal process are explicitly stated as subjects of
the verb or downgraded in a by-phrase or not stated at all. He discussed in detail
(1979a: 94) the implications of the newspaper headline: ‘RIOTING BLACKS

11
 Other types of texts they worked on include (bureaucratic) rules and regulations, interviews, birth
registration certificates, and official announcements, as well as greeting cards, pop songs, conver-
sations, and university guidelines on student enrollment.
38 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

SHOT DEAD BY POLICE AS ANC12 LEADERS MEET’.13 Here, ‘Blacks’ are

classified as rioters, are put at the beginning of the sentence and are thus salient,
while the actions of the police, who did the killing, are de-emphasized by the pas-
sive constructions, and in this case could be elided, as in (the possible but unat-
tested) ‘rioting blacks shot dead as ANC leaders meet’, leading to what many called
an agentless passive; this could also be done by the use of a grammatical metaphor,
i.e., a nominalization (‘the shooting of rioting blacks’). By contrast, the structure of
the headline about the same event in another paper, ‘Police Shoot 11 Dead in
Salisbury Riot’, effectively does the reverse: that is, the police are prominent, while
the phrase ‘11 Dead’, which is expanded in the text to ‘Eleven African Demonstrators’,
are presented as victims. In sum, Trew suggests that linguistic structure is both an
effect of, and contributes to, the different slant in the two newspapers and thus can
be aligned with their different ideological orientations. He (1979a, 1979b) also did
“some particularly fruitful work on ‘discourse in progress’ in newspapers—the
transformation of materials from news agencies and other sources into news reports,
and the transformations a story undergoes from one report to another, from reports
to in-depth analyses to editorials, over a period of time” (Fairclough, 1995: 26) and
also looked at the transformation in real time of the development (rewriting, recast-
ing, updating, etc.) of a story over a period of days.
All of these findings were more than reminiscent for the critical linguists of
George Orwell’s novel 1984 (Orwell, 1949; see also Orwell, 1968). In fact, Hodge
and Fowler (1979) is a study of “Orwellian linguistics” and emphasizes Orwell’s
recognition of “some of the connections between language, ideas and social struc-
ture” (Fowler et al., 1979b: 2). Indeed, they said that Orwell’s novel had an impact
on their general consciousness about the language of politics (Hodge & Fowler,
1979: 6), how thought could be controlled or limited through language, and how
Orwell’s concepts of ‘doublethink’, ‘newspeak’, and ‘duckspeak’ “rest on recogniz-
able principles of language-patterning” (Hodge & Fowler, 1979: 2, 9). In fact, Paul
Chilton’s edited book, Language and the Nuclear Arms Debate: Nukespeak Today
(1985a, 1985b; see also 1988, 1996), used the term ‘Nukespeak’ in its title as a pun-
ning allusion to ‘newspeak’; it included contributions by the critical linguists and
other scholars with similar concerns from the UK, Australia, and western Europe
about nuclear (dis)armament14.

12
 ANC stands for the African National Congress, the (mostly Black and African) opposition to the
white rule.
13
 As we go to press in the midst of a global Black Lives Matter movement, it strikes us that this
same type of headline is still being produced today, and hence the work of critical linguists that
started in the 1970s is still relevant, useful, and needed in 2020 (sadly).
14
 Chilton published several other studies on Orwell, e.g., 1988, Orwellian Language and the
Media, and 1996, Security Metaphors. He is still very active politically but is no longer in CritLing
or CDA, since he became attracted to cognitive linguistics (see Sect. 4.9).
2.4  Critical Linguistics (CritLing) 39

2.4.4  Kress and Hodge 1979: ‘Language as Ideology’

As said above, Kress and Hodge, who had participated in Fowler et al. 1979a, also
co-authored Language as ideology (Kress & Hodge 1979 [1st Edn.]; Hodge &
Kress, 1993 [2nd Edn.]). They underscored the social nature of language, its status
as a social fact; they also did a more thorough exposition of CritLing than was in the
other part of the CritLing ‘manifesto’ (Fowler et al., 1979a, 1979b); and in the con-
text of their discussion of ideology in language, they explored their debt to Sapir
(1921), Whorf (1956), Fillmore (1968) and Halliday (Sect. 2.3), and others, as well
as their debt to and differences with Chomsky. Their book, as they said in the
Preface, aimed “to provide an illuminating account of verbal language as a social
phenomenon, especially for use of critical theorists in a range of disciplines—his-
tory, literary and media studies, education, sociology—who wanted to explore
social and political forces and processes as they act through and on texts and forms
of discourse” (Kress & Hodge, 1979: vii). Therefore, the task they set for them-
selves and for linguistics was “to relate forms of thought to the existence of the
producers of those thoughts, as individuals living in a material world under specific
conditions in specific societies at given times […] linguistics had to provide the
theoretical and methodological framework for the analysis of materials studied by
all kinds of intellectual and cultural historian, indeed, by everyone concerned with
culture and thought” (1979: ix). In short, they set out to show that “the requisite
theory must encompass the study of syntax and the basic rule systems of the lan-
guage along with the social uses of language, that is, the relations between language
and society and between language and mind, in a single integrated enterprise”
(1979: 2). In conformity with CritLing thinking, they insisted that their “conception
of social reality includes antagonisms and conflicts within and between groups in a
class society […] linguistics, then, is an exceptionally subtle instrument for the
analysis of consciousness and its ideological bases, the ‘true shapes […] of invisible
and bodiless thought’” (1979: 13) and thus, it “should ‘be an instrument of discov-
ery, clarification and insight’, to make language itself speak” (1979: 14; with refer-
ence to Whorf, 1956).
As a result, they insisted, no linguistic form is neutral—not only does the (choice
of a given) materiality of language have meaning, but also all representation is
mediated. Thus a central component of their program was that language reflects,
(re)produces, and constructs ideology, and linguistics allows the analyst to explore
the value systems and sets of beliefs that reside in texts, since language use has
“society’s ideological impress” and “ideology is linguistically mediated and habit-
ual” for the user (1979: 185). For them, ideology is a systematic body of ideas
“organized from a particular point of view” (1979: 6), which underlies our “every-
day perceptions of the world (whether social or ‘natural’)” (Trew, 1979a: 97),
including taken-for-granted assumptions, beliefs and value-systems. And since lan-
guage is often overlooked or taken for granted, “the differences in constructs may
seem to be natural, universal and unalterable when in reality they may be produced
by a specific form of social organization” (Belsey, 1980: 42). What interested the
40 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

critical linguists most, therefore, was to bring ideology, which is hidden under “the
habitualisation of discourse, to the surface for inspection” (Fowler, 1991a: 89), par-
ticularly in the context of social formations (Fowler, 1987: vol. 2: 482; see also
Kress & Hodge, 1979)—in order to shed light not only on social and political pro-
cesses (Fowler, 1991a: 89) but also on the “ways in which people order and justify
their lives” (1991a: 92), and to challenge and change them. This type of
consciousness-­raising was also evident (Chilton, 1985a, 1985b) in Nukespeak,
since it was intended to expose the obfuscation and dissimulation surrounding the
discourse on nuclear arms, and also in (Threadgold, Grosz, Kress, & Halliday, 1986;
Hodge & Kress, 1988; Thibault, 1989).
At the same time, Kress and Hodge stressed that “language is ideological in
another, more political, sense […] it involves systematic distortion” (1979: 6), i.e.,
the abuse of language by those with social and political power. Indeed, they under-
scored that inequality of power is a prominent facet of social structure which influ-
ences linguistic structure and use, with the result that “language not only encodes
power differences but is also instrumental in enforcing them” (Fowler & Kress,
1979: 195), and, in some cases, in creating them. As a result, ideology is pervasive
and thus all texts in all types of contexts should be put under the CritLing linguistic
lens. Kress also published an “extended account of the operation of ideological
structures in the language uses of the media, in print, radio and television” (1991:
169); and in other work of the same time (cf. Kress & Threadgold, 1988), he gave
more attention than in earlier work in CritLing to productive and interpretative prac-
tices associated with (types of) texts. Of particular interest also was the work of
Theo van Leeuwen, who was to co-author important work later with Kress (see
Sect. 2.6), and who at this time did meticulously detailed analyses (see 1983, 1985a)
of the interrelation of sound, language, and other aspects of social practices in the
speech of radio announcers on different radio stations, showing how the station
policies, their audience, and their approaches to news values, were realized in cer-
tain phonological facets of their speech (e.g., pitch, rhythm, intensity). In the same
vein, he also worked on images and the “ideological effects of editing of videotapes
in television news programmes (1985b, 1986)”, and on the socio-semantics of
music (1987) and other semiotic modes (see discussion in Sect. 3.9). All of this
would be part of his later work with Kress on SocSem (see Sects. 2.6 and 2.7).

2.4.5  CritLing: Interdisciplinarity and a ‘Useable’ Approach

Given their beliefs and goals, the critical linguists went further against the ‘main-
stream’ of linguistics by espousing an inter/multidisciplinary approach to language
and text, with input from other domains to linguistics and output from linguistics to
those same and different domains; in other words, they engaged in what Kress
(1991: 170) called “intellectual trade”. As said above, they were very interested in
2.4  Critical Linguistics (CritLing) 41

interdisciplinary connections with other fields of knowledge than those related to

texts or linguistics, and as a result, they embraced insights, analytical concepts and
terms from a variety of different sources. They insisted that “linguistics had to pro-
vide the theoretical and methodological framework for the analysis of materials
studied by all kinds of intellectual and cultural historians, indeed, by everyone con-
cerned with culture and thought” (Kress & Hodge, 1979: ix) and thus linguistics
could be seen as a branch of anthropology, sociology or psychology, and also as an
instrument for the study of culture.
While their work in the late 1970s was strongly critical of “the dominant cur-
rents” in all the disciplines they dealt with (Fowler et  al., 1979b: 5), by the late
1980s—in the opinion of Kress (1991: 171)—the “critical aspects of social and
philosophical theorising” also led them to question some of the bases for linguistics
itself, such as the notion of ‘speaker’ as an unproblematic construct. They were
influenced by “the increasing focus on the socially and linguistically formed social
‘subject’ who is active in the construction and reconstruction of text. This in turn
has led to questions around the concept of the language system as a stable and
unproblematic entity in most linguistic theories, including systemic-functional lin-
guistics” (1991: 171).
As part of their interdisciplinary effort and their desire to reach linguists and
scholars in other domains, the critical linguists also insisted that their approach
should lead to practical analysis, in the sense of an useable mode of analysis (but
not an analytical routine), that is “simple and consistent enough to be applied by
non-­linguists in a ‘do-it-yourself’ critical linguistics of texts” (Fowler et al., 1979b:
4). Thus, their aim was to create a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary approach for
those interested in linguistics, sociolinguistics, sociology, political theory, social
theory, and so forth. In this effort, Fowler and Kress (1979) included “an annotated
checklist of linguistic features which have frequently proved revealing” (1979:
198), while cautioning that “there is no predictable one-to-one association between
any one linguistic form and any specific social meaning”. Indeed, they warned that
to lift “components of a discourse out of their context and consider them in isola-
tion would be the very antithesis” (1979: 198) of their approach, which relates dif-
ferent features and processes to each other and insists on the “multi-functional use
of linguistic form and […] emphasis on the systematic nature of selections”. For
their part, Hodge and Kress included two appendices in the second edition of their
book in an attempt to help the reader: (1) “Key concepts in a theory of social semi-
otics” (1988: 261–268), and (2) an “Annotated bibliography” of a diverse “set of
readings from many different disciplines” that were influential on their thinking
(1988: 269–272). These were invaluable then, and they still are, as a way of show-
ing their originality, their positioning in linguistics and critical theory, and their
interdisciplinarity.
42 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

2.4.6  Kress 1989: ‘Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural

Practice’

While there were many works by the critical linguists in the 1980s and 1990s that
were important and influential, there are certain works that have been singled out by
one or more of the prominent originators and current practitioners of CDA15.
Notable among those16 is Kress (1989, first edition in 1985b), Linguistic processes
in sociocultural practice, especially for his discussion of educational texts and
“spoken dialogue, including interview” (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997: 264); and the
shifts he makes in CritLing can be seen as an affirmation of, and response to, cri-
tiques of his own earlier work as well as the need for more work on CritLing, some
of which eventually led to CDA.  Kress’s book17 presents “a theory in which all
aspects of linguistic activity appear as social practice, and in which all linguistic
forms and processes are treated as and accounted for in terms of social forms and
social processes” (1989: 1). This includes the social practice of interviews, on which
we will focus here. Kress had already participated in research in this area in (Fowler
et al., 1979a), where they were treated as sociolinguistic mechanisms of control of
subordinate groups by dominant ones, and “not simply a random example of the
role of language in social practice. Their embodiment of inequality of power and
their use as an instrument of control make them a typical example” (Fowler et al.,
1979b: 2). Kress and Fowler (1979) and Hodge, Kress and Jones (1979) related the
linguistic features of interviews to the functions and meanings of the social situation
and the purposes of the participants. Kress and Fowler (1979) defined an interview
as a type of conversation, a rather simple and clear genre in which the means of
expression are highly overt, strict and (socially) legitimized; it is socially structured
face-to-face discourse that “exhibits an inequality, a skew in the distribution of
power” (1979: 63). And they showed how language reflects this inequality through
an in-depth analysis of, e.g., on the one hand, type of interview, status of the
­participants, issue of agency, conflicting ideologies, etc., and on the other hand, pas-
sives, nominalization, pronouns, modality, questions, syntax, transitivity, verb
types, etc. In their opinion, “these interviews are only a specialized, institutionally
validated, variety of the interactions revolving around power differences which go
on all the time in our society” (1979: 80).

15
 Wodak 2001 refers to Fowler 1991a for an account of CritLing; we also recommend Kress 1990,
since each one provides somewhat different pictures written by two major critical linguists. These
two articles—and many other sources, especially Fairclough and Wodak 1997; Kress 1991; Wodak
2001; Wodak and Meyer 2009, 2016—have informed our discussion of CritLing in this chapter.
16
 Two other books mentioned are by Fowler (1986, 1991c).
17
 The difference between the 1985 and 1989 editions is that the 1989 edition has a Forward (pp.
v–xii) by the editor (Frances Christie) of the series it was published in. Since the pagination of both
editions is identical, we cite 1989, but the reader can find the given quote in either the 1985 or the
1989 edition.
2.4  Critical Linguistics (CritLing) 43

The major difference between Kress’ account in (1989) and these earlier studies
is his use of “discourse” as defined in the work of Michel Foucault (1972), and in
particular the idea that “institutions and social groupings have specific meanings
and values which are articulated in language in specific ways” (Kress, 1989: 6). As
a consequence, “discourses are systematically-organised sets of statements which
give expression to the meanings and values of an institution. Beyond that, they
define, describe, and delimit what it is possible to say and not possible to say […]
with respect to the area of concerns of that institution, whether marginally or cen-
trally” (1989: 6–7). For Foucault, Kress said, discourse also “organises and gives
structure to the manner in which a particular topic, object, process is to be talked
about. In that it provides descriptions, rules, permissions and prohibitions of social
and individual actions” (1989: 7) from the point of view of the meanings and values
of a specific institution. Citing types of discourse—such as educational, nationalist,
sexist, feminist, patriarchal, romantic, Christian, conservative, capitalist, medical,
etc.—Kress said that they “do not exist in isolation but within a larger system of
sometimes opposing, contradictory, contending, or merely different discourses”,
which result in dynamic relations, shifts, movement, mismatches, disjunctions, dis-
continuities, and so forth, especially when they collide in a particular context.
Discourses attempt to reconcile these differences “by making that which is social
seem natural and that which is problematic seem obvious […] unchallengeable […]
‘common sense’” (1989: 10), with no alternatives. As a result, speaking/listening
and writing/reading are often determined by one’s place in (intersecting sets of)
discourses.
He also insisted that we are all members of social groups in which several differ-
ent institutions and their discourses operate and intersect and thus we are subject to
“social group discursive multiplicity, contestation, and difference” (1989: 11). The
discursive history of each member of a social group may be the same as, partially
similar to, or quite different from, others in the same social place, and thus there is
“social determination of an individual’s knowledge of language on the one hand,
and individual difference and differing position vis-à-vis the linguistic system on
the other” (1989: 11–12). This is particularly apparent in dialogues such as inter-
views, which “display discursive difference at every point” and “the structure of
difference particularly clearly” (1989: 12, 14), since by definition they are built on
differences around power and knowledge. Kress (1989: 23) also makes the point
that the “forms and functions of the social occasion and the purposes of the partici-
pants clearly give form and meaning” to the interview as a genre in spoken lan-
guage. Its interactional nature is foregrounded and a number of formal features
structure the interaction, e.g., turn-taking is directed by the interviewer, who has
power and control; the text of the interview is overtly motivated by difference; and
“the textual strategies are direction and questioning, on the part of the interviewer,
and response, information, and definition, on the part of the interviewee” (1989:
23). Interviews are, thus, highly structured and rule governed. Kress also empha-
sizes that while the forms and meanings of texts are determined by discourses and
genres, the sources of which are social/cultural, they are at the same time the prod-
uct of individual speakers who are located in “a network of social relations, in spe-
44 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

cific places in a social structure” (1989: 5) with their specific modes and forms of
speaking, practices, values, meanings, demands, prohibitions and permissions, as
well as “the kinds of texts that have currency and prominence in that community,
and the forms, contents and functions of those texts” (1989: 6). Thus, in an inter-
view, they are themselves “attempting to make sense of the competing, contradic-
tory demands and claims of differing discourses” (1989: 31). As a result, “the
discursive differences are negotiated, governed by differences in power, which are
themselves in part encoded in and determined by discourse and by genre” (1989:
32). The resolution of these discourses is the source of dialogue, with oneself or
with another, and leads to texts that are not the work of any one person (Bakhtin,
1986) and are the sites of struggle and linguistic and cultural change.
For Kress, language is entwined in social power, including distributions of power
and relations of difference, in a number of ways—by indexing it, expressing it,
heightening it, challenging it, subverting it, and even altering it in some cases.
Power differences and their effects are often conceptualized through textual and
visual metaphors using space and distance, and language often articulates a finely
nuanced means of talking about social hierarchical structures, both as a static sys-
tem and as a dynamic process—as often happens in interviews (1989: 53), since
they are social occasions and genres that are based on power differences. He exam-
ines ‘keeping one’s distance’, both in the spatial arrangement of interviewer and
interviewee and through linguistic usage, such as pronouns, names, modes of
behavior, commands, modality—all of which help in the assignment of, e.g., supe-
rior knowledge and more power to the interviewer vs. inferior knowledge and less
power to the interviewee. This can be mitigated by politeness conventions on the
part of the interviewer or heightened by subject positions, e.g., an assertive inter-
viewer vs. a tentative interviewee. The interviewer may also create more distance,
by assuming “a certain stance towards the content of the interaction, or to the pos-
sibility of an interaction … a retreat into an institutional impersonality, or a retreat
into individual invisibility … [which] make the sources of power or authority diffi-
cult to detect, and therefore difficult or impossible to challenge” (1989: 57). This
also extends to the various forms of language, e.g., high vs. low register, working
class vs. middle class, etc. and which ones are deemed to be appropriate in a given
interview situation. These issues are “subject to the laws of social power” (1989:
64), including the class, race, gender, ethnicity, age, status, etc. of the interlocutors,
the particular genre (e.g., job interview for an English teacher vs. for a sales man-
ager), the particular institution (e.g., education vs. industry), and so forth. This
shows that “we need to adopt a constantly critical stance towards our own practices
and assumptions, in every detail and at every level” (1989: 66) and to realize that all
social activity, including linguistic activity, is governed by larger, and sometimes
competing, ideologies.
All of this signifies that “while discourse and genre provide the systematically-
organised linguistic categories which make up a text, ideology determines the con-
figuration of discourses that are present together and their articulation in specific
genres. Ideology is therefore intricately connected into the construction of texts”
(1989: 83), into how the discourses are to be valued, how they relate to each other,
2.5 Hodge and Kress 1988: ‘Social Semiotics’ and Other Work 45

and how they are arranged in text in response to the demands of larger social struc-
tures. As a result, he claims that ideology is typically resistant to change (and thus,
perhaps paradoxically, ideology can be conservative), since it is based on estab-
lished social and material practices, and even when there is change, it provides the
categories that often shape the thinking about the new discourse practices, including
how to classify them and how to make them into common sense. But there is at the
same time a tension between social reality and social and material practices; and
“material practices continue to affect and shape cultural ideological categories,
those of language included. Here, in this difference and in this constant dialogue lies
the motor of social change, and therefore of language change” (1989: 84). This can
consist of a change in the ideological, discursive and generic positions of individual
speakers or a change in the linguistic system brought about by speakers in some
cases, which is in contrast with the tradition in (socio)linguistics and historical lin-
guistics which focuses on, and considers as very likely, changes in the system with
no human agency.
Kress was also interested in how individual action can effect change. He took as
his example ‘sexist discourse’, about which there was much written at the time,
which suggests specific subject positions for women, which in turn strongly shape
the kinds of language women use or is used about women. The effects of gender
roles (and sexism) meant that a woman had a typical placement in certain types of
genres; for example, if she participated in an interview, she was not usually the
interviewer and more likely the interviewee, treated as not being intelligent, patron-
ized by the interviewer, and so forth. If the situation is generalized, the same types
of texts are produced on many occasions and a recognizable manner of speaking
emerges and is seen as the natural or proper way for women to talk or be talked
about. However, “modes of talking can become altered. The theoretical analyses of
feminist writers, and the social practices of feminists over a long period are bringing
about a recognisable change in the discourse around gender, and in social practices”
(Kress, 1989: 94, we will discuss this in more detail in Sect. 6.7). As we will see,
much of what Kress called for in 1989 was taken up by CDA and thus his book
could be seen as pre-/proto-CDA. However, before we go into this, we first need to
discuss developments within SocSem that Kress was also very much involved in.

2.5  Hodge and Kress 1988: ‘Social Semiotics’ and Other

Work

Hodge and Kress’s highly praised book, Social Semiotics (1988), while it acknowl-
edged that Halliday’s book (1978)18 “had a profound influence on our own theory”
(Hodge & Kress, 1988: 270), it set out to correct a number of intrinsic limitations in
the scope of CritLing and in particular in the theory of their earlier work (Kress &

 They also praised him in their “Preface” “for his inspiring example as a researcher, teacher and
18

explorer of the social functions of language” (Hodge and Kress, 1988: ix).
46 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

Hodge, 1979; Fowler et al., 1979a; Aers, Hodge, & Kress, 1981). These needed to
be redressed “in order to fulfill our initial aim for a usable, critical theory of lan-
guage” (Hodge & Kress, 1988: vii). Thus they presented a way forward and pro-
posed an updated CritLing version of SocSem. They began with “social structures
and processes, messages and meanings as the proper standpoint from which to
attempt the analysis of meaning systems” (1988: vii). They also emphasized that a
theory of language “has to be seen in the context of a theory of all sign systems as
socially constituted and treated as social practices” (1988: vii–viii), and thus that
linguistics and the study of verbal language should be “thoroughly assimilated into
a general theory of the social processes through which meaning is constituted and
has its effects”, i.e., a “theory of communication and society” (1988: viii). Their
earlier theoretical position of language as ideology (Kress & Hodge, 1979; see Sect.
2.4.4) was extended to all the means whereby a society constitutes its cultures and
its meanings: “texts and contexts, agents and objects of meaning, social structures
and forces and their complex relationship together constitute the minimal and irre-
ducible object of semiotics analysis” (Hodge & Kress, 1988: viii). They thus
extended the critical linguists’ sociopolitical orientation to meaning-making in gen-
eral, and presented a coherent and useable framework which was both an interdisci-
plinary synthesis and a single coherent scheme of methods and concepts, from
semiotics, linguistics, psychology, sociology and others (see also Hodge, 1990).
Their work was based especially on semiotics and in particular, on a number of
premises that they wanted to emphasize as different from and/or a furthering of their
earlier joint work (Kress & Hodge, 1979) as well as Halliday (1978), e.g.: meaning
is produced and reproduced under specific social conditions and through specific
material forms and agencies; meaning exists in relationship to concrete subjects and
objects and is inexplicable except in terms of this set of relationships; society is
typically constituted by structures and relations of power, either exercised or
resisted; society is characterized by conflict and cohesion, so that the structures of
meaning at all levels, from dominant ideological forms to local acts of meaning,
show traces of contradiction, ambiguity, and polysemy. “So for us, texts and con-
texts, agents and objects of meaning, social structures and forces and their complex
interrelationships together constitute the minimal and irreducible object of semiotic
analysis” (Hodge and Kress, 1988: viii). In previous work Kress (1982) had already
said that “a more comprehensive notion of ‘text’ will have to include both the verbal
and pictorial elements of the one text” (1982: xi); and thus, in Social Semiotics “real
efforts [were] made to understand systems of representation other than language—
visual images, music, and performance. This understanding is then ‘turned back’ on
language in new theorizations of the characteristics of language” (Kress, 1990: 94)
and they argued that “no single code can be successfully studied or fully understood
in isolation because meaning resides so persuasively in a multiplicity of visual,
aural, and behavioral codes” (1990: 96). As a result, “meaning, in all its manifesta-
tions and in all places and how meaning is made, was the issue which provided the
underlying coherence” of their work (Böck & Pachler, 2013: 23–24). They took a
multi-semiotic standpoint and applied it to a wide range of semiotic media and
2.5 Hodge and Kress 1988: ‘Social Semiotics’ and Other Work 47

forms: e.g., images, TV, comics, sculpture, fashion, architecture, culture, media,
education, and advertising.
Since the central premise of their approach was that “the social dimensions of
semiotic systems are so intrinsic to their nature and function that the systems cannot
be studied in isolation” (Hodge & Kress, 1988: 1), they set themselves against
‘mainstream’ semiotics (or semiology), which, like ‘mainstream’ linguistics of the
time, “emphasizes structures and codes, at the expense of functions and social uses
of semiotic systems, the complex interrelations of semiotic systems in social prac-
tice, all of the factors which provide their motivation, their origins and destinations,
their form and substance. It stresses system and product, rather than speakers and
writers or other participants in semiotic activity as connected and interacting in a
variety of ways in concrete social contexts” (1988: 1). Despite this criticism, they
didn’t reject semiotics, as others did; rather, they argued for a reconstitution, and a
reconsideration, of a ‘new’ semiotics (just as the critical linguists had argued for a
‘new’ linguistics), since “semiotics […] must provide this possibility of analytic
practice, for the many people in different disciplines who deal with different prob-
lems of social meaning and need ways of describing and explaining the processes
and structures through which meaning is constituted” (1988: 2; see also Hodge &
Kress, 1982).
Hodge and Kress (1988) took as their starting point the Marxist critique of capi-
talism and their view of ideology as “a level of social meaning with distinctive func-
tions, orientations and content for a social class or group” (1988: 3) which can be
combined with other ideologies to represent “the social order as simultaneously
serving the interests of both dominant and subordinate”. As a result, “the meanings
and the interests of both dominant and non-dominant act together in proportions
that are not predetermined, to constitute the forms and possibilities of meaning at
every level” (1988: 8). For an example of this, see the discussion (in Sect. 4.6) of
their analysis of a billboard advertisement for Marlboro cigarettes and its amend-
ment by a group against ‘unhealthy promotions’ (1988: 8–9). They used Saussure’s
structuralist theory of semiotics as “an antiguide” and articulated an “alternative
semiotics” (1988: 18) based on “Saussure’s Rubbish Bin” (1988: 15–18), which
they conceptualized as being filled with those facets of language which Saussure
minimized, or treated as fixed and not needing further linguistic analysis, or claimed
were not amenable to scientific analysis, or excluded from linguistics and semiotics
as extrasemiotic phenomena. They, however, treated those very same facets as the
basic premises of their work. They focused on: culture, society and politics; other
semiotic systems in addition to language; the processes and the products of speak-
ing (parole); signifying practices in other codes; “the processes of signification, the
transactions between signifying systems and structures of reference … [and] the
material nature of the sign” (1988: 18). Reflecting on issues discussed in Kress and
Hodge (1979), they argued that there is an intrinsic connection between diachrony,
time, history, process and change, since all semiotic activity takes place in time and
is subject to transformational activity, and every transformation is a concrete event
with agents and reasons derived from material and social life (1988: 35).
48 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

In the course of the book, they amplified various facets of their theory: e.g., con-
text as meaning; style as ideology; social definitions of the real and reality; transfor-
mation and time; transformations of love and power: the social meaning of narrative;
and entering semiosis: training (young) subjects for culture. At the same time, they
analyzed a wide range of verbal and visual phenomena and discussed an impressive
variety of visual artifacts with (usually photographic) visual accompaniment: e.g.,
paintings, mosaics, sculptures, a photograph in a magazine, a children’s drawing,
cartoons, a hand-written text, kinship diagrams, family photographs, and so forth.
Other phenomena discussed in the text (without visual accompaniment) were just as
wide: e.g., fashion, a TV interview, a magazine article, rites of passage in various
communities (e.g., weddings, birthdays, funerals), the social meaning of folklore,
and so forth. Moreover, the inclusion of renderings of the visual phenomena made
the book very different from earlier ones and helped to open up a new way of dis-
cussing and presenting visual (social) semiotics, which paved the way for further
development in this area (see the next section and Sect. 4.6).
In essence, SocSem as Hodge and Kress (1988) present it is the study of both the
social dimensions of meaning and the power of human processes of signification
and interpretation in shaping individuals and societies. It is primarily interested in
the way language is used in social contexts, whether visual or verbal in nature, and
the way we use language to create society (see Thibault, 1991; Machin and Mayr,
2012). It also includes the study of how people design and interpret the meanings of
texts, and addresses the issue of how meanings are adapted as society changes.
Hodge and Kress also tried to account for the variability of semiotic practices. This
different focus shows how individual creativity, changing historical circumstances,
and new social identities and projects can change patterns of design and usage,
since, from their SocSem perspective, the many different channels for meaning-­
making are not fixed into unchanging codes but are resources which people use and
adapt (or design) to make meaning. This view provided the impetus for them and
many other SocSem scholars to reject the term ‘sign’ and replace it with ‘resource’,
based on Halliday’s view that the grammar of a language is a “resource for making
meanings” (1978: 192; see Sect. 2.3).
Two years later, Hodge (1990) published a book on literature as discourse, in
which he provided a highly accessible exposition of the concepts and methods of
CritLing SocSem and a new type of (literary/linguistic) criticism that puts forth a
theorization of (English) literature. He characterized the framework presented in
(Hodge & Kress, 1988) as an interdisciplinary synthesis and a single coherent
scheme of methods and concepts (from semiotics, linguistics, psychology, ­sociology
and others), a new strategy for dealing with text in all its media and forms, and “a
broadly based practice that is situated socially and historically” (Hodge, 1990:
233)—which is also needed for work on literature. The notion of language as social
semiotic, i.e., socially derived and with socially instrumental meanings, and this
new interdisciplinary version of SocSem, became the model for investigation by
Australian scholars at the interface of language, literary and semiotic studies, who
did (dynamic) intertextual analysis, such as Terry Threadgold (1986, 1988a, 1988b)
2.6 Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996: ‘Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design’ 49

and Paul Thibault (1991), who found Halliday’s original SocSem model too closely
preoccupied with linguistic structure (grammar).
In 1993, Hodge and Kress published the second edition of Language as Ideology,
in which they positioned themselves as being proponents neither of the older ver-
sion of CritLing nor of CDA, which had started in 1991 (see Sect. 3.2). They devel-
oped CritLing as a theory of language as a social practice, where “the rules and
norms that govern linguistic behaviour have a social function, origin and meaning”
(1993: 204). Their involvement in SocSem had a profound influence on much sub-
sequent research. The relation between CritLing and SocSem was very strong, and
for some, CritLing encompassed SocSem, while for others SocSem encompassed
CritLing; those practicing SocSem used the term SocSem to emphasize the inter-
play between language and other social semiotic systems (Hodge & Kress 1988;
Kress & Threadgold, 1988) and semiotically oriented studies of literature
(Threadgold, 1988a, 1988b). Still others continued to use CritLing as they devel-
oped what would become CDA or they discussed CDA favorably (Fairclough
1992, 1995).
Meanwhile, SocSem was about to undergo a new phase.

2.6  K
 ress and Van Leeuwen 1996: ‘Reading Images:
The Grammar of Visual Design’

2.6.1  Introduction

SocSem had a renewal of sorts through the publication of Kress and van Leeuwen’s
book, Reading images, in 1996 (2nd edition 2006; earlier version 1990), which
represented a turn to the visual. Theirs was the first systematic account of the “gram-
mar” (i.e., the choices and rules of combination) of visual design, which “offers a
much more comprehensive theory of visual communication than the earlier book”
of 1990 (2006: ix), which was less theoretical and more practical (i.e., oriented on
practice). They set their 1996 book in the theoretical framework of SocSem and
SFL/SFG (cf. O’Toole, 1994)19, which gave them the tools they needed in order to
understand visual ­representation and communication and to put analytical and
methodological emphasis on the integration of the visual and the verbal as semiotic
phenomena. They stipulated two major caveats: that the affordances and formal
organizational meanings differ across the two modes (due to, e.g., the prevalence of
time in spoken language and space in images) and that the term grammar means that
visual analysis should move beyond interpreting the meaning of individual elements

19
 O’Toole 1994 is a functional semiotic approach to the language of displayed art, e.g., sculpture,
architecture, and painting, using Halliday’s SFL and especially his metafunctions (with different
labels and definitions to suit the realms he discussed). He included a discussion of social semiotics
near the end of the book, that is, he considered what kind of social meanings are at play, but he
didn’t try to do a grammar of visual design, as Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) did.
50 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

(i.e., treating them as isolated words) and beyond focusing on the ‘denotative’ vs.
‘connotative’ meanings, iconographical vs. iconological, significance of elements
in images. In short, it should “examine the structures such elements form within a
visual composition” (Djonov & Zhao, 2018: 4). Due to their 1996 book, Kress and
van Leeuwen, separately and together, are seen as the founders of the addition of
visual (aspects of) texts to SocSem, and more widely, of serious visual analysis in
semiotics and other domains. They also provided an impetus for looking at the ways
in which images (and other modes of communication) are not neutral, since they
reflect social and power relationships, ideology, and a particular version of social
reality (Machin, 2007). And they launched (see also Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001)
the new area called multimodality (see Sect. 2.7), which has had far-reaching effects
on SocSem in general, CDA/CDS (see Sect. 4.6), work in visual communication
and visual semiotics—and beyond.
Since Reading Images (the title was inspired by Reading Television, by Fiske &
Hartley, 1979) was set within the theoretical framework of SFL/SFG SocSem, they
discussed three schools of semiotics that “applied ideas from the domain of linguis-
tics to other, non-linguistic modes of communication” (Kress & van Leeuwen,
1996: 6), such as painting, cinema, theatre, photography, fashion, music, etc. These
were: the Prague School, which drew on the Russian Formalists and their concept
of foregrounding, which results from deviation from standard forms for artistic or
aesthetic purposes; the Paris School of semiotics (semiology), which applied the
ideas of Saussure and others; and the “still fledging movement in which insights
from linguistics have been applied to other modes of representation has two sources,
both drawing on the ideas of Michael Halliday” (1996: 6). One source grew out of
CritLing in the 1970s at UEA and led “to the outline of a theory that might encom-
pass other semiotic modes” (1996: 6), as provided in Hodge and Kress (1988; dis-
cussed in Sect. 2.5). The other was a development of SFL and SocSem by Australian
scholars in semiotically oriented studies of literature (Threadgold, Thibault), music
(van Leeuwen, 1996: 6), and visual semiotics (O’Toole—and “ourselves”, Kress &
van Leeuwen, 1996: 6). As they said in their preface (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006:
viii), Halliday’s “view of language as social semiotic and the wider implications of
his theory” gave them the means to go beyond structuralist approaches and thus it
influenced their work greatly. In addition, they cited and used much previous work
in art history and visual communication.
We have discussed above various aspects of Kress’s prior work in SFL, CritLing
and SocSem (see Sects. 2.3.1, 2.4, and 2.5). As for van Leeuwen, we should note
here that, in an interview much later, he called his career “a mixture of design and
serendipity” (Andersen et  al., 2015: 93). In this case, he had much of the back-
ground needed to work with Kress on this project. He was both a practitioner and a
theorist of the visual, who had long experience in scriptwriting, film direction, edit-
ing and production and at the same time, knowledge of Paris School semiotics,
interest in social theory, experience working with SFL/SFG and SocSem, and a
deep-seated conviction that “creativity and intellect can be combined” (2015: 94).
He also had a desire to write about “the language of the image” (2015: 93—we will
discuss further his work in SocSem and CDA in Sects. 3.9 and 4.6). Kress and van
2.6 Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996: ‘Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design’ 51

Leeuwen’s joint work on visual communication began in the later 1980s and
included, especially, the stimulating environment of the Newtown Semiotic Circle
in Sydney (the ‘Semiotics Salon’), where they participated in discussions and
debates about SocSem which “helped shape our ideas in more ways than we can
acknowledge” (2006: vii)—they gave special thanks to “Jim Martin” and “Fran
Christie” (who were in Sydney) and “Bob Hodge” (who was at Murdoch University
in Perth, Western Australia). From that participation came their 1990 book, which
was “used in courses on communication and media studies, and as a methodology
for research in areas such as media representation, film studies, children’s literature
and the use of illustrations and layout in school textbooks” (1996: ix). The 1996
book was finished and published when both were in London, Kress at the Institute
of Education and van Leeuwen at the College of Printing. Their “view that language
and visual communication both realize the same more fundamental and far-reaching
systems of meaning that constitute our cultures, but that each does so by means of
its own specific forms” (1996: 17) and their specific proposals, “had a positive
reception among a wide group from the professions and disciplines which have to
deal with real problems and real issues involving images” (2006: vii).
However, the application of ideas from, or at least the search for parallels with,
linguistics for the analysis of visuals was controversial (see Machin, 2007 for an
overview). In the Preface to the 2nd edition (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), they
answered some critiques by stating that they had attempted to use the general semi-
otic aspects of Halliday’s SFG (Halliday, 1985a), e.g., the metafunctions, and not its
“specific linguistically focused features”, and that their goal of showing (Kress &
van Leeuwen, 2006: viii) “how visual communication works in comparison to lan-
guage” had been misunderstood as “an attempt to impose linguistic categories on
the visual”, while their concern was, rather, to bring out both “the differences
between language and visual communication” and “the broader semiotic principles
that connect, not just language and image, but all the multiple modes in multimodal
communication”. In light of these critiques, they delimited and/or reformulated in
(Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006, 2nd edition) various parts of their proposal and
addressed various omissions of the first edition, e.g., moving images, color, a wider
range of three dimensional objects. At the same time, they reflected on the major
societal changes in images and their use in the 10 years between the two editions
and expressed their thoughts about the future of visual communication, given all the
new affordances and meanings due to technology, the internet, websites, web-based
images, social media, etc. Those reflections, however, led others to take a critical
perspective on the issue of the unity and dominance of western visual language on
which their analysis (in Kress & van Leeuwen, 1990, 1996, 2006) is based. This is
because this unity derives from the global power of the western mass media and
cultural industries and their technologies, which sometimes co-exists with more
traditional forms (with higher, equal or lower status), or creates transitional forms/
stages through the integration of (often dominant) western elements with a local
visual semiotic, or exerts a normalizing influence through a variety of means on
visual communication around the world, and so forth. All of this, others said, should
52 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

be looked at more carefully with a critical lens (see further discussion of this in Sect.
3.9.4, which deals with van Leeuwen’s later work, in which he did just that).

2.6.2  General Overview

As said above, Kress and van Leeuwen deliberately left aside the study of visual
lexis or vocabulary (specific signs, which many previous accounts of visual semiot-
ics had concentrated on) since their primary aim was to make generalizations about
visual design and also to discuss “the broad historical, social and cultural conditions
that make and remake visual ‘language’” (1996: 4) in the Western visual cultural
tradition (including regional and social variation) over the last five centuries or so.
They used visual design as an all-encompassing term to cover “oil painting as well
as magazine layout, the comic strip as well as the scientific diagram” (1996: 3), and
many other types of visual texts, and thus they analyzed a wide range of examples,
from children’s drawings to textbook illustrations, photo-journalism to fine art, sci-
entific and other diagrams to maps and charts, and so forth. And they also “made a
beginning with the study of three-dimensional communication: sculpture, children’s
toys, architecture and everyday designed objects” (1996: vii). The term ‘grammar’
denotes how meaning is produced through recurring visual patterns of combination
which are semiotic resources for meaning making in the actions and artifacts we use
to communicate and the way in which people, places and things depicted in images
“are combined into a meaningful whole […] in visual ‘statements’ of greater or
lesser complexity and extension” (1996: 1). Thus, they set out to provide “invento-
ries of the major compositional structures which have become established as con-
ventions in the course of the history of visual semiotics, and to analyse how they are
used to produce meaning by contemporary image-makers” (1996: 1). They also said
that visual communication in general is less the domain of specialists than before
and much more crucial in the area of public communication, leading to new and
more rules and most importantly to the need for everyone to have ‘visual literacy’.
Reading Images had theoretical aims in addition to descriptive ones, and thus it
developed a framework that could be used for ideological analysis, since, just as
different ideological positions can be expressed by different grammatical structures
(e.g., active vs. passive), they saw “images of whatever kind as entirely within the
realm of ideology” (1996: 12), and thus different images could convey different
ideologies. They also regarded their book as “a contribution to a broadened critical
discourse analysis” (1996: 13; CDA had already started in 1991; see Sect. 3.2),
which would encompass other semiotic modes than language, especially since at
that time there was an “incursion of the visual into many domains of public com-
munication where formerly language was the sole and dominant mode” (1996: 13).
This became a significant theme in CDA/CDS itself (see Sect. 4.6). They argued
that “visual structures realize meanings as linguistic structures do also” (1996: 2).
Moreover, just as the term ‘grammar’ is often understood to mean a set of normative
rules in speaking and writing, many creative and aesthetic uses of (the grammar of)
2.6 Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996: ‘Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design’ 53

language exist in literature and poetry (and elsewhere); in the same way, the gram-
mar of visual design can be creatively employed by those in the fine arts, and at the
same time it can be used in socially normalized ways to underpin the production of
layouts, images, diagrams for reports, brochures, communiqués, advertising, etc.
Since their book is on visual design, it is about sign making (cf. Halliday’s notion
of meaning making) or sign using, about “representation as a process in which the
makers of signs […] seek to make a representation of some object or entity, whether
physical or semiotic, and in which their interest in the object, at the point of making
the representation, is a complex one, arising out of the cultural, social and psycho-
logical history of the sign-maker, and focused by the specific context in which the
sign is produced” (1996: 6). This means that visual signs do not necessarily pre-­
exist their making, nor are they necessarily encoded in a repository of signs, rather
they are the result of a process of construction of signs as “motivated conjunctions
of signifiers (forms) and signifieds (meanings)” (1996: 7), where ‘motivation’ is
understood “in relation to the sign maker and the context in which the sign is pro-
duced” (1996: 7; see also Kress, 1993), in relation to what the producer wants to
convey. In this way, the producer’s choice of a given sign in a given context is moti-
vated, in both its form and its meaning. What is also crucial here is that the concept
of motivation comes into play in the use of a sign in a social context. This means
that semiotic resources like images do not have fixed meanings but instead have a
semiotic potential that can be applied differently in different contexts (see
Abousnnouga & Machin, 2013).
In what is one of the striking aspects of the breadth of how they define the visual,
Kress and van Leeuwen (1996: 11) exemplified these and many other theoretical
points by children’s drawings (and illustrations in children’s books), because they
believed that “the production of signs by children provides the best model for think-
ing about sign-making, and that it applies also to fully socialized and acculturated
humans”. Indeed, the first few figures discussed in (1996: 6–10) are drawings by
very young children and the section about visual literacy analyzes an illustration
from Baby’s First Book by an adult about “every night I have my bath before I go to
bed” (1996: 21). Later in their book (1996: 155–158), they compared two Self-­
Portraits by Rembrandt and two drawings by two 8-year-old boys of themselves for
the covers of their class projects. Their point is that we can see the interpersonal
metafunction at work in both the portraits and the drawings, especially in how they
convey (in Rembrandt) and don’t convey (in the class projects) interaction with
the viewer.

2.6.3  The Three Metafunctions in Visual Design

As Kress and van Leeuwen say in their Introduction (1996: 13), the structuring
principle of both their ideas and the book came from Halliday (1985a, their major
source of inspiration, and 1978), in particular his three metafunctions (see Sect.
2.3.4), which they (re)define as a “social semiotic theory of communication” (Kress
54 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

& van Leeuwen, 1996: 40), with the understanding that each semiotic mode “has to
serve several communication (and representational) requirements, in order to func-
tion as a full system of communication”.
Their discussion of the ideational (experiential) metafunction (1996: 45–113)
deals with (1) narrative representations, which design social action, and (2) concep-
tual representations, which design social constructs—on the basis of both of which
they discuss “the patterns of representation which the ‘grammar of visual design’
makes available” (1996: 13) for representing the world around us in social and natu-
ral space and inside us in conceptual space. They divided images into two types:
detailed naturalistic pictures (e.g., a photograph of people in a landscape) and highly
abstract images (such as abstract art, or diagrams, maps, charts). And they analyzed
each of them into participants and processes (1996: 47). They combined Arnheim’s
art theory (1974, 1982) about volumes or masses (i.e., participants) and vectors,
tensions or dynamic forces (i.e. processes), with Halliday’s SFG and SocSem (1978,
1985), and extended Halliday’s notions of action and process vs. actor, goal, and
recipient to specific visual signs that are “about something which participants are
doing to other participants” (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996: 49). In other cases, they
analyzed a picture about participants who are simply carriers of meaning (through
their attributes) as being “about the way participants fit together to make up a larger
whole” (Machin, 2007: 127), i.e., not about doing anything, but about being “what
they are”.
On this basis, they divided “representational structures” into two types: narrative
or social action structures, which present “unfolding actions and events, processes
of change, transitory spatial arrangements” (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996: 79), vs.
conceptual structures, which represents “participants in terms of their more general-
ized and more or less stable and timeless essence, in terms of class or structure or
meaning”. In the case of social action, the participants (of various sorts, e.g., people,
animals, objects) are the actors or agents who are connected to a vector (e.g., road,
arrow, line), i.e., “they are represented as doing something to or for each other”
(1996: 56). They call this a narrative, as long as there is some feature of directional-
ity in the image, e.g., a painting of soldiers creeping up on their enemy with guns
pointing at them. Conceptual representations design social constructs, such as clas-
sifications, where participants are related to each other in terms of a kind of relation,
an overt or covert taxonomy (typically with at least one participant who is
­superordinate and one or more who are subordinate (1996: 81)). Examples include
illustrations of various artifacts found in an archeological dig, tree structure dia-
grams, pie-charts, graphs—and many of the diagrams found in (Halliday, 1985a,
1978) and in this book (see Table 4.1, this volume) and many scientific and technical
books) (see also Machin, 2007: 127).
Kress and van Leeuwen’s discussion of the interpersonal metafunction treats
representation and interaction, i.e., designing the position of the viewer, and modal-
ity, i.e., designing models of reality. It “deals with the patterns of interaction which
the ‘grammar of visual design’ makes available, and hence with the things we can
do to or for each other with visual communication, and with the relations between
the makers and viewers of visual ‘texts’ which this entails” (1996: 13). In their view
2.6 Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996: ‘Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design’ 55

“any semiotic system has to be able to project a particular social relation between
the producer, the viewer and the object represented” (1996: 41). Participants pro-
duce and make sense of images “in the context of social institutions which, to dif-
ferent degrees and in different ways, regulate what may be ‘said’ with images, and
how it should be said, and how images should be interpreted” (1996: 119).
The involvement of participants may be direct and immediate (face-to-face) or
there may be no immediate and/or no direct involvement. The context of production
and the context of reception may be the same or at least connected—or there may
be a disjunction between them; in the former case, the producer and the viewer may
be physically present, but in the (very common) case of disjunction, typically the
producer is absent and the viewer has only the image. Whether there is connection
or disjunction between the contexts of production and reception, they have in com-
mon “the image itself, and a knowledge of the communicative resources that allow
its articulation and understanding, a knowledge of the way social interactions and
social relations can be encoded in images” (1996: 120). As a result “the interactive
meanings are visually encoded in ways that rest on competencies shared by produc-
ers and viewers … [they] derive from the visual articulation of social meaning in
face-to-face interaction, the spatial positions allocated to difference kinds of social
actors in interaction” (1996: 120–121).
From this a variety of meanings arise. There are many different kinds of interper-
sonal relations, e.g. a person in a photograph may “address viewers directly, by
looking at the camera” (1996: 43) or may seem to look directly as the viewer’s eyes
or make an inviting gestures, etc.—they call this a “demand” image (based on
Halliday, 1985a), which demands something from the viewer (Kress & van
Leeuwen, 1996: 118), asks for some sort of (possibly) imaginary relationship
between the viewer and the image and therefore conveys a sense of interaction. Or
the person may be “turned away from the viewer and this conveys the absence of a
sense of interaction” (1996: 43), there is absence of gaze at the viewer—it is an
‘offer’ image (Halliday, 1985a), the participant is the object of the viewer’s scrutiny
(not only in photographs of people, but also in the cases of a drawing in a scientific
textbook, and also diagrams, maps and charts, etc., Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996:
119). And, we understand both types of interpersonal images, “because we under-
stand the way images represent social interactions and social relations” (1996: 121),
including relations with objects. There are other, interpersonal, facets of images:
e.g., size of the frame (a scale from close-up to medium to long shot), which sug-
gests different relations between participants and viewers, with regard to, e.g., social
distance, ranging from close personal distance to far personal distance to close
social distance to far social distance to public distance (1996: 130–135; see also van
Leeuwen, 1986). These patterns can be conventionalized in, e.g., television, dia-
grams, newspaper and magazine photos, advertisements, landscapes, and they are
typically not in an either-or relation but in “scales” or gradations (see Machin,
2007). However, because they are conventional, they can also lead to misunder-
standing, due to intercultural differences.
Another way in which images bring about or reproduce relations between repre-
sented participants and the viewer is perspective, the selection of an angle, a point
56 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

of view. There are various meanings associated with horizontal vs. oblique angle: a
frontal view typically represents involvement or intimacy or subjectivity (part of our
world, something we are involved with), whereas the further it goes to an oblique
angle, the more detachment there is or objectivity (not part of our world), with
degrees (or a scale) of involvement-shading-into-detachment (1996: 142–143). In
either case, they can express subjective attitudes that are “often socially determined”
(Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996: 135) and yet “naturalized” at the same time, based on
an “impersonal, geometric basis”. Beginning with the Renaissance, “visual compo-
sition became dominated by the system of perspective, with its single, centralized
viewpoint” (1996: 136), dependent on the viewer. This resulted in two types of
images, either “subjective”, “with (central) perspective (with a built-in point of
view)”, or “objective”, “without (central) perspective (without a built-in point of
view)” (1996: 136). Many late nineteenth and twentieth century images combine
both (as do, e.g., advertisements, 1996: 138–139). The angle of the shot is also
important: a vertical angle can signify differences of imaginary symbolic power,
depending on whether the viewer sees the participant from above, looking down
(and thus, the viewer is represented as exerting symbolic power over the participant,
who could have lower status, vulnerability, or inferiority), or looking up from below
(which represents less power and status, vulnerability or inferiority for the viewer
and more power, authority or respect for the participant (1996: 146)). A horizontal
camera angle can symbolize equality and no power differential (see further discus-
sion of distance, angle, gaze in Sect. 4.6.3).
According to Machin (2007: 48) “it was Kress and Hodge (1979) in Language as
Ideology who first pointed out that modality could also be expressed non-verbally”,
but it was Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) who proposed a variety of visual tech-
niques “whereby modality can be reduced and reality can be avoided or changed”.
As said (in Sect. 2.3.4), in SFG, ‘modality’ refers to the truth value or credibility or
degree of certainty of statements about the world; and in their discussion of “modal-
ity: designing models of reality”, Kress and van Leeuwen (1996: 159) stated that
“one of the crucial issues in communication is the question of the reliability of mes-
sages”. Is what we see true, real, or is it fiction, something outside reality? “The
questions of truth and reality remain insecure, subject to doubt and uncertainty, and,
even more significantly, to contestation and struggle” (1996: 159). And yet we have
to make decisions and we have to trust (or not) the information we receive, and thus
the message (text, visual image) should have some modality markers, i.e., cues
established by the social groups within which we interact as reliable guides to the
truth, factuality, certainty, credibility of messages, or their falsehood, fiction, doubt,
unreliability20. Visual SocSem does not claim to establish absolute truth or falsity of

20
 The current chapter was written in 2018 and updated in 2019 when modality questions of truth,
factuality, certainty and credibility (and the attendant issue of trust) vs. falsehood, fiction, doubt,
unreliability (and distrust) were uppermost in the minds of many, due to various political events
during those years, in Europe, the UK, and the US, and which continued in 2019 (particularly with
the issue of Brexit and the impeachment inquiry and trial of Donald Trump)—and they have kept
continuing in 2020.
2.6 Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996: ‘Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design’ 57

messages, but it can show how a visual proposition is represented as true or not
(1996: 159), according to the values and beliefs of a given group. That is, the defini-
tion of reality is based on “currently dominant conventions and technologies of
visual representation” (1996: 163) and “abstraction relative to the standards of con-
temporary naturalistic representation” (1996: 165). And “modality is realized by a
complex interplay of visual cues” (1996: 167), based on eight modality markers
(scales) of visual modality that go from “‘certain’ to ‘uncertain’ with ‘probable’ in
between” (Machin, 2007: 48), but also can descend again to lower modality, if it
goes beyond what is judged to be “naturalistic”, according to the (social) criteria for
what counts as real. There are also, e.g., scales for color (1996: 165–168; also Kress
& van Leeuwen, 2002), contextualization (“degrees of articulation of the back-
ground”, Machin, 2007: 51), representation from “maximum abstraction to maxi-
mum representation of pictorial detail” (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996: 166). These
rest “on culturally and historically determined standards of what is real and what is
not” (1996: 168), which can differ according to social communities and over time.
This has led to different coding orientations (Bernstein, 1981), “which inform
the way in which texts are coded by specific social groups, or within specific insti-
tutional contexts” (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996: 170), of which there are four types
in western society: technological (based on the effectiveness of the visual represen-
tation as a kind of “blueprint”); sensory (used in contexts “in which the pleasure
principle is allowed to be dominant”); abstract (used by sociocultural elites and thus
a mark of social distinction, e.g., “in ‘high’ art, in academic and scientific con-
texts”); and naturalistic, assumed to be common sense. This last one has been domi-
nant in our society—although with new image technologies, the status of this type
of coding is coming into crisis (1996: 170–171). The issue of modality is particu-
larly complex in modern art, which attempts to redefine reality and to reject photo-
graphic naturalism (1996: 171–180).
Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, 2006) also discussed the meaning of composition
(see also van Leeuwen, 2003), which is based on the textual metafunction and deals
with “the way in which representations and communicative acts cohere into the kind
of meaningful whole we call ‘text’” (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996: 14), which cov-
ers any kind of semiotic artifact. Given that “any semiotic system has to have the
capacity to form texts, complexes of signs which cohere both internally and with the
context in and for which they were produced” (1996: 41), visual grammar provides
a range of resources and different compositional arrangements in order “to allow the
realization of different textual meanings”. In particular, it is concerned with “the
way the representational and interactive elements are made to relate to each other,
the way they are integrated into a meaningful whole” (1996: 181) by “three princi-
ples of composition” (1996: 183): (1) ideational “information value”, i.e., place-
ment of elements left and right, top and bottom, (2) interpersonal salience which
attracts the viewer’s attention according to foreground vs. background placement,
relative size, contrasts in tonal value or color, differences in sharpness, etc.; and (3)
textual “framing”, i.e., framing devices such as dividing lines, or connectedness or
disconnectedness of the elements of the image. This happens not only with single
pictures or simple images, but also with composite visuals, or “multimodal texts
58 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

(and any text whose meanings are realized through more than one semiotic code is
multimodal)” (1996: 183). They concluded that the meanings of this type of text are
not simply the sum of the meaning of discrete elements or parts, but that “the parts
should be looked upon as interacting with and affecting one another” (1996: 183)
and thus, the whole is “an integrated text”, and neither the verbal nor the visual
aspects of the text are by definition prior to or more important than or independent
of the other. This, they explain, is why they draw comparisons between visual and
verbal communication, seek to break down disciplinary boundaries between the
study of each, and use comparable language and terminology for both.
Using these multimodal texts/images, they then go on to discuss elements of the
composition of the whole image (1996: 177–200) based on information value,
salience and framing, which they apply to an array of visual phenomena (such as
film, advertisements, newspapers, painting, diagrams, science textbooks, children’s
drawings), each of which can have a variety of ideological meanings, depending on
many factors. They identify three types of information value, dependent on place-
ment in the image. In those cultures with a left to right, top to bottom writing sys-
tem, the first is left vs. right placement, where left placement means ‘given’ (familiar,
agreed upon, point of departure) and right placement means ‘new’ (unknown, not
yet agreed upon, needing special attention) (1996: 181, cf. ‘theme’ vs. ‘rheme’ in
Halliday, Sects. 2.3.2–2.3.4). The second is top vs. bottom placement, where top
placement means ‘ideal’ (aspirations, desires, abstract representation, idealized,
generalized) and bottom placement means ‘real’ (more or less factual, specific and
detailed, realistic, practical). The third is center vs. margin(s), with “the crucial ele-
ment” (Arnheim, 1982; Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996: 192), the ‘nucleus’ of the
information, in the center vs. the elements that are ‘ancillary’ or ‘secondary’ in the
margins. This third dimension is less used in Western art and when it is, it is typi-
cally combined with one or both of the others, and the center is the bridge between,
e.g., ‘given’ on the left and ‘new’ on the right, and thus acts as ‘mediator’ (1996:
209, although there are many complexities).
They defined interpersonal ‘salience’ as “the degree to which an element draws
attention to itself, due to its size, its place in the foreground or its overlapping of
other elements, its colour, its tonal values, its sharpness or definition, and other
features” (1996: 210). Typically, it creates an interpersonal hierarchy of importance
among the elements, selecting some as more important or more worthy of attention,
and it interacts with given-new, ideal-real and center-margin, in a variety of ways.
In visuals, “when composition is the integration mode, salience is judged on the
basis of visual clues” (1996: 202), such as the greater the weight of an element, the
greater its salience, which may also depend on potent cultural symbols, size, color,
tone, focus, foregrounding, overlapping, etc. The third key element in composition,
‘framing’, can be stronger or weaker; if it is stronger, what is framed is a separate
unit of information, and context then shows the precise nature of the separation.
Framing stresses individuality and differentiation, a gap of some sort, whereas its
absence or a weak frame stresses group identity, as belonging together, and a strong
sense of connection across the frame of the (two) parts of the image. Framing can
be given by frame lines, objects in the image, discontinuities of color or shape, or
2.6 Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996: ‘Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design’ 59

empty space; and connectedness can be emphasized by vectors, depicted elements,

abstract graphic elements, or repetition of shapes or colors. And every element,
given or new, ideal or real, center or margin, can be framed either strongly or weakly
or not at all.
While those compositional elements seem to be well established in Western art,
Kress and van Leeuwen show that the issue of “reading paths” by the viewer is quite
complex. Some reading paths are obvious, as in linear (syntagmatic) compositions
which are strictly coded to be read horizontally left to right and line by line and
vertically top to bottom (1996: 204) as in densely printed pages of text (such as this
one). Or they can be more paradigmatic, less strictly coded and read in more than
one way, such as websites, which are “specifically designed to allow multiple read-
ing paths”, and also “increasingly many texts (newspapers, billboards, comic strips,
advertisements, websites) are of this kind” (1996: 208), and this is even more the
case in the twenty-first century. It is a fascinating part of the new ways of commu-
nication, and “the study of the meaning of new kinds of reading paths has barely
begun” (1996: 206) and has become another issue of interest in visual studies,
including in van Leeuwen’s work (see Sect. 3.9.4).

2.6.4  Other Facets of the Visual

Kress and van Leeuwen also discuss the issue of the materiality of meaning, i.e., the
materiality of the signs themselves, including the surfaces on which inscriptions are
made (e.g., paper, canvas, film, computer screen), and the means and processes of
inscription (e.g., ink, paint, chemicals), since, e.g., “it means something quite spe-
cific whether a painting is executed in watercolours or in oil, whether a knife is used
to apply the paint or a spraygun” (1996: 230). However, they point out that many
linguists would say that it is the same text when written with a pencil on scrappy bits
of paper with bad handwriting, or pen and ink on glossy paper with no cross-outs or
corrections, or printed out on good bond paper using a word-processor and printer
(Halliday, 1985a calls this ‘realization’, see Sect. 2.3)—as long as they are identical
word-for-word. However, a teacher, a sculptor, an artist, a potential employer or a
marketing executive would say that they are very different, since presentation
­matters. Thus, Kress and van Leeuwen (1996: 14) emphasize that differences in
presentation contribute to the meaning of visual texts. And, we could add, the mean-
ing of, e.g., a spoken text, differs when produced with a different regional or social
or foreign accent and/or with a variety of different intonations (as van Leeuwen had
said several years before, see Sect. 3.9.1).
For Kress and van Leeuwen, representational practices differ in the degree to
which the materiality of the text plays a role in semiosis. In their view, “the material
expression of the text is always significant” (1996: 216); it is a separately variable
semiotic feature. “Texts are material objects which result from a variety of represen-
tational and production practices that make use of a variety of signifier resources
organized as signifying systems” (1996: 216), each of which contributes to the
60 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

meaning of the text in its own particular way. Thus, the production of a text is “a
culturally and socially produced resource for meaning-making” and “it is in this
process that unsemioticized materiality is drawn into semiosis” (1996: 231).
Meaning potentials are different from culture to culture, from context to context,
etc. And even typography and letterform have their own meaning potential, meta-
phorical association and transport of meaning, and metafunctions. Thus, it is not the
case that all of the aspects that go into the making of an image are part of a single
representational system in which all the units are of the same kind. For example, a
portrait painting involves multiple signifying systems, including not only various
aspects of the painting itself, but also the size of the painting, the type of canvas it is
on, various aspects of the frame, the caption on the painting or above or next to the
painting, the signature of the artist, and so forth. The different means and processes
of inscribing words constitute one system among many since they can be changed
while other aspects of the production of the image are held constant. In addition,
any of the signifying systems can realize all the choices from the ideational, inter-
personal and textual metafunctions. This is also the case with language; in particu-
lar, the material expression of the text is, from a social semiotic point of view,
always meaningful, a separately variable semiotic feature, a culturally and socially
produced resource for meaning making. This is highly complex and there is no
established inventory in relation to, e.g., the way representations are produced,
especially in view of various new technologies. Thus, there are produced by, e.g.,
(1) the hand (with a variety of means for creating the representation, e.g., pencil,
pen, typewriter, etc.), (2) recording (of various sorts), e.g., printing press, and (3)
synthesizing technologies. These are linked to ongoing theoretical discussions not
only about production but also about transmission, reception, and distribution and
the ongoing (changes in the) limits of technology—all of which bring up many
other issues (see 1996: 217–238).
In addition, in their extension of their previous discussion “into the domain of
three-dimensional visuals” (1996: 14), Kress and van Leeuwen underscored key
similarities and differences between two- and three-dimensional objects. They
showed that the latter are themselves also subject to a grammar of visual design, as
in sculptures, which are primarily symbolic objects “for contemplation and venera-
tion” (1996: 240) vs. three-dimensional “designed objects” such as scientific mod-
els, children’s toys, or everyday objects, which are made for practical use (for the
user), although they may also “convey symbolic messages”, and there are many
other types of objects such as motorcars, architecture, and stage sets (which were
explored later by van Leeuwen, see Sect. 3.9). All of these depend on available
forms and meanings, but they also bring in new categories (e.g., for sculpture: pres-
ence or absence of a pedestal, frontal or oblique placement with respect to the
viewer, etc.; see also discussion of van Leeuwen’s work in Sect. 3.9). They also
discussed moving images and the role of color, as in film (later discussed in Kress
& van Leeuwen, 2002; van Leeuwen, 2011).
And, finally, as we have seen in our discussion, many of the images and objects
discussed by Kress and van Leeuwen were composites of more than one semiotic
mode—for which they used the term ‘multimodality’.
2.7 Kress and van Leeuwen 2001: ‘Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media… 61

2.7  K
 ress and van Leeuwen 2001: ‘Multimodal Discourse:
The Modes and Media of Contemporary
Communication’

While Kress and van Leeuwen’s work on the grammar of visual design became well
known for its many proposals about the analysis of visual images and was part of
the turn to focusing on visual design as a distinct mode, there was perhaps even
more interest within the SocSem and ultimately the CDA community in their new
concept of ‘multimodality’. Multimodality was based on their recognition that the
way we communicate is typically done through a number of semiotic modes simul-
taneously (see also O’Toole, 1994). One of the new ideas in Kress and van Leeuwen
(1990, 1996) was their argument that we should not analyze each semiotic resource
on its own, but rather the ensemble, the “multimodal text” (1996: 177), whose
meanings are realized simultaneously through more than one semiotic mode. They
insisted that each of the modes “should be looked upon as interacting with and
affecting one another” (1996: 177), and the choices from various semiotic resources
should be studied as to how they interact to create meaning multimodally. In their
work, they did not treat “the verbal text as prior and more important, nor treat visual
and verbal text as entirely discrete elements” (1996: 177); rather they looked at the
whole as an “integrated text” in which the “integration of different semiotic modes
is the work of an overarching code whose rules and meanings provide the multi-
modal text with the logic of its integration”. They also indicated that the verbal and
visual were not the only semiotic modes that could combine into a text, but that
there can be many modes in many different combinations with different (meta)func-
tions and hierarchies, and that the analyst should pay equal and equally detailed
attention to each without privileging one of them and also interpreting them in terms
of how they interact with and affect each other.
Kress and van Leeuwen discussed the new theoretical concept of multimodality
briefly in their 1996 and 2006 texts, but it received much greater attention in their
co-authored book (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001) on Multimodal Discourse, and
other publications (e.g., van Leeuwen, 1999; Kress, van Leeuwen, & García, 2000;
Kress, Jewitt, Ogborn, & Tsatsarelis, 2001; Kress, Jewitt, Franks, Bourne,
Hardcastle, Jones, & Reid, 2005; van Leeuwen, 2005; Kress, 2010; see also Sects.
3.9 and 4.6). Kress and van Leeuwen (2001: 2) present “a view of multimodality in
which common semiotic principles operate in and across different modes” and
reflect on the fact that with advances in digital technologies, non-specialists are
increasingly able to select and combine semiotic resources in a way that only spe-
cialists were able to do in the past, and that therefore, the study of contemporary
communication requires “a unified and unifying semiotics” (2001: 2). This rests on
two fundamental facets of human communication. The first is that it is multimodal:
for example, “meaning-making involves selecting from different modes (e.g., writ-
ten language, sound, gesture, visual design) and media (e.g., face-to-face, print,
film) and combining these selections according to the logic of space (e.g., a sculp-
ture), time (e.g., a sound composition), or both (e.g., a film)” (Djonov & Zhao,
62 2  Precursors to CDA and Important Foundational Concepts

2013: 1; see also Kress, 2010). Thus, “multimodality names both a field of work and
a domain to be theorized” (Kress, 2010: 54). The second facet of human communi-
cation is that it is always social, as underscored by work in all types of SocSem, and
thus it is both defined by and construes its social context, and over time it can be
transformed by and transform that social context.
Multimodal Discourse (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001) is based on “the idea of
communication”, of how people “use the variety of of semiotic resources to make
signs in concrete social contexts” (2001: Preface). At the same time, it also presents
the “common semiotic principles [which] operate in and across different modes”
(2001: 2). It presents “fundamental principles for a unified theory of multimodality”
(Djonov & Zhao, 2018: 5), such as: the study of multimodal communication should
focus on “broad semiotic principles that apply across different semiotic resources”;
and multimodal analysis should always consider “semiotic resources in relation to
specific, situated social practices” in context (see also Moschini, 2014) and should
deal with all aspects of communication in their complexity (see Kress, 2018). Kress
and van Leeuwen (2001) define four ‘strata’ (based on Halliday, 1985) of analysis:
discourse, i.e., “socially constructed knowledges of (some aspect of) reality” (Kress
& van Leeuwen, 2001: 4); design (the arrangement, the composition, of discursive
materials); production (the material realization of a semiotic event or object); and
distribution (which in the late twentieth and into the twenty-first century often adds
or changes meaning, 2001: 7). Interest in multimodality led to work by others influ-
enced by SocSem and/or SFL, who saw the exciting consequences of this new point
of view for their own research and publications (e.g., Lemke, 1998; Scollon, 2001;
Norris, 2004; and others). Multimodal SocSem (see van Leeuwen, 2005; Andersen
et  al., 201521) became even more interdisciplinary in nature and a way of
­understanding the practice of meaning-making across a range of texts and institu-
tions, and also allowing different theoretical voices, all concerned with the process
and practice of semiotic meaning-making, to dialogue with each other—for exam-
ple, in the journal Social Semiotics (founded in 1991).
In light of heightened interest in multimodality, many have said that there is
much more multimodality than there had been before, that the 2000s and on are a
historic moment when there are ongoing changes in the roles of the different modes
and a broad change in the way we communicate (going from monomodality to more
and more multimodality, and a different distribution of the three metafunctions, see
Machin, 2007), due to the many new digital, computational, and internet-based
technologies and their semiotic potentials and to the fact that frames are dissolving

21
 Andersen et al. 2015, on Social Semiotics: Key Figures, New Directions, focused on, and included
interviews with, Christian Matthiessen, James Martin, Gunther Kress, Theo van Leeuwen, and Jay
Lemke, who were chosen by the authors because they were inspired by the work of Halliday in
SFL and his model of SocSem while developing original work of their own. Among other things,
the interviews highlight their main lines of thought and discuss how they relate to both Halliday’s
original concept of SocSem and to each other. We focus here only on Kress and van Leeuwen,
since they had the most impact on SocSem in relation to CDA (see also Sects. 3.2 and 3.8).
References 63

everywhere and formerly clear boundaries are becoming ever more blurred (see
more in Sect. 3.9 on van Leeuwen and Sect. 4.6 on SocSem and multimodality).
Multimodality has been embraced by various other domains and has become a
field of research in its own right. It was also incorporated into SocSem and (along
with SocSem and SFL) into DA/DS, which for some is named multimodal DA
(MDA) and DS (MDS). Research on multimodality can also be critical (but not
necessarily part of CDA/CDS) and yet at the same time some of the critical
approaches have been taken into, or have become part of, CDA/CDS as multimodal
CDA (MCDA, to be discussed in Sect. 4.6). Fairclough and Wodak (1997: 264)
characterize the visual and multimodal version of SocSem by saying that it “draws
attention to the multi-semiotic character of most texts in contemporary society, and
explores ways of analyzing visual images […] and the relationship between lan-
guage and visual images”. In their estimation, SocSem also attends not only to
productive and interpretive practices of texts but also to the texts themselves, and
reflects a new orientation to struggle and historical change in discourse. Both Kress
and van Leeuwen have taken multimodality into new domains—Kress in his
research on education along with his students and colleagues (see Böck & Pachler,
2013) and van Leeuwen in his ongoing interest and innovations in SocSem (see
Sect. 3.9 and Djonov & Zhao, 2013, 2018). Given the important presence of multi-
modality in CDA, we postpone further discussion to Sects. 3.9 and 4.6.
We now turn to Chap. 3, in which we will discuss the (official) emergence of
CDA and the work of its founders, Kress, Fairclough, van Dijk, Wodak and van
Leeuwen.

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Chapter 3
Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation
of CDA, Work of the Founders

3.1  I ntroduction: Discourse Analysis (DA) and van Dijk

1985: ‘Handbook of Discourse Analysis’

This chapter recounts how critical work in discourse analysis (DA) became a recog-
nized program of academic research, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). However,
before doing that, we will first discuss briefly the general domain of DA. We have
already traced in Chap. 2 the interest within systemic functional linguistics (SFL/
SFG) in the analysis of text, the focus within critical linguistics (CritLing) on criti-
cal analysis of texts and discourse and within social semiotics (SocSem) in textual
and visual analysis. At roughly the same time, independently of those develop-
ments, scholars in a variety of disciplines in other parts of the world had an interest
in many types and phenomena of language use. Starting in the 1960s, there were
various scattered attempts to study discourse and texts in a variety of disciplines, not
only linguistics, but also e.g., philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and the emerg-
ing area of pragmatics. This led, in the early 1970s, to “the publication of the first
monographs and collections wholly and explicitly dealing with systematic discourse
analysis” (van Dijk, 1985c: 4), which then opened up in the later 70s and early 80s
to “a more widespread, interdisciplinary, and broader study of textlinguistics and
discourse” (1985c: 6).
This was part of an interdisciplinary trend that went against the autonomous
approaches in linguistics that took the isolated sentence as the highest unit to be
analyzed—segregated from other sentences, text, discourse, use, context of situa-
tion, culture and society, etc.—and in the same way saw linguistics as strictly sepa-
rate from other disciplines, like anthropology and sociology, and also from its own
subdisciplines, like sociolinguistics. The scholars in the new interdisciplinary trend
(to which SFL/SFG was also connected) were independent of each other at first,
since they were working in different research traditions, but they brought “new
ideas about language use, linguistic variation, speech acts, conversation, other

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 71

T. Catalano, L. R. Waugh, Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse
Studies and Beyond, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 26,
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72 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

dialogues, text structures, communicative events, and their cognitive and social con-
texts” (van Dijk, 1985c: 8), which soon led to (more) integrated interdisciplinary
study of language use and discourse. Teun van Dijk, who had been a contributor to
the history and development of DA (including text linguistics) with his own research
and writings (more about this in Sect. 3.6.1), was a major force behind the growth
and international prestige of DA through journals he edited and especially his four-
volume Handbook of Discourse Analysis (1985a) and his introductions to the
Handbook as a whole and each of the volumes (e.g., 1985c, 1985d, as well as in his
edited volume, 1985h, on Discourse and Communication, in which he had an intro-
duction (1985i) and a chapter on the ‘structure of news in the press’ (1985j)). In the
Preface to the Handbook he said that it was a “multidisciplinary1 publication”
(1985b: xi) that dealt with the “presentation of the various disciplines of discourse
analysis, introduction to descriptive methods, study of important genres of (dialogi-
cal) discourse, and application in critical social analysis” (1985b: xi–xii). He put an
emphasis on attention to “a common object of research—discourse (or texts, con-
versations, message, etc.)—despite a large variety of theories, descriptive approaches
and empirical methods” (1985b: xiii—this is also true of CDA, as we will see, in
Sects. 3.2 and 4.2). This variety is evidenced by the breadth of disciplines repre-
sented in the Handbook: the central ones of “linguistics, psychology, social psy-
chology, sociology and anthropology” (1985b: xiii), more recent interest from
“history, law, artificial intelligence, and philosophy … [and] the methods of dis-
course analysis developed in poetics (literary scholarship), stylistics, rhetoric, or
content analysis (e.g., in mass communication research)”.
Importantly for DA and CDA, van Dijk’s own writings at that time and the writ-
ings of others he included in the Handbook showed the interest that he took “in texts
and discourses as basic units and social practices” (Wodak, 2001a: 7). Vol. 2:
‘Dimensions of discourse’ covers various descriptive methods of DA from linguis-
tics (such as his own, van Dijk, 1985g, on ‘semantic discourse analysis’) as well as
those on the “boundary of linguistics and other disciplines, such as pragmatics and
analyses of argumentation, narrative, and nonverbal communication” (van Dijk,
1985f: xiii). At the same time, the Handbook contains “the work of a variety of
scholars for whom language and how it functions in discourse is variously the pri-
mary object of research, or a tool in the investigation of other social phenomena.
This is in a way a documentation of the ‘state of the art’ of critical linguistics in the
mid-1980s” (Wodak, 2001a: 7). The Handbook was also a harbinger of some of the
scholars, topics, and concerns of CDA, especially in Volume 4: ‘Discourse Analysis
in Society’. In his introduction to Vol. 4, van Dijk discusses the issue of “possible
applications and social relevance for the study of discourse” (1985d: 3), arguing for
what he called “critical discourse analysis” (1985d: 6) and emphasizing the need for
both “a sound discourse analysis” and “an adequate and critical social analysis”

1
 Van Dijk (and others) often use terms like interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary,
transdisciplinary for DA (and later, discourse studies DS) and also CDA/CDS. We will not make a
difference between these in citing other scholars—and will use the terms that van Dijk uses when
citing him—and in our own discussions we will use the term interdisciplinary.
3.2  Start of CDA 73

(1985d: 8). The volume includes chapters by, among others, Fowler (1985) on
power, Kress (1985b) on ideological structures in discourse and Wodak (1985) on
the interaction between judge and defendant in the courtroom.
Van Dijk and others continued to turn their attention to further development of
CritLing and DA throughout the rest of the 1980s. This set the stage for CDA, to
which we now turn.

3.2  Start of CDA

3.2.1  S
 ymposium in Amsterdam in 1991: Similarities
and Differences in the Original CDA Group

“CDA as a network of scholars emerged in the early 1990s, following a small sym-
posium in Amsterdam, in January 1991” (Wodak, 2001a: 4), which was organized
by van Dijk who, as Professor at the University of Amsterdam, secured funding for
the meeting from the University. As a result, he, Norman Fairclough (Lancaster),
Gunther Kress (London), Theo van Leeuwen (Sydney), and Ruth Wodak (Vienna)
met for 2 days to discuss “theories and methods of Discourse Analysis, specifically
CDA” (Wodak & Meyer, 2009b: 3). They mutually recognized the similarity of
their work in spite of their many differences, became the loosely knit “original CDA
group” (van Leeuwen, 2008a: xx), and reached a set of agreements about a way
forward. As we will see in our discussions below (Sects. 3.3–3.9), in the late 1970s
through the early-mid 1990s, (descriptive) phrases such as ‘critical analysis of dis-
course’, ‘critical approach to discourse analysis’, ‘critical discourse analysis’, ‘criti-
cal text(-)linguistics’, ‘critical language study’ (and others, such as ‘critical
sociolinguistics’, ‘critical language awareness’) had been used in various publica-
tions, along with or instead of, the already established Critical Linguistics (CritLing,
see Sect. 2.4). The various phrases with the term ‘critical’ indicated that many of the
ideas that were to become part of the field of CDA were ‘in the air’ but had not yet
coalesced into a recognized research paradigm nor had one particular way of desig-
nating it become standardized as a set name (and acronym). However, by the mid-­
late1990s, “the label CDA came to be used more consistently” (Wodak, 2001a: 5)
for this research program.
Before Jan. 1991, the five participants in Amsterdam had not all known each
other personally, although Kress and van Leeuwen had already worked together in
Australia (see Sect. 2.6) and van Dijk and Wodak in Europe (see Sect. 3.7). In gen-
eral, they had very distinct backgrounds and experiences, “which have, of course,
changed significantly since 1991 but remain important, in many respects” (Wodak
& Meyer, 2009b: 3). Thus, they had not thought of themselves as sharing strong
interests in the same issues. However, “in this process of group formation, dif-
ferences and sameness were exposed: differences towards other theories and
74 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

methodologies in discourse analysis (see Titscher, Meyer, Wodak & Vetter, 20002)
and sameness in a programmatic way, which could frame the differing theoretical
approaches of the various biographies and schools of the respective scholars”
(Wodak, 2001a: 3). All of those were already evident in 1991 and/or have developed
even further since then (see Chap. 4, also van Dijk, 2007a). Three of the participants
at the meeting had also published books in the 1980s, “which were coincidentally
(or because of a Zeitgeist) published simultaneously and led by similar research
goals” (Wodak & Meyer, 2009b: 3–4), especially their critical aims and their focus
on discourse, power and ideology with regard to social issues: van Dijk, 1984
(Prejudice in Discourse), Fairclough, 1989b (Language and Power) and Wodak,
1989a (Language, Power and Ideology). Since all three books were seen as pre-/
proto-CDA, we will discuss them in some detail in the sections devoted to each
author later in this chapter.
What unified the founders of CDA and their colleagues and differentiated them
most clearly from other types of DA (and also from pragmatics and sociolinguistics,
among other areas) was their general “constitutive, problem-oriented, interdisci-
plinary approach” (Wodak & Meyer, 2009b: 2). ‘Constitutive’, ‘problem-oriented’
and ‘interdisciplinary’ are all equally important in the identification of the approach,
which provided a base that allowed them to act as a group and at the same time
maintain their individuality. As a result, their unifying parameters were “rather spe-
cifics of research questions (critique) than the theoretical positioning” (Wodak &
Meyer, 2016b: 17) which they use to analyze, understand, and explain social phe-
nomena of various sorts. And this stance has remained a hallmark of CDA since
then, along with other generally accepted facets, such as common agreement that
language is a social practice (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997), that both language use
and context (or ‘text and context’) are equally important and that context should
include a variety of factors (the list has been extended and expanded to include, e.g.,
situation-specific, social, cultural, historical, (socio)cognitive, and political factors,
although not everyone uses all of these). And while CDA research is not focused on
specific linguistic items for their own sake, it requires some linguistic expertise,
since it is necessary for, e.g., deciding on which items are relevant for which specific
research objectives (and vice versa) and how to interpret them. CDA has a major
interest in de-mystifying (deconstructing) power and ideologies (Wodak & Meyer,
2009b: 3); it “aims to shed light on the discursive aspects of societal disparities and
inequalities [and] frequently detects the linguistic means used by the privileged to
stabilize or even to intensify inequalities in society” (2009b: 32) and also to show
how discourse properties are used in “social processes of power, hierarchy-building,
exclusion and subordination”. In addition, those who are part of CDA make their
own positionings and interests explicit (2009b: 3) and at the same time they are
“self-reflective of their own research process”. This means that, as much as possi-
ble, they maintain distance from the data and keep description and interpretation

2
 Wodak and Meyer (2009b, 2016b) mention Renkema (2004), Wetherell et al. (2001), Wodak and
Kryzyžanowski (2008), and Wodak (2008a).
3.2  Start of CDA 75

apart from each other, so as to be transparent in their analysis. At the same time,
they want “to produce and convey critical knowledge that enables human beings to
emancipate themselves from forms of domination through self-reflection. Thus they
are aimed at producing ‘enlightenment and emancipation’ … and seek to create
awareness in agents of their own needs and interests” (Wodak & Meyer, 2009b: 7).
As for the differences between the five scholars in the original CDA group, they
were many; but, as Wodak and Meyer (2009b: 32) said, they were “volitional char-
acteristics”, a conscious decision about the (wide) foundation on which they were to
be a group. They had been trained in different areas of and approaches to linguistics
and thus had no common linguistic theory or methodology. Fairclough, Kress and
van Leeuwen were influenced by Halliday’s SFL/SFG and were familiar, as well,
with the work of, e.g., Malinowski, Firth, Whorf, Bernstein, etc. (see Sects. 2.2–
2.4). However, they were involved in different projects in 1991 and after. Kress and
van Leeuwen went on to develop their own version of SocSem (and thus we devoted
Sects. 2.5 and 2.6 to these ideas)—but their interests diverged after that (see Sects.
3.3 and 3.9). For their part, van Dijk and Wodak were different from them (having
no prior interest in SFL/SFG nor CritLing nor SocSem), but they also had different
backgrounds in linguistics—van Dijk in text grammar, discourse pragmatics and
coherence, and discourse comprehension (see Sect. 3.6), and Wodak in sociolin-
guistics and applied linguistics (see Sect. 3.8). However, the two of them did have
various interests in common (Sect. 3.7).
The ‘original five’ also had grounding in a diverse set of social, critical and
sociocognitive theories. CDA “has never been and has never attempted to be or to
provide one single or specific theory” (Wodak & Meyer, 2016b: 5—as against many
other domains in the social and human sciences. Indeed, it “emerged as a mixture of
social and linguistic theories” (Wodak & Meyer, 2016b: 19) and has remained that
way ever since; this has meant that there is not just one single approach to CDA but
several (see Chap. 4, which discusses the current seven main approaches). Thus,
each scholar had—and still has—his or her own theoretical inclinations. For exam-
ple, a quick overview for the ‘original five’ would point out that Kress and Fairclough
were allied with Marxism (but in different ways), van Dijk with social cognition,
Wodak with the Frankfurt School, and van Leeuwen with SFL/SFG and SocSem.
This diversity led Fairclough to say: “I believe we should be open to a wide range
of theory” (2000: 163); Van Dijk suggested that CDA/CDS should be seen as “a
heterogeneous ‘movement’ with various methodologies and epistemological posi-
tions” (2008: 822); and Wodak and Meyer commented on the “huge variety of theo-
ries, ranging from theories on society and power in Michel Foucault’s tradition,
theories of social cognition, and theories of functional grammar as well as individ-
ual concepts that are borrowed from larger theoretical traditions” (2016b: 13).
These theories can be classified in various ways (as laid out in, e.g., Fairclough
& Wodak, 1997; Meyer, 2001; Wodak & Meyer, 2009b; 2016b; Fairclough,
Mulderrig, & Wodak, 2011). Wodak and Meyer (2009b: 32) summarize the situa-
tion in this way: “CDA works eclectically in many aspects. The whole range
between grand theories and linguistic theories is evoked, although each approach
76 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

emphasizes different levels” of theory, which can be arrayed as (all quotes from
Wodak & Meyer, 2009b: 24):
• epistemology (“theories that provide models of the conditions, contingencies
and limits of human perception … between the poles of realism and
constructivism”);
• general social theories, i.e., Grand Theories (which “conceptualize relations
between social structure and social action and thus link micro- and macro-­
sociological phenomena”);
• middle-range theories (with a focus on “specific social phenomena … or on spe-
cific subsystems of society”);
• micro-sociological theories (which “try to make sense of and explain social
interaction”);
• sociopsychological or sociocognitive theories (which “focus on the social condi-
tions of emotion and cognition”);
• discourse theories (which “aim at the conceptualization of discourse as a social
phenomenon and try to explain its genesis and its structure”);
• linguistic theories (“e.g., theories of semantics, pragmatics, of grammar or of
rhetoric, [which] describe and explain the patterns specific to language systems
and verbal communication”).
In this connection, Wodak and Meyer (2009b) characterized five of the approaches
in their book—which are also included in this one (see Sects. 3.5–3.9, 4.2–4.8)—in
terms of their theoretical background and “main theoretical attractor”, i.e., major
linguistic, social, cognitive, or critical thinker(s) (2009b: 20, Fig. 1.1) who has been
very influential on their work—although in all cases they have also had other
influences:
• for Wodak and Reisigl’s Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), the main theo-
retical background/theoretical attractor is Critical Theory (the Frankfurt School,
especially Habermas) and Symbolic Interactionism (e.g., Goffman, 1970) (see
also Sects. 3.8 and 4.5 for these and other influences and for more on the
approach).
• for van Leeuwen’s Social Actor Approach (SAA) the main theoretical back-
ground is Halliday’s SFL/SFG (functional grammar), and SocSem (see Sect.
2.3), as well as Critical Theory (see Sects. 3.9 and 4.6 where SAA is only one of
the approaches discussed). SAA is one part of van Leeuwen’s approach to CDA,
which he calls ‘discourse as the recontextualization of social practice’ (Van
Leeuwen, 2009a, 2016b); he said (2009a: 146–148, 160–161; 2016a: 140–141,
153) that he is influenced by other theorists, such as Malinowski (1923) and
Bernstein (1981, 1986, 1990: Chap. 5), and others.
• for Siegfried Jäger and Florentine Maier’s Dispositive Analysis Approach (DPA)
it is Foucault and his “structuralist explanations of discursive phenomena”
(Wodak & Meyer, 2009b: 25), and some others, as discussed in Sect. 4.7.
3.2  Start of CDA 77

• for van Dijk’s Sociocognitive Approach (SCA, Sects. 3.6.6 and 4.4) it is
Moscovici’s ‘social representation theory’ (Moscovici 1982, 2000) and earlier
work by e.g., Durkheim.
• for Fairclough’s Dialectical-Relational Approach (DRA, see Sect. 4.3) the main
theoretical tradition is Marxist theory and Marxism (1992; see Sects. 3.5 and 4.3
for more discussion of this and other influences).
This leaves aside two fairly newly formed approaches: the corpus linguistic
approach (CorpLingA, see Sect. 4.8) and the cognitive linguistic approach
(CogLingA, see Sect. 4.9). CorpLingA was included in Wodak and Meyer (2009b:
20) as influenced by Critical Theory but not in 2016b (see p. 18). This is because
CorpLingA—and CogLingA—both “offer methodologies and methods for analyz-
ing specific data sets without relying strongly on specific theoretical attractors”
(Wodak & Meyer, 2016b: 18). However, they are very different from each other in
many ways (see Sects. 4.8 and 4.9).
This way of classifying by general theoretical approach—and theoretical attrac-
tor—“neglects the interconnectedness of particular approaches (Hart & Cap, 2014b,
in their introduction)” on other grounds (Wodak & Meyer, 2016b: 19). However, we
agree with most of those in CDA/CDS that this classification is very useful and thus
we use it here (see Chap. 4, especially Sect. 4.2) and it does not preclude discussion
of, or classification by, other types of similarities across approaches. Moreover, as
we will see, while diversity is sometimes seen as a weakness, showing a lack of
cohesion, being too eclectic, or masking a failing/failure (as claimed in some cri-
tiques of CDA/CDS, see Chap. 5), it is an eclectic pluralism held together with a
few basic convictions that has been a cohesive and coherent strength.
The methodologies and types of analysis of the various approaches have the
same eclecticism. CDA has been from the beginning one overall school that has
integrated several different research schools with very different methodologies, and
also with diverse perspectives and procedures, about which, already in 1991, “a very
stimulating and rapidly expanding debate was begun among scholars, approaches
and methodologies” (Wodak & Chilton, 2005b: xii). As a result, while all of the
approaches can be seen as in some sense hermeneutic (i.e., where “hermeneutics
can be understood as the method of grasping and interpreting meanings”, Wodak &
Meyer, 2009b: 22), their interpretative perspectives have different emphases and
sometimes even include quantitative procedures, especially in the case of
CorpLingA. In other words, CDA/CDS has changed in many ways since 1991, due
not only to developments within the original approaches but also the addition of
new scholars, theories, research frameworks, empirical methods, specific questions
of research, and so forth. This heterogeneity has allowed for “continuous debates,
for changes in the aims and goals, and for innovation” (Wodak & Meyer, 2016b: 5).
And this has also meant that many scholars (including the current co-­authors) could
join the CDA/CDS research program by agreeing with the parameters that unify the
group, e.g., problem-oriented research questions, critique, and an interdisciplinary
approach (among others)—without giving up their own interests, projects, or ways
of working or having to take on theoretical (or other types of) positioning they may
78 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

not be comfortable with. And we are convinced that it is because of this, and the
hard work of the original CDA group as well as those who joined them in the early
years, that CDA/CDS has become an established, i­ nstitutionalized and international
academic framework—a development that has not changed its pluralistic character
(Wodak, 2001a: 11; 2001c: 64), despite those who predicted it would (see Chap. 5).
Other consequences of this eclecticism are that there have been different defini-
tions of basic terminology, most notably ‘discourse’, which has a wide range of
meaning in CDA/CDS (Wodak & Meyer, 2016b: 6) and also ‘text’, with its different
and sometimes conflicting definitions (and per force, the difference between dis-
course and text). As well, ‘critique’/’critical’ has different meanings in the Frankfurt
School, especially in Horkheimer and Habermas, vs. in CritLing vs. in some
approaches to CDA (see Wodak & Meyer, 2009b: 6–7). Given this situation for
‘discourse’, ‘text’ and ‘critique/critical’, we will not attempt to define them—nor
‘power’, ‘ideology’ or ‘context’, etc.—for CDA in general (see Wodak & Meyer,
2009b: 4–10; 2016b: 5–12, for a general discussion). However, we will define,
when relevant, what these terms mean for each approach (see Chap. 4, Sect. 4.2).

3.2.2  CDA: Consolidation and Development

The formation of the CDA group and its consolidation and the development of CDA
as a network of scholars was abetted by the launch in 1990 of van Dijk’s interna-
tional multi- (and trans-)disciplinary journal, Discourse & Society (International
Journal for the study of discourse and communication in their social, cultural and
political contexts), which was founded to publish scholarship in the various fields
studying discourse and communication and for “the further development of a seri-
ous critical paradigm” (van Dijk, 1990: 10). This new journal fits the cause of CDA
well since it is issue-oriented, i.e., it deals with relevant social problems, especially
“group-based forms of inequality” (1990: 10) and “power differences” (1990: 11),
and goes behind these surface forms in order to explore “the more complex and hid-
den mechanisms of discursively based (trans)formations of social cognitions, ideol-
ogy and socio-political and cultural structures that give rise to such interactional
expressions of inequality in the first place” (1990: 11). In addition, van Dijk wanted
Discourse & Society “to encourage cooperation and solidarity, stimulate coherence,
and initiate new cross-disciplinary developments […] and promote a new field of
socio-political discourse analysis” (1990: 13)—this succinct statement seems also
to characterize the aims of the meeting in Amsterdam in 1991. This ‘new field’
would include (in harmony with van Dijk’s commitment to social justice, see Sect.
7.3) scholars from, and issues of interest to, southern Europe and/or countries from
the southern hemisphere as well as women and (racial and ethnic) ‘minority schol-
ars’ from many disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. The journal pro-
vided a common medium for publishing critical research and a Forum (discussion)
section. As a result of the discussions of the original CDA group, there was a Special
Issue of Discourse & Society (volume 4.2) edited by van Dijk (1993b) on CDA,
3.2  Start of CDA 79

with his Editor’s Forward (van Dijk, 1993c) and papers originally presented at the
Jan. 1992 (second) workshop on CDA, also held in Amsterdam, with contributions
by Fairclough (1993), Kress (1993), van Leeuwen (1993), Wodak and Matouschek
(1993), and van Dijk (1993d). Discussions of all of these are included, when rele-
vant, in the sections in this chapter dedicated to their work. Wodak said about this
Special Issue and other joint ventures since then (1996: x): “I have been fortunate to
be able to discuss many important theoretical issues about ‘critical linguistics’3 with
my colleagues and friends Teun van Dijk, Norman Fairclough, Theo van Leeuwen
and Gunther Kress. They have been a source of invaluable knowledge of varied
cultural contexts of discourse production, of theoretical rigour and of criticism of
individual or collaborative work. Yet the collegial atmosphere of mutual respect in
which these critical exchanges have taken place has been nearly as rewarding as the
criticism itself”.
The 1991 Amsterdam meeting was also an institutional beginning of CDA due to
other plans: more (international, national and local) CDA symposia, conferences,
colloquia and workshops in various venues; an ERASMUS exchange program—
which was funded by the European Union for 1993–1996 with Wodak as Coordinator;
joint projects and collaborations between scholars (in addition to the original group)
who came from different countries and approaches (see Kress, 1990, 1991); and a
co-authored introduction to CDA that eventually resulted in a widely cited chapter
(Fairclough & Wodak, 1997), in van Dijk’s (1997a) edited book on DS (see also
Fairclough et al., 2011; Wodak, 2011; in van Dijk, 2011a). In addition to Discourse
& Society, several other new journals that welcomed CDA/CDS work were created,
e.g., Critical Discourse Studies, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Visual
Communication and later, The Journal of Language and Politics, and Discourse and
Communication, as well as the open-access e-journal published by the international
network of scholars, Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines
(CADAAD), which also sponsors international conferences every 2 years. As well,
there were various collaborative interdisciplinary CDA projects, book series, hand-
books and readers, and introductory texts and textbooks—and a wide variety of
other printed and electronic sources for DA/DS that include CDA and CDS. All of
this activity abetted the development and consolidation of CDA.
There were several early proponents of CDA who wrote about it (and in some
cases, its relation to CritLing) in the 1990s, such as Kress (1990, 1991, 1993a,
1996), Fowler (1987, 1991, 1996), Fairclough (1993, 1995b: 1–20), and most of all
van Dijk (e.g., 1993d, 1996, 1997c, 1999a—see also 2001a, 2001b, 2007b, 2009a,
2011c, 2013d, 2015, 2016a). The first edited collection of papers in book form with
the label CDA was published in 1996, with a Preface by the editors Carmen Caldas-
Coulthard and Malcolm Coulthard (1996a), who had both been involved in a
descriptive approach to DA before (see, e.g., Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975; Coulthard,
1977/1985; Coulthard & Montgomery, 1982; Coulthard, 1992, 1994) and who felt

3
 As noted below, Wodak, among others, used both ‘critical linguistics’ and ‘critical discourse
analysis’ as more or less synonymous terms for their critical work in the early to mid 1990s.
80 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

that it was “part of their professional role to investigate, reveal and clarify how
power and discriminatory value are inscribed in and mediated through the linguistic
system” (1996: xii). Their book included contributions by each of the co-editors and
scholars who continued to do CritLing and/or were early members of the CDA
group (e.g., Caldas-Coulthard, 1996; Coulthard, 1996a; Fowler, 1996; Fairclough,
1996; Kress, 1996; van Dijk, 1996; van Leeuwen, 1996; Wodak, 1996b). Among the
overviews of CDA/CDS, the earliest, most comprehensive and informative are the
volumes co-edited by Wodak and Michael Meyer (2001, 2009a, 2016a) and their
introductory overview chapters that cover the history, concepts, development and
different approaches to CDA (Wodak & Meyer, 2001, 2009a; Meyer, 2001) and
later to CDS (Wodak & Meyer, 2016a, which also includes a Glossary). Their trans-
lation into other languages (e.g., Spanish, Japanese and Arabic, see the Preface in
Wodak & Meyer, 2016a: x) underscores the international interest in CDA/CDS and
its perspective. During this period, Wodak (co-)edited and (co-)authored introduc-
tions to other books on CDA/CDS and put long discussions of it in other work (for
more on Wodak as historian and biographer of the CDA group, see Sect. 3.8.8).
There also were others who contributed to documenting the new research field, e.g.,
the edited collections with introductions by Toolan, 2002a, 2002b (4 Vol.)—and
later Hart & Cap, 2014a, 2014b). All of this was important in establishing and devel-
oping CDA as a new intellectual domain of academic research with a clear and
recognized academic identity; and the use of the term CDA (and eventually CDS,
see Sect. 4.1) became a way of showing allegiance to a general framework and a
common enterprise carried out by a group of scholars (Wodak, 2001a) which opens
up a whole new array of questions and concerns.
By 2009, CDA had become “an established discipline, institutionalized across
the globe in many departments and curricula” (Wodak & Meyer, 2009b: 4, 2016b:
5). It attracted an increasing number of researchers and “many more academic posts
and programmes of study and research, and it has become more mainstream, and
certainly more ‘respectable’ than it was in the early days” (Fairclough, 2010: 10).
As for the relation between CritLing, SocSem and CDA, there were many who saw
CDA as a continuation of, or as occupying the same paradigmatic space as, CritLing
(see Kress, 1990, 1991; Fairclough & Wodak, 1997; Blommaert & Bulcaen, 2000;
Wodak & Meyer, 2001) and given that fact, some used CDA and Critical Linguistics/
CL4 interchangeably as near-synonyms for a while. However, Wodak et al. (1999)
said that, in contrast with CritLing, those doing CDA “place great emphasis on the
analysis of empirical data” (1999: 2) (more than those in CritLing). There were oth-
ers who agreed with van Dijk that CDA and CritLing “are at most a shared perspec-
tive on doing linguistic, semiotic or discourse analysis” (van Dijk, 1993b: 131). And

4
 CL was used as the acronym for ‘critical linguistics” by its founders and also by some in CDA
(such as Wodak). However, later CL was created as an acronym for ‘cognitive linguistics’, which
is also discussed in this book (see Sect. 4.9). In order to avoid confusion, we have created the more
transparent acronyms, ‘CritLing’ and ‘CogLing’ for these two, very different types of linguistics,
while keeping CL for CritLing in quotations, but not in our text. See the List of Acronyms and
Abbreviations.
3.2  Start of CDA 81

Kress (1990: 94) stated that there is a large continuity between the two, due to two
claims they had in common—that discourses are i­deological (Kress, 1985a/1989)
and there is no “arbitrariness” of the linguistic sign (Kress, 1993a) since it is social
in origin, development and use. However, Kress also said that CDA was “emerging
as a distinct theory of language, a radically different kind of linguistics” (1990: 94).
Fairclough knew CritLing well, but he developed his own, somewhat different,
approach (Critical Language Studies [CLS], see Sect. 3.5.1); he joined CDA in the
mid 1990s (Fairclough, 1995b; Fairclough & Wodak, 1997), but he also distanced
himself from it in some of his subsequent publications (e.g., Chouliaraki &
Fairclough, 1999—see Sects. 3.5 and 4.3). Some of the others who had been doing
CritLing did not join the CDA research program for various reasons (see Fowler,
1996), while scholars from other backgrounds joined the growing CDA group fairly
early, such as Caldas-Coulthard and Coulthard, cited above (1996b), Lilie
Chouliaraki (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999) and Luisa Martín Rojo (Rojo & van
Dijk, 1997)—and Ron Scollon (Scollon, 2001), who later left CDA (before he
passed away)—and many others (see Chaps. 4 and 6). Also, since CritLing was
heavily influenced by, and interrelated with, SFL/SFG (see Sect. 2.4), there was
recognition of the credit CDA owed to the systemicists directly or indirectly, espe-
cially given their interest in social meaning and their influence on Kress, Fairclough
and van Leeuwen (Martin & Wodak, 2003b: 3–4; Young & Harrison, 2004a, 2004b).
In (1995a: 20), Fairclough said that CDA has “passed through the first flush of
youth and is embarked upon the maturation process”, which involved new agendas
and more scholars and emerging or evolving approaches (theory and methodology)
“which frequently find innovative ways of integrating the more traditional theories
or of elaborating them” (Wodak & Meyer, 2009b: 3, see Chap. 4 for a discussion of
the ‘main approaches’). Various critiques have been made of the new program (see
Chap. 5) and over time a variety of new interdisciplinary connections have been
formed (see Chap. 6); and this has continued as the maturation process has deep-
ened. The preferred name for this program for much of this time was CDA, but (see
Sect. 4.1 for more detail) in the 2000s and 2010s the label Critical Discourse Studies
(CDS) began to be used interchangeably with, in addition to, or instead of CDA,
depending on the scholar. For its part, Social Semiotics (SocSem, see Sects. 2.5, 2.6,
3.9, and 4.6) has continued to be used by many to embrace a socially oriented criti-
cal approach to literature, semiotics, visual analysis, multimodality and so forth,
either separate from or in the context of CDA/CDS, and some of the critical work in
SocSem was incorporated into CDA/CDS as either SocSem or multimodality or
both, e.g., Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA, see Sect. 4.6); and van
Leeuwen, in particular, has continued to work on both CDA and SocSem (see
Sect. 3.9).
With that background, we now turn to a discussion of the five founders of CDA,
“the original ‘critical discourse analysis group’” (van Leeuwen, 2008a: ix). In each
case, after providing a short introduction, we discuss their pre- and early CDA writ-
ings, along with other pertinent information about their CDA activities, and their
work on their approach to CDA; the most recent version of their approach is dis-
cussed in Chap. 4.
82 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

3.3  Gunther Kress: Multimodal Learning and Education

In the course of an interview published in Andersen, Boeriis, Maagerø, and Tønessen

(2015a: 69–92), Gunther Kress said that his “life has been a series of accidents,
really” (p. 88), starting with his move to Australia from Germany with his parents
when he was sixteen and thus the necessity of “learning a new culture and a new
language ‘on the job’” (2015a: 69), which led him to think about many issues that
were to become a focus of his research. As said in Sects. 2.4–2.7, he was central in
the development of CritLing and SocSem in the 1970s and 1980s (in the UK and
Australia); and while in Australia, he “was in a place that focused on media studies
and media production, cultural studies, cultural production” (2015a: 88), which was
influential on his thinking and his eventual scholarship. At the time of the Jan. 1991
meeting in Amsterdam, he and van Leeuwen had just published the early version of
their book on reading images (1990—see Sect. 2.6.1) and he had left Australia and
moved to the Institute of Education in London (later the Institute of Education of
University College London [UCL]) as Professor of English (later, Professor—then
Chair—of Semiotics and Education). When van Leeuwen was also in London, hav-
ing moved there in 1993 (see 3.9.6), they finished the more extensive and better
known Reading Images: A Grammar of Visual Design (1996, 2nd revised edition in
2006, see Sect. 2.6), which was heavily influenced by Halliday’s SFG and SocSem
ideas (see Sect. 2.3) and was a major catalyst in the further development of the study
of visual communication. This visual version of SocSem was the context in which
they originated and developed, along with many others, the new international field
of multimodality (see Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001 and Sects. 2.7 and 4.6).
One of Kress’s earlier publications (1985a/1989, discussed in Sect. 2.4.6) was an
important impetus for CDA; and in Kress (1990: 84–97) he gave an account of the
theoretical foundations and sources of CritLing (see Sect. 2.4 and also Kress, 1991,
1993, 1996) and listed criteria that characterize work in CDA, which Fairclough and
Wodak (1997; see also Fairclough et  al., 2011) took up and elaborated upon.
However, while some of his criteria are agreed-upon common ground in CDA (see
Chap. 4), others are controversial (see Wodak, 2001a). According to Wodak, Kress’s
work contained “many of the basic assumptions of CL/CDA that were salient in the
early stages, and were elaborated in later development of the theory” (2001a: 5).
In Sept. 1994, Kress participated in the highly influential meeting of, and even-
tual article (1996) by, “the New London group” (ten scholars who met in the
American town of New London, including also Fairclough), which discussed the
future of literacy pedagogy. In order to meet the projected challenges for education
in the new century, the group emphasized “assisting learners in developing con-
scious awareness of and control over the relation between discourse and specific
socio-historical, political, and cultural contexts, and thereby equipping them to suc-
cessfully participate in and transform social practices” (Djonov & Zhao, 2014b: 7).
They also made plans to foster collaborative research relationships and programs of
curriculum development. Given Kress’s new position and the many serious issues
around education in Britain at that time—which were due in particular to profound
3.5  Norman Fairclough 83

social changes and the rise of neoliberal agendas—most of his effort went into “an
integration of his previous interests in language and social power, with educational
matters of vital importance for social futures on a cultural as well as an individual
level” (Andersen et al., 2015a: 10). This led to his “strong commitment to multi-
modal learning as well as the politics of education” (Andersen et al., 2015a: 10), and
his special interests in multimodal teaching and learning (Kress & van Leeuwen,
2001), literacy in the new media age (Kress, 2003), and multimodal literacy (Jewitt
& Kress, 2003), and related domains. He and his colleague Carey Jewitt founded the
Centre for Multimodal Research at UCL in 2006; a volume in his honor (Böck &
Pachler, 2013) celebrated his work on multimodality and social semiosis, in relation
to communication, meaning-making, and learning. His contributions were recog-
nized by his becoming a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). Sadly,
while still contributing to scholarship and giving keynote addresses at conferences,
he passed away in June 2019.

3.4  I ntroduction to Norman Fairclough, Teun Van Dijk,

Ruth Wodak, and Theo van Leeuwen

We will now focus on Fairclough (Sect. 3.5), van Dijk (Sect. 3.6), Wodak (Sect. 3.8)
and van Leeuwen (Sect. 3.9), the four others at the Amsterdam meeting, who were
influential in not only the founding, but also the further growth, of CDA as a net-
work of scholars. As said in Sect. 3.2.2, Fairclough, van Dijk and Wodak had already
had significant publications in the 1980s which addressed issues that would become
central in CDA, including their pre-/proto-CDA books and many other publications
that also contained concerns, ideas, analyses, etc. that were part of CDA (and other
research programs). And van Leeuwen had already been laying the groundwork for
his many contributions to SocSem and CDA.  We will focus here on the relevant
work of each of them in the 1980s and 1990s (and beyond in some cases), which
will then lead into our detailed discussion of their most recent approaches to present-­
day CDA/CDS in Chap. 4 (Sects. 4.3–4.6).

3.5  Norman Fairclough

3.5.1  Introduction and Early Work

At the time of the Jan. 1991 meeting, Norman Fairclough was at the University of
Lancaster, where he later became Professor, and then Emeritus Professor, of
Language in Social Life; he was one of the early and leading figures in CDA and
critical approaches more generally. Linguist and Marxist social theorist, Fairclough
criticized mainstream linguistics for its “desocialization of language and discourse”
84 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

(1985a: 759) and lack of connection between language structure (grammar, compe-
tence) and language use (discourse, performance). He praised (1989a: 6–12) some
of the new developments in linguistics for opening up the study of language and
having some elements that were close to his own views, including in particular:
Halliday’s SFL/SFG (Sect. 2.3)—connection between language/grammar and soci-
ety; socolinguistics—the socially constituted nature of language; pragmatics—lan-
guage use as a form of action; and discourse analysis—discourse and text as prime
examples of language (use) and as objects of analysis (Sect. 3.1). However, he
argued that none of these look critically (enough) at society, language practice/use,
discourse, meaning, etc. Fairclough has had different, but overlapping, critical
approaches to his linguistic work over the years, including, in the 1980s and early
1990s, Critical Language Study (CLS), which had much in common with CritLing
(see Sect. 2.4), but there was “by no means an identity of views” (Fairlough, 1985:
747). His work aimed “to show up connections which may be hidden from people”
(1989a: 5) between language and society, to analyze the linguistic elements of social
interactions and also expose “their generally hidden determinants in the system of
social relationships, as well as hidden effects they may have upon that system”. In
his book on Language and Power (1989a: 246) he cited favorably Kress’s “valu-
able” book (1985a/1989, see Sect. 2.4.6), which he saw as close to his own work,
but later he criticized CritLing (Fairclough, 1992a: 25–30; 1995b: 25–28) for its
(too) narrow conceptualization of the interconnectedness of language, power and
ideology. And he lauded SocSem (Sects. 2.5 and 2.6; Hodge & Kress, 1988; Kress
& van Leeuwen, 1990) for its interest in visual semiosis and productive and inter-
pretative practices and its “orientation towards struggle and historical change in
discourse and towards the development of a theory of genre (van Leeuwen, 1986,
1993a)” (Fairlough, 1995b: 28).
One of Fairclough’s early publications, “Critical and descriptive goals in dis-
course analysis” (1985), came from his work on developing an analytical frame-
work, both theory and method, for studying connections between language, ideology
and power; it contained many ideas which he was to develop further (in 1989a,
1995a). He proposed a “‘global’ explanatory critical approach to discourse analy-
sis” (1985: 753), which is very different from non-critical, descriptive frameworks
with “non-explanatory (or only ‘locally’ explanatory) goals” (1985: 754). He called
for DA to investigate “verbal interactions in terms of their determination by, and
their effects on, social structures” (1985: 747; see also Giddens, 1981), which are
not necessarily apparent to interactants and result in “opacity” (Fairclough, 1985:
746) and “naturalization”, and thus are seen as “common sense”; as a result, he said,
“the goals of critical discourse analysis are also therefore ‘denaturalizing’” (1985:
746). Fairclough also argued that social actions, including discourse, tend to cluster
in terms of institutions (1985: 748), which are thus the more important locus of
analysis than, e.g., casual conversation (the focus of work at the time from a non-
critical perspective). For him, institutions have their own ways of constructing those
who participate in them as “subjects” (1985: 750), e.g., by imposing ideological and
discoursal constraints upon them, which are understood as non-ideological ‘com-
mon sense’, i.e., as “based in the nature of things and people, rather than in the
3.5  Norman Fairclough 85

interests of classes or other groupings” (1985: 746). As a consequence, he said,

naturalized ideologies and practices become part of the unsaid implicit presupposi-
tions common to interactants. He called for a rational research program with a prin-
cipled, systematic way of (a) sampling from the infinite amount of discourse in
institutional contexts for analysis; combined with (b) a sociological account of the
institution under study, its relationship to other institutions and the relations between
forces within it; and linked to (c) an account of the ‘order of discourse’ (Foucault,
1971), “the ordered set of discursive practices associated with a particular social
domain or institution … and boundaries and relationships between them”
(Fairclough, 1995a: 12). These three led to his analysis of “ideological and dis-
coursal” power using the work of Foucault (e.g. 1971, 1979) as “a suggestive start-
ing point for such research” (Fairclough, 1985: 759).

3.5.2  Fairclough 1989a: ‘Language and Power’, i.e.,

Discourse, Power, and Ideology

The ideas presented in (Fairclough, 1985) culminated, along with similar ones in
other papers (e.g., 1982, 1988a, 1988b), in his influential book Language and Power
(1989a, 2nd ed., 2001, 3rd edn. 2015); the first edition was cited by Wodak (2001a:
4, see also Breeze, 2011: 495) as one of the pioneering publications leading to
CDA. As the title indicates, 1989a is about language and power, “or more precisely
about connections between language use and unequal relations of power” (Fairlough,
1989a: 1), i.e., about showing the “significance of language in the production, main-
tenance, and change of social relations of power” (1989a: 1) and also about raising
the consciousness of the general public concerning “how language contributes to
the domination of some people by others, because consciousness is the first step
towards emancipation” (1989a: 1). And while there are sociolinguistic studies that
show how social conventions distribute power unequally, they haven’t tried to
“explain these conventions as the product of relations of power and struggles for
power” (1989a: 1). In contrast, he said, “my approach will put particular emphasis
upon ‘common-sense’ assumptions which are implicit in the conventions according
to which people interact linguistically, and of which people are generally not con-
sciously aware” (1989a: 2), and yet those ‘common-sense’ assumptions are ideolo-
gies which are by definition closely linked to power. This is because “the nature of
the ideological assumptions embedded in particular conventions, and so the nature
of those conventions themselves, depends on the power relations which underlie the
conventions” (1989a: 2). He chose to focus on this ideological dimension not just
because the linkage of language and power had been neglected but rather because
the exercise of power is “increasingly achieved through ideology, and more particu-
larly through the ideological workings of language” (1989a: 2). This had also been
recognized by social theorists and had led to what has been called the ‘linguistic
turn’ in social theory, with the recognition not only of language as the primary
86 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

means of control but also of the contemporary growth of language in terms of its
complexity, variety and use.
Fairclough characterized his CLS as an alternative orientation (1989a: 13) to
non-critical grammar-oriented approaches and (socio)linguistic frameworks (see
2.4). When fully elaborated, CLS would place “a broad conception of the social
study of language at the core of language study” (1989a: 13) and would work with
functionalist approaches (such as Halliday, 1985; see Sect. 2.3), as well as continen-
tal pragmatics (especially Mey, 1985, a critical approach to pragmatics) and cross-­
disciplinary trends in DA (e.g., van Dijk, 1985a; see Sect. 3.1). It would focus on
how language and society are interrelated, with an emphasis on power and ideology.
He also presented what he called “critical discourse analysis” (1989a: 14) as a pro-
cedure for critical analysis, consisting of “description of text and processes of pro-
ducing and interpreting texts, and the analysis of their social determinants and
effects” (1989a: 14). Fairclough stressed that the conception of language needed for
CLS is “discourse, language as social practice determined by social structures”
(1989a: 17), “a socially conditioned process, conditioned that is by other (non-lin-
guistic) parts of society” (1989a: 22), which has an “internal and dialectical rela-
tionship” (1989a: 23) with society. He also said (following Foucault) that discourse
is the result of “socially constituted orders of discourse, sets of conventions” (1989a:
23), sets of practices associated with a particular social domain or institution that
are “ideologically shaped by power relations in social institutions and in society as
a whole” (1989a: 23) and thus have effects on, as well as are determined by, social
structures, such that they contribute to social continuity and change”. A discourse
for Fairclough is the language associated with a particular social field or practice
(e.g., medical discourse)5—which is close to Halliday’s notion of meaning-making
as one element of the social process (see Sect. 2.3) but is very different from (writ-
ten and spoken) ‘text’ in the Hallidayan sense, which is the result of language use
and language activity and of processes of production and interpretation and thus
should be studied historically and dynamically.
Fairclough also said that, in addition to a focus on discourse itself, attention
should be paid to power relations in discourse, how power relations and power
struggles shape and transform the discourse practices of a society or institution, and
“the relationship between texts, processes and interactions and their social condi-
tions” (1989a: 26), including their situational and institutional context and larger
social structures. For this work, he brought many ideas into linguistics from critical
and social theory—especially when it is concerned with a better understanding of
the trends of contemporary capitalism and the language (or discourse) of each of
them. For his critique he used many sources but positioned himself in relation to
three recent contributions to social theory that “have explored the role of language
in the exercise, maintenance and change of power” (1989a: 12); they influenced him
the most in the early stage of his work and would also underpin certain aspects of

5
 See Sect. 2.3 for a discussion of text and discourse in Halliday and Sect. 4.3 for further discussion
of Fairclough’s later conceptualization of ‘discourse’/’discourses’ and ‘orders of discourse’.
3.5  Norman Fairclough 87

(his approach to) CDA. These contributions were: (1) The theory of ideology, its
importance as a mechanism of power in modern society, “as against the exercise of
power through coercive means” (1989a: 12), and language as the major locus of
ideology (see Gramsci, 1971; Althusser, 1971; Pêcheux, 1982; Thompson, 1984;
McLellan, 1986). (2) The work of Foucault (1971, 1972), “which has ascribed a
central role to discourse in the development of specifically modern forms of power”
(Fairclough, 1989a: 12). And (3) the ideas of Habermas (1984), “whose ‘theory of
communicative action’ highlights the way in which our currently distorted commu-
nication nevertheless foreshadows communication without such constraints”
(Fairclough, 1989a: 12–13). Later, he was also influenced by the ideas of Bourdieu
(1977, 1982, 1984) about, e.g., capital and power. Despite their contributions to
social theory, the major failing of all of this work, according to Fairclough, was that
they did not engage in the analysis of particular instances of discourse—while his
own orientation was on how (higher-level) theory could be used to inform analysis
of real texts about real happenings. As a result, he tied “the abstractions of Bourdieu,
Foucault and Habermas to the actualities of encounters, linking the work of British
and Australian ‘critical linguists’ … to the mainstream of European social theory”
(Candlin, 1989: viii).
What emerged was his own social-and-linguistic theory: a critique of particular
kinds of ideological discourse and their role in the reproduction of the social order
of British, and more generally, Western society, of the 1970s to the 1990s (and to the
present), where his critique was based on a commitment to a critical, socialist
(Marxist) approach to language, ideology and power (1989a). Fairclough used all of
this in his later work on language and education (1990a, 1992b), discourse and
social change (1992a), media discourse (1995b) and political discourse (Chouliaraki
& Fairclough, 1999). As well, he reacted through his publications to the many social
and political issues that arose in the UK (and globally) in this time period. His broad
objective was “to develop ways of analyzing language which address its involve-
ment in the working of contemporary capitalist societies” (Fairclough, 2010: 1), not
only because capitalism is the dominant economic system internationally and in
need of critique, but also because any economic system affects all aspects of social
life. As a result, in his work on language and discourse, he took on a variety of
‘macro’ issues having to do with the overlap of economic and political domains in,
e.g., new/global capitalism, neoliberalism, globalization, and others.
For Fairclough, putting discourse at the center of what language is entails placing
the relationship between discourse, power and ideology at the center of analysis and
understanding power and ideology in their relationship to discourse. With regard to
discourse and power, he looked at the two major aspects of the power/language
relationship, i.e., power ‘behind’ discourse, and power ‘in’ discourse. In the case of
the former, his focus was on “how orders of discourse, as dimensions of the social
orders of social institutions or societies, are themselves shaped and constituted by
relations of power” (1989a: 43), for example, the differentiation of dialects into
standard and nonstandard, the conventions associated with a particular order of dis-
course, or discourse type (e.g., the discourse of medical examinations), and the
­various constraints on access to discourse within orders of discourse, which expose
88 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

‘free speech’ as a myth. In the case of power ‘in’ discourse: discourse is “a place
where relations of power are actually exercised and enacted” (1989a: 43) as in face-­
to-­face encounters between unequals (1989a: 44–47) or cross-cultural discourse
where “the non-powerful people have cultural and linguistic backgrounds different
from those of the powerful people” (1989a: 47); and “the ‘hidden power’ of the
discourse of the mass media” (1989a: 43) is one-sided between those in power and
the rest of the population, who are not aware of that fact. Thus “the whole social
order of discourse is put together and held together as a hidden effect of power”
(1989a: 55). In this way, he put forth “a broad framework within which we can think
about longer-term tendencies in and consequences of social struggles over dis-
course” (1989a: 74), including constraints on and struggles over discourse contents
(knowledge and beliefs), the social relationships enacted, and the social identities
(social subjects of an institution or society) enacting them.
With regard to discourse and ideology, Fairclough expressed his view that “con-
ventions routinely drawn upon in discourse embody ideological assumptions which
come to be taken as mere ‘common sense’, and which contribute to sustaining exist-
ing power relations” (1989a: 77), and hence he dwelt on “common sense in the
service of power” (1989a: 77) and on “how ideologies are embedded in features of
discourse which are taken for granted as matter of common sense” (1989a: 77). As
a result, “the coherence of discourse is dependent on discoursal common sense”
(1989a: 77), which is itself related to processes of discourse interpretation. All of
this, he said, needs to be foregrounded (1989a: 77–78), because it affects the mean-
ings of linguistic expressions, conventional practices of speaking, social subjects
and situations of discourse; and it can also sustain unequal relations of power
(1989a: 84), since, as is well known, “ideology is most effective when its workings
are least visible” (1989a: 85). There can also be struggles between “ideologically
diverse discourse types” (1989a: 90) and their conventions, norms, and codes of
practice. In political discourse, for example, a given party or political force tries to
win “general acceptance for its own discourse types as the preferred” ones (1989a:
90), such that they become “natural, and legitimate because it is simply the way of
conducting oneself” (1989a: 91). Indeed, he said that ‘naturalization’ is “the royal
road to common sense” (1989a: 92) and to being perceived as non-ideological, out-
side of ideology, and neutral. The same is true of ‘interactional routines’, “the con-
ventional ways in which participants interact with each other” (1989a: 98), e.g., in
buying-and-selling transactions in stores, interviews with social workers, consulta-
tions with doctors, etc. Citing Althusser (1971), Fairclough pointed out that the
social processes of producing subject positions and social subjects are learned, are
specific to discourse types and are ideologically variable, and yet people “are not
conscious of being socially positioned as subjects, and standardly see their own
subjective identities as somehow standing outside and prior to society” (1989a:
105). The same is true of the meanings of words and linguistic expressions, which
are also naturalized. “Naturalization, then is the most formidable weapon in the
armoury of power, and therefore a significant focus of structure” (1989a: 106); and
it is “ideological to the extent that it contributes to sustaining unequal power rela-
tions, directly or indirectly” (1989a: 107).
3.5  Norman Fairclough 89

3.5.3  C
 ritical Analysis of Discourse Samples: Description,
Interpretation, Evaluation

Fairclough devoted a significant portion of Language and Power (1989a) to what he

called “critical discourse analysis in practice … critical analyses of discourse sam-
ples” (1989a: 14), making use of, but also going beyond, other approaches by “pro-
viding a synthesis of necessary theoretical concepts and analytical frameworks for
doing critical analyses” (1989a: 14). He viewed these as “a procedure for a close
analysis of texts in terms of those features which can lead to an understanding of
power relations and ideological processes in discourse” (1989a: 109), and as a peda-
gogical or methodological exercise to illustrate CLS. He divided analysis into three
stages: “description of text, interpretation of the relationship between text and inter-
action, and explanation of the relationship between interaction and social context”
(1989a: 109). With respect to description, he acknowledged Halliday’s (1985)
approach to grammar (see Sect. 2.3) as “particularly fruitful” (Fairclough, 1989a:
139) as well as Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) work on sentence connection (‘cohe-
sion’); he also mentioned discussions of the relationship between meaning and ide-
ology by CritLing (Kress & Hodge, 1979; Fowler, Hodge, Kress, & Trew, 1979—see
Sect. 2.4). He claimed that the “formal features of texts have experiential, relational,
expressive or connective value” (Fairclough, 1989a: 140); three of them are corre-
lated with Halliday’s metafunctions (experiential = ideational, relational = interper-
sonal and connective = textual, see Sect. 2.3.4). The fourth, ‘expressive’ value is “a
trace of and cue to the producer’s evaluation (in the widest sense) of the bit of the
reality it relates to … [it] is to do with subjects and social identities” (1989a: 112).
He further stated that experiential, relational and expressive values are connected to
“three aspects of social practice which … may be constrained by power (contents,
relations, and subjects) and their associated structural effects (on knowledge and
beliefs, social relationships, and social identities)” (1989a: 140).
In his discussion of the stages of interpretation and explanation, Fairclough elab-
orated on his belief that the relationship between text and social structures is indi-
rect and mediated by the discourse connected to the text. Common ground and
background assumptions are assumed to be in operation by the discourse partici-
pants and allow them to understand each other (unless something goes wrong),
because discourse works, and people understand each other, in spite of a large gap
between what is said and what is meant and/or understood. However, “neither the
dependence of discourse on background assumptions, nor the ideological properties
of these assumptions which link them to social struggles and relations of power, are
generally obvious to discourse participants. Interpretation and explanation can
therefore be seen as two successively applied procedures of unveiling, or
­demystification” (1989a: 141). While some scholars in pragmatics, DA, cognitive
psychology and artificial intelligence (AI) call these assumptions ‘background
knowledge’, or a ‘knowledge base’, which allows people to produce, interpret and
evaluate texts, Fairclough rejected the term ‘knowledge’ as misleading, since for
him the background assumptions are “naturalized ideologies” (1989a: 141) that are
90 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

common to members of a social community. As a result, interpretations are gener-

ated by “what is in the text and what is ‘in’ the interpreter” (1989a: 141), i.e., what
the interpreter brings to interpretation, as well as what is activated in the interpreter
by features of the text, aka, ‘interpretative procedures’.
In his discussion of these procedures, Fairclough considered the major domains
of interpretation, their connection to major elements of ‘naturalized ideologies’, and
the specific resources they are based on. For example, the intertextual context (the
context of other texts, genres, discourses and their combinations as discussed in
Kristeva, 1986; Kress & Threadgold, 1988; Thibault, 1991) is connected to interac-
tional history and assumptions about which previous discourses the current one is
connected to and thus, for example, what can be taken as common ground. However,
this may be imposed by the most powerful participant on others and thus may be
ideological in nature, just as the meaning of the text, including implicit meanings
and pragmatic conventions, can be determined by the participant with the most
power and is thus potentially also ideological (1989a: 156). The textual resources
associated with various interpretative procedures are mental representations of
some aspects of the world, which are also ideologically variable. In explanation, the
relationship between text and social structures is mediated by the social context of
the discourse, since “the discourses in which these values are embedded themselves
only become real, socially operative, as parts of institutional and societal processes
of struggle” (1989a: 140–141) and power relations. Thus, “the objective of the stage
of explanation is to portray a discourse as part of a social process, as a social prac-
tice, showing how it is determined by social structures” (1989a: 163). It is also
concerned with which elements of interpretative practices that participants draw
upon have an ideological character, how a discourse is positioned in relation to
struggles at the situational, institutional, and societal levels, whether the struggles
are overt or covert, whether the discourse is normative or creative, whether the dis-
course contributes to sustaining existing power relations or transforming them, and
so forth. Fairclough also clarified the position of the analyst in interpretation vs.
explanation as similar to that of the participants, since analysts draw on their own
interpretative procedures in order to explicate how participants draw upon theirs
(1989a: 167). But what distinguishes analysts is the need to explain what they are
doing and to develop self-consciousness about how discourse is rooted in ‘common-­
sense’, i.e., in ‘ideological assumptions’. Furthermore, analysts should not bring in
untheorized assumptions nor act “as if explanation could be theory-independent or
theory-neutral” (1989a: 167), since it can’t be.

3.5.4  Fairclough 1992a: ‘Discourse and Social Change’

and 1995a: ‘Media Discourse’

Several of the themes Fairclough treated in Language and power (1989a) were
given longer treatment in his books and papers in the 1990s, at the same time as he
began to grapple with major social issues that developed in the UK in particular and
3.5  Norman Fairclough 91

Western society more generally. In his book on Discourse and social change,
Fairclough identified “certain broad tendencies in discursive change affecting the
societal order of discourse, and relate[d] these tendencies to more general directions
of social and cultural change” (1992a: 200), e.g., the move to neoliberalism, which
he was to write about at length later (see 3.5.5, 4.3, 6.3.2). This early work was a
synthesis of socially- and linguistically-oriented views of discourse, which resulted
in his multidimensional approach and ultimately his ‘social theory of discourse’. It
was centered on an analysis and critique of the “significant shift in the social func-
tioning of language … [and] changes in language practices” (1992a: 6). Fairclough’s
claim was that the important aspects of discourse and wider social and cultural
changes in contemporary society are having a major impact “upon the contempo-
rary order of discourse” (1992a: 200), in the following ways:
(1) “‘democratization’” of discourse (1992a: 201), “the removal of inequalities and asym-
metries in the discursive and linguistic rights, obligations and prestige of groups of people”
in, e.g., “relations between languages and social dialects, access to prestigious discourse
types, elimination of overt power markers in institutional discourse types with unequal
power relations, a tendency towards informality of language, and changes in gender-related
practices in language”. But since the processes of these changes were very uneven, he had
questions about how real or how cosmetic they were (1992a: 201).
(2) “commodification” of discourse (1992a: 207), “the process whereby social domains
and institutions […] come to be organized and conceptualized in terms of commodity pro-
duction, distribution and consumption” and as part of ‘enterprise culture’ (Fairclough,
1990b). This is exemplified by sectors of education and associated educational discourse
being referred to as ‘industries’ that focus on “producing, marketing, and selling cultural or
educational commodities to their ‘clients’ or ‘consumers’” (1992a: 207), i.e., their students.
For example, he pointed out that in a brochure about a specific program at a university, the
vocabulary of skills or competence is used (1992a: 209–210), as are genres like advertising,
which include photographs, graphics, and the blending of information and persuasion
(1992a: 210–215).
(3) “technologization” of discourse (Fairclough, 1992a: 215–218; see Habermas, 1984;
Foucault, 1981), by which he meant that discourses like interviewing, teaching, counseling,
advertising, are often handled by designated social agents, and thus “establish a close con-
nection between knowledge about language and discourse, and power” (Fairclough, 1992a:
215), are “associated with an extension of strategic discourse to new domains” (1992a:
216), and are part of the shift of private discourse “into the public domain” (1992a: 217).

Fairclough said that there were three different ways of interpreting these tenden-
cies, but the interpretation he developed the most in the book was a “hegemonic
model of discursive practice … the disarticulation of existing configurations of dis-
course types and elements, and the rearticulation of new configurations, giving
prominence to interdiscursivity and intertextuality” (1992a: 223), which “seems to
make sense of the contemporary societal order of discourse” (1992a: 224). However,
he calls for further research since even this model is inadequate for analyzing all of
the domains he looked at and the tensions between them. The effect of social change
on discourse and the issue of the role of discourse in social change remained a focus
of interest of his well into the 2000s, around such developments as not only neo(-)
liberalism, but also globalization, new capitalism, New Labour (in the UK), and
other domains—all of which he considered to be part of the ideology of the knowl-
edge based economy (Fairclough et al., 2008).
92 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

In his study of public language (Faircough, 1994) and in his book on Media
Discourse (1995a), about “public affairs media—news, documentary, magazine
programmes, dealing with politics, social affairs, science, and so forth” (1995a: 3),
Fairclough scrutinized the mass media in Britain, the US and Australia. He showed
the fallacy of their assumption of neutrality (‘objectivity’), contended that the media
is a site of power and struggle, and illustrated the mediating and constructing role of
the media with a variety of examples. He argued for a satisfactory analysis, which
would include the use of a critical discourse analysis framework, along with an
intertextual analysis of media texts showing how “media texts transform and embed
within themselves other texts, and in terms of how they draw upon and combine
together available discourses and genres” (Fairclough, 1995a: 19). His critical anal-
ysis of media discourse (1995a: 53) involved a perspective that, according to him,
combined two essential properties of any instance of discourse: its status as a com-
municative event and the order of discourse it is part of. In explaining this, he speci-
fied that since he views language use as social practice it is a “socially and historically
situated mode of action, in a dialectal relationship with other facets of the social …
It is socially shaped, but is also socially shaping—or socially constitutive … lan-
guage use—any text—is always simultaneously constitutive of (1) social identities,
(2) social relations, and (3) systems of knowledge and belief” (1995a: 55), which
may lead to complex mixtures of different discourse types and orders of discourse.
Thus, for example, “the order of discourse of a social institution or social domain is
constituted by all the discursive types which are used there” (1995a: 55; see Sect.
6.3.2.2 for orders of discourse in higher education). His aim was to define those
discourse types for the media, the overall structure of the order of discourse, and the
way it is evolving (1995a: 56, 62–68).
In several chapters of 1995a, he revisited some of the topics already discussed in
1989a and 1992a but brought new insights to them at the same time. His discussion
of media discourse includes the mixture and tension between private language and
public language and also “between information and entertainment” (1995a: 10), as
shown in the popular word ‘infotainment’. They are indicative of two related ten-
dencies in public affairs media: “to become increasingly conversationalized”
(1995a: 9, see also 1994), and “to move increasingly in the direction of entertain-
ment—to become more ‘marketized’” (1995a: 10). He likened this to the ongoing
marketization of universities (Fairclough, 1992a, 1993), aka the commodification of
universities, which is part of a “longer-term study of change in higher education”
(1995b: 159) in the UK (see Sect. 6.3.2). He argued for a discourse perspective on
this change, i.e., for an analysis of discourse practices alongside sociocultural ones.
He also stated that “it is becoming essential for effective citizenship that people
should be critically aware of culture, discourse and language” (1995a: 201) and thus
they should be taught “critical media literacy” (1995a: 201).
3.5  Norman Fairclough 93

3.5.5  Fairclough 1995b: ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’

and Early CDA

As said above, after the 1991 meeting in Amsterdam the term CDA was used along-
side earlier terms (like CritLing or, in Fairclough’s case, CLS) as near-synonyms,
but it eventually supplanted them. Fairclough’s book of 1995 with the title Critical
Discourse Analysis (1995b) is an example of this: it is a compilation of ten of his
papers, seven of which had been previously published, and thus they constitute, to a
certain extent, a retrospective of his writings using the CLS framework; two of the
papers were about topics in his earlier books discussed above (1992a, 1992b); and
the tenth one was tied to (1995a). Thus they represent the development of his work
up to 1995, which he put under CDA at that time. The much larger second edition
(Fairclough, 2010) with more recent studies is discussed in Sect. 4.3. In his General
Introduction, Fairclough characterized broadly the four sections of the book as
being the major concerns of his research during that time period; at the same time,
he identified them as dealing with “a range of issues and problems, which are … on
the current agenda of critical discourse analysis” (1995b: 1). As he noted there are
overlaps between the sections and papers, “all of which are orientated towards a
single broad objective: to develop ways of analyzing language which address its
involvement in the workings of contemporary capitalist society” (1995b: 1).
For Section A, on language, ideology and power, see Sect. 3.5.2. Section B is
centered on his conviction that evolving discourse practices have taken on “a major
role in sociocultural reproduction and change” (1995b: 2) and are “an important
part of wider processes of social and cultural change” (1995b: 87). For this analysis
he developed a three-dimensional framework that combines Bakhtinian (1986) the-
ory of genre and Gramscian (1971) theory of hegemony, and investigates social
change “in terms of the mapping onto one another of shifting, unstable sociocultural
practices” (Fairclough, 1995b: 2), due to e.g., marketization and technologization of
discourse (see Sect. 3.5.4 and also Fairclough, 1996). Section C, which is addressed
to those outside of language studies, argues for “a substantial element of textual
analysis within discourse analysis as a method of social research in various disci-
plines” (1995b: 3), with the goal of showing the value of “socially and culturally
sensitive discourse analysis” (1995b: 186). In Section D, about Critical Language
Awareness (CLA, see 1995b), he is concerned with applying CDA to education and
specifically to the study of language in schools (see Sect. 6.3.2).
He organized the rest of his discussion of the issues and problems in CDA in
terms of controversies around CDA, including on the one hand differences between
scholars doing CDA and those in adjacent fields, and on the other hand differences
among those doing CDA (1995b: 3)—which have to do with text and language,
discourse practices, and sociocultural practice. He argues for: a view of text as
multi-semiotic; the existence of both homogeneous and heterogeneous texts (includ-
ing ‘heteroglossia’, Bakhtin, 1986); analysis of processes of text production, distri-
bution and consumption and “of institutional and discoursal practices within which
texts are embedded” (Fairclough, 1995b: 9); and the combination of “CDA of dis-
94 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

cursive events with ethnographic analysis of social structures and settings” (1995b:
9–10). He concludes by saying that this is “the moment for some consolidation, for
some collective thought to be given to the unity and coherence of CDA” (1995b:
10), with the hope that his general introduction to the volume will “contribute to that
debate” (1995b: 20). Indeed Wodak and Meyer said that he showed “how CDA is
useful in disclosing the discursive nature of much contemporary social and cultural
change” (2009b: 12).
In later work Fairclough changed from the term ‘discourse’ in the sense of
meaning-­making to ‘semiosis’, which should, he said, reduce confusion and suggest
that (C)DA is concerned with various semiotic modalities and includes, e.g., visual
ones (as in Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996) and their various roles in making meaning.
Since discourse in this sense is an element of the social process that is dialectically
related to others, he argued that “CDA focuses not just upon semiosis as such, but
on the relation between semiotic and other social elements” (2009: 163). Eventually,
he changed the name of his approach to the “dialectical-relational version of CDA
in transdisciplinary social research (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999)” (Fairclough,
2009:162). DRA is discussed in Sect. 4.2.

3.6  Teun A. van Dijk

3.6.1  Introduction and Early Work

Teun A. van Dijk was Professor of Discourse Studies at the University of Amsterdam
at the time of the meeting in Amsterdam in Jan. 1991, and is now Professor at
Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona (see Sects. 3.7, 4.4, and 7.3). There were many
(positive and very important) results of the 1991 meeting (see Sect. 3.2) that were
due in no small part to his wide background in and promotion of DA (Sects. 3.1 and
3.6.1.1), his professional status, energy and vision, and his founding in 1990 of the
journal Discourse & Society for “the further development of a serious critical para-
digm” (van Dijk, 1990: 10; see Sects. 3.2 and 3.7). All of this positioned him well
to be one of the founders of, and an active participant in, CDA (see his website6 for
further discussion). Van Dijk has also been engaged in very important editorial work
throughout his career; he founded several other journals in addition to Discourse &
Society, e.g., Discourse Studies (founded in 1999), Discurso e Sociedad (2005, on-­
line), and Discourse and Communication (2007). These provided a publication
venue for himself and others where they could consolidate developments in cross-­
disciplinary endeavors and provide a forum in the context of which researchers
could “transgress” (van Dijk, 1999b) the remaining barriers and boundaries at the
cross-roads of those endeavors. He also edited, or encouraged others to edit, Special
Issues on CDA/CDS-related themes, for instance, his volume of Discourse &

 http://www.discourses.org.
6
3.6  Teun A. van Dijk 95

Society on ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’ (Vol. 4.2, 1993, see Sect. 3.2). Van Dijk
also continued his editing of collected articles and chapters in books about DA into
the mid 1990s (see Sect. 3.1), and after that, about the domain of discourse studies
(DS), which he founded as a “new cross-discipline that comprises the theory and
analysis of text and talk in virtually all disciplines of the humanities and social sci-
ences” (van Dijk, 1997b: xi). He promoted and documented DS through the journal
Discourse Studies and edited books, their prefaces and introductions (e.g., 1997a,
1997b, 1997c [2 volumes, 1st edition]; 2011a, 2011b, 2011c [1 volume, 2nd edi-
tion]; and 2007a, 2007b [5 volumes, Sage Benchmarks in Discourse Studies), all of
which also included work in CDA/CDS (see Sect. 3.2.2).

3.6.1.1  Early Publications in DA: Text Grammar and Pragmatics

In line with his interest in DA/DS more generally, van Dijk himself was actively
doing research and publishing his own work in the linguistic analysis of discourse
and text, beginning with his (1972) book on ‘text grammars’ (and text(-)linguistics)
and continuing with further research on ‘text and context’, ‘macrostructures’, and
‘discourse pragmatics’ (e.g., 1977, 1980, 1981). All of these books went beyond the
prevailing focus of the time in linguistics on sentences, showing “his interest in texts
and discourses as basic units and as social practices” (Wodak, 2001a: 7, cited
above). He understood linguistics “in a broad ‘structural-functional’ sense” (Wodak
& Meyer, 2009b: 25)—although he didn’t use SFL/SFG and was quite critical of it
(see van Dijk, 2008a). As he explained in his ‘academic autobiography’ (2004), his
early book on aspects of (generative) text grammars (van Dijk, 1972) was influ-
enced by Chomsky’s approach to generative grammar (e.g., 1965, 1966, 1968) and
in it he attempted to provide an explicit description of the (grammatical) structure
of texts, including an account of semantic coherence relations between sentences.
For the latter, he introduced the notion of ‘macrostructures’ (van Dijk, 1980), since
texts have not only local (microstructural, intersentential) relations, but also global/
textual semantic coherence structures that define their overall organization. Those
structures have to do both with meaning (e.g., discourse topic) as well as form—for
which he later used the term “superstructures”, i.e., “the abstract, schematic struc-
tures that organize the overall form or format of the text, as we know them from the
theory of narrative or the theory of argumentation (van Dijk, 1980)” (van Dijk,
2004—see van Dijk 1985j about news discourse schemata). As he explained later,
he felt that the “basic principles of text grammar are still sound today” (van Dijk,
2004) but that many aspects of his approach had been (too) speculative. “What
remained though was the importance of the notion of coherence in any semantic
theory of discourse, and the obvious idea that texts also are organized at more
global, overall levels of description” (van Dijk, 2004).
Between the later 1970s and the mid 1980s, his work widened into a multi-­
pronged discussion of various properties of text and discourse, in a mixture of (text)
grammar (and text linguistics), (formal, propositional) semantics, and (discourse)
pragmatics. For instance, in his discussion of text and context, he focused on local
96 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

coherence relations between sentences based on referential relations within a pos-

sible world (1977); he also defined coherence relations as formal (causal, condi-
tional) or functional (e.g., when the relations can be described as generalization,
specification, explanation, and exemplification); and he stipulated that pragmatic
and cognitive parameters need to be added, since discourse is not coherent in the
abstract but in the sense of coherent-for-discourse-participants (2004) in a specific
communicative situation. He formulated rules for deriving what he called ‘macro-­
propositions’ from micro-propositions, as in the summary of a text. He defined
pragmatics as having to do with action generally, and speech acts specifically, and
with conditions of ‘appropriateness’ (i.e., the successfulness) of speech acts. His
work on the pragmatics of discourse (1981; see also 2004) included the pragmatic
connectedness of a sequence of (micro-)speech acts, their contribution and relation
to the overall coherence of the text, so that they then make up macro-speech acts
(e.g., a news report is a macro assertion). In the same vein, language users’ recall of
a conversation-as-action may not include “the detailed, local speech acts, but rather
the pragmatic ‘upshot’ or ‘point’ of a discourse, that is, its overall macro speech act”
(2004), e.g., a summary of a conversation as ‘he warned/promised/told me that […]’.

3.6.1.2  v an Dijk and Kintsch 1983: ‘Strategies of Discourse

Comprehension’

Given van Dijk’s interest in developing a “cognitive theory of speech act processing
and communication” (1981: 2), he “worked for a decade, mainly in collaboration
with Walter Kintsch, on the cognitive psychology of text processing” (van Dijk,
1989b: vii). This culminated in their co-authored book on the Strategies of Discourse
Comprehension (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983), which received the Outstanding Book
Award of the American Association of Educational Psychology in 1984. Many of
van Dijk’s earlier ideas on text grammar were coupled with their new research and
findings; their work “considered the relevance of discourse to the study of language
processing. Their development of a cognitive model of discourse understanding in
individuals gradually developed into cognitive models for explaining the construc-
tion of meaning on a societal level” (Wodak, 2001a: 7) and triggered “research in
discourse and cognition from interdisciplinary and critical perspectives” (Wodak &
Meyer, 2009b: 13). They defined ‘strategy’ as involving “human action, that is,
goal-oriented, intentional, conscious and controlled behavior (van Dijk, 1977,
1980)” (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983: 62) for their model. They said that what lan-
guage users actually do when they process text is to “start with the (tentative) inter-
pretation of the first words of a sentence before it has been fully heard or read” (van
Dijk, 2004)—i.e., comprehension is ‘on line’, linear, fast, dynamic—and hypotheti-
cal and may (need to) be repaired as the text continues. Language users also may
use information from both text and context at the same time and/or operate on sev-
eral text levels simultaneously. And the same is true of discourse production, since
we speak (or write) without a fully developed structure or whole discourse ‘in mind’
and may make changes as it progresses (including this book!).
3.6  Teun A. van Dijk 97

Since they assumed that discourse participants represent sentences (more strictly,
propositions) and their meanings in memory, van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) worked
on the strategies for their manipulation (analysis, interpretation and storage) in the
minds of language users. In this regard, they worked with many different explana-
tory concepts that they and others put forward at this time. For example, the concept
of the presupposition and activation of (vast amounts of) social-cultural ‘world
knowledge’ that language users need for a variety of processes—such as under-
standing a text, defining coherence relations between sentences (or utterances), and
constructing macrostructures. This included the concept of ‘scripts’ (Schank &
Abelson, 1977, Sect. 3.6.2), i.e., the abstract ways people organize their knowledge
about stereotypical events (such as eating in a restaurant). They also developed the
notion of a mental (or situation) model, which allows language users to work with
not just the meaning of a text, but also a semantic “representation of the event or
situation that text is about” (2004). According to van Dijk (2004), this mental model
‘grounded’ the theory of (referential) coherence by defining it relative to a situation
in the world (or at least in the language user’s (inter)subjective (re)construction of
the world). It also gave a way of understanding many other phenomena: macrostruc-
ture in terms of the higher level macrostructure in the model itself (and not ‘in’ the
text); the processing of a text as starting from the model; the recall of a text as based
on a model constructed for that text that may be derived from both the contents of
the text and such things as world knowledge; the representation of an event (includ-
ing a text) in the model in terms of not just the event but also general, socially shared
cognitive representations which may include evaluative beliefs, opinions and ide-
ologies, as well as personal opinions and emotions about that event; and so forth.
‘Knowledge’ may thus be seen as a generalization and abstraction from these models.

3.6.2  P
 roject on Racism and Discourse;
Discourse-Cognition-­Society Triangle

In 1980, after teaching in Mexico City for several months, van Dijk decided that text
grammars and psychological theories “had very little to do with the real problems in
this world” (2004), especially “the ways racism is expressed, reproduced or legiti-
mated through text and talk” (2004). He began to refocus his research on the “cru-
cial social dimension of discourse … [and] a systematic account of specific discourse
structures of language use” (van Dijk, 2016b: 286) with a more critical perspective
and a focus on racism. At the same time, he expanded on his earlier interests to
include “major applications in the structures and processing of news in the press”
(2016b: 286). In analyzing various kinds of discourses that encode prejudice, van
Dijk was interested in exposing the growing breadth and depth of racist discourse
and developing a theoretical model that would explain the role of not only cognitive
discourse processing mechanisms but also social ones. He expanded on his reper-
toire for work in this area to include rhetoric (the use of persuasive strategies) and
98 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

argumentation (the ways we convince others of the truth or acceptability of what we

say, the ways we justify or refute a standpoint)—as well as ideas from various
approaches to mass communication. This change in his research goals led to work
in five major research projects: Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), Racism and
Discourse, Discourse and Ideology, Theory of Context, and Discourse and
Knowledge (see his website7, which includes, for each project, an explanatory intro-
duction and a list of some of his publications). Our primary focus here will be his
Project on Racism and Discourse, which has occupied him for almost 40 years.
His first series of published work on racism was in the 1980s and early 1990s,
first in Dutch and then in English, with several books and articles (for example, van
Dijk, 1984, 1987, 1988a (Chap. 3); van Dijk & Wodak, 1988a, 1988b; van Dijk,
1991, 1993a; Wodak & van Dijk 2000); it continued well into the 2000s (e.g., van
Dijk, 2005a, 2009c—see van Dijk, 2016b). We will begin with van Dijk 1984 (in
Sect. 3.6.3). For this work he developed his cross-disciplinary ‘Discourse-Cognition-­
Society triangle’: as he said in (1984: ix), he was primarily interested in the relation-
ship between discourse (especially discourse structures) and the cognitive and
social contexts of language use. He developed an account in terms of “cognitive
models of social attitudes and intergroup conflicts as well as in terms of a sociology
of communicative interaction and its context” (1984: ix), or, as he put it later, the
relationship between “the sociocognitive structures of ethnic prejudice and the
social and political functions of racist discourse” (2016b: 287; see also 2001a:
95–120). This work was inter- (multi-, cross-) disciplinary, a combination of a dis-
cursive, conversation analytic, cognitive, social psychological, and sociopolitical
“approach to the study of discursive racism” (2016b: 289). However, before embark-
ing on that discussion, we need to underscore that van Dijk used the phrase ‘ethnic
prejudice’ as in the quote above and in his early work in this area (e.g., in the text of
van Dijk, 1984), to mean (negative) prejudice against ‘ethnic’ people—e.g., racial
minorities, immigrants, refugees8—on the part of the dominant (usually white)
members of Dutch (van Dijk, 1984), and (in later work) other European, UK, and
US societies. Other phrases that include the word ‘ethnic’ are similar: ethnic ‘dis-
course’/ ‘opinions’/ ‘attitudes’/ ‘stereotypes’/ ‘ideologies’/ etc., mean negative (or
pejorative) discourse or opinions, attitudes, stereotypes or ideologies by whites—
concerning ethnic or non-white people (racial minorities, certain kinds of immi-
grants and refugees); since this is different from other meanings of ‘ethnic prejudice’,
we will put it in single quotes in our text.
Van Dijk cited his own previous linguistic and pragmatic studies of discourse
(e.g., 1972, 1977, 1980, 1981), from which he drew many notions (see Sect. 3.6.1.1)
that were relevant to this new work, such as “conditions on local semantic coher-
ence, the concept of semantic macrostructure, the analysis of speech act sequences”

7
 www.discourses.org.
8
 He made no rigorous difference between racial minorities, immigrants, refugees, people of differ-
ent ethnicities in his (early) work when speaking about ‘prejudice’, ‘racism’, etc. He also “does not
nearly distinguish between ethnicism, racism and adjacent forms of discrimination” (Reisigl &
Wodak, 2001: 21) because he finds these concepts to be fuzzy and overlapping.
3.6  Teun A. van Dijk 99

(1984: 2) and the nature of narrative structures. He also referenced his work with
Kintsch (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983; see Sect. 3.6.1.2), which he used to analyze the
strategic nature of talk by the interviewees about minorities (van Dijk, 1984: 3). He
also drew on some of the work in “(cognitive) social psychology about (ethnic and
other) stereotypes, group schemata and biased information processing about minor-
ity groups” (1984: 3). He paid attention to general, socially shared ‘scripts’, which
(can) include evaluative beliefs, opinions, and ideologies and which are also linked
to the issue of (presupposed) ‘world knowledge’ that undergirds the understanding
of a text—for which he used the situation (or semantic) model of what a text is about
(van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). He also developed a ‘context model’ (aka a ‘pragmatic
model’) “to represent ethnic attitudes in general and prejudice in particular” (1984:
ix; see also Sect. 3.6.1.2), which he characterized in his (much later) book on dis-
course and context (2008) as being comprised of the subjective “definition of the
relevant properties of the communicative situation by the discourse participants”
(2008: backcover); he saw this as a mediating interface which accounts for many
facets of discourse. Since this type of model was elaborated in his more mature
work, it will be discussed in more detail later (in Sect. 4.4). In addition, van Dijk
theorized about (negative) ethnic attitudes, stereotypes, and prejudice in ways that
were compatible with research in the (new) area of ‘social cognition’ (Forgas, 1982;
see also Moscovici, 1982, 2000 about ‘social representations’) which looked at the
knowledge, attitudes, ideologies, norms and values of social collectivities such as
groups, organizations, and institutions—that are typically expressed in discourses
(and texts). He viewed prejudice “as a central property of social members of groups,
on the one hand, and of groups and intergroup relations, on the other hand” (van
Dijk, 1984: 3; citing Tajfel, 1981, 1982), which led him to become convinced that
“ethnic prejudice cannot be fully understood without an explicit account of its func-
tions for observation, action and interaction” (van Dijk, 1984: 3) in interethnic
encounters and in society at large. He also defined prejudice as a ‘group schema’
since “prejudice is both a cognitive and a social phenomenon. It is not merely a
characteristic of individual beliefs or emotions about social groups, but a shared
form of social representation among group members, acquired during processes of
socialization and transformed and enacted in social communication and interaction
… we will therefore label our approach ‘sociocognitive’” (1984: 13), a label (and
eventually an acronym, SCA) he has kept ever since in relation to his ‘triangular’
Discourse-Cognition-Society approach and which he later used as his approach to
CDA/CDS. He also made various updatings and some changes in its meaning, some
of which we will discuss in this section—but see Sect. 4.4 about the latest ver-
sion of SCA.
Van Dijk also focused on other communicative and social functions served by
prejudiced talk “such as interpersonal persuasion, the diffusion of social beliefs and
opinions in the community, group solidarity, or normalization of attitudes and social
precepts for the behavior towards minority groups” (1984: 4). He noted that there
was much written on racism and anti-ethnic and anti-minority attitudes in various
types of texts (e.g., media discourse, political propaganda, laws and regulations),
but only some of it was based on systematic analysis (1984: 8) and there was little
100 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

about it in the literature on the functions of everyday talk. Thus his work on ‘ethnic
prejudice’ contributed to studies that aimed at the critical analysis of prejudice,
including his own prior work on news reporting in the (Dutch) press and secondary
school textbooks, two types of discourse he did more work on in the later 1980s (see
1993, Chaps. 5, 6, 7, for a summary).

3.6.3  van Dijk 1984: ‘Prejudice in Discourse’

Van Dijk’s 1984 book on ‘prejudice in discourse’ was about the ways in which
(white) Dutch people of different social backgrounds in different neighborhoods of
Amsterdam talked about immigrants (and refugees) in everyday conversation. This
“modest monograph” (van Dijk, 1984: 2) was singled out by Wodak (2001a: 4) as
one of three studies that helped launch CDA. Van Dijk wrote that motivation for the
project came from “the realization that ethnic prejudice and racism are a rapidly
spreading problem in our society, especially also in Western European countries”
(1984: x), and that, therefore, studying “the processes in which racist beliefs and
attitudes are formed and diffused … including informal everyday conversation” was
imperative. His work was “also intended as a demonstration of the feasibility and
necessity of an applied, critical approach to discourse analysis” (1984: x).
Van Dijk had both an empirical and a theoretical perspective on prejudiced dis-
course: he analyzed how white people talk about ethnic minority groups and how
what they say expresses their underlying prejudices. His empirical data consisted of
nondirected, recorded interviews with (white) Dutch people in various neighbor-
hoods of Amsterdam about ‘life in the city’. Since it was crucial for understanding
their attitudes and prejudice, he relied on his own knowledge of, and he provided
information for the reader about, the historical, cultural, and socio-economic back-
ground of the Netherlands, and “the expression of ethnic attitudes in other types of
discourse” (1984: 8), such as the media (news, TV programs, advertising, movies),
political propaganda, laws and regulations, and so on (some of which he wrote
about in more detail later). His interview data showed that many people cited news
reporting in the press (discussed in Sect. 3.6.5) as evidence for their beliefs, and
other research showed that the media provided a very specific picture of the ethnic
situation, including “the overall negative evaluation of minorities in our society”
(van Dijk, 1984: 10). His own prior research had revealed that the same negative
view was present in secondary school textbooks, where the representation of minor-
ity groups is very often “an incomplete, biased, ethnocentric, if not a prejudiced
presence” (1984: 10), and also in comics and children’s literature. All of this is
important “because many of the more specific beliefs about minorities in conversa-
tions derive from what we have read and heard about them from other sources”
(1984: 10) which help to transmit what eventually become general cultural ‘beliefs’.
He also took into account the contexts of prejudiced discourse, specifically “the
social constraints on interaction and communication as well as the strategies in the
3.6  Teun A. van Dijk 101

presentation of the self” (1984: 46), and assumptions about the listener. “Discourse
appears to be one of the most important media linking the individual and the social,
the cognitive and the interactional dimensions of racism” (1984: 53). As a result of
this work, he discerned and defined “the 7 D’s of Discrimination: Dominance,
Differentiation, Distance, Diffusion, Diversion, Depersonalization or Destruction,
and Daily Discrimination” (1984: 40), which tend to organize many, if not all, dis-
cursive and non-discursive “actions, against, about, or with minority members”,
Since van Dijk’s focus was on “how prejudices may be related, both through
cognitive and social strategies, to the ways people express them in everyday conver-
sation or other types of discourse” (1984: 41), a significant part of Prejudice in
Discourse “tries to connect various cognitive representations and strategies with the
discourse characteristics of what people say about minorities” (1984: 155), and also
the contents and style of prejudiced talk. This allowed him “to make valid infer-
ences about the actual contents and organization of ethnic prejudice, as well as
about their social functions” (1984: 41) and to make claims about “which properties
of discourse are typical or possible expressions or manifestations of underlying eth-
nic prejudices and ideologies” (2016b: 291). He looked at both the global, overall
organization of talk, “in terms of semantic macrostructures (topics), of narrative
structures, and of argumentation” (1984: 155–156) and the local features of talk,
including lexical and propositional meanings, which may be implied or presup-
posed but not explicitly asserted. He also examined, “semantic moves, style and
rhetoric, speech act sequences, and conversational phenomena” (1984: 156), as well
as more ‘subtle’ features of talk (intonation, syntax, rhetorical figures and other
properties such as turn taking, repairs, pauses, hesitations, and so on). He paid atten-
tion to various pragmatic properties of the communicative event (van Dijk, 1981),
including intention, current mood and emotions of participants, their opinions, and
their interactional concerns such as self-presentation and impression formation. He
found that there were “two major interactional strategies of talk about minorities,
viz. those of positive self-representation and of effective persuasion and communi-
cation” (1984: 156), so that they were “geared towards the enhancement of their
persuasive effects rather than towards a proof of their solidity or validity”. He also
found significant (mostly negative) stereotypes, in the formulation of prejudices and
other beliefs by the (white) Dutch about immigrants and minorities, which were
also abundant elsewhere, for example, in storytelling (narrative structures and con-
tents), which dealt with a stereotypical list of topics, including crime, housing,
work, social benefits and cultural deviance. Stories also shed light on the (often
stereotypical) situation models of ethnic events (related to, e.g., criminal acts); they
often ended with negative conclusions or a moral that “defines the ultimate com-
municative and persuasive functions of storytelling about minorities” (1984: 156).
Some stories functioned to provide plausibility for prejudicial opinions and
abounded in fallacies about minorities—and yet they were still highly effective.
And the same was true of local ‘semantic moves’, such as in the “familiar racist
disclaimers … I have nothing against immigrants, but … [which] provide a positive
basis for the next negative expressions” (1984: 157) and are typically “functional
within the interactional strategies of positive self-presentation and effective persuasion,
102 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

and have as their direct aim the monitoring and the management of (wanted) infer-
ences of the hearer”.
Allied to the issue of stereotypes were his consistent findings that, as he said
later, “racist ideologies, as well as other ideologies, tend to be organized by a polar-
ized representation of Us versus Them, where positive characteristics of the in-­
group and negative characteristics of the out-group are emphasized, whereas Our
own negative properties (such as racism) and the positive characteristics of Them
tend to be mitigated” (van Dijk, 2016b: 291). There may also be marginal in-group
members (the Others among Us, such as neo-Nazis). This was correlated with his
finding that one of the prevalent topics in prejudiced discourse could be summarized
by the keywords “difference, deviance, and ‘threat’” (2016b: 291). In this case, dif-
ference is sometimes associated with exoticism but it “soon deteriorates into a focus
on unacceptable differences, that is, into deviance” (2016b: 291) from ‘us’, due to,
e.g., religion, religion-related clothing and buildings (e.g., the hijab and mosques),
not speaking our language, and “lack of adapting themselves to our culture, norms,
and values”, and thus “the Other may be perceived as a threat when they are defined
as ‘waves’ or as ‘invaders’ of our country, as a threat to Western values and norms,
or when they are seen as aggressive and criminal”. He also looked at local features
of talk, local meanings in “lexical items, person and group descriptions, implica-
tions and presuppositions, and metaphors” (2016b: 292)9 and found the same pat-
tern of polarization: we are “normal, modern, tolerant, intelligent, hardworking,
responsible, and law-abiding, whereas the Others (immigrants, minorities) tend to
be described as strange, traditional or backward, intolerant, aggressive, and as crim-
inal”. Van Dijk concluded from this that ‘ethnic prejudice’ is “defined in terms of an
organized set of beliefs and opinions about minority groups, that is, as a ‘group
schema’” (1984: 23), which is general, decontextualized and abstract and used by
the majority group in the interpretation of specific actions by minorities. He also
proposed an “(ethnic) attitude schema” (1984: 155) founded on a “number of basic
categories (origin, appearance, socioeconomic, cultural, etc.) that are used to collect
and order information (beliefs, opinions) about minority groups … [and are] directly
interrelated with the features of the context of a racist society”, since this type of
prejudice is “a shared, group-dependent, social representation”. In addition, he used
his situation model to show how the negative organization of prejudice is accom-
modated to “concrete information about situations and events” (1984: 155).
Van Dijk also studied the production features of interview interaction by the
Dutch majority whites, which included pauses, hesitations, corrections, etc., espe-
cially when they carefully used expressions for designating ethnic minorities, their
properties and actions. He interpreted this on-line monitoring of speech as due to
the force of social norms, values, and constraints as well as “the requirements of

9
 We are struck by the fact, as no doubt van Dijk was when writing his 2016 chapter, that what he
described in 1984 is in many respects close to, or almost identical with the current wave of racism
and accompanying discourse in the West, including the US (2016-the present). It is very sad that
so little progress was made in this domain in the more than 30 years between his two publications
and that he still has to write opinion pieces about this issue.
3.6  Teun A. van Dijk 103

interactional strategies of positive self-presentation as tolerant, understanding citi-

zens and as credible ‘victims’ at the same time” (1984: 157, ‘victims’ because
‘those’ minorities cause ‘us’ harm, stress, loss of livelihood, etc.). That is, those
interviewed felt the need to make a good impression on the interviewer by avoiding
racist talk but also the desire to express negative opinions. These set up conflicting
aims, not only in actual production of speech but also at other levels, such as “topi-
cal sequencing, storytelling, argumentation, semantic moves, style and rhetoric”
(1984: 157). He used these formal, semantic, pragmatic, argumentative, stylistic
and rhetorical aspects of discourse in conjunction with social and individual cogni-
tive schemas and models in this and other work on racism to understand the ways in
which dominant members of a community talking about minorities not only express
and enact power but also draw on their own mental models and group and ethnic
schemas, through which they attempt to construct the same ones in the hearer, in
order to influence, manipulate, and control the hearer’s discourses, social cognition,
and mind.

3.6.4  Other work on Ethnic Prejudice and Racist Ideologies

Van Dijk’s book (1984) was his first (in English) to address the topic of prejudice
and racism through discourse and cognition in the Netherlands; he continued to
publish in this domain about several other countries. For example (van Dijk, 1987)
is about the ways that ‘ethnic prejudice’ is communicated in San Diego, California;
later, he published on the relation between discourse and racism more generally in
the US (Smitherman-Donaldson & van Dijk, 1988)—with similar findings. He also
studied the representation of immigrants in textbooks, and found that either the
books ignore them altogether or repeat simple stereotypes or even racist prejudices
(summary in van Dijk, 1993a, Chap. 6). This led to increasing interest on his part in
formulating a more general account of the role of power and ideologies in society
and their reproduction and legitimation through discourse—and in applying his
discourse-cognition-society ‘triangular approach’ not only to racism but also to
associated issues. In 1988, van Dijk and Ruth Wodak co-edited a Special Issue of
Text (8, (1–2): 1988a) on Discourse, Racism and Ideology based on a symposium
they held at the International Conference on the Social Psychology of Language. In
their introduction to the volume they said that the papers reported the results of
ongoing research projects in the UK and the Netherlands which fill the gap of ­paying
close attention to the micro-level of interaction, discourse and social cognition,
since it is at this level “that racism and its sustaining ideologies are actually enacted,
manifested, realized, legitimated, and reproduced, on the one hand, and experi-
enced, interpreted and resisted against, on the other hand” (van Dijk & Wodak,
1988b: 2). In their view, a more explicit and systematic account of prejudice in these
terms would go beyond the limitations of traditional social psychological and dis-
course analytic approaches to attitudes and prejudice and would at the same time
104 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

foster “further understanding of the crucial role of text and talk in the expression,
enactment, legitimation and communication of racism” (1988b: 2).
In a move that was novel at the time, they decided that systematic analysis of
accounts and interpretation of intergroup encounters by some of those involved
would give further insight into the cognitive mechanisms of interpretation and pro-
duction of racist events and also provide empirical data about the social nature of
those events (1988b: 3). Thus, on the one hand several contributions in the Special
Issue show how racism may be reproduced in the discourse of ‘white’ group mem-
bers; and on the other hand studies of the accounts of ‘black’ group members show
how these ‘white’ strategies may be “analyzed, understood and further interpreted
as manifestations of prejudice, discrimination and racism” (1988b: 3). They stipu-
lated that the voice of the ‘other’ can contribute to our understanding and must be
heard, as in the analysis of and resistance against, both antisemitism (in Wodak’s
own work, see Sects. 3.8.4 and 3.8.5) and “ethnicism against other, often Third
World, immigrant groups, in North-Western European societies, in general” (van
Dijk & Wodak, 1988b: 3–4). They hoped that this project would open up approaches
to DA that combine analysis of structures and strategies of text and talk with both a
cognitive approach focused on production and comprehension and a social approach
to the various facets of the context, which would provide a much more complex
understanding of the ideological functions of discourse in social situations and soci-
ety at large (1988b: 4). In their opinion, DA had become sophisticated enough to
make a significant contribution to the problem of dominance and inequality inherent
in racism, which was a direction that a critical (approach to) discourse analysis
should take (1988b: 4; see Sect. 3.7).

3.6.5  Media Discourse and Racism

In his work critically analyzing discourses that encode these types of prejudice, van
Dijk wrote on a variety of issues, but he focused on two interconnected ones, the
reproduction of racism in various types of discourse (including the media) and the
study of news in the press (especially newspapers). He used a slightly altered ver-
sion of his discourse-cognition-society triangle by focusing on discourse and text,
socio-cognitive models of discourse production and comprehension and mass media
and communication (in e.g., 1985e, 1985i, 1988a, 1988b, 1989a, 1991, 1993a). He
began with his study of the role of the Dutch media in the reproduction of racism,
especially through their coverage of immigrants in the early 1980s (see now Chap.
7 of van Dijk, 1993a). It then expanded to include several sub-projects about the
Netherlands, the US and Europe, and (most recently) Latin/South America, for
which he was interested in the way the prejudice of white majorities against racial
and ethnic minorities (including indigenous groups), immigrants, refugees and
3.6  Teun A. van Dijk 105

people from the South10 (and developing nations) in general (2000a, 2000b, 2000c,
2005a, 2009c, 2010, 2011d, 2013b), is expressed, reproduced or legitimated in
many situations. He has said that it is this project, and his interest in ideology (van
Dijk, 1998; Sects. 4.4 and 7.3), that inspired him to help establish, and to engage
in, CDA.
At the beginning he worked on the structures of news discourse, and then turned
once again to racism with this as his basis. Since many of his arguments are familiar
because they are the same as in his work on racism in general, we will focus here on
his new proposals, namely, his argument for his theoretical framework in the study
of news in the press and other media and mass communication in general, which
constitutes a move away from the classical (descriptive) approach of content analy-
sis to an explicit, systematic, and critical account of media discourse and a concern
for the production and reproduction of ideologies in and through the media (1985i:
3). In his review of previous research, van Dijk mentions Fowler et al. (1979) on the
relation between language and ideology in the media from a CritLing perspective
(see Sect. 2.4) and their “close analysis of the grammatical structures of media mes-
sages about an event” (van Dijk, 1985i: 4). And while he admitted that “a syntactic
analysis of sentences alone may already reveal biases in the description of facts”
(1985i: 4), he also asserted that his type of DA would allow researchers to “trace
further properties of media messages that go beyond those of syntactic structures of
single sentences”.
In his book on news as discourse, van Diijk set as his task an “outline of a theory
of news, focusing on the discourse structures of news and the social cognition of
production and interpretation” (1988a: 181) which would combine “linguistic, dis-
course analytical, psychological and sociological analysis of news discourse and
news processes” (van Dijk, 1988a: 15; see also 1985i). However, he also began to
question whether analyses such as these actually contribute to solving real issues
such as inequality, poverty, or oppression (1988a: 290; see Sect. 3.6.2) and called
for “a completely different way of doing academic work” that focuses more on
social change (1988a: 294). In News Analysis (1988b, the companion book to
1988a), he discussed three case studies of news in the Dutch press about ethnic
minority groups, refugees, and ‘squatters’, and presented his argument for under-
standing the processes of the reproduction of racism through a “framework of
­historical, political, socio-economic and cultural power relations in society” (1989a:
202), which he incorporated into his triangular approach. His conclusions (to 1988a)
do not differ widely from his earlier studies, although he argued more than before
that the Press is part of the problem of racism, and that Dutch journalists, who are

10
 The South here means ng., Africa (vs. Europe), everything south of the U.S. border with Mexico,
the southern hemisphere (vs. the northern one), and in some cases, southern Europe vs. northern
Europe; in other words, areas where much of the population is poor, people of color, ‘minorities’,
etc.. However, this term along with others such as ‘Global South’, ‘Developing World’ or ‘Majority
World’ have all been critiqued as problematic in various ways (see Silver, 2015); hence we believe
the best way to deal with this issue is to refer to specific countries/geographic areas when possible
instead of combining them all together.
106 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

part of the cultural elite and consider themselves to be balanced and neutral (1988b:
21) in their reporting, “contribute to the autonomous production of racism at least as
much as they participate in its reproduction” (1988b: 211). He also said that “the
mass media (news, film, advertising, fiction) play a crucial role in the persuasive
reproduction of dominant ideologies in general, and of ethnic ideologies in particu-
lar […] The media not only express, reflect or disseminate ethnic opinions, but
actively mediate them, both among the various power elites themselves, as well as
between the elites and the public” (1988b: 213).
Van Dijk’s book on Racism and the Press (1991) continued this theme, by
addressing, as he said in the Preface, the issue of “how exactly the Press is involved
in the continuity of racism” (1991: x), i.e., how journalists (continue to) play a role
“in the discursive reproduction of the ideological framework that legitimates the
ethnic and racial dominance of the white group”, in north-western societies of
Europe. He noted that the book is meant for a broad audience, with the hope that it
would “inspire more students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences
actively to join the struggle against racism and to engage in the detailed and explicit
analysis of the many dimensions of the discursive reproduction of racism by the
Press in their own countries” (1991: xi). Furthermore, he said: “I hope that journal-
ists will also profit from this book, if only by seeing more clearly the implications
of their everyday routine writing (or non-writing) about race” (1991: xi; see Sect.
7.3.2). He ended the Preface with a “call to the readers” (1991: xii), stating that
research on the reproduction of racism in the Press is arduous and labor-­intensive,
which means that “it needs to be a collective, interdisciplinary and international
enterprise” (1991: xii) and “would highly benefit from your critical comments, sug-
gestions, examples, experiences or [your] own research results” (1991: xii–xiii),
sent to his official university postal address.
He focused on the British press—from right-wing tabloids to conservative and
liberal newspapers—with occasional analyses of the Dutch press and brief reports
on the results of earlier research on other countries. Some of the most important
findings were that the presence of minorities in politics, social affairs and culture is
under-reported, and even whites who are against racism (i.e., anti-racist whites) are
systematically associated with “intolerance, unreliability or even reverse ‘racism’,
whereas the negative actions of white authorities and organizations tend to be
ignored or minimized” (1991: 246). At the same time, minority journalists “con-
tinue to be discriminated against in hiring, promotion and news story assignments”
(1991: 245). And finally, he said that the reproduction of racism by the Press is
largely effective because it manufactures a consensus about minorities and sets the
agenda for public discussion, and, “more important, they strongly suggest how the
readers should think and talk about ethnic affairs” (1991: 245). He concluded that
this book (and his earlier work) provides evidence to support the claim that “the
reproduction processes involved are essentially controlled by the elites” (1991: 253,
see Sect. 3.6.6), and since racist ideologies are learned, “a large part of this social
learning process operates through formal education and the mass media”. This leads
to “the conclusion that the Press plays a central role in the initial reproduction of
racism by the elites” (1991: 253) and that since the role of the Press is “largely
3.6  Teun A. van Dijk 107

symbolic and ideological and hence based on discursive practices”, it needs to be

analyzed thoroughly and systematically including “the subtleties of ethnic report-
ing” (e.g., the underlying bias in reporting about ethnic/racial groups). However, he
felt that most of the “fundamental questions of this problem are still on the agenda”
(1991: 254). The book ends with an ‘Appendix’ (1991: 255–257), consisting of
“Guidelines for Race Reporting” by the National Union of Journalists for “all of its
members to follow when dealing with race relations subjects. If you are a member
these are your guidelines” (1991: 255). As is clear, this book and others in his
Project on Racism were part of van Dijk’s professional and personal crusade for
social justice (see Sect. 7.3).

3.6.6  v an Dijk 1993: ‘Elite Discourse and Racism’

and Other Work

Van Dijk’s book on Elite Discourse And Racism “provisionally concludes more than
a decade of research into the relationship between discourse and racism” (1993a:
ix), by bringing together his work of the 1980s and early 1990s about racism in
everyday conversations, textbooks and the press, and extending this range to other
types of elite discourse, by politicians, scholars, and corporate managers, as well as,
for example, Western parliaments, academic sociology textbooks, and personnel
managers of large corporations. It analyzes previous results from the perspective of
the role of many types of elites in the reproduction of white dominance over other
racial/ethnic groups and both integrates and elaborates on his earlier research. He
bases his interest in these elites on the assumption that power and influence are
(typically) discursive and “are implemented by preferential access to and control
over public discourse and its consequences for the manufacture of consensus. This
is particularly the case for the symbolic elites, those who control the means of com-
munication and who are engaged in the manufacturing of public opinion” (1993a:
ix–x). His focus is, thus, on the more subtle discursive dimensions and seemingly
‘respectable’ forms of modern elite racism (1993a: xi), through a discussion of
political, corporate, academic, educational, and media discourse in a few (Western)
countries.
His approach is, as in his other work, complex and multidisciplinary, an interplay
of “scholarly, social, cultural, and political insights” (1993a: 18) that makes use of
“discourse analysis, linguistics, cognitive and social psychology, sociology, anthro-
pology, political science, and history”, which he then combines into a “coherent
theoretical framework in which a multidisciplinary concept of discourse plays a
central and organizing role”. He emphasizes that contemporary racism, which
includes ethnicism, “that is, group dominance based on perceived or constructed
cultural differences” (1993a: 47–48), is not only a consequence of current white
group dominance but is also historically rooted in the dominance of whites over
others across several centuries not only in Europe but also in (former) colonies. His
108 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

focus is on the ‘symbolic’ elites and an examination of how they “speak and write
about ethnic minorities, and persuasively contribute to the manufacture of the ethnic
consensus among the white group at large” (1993a: 48), with a systematic study of
their discourse, their relation to social cognitions (including attitudes), and the
embedding of the discourses in a complex framework. This framework is the basis
for an integrated account of “the various modes and modalities of elite racism”
(1993a: 48), in terms of the familiar triangular link between discourse, (social) cog-
nition and society, in which “discourse is a form of social action and a cultural
product … a rather explicit manifestation of and source of social knowledge and
beliefs … [which] reflects much of the contents and structures of the social cogni-
tions, including prejudices and racist ideologies, which are otherwise difficult to
access”.
Near the end of the Preface he notes that writing this book was “an arduous
enterprise, if not, at times, an impossible task” (1993a: x)11. His reflections on the
ways in which academics can fight against racism are more somber and less hopeful
than 2 years earlier (in van Dijk, 1991; see Sect. 3.6.5, when he sent out a call to
the readers—see also Sect. 7.3). Nevertheless, he does extend another ‘Call to the
Readers’, saying this time that “since there is little systematic work on discourse
and racism, I am particularly interested in personal feedback from readers and users
of this book: scholars as well as undergraduate and graduate students or others
involved in the analysis of or the struggle against racism” (1993a: xi)—which could
be sent to his postal or email address at the university.
In 2000, van Dijk returned once again to the issue of elite racism in parliamen-
tary debates (in Wodak & van Dijk, 2000). He wrote two chapters for the book: one
on its “Theoretical Background” (2000a: 13–30), which contained the same themes
discussed above, and the other on “Parliamentary Debates” (2000b: 45–78), which
was also the topic of Chap. 3 of van Dijk 1993 on political discourse (based on other
data). The debates were collected in 1996–1997 in 6 EU countries (Austria, France,
Great Britain, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands), each with different ethnic situa-
tions, immigration histories, and parliamentary systems12. They centered on the
topic of immigration and related ethnic issues. For this, a random selection was
made from the speeches by Prime Ministers and members of parliament from main-
stream parties (not the radical Right) and were examined to shed light on the role of
official discourse in parliamentary debates in the (re)production of racism. They

11
 We find his handling of the data to be excellent and we note in solidarity his disappointment in
the academic elites, especially those in many approaches to linguistics, who do not “feel that it is
indeed part of their professional role to investigate, reveal and clarify how power and discrimina-
tory value are inscribed in and mediated through the linguistic system” (Caldas-Coulthard &
Coulthard, 1995a: xi).
12
 There were also other differences in terms of which groups suffer discrimination and the specific
practices of discrimination, due to the fact that: only some countries subscribed to the Schengen
treaty, only some had a colonial past, and only some had recruited foreigners as immigrant work-
ers; the concepts and definitions of nationality and citizenship are different across the countries;
the memory of the Holocaust and WW II is important for all formerly occupied countries, but in
different ways; in some countries the term ‘race’ is a taboo; and while explicit antisemitism is a
taboo, racism against minorities is overt.
3.7  Teun van Dijk and Ruth Wodak: Productive Professional Collaboration 109

also looked for any anti-racist discourse that might be present, i.e., the formulation
and propagation of opposition, dissident, non-dominant, or non-/anti-racist opin-
ions (see also Reisigl & Wodak, 2000c).
After this book was finished, van Dijk went on to look (more) at racist discourse
in media and textbooks, as well as political discourse in Spain (van Dijk, 2005a;
written as a complementary study to van Dijk, 1993a), where he examined, in par-
ticular, discursive reactions to recent immigration. He conducted careful analysis of
the media, political discourse, textbooks and other public discourses; he found that
Spain reproduces, but in a less radical way, the kind of racist discourse found else-
where in Western Europe. He also showed that discursive Euro-racism is ubiquitous
in several Latin American countries (e.g., Mexico, Argentina and Chile, van Dijk,
2005a, 2008), where ages-old ethnicism and racism against indigenous people and
Afro-Latinos has prevailed in elite discourse since the days of colonialism and slav-
ery and remains a major social problem, even (or especially) if ignored or denied. In
the later 1990s, his own work turned to a more specific focus on issues of impor-
tance to the theoretical development of both SCA and CDA/CDS, such as the rela-
tion between discourse and ideology, manipulation, context(s), society, and
knowledge (e.g., van Dijk, 1998, 2006, 2008, 2009b, 2014; discussed in Sect. 4.4).
He also continued to write about (anti)racist political discourse in Brazil, as well as
about social movements, discourse, and cognition (Sects. 4.4 and 7.3).
Meanwhile, some of the elites—including journalists—in the Netherlands
attacked him for his work on racism in journalistic discourse and effectively cut off
his ability to conduct his research in the way he wanted to; he left and went to
Pompeo Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain in 2001, became Professor and then
Director of the Centre for Discourse Studies, and still lives in Barcelona (for more,
see Sects. 3.7.2 and 7.3).

3.7  T
 eun van Dijk and Ruth Wodak: Productive Professional
Collaboration

Before leaving our discussion of van Dijk and going on to Ruth Wodak, we want to
point to the collaborative and productive professional relationship between the two
of them that was undoubtedly one of the underlying factors for the success of the
meeting in Amsterdam and of CDA/CDS in general since then; we will also write
about the consequences for each of them of their research on ‘delicate’ topics in the
Netherlands and Austria.

3.7.1  Shared Intellectual and Social Justice Interests

Despite the differences in their backgrounds in linguistics, their professional identi-

ties and their approaches to DA, van Dijk and Wodak knew of and appreciated each
other’s work already in the 1980s. He invited her to contribute a chapter (Wodak,
110 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

1985) to his Handbook of Discourse Analysis (van Dijk, 1985a; see Sect. 3.1). They
met in person in 1986 at a conference on ideology in Utrecht, where she also met
van Dijk’s co-authors on a book about discourse, poetics and psychiatry (Zavala,
van Dijk, & Díaz-Diocaretz, 1987); Zavala and Díaz-Diocaretz were also the series
editors of ‘Critical Theory: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Language, Discourse
and Ideology’ for John Benjamins, and she later published her book on ‘language,
power, and ideology’ (Wodak, 1989a, see Sect. 3.8.2) in that series. Her character-
ization of meeting all three of them in 1986 was: “What a wonderful experience and
what a stimulating discussion!” (Wodak, 1989c: xix). Van Dijk and Wodak had
many things in common—e.g., interest in (critical work in) DA; background in
pragmatics; interest in socio-psychological/cognitive concepts and more particu-
larly in theories of social cognition; an inter-/multi-/cross-disciplinary orientation,
operationalization and integration of a broad range of linguistic, pragmatic and
argumentative features in their analysis of specific texts; preference for both empiri-
cal research with ‘real’ data and theoretical concerns; and research on similar top-
ics, in particular racism and antisemitism. As van Dijk said later (2011c: 6), it was
not surprising “that much of our research on discourse and racism was mutually
inspiring, and that we were able to cooperate so closely for so many years”.
That cooperation led to many important milestones in the emergence and devel-
opment of CDA. In their joint introduction to the Special Issue of Text, on “Discourse,
Racism and Ideology” (van Dijk & Wodak, 1988a) they said that the Issue repre-
sented “but one of the many directions a critical discourse analysis may (and in our
view, should) take in the years ahead” (1988b: 4). A year later, van Dijk published a
paper (1989a) in her edited volume (1989a), which she praised in her Introduction
(Wodak, 1989b: xviii) as presenting “a thorough and impressive analysis of the way
racism is transmitted through the media in the Netherlands. It is not only important
how much is said about foreigners (classical content-analysis), but even more so
what and how it is put and this is precisely the very productive type of contribution
critical linguistics13 can make”. Van Dijk praised her book (1989a) as “CDA before
its time” (2001a: 120) and noted that “it is also important because the work of sev-
eral German-language scholars is translated into English here” and it contained
papers on “fascism, racism, prejudice, patriarchy, and political discourse”, all of
which were to become important topics in CDA.
In addition to being one of the five participants in the 1991 meeting in Amsterdam
about CDA (see Sect. 3.2), Wodak was centrally involved in various follow-up
activities planned at the meeting (and subsequent ones): e.g., she contributed an
article (Wodak & Matouschek, 1993) to the Special Issue of Discourse & Society he
edited about CDA (van Dijk, 1993b); and she co-authored a chapter about CDA
(Fairclough & Wodak, 1997) for (van Dijk, 1997a), that had been agreed on but was
delayed (see also Fairclough et al., 2011 in van Dijk, 2011a). In a continuation of
their joint interest in racism, Wodak and van Dijk co-edited the book Racism at the

13
 We need to remind the reader that Wodak used the term ‘critical linguistics’ for critical work by
herself, van Dijk, and others into the 1990s, before CDA was established and the acronym adopted.
3.7  Teun van Dijk and Ruth Wodak: Productive Professional Collaboration 111

Top (2000), which concerns parliamentary debates about immigration in various

countries of Europe. It was the result of a project funded through her Discourse
Politics and Identity Centre (DPI, see Sect. 3.8.6—van Dijk was on its International
Advisory Board); the research was carried out by a team of international scholars
from various disciplines (Wodak, 2003: 26–27, 44–45); and van Dijk wrote two
chapters for the book (2000a, 2000b; cf. van Dijk, 2000c in Reisigl & Wodak,
2000a; see also 2000c and Sect. 3.6.6). The analysis was accomplished using a
combination of their two approaches—her DHA (Sects. 3.8.5 and 4.5) and his SCA
(Sects. 3.6.2–3.6.6, and 4.4); that combination was also used in Titscher, Meyer,
Wodak, & Vetter, 2000. Later, in their book on the ‘politics of exclusion’, which is
about antisemitism, racism and xenophobia, Michał Krzyżanowski and Wodak
lauded van Dijk’s “truly innovative approach to discourse and racism, which serves
to explain cognitive discourse processing mechanisms related to the production and
reproduction of racism” (2009: 15; with reference to van Dijk, 1984, 2005a, 2005b).
As we noted above (Sects. 3.1, 3.2, and 3.6.1) van Dijk was the major historian
and biographer of DA/DS, a major figure in the founding of CDA, editor of (and
contributor to) a Special Issue of Discourse & Society on CDA (1993b; see also van
Dijk, 1993c, 1993d), and author of several important articles and chapters about
CDA. Once CDA was launched, Wodak became the major historian and biographer,
and in particular she co-edited three highly regarded books that introduced CDA/
CDS (Wodak & Meyer, 2001, 2009a, 2016a). In the introductions to those books
(Wodak, 2001a; Wodak & Meyer, 2009b, 2016b), van Dijk was mentioned several
times (see also Sect. 3.2) and also his multidisciplinary, ‘triangular’ approach which
was to become his SCA to CDA (Sects. 3.6 and 3.6.2); and his chapters on his
approach were included in all three editions (van Dijk, 2001a, 2009a, 2016a). She
also supported his later efforts to broaden, and rename, CDA as CDS. Like him, she
changed her designation for the field (as in the title of, and the “Introduction” to,
Wodak & Meyer, 2016a, 2016b; see Sects. 3.8.8 and 4.1), and she also included the
issue of (social) cognition generally in CDA/CDS. In addition to her edited volumes
with van Dijk, she co-edited a book with Paul Chilton (Wodak & Chilton, 2005a,
2005b), a cognitive linguist who had been part of CritLing; Chilton’s chapter (2005)
in that book argued for a more cognitive approach to CDA (see also Sect. 4.9) and
van Dijk had an important chapter in that book (2005b) about ‘contextual knowl-
edge management in discourse production’.
Van Dijk published chapters in books and articles in Special Issues of journals
edited by Wodak in the early 2000s: on discourse, ideology and context (van Dijk,
2001c) in a Special Issue of Folia Linguistica about CDA in post-modern societies
(Wodak, 2001b); on the discourse-knowledge interface (van Dijk, 2003) in (Weiss
& Wodak, 2003a) about CDA; on politics, ideology and discourse (van Dijk, 2005c)
in a volume on politics and language (Wodak, 2005). For his part, in his Sage
Benchmarks in Discourse Studies, van Dijk (2007a) reprinted (Wodak, 1991; see
also Wodak, Nowak, Pelikan, Gruber, de Cillia, & Mitten et  al., 1990; and Sect.
3.8.4) on antisemitic discourse in Austria. In addition, he participated in the
Festschrift für Ruth Wodak (de Cillia, Gruber, Krzyżanowski, & Menz, 2010) with
a paper on the coverage of immigration in Spanish textbooks (van Dijk, 2010).
112 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

In her four-volume edited book about CDA (Wodak, 2013; Sage Benchmarks in
Language and Linguistics), she reprinted three of his articles (van Dijk, 2013a,
2013b, 2013c); taken together, they (1) provide an excellent overview of his trian-
gular/SCA approach (van Dijk, 2013a [originally published in 2006]; also van Dijk,
1998, 2001c; Sects. 3.6.5 and 3.6.6); (2) examine the discursive strategies and cog-
nitive and social functions of the denial of racism (van Dijk, 2013b [originally pub-
lished in 1992]); and (3) give a summary (van Dijk, 2013c [originally published as
2006]) of the structures and processes of discursive manipulation “through positive
self-representation and negative other-representation expressing ideological con-
flict” (2013c: 338) in speeches by (former) Prime Minister Blair of the UK.
In addition to all of their shared intellectual interests, Wodak and van Dijk also
have an overlapping and strong focus on social justice (see Sects. 7.2 and 7.3, for
more on this and how each of them has participated in ‘making a difference in the
world’). They co-founded CRITICS (Centres for Research Into Text, Information
and Communication in Society), the only remaining (but important) activity of
which is the CRITICS-L Listserv. They also established IASR (International
Association for the Study of Racism, with about 200 European scholars in the mid
1990s), which “reacts to racist discourse in the public sphere through resolutions,
letters, expertise, etc.” (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997: 281); however, it is currently
active only in Austria (see Sect. 7.2), due to lack of financial assistance elsewhere.
And each of them has reached out to those they have written for and about in order
to get more data and/or to bring the results of their research to them: e.g., as said
above, van Dijk asked his ‘readers’ to help with research on prejudice and racism
(Sects. 3.6.5 and 3.6.6) and talked with Dutch journalists about his issues with their
discourse on racism (see Sects. 7.3.1 and 7.3.2). Wodak and her colleagues (from
the 1980s on, including in her DPI center, see Sect. 3.8.6, also Sect. 7.2) wrote for
doctors, lawyers, teachers on how to communicate effectively with others, held
training seminars for those groups and for politicians and bureaucrats, and, as her
research became more critical and political, provided expert opinions for courts on,
e.g., the use of presuppositions and hidden meanings in discourse; they were also
involved in issues about non-sexist and non-discriminatory language use.

3.7.2  Consequences of Research on Racism and Antisemitism

And finally, we want to point out the serious consequences that both van Dijk and
Wodak have suffered for taking strong stands in their work on sensitive social issues,
especially contemporary racism and antisemitism in the Netherlands and Austria
(and also in Europe more generally), while also being highly visible and
­well-­regarded in their professional domains. As Wodak has said, those social issues
“touch the core of the respective national communication to which the researcher
belongs. For example, research on concrete antisemitic, xenophobic and racist
occurrences is much more controversial in certain academic and national contexts
and is sometimes regarded as ‘unpatriotic’, or hostile. This explains the serious
3.8  Ruth Wodak 113

problems which some critical scholars have encountered when venturing into such
sensitive fields (Heer, Manoschek, Pollak & Wodak, 2008)” (Wodak & Meyer,
2016b: 19). This has led to heavy consequences for their professional and personal
lives, since each of them decided to leave their positions in order to continue their
careers away from their home language, culture and country, not to speak of family
and friends (which we empathize with, recognizing the strain they each must have
been under). In 2001, van Dijk went to Pompeo Fabra University in Barcelona,
Spain (where he continues to live), became Professor and then Director of the
Centre for Discourse Studies (see Sect. 7.3); he has been very active in his new
home with publishing (see Sects. 3.6.6 and 4.4). As for Wodak, in 2004 she became
Chair in Discourse Studies and then Distinguished Professor at Lancaster University
(see Sect. 7.2). She retired in 2014 and returned to Vienna (where she continues to
live), where she had remained affiliated with the University. She too has been very
active with publishing (see Sect. 3.8.1 just below, and Sects. 3.8.6, 3.8.7, and 4.5).

3.8  Ruth Wodak

3.8.1  Introduction and Early Work

At the time of the meeting in Amsterdam in 1991 (see Sects. 3.2 and 7.2), Ruth
Wodak was Professor of Applied Linguistics and Chair of the Department of
Linguistics at the University of Vienna, where she had been teaching since 1975 and
was awarded “Habilitation” in 1980. In 1996, she received the Wittgenstein Prize
for Elite Researchers and established a center on Diskurs, Politik, Identität (DPI,
aka Discourse, Politics, Identity), first at the University of Vienna and then at the
Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna (see Sect. 3.8.6). As just said, from 2004
to 2014 she was Chair in Discourse Studies and then Distinguished Professor at
Lancaster University, commuting regularly between the UK and Austria; she retired
early in 2014 as Emerita Distinguished Professor and returned to Vienna (where she
continues to live), where she had remained affiliated with the University of Vienna.
She is co-editor of three journals in the area of CDA/CDS: Discourse & Society,
Critical Discourse Studies, and the Journal of Language and Politics, and is a mem-
ber of Academia Europaea and the British Academy of the Social Sciences (FAcSS).
She has been very prolific: according to the CV on her website at the University of
Lancaster in Feb. 2018, from 1972 to 2018 she published 41(co-) authored and (co-)
edited books, monographs and Special Issues of journals, and 500+ articles in a
variety of journals and chapters in books. Her research interests have been multiple,
wide-ranging, diverse, and interdisciplinary in scope; in her 2018 CV, she listed
seven Key Research Interests: Discourse Analysis, Organizational Discourse,
Sociolinguistics, Language and/in Politics, Prejudice and Discrimination, Gender
Studies, and Methodologies of Qualitative Analysis and Linguistic Fieldwork.
However, her research interests have changed many times over the course of her
114 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

career and have been changing again up to our cut-off date of 2018 as she finishes
current projects and takes up new ones. While most of her publications are relevant
for CDA/CDS in some way, we will discuss only a few here (see also Sects. 3.7.1,
4.5, 6.4, 6.5, 6.7, 6.9, and 7.2).
Due to the many stimulating and important debates around various social issues,
very early on Wodak became acquainted with Critical Theory (the ‘Frankfurt
School’, e.g., the thinking of Habermas (1969, 1970a on ‘systematically distorted
communication’, 1970b; and Horkheimer & Adorno, 1969) and decided to study
language use and its relation to society, i.e., sociolinguistics. In an early study
(Leodolter, 1975—she published as Leodolter, Wodak-Leodolter, and Wodak-­Engel
before the mid-1980s) of institutional behavior she focused on “power and social
class, using text-linguistic and phonological variables” (1996a: 5). Her post-­doctoral
(“Habilitation”) dissertation was on language behavior in therapy groups (see
Wodak, 1981), for which she used the term Applied Linguistics (widely defined).
According to her Introduction (to Wodak, 1996a: 1–8; see Sect. 3.8.3), the various
dimensions of sociolinguistics changed considerably from the mid-1980s to the
mid-1990s, as had her own view of her projects. In particular, there was an emerging
interest in oral communication at the level of the text (discourse), which led to, e.g.,
a methodological convergence of the fields of discourse analysis and sociolinguis-
tics and equal attention to ‘text’ (or ‘discourse’) and ‘context’. This meant the inte-
gration of concepts important for the definition of context from a variety of domains:
(socio)linguistics; sociology, (social) psychology, and history; and discourse analy-
sis/theory—which dovetailed with her commitment to interdisciplinary research. As
well, in line with her interest in discourse, she was attracted to the ‘qualitative turn’
in sociolinguistics—such as in Habermas’s ‘world of life’ (‘qualitative research’,
see 1981), Bourdieu’s ‘symbolic capital’ (1987) and Foucault’s genealogical post-
structuralist concept of ‘discourse’ (‘orders of discourse’, 1971, 1972—see Wodak,
1996a: 6; also Titscher, Meyer, Wodak, & Vetter, 2000; Kendall, 2007).
She published many co-authored books, chapters and articles about her “ambi-
tious empirical studies” (Wodak, 1996a: x) conducted during that time and formed
the ‘Vienna Group’ (aka the ‘Vienna School’), comprised of colleagues, PhD stu-
dents and former students, who conducted and published research with her (some of
which is discussed in 1996a). They also wrote guidelines and practical proposals,
e.g., for doctors on how to communicate effectively with patients, and they held
training seminars, e.g., for teachers, doctors, and lawyers, and later for politicians
and bureaucrats. They also applied their results in “teaching, in practice-related
seminars, within organizations, in giving expert evidence, in the production of
guidelines and in offering expert opinions” (Wodak, 2003: 5). Later, as her research
became more critical and political, she provided expert opinions for courts on, e.g.,
the use of presuppositions and hidden meanings in discourse; she was also involved
in issues about non-discriminatory, and non-sexist, language use. That is, she and
her students were also addressing more ‘praxis’-oriented concerns, e.g., by provid-
ing answers to the question, “can sociolinguistics help remedy the inequalities it
identifies?” (1996a: 6; see Sect. 7.2).
3.8  Ruth Wodak 115

3.8.2  W
 odak 1989: ‘Language, Power and Ideology: Studies
in Political Discourse’

In the same year as Fairclough’s Language and Power (Sect. 3.5.2), Wodak pub-
lished her edited book on Language, Power and Ideology (1989a), which has been
seen as a harbinger of the CDA program: “this important collection of studies is
certainly CDA before its time and definition” (van Dijk, 2001: 120, see his own
contributions, van Dijk, 1989a, 1989b). In the Notes on Contributors, she listed her
areas of research as: “socio- and psycholinguistics as well as discourse analysis,
(class- and sex-)specific language behaviour, language minorities, mass communi-
cation, therapeutic discourse, legal discourse, doctor-patient discourse, language
and ideology, antisemitism, etc.” (1989b: x)—which were the topics of her nine
books and over 100 articles/chapters from 1972 to 1989). In her “Introduction”
(1989c) she stated that all the papers in 1989a dealt critically with the social and
political practice of language as well as “with the dialectics between society (includ-
ing its subsystems), power, values, ideologies, opinions expressed and constituted
in and about language” (1989c: xiv). Citing Habermas (1971), Wodak said that what
guided her critical analysis was uncovering injustice and inequality and taking the
side of the powerless and suppressed (1989c: xiv). She agreed with (Adorno, 1969)
that no research is completely objective, and thus researchers should state their val-
ues, analyze all aspects of the issue under investigation, take into account multiple
data and methods before drawing conclusions or interpreting/explaining the find-
ings—and at the same time they should maintain a certain distance from the prob-
lem being investigated. She aligned herself specifically with “‘critical linguistics’
(or ‘critical discourse analysis’)” (1989c: xiv–v, see Sect. 2.4), and characterized its
threefold aims as: (1) diagnosis, by uncovering and de-mystifying social processes
and making “mechanisms of manipulation, discrimination, demagogy, and propa-
ganda explicit and transparent” (1989c: xiv); (2) interpretation of the results of the
diagnosis (using all means at one’s disposal); and (3) coming to an understanding of
“why reality is structured in a certain way” (1989c: xiv) through examining every-
thing in the context, an interdisciplinary task. As a result, she said, “practical and
political steps should be taken by teams of practitioners, researchers in other fields
and the people who are most involved” (1989c: xv)—with “the hope […] that
changes can be brought about” (Wodak, 1989c: xv). She stated that while “the study
of the relationship between language and power or language and politics began a
long time ago” (1989c: xv) in work on rhetoric and stylistics, bringing this “detailed
and subtle approach from a critical point of view” (1989c: xv) to other areas was
new (citing Chilton, 1985a, 1985b; Kress, 1985a/1989, 1985b; Seidel, 1985). She
placed her volume in this new paradigm since it “draws together diverse theoretical
and methodological concepts in analyzing issues of social relevance” (Wodak,
1989b: xv).
The papers in (Wodak, 1989a) were divided into: I. Language and totalitarism
[aka totalitarianism]. II. Language of politics/or politicians. III. Institutions, control
and discourse in specific settings. Her own paper (1989d: 137–164), in part II, was
116 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

on the power of political jargon, for which she analyzed a discussion (on Club-2, a
regular Austrian TV program) which was held on the 10th anniversary of the 1968
student movement in Europe—between a conservative journalist, a liberal political
scientist, and two well-known student leaders. She addressed particularly the ques-
tions: “how do group languages grow, how does jargon create reality, what is the
relationship between political jargon and specific ideologies?” (1989c: xvii). Her
focus was on their image-making, self-portrayal and argumentative (persuasive, jus-
tifying or challenging) strategies at the text-level, various facets of their utterances
at the syntactic level, and their use of political slogans, jargon and technical terms.
She also compared their jargon with that of the ‘green movement’ (1989c: xvii),
since she was interested in the ways in which technical jargon is created and used,
and may either divide or consolidate groups.

3.8.3  W
 odak 1996: ‘Disorders of Discourse’: Discourse
Sociolinguistics and Early CDA

During the 1990s, influenced by the change in sociolinguistics and also emerging
CDA, Wodak revisited her earlier work and reformulated it; this led, among other
things, to her book on Disorders of discourse (1996a), in which she discussed more
generally and theoretically and also framed in a different way the results of her stud-
ies from the 1970s to the early 1990s on various types of institutional (aka organi-
zational) discourse, in particular, doctor-patient interaction in a hospital outpatient
clinic, meetings in schools between teachers and pupils, therapeutic communication
in groups, and radio news bulletins. She was especially interested in not only
‘discourse(s)’ per se but also the problem of ‘disorders’, i.e., lack of understanding,
misunderstandings and various barriers to effective communication, as well as the
conflicts in these (and similar types of) situations that were due to “gaps between
distinct and insufficiently coincident cognitive worlds: the gulfs that separate insid-
ers from outsiders, members of institutions from clients of those institutions, and
elites from the normal citizen uninitiated in the arcana of bureaucratic language and
life” (1996a: 2). Those gaps and gulfs can also result from, e.g., unfamiliar profes-
sional and technical jargon as well as occasions “where worlds of knowledge and
interests collide with one another” (1996a: 2). At the same time, and more impor-
tantly, she showed that the understanding of how institutions work needs to be
­redefined, since, contrary to the assumptions of both the public and earlier academic
research, institutional culture is not always characterized by ‘harmony’, but by con-
flicts, contradictions, and disorders of discourse, which should be seen as having an
emphasis on discourse and power. And, since reality in institutions is produced and
reproduced through discourse, she stressed “the dialectic between ‘objective’ real-
ity (such as buildings) and the inside life of the organization” (1996a: 12).
Wodak’s approach, ‘discourse sociolinguistics’, which she placed at the intersec-
tion of linguistics and sociology, sociolinguistics and discourse theory, studied discourse
3.8  Ruth Wodak 117

(and text) in (social) context, and thus it was “capable of identifying and describing
the underlying mechanisms that contribute to those disorders in discourse which are
embedded in a particular context … and inevitably affect communication” (1996a:
3). She focused on the production and comprehension of authentic discourses within
institutions, using an ethnographic approach (i.e., as the analyst, she observed the
behavior first-hand inside the institution) in order to see it from the perspective of
insiders; and when she concentrated on the impact of institutional products on those
outside the institution she used an ‘outside’ approach through tests and interviews
which she complemented with observation from within the institution. In this way
“discourse sociolinguistics, like critical linguistics … aims at de-mystifying the dis-
orders of discourse, in actual language use in institutions and in the intersection of
institution and everyday life” (1996a: 3). She later (2000: 144–145) said that the
emergence of this type of critical perspective in (socio)linguistics could be under-
stood as a reaction against non-critical contemporary pragmatics (e.g., speech act
theory) and Labov’s quantitative-correlative sociolinguistics (see Wodak, 1995a:
205; see also Fowler et al., 1979; and Sect. 2.4); and she was in agreement with Mey
(1985), who explicitly favored a critical direction in linguistic pragmatics. She also
stressed the view (see Kress & Hodge, 1979) that “discourse cannot exist without
social meanings, and that there must be a strong relation between linguistic and
social structure” (Titscher et al., 2000: 145; see Sects. 2.3–2.5). As a result she dealt
with theoretical and methodological issues in relation to her data and their context
and to her politically oriented (‘praxis’) concerns about how or whether the linguis-
tic behavior of people in the institutions could be altered: “is it possible today to
realize the emancipatory claims of sociolinguistics, i.e. can sociolinguistics help
remedy the inequalities it identifies?” (1996a: 6) and how should we address the
problem of “why there are so many disorders and such little understanding”
(1996a: 6)?
The empirical data were taken from studies Wodak and her collaborators had
carried out over the preceding 20 years, but in 1996a she approached the data from
her new viewpoint. She integrated the findings of two very different levels of analy-
sis: on the one hand, those (socio)linguistic approaches that enable description of
how conversations are structured and show “how communication problems are con-
stituted at the micro-level of the text itself” (1996a: 7), pointing to gender, age,
status, class, ethnicity, etc., and on the other hand, sociological theories, such as
Parsons’ systems theory approach and Habermas’ ‘critical theory’, both of which
study the macro-level conditions that “promote or hinder social communication at
the levels of the institution and society”. With these tools, her analysis of the daily
routines of an outpatient clinic led her to formulate generalizations about ‘frame
conflicts’, where the worlds of knowledge and interest collide. Her study of public
discourse, e.g., radio news bulletins, as well as comprehension tests and in-depth
interviews with test subjects allowed her to delineate the characteristics of discourse
that restrict or impede understanding. This led to her larger conclusion that refor-
mulation of the texts of news bulletins would help in only a limited way since
they would have to make not only technical improvements but also enhance both
118 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

experience and background knowledge on the part of the listeners, a task which
goes well beyond sociolinguistics.
In answering her own question about “what a critical discourse sociolinguistic
analysis of institutional discourse is seeking to achieve” (1996a: 8), she took issue
with both Habermas’ concept (1969, 1970a, 1970b) of the ‘ideal speech situation’
and Foucault’s “genealogical poststructuralist concept of ‘discourse’ (1993)”
(Wodak, 1996a: 8) and declared (1996a: 13) that her own concept of ‘discourse’ had
changed over many years of studying institutions. It shared certain elements with
van Dijk’s approach (1990: 163ff; 1993a (see Sect. 3.6)) and also Fairclough’s
(1992a: 62ff (see Sect. 3.5.4)), since she defined ‘discourse’ as ‘text in context’ (van
Dijk, 1990: 164), a ‘set of texts’ (Dressler and Merlini-Barbaresi, 1994: 6ff), and a
form of or a part of ‘social action’. However, she insisted that ‘discourse’ is not
necessarily a self-contained (social or communicative) act, because it also evidences
intertextuality: “there is no objective beginning and no clearly defined end, because
every discourse is related to many others and can only be understood on the basis of
others” (Wodak, 1996a: 14). She also cited Fairclough (1992a: 62; Fairclough &
Wodak, 1997 (in press at the time, see Sect. 3.2)), who emphasized that discourse is
a “form of ‘social practice’ […] socially constitutive, as well as socially shaped—it
constitutes situations, objects of knowledge, and the social identities of and rela-
tionships between people and groups of people. It is constitutive both in the sense
that it helps sustain and reproduce the social status quo, and in the sense that it
contributes to transforming it” (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997: 258). The reality-­
constituting elements of discourses are consequential; for instance, they can give
rise to ideological effects because they aid in the (re)production of unequal power
relations “through the ways in which they represent things and position people”
(Wodak, 1996a: 15). As a consequence the case studies in the book are “investigated
by way of discourses which originate in organizations and are all connected with
questions of power and ideology” (1996a: 15). In summing up, she states that dis-
courses are “multi-layered, verbal and non-verbal, they are rule-bound, the rules
being either manifest or latent, they determine actions and also manifest them, they
are embedded in forms of life (cultures), of which they are simultaneously co-­
constituent” (1996a: 17).
She viewed discourse sociolinguistics as one of the ‘schools’ in CDA, for which
she provided a list of “some principles of critical discourse analysis (CDA)” (1996a:
17) in its theoretical approach as outlined in (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997) and also
as discussed extensively in (Fairclough, 1992a, 1993; Kress, 1993a; van Dijk,
1993d; Wodak, 1995a). Those principles and the chapters they correlate with (in
Wodak, 1996a: 17–20) are: (1) CDA addresses social problems (all chapters). (2)
Power relations are discursive (Chap. 3 on “Hierarchy or democracy? Power and
discourse in school committee meetings”). (3) Discourse constitutes society and
culture (Chap. 2 on “‘What pills are you on now?’ Doctors ask, and patients
answer”). (4) Discourse does ideological work (Chap. 4 on “Understanding the
news? Information for the already informed!”). (5) Discourse is historical (Chap. 5
on “‘Self reflection and emancipation?’ Sociolinguistic aspects of the therapeutic
process and its effect”). (6) The link between text and society, between the micro
3.8  Ruth Wodak 119

and the macro, is mediated (Chap. 4 again). (7) CDA is interpretive and explanatory
(Chap. 5 again). (8) Discourse is a form of social action (Chaps. 2, 3, and 4 again).
She also stressed the ongoing evolution of CDA, since it “is in the process of devel-
oping its own methods and tools in order to analyse discourses, which are ‘dis-
torted’ by power and ideology” (1996a: 17, see Chap. 4).

3.8.4  D
 iscourses of Antisemitism: Waldheim, Haider
and Discourses of National Identity

There were various significant and disturbing political events in Austria starting in
the mid 1980s that resulted in very controversial political, media and other types of
public discourses that Wodak and her colleagues analyzed closely; this led to a new,
multifaceted line of research and many publications by herself and her ‘Vienna
group’. The first event was the ‘Waldheim Affair’ of 1986, when Kurt Waldheim
(former Secretary General of the United Nations) was campaigning for president of
Austria and his involvement with the infamous German (Nazi) Wehrmacht during
the second World War was revealed and discussed in the media. When his support-
ers said that the disclosures were part of a defamation campaign and a conspiracy
by the foreign press and Jews (including the World Jewish Congress), the public
discourses that resulted were filled with (often virulent) antisemitism, racism, anti-­
ethnic bias, and so forth. As a result, Wodak began a multi-year process of position-
ing herself “explicitly with [her] research on anti-Semitism and racism” (Wodak, in
Kendall, 2007; see also Sect. 3.8.7). She and her group worked with very large
amounts of discursive data showing, e.g., the persistence, revival and creation of
new types of antisemitic discourse in Austria (e.g., Reisigl & Wodak, 2001: 91–143;
Wodak, 2001c: 67–93; see also Gruber, 1991; Mitten, 1992; Mitten & Wodak,
1993). In the case of Waldheim, they traced in detail the construction of a ‘Feindbild’
as it emerged in public discourse—a hostile, antisemitic stereotyped “image of the
Jew as the enemy, which, in turn reinforced existing prejudices” (Wodak & Pelinka,
2002b: x). In order to be able to study the Feindbild, its context had to be unpacked
into various dimensions; this necessitated the work of six researchers from three
fields (linguistics, history, psychology) and an approach that focused on many dif-
ferent genres in the different political fields of action. The team developed its cate-
gories with an emphasis on ‘integrative interdisciplinarity’ (Wodak et  al., 1990).
They studied the rhetorical strategies used for constructing discourses of justifica-
tion; they contrasted newspaper reports and news bulletins in Austria with the
reporting by the New York Times in the US about, e.g., “atrocities committed by the
Wehrmacht in the Balkans and the deportation of Jews from Greece” (Wodak,
2001c: 70); and they reported on the systematic distortion of the facts in the Austrian
sources. She and her colleagues noted that there was “a perceptible shift in public
discourse, which developed a distinctive ‘us’ and ‘them’ pattern” (Wodak & Pelinka,
2002b: ix). The outgroup (‘them’) were Jews, leftists, a few Austrians who were
120 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

interested in ‘digging up’ Austria’s Nazi past, and everyone outside of Austria; and
the ingroup was the ‘real’ Austrians (‘us’). In their overview of the political and
media discourse in 1986 and its aftermath, they also noted that before these events
there was typically a marked difference between the various private and public dis-
cursive forms—e.g., open, explicit, antisemitic discourses in private domains and
coded, implicit ones in public domains (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001). However, they
concluded that some of the older taboos “with respect to antisemitism fell away in
certain public realms, especially in the media” (2001: 142; see Wodak & Pelinka,
2002b: x).
Wodak and her team also looked at the discourses about events that occurred in
1988, including the Austrian “Gedenkjahr” (‘Year of Commemoration’), i.e., the
50th anniversary of Hitler’s occupation of Austria. Their data for these studies
included all sorts of oral and written texts and all types of media: e.g., newspapers,
radio reports, television news broadcasts, speeches by Austrian politicians, and offi-
cial political and media recollections of those past events. This allowed for a critical
examination of the Austrian Nazi past, the often conflicting narratives about Austrian
history, and the myths that cast Austria as the ‘victim’ of, not the ‘perpetrator of’ or
‘collaborator in’, WW II war crimes (even though the latter was well documented in
many different sources). Another major research focus was the Austrian reaction to
the arrival of refugees from the former Warsaw Pact countries after the fall of the
‘iron curtain’ in 1989–1990 (see in particular, Matouschek, Wodak, & Januschek,
1995). When they were not welcomed, the nationalist and racist discourses that
accompanied this issue were filled with fears concerning, e.g., loss of cultural iden-
tity, changes in the Austrian way of life, being overwhelmed by the ‘flood’, ‘massive
stampede’, ‘exodus’ of immigrants14 who were a threat to law and order, and so
forth. This led to, e.g., restrictive measures against not only refugees (especially
those seeking asylum) but also those who were living in Austria and were applying
for status as residents. And it led also, once again, to antisemitism. This was particu-
larly true of the anti-immigrant discourse in the xenophobic ‘Austria First’
(‘Österreich zuerst’), Anti-Foreigner-Petition campaign of Jörg Haider starting in
the early 1990s, with explicit racist and antisemitic slogans of his ultra-right-wing
Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) (see Reisigl & Wodak, 2000a, 2000b, 2001; Wodak,
2001c; Wodak & Pelinka, 2002a, 2002b; Wodak, 2002). As Wodak and Matouschek
(1993: 225) noted earlier, that discourse merged with “prejudices against Jews,
Turks and bicycle riders” (citing van Dijk’s work, e.g., 1984, 1987, 1993a on rac-
ism; see Sects. 3.6.3–3.6.6), as well as against the refugees and immigrants from
former Warsaw pact countries, which created “a generic neo-racist discourse”
(Wodak & Matouschek, 1993: 225; see also Reisigl & Wodak, 2000b, 2001:
148–151). She along with her colleagues also studied the claims by Haider and the
FPÖ that they would protect Austrians against ‘aliens’ and ‘foreigners’; and they
analyzed the slogans, such as ‘Stop Overforeignization’ and ‘Stop the Abuse of

 These same tropes emerged later in anti-immigrant discourse in other parts of Europe and the US
14

and have been discussed in e.g., CDA/CDS studies of metaphors (see Sect. 4.9).
3.8  Ruth Wodak 121

Asylum’—and showed that they used a variety of linguistic devices in a ‘coded’

language of racism and antisemitism. There were also various discourses about the
Austrian nation and national identity, for the analysis of which Wodak et al. (1998,
1999; see also Matouschek et al., 1995; Sects. 3.8.6 and 3.8.7) looked at the discur-
sive construction of national sameness on the one hand and difference on the other
hand, which allowed, once again, for the exclusion of ‘outgroups’ (Wodak, 2001c:
71). She and her ‘Vienna Group’ were able to follow the evolution of the arguments
brought up and their (re)contextualization in various public discourses in light of
“the social interests of the participants and their power relations” (Wodak,
2001c: 72).

3.8.5  Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) in 2000

While Wodak and the members of her ‘Group’ (the ‘Vienna School of Discourse
Analysis’) were analyzing the many and multi-faceted discourses associated with
this political upheaval in Austria, they were also establishing a new, critical approach
that would be the basis for her work from then to the present, combining empirical
research with theoretical grounding. This became what she called discourse-­
historical analysis, aka the discourse-historical approach (DHA), which went well
beyond her concerns in her (discourse) sociolinguistic approach (Sect. 3.8.3) and
was committed to the goals of CDA (Wodak, 2001c: 64), which began to emerge in
the 1990s (Sect. 3.2). As she made clear (2001c: 70; see also Wodak, de Cillia,
Reisigl, & Liebhart, 1999: 2), DHA was developed to analyze the series of anti-
semitic and racist discourses in the ‘Waldheim affair’ and in particular the ‘Feindbild’
in public discourse during Waldheim’s presidential campaign of 1986 (see Sect.
3.8.4 and Wodak et al., 1990; Gruber, 1991; Mitten, 1992). By the early years of the
1990s, several of the major characteristics of DHA were established; they were, as
Reisigl and Wodak (2016: 31) defined them: (1) “interdisciplinary research with a
special focus on historical embedding”; (2) ‘triangulation’ as a methodological
principle, which combined various perspectives, including multiple and different
data, theories, methods, and researchers (who were working as a team); and (3)
practical application of results. The Vienna Group “combined linguistic analysis
with historical and sociological approaches” (2016: 31) and mounted an exhibition
about ‘Post-war antisemisim’ at the University of Vienna already in 1987, based on
their analysis at that time of the many texts and genres used in their research. DHA
was elaborated further as they dealt with the other political issues in Austria men-
tioned above, as well as discourses about “nation and national identity in Austria
(Matouschek et  al., 1995; Reisigl, 2007; Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Liebhart,
2009)” (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016: 31), for which they took “several current social
scientific approaches as a point of departure, … [and] developed a method of
description and analysis that has applications beyond” (Wodak, 2001c: 71) the spe-
cific case(s) under discussion. DHA was described and exemplified in more or less
the same form in a series of publications by Wodak and/or her students in 1999–2002;
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we will use this ‘2000’ version in our discussion and in particular their analysis of
the discriminatory discourse of Jurgen Haider’s FPÖ ‘Austria First’ petition of
1992–1993 (as presented in Wodak, 2001c: 72–93; see also Reisigl & Wodak, 2001:
31–90, 144–204; also Wodak et al., 1999). DHA was developed further in the con-
text of her DPI Centre (see Sect. 3.8.6) when they enlarged their study to encompass
“comparative interdisciplinary and transnational projects relating to the issue of
European identities and European politics of the past (Heer et al., 2008; Kovács &
Wodak, 2003)” (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016: 31). And she worked on it while she was
in the UK from 2004 to 2014 (see Sect. 3.7.2), after she returned to Vienna in 2014
(see Sect. 3.8.7) and up to now. The latest version of DHA, which is both similar to
(in its major lines) and different from (in certain specificities) this ‘2000’ version, is
discussed in Sect. 4.5.
In 2000, Wodak defined DHA as having roots in Bernstein’s sociolinguistic
approach (Wodak et al., 1999: 7), as being situated in CDA as well as in the socio-­
philosophical orientation of Critical Theory (e.g., Habermas, 1996; Horkheimer &
Adorno, 1969; and other theoreticians, many of them from the Frankfurt School; see
Wodak, 2001c: 94, n4; Reisigl & Wodak, 2001: 31–90). She also said that it was
“grounded in the political and ethical grid of values of Critical Theory” (Wodak
et al., 1999: 7)—which undergirds, for instance, her commitment to being critical
and self-reflexive as well as to pursuing practical applications of her research for
people, institutions and communities outside of academia. Seeking a way to deal
with “the theory crisis in the social sciences” (2001c: 64), she supplemented Critical
Theory with “a more pragmatically oriented theoretical approach” (2001c: 64; see
Mouzelis, 1995), which “relate[s] questions of theory formation and conceptualiza-
tion closely to the specific problems that are to be investigated” (Wodak, 2001c: 64)
and focuses on the conceptual pragmatic tools needed for analysis of a given prob-
lem, that is, it engages in “problem oriented science” (2001c: 64; see Sects. 1.1,
3.2.1, and 3.2.2). DHA was based on a complex concept of “social critique” with
three interconnected aspects (see also Reisigl & Wodak, 2001: 32–34): (1) “text or
discourse-immanent critique” (Wodak, 2001c: 65) which is aimed at finding incon-
sistencies, self-contradictions, or other such problems in the text or discourse being
analyzed; (2) “socio-diagnostic critique” (2001c: 65) by the analyst who, making
use of background and contextual knowledge and studying the structures of a dis-
cursive event in relation to socio-political processes and circumstances, aims to
expose and demystify the “possibly persuasive or ‘manipulative’ character of dis-
cursive practices” (2001c: 65); and (3) ‘prognostic critique’ (or “prospective cri-
tique”, Reisigl & Wodak, 2001: 33), which is associated with an ethical and practical
dimension nurtured by a sense of justice; and because it is future oriented, it could
contribute to “the transformation and improvement of communication” (Wodak,
2001c: 65; see also Wodak, 1996a)—as in, e.g., guidelines for avoiding sexist lan-
guage use (Kargl, Wetschanow, Wodak & Perle, 1997; see also 3.8.1). Wodak also
stipulated that in order to minimize being biased, the analysis should follow her
updated “principle of triangulation” (2001c: 65), that is, work with different
approaches/theories, multiple methods, and many types of empirical data, along
3.8  Ruth Wodak 123

with information (Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, Liebhart, Hofstätter, & Kargl, 1998;
Wodak et  al., 1999) about the historical sources and background of the socio-­
political arena in which the particular events under investigation are found and the
ways in which they are subject to (diachronic) change (Wodak et al., 1990).
Wodak defined (written and spoken) ‘discourse’ as a type of social practice
(Fairclough & Wodak, 1997), i.e., as a “way of signifying a particular domain of
social practice from a particular perspective (Fairclough, 1995b: 14)” (Wodak,
2001c: 66). Because of their dialectic relationship, social practices constitute (shape
and affect) discourses, and discourses in turn shape and affect both discursive and
non-­discursive social practices. Discursive practices themselves are embedded in
social ‘fields of action’ (Girnth, 1996), which are segments of social reality and
include e.g., contexts of situation, institutional frames and social structures; and the
social fields in turn “contribute to constituting and shaping the ‘frame’ of dis-
course’” (Wodak, 2001c: 66) and are differentiated by their functions or aims. Thus,
in the domain of political action, the fields include (2001c: 66–68, see Fig. 4.1) “law
making”, “formation of public opinion”, “political advertising”, etc., each of which
is associated with specific discourse genres—e.g., law making is associated with
“laws, bills, amendments”, etc. And each of these in turn is associated with (a range
of) specific discourse topics. In her differentiation of ‘discourse’ and ‘text’ (based
on Lemke, 1995), Wodak (2001c) further specifies that discourses are very often
manifested as interrelated oral or written texts (material products of linguistic acts)
and the texts themselves are typically classified in conventionalized, schematically
defined types, or ‘genres’ (Fairclough, 1994; Girnth, 1996; Fairclough & Wodak,
1997), which are characterized by textual topics and sub-topics, (often) associated
with a particular social activity, and constrained by rules and expectations in con-
nection with social conventions. DHA also integrates social theories in order to
define the (textual-discursive, socio-institutional, socio-political, historical) context
in which discursive events happen. In her approach, ‘context’ has four levels: (1) the
immediate, internal co-text; (2) the “intertextual and interdiscursive relationship
between utterances, texts, genres and discourses” (2001c: 67)—intertextual and
interdiscursive relationships exist when, e.g., part of a text or a discourse is incorpo-
rated into another text (as in paraphrase) or discourse (as when racist anti-immigrant
discourse is used in a discussion of unemployment); (3) extralinguistic social vari-
ables and “institutional frames of a specific ‘context of situation’” (2001c: 67); and
(4) sociopolitical and historical contexts.
Wodak stressed the most important characteristics of DHA as the following
(2001c: 69–70, references below are our addition): it is interdisciplinary on several
different levels—“in theory, in the work itself, in research teams, and in practice”15;
it is problem oriented; it is eclectic in theory and methodology, using whatever can
be helpful; it incorporates fieldwork and ethnography (i.e., study and observation
from the inside) as a “precondition” before doing any further analysis or theorizing;

15
 Note that in the 2001 version of the book, methods and methodology and practical application
are not emphasized, whereas in the latest version (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016) they are (see Sect. 4.5).
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it is “abductive” in the sense that there is constant movement back and forth between
theory and empirical data; it studies multiple genres and public spaces, investigates
intertextual and interdiscursive relationships, and uses the concept of ‘recontextual-
ization’ (van Leeuwen, 1993; van Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999) to connect genres,
topics and arguments (topoi); it always analyzes and integrates the historical context
in the interpretation of discourses and texts; it determines the categories and tools of
analysis according to its own steps and procedures and the specific problem being
investigated; it uses a multi-methods approach, with different types of empirical
data and much background information (Wodak et al., 1998, 1999); it has ‘grand
theories’ as a general foundation (e.g., Critical Theory), but ‘middle range theories’
“serve the purposes of analysis better” (2001c: 70) since they are suited to the spe-
cific problem or social situation being analyzed; and its target is ‘practice’, i.e., the
results should be made available to other experts and should also be applied in order
to change existing discursive and social practices. The historical dimension, which
integrates and also is integrated with, e.g., the discursive-textual, ethnographic,
sociological, political, psychological and linguistic dimension, in analysis and inter-
pretation, is considered in two ways: (1) by combining as much “information as
possible on the historical background and the original historical sources in which
discursive ‘events’ are embedded” (Wodak et  al., 1999: 7–8) and (2) by tracing
diachronic change, which some types of discourse undergo, in a specific time
period. We need to note that the emphasis put on the importance of the historical
context was driven by the data she was analyzing and it was also what distinguished
most her approach from others in DA and CDA, and thus it was used in the
name DHA.
Wodak characterized the DHA method used in the four studies about the ‘Austria
first’ petition as “three-dimensional” (2001c: 72, all quotations below from this
source): (1) establish first the contents or topics of specific discourses “with racist,
anti-Semitic, nationalist or ethnicist ingredients”; (2) investigate the “discursive
strategies (including argumentation strategies)” used; and (3) identify and examine
“the linguistic means (as types) and the specific, context-dependent linguistic real-
izations (as tokens) of the discriminatory stereotypes” (Wodak, 2001c: 72), with a
focus on, e.g., how persons are named and referred to linguistically. In her discussion
(2001c: 72–93) of the tools that are useful for analyzing discourses about racial,
national and ethnic issues, she took as her case-study, Haider’s FPÖ ‘Austria First’
petition (1992–1993) and the discourses around it (Sect. 3.8.4). She delineated five
types of discursive strategies, i.e., the set of discursive practices or the systematic
types of language use employed for achieving a particular aim, in this case, the “lin-
guistic or rhetorical means by which persons are discriminated against in an ethnicist
or racist manner” (2001c: 72) and which were all involved in positive ‘self’ and
negative ‘other’ presentation. One of those strategies was (2001c: 73): “argumenta-
tion”, which was used for “justification of positive or negative attributions”, through
e.g., the topoi of justification. She further clarified that argumentation and ‘topoi’
could be used when discussing “the different forms of social exclusion and discrimi-
nation … both arguing for and against racism, ethnicism and nationalism” (2001c:
73). The notion of ‘topos’ (plural, ‘topoi’) comes from argumentation theory, where
3.8  Ruth Wodak 125

it is defined as a (socially conventional) rule that connects the argument(s) in the

argument scheme with the conclusions (Kienpointer, 1992: 194), either implicitly or
explicitly. Wodak provided a short list of some 15 topoi (e.g., topoi of usefulness,
danger, humanitarianism, justice, etc.) that could be useful in the “analysis of typical
content-related argument schemes” (2001c: 74, see Table 4.2) and she exemplified
how they might be used in arguing for or against racism and ethnicism. Topoi may be
plausible; or, if not plausible, they may be ‘fallacies’ (Kienpointer, 1996) since they
are violations of “rules for rational disputes and constructive arguing” (Reisigl &
Wodak, 2001: 70). Reisigl and Wodak used the notion of fallacy especially in their
analysis of “the persuasive, manipulative, discursive legitimation of racist, ethnicist,
nationalist, sexist and other forms of discrimination” (2001: 71). They also pointed
to a set of ‘pragmatic fallacies’ used to justify discrimination (2001: 71–74) and
analyzed some “typical content-related argument schemes used for and against dis-
crimination” (2001: 75–80). One brief example is the fallacy of ‘abuse’ (2001: 80),
which is based on the argumentation scheme—“if a right or an offer for help is
abused, the right should be changed or the help should be withdrawn or measures
against the abuse should be taken” (2001: 80). This was used when (right-wing) poli-
ticians such as Haider, in his ‘Austria first’ petition, argued that ‘aliens’ or ‘foreign-
ers’ ‘exploit’ the welfare or social security system and thus something in the system
should be changed, or it should be withdrawn, or measures should be taken against
that ‘exploitation’ (Wodak, 2001c; Reisigl & Wodak, 2001: 144–204).
In the rest of her discussion, Wodak provided a good deal of background infor-
mation which is important for understanding the ‘Austria first’ petition: some his-
torical context about the FPÖ and its xenophobic anti-foreigner tone, the context of
the FPÖ’s recent election success, the application of her discourse model to the
specific populist discourse in Austria of 1993 with topics and sub-topics (2001c: 79,
Fig. 4.5), a contrastive analysis of potential intertextual and interdiscursive relations
between the petition and Austrian discourse about ‘national security’ (2001c: 79,
Fig.  4.6, see also Reisigl & Wodak, 2001), and necessary information about the
genre of the petition. In her (in-depth) analysis of the petition she identified topoi
and fallacies, polemical rhetoric, various discursive strategies, ambiguities (multi-
ple possible readings), presuppositions, inferences, etc., and pointed out discrimina-
tory formulations, anti-foreigner prejudices, scapegoat strategies, and so forth. Her
conclusion summarized the seven most important procedures (which are recursive,
and constantly go between text, ethnography, theories and analysis) used in the
analysis of this text (Wodak, 2001c: 93 for all quotes): (1) “sample information
about the co-text and context of the text”; (2) establish “the genre and discourse to
which the text belongs”, “sample more ethnographic information”, “establish inter-
discursivity and intertextuality”; (3) “formulate precise research questions and
explore neighboring fields for explanatory theories and theoretical aspects”; (4)
“operationalize the research questions into linguistic categories” (including rhetori-
cal, argumentative and other devices); (5) “apply these categories sequentially to the
text while using theoretical approaches to interpret the meanings resulting from the
research questions”; (6) “draw up the context diagram for the specific text and the
fields of actions”; and (7) “make an extensive interpretation while returning to the
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research questions and to the problem under investigation”. While we can’t dwell on
this at any length, Wodak was (and is still) very concerned about rigorous and
evidence-­based methodology (see now Sect. 4.5); by 2000, DHA had become much
more nuanced and wide-ranging than in the early 1990s in its use of, e.g., argumen-
tation theory, pragmatics, rhetoric, genre theory, discourse and text theory, context
theory, and other approaches to (political) discursive strategies.
Given the interdisciplinary stance of DHA, in another book on ‘the Haider phe-
nomenon’ Wodak and Anton Pelinka (2002a) included papers by scholars from
political science, history, anthropology and linguistics which looked at, in particu-
lar, the combination of discourses about, e.g., protecting jobs, keeping Austria from
being ‘colonized’ by other cultures, maintaining the traditional economic security
provided by the Austrian welfare state, answering the worries of Austrians about the
EU (especially its push to enlargement by admitting former Warsaw pact states and
its rhetoric of globalization), and so forth. All of these were associated with the
populist rhetoric of exclusion used by Haider and his allies (see Wodak, 2002; see
Sect. 3.8.7 for more on populism). There also was DHA work published in a long
series of books and papers to analyze discourses about (the Austrian) nation and
other discourses of nationalism which gave rise to nationalistic emotions, symbols
and actions and xenophobia, and the ‘discursive construction of national identity’
(Wodak et al., 1999) in the context of discussion about the possible membership of
Austria in the European Union (EU)—based on the concept of ‘nation’ as an ‘imag-
ined community’ (Anderson, 1983). While their findings can’t be generalized on
every point, many of the tendencies they found are observable across Europe, since
discursive constructs of national identities (tend to) emphasize national uniqueness
and intra-national uniformity and ignore intra-national difference. In the second
edition of their book (Wodak et al., 2009), which was based on data collected in
2005 and contrasted with the 1995 data analyzed in the first edition, they found that
the discursive strategies had changed, since they were “accompanied by chauvin-
ism, revisionism, EU-scepticism and racist, xenophobic beliefs” (Wodak et  al.,
2009: 203; see also Krzyżanowski & Wodak, 2009). They stressed that there had
been a move toward a confluence of racism and xenophobia, which created a new
kind of racism, which is expressed as the ‘denial of racism’ (as also brought out by
van Dijk, 1989a), normalizes ‘othering’, and is ‘syncretic’, a mixture of racist and
xenophobic prejudices and stereotypes, i.e., a “‘xeno-racism’” (Krzyżanowski &
Wodak, 2009: 3). It is also subject to “many socio-political, historical, discursive,
and socio-cognitive processes” (2009: 4), which were analyzed in various studies
connected with projects related to European identities and European politics of
memory (Kovács & Wodak, 2003; Heer et al., 2008; Reisigl & Wodak, 2009: 95),
some of which were connected with her DPI Centre.
3.8  Ruth Wodak 127

3.8.6  D
 iscourse, Politics, Identity (DPI) Wittgenstein Research
Centre

In 1996 Wodak was awarded the highly prestigious Wittgenstein Prize for Elite
Researchers (1997–2003)—the first time this prize was awarded to a woman and the
first time for research in an area of the humanities/social sciences. This resulted in
the ‘Discourse, Politics, Identity’ (DPI, ‘Diskurs, Politik, Identität’) Wittgenstein
Research Centre, located first at the University of Vienna (1997–1999), while she
continued her work as Professor and Chair, and then at the Austrian Academy of
Sciences (1999–2003), where she was Research Professor. She recruited and worked
with an interdisciplinary research team (see Wodak, 2003) from many different
countries; it consisted of linguists with different perspectives in the areas of dis-
course studies and sociolinguistics—and, as well, sociologists, political scientists,
and historians. Most of them were in the early stages of their careers and had their
first substantial (post-doctoral) research position at the Centre. In addition, there
was a 12-member International Advisory Board of well-known experts. The partici-
pants in the Centre produced many publications, including books, special issues of
journals, and articles in books and journals (many of them in collaboration with
others working on the DPI team or the Advisory Board). They established in 2002
the well-regarded Journal of Language and Politics, an interdisciplinary and critical
forum (mentioned in 3.2)—Wodak was its executive editor (now senior editor).
They organized, and/or participated in, 15 conferences, panels, workshops, and ses-
sions in those years. And, in addition to this basic research, they also applied their
results in “teaching, in practice-related seminars, within organizations, in giving
expert evidence, in the production of guidelines and in offering expert opinions”
(Wodak, 2003: 5), in line with her previous attention to practical applications of her
scholarship (see also Sects. 3.8.1 and 7.2).
In her presentation of the work of the Centre, Wodak said “we have devoted our-
selves to the great adventure of the European Union and to the search for identity in
the EU. At the same time, we have also examined the ‘politics of the past’ in Austria
and Germany. This is because, unlike many de-historicizing approaches, we believe
that the present and the future cannot be handled without an understanding of and
confrontation with past times. At every level, the past will always catch up with us
and it cannot be eradicated” (2003: 5, see Sect. 3.8.4). There were seven different
projects undertaken at the Centre; some of them were entirely new, others were
already in progress and were completed at the Centre, and still others were prolon-
gations of existing projects with a different focus—for example, the “shift to com-
parative interdisciplinary and transnational projects relating to the study of European
identities and European politics of the past (Heer et al., 2008; Kovácz & Wodak,
2003)” (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016: 31). The projects were: (1) ‘“The EU is not the
nanny of Eastern Europe”: Attitudes and patterns of argumentation in Austrian dis-
courses on EU-enlargement’. (2) ‘EU discourses on unemployment: An interdisci-
plinary study of employment policies and organizational change in the European
Union’. (3) ‘European “soul searching”: German, British and French discourses on
128 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

Europe’. (4) ‘Racism at the top’. (5) ‘The discursive construction of history: “How
history is constructed”’. (6) ‘The Wehrmacht and crimes of the Wehrmacht in public
and private memory in Austria and Germany after 1945’. (7) ‘National focal point
for Austria, in connection with the formation of an EU-wide information network
on RAXEN’ (Racism and Xenophobia European Network—Wodak was Director of
the Austrian focal point). For these projects, various participants in the DPI also
continued to work on DHA with her and developed it further in light of the new
topics being analyzed (Wodak, 2004; Wodak & Meyer, 2009b; Reisigl & Wodak,
2009). All of the projects had different durations, different principal investigators
and research teams (always including Wodak, along with others at DPI or on the
Advisory Board or recruited to join the project), various sources of funding in addi-
tion to the Wittgenstein Prize (depending on the project), and a variety of different
goals and outcomes.
The DPI Center was an immense and very complex undertaking and it is a tribute
to Wodak’s professional, intellectual, and organizational abilities that she was able to
form a group of this sort and to have many successful outcomes. For example, she
(2003: 50–64) lists 312 publications (books, Special Issues of journals, articles and
chapters) between 1997 and 2002 by 13 different researchers (some of them in col-
laboration with others at the center, and thus listed more than once, and/or with other
scholars elsewhere), of which 107 are by Wodak herself. There was also a journalist
who wrote a commissioned report on the basis of ethnographic work with the DPI
team (Flos, 2003). However, as Wodak said in her interview with Kendall (2007, see
Sects. 3.7.2 and 7.2), when she talked about being a public intellectual as well as an
academic, “there are risks involved; taking a stance and writing in other nonacademic
genres (newspapers) can make a scholar more vulnerable—this happened to me in
Vienna, 2002/2003, and basically also led to the closure of my research centre in
2003 … by right-wing, anti-Semitic, and sexist members of the Academy who also
‘opposed interdisciplinary critical research vehemently’ (see also the Times Higher
Education Supplement November 2003, for details on this ‘case’)” (Wodak in
Kendall 2007; see Sect. 7.2). She has since discussed those issues with regard to the
consequences of writing about topics that are “sensitive” in certain national contexts
and can be seen as not only “controversial” but also as “unpatriotic” or “hostile”
(Wodak & Meyer, 2016b: 19; see Sect. 3.7.2). In any case, she decided to leave her
position at the University of Vienna in 2004 when she was ‘headhunted’ to be
Norman Fairclough’s successor at Lancaster University (see Sects. 3.7.2 and 3.8.1),
where she became Distinguished Professor and Chair in Discourse Studies. She
stayed there for 10 years, commuted regularly between Lancaster and Vienna, retired
early in 2014 and returned to Vienna, where she had remained affiliated with the
University. During that time period, and while teaching and working with students,
she finished and/or continued her work that came out of the DPI center and also
began new offshoots and topics around the EU, including European identities, the
European Parliament, and ‘politics in action’ (see Wodak et al., 2009; Wodak, 2011),
the ‘politics of fear’, and some other non-EU topics (see Sect. 4.5).
3.8  Ruth Wodak 129

3.8.7  W
 odak 2015: ‘The Politics of Fear’ and Research
on Populism

A year after her return to Vienna from Lancaster, Wodak’s highly acclaimed book
appeared, namely, The Politics of fear: What right-wing populist discourses mean
(2015a, in German translation 2016, currently being translated into Russian). It was
chosen as the academic book of the year in the Humanities in 2017 by the Austrian
Ministry of Science on the basis of public voting and a jury—which showed that she
had met her goal of writing a book of scientific merit based on DHA that could be
read and appreciated by the public (see Sects. 6.9.2 and 7.2). It also thrust her even
more than before into the public sphere and led to many invitations to speak about
far-right populist discourse/politics, including, e.g., a 2018 European Commission
lecture. The book provides fifteen illustrative ‘vignettes’ (e.g., there was a ‘vignette’
about the ideologies of Euro-scepticism and the search for European identities)
along with in-depth analyses of ‘snapshots’ of the “political situation in Austria,
Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the
Ukraine, the UK and the US” (Wodak, 2015b: xii). She focuses on the rhetoric,
performance and argumentation of micro-politics of right-wing populist politicians
across Europe through the many discourses, genres, images and texts in both formal
and informal contexts, on the ‘front’ and ‘backstage’ (Goffman, 1959, 1971) of
politics, and elaborates on the (inter)dependencies between politics and the media
through several case studies. She embeds her analysis not only in various types of
contextual information, including, e.g., the ‘facts and figures’ of national and EU
elections, but also in “theoretical discourse-analytic, sociological, historical and
political science theories” (2015b: xii), which help to guide the “fine-grained lin-
guistic, pragmatic, rhetorical and argumentation analysis” (2015b: xii). She also
looks at the recontextualization and ‘glocalisation’ (the blending of the global and
local) in images and posters across several right-wing political parties. She analyzes
salient linguistic phenomena, discursive strategies, rhetorical tropes, argumentation
schemes and specific ‘topoi’ that occur in right-wing populist rhetoric (see Sect.
6.9.2 for how Politics of Fear incorporates pragmatics concepts; for a discussion of
topoi see also Sect. 4.5 with different examples).
“Using close linguistic analysis and impressively deep political insight, Wodak
takes apart the strategies, rhetoric and half-truths of today’s right wing populists”
(statement by Billig on the back cover of Wodak, 2015b), which she divided into
two types: on the one hand, neo-Nazi movements, extreme fair-right parties, and
horrific hate crimes, and on the other hand, “‘soft’ right-wing populist parties”
(2015b: 2), which she labeled as ‘the Haiderization of politics’ (see Sects. 3.8.4–
3.8.6). She also uncovered the normalization of nationalistic, xenophobic, racist and
antisemitic rhetoric and revealed “the micro-politics of right-wing populist parties”
(2015b: 2): how discourses, genres, images and texts are performed and manipu-
lated in both formal and informal contexts, such as “in everyday politics, in the
media, in campaigning, in posters, slogans and speeches” (2015b: 2), and she
pointed to their openness to change and further developments. She stated that popu-
130 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

list parties and politicians create fear and ‘legitimize’ their proposals in various
ways (see van Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999 for the notion of ‘legitimation’). And she
included what she called “the right-wing populist perpetuum mobile” (Wodak,
2015b: 19; see also Sect. 6.9.2), which she deconstructed into a dynamic set of nine
(discursive) acts in an example of what she calls the ‘politics of denial’, whereby
politicians/members of a political party: create a scandal through some event; deny
the accusations about the (offensive) meaning of the scandal; redefine and equate
the scandal with other phenomena; claim victimhood; dramatize and exaggerate the
event that set this off; justify the event through freedom of speech (which shifts the
frame and triggers another debate); construct the accusation as a conspiracy with
scapegoats; launch a new scandal; and give a quasi-apology if needed (2015b:
19–20). And she summarizes the characteristics of populist parties in terms of nine
features (2015b: 20–22; see also 2013c), which are discussed in some detail in six
chapters on the politics of: identity (theories and definitions), exclusion (protecting
borders and the people), nationalism (language and identity), denial (of offensive
language or stance, such as antisemitism), charisma (performance and the media),
and patriarchy (gender and the body politic). The final chapter discusses the normal-
ization of exclusion: with sections on the ‘Haiderization’ of Europe (2015b: 177),
mainstreaming and normalization, nativist body politics: East and West, the politics
of fear, (not) falling into the trap (of the ‘perpetuum mobile’); and an epilogue on
new developments in Germany in autumn 2014. She has announced the preparation
of a second edition to be published in Sept. 2020, since it was indeed prophetic
about the few, but highly consequential, years between 2015 and now, when far-
right populism has spread much further, become even more important in Europe, the
UK (Brexit), and the USA (election of President Trump has developed what she
calls the shameless normalization of their populist discourses), and so forth. We are
eager to see the new edition.

3.8.8  Biographer and Historian of CDA/CDS

We will close this discussion by recognizing briefly Wodak’s role in defining, estab-
lishing and expanding CDA/CDS.  As noted (in Sects. 3.1, 3.2, 3.6, and 3.7) van
Dijk was the widely recognized promoter, biographer and historian of DA/DS who
organized the meeting in Jan. 1991 that led to CDA and also contributed various
articles and chapters on CDA/CDS to Special Issues of journals and edited volumes,
especially in the 1990s and early 2000s. In the later 1990s and into the 2000s Wodak
became the (unofficial) biographer and historian of CDA/CDS, whose work has
been very influential on this book (along with the contributions of Kress, van
Leeuwen, O’Toole, cited above in Sect. 3.2.2). Her three co-edited volumes in
English (with Michael Meyer16) are particularly noteworthy, i.e., her ‘Methods’

16
 Professor for Business Administration at Vienna University of Economics and Business
3.9  Theo van Leeuwen 131

books about CDA/CDS (Wodak & Meyer, 2001, 2009a, 2016b; see Sect. 3.2.1),
including the chapters in those books on DHA (Wodak, 2001c; Reisigl & Wodak,
2009, 2016) and the introductions to those volumes (Wodak, 2001a; Wodak &
Meyer, 2009b, 2016b) which deal with history, agenda, theory and methodology
and include discussion of the founders and their common ground, their differences,
their research agendas, and a variety of methodological issues pertinent to CDA/
CDS. Each of the volumes also contains chapters by various participants in CDA
and CDS about their own approach (she was especially careful to include English
versions of the chapters about ‘dispositive analysis’ (DPA), since other books, arti-
cles and chapters in this framework are not readily available in English—see Jäger,
2001; Jäger & Maier, 2009, 2016; also Sect. 4.7). In addition to the ‘Methods’
books, Wodak has been diligent in other ways in defining and documenting the ever-­
evolving CDA/CDS domain. For instance (see also Sects. 3.2 and 4.2), she has (co-)
edited, and (co-)authored introductions to, other books that are partially or wholly
about CDA/CDS (e.g., Wodak & Ludwig, 1999; Weiss & Wodak, 2003a, 2003b;
Martin & Wodak, 2003a, 2003b; Wodak & Chilton, 2005a, 2005b; Wodak, 2013a,
2013b; Richardson et al., 2014a, 2014b; Angermuller et al., 2014a, 2014b; Wodak
& Forchtner, 2018) and has also participated in writing other pieces on CDA (e.g.,
Fairclough & Wodak, 1997; Wodak, 1995a, 1995b, 1996a, 1996b, 2004, 2007,
2011, 2013a, 2013b; Titscher, Meyer, Wodak, & Vetter, 2000; Reisigl & Wodak,
2000a, 2000b; Reisigl & Wodak, 2001; Wodak & Krzyżanowski, 2008; Fairclough
et al., 2011). They have been very influential on this chapter and this book; indeed,
much of our framing of CDA/CDS comes from what is said in the ‘Methods’ books.

3.9  Theo van Leeuwen

3.9.1  Introduction and Early Work

Characterizing his career as “a mixture of design and serendipity” (interview in

Andersen et al., 2015b: 93) and his strong belief in combining “creativity and intel-
lect” (2015: 94), Theo van Leeuwen had a first career as a scriptwriter and film
producer in the Netherlands and then in Australia, then he was a tutor in courses on
film and television production with interests in semiotics, and throughout much of
this time period (and after) he was also a jazz pianist. At the time of the 1991 meet-
ing in Amsterdam, he was Senior Lecturer in Mass Communication at Macquarie
University in Sydney and was also working on his doctoral thesis in Linguistics at
the University of Sydney, which he finished in 1992 (see 1993b). Kress and van
Leeuwen 1990 (see Sect. 2.6) had been published and they were working on the
more theoretical, integrated and better known Kress and van Leeuwen 1996 version
(and, later, the 2006 second edition) on ‘reading images’, which was completed

Administration.
132 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

after Kress had moved to the Institute of Education in London (see Sect. 3.3) and
van Leeuwen had taken up, in 1993, a position as Principal Lecturer at the London
College of Printing (later the London College of Communication, see Sect. 4.6).
Their joint work gave an impetus to the study of “the semiotics of visual communi-
cation” (Wodak, 2001a: 8) and “the interaction between the verbal and visual in
texts and discourse” (2001a: 8), which created a “framework for considering the
communicative potential of visual devices in the media” (2009b: 15) and opened up
the study of multimodal discourse. Van Leeuwen held teaching and research positions
in media, language and (mass) communication, as well as administrative positions,
in Australia and the UK.  He is currently Emeritus Professor, University of
Technology, Sydney; he is as well Professor of Multimodal Communication in the
Department of Language and Communication, at the University of Southern
Denmark, Odense. He participated in the founding of the journal Social Semiotics
and was founding editor of Visual Communication. He is a fellow of the Australian
Academy of the Humanities.
Van Leeuwen studied SFL/SFG and SocSem (see Sect. 2.4, 2.5) in connection
with his interest in developing an analytical (and not just an interpretative) approach
to his work and wrote a series of articles starting in the 1980s on topics such as “the
intonation of disc jockeys and newsreaders, the language of television interviews
and newspaper reporting, and, more recently, the semiotics of visual communica-
tion and music” (Wodak, 2001a: 8–9, e.g., van Leeuwen, 1983, 1985, 1988; Bell &
van Leeuwen, 1994). His Ph.D. thesis (see 1993b), written under James Martin of
the University of Sydney, “whose work on activity sequences was a key inspiration”
(van Leeuven, 2008a: ix; see Martin, 1984, 1992), was on the representation in text
of social actors (participants) and social actions (events). He created and exempli-
fied various categories of representation for his analysis of a newspaper article,
“Our Race Odyssey” (about immigration in Australia, published in 1990 in the con-
servative Sydney Morning Herald—see next section and Sect. 4.6); his thesis
focused in particular on racist discourse that represents immigration in a way that is
founded on fear (e.g., fear of loss of livelihood and cultural identity, cf. van Dijk
Sect. 3.6 and Wodak Sect. 3.8). He outlined the meaning potential of social actors
and social actions of various sorts and established a ‘sociosemantic’ inventory of the
ways in which they can be represented, as well as the sociological and critical rele-
vance of the categories, as discussed in (van Leeuwen, 1995, 1996, and 2008a). His
analysis was praised as a “systematic way of analyzing the protagonists and their
semantic roles in discourse and various genres” (Wodak, 2001a: 8); it became his
Social Actors Approach (SAA) which was part of his Discourse as the
Recontextualization of Social Practice Approach to CDA (discussed below in Sect.
3.9.3, van Leeuwen, 2009a, 2016b). We should also note van Leeuwen’s continued
collaboration on more SocSem themes with Kress on discourse semiotics, the (criti-
cal) analysis of newspaper layout, visual interaction, and the semiotic landscape
(e.g., Kress & van Leeuwen, 2007); he also contributed a paper on color schemes to
a volume in honor of Kress (van Leeuwen 2016a; see also Kress & van Leeuwen,
2002; van Leeuwen, 2005a, 2011 on color as a semiotic mode). Kress (2018) con-
3.9  Theo van Leeuwen 133

tributed a recollection of their collaborative work to a volume in honor of van

Leeuwen; and van Leeuwen (2019) wrote a moving obituary about Kress.
Just as for the other founders of CDA, we will discuss some of his work here, and
his approach as it has been incorporated in CDA/CDS in Sect. 4.6; however, since
van Leeuwen was working on a continuation of his work in SocSem and multimo-
dality and since some of that work criss-crossed with CDA at various moments, we
will look at it in more detail here (see also Sect. 7.11).

3.9.2  Van Leeuwen 2005: ‘Introducing Social Semiotics’

In 2005, van Leeuwen developed a new, wide-ranging, integrated, version of

SocSem based on much of his previous work, including Kress and van Leeuwen
(1996) and relevant studies incorporated in (van Leeuwen, 2008a; see Sect. 3.9.3).
Out of this came his carefully crafted book, Introducing Social Semiotics, “an
accessible, and, above all, usable introduction” (2005a: xi) about “the ways in
which different aspects of modern society combine to make meaning” (2005a: fron-
tispiece), an intellectually rich, interdisciplinary approach with key theoretical con-
tributions. He stated that while his work in SocSem was originally inspired by
Prague School and Paris School semiotics, the focus in this book was not on sign,
structure and system as in those approaches, but rather on “the way people use semi-
otic ‘resources’ […] in the context of specific social situations and practices”
(2005a: xi) and defined semiotic resources as “the actions and artefacts we use to
communicate” (2005a: 3). Earlier, he had explored these resources and their semi-
otic values in speech, music and sound, including their materiality, e.g., the various
material components of sound, such as pitch, loudness, duration, rhythm, move-
ment, range, sound quality, vibrato, etc. (1999). He drew on many, shorter papers in
the 1990s and 2000s, which ranged over various topics such as visual semiotics and
semiotics of music, the news, and the media, as well as interdisciplinarity, intertex-
tuality, and multimodality, and also developed a variety of new frameworks (includ-
ing provenance and experiential meaning), for studying color, kinetic design, voice,
tactile and visual texture, timbre, etc. For example, he said that taste needs to be
placed in the context of the semiotics of action since “it is only in our physical expe-
rience of materials, that the qualities of those materials can be perceived” (1998:
149), e.g., touching, licking, sucking, biting, chewing, combined with our knowl-
edge of the provenance of the materials and the cultural values assigned to them. He
also revisited old topics and added new ones: the semiotics of a variety of phenom-
ena—such as voice, decoration, listening, kinetic typography, film lighting; critical
analysis of musical discourse; grammar of movement (the 4th dimension); social
semiotic theory of synesthesia, aesthetics and text; and so forth. His co-edited
Handbook of Visual Analysis (van Leeuwen & Jewitt, 2001) and Special Issue of
Discourse Studies (Thornborrow & van Leeuwen 2001) about authenticity in media
discourse were also a source of ideas. And he focused on the role of social, histori-
134 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

cal, cultural and political factors, in keeping with the socio-political and critical
orientation of his research.
These (and many other insights) led van Leeuwen to define his new, unified ver-
sion of SocSem in contrast to his own (and others’) previous work (2005a: xi):
rather than focusing on the semiotics of individual modes in isolation (such as music
or language or image) or with reference to a given type of human perception (such
as sound, sight, or taste), he developed further the concept of multimodality (Sect.
2.7), by looking at “semiotic modes, exploring what they have in common as well
as how they differ, and investigating how they can be integrated in multimodal arte-
facts and events” (2005a: xi). Rather than “describing semiotic modes as though
they have intrinsic characteristics and inherent systematicities or ‘laws’” (2005a:
xi), he explored “how people regulate the use of semiotic resources, again in the
context of specific social practices and institutions and in different ways, and to dif-
ferent degrees”. And, rather than focusing on meaning in the sign, he stressed that
semiotic resources have a meaning potential which is dynamic and both shapes and
is shaped by the social contexts in which the resources are used (2005a: 285). And,
in answer to his own question—what kind of activity is social semiotics?—he
defined it as “a practice oriented to observation and analysis, to opening our eyes
and ears and other senses for the richness and complexity of semiotic production
and interpretation, and to social intervention, to the discovery of new semiotic
resources and new ways of using existing semiotic resources” (2005a: xi), an
approach that “comes into its own when it is applied to specific instances and spe-
cific problems” (2005a: 1). And, finally, he focused on the relationship between
meaning making and “the interests/agency of meaning-makers, and the ways in
which specific institutional and broader social contexts govern the use of semiotic
resources” (Djonov & Zhao, 2018: 3).
As a result, van Leeuwen’s book (2005a) discusses many of the semiotic
resources and semiotic modes that surround us and carry socio-cultural value and
significance—such as language, gesture, images, music, food, dress, magazines,
and everyday (often three-dimensional) objects; it also touches on the historical
development of certain semiotic resources, such as the press and advertising.
Drawing on his earlier work, he combined his ideas about resources and modes on
the one hand and genre, style, framing, salience, rhythm, and so forth on the other
hand, and brought together the various facets of SocSem analysis by presenting
them in three different categories:
(1) The “Semiotic principles” (2005a: 1) “that make social semiotics a new and
distinctive approach to the practice and theory of semiotics”, including not only
“Semiotic resources” (2005a: 3) for representation, i.e., meaning-making, but also
“Semiotic change” (2005a: 26), e.g., innovation, adaptation, resistance, etc.),
“Semiotic rules” (2005a: 47) of different kinds that are taken up in different ways in
different contexts and “change over time” (2005a: 53), and “Semiotic functions”
(2005a: 69), including a discussion of functionalism in architecture, sociology,
anthropology, linguistics and semiotics (2005a: 69–79).
(2) The key “Dimensions of Semiotic Analysis” (2005a: 91): “Discourse” (“how
semiotic resources are used to construct representations”, “Genre” (“how semiotic
3.9  Theo van Leeuwen 135

resources are used to enact communicative interactions”), “Style” (“how people use
semiotic resources to ‘perform’ genres, and to express their identities and values in
doing so”, and “Modality” (“how people use semiotic resources to create the truth
or reality values of their representations, to communicate, for instance, whether they
are to be taken as fact or fiction, proven truth or conjecture, etc.”.
(3) The various “ways in which different kinds of semiotic resources are inte-
grated to form multimodal texts and communicative events” (2005a: 179), through
“Multimodal cohesion”, which includes: “Rhythm [which] provides coherence and
meaningful structure to events unfolding over time” in, e.g., interaction and film,
music, etc. (see also 2005b); “Composition [which] provides coherence and mean-
ingful structure to spatial arrangements”, in e.g., images, layout, and three-­
dimensional arrangements; “Information linking … [which] links between the items
of information” in both time- and space-based media, including multimodal texts;
and “Dialogue … how the structures of dialogic exchanges and form of musical
interaction can be used to understand the relationships between semiotic modes in
multimodal texts and communicative events”.
All of this is supported by a wide variety of texts such as photographs, advertise-
ments, magazine pages, and film stills, as well as many other apposite examples
from a wide variety of semiotic practices.

3.9.3  van Leeuwen 2008a: ‘Discourse and Practice’; Toys

as Discourse

In his book on discourse and practice, van Leeuwen (2008a) brought together his
work of the previous 15 years on CDA and (critical) SocSem with an emphasis on
his theoretical and methodological papers (including 1993b) and a focus on his
“conception of discourse as recontextualized social practice” (2008a: 3). As he said
in the Preface of his book, he developed his analytical framework for (C)DA from
two main sources: “Michel Foucault’s concept of discourse as semantic construc-
tions of specific aspects of reality that serve the interests of particular historical and/
or social contexts” (2008a: vii) and “Michael Halliday’s concept of ‘register’ as a
semantic variety of language, a social dialect which is distinct in its semantics rather
than in its phonology and lexicogrammar”. These can be realized by any one semi-
otic (verbal or visual) mode alone or together or with other modes, in which case the
construction is multimodal and should be analyzed through multimodal discourse
analysis (see Sect. 4.6) and multimodal semiotics (see Djonov & Zhao, 2014a,
2014b: 7; also O’Halloran, 2004; O’Halloran & Smith, 2011).
The approach he designed was based, once again, on Bernstein’s (1990: 184)
concept of “recontextualization” and his claim that semantic shifts take place in the
move from “the context in which knowledge is produced to the pedagogic context
in which it is reproduced and disseminated” (van Leeuwen, 2008a: vii). Those shifts
are determined by what Bernstein called “recontextualizing principles … which
136 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

selectively appropriate, relocate, refocus and relate to other discourses to constitute

its own order and orderings” (Bernstein, 1990: 184). Van Leeuwen widened this
view with his own “assumption that all discourses recontextualize social practices”
(2008a: vii), not just pedagogical ones, and they can also change the meaning of
those social practices, and “that all knowledge is, therefore, ultimately grounded in
practice”.
The book is itself a recontextualization of his previously published work identi-
fied in the Preface (2008a: viii); he relates that work specifically, or more specifi-
cally than before, to CDA; and it led to further recontextualizations by himself and
many in CDA/CDS as well as in SocSem and multimodality (and other areas). The
introductory analytical and methodological chapter, “Discourse as the
Recontextualization of Social Practice” (2008a: 3–22), was rewritten (van Leeuwen,
2009a, 2016b) for the Wodak and Meyer volumes (2009a, 2016a) about CDA and
CDS. It shows how the recontextualizing principles are “linked to key elements of
social practices: actors and their roles and identities, actions and their performance
styles, setting, and timings” (2008a: vii), in which he explained the role of each of
these components in establishing social structure. He also identifies how each of
them undergoes the many kinds of transformations that happen in the process of
recontextualization, such as substitutions, deletions, rearrangements, and additions
(e.g., repetitions, reactions, evaluation). As a result, the process of recontextualiza-
tion may eliminate some aspects of the social practice from the discourse, or it may
“add elements such as purposes and legitimations for the actions” (2008a: vii). This
means that, in many cases, the details of the social practices that discourses focus on
may not be discernable in them. Thus, there is both a link between practice and
discourse and a (potentially large) “distinction between social practices and their
representation in texts, or discourses” (Djonov & Zhao, 2018: 8), which is why the
same social practice may attract “a plurality of discourses” (van Leeuwen, 2008a: 6).
He explores all of this in a detailed account, which shows how the various cate-
gories of social practices can undergo this process and how each of them works in
specific discursive contexts. He uses many examples—among them, a corpus of
(multimodal) texts about the social practices of the first day at school of young chil-
dren, the article “The Race Odyssey” (see 1993b) and, more sporadically, an anti-
nuclear speech, videos of children at play, etc. As he explains in his methodological
and analytical discussion of recontextualization, he begins (as in 1993b) with a
sociosemantic inventory of, e.g., the participants (social actors) and their actions
(social actions), as well as sociological categories (such as agency) and their possi-
ble linguistic (and rhetorical) representation. He insists that it is the inventory that
comes first and the linguistic representation that comes after, in contrast with most
approaches to CDA, which are much more language/textual in their orientation; and
he visualizes each one with network tables he created. The rest of the book is on
various aspects of the inventory: representing social actors (aka social actor theory);
representing social action; time in discourse, e.g., the timings of social practices;
space in discourse, e.g., the settings of social practices as represented in verbal
­discourse and visual images; the discursive construction of legitimation through
authority, moral evaluation, rationalization, and mythopoesis; the discursive con-
3.9  Theo van Leeuwen 137

struction of purpose; the visual representation of social actors, based on his social
actor theory and his work on the grammar of visual design (Kress & van Leeuwen,
1996/2006; see also van Leeuwen, 2000b on visual racism and visual representation
of others). We should add that van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) use his model of the
discursive construction of legitimation along with Wodak’s DHA (see Sects. 3.8.5
and 4.5) to analyze immigration; it is a very important resource that has aided other
scholars in their understanding of, and to help them with their own, recontextualiza-
tion analyses).
The final chapter (Chap. 9, van Leeuwen, 2008a) is on representing social actors
with toys (dolls, teddy bears, and especially Playmobil figures) and is based on his
(highly acclaimed) ‘Toys as Communication’ research program which he had
started to work on with Staffan Selander in 1995–1998 (with funding from the
Royal Bank of Sweden; cf. also Kress, 1982/1994 about Lego toys). He continued
it in collaboration with Carmen Caldas-Coulthard and it resulted in a series of
papers: (Caldas-Coulthard & van Leeuwen, 2001) about the discursive construction
of babyhood in a Special Issue of Folia Linguistica edited by Wodak on ‘CDA in
post-modern societies’; (Caldas-Coulthard & van Leeuwen, 2002) on display dolls
like Barbie, Sindie and action men; (2003b) about teddy bear stories in a Special
Issue of Social Semiotics on ‘critical social semiotics’ (edited by Caldas-Coulthard,
2003a, about the relation of SocSem, multimodality and CDA); and (van Leeuwen
& Caldas-Coulthard, 2004) on dolls and kinetic design, for interactive and/or repre-
sentational play. In addition, Van Leeuwen (2005a: 79–89) did a (meta)functional
analysis of a pram rattle, including its pragmatics, ideational and interpersonal
meaning potential (see Sects. 2.3.4 and 2.6.3), rules of use, and an analysis of (a
transcript of) actual use. This line of research culminated in his work on Playmobil
figures (meant for children’s play, van Leeuwen, 2008a; see also van Leeuwen,
2008c, 2009b; see Sect. 4.6), emphasizing the multimodal nature of semiotic pro-
duction and interpretation. He focused on the preschool version of a Playmobil toy
system. For this research, he studied the way toys are “designed and marketed to
communicate a particular perspective on the social world” (van Leeuwen, 2008a:
150). And he also looked at the way that e.g., the social roles, identities and mean-
ings of Playmobil figures can be read in videos of children at play in preschool and
home settings (2008a: 154).
As a result of the work presented in this book, van Leeuwen provided more tools
for reaching the goal of CDA/CDS: “to reveal how discourses help perpetuate or
expose and challenge social boundaries, oppression and inequality” (Djonov &
Zhao, 2018: 8). Moreover, as van Leeuwen insisted (2013: 2), “the discourses that
need the scrutiny of a critical eye are now overwhelmingly multimodal and medi-
ated by digital systems that take multimodality entirely for granted”. However, (rac-
ist) stereotypes are found increasingly in multimodal texts, e.g., in advertisements
and other forms of popular culture (see van Leeuwen, 2000a), including children’s
toys, and they need serious CDA/CDS and SocSem analysis.
138 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

3.9.4  J oint Work on Multimodality, Global Media Discourse

and Semiotic Software: Machin, and Djonov and Zhao

Van Leeuwen ventured into other new, critical, domains in a long-standing and very
generative collaboration with David Machin (see, e.g., Machin & van Leeuwen,
2003, 2004, 2005a, 2005b, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2014, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, 2016d),
whom he singled out (in the Preface to van Leeuwen, 2005a) as having produced
“several of the key examples” (2005a: xii) used in that book; he also said that their
‘joint work’ had “been a constant source of inspiration” (2005a: xii). That joint
work includes the analysis of, e.g., global magazines, global media discourse, com-
puter/mobile games, toys as discourse—through the lenses of visual semiotics, mul-
timodality, aesthetics, schemas, genre analysis—with a focus on the contrast of
global and local discourses, homogeneity and diversity, political discourse, kinetic
design, verbal and visual styles, and so forth. Their co-edited Special Issue of the
Journal of Language and Politics explores multimodality, politics, and ideology
(Machin & van Leeuwen, 2016a, 2016b, for more on this see Sect. 4.6). The topics
in this collaboration highlight van Leeuwen’s recent focus on an issue of great con-
cern to him and Machin: “the role and status of semiotic practices in society are
currently undergoing change as a result of the fact that it is increasingly global
corporations and semiotic technologies, rather than national institutions, which
regulate semiotic production and consumption” (Wodak & Meyer, 2009b: 15; see
also van Leeuwen & Suleiman, 2008).
In their book about global media discourse, Machin and van Leeuwen (2007)
provide some of the findings of a 5-year Leverhulme Trust grant awarded to van
Leeuwen (2000–2005) for research on language and global communication (and
other topics) carried out at Cardiff University’s Centre for Language and
Communication, of which van Leeuwen was Director and Chair. In this interdisci-
plinary project combining the fields of “political economy, discourse analysis and
ethnography” (2007: viii)—a combination van Leeuwen saw as essential for deep,
qualitative work but had seldom been able to achieve before, due to inadequate
funding—they “studied how globalization has changed language and communica-
tion in a range of fields” (2007: vii), including the media.
For this work, they devised a critical approach to the (verbal and visual) dis-
course of global media, based on three intertwined semiotic areas: (1) Context, i.e.,
“the main themes of globalization theory” (2007: 3) and their applications to case
studies. (2) Discourses, especially stories, which convey to listeners, readers and
viewers how the world works (in order to “engender different kinds of identity and
community from those traditionally fostered in nation states” (2007: 39), i.e., how
people behave or should behave (as in the kinds of identities created for women in
the global magazine Cosmopolitan, which “propagates its ideal of the ‘fun, fearless
female’ in 50 different versions around the world” (2007: 39), and what types of
problems there are and the solutions that are available for dealing with them (i.e.,
the representation of the war on terrorism, as depicted in American computer games
vs. alternative ones developed by Middle Eastern game designers). (3) Language
3.9  Theo van Leeuwen 139

and image, “the forms and formats of global media communication” (2007: 105),
which combine localized content with the genres of global media and global visual
and verbal styles. In their analysis of the women’s magazine Cosmopolitan they
note that “the same genre of communication is used for the domains of work, sex,
relationships and fashion” (2007: 105) and that the overall message is that (wom-
en’s) empowerment “can only be achieved through the consumption of global goods
and services” (2007: 105).
They discuss language styles, including localized English and local languages—
where the language used has to adapt to the requirements of global media formats
(as in the English-language version of a Vietnamese newspaper, and the linguistic
style of the Indian, Spanish, Chinese, and Dutch versions of Cosmopolitan). And
they look at the global visual language, in particular large collections of images
provided by global image banks (such as Getty Creative Image) for use worldwide.
As can be expected, their findings are multiple and nuanced—and very troubling. In
essence they discuss the trend to global domination by transnational and large
national media conglomerates through the rise of global media, which is leading to
“homogenization of world culture through Western media, and through the values
and kinds of identity they promote” (2007: 5), in particular through templates asso-
ciated with American news, movies, advertising and magazines. They point out that
this model of the world and its peoples promotes new kinds of identity and com-
munity which “serve the interests of global consumer capitalism” (i.e., neoliberal-
ism) (2007: 39) and that global visual discourses are increasingly designed to fit
with advertisements and, like other global messages, are focused on the symbolic
representations associated with late capitalist consumer society. These discourses
also foster new “lifestyle identities” (2007: 171), i.e., preferred leisure time activi-
ties, attitudes and consumer choices, through aligning practices and values with the
consumption of goods and services. In addition, realms of life, such as work, leisure
and relationships that were previously seen as separate, have merged and operate by
the same rules, such as seeking an edge in a world of competitors.
This leads to the second area of concern: the worldwide impact of forms and
formats of global media communication: what is typically localized content is
embedded in global media structure such that “the linguistic style of global media
expresses the values and interests of corporations” (2007: 170) with some local
accents. And while some national and local cultures still exist alongside global cul-
ture and are “still very much alive” (2007: 171), others are being pushed towards the
margins, becoming static and “hollowed out”, i.e., turned into a surface feature, a
tourist attraction and/or a museum exhibit. It is true that the new global culture has
its own diverse choices and lifestyles—however, it is unclear how deep these new
identities go and whether they ultimately can satisfy “the human need for identity
and belonging” (2007: 171)
Van Leeuwen also explored the issue of the impacts of advanced technology17
through sole-authored and collaborative papers with, in particular, Emilia Djonov

17
 His 2009 book with Martinec seems to be more optimistic and to offer ways of thinking about
140 3  Symposium in Amsterdam, Formation of CDA, Work of the Founders

and Sumin Zhao (van Leeuwen, 2009c; van Leeuwen, Djonov, & O’Halloran, 2013;
Djonov & van Leeuwen, 2014, 2018; Zhao, Djonov, & van Leeuwen, 2014; see also
Djonov & Zhao, 2014a, 2014b) on the new, semiotic technologies and practice and
semiotic software, and critical multimodal studies about the ways in which tech-
nologies and software (such as bullet points, Powerpoint) shape social and semiotic
practices due to their (built-in) capacities for meaning-making. He and his collabo-
rators researched the multimodal analysis of software, the power of semiotic soft-
ware, the issue of normativity and software, music and gender in mobile games, and
genre issues in online shopping, among other issues. Their ideas provided “tools for
understanding the seismic social, cultural and political changes in the past two
decades and thereby have influence beyond semiotics, communication studies, and
applied linguistics, in fields such as education, arts, design, media, cultural and
management studies” (Djonov & Zhao, 2018: 2) and in the global social world.
Once again they raised the issue of global homogeneity and the loss of diversity.
Due to van Leeuwen’s many publications on a variety of topics in SocSem, he
was one of five scholars (in addition to Christian Matthiessen (see Sect. 2.3), James
Martin (see Sect. 2.3), Kress (see Sects. 2.6, 2.7, and 3.3) and Jay Lemke) who were
featured in the book, Social Semiotics: Key Figures, New Directions (Andersen
et al., 2015b), including an in-depth interview with each scholar. The interview with
van Leeuwen (Andersen et  al., 2015b: 93–113), written up by the authors and
approved by him) covers (social) semiotics, sign making, multimodality and mode,
technology and meaning, theory building, linguistics and interdisciplinarity and has
been very helpful for this section. And in 2018 a volume in van Leeuwen’s honor
appeared (Zhao et al., 2018), celebrating “the illustrious academic career of Theo
van Leeuwen, a social semiotician, a seasoned jazz pianist, and a founder of the
research field of multimodality. Born in the Netherlands in 1947, Van Leeuwen’s
career in semiotics spans four decades and two continents” (2018: 1). In their chap-
ter on his contribution to SocSem, Djonov and Zhao (2018: 1) remark on his work’s
“breadth and evolving nature, its range in subjects and perspectives, and its transdis-
ciplinary reach”, with research on, e.g., film, children’s toys, music, school text-
books, women’s magazines, kinetic art, news journalism, semiotic software and a
large variety of other issues, as discussed here. They remarked on his rich back-
ground in a wide range of theories and perspectives, not only the Paris and Prague
schools of semiotics and Foucault’s theory of discourse but also the Bauhaus art and
design movement, Arnheim’s psychology of visual perception, Schafer’s studies of
music and sound, Gage’s theory of color, and the anthropologist Goffman.
It is fitting that we should finish this chapter with van Leeuwen’s transdisci-
plinary reach, as this will prepare the reader for the discussion in Chap. 4 about CDS
and the various approaches to CDA/CDS.

new media design, especially websites and other multimedia products; it provides a “map for how
we believe new media design should evolve” (Martinec & van Leeuwen, 2008: 195).
References 141

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Chapter 4
The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

4.1  Introduction: CDA, CDS and CDA/CDS

Before we describe the best known approaches to CDA/CDS, we need to address

again the issue of the relation between CDA and CDS. As said in the Preface and
also in Chap. 1, we view both CDA and CDS as part of the same overall research
domain, as do many practitioners. It is clear that CDA is the ‘older’ name and CDS
the ‘newer’ one. This is evidenced in this book by the (almost) exclusive use of
CDA in Chaps. 2 and 3, which are focused on the precursors to and the emergence
of CDA. But now that we are moving on to its further development, we will be dis-
cussing both CDA and CDS, since, in recent years, some of the critical discourse
scholars have transitioned from using just CDA and have moved more toward (only)
CDS (van Dijk, 2011). A few examples of this include the journal Critical Discourse
Studies, but also recent books, articles, and chapters, and handbooks1 (such as van
Dijk, 2016; Wodak & Meyer, 2016a; Flowerdew & Richardson, 2018a). This has led
to various subtle and substantive differences in the use of the two names. Some have
kept with the original term CDA since CDA is widely known and used and they are
comfortable with it (or they use both CDA and CDS, more or less interchangeably),
or they see CDS as simply an organic extension of CDA in its more mature stage
and thus CDA is still appropriate. For others, CDS is more commonly used to refer
to the field as a whole while CDA denotes the methodology or ‘analysis’ in the nar-
row sense. And, for still others, CDS means that scholarship of this sort is more
wide-ranging and expansive than in CDA (see Sect. 4.2.1 below). For example, they
see CDA as interdisciplinary but centered on linguistics as its ‘pilot’ discipline with
a more restrictive grammatical, lexical or textual orientation; and, in contrast, they

1
 We can note that the older term discourse analysis (DA), on which the label CDA is built, exists
alongside the newer term, discourse studies (DS) on which CDS is built, with certain parallel
issues of the difference(s) between them; we also note that DA continues to be widely used by
many scholars.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 155

T. Catalano, L. R. Waugh, Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse
Studies and Beyond, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 26,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49379-0_4
156 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

see CDS as a broader multi/trans/cross-disciplinary field of study at the crossroads

of language and society and other domains of human experience and in which vari-
ous facets of expansive areas of context are studied and integrated (see Richardson,
Krzyżanowski, Machin, & Wodak, 2014b). And they also make a parallel between
critical discourse ‘studies’ and ‘discourse studies’ (DS) on the one hand and gender
or culture or East Asian ‘studies’ (etc.) on the other hand, which for them points to
the widening and the maturing of CDA into CDS and gives the field more credibility
and a different positioning.
And yet, as Zhang, Paul, Yadan, and Wen (2011: 95) point out, “there is a large
amount of work using the label ‘CDA’ emerging in other parts of the world, in other
languages and under social and political conditions that are very different from
those of liberal-democratic Europe”. Given the beliefs of critical scholarship, we do
not want to ‘disenfranchise’ those who use CDA in various parts of the world and
we do not want to ‘privilege’ either CDA or CDS; therefore we are using our own
acronym CDA/CDS to show that we see them as tightly tied with each other both
chronologically and intellectually and we also view everyone under this name,
including ourselves, as working together “harmoniously” (Zhang et al., 2011: 105).
Tracing the use of these terms over time, the earliest scholarly publication we
could find that explicitly addresses the issue of the difference between the terms
‘critical discourse analysis’ and ‘critical discourse studies’ as a programmatic use is
the inaugural issue of the journal Critical Discourse Studies, established in 2004. In
the introduction to the first issue, Fairclough, Graham, Lemke and Wodak (2004: 1)
mark the emergence of a “field of critical discourse studies” which “draws upon but
goes beyond established enclaves of specialized work on discourse”. Later they add
(2004: 4):
The development of a field of critical discourse studies, characterized as it is by a remark-
able degree of interdisciplinarity, gives rise to a wide range of issues which we hope this
journal will be able to address.

Despite the journal’s title and clear stance regarding the use of ‘critical discourse
studies’ (CDS) to denote the field at large, many of the articles it publishes use
‘critical discourse analysis’ (CDA) in their titles and texts. And as we noted above,
the use of CDA has still continued in the work (and titles) of many well-known
scholars, including Fairclough, whose much expanded second edition (2010) of
Critical Discourse Analysis kept the same title. However, on the website for Rebecca
Roger’s (2011) version of An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis in
Education (with that title), there is a video of a lecture by Teun van Dijk in which
he states his preference for the label, critical discourse ‘studies’ in the introduction
to his talk (2011; excerpt from video transcription, single quotes by the authors):
[…] I would like to propose to all of you if you would like to do, as I will do, henceforth,
not use ‘critical discourse analysis’ but ‘critical discourse studies’ because ‘analysis’ sug-
gests that it is mostly analysis and not much theory … so in the same way that we have
‘feminist studies’ or ‘gender studies’ and so on, I would like to propose that we henceforth
use ‘critical discourse studies’ … (van Dijk, 2011).
4.1  Introduction: CDA, CDS and CDA/CDS 157

And we should note the title of (van Dijk, 2013): ‘CDA is NOT a method of criti-
cal discourse analysis’ (see also Wodak, 2013b; Wodak & Meyer, 2016b: 2). Here,
it is clear that van Dijk is (one of) the major proponent(s) of a move from CDA to
CDS as the label of this research field. Much before the programmatic use of the
term, van Dijk called it CDS in publications such as Elite Discourse and Racism
(1993b, on the back cover), his paper ‘Discourse Semantics and Ideology’ (1995b),
and then, more systematically, his book Discourse and Power (2008b), in which he
explicitly proposed using CDS instead of CDA (van Dijk, personal communication,
May 24, 2019), and he was also talking about it in public lectures (such as the one
in 2011 we mention above). However, outside of the journal Critical Discourse
Studies, the name still hadn’t caught on in titles of major academic publications
until a few years later, and then not for everyone.
In Wodak and Meyer’s Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis books, the authors
(2001, first edition) use the terms Critical Linguistics (CritLing) and Critical
Discourse Analysis (CDA) interchangeably, while in the 2nd edition (2009a),
Wodak and Meyer (2009b) have a decided preference for CDA (but they allude to
CDS). And in the 3rd edition (2016a), they adopt CDS, including in the title, which
became Methods of Critical Discourse Studies and in the Introduction (Wodak &
Meyer, 2016b: 3). They explain this evolving terminology by first providing a
lengthy quote from van Dijk (2013) justifying this change. Hart and Cap (2014a)
used CDS in the title of their edited book (Contemporary Critical Discourse
Studies), although, again, individual authors (e.g., van Leeuwen, 2014) varied in
their chapters as to the use of CDS or CDA. And all of the chapters in Richardson,
Krzyżanowski, Machin and Wodak (2014a) were originally published in Special
Issues of the journal Critical Discourse Studies (2008, 2009, 2011). Both CDA and
CDS are used in the joint Preface (Richardson et al., 2014b) and the titles and texts
of the chapters, showing once again the interchange between the two. Ian Roderick’s
book (Roderick is currently on the editorial board for Critical Discourse Studies)
uses ‘studies’ in the title: Critical Discourse Studies and Technology: A Multimodal
Approach to Analyzing Technoculture (2016) and quotes van Dijk (2009b: 62) to
justify using CDS in order to avoid confusion. Finally, Flowerdew and Richardson
title their 2018 book The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies and
note in the introduction (2018b: 1–2):
While CDS is rapidly becoming the favorite acronym, Critical Discourse Studies (CDS)
was previously referred to as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and in fact, the initial pre-­
publication title for this volume used this term. While we prevaricated for some time over
whether to update the title, our minds were made up with the change of the third edition of
Wodak and Meyer’s (2016a) influential Methods of Critical Discourse Studies from the title
of the first two editions, which was Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. As van Dijk
(2009b: 62) has observed, the rationale for this change of designation resides in the fact that
CDA was increasingly not restricted to applied analysis, but also included philosophical,
theoretical, methodological, and practical developments (of which not all use the term
CDS). This indeed, is reflected in many of the chapters of this volume (although the case
studies included as a part of nearly all of the chapters focus on analysis); hence our decision
to update the title.
158 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

Flowerdew and Richardson are both on the editorial board of the journal Critical
Discourse Studies (Richardson is current editor), so it is not surprising that they
adopt this term in their book. A final example of this is Ledin and Machin (2018),
whose recent book is called Doing Visual Analysis: From Theory to Practice.
Although the authors use MCDA (multimodal critical discourse analysis) and CDA
when they talk about the field as a whole (2018: 27–28), they note that “CDA as a
field of research today has become institutionalized as critical discourse stud-
ies (CDS)”.
Given the above information, the historical and intellectual linkage of CDA and
CDS with each other, the substantial overlap between them and general situation of
CDA and CDS, we have decided to include both (using our own acronym CDA/
CDS) in this book. We will now move on to our discussion of the best-known
approaches to CDA/CDS research.

4.2  P
 anoply of Work in CDA/CDS: Criteria for the Main
Approaches

4.2.1  Introduction

In this chapter, we will use the term ‘approaches’ (and sometimes ‘frameworks’ or
‘models’ or ‘research strategies’) as a way of talking about the panoply of work in
CDA/CDS.  Wodak (2001a, b; in Wodak & Meyer, 2001; see also Fairclough &
Wodak, 1997; Reisigl & Wodak, 2001), who was the main historian and biographer
of the early days of CDA (see Sect. 3.8.8), seems to have been the first to point out
and document that there were various different approaches which could be listed
under the heading of CDA (not just different critical approaches to DA, for which
see van Dijk, 2006/2011; Fairclough & Wodak, 1997) and also that they could be
seen as a strength of CDA. As Wodak points out (2001a, b; see also Sect. 3.1) the
variety of approaches is in a certain sense the result of the natural evolution of CDA
from the 1991 symposium in Amsterdam with five different scholars and their
‘shared perspective’, which includes “the concept of power, the concept of history,
and the concept of ideology” (Wodak, 2001a: 3) in addition to a ‘critical’ perspec-
tive. And this is so in spite of the many differences between them—including the
fact that, as will become clear, both the notion of ‘discourse’ and also ‘critique/criti-
cal’, ‘context’, ‘power’, ‘history’, ‘ideology’, and others, were understood in differ-
ent ways by the ‘original CDA group’ as well as the successor groups and researchers
(see Sect. 3.2). In other words, they were at the beginning—and they remain—as
also said above (Sect. 3.1), “an international heterogeneous, closely knit group of
scholars … bound together more by a research agenda and programme than by
some common theory or methodology“ (Wodak, 2001a: 4). That is, there was a
wide variety of different approaches and linguistic tools used to analyze discourse
(as indicated by the subtitle of Wodak & Meyer, 2001, 2009a, 2016a). And Meyer
4.2  Panoply of Work in CDA/CDS: Criteria for the Main Approaches 159

(2001) also pointed out other issues that had not been adequately discussed (e.g., the
operationalization of the various theories, the relation between the linguistic and
social dimensions, the definition of ‘context’, the achievement of ‘true’ inter- or
cross- or transdisciplinarity, and so forth (see also Wodak, 2001a)).

4.2.2  Issues with the Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

The purpose of this chapter is not to document, describe or prescribe all ways of
doing CDA/CDS work or to place each scholar’s work into neat little boxes (which,
in any case, can’t be done). Rather, the purpose is to provide a convenient way of
thinking about the domain of CDA/CDS, its approaches and its influences. In doing
so, we recognize that many scholars (such as Wodak) are happy to take inspiration
from a variety of frameworks, since she in particular feels that the basis of her work
lies principally in her own approach (DHA) to CDA/CDS, with overlays/additions
that show the influence of other models (such as van Dijk’s SCA) and of other fields,
such as sociolinguistics (see Sects. 3.8.3 and 6.4), pragmatics (see Sect. 6.9) and so
forth. Furthermore, it is actually more common to find CDA/CDS scholarship that
combines two or more approaches than work which strictly adheres to one. We
would also like to point out that across the numerous scholarly works that describe
and explain CDA/CDS, there are differences in names and groupings (and even
understandings) of the various approaches. Our chapter synthesizes them into the
most commonly discussed, but also according to what we hope will make sense to
our readers in terms of grasping the scope of work in this domain. We also want to
underscore that we do not say that any approach is better or more useful, given that
we feel this greatly depends on a variety of factors and the different contexts in
which scholars are working (and because this is not the aim of our book). However,
we do note in what ways each approach, in our opinion, makes a significant addition
to the field.
The question of what approaches there are to CDA/CDS has become more and
more complex as the field has developed, and perhaps even more problematic in the
sense that many of them have changed greatly over time and increasingly they have
tended to overlap with each other and even with ones outside of CDA/CDS (we
expand on this below) or to bring into CDA/CDS domains that weren’t originally
thought of as part of its scope (e.g., multimodality, corpus linguistics, cognitive
linguistics). Since the 2000s CDA/CDS approaches have been defined and mapped
out in various ways, such as in terms of their relation to various theories in other
domains (e.g. post-structuralism and cognitive psychology) or whether they are
concerned with linguistic content or structure (e.g. syntagmatic, paradigmatic,
cohesive, conceptual) or if they focus on the cognitive or functional (social) dimen-
sions of discourse (see Hart & Cap, 2014a: 6–8). And, as Wodak and Meyer (2016b:
19) point out, “different authors in the field use theoretical entry-points in a rather
eclectic way depending on their specific interests and research questions”. In addi-
tion, scholars have brought attention to a past lack of recognition of the
160 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

i­nterconnectedness of each of the approaches to the others (Hart & Cap, 2014b;
Wodak & Meyer, 2016b).
Even when the approaches are designated as the same, they are often referred to
in somewhat different ways by different authors (e.g., ‘corpus based approaches’ vs.
‘corpus linguistic approaches’). Fairclough, Mulderrig, and Wodak (2011: 361–366)
divide them into the following categories: critical linguistics (CritLing) and social
semiotics (SocSem), “Fairclough’s approach”, SCA, DHA, argumentation and rhet-
oric, and corpus linguistic approaches (CorpLingA). Angermuller, Maingueneau
and Wodak (2014: 361) categorize them as DRA, SCA, SocSem and visual gram-
mar, DPA, and DHA, noting that they have been (and continue to be) “elaborated,
challenged, changed, and reformulated”, and “new approaches have been devel-
oped”. Hart and Cap (2014b) give the topic of approaches much attention, discuss-
ing in detail each one, while adding some that are not listed in previous sources,
such as critical cognitive pragmatics, legitimization-proximization model, cognitive
linguistic approach (CogLingA), critical metaphor analysis and CorpLingA. Each
of them is defined in terms of the most salient elements they analyze (e.g. grammati-
cal metaphor, argumentation, conceptual metaphor, frequency and reference), epis-
temological orientation (e.g. post-structuralism, systemic functional grammar) and
focus on structure versus content or functional versus cognitive dimensions of dis-
course. Roderick (2016) mentions four major approaches, DRA, DHA, SCA and
SocSem and MCDA and also notes that recently there has been an additional align-
ment of corpus linguistics and cognitive linguistics with critical approaches.
Wodak and Meyer (2016b: 17–21) include chapters on the following five major
approaches which are updated versions of the same approaches as in the 2009 ver-
sion of their book: DHA (Reisigl and Wodak), SCA (van Dijk), DRA (Fairclough),
DPA (Jäger and Maier), and discourse as the recontextualization of social practice
(van Leeuwen). They also include three other chapters on: CorpLingA (Mautner
2009, 2016), analysis of visual and multimodal texts (Jancsary, Höllerer, & Meyer,
2016), and CDS and social media (KhosraviNik & Unger, 2016)—which are more
narrow in their conceptualization than the other five. Thus, several different types of
‘approaches’ are presented in Wodak’s co-edited ‘Methods of CDA/CDS’ books,
including (as documented in Sect. 4.2) four that have been part of the CDA/CDS
group across 2001–2016 (although each of them has evolved over that time period)
and four others that were created during this time period and are still very active. In
addition, we should note that Kress distanced himself from CDA very early on and
hence is not included in the ‘Methods of CDA/CDS’ books at all, and Ron Scollon
was included in Wodak and Meyer (2001), but not in later versions, since he with-
drew from CDA and then passed away.
Most recently, Flowerdew and Richardson (2018b: 8), in their comprehensive
edited volume, The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, dedicate
one section of the book to “current predominant approaches to CDS” and note that
it covers “more established theoretical-analytic positions” (such as the DRA, SCA,
DHA and MCDA). However, they also address “newer approaches” (2018a: 8),
which stress the role of cognition (e.g., CogLingA) (Hart & Cap, 2014a, 2014b),
culture (Gavriely-Nuri, 2018; see Sect. 6.6) and corpora (e.g., CorpLingA) (Mautner,
4.2  Panoply of Work in CDA/CDS: Criteria for the Main Approaches 161

2009, 2016; Subtirelu & Baker, 2018), as well as positive discourse analysis (PDA,
Bartlett, 2018; see Sect. 5.8). Although no other sources discussed above included
PDA as an approach, Flowerdew and Richardson (2018b: 8) justify its placement in
their book, saying that they chose to include it because of its focus on discourses
and texts that “offer hope and solutions rather than emphasizing problems and nega-
tive forces, as is often the case in mainstream CDS”.2

4.2.3  Synthesis of our Analysis of the Major Approaches

In this section, we compare some of the most important scholarly works that dedi-
cate significant attention to ‘approaches’ to CDA/CDS; and while we do not claim
nor can we aim to represent every article that has dealt with them, our goal is to
include some of the most recent and most cited sources of this information. Below,
Table 4.1 synthesizes our analysis of the books/articles and their listing of the major
approaches. We have organized the scholarly works in terms of their chronological
order (from left to right) and the names of the approaches in alphabetical order. Note
that the presence of an approach that is explicitly named in the scholarly work is
indicated with an “X”. If the approach is included, but the title varies in some way
from the title we list, that variant is given in parentheses.
Given this variety in terminology and difference of opinion as to whether or not
certain perspectives are included in the list of major (or most common) approaches
to CDA/CDS, we have chosen to outline in this chapter the seven best known
approaches according to the following criteria: they are frequently cited in the lit-
erature, have the most publications, have appeared in major journals in the field
(especially Discourse and Society, Critical Discourse Studies, Discourse Studies,
and Social Semiotics) and are currently commonly used by scholars in the field. In
addition, we will treat other emerging approaches or combinations of CDA/CDS
with other disciplines in Chap. 6. We have also chosen to use names for the
approaches that are most commonly found in the literature, or reflect current trends
in the field, as in the case of the social semiotics/multimodal approach (SocSem/
MCDA). Therefore, this chapter covers the following approaches: DRA, SCA,
DHA, SocSem/MCDA, DPA, CorpLingA, and CogLingA, starting with the
approaches of the original founders in the order in which we discussed them in
Chap. 3. However, we would also like to affirm once again (see Hart & Cap, 2014a;
Wodak & Meyer, 2016b) the interconnectedness of all of the approaches and the
fact that much CDA/CDS work combines approaches, topics and fields of study
which come from different schools of thought and a wide range of disciplines. In
addition, it is rare to find a researcher who uses only one approach without the

2
 Although we agree with this assessment of the value of PDA, we decided to place our discussion
of it in Chapter 5, as a response to critique of CDA since only Flowerdew and Richardson label it
as an approach, and our discussion of PDA explains in detail why we believe it is more of a
changed focus rather than a different approach.
Table 4.1  Books/articles that address CDA/CDS approaches (in chronological order)
162

Wodak and Angermuller,

Name of approach (in Meyer Fairclough, Mulderrig, Hart and Cap Maingueneau, and Roderick Wodak and Meyer Flowerdew and
alphabetical order) (2009a) and Wodak (2011) (2014a) Wodak (2014) (2016) (2016a) Richardson (2018a)
CDA/CDS and Social X
Mediaa
Cognitive Approaches X (includes four X X (stresses the role
different cognitive of cognition)
approaches—see
below, Sect. 4.9.3)
Corpus Linguistic X X (corpus based) X X X X(stresses the role
Approaches of corpora)
Critical Linguistics X X
Cultural Approaches X
Dialectical-Relational X X (called ‘Fairclough’s X X X X X
approach’)
Discourse Historical X X X X X X X
Foucauldian/Dispositive X X (includes X X X X
analysis argumentation and
rhetoric)
Positive Discourse Analysis X
Recontextualization of X (social X (social actors) X
social practice actors)
Social semiotics/multimodal X (grouped together X (Social semiotics X X (analysis of X (multi-modal
approach with critical and visual grammar) visual and CDA)
linguistics) multimodal texts)
Sociocognitive X X X X X X X
a
While we choose not to feature CDA/CDS and social media as a separate approach in this chapter, we would like to point out that CDA/CDS scholars have
recently given increasing attention to social media, and more and more studies have been published analyzing social media discourse. We refer to many of these
studies throughout the book and cite them where relevant in terms of the approach used to analyze that type of discourse
4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS
4.2  Panoply of Work in CDA/CDS: Criteria for the Main Approaches 163

i­nfluence of, or the borrowing of terminology or concepts from, another. Wodak is

an excellent example of a scholar who borrows from many disciplines and scholarly
works and is also consistently forthright about how the work of others has influ-
enced her own. Her highly regarded book (2015), The Politics of Fear (discussed in
Sects. 3.8.7, 4.5, and 7.2), relies on DHA and also includes, e.g., multimodal analy-
sis from a SocSem frame. Therefore, we agree that one of the advantages of CDA/
CDS is “its lack of set ways of conducting analysis” (Baker, 2012) and one of its
strengths is the fact that different approaches can be combined with different disci-
plines (to be discussed in Chap. 6) and can be used to analyze different types of texts
(see also Wodak & Meyer, 2009a, 2016a).

4.2.4  What the Approaches Have in Common

What is important about the different approaches and what ties them together is that
they have a number of characteristics in common (see Sect. 3.2). For example, they
are problem/issue oriented, interdisciplinary and eclectic, and share an interest in
“demystifying ideologies and power through the investigation of semiotic data (e.g.,
written, spoken, or visual)” (Wodak and Meyer, 2016b: 4). In addition, they each
aim to “investigate critically social inequality” as it is expressed, constituted and
legitimized in discourse (2016b: 12). Moreover, they work eclectically as a group in
terms of theoretical background, touching upon an entire range of theories from
Grand Theories to micro(-linguistic) ones (2016b: 17); they also state that “there is
no accepted canon of data sampling”, but that “operationalization and analysis are
problem-oriented and imply linguistic expertise” (2016b: 22). They also share core
beliefs related to the role of discourse and society (see Paltridge, 2012: 188–190;
Wodak & Meyer, 2016b; see our individual discussions of each approach below for
more specific details).
Given this, most types of CDA/CDS seek to ask questions about the way specific
discourse properties are deployed in the reproduction of social dominance, and (no
matter the approach) attempt to define whose interests are being represented, e.g.,
which social actors, groups, or institutions have the power to convince, harm, domi-
nate, or control others and to what ends. But it also has a role in helping people
break free from the deleterious effects that are uncovered in CDA/CDS analyses
(see Chap. 7 for more details). Social power is seen as a source of control, a power
base of privileged access to scarce social resources, such as force, money, status,
fame, knowledge, information, language, and specific forms of discourse, including
especially public discourse and access to ways to instill beliefs about the world
through discourse and communication. We would also add that all of the approaches
have now taken a ‘multimodal turn’ (Jewitt, 2009; Machin, 2013) in the sense that
they affirm and account for the fact that meaning-making in communication does
not happen only through language and thus all of the approaches we describe here
are in essence multimodal, but some more than others (and not all use the term).
What’s new is not that communication is multimodal, since (as said in Sects. 2.6,
164 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

2.7, and 3.9) it has always been that way, but that it has been becoming increasingly
more multimodal in our global and technologically interconnected world, which has
led to both recognition of this fact in the CDA/CDS community and attempts to
build multimodality into theories and into understanding of communication.
Despite these commonalities, the several frameworks of CDA/CDS scholarship
vary considerably according to scientific methodology, theoretical influence and
“ability to ‘translate’ their theoretical claims into instruments and methods of analy-
sis” (Wodak & Meyer, 2016b: 14). Each approach, combination of approaches and
school of thought has “different theoretical models, research methods and agenda”
(Fairclough et al., 2011: 357) (see Sect. 3.2).
Below, we outline the origins of each major approach, associated scholars and
research focus/foci, as well as central concepts/distinguishing features, including
(when applicable) their definition of ‘discourse and other concepts given above.

4.3  Dialectical-Relational Approach (DRA)

4.3.1  The Major Properties of DRA

As said above, Fairclough is one of the key figures in the realm of CDA (he doesn’t
use the term CDS; see also Sect. 3.5 on CLS and CLA); his Language and Power
book (Fairclough, 1989–, 2nd ed. 2001, 3rd ed. 2015) is commonly considered one
of the pioneering publications for the genesis of CDA (see Sects. 3.1 and 3.5.2). He
has been very prolific and has continued to publish in this area since that time,
although the ways in which he has characterized his particular approach to CDA
have also evolved over the course of his career (see Fairclough, 2018 for the latest
version). Like Wodak (see Sect. 3.8.1) he actively read social theory before the
advent of CDA, although his work is heavily influenced by Marxism (see Sect.
3.5.1) while hers is more influenced by the Frankfurt School. According to Wodak
and Meyer (2009b: 27), the DRA:
focuses upon social conflict in the Marxian tradition and tries to detect its linguistic mani-
festations in discourse, in specific elements of dominance, difference and resistance … He
understands CDA as the analysis of the dialectical relationships between semiosis (includ-
ing language) and other elements of social practice … His approach to CDA oscillates
between a focus on structure and a focus on action.

One measure of Fairclough’s own maturation in CDA is a comparison of the first

edition of his book (see also Sect. 3.5.5), Critical discourse analysis: The critical
study of language (1995) with the 2nd edition (2010a). The former is a collection of
ten papers written between 1983 and 1992, grouped into four sections: ‘Language,
ideology and power’; ‘Discourse and sociocultural change’; ‘Textual analysis in
social research’; and ‘Critical Language Awareness’ (see Sect. 3.5.5). In the second
edition, there are 23 papers (six from the first edition) from 1983 to 2008, for which
he kept the first two sections as before, renamed the fourth section as ‘Language and
4.3  Dialectical-Relational Approach (DRA) 165

education’, and added four others: ‘Dialectics of discourse: Theoretical develop-

ments’; ‘Methodology in CDA research’; ‘Political discourse’; and ‘Globalisation
and ‘transition”. The four new sections are a reflection of the ways in which his
work developed between 1995 and 2010. In the general introduction (2010b) to the
second edition he states that the broad objective of his work in CDA had remained
the same: “to develop ways of analysing language which address its involvement in
the workings of contemporary capitalist societies” and to better understand how
capitalism prevents, limits or facilitates “human well-being and flourishing”
(Fairclough, 2010a: 1–2).
Fairclough’s DRA approach to CDA has three basic properties. It is “relational”
in the sense that it focuses on social relations and not individuals, and these relations
are “dialectical” in the sense of “being different but not ‘discrete’, i.e., not fully
separate” (Fairclough, 2016: 87), not either fully exclusive or separate from each
other (Fairclough, 2010a: 4). In addition, it is “transdisciplinary” because when
analyzing dialectical relations between discourse and other objects, elements or
moments, as well as internal elements, analysis must cut “across conventional
boundaries between disciplines” (Fairclough, 2010a: 4). Hence, there is dialogue
between disciplines, theories and frameworks. The transdisciplinary nature of the
approach also “allows for various ‘points of entry’ for the discourse analyst, the
sociologist, the political economist and so forth, which focus upon different ele-
ments or aspects of the object of research” (Fairclough, 2010a: 5). His approach is
also “realist” (see Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999, 2010; Fairclough, 1999, 2003,
2006, 2009, 2010b, 2012), because it posits that there is a real world (which includes
the social world), which exists regardless of how well we know or understand it. In
his ‘critical realist approach’, he recognizes that the natural and social worlds differ
and the social world depends upon human action for its existence and is socially
constructed.
With this as the basis, Fairclough (2016: 87) uses the term ‘discourse’ in various
interlocking senses including: “(a) meaning-making as an element of the social pro-
cess, (b) the language associated with a particular social field or practice (e.g. ‘polit-
ical discourse’), (c) a way of construing aspects of the world associated with a
particular social perspective (e.g. a ‘neo-liberal discourse of globalization’)”. In
order to avoid confusion among these different meanings of discourse he uses the
term ‘semiosis’ in Halliday’s sense (1985) of ‘meaning-making’ (e.g., how we
understand the world) which “frames social interaction and contributes to the con-
struction of social relations” (Fairclough et al., 2004: 219). But he also insists that
elements such as social relations, power, institutions, etc. are only partly, not purely,
semiotic, and thus he opens up the question about the “relations as articulations
between semiotic and non-semiotic elements … and between semiotic elements”
(Fairclough, 2010b: 164). Specific ‘discourses’ (vs. ‘discourse’) “are semiotic ways
of construing aspects of the world (physical, social or mental) which can be gener-
ally identified with different positions or perspectives of different groups of social
actors” (Fairclough, 2016: 88). And ‘orders of discourse’ (Fairclough,
1992—­configurations of different genres, discourses and styles; see also Foucault,
166 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

19723)—are “the semiotic dimension of (networks of) social practices which consti-
tute social fields, institutions, organizations, etc.” (Fairclough, 2016: 89). He
reserves the term ‘text’ for the semiotic dimension of events4; it encompasses writ-
ten, conversational, interviews, and multimodal texts.

4.3.2  The Values of DRA

We agree with Fairclough that one of the values of the DRA lies in its ability to
make sense of data from different perspectives (Fairclough, 2009, 2016). Moreover,
DRA allows people to see through the “complex dialectical relations between semi-
otic and non-semiotic elements which constitute the social, political and economic
conditions of their lives”—something most people are not capable of doing by
themselves (Fairclough, 2016: 106). Drawing on the work of Harvey (1996),
Fairclough argues for theoretical diversity through incorporating the macro level of
social structure and the micro level of social action. Chouliaraki and Fairclough
(1999: 16) posit the following:
We see CDA as bringing a variety of theories into dialogue, especially social theories on the
one hand and linguistic theories on the other, so that its theory is a shifting synthesis of
other theories, though what it itself theorises in particular is the mediation between the
social and the linguistic—the ‘order of discourse’, the social structuring of semiotic hybrid-
ity (interdiscursivity).

In fact, DRA refuses to be limited to specific fields or methodologies and, there-

fore, Fairclough et al. (2011: 362) posit that this approach “has explored the discur-
sive aspect of contemporary processes of social transformation … [through a]
commitment to transdisciplinarity—whereby the logic and categories of different
disciplines are brought together into dialogue with one another”.
Fairclough (2016: 91–95, 104) organizes the implementation of DRA into four
stages: (1) focus on a social wrong (e.g., an order which is detrimental to human
well-being) with special attention to dialectical relations between semiotic and
other ‘moments’; (2) identify obstacles to addressing the social wrong (e.g., what is
it about the way society is structured that prevents it from being addressed?); (3)
consider whether the social order ‘needs’ the social wrong for the greater good to
occur (e.g., the suppression of political differences in favor of a consensus is seen as
necessary for a state to operate); and (4) identify possible ways past the obstacles
(e.g., texts that offer alternative imaginaries, oppositional strategies). He describes
the core analytical categories of this approach as being semiosis (and other social
elements), discourse/style/genre, order of discourse (and social practices), text (and

3
 This concept is influenced by Foucault’s (1972: 211) idea of discourse as not simply “that which
translates struggles or systems of domination”, but as the entity “for which and by which there is
struggle” and the idea that discourse itself is the power that needs to be seized.
4
 In much of his work, Fairclough insists upon his ‘text-orientation’, that is, a focus on particular
authentic texts.
4.3  Dialectical-Relational Approach (DRA) 167

social event), interdiscursivity (and interdiscursive analysis), recontextualization

and operationalization (enactment, inculcation, materialization) (2016: 171).
An excellent example of DRA (included in Fairclough, 2009, 2016; see also
Fairclough, 2000) is his political discourse analysis of the Foreword to a govern-
ment document written by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and a critique
of Blair’s ‘New Labour’ government by two former members of the Labour Party.
Fairclough begins with a summary of the political condition at that time (with a
detailed description of the role of globalization and neo-liberalism) and then shows
how the texts define relations between the companies and national governments,
and the contrast between what is, and what should be, inferred in relations between
the EU and national governments, demonstrating the dialectical nature of these rela-
tions and placing the focus on semiosis. He then explains (2016: 105) how the first
text “depoliticises by construing a consensus on the global economy as an inevitable
fact of life and building national competitiveness as a necessary response” whereas
the second text “politicises by construing the globalised economy as a stake in
struggles between governments and transnationals, and capital and labour, and by
opposing that construal to the government’s concensualist construal” (2016: 105).
Fairclough’s approach has been criticized for spending too much time on depo-
liticization and not enough on politicization (which he justifies as a known bias
stemming from his involvement in the left-wing politics of the 1970s), and while he
does not agree that this is a limitation, he does admit that more cognitively oriented
research on discourse could be complimentary to the DRA (2016: 106). Some other
work by Fairclough taking this approach includes his research on the discourse of
New Labour (2003), which supplies many examples of applications of this approach,
his (2005) analysis of neo-liberalism and its effects on the branding of Bãsecsu, a
presidential candidate in Romania, his (2006) work on the politically powerful con-
cepts of globalization, and various chapters in (2010b), described above.

4.3.3  Changes in Fairclough’s Approach

Fairclough and Fairclough (2012) present a new approach to the analysis of political
discourse as a contribution to the development of CDA, somewhat different from
the political discourse analysis of Chilton (2004, 2010), which we will discuss
shortly, and Wodak’s DHA (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009, 2016; Wodak, 2001a, 2009; de
Cillia & Wodak, 2006, discussed below). What is new is “that it views political
discourse as primarily a form of argumentation … practical argumentation, argu-
mentation for or against particular ways of acting, argumentation that can ground
decision” (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012: 1), and the 2012 book includes a frame-
work for analyzing and evaluating political discourse from this point of view, using
many examples stemming from the financial crisis (2007–2011). Since it is meant
to be a textbook for advanced students, one of its objectives is pedagogical and
methodological, “to provide a new and better method that can be replicated in the
analysis of different sets of data” (2012: 13).
168 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

Fairclough (2015, 2016) stresses (again) the dialectical character of his approach,
and how this aids in making it attuned to transdisciplinary research, enhancing the
capacity of “various bodies of social theory and research to address often neglected
semiotic dimensions” as well as taking from them perspectives and research logics
that move the approach itself forward (2016: 105). He also addresses his critics
(again), reiterating his response to the critique we mentioned above about spending
too much time on depoliticization and not enough on politicization but also adding
that he agrees with Chilton’s (2005a) argument that people are capable of doing
their own political critique. However, he does not believe that this means they are
“generally capable of seeing the dialectical relations between semiotic and non-
semiotic elements that constitute the social, political and economic conditions of
their lives” (Fairclough, 2016: 106). Hence, the “essence of CDA and what distin-
guishes [the DRA] from other forms of (critical) analysis” as he sees it, is the way
in which it explains how discourse relates to other elements of the existing reality
(2015: 6). It is these explanations for why particular discourses exist that make up
the “critical” in CDA (2015: 7) and also what render it something that average
media consumers do not normally arrive at on their own. Furthermore, he argues
that if we don’t understand how existing societies work, we cannot understand how
discourse figures within them nor how we can change societies for the better. Thus,
we must emphasize “the power behind discourse rather than just the power in dis-
course” with the aim of raising consciousness of how language contributes to the
domination of some people over others (2015: 3). In this view, social reality begins
with discourse and thus if one wishes to critique the discourse, one needs to start
with critiquing the existing social reality (a point discussed in Sect. 3.5). In addition,
he reiterates how CDA “is nothing if not a resource for struggle against domination”
(2015: 3), and its whole point and purpose is to provide those undergoing social
struggle with a resource in advancing the struggle toward “social emancipation”
(2015: 252) and against neo-liberalism. We believe that Fairclough’s emphasis on
resistance to neoliberalism is a crucial research direction for many of the areas
which CDA/CDS touches upon.
An excellent example of recent CDA/CDS work that tackles neoliberalism (and
explains how CDA/CDS is an apt tool for doing so) is Ulysse (2013), who doesn’t
explicitly say he is doing DRA, but he does cite Fairclough’s work frequently, and
both his topic and his analysis are clearly influenced by it. In his chapter in
Counterpoints: Paradigms of research for the twenty-first century, he describes how
neoliberalism can be defined as a discourse and cites studies that trace its develop-
ment (e.g., Davies & Bensel, 2007). Additionally, he breaks down concepts such as
‘privatization’ (which he says rarely delivers on what it purports to do), ‘the free
market’, ‘deregulation’, and ‘freedom’. Ulysse declares ‘freedom’ to be symbolic
and virtually impossible to enjoy on an equal basis in a neoliberal world (2013:
227–232). Most importantly, he demonstrates how neoliberal ideologies are propa-
gated, implemented, and reinforced, overtly and covertly, with the ultimate effect of
both consciously and unconsciously controlling “the thoughts and behaviors of
people in their respective societies” (2013: 232).
4.3  Dialectical-Relational Approach (DRA) 169

Another excellent example of scholarship that makes the connection between

CDA/CDS and its role in challenging neoliberalism is Chun (2018). In his chapter
(in Flowerdew & Richardson, 2018a), he provides a detailed definition of neoliber-
alism and globalization and gives an example of counter narratives to neoliberalism
put forward by reader comments in an opinion piece in the New York Times. He then
suggests that these comments serve as models for discursive strategies and practices
that contest “neoliberal common-sense beliefs” and “question who benefits and who
is left behind in our societies” because of them (Chun, 2018: 431). He also argues
that the primary aim of CDA/CDS is to “remake new common-sense beliefs based
on our collective and communal agencies in solidarity among each other against the
onslaught and ravages of neoliberalism” (2018: 431).
Up to now, we have explained the major characteristics of Fairclough’s approach
as well as some of the changes in it over time. To summarizes these changes briefly,
the first version was oriented to the post-World War 2 social settlement and centered
on critique of ideological discourse as “part of a concern with the reproduction of
the existing social order” (Fairclough, 1989); the second was related to the move to
neoliberalism and centered on critique of discourse as social change (Fairclough,
1992); his third and latest version is “CDA as dialectical reasoning”, and in
(Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012), he examines the 2007 and after financial/eco-
nomic crisis and focuses on deliberative discourse as a strategy to overcome it.
In this latest iteration, Fairclough defines ‘dialectical reasoning’ as a form of
practical argumentation which emphasizes the connection between critique, expla-
nation and action. He describes how it works in four steps—which are somewhat
different from the four stages he described in Wodak and Meyer 2016a, discussed
above. He explains that his most recent version puts more emphasis on supporting
political action “to change social life for the better” such as seeking solutions to
problems like the funding of education (Fairclough, 2018: 13, 17). The four steps
named are: (1) normative critique of discourse (basically, describing the discourse);
(2) explaining what features brought about this state of affairs; (3) critiquing this
state of affairs; (4) advocating action to change the existing state of affairs for the
better (2018: 16). Another valuable addition in Fairclough (2018: 24) that allows us
to understand the evolution of his approach is the presentation of the essential ele-
ments of dialectical reasoning which are: (1) how to recognize an argument; (2) how
to identify what type of argument it is; (3) how to identify the premises and conclu-
sion of the argument; (4) how to evaluate it; (5) how to identify an explanation and
its parts; (6) how to identify reasons, motives and causes and the connections
between them; (7) how to evaluate and critique argumentation as a first step in the
sequence of deliberation-decision-action-change; (8) how to develop counter argu-
ments; (9) how to identify the ‘terms of debate’ and their limitations; and (10) how
to approach changing the terms of debate. Finally, he envisions scholars in CDA as
opening up a dialogue with those involved in political action, and he proposes dia-
lectical reasoning as a way for CDA to “contribute to political action to change
existing reality for the better”, and as a method of “showing how deliberation
enables and constrains decision, action and change, which can be opened up by
changing the terms of debate” (2018: 25). To illustrate this revised approach, he
170 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

uses a case study of the Kilburn Manifesto (“a political manifesto for transcending
neoliberalism”) (2018: 19–21). For a more recent and detailed look at how the DRA
has changed over the years, see Fairclough’s own account of these changes (which
we have cited a few things from above) in Flowerdew and Richardson (2018a),
where he contends that there are three main versions of his approach, which have
transformed in response to social changes (2018: 14).

4.4  Sociocognitive Approach (SCA)

The sociocognitive approach (SCA), first developed by Teun van Dijk in the 1980s
with some changes since then (see van Dijk, 2016 and Sect. 3.6), emphasizes the
importance of the study of cognition in the critical analysis of discourse, communi-
cation and interaction and the cognitively mediated relationship between discourse
and society. Emphasizing his use of the term CDS exclusively (as opposed to CDA,
see our discussion of this in Sect. 4.1), van Dijk contends that CDS is a critical per-
spective or attitude within the field of discourse studies (DS) that “uses different
methods of the humanities and social sciences” (2016: 65). In this approach, ‘dis-
course’ is seen as a multidimensional social phenomenon which is a linguistic
object, an action, a form of social interaction, a social practice, a mental representa-
tion, an interactional or communicative event or activity, a cultural product, or even
an economic commodity that can be bought and sold (van Dijk, 2009b: 66–67).
The concept of ‘social cognitions’5 is central to van Dijk’s approach, which rep-
resents the socio-psychological dimension of CDS, and draws on ‘social representa-
tion theory’ (Moscovici, 2000), which refers to the “bulk of concepts, opinions,
attitudes, evaluations, images and explanations which result from daily life and are
sustained by communication” (Wodak & Meyer, 2009b: 25). These socially shared
representations of (perceptions of, ways of thinking about) societal groups and rela-
tions—as well as mental processes such as interpretation, thinking and arguing,
making inferences and learning—form a core element of the individual’s social
identity (van Dijk, 1993a; Meyer, 2001). Along with abstract knowledge of the
world they link the social system on the one hand and the individual’s cognitive
system on the other hand and are shared among members of the same social group,
just as attitudes and ideologies are shared (van Dijk, 2016). In SCA, social cogni-
tions are viewed as part of a discourse-cognition-society “triangle” in which rela-
tions between discourse and society are seen as cognitively mediated (van Dijk,
2016: 64, see Sect. 3.6). In her overview of CDA Wodak (2011: 60) notes that cog-
nition provides the “missing link” that demonstrates how societal structures are
“instituted, legitimated, confirmed or challenged by text or talk”, and we agree with

5
 Van Dijk uses the plural “social cognitions” here to donate the concrete noun referring to the
many different representations that people share. When he uses “cognition” in the singular, he is
referring to the abstract noun and general process of acquiring knowledge and understanding as
opposed to specific socially shared representations.
4.4  Sociocognitive Approach (SCA) 171

Wodak that this is a significant element that SCA adds to CDA/CDS research.
Control of the ‘public mind’ is accomplished through this linking of discourse to
social cognitions, and social cognitions also explain the production as well as the
understanding of discourse. Social representations are relevant in the context of
(personal, group, cultural) knowledge, attitudes and ideologies (Wodak, 2011: 26)
and the exercise of power involves the influence of knowledge, beliefs, values,
plans, attitudes, ideologies, norms and values, all of which are part of social
cognition.
Van Dijk also describes how discursive units (ranging from one word to sen-
tences to very long utterances) are linked to the generation of prejudice and dis-
crimination, turning his focus to the study of (discourse and) context (2001b, 2008a,
2009a). He argues that there has been much interest in context and contextualization
in CDA, but little research on the details and theory of context, which he defines as
dynamic representations of the ongoing communicative event (van Dijk, 2009b:
73–75; see also Sects. 3.6.1 and 3.6.2; Wodak, 2011: 61). This is accomplished by
incorporating the very important idea of context models (see Sect. 3.6.1.2, aka prag-
matic models), a type of mental model that is salient to the participants and “repre-
sents how each participant understands and represents the communicative situation”
(van Dijk, 2016: 67) which helps them achieve a variety of dynamic processes.
Thus, context models control much of discourse production and understanding,
such as genre, topic choice, local meanings and coherence, along with speech acts,
rhetoric, and style (2001a: 109). They represent the models of events that language
users refer to in the discourse as well as “dynamic pragmatic models of (each
moment of) the very communicative event in which they participate” (2012b: 589).
They allow language users to adapt their discourse to the communicative situation
in which they find themselves, and “since at least the time, the knowledge and the
intentions of the context model change permanently during discourse processing
(production, comprehension), context models are fundamentally dynamic” (2012b:
589). And, finally, they control the pragmatic aspect of discourse because they
“define the appropriateness of discourse with respect to the communicative situa-
tion” and work to manage knowledge in interaction (2016: 67). In this sense, lan-
guage users adapt their discourse to the assumed knowledge of the other participants,
recognizing the intentions of other speakers/social actors (Tomasello, 2008). Groups
in power affect discourse through the social representations shared by those groups.
Thus, when looking at discourse, SCA can help us bridge the gap between the
‘micro’ level (language use, discourse, verbal interaction, and communication) and
the ‘macro’ level (power, dominance, and inequality between social groups) of soci-
ety, and is thus particularly useful in uncovering hidden ideologies embedded in the
discourse. Furthermore, SCA helps us to understand how discourse can be a “pri-
mary source of evidence for underlying social representations” (van Dijk,
2014a: 290).
Throughout his more recent work in CDS—and linked to his pre-CDA and early
CDA work on racism and discrimination in discourse and communication (see
Sects. 3.6.1–3.6.4)—van Dijk has used SCA to focus on the (re)production of rac-
ism in discourse and communication (see recently van Dijk, 2012a, 2014a, 2016;
172 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

Wodak, 2011: 60; and also Sects. 3.6.5 and 3.6.6) as well as the media, and also to
examine more general questions of power abuse and the reproduction of inequality
through ideologies, integrating elements from his earlier studies on cognition that
found that those who control the most dimensions of discourse (i.e. topics, style,
setting) have the most power (see Wodak, 2011: 60). He has also written extensively
on ideology, in particular his book (van Dijk, 1998) in which he proposed a new,
multidisciplinary theory of ideology based on the reformulation and integration of
three central concepts: (1) the status, internal organization and mental functions of
ideologies in terms of social cognitions; (2) the social, political, cultural and histori-
cal conditions and functions of ideologies; and (3) the formation, changes, and
reproduction of ideologies through socially situated discourse and communication.
For van Dijk (1998: 8) “ideologies may be very succinctly defined as the basis of the
social representations shared by members of a group”, e.g., ways of organizing
good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, true vs. false, us vs. them. Van Dijk’s more recent
work investigates the role of knowledge in discourse (van Dijk, 2012b, 2012c,
2012d, 2014b), another area that he feels is underrepresented in the literature; he
summarizes a theory of ‘natural’ knowledge and its relevance for the study of text
and talk, as well as a basis for his own work on social cognition and discourse (van
Dijk, 2014c). In his book on ‘discourse and knowledge’ (2014b), he takes a multi-
disciplinary approach to studying the relationship between discourse and knowl-
edge and argues that discourse can only be produced or understood in terms of
shared sociocultural knowledge, which is acquired through text and talk.
As in all the approaches we list here, SCA is often combined with other ones that
overlap and complement it in some way, and hence render the analysis specifically
suited to the data. One recent example that illustrates van Dijk’s triangular SCA, the
multimodal turn of CDA/CDS and the way in which CDA/CDS often combines
approaches, is from his contribution to Wodak & Meyer (2016a: 65–66). He exam-
ines a billboard in Britain for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) dur-
ing the 2014 parliamentary elections in which UKIP used blatant racist and
xenophobic propaganda to win (surprisingly, for many) 10 new members of the
European parliament (MEPs) and 27.5% of the vote (Kirkup & Swinford, 2014). In
his brief analysis, van Dijk shows how the interpretation of the multimodal mes-
sages in the billboard (such as image and color) requires cognitive structures such
as shared sociocultural knowledge (aka background knowledge) about the unem-
ployment situation in the UK at that time and the lifting of restrictions for workers
from Eastern Europe (which brought new immigrants to the UK). In addition, he
points to the role of attitude and ideology, as well as the ‘context model’ of readers
of the billboard (e.g., how they understand and represent the situation), which fea-
tures emotions such as anger and fear. We should also underscore the way that
UKIP’s campaign played upon the emotions of voters was a major factor in UKIP’s
rise to power, the eventual success of the 2016 BREXIT vote and the UK’s exit from
the European Union. Hence, van Dijk’s analysis (which he conducted before the
BREXIT vote) was spot on in identifying exactly how voters were manipulated by
UKIP—and how SCA is very useful since it uncovered this fact.
4.5  Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) 173

Van Dijk has published the most of any scholar on SCA (and one could argue that
he has done a large part of the work that explains and models SCA). Indeed, most
of van Dijk’s work in this area has been as sole author, although he has occasionally
co-authored with Wodak (e.g., Wodak & van Dijk, 2000; see Sects. 3.6.6 and 3.7;
see also Clarke, Kwon, & Wodak, 2012) and a few others. However, there are a few
examples of other scholars who have taken up CDA/CDS work using SCA, alone or
in combination with other approaches, in recent years (such as Isbuga-Erel, 2008;
Olausson, 2009; Foluke, 2011; Peyroux, 2012; Ushchyna, 2017).

4.5  Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA)

The term ‘discourse-historical approach’ (DHA) first appeared in Ruth Wodak’s

studies that were conducted with the ‘Vienna School of Discourse Analysis’ (which
included her current and former students and colleagues) and were about post-war
Austria and antisemitic discourses (see Sect. 3.8.5). In general, DHA adheres to the
socio-philosophical orientation of Critical Theory, especially the thinking of
Habermas (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001), supplemented with an approach that relates
theory formation and conceptualization to the specific problems being investigated.
It also features a multi-methodological, interdisciplinary approach to empirical data
as well as the integration of available background information into the analysis of
different layers of a spoken or written text (Ahmadvand, 2011; Krzyżanowski &
Wodak, 2009: 21). Analysts using this approach perceive both written and spoken
language to be forms of social practice and assume a dialectical relationship between
discursive practices and the situations they are embedded in (Fairclough & Wodak,
1997). Wodak has focused on issues of methodology, hence the emphasis on
‘Methods’ in the title of her 2001/2009/2016 co-edited books with Meyer on CDA/
CDS (and also of the non-CDA-oriented Titscher, Meyer, Wodak, & Vetter, 2000
(1998  in German)) which discusses each of the approaches (aka frameworks,
research strategies) in terms of their different methods, among other issues (which
shows that CDA/CDS in general is not a method (see van Dijk, 2012d)).
On her website at Lancaster University6, Wodak refers to DHA as “an interdisci-
plinary, problem-oriented approach which analyses the changes of discursive prac-
tices over time and in various genres”. With respect to the first principle, being
“interdisciplinary”, Reisigl and Wodak (2009: 89) referred to its application to the
collection and analysis of data from various sources and various analytical perspec-
tives (which is also the case for other CDA approaches); and by problem-oriented,
she meant (as discussed in Sect. 3.2) that the focus is on, e.g., some social problem
or issue, not on particular linguistic issues. These both are related to the principle of
‘triangulation’ (Wodak & Meyer, 2016b: 26), which combines empirical observa-
tions, theories and methods from various disciplines, as well as background

 https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/linguistics/about/people/ruth-wodak
6
174 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

i­nformation in the study of a given issue. However, in the latest definition of DHA,
Reisigl and Wodak (2016: 31) note again that it is interdisciplinary—which they
identify as the first of the ten most important principles of DHA—but they re-frame
it as involving theory, methods, methodology, research practice and practical appli-
cation whereas earlier definitions did not include all of these (see Sect. 3.8.5). As to
changes in discursive practices over time, of the founders of CDA/CDS, Wodak is
the one who has insisted the most on the incorporation of (wide-ranging) historical
data into any (C)DA/(C)DS, critical or not, including the historical embedding of
discourses and texts and “explor[ing] how discourses, genres and texts change in
relation to sociopolitical change” (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009: 90). And there are other
important principles of DHA (2016: 31–32): it incorporates fieldwork and ethnog-
raphy; it moves recursively between theory and empirical data; it studies numerous
genres and public spaces as well as intertextual relationships (the way in which texts
are linked to other texts, e.g., through taking a portion of one text and inserting it
into another text, as in quotation) and interdiscursive ones (the way in which dis-
courses are linked to each other, e.g., a discourse on one topic may refer to topics or
sub-topics of other discourses (2016: 27–28), as when (racist) arguments about
restrictions on immigration are used in discussions about combatting unemploy-
ment); its categories and methods that are not fixed once and for all (2016: 32); it
uses ‘Grand theories’, which “conceptualize relations between social structure and
social action and thus link micro- and macro-sociological phenomena” (Wodak,
2009b: 204) and augments them further with ‘middle-range theories’, which are
concerned with “specific social phenomena … [or] specific subsystems of society”
and provide a better theoretical basis; and it views the application of results and the
communication of them to the public as important aims, along with some form of
social action (see Sect. 7.2.1.2).
The definition of ‘discourse’ in DHA has evolved from the early 2000s and has
become quite complex in the most recent version; “a cluster of context-dependent
semiotic practices that are situated within specific fields of social action; socially
constituted and socially constitutive; related to a macro-topic; linked to the argu-
mentation about validity claims such as truth and normative validity involving sev-
eral social actors who have different points of view” (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016: 27).
The presence of intertextuality and interdiscursivity in the DHA framework means
that discourses are often dynamic and open and hybrid, since, e.g., new subtopics
are easily created, and discourses and their topics may cross from one social field to
another, may overlap with each other, or may be socio-functionally linked with each
other in some way. Scholars in DHA have also added to the theory of discourse by
linking texts, discourses and genres (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016: 28–29) with fields of
action (Girnth, 1996), such that texts are parts of discourses that can be assigned to
genres, which are “a “socially conventionalized type and pattern of communication
that fulfills a specific social purpose in a specific social context [or a] mental scheme
that refers to specific procedural knowledge about a specific text function and the
processes of text production, distribution and reception” (2016: 27). Discourses can
be realized through many different genres and texts; for instance, the discourses of
climate change (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016: 27) may be realized in genres such as TV
4.5  Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) 175

debates on environmental policies, guidelines for reducing carbon emissions,

speeches by climate scientists, online comments about articles on climate change,
and so forth. And, finally, fields of action indicate segments of reality that make up
partial frames of a discourse and are “defined by different functions of discursive
practices” (2016: 28). For example, in the general area of political action, “forma-
tion of public attitudes” could be one field while “political advertising” could be
another (2016: 28–29). Thus, there is a type of dialectical relationship between dis-
cursive practices and the fields of action they are embedded in. In DHA, ideology is
seen as a perspective that is often one-sided and encompasses “a worldview, a sys-
tem composed of related mental representations, convictions, opinions, attitudes,
values and evaluations, which are shared by members of a special social group”
(Reisigl & Wodak, 2016: 25). Fully developed ideologies such as conservatism are
referred to as ‘grand narratives’. For example (in the version articulated by President
Donald Trump of the US during his candidacy in 2016), it includes representations
of what a society looks like now (e.g., it is going downhill), models of what the
society should be in the future (e.g., ‘Make America great again’ [MAGA]), and
models of how to go from the present to the future (e.g., don’t allow Muslims or
Mexicans to enter the US, keep American ‘exceptionalism’ alive, keep American
jobs in the US, etc.). These narratives differ from ‘grand theories’ (mentioned
above) because they are not based on empirical evidence or scholarly research or a
specific approach to social theory. Nevertheless, the ideologies serve as powerful
means of “creating shared social identities” and of establishing, maintaining and
transforming unequal power relations through discourse (Reisigl & Wodak,
2016: 25).
DHA generally focuses on politics and many types of political discourse; ana-
lysts are enjoined to make sure not to get lost in “theoretical labyrinths”, but instead
to attempt to develop conceptual tools that are adequate for specific social problems
(Reisigl & Wodak, 2016: 26), such as van Dijk’s notions (see Sect. 3.6.2) of “posi-
tive self” and “negative other” presentation, which Wodak used in analyzing antise-
mitic and racist discourses (see Sects. 3.8, 3.4, and 3.5). In terms of its general
methodology, DHA is three dimensional (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016: 32): (1) identify
“the specific content or topic(s) of a specific discourse”, (2) investigate the “discur-
sive strategies”, and (3) examine “the linguistic means (as types) and context-­
dependent linguistic realizations (as tokens)”. As for the identification of the
strategies that need special attention in the analysis, they frequently orient them-
selves to five questions (e.g., “what arguments are employed in the discourse in
question?” (2016: 32), are they “articulated overtly, intensified or mitigated?”).
They then provide (2016: 34)7 an eight-step program that a “thorough, ideal-­typical”

7
 At this point, we would like to recognize the importance of Martin Reisigl’s input in the develop-
ment of DHA, particularly in this phase, given the amount of scholarly work he co-authored with
Wodak and sole-authored himself in the 2000s (see Reisigl & Wodak, 2001, 2009, 2016; Reisigl,
2007, 2011, 2014). For example, we note that it is his chapter with Wodak (Reisigl & Wodak,
2016) which lays out the latest version of DHA in detail and which we have cited heavily in this
discussion.
176 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

DHA should follow (although they are aware that not all projects will have the time,
personnel or money to be realized on this scale, and thus they say that smaller stud-
ies, such as PhD projects, which might include case studies or a pilot study, are also
worthwhile). The program is the following (each step is to be implemented
recursively):
(1) Activate and consult preceding theoretical knowledge (e.g., collect, read, dis-
cuss previous research).
(2) Collect data and context information, which vary depending on a variety of fac-
tors such as events, media, social actors, etc.
(3) Select and prepare data for analysis (e.g., transcribe interviews or downsize
data).
(4) Identify research questions and assumptions based on the literature review and
first skimming of the data.
(5) Conduct a qualitative pilot analysis of context, macro- and micro-analysis.
(6) Include detailed (primarily qualitative but also quantitative) case studies of a
range of data.
(7) Formulate a critique/interpret and explain results taking context knowledge and
the three dimensions of critique into account.
(8) Propose practical applications of the results of the analysis that target some
social impact.
Reisigl and Wodak illustrate DHA using their own pilot study on news reporting
about climate change, which places special focus on ‘argumentation strategies’.
They define ‘argumentation’ as a “linguistic as well as a cognitive pattern of
problem-­solving that manifests itself in a (more or less regulated) sequence of
speech acts which form a complex and more or less coherent network of state-
ments” (2016: 35), which (the speaker hopes) will persuade listeners. Topoi (singu-
lar ‘topos’) are “parts of argumentation that belong to the required premises” and
“connect the argument(s) with the conclusion, the claim” (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016:
35; see the discussion of topoi in earlier work in DHA in Sect. 3.8.5); they are
“socially conventionalized and recur habitually”. The reasoning can be convincing
(sound) or not reasonable, i.e., not based on sound arguments, in which case the
topoi are called ‘fallacies.’ They then list ten rules for ‘rational disputes and con-
structive arguing’ (e.g., rule 2, “obligation to give reasons—parties that advance a
claim may not refuse to defend that claim when requested to do so” (2016: 36); see
van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992; van Eemeren, Garssen, & Meuffels, 2009).
Those rules enable discussants to differentiate sound topoi from fallacies; and if
these rules are violated, then fallacies will occur (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016: 36). With
regard to news reporting on climate change, they go through all eight steps in their
‘programme’ illustrating how the process would occur in this specific case. Some of
the important, but fallacious, argumentation schemes they find from their analysis
include the ‘argument from nature’ (topos or fallacy of nature) which argues that
temperatures rise and fall naturally and therefore we shouldn’t worry about climate
change, and the ‘argument of ignorance’ (topos or fallacy of ignorance) that “stresses
the lack of (scientific) understanding of the issue under discussion” and puts forth
4.5  Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) 177

the idea that scientists are just trying to scare people (2016: 54). Of note is their sec-
tion on the application of the results, which contends that the study should not end
with scholarly publication of the results. Rather, the insights need to be made avail-
able to the “‘general public’ (e.g., via recommendations, newspaper commentaries,
training seminars, radio broadcasts and political advising)”, which means that the
way it is written will need to be transformed for different audiences, genres, and
communicative practices (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016: 56). We believe this is an impor-
tant element that differentiates DHA from other approaches, not only because it is
included as one of the steps of analysis, but also because it explicitly makes research-
ers understand that they cannot simply take their findings from their scholarly work
to the public without involving some recontextualization (including rewording,
adopting a different stance, different register, i.e., style of writing, etc.).
A highly important element of Wodak’s approach, which differentiates her from
many adherents of CDA/CDS and which we want to emphasize here, is the inclu-
sion of the ‘insider’ or ‘emic’ perspective through an ethnographic approach (men-
tioned briefly above), which she adopted before DHA was formulated and has kept
ever since. Out of many examples, we can mention one way of examining how
minorities or migrants actually experience racial or ethnic discrimination in today’s
societies, by conducting focus groups in which relevant topics regarding the issue at
hand are discussed (in Krzyżanowski & Wodak, 2009: 4; see also van Dijk &
Wodak, 1988; Sect. 3.6.4). We believe that the incorporation of ethnographic
approaches along with the fact that DHA traces the changes in discursive practices
over time are what make DHA particularly comprehensive and insightful. For a
clear example of how DHA works, see The Politics of Exclusion: Debating Migration
in Austria (Krzyżanowski & Wodak, 2009). In addition, The Politics of Fear (Wodak,
2015) is informed by DHA but since it is meant for a larger audience, she doesn’t
stress its theoretical underpinnings. The book also includes multimodal analysis
from a SocSem frame which draws on the work of Blasch (2012), who develops the
analytical categories of Kress (2003), van Leeuwen (1996), and Dyer (1998) to cre-
ate a framework for “analysing the media constructions of (hyperreal) politicians’
identities and positionings on the World Wide Web” (Wodak, 2015: 136). See also
our discussion of ethnography and CDA/CDS in Sect. 6.5, and more discussion of
The Politics of Fear (and how pragmatics is utilized in CDA/CDS) in Sect. 6.9.2.
DHA is currently thriving through Wodak’s prolific scholarship, forceful presen-
tations, impressive grasp of much work on argumentation and rhetoric, and contin-
ual development of her approach, which she sometimes combines with several other
fields in or aligned with CDA/CDS (e.g., those discussed in Chap. 6, especially
Sects. 6.4, 6.5, 6.7, and 6.9). Wodak continues to have a full schedule of research
and writing and is currently involved in multiple projects related to DHA. For exam-
ple, in 2015–2018 she was PI of a research project on the discursive construction of
identity in Austria (2017a, a topic she had already explored earlier—see Sect.
3.8.4—but came back to with new insights); she was also involved in a project about
the narratives told by children of Austrian Holocaust survivors (2017c); and she col-
laborated with her former students about the ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe
(Krzyżanowski, Triandafyllidou, & Wodak, 2018). In addition, she is continuing to
178 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

publish on right-wing populism and/or nationalism (e.g., Stoegner & Wodak, 2016;
Wodak, 2016, 2017b, 2018a, 2018b, 2018d, 2018e; Wodak & Krzyżanowski, 2017;
Rheindorf & Wodak, 2018; Wodak & Forchtner, 2018b); social media (Unger,
Wodak, & KhosraviNik, 2016; Wodak, 2018c), and migration issues (Wodak, 2018f).
There are many publications by Wodak, some with colleagues and (former) stu-
dents, and others without her, that utilize DHA in CDA/CDS scholarship, too many
in fact for us to cite all of them, since she is very prolific, and so are her co-authors.
Hence we will conclude this section by providing some references to DHA scholar-
ship that include Wodak as sole or co-author that were not already cited above (stop-
ping at our date limit of Feb. 2018). These include: de Cillia, Reisigl, and Wodak
(1999), Krzyżanowski and Wodak (2009), Clarke, Kwon, and Wodak (2012),
Forchtner, Krzyżanowski, and Wodak (2013), Wodak (2013a, 2013b, 2015, 2017a),
Wodak and Boukala (2015), Forchtner and Wodak (2018), and Wodak and Forchtner
(2018b). Finally, we list (some) publications that illustrate DHA by scholars besides
Wodak, such as Graham, Keenan, and Dowd (2004), Machin and Suleiman (2006),
KhosraviNik (2010), Krzyżanowski (2010), Von Stuckrad (2013), Boukala (2016),
Forchtner and Schneickert (2016), Klymenko (2016), Wu, Huang, and Zheng
(2016), Dimitrakopoulou and Boukala (2017), Dorostkar and Preisinger (2017),
Krzyżanowski and Ledin (2017), and Sayers, Harding, Barchas-Lichenstein, Coffey,
and Rock (2017). Also worth noting is Forchtner (2016), which provides an innova-
tive approach to DHA in CDA/CDS and as well includes narrative theory.

4.6  S
 ocial Semiotics (SocSem) and Multimodal Approaches
(MCDA)

4.6.1  Introduction

As discussed above (in Sects. 2.3, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 3.3, and 3.9), social semiotics
(SocSem) has a long history and is connected with Halliday’s SFL, CritLing, mul-
timodality, and, especially, van Leeuwen’s more recent work. SocSem is interested
in both the way language is used in social contexts and the way we use language “to
create society” (Machin & Mayr, 2012: 17) as well as the way society creates lan-
guage. Note that ‘semiotics’ as it is used here is different from Fairclough’s use of
the word, which was meant more in the classical sense, heavily influenced by
Saussure’s work without emphasis on the social dimension. Based on our definition
above of what SocSem is, we will outline what SocSem approaches to CDA/CDS
are interested in doing and how this is accomplished. In addition, we decided to treat
SocSem and multimodality8 (see Sects. 2.7 and 3.9) together because, although they

8
 The term ‘multimodality’ emerged in the 1990s when it began to be used alongside/interchange-
ably with social semiotics as a way of emphasizing the way meaning is created in texts “not only
by language but also visually” (Ledin & Machin, 2018: 24), although it encompasses much more
than that.
4.6  Social Semiotics (SocSem) and Multimodal Approaches (MCDA) 179

are different, they are inherently intertwined from a CDA/CDS point of view in,
e.g., MCDA; thus, this section explains the connection between them, as well as
their connection to CDA/CDS.
A SocSem approach to CDA/CDS focuses on describing the available choices of
signs used in communication so that we can go on to understand what it is that
people are actually doing with them. Because SocSem can be seen as “a way of
accounting for a radically changing society and re-orienting the field to deal with a
whole new set of social issues” (Zhao, Djonov, Björkvall, & Boeriis, 2017: 10), it is
easy to see why it aligns with the goals and aims of CDA/CDS. And, because com-
munication is so much more than just language, this approach has considered all
ways of making meaning, such as gesture, images, language, sounds, etc. (Kress,
2010). In a sense, SocSem has been always been about more than just language,
because it is based in semiotics, which classifies language under a larger umbrella
category of types of sign-making resources in various modalities (with an emphasis
on the verbal and visual). Hence, researchers doing MCDA “see linguistic and
visual modes of communication as manifestations of a single underlying semiotic
capacity” (Hart, 2015: 238). Influenced by a wide range of sociological and linguis-
tic theories utilizing sources from Malinowski to Bernstein and Bourdieu (Wodak &
Meyer, 2009b: 27; see above) and drawing on the work of M.A.K. Halliday (1978,
1985), Foucault’s notion of discourse (1972) and CritLing (Fowler, Hodge, Kress,
& Trew, 1979; see Sect. 2.4) as well as Chomskyan linguistics and French semiotics
(Barthes, 1973), the SocSem approach takes the view that all communication (not
just language) has underlying patterns and conventions which determine why we do
and say certain things, as well as why certain things stand for other things. Hence,
in the SocSem theory of communication, the aim is to describe and document the
“underlying resources available to those who want to communicate meanings”
(whether these meanings are expressed verbally, visually, through materials, etc.)
and then analyze “the way that these are used in settings to do particular things”
(Machin & Mayr, 2012: 18). SocSem approaches are also interested in the ways that
signs have been used both in the past and in the analyzed context, as part of their
‘meaning potential’,9 that is, the “range of possibilities that are able to carry the
intended ideas, values and attitudes” of the discourse being analyzed (Abousnnouga
& Machin, 2013: 22) as well as other discourses, including future ones. More
importantly, SocSem is concerned with the interests of the sign-maker, and why he/
she would want the signs to mean and do what they do, as well as what specific
means were used to create them (Kress, 2010). For example, Abousnnouga and
Machin’s (2013) study of the discourses of war as they are expressed in war monu-
ments shows how materials like marble, granite and bronze suggest ancient times or

9
 The idea of ‘meaning potential’ comes from SFL (see discussion of Halliday in Sect. 2.3) which
defines it as all of the options that can be used to convey what is meant. For example, a text, which
he defines as whatever is said or written, can be seen as ‘actualized’ meaning potential whereas the
range of possible things that could be said in a particular situation would be the meaning potential.
For Halliday, language itself is a meaning potential.
180 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

the values and attitudes of the ancient warrior—because they are durable and long
lasting, and have been used throughout time. Thus they can convey these meanings
in a way that plastic or paper materials cannot.
Another important concept in this approach (which is based on Halliday, 1978,
1985) is the notion of ‘semiotic resource’, which is central to van Leeuwen’s theory
of SocSem (van Leeuwen, 2005, 2008; Djonov & Zhao, 2017: 2; see Sect. 3.9), and
“reflects Halliday’s model of language as a social semiotic resource whose meaning-­
making potential is dynamic, and shapes (and is shaped by) the social contexts in
which it is employed”. In this sense, semiotic resources do not have fixed meanings
but instead they have (as said above, and in Sect. 2.6.2) a semiotic potential that can
be applied differently in different contexts (Abousnnouga & Machin, 2013). A good
example of this can be seen in Hodge and Kress (1988: 8–12), which explains in
detail their theoretical framework for SocSem. In their example (see Sect. 2.5), they
show a Marlboro billboard in which the original headline is “New. Mild. And
Marlboro” featuring a photograph of a cowboy on a horse (smoking) and a packet
of Marlboro cigarettes to the right of the cowboy. However, on the top of the bill-
board, graffiti artists have crossed out some letters and written over the original,
changing the headlines to “New. Vile. And a bore”, with speech bubbles that say
“cough cough” and “poo this macho stinks” along with “cancer sticks” and a $ sign
on top of the cigarettes, and “r.i.p.” [=rest in peace] on an (obviously) fake tomb-
stone in the background. In a careful analysis, the authors demonstrate the layers of
meaning and the ways in which the graffiti writers revealed their interpretation of
the signs (Hodge & Kress, 1988: 8–12). They also note that in SocSem one cannot
assume that texts produce exactly the meanings and effects that their authors hope
for, and it is resistance and struggle as well as the “uncertain outcomes” that must
be studied at the level of social action. SocSem approaches should therefore
acknowledge the “importance of the flow of discourse in constructing meanings
around texts”, paying close attention to its dialogic nature, as in their example. In
addition, meaning should always be seen as negotiated, not just imposed on the
reader/viewer by the author/s, and the attention of the analyst should be focused on
how the social practices in question are represented ideologically.

4.6.2  SocSem Tools

One set of tools that helps for this has been provided by van Leeuwen and Wodak
(1999) (and more recently, an updated version by van Leeuwen, 2005, 2016; see
also Sect. 3.9). These SocSem tools are particularly adapted to MCDA, which we
will discuss shortly, and are based on the idea that discourses are ‘recontextualiza-
tions’ (i.e., transformations, van Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999; see Sects. 3.9.2 and
3.9.3) of social practice. That is, representation of social actors is based on what
people do and thus texts (which are the evidence for the existence of discourses)
should be interpreted as representations of social practice. In addition, van Leeuwen
(2008: 6, 2009, 2016) stresses the difference between social practices themselves
4.6  Social Semiotics (SocSem) and Multimodal Approaches (MCDA) 181

and representations of social practices, noting that in many texts, aspects of repre-
sentation are more important than the (representation of) the social practice itself.
Hence, when a person reads or views information about an event, someone else has
prepared it—it is not the actual event that is being presented, but someone else’s
version of it (e.g., the journalist’s as well as the editor’s, in the news media). In the
same way, in an article with text and some photographs in an online newspaper
about, e.g., the #NeverAgain movement (a grass-roots student led movement for
gun control in the US), different aspects of it would be shown, depending on what
the source is, which images or videos are shown as iconic of the events, and who the
creator was. For example, the students might be represented as responding to the
horrors of school shootings (e.g., Taylor, 2018) or as being anti-gun (“Parkland high
school students,” 2018). Hence, the students could be depicted in a myriad of differ-
ent ways because when an event is represented: specific choices have to be made
(since space is limited), a coherent narrative has to be told, the newspaper may have
already taken a stance (e.g., on shootings) or have a political stance (e.g., about gun
control), the newspaper needs to pay attention to ratings (in view of the so-called
‘bottom line’, i.e., their financial success/well-being), and many other factors. Most
importantly, the interest of the sign-maker (or those in control of the sign-maker) in
portraying events or social actions in a particular way is typically given precedent.
Like other approaches, scholars with a SocSem lens view ‘discourses’ as the
broader ideas communicated by a text (van Dijk, 1991; Fairclough, 2000; Wodak &
Meyer, 2016a) and as “models of the world in the sense described by Foucault
(1979)” (Abousnnouga & Machin, 2013: 24). In laying out the set of tools for ana-
lyzing discourse, van Leeuwen (2016, also 2009) highlights the crucial elements of
social practices which are always present (e.g. actions, performance modes, actors,
presentations styles, times, spaces, resources, eligibility, see Sect. 3.9). He also dis-
cusses important processes that can transform the representation of social actions
(i.e., using deletion, substitution and addition in the text) and describes how social
actions are actually transformed through using verbs that are actions and reactions
and are “cognitive” (e.g., ‘grasp’), “perceptive” (e.g., ‘has a nose for’) or “affective”
(e.g. ‘feel’) (van Leeuwen, 2016: 148; cf Halliday, 1985; see Sect. 2.3). In addition,
actions can be seen as “material” (e.g. ‘buys’) “semiotic” (e.g. ‘articulate’) or
“behavioral” (e.g. ‘communicates’). Actions and reactions can also be seen as “acti-
vated” (shown dynamically) or “de-activated” (shown in a static way), represented
as brought about by human agency or not, and generalized or represented abstractly
(van Leeuwen, 2016: 149–150). Fairclough (1995) had already argued that when
these “transformations” occur, it is evidence that there is ideological work at play,
and van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) provided a good example of how this is done
in an analysis of official letters from the Austrian government that notify immigrant
workers of the rejection of their ‘family reunion’ applications which would have
allowed them to bring family members to Austria if they had been accepted.
Combining SocSem (with emphasis on the recontextualization of social practice)
and the DHA approach to CDA/CDS, van Leeuwen and Wodak were able to link the
analyzed discourse to the history of post-war immigration in Austria more generally.
182 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

4.6.3  SocSem and Classification

In SocSem approaches that look at non-verbal modes, analysis focuses on social

roles (such as ‘agency’) instead of linguistic/grammatical categories such as ‘nouns’
or ‘passive sentence’ and the elements examined are linked through the concept of
‘social actors’ rather than linguistic concepts such as ‘nominal groups’ (see van
Leeuwen, 2008: 23–54, which offers an expansive inventory of the ways we can
classify people and the ideological effects these classifications can have). These
classifications often include ‘personalization’ vs. ‘impersonalization’ (e.g., in the
former case, a statement like ‘Professor Smarty required students to attend the con-
ference’ vs. in the latter case, ‘The university required students to attend the confer-
ence’). In addition, a distinction is made between ‘individualism’ versus
‘collectivization’ (e.g., ‘Two women, Mary Smith and Lisa Gonzalez, were injured
in the riots’ vs. ‘Protesters were injured in the riots’), and ‘specification’ vs. ‘generi-
cization’ (e.g., ‘Yassine’ vs. ‘a Muslim man’). Other classifications include ‘nomi-
nation’ or ‘functionalization’ (people referred to in terms of who they are or what
they do), use of ‘honorifics’ (e.g., titles that suggest a degree of seniority or respect,
such as the use of Sheriff Arpaio to legitimize the arrest of a Latino man and connect
it to immigration issues, see Catalano & Waugh, 2013b) and ‘objectivization’ (when
objects are represented through a feature such as ‘the beauty’) (Machin & Mayr,
2012: 83). Objectivization can also be dehumanizing, such as when women’s bodies
are equated to cars (e.g., in Italian, a woman can be described as having a nice ‘car-
rozzeria’, meaning ‘body’, but using the technical word for car bodies). In contrast,
‘humanization’ occurs when animals or objects are seen as human beings and given
human characteristics. ‘Anonymization’ happens when sources are referred to by
terms like ‘Some people…’ and ‘aggregation’ when participants are quantified and
treated as statistics, as in ‘Hundreds of immigrants…’). A final category listed is
‘suppression’, which is the exclusion (see also ‘deletion’ above) of social actors or
parts of an event in a text (Machin & Mayr, 2012: 85).
With regard to personalizing/impersonalizing or representing people as individu-
als/groups, image can do the same as language in the above examples by showing
photos of people all dressed in the same way, e.g., the picture in (van Leeuwen,
2008: 145) of Muslim women wearing veils. Three key factors in representing peo-
ple in images are distance, angle and gaze (see Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006:
114–153; also Sect. 2.6.3). Just as in many real life situations, in image, distance
can signify social relations (van Leeuwen, 2008: 97) and as such, it becomes sym-
bolic (2008: 138). Thus, if people are shown in a close-up shot, this can represent
intimacy and the social actors are seen as “one of us”; the opposite is true if the
camera distance is a long shot. In the case of angle, vertical angle (whether we see
the person from above, at eye level or from below) can relate power distances. Thus,
looking down on someone/something is the same as exerting imaginary symbolic
power (Bourdieu, 1991) over that person, while looking up at someone/something
represents symbolic power over the viewer and authority or respect (e.g. photo-
graphs of eagles with upward camera angles symbolizing their majestic nature). The
4.6  Social Semiotics (SocSem) and Multimodal Approaches (MCDA) 183

horizontal camera angle (whether we see a person frontally or from the side—or
somewhere in between) can symbolize involvement or detachment, depending on
the context, and can lead to objectivization, for example, when people are not look-
ing at us and thus they are objects for our scrutiny (van Leeuwen, 2008: 141).
Also important in how we represent social actors visually is what or who is
excluded from the image, such as in van Leeuwen’s discussion (2008) of Playmobil
toys that have no black, brown or yellow people, or a photo supposedly representing
the Roma people, where they are shown begging (see Catalano, 2012). From a
SocSem viewpoint, the choices journalists make in how people are represented are
based on the way they wish to signpost what kind of person they are representing
(Machin & Mayr, 2012: 103). Thus, it is essential to describe carefully the various
representational strategies for different participants according to the categories
shown above (or variations of them, whether verbal or visual) and to connect this to
broader discourses.

4.6.4  SocSem and Multimodality

As mentioned earlier, much CDA/CDS work using the SocSem approach has paid
attention to non-verbal signs, beginning with early work such as Hodge and Kress
(1988) and later Kress and van Leeuwen (1990, 1996, 2001, 2006) and many others,
but scholars such as van Leeuwen have felt that the ‘social’ in SocSem should also
be focused on more (Andersen, Boeriis, Maagerø, & Tønessen, 2015; Sect. 3.9.4).
Keeping this in mind, it is clear that multimodality, as coined and developed by
Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, 2001; and later, van Leeuwen, 2005; Kress, 2010),
was informed by SocSem and highly influenced by it (see Sect. 3.9.3). This area has
now emerged as a field in its own right (Machin, 2016), as Multimodal Discourse
Analysis (MDA), and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), mentioned
above. For example, scholars such as Wodak and Meyer (2016a) have included
analysis of visual and multimodal texts as one of the approaches to CDA/CDS in the
latest version of their Methods of Critical Discourse Studies (see Jancsary, Höllerer,
& Meyer, 2016). As we said earlier, the idea behind multimodality is that: meaning
is communicated not just through language but also through other modes such as
visuals, gestures, materials, packaging, etc.; often these various modes are used
simultaneously; often, other modes are doing things that are different from, or have
different effects than, language could have; and they are (often) working together.
The term ‘multimodality’ can be used to “designate a theoretical approach as
well as a multifaceted scholarly practice” (Maiorani & Christie, 2014). Obviously
(as said above), the fact that people have used many modes of communication is not
new—people have always used image and other non-verbal forms to communicate;
in fact, image, gesture, and other modes have been “a part of human cultures longer
than script” (Kress, 2010: 5). And the fact that they are often combined with each
other is also not new, since they have been part of face-to-face communication
across human history and cultures. What is new (especially in the twenty-first
184 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

c­ entury) is how they’ve become so prevalent through technology, the web, etc. The
reason why there has been a “multimodal turn” (Jewitt, 2009) in CDA/CDS research
(and in other academic domains) in the last decade is because “the world of com-
munication has changed and is changing still; and the reasons for that lie in a vast
web of intertwined social, economic, cultural and technological changes” (Kress,
2010: 5). Globalization is one major factor in this change. Forces of neoliberal ide-
ologies have sponsored and amplified the conditions of globalization that make it
possible for the characteristics of one place to be present and active in another
(Kress, 2010). According to Kress, the effects of globalization have brought radical
instability, which has caused far-reaching changes in semiotic production (e.g., how
meaning is made), dissemination of messages and meaning, and mediation and
communication—all of which have changed profoundly. The use of recent tech-
nologies (e.g., social media) “enables modes to be configured, be circulated, and get
recycled in different ways” (Jewitt, 2009: 1) and we must have theories and tools
that allow us “to understand and account for the world of communication as it is
now” (Kress, 2010: 7; on this see also Machin & van Leeuwen, 2007).
The SocSem theory of multimodality (Kress, 2010, see also Kress & van
Leeuwen, 1996/2006, 2001) on which MCDA is based views the relation of form
and meaning as one of aptness and “best fit” (Kress, 2010: 55). MCDA is interested
in the affordances of the various modes (i.e., what the mode facilitates happening or
hiding or inhibiting), the way they shape meaning, and the way they work together.
To give a mundane example, this author (Theresa’s) IPhone has seven different key-
boards that allow her to move between the languages she needs to use when texting.
However, if she does not remember to change from one keyboard to the next (when
texting someone who speaks a different language), the keyboard stays the same and
produces auto-corrected gibberish that she later needs to apologize for. Hence, the
mode of IPhone texting affords her different keyboards that can alter her meanings
unintentionally and shape all types of mis-communications. It also affords her the
use of emojis, which have in turn led to mis-communication since she doesn’t
always use glasses for reading and she has been known to send emojis with frowny
faces when she meant to send smiley ones. In addition, she has been overcome with
the desire (because it takes ‘SO LONG’ as opposed to using a computer) to use
texting language such as “u” instead of “you” (to her co-author) and acronyms such
as the infamous “LOL”, which has also affected meaning (and which seems to have
different meanings for different people or in different contexts: laugh-out-loud, lots-­
of-­luck, lots-of-love; see Heaney, 2013 for other meanings). Another excellent
example of how different modes have different affordances was given by Kress
(2010: 16) in which he demonstrates how a drawing of a cell with a nucleus includes
information about, e.g., size and location, that simply saying “the cell has a nucleus”
does not.
Besides looking at the way in which various modes shape meaning, MCDA is
interested in looking at the way that different modes interact since these ‘intersemi-
otic relations’ (van Leeuwen, 2005) can be complementary, or in tension, or relate
in other ways. As Lemke (2002: 303) observes:
4.6  Social Semiotics (SocSem) and Multimodal Approaches (MCDA) 185

No [written or spoken] text is an image. No text or visual representation means in all and
only the same ways that text can mean. It is this essential incommensurability that enables
genuine new meanings to be made from the combinations of modalities.

A good example of how visual and written text can be in tension is in Catalano
and Waugh (2013b) in which the authors studied the way that CEOs are represented
in crime reports. They found that while some of the text descriptions of the CEOs
talked about their negative actions, the photographs included with the analysis
showed them in high status clothing (e.g., suit and tie) with smiles and friendly
faces, as opposed to standard ‘mug shots’ which are common practice for perpetra-
tors of street crime. These mixed messages were crucial to MCDA because they
were able to show how images can contribute subliminal messages that change the
overall representation of a social actor and result in a less (or more) negative impres-
sion of what the person actually did (in this case, less negative in the case of the
heinous crimes committed by CEOs that harmed many people). Bearing in mind the
Catalano and Waugh (2013b) paper mentioned above and the body of work we have
done in this area, we cannot imagine doing CDA/CDS without taking into account
multimodality.

4.6.5  Multimodality, SocSem and Other Approaches

There are many different approaches to the field of multimodality, but not all of
them intersect with the interests of CDA/CDS (Machin, 2013). Hence, while much
CDA/CDS work has taken a multimodal turn, the field of multimodality in general
has not taken a critical turn. That is, with the exception of MCDA (also often
referred to as a social-semiotic approach to multimodality), most approaches to
multimodality are not critical, and focus on issues like rendering visible (i.e., evi-
dent) those “phenomena that we are unaware of as participants in an interaction” in
the highly descriptive Conversation Analysis approach (Jewitt, Bezemer, &
O’Halloran, 2016: 102) or “analysing the nature of the intersemiotic relations that
are established and identifying the expansions of meaning that take place as semi-
otic choices are resemiotised”, in the SFL approach (Jewitt, Bezemer, & O’Halloran,
2016: 50, see also Sect. 2.3). Even some work claiming to take a social-semiotic
approach to multimodality is not necessarily critical in the sense that it does not aim
to reveal ideologies behind the different modes of communication analyzed.
According to Machin (2016), the current state of the field of multimodality is
fragmented internally and externally, due to a variety of divergent core interests. For
example, Jewitt (2011) divides current approaches to multimodal studies into three
areas: SocSem multimodal analysis, multimodal DA, and multimodal interactional
analysis. Jewitt, Bezemer, and O’Halloran (2016) list the same approaches, but with
slightly different terminology (e.g., multimodal DA is called the ‘systemic func-
tional linguistics’ approach), but they also add other approaches: Conversation
Analysis, geo-semiotics (or discourses of place), multimodal ethnography,
186 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

­ ultimodal corpus analysis, and multimodal reception analysis (which combines

m
eye-­tracking methods with a focus on cognitive processes). Machin (2016) catego-
rizes them slightly differently, positing that they range from those influenced by
O’Toole’s The Language of Displayed Art (1994) and Halliday’s SFL (1978), which
focus on how different modes communicate different meta-functions (O’Halloran,
2008), to those interested in multimodal metaphor and metonymy (Catalano &
Waugh, 2013b), to sociolinguists who study interactional analysis (Scollon &
Scollon, 2004; Norris, 2004) and focus on the way that language use in settings is
part of the interplay of different semiotic resources and complex ‘multimodal
ensembles’ (Norris, 2004), to those influenced by Kress and van Leeuwen’s Reading
Images (1996, 2006) and Halliday (1978) and who emphasize situated meaning and
the affordances of semiotic resources rather than the system itself. We would also
argue that some of these approaches overlap with each other.
Machin (2016) contends that scholars engaged in MCDA need to look toward
other disciplines and take seriously the work done in many other fields (e.g. visual
studies and media and cultural studies) that have been analyzing these things for
some time. At the same time, he emphasizes that more attention and care needs to
be given to the kinds of tools and approaches that best fit the aims of CDA/CDS. In
his view (2016: 332), “we must favor an approach which better locates the sign both
as motivated and as having form, but also which roots it in ideology and how this
shapes the way the world appears to us”. In this sense, he encourages more work
that analyzes semiotic resources while paying attention to wider discourses and
institutional processes and dynamics of hegemony that shape the choice to use them
and “the way that political ideologies are infused into culture more widely” (Machin
& van Leeuwen, 2016: 243). In our opinion, this is the key element that multimodal-
ity brings to CDA/CDS, because if we just looked at language or each mode sepa-
rately, we would not get the full ideological picture in the larger discourse.
Machin and van Leeuwen (2016: 251) lay out very clearly what an MCDA of
political discourse stemming from the ideas proposed above might look like. They
demonstrate how it progresses by first focusing on “the signifier” (e.g., visual or
audible evidence) and describing it, then focusing on “the signified, or meaning”, by
showing the meaning potential and how it is actualized in the particular context
under analysis (and whether it comes from experience or cultural provenance). The
third stage then focuses on the wider significance of the semiotic resources, which
requires analysts to draw on their “knowledge of language and other semiotic
modes, a knowledge of culture and history, and a knowledge of sociological theory
to help us understand the role of multimodal discourse in social life” (2016: 254).
This type of MCDA updates SocSem analysis in a way that is suited to current times
and also makes it relevant to important issues of political power, such as neoliberal-
ism and the struggle against it, which, as we noted earlier, Fairclough and many
others believe is one of the most important issues that CDA/CDS should be con-
cerned with at the moment. Indeed, in the interest of modeling how scholars make
their biases explicit, we would also like to say that we agree wholeheartedly with
this assessment and the need for more CDA/CDS work in this domain.
4.7  Dispositive Analysis Approach (DPA) 187

Because of the multimodal turn, there are many recent examples of articles that
take a SocSem/multimodal approach to CDA/CDS, and in fact, in the latest issues
of Discourse and Society, Critical Discourse Studies, Social Semiotics, Journal of
Language and Politics and other important journals in the field, multimodal analy-
ses combined with other approaches appear to be more numerous than purely tex-
tual ones. For example, Special Issues in 2016 of both Discourse and Society (Vol
27, issue 3) and Journal of Language and Politics (Vol 15, issue 3) included many
articles that involve multimodal CDA/CDS and new conceptualizations in the field
because of it. A few good examples of other recent multimodal work (informed by
SocSem) that take approaches which align well with CDA/CDS include Moran and
Lee (2013), Roderick (2013, 2016, 2018), Ledin and Machin (2015), Oostendorp
(2015), Strom (2015, 2016), Catalano and Gatti (2016), Catalano and Waugh (2017),
Lirola (2016), McMurtrie and Murphy (2016), Monson, Donaghue, and Gill (2016),
Pérez-Latorre, Oliva, and Besalú (2016), Lindsay and Lyons (2017), Way and Akan
(2017), Veum and Moland Undrum (2018), Wodak and Forchtner (2018a).
In addition, if readers are interested in a guide to MCDA that provides tools for
this type of analysis and with a critical lens, Ledin and Machin’s recent book Doing
Visual Analysis (2018) is highly recommended, since they emphasize the range of
semiotic materials included when we talk about “visual communication” (2018: 3).
In the book, they examine the packaging of shampoo bottles, pasta, and baby food,
as well as smart phone design, spatial design (such as in classrooms) and data rep-
resentation (and more), and they provide a guide/tool kit for the analysis of these
different types of visual domains. They also introduce a theoretical model based on
the idea of how the visual is used to accomplish a variety of different objectives.
Moreover, they argue that because discourse and ideology are fused into everything
we create and use and which both direct and afford social practices, a critical
approach is needed in order to reveal these discourse and ideologies. They posit that
tools from SocSem are particularly useful in helping CDA scholars answer research
questions about the ways in which the meanings of visual (or other types of) com-
munication reference other “well-trodden themes and established institutionalized
uses” (Ledin & Machin, 2018: 191), as well as how ideology and power drive the
way we look at the world, and help shape what we think and what we do. We agree
with many who have been mentioned in this section that multimodality and visual
analysis, etc. in relation to CDA/CDS have many important contributions to make
and should be very generative of ideas and publications in the years to come.

4.7  Dispositive Analysis Approach (DPA)

Many who practice CDA/CDS (e.g., Wodak) recognize implicitly or explicitly the
influence of Michel Foucault’s discourse theory on the field. From the beginning,
Fairclough, for example, has invariably cited Foucault (see especially Fairclough,
1992, Chap. 2: “Michel Foucault and the analysis of discourse”: 37–61); but few
actually apply Foucault’s work in DA—rather they “put Foucault’s perspective to
188 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

work” (Courtine, 1981: 40; cited by Fairclough, 1992: 38). However, the Dispositive
Analysis approach (DPA) is in essence, CDA/CDS based on Michel Foucault’s dis-
course theory (Jäger & Maier, 2009). At the heart of this theory are the issues of
what knowledge is (and discourse, for that matter), how it arises and is passed on to
others, what function it has for constituting subjects, and what impact it has on
societal shaping and development (Jäger & Maier, 2009: 34). The DPA (as described
by Jäger & Maier, 2009) is oriented toward the cultural sciences and of all the
approaches reviewed in this chapter, it is the least concerned with the structural/
grammatical/linguistic features of a text (the micro level) and the most focused on
the macro level, “large categories, identified with equally large chunks of often
undeconstructed text” (Threadgold, 2003: 11). “Discourse analysis and its exten-
sion, dispositive analysis, aim to identify the knowledges contained in discourses
and dispositives, and how these knowledges are firmly connected to power relations
in power/knowledge complexes” (Jäger & Maier, 2009: 34–35).
Jürgen Link and his team are the scholars most closely associated with develop-
ing this approach (1982, 1983, 1988, 1992, 2008; Link & Link-Heer, 1990). Link,
an emeritus professor of modern German literature and discourse theory at the
University of Dortmund, is known for his theory of normalism/normativity, which
he provided a sophisticated analysis of in (1997/2013). Drawing on Foucault’s con-
cept of ‘dispositifs’ (the total of all social means through which normalities are
produced), he theorizes what constitutes the ‘normal’, how it is in a constant state of
flux, and what is regarded as normal vs. abnormal (Mihan, Haakenson, & Link,
2004). According to Link, a ‘discourse’ is defined as “an institutional way of talking
that regulates and reinforces action and thereby exerts power” (Link, 1983: 60;
Jäger & Maier, 2009: 45). ‘Discourse’ in this approach can also be seen as the flow
of all societal knowledge stored over time (Jäger, 1993, 1999), which determines
individual and collective actions and exercises power, thus shaping society (Jäger &
Maier, 2009); and ‘discourse strands’ exist at the level of concrete utterances located
on the surface of texts (Foucault, 2002). Both are different from a (single) text since
“a discourse with its recurring contents, symbols and strategies, leads to the emer-
gence and solidification of ‘knowledge’ and therefore has sustained effects” (Jäger
& Maier, 2009: 38). As to ‘power over discourse’, since discourses are supra-­
individual, they take on a life of their own as they evolve; and thus only groups that
have power can effect changes in discourse, for example because they have access
to the media or more wealth.
DPA serves as an important analytical strategy for some CDA/CDS practitioners,
enabling them to examine the multiple and complex dimensions of power mani-
fested in the dynamic relationship of discourses, actions, and objects (Andersen,
2003: 27; Caborn, 2007: 113; Jäger & Maier, 2009: 39–42). Analysts using this
approach “look to statements not so much for what they say but what they do; that
is, one questions what the constitutive or political effects of saying this instead of
that might be?” (Graham, 2011: 667). Moreover, the dispositive contributes to DA/
DS by insisting that analysis should move beyond the exclusive domain of language
towards work on non-linguistic elements.
4.7  Dispositive Analysis Approach (DPA) 189

As Foucault explains, the dispositive is a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble

consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions,
laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and phil-
anthropic propositions—in short, ‘the unsaid’ as much as (or even more than) ‘the
said’ (Foucault, 1980: 194). The dispositive is essentially the “net which can be
woven” between the above-mentioned elements (Foucault, 1978: 119–120) the
interplay of discursive practices (e.g., writing, thinking), non-discursive practices
(sawing a tree, walking across the street) and manifestations and/or the materializa-
tions of these practices (e.g., constructing a building and/or the existence of a school
building) and the relationship between all these elements (Jäger & Maier, 2009: 39).
It is an eclectic assemblage of language and material objects that attempts to show
how forms are linked together as functional elements of an apparatus. This hetero-
geneity of elements is significant in Foucault’s analysis of discursive and non-­
discursive practices of a dispositive, the various elements of which are viewed not
as mutually exclusive but as connected. Thus it is “not so much the individual ele-
ments that make […] up [a dispositive but] the particular arrangement and the rela-
tions between them” (Bussolini, 2010: 92), which are important because they arise
in response to a particular need. When an urgent situation occurs, society responds
by organizing text, talk, people, organizations, institutions, and materials together
(Jäger and Maier, 2009: 42). When these various elements come together, that is,
when they are connected with the purpose of addressing a crisis, the connections
constitute the dispositive. While Foucault sees these elements as being somehow
connected, he does not explicitly link discursive and non-discursive practices
together and is rather vague about the ‘bond’ between them.
Turning to Leont’ev’s ‘activity theory’ (1978) in order to extend Foucault’s
notion of the dispositive, Jäger and Maier (2009) make an explicit connection
among discourses, actions, and objects. In activity theory, meaning is assigned to an
object when a need arises, for which human action is employed in order to shape
raw materials into purposeful objects used to fulfill that specific need. More pre-
cisely, “meaning is assigned to an object through work” (Jäger & Maier, 2009: 43).
Leontjev’s activity theory (1978), they point out, is significant because it explains
human action as the “bond” that connects “subject and object, society and objective
reality” (Jäger & Maier, 2009: 43). In this view, the dispositive is the connection
between discursive practices (thinking and talking), non-discursive practices
(human action), and materialization (objects produced by human action) together,
all of which are based on knowledge that is transmitted through discourse. Discourse
is seen as powerful because it transports knowledge, which is the basis of all think-
ing and talking, acting, and material objects. On the basis of knowledge, we not only
ascribe meaning to objects but also conduct our actions around the meanings we
ascribe to them. This means that the attribution of meaning always entails physical
action. Human action is used to transform raw materials into objects, which retain
their meaning insofar as the discourse sustains them.
The DPA approach can be seen in microcosm in Foucault’s Discipline and
Punish (1979) and History of Sexuality (1978) as well as in Klemperer’s (1995)
diaries. However, in these examples, the method is applied implicitly by “analyzing
190 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

the discourses, assembling knowledge, consulting statistics, critically deconstruct-

ing them, drawing conclusions from them and so on” (Jäger & Maier, 2009: 61).
Thus, there is no explicit “how-to book” on DPA, but according to Jäger and Maier,
there are books (and others cited below) that can be used to generate ideas as to how
we can analyze discourse, action and the resulting materializations and/or manifes-
tations in the future. They themselves provide “a little toolbox for discourse analy-
sis” (Jäger & Maier, 2009: 52–56) which was updated in the 2016 version (Jäger &
Maier, 2016: 127–134) and point the reader to Jäger’s (2004) methodological justi-
fication for each of the tools. Prior to this, Graham (2011) had attempted to remedy
the lack of a model for Foucauldian DA by developing a DPA methodological plan
that includes description, recognition and classification and provides clear examples
for each. Scholars interested in DPA might find Graham’s article useful particularly
for doing educational research and for tracing “the relationship between words and
things: how the words we use to conceptualize and communicate end up producing
the very ‘things’ or objects of which we speak” (p. 668). There are a small number
of studies (cited below) that use primarily this approach: Link (1992), Jäger (1993,
2004), Jäger (1996), Klemperer (1999–2001; according to Jäger & Maier, 2009: 60,
this “can be read as a dispositive analysis”), Popkewitz and Lindblad (2000),
Graham (2007), Jäger and Jäger (2007), Graham and Slee (2008), McGrath (2008).
But only Rodriguez and Monreal (2017) was published recently (2017, i.e., since
Jager & Maier, 2009; Graham, 2011). Thus, from our point of view, there is an
unfortunate lack of specific examples using DPA (see the footnote below for more
on this10), since its knowledge of and adherence to Foucault’s original ideas mean
that it shows promise and deserves more attention in the context of CDA/CDS.

4.8  Corpus Linguistic Approach (CorpLingA)

A common critique of CDA/CDS approaches (see Sect. 5.4 for more details) has
been that researchers often ‘cherry-pick’ data, i.e., choose only those data that
match a preconceived point/argument they want to make (Baker, 2012). The inte-
gration of CDA/CDS with corpus studies research has come about in response to
this critique and also to related criticism that not only early CDA but also CDS has
traditionally lacked quantitative and comparative methods (Machin & Mayr, 2012:
216). Thus the introduction of corpus techniques (largely taken from CorpLing) into

10
 We would like to note that we deliberated about including DPA as one of our major approaches
since we had a very difficult time finding scholarly articles that explicitly used it after 2009, except
for Rodriguez and Monreal (2017). We felt that it is very possible that there is more recent work
that utilizes it and that we did not find it (perhaps given the fact that, unfortunately, neither of us
reads German fluently, the language in which much DPA scholarship is written). We decided to
include DPA because, after creating our table of approaches of CDA/CDS scholarship given above,
we noted that every major source that discusses CDA/CDS approaches included it and that there
seems to be a broad consensus as to its importance by CDA/CDS scholars.
4.8 Corpus Linguistic Approach (CorpLingA) 191

CDA/CDS helps to address the problem of the representativeness of the samples of

language analyzed and the need to check the hypotheses developed in qualitative
analysis so that they are quantifiably verifiable. In addition, it allows analysts to
work with a much larger amount of data than when using manual techniques.
CorpLingA uses computer support “to analyze authentic, and usually very large,
volumes of textual data” (Mautner, 2016: 155). Alongside reference corpora such as
the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Corpus of
Historical American English (Davies, 2010), some examples of this type of com-
puter support include concordance software such as Alongside Wordsmith, Ant
Conc freeware (Anthony, 2005, July), Concordance, TextStat, AdTat, and tools to
create collocational networks that represent relationships visually such as GraphColl
(see Baker & McEnery, 2015b). Stubbs (1996) and Baker (2006) each give an excel-
lent introduction to CorpLing and also explore its value for DA. Charteris-Black’s
work (2004, 2006), also cited in the next section on cognitive linguistics (since he
does critical metaphor analysis), is based on a CorpLingA. In his books, he explains
why a CorpLingA should be used in analyzing metaphor because of the importance
of having a large and representative sample of language (that includes a wide range
of texts). He also describes how CorpLing can be used to measure the frequency of
metaphors.
Mautner’s chapter in Wodak and Krzyżanowski (2008) deals with the analysis of
newspapers, magazines and other print media using CorpLing and contains an
excellent discussion of how to combine both qualitative and quantitative methods
and methodologies. She illustrates how to put together what some have called a
‘small corpus’, which is often what is used, given the qualitative nature of much
CDA/CDS research. Based on Bauer and Aarts (2000: 31–34), she outlines a cycli-
cal (rather than a random) method of sampling (Mautner, 2008: 35) or, alternatively,
a top-down approach (2008: 36), leading to a “specialized, topic-oriented and dia-
chronic corpus (see Baker, 2006: 26–29)”. She says that the use of these techniques
balances subjective judgment with “rigour and choices exposed to critical scrutiny.
The key correctives are transparency and accountability” (Mautner, 2008: 37). She
then lays out the components of an analytical toolkit, using traditional aspects of
both CDA/CDS and CorpLing. For example, she suggests that the connotative
meaning (evaluative load) of words, which CDA/CDS analysts often work with and
is widely shared in a speech community (Stubbs, 2001: 35), can easily be checked
by taking a word like ‘undesirables’ and getting comparative evidence from a refer-
ence corpus, such as the British National Corpus or Wordbanks Online (both of
which have many millions of words). With the types of software available to deal
with very large corpora, it is relatively fast and easy to find out what the shared con-
notations are (Mautner, 2008: 45). In this way analysts can put their judgment of
evaluation in perspective and make sure they don’t over- or under-interpret
(O’Halloran & Coffin, 2004).
Mautner also suggests that the typical CorpLing technique of finding the colloca-
tions that a word normally occurs in, which gives it a “consistent aura of meaning”
or “semantic prosody” (Louw, 1993: 175), can be used in CDA/CDS. For example,
for an expression like ‘rampant immigration’, the researcher can use the British
192 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

s­ ections of Wordbanks Online and find that, for ‘rampant’, the aura is consistently
negative, given the types of words it typically is used with (e.g., ‘commercialism’,
‘consumerism’, ‘materialism’, ‘corruption’, ‘inflation’ (Mautner, 2008: 45). She
further points out that an expression such as ‘ethnic diversity’, which is an example
of “nodes around which ideological battles are fought” (Stubbs, 2001: 188; see also
Mautner, 2008: 46), and thus are of interest to CDA/CDS, can be either positive or
negative, depending on who uses it and in what textual and political contexts. This
necessitates going backwards and forwards in the text in order to check “the dyna-
mism of meaning-making as the text proceeds” (O’Halloran & Coffin, 2004: 85),
not only other words and expressions used in the text but also images, thereby incor-
porating MCDA as well. In the same way, Mautner’s (2010) book Language and the
Market Society incorporates CDA/CDS and CorpLing to examine the marketization
of language in various aspects of society. Mautner’s revised chapter in Wodak and
Meyer (2016a) includes an excellent (updated) discussion of the potential contribu-
tions of CorpLing to CDA/CDS as well as different perspectives and therefore con-
tributes to methodological triangulation (McEnery & Hardie, 2012: 233); it also
helps to reduce researcher bias, which has consistently been a strong issue in CDA/
CDS. And finally, the combination of quantitative and qualitative perspectives on
textual data allows for the detailed examination of “collocational environments”
(a.k.a. co-textual contexts) as well as the ability to see patterns in the discourse
(Mautner, 2016: 156).
Mautner (2016: 174–176) also provides a detailed discussion of epistemological
issues and warnings regarding this approach. In particular, she notes that evidence
may be laid out by corpus software, but it “never speaks for itself” (2016: 174).
Hence, human analysts (not computer software) must be the ones to make the con-
nections. Furthermore, she points to the importance of working out an item’s social
significance, being careful not to draw over-encompassing conclusions, remember-
ing that corpora are not the only tools for observing language use, and remaining
flexible and transdisciplinary. She also argues that analysts must recognize that cor-
pus evidence is not superior to manual or qualitative procedures, but complemen-
tary, and that statements about the presence, absence or frequency of an item in one
data set only make sense in comparison with others. Additionally, we need to clarify
whether our software tools provide quantitative or qualitative data and avoid making
“pseudo-quantitative statements” such as ‘some’, ‘most’, ‘the majority’, etc. when
actual quantification did not occur, because in quantitative data, “you either count or
you don’t: there is no legitimate half-way house” (Mautner, 2016: 176). Finally, she
reminds analysts that corpus linguistic techniques cannot make up for flawed
designs or samples.
Paul Baker has also published a large body of work in this area, which includes
his edited volume (2009) Contemporary Corpus Linguistics in which Mautner
(2009) wrote a chapter on the combination of CDA/CDS and CorpLing. Baker
(2012) responds to criticism of CDA/CDS and how the use of CorpLing can provide
answers to some of the critiques:
4.8  Corpus Linguistic Approach (CorpLingA) 193

This is why I would argue that any analytical tools and methods that are rigorous and
grounded in scientific principles such as representativeness, falsification, data-driven
approaches, using statistical approaches to test hypotheses and a desire to provide a full
picture of representation (not just the negative cases) can only serve to help to improve
CDA’s standing, ultimately making its findings more influential (2012: 255).

Taking the reader step by step through his analysis of the representation of Islam
and Muslims in the British press, Baker (2012) shows how corpus-driven proce-
dures determined that Muslims tended to be linked to the concept of extreme belief
much more than moderate or strong belief. However, he then methodically presents
the problems and different choices he had to make as an analyst in interpreting this
data. This leads him to conclude that no matter how much quantitative analysis and
use of statistics we apply, they are still subject to human bias. Hence (not unlike
Mautner’s warnings), he posits that we should be careful not to overstate the ability
of CorpLing to reduce researcher bias. He suggests increased researcher reflexivity
as one way to address this problem (see Chap. 5).
In their edited volume entitled Corpora and discourse studies: Integrating dis-
course and corpora (2015a), Baker and McEnery bring together studies that utilize
CorpLing in DA/DS (including different text-types and different types of DA/DS,
not just CDA/CDS). In their own chapter, the authors examine discourse on Twitter
regarding people who receive government support (referred to as ‘benefits’) in the
UK between the years 2008–2009 and 2011–2012. Using CorpLing, they found that
the discourse around benefits in 2012 was less sympathetic and told more negative
stories both at the individual level and on the level of the wider society, representing
the previous government as soft, open to abuse, and in need of reform.
More recently, Subtirelu and Baker (2018) provide a detailed look at the develop-
ment of CorpLing in CDA after it first started in the 1990s. Tracing the first actual
linkage of CDA to corpus approaches to Hardt-Mautner (1995), the authors high-
light the method as a response to the ‘cherry-picking’ critique of CDA (as said
above) but also discuss popular methodologies in corpus approaches and how they
have been developed through the years. Another valuable part of the chapter is a
clear example from the authors of a corpus approach to CDA that centers around US
negotiations of the ‘fiscal cliff’ (a term referring to the undesirable effects expected
to incur as a result of budget decisions scheduled either to take effect or to expire11)
and its coverage in two different news sources. In their analysis, the authors take
readers through six steps: (1) Research topic and questions; (2) Background
research; (3) Corpus collection; (4) corpus-driven analysis-keywords extraction; (5)
Qualitative analysis; and (6) Corpus-based analysis-collocation analysis (in which
they sought evidence for generalizations through corpus data) (2018: 110–117). In
doing so, they are able to illustrate how
techniques from corpus linguistics such as keyword or collocation analysis are particularly
helpful in supporting generalisations about discourse, both in the form of how words or
phrases might be used generally as well as how characteristic of a set of texts a particular
usage of a word or phrase is (Subtirelu & Baker, 2018: 118).

11
 See Catalano and Waugh (2013a) for a critical metonymy analysis of fiscal cliff.
194 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

In addition, they show how technology in corpus approaches can assist in mak-
ing more credible interpretations about salient patterns in large amounts of data that
might have been overlooked otherwise. We recommend this chapter to anyone inter-
ested in the development of the field, learning about new technologies in corpus
approaches such as GraphColl (which can create instant collocational networks to
give a visual representation of relationships, including those between concepts), and
how CorpLing can be integrated into CDA. For those readers interested in the digi-
tal humanities (i.e., applying computational tools and methods to disciplines such as
literature, history, and philosophy), Kieran O’Halloran’s (2017) book on corpora
and digitally-driven critical analysis lays out a clear methodology for using a corpus
approach to CDA in the context of digital humanities. The book goes into detail on
how to use corpus tools as a way of examining arguments in the public sphere, and
provides convincing arguments as to why corpus tools are useful in CDA/CDS.
Some other examples of corpus approaches include Kim’s (2014) study that
investigates the way in which North Korea is constructed in the US media by ana-
lyzing collocational patterns, and Partington (2014), who looks at the role of a cor-
pus approach in evaluating why certain terms are absent from corpora. Rheindorf
(2018) provides a useful model for integrating quantitative and qualitative analysis
in CDA/CDS scholarship; he is continuing to publish much more in this area, par-
ticularly on how to use a DHA perspective while combining corpus and qualitative
methods. Additionally, see Bednarek and Caple (2014), Brindle (2016), Jeffries and
Walker (2017), O’Halloran (2012), Pérez-Paredes, Jiménez, and Hernández (2017),
Potts (2013), Potts, Bednarek, and Caple (2015), and Wilson and Krizsán (2017).
Although above we have stated the way in which corpus approaches have
addressed shortcomings in CDA/CDS scholarship, we would like to stress that
because of the ever-present need to take context into consideration, we believe it is
important for CDA/CDS scholars doing corpus approaches to always return to con-
text, which sometimes means having a small corpus and/or going through the data
manually and taking the time to look at it in terms of how linguistic elements have
different meanings in different contexts.

4.9  Cognitive Linguistic Approaches (CogLingA)

4.9.1  Introduction

Increasingly, cognitive linguistics12 (CogLing) has influenced and been influenced

by the field of CDA/CDS in multiple and varying ways, many of which are dis-
cussed in Hart and Lukeš (2007a, 2007b), as well as more recent work such as Hart

12
 For some, capitalized “Cognitive Linguistics” refers to the work of Lakoff, Langacker, Fillmore,
Fauconnier, and others mentioned in this section whereas ‘cognitive linguistics’ not capitalized
refers to the study of linguistics which is cognitive in orientation (Hart & Lukeš, 2007b: x). In
addition, we use the acronym CogLing in order not to confuse it with critical linguistics or other
areas, while other scholars often use CL.
4.9  Cognitive Linguistic Approaches (CogLingA) 195

(2011a, 2011b) and Hart and Cap (2014a). A number of approaches to CDA/CDS
incorporate a CogLing lens and theories and they address the analysis of discourse
differently. Oswald (2014: 98) refers to this as the “cognitive turn” and like other
scholars in this area, he finds a natural and complementary nexus between the two
perspectives.
Fauconnier and Turner (2002) define CogLing as a scholarly perspective on the
study of language, conceptual systems, human cognition and meaning construction
(see also Hart, 2010: 24). It is concerned with how we make meaning of our world
and how we define our everyday realities (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980: 3; Fauconnier
& Turner, 2002). Cognitive linguists believe that communication involves concep-
tual processes, and that language is based on the same system that we use in thought
and action. Thus, linguistic structure provides us indirect access to those processes
and that system is in this sense a “window to the mind” (Fauconnier, 1999: 96; Hart,
2010: 72). According to Hart (adapted from 2018a: 78), the principle aims of
CogLing are:
(i) to model the conceptual structures invoked by language;
(ii) to disclose the ideological qualities and legitimating potentials which concep-
tual structures, may carry.
CogLing approaches focus on “interpretation-stage analysis” (Fairclough, 1995:
59), which is concerned with how readers/viewers construct meaning (Hart, 2018a:
78). No other mainstream approaches besides CogLing commonly use cognitive
theories of language (Hart, 2010), although other approaches, such as van Dijk (van
Dijk, 1985, 1988, 1993a, 1993b, 1995a; see Sect. 4.4) attend to cognition (from a
social psychological approach, as social cognition). Some CDA/CDS scholars (such
as Wodak) have noted that in the past, CogLingA have been largely excluded from
CDS for unjustifiable reasons (Wodak, 2006), and Chilton (2005a, 2005b), a cogni-
tive linguist, has argued that CogLing theories have been underused in CDA/CDS
and have not received enough attention in the literature. Recently, scholars have
begun to counter the critique (Widdowson, 2004) that CDA/CDS lacks a systematic
linguistic analysis, or, as noted earlier, that SFL is inadequate for its needs (van
Dijk, 2008a), and there has been an increasing focus on the possibilities that a CDA/
CDS and CogLing combination allows in analysis. Adding to this, Jeffries (2010:
128) notes that the use of CogLing theories could help us to understand the mecha-
nisms by which ideological influence operates (a point also made by van Dijk).
Scholars such as Chilton (2005a), Hart (2010, 2011a, 2018a, 2018b), Hart and Cap
(2014b), Koller (2005), Musolff (2012, 2014), and Wodak (2006) have been some
of the most outspoken advocates for this combination, especially CDA/CDS and
metaphor analysis, although Hart and Cap (2014a, 2014b) and Hart (2018a, 2018b)
(to be discussed below) reveal many more areas where CogLing and its theories are
compatible with CDA/CDS13.

 Not all work on metaphor is directly or only inspired by cognitive linguistics, but it is the most
13

important influence.
196 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

While Paul Chilton is often cited as one of the founders of CDA/CDS, he has
never explicitly applied the term CDA or CDS to his own work on the discourse of
politics and international relations (cf. Chilton, 1994a, 1996b, 2004, 2005a, 2005b;
Chilton & Lakoff, 1995). He has participated in work with CDA/CDS scholars like
Wodak, albeit typically as a critic of CDA (Chilton & Wodak, 2007; Wodak &
Chilton, 2007). Chilton has more recently (like Hart, 2010) drawn on cognitive
evolutionary psychology to ask whether there might exist an innate ‘critical instinct’
and if so, what the role of CDA/CDS is (Chilton, 2005a), a position that has been
challenged by other CDA/CDS researchers (Fairclough, 2009; van Dijk, 2006/2011;
Wodak, 2007). Chilton’s argument is that the most fundamental issue is whether
societies provide the freedom to enable the ‘critical instinct’ to operate (Wodak &
Meyer, 2009a: 14). His CDA-type work (i.e., Chilton, 2007) could be described as
“comparative discourse analysis that crosses linguistic, cultural and political bound-
aries” (Wodak & Meyer, 2009a: 14) and is largely concerned with universal aspects
of language and the human mind, integrating CogLing into CDA/CDS and attempt-
ing to address his own critiques about CDA/CDS work.
Chilton’s most recent work, with the exception of a 2016 Chinese translation of
Wodak and Chilton (2007), focuses more on concepts in CogLing, and less on CDA/
CDS. For example, his book, Language, Space and Mind: The Conceptual Geometry
of Linguistic Meaning (2014) examines the geometric elements used to describe
concrete spatial expressions and cognitions. The book lays out in detail ‘Deictic
Space Theory’ (developed from Chilton’s earlier model of 2004, ‘Discourse Space
Theory’) which is rooted in embodied geometry and has underpinnings related to
neuroscience. The theory proposes a three-dimensional conceptual space that inte-
grates different types of distance (i.e., attentional distance, temporal distance and
epistemic distance) that allow for the unification of numerous linguistic-conceptual
phenomena such as tense, aspect and modality. Nothing in the book’s description
mentions CDA/CDS or an application of this work to CDA/CDS.

4.9.2  Critical Metaphor and Metonymy Analysis

There has been an increasing trend of integrating critical metaphor research into
CDA (and often incorporating corpus approaches as well) which has been highly
successful and numerous publications have occurred since Charteris-Black first
introduced the term ‘critical metaphor analysis’ in 2004 (he also argued for ‘corpus
approaches’ to critical metaphor analysis as noted in 4.8 and combined them both in
his work). In the case of Charteris-Black, while he recognizes the value of the
­cognitive approach to metaphor because it explains the “correspondence between
otherwise irreconcilable domains by accessing the semantics of metaphor” (2004:
17), he feels that it doesn’t account for individual speaker meaning. For that, he says
that a pragmatic view of metaphor is needed, since speakers use metaphor with the
goal of ‘persuasion’ (and thus he aligns his work on metaphor with rhetoric) and
4.9  Cognitive Linguistic Approaches (CogLingA) 197

this means that metaphor choice is motivated by ideology (2004: 247)14. He argues
that ‘cognitive semantics’ can explain how metaphors are understood, but a prag-
matic perspective can explain why a particular metaphor is chosen and what pur-
pose it serves in a given discourse context (we will discuss pragmatics in Sect. 6.9).
In the end, he argues for a combination of a cognitive and a pragmatic approach to
metaphor (and cites also Forceville, 1996: 35, who shares this point of view), and
also, ultimately, a view of metaphor based on “the interrelatedness of linguistic,
cognitive, pragmatic, cultural, ideological and historical factors” (Charteris-Black,
2004: 251; see also 2006), in which he uses cognitive semantics.
He carried this theme further in a series of books: (Charteris-Black, 2005/2011,
revised and updated 2nd edition) focuses on rhetoric (and rhetorical schemes and
strategies), the persuasive power of metaphors (and the myths they create), and
ideology and political discourse, a detailed analysis of the speeches of several dif-
ferent British and American politicians; he develops this further in discussing the
‘design’ of leadership style (2007); he looks at metaphor and gender in British
Parliamentary debates (2009); he encompasses various approaches to rhetoric, criti-
cal approaches to discourse (with special focus on Wodak’s DHA), critical meta-
phor analysis (with attention to social cognition as in van Dijk’s work) (2014)—and
discusses various ‘case studies’ (e.g., speeches of British and American politicians);
he wrote on ‘fire metaphors’ (and metonyms)—the discourse of ‘awe and author-
ity’, language (lexical semantics, corpora and collocates), conceptual metaphor
theory and thought—and more specifically it discusses a variety of religious and
political discourses, including in visual media (British political cartoons) (2017).
He also co-authored a book on gender and the language of illness (Charteris-Black
& Seale, 2010) which combines his approach with a sociological one.
Some examples of other publications featuring CogLing (and spanning disci-
plines) include Chilton (1994a, 1994b, 1996a, 1996b), Chilton and Lakoff (1995),
Santa Ana (1999, 2002, 2013), El Refaie (2001), Koller (2004, 2005), Musolff
(2004, 2006, 2007, 2010, 2016), Goatly (2007), Maalej (2007), and Nordensvard
(2013). In addition, in the Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language (2017)
edited by Semino and Demjén, Musolff (2017b) has a chapter on metaphor and
persuasion in politics incorporating CogLing, and Hidalgo-Downing and Kraljevic-­
Mujic (2017) address persuasion in commercial advertising, both of which specifi-
cally mention CDA/CDS (but neither of them say specifically that they use
CogLing).

14
 At this point, we would like to note that what is often called metaphor in some of the scholarly
work we cite in this section is in some cases actually metonymy, or at least it includes metonymy
on some level. We believe it is important to separate out the two when possible, and recognize
which one is being used in a given text, partly because this difference helps us to deal with the
relation between text and image. We also believe, along with Portero-Muñoz (2011), Littlemore
(2015), and others that metonymy is the larger and more ubiquitous process, and hence more atten-
tion needs to be paid to metonymy and its role in motivating metaphors that shape or are shaped by
the way we think.
198 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

Another important scholar who has established himself as a leader in this area is
Andreas Musolff (also cited above) who, focusing mainly on metaphor analysis15
(2012: 303), underscores its importance in unmasking racist ideology in discourse,
pointing out “the argumentative advantage that metaphor gives its users when they
want to dis-qualify political developments, social groups or even individuals as
threatening the identity or continued existence of a nation state” and thus meta-
phor’s relevance to CDA/CDS. Moreover, he demonstrates the usefulness of critical
metaphor theories as a fundamental means of concept and argument-building,
incorporating a modified cognitive approach informed by Relevance Theory (which
provides a framework for explaining influence through the analysis of information-­
processing mechanisms, see Oswald, 2014) within CDA/CDS (Musolff, 2012: 303).
Musolff also shows how critical metaphor analysis can align nicely with DHA. In
Musolff (2014) he compares the metaphors used during particular political periods
in order to help readers understand their danger when seen through a historical lens,
such as the current re-surfacing of particular metaphors commonly used during
Nazi times. Additionally, in his book Political Metaphor Analysis (2016), he inte-
grates critical metaphor analysis with DHA and CorpLingA and demonstrates how
using corpuses (corpora) at different points in time can reveal the origins of “meta-
phor scenarios16” that draw on past historical contexts and utilize them in current
contexts. One point of focus is the metaphor JEWS ARE PARASITES. Reviewing
documents such as Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1933) (and going back much further in
time) Musolff traces the origins of this metaphor and then follows it into modern
times as it is used to stigmatize individuals. Another important revelation in
Musolff’s book is arrived at by using experiments in which students write their
interpretations of the metaphor NATIONS AS PERSONS17.  Through initial data
collection in which students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds gave
their interpretation of the way in which ‘nation’ can be described in terms of the
human body (Musolff, 2016: 120), he found (2016: 129) that (as opposed to Lakoff
& Johnson’s, 1980 claims) “metaphor understanding and interpretation is at least as
variable as metaphor use and production”. Musolff then concludes, somewhat con-
troversially, that because his findings show that hearers/readers vary greatly in their
metaphor interpretations and creatively de- and reconstruct metaphors to fit new
scenario versions, the idea of a naïve hearer/reader who understands and
­automatically accepts the ideological bias of political metaphors is no longer viable.
Thus, we cannot absolve readers/hearers of dangerous metaphors “of their respon-

15
 We need to underscore that not everyone who does metaphor (or metonymy) analysis is neces-
sarily a cognitive linguist.
16
 According to Musolff (2016: 30), “metaphor scenarios” are “discourse-based culturally and his-
torically mediated” versions of a source domain which include “specific narrative and evaluative
perspectives” and they consist of a set of assumptions made about the prototypical elements of a
story or event and participants’ ethical evaluations of these elements which are related to the atti-
tudes and emotional stances present in the respective discourse community.
17
 Musolff has recently published more on this metaphor resulting from years of gathering data
from students around the world so we encourage readers to seek out this newest work as well.
4.9  Cognitive Linguistic Approaches (CogLingA) 199

sibility for letting themselves be manipulated” (2016: 131). For example, when
people hear others call social groups ‘parasites’, we cannot let the notion of a naïve
hearer/reader who is manipulated by metaphor “become a convenient excuse” for
inaction and refusal to denounce racist discourse (Musolff, 2016: 131). Musolff
does caution, though, that these conclusions are based on limited research, and
much more needs to be done in order to truly gain evidence for this claim.
More recently, Musolff has begun to focus on hate speech (e.g., Musolff, 2017a,
2018). His forthcoming article (pre-publication draft) in Pragmatics & Society illus-
trates the strategic use of figurative language in self-legitimizing discourse which
enables hate speakers to convey their message while denying that it is discrimina-
tory or racist. This then makes it difficult to prosecute them for hate speech. Musolff
argues for the presentation of sophisticated counter-narratives that undermine the
implicit speech utilized by hate speakers so as to beat them at their own game
(Musolff, 2018 draft; 2019). Finally, Musolff has also moved into MCDA, with a
multimodal critical metonymy/metaphor analysis of online news sources that report
on unaccompanied youths from Central America and Border Patrol/immigration
officials in the US (Catalano & Musolff, 2018 draft; 2019). Findings from this study
reveal verbal and visual metonymies that dehumanize and criminalize child migrants
while Border Patrol/immigration enforcement discourse creates WAR/WILD
WEST metaphors that justify the militarization of the border. The article also shows
how revealing underlying conceptualizations of migrants by immigration and bor-
der control agencies helps readers understand the social imaginary which allows the
government to garner public support for unjust policies and treatment of migrants
(with particular focus on the Trump administration).
It is also worth noting that metaphorical discourse can be found in visual (and
other) data, and MCDA of metaphorical discourse has been also conducted by
scholars such as El Rafaie (2003), Forceville and Urios-Aparisi (2009), Bounegru
and Forceville (2011), Forceville (2014a, 2014b), and Tseronis and Forceville
(2017). As can be seen, Charles Forceville (who works on gesture, among other
domains) has been a leader in this area, and his work (especially with Urios-Aparisi,
2009) is frequently cited in studies that examine multimodal metaphor, regardless of
whether or not it is also combined with CDA/CDS.
Critical metonymy analysis has recently taken an equal place with metaphor in
the integration of CogLing into CDA and several publications that feature analysis
of metonymy (uniquely or in addition to metaphor) have emerged in the last few
years, including MCDA of metonymy (Meadows, 2007; Portero-Muñoz, 2011;
Riad & Vaara, 2011; Velázquez, 2013; Catalano & Moeller, 2013; Catalano &
Waugh, 2013a, 2013b, 2017). These types of analyses (like those concerned with
metaphor) expose the use of metonymy as a tool of persuasion and manipulation
and add more depth, resulting in a more detailed and systematic analysis.
200 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

4.9.3  Hart’s Approaches to CogLing

Although much work has been done in CogLing with critical metaphor/metonymy
analysis, Hart (2010, 2011a; Hart & Lukeš, 2007a, 2007b) believes that CogLing
(2016: 336) has much more to offer CDA analysts. One major contribution that he
has discussed (Hart, 2011a) that has not been fully utilized is the new perspective it
can offer on objects of analysis such as the use of a passive sentence without the
agent, which could be analyzed/interpreted through cognitive linguistic notions
such as profiling/backgrounding (Croft & Cruse, 2004) and metonymy (Reisigl &
Wodak, 2001). In addition, Hart believes that Talmy’s theory of Force-Dynamics
(Talmy, 1988, 2000), which refers to how entities react with respect to force, is use-
ful in understanding and explaining our “conceptualisations of physical interactions
but also, by metaphorical extension, social, psychological, political, legal and lin-
guistic interactions”, particularly in discourse related to immigration (Hart, 2011b:
273). Besides force-dynamics, Hart also encourages the use of other CogLing con-
cepts, such as mental spaces (Fauconnier, 1994, 1997), conceptual blending
(Fauconnier & Turner, 1996, 2002) and cognitive grammar (Langacker, 1987, 1991,
2002, 2008) (as cited in Hart, 2010: 25).
In their book, Hart and Cap (2014a) first categorized CogLing approaches into
four distinct groups: ‘critical metaphor analysis’ (e.g., unmasking ideology in dis-
course), ‘critical cognitive pragmatic approach’ (e.g., how language users try to
influence their addressees or audience), ‘legitimization-proximization model’ (e.g.,
concerned with how speakers help legitimize their actions by showing that an exter-
nal threat is encroaching on the addressee), and ‘cognitive linguistic approach’
(described above, including visual grammar). However, in (2018a, 2018b), Hart
simplifies this classification and refers to all the different approaches as CogLing.
Since the publication of his 2010 book, Hart has produced a large body of work
that continues to expand the applications of CogLing to the CDA/CDS realm (see
Hart, 2011a, 2011b, 2014, 2015 2016, 2018a, 2018b). As we mentioned earlier, Hart
(2011a) discusses how CogLing can inform CDA in so many ways other than just
metaphor analysis, mainly due to the way it can explicitly address conceptualiza-
tion, which CDA had taken for granted. Hart develops these concepts even further
in (Hart and Cap 2014a, 2014b), adapting the vocabulary of film studies as a meta-
phor for the way the brain performs these construal operations.
In their introductory article to a Special Issue of Discourse & Society dedicated
to “moving beyond foundations” Krzyżanowski and Forchtner (2016: 259) view
Hart’s work on CogLing (along with others) as “indispensable input in the debate
which concerns the need for empirical analysis that is oriented toward language-in-­
use”, and also as “theoretically well-informed and conceptually rich”. They also
point out that “Hart presents an argument from cognitive linguistics which suggests
that understanding language involves the construction of multimodal mental repre-
sentations, the properties of which can be approached within frameworks of multi-
modal social semiotics and the wider multimodal CDS” (2016: 259). In Hart’s view,
we should use CogLing to “illuminate the nuances of meanings communicated via
4.9  Cognitive Linguistic Approaches (CogLingA) 201

language” (Hart, 2016: 345). Furthermore, he calls for a change in direction of

influence from linguistic forms of DA influencing non-linguistic forms to the other
way around (or at least a bi-directional influence). Here, he further develops the
concept of ‘point of view’, including visual examples from The Guardian and The
Telegraph in the UK and how each newspaper presented the same event of a politi-
cal protest in different ways depending on the perspective that was featured. What
is innovative about this work is the way in which Hart shows how visual grammar
(such as whether a person appears on the left or right of the visual frame) can be
analyzed from the perspective of the viewer, and how this can work together with
verbal discourse from the perspective of ‘point of view’, in particular, anchor, angle
and distance (Hart, 2015; drawing on ideas in Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996, 2006
and others). Hart demonstrates how in conceptualizing visual images, viewers tend
to sympathize more with those positioned on the right. This is based on the idea
(Casasanto, 2009) that people tend to associate rightward space with positive ideas,
and leftward space with negative ones (and left for old information and right for new
information, Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). The reason for this is that most people
are right-hand dominant, which means they can manipulate objects that are located
to the right of the body better,18 which helps in the analysis of how pictures act as
co-text.
What is noteworthy in this perspective is the way in which literal language uses
as well as non-literal/figurative ones (e.g., metaphor) can actually be felt or visually
imagined by those experiencing them verbally. For an example of this, Hart cites
research that describes how when a reader comes across the metaphor
IMMIGRATION IS A FLOOD, it can result in feelings of drowning because it
involves a “simulation of events which are technically impossible but are imagined
as if they were real” (Hart, 2016: 347). According to him, the most important thing
to take away from multimodal studies that incorporate CogLing such as his own is
the way in which they “illuminate some of the subtle ways in which language con-
tributes to the social construction of knowledge and values” (Hart, 2016: 346),
which is particularly important given the increasingly visual practices of news
communication.
Hart’s work on CogLing has continued to progress. In 2018, he published two
chapters in two different handbooks which demonstrate his evolving ideas in
CogLing (Hart, 2018a, 2018b). In both chapters, instead of dividing up the sub-­
categories into four types, as above, he simplifies them in three over-arching catego-
ries: ‘image schema analysis’ (e.g., a fundamental way of helping us understand the
way the world works), ‘metaphor analysis’ (see Sect. 4.9.2, but it also includes

18
 This line of reasoning makes the first author wonder if she construes events the opposite way,
since she is left-handed. Hence, there are still issues to be considered about left-handers, since they
may be a ‘minority’ but they shouldn’t be treated as not of interest (which wouldn’t be a very CDA/
CDS way of treating the topic). Also, the second author, who is decidedly right-handed and much
more verbal than visual, has trouble working with left=old/negative and right=new/positive,
including when using a large monitor that can accommodate old and new versions of a text (as in
the case of writing this book)!
202 4  The Main Approaches to CDA/CDS

multimodality), and ‘discourse world analysis’ (e.g., how meaning is construed in

discourse beyond the sentence). However, this area of CogLing is clearly in flux at
the time (Feb. 2018) of this writing, and is sure to change and develop more in the
future (we note that Hart has announced a new book). We hope to see more develop-
ment in multimodal work in this area, particularly in terms of using multimodal
cognitive types of analysis as tools of resistance. We believe that because of the way
that image/video can reach viewers on an emotional level, it is particularly powerful
when combined with written text and other modes; hence, it is essential that schol-
ars in this area use CDA/CDS tools to uncover the ideologies hidden in these types
of texts.
Having finished our discussion of the major approaches to CDA/CDS, in the next
chapter we will examine the large body of research that has critiqued CDA/CDS and
ways in which more recent work in CDA/CDS attempts to address these concerns.
In doing so, we will illustrate the ability of CDA/CDS scholars to be reflexive and
thoughtful about their work.

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Chapter 5
Critiques of CDA/CDS and Responses

5.1  Introduction

“CDS has come a long way, theoretically as well as analytically, since its begin-
nings” (Krzyżanowski & Forchtner, 2016b: 254). CDA/CDS has not only increased
attention given to pressing social issues, but it has moved scholars from seeing
language as abstract to seeing it as a way to represent speakers/writers’ “beliefs,
positions, and ideas” (Mogashoa, 2014:105). It has focused on the way in which
language and power are connected, and the way that discourse not only represents
the world but constitutes it, and more recently, the way that other modes of com-
munication (e.g., image, sound, color, etc.) have contributed to this. It has given us
a scholarly lens with which to see the world, and for those that seek to resist oppres-
sive forces in the world, it can give them hope. However, while it offers substantial
potential applications in a wide range of contexts, it has received its share of criti-
cism. According to Haig (2004: 5), “although there have been, and continue to be, a
great number of critics of CDA (so much so that the activity threatens to develop
into a whole new academic cottage industry of its own) essentially they are all con-
cerned with asking, from their several perspectives, the same fundamental question:
Does CDA produce valid knowledge?”.
Before entering into our discussion of the different critiques, we would like to
note several things. First, for much of this volume (except in direct quotations of
other scholars), we have used ‘CDA/CDS’ to show that they aren’t separate from
each other and also to underscore how the field/research program is evolving.
However, in Chap. 2, and to a certain extent, in three we very often use ‘CDA’ alone,
since in the time period under discussion, only ‘CDA’ was used and ‘CDS’ didn’t
exit or wasn’t used (or much more rarely). Hence, in much of this chapter, where
most of the critique came about when the term ‘CDS’ had not yet been used, readers
will note the frequent use of ‘CDA’ alone, except near the end of the chapter where
we discuss the creation of CDS in light of the critique we explore here, or in places

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 219

T. Catalano, L. R. Waugh, Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse
Studies and Beyond, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 26,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49379-0_5
220 5  Critiques of CDA/CDS and Responses

where the authors we cite use CDS or both CDA and CDS. In addition, we want to
emphasize that some of the critiques of CDA are also valid for CDS, while others
were ‘answered’ by the creation of CDS.
A second issue is that we decided to center the book more on the historical devel-
opment of CDA, its various approaches and multidisciplinary connections—and
less on critiques. Given that, this chapter provides more of a synthesis of the com-
mon critiques, rather than a detailed account of every single issue by every scholar
who has critiqued it, especially when very similar critiques are made by the same or
other scholars. In this way, we focus on what CDA was, is, and will be (hopefully)
in the future. We would also like to point out that the fact that CDA has received so
much critique shows that the field has really elicited much attention, which means
that people are reading CDA work, and it has earned a distinct place among other
fields. Furthermore, most (but not all) of the criticisms were made with the aim of
making CDA work better, not tearing it apart. In fact, many of the critiques were put
forth by CDA scholars themselves as part of reflexive practice, and as such (as we
point out later), many CDA scholars have responded to the critiques with changes
or additions to the field which have resulted in improvements.
We also need to remind the reader that, as discussed in Sect. 3.2 and as shown in
Chap. 4, CDA is made up of several different approaches. This means that any criti-
cism of CDA meant to address the whole program is usually only valid for part of
it, since (see Wodak & Meyer, 2001, 2009, 2016) it is not monolithic, and many of
the approaches are so different from each other that they are not all subject to the
same criticism: not all have the same underlying theories, analytical questions,
methods, goals, etc. For example, some critics of CDA who lean toward quantitative
research (and in some cases doubt the benefits of qualitative research) consider
knowledge to be valid only when there are tests that show its validity. This then
raises the constant question of whether CDA is knowledge or just opinion, given
that CDA scholars are straightforward about declaring their own bias (and many,
even in the sciences, have said that the ‘lack of bias’ in science is an illusion). But
this is not the opinion of everyone, and so all of this should be kept in mind as read-
ers advance through the chapter.
While we cannot cover the extensive critique in its entirety, the overall aim of
this chapter is not to take sides in the debates about the field, but to describe some
of its most important multi-layered facets and show briefly how scholars in the field
have attempted to remedy these problems and continually improve CDA research as
a whole—although, at times, we make it known which critiques we take seriously.
We do this by beginning with a brief discussion of a well-known debate (via articles
in Language and Literature 1995/1996) between Henry G. Widdowson and Norman
Fairclough, which marks the start of a long series of critiques aimed at CDA, fol-
lowed by a later response by Wodak (2006). We then discuss various other critiques
in detail, including what it means to be ‘critical’; methodological and theoretical
shortcomings; the need for, as well as the role of, context; the relationship with
readers of texts; and the need to attend to other fields and modalities. We also dis-
cuss critiques dealing with the need to pay more attention to how political ideolo-
gies are infused into culture more widely and the necessity of amplifying the
5.2  Widdowson vs. Fairclough 221

theoretical foundations of CDA that look closely at the spread of neoliberal ideolo-
gies and the changing discursive dynamics in an increasingly mediatized world. In
addition to addressing some responses to each critique immediately after it is dis-
cussed, we conclude the chapter by describing in some detail various changes of
focus in, and extension of, the field such as positive discourse analysis, generative
critique, more attention to culture and the need for CDA to turn inward (become
self-critical and self-reflexive) including reflection on researcher ideologies and the
way that CDA scholars are continually (and currently) re-defining the field.

5.2  Widdowson vs. Fairclough

In 1995, the same year when Fairclough’s 1995 book Critical Discourse Analysis
(see Sect. 3.5.5) was published, and when CDA came to be more widely known,
Henry Widdowson published a substantial “critical review” of CDA in Language
and Literature (Widdowson, 1995). Soon after, Fairclough (whose work was largely
targeted in Widdowson’s article), was invited to react by writing a response (1996).
Because this was one of the earliest evaluations of CDA by a well-known scholar,
and also because there was a response from a leader in CDA this critique (and the
reply) became well known and cited by CDA scholars, including in Special Issues
of Discourse & Society (1997, 2008) which were dedicated to responding to it. In
addition, the debate was reprinted in the 4th volume of Toolan’s (2002) series on
CDA. Widdowson’s (2004) book Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Discourse
Analysis, gave some of the same critiques. And Wodak (2006) published a later
response in Language in Society. As a result of all this attention and the importance
given to it, we decided to provide a brief outline of the critique and response from
Fairclough, as well as the later response by Wodak1
Among some of the principal concerns that Widdowson has had with CDA is the
way that ‘discourse’ is (not) defined and how it seems to be something everyone is
talking about, but yet no one really knows what it is. As such, it is “in vogue and
vague” (Widdowson, 1995: 158). He also argues that a text should be identified by
its social intent, not by its linguistic size, and that identifying something as a text is

1
 Another important and well-publicized debate in this area was between Schegloff and Michael
Billig which appeared in a Special Issue of Discourse & Society in 1999. Since this debate largely
discussed differences between conversation analysis and CDA (and began with Schegloff’s (1997)
article “Whose text, whose context?” which compared the two with a critical eye on CDA) we will
not describe it in detail in this chapter except to say that the issue of methodology, and researchers
imposing their own assumptions on readers came up (which we will discuss shortly in Sect. 5.4 and
elsewhere). However, interested readers can consult Schegloff (1997, 1999a, 1999b) and Billig
(1999a, 1999b) for more information about the details of this contentious debate between scholars
from two very different approaches to discourse analysis.
222 5  Critiques of CDA/CDS and Responses

not the same as interpreting what it means, which is why ‘discourse’ is different
from ‘text’2. Furthermore, for him, “what a writer means by a text is not the same as
what it means to a reader” (p. 164). Additionally, Widdowson takes aim at CDA
scholars’ “commitment to reveal the impositions of power and ideological influ-
ence” because he argues that analysts should not assume that “ideology is already
fixed in the language” (pp. 167–168) nor should they narrow down their interpreta-
tions to one possibility. Furthermore, he says that what is actually revealed through
the analysis is not the ideological influence of the text producer but the discourse
perspective of the analyst.
Fairclough’s response addresses Widdowson’s argument about the failure of
CDA to distinguish between ‘text’ and ‘discourse’, saying that Widdowson misrep-
resents CDA by claiming there is usually only one interpretation of texts offered and
there are rarely suggestions of alternative interpretations. To refute this point, he
quotes from his own work (1992), which reiterates that texts are open to multiple
interpretations and that “diversity of interpretation of texts is a central assumption
in the theoretical framework” of CDA (1996: 50). Fairclough goes on to discuss
Widdowson’s claim that CDA’s ideological commitment is where its ‘prejudice’
comes from, and evidence of how it favors particular ideologies. He argues that
CDA scholars “see things wrong with their societies” and “are committed to making
changes through forms of intervention involving language”, but it is not a political
party and “the particular nature of political commitments and strategies of interven-
tion vary widely” (1996: 52). He then accuses Widdowson of offering a “classical
liberal distinction between ideology and science (or theory): on the one hand, ideol-
ogy, commitment, prejudice and partiality (CDA); on the other hand, science and
impartiality (e.g., Widdowson)” (p. 52). According to Fairclough, we all write from
within our own discursive practices and commitments and interests, except that
CDA is “better placed to recognize its own partiality” (p. 53), and he goes on to
point out ideological assumptions in Widdowson’s own theoretical framework that
color the way he views CDA.
In response to Widdowson’s critique of discourse being “in vogue and vague”
(1995: 158), Fairclough points out that the concept of discourse is “variously under-
stood, and widely contested” and so trying to define it simply and finitely is “a hope-
less and fruitless task” (1996: 54, which is exactly why we don’t attempt to do it in
this book). Overall Fairclough says Widdowson’s critique of CDA constitutes a mis-
leading picture of current CDA work which is different from CritLing in that it
emphasizes how discursive practices are “heterogeneous in forms and meanings”
and can be analyzed as “facets of wider processes of social and cultural change”
(Fairclough, 1996: 55).
As mentioned above, there is more discussion of the Widdowson vs. Fairclough
debate in two Special Issues of Discourse & Society in 1997 and 2008, which also
bring up other critiques—we will address those in the next sections. However, we

2
 See Sect. 4.5 for a discussion of the difference between text and discourse (and other concepts)
regarding DHA.
5.3  The ‘Critical’ Aspect 223

feel it is important to say here that Wodak’s (2006) response to Widdowson’s

appraisal of CDA is part of a review of Widdowson (2004) and three other books on
DA. She notes that “criticism of CDA seems to be at the top of Widdowson’s agenda
and has been for years” (Wodak, 2006: 606). She then responds to each of his prin-
ciple concerns, for example, his claim about their lack of attention to methodology,
by pointing to a number of more recent books and articles that attend to this and by
making note that he neglected to read entire studies that give special attention to
methodology before critiquing them. Another example: she addresses his claim that
CDA analysts are not neutral but that they should be by aligning with Fairclough’s
response on this point, that is, essentially, ‘no one is!’. Nonetheless, despite the
rejection of many of Widdowson’s points, Wodak still agrees with some of his
assessment of problems with CDA and makes a point of emphasizing that these
kinds of controversies make research in this field “interesting and worthwhile”
(2006: 609) and can lead to important changes.
We now turn to a discussion of specific elements that have been at the center of
debate about what is wrong with CDA from the point of view of other scholars.

5.3  The ‘Critical’ Aspect

With regard to the ‘critical’ aspect of CDA, Billig (2002) draws particular attention
to its role in self-understanding and ‘marketing’ of CDA. He posits that approaches
like CDA are “critical of the present social order” and “position themselves as being
critical of other academic approaches that are not primarily addressed to the critique
of existing patterns of dominance and inequality” (Billig, 2002: 38). He then argues
that critical approaches need to be self-reflexive and this includes an examination of
the marketization of CDA and the way in which it is a “brand” itself, and how its
scholarly works are products. In addition, Billig says that CDA scholars need to
examine academia, the exercise of power through grading, and the way that certain
scholars and theories are promoted over others. Furthermore, scholars need to con-
sider the potential risk of the loss of intellectual creativity due to the field becoming
more established (Billig, 2002: 43–44) as well as, according to (Breeze, 2011: 493),
the “possibility for it to be taken for granted, simply accepted as a valid way of
thinking and researching, alongside the other paradigms that have attained intellec-
tual respectability” (see Sect. 5.10 for Wodak’s and others’ response to this). In
addition, as part of the question of what ‘critical’ means, Chilton has questioned
“whether CDA has had genuine social effects” (Chilton, 2005: 21) and Bartlett
echoes this, asking if it has ever really offered genuine emancipatory alternatives
(2012)—and indeed van Dijk has claimed that CDA/CDS has often resulted in a
“blame game” rather than contributing to any real solutions or resistance (2009: 4).
One of the results of some of this type of criticism has been to make CDA schol-
ars more reflexive. In fact, Wodak and others have shown their appreciation for
critiques of CDA and its benefits to the field in various statements they have made
regarding the need for reflexivity (see Sect. 5.10 for examples). In Chap. 7 we
224 5  Critiques of CDA/CDS and Responses

explore questions such as those posed by Chilton and Bartlett by looking outside of
academia to see how CDA/CDS scholars have addressed the issue of, e.g., ‘social
effects’, both in their scholarship and, even more, in the ways they have connected
their scholarship to handling (or trying to handle) real world situations. Often, this
has not occurred in academic work per se, but in other genres such as films, novels,
song-writing, social media/blogs, being board members of anti-racist associations,
and so forth. This is because CDA/CDS scholars, like others in any field, often have
to work within the constraints of academia and many of the results of their research
do not ever reach the general public. However, there are many who are taking their
work outside the academic realm, and there appears to be an increasing trend (which
seems to have taken priority since populist governments started winning elections in
Europe, Brexit passed in the UK and Donald Trump was elected President in the
US), in which scholars and professional organizations associated with CDA/CDS
are highlighting even more how it can be used as a resource for social change. We—
along with those who have generously contributed their thoughts to this volume—
will describe how this is being accomplished in Chap. 7.

5.4  Methodological and Theoretical Shortcomings

The next critique we will address is related to methodology and, in particular, meth-
odological shortcomings, since there are many who feel that CDA’s analytical mod-
els are too vague. According to Schegloff (1997), CDA does not provide an analysis
of texts that is sufficiently detailed or systematic, which results in researchers
imposing their own assumptions on the reader. Similarly, Widdowson (1998: 136)
contends that CDA scholars draw selectively and unsystematically on different
methodologies in analyzing the data and also accuses (2004) them of blurring
important distinctions between concepts, disciplines, and methodologies. As men-
tioned earlier, he notes that many concepts and analytical models are ‘vague’ and
blames CDA for condoning ‘biased’ interpretations of discourse under the guise of
critical analysis. Breeze (2011: 520) adds that analysts have sometimes “move[d]
too quickly from the language data to the stage of interpretation and explanation of
those data in terms of some type of social theory”. Additionally, she said that care
needs to be taken in how data is obtained and subsequently interpreted in order to
apply the same standards of rigor when handling language data as in many other
areas of linguistics.
Breeze proposes corpus linguistics (CorpLing) as one way to have a more repre-
sentative overview across a larger sample of languages (2011: 503, 520) and to
avoid “‘cherry-picking’ or selecting isolated instances of discourse that confirm the
existing ideological biases of the researcher” (Bartlett, 2012: 4). She contends that
although CDS draws on a wide range of theories about language and society, these
theories are not always clearly defined, and there is a “tendency to draw on an eclec-
tic mix of concepts from different intellectual traditions, not all of which are com-
patible” (2011: 520). Along these same lines, Widdowson (1998: 136) argues that
5.5 Context 225

CDA “analysis is not the systematic application of a theoretical model, but a rather
less rigorous operation, in effect a kind of ad hoc bricolage which takes from theory
whatever concept comes usefully to hand”.
Since the publication of Widdowson’s (and others’) critiques, corpus linguistic
approaches (CorpLingA) to CDA/CDS have become more common (e.g. Baker,
2006, 2012; Mautner, 2008, 2016; see Sect. 4.8). The strength of CorpLing lies in
its ability to address the critique that CDA lacks quantitative and comparative meth-
ods and their affordances. Specifically, CorpLing is a way to grapple with the prob-
lems of measuring the representativeness of the samples of language analyzed
(Machin & Mayr, 2012: 216), whether there’s enough data (and it’s not ‘cherry-­
picked’), the verifiability of the data, data replication, and so forth. All of this can be
accomplished through the use of computer support that allows scholars to analyze
large amounts of textual data and makes it relatively easy to find out, e.g., what the
shared connotations are (see Sect. 4.8 for more details). However, despite the fact
that CorpLing has served remarkably well in handling methodological problems,
Mautner (2016: 176) still cautions that CorpLing techniques can never make up for
faulty design or biased samples. In addition, it cannot solve many of the problems
that quantitatively inclined researchers associate with qualitative research, e.g., lack
of statistical significance, subjectivity of interpretive work, lack of generalizability,
etc. To address this, scholars such as Rheindorf (2018) have recently pushed for
more eclectic approaches that can handle both qualitative and quantitative aspects
of research. As with other critiques of CDA, not all of these issues have been
resolved (or are resolvable at all) due to the nature of the research people are doing
and the inclinations of the researchers. And some of them are not unique to CDA,
since the issue of qualitative vs. quantitative research (with or without something
like CorpLing) crosscuts many disciplines of the humanities and social sciences.

5.5  Context

CDA has also been criticized for not bringing ‘context’ (variously defined) seri-
ously into CDA work—most notably by van Dijk (1999, 2008, 2009), who has
argued forcefully for bringing in context and making a case that it is legitimate to
examine text and context separately and explore how features of the context affect,
or are affected by, the text. He has also said that individual researchers need to deter-
mine how much particular external categories are important in understanding the
text and how far the analysis should go (co-text, speech event context, social and
cultural context, historical context, etc.) However, he also argues vigorously that
CDA researchers should not feel constrained by rigid disciplinary norms. Blommaert
(2005: 34–35) has also discussed what he perceives as the failure of some in CDA
to take into account the social factors behind the production of texts or the social
consequences of their production (see also Bartlett, 2012: 5). Jones (2004), Jones
and Collins (2006, 2010) and Collins and Jones (2006) also find fault with context
in CDA (among other issues). They argue that CDA has not done a good job of
226 5  Critiques of CDA/CDS and Responses

showing how the linguistic phenomena they analyze are related to or contribute to
or result from the social history they are part of, and thus it is not clear exactly how
CDA is used to “find the communicational means, occasions and practices which
will contribute to advancing a particular agenda” (Jones, 2018, personal communi-
cation). Furthermore, Collins and Jones (2006) posit that CDA does not pinpoint the
contribution that communicational acts and processes make to social history nor
does it pay enough attention to the real social process within which discourse exists,
while Jones and Collins (2006) claim that CDA takes the play of words and word
meanings within a verbal system and abstracts them from communicative practices
instead of thinking critically about, or engaging intellectually with, those practices.
Jones (2004: 112) takes particular issue with Fairclough’s3 approach, arguing that it
has an “upside-down view of the role of discourse in relation to the social process
as a whole” and that some CDA approaches would do better to engage in “careful,
informed and critical examination of communicative activities”. According to Jones
and Collins (2006: 43) this exposes “the workings of power based on diligent explo-
ration and informed piecing together and analysis of the facts and circumstances”
rather than the linguistic analysis that they see as divorced from social context.
Many of the above critiques were common because early work in CDA (with the
exception of DHA and SCA) often concentrated on decontextualized samples of
language, so that texts or parts of texts are analyzed without regard to their immedi-
ate context or to wider issues related to their production, distribution or consump-
tion (Breeze, 2011: 514). For example, Verschueren (2001: 60–70), in a critique of
Fairclough’s (pre-/proto-CDA) Language and Power (1989), notes that Fairclough
does not place texts in the type of social and intertextual context within which they
would usually be read. For instance, he “takes a linguistic feature such as nominali-
sation in news reports, and interprets it as being used to obfuscate issues of agency
and avoid attribution of responsibility” (Breeze, 2011: 506), while in that case,
which had been reported about in various issues of the same newspaper, it might
have been quite clear to readers where the responsibility lay, and thus context has to
be seen more widely. Slembrouck posits that CDA has been mostly text-based and
at best speculative in claims about how actual participants are likely to interpret
texts, exchanges and moves within talk (2001: 43). Some critics have also argued
that CDA does not always look closely at the linguistic features of interactions, and
thus there is a tendency to jump too quickly to the ‘macro’ context, making asser-
tions as to how macro relations might be mapped onto micro interactions
(Widdowson, 1998).
After a review of the critique of context in CDA, it is clear that, with the excep-
tion of DHA and SCA (see Sects. 4.4 and 4.5), early CDA work paid less attention

3
 We would like to note here that much of the critique discussed above alludes to the problem we
mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. That is, it treats CDA as homogenous while, as said
already in Sect. 3.2, it is decidedly heterogeneous and that is one of its strengths. Given this, while
we agree this is important critique, we caution that readers should read it in terms of its application
to specific approaches and not others (a point that Wodak & Meyer, 2009: 5 also make “any criti-
cism of CDA should always specify which research or researcher they relate to”).
5.5 Context 227

to context, but more recent work that has employed a variety of approaches has
attended much more to context and to a wider view of context (not just co-text, or
situational context, but also social, cultural, political, historical, etc. context). For
example, there is scholarship (e.g., Abousnnouga & Machin, 2013; Leitch & Palmer,
2010; Musolff, 2016), which is grounded in different disciplines and approaches to
CDA/CDS and addresses these concerns and pays more attention to context in their
analyses. In addition, Flowerdew (2017) describes how conversation analysis and
systemic functional linguistics (SFL) can aid CDA/CDS research in different ways
since they work with naturally-occurring data in real life contexts or relate language
form to context. One study that explicitly mentions this issue is Leitch and Palmer
(2010), which examines the analysis of texts in context and how it has been applied
to organizational studies; the authors argue that the problem of context has not been
adequately addressed in CDA and they show how specific texts can be linked to
specific contexts. They also note (paying heed to van Dijk’s concern that CDA
scholars need not be constrained by rigid norms of analytic practice) that their pur-
pose is to “strengthen the rigour of CDA in organization studies rather than to stan-
dardize it” (Leitch & Palmer, 2010: 1195).
Since its inception, DHA approaches have paid close attention to context because
they include the historical circumstances related to the data being analyzed and thus
are able to connect the data to specific times and events. The best example of this is
Wodak’s work, which from its earliest, pre-CDA stages was concerned with how
much and what types of historical information should be included in DA, ‘discourse
sociolinguistics’ and CDA (especially in DHA), and Reisigl and Wodak (2001,
2009, 2016) have argued for the importance of looking at the historical context in
any text analysis (see Sect. 4.5). In addition, as said in Chap. 3, Musolff’s (2016)
work on political metaphor scenarios combines DHA with CorpLing (and CogLing)
showing systematically the presence of metaphor scenarios throughout history,
which is then linked to current racist/antisemitic discourse with the aim of holding
speakers accountable for the more covert hate speech they try to deny. Finally, stud-
ies such as Catalano and Mitchell-McCollough (2019) have examined the represen-
tation of groups in the US media over two different time periods (e.g., unaccompanied
minors fleeing Central America in 2014 and then at the time of the 2016 election).
They found that coverage during the two time periods revealed similar patterns of
representing migrant children as dangerous water and threats, with only a small
percentage of the discourse dedicated to global compassion and pleading on their
behalf. But also, there were more troubling narratives related to government poli-
cies of family separation and militarization of the border in the US that surfaced in
the later data due to the political context (including election politics) that had
changed.
228 5  Critiques of CDA/CDS and Responses

5.6  Relationship with Readers of Texts

Another major criticism of CDA has to do with the relationship with readers of the
analyzed texts. In fact, much of CDA research proceeds on the basis that there is a
simple, one-to-one relationship between the text and its reader, or the discourse and
its recipient, and reader response or audience reception is often naively assumed to
be the same as the researcher’s interpretation of the text (Breeze, 2011: 521).
Widdowson (1998) has strongly advocated for the inclusion of discussion with the
readers (and producers) of texts, since he sees CDA as not only relying on the ana-
lyst’s view of a text’s possible meaning, but also not considering the role of the
reader in the consumption and interpretation of the text.
In the wake of criticism against CDA for the problem of this disconnect between
the researcher as against writers and readers of texts, scholars have offered ethno-
graphic methodologies as a potential corrective (Wodak & Meyer, 2016).
Blommaert (2005), for instance, finds that CDA’s linguistically oriented research
practices can benefit from these and other (social science-related) methodologies.
Machin and Mayr (2012: 217) also note what can be gained by adding an ethno-
graphic dimension, citing studies such as McFarland (2006), which illustrate the
dangers of analysts making claims about reactions to texts without ever talking to
readers. In particular, McFarland shows how women’s reactions (shown from inter-
views) to Fairclough’s analysis of The Pregnancy Book “were different in signifi-
cant ways to the positions attributed to them by Fairclough” (Machin & Mayr, 2012:
217). Machin and Mayr also advocate for adding an ethnographic dimension to the
analysis of newspaper discourse, which can mean interviewing editors and journal-
ists about their choices; their article (2007) and Stubbs’ (1997) are good examples
of such approaches (for more details and examples of ethnographic approaches to
CDA, see Sects. 4.5 and 6.5) as is Machin and Lydia Polzer’s (2015) book Visual
Journalism in which they interview visual journalists about their work.

5.7  Paying Attention to Other Fields and Modalities

CDA has also been criticized for being “too linguistic or not linguistic enough”
(Wodak & Meyer, 2016: 22). In the case of being too linguistic, CDA is sometimes
caught between linguists and non-linguists on the one hand, and on the other hand
those scholars who come from media studies or other areas that have well developed
theories for handling multimodal data; many have complained that CDA relies too
much on linguistic methods of analysis which are not always applicable to multi-
modal data when analyzing visual communication (see our discussion in Sects. 2.7
and 4.6 for more on this topic, as well as Machin, 2016). Along these lines, CDA has
been criticized for putting “a very high price on linguistic-textual analysis and not
paying attention to non-linguistic texts. In addition, it has been criticized for relying
too much on systemic-functional linguistics” (Blommaert, 2005: 34), while exclud-
5.7  Paying Attention to Other Fields and Modalities 229

ing other critical schools that look at language and also other approaches to linguis-
tics that could be used in a critical analysis. Blommaert assures the reader that
“linguists have no monopoly over theories of language and that means there are
more candidates for critical potential … than SFL” (2005: 35). Van Dijk (2008)
raises concerns that the SFL notion of context focuses too much on the lexico-­
grammatical level of language and is limited to the analysis of clause structure and
thus is not useable for studying other discourse structures (see Sects. 3.6 and 4.4).
He also argues that SFL has ignored many of the developments in DA, linguistics,
and psychology of the last decade(s) and has been little influenced by the social sci-
ences even though it is a ‘functional’ approach.
Since the time of van Dijk’s critique (2008: 827), much work has been done to
use more eclectic approaches and draw on theories from other areas in the social
sciences as well as expand on the “multidisciplinary” approach of CDA by account-
ing for what other fields have already done. However, there is still a need for CDA
researchers to engage more with other fields, since it is often the case that, unfortu-
nately, while they can tell CDA scholars much about a particular concept or issue,
their approach might not integrate well with CDA aims. For example, Machin
(2016) urges scholars in multimodal CDA/CDS (Sect. 4.6) to engage with the fields
of visual studies and media and cultural studies that have been looking at similar
concepts for decades, but then he warns them that many of these studies don’t nec-
essarily align with a “socially driven form of analysis such as CDA” and instead,
these approaches and concepts may simply “cloud and distract” (2016: 324) their
perspective. In addition to addressing the need to work more across disciplines, a
recent Special Issue of Discourse & Society focuses on theoretical and conceptual
challenges in CDS that we will discuss in more detail shortly.
Another main disadvantage of CDA related to the above critique of being “too
linguistic”, is that CDA depends on available discourse (Blommaert, 2005), and it is
not possible to analyze discourse that is absent. So, there is no means to investigate
what could have been said or was said in another context that the analyst is unaware
of, was not able to have access to, and/or was not interested in investigating (although
there are many scholars who have tried, by looking at, e.g., different headlines used
in newspapers for the ‘same event’—CritLing, see Sect. 2.4). CorpLing has come
forward as an (at least partial) solution to this problem. But, many have said that, in
order to fully contextualize discourse within the sociopolitical landscape, CDA ana-
lysts need to look beyond language. On the basis of the work of Stubbs (1997),
Breeze (2011: 509) contends that if researchers want to make claims about what
people think on the basis of what they read or hear, they ought to obtain non-­
linguistic evidence about their beliefs, or examine their behavior, and that, in any
case, it is unreasonable to assume a one-way influence from discourse to thought.
Although Stubbs (1997) and Breeze (2011) make good arguments in this regard,
they do not attempt to provide suggestions about how to remedy the problem with-
out using language4.

4
 It is worth mentioning here that many of the critiques of CDA have also been made of many—but
not all—(non-critical/ descriptive) discourse analysis/studies (DA/DS), such as the critique of
being ‘too linguistic’.
230 5  Critiques of CDA/CDS and Responses

Despite this, we found a few studies that attempt to examine beliefs of readers
and how their thoughts and behaviors have been affected by media discourse. One
such study is by Leudar, Hayes, Nekvapil and Baker (2008), who examine the
effects of media discourse about refugees and asylum seekers on those very groups
in the UK by analyzing the way they position themselves and reshape their identi-
ties in interviews and biographic narratives; what the researchers found was that
they made the “grounds of contemporary hostile rejections false and irrelevant to
themselves” (2008: 187). What is innovative about their technique is that they were
able to trace the effects of hostile discourse about them in the media to the way the
participants thought and talked about themselves through the use of dialogic net-
works, which the authors argue can inform us about the origin of discourses and
how they are used in situ (Leudar et al., 2008: 188). Catalano (2016) also examined
(indirectly) the effects of public discourse, through interviews that centered on
migration experiences with migrants and refugees from around the world. One
example of how the migrants/refugees revealed the way that discourse (in this case,
legal terminology in immigration contexts) affected their experience can be seen
below, where the participant considers the way that certain immigration terms made
him feel welcome or not welcome:
[…] they stamp you and they give you a ‘landed immigrant’ status so you know, that’s a big
difference between Canada and the United States. You, in—in the United States you’re a
‘legal alien’ in uh, in Canada, you’re a ‘landed immigrant.’ So, it’s a—so from that point of
view you feel very welcome … into the country (Catalano, 2016: 181).

Furthermore, in several interviews, participants used terminology they had been

exposed to in media discourse (i.e., ‘illegal’) to describe themselves, even though
they did not align ideologically with the use of the term, which puts migrants in a
frame of criminality (Catalano, 2016: 117). The use of terms such as ‘illegal’ (i.e.,
‘ilegal’ in Spanish, the language of these particular interviews) revealed that partici-
pants were well aware of the terminology used to talk about them. While both of
these studies are linguistic in orientation, they do get closer to Breeze’s critique that
we cannot really know the effects of discourse on readers or communities where the
discourse is prevalent without using, in this case, qualitative interview techniques,
or, in other cases, ethnographic ones (see Sects. 4.5 and 6.5) or other means of get-
ting at the perspective of the people involved.
Besides Leudar et al. (2008), the field of CogLing (and eclectic approaches such
as that of Catalano (2016) which combines ethnographically informed methods
with CDA/CDS and CogLing) has much to offer CDA/CDS in terms of looking at
the way that thought shapes discourse and vice-versa. Hart (2015; see Sect. 4.9)
examines point of view, basing his work on theoretical foundations from the field
of CogLing, such as the idea that language is embodied, i.e., that language is
grounded in physical experience and the fact that “the conceptual processes involved
in language and discourse are not principally distinct from processes that function
in other experiential realms like visual perception and spatial cognition” (2015:
239). The upshot of the embodied nature of language is that we can infer that lin-
5.8  Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA) 231

guistic constructions include or invoke properties related to visuo-spatial experi-

ence, which can reveal much about thought, and hence address Stubbs and Breeze’s
(1997/2011) critiques that CDA lacks non-linguistic evidence about readers’
beliefs.

5.8  Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA)

Another criticism that has received a great deal of attention has been the negative
nature of CDA, or more accurately, the way in which it is deconstructive as opposed
to constructive (Martin, 2004). According to Breeze, given the assumptions made in
CDA about the nature of society, and the “overwhelming interest in exposing ideo-
logical manipulation that shapes and perpetuates power imbalances through dis-
course, it is hardly surprising that language scholars of this school find it easier to
deconstruct than to construct” (2011: 516). Researchers such as Luke (2002), Martin
(2004), and Bartlett (2012) have criticized CDA for focusing on deconstruction of
discourse rather than contributing to bringing real solutions in order to make needed
changes in the world. Martin draws particular attention to these issues, locating
CDA as part of “a pathological disjunction in twentieth century social sciences and
humanities research which systematically elides the study of social processes which
make the world a better place in favour of critique of processes which disempower
and oppress” (2004: 186) and calls for a serious attempt to re-configure CDA in a
more positive sense. Breeze suggests that it is perhaps because of CDA’s self-image
as a “critical” force, that the focus of this work has been deconstructive versus con-
structive (Breeze, 2011: 517). Breeze argues that scholarship that explores emanci-
patory discourses or positive changes in social language use would be better,
because it would provide information about the way that positive transformations
can be brought about (Breeze, 2011: 521). Hence, PDA came out of the above cri-
tique about CDA and Martin’s repeated call for a focus on texts that analysts don’t
find objectionable.
This critique of negative vs. positive has been addressed by scholars such as
Wodak who contend that being critical is not about being positive or negative, it is
about questioning the extant social order (personal communication, March 11,
2018). However, a close reading of Martin (2004: 184) reveals that his comments
about being “negative” are more centered on the need to “focus on community, tak-
ing into account how people get together and make room for themselves in the
world—in ways that redistribute power without necessarily struggling against it”,
and hence this critique is about doing scholarship that can make positive change
and pointing out the kinds of positive changes that people are trying to make (see
Chap. 7). In addition, Bartlett’s (2012) and Luke’s (2002) critiques are about how
CDA can actually pose solutions and be involved in CDA rather than be more
‘positive’.
232 5  Critiques of CDA/CDS and Responses

According to Haig (2004: 13), Martin’s analysis of excerpts from the autobiog-
raphy of Nelson Mandela or the music of U2 (2000) are excellent examples of the
kind of work he is referring to here:
If discourse analysts are serious about wanting to use their work to enact social change, then
they will have to broaden their coverage to include discourse of this kind—discourse that
inspires, encourages, heartens; discourse we like, that cheers us along. We need, in other
words, more positive discourse analysis alongside our critique; and this means dealing with
texts we admire, alongside those we dislike and try to expose (Martin 1999 [2002]:
196–197).

Other articles (e.g. Martin, 2002) and particularly the book by Martin and Rose
(2003) also provided excellent examples of the kind of work he referred to.
It wasn’t until after 2004 that Martin explicitly named the term PDA (see Bartlett,
2012) and provided three examples of what it is for him, including genre renovation,
evaluative language, and narrative in the context of post-colonial relations between
Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. For the latter, he shows how the gov-
ernment report Bringing Them Home (that details the ‘National Inquiry into the
Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families’)
gives voice to Indigenous Australians through multimodal discourse which involved
a combination of spoken testimony with policy documents, language, and image
(Martin, 2004). In addition, Martin suggests “that communities are formed around
attitudes to things”, noting that empathy is just as important as persuasion when the
goal is to align readers with the authors’ point of view and “the political power of
narrative closure is something positive discourse analysis cannot afford to ignore”
(2004: 13, 18).
While some scholars would disagree with this differentiation and/or sub-­
categorization of PDA as an approach or type of CDA/CDS, we decided that it was
important to include it, show how people have responded, and also let readers know
that there is still controversy as to whether this constitutes its own approach—see
Table in Sect. 4.2, where we show that Flowerdew and Richardson (2018) believe
that PDA is its own approach, but many others do not, and we discuss why we
decided not to include PDA in Chap. 4, but in this chapter instead.
Since 2004, other articles have appeared that have explicitly named PDA as their
approach (e.g. Macgilchrist, 2007; Rogers & Mosley-Wetzel, 2013). These studies
are rooted in the conviction that deconstruction of social problems is very different
from positive reconstruction and betterment of society, especially because this posi-
tive approach is “fuelled by the potential for analysis to have an effect—however
small—on the social world” (Macgilchrist, 2007: 74). PDA has thus billed itself as
an alternative to traditional CDA critique of discourse that addresses the need for “a
complementary focus on community, taking into account how people get together
and make room for themselves in the world—in ways that redistribute power with-
out necessarily struggling against it” (Martin, 2004: 7). In this regard, it can be seen
as making visible different social actors by giving voice and thus presence to those
who have been traditionally marginalized by dominant discourse practices includ-
ing those in new multimodal genres.
5.8  Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA) 233

According to Martin, PDA is (re)constructive, and without it “our understanding

of how change happens, for the better, across a range of sites [is crippled…] And
this hampers design, and perhaps even discourages it since analysts would rather tell
us how struggle was undone than how freedoms were won” (2004: 7–8). By exam-
ining texts from the perspective that moves beyond critique towards positive social
changes, analysts envision and design an emancipatory alternative. Therefore, it
focuses on discourse that does good rather than the opposite (Macgilchrist, 2007)
and seeks to show how freedoms were won, takes a stand and positively values
some aspect of social change, which may involve “looking at discourses we don’t
typically associate with CDA, and in addition considering whether new kinds of
analysis are required by consideration of these sites” (Martin, 2004: 8). This ‘yin
and yang approach’ in which deconstructive and constructive activity is required
seeks to understand, expose, and resist social inequality by looking at both its posi-
tive and negative aspects (Bartlett, 2012: 7).
Macgilchrist (2007) provides an excellent example of how this is done by exam-
ining strategies for bringing forward marginal discourses into the mainstream news
media. Her paper discusses current research (e.g., Laclau & Mouffe, 1985; Lakoff,
2002, 2004; Bamberg & Andrews, 2004) on counter-discourse and takes a case
study approach to illustrating five strategies used in those few texts which contest
the mainstream discourse, providing evidence of how PDA can be useful in the
investigation of media discourse. In the realm of teacher education, Rogers and
Mosley-Wetzel (2013) put forth an informative multimodal analysis of agency and
leadership in a workshop about culturally relevant teaching and argue that PDA is
not really a new approach, but instead, a shift in focus (which could be taken as
evidence of the way in which CDA, as well as DA and DS, has been extended and
expanded and how the term CDS could be used to indicate this, see Sect. 4.1). They
demonstrate how the teacher participant in their article accepts and extends invita-
tions for agency, uses problems to enhance learning, as well as narratives and
counter-­narratives, and creates multiple storylines for herself and others. Finally,
they call for more research of this type that considers agency across contexts.
Despite its initial popularity, its emergence across disciplines and its attempts to
address critiques aimed at CDA, PDA itself has been subject to a fair amount of
criticism, some of which is similar to what has been said of CDA since there are
many things in common between them. Scholars such as Bartlett (2012) warn us
that there is a danger in only focusing on and celebrating the positive without “due
consideration of the social factors that created the conditions of possibility for such
texts at the local level and how structural features within the wider sociopolitical
context might make it possible for such positive change to take hold and spread”
(2012: 7). In addition, Bartlett asserts that PDA often lacks a detailed analysis of
context that accounts for how hegemonic discourses continue to circulate, including
whose interests they serve and how they fail to acknowledge the tensions which
exist and how emergent reconfigurations of power relations at the local level can
exploit these tensions to “reorient existing structural conditions of domination
within the wider society” (2012: 8). This then results in the failure of PDA to con-
sider how the sociocultural background of both producers and receivers affects the
234 5  Critiques of CDA/CDS and Responses

meaning of texts. As a result of this critique, there has been a call for the voices of
the ‘oppressed’ to be heard rather than solely the analyst’s and for a comparison of
the findings of the analyst with what the members of the target community think and
say (a point made above, see Rogers, 2011; Wodak & Savski, 2018) and addressed
by Leudar et al. (2008) and Catalano (2016) as well as others.

5.9  The Move (from PDA) to Generative Critique

Recent work in this area has attempted to address these shortcomings and many no
longer find the term ‘PDA’ to be useful. According to Macgilchrist, this is because
“positive” oversimplifies the issue and makes it appear as if this type of approach
was separate from CDA/CDS (personal communication, July 30, 2016). This is
evident in the fact that a search of the major CDA/CDS journals (e.g. Critical
Discourse Studies, Discourse & Society and others) did not yield any articles besides
Rogers and Mosley-Wetzel (2013) and Macgilchrist (2016) that have been pub-
lished since 2013 that specifically mention ‘PDA’. Instead, Macgilchrist (2016)
insists that PDA is really about the move to orient CDA to a more generative cri-
tique and she reframes it (p. 273) in terms of ‘postfoundational’ thinking, which has
the potential to:
(1) orient analysis more immediately to generative, ambivalent, reparative critical practices;
(2) free analysis from the foundationalism arguably associated with critical theory’s justifi-
cation for taking a particular moral or political stance, thus enabling analysts to simply
(although it is no simple matter) state the coordinates of their standpoints; and (3) move
CDA on from post-positivist debates about objectivity and bias, in order to embrace sur-
prise, irony and transgressive validities.

Macgilchrist (2016: 264) believes that postfoundational thought (which ques-

tions the solidity and pervasiveness of foundations such as truth, universality,
essence, etc.) is the answer, because postfoundational approaches aim to question
what is considered to be true, and in the context of research, this means thinking
about the partial truths we are constructing in our research questions, aims, and top-
ics of research. She also acknowledges that social exclusion and discrimination con-
tinue to be pervasive and CDA scholars must always attend to how dominant
discourse is being challenged. However, she believes the field of CDA is changing
because the world is changing, and as a result, new demands are being made on DS,
critical or not. Since more people are “simultaneously accessing multiple, contra-
dictory news stories”, knowledge claims are made more visible because it is easier
to see how they are constructed (2016: 273). Hence, she says, the role of the CDA
analyst now is to examine conflict and dissonance, not just the acceptance of already
established dominant ways of thinking. This means deconstructing the way in which
lies are constructed as “alternative facts” (Bradner, 2017), and how reality is bent
and spun (e.g., by politicians such as Donald Trump) in ways which favor political
agendas and manipulate the public via a variety of media venues including social
media. Through examining social change that is happening, as well as breakdowns
5.10  Attention to Culture in the Construction of Discourse 235

and disruptions, we can also critique power imbalances by sharing these “hope-­
giving, on-the-ground practices” which are “oriented to equality and heterogeneous
well-being” (Haraway, 1997: 95, as cited in Macgilchrist, 2016: 273).
Macgilchrist (2016) gives two examples of what this type of CDA scholarship
might look like. The first one (Macgilchrist, 2015; Macgilchrist & Van Praet, 2013)
examines different accounts of social movements and radical democracy in history
textbooks in the US and looks at how the worker and soldier council movements of
1918–1919 have, since the 1960s, been associated with violence and anti-­democratic
thinking through their contact with the Soviet Union. However, the authors found
that alternative interpretations of these councils in terms of a socialist democracy
were not included, and in fact, little teaching of social movement history exists in
mainstream history curricula (Macgilchrist, 2015; Macgilchrist & Van Praet, 2013).
By examining heated discussions of the textbook with the publishers after which the
resulting text reframed the movement as more “moderate and thoughtful”
(Macgilchrist & Van Praet, 2013: 641), the authors were able to link the text and talk
to “broader contemporary shifts towards more diverse understandings of democ-
racy” in which social movements can be studied as “participatory, social and con-
flictual” (Macgilchrist, 2016: 272).
A second example Macgilchrist (2016) gives is Gibson-Graham’s (2006) work
that critiques capitalist dominance and its perceived homogeneity, the aim of which
is to “help create the discursive conditions under which socialist or other non-­
capitalist construction becomes a ‘realistic’ present activity rather than a ludicrous
or utopian future goal” (Gibson-Graham, 1996: 263f). However, in order to do this,
we must first “smash Capitalism and see it in a thousand pieces”. In his analyses,
Gibson-Graham makes visible “the diversity, change and disunity which breaks up
today’s apparently unified capitalist economy” (Macgilchrist, 2016: 272), ulti-
mately questioning the inescapability of capitalism today, and taking a first step
toward imagining a different way (Gibson-Graham, 2014). In reframing the way we
think about “economy”, Gibson-Graham looks to those who are already reshaping
new economic languages that are oriented to the concerns of community econo-
mies. For Macgilchrist, generative critique such as those outlined above, which are
oriented to well-being, should be the new frontier for CDA and thus, work that
“addresses unequal power relations through (fine-grained) analysis of hope-giving,
reparative discourse” is a new direction that brings real promise for the future
(Macgilchrist, 2016: 262).

5.10  Attention to Culture in the Construction of Discourse

CDA research has been accused by Shi-xu of being (too) Euro-centric and paying
(too) little attention to “the possibilities of the existence of other cultural concepts,
theory and approaches, and of their own cultural limitations and bias” (2012: 485).
In addition, he argues that it is often taken for granted in CDA research that “human
discourses have (more or less) the same (categories of) structure and process and
236 5  Critiques of CDA/CDS and Responses

operate more or less equally across cultures” and “culturally divergent forms of
discursive practice and local practical needs for discourse research are usually
ignored” (2012: 485). Chilton (2005, 2016) states that CDA now has to work in a
global environment; and opening up to other societies is unavoidable because it has
been adopted in many regions and nations and under many different types of politi-
cal and social regimes. Thus, he says, questions such as “Is CDA a western import?
Is critique based on relative or absolute values? On what values is critique based?”
must be asked. In addition, CDA has lacked a way of dealing with the encounter
between culture and discourse in general and the triangle discourse/culture/critical
analysis in particular (Gavriely-Nuri, 2012: 78). These questions are echoed in
Kecskes (2014), who looks at a new trend (emerging from this critique) that includes
theoretical research on culture as a key player in the construction of discourse,
which has begun to grow in the last few years.
While we will discuss the cultural approach to CDA/CDS, (which strengthens
the connection of culture to discourse) in more detail in Sect. 6.6, it is worth noting
here that this approach grew out of the above critique, and that, starting in 2010,
Gavriely-Nuri has been a leader in its development.

5.11  Researcher Reflexivity

Another area of critique of CDA is that CDA scholars need to be more self-critical
and self-reflexive, including the way they reflect on their own ideologies. This
means that analysts must be sure that their “own use of language is not marked, even
corrupted, by those ideological factors that they seek to identify in the language of
others” (Billig, 2008a: 783). Thus, in Billig’s view, CDA researchers should be
particularly concerned with examining their own use of language (which Billig him-
self does) and analyze their own writings for the same linguistic forms they criticize
others of using, such as nominalizations and passivizations (2008a: 784). He sug-
gests that in the aim of being reflexive, CDA researchers “need to use simpler, less
technical prose that clearly ascribes actions to human agents” (Billig, 2008a: 783).
In particular, Billig criticizes Fairclough in a series of articles that became part of a
Special Issue in Discourse & Society (2008a, 2008b) on CDA and nominalization.
In the articles, Billig claims that, in his explanation of nominalizations, Fairclough
avoids using phrases that draw attention to the activities that language users must
accomplish when they nominalize and as a result, he is vague about how this trans-
formation takes place. In his responses to Billig’s critique, Fairclough (2008a,
2008b) points out that he appreciates the opportunity for debate in the field and is
“grateful to him for making me think more about what I am doing” (2008a: 811).
He agrees with Billig’s notion that CDA scholars should be more careful about their
own writing and should “make the question of how we write more of an issue than
we have done” (p. 812). However, he stresses that scholars write for different audi-
ences and that this means that when writing for people in the field, the technical
5.12  Redefining CDA/CDS 237

jargon cannot be taken out. He also dismisses the idea of trying to write for a general
readership.
Despite rebuffing many of Billig’s critiques (2008a, 2008b), Fairclough (even
just by the fact that he was willing to debate this through several back and forth
articles in this Special Issue) was able to listen to critique and dialog about it as part
of the whole process of CDA developing and growing as a field. This is noteworthy
because another critique of CDA has been that there is a lack of internal dialog
which has tended to “consolidate CDA from the outside, as an intellectual paradigm
with its own hierarchy and systems of control, but also detracts from the seriousness
of its intellectual enterprise” (Breeze, 2011: 519). However, Wodak and Meyer,
encourage more critique that allows for “fruitful and necessary debates for CDA”
(2009: 32) and looks for changes in its aims and goals, essentially keeping the field
alive “because it necessarily triggers more self-reflection and encourages new
responses and innovative ideas” (Wodak & Meyer, 2016: 22). Lin’s (2014: 228)
review of CDA in applied linguistics calls on scholars in this field to attempt more
“up-front critical reflexive studies and action on its own status as an academic dis-
cipline”. And the recent Special Issue of Discourse & Society (2016), which we
discuss below, also continues to keep the field alive with new frameworks and shifts
in focus.

5.12  Redefining CDA/CDS

As we have demonstrated in this chapter, response to multilayered critique has rede-

fined CDA and propelled scholars in the field to propose new frameworks and shifts
in analytic focus. In this section, we continue to describe changes in CDA as a result
of critique, occasionally returning to the critique itself in order to remind reviewers
of the origin of such shifts and changes. As mentioned in Sect. 4.1, the journal
Critical Discourse Studies was created in 2004 to provide a forum for new work that
deals with much of the critique mentioned here. In addition, for some scholars this
post-critique work can be recognized by the creation of the new label CDS. We will
now focus on current critique and responses to it that can be seen in Special Issues
of the Journal of Language and Politics and Discourse & Society in 2016. This
more recent dialogue results from societal changes that have forced the field to
reflect once again on the purpose and direction of CDA/CDS. According to Machin
and van Leeuwen (2016b: 243), “The power of governments is increasingly shared
between the government and the media, and increasingly shifting from government
to private capital, with complex relations of mutual dependence and complex ten-
sions between these three”. Hence, public communication increasingly addresses
the public as consumers, rather than as citizens. This “marketization of discourse”
(Fairclough, 1993; Mautner, 2010; see also Sects. 3.5.4 and 3.9.4) is characterized
by aesthetically pleasing designs, a conversational style and increased use of multi-
modal resources which are facilitated by “technologies for everyday communica-
tion that are made available worldwide by global IT corporations” (Machin & van
238 5  Critiques of CDA/CDS and Responses

Leeuwen, 2016b: 244). Thus, “the power of the global economy and the neoliberal
principles that underpin it has been on the rise” (Sewell, 2005) and understanding
this shift is paramount for CDA/CDS scholars. Machin and van Leeuwen thus point
to the need to “pay increasing attention to the way that political ideologies are
infused into culture more widely” (2016b: 243; see also Sect. 3.9.4).
In the Special Issue of the Journal of Language and Politics dedicated to multi-
modality (2016a), Machin and van Leeuwen (2016b) tackle in their introduction the
connection between multimodality, politics and ideology (see also Sects. 3.9.2 and
4.6) through including topics such as computer software, reality TV. shows, and
apps and games targeted at young children, as well as the use of strategic diagrams,
the design of office furniture, the promotion of health care services and also new
kinds of corporate images which claim to promote gender diversity. In laying out
the critique that more attention needs to be paid to the way that political ideologies
are infused into culture other than, or in addition to, written discourse, Machin and
van Leeuwen provide a sequential model for analysts to follow (which we discussed
in more detail in Sect. 4.6) which first identifies the signifier and visible/audible
evidence which the text or object of analysis provides, then focuses on the meaning
and finally, attends to its wider significance. In doing this, analysts can and should
show not only what is communicated but what is not, revealing gains and losses
(Kress, 2005) and the extent of recontextualization (van Leeuwen, 2008; Machin,
2013) that gives rise to the new forms of political discourse mentioned here. Machin
and van Leeuwen conclude that CDA/CDS scholars who engage in MCDA should
identify which resources are harnessed for which ideological purposes and how they
are used to recontextualize social practices in the service of neoliberal ideology,
such as the way Roderick (2016) showed how office furniture design does not facili-
tate individual work or long-term projects (Machin & van Leeuwen, 2016b: 255). It
is worth mentioning that this recent shift, while different in important ways from
before, because of its focus on multimodality, still aligns with Fairclough’s (2015)
call to fight back against neoliberal forces (see Sects. 3.5.4 and 4.3).
In a similar article in the Special Issue of Discourse & Society dedicated to
‘Theoretical and Conceptual Challenges in Critical Discourse Studies’ (edited by
Krzyżanowski & Forchtner, 2016a), Machin (2016) repeats these same arguments
that critical multimodal research (and MCDA) needs to show how different semiotic
resources are used to serve the interests of particular institutions and ideologies, but
also points out that in the burgeoning field of multimodal studies, not all types of
multimodal work fit neatly within the aims of CDA/CDS. In particular, he posits
that CDA/CDS scholars should continue to focus on multimodality but remember to
take care to “show how discourses seek to control and shape social practices in the
interests of dominant ideology” (Machin, 2016: 331). That is, instead of just describ-
ing what the different modes do and how they interact, scholars should analyze
more what the interactions of multiple means of communication do. In addition, he
addresses the continuing critique, mentioned above, that CDA does not pay atten-
tion to nor connect with what other fields are doing and argues for more engagement
with wider scholarly work (2016: 332; see Chap. 6 on the inter/multidisciplinary
connections of CDA/CDS).
5.12  Redefining CDA/CDS 239

In the same Special Issue of Discourse &Society, in their introduction

Krzyżanowski and Forchtner (2016b) also call for CDA/CDS to be enriched by
other fields in order to help CDA/CDS theory move beyond its foundations “as well
as face socio-political and academic challenges ahead” (2016: 254). We have
already mentioned the contributions by Hart (2016), Machin (2016), and Macgilchrist
(2016) to this Special Issue; other articles include Forchtner and Schneickert (2016),
Herzog (2016a), see also Herzog (2016b), and Krzyżanowski (2016). Herzog
(2016a) answers Krzyżanowski’s and Forchtner’s call for the adoption of theory
from other fields, by proposing the merging of immanent (aka normative) critique
with DA/DS, since it can help CDA/CDS to “ground, anchor or justify its normative
claims” and “defend a normative stance that is ultimately anchored in the claim that
human-made suffering should vanish” (Herzog, 2016a: 289). In his (2016b) book,
which builds on his article, Herzog further develops his theoretical approaches to
critique, also including analytical tools and examples. He adds that
immanent critique can provide theoretically informed research questions for discourse
analysis, such as questions regarding the existence of (silent) suffering, the process of the
social production of that suffering and the structural obstacles to ending such suffering
(Herzog, 2016a: 289).

Fairclough (2015: 12) gives a clear explanation of normative critique, saying

that, as opposed to transcendental critique, it “does not go outside the social reality
it is critiquing to find a measure or standard against which reality can be evaluated
and criticized (e.g. to religion or philosophy)”. Instead, it “identifies internal contra-
dictions within that social reality, including those between what is supposed or said
to happen and what actually does happen” (2015: 12). Fairclough argues that CDA
is unique because unlike other forms of critical analysis, it proceeds from normative
critique of discourse to “explanatory” critique, which “provides the crucial link
between normative critique of discourse and action to change existing reality”
(2015: 19). He then argues that this type of DA can result in social change.
Forchtner and Schneickert (2016) add to new theoretical applications of CDA/
CDS by proposing a merger of Bourdieu, Habermas and DHA in one framework,
which would bring together “the idea of providing detailed linguistic analysis of,
possibly, diachronic developments (DHA) through a series of sociological concepts
(Bourdieu) on the basis of an imminent idea of transcendence” (2016: 304). They
first introduce Bourdieu’s framework into DHA, then discuss links and alleged con-
tradictions between Habermas and Bourdieu and finally, they indicate how collec-
tive learning processes might be integrated into field theory. A final article in the
Special Issue dealing with CDS theory is by Krzyżanowski (2016) and argues that
an in-depth rethinking of the ways in which CDS approaches recontextualisation is
needed. This responds to the fact that “contemporary public discourse increasingly
revolves around debating and redefining various social and political and indeed
abstract concepts, often in lieu of re/presenting the actual society or its members”
and that this type of discourse supports “the spread and solidification of neoliberal
tendencies in contemporary societies” (2016: 309, 318). One example he gives of
this change is the case of contemporary discourses on immigration which feature
240 5  Critiques of CDA/CDS and Responses

concepts such as ‘integration’ and use it as “a catch-all excuse for the fierce criti-
cism of social groups—in this case migrants—who can thereby be very easily tar-
geted by politicians and journalists and stigmatised as those who allegedly ‘do not
follow integration’, do not ‘want to integrate’ and hence should not belong
(Krzyżanowski, 2010; Bennett, 2015)” (Krzyżanowski, 2016: 310). Krzyżanowski
argues that CDA/CDS needs a set of new conceptual and analytical tools that can
help it deal with such problems and proposes that its theoretical (as well as related
analytical) tools should be combined with Begriffsgeschichte (‘conceptual history’),
which is concept-oriented and based on the idea that the central object of historical
inquiry should not be events, but “social and political concepts which come to
define societies and various facets of social order” (2016: 312). He then suggests
that CDA/CDS could be enhanced not only by combining Begriffsgeschichte and
critical-analytical views but also by re-thinking how we approach recontextualiza-
tion (2016: 318). In this way, the combination of the two can lead to more in-depth
examination of how recontextualisation and transformation of meanings operate in
discourses to define and regulate the contemporary public realm. A clear example
(2016) of how to do this is by examining discourse related to multilingualism which
frames its benefits in terms of economic gain.
Having discussed the major critiques of CDA and responses by scholars to them,
we want the reader to keep in mind that, as is the case throughout this book, we have
established a cut-off date of Feb. 2018 for discussion of new work. We note that, as
this book goes to press, new trends and responses to critique continue to emerge,
and so it is inevitable that we have missed some very recent ones in this chapter that
readers know about.
We now turn to the way in which CDA/CDS is currently engaging with other
disciplines.

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Chapter 6
CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary
Connections

6.1  Introduction

CDA/CDS has always been interdisciplinary1 (see Sect. 1.1 and Chaps. 3 and 4).
This is due in part to its origins in DA (Sect. 3.1), and also to being formed by schol-
ars who themselves were interdisciplinary (Sect. 3.2) and continued to be so in this
new endeavor. It is also because most approaches to CDA/CDS are connected to
general social theories (‘Grand Theories’), ‘middle-range’ theories, and so forth (as
explained in Sect. 3.2, see Reisigl & Wodak, 2016: 17), which are interdisciplinary
in their focus and have influenced many of the academic areas that CDA/CDS is
connected to. We also note that the commitment to interdisciplinarity and various
kinds of theoretical positioning has meant that the earlier approaches—Dialectical-­
Relational (DRA), Sociocognitive (SCA), Discourse-Historical (DHA), and
Dispositive (DPA) Approaches (Wodak & Meyer, 2001, 2009, 2016, see Sects. 4.3–
4.5 and 4.7)—have, over time, created contacts with even more fields or (research)
areas or in different ways than before. And it is not a surprise that new approaches
have arisen since then and have become institutionalized in CDA/CDS, in the sense
that they are included in the Main Approaches (Chap. 4)—Social Semiotics and
Multimodal (SocSem and MCDA), Corpus Linguistic (CorpLingA) and Cognitive
Linguistic (CogLingA) Approaches (Sects. 4.6, 4.8, and 4.9)—and that they too are
interdisciplinary. We will not revisit this issue of the interdisciplinarity of CDA/
CDS here since it is discussed throughout this book and also treated by many arti-
cles, chapters and books cited in Chaps. 1–5; we can simply say that we believe,
along with other CDA/CDS scholars, that the interdisciplinary stance coupled with
openness to theoretical positioning of CDA/CDS is the key to the rich, subtle and

1
 As noted in Sect. 1.1 and in Sect. 3.1 (see also Sects. 1.1 and 3.5), some CDA/CDS scholars prefer
to use the terms multi-, cross- or trans-disciplinary with some slight differences in connotation for
some, but we will not address that issue here.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 247

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Studies and Beyond, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 26,
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248 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

complex nature of our work. It also makes the field more relevant, up to date, and
effective, since it is dynamic and accommodates new approaches, new scholars,
new topics, new research problems, new methods, etc. (as said in Sect. 3.2).
What we will be exploring in this chapter is the multiple ways in which CDA/
CDS has connected with different fields that are not currently part of it (and perhaps
never will be)—and conversely the way that work in other areas has serious linkages
with CDA/CDS. We also note that of the fields we will cover, the majority (if not
all) of them are also interdisciplinary and/or open to ties with scholarship in other
areas—which, in fact, is not surprising. We view this as a relationship that can go in
one or both directions: CDA/CDS research that has a serious connection with some
facet(s) of a specific field, and/or scholarship in another area with a strong connec-
tion to some facet(s) of CDA/CDS. This may be because scholars in CDA/CDS
integrate or combine explicitly theories/methods/approaches/research practices/
concepts/perspectives (and so forth) from other areas into their scholarship or are
influenced by them in some way and/or because scholars in other areas incorporate
any one of those theories/methods, etc. from CDA/CDS into their research or are
influenced by them. In some cases, this connection is recognized by the CDA/CDS
community, for example, through chapters in edited books, articles in journals,
Special Issues of journals, etc., or through specific mention in scholarship. In the
reverse direction, it is made explicit through books/articles, etc. and/or through the
positioning of the scholarship in the other fields or areas in relation to CDA/
CDS. While there are possibly other areas or disciplines that have these kinds of
connections, the ones featured in this chapter are those that are the best established
or the most obvious about their relationship with CDA/CDS—and are the most
notable from our point of view. They are the following (in this order in this chapter):
critical applied linguistics, education, anthropology/ethnography, sociolinguistics,
gender studies, queer linguistics, pragmatics and ecolinguistics. In each section, we
describe basic concepts important to the scholarship in the given field/area, and then
we explain how CDA/CDS incorporates or combines theories/models, etc. from
them into its own scholarship or how they integrate CDA/CDS scholarship into
theirs (before Feb. 2018, our cutoff date).
We begin with critical applied linguistics.

6.2  CDA/CDS and Critical Applied Linguistics

There are many different definitions of applied linguistics and since it is not our
purpose here to resolve the issue of what it is, we will quote three fairly short ones.
Richards et al. (1985: 15) define it as “the study of second and foreign language
learning and teaching” and “the study of language and linguistics in relation to
practical problems, such as lexicography, translation, speech pathology, etc.”. For
Brumfit (1997: 93) it is “the theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world
problems in which language is a central issue.” And Schmitt and Celce-Murcia
(2002: 1) say that it uses “what we know about (a) language, (b) how it is learned,
6.2  CDA/CDS and Critical Applied Linguistics 249

and (c) how it is used, in order to achieve some purpose or solve some problem in
the real world.” For these scholars, and many others, applied linguistics is an inter-
disciplinary field and it draws on linguistics, sociolinguistics, education, sociology,
anthropology, cultural studies, to name but a few.
Pennycook (1990), who was the first to coin the term ‘critical applied linguistics’
and to place a critical emphasis on applied linguistics, claims it is a “critical approach
to applied linguistics” (2001/2009: 1; for a definition of critical applied linguistics
and its main concerns, see Pennycook (2001/2009, Chap. 1). Pennycook recognizes
that there is a substantial amount of confusion around what it means to be ‘critical’
in addition to the confusion around the definition of ‘applied linguistics’. However,
it is a “useful umbrella under which a number of emerging approaches to language
and education can be described” (Pennycook, 1997: 23). In essence, it takes a criti-
cal approach to the study of language that emphasizes making applied linguistics
matter, and remakes the connections between discourse, language learning, and lan-
guage use, and the social and political contexts in which all of them occur. Moreover,
as Pennycook points out, ‘critical applied linguistics’ draws on a variety of critical
approaches to develop an understanding of the relationship between language, cul-
ture, and discourse, coupled with a belief that research in this area needs to focus on
an analysis of the micropolitics of everyday life. Two of the many critical approaches
he includes in critical applied linguistics are CDA/CDS and critical linguistics
(CritLing) (1997: 23–24).
Pennycook (1997: 25) also posits that critical applied linguistics should not only
explore “questions of language and inequality” but also attempt to “change those
conditions”. Mahboob and Paltridge (2013: 1) echo this call, stating that the purpose
of this approach is “not only to understand and explain how power is constructed
and exercised through language, but also to change the practices and empower those
who are at risk from oppressive practices”. Thus, it should be seen as a way of think-
ing and doing that is always problematizing (much like CDA/CDS). In fact,
Pennycook (2004) explains that he sees it as a dynamic, constantly shifting approach
to language in multiple contexts, rather than a method, a set of techniques, or a sum
of related critical approaches to language domains. In his own words (2004:
803–804), this approach is not just
the addition of a critical dimension to AppLing [=applied linguistics], but rather opens up a
whole new array of questions and concerns, issues such as identity, sexuality, access,
ethics … or the reproduction of Otherness that have hitherto not been considered as con-
cerns related to AppLing.

Critical applied linguistics examines inequality in terms of linking micro-­

relations of applied linguistics to macro-relations of social and political power. In
this vein, it empowers applied linguists in the sense that it enables them to make the
connection between discourse, language learning, language teaching, language use,
and the social and political contexts in which these processes take place.
Critical applied linguistics studies the “ways in which education, regulation, and
the study and use of language relate to the realization, maintenance, and ­reproduction
250 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

of the distribution of power in society” (Mahboob & Paltridge, 2013: 1). It focuses
on how power is performed, reproduced, and resisted through language study fields,
including language policy and planning, language codification, language teaching,
language learning, and language testing. For example, a critical approach to lan-
guage policy should focus on the “regulations, laws, policies and practices that
relate to the use and functional distribution of languages”, examining questions
such as the privileged positions certain languages are given, and how the use of
certain languages helps those in power to maintain power. In this area, Phillipson’s
(1992) book Linguistic Imperialism was one of the first to examine the role, func-
tion and power of English as a global language. In addition, Canagarajah (1999),
Mahboob (2002), and Pennycook (2001/2009) note the power of English (and how
it is used to devalue local languages) as well as the importance of studying how
English is appropriated and/or resisted in various communities around the world. In
addition, this work examines the discursive construction of English as directly con-
nected to modernization and how English is marketed as a “language of diplomacy,
education, finance, globalization, science, technology, tourism, and so forth”
(Mahboob & Paltridge, 2013: 2); but conversely, the relationship between English
and modernization-globalization can best be described as tenuous.
In the area of language codification, critical applied linguistic studies are inter-
ested in understanding which languages become codified and used as models of
education as well as the consequences speakers face when they don’t adhere to
standardized varieties. Kachru (1990) has investigated these questions regarding
World Englishes while Nero (2006) has looked into creole studies. Another area of
research that has sprung from the study of World Englishes and critical language
policy is that of the non-native English speakers in the Teaching English to Speakers
of Other Languages (TESOL) movement (Mahboob, 2010; Mahboob & Golden,
2013; Lowe & Kiczkowiak, 2016). Experts in this area have raised awareness of
inequities for non-native English speakers—often referred to as ‘native-­
speakerism’—and have connected those issues to race. For example, Crump (2014)
draws on critical race theory to connect subject-as-seen with subject-as-heard (i.e.,
accent), urging scholars to continue to investigate “the ways in which race, racism
and racialization intersect with issues of language, belonging and identity”
(2014: 207).
Crump’s work also connects to the area of critical language teaching, in which
the importance of identity in discussion of language teaching and learning is high-
lighted, such as by Canagarajah (1999) and other scholars who connect research to
practice and illustrate ways in which creative classroom strategies can be used to
engage with local context, needs and resources. In addition, critical applied linguis-
tic scholarship that combines with genre studies (e.g. Martin & Rose, 2008) urges
the explicit teaching of the discourses of power so that students from disadvantaged
backgrounds can move out of their position by producing written texts that will help
them gain access to power. Related to this same goal, critical language learning
research examines how power relations affect language learning as well as “the
social identities, wishes, desires and histories of language learners” (Ellis &
Barkhuizen, 2005: 281).
6.2  CDA/CDS and Critical Applied Linguistics 251

A final area of critical applied linguistics examined by Mahboob and Paltridge

(2013) is that of language testing, in which Shohamy’s (2001) book The Power of
Tests marked a turning point where the focus changed from measurement and valid-
ity to ethical issues that question what tests actually do and how they change peo-
ple’s lives. McNamara and Shohamy (2008) examined the use of language tests for
citizenship, immigration and asylum purposes in Australia, as well as various coun-
tries in Europe, the UK, and the US, arguing for the need for more advocacy on
behalf of (and by) the people affected by the tests so that the unfair policies that they
focus on can be challenged; and Wodak (2013a, 2013b) and Wodak and Boukala
(2015) combined CDA/CDS with critical applied linguistics to examine language
testing policies.
In addition to the areas of critical applied linguistics highlighted by Mahboob
and Paltridge (2013), Lin (2014: 219) also notes that it has been used to address the
field of applied linguistics itself, as well as public and media discourses and other
educational discourses. This research includes topics such as educational policies
and classroom interactions, curriculum, creative writings and texts produced by and
about discourses of or on educators, teacher-educators, community leaders, new
immigrants etc. In the area of textbook analysis, Lin gives the example of (de los
Heros, 2009), which looks at the way in which textbooks in Peru contradict lan-
guage policies that advocate for the teaching of respect for indigenous languages
and language diversity, and also cites other examples of work in this area (e.g. Le
Roux, 2008) but notes that these studies could be improved by showing how the
textbooks are actually used in different ways by school participants (Lin, 2014). In
studies that focus on discursive construction of identities (e.g. Briscoe & De Oliver,
2012; Gu, 2010), Lin notes that more researcher reflexivity is needed as well as
interdisciplinary research methods and perspectives. In her discussion of media dis-
course analysis (DA) (e.g. O’Halloran, 2007 and Baker, Gabrielatos, & McEnery,
2013, which both utilize corpus linguistics), Lin acknowledges that both studies are
socially committed, problem-oriented and reflexive, and they both use a diverse
range of methods. However, she advocates for more research to adopt Wodak’s
DHA since it emphasizes “collecting data over a period of time, highlighting the
importance of the longitudinal, historical dimension of CDA” (Lin, 2014: 226; see
Sect. 4.5).
In terms of the connection of critical applied linguistics to CDA/CDS, it is not
hard to see how its aims are similar to those of CDA/CDS, and how they can easily
intersect. According to Mahboob and Paltridge (2013), they both aim to de-­construct
power relations that are “not evident, on first sight, to people” (2013: 5) and to
describe and seek to “change discriminatory practices that are related to descrip-
tions, perceptions and policies and practices of language” (2013: 5) and work in the
areas of critical applied linguistics described above intersects in important ways
with CDA/CDS. Not all applied linguistic work is critical, but much work that is
uses CDA/CDS as a theoretical foundation and framework from which to describe
the naturalization of “power, prestige and authority” with the goal of resisting them
in order to bring about social change (Mahboob & Paltridge, 2013: 6). Some other
examples of critical applied linguistic studies not mentioned here but worth reading
252 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

include Kubota, (1999), Martinez (2003), and Anya (2016), on racialized identities
of second language learners in Brazil (which was the 2019 recipient of the American
Association of Applied Linguistics First Book Award). In addition, in the next sec-
tion we describe Fairclough’s work in education which overlaps to some degree
with critical applied linguistics.

6.3  CDA/CDS and Education

6.3.1  Introduction

Another area that has incorporated the use of CDA/CDS into its research is that of
education, at all levels. In this section, we demonstrate how CDA/CDS can not only
be combined with educational issues to explore power relations in teaching and
learning, but also how it can be a potent tool to counter neoliberal forces (as men-
tioned by Fairclough, see Sects. 3.5.4, 3.5.5, and 4.3). Just as in other areas, educa-
tional realms have been highly affected by neoliberal ideologies, and CDA/CDS has
emerged as one tool that can expose them in order to resist them (see Sect. 6.3.2.2
for more).
Since the late 1990s, educational researchers have increasingly engaged in CDA/
CDS to answer questions about the relationship between language and society, and
as they do so, they show its applicability to education and at the same time continu-
ally reshape its boundaries (Rogers et  al., 2005). Before this, scholarship that
engaged critically with education, such as that of Paulo Freire and critical pedagogy
(Freire, 1970/2018), didn’t necessarily focus on language per se, with the exception
of some of Fairclough’s (and his colleagues’) early work (see the next Sect. 6.3.2).
However, much CDA/CDS work in this area draws on the work of critical peda-
gogy, or at least works toward the same aims, but focuses explicit attention on lan-
guage. Other early examples of linguistic analysis in education (such as Cazden,
1988/2001) made sense of the ways in which people make meaning in educational
contexts (Rogers et al., 2005: 366). The current wide use of CDA/CDS in educa-
tional research is due perhaps to its compatibility with educational issues in many
areas, and the increasing willingness of CDA/CDS scholars to look across disci-
plines for applications. For example, if one considers educational practices to be
communicative events, then it is easy to understand how Fairclough’s approach
(2011) can be useful in examining the ways in which text, talk and other semiotic
interactions involved in learning are constructed in varying contexts (Rogers, 2011a:
1). CDA/CDS is also useful in education because it provides a way of conceptual-
izing interaction that is quite compatible with Vygotsky’s sociocultural perspective
(1962, 1978; see Wertsch, 1985; Lantolf & Thorne, 2006) in educational research
(Moll, 1990/2014; Gutiérrez, 2008; Lewis, Enciso, & Moje, 2007) and applied lin-
guistics in general and allows for the interpretation of multimodal social practices
such as those found in education (Rogers, 2011a: 1).
6.3  CDA/CDS and Education 253

In addition, CDA/CDS and educational research are both committed to address-

ing problems through a range of theoretical perspectives. Many of the problems in
the globalized system of education have to do with power and inequality, and CDA/
CDS is particularly equipped with the tools needed to address these issues and the
complex movement across educational sites, practices, and systems in a world of
global inequalities (Rogers, 2011a: 1; also Collins, 2011). As more and more edu-
cational researchers adapt CDA/CDS tools to their research, “interesting and sub-
stantive concerns arise about how it is applied to educational issues, how it affects
other research and approaches in education, and how it might be reviewed in the
non-educational research traditions from which it came” (Rogers et al., 2005: 366).

6.3.2  Norman Fairclough

Since the publication of his work with colleagues in the linguistics department at
Lancaster University (e.g., Clark et al., 1990) and his edited book (1992) Critical
Language Awareness, Norman Fairclough has been a leader in calling for Critical
Language Study (CLS) (which later developed into some facets of CDA) to deal
with educational issues and has been very influential in this area, as will be explored
in the next three sections (see also Sect. 3.5).

6.3.2.1  Language Education

According to Fairclough (1999: 79), “The need for critical awareness of discourse
in contemporary society should make it a central part of language education in
schools, colleges and universities.” Fairclough first began to emphasize this point in
Critical Language Awareness (1992), and later included it along with CDA in his
1995 book. One of the results of his work with the Language, Ideology and Power
research group at Lancaster (and those who helped shape this work—Luciano
Celes, Stef Slembrouck, and Mary Talbot) was an article that reviewed current
approaches to ‘language awareness’ (Clark, Fairclough, Ivanič, & Martin-Jones,
1990), followed by his own edited volume Critical Language Awareness (Fairclough,
1992). In Clark et al. (1990: 251), Fairclough and his co-authors compare critical
and non-critical approaches to language awareness, defining it as “a person’s sensi-
tivity to and conscious awareness of the nature of language and its role in human
life”. Using an extract of the poem ‘Queen of Hearts’ in standard British English vs.
Jamaican English from a writing textbook in which the standard variety of English
is presented to students as the appropriate way to use language in writing as opposed
to Jamaican English, the authors argue that “the sociolinguistic order is portrayed as
a natural order rather than an order which has become naturalized” (Clark et al.,
1990: 258). In addition, they contend that “the extract encourages learners to think
that ‘dialects other than standard English’ are appropriate only for quaint written
uses such as nursery rhymes, stories and poems”, and the way the dialect vs. the
254 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

standard is presented “objectifies and sanitises language in a way which isolates it

from its social context: learning about language separately from purposeful lan-
guage use” (p. 259). They then suggest that education should equip children for the
reality that there are inequalities within the “sociolinguistic order” (p. 260). That is,
there are reasons why standard English is preferred in formal situations, and why
certain other varieties are stigmatized in those same situations. In other words, these
orders of discourse did not just naturally happen to be this way—they have to do
with colonization, domination, and power. The authors conclude that CLA (and
CDA) “complements the development of language capabilities and can empower
learners to challenge the status quo, and to work for change” (p. 260)2.
In the introduction and his chapter on ‘the appropriacy of appropriateness’,
Fairclough (1992; see also Sects. 3.5.1, 3.5.4, and 4.3) reiterates that “development
of a critical awareness of the world, and of the possibilities for changing it, ought to
be the main objective of all education, including language education” (p.  7). He
adds that in CLA (versus non-critical approaches), language education should be a
“resource for tackling social problems which centre around language” (p. 12). He
also draws on the work of critical pedagogy scholars such as Freire (1985) and
Giroux (1983), to argue that language education should provide learners with an
understanding of the way in which social issues can be resolved outside of schools
as well as within educational contexts. Again, he uses the teaching of standard
English as an example. Essentially, he says that, “in passing on prestigious practices
and values such as those of standard English without developing a critical aware-
ness of them, one is implicitly legitimising them and the asymmetrical distribution
of cultural capital” (Fairclough, 1992: 15). In other words, in a CDA/CDS view of
language education, we should make students aware of the way society values or
devalues different language varieties but also raise the question as to how, and why,
dominant rules about language variation and policy could be challenged and disre-
garded. Although he does not propose exact ways to do this, others in the volume
(which we discuss below) do; in addition, as we discuss also in Sect. 6.4 below,
there are sociolinguists who adhere to this line of research, and often cite Fairclough
in their work (e.g. Boxer, 2002; Deckert & Vickers, 2011; Downes, 1998). In the
rest of the edited volume on CLA, language education scholars give examples of
how to challenge and resist dominant ideologies as related to topics like critical lit-
eracy (Wallace, 1992), raising student consciousness about the writing process
(Clark, 1992), academic writing (Ivanič & Simpson, 1992), English teaching, infor-
mation technology (Stubbs, 1992), euphemisms, school discourse, and empower-
ment of high school students in Botswana (McKenzie, 1992), the treatment of
minority languages in the British educational system (Bhatt & Martin-Jones, 1992),
and how to challenge the domination of standard varieties by using non-standard
varieties for prestigious purposes (Janks & Ivanič, 1992).
Besides the two works discussed above, Fairclough also attended to language
education issues in Language and Power (1989/2001/2015; discussed in Sects.

 Much of this work overlaps with Fairclough’s other work in sociolinguistics (see Sect. 6.4).
2
6.3  CDA/CDS and Education 255

3.5.2 and 3.5.3), advocating for the use of CLS (and later CDA) in the teaching of
English as a Second Language because these learners include some of the “most
disadvantaged sections of the society, whose experiences of domination and racism
are particularly sharp” (Fairclough, 2015: 230). He notes that developing a “critical
consciousness3 of discourse” as a basis for ideological struggle is something that
has already been established in English as a Second Language research, but that
other areas such as public service (i.e., nursing) or trade unions could also benefit
from the use of CDA.

6.3.2.2  Philosophy of Education and CDA/CDS

Besides focusing on language education, Fairclough also problematized the mean-

ing and purpose of education in general, connecting it to CDA/CDS aims. In his
book on CDA (1995/2013; see Sect. 3.5.5), he discusses his work on CLA but also
alludes to the ‘marketization’ of education as well as the “contemporary tendency
of the purposes of education to narrow down towards serving the needs of the econ-
omy” (Fairclough, 1999: 81, e.g., ‘neoliberalism’, aka ‘neo-liberalism’, see Sects.
3.5 and 6.3.2.3). In addition, he questions the status quo of educational reform and
what the true purpose of education is (2013: 555, see also Fairclough, 1999). In his
analysis (in both 1995/2013 and 1999), he argues against the ideologies put forth by
the Dearing Report (National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, 1997, in
the UK) which views teaching and learning as “‘key skills’ which are seen as trans-
ferable from one sphere of life to another and as the basis for future success includ-
ing successful ‘lifelong learning’” (Fairclough, 1999: 80). The problem with this,
according to Fairclough, is that if we see education as learning communication
skills which, once learned, can be transferred freely from one context to another, we
can over-generalize and ignore local contexts and ways in which each context might
need a different approach. And because “discourse is a complex matching of models
with immediate needs in which what emerges may be radically different from any
model, ambivalent between models, or a baffling mixture of models, and where flair
and creativity may have more impact than skill” (1999: 80), this can result in disas-
trous consequences. To illustrate such consequences, he gives the example of some-
one using skills learned in interviewing university candidates to interview celebrities
on a T.V. talk show (1999: 80). Accordingly, he rejects the archaic ‘transmission’
model of education in which knowledge and skills are supposedly passed on to the
learner, and instead, he argues that critical approaches do not just pass on informa-
tion, they teach students to question what they learn.

3
 The use of ‘critical consciousness’ here reflects Freire’s influence on Fairclough’s work in educa-
tion, since it is a translation of the Portuguese conscientização, developed by Freire (1974) to refer
to an awareness of social and political contradictions and how to take action against oppressive
elements in one’s life. Freire’s work is also grounded in post-Marxist critical theory, so it makes
sense that Fairclough draws on it in his efforts to bridge CDA and education.
256 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

In another chapter (2011: 119), Fairclough turns to educational research and

notes that his earlier work in the late 90s and early 2000s (e.g., Chouliaraki &
Fairclough, 1999; Fairclough, 2000a, 2000b, 2001c, 2003; Chiapello & Fairclough,
2002; Fairclough, Jessop, & Sayer, 2003) was criticized for not incorporating a
view of learning. He then seeks to remedy this problem by addressing the “possibili-
ties for and limitations of critical educational research motivated by emancipatory
(e.g., antiracist) agendas for learning and social transformation” (Fairclough, 2011:
126). He suggests overall that educational researchers consider both structural char-
acteristics and factors to do with agency in looking at educational issues. In essence,
he views educational research as part of a network of social practices which includes
classroom teaching, administration, educational research, government and educa-
tional policy (in part as a means of control or governance) in which researchers can
seek to create more equal relations between the orders of discourse, such as (for
example) between academic research and classroom teaching. Furthermore, he sug-
gests that educational researchers see themselves as agents using their research to
“develop, recontextualize, and seek to enact and inculcate new discourses” 2011:
126), which can be done through dialog between researchers and teachers (and, pos-
sibly, students).

6.3.2.3  Neoliberalism and Higher Education

As alluded to earlier, Fairclough has used CDA/CDS to address neoliberalism in

English language education (2015: 229–238; 2013: 544–557) as well as in higher
education in the UK (1993, 2007), and in Austria and Romania (Wodak & Fairclough,
2010). In 2000, he published a brief article in Discourse & Society calling for “co-­
ordinated action against neo-liberalism on the part of critical language researchers”
(Fairclough, 2000c: 147). He adopts Bourdieu’s definition of neoliberalism as a
“political project for the reconstruction of society in accord with the demands of an
unrestrained global capitalism” (Bourdieu, 1998, as cited in Fairclough, 2000c:
147). In this two-page call for action, he states clearly the problems of neoliberal
ideologies and actions which result in “an increasing gap between the rich and the
poor, less security for most people, less democracy, major environmental damage”
(p.  147). He ends the paper with a call for an international network to link the
diverse work that is already going on and to encourage more to happen, giving his
email address for interested scholars to contact him. Fairclough has not been alone
in this endeavor and has joined other British and European scholars (especially
Wodak) in looking at the issue of ‘education and the knowledge-based economy in
Europe’ (Jessop, Fairclough, & Wodak, 2008; see Jessop, 2004, 2008 on critical
semiotic analysis and cultural political economy, and Jessop & Sum, 2010; also
Sum, 2009). Mautner (2006), has also looked at the use of the “buzzword”, ‘entre-
preneurial university’, in higher education. Other scholars, such as Davies and
Bansel (2007) have examined neoliberalism in education in other areas such as
Australia and New Zealand, while Machin and Ledin (2016), Ledin and Machin
(2016, 2018) have looked at document design in higher education in Sweden as it
6.3  CDA/CDS and Education 257

relates to neoliberalism, and in the US, CDA/CDS researchers have explored neo-
liberalism in K-12 education (e.g., Rogers, 2011a).
Despite the fact that many others have also been tackling this subject, we are
dedicating this section to Fairclough’s work on neoliberalism and education because
he has concentrated such a large amount of his attention to this area and has also
been a leader in calling for CDA/CDS scholars to do the same. Most noteworthy is
his belief, stressed at the end of Language and Power (2015: 252), that the primary
struggle of CDA/CDS “must be against neo-liberalism”, which is similar to his call
for a network of scholars working against neoliberalism mentioned above
(Fairclough, 2000c). He also used examples of neoliberal discourse in higher educa-
tion to demonstrate how his DRA approach to CDA works (e.g., Fairclough, 1995;
see also Sect. 4.3). For example, in Chap. 4 of Fairclough (1995, which first appeared
in Discourse & Society in 1993), he analyzes the way that public discourse has been
transformed by the marketization (i.e., “restructuring of the order of discourse on
the model of central market organisations”) of discourse in higher education in
Britain (Fairclough, 1993: 143). Basically, this concerns the way in which universi-
ties have become more like businesses than educational institutions. He justifies
using higher education discourse as an example because it represents a typical case
of “processes of marketisation and commodification in the public sector more gen-
erally” (Fairclough, 1995: 101). In addition, he notes that his paper is part of a lon-
ger study of higher education in collaboration with Susan Condor, Olivia Fulton,
and Celia Lury, in which they look at “changing organizational forms, discursive
practices, and social and professional identities in higher education” (Fairclough,
1993: 166). He introduces the idea of marketization by discussing how educational
institutions establish an ‘internal’ market by making departments more financially
autonomous, using managerial approaches in staff appraisal and evaluation and
paying more attention to marketing, and also how they treat students as ‘custom-
ers’—and how all these changes are top-down4. He demonstrates the way these
changes are represented discursively (including through his DRA approach to CDA,
see Sect. 4.3), by examining academic documents such as job advertisements, a
packet from an academic conference, a curriculum vitae, and an undergraduate pro-
spectus for the years 1967–1968, 1986–1987 and 1993. He concludes that the dis-
cursive shifts are indicators of the decline of stable institutional identities in favor of
“more entrepreneurial identities” as well as a “decline in the implicit (unspoken)
authority of the institution over its applicants, potential students, and potential staff”
(Fairclough, 1993: 157). As a result, academics then reconstruct their own identities
on a more self-promotional/entrepreneurial basis by highlighting or foregrounding
their personal qualities. Another paper in which he covers similar ground is
Fairclough (2007).
Later, Fairclough and Wodak (2008; Wodak & Fairclough, 2010) demonstrate
how CDA can be used to analyze policy documents such as the Bologna Declaration

4
 We assume that this will sound familiar to many of the readers of this book, since these issues are
now prevalent in, e.g., the rest of Europe and North America.
258 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

(1999), which outlines the ‘Bologna process’ (i.e., the series of meetings and
­agreements between EU countries to ensure they are comparable in standards and
quality of higher education) and their implementation. In Wodak and Fairclough
(2010), which analyzes the implementation of the Declaration using Austria and
Romania as ‘case studies’, they show how the reforms are recontextualized in order
to get others to actively agree with changes as if they are a necessary pre-condition
for implementing the Bologna process. Some of these changes in Austria include
the disappearance of participatory structures (in contrast to what was actually pro-
posed in the Declaration) and the increased power of University Councils, which
consist of a large number of politically appointed members. In addition, ‘autonomy’
became a euphemism for new managerial and hierarchical structures which are
dependent on political interests, funding for research was cut, and private elite uni-
versities were created. In Romania, implementation of the Declaration resulted in
“deep changes in social and personal relations and in professional and personal
identities which are profoundly at odds with existing social relations and identities
in Romanian” higher education (Wodak & Fairclough, 2010: 36). A valuable part of
the analysis is the way they go into depth examining the two specific cases to show
how the same policies and processes can look very different (and have different
results) in two very different contexts.
Having just looked at Fairclough’s (and colleagues’) influence on the connection
of CDA/CDS to educational issues in Europe and elsewhere, we now turn to two
scholars who have had an impact in this area in the United States.

6.3.3  Rebecca Rogers: Primary and Secondary Education

We should note that much of the work we will describe in this section relates to
K-12 (primary and secondary) education. When applicable, we will provide needed
background information about the US education system in footnotes, so that it is
understandable to all readers. At the same time, many issues, such as neoliberal
ideologies and privatization of education (including the privatization of teacher
preparation programs), are also relevant to many other countries in the world, e.g.,
Brazil, Chile, Turkey, Portugal and the UK (cf. Diniz-Pereira & Zeichtner, 2018; see
also Fairclough Sects. 3.5.2 and 3.5.4).
Rebecca Rogers has undoubtedly had a great influence on scholarly work that
connects CDA/CDS and education. One of her most important contributions is her
edited volume (2011a, 2nd updated edition) introducing CDA in education, in
which all of the chapters explore different facets of education from a CDA/CDS
perspective. Rogers’ introductory chapter (2011b) provides an excellent overview
that explains the link between CDA/CDS and education and the range of areas and
topics explored in the educational realm in which CDA/CDS is employed as an
analytical tool. Fairclough’s chapter considers the semiotic aspects of social trans-
formation and learning, noting this as a gap both in CDA/CDS in general and in his
own work in particular. He approaches questions of learning from the fundamental
6.3  CDA/CDS and Education 259

problem of the “performativity of texts,” using the term ‘semiosis’ “to refer in a
general way to language and other semiotic modes such as visual image” (2011:
119). Kress’s chapter (2011) is a multimodal social semiotic (SocSem) approach to
education (see also Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996/2006; Sects. 2.6, 2.7, and 4.6 on
SocSem and multimodality). And Lewis and Ketter (2011) focuses on learning as
social interaction and on the “nature of learning over time among members of [a]
study group” (2011: 128).
On Rogers’ book’s website updated for the 2011 edition5, there is a long bibliog-
raphy (up to 2010) as well as syllabi from each of the authors for courses in CDA/
CDS and education. The site also lists journals dedicated to the study of discourse,
language, talk and text which feature articles that relate to educational issues, such
as Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Journal of Classroom Interaction,
Language and Education, Linguistics and Education, Classroom Discourse, and
TESOL Quarterly. There are also transcribed interviews with James Gee (from
2009), Norman Fairclough (from 2003) and Gunther Kress (from 2004) that illus-
trate the varied backgrounds that continue to inform CDA/CDS. Finally, the website
offers videos6 that feature some of the contributors to the book, such as not only
Fairclough, Gee, and Kress, but also van Leeuwen, Caldas-Coulthard, Chouliaraki,
James Collins, Luisa Martín Rojo and van Dijk (see Sect. 4.1, since in that video he
recommends that scholars adopt the term ‘CDS’). In addition, the various scholars
discuss the principles and methods of CDA/CDS as well as future directions, such
as the move toward more multimodal work, more attention to the global south and
its relationship with the global north, and reflexivity in the field in terms of which
voices are being privileged in CDA/CDS work and which are not.
Rogers collaborated with Melissa Mosley-Wetzel (2013, 2014) on an article and
book that connect literacy education with CDA/CDS; in their 2014 book, which is
geared toward those interested in critical literacy, teacher education, DA and teacher
research, they illustrate how CDA can be used in the service of literacy education,
defining critical literacy as an “approach to literacy education that seeks to both
disrupt unjust texts and social practices and use literacy to reimagine and redesign
new possibilities” (Rogers & Mosley-Wetzel, 2014: ix). In addition, critical literacy
can be a way to encourage students to use language to question the relationship
between language and power and understand how these relationships are socially
constructed and how they can take action to promote social justice (Lewison,
Leland, & Harste, 2007/2015). Furthermore, critical literacy is about analyzing
popular culture and media. Rogers and Mosley-Wetzel (2014) is especially useful
for teachers of CDA/CDS because it provides a model (with good examples) for
how to teach students to do CDA/CDS and also critical literacy skills. This is espe-
cially relevant at a time when media representations of people have increasing
power and presence in the lives of students. In light of the political climate
post-2016 in the US, reaching students in terms of teaching them to be critical con-

 http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415874298/.
5

 http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415874298/videos.asp.
6
260 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

sumers of media and to question what is behind the stories they have access to
becomes even more vital to the survival of democratic societies and cannot be taken
lightly (cf. Wodak, 2015 for more about this situation worldwide). In Chap. 7, we
also take a look at the way in which CDS scholars try to reach the world through
education, including Rebecca Rogers, who provides a very detailed and in-depth
description of her own work in her own words, as well as the many things she is
doing in CDA/CDS that connect to social change, particularly as regards education
(see Sect. 7.12.2).
Another recent work by Rogers worth mentioning is her comprehensive chapter
(Rogers, 2016), where she outlines the progress of CDA/CDS and the increase in
educational research that draws on CDS/CDA theory, methods, and aims, and sur-
veys over 30 years of scholarship; thus, it is highly informative about CDA/CDS
and education. She discusses reflexivity (researcher self-positioning), social action
(political commitment on the part of the researcher), and context (the linguistic
boundaries of the inquiry), as three qualities of CDA research important to educa-
tional researchers, and also several examples of studies that represent ‘low’,
‘medium’, and ‘high’ levels of these qualities. In addition, she notes the evolving
framework of CDA/CDS and the way it has responded to changes in educational
policy and practice. In terms of future directions for the field of CDA/CDS and
education, Rogers proposes more attention to examining virtual communities of
learning and discourses that are produced through classroom Wikis, smartboards,
tablets, and multiplayer gaming systems in order to show the larger community
(including policymakers) what occurs in this type of learning.
To read more examples of similar CDA/CDS work in the field of education, the
following are especially recommended: Anderson (2008) (persuasive letter writ-
ing); Anderson and Wales (2012) (digital studies); Belluigi (2009) (art education);
Graff (2010) (critical pedagogy in a multicultural literacy course); Lam (2009) (dig-
ital studies); Lau (2013) (biliteracy); Masuda (2012) (teacher education); Medina
(2010) (biliteracy); Taylor (2008) (adult literacy); Richardson (2007) (family and
community literacies); Rogers and Mosley (2008) (racial literacy in teacher educa-
tion); Schaenen (2010) (teacher action research on genre construction); Shardakova
and Pavlenko (2004) (foreign language learning); and Takayama (2009) (race, cul-
ture, ethnicity).

6.3.4  James Paul Gee

James Paul Gee is another influential and well-known scholar in this area. In (Gee,
2011a), about what makes DA critical, he argues that “language-in-use is always
part and parcel of, and partially constitutive of, specific social practices, and that
social practices always have implications for inherently political things like status,
solidarity, the distribution of social goods, and power” (2011a: 28, also 29, 31–32),
although many of his books don’t use the term ‘critical’. He uses the term ‘dis-
course’ (or ‘little d’ discourse) to mean “any instance of language-in-use or any
6.3  CDA/CDS and Education 261

stretch of spoken or written language (often called a ‘text’ in the expanded sense
where texts can be oral or written)” (2011c: 205). On the other hand, ‘Big “D”
Discourse’ refers to “ways of combining and integrating language, actions, interac-
tions, ways of thinking, believing, valuing, and using various symbols, tools, and
objects to enact a particular sort of socially recognizable identity” (2011a: 36;
2011b: 176–184). Later (2018: 163–165), he refers to ‘Big “D” Discourses’ as
“socially recognizable ways of being different kinds of people” and ‘Conversations’
(‘Big “C”’) as debates over time between and among Discourses which “many peo-
ple in society know much about”. His concept of ‘Conversations’ resembles very
much Musolff’s idea of ‘discourse scenarios’ (2016) mentioned in Sect. 4.8) and
also the broader definition of ‘discourse’ put forth by Fairclough and others, all
based in one way or another on Foucault (1972, 1976, 1979).
Gee has produced a body of work that connects (‘critical’) discourse methods
and perspectives to education, and, according to his own website, his “book
‘Sociolinguistics and Literacies’ (Fifth Edition, 2015) was one of the founding doc-
uments in the formation of the ‘New Literacy Studies’” And his book ‘An
Introduction to Discourse Analysis’ (Fourth Edition, 2014) brings together his work
on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach
that has been widely influential over the last two decades”7 (see also Sects. 3.3 and
3.5, since both Kress and Fairclough also participated in the New London group
meeting). Gee (2017) continues this focus in his book on teaching and learning lit-
eracy. His textbooks introducing DA (Gee, 1999 and new editions in
2005/2011a/2014a) and about how to do DA (Gee, 2011b/2014) have been very
prominent in the education realm in the US (among others of his books), and many
studies that connect education and CDA/CDS (and DS) cite his work and use his
terminology, such as big “D” and little “d”. Another example is ‘figured worlds’,
which he uses to mean pictures/concepts (in our minds) of a simplified world that
captures what is taken to be typical or normal and that vary by context and by peo-
ple’s social and cultural groups (2011b: 170). In the field of cognitive linguistics
(CogLing, discussed in 4.9), this might be referred to as ‘mental models’ or ‘frames’,
and is also similar to van Dijk’s concept of social cognition.
Some of Gee’s more recent publications focus on video games and in Gee (2015),
he combines his work on gaming with DA/DS. According to Carrillo Masso (2016:
102), a well-known scholar in the field of game studies, numerous other scholarly
publications exist that study the nexus between language and gaming (e.g. Carrillo
Masso & Ensslin, 2010; Ensslin, 2011, to name a few), and there are some chal-
lenges to separating DA/DS from multimodality in some places and uniting them in
others. Because of this, academics and scholars interested in the connection between
DA/DS and education might find his book (Gee, 2003/2007, 2nd ed.) on what video
games teach us about language and learning more relevant since it situates video
games as powerful learning devices by analyzing language to show how video

7
 https://webapp4.asu.edu/directory/person/1054842.
262 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

games shape identities and thus—far from being a waste of time—their use can
actually facilitate the learning of content.
Gee has a range of interests as a scholar, and although he continues to work in the
area of DA (see 2018), he still publishes across a wide variety of areas including
literacy and learning. What’s more, Gee is known for the accessibility of his work,
and his books are full of relevant examples that target the interests of his readers and
make them engaging and easy-to-understand, which is perhaps one reason why they
are so widely read.

6.3.5  CDA/CDS, Education and the Media

Besides its use in exploring K-12 educational practices and the development of critical
literacy in the US, CDA/CDS has increasingly become important in the analysis of
media discourse related to education. With the increasing privatization of education,
the vilification of teacher preparation programs and debilitating narratives of failing
schools and corrupt teachers’ unions in the US—responding to and creating an aware-
ness of how educators and education are represented in the media (and how this in turn
affects educational policy and public opinion of education) has become imperative. As
a result, many recent studies have taken an interest in exposing the way language is
used to represent various elements/actors in the educational realm. Cohen’s (2010)
study was one of the first to track the narrative of educational crisis in media dis-
course. In an analysis of educational news discourse in a US newspaper, she calls
attention to the way that teachers are represented in the media and then exposes how
micro-level language patterns shape the templates framing news coverage, favoring
and highlighting the language of ‘Accountability’ over ‘Caring’, and argues that
teachers need to have a larger role as crucial stakeholders in policy debates. She also
encourages teacher educators (e.g., those responsible for the preparation of K-12
teachers) to cultivate teacher candidates who are aware that critical, public voices
should be “a central part of teacher professional identity and teacher education” and
calls for “more sustained and developed studies of those producing the education
news” (Cohen, 2010: 116, 117). Pini does just that, examining websites for educa-
tional management organizations (the for-profit private companies that manage char-
ter schools in the US8) finding that their rhetoric “builds an ideal model of education
that is not consistently supported by evidence and veils the for-profit character of the
companies” (2011: 268, 287). In doing this, they portray “traditional” public schools
(which all children have the right to attend for free and are paid for by the government)
as tired and anachronistic and need to be replaced by a “superior” market model of
education which they propose. Pini (2011: 287) then concludes with a description of
how privatization proposes itself as a magical solution to educational problems, mask-
ing its real “for-profit” nature.

8
 In the US, ‘charter schools’ refers to K-12 schools that are subject to fewer regulations than public
schools but receive less—but still some—public funding. Some of these schools are for-profit.
6.3  CDA/CDS and Education 263

Goldstein (2011) also examines media framing of educational issues, this time
looking at ‘No Child Left Behind’ (NCLB)9 and educational reform. The article
demonstrates how the (visual and textual) media framing of NCLB and market
reforms positioned them as the only solution to address the failures of public educa-
tion by attacking teachers’ unions and individual teachers. Gabriel & Lester (2013)
explore value-added measurement (VAM)10 and the ways in which the media dis-
course functioned to politicize and (over)simplify issues related to VAM which ulti-
mately influence how the public perceives teacher effectiveness. Taking a different
angle and focus, Catalano and Moeller (2013) investigated media coverage of dual
language programs (a type of bilingual education in which biliteracy, bilingualism,
and interculturality are goals)11 in the US and found that media representation of
these programs reproduced dominant metaphors that compared education to busi-
ness and connected to dominant discourses about immigration, such as discourses
that view immigrants pejoratively in terms of ‘dangerous water’ (Santa Ana, 2002;
see Sect. 4.8). Valdez, Delavan and Freire (2016a) conducted a critical content anal-
ysis of newspaper reports about bilingual education programs (including dual lan-
guage) in Utah, focusing on discourses related to these programs. The authors found
that the discourse demonstrated a shift from an equity/heritage policy framework to
a global human capital one in US language education policy discourses. This shift
represents a change in audience and an emphasis on marketability that ultimately
overshadows equity (cf. Freire, Valdez, & Delavan, 2017; Valdez, Freire, & Delavan,
2016b for similar studies and conclusions).
Correspondingly, Lu and Catalano (2015) looked at reader response to media
discourse about dual language programs and found that two types of discourses
were represented in the debate about dual language education: both multilingual12

9
 NCLB was a legislative act of 2001, which is most known for the increased role of the federal
government in holding schools accountable (via standardized tests) for learning by their students.
After much controversy, it was replaced by the ‘Every Student Succeeds Act’ (ESSA, passed in
December, 2015). The new act has modified but not eliminated provisions related to standardized
tests.
10
 Value-added measurement (VAM) is a statistical approach that is increasingly being used as a
measure of teacher effectiveness. The tool connects student scores on standardized tests to the
effectiveness of teachers. Even though the creators of the statistical tool warned that it should never
be used as the sole indicator of effectiveness and should never be made public, it is currently being
used to make important decisions such as “hiring, promotion, tenure, and dismissal” and as a way
to judge the success of teacher education programs (Gabriel & Lester, 2013: 7).
11
 In the 1980s–1990s in the US, bilingual education programs came under attack by ‘English only’
advocates falsely accusing the programs of not teaching students English. Many laws/policy
changes were made during this time that prohibited or put limitations on programs (San Miguel,
2004). The term ‘dual language’ represents a ‘re-branding’ of these programs in light of this politi-
cal context (cf. Katznelson & Bernstein, 2017 for more details), and hence we use both terms
interchangeably in our discussion, since both are used in the literature.
12
 In some cases we use ‘multilingual’ to denote the multiple varieties spoken by students, and in
other cases we use ‘bilingual’ because these are the official names of programs or they denote that
content is delivered in two languages although students may speak many more than just two, and
hence they are considered multilingual.
264 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

discourses (which advocate for additive language education in which students learn
new languages while maintaining and developing their other language/s) and mono-
lingual discourses (in which the dominant language is argued to be the only one of
importance and home languages are only a vehicle in which to learn this L2, and
hence no longer needed once the dominant language is acquired). However, they
warn advocates of the programs that over-emphasis on global human capital runs
the risk of further marginalizing the already marginalized minority language speak-
ers and does not necessarily help win more support for these programs. In a similar
vein, Katznelson and Bernstein (2017) studied the 2016 overturning of California’s
Proposition 227 (which eliminated bilingual education in California). Using CDA/
CDS, they examined the framing of bilingual education in both the original proposi-
tion and its repeal, noting a marked shift in the way that bilingual education was
represented. Although Proposition 58 was passed (which implements the California
Multilingual Education Act of 2016, effectively dissolving the English-only require-
ment of Proposition 227), and hence worth celebrating, Katznelson and Bernstein
(2017) caution against the way neoliberal and global human capital discourses are
used to “sell” multilingualism to voters, arguing for alternative discourses that ques-
tion neoliberal logic that eclipses the needs of communities for which dual language
education was designed in the first place, and consequently suppress democratic
values that are “usurped by the unitary focus on economic value” (p. 22).
A final article with a similar focus is that of Delavan, Valdez and Freire (2017);
it examines the focus by Utah on bilingual education programs, using CDA/CDS to
investigate the way in which state promotional materials represent the three differ-
ent constituencies of dual language programs (e.g., maintenance, heritage, and
world language13) and their interests. Similar to the studies mentioned above, find-
ings revealed that discourses on dual language programs targeted the White, ‘world
language’ constituency, by privileging economic arguments that erase equity and
local language concerns associated with maintenance and non-White heritage con-
stituencies. Hence, all of the above studies utilized CDA/CDS to show how neolib-
eral discourses interplay with language education and favor global capital and
economic discourses that privilege dominant groups instead of promoting local
diversity and equity.
As for multimodal studies that connect CDA/CDS, education and media dis-
course, Faltin Osborn and Sierk (2015) conducted a multimodal semiotic analysis of
the representation of many future teachers in the Teach for America program. In
their analysis, they showed how Teach for America used image and graphics to align
readers with a positive representation of their organization and caution that the web-
site plays an important role in drawing in young people who know little about the
program and who are attracted to the way in which the program positions itself as a

13
 According to Delavan, Valdez and Freire (2017: 87), the maintenance constituency is composed
of students who speak the target language when they enter school. The heritage constituency
includes those who don’t initially speak the target language but are connected to it through their
heritage, and the world language constituency is comprised of those who want to learn the lan-
guage as a foreign/world language.
6.3  CDA/CDS and Education 265

solution to educational challenges and a way to provide high quality education to

minority students. This portrayal is misleading, because, while providing a highly
positive visual picture of the program’s effects, it backgrounds and erases problems
with the program, such as under-preparation of its recruits and its role in the destruc-
tion of public education, including the decline of African-American teachers in
urban communities (White, 2016). In addition, its managerial and technocratic
approach to education excludes a discussion of larger, systemic problems such as
poverty, segregation and unequal funding (Strauss, 2016).
A critical multimodal (MCDA) study focusing on education and the media by
Catalano and Gatti (2016) is one of very few studies that examine how teachers
themselves are represented, showing how, like groups lacking power in crime dis-
course, they are “demonized and stigmatized in the popular media” (Greer &
Jewkes, 2005: 29). Catalano and Gatti examine the representation of teachers in the
Atlanta ‘Cheating Scandal’ (in which teachers were charged with racketeering for
changing the test scores of their students), illustrating how the media’s framing of
teachers as criminals both reflects and conceals the specific interests of the powerful
‘educational reform’ movement (in which privatization of public education is a
large part of the agenda) and the corporations that benefit from a narrative that
blames educational problems on teachers. The authors conclude by calling for more
counter-narratives that expose how dominant representations reify negative public
perceptions of teachers.
As regards education policy and CDA/CDS, in 2017 Education Policy Analysis
Archives published a Special Issue on the intersection of education policy and DA
(largely focusing on issues within the US). The introductory chapter by Lester,
Lochmiller and Gabriel (2017) highlights the usefulness of CDA/CDS when attend-
ing to educational policy issues (citing Rogers et  al., 2016; see Sect. 6.3.3) and
declares that CDA/CDS is the “dominant discourse analytic approach” used by edu-
cation policy scholars (2017: 2). The six articles in the Special Issue share a com-
mon interest in using CDA/CDS to understand “new ways forward for communities,
communication, and commitments, particularly as language is used to construct and
resist policies in action” (2017: 4). For example, Burman et  al. (2017) uses a
Foucaldian approach to examine participant narratives as sites of resistance, strug-
gle, and reformation. Wilinski (2017) explores pre-kindergarten policies, looking
closely at state-funded community partnerships, which whitewash and overlook the
differences in power, position, and discourse within and between partnered organi-
zations. Koyoma (2017) examines civic education and civic identify formation, spe-
cifically as regards voting among Latino youth. Hurst (2017) looks at district
superintendents’ political tweets to see how language is used to represent their
engagement with the public (and how they present it) in the policymaking process
and in activism. Supovitz and Reinkordt (2017) investigate tweets related to the
Common Core State Standards and underscore the importance of revising the citi-
zenship curriculum to include how students can be politically active online. Finally,
Gildersleeve (2017) explores the intersection of higher education policies and
immigration policies, describing the subject positions made available for under-
standing students as having “undocumented” and/or “illegal” identities.
266 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

In this section, we have described work in education that utilizes the tools of
CDA/CDS to expose neoliberal agendas and ideologies that affect all areas of edu-
cation. Of all the areas affected by neoliberalism, the educational sphere has, we
believe, the most urgent need for the tools and perspective CDA/CDS has to offer
because, as Nelson Mandela said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which
you can use to change the world”. Without counter-narratives to neoliberal propa-
ganda that could lead to changing policies and ways of thinking about schooling
(such as those investigated in the articles and special issues mentioned above), (pub-
lic) education in the US (and see Fairclough Sect. 3.5.4 about the UK) will continue
on a path to destruction.

6.4  CDA/CDS and Sociolinguistics

The relationship between DA and sociolinguistics is so close that for many scholars,
especially those in Europe, DA/DS14 (sometimes including CDA/CDS) is seen as a
sub-category of sociolinguistics. For example, Wodak (Sect. 3.8.1) was trained as a
sociolinguist, among other things, and later became a discourse analyst—we dis-
cuss ‘discourse sociolinguistics’ in her work (Sect. 3.8.3). We should also note that
she was co-editor of The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics (2010) and is profiled
by Anthonissen (2001) in the Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics15 (which
also includes an article by Kress on critical sociolinguistics). As well, Boxer (2002:
7) says that “CDS is the quintessential applied sociolinguistics, as its goal is to
transform societal values through the exposing of harmful ways of speaking”. There
are quite a few books on sociolinguistics that include sections or chapters on DA/DS
and/or CDA/CDS (e.g., Cheshire & Trudgill (Eds.), 1998; Deckert & Vickers, 2011;
Downes, 1998; Boxer, 2002; Hornberger & McKay, 2010; Hudson, 1996). In addi-
tion to the books that feature DA, there are a few recent examples of sociolinguistic
studies that explicitly comment on their use of CDA/CDS, for example (Block,
2018), which defines sociolinguistics as a “broad church” (2018: ix) that encom-
passes both the ‘socio’ and the ‘linguistic’ side of research, and discusses at length
the issue of neoliberalism (see Sect. 6.3, and in particular, Sect. 6.3.2 on Fairclough’s
work, which overlaps with the aims of sociolinguistics), with reference to education
and research funding and rising inequality in the world. Block (2018) focuses on
five areas of (socio)linguistic research in which the issue of ‘political economy’ is
applied (as said above, his theoretical viewpoint is within a critical Marxist approach
and he adopts a critical realist lens): what he calls the ‘English divide’ (between

14
 Since sociolinguistics is almost invariably concerned with spoken language, the types of DA/DS
used are typically those applied to spoken language; in addition, other terms than ‘discourse’ or
‘text’ are used for the object of analysis: speech, (face-to-face) interaction, talk, conversation, and
so forth.
15
 In our discussion above we looked at those scholars who see (C)DA/(C)DS as part of, or closely
tied to, pragmatics, which is also focused on spoken language, conversation and interaction.
6.4  CDA/CDS and Sociolinguistics 267

those who speak English and those who do not); language in the workplace; the use
of economic theories to explain linguistic phenomena; language and tourism; and in
his last chapter ‘inequality, class and class warfare’, using CDA/CDS and referring
to (Wodak, 2013a) about right-wing populism in Europe, he analyzes discourses
and discursive strategies of home evictions and protests in Spain in 2013.
However, it is important to note that many sociolinguistic studies that align with
the aims, methodologies and perspectives of CDA/CDS do not always mention it
per se. And we should add that linguistic anthropology, as practiced in the US, also
includes DA/DS and sometimes issues close to CDA/CDS (see Sect. 6.5) as well as
sociolinguistics. Many of the themes that sociolinguists (and many linguistic anthro-
pologists) have been concerned with have been taken up by CDA/CDS scholars,
since it shares with sociolinguistics the assumption that language use should be
studied in a social context (e.g., Duranti & Goodwin, 1992). Therefore, CDA/CDS
often employs sociolinguistic methods for examining the linguistic features of dif-
ferent types of discourse units and the way they are tied together to create meaning.
It also concerns itself with critically examining the social context in which interac-
tion occurs in order to understand and interpret meaning within that particular social
context. In the same manner, there has always been much work in sociolinguistics
that has both the intention and frequently the effect of making changes in social
practices. Similar concerns about language and society have yielded an innovative
body of work in sociolinguistics (about, e.g., race, ethnicity, class/socio economic
status (SES), immigrant status, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc.). For exam-
ple, an issue that has gained prominence in sociolinguistic research is that of
inequality and the positioning of individuals and groups in contemporary social and
political hierarchies.
There is much overlap between CDA/CDS work in sociolinguistics and anthro-
pology/ethnography (which we will address in Sect. 6.5), and scholars such as Dell
Hymes could be mentioned here (as well as in Sects. 6.5 and 6.6). In fact, Hymes
was (at least) a linguist, sociolinguist, linguistic anthropologist, cultural anthropolo-
gist, and folklorist, as well as the founder of ethnography of speaking/communica-
tion; he also coined the term ‘communicative competence’. Hymes’s (1969a) edited
‘antitextbook’ called Reinventing Anthropology contains an introduction on “The
Use of Anthropology: Critical, Political, Personal”16 and sections with articles by
noted anthropologists on ‘studying dominated cultures’, ‘studying the cultures of
power’, ‘responsibilities of ethnography’, and ‘critical traditions’ (the latter includ-
ing a chapter by Scholte ‘Towards a Reflexive and Critical Anthropology’). Hymes’
(1996) critical essays on education and narrative reopened debates on the allocation
of speaking rights and linguistic-communicative resources and argued forcefully for
more attention to communicative inequalities in linguistic anthropology and socio-
linguistics. He never used the term CritLing (or CDA/CDS) and yet his work fits
right into the heart of this area. Scholars like Blommaert and Hornberger, among

16
 Note that Hymes’ use of the word ‘critical’ in (1969b) is earlier than the critical linguists dis-
cussed in Sect. 2.4, but it doesn’t seem that they knew about it.
268 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

others, have focused on reviving Hymes’ work and shedding light on its critical
approach. Blommaert (2009) posits that whenever one reads Hymes, it becomes
obvious that “most of his oeuvre … can be read as a political statement [and] an
attempt toward a critical science of language in social life” (2009: 257). The idea
that differences in language use contribute to social discrimination and actual
inequality is central in Hymes’ work, and he notes that the study of language has to
a great extent developed as an instrument of exclusion and domination (1969b). We
have decided to include him in the CDA/CDS and Sociolinguistics section, while
recognizing that much of his work overlaps with other areas, and that it is Hymes’
expansive focus on context, language and culture, speech, and social life that makes
him known to and appreciated by CDA/CDS scholars. Hornberger (2011) points out
that “language inequality is an enduring theme of Hymes’s work (1980, 1996) and
his vision of the role of language in achieving—and denying—social justice in and
out of schools shines clearly in all of his essays” (2011: 317). It is for these reasons
that Blommaert states that Hymes’s work “was a critical discourse analysis long
before anyone laid claim to that term” (2009: 273).
For his part, Blommaert has criticized CDA for “overlooking sociolinguistics”
(2005: 36), mainly arguing that more attention to sociolinguistics could improve,
for example, Fairclough’s book (1989/2001, latest edition 2015) on language stan-
dardization and his “account of inequalities between people in the communicative
resources which they have at their disposal” (Fairclough, 2015: 25). Furthermore,
the addition of sociolinguistics could contribute to overcoming “closure to particu-
lar societies”, which is another of Blommaert’s critiques (2005: 36) of CDA (men-
tioned in Sect. 5.9). Fairclough’s latest edition of Language and Power (2015)
addresses this critique, adding that he believes it is valid that he only focused on
Britain in his book because his point was to introduce CDA to students and col-
leagues of other disciplines and show how it could contribute to other areas of
research. We also adopted a similar approach in our previous section on CDA/CDS
and education, in which we focused largely on work surrounding US educational
contexts in order to demonstrate the type of research that is being done by scholars
we are most familiar with. Fairclough agrees with Blommaert that it is important not
to assume universal validity for one’s way of life and that CDA/CDS work should
ask how the findings are relevant to the world in both large and small communities
everywhere (2005: 26). He then questions whether his version of CDA/CDS (devel-
oped in Britain and with similar countries in mind) can be applied to countries like
China or Tanzania, adding that he thinks it can (citing Fairclough, 2006 and 2009 as
examples of how). He argues that there are things in common between all of these
countries and others, such as hegemonic relations and struggles with neoliberalism,
and that international and intercultural solidarity can be both a virtue in itself and an
antidote to nationalism, as well as an effective means of resistance if organized on
an international scale (Fairclough, 2006: 37).
Since sociolinguistics can be defined as the study of language in relation to social
factors, such as how people with different social identities speak and how their
speech changes depending on social context, it is not surprising that many sociolin-
guistic and CDA/CDS studies have to do with language education. In the field of
6.4  CDA/CDS and Sociolinguistics 269

Spanish Heritage Language Studies, Ducar (2006) addresses the representation of

Latinos17 and US varieties of Spanish in the Spanish Heritage Language context in
the US. Using CDA/CDS, she shows how both culture and language are represented
in intermediate level university Spanish as a Heritage Language textbooks, illustrat-
ing how such texts present US Spanish-speaking people’s culture and their language
varieties. Her findings reveal an overall marginalized presentation of US Latinos
and their language, due largely to the textual emphasis on and discussion of immi-
gration related issues that follow society’s naturalized presentation of immigrants as
“Other” (2006: 231). She notes that it is important to see the connection between the
degradation of immigrants and minorities and the simultaneous belittling of their
variety of the Spanish language. The study concludes with suggestions for improv-
ing textbooks and Spanish as a Heritage Language pedagogy, advocating for a soci-
olinguistics (and/or corpora) informed textbook, in which students would “have a
clearer picture of the reality of the language variation that is currently only treated
in brief, as a geographic side-note in the texts” (2006: 247). In addition, Ducar
argues that other (non Euro-centric) varieties of Spanish must be legitimized, and
that community varieties should be emphasized and valued. Furthermore, students
should be taught critical perspectives that are dependent on student agency and
produce “more informed students who are better prepared to function with their
knowledge of the intricate interaction of language and society” (2006: 255).
A similar example of CDA/CDS and sociolinguistics in regards to Spanish as a
Heritage Language textbooks is Leeman and Martinez (2007), a critical analysis of
language ideologies in the instructional discourse of Spanish for heritage speakers
in the US.  Focusing on prefaces and introductions in the textbooks published
between 1970 and 2000, their findings revealed that the intertextual discourse
emerging in the textbooks correlated with “broader ideologies regarding the societal
role of the university, the positioning of ethnic studies programs, and the portrayal
of cultural and linguistic diversity within academia and society at large” (Leeman &
Martínez, 2007: 35). Furthermore, in their diachronic analysis, they found that dis-
courses of textbooks from the 1970s and 1980s tended to “underscore access, inclu-
sion, and representation for minority Spanish language students” while textbooks
published in the 1990s emphasized “economic competitiveness and globalization”
(2007: 35). They argue that students and educators in the field should examine the
ideologies present in their discourse (in this case, in Spanish as a Heritage Language
textbooks) so that they can either reinforce or challenge existing ideologies that
assess the value of language (as well as culture and people) in particular ways. This
shift from an emphasis on inclusion and access to a concern for global competition
marks a change in how diversity was construed formerly in terms of social justice
and now reframed as a business resource or commodity. These findings are echoed
by other studies that examine this issue in the representation of dual language

 Latinx (plural Latinxs) is the gender-neutral way of saying Latino, Latina, or Latin@. It is used
17

by an increasing number of scholars and activists (Love Ramirez & Blay, 2017). In this book, we
adopt this term when authors refer to it as such. If authors (such as in the case of Ducar) use
‘Latinos’, we use their terminology as in above.
270 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

p­rograms, such as Delavan et  al. (2017), Freire et  al. (2017), Katznelson and
Bernstein (2017), Lu and Catalano (2015), and Valdez et al. (2016a, 2016b), which
are described in more detail in Sect. 6.3.5. Burns and Waugh (2018) revisit the issue
of textbooks in Spanish as a Heritage Language classrooms but this time with a case
study that looks at attitudes toward language variety at a Southwestern university in
the US. Using CDA/CDS perspectives and tools, they found systematic reinforce-
ment of the ideology of a monolithic ‘standard’ Spanish in the textbooks and cur-
ricula, with only cursory attention to regional varieties of Spanish and both implicit
and explicit de-legitimization of US Spanish. The study also included data from
focus group meetings in which the teachers identified a clash between on the one
hand program goals (such as validating students’ varieties of Spanish while also
developing academic/professional registers of Spanish) and on the other hand class-
room realities in which the ‘standard’ was valued and students’ non-standard variet-
ies were tolerated or de-valued.
Showstack (2012) investigates classroom discourse in two Spanish language
courses for Spanish-English bilingual students (at a university in central Texas) in
order to understand the ways that participants used language to construct their lin-
guistic and cultural identities. The study shows how Spanish heritage speakers
reproduce hegemonic discourses about language and cultural diversity and how
bilingual identities of students are connected to socially constructed discourses on
the value of different language varieties and cultural experiences that represent an
oversimplification of the social world. Findings showed how participants con-
structed simplified categories of different kinds of US Hispanics, often assuming a
connection between language and identity and positioning themselves and others
within these categories. In doing so, they constructed their own languages skills and
cultural backgrounds as either a benefit or a deficit, and in particular, linguistic mix-
ing was viewed more negatively than monolingual standard varieties. Results of the
study suggest the need to make heritage language learners more aware of the differ-
ences among Spanish speakers and the nature of the social world. Achugar (2008)
examines Spanish language use along the Southwest Texas border and how local
norms for language use respond to and contest dominant monolingual ideologies.
Analyzing interviews with university personnel (e.g. president, program director,
professor) and newspaper articles, she shows how “institutional actors from the
media and education contest dominant monolingual language ideologies by situat-
ing these views historically and connecting them to key conceptual metaphors that
encapsulate language ideologies” (2008: 1). In doing so, she challenges national
ideologies that portray monolingualism and standard ‘English’ as the only option
that can bring social and economic success and proposes Spanish and bilingualism
as legitimate alternatives. These counter narratives question the deficit perspective
on bilingualism and see it as the cause of inequality, bringing to light other possible
sources for social injustice in this community such as “oppression, discrimination,
and economic exploitation among others” (2008: 16).
A similar study that combines sociolinguistics and CDS is Velázquez (2013),
which draws on a larger study (Velázquez, 2008) that describes household language
practices and patterns of language maintenance and shift in families in El Paso,
6.5  CDA/CDS and Anthropology/Ethnography 271

Texas. Velázquez (2013) examines how these speakers conceptualize language use
and language users, and what this tells us about how individual discourse maps onto
larger language ideologies. Findings reveal how the metaphors, metonyms, referen-
tial strategies, and deictic expressions used by a group of middle-class bilinguals
illustrates the tensions between ideologies of language pride and language panic
(i.e., in the sense of positioning Latinx populations as an imminent threat) that are
central to the Mexican American language experience, particularly in this area of
the country. Velázquez’s recent book (2018) is a sociolinguistic analysis of every-­
day household language dynamics and language planning efforts in a group of first-­
generation Spanish-speaking families in the US Midwest (as opposed to her earlier
work in El Paso). In this comparison of the self-perceptions and attitudes of the
mother and one child in each household about their family language and its viability
in public and private spaces, Velázquez aims to understand Spanish maintenance
and loss from the perspective of the family, and to analyze the impact of attitudes
and self-perceptions on household language dynamics.

6.5  CDA/CDS and Anthropology/Ethnography

Critical approaches have been employed in ethnographic studies in anthropology

(including linguistic anthropology) that examine the discourses of, e.g., local poli-
cies regarding white racism and ‘mock Spanish’ (Hill, 1995, 2007, 2008), water
distribution (Ennis-McMillan, 2001), drug addiction and subjectivity (Prussing,
2008), corporate manipulation and health policies (Ortanez and Glantz, 2009), and
immigrants’ rights to health care (Willen, 2011). And an anthropological study by
Wasson (2004) about the “Sigma Corporation”, which combines ethnographic
methodologies with insights from CDA/CDS, has investigated, among other things,
the impact of workplace discourse on social actors’ perceptions. She examines
‘enterprise’ language and its associated ideologies and contends that the use of this
language—e.g., marketplace metaphors such as buy-in and taking ownership—by
corporate employees shapes corporate managers’ perceptions of employees’ sub-
jectivity and defines workplace relationships. Employees who fail to navigate the
complexities associated with this use are afforded no respect, since their failure is
understood as betraying their lack of understanding of and commitment to corporate
ideologies.
While these studies show the openness of (linguistic) anthropology and ethno-
graphic methodology to a ‘critical’ or CDA/CDS approach (as also discussed in
Sects. 6.4 and 6.5), we also want to pay some attention here to the connections that
tie the research practices of CDA/CDS and ethnography. Ethnographic approaches
represent a distinctive way of analyzing language in culture (among other things)
and hence, we address these approaches in this section, while the next section will
address other types of approaches that combine the study of culture and CDA/
CDS. As said in Sect. 5.4, in the wake of criticism against CDA/CDS for its lack of
attention to context and how features of the context affect, or are affected by, the
272 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

text, etc., scholars have offered ethnographic methodologies as a potential correc-

tive to address this criticism. In fact, Wodak had already attended to the connection
between DA and ethnography in her pre-CDA work in the 1970s and 1980s, had
incorporated ethnographic methods in DHA (1996; see also 2009, Sects. 3.8 and
4.5), and has said repeatedly since then that ethnography and ethnographic methods
are an important way to contextualize CDA/CDS research, as she has done regu-
larly. In addition to Wodak’s early and continuing advocacy of ethnography,
Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999: 62; see also Chouliaraki, 1995) also urged other
scholars in CDA/CDS to use ethnographic methods in CDS/CDA and asked them to
explore “the beliefs, values and desires” of participants as well as how social rela-
tions are reproduced, and inequalities perpetuated, through discourse by social
actors in their immediate social context. Additionally, Blommaert found that CDA/
CDS’s linguistically oriented research practices can benefit from these methodolo-
gies: “CDS is still burdened by a very ‘linguistic’ outlook, which prevents produc-
tive ways of incorporating linguistic and non-linguistic dimensions of semiosis […]
Here as well, an ethnographically informed stance, in which linguistic practice is
embedded in more general patterns of human meaningful action, could be highly
productive” (2001: 461)
Since we have already addressed Wodak’s early adoption of an ethnographic
stance elsewhere in this book, we would like to highlight here a very recent example
of this regarding language policy, which we haven’t discussed, i.e., Wodak and
Savski (2018, in the Oxford Handbook of Language Policy and Planning) which
describes research by CDA/CDS scholars and critical ethnographers and demon-
strates how an integrated approach can be applied in empirical research in language
policy contexts, through a richly contextualized, critical analysis of institutional
discourse and practices. They consider ethnography to be both a methodology and
an approach in which the researcher is directly involved in the context as a partici-
pant and/or observer over an extended period of time, as is typically the case in
ethnographic research; however, in a ‘critical ethnographic’ approach the researcher
seeks to challenge power imbalances from the perspective of both those who are
dominant and those who are dominated, critiquing those in power while aiming to
voice the needs of the disadvantaged (Madison, 2005). In their detailed example of
the merging of CDA/CDS and critical ethnography, Wodak and Savski (2018)
describe work done in collaboration with the DYLAN project (see Berthoud, Grin,
& Lüdi, 2013; Unger, Krzyżanowski, & Wodak, 2014 for a comprehensive over-
view of the project) that studied multilingualism in EU contexts (see Wodak,
Krzyżanowski, & Forchtner, 2012). This work involved in-depth pre-fieldwork that
explored prior knowledge related to this topic, including modes, patterns, practices
and ideologies. In addition, there were ethnographic observations that studied pat-
terns of communication and multilingualism in meetings as well as in-depth qualita-
tive analysis of meetings that focused on power and communicative (a)symmetries.
Wodak and Savski (2018) took a “reflexive stance”, where the boundaries between
‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ of research are difficult to delineate. The ethnographic
observations took place in 2009 and covered dimensions such as linguistic profiles
of the meetings, frequency of code-switching, topic-related vs. addressee-related
6.5  CDA/CDS and Anthropology/Ethnography 273

language choices, language choice in relation to formality and informality, and

metacommunication on language. Findings from the study show that many factors
are at play in determining the organization of interactions, turn-taking, and the dis-
tribution of power in such multilingual settings. This example illustrates how the
analysis of such complex interactions would be impossible without the contextual
information gained from a critical ethnographic approach. Wodak and Savski (2018)
also list a few more recent examples of this kind of work in the area of language
planning and policy (such as Capstick, 2015; Källkvist & Hult, 2016; Savski, 2016).
What could be called an ‘ethnographic turn’ in CDA/CDS has meant that there
is quite a lot of work connected with the area of education where ethnography has
been used very productively. In addition to Roger’s work discussed in Sect. 6.3.3,
we can cite her (Rogers, 2002) ethnographic study, which took place in up-state
New York and revealed a series of ‘institutional contradictions’ and practices by the
district Committee on Special Education (consisting of district specialists on special
education18 but excluding any teachers who worked with the students of focus). The
contradictions show how “disability” (in the case of the study, this refers to test
scores that indicate the participant was reading below grade level and also had “defi-
cits” in speech and language) is discursively constructed in such a way that minority
children with disabilities are not allowed to enter ‘mainstream’ educational class-
rooms. Because of this, “the study of disability from an anthropological perspective
should include attention to shifts and changes across discourses, context, and time”
(Rogers, 2002: 233). In addition to this work on the discursive construction of dis-
ability, Rogers also applied ethnography to research on schooling in her book on
family literacy practices19 (2003), where she includes a case study of a mother and
daughter. She explores the connections between literacy and society by combining
participant observation, ethnographic interviewing, photography, document analy-
sis and CDA (using Fairclough’s approach and theories), which she extends on the
basis of the rich ethnographic data she gathered by “demonstrating how power in
language operates over time and across generations, from mother to daughter” as
well as how people both regulate and are regulated by literacy practices (2003: xiii).
In doing so, she illustrates how a critical analysis of discourse in ethnographic
research undergirds the importance of considering the ever-shifting role of context
and discourse in research that is concerned with issues of power. Later, Rogers
(2011c) drew on another case study from her 2003 book, which focused on an
African-Amerian young woman who struggled to obtain a high school diploma
while labeled as a special education student. Over the course of 10  years, she
explored important issues related to understanding educational tracking (e.g., sepa-
rating students into groups by academic ability), constructing the context of her
participants’ experiences within the educational system through the “discursive
details of official and unofficial records and transcripts and against the backdrop of

18
 ‘Special education’ refers to instruction adapted for students with exceptional needs (e.g., extra
reading help provided for students with dyslexia).
19
 The term “literacy practices” is used to describe the variety of ways in which students engage in
reading and writing in their daily lives.
274 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

neoliberal education policies that reinforce educational and social inequalities”

(2011c: 239). In doing so, she demonstrated how using CDA/CDS within longitudi-
nal ethnography can enable micro and macro discourses to be connected, which in
turn helps us to “understand the long-term consequences of educational decisions
and what these might mean for educational equity” (2011c: 239). Later, Rogers
(2014) again drew on her 2003 work and combined CDA/CDS with over 100 hours
of participant observation and examined the intersection of national, state and local
educational policies and their role in pushing students out of school. Analysis of her
participant’s experiences “point to flaws in three intersecting policies: ability group-
ing, the system of alternative educational choices and discipline policies” (2014:
496). These findings revealed a system more concerned with test scores (as a result
of accountability policies) than the individual student’s achievement (an issue noted
above in Sect. 6.3). This article is an excellent example of the strengths of ethno-
graphically informed CDA/CDS and the way in which it can be used to inform
readers about, e.g., how policies intersect with student experiences.
A study by Johnson (2011), published in the Special Issue of Critical Discourse
Studies discussed in the next paragraph, explored the integration of ethnography
and CDA/CDS in language policy in the US, examining how to make connections
between macro-level policy texts and discourses and micro-level language use. He
argues that the combination of CDA/CDS and ethnography is particularly useful for
revealing the connections between the multiple layers of policy activity and pro-
vides a foundation for understanding how particular policies are reworked in par-
ticular contexts. To show this, he looks at how federal educational language policy
in the US is recontextualized in the School District of Philadelphia and what this
means for bilingual education. Using ethnographic data that emerged out of a series
of action-oriented research projects on language policy and bilingual education pro-
gram development with teachers and administrators (as well as observation and
field notes from bilingual schools and teachers’ meetings and language policy meet-
ings), Johnson was able to show how changes in policy were actually interpreted
and appropriated in schools, and in particular, how language policy from the law
called No Child Left Behind (discussed in Sect. 6.3.5), adversely affected bilingual
programs in the US. A final study that combines CDA/CDS and ethnography that
we want to mention here is Kirkham’s (2016) paper, which examines the marketing
of diversity in UK schools. The term ‘marketing of diversity’ refers to the way in
which stakeholders publicize their schools so that they appeal to (and directly tar-
get) parents who want their children to interact with all kinds of students of different
ethnic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds (hence “diversity”), since parents have
some choice as to which schools they send their children to. The study also explores
the way in which students in the schools engage with discourses of multicultural-
ism. Kirkham’s paper also investigates how students use discourse strategies to
negotiate their identities in talk about ethnic diversity and shows how this acts as a
form of social practice, “allowing students to negotiate tensions between the exis-
tence of racism and the construction of an anti-racist educational environment”
(2016: 385). To do this, he combines ethnographic field work and DA to identify
three themes that characterize talk about multiculturalism at school: (1)
6.5  CDA/CDS and Anthropology/Ethnography 275

multiculturalism-­as-beneficial commodity, (2) claims of ‘reverse racism’ in provi-

sions for minority groups, and (3) denial of racism and constructing the school as a
tolerant environment where everybody gets along (2016: 387). He concludes that
progressive/liberal schools in Britain need to pay more attention to how to engage
students in critical discussions of race, ethnicity and multiculturalism as part of the
curriculum but also beyond it.
There are other types of examples that productively combine CDA/CDS and
ethnography, in other areas. An early attempt to combine CDS with ethnography
can be found in Pujolar (1997); Meadows (2009) incorporates ‘ethnographically-­
sensitive’ CDA/CDS to examine how the relationship between nationalism and lan-
guage learning is manifested in an English language classroom along the Mexico/
US border. In the 2011 Special Issue ‘Ethnography and Critical Discourse Analysis’
of Critical Discourse Studies (edited by Krzyżanowski) discusses a wide range of
ethnographic studies combined with CDS focused on, e.g., mental health (Galasiński,
2011, discussed below), language policies (Johnson, 2011, discussed above), “track-
ing” (i.e., ability grouping) and educational inequalities (Rogers, 2011c) and inter-
nal guidelines in shaping news narratives (Barkho, 2011, discussed below).
Krzyżanowski’s introduction to the issue (2011a) recognizes the link between eth-
nography and CDS as indispensable in contributing to a fuller analysis of societal
issues. His own article (2011b) examines the 2002–2003 European Convention’s20
institutional reality, using extensive fieldwork and ethnography, and looks at how
institutional (or organizational) cultures and identities are constructed discursively
by means of practices as well as through discourses of officials who are involved on
some level in the work of the European institutions. Readers might also want to
refer to Krzyżanowski’s (2008) earlier work on qualitative DA (in Wodak &
Krzyżanowski, 2008), in which he discusses methods for analyzing focus group
discussions, as well as Oberhuber and Krzyżanowski (2008), which deals with the
combination of ethnographic methods and DA. Galasiński (2011) takes the connec-
tion of CDA/CDS and ethnography to the mental health arena, examining how in
situ interviews can benefit from CDA/CDS, pointing out the way in which it can
give ethnography a firm empirical basis. Together with ethnography, CDA/CDS can
help answer the question of what it means to be a patient (which is crucial to under-
standing and improving care) and “how the service user understands and sees those
who attempt to help him/her” (2011: 263). Barkho (2011) argues that in order to
relay findings in studies of media discourse back to text producers and their institu-
tions and inform readers about institutional discourse, scholars have to involve
empirically the social world of those who produce and receive the texts (cf. Machin
& Mayr, 2012). Hence, ethnographically driven CDA/CDS scholars can move anal-
ysis beyond textual output by talking to editors and investigating internal guidelines
and instructions through which they maintain power relations and legitimacy. In
(Barkho, 2011) he does just that—studying the internal guidelines of Al Jazeera

 The European Convention (which worked for almost 18 months between February 2002 and July
20

2003) was “entrusted with the task of drafting Europe’s first supranational constitution”
(Krzyżanowski, 2011b: 287).
276 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

(English) and the BBC (British Broadcasting Company) and their role in shaping
and patterning news discourse from these agencies and ultimately developing final
outputs on their Middle East coverage. The paper’s ethnographic angle helps illus-
trate how the two news agencies use their organizational power to disseminate and
inculcate their ideology and viewpoints of the Middle East conflict, and also how
the reporter in the field is only part of the process and often has little power in final
representations of news reports.
Other work on the media that incorporates an ethnographic approach includes
Machin and Mayr’s (2007) critical analysis of the Leicester Mercury in which the
editor is interviewed in order to enrich the textual analysis by investigating the pro-
cesses that lie behind the production of (newspaper) texts (2007: 217) and Machin
& Polzer’s (2015) book on visual journalism mentioned in Ch. 4. In addition,
Benwell’s (2005) study of male readers’ responses to men’s magazines provides a
good example of how unstructured interviews can complement a critical multimodal
analysis (MCDA). Another example is Turner (2015), who examines the construc-
tion of a collective identity of lesbians and bisexual women in DIVA magazine.
What makes this article unique is the way in which she sheds light on the behind-­
the-­scenes magazine production operation through interviews with editorial staff.
These interviews allowed her to learn more about “the founding of the magazine, its
staff, the feelings of those in positions of power, and the imperatives set out by the
publisher and the relationship between DIVA and its readers” (2015: 140). Hence,
what the interviews add to the analysis is a more nuanced understanding of what is
behind the discourse, and the way in which both identities of individual readers and
a collective identity are negotiated.
We now turn to the issue of CDA/CDS and culture.

6.6  CDA/CDS and Culture

There are many ‘cultural’ approaches to the study of discourse in a variety of fields
treated in other sections of this chapter, such as education, pragmatics, linguistic
anthropology, sociolinguistics, ethnography and anthropology (as just discussed),
and so forth. In the field of pragmatics (discussed in Sect. 6.9 with regard to other
issues), intercultural pragmatics (Kecskes, 2014b) is the best equipped to deal with
the concept of “culture” and differs from ‘mainstream’ pragmatics in its multilin-
gual, socio-cognitive and discourse-segment (as opposed to utterance) perspective.
Intercultural pragmatics focuses on how language systems are put to use in intercul-
tural encounters to co-construct conventions and norms of communality resulting in
a “shift of emphasis from the social to the individual” (although both are considered
important) (2014b: 46). In linguistic anthropology, the basic assumption is made
that “human discourse is a resource for language users to work out who they are,
what they are up against, and what is worth pursuing in life”, hence discourse is
“what makes human cultures possible and unique”, according to Keating and
Duranti (2011: 331), who provide a nuanced discussion of the definition of “cul-
ture” and the ideological implications of ways of writing about other people’s ways
6.6  CDA/CDS and Culture 277

of being and doing. Using linguistic anthropology as a frame in which analysis of

discourse always starts from an ethnographic experience such as through participant-­
observation in a given community, the authors argue that our understanding of dis-
course should be informed by the participants’ point of view. In this view, discourse
and culture mutually constitute one another and “culture is to a great extent, a dis-
cursive project” (2011: 353).
Hence, scholarship in the field of linguistic anthropology is often widely read by
CDA/CDS scholars, and there is a definite connection between the two areas, so
much so that books on DA/DS (e.g., van Dijk, 1997, 2007, 2011a, 2011b) and CDA/
CDS often include chapters by linguistic anthropology scholars. We must also note
that although we focused on anthropology/ethnography in Sect. 6.5, we mention it
again here—specifically as linguistic anthropology—since it is one of a variety of
cultural approaches to language. In Sect. 6.5, we pointed out how ethnographic
methods add rich context and much more to CDA/CDS analyses. Here we focus
more on approaches that examine cultural perspectives on discourse, although just
as with the issue of where sociolinguistics lies, there is no clear boundary between
a cultural and a social perspective on discourse, and some scholars use the term
socio-cultural in order to show that.
Linguistic anthropology as a field has been particularly good at connecting
scholars in North America through online ListServs21 and providing more informal
venues for scholars to read each other’s work that connects discourse to politics and
culture such as the following articles featured on the Anthropology News website
by Adam Hodges: When the Discourse of Theater Trumps Truth22, How Plausibly
Deniable Is It?,23 and Trump’s Formulaic Twitter Insults24. In addition, linguistic
anthropology scholars have been particularly adept at connecting DA with culture
and making their work relevant to current issues/events, as exhibited by the follow-
ing call for proposals which appeared March 1, 2017 on the LingAnth listserv, cited
in Sect. 6.5:
Call for papers: AAA25 panel on language in the Trump era
The rise of Donald Trump has shifted the linguistic playing field in American politics
and political commentary. Trump’s campaign, with its racism, Islamophobia, sexism, vul-
garity, and violence, fomented right-wing hostility toward “political correctness” on college
campuses and beyond, while “Trump talk” appears to have emboldened hate speech and
other forms of verbal bullying (Pollock, 2016)26 … This panel proposes to examine prag-
matics and meaning-making in the Trump era, in the United States and beyond…

Besides making work relevant to current issues and events, scholars such as
Kecskes (2014a, 2014b) argue that taking a cultural perspective helps to solve the

21
 Such as [email protected].
22
 http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2017/03/01/when-the-discourse-of-theater-
trumps-truth/
23
 http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2017/02/01/how-plausibly-deniable-is-it/
24
 http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2017/01/18/trumps-formulaic-twitter-insults/
25
 AAA is the acronym used by the American Anthropological Association.
26
 This is a reference to Mica Pollock’s 2010 book that was cited in Strauss (2016) in the Washington
Post.
278 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

problem confronted by pragmatics-oriented research, due to communication

­becoming more and more intercultural (in the sense that intercultural perspectives
and both successful communication and miscommunications must be addressed).
Carbaugh (2014) agrees with this notion, stating that special attention should be
given to intercultural interactions as a “site for the application and development of
cultural discourse analysis” (2014: 565). This is because communication often
involves interlocutors who have different first languages, communicate in what is
often another, common language, and represent different cultures (Kecskes, 2004),
yet theoretical pragmatics does not pay much attention to this and “remains pre-
dominantly English-based and monolingual” (Kecskes, 2014b: 47) and mono-cul-
tural. Kecskes believes that the problem with this is that the monolingual view
presupposes that the way we communicate is universal, no matter what language we
use and what languages we talk about. And he also says, like many others, that lan-
guage and culture are necessarily entwined. Therefore, just as we should not ignore
language-­specific features (which are as important as universal features), we should
not ignore culture-specific features either, nor should we underestimate (or overes-
timate) the fact that many people function in multiple languages (Kecskes, 2014b).
According to Kecskes (2014a, 2014b), human communicative actions are affected
by knowledge of more than one language and culture and hence, studying interac-
tions of those with different first (native) languages who use a common second
language for communication can enlighten the field and contribute to CDA/CDS
and any type of DA/DS.
We agree with Kecskes that the field of CDA/CDS as a whole could benefit from
more analysis of languages other than English (and indeed, in recent years, this has
become more common, although much more should be done) and of different cul-
tures, and in particular there should be studies in which attention is paid to lexical
choices used across languages and to examples in both the language of analysis and
their translation. Such studies do exist: for instance, Wodak (who is a native speaker
of Austrian German) has done some excellent work both in English and German,
often providing examples in the original language of analysis (cf. Wodak, 2015,
2016b for how she includes multimodal discourse from signage and other modes in
the original language and follows with a discussion). However, much work in the
field deals with language constructs in English language contexts, since the major
journals in this area (with a few exceptions) are in English. An example of how
CDA/CDS work could respond more to Kecskes’ concerns about not ignoring spe-
cific language features is the excellent article by Martin and Papadelos (2016),
which combines feminist DA (see Sect. 6.7) and cognitive linguistics to de-­construct
the use of guys in contemporary American discourse, showing how the metonymic
construction subsumes the feminine within the masculine, essentially making
women/girls disappear from the discourse.
Catalano and Waugh (2017) provide an example of cross-linguistic analysis in
CDA/CDS, highlighting how the Italian language encodes the notion that a person
has been accused and not yet convicted of a crime through the use of the conditional
for mafia offenders (e.g. avrebbe affidato lavori importanti in sub appalto [he ‘sup-
posedly’ entrusted important sub-contracting work/it is said that or it is reported that
6.6  CDA/CDS and Culture 279

he entrusted…]—the same is common in French in news reporting). The present

perfect (which reads as if the action actually occurred and not that they were only
accused of committing it) was used to report crimes by Romani offenders. These
types of analysis are important because they make comparisons between ways that
similar types of communications occur across languages so that patterns of dis-
course can be revealed. Catalano and Waugh (2017) also compare this to the way
verbs encode reporting of crimes in the US to subtly treat an alleged crime suspect
as a convicted one, as shown in Catalano and Waugh (2013a). In this case, what is
revealed is that Italian and US news sources often ignore the fact that an offender (of
an oppressed minority group, such as Latinxs in the US and Romanies in Italy) has
not actually been convicted, through the language they use to report it—but the way
they do this is grammatically and semantically different depending on whether the
language used is Italian or English (Catalano & Waugh, 2013a). In contrast, when
people of power (such as CEOs and politicians) are accused of crimes, it is clearly
linguistically encoded that the person has been accused and not convicted, which
puts them in a more positive light and shapes public opinion toward them and their
companies/organizations.
We also believe that CDA/CDS scholars could benefit from more opportunities
to read and do CDA/CDS research in languages other than English and about lan-
guages other than English, as this connects to Kecskes’ notion that we should not
ignore language specific features. Furthermore, publishing CDA/CDS scholarship
in a limited number of languages and giving preference to articles or chapters in
English and/or about research focused on English or in countries where English is
at best the L2, puts L2 speakers of English in the field at a disadvantage. Although
we recognize that this is partly a systemic problem related to the dominance of
English in academia and other fields, we feel that there is no better place to resist it
than in our own field since it is dedicated to pointing out and resisting dominant
ideologies. The online journal, Discurso & Sociedad 27 founded and edited by the
CDA/CDS scholar, Teun van Dijk (see Sects. 3.1, 3.2, and 3.6), is one example of
an opportunity for CDA/CDS scholars to publish in and feature a language other
than English in their analyses. The journal is described along with its objectives on
its website (translation by the authors):
Discurso & Sociedad es un proyecto común de investigadores hispanohablantes en el área
del análisis social, político y crítico del discurso. Su objetivo es contribuir al análisis y la
resolución de los problemas sociales. [Discurso & Sociedad is a joint project of Spanish-­
speaking researchers in the area of social, political and critical discourse analysis. Its objec-
tive is to contribute to the analysis and resolution of social problems].

The journal also explains its aims to promote collaboration:

Discurso & Sociedad espera poder mejorar los contactos y la colaboración entre estudiantes
y profesores de estudios del discurso en España, América Latina y otros países. [Discurso
& Sociedad hopes to improve contacts and collaboration between students and professors
of discourse studies in Spain, Latin America and other countries.]

27
 http://www.dissoc.org/dissoc/objetivos/
280 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

Other journals such as Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung and OBST (Osnabrücker

Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft) also provide excellent forums for CDA/CDS
work in German (Wodak, personal communication, December 3, 2016).
As said in Sect. 5.4, another culture related critique of CDA/CDS is that it does
not consider the existence of non-Western cultural concepts, theory and approaches,
nor has it considered its own cultural limitations and biases (Shi-xu, 2012).
Examining the meaning of CDA/CDS in Chinese, Zhang et al. (2011) propose that
the concept and practice of ‘critical’ can be problematic when crossing cultural,
social and political boundaries (in addition to linguistic ones). The Journal of
Multicultural Discourses (founded in 2006 by Shi-xu) has created a space to
advance the agenda of cultural approaches in discourse research, responding to cri-
tiques not only (as said above) that CDA/CDS scholarship is “Western-centric” but
also that it adopts a “conception of values as if they were universal” and
“adjudicate[es] other cultural communities, governments or institutions” (Shi-xu,
2012: 485). Hence, this journal has focused on “non-Western data, theories and
methods, marginalized, disadvantaged, and developing discourse communities,
with a particular focus on Asian, African, and Latin American cultures” (Scollo,
2011: 1). In that article, Scollo outlines three different approaches to culturally-­
inclusive discourse research, which include Blommaert’s (2005) culturally-­inclusive
approach to CDA/CDS (based in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics), Shi-­
xu’s (2005) cultural approach to discourse (renamed cultural discourse studies in
Shi-xu, 2012) and Carbaugh’s (2005, 2007, 2010) cultural discourse theory.
According to Scollo (2011), Blommaert’s approach (2005: 14–15) avoids universal-
ist positions and focuses analysis on what language use means to its users, how
language operates differently in different environments, and how we must conceive
of communication as influenced by the structure of the world system (2005: 14–15).
Shi-xu’s research program represents a more “culturally nuanced way of doing dis-
course studies”, and thus has more of a cultural bent, is more open to multiple
viewpoints, and positions itself “between cultures” to examine power relations
(Shi-xu, 2005: 5, 2012: 485). In addition, proponents of cultural discourse studies
argue for a “culturally conscious and reflexive approach beyond the discipline’s
taken-for-granted multi-disciplinarity, moral stance and monologue” aiming to gen-
erate research innovation and “cultural equality and prosperity” (Shi-xu, 2012: 484).
Recently, a Special Issue of the Journal of Multicultural Discourses was dedi-
cated to work in ‘Cultural Discourse Studies’28. In this issue, Shi-xu (2016) provides
an excellent introduction in which he reviews work in the Cultural Approach to
CDA/CDS (CCDS) going back 10 years, when it was just a “nascent intellectual
current that drew attention to the cultural nature of human communication” and
gave voice to non-European scholars, their identities and paradigms of research
(2016: 1). His introduction reviews this “multicultural-intellectual movement” in
terms of motivating factors, achievements and contributions, and also provides

28
 Shi-xu (2016) refers to this in his introductory article as “CDS”; however, so as not to confuse
readers, we will continue to refer to it as ‘CCDS’.
6.6  CDA/CDS and Culture 281

s­ uggestions for moving forward in the field. In terms of contributions to the field,
Shi-xu shows how CCDS scholars have redefined CDA/CDS objectives to consider
all the relations of communicative events such as subjects and identities, acts and
intents, mediums and channels, purposes and effects, and historical and cultural
relations involved (Shi-xu, 2016: 3). This has resulted in exposing features and
problems that might have gone undiscovered (Blommaert, 2011, as cited in Shi-xu,
2016: 329). Shi-xu gives as examples recent articles about tourist websites
(Kauppingen, 2014), discourse of economic experts (Maesse, 2015; O’Rourke,
2015) and media and globalization (Gunaratne, 2013; Waisbord, 2013; Bouvier,
2015) to show how CCDS has tackled analyses of historical, cultural, social, and
economic problems as well as aspects involving disputes and how to resolve them
that relate to the communicative event in question.
Carbaugh’s approach (2014) is distinguished by his strong belief that before per-
forming any type of critical appraisal in CDA inquiry, it is important to describe and
interpret a communication practice from the viewpoint of the participants. Hence,
he argues that “the analyst must first establish a deep understanding of the phenom-
enon of concern from the view of those engaged in it prior to evaluating it” (2014:
572), providing more evidence of the need for ethnographic/anthropologically sen-
sitive CDA/CDS work, as discussed in Sect. 6.5. His approach, which he calls “cul-
tural discourse theory” or “cultural discourse analysis”, is positioned within the
ethnography of communication program (once again revealing the cross-over
between these areas, see Sects. 6.4 and 6.5) and has been described in detail in his
latest works (2005, 2007, 2010, 2014; see also Scollo, 2011: 18). Those interested
in learning more about this approach and conducting cultural DA can read Talking
American (1988), Carbaugh’s first book, which includes an excellent example of an
interpretive analysis in this frame, or his chapter (2014) which presents a detailed
summary of his framework.
Theoretical research on culture as a key reference point in the construction of
discourse has become popular in the last few years; and Gavriely-Nuri has been
another leader (besides Shi-xu and Carbaugh) in explicitly connecting CDA/CDS to
culture in Cultural CDS (CCDS). According to Gavriely-Nuri (2010), CCDS can be
defined in various ways. It is the systematic and explicit analysis of the cultural ‘tool
kit’ by which people construct discursive strategies and a methodology that seeks to
explore the various ways in which culture contributes to the reproduction of power
abuse and domination (2010: 567–568). It is employed to decode cultural elements
within discourse referred to as the “cultural code”, a network of shared values,
norms and beliefs that construct a community’s beliefs (Bar-Tal, 2000; Gavriely-­
Nuri, 2010). It seeks to expose the “global dictionary of power and manipulation”,
e.g., expressions such as “war on terror”, and Bourdieu’s ideas (about e.g., ‘cultural
capital’) are appropriated and expanded to include new proposals, such as ‘discur-
sive capital’. Its aim is to expose how “cultural codes can be perceived as a part of

29
 When we refer to publications that are cited in other works, we do this only in cases where we
are taking readers step by step through an article/book and want them to understand other authors
these scholars refer to and are influenced by.
282 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

the discursive capital of a certain cultural community” (Gavriely-Nuri, 2012: 82). In

addition, it aims to uncover cultural and cross-cultural aspects of discourse by
adopting tools from cultural studies, such as the heuristics of decoding cultural
codes, exploring intertextuality and recontextualization, and combining this with
CDS’s systematic and explicit analysis of structures and strategies of text and talk
(Gavriely-Nuri, 2010: 568). Finally, it is applicable to a range of discourses and
cultures, enables comparative research and at the same time is sensitive to the
uniqueness of specific discourses.
As alluded to in Chap. 5, the cultural approach to CDA/CDS has begun to address
the critique presented in Sect. 5.10 by “exposing the cultural codes embedded in
discourse, which contribute to reproducing abuses of power” (Gavriely-Nuri, 2015:
13, in her book on Israeli peace discourse). She admits that the connection of culture
to discourse has traditionally been a weak link in the field of CDA, mainly because
of the complexity and ambiguity that surrounds the concept of ‘culture’.
Consequently, the cultural approach offers a way to strengthen this connection, and
the ‘triangle’ of discourse/culture/critical analysis, by focusing on a specific national
culture, but more importantly, “by referring to culture as a discursive mechanism”
(2015: 13). She argues that CCDS scholars play an important role in the promotion
of ‘positive peace’ and in championing “ecological discourses and cultures of
peace” (2015: 17). Ecological discourse (see also Wenden, 2008) is defined as dis-
course that promotes positive universal values and cultural codes (Gavriely-Nuri,
2015: 17), where “positive universal values” refers to values that promote peace and
reconciliation, such as freedom, equality, justice and others (see also Sect. 6.10).
Comparing cultural codes to the skeleton of the human body, Gavriely-Nuri con-
tends that they “provide the foundations for the entire cultural structure”, “operate
like an undeclared social compass, directing the community’s members as to how to
rationalize and legitimize decision making”, and are also naturalized and perceived
as common sense (2015: 15). Hence, one of the roles of CCDS is to decode these
cultural codes embedded in discourse. Gavriely-Nuri argues that ecological dis-
courses and cultures of peace can inspire each other and believes that CDS scholars
should not limit themselves to the critique of social reality, but should also include
theoretical and practical tools for the promotion of a better society. Therefore,
CCDS should not only be used to expose manipulative discourse strategies but also
to develop theoretical and methodological tools that can aid scholars in identifying
and defending positive types of discourse, using arguments that are similar to those
put forth by proponents of PDA (discussed in Sect. 5.8). She proposes Cameron
(2007) as a clear example of this approach, since it points out reconciliation meta-
phors in a talk between an IRA (Irish Republican Army) bomber and a victim of
(an) IRA attack(s).
In addition, Gavriely-Nuri questions (2015: 5) the role language and discourse
play in the advancement of peace, and analyzes Peace-Estrangement Discourse
(PED)30 regarding the modern Arab-Israeli conflict over various different periods,

 PED refers to the set of discursive strategies used to undermine positive meanings of peace
30

(Gavriely-Nuri, 2015: Appendix).

6.6  CDA/CDS and Culture 283

beginning with “the conflict between Jews and Arabs which arose in the early twen-
tieth century” and continuing after the 1967 War, and at the time she wrote the book.
Findings reveal the use of a series of specific PED strategies which included
semantic-­conceptual blurring31 between war and peace, Peace in the Service of War,
and abstraction. She concludes by recommending that those in the field should pro-
mote more peace-oriented terminology that avoids “disparaging and dehumanizing
expressions in the description of opponents” and contributes to the “establishment
of a clear and direct peace language” (2015: 131). She also advocates for more
scholars of peace to apply UNESCO’s peace model to their analysis32 and to be
aware of the unique “dominant characteristics” (e.g., valuing bravery and military
activism, as seen in Israeli war rhetoric) of a specific culture and how they might
appear more often in discourse. This “cultural sensitivity”, developed by her famil-
iarity with Israeli culture, became a tool for Gavriely-Nuri herself, as she navigated
Israel’s “cultural database” in order to identify specific dominant characteristics
(2015: 33). Some other examples of CCDS in her work are her studies of metaphors
and cultural codes in the Israeli peace process (2010), the discourse of peace (2012)
and the normalization of war and collective memory (2013, 2014).
Another way in which CCDS has contributed is the manner in which it has rec-
ognized and highlighted discourses as cultural in nature, showing how discourses
are often not only diversified, but divided. Articles such as (Miike, 2009; Pardo,
2010; Prah, 2010) are examples of how CCDS has exposed and critiqued cultural-­
imperialist West-centric biases in society and how Western communication scholar-
ship as global discursive practice “often overlooks non-Western intellectual
legacies” (Shi-xu, 2016: 4)33. In addition, authors like Bolívar (2010) point out that
Latin American realities require new research frameworks that are not Eurocentric,
which could lead to new methods and results. CCDS scholars have also shown that
cultural elements, such as ethical codes and religious teachings, can greatly influ-
ence political and military actions (e.g. Ergül, Gökalp, & Cangöz, 2010; Gavriely-­
Nuri, 2012, 2015) and teaching and learning of English (Awayed-Bishara, 2015). In
terms of bringing forward non-European voices to CDS, CCDS work has also
included perspectives from Asian religious teachings and philosophies (e.g. Ishii,
2007; Cao, 2008; Shi-xu, 2009; Dissanayake, 2009; Gunaratne, 2013).

31
 Gavriely-Nuri defines ‘semantic blurring’ as a meta-discursive strategy (part of PED) “that con-
sists of juxtaposing two distinct concepts, such as “peace” and “war”, within a single phrase in a
way that blurs the distinction between them” (2015: Appendix).
32
 In UNESCO’s peace model, supportive discourse is defined as possessing positivity, concrete-
ness and bilateralism whereas oppressive discourse contains negativity, abstractness and unilater-
alism. Hence, the model advocates for supportive versus oppressive discourse (Gavriely-Nuri,
2015: 31).
33
 We use the terminology of the authors here to talk about the Western/Eastern divide but we note
that it has been disputed (in this very same issue of Journal of Multicultural Discourses) by Wodak
(2016a: 5) and others, who contend that such a dichotomy presupposes “two quasi homogenous
static geographical entities characterized by distinct and observable differences”, but no such
homogenous societies exist.
284 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

One of the goals of CCDS has been to undermine cultural hegemony and foster
cultural harmony in both scholarship and society as in (Shi-xu, 2016), which advo-
cates for CCDS work to “achieve a culturally conscious, critical and creative form
of discourse and communication scholarship that helps with the co-existence, har-
mony and prosperity of human communities” (2016: 6). One way scholars have
done this has been to give priority to neglected or under-studied topics in interna-
tional teaching and research on language, discourse and communication. Gavriely-­
Nuri’s (2012, 2015) work is a good example in the area of war, peace and
reconciliation (as we will discuss below), but others who have worked toward this
goal include Pardo (2010) (difficulties and needs in Third World academia),
O’Sullivan (2013) (cultural reflexivity and critique in the mainstream), Gunaratne
(2013) (non-western intellectual resources for research innovation), Melkote and
Steeves (2015) (development in Third World34 societies), and Torres-Simon (2015)
(whiteness and ethnocentrism in society and scholarship), and many more (cited in
Shi-xu, 2016). Despite all the achievements in CCDS in the last 10 years, Shi-xu
believes there is more work to be done and suggests that scholars need to continue
extensive reflexive and critical efforts to deconstruct cultural hegemony. Additionally,
more scholars from developing societies need to participate in the “construction or
reinvention of various cultural frameworks of research” with more attention paid to
“aboriginal, native cultural and intellectual resources” (2016: 6). Furthermore,
CDA/CDS needs to (continue to) dialogue with contemporary critical currents, such
as postmodernism, postcolonialism, feminism, as well as collaborate with other
fields and journals, such as Critical Arts, Lingue, Kurgu On-line International
Journal of Communication Culture, Mediazioni, and Covenant Journal of Language
Studies (2016: 6).
Besides Shi-xu’s suggestions for continued work in CCDS (2016), Gee (2016)
proposes an alternative solution to the problem of one-sided (only European) per-
spectives that leave out other cultural perspectives: that we “think of discourse anal-
ysis in a way that crosses cultures, and in a sense, stays ‘neutral’ politically” (2016:
343). However, this does not align with CDA/CDS principles nor with what he says
elsewhere. In order to make this happen, he argues that we must pay attention to the
different “frameworks”35 in our minds, and present and seek to understand alterna-
tive ones. In her commentary on Gee’s paper, Wodak (2016a) agrees with Gee that
DA/DS can act as a bridge between cultures and enhance understanding and that
different conceptual understandings can shape world views and “influence percep-
tion and dialogue” (2016: 1). However, she argues that this is nothing new, given

34
 While Shi-xu and others in the field still refer to these countries as Third World, we note Dogra’s
(2014) terminology of Majority World (MW) vs. Developed World (DW) which avoids the nega-
tive connotations of “Third World” and highlights the fact that the majority of the world’s popula-
tion lives outside the ‘developed world’, but also acknowledges that “majority worlds also exist in
developed worlds and vice versa in view of the fluidity and closeness of global connections”
(Dogra, 2014: 21).
35
 Gee defines “frameworks” as “sets of ideas that guide us in what to expect and how to value,
assess, or appreciate things and happenings in specific situations” (2016: 351).
6.7  CDA/CDS and Gender Studies 285

that this notion has been widely accepted since Wittgenstein’s seminal Philosophical
Investigations (1967 (1953)) and resurfaced again in Whorf’s work (discussed in
Sects. 2.3 and 2.4). In addition, Wodak points out that Gee’s notion of “frameworks”
is reminiscent of van Dijk’s sociocognitive approach, his context models, and epis-
temic communities (2007, 2008, see Sect. 4.4), as well as Aristotle’s idea of
‘endoxon’ (Boukala, 2016). She also notes that Gee does not include a discussion of
power relations and their relationship to learning and that it is important to consider
developments of power and power struggles because they “also affect ideologies
and belief systems” (Wodak, 2016a: 371). She then provides a detailed discussion
of the connection between power relations and learning and includes numerous
examples, such as the studies by Forchtner and Schneickert (2016) and Miller
(2006), who tackle the idea of barriers in interactions. Wodak also describes her
2010 paper with Paul Chilton in which they challenged the East/West dichotomy,
noting that referring to this dichotomy reproduces ‘orientalist’ and ‘colonialist’
belief systems. She concludes that CDA/CDS is fully equipped with the tools and
methodologies (and does not need ‘new’ frameworks, such as those proposed by
Gee) to accomplish its aims. However, these goals will remain abstract if we do not
“consider, reflect, and challenge the normative frameworks” we draw on, as well as
the “complex socio-cultural contexts of understanding and learning, in the depth
these issues deserve” (Wodak, 2016a: 372).
It is clear from this brief summary of cultural approaches to CDA/CDS that there
exist a wide range of conceptions, theories and methods that take into account both
critical and cultural perspectives. While we do not claim to have covered all of the
relevant approaches, studies or scholars, we hope to have introduced the most prom-
inent and most explicitly connected to CDA/CDS. In addition, while we have dis-
cussed these approaches separately, it is clear that, as is the case for many other
(interdisciplinary) areas, there is much overlap, and each “brings its own significant
features of discourse and its analysis into view and all can benefit from each other”
(Scollo, 2011: 19).

6.7  CDA/CDS and Gender Studies

As we noted in the Introduction to this chapter, the topic of gender (and sex/
sexuality)36 is on the agenda for work in CDA/CDS; the pioneers of CDA/CDS and
the many scholars who joined the trend in its various manifestations have all been
aware, in one way or another, of work on gender in sociolinguistics and other allied

36
 We will use the term ‘gender’ here since it is the one favored by the majority of researchers work-
ing in this area. In addition, this section deals mainly with differences between males and females.
However, note that we have a discussion in Sect. 6.8 of Queer Linguistics which includes analyses
that are informed by the insights of Queer Theory and which contest heteronormative ideologies
(e.g. gender binarism) in the social construction of sexuality and gender (Motschenbacher &
Stegu, 2013).
286 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

fields, including DA. Work in sociolinguistics and DA typically focused (especially

in the beginning) on the speech behavior of men and women on the phonological
level and on conversational styles in interactions between women and men (see
Wodak, 1997a). The best known examples of work in this domain are based on a
quantitative-correlational approach, with a focus on urban groups (see the early
work of e.g., Labov, 1966a, 1966b; Trudgill, 1972, 1974; Milroy & Milroy, 1978).
However, as said above (Chaps. 2 and 3), in CritLing, in Fairclough’s article (1985)
on descriptive vs. critical goals in DA, in Wodak’s work in Sects. 3.8 and 4.5 (and
also that of van Dijk, see Sects. 3.6 and 4.4)—as well as in Sect. 6.4—many in
CDA/CDS have seen sociolinguistic work as too descriptive and not critical
(enough). Thus, from at least the 1990s on there have been critical discussions of
sociolinguistic gender studies (see, e.g., Cameron, 1990; Cameron & Coates, 1990;
Coates, 1993; Wodak & Benke, 1996; Wodak, 1997a37). In descriptive (correla-
tional) sociolinguistic work, gender is treated as just another category for classify-
ing people and groups alongside race/ethnicity, religion, class, socioeconomic status
(SES), educational background, etc., all of which also call out for, and some have
been approached through, critical work. The tendency toward descriptive work has
led to critically oriented research from a feminist perspective on linguistic theory
(Cameron, 1992), stylistics (Mills, 1995), pragmatics (Christie, 2000) and conversa-
tion analysis (Kitzinger, 2000), which has pointed to the bias of these various (sub)
disciplines or interdisciplinary areas toward supposedly neutral and objective
inquiry, which is often implicated in patriarchal ideology and oppression and which
doesn’t address the issue of “relations of power that systematically privilege men as
a social group and disadvantage, exclude and disempower women as a social group”
(Lazar, 2005a: 5). However, as is obvious, CDA/CDS is (or should be) different,
given its overtly political stance and its concern with all types of social inequality
and injustice. And, as Lazar points out (2005a: 1): “a critical perspective on unequal
social arrangements sustained through language use, with the goals of social trans-
formation and emancipation, constitutes the cornerstone of critical discourse analy-
sis (CDA) and many feminist language studies”. Thus, they have much in common.
And it has also been claimed (van Dijk, 1991; see Lazar, 2005a: 2) that feminist
approaches in women’s studies provided an impetus in the 1980s for CritLing (see
Sect. 2.4) and ultimately for CDA/CDS.
However, much critical work on gender and discourse is not presented as CDA/
CDS, and one can understand (Lazar, 2005a) that some feminists feel comfortable
working in CDA/CDS without needing to explicitly name, or talk about, their femi-
nist perspective (such as the two authors of this book), or conversely, that other
feminists are uncomfortable with the fact that CDA/CDS scholars don’t recognize
the connection between work on gender and discourse in CDA/CDS on the one
hand and in (feminist) women’s/gender studies on the other. Regarding this connec-
tion, we can cite prolific work by Wodak from her sociolinguistic, DA and CDA
periods (1981, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1996, 1997a, 1997b; Wodak

37
 This is an especially rich and dense discussion of these issues, along with an extensive
bibliography.
6.7  CDA/CDS and Gender Studies 287

et al., 1989, 1999; Wodak & Benke, 1996; Kotthoff & Wodak, 1997). In discussing
the vast literature in the domain of gender and discourse/sociolinguistics, Wodak
(1997a: 1) notes the “many contradictory approaches, assumptions, and results” and
argues for a critical approach to the literature itself. She says that the many empiri-
cal studies that exist have neglected the context of language behavior, analyzed
gender by looking at biological sex and made hasty generalizations about gender-
lects. She proposes an approach that is sensitive to context and views gender as a
social construction “in connection with the socio-cultural and ethnic background of
the interlocutors, and in connection with their age, their level of education, their
socio-economic status, their emotions and the specific power-dynamics of the dis-
course investigated” (1997a: 2). Her 1997 edited volume on gender and discourse
contains chapters by some of the best known (feminist) linguists/discourse analysts
of that time working on language (e.g., Holmes, 199738; Cameron, 1997; Kendall &
Tannen, 1997; McElhinny, 1997; Coates, 1997).
Thus, feminist CDA/CDS has existed for a long time, but as a body of research
it has not been sufficiently recognized, since it is dispersed across a variety of jour-
nals (e.g., those friendly to CDA/CDS and others open to critical and/or feminist
work) and various edited volumes on gender and language. And, as we have seen,
there are many overviews of CDA/CDS—and many about feminist language stud-
ies—but the two together have received only brief mention (e.g., Wodak, 1997a;
Fairclough & Wodak, 1997; Cameron, 1998); and even when feminist scholarship
in CDA/CDS has been discussed, the scope has been narrow and limited (see
Bucholtz, 2003). This has led to a call for an overtly feminist CDA/CDS (Lazar,
2005a). In addition, we would like to note that besides feminist CDA/CDS, this
whole chapter is in some sense an answer to critiques like the one discussed above,
i.e., that certain perspectives are missing or limited in CDA/CDS interdisciplinary
work. Another reason why there has been a trend toward an explicitly feminist
CDA/CDS is that most of the studies in CDA/CDS with a gender focus adopt a criti-
cal feminist view of gender relations and are motivated by the need for social change
and social justice, i.e., for a politically invested program of DA/DS with social
emancipatory goals with respect to gender. In addition, Cameron (1998: 969–970)
argues that CDA/CDS “is one of those broadly progressive projects whose founders
and dominant figures are nevertheless all straight white men”; this is not completely
accurate, as we have seen, given the prominence of Ruth Wodak in the founding and
continuing development of CDA/CDS. And while it is true that among the major
contributors to CDA/CDS, there are many women (as documented in Chaps. 4–6),
men are by far in the majority, and according to Wilkinson and Kitzinger (1995),
men have tended not to give credit to feminists by citing their work. In addition,
they dominate leadership positions in CDA/CDS journals and professional
organizations.39

38
 See also Holmes (2005).
39
 For example, Critical Discourse Studies, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Discourse &
Society, Discurso & Sociedad, Social Semiotics, Journal of Language and Politics (JLP) all (at the
time this book was written) have male editors (note that in the case of JLP, Michał Krzyżanowski
is editor-in-chief but Ruth Wodak is named as senior editor). However, things are changing, as
288 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

Besides Wodak and van Dijk, there is some work in CDA/CDS that draws on
feminist sources (see Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999), but Lazar argues (2005a: 3)
that citations are not enough, what is needed is to “theorise and analyse the particu-
larly insidious and oppressive nature of gender as an omni-relevant category in most
social practices”. Naming the trend ‘feminist CDA/CDS’ means that the women
(and men) who practice it will develop a sense of group membership and visibility,
and will be given a voice in what is now mainstream CDA/CDS—which, ironically,
would give the self-naming a political function and raise self-reflexivity. And finally,
the trend within CDA/CDS to look at both text and talk is an important contribution
to feminist work on language and discourse; and the multimodal/semiotic dimen-
sions of CDA/CDS discussed in Sect. 4.6 make for an enriching and insightful anal-
ysis. Thus, “a multimodal view of discourse has great value for a holistic feminist
critique of discursive constructions of gender (Lazar, 1999, 2000)” (Lazar, 2005b:
5), as in CCDS. Moreover, as Lazar points out (2005b: 24), her edited book (Lazar,
2005a) is the first international collection of work on CCDA/DS and feminist work,
especially studies of language. She is quick to say that one cannot speak of men and
women in universalizing terms, since gender as a social identity intersects with
many other types of culturally determined and shifting social identities such as, e.g.,
sexuality, ethnicity, age, class, social position and geography, to name but a few. She
also underscores the fact that the “workings of gender ideology and asymmetrical
power relations in discourse are assuming more subtle forms” (2005b: 1) in the
twenty-first century, especially as we look at the taken-for-granted social assump-
tions and hegemonic power relations in news and advertising, educational settings,
workplaces, institutions of various sorts, and governments and transnational organi-
zations. Her book, which is centered on “Post-equality Analyses of Subtle Sexism”
and “Emancipation and Social Citizenship: Analysis of Identity and Difference”
(2005a), includes chapters by Holmes (2005), Wodak (2005), Lazar (2005b), and
Talbot (2005).
Later, in her 2007 paper in Critical Discourse Studies, Lazar formally labels her
approach Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA), and reaffirms its aims as
“advancing rich and nuanced analyses of the complex workings of power and ide-
ology in discourse in sustaining hierarchically gendered social orders” (2007:
141). She says it should also expose the “complex, subtle, and sometimes not so
subtle, ways in which frequently taken-for-granted gendered assumptions and
hegemonic power relations are discursively produced, sustained, negotiated, and
challenged in different contexts and communities” (2007: 142). She also provides
a rationale for highlighting a feminist perspective in CDA/CDS and proposes the
key principles for a feminist discourse praxis. In addition, she encourages more
multimodal analyses that include visual images, layouts, gestures, and sounds, in

evidenced by the largely female executive committee of the professional organization CADAAD
(Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines), which at the time of this writing
has a female chair (Laura Filardo Lamas) and 7 out of 12 of the other committee members are
women.
6.7  CDA/CDS and Gender Studies 289

order to provide a more holistic analysis that captures the entirety of the communi-
cative event. In fact, since her article was published, many more studies have come
out that utilize FCDA perspectives/theories with multimodal data. A few examples
are Machin and Mayr (2012), which (among other things) examines photos from
Cosmopolitan to show how multimodal elements such as color, background,
abstract(ed) settings and textures of clothing represent women’s lives as “playful
fantasies” (2012: 53, see Sect. 3.9.4), and Wang (2016), which examines how gen-
dered representations of the ‘Singapore Girl’ are manipulated in Singapore
International Airline’s multimodal advertisements. We would like to point out here
that FPDA (Feminist PostStructuralist Discourse Analysis) (Baxter, 2002, 2003,
2008, 2010) is similar to FCDA, but differentiates itself in the following ways; (1)
It aims for a “transformative quest” as opposed to an emancipatory agenda, mean-
ing that it does not support any agenda that might one day become its own “grand
narrative” (Baxter, 2008: 245). (2) It opposes the polarization of subjects of study
(e.g., the dichotomy of oppressor/oppressed) and challenges modernist thinking
which structures thought in oppositional pairs. And (3) it adopts an anti-materialist
stance (e.g., speakers do not exist outside discourse), which argues that social real-
ities are always discursively produced (Baxter, 2008: 246). Other work in the
FPDA perspective is by Glapka (2018 for example), which is published in CDA/
CDS journals and very much overlaps with CDA.
Another important work that includes feminist linguistic approaches is Sarah
Mills’ book (2012), which is a collection of her previously published papers and
book chapters and is divided into four sections: Gender and Reading/Writing,
Analyzing Sexism, Gender and Politeness, and Strong Women Speakers. In the
introduction, she disputes the claim that gender issues are no longer as relevant or
as problematic as they once were, and argues instead that while there has been prog-
ress, there has not been as much as some people claim. Some of the still existing
problems she discusses include lack of pay equity, under-representation of women
in politics, restrictions concerning partner choice and reproductive choice, and so
forth. The main arguments made in the book are that ‘gender matters’, but it matters
differently now than in previous “waves” of feminist movements because of the way
it is now implemented in society in a much more indirect way. A second important
argument she makes is that feminist DA has an important role in shedding light on
sites of struggle in areas of gender equity. Probably her most important contribution
to this is in her description of how to identify sexism in language, noting that more
attention is being paid to context in this latest wave, and that “sexism has not been
eradicated but its nature has been transformed into [a] more indirect form of sex-
ism” (2012: 93). She also provides an excellent overview of work in feminist lin-
guistics over a 40-year period, as well as a substantial bibliography for those
interested in this field.
It is clear from this brief overview of feminist approaches to CDA/CDS that
although there exists a vast literature in this domain which is not recognized as
being (connected to) CDA/CDS, there is at the same time a desire on the part of
290 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

many to further the aims of this new sub-area. While we do not claim to have cov-
ered all of the feminist approaches relevant here, we hope to have given the reader
some understanding of work in this area. Some more recent articles that could fall
under this category of feminist approaches to CDA/CDS and also sometimes over-
lap with other areas such as Queer Linguistics discussed in the next section, include
Diabah and Amfo (2014) (representation of women in Akan (Niger-Congo, Kwa)
proverbs); Myketiak (2015) (the discursive construction of cybersex practices);
Romera (2015) (gender stereotypes in higher education institutions); Pereira and
Monfardini Biachi (2016) (representation of woman candidates in the Brazilian
presidential elections); Martin and Papadelos (2016) (androcentric language and its
relationship to metonymy, particularly the use of guys, mentioned above); and Pérez
and Greene (2016) (dominant frames and feminist counter-frames in rape jokes). In
addition, the journal of the International Gender and Language Association, Gender
and Language includes many scholars directly connected to, or sympathetic to,
CDA/CDS; it is edited by Caldas-Coulthard and Milani and features an advisory
board with scholars such as Bucholtz, Cameron, Lazar, Tannen, and Wodak. In a
2016 Special Issue on multimodality (edited by David Machin), the journal explores
topics such as gender and language as it relates to hijab fashion (Bouvier, 2016),
semiotic representations of grandmotherhood (Caldas-Coulthard & Moon, 2016),
sound, music and gender in mobile games (Machin & van Leeuwen, 2016) (to name
a few). In addition, the introduction to the Special Issue (Machin, Caldas-Coulthard,
& Milani, 2016) situates gender and language studies within the field of ‘critical
multimodality’ (see Sect. 4.6).
Finally, not all studies that utilize FCDA examine discourse related to women
and more recently, there are some studies that explore the representation of men in
media discourse: e.g., Diabah (2015), which looks at how men are depicted as sex
objects in Ghanaian radio commercials, showing how “manliness” is equated with
sexual power; Gong (2016), which explores online discourse of masculinities in
transnational football fandom (from Chinese Arsenal fans); and Smith (2016) which
draws on CDA/CDS feminist studies to examine the gendered construction of
Barack Obama in the context of the 2008 election to show how gendered perfor-
mances can mirror changes in society.

6.8  CDA/CDS and Queer Linguistics/Theory/Studies

6.8.1  Introduction

Queer linguistic approaches to discourse explore the connection of language-­

focused forms of DA and Queer Theory using Queer Linguistics as an overarching
framework. Given Queer Theory’s emphasis on the meaning of words and the power
of language, the connection of Queer Theory to CDA/CDS is quite a natural one; for
instance, special attention was given to Queer linguistic approaches and their
6.8  CDA/CDS and Queer Linguistics/Theory/Studies 291

c­ onnection to CDA/CDS in a Special Issue of Discourse & Society in 2013. We will

describe articles from this issue in detail later in our discussion, but it is worth high-
lighting now that it includes an introductory essay by Motschenbacher and Stegu
(2013) which provides an excellent discussion of the theoretical underpinnings of
the connection between DA/DS and Queer Theory within Queer Linguistics, and
how they relate to Queer Discourse Studies, which is the name they give to the com-
bination of CDA/CDS and Queer Linguistics. But first we will give a short back-
ground to Queer Theory (/Studies).

6.8.2  Queer Theory/Queer Studies

Queer Theory (or Queer Studies) is an interdisciplinary perspective that “seeks to

disrupt socially constructed systems of meaning surrounding human sexuality” (Ott
& Mack, 2014: 197), investigates “the naturalising narratives of compulsory hetero-
sexuality” (Butler, 1990: 146) and also examines how heterosexuality is produced
in specific contexts and interactions (Cameron & Kulick, 2003: 55 as cited in
Coates, 2013: 537). These changing theoretical perspectives occurred at a time
when researchers began to question the notion that “sexuality may serve as the basis
of an essentialist identity category which ignores the intersectionality of sexuality
with other identity facets such as class, age, ethnicity or even gender”
(Motschenbacker & Stegu, 2013: 520). Hence, Queer theorists became motivated to
deconstruct or blur the female/male, homosexual/heterosexual binaries, use the
realm of sexuality as a starting point for this deconstruction and assert that “indi-
vidual sexuality is fluid and difficult to categorize”. As a result, the simplified cate-
gories we use to name sexuality can “never fully represent an individual’s actual,
varied sexual drives” (Ott & Mack, 2014: 198) and the job of Queer theorists is to
expose these labels and how they function to support systems of power and privi-
lege. The work of both Michel Foucault (1976) and Judith Butler (1990, 1993,
1997) is foundational to Queer Theory/Studies, although it was published many
years before (Ott & Mack, 2014). Both of them contribute to our understanding of
sexuality as a social or discursive construction and it is in their work that “the notion
of queerness primarily gains its political, disruptive edge” (Ott & Mack, 2014: 206).

6.8.3  Queer Linguistics and Queer Discourse Studies

Queer Linguistics focuses on the “discursive regimes” that control all sexual identi-
ties and/or desires, as well as the way heterosexualities are constructed discursively
(Motschenbacher & Stegu, 2013: 523). An important concept regarding the way in
which heterosexualities are constructed in discourse is that of hetero/homonorma-
tivity. The term ‘heteronormativity’, coined by Warner (1991) includes the notion
“that sexuality is organized and regulated in accordance with certain societal beliefs
292 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

about what is normal, natural and desirable” (Cameron & Kulick, 2006: 165). Using
the term “heteronormativity” forces us to understand the way in which heterosexu-
ality is constructed culturally and how it relies on “strictly enforced norms for its
continuing dominance” (Coates, 2013: 537). Queer theorists work to question the
systemic naturalization of heterosexuality, but not individual heterosexuals, so it is
important to understand that Queer theory is not opposed to individual heterosexual
practices or feelings. Rather, being “queer” or “queering” represents “a rejection of
clear sexual definitions in one’s scholarship, interaction, and daily life” (Ott &
Mack, 2014: 199). Sullivan (2003) notes that the word ‘queer’ has historically been
used in several ways. It can mean something that is strange or has negative charac-
teristics (such as ‘madness’ or ‘worthlessness’) or can be something that a person
associates with others and not the self. However, it can also mean one’s difference
(from others), or ‘strangeness’ in a positive way. It has also been used (sometimes
abusively), as a “colloquial term for homosexuality” (Sullivan, 2003: v). Milani
notes that the term ‘queers’ in a ‘lay’ connotation refers to all those who do not see
themselves as fitting into the matrix of heterosexual desire—those who would gen-
erally fall under the (daunting) acronym of LGBTQIA40 (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
Transgender, Questioning, Intersexual and Asexual) (Milani, 2013: 630). On the
other hand, ‘queer’ has also been used in the academic realm as a synonym of
‘rebellious’, ‘anti-normative’ and ‘against the normal’ (Halperin, 1995; see also
Halperin, 2012: 15, for a similar mobilization of the semantic duality of ‘queer’).
In discussing Queer Studies, it is important to specify that the area of interest is
not the study of how non-heterosexual people use language (e.g. as in [queer dis-
course] studies), rather Queer theorists are interested in “any kind of sexuality-­related
discourse from a Queer theoretical point of view: (1) heteronormative discourse, (2)
non-heteronormative discourse (pertaining to non-normative heterosexualities), and
(3) non-hetero normative discourse (associated with all forms of non-heterosexual-
ity, including gay male and lesbian sexualities, but also many more)” (Motschenbacker
& Stegu, 2013: 527, italics in the original). In addition, Queer analysis is “not only
appropriate for scholars who may also identify as queer” (Ott & Mack, 2014: 216);
since individuals who identify as homosexual have limits placed on them because of
heteronormative social systems, and those who identify as heterosexuals are also
subjected to limits on personal identity, practice and desire, hence, “only by ‘queer-
ing’ everyone can we begin to make the world a better place to live”. Motschenbacker
and Stegu (2013: 527) agree with the notion that Queer Linguistics should focus on
“the discursive regimes governing all sexual identities/desires” and, as such, it should
also study the discursive formation of heterosexualities.

40
 This quote was taken from Milani, (2013), but since then many people also use the acronym
LGBTQIA+ which stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Pansexual, Transgender, Genderqueer,
Queer, Intersexed, Agender, Asexual, and Ally community. See https://www.uis.edu/gendersexu-
alitystudentservices/about/lgbtqaterminology/.
6.9 CDA/CDS and Pragmatics 293

6.8.4  S
 pecial Issue of ‘Discourse & Society’ on Queer
Linguistics/Queer Discourse Studies

In their introductory essay for the Special Issue of Discourse & Society, which is
about ‘Queer linguistics approaches to discourse’ and their relationship to CDA/
CDS, Motschenbacher and Stegu (2013) lay out what research in the field of Queer
Linguistics/Queer Discourse Studies has focused on and they provide an overview
of the contributions of this research to the field. In addition, they identify several
areas of research which are less represented and could be expanded on in the future.
Other articles in the Special Issue include Motschenbacher (2013), about an
ethnographically-­ based, in-depth analysis of linguistic constructions of non-­
heteronormativity at the Eurovision Song Contest press conferences, Schneider
(2013), a critical analysis of heteronormative and queer performance in Salsa dance
contexts, Milani (2013), an online community (called meetmarket) for men looking
for men in South Africa, and Koller (2013), which is written from a lesbian subject
position at different points in recent history in order to show how “lesbian identity
constructions serve as demarcations from a heterosexuality that is elsewhere pre-
sented as a naturalized social norm” (2013: 573). Coates (2013: 530) echoes other
areas of CDA/CDS shown in Sect. 6.6 (CDA/CDS and Culture), noting that “a
cross-cultural comparison of the discursive construction of sexuality that involves
non-Western cultures would be highly valuable as a contribution to the de-­
essentialisation of sexual categories that are frequently treated as self-evident in
Western societies (cf. Gaudio, 2011 on Nigeria; or Hall, 2012 on India)”.
Some more recent work in this area—from non-western viewpoints—include
Diabah (2015) (the representation of male sexual power in Ghanian radio commer-
cials, mentioned above) and Wei (2016) (homosexually themed discourse and the
construction of heteromasculinity among Chinese urban youth). A second area
needing further research is less publicly visible sexualities (see e.g. Motschenbacher,
2014; and Szegheo-Lang, 2015 on objectophilia; Ritchie & Barker, 2006; and
Rambukkana, 2015, on polyamory; or Candelas de la Ossa, 2016; Turner, 2015; and
Thorne, 2013 on bisexuality). We agree that the above are fundamental emerging
areas, and we hope that more publications based on important research will be done.
Other examples of recent work in this area include Dirks (2016) (transgender
people on Big Ten campuses); King (2015) (intersex people in secondary sexuality
education documents); Milani (2015) (sexual citizenship in South Africa); Potts
(2015) (how gamers and fans play with sexuality, gender, and Minecraft on
YouTube); Pulos (2013) (sexuality in World of Warcraft); Rhodes and Stewart
(2016) (LGBT workplace protections); Self (2015) (undocumented immigrants and
sexuality discourse); Self (2015) (discursive framing and theorization of LGBT
­centers); Soich (2015) (the discursive construction of transvestites in Argentinian
television); and VanderStouwe (2015) (queer identity in public spaces).
294 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

6.9  CDA/CDS and Pragmatics

6.9.1  Introduction: Definition of Pragmatics

As seen in Chap. 3 (and earlier sections of this chapter), there are many different
views of what CDA/CDS is and thus it is difficult to give an overall account of the
relationship between CDA/CDS and pragmatics, since the definition of pragmatics
is also very complex. Some proponents of CDA/CDS often incorporate pragmatics
or use some of the findings of pragmatics in their analyses, but they often do not
make this clear or even recognize (or perhaps even realize or think it is noteworthy)
that they are incorporating elements from pragmatics. As a result, the “relationship
of discourse analysis and pragmatics cannot be answered absolutely and definitely,
but only relatively” nor is it clear-cut or mono-directional (Reisigl, 2011: 13, 23).
Indeed, in the research process for this section, we uncovered only a few articles/
chapters/books that clearly stated that they were a combination of CDA/CDS and
pragmatics, although Wodak and van Dijk (see Sects. 3.6–3.8, 4.4, and 4.5) are
exceptions. Moreover, despite the fact that “there is no commonly accepted defini-
tion of pragmatics in linguistics which would refer to a single, unified and homoge-
neous field of study” (Bublitz & Norrick, 2011: 3) especially if we compare work in
the US with that in Europe, there is a ‘family’ of definitions that bring pragmatics
close to DA/DS: it is a perspective on or an orientation towards language use, looks
at language use in relation to its users, is concerned with the way(s) in which humans
use language in social contexts, analyzes the functioning of language, investigates
how people achieve meaning in particular contexts, deals with language use in con-
texts of situations, focuses more on the spoken rather than the written use of lan-
guage, and deals with everyday talk and conversation (Mey, 2001b; Bublitz &
Norrick, 2011; Zienkowski, 2011). Pragmatics is sometimes seen as just one of a
number of (sub)disciplines of linguistics which deal with language use, and as a
result, it has been conceived of as subordinate to, or overlapping with, or subsuming
DA/DS. Or it is seen as a separate (interdisciplinary) approach to language which
overlaps in certain ways with linguistics (see Bublitz & Norrick, 2011).
Some of the practitioners of CDA/CDS (Fairclough, 2001b: 7; Reisigl, 2011)
have pointed out that there is an especially wide gulf between two general approaches
to pragmatics. The earlier one came about when linguists began to explore phenom-
ena of ‘performance’ (the term for language use in the Chomsky/formal linguistics
tradition) and adopted ideas developed by the ‘ordinary language philosophers’
John Austin (1962) and John Searle (1969, 1979, referred to often in Chaps. 2 and
3) about ‘speech acts’ and, eventually Speech Act Theory, and H. Paul Grice about
conversation, especially the Cooperative Principle (CP) and accompanying maxims
(quality, quantity, manner and relation/relevance) as well as presuppositions, con-
versational implicatures and inference. This led to what some have called the “prag-
matic turn” in linguistics (Bublitz & Norrick, 2011: 2; cf. Mey, 2014: 17), when
attention turned to ‘utterance’ (rather than sentence/word) meaning. From a CDA/
CDS point of view, the key insight is “that language can be seen as a form of action
… the idea of uttering as acting is an important one” (Fairclough, 2001b: 7).
6.9  CDA/CDS and Pragmatics 295

However, in the UK and the US, this perspective developed into a narrow Anglo-­
American, analytical-philosophical conception of pragmatics, which studies deixis/
indexicality in addition to the ideas of Austin and Searle and Grice (and one or two
other topics). All of these are important, but their work “was based on introspection
and invented examples in imagined contexts” (Bublitz & Norrick, 2011: 5), against
the tendencies in (C)DA/(C)DS.
According to Blum-Kulka and Hamo (2011), more recently pragmatics has
offered specific analytic frameworks for understanding how language works, which
have been “adopted by students of discourse and applied to the analysis of actual
sequences of text and talk in context, rather than isolated utterances, as in classic
pragmatics” (2011: 143). Such research is often referred to as discourse pragmatics
and has often gone beyond the core pragmatic models, incorporating influences
from other approaches (2011: 143). The three models which were adopted and
adapted in DA/DS include Grice’s approach to conversation and its concern with the
ways interlocutors recognize each other’s communicative intentions (1975, 1989);
Speech Act Theory and its concern with the classification of communicative inten-
tions and the ways they are linguistically encoded in context; and Politeness Theory
(Brown & Levinson, 1987), which “builds on the assumption of cooperation, and
suggests that social motivations can explain deviations from explicitness and direct-
ness and their social implications” (Blum-Kulka & Hamo, 2011: 152). CDA
researchers see many weaknesses and limitations of these and other types of Anglo-­
American pragmatics, including: (1) its focus on the individual (Fairclough, 2001a:
7–8) rather than society; (2) its underestimation of the extent to which language use
is subject to both social conventions and strategic creativity, leading to a need for a
theory of social action and social practice, which is lacking; (3) its idealized, almost
Utopian, image of linguistic interaction between equals, rather than an understand-
ing of linguistic practice as subject to social struggles and permeated with inequali-
ties of power; (4) its focus in many cases on single invented sentences rather than
real utterances in extended discourse; (5) the difficulty of defining speech acts in
actual language use; (6) its narrowness and disciplinary basis rather than being
interdisciplinary (Reisigl, 2011: 20); (7) not enough focus on linguistic practices
and multimodal semiotic complexities; (8) its understanding of context that is too
narrow (van Dijk, 2008, 2009); (9) its view of language as an abstraction without
variation by speaker, region, time, and so forth (see Sect. 6.4); (10) its view of lan-
guage as a non-cultural, non-social, static, depersonalized, abstract object indepen-
dent of context and discourse; (11) its closeness to a formalist model of language in
some cases, and thus the definition of pragmatics (and sometimes also of discourse)
as an additional ‘module’ of language; and (12) its acknowledgement of, but no real
engagement with, the issues of social context (see Fairclough, 2001b: 7–8, Bublitz
& Norrick, 2011: 4).
The other conception of pragmatics is a much broader point of view, typically
associated with (continental) European scholars, some of whom define pragmatics
as “the science of language use” (Fairclough, 2001b: 7, who refers to the first issue
of the Journal of Pragmatics in 1977; see also Levinson, 1983; Verschueren, 1999;
Mey, 2001a, 2001b; Reisigl, 2011; Bublitz & Norrick, 2011). From this point of
296 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

view, (1) authentic language use and actual language users in interaction are pri-
mary; (2) the focus is on whole speech events or language use (‘language games’,
Wittgenstein, 1953) in real social contexts and considers both the present state of
affairs in connection with prior and succeeding actions and the unique historical
event created by actual speakers to perform linguistic acts in an actual situational
context in order to accomplish specific goals; (3) it focuses on micro-phenomena
and sees the “messiness” of language in real embodied human contexts, where par-
ticipants with personalities, feelings and goals interact in complex ways with physi-
cal objects and other participants within institutions and communities (Bublitz &
Norrick, 2011: 4); (4) it is interdisciplinary in nature and encompasses a variety of
researchers, research programs, heuristics, methodologies, objects of investigation
and terminologies. According to Fairclough (2001a: 7) there are tendencies in this
European view of pragmatics that are compatible with what he was then calling
CLS (one of the approaches that later developed into CDA/CDS, see Sects. 3.5.2
and 3.5.3), although there are also (some important) differences between (CLS and)
CDA/CDS on the one hand and pragmatics on the other. In particular, CDA/CDS
examines in more depth the social, political and historical aspects of context than
pragmatics does and pays more attention to the concrete performance of linguistic
practices and the specific conditions and practices of language production, distribu-
tion and reception. In addition, CDA/CDS is, especially recently, more focused on
multimodal semiotic complexities than pragmatics is. While some European
approaches to pragmatics see it as encompassing linguistics and CDA/CDS, and
other approaches see pragmatics as a (sub)discipline of linguistics, neither of these
conceptions of pragmatics is prevalent in CDA/CDS. As we saw in our discussion
of the main approaches to CDA/CDS (see Chap. 4), none of them spoke of CDA/
CDS in either of these ways. Indeed, for the proponents of CritLing, SocSem, and
CDA/CDS, pragmatics is most often seen as an aid, part of the ‘toolkit’ of the ana-
lyst; it thus ranges from being a side discipline or area to overlapping with each of
these approaches in different (and in many cases, undetermined) ways.
There is a further division of European pragmatics which is of importance to
CDA/CDS, namely, the distinction between pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics,
first introduced by Leech (1983) and Thomas (1983). Pragmalinguistics is defined
as the study focusing on the specific linguistic forms used to achieve an intended
pragmatic effect and essentially, understanding language as a system used for com-
munication purposes, while sociopragmatics, on the other hand, is seen as the study
of the action domain that co-constructs social order in culturally sanctioned ways
and, in essence, it looks at when a particular pragmatic strategy should be used (see
also Marmaridou, 2011; Bublitz & Norrick, 2011). While the borderline between
the two may at times be fuzzy, pragmalinguistics is the “language-specific” study of
the resources a language provides for conveying pragmatic meaning (illocutionary
and interpersonal), whereas sociopragmatics is the “culture-specific” study of
“external pragmatic factors affecting language use” and “relates pragmatic meaning
to an assessment of participants’ social distance, the language community’s social
rules and appropriateness norms, discourse practices, and accepted behaviours”
(Marmaridou, 2011: 77, 80). As should be obvious, sociopragmatics has a closer
6.9  CDA/CDS and Pragmatics 297

connection to CDA/CDS than pragmalingistics and other areas of pragmatics do—

and this is due also to its relation to earlier work in Marxist pragmatics (Mey, 1979),
its attention to the co-construction of social and cultural practices in context, its
intersection with studies in sociolinguistics (see Bublitz & Norrick, 2011: 9), and its
relation to the sociological interface of pragmatics (Marmaridou, 2011: 83).
According to Bublitz and Norrick (2011: 9) sociopragmatics “foreshadows work in
Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1995a)”. In CDA/CDS, pragmatics has
been incorporated successfully into the analysis of, e.g., media discourse by utiliz-
ing pragmatically-oriented concepts such as ‘discourse as social action’ or ‘inter-
subjective inference rules’ and applying them to the analysis of diverse genres, such
as political campaigns (see Tolson, 2006; Blum-Kulka & Hamo, 2011: 157–158).

6.9.2  Pragmatics Concepts in CDA/CDS Scholarship

Of the major CDS analysts, van Dijk and Wodak have the most background in prag-
matics and have used it consistently in their pre- and current CDA scholarship. As
said earlier, van Dijk uses speech act theory; he had three early books that included
a discussion of pragmatics (van Dijk, 1977, 1981, 1984; see Sect. 3.6.1.1), and a
glance at his (CDS/DS) writings since then shows that he has continued to integrate
pragmatics into his work, e.g., more recently, in his analysis of immigration dis-
course in the Spanish parliament (van Dijk, 2011b) and the role of knowledge in
discourse processing (van Dijk, 2012, where he defines ‘knowledge’ as the shared
beliefs of members of a community). As noted above, Wodak also used pragmatics
in her earlier work in the 1980s, it was made part of DHA in the 1990s and she has
used it ever since (see Sect. 3.8). To cite one example among many, in her study
analyzing election speeches by Austrian right-wing politician Jörg Haider (Sects.
3.8.4 and 3.8.5), she gives some examples of pragmatic devices that can be useful
for CDA/CDS such as insinuations/allusions, wordplay, presuppositions and impli-
catures (Wodak, 2007: 203), and also asserts that work such as her own, that decon-
structs explicit prejudiced utterances as well as inferred and indirect linguistic
devices, must turn to the “pragmatic toolbox” to be able to systematically detect and
analyze hidden and coded meanings which often appear as cues in the text (2007:
204) (see also our discussion below of Wodak, 2015). A few examples of other work
that combines CDA/CDS and pragmatics (especially sociopragmatics) either explic-
itly or implicitly, include Charteris-Black’s book Critical Metaphor Analysis (2004,
discussed below) which incorporates corpus-based cognitive and pragmatic
approaches to metaphor in political discourse, press reporting, and religious dis-
course; Bhatia and Bhatia’s work on discursive allusions in legislative discourse
(2011); Biria and Mohammadi’s (2012) study of the sociopragmatic functions of
inaugural speeches; and Mulderrig’s (2012) corpus-based analysis of deixis in edu-
cation policy.
Capone and Mey note that the contributions to their edited volume on pragmat-
ics, culture, and society indicate a “current and indeed resurgent interest in issues
298 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

connecting language and culture in a societal context” (2014: 9). We will now draw
on a few studies from that book in order to illustrate current topics in pragmatics and
to show how other CDA/CDS studies combine analysis of this topic with CDA/CDS
aims of social change. Norrick (2014) provides a clear description of the discourse
(or pragmatic) ‘markers’ well and but, a short overview of their special functions
particularly in oral narratives, and also suggests that more research needs to be done
on the local determination of discourse marker functions in different genres and in
linguistic communities. Fielder’s work (2015a, 2015b) exemplifies this kind of
scholarly research on the functions of discourse markers (that incorporates a CDA/
CDS perspective). In (Fielder, 2015a) she studies the use and local determination of
the functions of discourse markers in conversation and their relation to power and
history in Bulgaria, making the case that systematic variations of discourse markers/
connectives such as ami and ama (Bulgarian discourse markers meaning “well” and
“but”) can be used as social identity markers. By incorporating perspectives from
pragmatics as well as SocSem, CogLing, and sociolinguistics, she shows how ami
is used to index “a distal relationship between the speaker and the addressee, while
ama indexes a proximal one, and depending upon the context can reflect (in)formal-
ity, register, power, politeness and face” (2015a: 215). In 2015b, Fielder takes this
further, incorporating DHA into the analysis of ami and ama to demonstrate how
the strategic use of these markers can expose ‘linguicism’ (e.g., unfair treatment of
people based on their use of language). Studying how the geolinguistic patterning
of ama and especially ami reveals historical and contemporary socio-political power
relations, she explains how ami indexes the urban speaker from Sofia, how in these
contexts the meaning of ami is often erased and translated better as “well” rather
than “but”, and how youth in this area use it to perform identity and position them-
selves as more “Western” (2015b: 216). In addition, the study shows the influence
of Macedonian, particularly Aegean Macedonian, on the disruption of the homog-
enous center of the Bulgarian standard language.
The study of indirect reports (as a societal practice) is another important area in
pragmatics. Capone defines indirect reports as situated speech acts (or ‘language
games’) in which “the purpose, the participants and the societal rules play major
roles in the interpretation” (2010: 379). In addition, indirect reports tell us about
what people said and “require a reporter, a piece of language behaviour to report,
and a situation that motivates the reporting and ends up constraining the form of the
report” (2010: 379). Capone (see 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014a, 2014b; Capone &
Nodoushan, 2014) has done a large body of work in this area, showing the underly-
ing principles that govern indirect reports as well as their functions in society. In
(Capone, 2016), he extends this work to the interpretation of laws, equating that
interpretation with indirect reports by showing that when one interprets the law, one
is making a statement about what the lawmakers said (in a statute or constitution for
example), and this is done for the purpose of informing people involved in a judi-
ciary proceeding. There are some examples of CDA/CDS work that can be related
to Capone’s attention to indirect reports and the law (e.g., Catalano & Waugh,
2013b; Catalano & Gatti, 2016). This is because manipulation of people and
6.9  CDA/CDS and Pragmatics 299

­ aintenance of resistance to power often involve the recontextualizing of discourse

m
as it is reported in the media, and much of that appears in the form of indirect reports
or rephrasings of what people have said for ideological purposes. Catalano and
Waugh (2013b) show how media discourse reporting crimes related to the 2008
financial crisis by enterprises such as the Federal National Mortgage Association
(aka Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (aka Freddie
Mac) indirectly interpreted information about lawsuits against these organizations
in a way that presented a more positive picture of them and what they did. Focusing
on metonymy, they show how the reporters used nicknames such as “Fannie” and
“Freddie” to represent the companies in a more intimate and friendly manner, and
used words such as misrepresented instead of lied, as well as nominalizations such
as “exposure to subprime loans” (instead of buy or sell) to hide their heinous actions
of buying limited-income verification loans (2013b: 414). Since journalists have
many choices when making changes in the wording of the lawsuit in their reports,
Catalano and Waugh (2013b) considered why these particular recontextualisation
choices were made and pointed out the effects of those choices.
Another important area of pragmatics research is the study of ‘argumentation
strategies’ (which in other traditions are part of rhetoric or communication studies),
which have to do with the situated use of ‘argumentation’ broadly defined in dis-
course. As said earlier, Wodak has published a large body of studies that incorpo-
rates concepts related to argumentation strategies. We want to point out here that her
recent book The Politics of Fear (2015), which is meant to be more accessible to the
public, is an excellent example of work she has done that explicitly utilizes prag-
matics—theories, concepts and terminology (see also Sect. 4.5). Wodak specifically
talks not only about pragmatic ‘devices’ such as insinuations, implicatures, infer-
ences and presuppositions (mentioned above) and their connection to DHA but she
also discusses in detail argumentation schemes and topos/topoi ‘strategies of argu-
mentation’ (2015: 51). Among other definitions she refers (Wodak, 2015: 51) to
Rubinelli (2009: 265), who notes that these strategies can be used for gaining the
upper hand and producing successful speeches (see our discussion in Sect. 4.5 for
more on topos/topoi). Throughout the book, Wodak (2015) uses vignettes when giv-
ing examples of the different strategies of right-wing populism. In Chap. 3, she
discusses an excerpt from Geert Wilder’s (Dutch Freedom Party) speech given in
Rome in which he defines immigration as the “most dangerous threat against the
West” (2015: 55–56). She then analyzes the vignettes, pointing out the topoi (e.g.,
definition, threat, comparison), logical connections (‘if-then’ conditionals), logical
fallacies (e.g., post hoc ergo proper hoc), places where he rewrites history in service
of the comparisons he wants to make (the fall of Rome to the ‘barbarians’ and
Europe being invaded by immigrants who are ‘others’), etc. There are many more
examples of this sort throughout the book.
At the end of the third chapter, Wodak summarizes what she calls the “micro-­
politics of fear” (2015: 66–68); referencing Billig (2006), she lists factors that need
to be considered when analyzing discriminatory and exclusionary rhetoric, such as
that of post-war Europe. She then gives specific phenomena related to right-wing
populist rhetoric that she found, along with discursive strategies such as ‘us’ vs.
300 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

‘them’ divisions, ‘insiders’ vs. ‘outsiders’, the ‘straw man’ fallacy, etc. Also highly
relevant and interesting is what she calls the “right-wing populist perpetuum mobile”
(2015: 19, see also Sect. 4.5), a model that describes the dynamic in which populist
parties are able to set the agenda and distract the media (and the public) from impor-
tant news, and thus gain attention and popularity. While Wodak uses an example by
the Austrian Freedom Party41 (discussed in 4.5), we will use Donald Trump to illus-
trate this “perpetuum mobile”, as it easily applies to the context of the 2016
American presidential campaign (and his presidency since then) and to populism.
First, a scandal is intentionally provoked by the politician or his/her party by violat-
ing publicly accepted norms; there are many different examples, but we refer to a
website that has 16 offensive comments about women said by Trump during the
campaign (Pearson, 2016). Then, evidence of sexism is produced by the opposition,
in this case, an (infamous) Access Hollywood YouTube video42. It is immediately
denied (e.g. the comments were called “locker room talk”, used by men with each
other and inconsequential). Then, the scandal is redefined and equated with entirely
different phenomena; and the politician claims victimhood (see Diamond & Diaz,
2016). The accusation is then turned into claims of a conspiracy, and quickly, a new
scandal is launched (e.g. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails and accusa-
tions of sexual misconduct by her husband, ex-President Bill Clinton, are brought to
debate), followed by a quasi-apology43. And so on, without an obvious end. The
Politics of Fear (Wodak, 2015) is a great example of how pragmatics can be har-
nessed for CDA/CDS aims, and how, in particular, argumentative strategies can be
made apparent so that their fallacies can be called out. We believe that, given recent
political events, work such as this, which is deeply rooted in well-researched prag-
matics theory that makes clear the strategies of many different public figures, is
needed now more than ever. Another example of a scholarly publication rooted in
pragmatics that utilizes CDA/CDS to de-construct Trump’s discursive strategies is
Capone and Bucca (2018), which examines presuppositions in relation to Donald
Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey. According to Jacob Mey
pragmatics can have an emancipatory function and the heightened awareness of the social-­
linguistic problematic that is the focus of pragmatics will help us to better devise our
language-­related and other educational activities, in order to improve our interaction with
the world and our fellow human beings […] (2014: 39).

Machin and Ledin (2016; see also Ledin & Machin, 2016) provide an excellent
analysis that draws on pragmatic concepts but also connects to the larger idea of

41
 One can’t help wondering if someone in Austria read Wodak’s book before their December, 2016
election in which the right-wing candidate Norbert Hofer lost. One also can’t help wishing that
more people had read this book and particularly the “right-wing perpetuum mobile” before the US
elections that same November, and perhaps even before England’s Brexit vote earlier. We discuss
in Sect. 7.2 how the book has been taken seriously in the public arena.
42
 Those not familiar with this video can view it here: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=NcZcTnykYbw; in essence, it provides footage of Donald Trump in which he talks in a
vulgar way about his access to women via his stardom.
43
 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TJez78b5x0.
6.10  CDA/CDS and Ecolinguistics 301

improving interaction in the world by better understanding its shaping forces, e.g.,
neoliberalism. Examining steering meetings and official documents, they show how
administrators present vision statements that are first shown as strategies and then
as concrete activities related to bundles of performance indicators. They then illus-
trate how the documents recontextualize the practices of teaching and research to
align with marketized goals. The resulting documents lack clear agency, causality
and process. Ledin and Machin (2016) take a multimodal (critical) approach
(MCDA see Sect. 4.6) to the same topic, this time showing how neoliberal ideolo-
gies are visually communicated through design (e.g., Power Points and the use of
bullets) and how they enter into and control all areas of work life.
The above examples illustrate how pragmatics and CDS naturally intertwine in
numerous ways. Additionally, we have shown the way in which pragmatics can
greatly enhance the systematic analysis of CDA/CDS scholars, by providing well-­
researched principles, theories and concepts that can help them explain their data so
that they can raise awareness and move toward social change.

6.10  CDA/CDS and Ecolinguistics

We now turn to a final area in which CDA/CDS’s influence is present: Ecolinguistics44.

In our opinion, ecolinguistics is a prime example of the importance of being inter-
disciplinary because the world and all the living animals and plants on it are all
interconnected, and thus the work on issues relating to this is by definition interdis-
ciplinary; and ecology, for example, is a well-recognized interdisciplinary area. At
the same time, scholars in CDA/CDS should be eager to recognize contributions
from climate scientists working in—or alongside—CDA/CDS, especially since
they address an issue that is relevant to all of us.
In essence, ecolinguistics consists of questioning the stories that underpin our current
unsustainable civilization, exposing those stories that are clearly not working, that are leading
to ecological destruction and social injustice and finding new stories that work better in the
conditions of the world that we face. (Stibbe, 2014a: 117).

Ecolinguistics uses “techniques of linguistic analysis” to reveal these ‘stories’,

“opening them up to question and challenge from an ecological perspective” (Stibbe,
2015: 9). According to Stibbe (2014b), ecolinguistics is a sub-discipline of CDA/
CDS which focuses on the relationship of humans with other species and the physi-
cal environment, an area which (until its establishment) had been largely “erased”
or overlooked in CDA/CDS scholarship (Stibbe, 2014b: 584), and which is part of
a larger paradigm shift in the humanities and social sciences (many of which are not
associated with CDA/CDS). For some linguists, ecolinguistics can help the disci-
pline of linguistics understand better how language works; and for those coming

44
 We chose to discuss ecolinguistics in part because we feel that the environment should be a prior-
ity on all of our agendas—if there is no life on this planet and/or no planet to live on, all of our
other concerns become irrelevant. Nothing else will matter.
302 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

from a ‘language ecology’ perspective (e.g. Bastardas-Boada, 2003, 2005), ecolin-

guistics is viewed as a way to help us understand how languages relate to each other
and the places where they are spoken. However, studies in this area that relate most
to CDA/CDS are those that “apply an ecolinguistic perspective to practical issues of
pressing importance in the twenty-first century such as environmental justice, water
scarcity, energy security, and in general, the gradual destruction of the ecological
systems that support life” (Stibbe, 2014b: 584). There is an obvious connection
between this work and CDA/CDS (made above all in Stibbe’s work), since oppressed
groups are usually those that are “hit first and hardest” when ecological systems fail
(2014b: 584) and thus are subject to ecological destruction and oppression that
threatens their livelihood, their way of life, and life itself. According to Stibbe
(2014b: 584), it seems odd that we need the name “ecolinguistics” at all, given that
the field of linguistics should recognize that human societies are embedded in larger
natural systems. However, because this fact has been largely overlooked in “main-
stream linguistics”, the term exists as part of a movement to remind linguists of the
connection between the two.
Ecolinguistic studies focus on discourses of environmentalism and scientific
ecology, seeking to expose hidden messages that work against “the goals of the
institutions or disciplines which employ them” (e.g. Alexander, 2010; Harré et al.,
1999; Stibbe, 2005 as cited in Stibbe, 2014b: 585). Their main concern is the impact
that these discourses can have on the systems that support life. This means that eco-
linguistic studies also include analysis of consumerism, advertising and economic
growth which have an impact on the environment (e.g. Halliday, 2001; Hogben,
2008; Slater, 2007). In addition to these types of studies, some ecolinguistic scholar-
ship maintains a generative purpose in which they seek to find ways to talk and think
about the world by looking at discourses cross-culturally or by creating new ones
(e.g. Bringhurst, 2006; Martin, 2006; Stibbe, 2012). Some general characteristics of
an ecolinguistic approach to CDA/CDS (adapted from Stibbe, 2014a: 118) are:
(a) It focuses on discourses that (potentially) have a significant impact not only on
how people treat other people but also how they treat the larger ecological sys-
tems that life depends on.
(b) It analyzes discourse by showing how clusters of linguistic features come
together to form particular worldviews or ‘cultural codes’, “a compact package
of shared values, norms, ethos and social beliefs … [which] constructs and
reflects the community’s ‘common sense’” (Gavriely-Nuri, 2012: 80; see Sect.
6.6). An example is the pervasive code that sees unlimited economic growth as
both a possible and a desirable goal for human societies.
(c) It is based on an ecological philosophy, or “ecosophy” perspective (discussed
below), which is informed by both a scientific understanding of how organisms
(including humans) depend on interactions with other organisms and a physical
environment to survive and flourish in, and also an ethical framework that helps
us decide why survival and flourishing matters and whose survival and flourish-
ing matters.
(d) It aims to expose and draw attention to discourses which appear to be ecologi-
cally destructive (i.e., which work against the principles of the ecosophy), or
alternatively seek out and promote discourses which could potentially help pro-
6.10  CDA/CDS and Ecolinguistics 303

tect and preserve the conditions that support life (i.e., which are aligned with the
values of the ecosophy).
(e) It aims towards practical application through raising awareness of the role of
language in ecological destruction or protection, informing policy and educational
development, or providing ideas that can be drawn on in redesigning existing
texts or producing new texts in the future.
Ecolinguistics connects with CDA/CDS by “exposing how common-sense
assumptions within transnational capitalism play a role in destroying the ecological
systems that oppressed communities depend on for their wellbeing and survival”
(Stibbe, 2014a: 118) and by providing evidence and resources for social movements
from these communities that can be used to work toward social change. Ecolinguistics
also stands up for those that do not, or can never, have a voice: indigenous commu-
nities, oppressed or poverty-stricken peoples, rural and farming communities, etc.,
as well as animals, birds, plants, rivers, forests, etc. This aligns with CDA/CDS
goals of taking the perspective of “those who suffer most from dominance and
inequality” (van Dijk, 1993: 252). Because daily practices/policies can affect the
environment now and in future generations, ecolinguists not only focus on raising
consciousness about how these policies affect oppressed peoples, they also aim to
raise awareness of the impact of ecologically destructive societies on others, “both
human and non-human, close or distant, and present and future generations” (Stibbe,
2014a: 120). We note that now, some six years after this was published, it is even
more relevant and important. Stibbe also connects ecolinguistics to CCDS (see Sect.
6.6) and the framework of a “culture of peace” (Gavriely-Nuri, 2012: 83), although
he believes that CCDS should be considering the ecological embedding and impact
of cultures because “peace in a society that exceeds environmental limits will be
short lived” (Stibbe, 2014a: 120).
Ecolinguistics draws on a number of philosophical and theoretical frameworks
that all consider both ecological and social dimensions. Naess (1996) uses the term
“ecosophy” (mentioned above), to refer to frameworks in ecolinguistics that include
a philosophy of ecological harmony. These “ecosophies” can range from “anthropo-
centric to ecocentric, optimistic to pessimistic, neoliberal to either socialist, localist
or anarchist” (Stibbe, 2014a: 121); they recommend all manner of ways of seeing
the problem and moving to solutions which need to be viewed critically, e.g., sus-
tainable development philosophies which center on combining economic growth
and environmental protection (e.g. Baker, 2005), although this is done in ways that
“provide little challenge to existing social structures” (Stibbe, 2014a: 121). Indeed,
Stibbe (2014a) notes that ecolinguists must choose among various philosophies
mainly by ruling out those that would be scientifically impossible or implausible,
and then building their own out of the ones that are plausible. Ecolinguistic studies
show how linguistic features work together to present a particular worldview, which
is then judged against the analyst’s ‘ecosophy’. Once the discourse can be declared
as ecologically destructive, the analyst works to resist these discourses. Hence, the
aim of ecolinguistics is not only to provide evidence of the damaging effects of
discourse but also to make resources available to resist it.
304 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

One of the seminal books in this area that makes explicit connections to CDA/CDS
is Alexander’s (2010) Framing discourse on the environment: A critical discourse
approach, in which critical analysis of discourse about the environment is related in
different ways to ecology. With the aid of CorpLing, he shows how environmental
discourse is constructed and how “greenwashing” strategies can be detected and
resisted (Caimotto, 2011: 227), where the term ‘greenwashing’ refers to disinforma-
tion that is disseminated by an organization in order to present it as environmentally
responsible. The book’s clear and detailed explanations of methodology make it an
important reference for CDA/CDS scholars interested in environmental issues, or for
environmental scholars from various fields interested in conducting their own CDA/
CDS of texts in their field, as well as those who want to learn how to resist ‘green-
washing’ strategies and improve communication about environmental issues.
Finally, Stibbe, who has been a key scholar in the connection of CDS/CDS to
ecolinguistics, shows in his recent book on “the stories we live by” (2015) the value
of linguistic analysis in revealing prevailing narratives and questioning them. The
book unites recent studies in ecolinguistics with new theoretical insights and practi-
cal analyses, solidifying the role of ecolinguistics in CDA/CDS and critical inquiry
in general. He provides a framework for understanding ecolinguistic theory and its
application to real life, explores diverse topics, from consumerism in lifestyle maga-
zines to Japanese nature haiku in a wide range of texts (e.g. newspapers, magazines,
films, image) and includes an extensive glossary of terminology used in the book. In
addition, his papers (2014a, 2014b) provide a good introduction to the field as well
as explanations of its connection to CDA/CDS. Stibbe also deals with advertising
and the environment noting that, “awareness of the manipulative effects of advertis-
ing discourse could help people resist it through reducing their exposure to advertis-
ing and being more critical” about whether the products advertised are necessary.
CDA/CDS work in this area also questions whether the products actually lead to the
benefits promoted in the advertisement or amount to ecologically destructive dis-
course (because they promote things that harm the environment) (Stibbe, 2014a:
123). According to Stibbe, studies in ecolinguistics are most effective when they are
aimed at people who (re)produce the discourse in question. Other articles that pro-
vide an overview of ecolinguistics include Fill (2001) (which also traces back to
work by important scholars in the development of ecolinguistics), and Derni (2008),
which shows how linguistic forms are produced “in a three dimensional relationship
of social praxis that links linguistic behaviour to ideological, sociological, and bio-
logical dimensions” (2008: 21) and explains how the ecolinguistic approach has
developed to include features from geography, economics, and politics to explain
linguistic findings.
A few examples of some specific ecolinguistic studies that appear in CDA/CDS
journals or books include McElhinny (2006), which examines the way that space
has been discursively produced in debates about a glacial landscape in southern
Ontario, Bevitori (2014), which explores what the values, assumptions and beliefs
about climate change are and how they have been construed in British newspaper
editorial coverage (2014: 604), and Cook (2015) which explores how the centrality
of animals in human life has been marginalized and erased by the humanities and
6.10  CDA/CDS and Ecolinguistics 305

the ‘human sciences’. Some other scholarly works worth mentioning include Carson
(2002) and Shiva (2009, 2016a, 2016b), in which both authors take a ‘generative’
angle, showing how scientific knowledge can be expressed in a way that does not
devalue other species and the way in which language can be used to reassert the
traditional metaphors of local cultures—and how these both could be helpful in
reshaping environmental discourse. Additionally, Cagliari (2016) uses CDA/CDS to
analyze the emergence and evolution of the negotiating positions on loss and dam-
age related to climate change in developing and developed countries.
In summary, ecolinguistics seeks to reveal the ecologically destructive ways that
our everyday language constructs daily life and this issue. It also provides tools to
resist this rhetoric, and highlights ways to address how discourses shape vital rela-
tionships “between humans, other species and the physical environment in many
different ways” (Stibbe, 2014a: 126). Ecolinguistics has much to offer CDA/CDS,
such as expanding the range of issues to study, providing philosophical frameworks
for judging discourses that attend to ecological aspects, and developing new theo-
ries that help us understand how discourse works based on the new data from this
approach. Stibbe (2014a) cautions that this new and emerging area is quite divided,
given the broad range of philosophical roots and preoccupations. However, his hope
is that the different approaches and sub-disciplines (e.g. ecofeminism, ecopsychol-
ogy, ecocriticism) will eventually merge and no longer be necessary because critical
studies of all kinds will finally begin to consider the ecological embedding of human
societies.
We want to point out as an addendum to this discussion that there is some prom-
ising work on ‘climate change’ (aka ‘global warming’) by CDA/CDS scholars,
notably Reisigl and Wodak, who in their contributions to the Wodak and Meyer
‘methods books’ (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009, 2016; see also Reisigl, 2014; Wodak,
2011, 2014, 2015; Sedlaczek, 2016) analyze two very different ‘discourse frag-
ments’ about the issue of climate change. They use several facets of the DHA pro-
gram, including in particular a comprehensive analysis of ‘argumentation’
(categories, strategies, schemes and structures, etc.) with special focus on content-­
related topoi and fallacies (see Reisigl and Wodak, 2009: 96–120, 2016: 34–61).
While it is not surprising that there should be someone in CDA/CDS interested in
doing serious analysis of the discourses around climate change—nor that it should
be done using DHA—we want to point out the fact that it seems that neither the
CDA/CDS-DHA side nor the ecolinguistics one knows about the interest in, or
work by the others on, this pressing topic. This is of course one of the potential
problems of interdisciplinary analysis, that it should not be well-informed about
work of interest to it. And it certainly is a warning that all of us should exercise ‘all
due diligence’ to know about relevant work, when trying to make connections to
others in different areas, different research traditions, different linguistic/cultural/
geographic conditions, with whom we could make ‘common cause’. And while we
hope that this chapter has shown the breadth of the interdisciplinary connections,
we hope also that the various ones discussed here will inspire the development of
others or at least for them to be more visible.
306 6  CDA/CDS and Its Interdisciplinary Connections

It is fitting that ecolinguistics (and CDA/CDS work on climate change/global

warming) is the last section of this chapter, because its vast concerns about the
future of the planet, human societies and communities, and human life in general,
are a natural bridge to our next chapter, which will explore the actual impact of
CDA/CDS on society, as well as ways in which CDA/CDS scholars and students
have taken what they have learned from areas such as those presented in Chaps. 4
and 5 and this chapter, and attempt to make a difference, create social and political
change, and work for social justice in the world.

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Chapter 7
What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing
to Make a Difference in the World

Critical Discourse Analysis is essentially political in intent with

its practitioners acting upon the world in order to transform it
and thereby help create a world where people are not
discriminated against because of sex, colour, creed, age or
social class.
(Caldas-Coulthard & Coulthard, 1996: xi)

7.1  Introduction

The idea for this chapter stems from an email conversation Theresa Catalano had
with Teun van Dijk in 2009. At the time, she was writing her Ph.D. exams and co-
author Linda Waugh (who at that time was a member of her doctoral committee),
suggested that she review what CDA/CDS researchers have accomplished, i.e.,
what they have done to make a difference in the world. Since Theresa could not find
anything written about this, she decided to email van Dijk about this question, and
he responded by saying, in essence, that the answer was not clear, since it was dif-
ficult to prove that CDA/CDS had a role in positive changes that have happened.
However, he also pointed to some work that he had done to persuade journalism
departments to include courses on the role of the media in (re)producing racism and
generously shared with her an article he had written that researched how many jour-
nalism departments had such courses (see van Dijk, 2011). This answer was helpful,
but left her unsatisfied: she thought that there should be a source that documents
some ways in which the field has been a positive force on society. This chapter seeks
to provide the beginning of a remedy for this problem.
Since the positive vote for Brexit (the withdrawal of the UK from the European
Union), the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in 2016 (and
the rise of other right-wing populists worldwide, see Wodak, 2015, The Politics of
Fear), the global pandemic and worldwide social movement against racism, there has
never seemed to be a more urgent time in recent history than now to focus on the
significance of CDA/CDS in the world besides its presence in academic journals,

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 325

T. Catalano, L. R. Waugh, Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse
Studies and Beyond, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 26,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49379-0_7
326 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

books, and conferences. In addition, what better way to show how all of the theories,
approaches, and disciplines that we have outlined in this book actually matter, i.e.,
lead to action, by scholars based on the convictions they express in the academic
arena? Hence, this chapter describes what scholars are doing outside of academia to
make a difference (information that is not published to our knowledge in any other
venue of this sort), and concludes by suggesting future directions for CDA/CDS
related organizations and scholars. As readers learn about these scholars and the mul-
titude of things they are doing out in the world (and in their classrooms) that reflect
or are influenced by CDA/CDS research, they should keep in mind that most contrib-
uted these descriptions between March 2017 and August 2018, while this book was
still in progress, and therefore many of them have probably done much more (and
have changed some things in their bios as well) than is given here since we assume
they have not stopped their work or the flow of life when the book went to press.
However, we hope that the descriptions below provide a small glimpse of the general
kinds of things they are doing and we encourage you to keep your eye on this talented
and compassionate group in the future and think of doing something yourself!
For this chapter, we enlisted the help of numerous scholars in the field (from
some who are very well-known and highly featured in this book to others who are
just beginning their careers). Through email or Skype (or occasionally in person),
we asked those who agreed to be part of this chapter to answer the following ques-
tion: How have you used your knowledge of CDS to do good in the world (besides
publishing your academic work, which, unfortunately, tends to be read only by
other academics and students)?1 Below, we include their responses to our question
along with a short autobiography (written by them, with a few exceptions). Many of
the descriptions of what they have done (or are doing) are in their own words as sent
to us via email (e.g., Rogers’), or with slight modifications that we made with their
permission (e.g., Machin’s). Others (e.g., Wodak’s, van Dijk’s) were written by us
on the basis of email conversations and dialog with them as well as interviews,
CV’s, websites and publications, and then read, corrected and approved by them.
Readers will note that some of them refer to their work as CDS, others as CDA, due
to reasons we discussed in Chap. 4 (Sect. 4.1) about the issue of what to call the
field. Hence, any inconsistencies in the chapter both in the autobiographies or
descriptions of what they have done result from the fact that they were written by a
variety of CDA/CDS scholars who wanted to highlight different aspects of their
work, and who have various ways of referring to the field.
The order of appearance of scholars in this chapter is to a certain extent chrono-
logical in terms of when we received their responses, divided between early ones
and later ones; but since we received many of the early responses at virtually the
same time, we put them in random order, which means that the order near the end
of the chapter is more indicative of when the descriptions arrived; and, finally, we
put our own descriptions last.

1
 At the time that we posed this question to scholars we had not decided on the CDA/CDS terminol-
ogy so we just used CDS in our question. However, as will be obvious from their answers, many
used CDA and others CDS in their answers.
7.2  Ruth Wodak 327

We do not claim to represent all those doing CDA/CDS, just the ones we know
well and/or the ones we were able to establish contact with, and who were available
and willing to have their responses published. Moreover, we do not attempt to find
patterns or make sweeping statements about tendencies of scholars to do certain
kinds of real work in the world. Rather, this section is more about making public
what people are doing to make a difference, create change, and work for social jus-
tice in the world, so that others can be inspired to do something too. In addition, we
believe that CDA/CDS scholars need to know that others are also trying somehow
to make a difference in the non-academic world.

7.2  Ruth Wodak

In Sects. 3.2, 3.7, 3.8, and 4.5 (see also Sects. 6.4, 6.5, 6.7, and 6.9), we discussed
in detail Ruth Wodak’s academic work on and history with CDA/CDS and in par-
ticular the discourse-historical approach (DHA, see Sect. 4.5) she is well known for.
Below we provide a short biography in which we focus on her academic back-
ground that is pertinent for understanding her non-academic work (for a full version
of her contributions, see her CV on her website).2

7.2.1  Short Biography

Ruth Wodak is Emeritus Distinguished Professor at Lancaster University in the UK,

where she taught from 2004 to 2014, becoming Distinguished Professor and Chair
in Discourse Studies (personal chair). She is affiliated to the University of Vienna,
where she taught from 1975 to 2004, becoming full Professor of Applied Linguistics
and Chair in 1991 (see Sect. 4.5, also Sect. 3.7.2). In 1996 she was awarded the
prestigious Wittgenstein Prize for Elite Researchers (1997–2003) for research on
Discourse, Politics, Identity (see Sect. 3.8.6). As of Feb. 2018, she had published 41
books and Special Issues of journals and 500+ articles and chapters (and she has
continued to publish since then). In recognition of her outstanding accomplish-
ments, she has received many honors, including the Women’s Prize of the City of
Vienna (in 2006), the Grand Decoration of Honour in Silver for Services to the
Republic of Austria (in 2011), and the Lebenswerk Preis (Lifetime Achievement
Award) from the Ministry of Women’s Affairs in Austria (in 2018). At the same
time, she has devoted much of her energy to ‘making the world a better place’, i.e.,
to practical and societal applications of her work—to which we now turn.

 http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/linguistics/about-us/people/ruth-wodak.
2
328 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

7.2.2  Attempting to Make a Difference

This section is based on: discussions the second author had with Ruth Wodak in
person in 2015 and by Skype in 2018 and follow-up discussions by email and in
person; a number of short published interviews in newspapers; a long interview in
2007 with Gavin Kendall; and close reading of some of her academic work where
she discusses the issue of direct social action.
Wodak has said that “it is very important for me not to stay in the ‘ivory tower’—
in Austria, I am perceived somewhat as a ‘public intellectual’” (Wodak in Kendall,
2007), which is due in large part to the fact that she has deliberately written for the
public, is often on a public stage, and has dealt with many themes that have risen to
the consciousness of the public. According to Wodak, “critical discourse analysts do
not stop after having deconstructed textual meanings; practical application of
research results is also aimed at” (2012: 631). Referring to her own research (Wodak,
1996, 2011), where she wrote about her “engaged social critique … nurtured ethi-
cally by a sense of justice” (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001: 34), she said that “critical
analysis itself is a practice that may contribute to social change” (2012: 632). In
addition, she makes a conceptual distinction between three types of critique (e.g., in
Reisigl & Wodak, 2001: 32–35; Sect. 3.8.5), the third of which is “prospective” (or
“retrospective”) critique, which identifies “areas of social concern that can be
addressed by direct social engagement in relation to practitioners and wider audi-
ences” (Wodak, 2012: 633)—through a deeper understanding of the past and the
present as well as deliberate action to influence the future. We can thus understand
her own social engagement as directly tied with her work, and, as we shall see, her
role in the world has widened during her career just as her research has.
One domain that has not changed, but deepened over time, is the direct influence
she has had on the world through her intellectual generosity by including her col-
leagues, younger researchers and her current and former PhD students in her
research projects, in both Vienna and Lancaster—and other places where she has
taught and stayed. In addition, as is obvious from the books, monographs, articles
and chapters listed on her CV, she has consistently co-authored and co-edited a large
number of publications with other scholars, colleagues and former students; and she
has urged them to publish in their areas of interest. In the preface of her recent book
Politics of Fear (2015), she says “I am extremely grateful to my former and current
PhD students: it was and continues to be a great pleasure and challenge to work with
them, to discuss not only their research but also mine; I owe many insights to their
critical, inspiring and knowledgeable questions and comments” (2015: xv). It is not
a surprise, then, that she has co-authored many publications with them. At the same
time she has given many younger and emerging scholars a chance to learn how to
carry out first-rate research, publish highly visible work, and establish their careers.
Early in her career (in the 1970s) and continuing through the 1980s and 1990s,
Wodak was interested in organizational discourse and institutional communication
and also the issue of barriers to successful communication in courts, schools,
bureaucracies, and hospital clinics. And she was dedicated to the application of
7.2  Ruth Wodak 329

results to communication problems. From the 1980s on, she and her ‘Vienna group’,
i.e., her colleagues and students at the University of Vienna, were repeatedly
engaged in elaborating proposals and guidelines for “reducing language barriers in
hospitals, schools, courtrooms, public offices, and media reporting institutions”
(Reisigl & Wodak, 2001: 33, Wodak, 1996). They formulated “guidelines for avoid-
ing sexist language use” for the Federal Ministry for Women’s Affairs (Austria) and
the Ministry of Social Services (Germany) (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001: 33; see Kargl,
Wetschanow, Wodak, & Perle, 1997). They applied their results in “teaching, in
practice-related seminars, within organizations, in giving expert evidence, in the
production of guidelines and in offering expert opinions” (Wodak, 2003: 5). Wodak
provided expert opinions for courts on language use, especially the issue of presup-
positions and hidden meanings in what people say. She was also a consultant on
intercultural communication, text comprehension, and text production for the
Austrian Diplomatic Academy and the comprehensibility of legal texts for the
Vorarlberg Regional Ministry. In addition, she participated in panel discussions,
gave lectures in non-academic venues about the results of her research and was
interviewed many times by newspapers and also on TV, a practice that continued
and accelerated with new research directions.
In the 1980s and 1990s her research turned more to political issues, and she posi-
tioned herself “explicitly with [her] research on anti-Semitism and racism, as well
as on right-wing populist rhetoric” (Wodak in Kendall, 2007: 4; Sects. 3.8.4–3.8.7).
In connection with this academic work, Wodak also wrote pieces for the general
public about political language, antisemitic, anti-Muslim, racist and sexist language
use by many public figures, including, e.g., journalists and politicians as well as in
political posters (e.g., of the FPÖ, the extreme right Austrian Freedom party)
(Wodak, 2011). And she has given advice to NGO’s about refugees, including the
problems of intercultural communication, the trauma associated with being a refu-
gee, and issues concerning the xenophobic atmosphere of Austria.
In line with her deep interest in inter- and multidisciplinary work and her belief
that the type of advocacy she was doing could only be accomplished successfully in
cooperation with others, she helped to establish, with Teun van Dijk and several
other international colleagues (see Sect. 3.7.1): the CRITICS group (Centers for
Research Into Text, Information and Communication in Society), which sponsors
the CRITICS-L listserv that disseminates information about activities related to its
interests; and the International Association for the Study of Racism (IASR), which
draws together researchers from various disciplines and studies racism in various
forms, including racism in the media; it has a continuing relationship in Austria with
two NGOs for which she is a consultant: the largest Austrian anti-racism and anti-­
discrimination NGO, ZARA, which is involved in civil courage and anti-racism
work, and SOS Mitmensch, which is involved in anti-fascist campaigning and in
issues concerning integration of refugees. In addition, from 1999 to 2002, she was
co-director of the Austrian National Focal point (NFP, which was one of her projects
for the Wittgenstein Center discussed above in Sect. 3.8.6), later renamed the
European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) of the European Monitoring
Centre for Racism, Xenophobia and Antisemitism.
330 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

More recently, she has acted on the last sentence of her 2001 book with Martin
Reisigl: “we will, obviously, keep an eye on the future political developments”
(p. 271), and has written a series of books about politics, migration, identity and
belonging, fascism, and right-wing populism, including her highly acclaimed book,
The Politics of Fear (2015; see 3.8.7). This book provides snapshots of the political
situation in many countries of Europe, the UK and the US and has thrust her even
more than before into the public sphere. It was very timely (and she has announced
the preparation of a second edition, since it was indeed prophetic about the years
between 2015 and now) and, most importantly of all, it is deliberately accessible to
the public. As Wodak says in the preface, it “primarily addresses readers outside of
academia pure—this is why I have made a point of employing a more popular, com-
prehensible style of writing” (2015: xii), so that it would garner attention not only
from academics but also from journalists and other members of the public.
However, as Wodak said in her interview with Kendall (2007), “there are risks
involved; taking a stance and writing in other nonacademic genres (newspapers) can
make a scholar more vulnerable—this happened to me in Vienna, 2002/2003, and
basically also led to the closure of my research centre in 2003” (see Sects. 3.7.2 and
3.8.6). However, this did not keep her from continuing to take a public stance and
being involved in issues of laws about non-discriminatory language, in order to
raise awareness and make changes. Specifically, she helped the Jewish Community
and its President Ariel Muzicant win a lawsuit against Haider by giving her expert
opinion (see Wodak & Pelinka, 2002). She has also published opinion pieces and
made postings on Creative Commons, europpblog, opendemocracy.net, and the
conversation.com, about the rise of the far-right, populism and the threat to democ-
racy. She has also been writing letters to the editor, op-ed pieces and commentaries
for many newspapers. She has frequently been invited to various events (e.g., the
Opening of the Linz Music Festival in 2013) to give lectures to the general public
on politics, the media, etc. She was a keynote speaker for, and toasted the 15th anni-
versary of, ZARA in November 2014 at the Concordia Press Club in Vienna. She
gave a report in January 2018  in the Austrian Parliament on ARENA (an annual
report, a survey of intellectuals, journalists, and scholars, about the ‘future’ of
Western democracies); she was asked to lecture about far-right populist discourse/
politics to the European Commission in 2018 and to European Trade Unions and the
European Parliament in 2019, in preparation for the European Parliament elections
in 2019.
Over the years, Wodak has participated in many interviews which were meant for
the general public and were published in a variety of different newspapers, news
magazines and other media outlets (such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Die
Zeit, Huffington Post, Euronews, Le Monde, and many Austrian newspapers and
magazines). While earlier they typically centered on political language, antisemi-
tism, racism, sexism and gender issues, later they turned to the political issues of the
rise of the radical right and populism, and then to her 2015 book. She has also par-
ticipated in several debates on TV, e.g., (October 2016) about Trump as candidate
for the US presidency and (November 2016) about the Austrian presidential elec-
tion. And while the current book was in preparation (and after our 2018 cut-off
7.3  Teun A. van Dijk 331

date), she has added many more contributions to this list of publications, reports,
and activities having to do with current political issues.

7.3  Teun A. van Dijk

In Sects. 3.1, 3.2, 3.6, 3.7, and 4.4, we discussed in detail Teun van Dijk’s academic
work on and history with DA/DS, CDA/CDS, as well as the sociocognitive approach
(SCA) he is well known for; below we provide a short biography where we focus on
his academic background that is pertinent for understanding his non-academic work.

7.3.1  Short Biography

Teun A. van Dijk was Professor of Discourse Studies (personal chair) at the
University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, until 2004, and is at present Professor at
the Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain. He was a major figure in DA and
later DS; he was the organizer of the symposium in Amsterdam in 1991 that started
CDA; and he has both originated and participated in many CDA and CDS projects
since then, including the introduction of the term CDS. He has a triangular approach
to his work, consisting of discourse, cognition and society, which underpins his
sociocognitive approach to CDS. He has edited many books about DA/DS/CDA/
CDS, has founded and edited many journals, among which are some that have pub-
lished very important work in CDA/CDS (see Sects. 3.2 and 3.6). His own work
centers on racism (see Sects. 3.6.3–3.6.6 and his website).

7.3.2  Practical and Social Applications of van Dijk’s Work

Before presenting van Dijk’s summary of his contributions outside academia, we

would like to say that a direct influence he has had on the world (that he does not
mention) has been through his intellectual generosity—for instance, by responding
to doctoral students at other universities and sharing his work with them, by mentor-
ing emerging scholars in the field, and by the way he has been instrumental in advo-
cating for (and helping to establish) academic publications on CDA/CDS in
languages other than English, such as his work as co-founder and editor of the
online journal Discurso y Sociedad (2005). Furthermore, dating back to his “Call to
the Readers” in Racism and the Press (1991) and Elite Racism (1993) (mentioned
in Sect. 3.6.5) he has always invited students and CDA/CDS scholars and some-
times members of the general public to give him feedback, and to share their work
with each other and with him (including comments/critique/suggestions), since
work on discourse and racism is “overwhelming, labor-intensive and daunting”
332 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

(1991: xii). In addition, as we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, he has

worked hard to persuade journalism departments to include courses on the role of
the media in (re)producing racism (van Dijk, 2011) and met with journalists about
their coverage of minorities and immigrants (see below).
Below, van Dijk outlines in his own words the practical and societal applications
of his work in the field of critical assessment of racism and racist discourse, since
the early 1980s and the repercussions his work led to (for his academic publications
on racism and discourse)3.
1. Antiracist Criticism of the Media. Participation (in the Netherlands) in meetings with jour-
nalists to improve their coverage of minorities and immigrants, and against racism in the
media. Up to now my criticism of the (Dutch) press has been strenuously resisted by Dutch
journalists, who have a very positive image of themselves as being very progressive. Their
denial of racism is classic.
2. The Rasoel-Komrij Affair. In the wake of the international Salman Rushdie Affair4, in the
early 1990s, a racist, anti-Islam pamphlet was published in the Netherlands (De Ondergang
van Nederland—The Downfall of the Netherlands) by someone writing with the pseudonym
Mohammed Rasoel. Asked by an organization of immigrants to evaluate that pamphlet, I
recognized the contents and style of a famous Dutch writer and poet, also a columnist of the
main Dutch quality newspaper (NRC-Handelsblad), Gerrit Komrij. I reported my suspicion
about the participation of Komrij in this pamphlet to the immigrant organization, but that letter
was leaked to the press and was front page news the next day. What followed was an enor-
mous, national scandal (that I dared to accuse our famous author of racism!!!), despite the fact
that the same writer had published many anti-Muslim columns in his own name. Komrij sued
me for slander, a case that was also repealed, but the judges did not condemn me (because no
one believed me anyway, according to them). Indeed, also my colleagues at the university did
not believe my analysis, and Komrij himself wrote several columns attacking me and insisting
that the University of Amsterdam should fire me. The whole press reported very critically
about my findings, ridiculed me, and delegitimized me nationally. Since I no longer had
access to the press (which was critical for my work on racism and the press in the first place)
I decided 10 years later to write a book on the whole affair, in Dutch, De Rasoel-Komrij affaire
(2003, on my website). However, no publisher dared to publish that book, so I published it
myself, and sent it to all relevant newspapers, news magazines, etc. However, not a single
newspaper or magazine reviewed the book, so that it was not sold at all, and I had to send cop-
ies to all libraries so that it would at least remain publicly available. There is much more to tell
about the whole affair, and all that is in the book. Since the whole story reads like a thriller (a
whodunnit)—with a Pakistani circus artist hired by the author(s) to pretend to have written the
pamphlet, make appearances in disguise, so that he would not be recognized by those also
threatening to kill Rushdie…)—but since the story is very much tied to the Dutch situation, I
never translated or published it internationally. Obviously, the affair completely delegitimized
me in the public eye in Holland, and if I had not had my international prestige as a discourse
analyst, I guess that would have affected me very much. Moreover, in 1999 I had already

3
 See: http://www.discourses.org/projects/racism/.
4
 Rushdie, a British Indian novelist and essayist from a Muslim family of Kashmiri descent, pub-
lished The Satanic Verses in 1988, which caused a major controversy, with violent protests from
Muslims in several countries, death threats against him, and a fatwā by Ayatollah Khomeini calling
for his assassination, because of which he lived under police protection for several years. He has
since been recognized in the UK, France, and US as a major writer, elected to prestigious national
literary organizations, and was knighted in 2007 by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to
literature.
7.4  Andreas Musolff 333

moved to Barcelona, and could hardly care about the reactions to my antiracist work in the
Netherlands. In the meantime, the case remains unsolved, also because the famous writer,
Komrij, died a few years ago. But I know that others were involved in this conspiracy, proba-
bly intended as a practical joke (to see the reactions of the Dutch to a book critical of Islam
written by a Muslim), probably associated with NRc-Handelsblad newspaper, which hap-
pened to have published the first chapter of the book.
3. Expert witness. I acted as expert witness in a court case against Neo-Nazi racist texts.
4. PAREL: antiracist textbook criticism. With some other people in the Netherlands in the
field of education we founded an organization (PAREL) for the antiracist criticism of text-
books. We reviewed textbooks, and our guidelines for such evaluations were published, also
in English.
5. CRITICS. With several international colleagues (such as Ruth Wodak), we founded the
C.R.I.T.I.C.S Foundation: Centers for Research Into Text, Information and Communication
in Society. We planned several activities, but unfortunately the only activity remaining is the
CRITICS-L listserv.
6. IASR. With other international colleagues working on racism (such as Ruth Wodak), we
founded the International Association for the Study of Racism (IASR). Regrettably IASR was
not very active, again also due to lack of financial assistance.
7. SOS-Racismo. In Barcelona, I became a member of the board of an antiracist organization,
SOS-Racism, and gave some talks on racist discourse in some neighborhoods.
8. Racismos: Analisis critico. In Spain, I created the www.racismos.org website to publish
information on racism research in Spain and Latin America. Unfortunately, because of lack of
assistance, the website was not much developed.
9. Interviews. I have given many interviews, in many countries, especially in Latin America,
especially also on racism. I guess some are available on the internet.
10. Anti-Impeachment in Brazil. A few months ago in Rio, I wrote a paper critically examining
the manipulation of the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff by the Globo media. An
earlier (less academic) version of the paper was circulated on the web, with many reactions5.
The lawyers of former President Lula, also mercilessly attacked by the (rightwing) Globo
media, asked me to contribute my findings of that coverage to Lula’s defense.

7.4  Andreas Musolff

7.4.1  Short Biography

Andreas Musolff graduated from Düsseldorf University, worked at a School for

Disabled Children and taught at Universities in Germany, the Netherlands and the
UK. He is currently Professor of Intercultural Communication at the University of
East Anglia in Norwich (UK). His research interests focus on Cultural Metaphor
Studies, Intercultural and Multicultural communication, and Public Discourse
Analysis (i.e., parliament meetings, local political meetings, anything open to the
public, not just media discourse). He has published widely on figurative language
use in the media and in the public sphere in general; his publications include the
monographs Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios (2016),
Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust (2010), Metaphor and Political Discourse

 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1750481317691838.
5
334 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

(2004), and the co-edited volumes Metaphor and Intercultural Communication

(2015, with Fiona MacArthur and Giulio Pagani), Contesting Europe’s Eastern
Rim: Cultural Identities in Public Discourse (2010, with Liliana Šarić, Stefan Manz,
& Ingrid Hudabuinigg) and Metaphor and Discourse (2009, with Jörg Zinken).

7.4.2  Reaching the Public through CDA

When asked our question, Musolff passed on our invitation to Leticia Yulita, since
he knew she was very engaged in community activities (see description below).
However, he mentioned to us his own role in the Norwich City of Interculture (NCI)
community engagement event (sponsored by the University of East Anglia) which
brings together university and community members to celebrate cross-cultural (and
cross-linguistic) diversity and communication. Musolff gave a public talk at this
event entitled “’They have lived in our street for 6 years now and still don’t speak a
work [!] of English’: Scenarios of alleged linguistic underperformance as part of
anti-immigrant discourses”. Together with his Master’s students, he conducted a
survey of public opinion on rights/duties of immigrants to learn English and who
should pay for it (in view of discussions by the UK government about cuts to lan-
guage teaching for immigrants). Although they only received 15 responses at NCI
2016, all were in favor of continued public funding after having listened to argu-
ments prepared by the students. Hence, Musolff and his students brought to the
public their CDA/CDS work which questioned the dominant public narrative on
immigration (that had a large role in the success of Brexit), and they even had a
chance to directly gauge the impact of their presentations on the public. Musolff
also participated in previous NCI events but the honor of starting and coordinating
them lies with his colleagues, as we will discuss below.

7.5  Leticia Yulita

7.5.1  Short Biography

Leticia Yulita, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in Intercultural Communication and

Spanish at the University of East Anglia and Study Abroad Lead with coordination
responsibilities for Spain and Latin America. Her teaching and research interests
include language learning, intercultural citizenship education, identity and critical
pedagogy. Leticia has developed the language and intercultural communication cur-
riculum in the higher education sector in Uzbekistan through a British Council
funded project. She has also been involved in the internationalisation of the Spanish
language curriculum through the implementation of intercultural projects. Her more
recent work has involved delivering professional development sessions for teachers
7.5  Leticia Yulita 335

based on her recent research in the area of human rights education in language
teaching and learning.

7.5.2  Using CDA to Inform Teaching

In answer to our question about making a difference in the world, Leticia reported
the following:
In the Spanish language classes I teach I have become critically conscious over
the years that my students tend to stereotype Hispanics. Being Argentinian myself,
I often feel annoyed by their rigid world-views and frustrated by my inability to
challenge those stereotypes in a convincing and efficient manner. This situation has
led me to seek guidance from CDA to address this issue in my own teaching. I am
aware of van Dijk’s (2000: 34) views that contemporary forms of racism are subtly
enacted in the ways we speak about others using what we regard as ‘normal’, ‘natu-
ral’ and ‘commonsensical’ assumptions, which exclude and marginalise others in a
hegemonic process. Based on his ideas, I decided to implement a pedagogical inter-
vention which examined and challenged my students’ common-sense assumptions
and social myths about Hispanics.
I tried to facilitate situations in the seminar room whereby students learnt to
think, speak and act in a less stereotypically biased way. I approached this task by
raising their awareness that stereotyping may be considered a contemporary form of
racism that may lead to oppression. I explained to the students that ‘oppression’ for
me was any form of social injustice, whereby people are inhibited to exercise their
capacities and to express their needs, thoughts and feelings; with marginalisation,
powerlessness and discrimination being perhaps some of the most dangerous facets
of oppression (Young, 2000). As their teacher, I rejected the idea of participating in
perpetuating or maintaining stereotypical beliefs, for in so doing I felt I would have
been legitimising processes of oppression and this form of knowledge. These ste-
reotypes certainly felt oppressive to me as an Argentinian, as a South American and
as a Hispanic woman.
I knew that the new pedagogy had to be relevant to the students’ Spanish lan-
guage honours degree course, so I chose their personal experiences of being stereo-
typed during their mandatory period of study abroad in Spain or Latin America.
This choice was also relevant to me given my role as Year Abroad Coordinator. Most
of the students in my seminars and lectures came from affluent backgrounds and
were European. I wondered whether it was possible for these students never to have
been ‘oppressed’. I speculated that their experiences during their year abroad, when
they would have been in a ‘stranger’ situation than at any previous time, might have
given them the experience of oppression. With this in mind, I implemented tasks
that focused on the examination of critical incidents based on the students’ percep-
tions of being excluded or marginalised during their period of residence abroad. I
hypothesised that this pedagogical intervention would enable them to speak from
336 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

the margins of their experiences of being the objects of prejudice and bias and hoped
that they would feel the workings of stereotyping.
The results of this curricular intervention were as expected. However, I had paid
little attention to the role of emotion in the realisation of my pedagogical approach.
In fact, the students spoke about their experiences of feeling humiliated, ignored
and discriminated against during their period of study abroad due to stereotyping by
Hispanics. Many students referred to critical incidents in which they felt stigma-
tised, victimised, isolated and marginalised; whilst others had been made to feel
unwelcome, uncomfortable and disliked. The students also narrated their anecdotes
of frustration, invisibility, vulnerability, confusion and fear. The way I dealt with
these emotional responses was by teaching the students a language that enabled
them to intellectualise their emotions. This language was drawn from CDA and
intercultural communication, comprising of notions and concepts that theorised
moments of invisibility, verbal abuse and discrimination. The purpose of this teach-
ing was to help students become more critical and analytical without their judge-
ment being influenced by their emotions.
This pedagogical intervention is an example of how CDA can lead to changes in
the curriculum in pursuit of the values of social justice and social responsibility. In
my particular case, it illustrates how I used my knowledge for social transformation
and action in the real world, which for me was the classroom with my own students.
I regarded this enhanced self-awareness and self-transformation as an improvement
in my life and I wanted my students to have the opportunity to undergo a similar
experience to mine, that of understanding the world in a different way, and thus act-
ing differently.

7.6  David Machin

7.6.1  Short Biography

David Machin is Professor of Media and Communication at Örebro University in

Sweden. He spent much of his career before at Cardiff University, after having
gained a PhD at Durham University, UK in 1994. He has (co-)authored a number of
books, including the following: Global Media Discourse (2007, with Theo van
Leeuwen), Introduction to Multimodal Analysis (2007), Analysing Popular Music
(2010), Language of Crime and Deviance (2012, with Andrea Mayr), How to do
Critical Discourse Analysis: A multimodal introduction (2012, with Andrea Mayr),
Language of war monuments (2013, with Gill Abousnnouga), Visual Journalism
(2015, with Lydia Polzer) and Doing Visual Analysis (2018, with Per Ledin). The
next section is David’s answer to our question in his own words (slightly edited by
the authors, with his permission).
7.6  David Machin 337

7.6.2  F
 ostering the Development of Critical Citizens
and Challenging Injustice

All of Machin’s books and papers emphasize how ideology and politics become
infused into everyday popular entertainment, leisure, domestic life and work. For
example, they encourage us to look critically at the way that mundane and banal
features of culture are loaded with ideas and values which maintain and legitimize
different kinds of power relations. What they also seek to do is to connect critical
linguistic analysis to wider thematic and theoretical issues in media communica-
tions, such as the nature of media production, the kinds of social things we need to
grasp in order to carry out CDA. As Fairclough and others have argued for many
years, linguistic analysis without this sense of context is simply not CDA. Machin
believes that there would be great benefit from showing more directly how this must
be done. So, he (and those he works with) aims to understand and critically analyze
news texts, war monuments, food packaging and management documents, not only
at a textual level but as regards contexts of production and how these relate to wider
social processes and practices.
Several of his books seek to make a contribution to CDA and also to engage with
other scholarly fields as well as with practitioners. Language of Crime and Deviance
(Machin & Mayr, 2012) is written in part to indicate to the field of criminology the
value of deeper critical linguistic and multimodal analysis. The book Visual
Journalism (Machin & Polzer, 2015) is aimed at practitioners; it is on the one hand
a kind of design guide, and on the other hand, throughout the book, critical ideas
about news, sourcing, and ideology are presented. This was a follow up to the book
News Production: Theory and Practice (2006, later version in 2014 and co-authored
with Sarah Niblock) which also aimed to be in part a training book for journalists,
but at the same time it introduces trainees to critical ideas and teaches them to be
aware of the deeply ideological nature of news. Over the past few decades Machin
has been involved in training journalists; and, recently, he was the head of a digital
reporting master’s program called Journalism Connected. And it is this kind of
engagement with students, sending them out into the work place, not only equipped
with professional skills but also critically aware of social inequalities and how they
can be maintained and legitimised through news media, which he feels is the most
valuable part of his work. In the present socio-political environment academics are
under pressure to demonstrate ‘impact’. But this typically means easily tangible
terms, such as designing a new form of learning app. However, he fears this can
make us forget our role in fostering the kind of citizens who are themselves critical
of such pragmatism. Many years ago when Machin began to teach, he felt that his
students relished developing this critical stance, since it had been recently replaced
by economic interests. But at the same time, the challenge remains to find ways to
foster critical perspectives. He has also published many academic papers dealing
with topics such as the representation of women’s agency in the media, representa-
tion of war and conflict, and the changing nature of news and communication in
institutional documents. All of these explore how we can look at the details of
338 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

d­ ifferent forms of communication, such as video games, magazines, TV, monu-

ments, data representations, in order to know how they seek to steer ideas and prac-
tices in the name of the dominant interests in society.
A number of Machin’s books and articles have gained attention beyond the
scholarly community. For example, his articles and a book on war monuments
(Abousnnouga & Machin, 2013) showing how there was a deliberate attempt by the
ruling classes to diffuse dissent and anti-war feelings led to a BBC radio documen-
tary which was aired several times in 2016 around the commemoration of WW1.
Several papers on the changing nature of news reporting, specifically the decline in
the number of sources used in a news industry under huge financial pressures, were
used as evidence in the British House of Lords for a debate on the nature of news
and its role in democracy. His critical work on Getty Images resulted in several of
the management team turning up at a public talk on Getty Images he gave in London.
Over the past few years a number of his papers on changing management practices
and techniques and how they background professional expertise as part of steering
systems based on goals and measures (Ledin & Machin, 2015) were reported in the
national press in Sweden. However, while there was a conscious effort to publicize
this work, much of the other publicity was done by chance. And in fact, many aca-
demics have heavy and stressful workloads, often with constant appraisals, the
demand for constant outputs, a drive to obtain ever scarce external funding and to
produce ‘satisfied students’. So, how at the same time can we engage in civic activi-
ties? But this does not mean that our work, as researchers and just as crucially as
teachers should not be about clearly challenging injustices.

7.7  Felicitas Macgilchrist, Marcus Otto, and Riem Spielhaus

These three scholars responded as a team to our question in their own words.

7.7.1  Short Biography of Felicitas Macgilchrist

Felicitas Macgilchrist is Head of the “Media/Transformation” Department at the

Georg Eckert Institute (GEI) of International Textbook Studies, Braunschweig, and
Professor of Media Research at the University of Goettingen. Her current research
focuses on the politics and educational technology and the discourse of digital
education.
7.7  Felicitas Macgilchrist, Marcus Otto, and Riem Spielhaus 339

7.7.2  Short Biography of Marcus Otto

Marcus Otto is Research Fellow at the GEI of International Textbook Studies,

Braunschweig. His current research explores decolonisation and memory politics,
social theory, and the semantics of crisis in Europe and the figure of the European
subject in textbooks from the twentieth century.

7.7.3  Short Biography of Riem Spielhaus

Riem Spielhaus is Head of the “Knowledge in Transition” Department of the GEI

of International Textbook Studies, Braunschweig, and Professor of Islamic Studies
with a focus on education and cultures of knowledge at the University of Goettingen.
Her research interests include female authorities on Islam, the institutionalisation of
Islam, the political participation and religious practices of Muslims in Europe, and
the production of knowledge about Muslims in Europe.
Below is their response verbatim to our question.

7.7.4  Shaping and Changing How Discourse Unfolds

It is a wonderful idea to gather ideas of how CDS has been used to try to change the
world. At the same time, we hesitated to accept the invitation to write about how we
have “done good in the world” with our analysis. We’re not sure we would claim
that we have been able to do that, although we do feel it is important to see “impact”
beyond a journal’s impact factor, and “knowledge exchange” as more than simply
an “add-on” for the funding bodies. In the best case, knowledge exchange aims to
have an impact on shaping and changing how discourse unfolds in the areas in
which we work. At the Georg Eckert Institute (GEI), several scholars work with
discourse analysis (Foucauldian, critical, post-colonial, etc.). Beyond the individual
activities that we engage in, such as commenting on public discourse on twitter (e.g.
@discoursology), writing journalistic pieces, supporting activists, or teaching CDA
to future teachers, the institute as a whole orients to the critical analysis of textbooks
and other media used in education, as well as critical approaches to curricula and
educational policies. Analysis focuses on e.g. colonialism, migration, racist dis-
course and the exclusions and inclusions which these educational texts enable. We
want here to mention three recent activities. First, a study of the discourses on
migration in high school textbooks in Germany (Beauftragte der Bundesregierung
für Migration, Flüchtlinge und Integration, 2015). Conducted by Marcus Otto and
Inga Niehaus at the GEI with colleagues from the University of Hildesheim, the
study identifies how textbooks used in Germany today construct images of migrants
as the “Other”. After the analysis, which is available online, the team was invited to
340 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

lead workshops at major publishing companies in Germany. Editors and senior edi-
tors participated and thought with the team about how, despite all good intentions,
their texts continue to imagine the readership as white, and to marginalize students
from ethnic minorities or those students who have experience of migration in their
families. The team discussed examples from ongoing work, critiqued the texts and
considered how to shift the representations to become more inclusive, more aware
of diversity, and more sensitive to (inadvertently) reproducing racist or othering
positions. Second, Riem Spielhaus and Felicitas Macgilchrist are pleased to be able
to use the “category entitlement” that their relatively new status as “professor” gives
them in order to talk in public about the findings from their discourse analyses. For
instance, Riem spoke recently on the mainstream evening television news
(‘Tagesthemen’) on the public discourse about Islam and Muslims (see Spielhaus &
Herzog, 2015). Felicitas spoke at a public event with policy makers and other edu-
cational decision makers about how the policy discourse on digital education imag-
ines a particular type of (neoliberal, entrepreneurial) student-subject, and forecloses
more participatory imaginaries. Similarly, being part of the Leibniz Association of
non-university research institutes gives discourse analysts at the GEI the chance to
speak informally in face-to-face situations with individual politicians at events such
as the “Leibniz in Federal Parliament” (Leibniz im Bundestag) or “Leibniz in State
Parliament” (Leibniz im Landtag) events. The goal of these events is to raise policy-­
makers’ awareness of the ideologies that educational policies carry over into educa-
tional practices. Third, the GEI has started to include budgets for films or other
visual products into their funding grants. These aim to draw on today’s media aes-
thetic to showcase a critical take on how educational media are used. This critical
take includes a critique of current ideologies, but also a “generative critique”
(Macgilchrist, 2016; see Sects. 5.8 and 5.9) of how schools and activists are already
enacting media practices oriented to e.g. solidarity, diversity or equality.

7.8  Richard Jackson

7.8.1  Short Biography

Richard Jackson is Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Otago, in

Dunedin, New Zealand. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal, Critical Studies on
Terrorism, and the author/editor of ten books and more than 60 papers on terrorism,
political violence, pacifism and conflict resolution. His most recent book is The
Routledge Handbook of Critical Terrorism Studies (2016), and some recent articles
include “Post-liberal peacebuilding and the pacifist state” (2017b, in Peacebuilding),
and “Pacifism: The anatomy of a subjugated knowledge” (2017a, Critical Studies
on Security). He is also the author of a research-based novel entitled Confessions of
a Terrorist (2014). Below is his statement about his work in CDA/CDS outside of
academia.
7.8  Richard Jackson 341

7.8.2  H
 ow CDA Informs my Teaching, Public Engagement,
Activism and Politics

My commitment to CDA goes far beyond simply a methodological choice for

research; rather, it informs all my work, including teaching, public engagement,
activism and politics. For example, I use it as the main pedagogical approach in my
teaching about terrorism, in which I help the students deconstruct the dominant
social and political discourse of terrorism in society today. Included in this, I teach
the students how to critically ‘read’ films and TV shows about terrorism. Moreover,
once they understand the socially constructed nature of terrorism discourse, I task
them with creatively and publicly deconstructing and challenging the public dis-
course. Every year, my students have to produce plays, films, and sometimes even
graffiti campaigns which question and undermine public perceptions about terror-
ism and counterterrorism.
Related to this, I give 20–30 public talks, as well as media engagements, every
year. In all of these, I make a point to try and educate the audience about the impor-
tance of language for framing political issues and the consequences of these fram-
ings, as well as challenge and critique dominant discourses. In other words, I try to
practice both internal deconstruction (showing the inconsistencies and mistakes of
a discourse or public narrative) and external deconstruction (showing how knowl-
edge from other areas of life and theory can reveal the interests and politics of par-
ticular discourses and narrative strategies).
In addition to all my academic publications over the past 12 years which have
attempted to critique and deconstruct the war on terror discourse, as well as the
ways in which terrorism is constructed through literature, I also have a public blog
(see Richard Jackson, terrorism) where I try and do the same thing in a more acces-
sible and engaging way. For example, when a major terrorist attack occurs, I will
often deconstruct the public discourse surrounding it in a blogpost. More signifi-
cantly, I published a novel entitled Confessions of a Terrorist (2014) which both
attempted to destabilise and question the dominant discourse about terrorism and
counterterrorism, and promote an alternative narrative about why a terrorist might
want to attack western societies. This has been my biggest effort to intervene criti-
cally in the public discourse of terrorism. The novel questions who really is the
terrorist (between militants and the governments who fight them with a ‘war on
terror’), and whether the terrorist figure really is an inhuman monster.
Finally, as a practitioner of CDA, I also engage in a lot of direct protest and resis-
tance activity, as well as community organising. I go on a lot of marches, take part
in protest actions, and do a little community organising, such as being part of the
Dunedin Free University for the years it operated. This grows directly out of my
CDA approach which assumes that the point of analysis and understanding is to act
to make the world a more just, equal and peaceful place.
342 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

7.9  P
 aul Chamness Iida (Known earlier as Paul Chamness
Miller)

7.9.1  Short Biography

Paul Chamness Iida is Professor of the Faculty of International Liberal Arts at Akita
International University in Japan. His current research focuses on how sports-­
oriented media addresses the coming-out of professional athletes and he is also
researching the lived experiences of bi-cultural youth in Japan. Here is his answer
to our question in the next section.

7.9.2  U
 sing CDA to Model how to Dialogue about
and Advocate for Social Justice

I am presently Professor of International Liberal Arts at Akita International

University (AIU) in northern Japan, and this is my fifth academic year here. I teach
undergraduates, most of whom are in their first or second year of their university
life. I also mostly teach writing courses that resemble a typical basic “composition”
course one might find in a university in North America. Prior to coming to Japan I
was a K-12 teacher educator in a typical curriculum and instruction program [in the
US]. Given my background as a teacher educator, I also teach a course here on using
pop culture to teach English to pre-service English (as a foreign language) teachers.
English is used as the language of instruction for our entire curriculum at AIU. Our
students are also required to study abroad for 1 year at one of our nearly 200 partner
universities around the world. We offer only two majors to our undergraduates:
global studies and global business. One of the biggest discoveries I’ve made in my
career here is that, despite being an international university with a global emphasis,
our students, by and large, do not have the ability to think critically, nor are they
aware of many of the social issues plaguing our world. Perhaps one of the biggest
reasons for this is that Japanese students typically spend their lives as students
studying for entrance exams. Consequently, Japanese education is about memoriza-
tion of facts, not about thinking critically.
Despite this emphasis on the regurgitation of information in Japanese education,
I believe in preparing students to be citizens of the world. Part of this citizenship is
understanding the injustices happening around the globe every day and the effects
they have on the world, developing empathy for the victims of these injustices, and
ultimately becoming an advocate for these victims. The challenge for me, as a sec-
ond language writing teacher, is that because our students do not have exposure to
critical thinking, they also lack the requisite language to learn about and discuss
issues related to social justice. So my job has been finding methods for developing
my students’ linguistic competence to effectively engage in critical thinking, espe-
cially as it relates to social justice.
7.9  Paul Chamness Iida (Known earlier as Paul Chamness Miller) 343

What I have found that works well for my students is to provide them with per-
sonal narratives. Narratives are typically written in a way that is easy to understand,
and I have found that students learn the discourse used to engage in dialogue around
social justice through these narratives, which serve as excellent models. Furthermore,
narratives exist at a variety of levels of difficulty. For example, some of our students
who are still learning basic English skills, benefit from something like “Michael’s
Diary”6 This narrative is written like a diary with entries that are short and manage-
able and follow a boy named Michael, who wants a sewing machine for his birthday.
It raises a lot of interesting issues about gender non-conformity and acceptance.
More advanced language learners read longer, more complicated narratives like
those found in Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism,
edited by Uriel Quesada, Letitia Gomez, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz. Depending on
the linguistic level of my students, I also encourage alternative ways to engage in
the dialogues we have about social justice issues, including the use of artistic expres-
sion to accompany more formal language use.
Once students reach the final required writing course, which I also teach, the
type of writing changes. The focus of this course is on using primary data. It resem-
bles a basic introductory research methods course, but we focus on only one or two
basic methods of data collection, typically surveys and interviews. The students
write two short research papers, the first of which is a collaborative research project.
Depending on the size of the class, students decide on a single topic for the whole
class—or in the case of this current semester, it is a large class, so they are divided
into 4 groups with 4 different topics—what their research question will be, and with
my guidance determine what procedures will best help answer this question. Then
they carry out the data collection, analysis, and write the paper. Although I leave the
topic up to the students to choose, I do ask that their topic focus be on some aspect
of social justice. This semester, for example, one group was interested in racial
issues in Japan, which then turned into the influences of white supremacy in Japan.
They were a large group, so they divided into two groups, one focusing on how bi-­
cultural Japanese people who are half white and half Japanese are almost exoticized
while other bi-cultural individuals face discrimination. The other group focused on
how Japanese women work to maintain really light skin. While each group’s focus
was unique, they both explored how these issues of whiteness are entrenched in
racism in Japan. Another group wanted to focus on “maternity harassment” and
how women in Japan are essentially bullied until they resign from their job if they
become pregnant, forcing women to often choose between a career or motherhood.
And the last group chose a topic that is not exactly a social justice issue, but inter-
esting nonetheless—the lack of interaction between international students and
Japanese students on our campus. My goal for this course is to not only help them
develop research skills, but to learn how to use these research skills to understand
more deeply how issues in society can lead to marginalizing others. Perhaps even
more importantly, I want students to take these skills and apply them to standing up
for those who are marginalized.

 http://www.tolerance.org/magazine/number-44-summer-2013/department/michael-s-diary.
6
344 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

In my pop culture course, we discuss a lot how pop culture of all kinds relates to
issues of social justice. Students just engage in pop culture, but they often do not
think beyond the surface. In this course, I provide students with examples that lead
them to a more profound consideration of what pop culture is and how it disenfran-
chises others. One example related to music that I like my students to think about
that has to do with race. I play a clip of “Hound Dog” sung by Elvis Presley, which
most of them have heard before. But what they don’t know is that this song was first
recorded by “Big Mama” Thornton and only became famous when a white person
(i.e., Elvis) sang it. We look at examples of Disney and the messages that it sends
with this mostly white cast of princesses, as well as the message of body image sent
by the fashion industry. We examine television programs and their portrayal of race,
as well as other marginalized groups, such as members of the LGBT community. By
raising their awareness of the hidden (and maybe not-so-hidden) messages of pop
culture, they begin to see pop culture for more than its face value, critically examin-
ing its role in their lives.
In all of these instances, I am not necessarily engaging in formal CDA, but I use
language to model how to dialogue about social justice. I also encourage students to
critically think about topics with the language they see and hear, whether it is
through choosing sources for essays, peer editing each other’s work, or engaging in
discussions about pop culture. Through this work, students are analyzing forms of
language critically in the ways language presents itself in the courses.
In addition to learning and talking about social justice, my goal is to instill empa-
thy in my students and encourage them to become advocates for those who are
voiceless. Consequently, I push them to not only learn about these topics, but to
think about how they then can become agents of change to make society better,
whether it is right here on our campus or out in the community. I don’t often get to
see the fruit of my labor, but I am hopeful that my messages sink into their minds
and when opportunities arise they will stand up for what is right.

7.10  John Richardson

7.10.1  Short Biography

John E. Richardson is Adjunct Associate Professor in Language & Linguistics at the

University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia. His research interests include struc-
tured social inequalities, British fascism, racism, CDS and argumentation. His pub-
lications include: the books (Mis)Representing Islam: the racism and rhetoric of
British Broadsheet newspapers (2004, paperback edition 2009), Analysing
Newspapers: An approach from critical discourse analysis (2006), Analysing
Fascist Discourse: European fascism in talk and text (2013, co-edited with Ruth
Wodak), Advances in Critical Discourse Studies (2016, co-edited with Michał
7.10  John Richardson 345

Krzyżanowski, David Machin & Ruth Wodak), Cultures of Post-War British

Fascism (2015, co-edited with Nigel Copsey), British Fascism: A Discourse-
Historic Analysis (2017) and the Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies
(2017, co-edited with J.  Flowerdew); and academic articles on critical discourse
studies, commemorative discourse, newspaper representations of Muslims, balance
and impartiality in BBC reporting of Israel/Palestine, argumentation in readers’ let-
ters, political communications and party political leaflets. He is currently research-
ing the commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain. He is Editor of the
international peer-reviewed journal Critical Discourse Studies and is on the edito-
rial boards of various journals. Talking about his work in ‘memory studies’,
Richardson discusses below how he has taken his CDA/CDS work outside academia.

7.10.2  T
 aking the Emancipatory Agenda of CDS out ‘Into
the World’

One thing that has happened is that I felt compelled to organise an event to com-
memorate Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) in 2016. I am interested in examining
the commemoration of HMD, in the mass media, in the official national ceremony
and in the increasing engagement of the public with commemoration. Since 2005,
the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust has had the responsibility of organising HMD
and, as part of their desire to expand its visibility and reach, they organise work-
shops for anyone who wants to organise an event to commemorate HMD. These
tend to be teachers, people who work for local government, members of faith com-
munities, but increasingly also librarians, prison wardens and many others. I
attended 3 of these workshops at the end of 2015. I had imagined I would analyse
their rhetoric, but I found myself being called to in ways that I hadn’t anticipated. I
felt that I, too, should organise a commemorative event—which I did in January
2016, in my University. I have since analysed the processes through which this
occurred—I argue that HMD interpellated me, as it does many others.
Commemoration is aimed at achieving several things of course, but one aspect of it
relates to recommitting to, and revivifying, shared values. So this could be viewed
as taking the emancipatory agenda of CDS out ‘into the world’—or, perhaps, it
demonstrates that we are part of the world, and so our research always relates dia-
lectically with our lives outside of academia.
346 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

7.11  Theo van Leeuwen

7.11.1  Short Biography

Theo van Leeuwen is Professor of Multimodal Communication in the Department

of Language and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense,
and Emeritus Professor, University of Technology, Sydney. He has published widely
in the areas of CDA, visual communication, multimodality and social semiotics. He
has a number of (co-)authored and (co-) edited books and Special Issues of journals
(see Sects. 2.6, 2.7, 3.9, and 4.6 for more about his work). Below, he gives his
answer to our question.

7.11.2  For my Students

One of the things I do is to survey the semiotic landscape we live in. What resources
for meaning-making and communication have we developed, and why? What are
the affordances that allow them to be used in meaning-making and communication?
What role do different resources (linguistic, visual, musical, and so on) play in soci-
ety, and what are the dominant (and less dominant) attitudes we have towards them?
Sometimes this aspect of my research takes a broad sweep of the landscape, as in
the ‘grammar of visual design’, which I wrote with Gunther Kress (Kress & van
Leeuwen, 1996/2006), or in my books on sound and music (van Leeuwen, 1999)
and social semiotics (van Leeuwen, 2005). Sometimes it focuses on a specific region
of the landscape, or even on a specific person, as in my recent study of the resources
for kinetic sculpture which Jean Tinguely developed in the course of his career (van
Leeuwen, 2016).
I see this work very much as part and parcel of CDS, not only because it provides
plausible and consistent methods for the critical study of texts and artefacts, but also
because languages, and other semiotic resources, are the way they are, as Halliday
(see 1978, 1985) has always stressed, because of the needs and interests of the soci-
eties that have developed them. The modality system, for instance, the linguistic and
visual resources we have for expressing the validity of representations, closely
relates to the foundational ideas of key institutions such as science, religion and
democracy, and evolves as these institutions evolve. In this context it is, today, par-
ticularly important to study the digital semiotic technologies which have become
such all-important resources for meaning-making and communication in so many
domains, and whose designed-in affordances ultimately serve the needs and inter-
ests of the global corporations that have developed them. This has, for instance, led
to my work on PowerPoint, in collaboration with Emilia Djonov (e.g. Djonov & van
Leeuwen, 2012, 2013a, 2013b, 2017; van Leeuwen, Djonov, & O’Halloran, 2013;
Zhao, Djonov, & van Leeuwen, 2014; see Sect. 3.9.4).
7.12  Rebecca Rogers 347

A second strand of my work seeks to show how these resources are used in spe-
cific practices, including the degree to which, and the manner in which, their use is
regulated and justified in these domains, and the degree to which it is open to chal-
lenge and change. This work, too, is important for CDS. It includes, for instance, my
work on toys and gender, and on computer war games, the former in collaboration
with Staffan Selander and Carmen Caldas-Coulthard (e.g. Caldas-Coulthard & van
Leeuwen, 20027), the latter in collaboration with David Machin (e.g., Machin & Van
Leeuwen, 2007a, 2007b; see Sects. 3.3 and 3.4). Many critical discourse analysts
have focused on more or less explicit political discourses, such as political speeches,
and newspaper reports and editorials. I have done that as well, but I have also always
stressed the importance of popular media, including toys and games, and non-­
linguistic forms of communication, including especially music, for CDS.
And finally, I have always found it important to connect the critical analysis of
multimodal discourses to the practices of their production, dissemination and inter-
pretation. Already in one of my first books Philip Bell and I not only analyzed media
interviews, but also debated our analyses with the media interviewers whose work
we had analyzed (Bell & van Leeuwen, 1994), and in the Sage journal Visual
Communication, which I co-founded with Carey Jewitt and Teal Triggs (the latter
herself a practitioner), we have consistently mixed contributions by scholars and
practitioners. The very most important way, however, in which we can do something
in the world and influence practice is through teaching the students that will live in
the semiotic landscape of the future. All my work is, and always has been, for my
students. This is all the more important because we now have, certainly in countries
like Australia and the UK, students from all parts of the world, for many of whom
CDS is inspiring and eye-opening.

7.12  Rebecca Rogers

7.12.1  Short Biography

Rebecca Rogers is Curators Distinguished Research Professor of Literacy Studies at

the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She is an educational researcher who special-
izes in literacy studies, teacher learning and CDA.  Her research focuses on the
socio-political contexts of literacy and language education and situates CDA within
an ethnographic tradition. She has published seven books and over 75 articles and
chapters in national and international journals on language and literacy education.
She is a founding member of the grassroots educator network called Educators for
Social Justice. Below, she provides a detailed description of the work she is doing.

7
 As said above (Sect. 3.9.4), the research for this publication “was part of the research program
Toys as Communication led by Professor Staffan Selander of the Institute of Education, Stockholm,
and financed by a grant from the Swedish Royal Bank” (van Leeuwen, 2008: viii).
348 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

7.12.2  F
 rom Describing Educational Inequities to Creating
Space for Social Justice: The Interventionist Promise
and Potential of Critical Discourse Analysis

Sofia, my 5-year old daughter, and I recently read a children’s book called “I
Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes her Mark” (Levy, 2016), a biography of the
first woman who served on the Supreme Court in the United States. In response to
the book, Sofia created an illustrated summary. One of her response pages reads,
“Ruth is strong. She has the power.” Her picture features two hands, rising upward
and written vertically on the left hand is the word “power” and on the right hand is
the word “hand.” She, literally, has the power in her hands.
Power is central in understanding the relationships between discourse and social
life. Sofia’s text and illustration captures an expanded understanding of power; i.e.
power does not exist solely from above, below, or behind. Power is embodied and
enacted through the interactions of individuals that accumulate across time and con-
texts. As she shared this page with me, we talked about how Ruth Bader Ginsburg
used her voice and her right to dissent as she worked for gender equity. Later, when
I asked her to come in from playing she exclaimed “I dissent!” She enacted the idea
captured in her writing; power lives in the bodies, minds, words, and actions
of people.
As a critical discourse analyst, I cannot help but integrate my understandings of
discourse and power across the domains of my life: as a professor, a teacher educa-
tor, a researcher, activist, Board member, citizen, and mother. I am white, hetero-
sexual, able-bodied, speak English as my first language, and hold citizenship in the
United States. I, along with my sisters, are the first generation in our family to attend
college and earn graduate degrees. While I am of the middle class now, that has not
always been the case. But my family benefited from property and home ownership.
Growing up in the 1970s in rural upstate New York, I enjoyed the full privileges of
public school. My school was predominantly white with just two African American
families in the entire high school. I was perceived as bright and put on accelerated
tracks in school. When I was a trouble-maker in school, I was not suspended or
tracked into the juvenile court system. The curriculum celebrated my heritage and
the school routines matched the norms of my home and community. In sum, I ben-
efited from a society that grants unearned privilege to those who identify as white
and discriminates against people of color.
My consciousness about equity and justice were piqued as a child. My mother
donated clothes and home goods to the family of a girl in my classroom who lived
in poverty and to a store run by and for women with mental illness. The memory of
my mother and I packing the clothes in paper bags from the grocery store lives in
my mind and body. With her example, I was eager to contribute to my community.
When I was 15, I volunteered with Literacy Volunteers of America [LVA] and
became trained as a literacy tutor. Not yet able to drive, I was charged with tutoring
adults who were twice my age but unable to read and write with the proficiency
needed to secure a job. This was one of my first conscious entanglements with
7.12  Rebecca Rogers 349

l­ anguage, literacy, and power. This experience led me to a job as a program coordi-
nator for LVA and for a deep affiliation with the work of Paulo Freire and popular
education. I would later study at popular education centers in the United States and
in Mexico: Highlander Research and Education Center, the popular education cen-
ter where Paulo Freire and Myles Horton worked together and at Cuernavaca
Center for Intercultural Dialogue on Development (CCIDD) and Central Tlahuica
de Lenguas e Intercambio Cultural (CETLALIC), both in Cuernavaca, Mexico. I
share this autobiographical background because my theoretical inclination for CDA
is rooted in my experiences in the world. Indeed, my awareness of injustices pro-
pelled me to use CDA as an interventionist tool to make the world a better place.
Homi Bhaba, Teresa Ebert, Edward Said, Alex Callinicos, Karl Marx, Michel
Foucault were the theorists who piqued my theoretical interest in power, discourse,
and material conditions. I fell in love with the struggle and pleasure of reading criti-
cal social theory; how the abstractness of language shed relief on social constructs
such as race, hegemony, colonialism, structuralism, dialectics and discourse. As a
graduate student working on my Masters in English (1994 and 1995) I studied with
Teresa Ebert, a materialist feminist and Amy Lee, a critical composition theorist. I
found a theoretical home in critical social theory. I was working as a Program
Coordinator for adult literacy and on the front lines of working alongside adults
seeking cultural, political, and economic resources. These adults were often disen-
franchised by the very educational institutions they relied on to get ahead. Their
literacy education needed to be different than it had been the first time around. I
spent long hours studying and applying Paulo Freire’s (1970) Pedagogy of the
Oppressed. I longed for applied tools.
I first became exposed to the formalized tradition of Critical Discourse Analysis
from one of my mentors in graduate school, James Collins. Jim is an anthropologist
and educational linguist who studied with John Gumperz. Jim was a founding mem-
ber of the Language, Power, and Identity working group along with Jan Blommaert,
Stef Slembrouck, Monica Heller, and Jef Verschueren. It was in Jim Collins’
Discourse Analysis course that I was introduced to Fairclough’s (1989) Language
and Power. I distinctly remember the feeling of relief that washed over me as I read
this book. Finally, I had found a way to merge critical social theories and systemic
functional linguistics to describe, interpret, and explain discourse, power, and social
change. Later I would learn directly from Norman Fairclough more about CDA and
Hilary Janks on critical literacy. In 1998, Jim Collins invited me to join a group of
teachers to explore the mounting accountability regime of testing and standards in
Albany, NY. Media reports, school documents, and lived experiences became the
basis of our critique and analysis. He later more closely examined transcripts of
these discussions to study our responses to educational reform discourses
(Collins, 2001).
What I did not know then is that (a) CDA is often used to describe, interpret, and
explain inequities but is not used as frequently as a tool of intervention, and (b) that
the ‘founders’ of CDA were mainly from the North-Atlantic and so the tradition was
subject to the very same trappings of power and privilege that it set out to critique,
and (c) a great deal of scholarly attention focuses on inequities and there was great
350 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

value to shifting our collective gaze to equity, justice, liberation, and freedom. These
are some themes that I will pick up on in this essay and that run through my
scholarship.
In the mid-late 1990s, I was carrying out my dissertation research which eventu-
ally became a book, A Critical Discourse Analysis of Family Literacy Practices:
Power in and out of Print (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003). The study was a longitudinal
ethnographic case study of an African American family’s literacy practices in their
family, community, and school. Through CDA, I show the discursive details of how
educational tracking is carried out; as well as the tools and resources that a family
with limited cultural capital uses to interrupt this process and advocate for educa-
tional and social equity. In my role as an ethnographer, I witnessed the medication
of the family’s first grade child; the short-term incarceration of the father; the track-
ing of the oldest daughter into special education; the removal of the second oldest
child from the High School and into an alternative school. I witnessed the daily
assault and violation of an African American family living in the grasp of institu-
tionalized racism and poverty. CDA helped me to describe, interpret, and explain
the reproduction of institutional and societal power and how these relations were
construed through daily interactions and textual practices. That is, I could illustrate
the slow-motion semiotic work of educational tracking in its different forms. While
I engaged in some advocacy work in my role as a literacy teacher with the family, it
was limited. I did not yet have the theoretical tools (critical race theory) to under-
stand these violations as the work of structural racism. Yet, I could not turn away
from the devastating effects of racism on a family I cared deeply about.
I worked my way through my PhD program as a literacy teacher in elementary
and adult education classrooms and as a research assistant with the Center on
English Learning and Achievement (CELA). I was aware of my role as a cultural
broker between learners, texts, and cultural change. I found inspiration in critical
literacy pedagogues such as bell hooks, Ira Shor, Michelle Fine, Antonia Darder,
Sonia Nieto, Peter McLaren, Mark Jury, Jim Collins, Cheryl Dozier, and Peter
Johnston. Most were mentors through studying their written work; the latter four
were mentors at the University of Albany. My doctoral work at the University of
Albany included working alongside of scholars who understood the theory and
practice of literacy acceleration within critical literacy frameworks. Indeed, Cheryl
Dozier, Peter Johnston, and I integrated these ideas and practices into our work in
literacy clinics housed in an urban elementary school (Dozier, Johnston, & Rogers,
2005). I continue to be a critical literacy practitioner and, in this context, invite
teachers to use the tools of CDA to read, write, and act on texts differently.
My first academic job in 2000 was at an elite university in St. Louis. St. Louis is
well known for the enduring and visible presence of institutionalized racism (seen
in defunded public schools and services, gun violence, sex and drug trade) and also
the long struggle for civil rights which include several well-known federal court
cases (e.g. desegregated schools and housing). My critical racial awareness was
brought to life in St. Louis. It was there I was exposed to critical race theory by
friends and colleagues. Lester Spence, an African American political scientist and
professor, asked me how I could study the family literacy practices of an African
7.12  Rebecca Rogers 351

American family without a deep understanding of African American Language and

critical race theory? He insisted I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965).
Soon after, I participated in a week-long Dismantling Racism Institute for Educators
sponsored by NCCJ (National Conference for Community and Justice) which
turned into a life-long commitment to ending structural racism. I was building an
understanding in my mind, heart, and body of the destructive impact of white privi-
lege and institutionalized racism. With a framework (both personal and theoretical)
for understanding what I had witnessed happen to the Treaders in Albany [the
African-American family she studied in her dissertation] and to millions of other
children and families in the US and around the world. As a teacher educator, I
claimed my responsibility to help educators develop a racial conscience and what I
came to call the tools of racial literacy.
As a scholar, I wanted to know more about the process by which people came to
develop the tools of racial literacy. Melissa Mosley, a second-grade teacher and
doctoral student at the time, and I designed an action research study in her class-
room focused on young children’s engagements with racial literacy. CDA, at this
point, was more of a tool I used after the data had been collected to understand the
process of racial literacy development (Rogers & Mosley, 2006). Yet, I also used the
findings to help other educators read texts, interactions, and social practices differ-
ently. I presented workshops locally, nationally, and at my university with educators
with the intention of inviting people to see how in slowing down interactions, they
could see the levels of racialized meanings unfold not only in what people said or
did but how they said or acted. At this stage, the social action of raising awareness
came as a product of the research rather than being integrated into the research pro-
cess itself.
Wanting to re-connect with struggle and tools that are often connected with adult
literacy education, I sought out colleagues in St. Louis working in this area.
Serendipitously, a cold phone call to a program coordinator, Mary Ann Kramer,
resulted in a 16-year collaboration and friendship. Our first meeting cut right to the
heart of issues that stood in the way of access to literacy education: structural rac-
ism, poverty, de-professionalization of teachers, sexism. These were material condi-
tions that manifested themselves in ‘toxic literacies’ (to use Denny Taylor’s term)
which subverted freedom, liberation, and agency. We lamented the lack of a coher-
ent effort around education and freedom in St. Louis and the compassionless work
environments we both experienced. We decided to act together to fill this space. We
co-founded a discussion and research group for social justice educators across the
lifespan. This group became known as the Literacy for Social Justice Teacher
Research Group [LSJTRG]. This was during a time when the assaults on public
education were increasing and the wave of profiteering via neoliberalism was taking
hold. Given our critical analysis of discourses of accountability, standards, and
high-stakes testing, we sought to create different frames and opportunities for teach-
ers to position themselves as public intellectuals. As a collective, we called on our
herstories as activists and educators—protesting, marching, writing letters to the
editors, building coalitions, direct organizing, and building leadership through a
group centered approach.
352 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

This work alongside of educators who were using the tools of critically oriented
discourse analysis (without naming it as such) to organize for social justice and
equity taught me an important lesson about the limits of CDA as it was practiced in
the academy. We wrote a book that featured educators across the lifespan inquiring
into language and power with their students (Rogers, Mosley, Kramer, & LSJTRG,
2009). 16  years later, this grassroots group is called Educators for Social Justice
[ESJ]8 and is a not-for-profit organization that holds an annual “Educating for
Change Curriculum Conference,” book clubs, racial equity curriculum partnership,
Inquiry to Action Groups, and is in a coalition with other community groups to
break the school-to-prison pipeline through policy changes that ban out-of-school
suspensions for young children. ESJ is unique because it is run entirely by educators
for educators.
The continued presence of ESJ speaks to the power of the counter-narrative we
created that frames educators as intellectuals and educational equity as central to the
educational experience. Rather than focus solely on critique, one of our strategies
has been to put positive pressure on school districts to take bold, public stances on
issues of racial equity and civil rights. This is a turn that I have taken from positive
discourse analysis, a variety of CDA (see Sect. 5.8). For instance, when one school
district’s school board passed a resolution on racial equity and social justice, we
endorsed it and asked other educational leaders to follow suit. By doing a power
analysis of what motivates educational leaders to contribute to social justice efforts,
we have been able to strategize as an organization about how to deepen and
strengthen social justice work in the region. We continue to build coalitions with
national groups such as Free Minds, Free People.
Early in my academic career, I secured funding to design a working symposium
focused on CDA and education with James Gee, Norman Fairclough, Shawn Rowe,
Loukia Sarroub, Josephine Peyton Young, Cynthia Lewis, and Lisa Stevens. Around
this time, CDA in educational research was just beginning to take off in the United
States (Rogers, Malancharuvil-Berkes, Mosley, Hui, & Joseph, 2005). We worked
together to write an edited book. We set forth some important ideas in the book
about the need to put CDA in dialogue with theories of learning which was impor-
tant for understanding how a critical, activist stance emerges, develops, and trans-
forms in the world. This, too, is another way in which I think I have made some
relevant advancements with CDA. My scholarship has consistently embedded CDA
within ethnographic contexts which means that I attend to the uptake and trajectory
of discourse practices as they unfold. That is, I came to realize that it is not enough
to study social reproduction. This analysis must be accompanied by a theory of
social transformation so that we might imagine and create a world that is more sus-
tainable, equitable, and hopeful.
Attending to the intersections of CDA and learning theories became particularly
important as I began teaching graduate courses in CDA. I struggled with how best
to engage students as learners with the theories and methods of CDA (Rogers,

 www.educatorsforsocialjustice.com.
8
7.12  Rebecca Rogers 353

2011). In 2004, I attended the first annual CDA conference in Valencia, Spain.
There, I interviewed some of the founders of CDA and created a short documentary
that features areas of persistent interest to CDA researchers. This video became part
of an interactive website I created to accompany the second edition of An Introduction
to CDA in Education. The website9 includes resources, chapter extensions, com-
plete transcripts of the founders of CDA.
My intention with the interactive website was to democratize CDA and make it
more accessible for scholars who may not find an academic home with the European
tradition. I intentionally invited scholars who represented southern and eastern epis-
temologies and were bringing diverse epistemologies to CDA to the new edition of
the book and website: Manika Subi Lakshmanan, Guadalupe López-Bonilla, and
Mónica Pini. The widening of epistemologies and the continued presence of inter-­
racial collaborative CDA work has been a persistent contribution and can be found
in some of my publications (Rogers & Christian, 2007; Rogers & Trigos-­
Carrillo, 2017).
While there were many privileges associated with being at a private, elite univer-
sity, I found it impossible to reconcile the elitism, sexism, and racism I encountered.
The politically correct version of my narrative would simply make mention of this
and move on. Yet, I feel compelled to disclose more, particularly in an essay focused
on language and power. As a young, female Professor (28 years old at the time), I
was often made invisible, objectified, and silenced. While the assaults were often
discursive, they held with them the threat of material consequences. A senior faculty
member told me, “your career is over now that you are getting married.” Another
senior faculty member on the tenure and promotion committee advised me “you are
too passionate about your work.” Yet, another told me that I was wasting my time
writing a book with teachers because “teachers couldn’t write.” They were all men
who were responsible for judging my promotion and tenure. These micro-­
aggressions impacted my ability to engage in intellectual activities in a manner that
felt true to me. I knew my colleagues of color (faculty and students) faced much
worse. These experiences deepened my understanding of power and the epistemic
privilege that comes from life in the margins. I happily moved to a land grant public
university where approximately 20% of students are African American and many
are the first in their family to attend college. There, I have many intellectually
engaged and compassionate colleagues.
I have found that it is absolutely essential to be nourished and inspired by other
CDA analysts for intellectual and activist reasons. Educators for Social Justice con-
tinued to be this space, working alongside of classroom teachers, who are also
struggling to understand issues of language, power and practice. I was also fortunate
to have a community of colleagues at the Literacy Research Association that I could
turn to for intellectual inspiration. There, Cynthia Lewis and I founded the Critical
Discourse Analysis Study Group which we ran for several years. It can still be found
on the conference program but the name has changed. Again, I sought to create

 www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415874298.
9
354 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

institutionalized spaces for the study of discourse, power, and social change. During
this time, Michael (my partner) and I immersed ourselves in learning about indige-
nous and minority struggles for economic, social, political, and educational rights in
Cuernavacca, Mexico, including the teachers’ movement in southern Mexico.
Guided by a lay Maryknoll missionary and transnational community organizer, we
also took several extended visits to Venezuela during the peak of the socialist revo-
lution. There, we learned about their literacy campaign, endogenous development,
and community cooperatives. It was over a dinner of fresh fish with Adriana Bolivar
and her husband in Venezuela that I learned more about la Asociación Latino
Americana Estudios del Discurso (ALED) (Zapata, 2007). Closer to home, I spent
time at the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market Tennessee;
the popular education center where Myles Horton, Paulo Freire, Martin Luther King
Jr. and many other civil and human rights activists gathered. The fact that there were
histories, contexts, traditions that are rendered invisible began to boil in my blood.
These experiences piqued my interest to know what was unknowable; to move
beyond Western and Northern epistemologies.
Inspired and agitated by these political and social movements, I could not sit on
the sidelines. In 2006, I ran for a seat on the St. Louis Public School Board. As I
campaigned, I focused on what I could bring to the school board as a critical educa-
tor and co-founder of ESJ. I drew on examples from my CDA research to illustrate
social reproduction and transformation. I invited people to imagine with me a sys-
tem of governing public education that would create space for meaningful, relevant,
and liberatory education. I won the election and joined the seven-person board—
what became known as the “board in exile”—because just a year earlier, the state
had stripped the elected board of governance power and put in place a politically
appointed school board. The primary roles of the elected school board would be to
monitor, audit and report to the public. My fellow elected board members were
professionals in law, nursing, education, and construction. Our school board
engaged in critically analyzed discourse practices and used these analyses to inter-
vene in the ongoing policy considerations. For example, we reread accreditation as
a political process, engaged parents and community members in collaborative
inquiry about the conditions that limit participation in school governance, and fore-
grounded the “public” in public education in all of our meetings. We used our analy-
sis of discourse and power to raise awareness and advocate with the use of powerful
literacy practices for self-governance, transparency, and educational justice. We did
this through attending to forgotten histories and contexts, closely analyzing ambigu-
ous signifiers, and creating counter-narratives. We wrote resolutions, letters to the
editor, and a transition plan to provide a foundation to move back to an elected
board. Following Scollon (2008), I refer to this variety of CDA as public consulta-
tive discourse analysis. This variety seeks to put analysis to work in the policy-­
making process, making the results of the discourse analysis immediately relevant
to the context, people, and problems with which the researcher is engaged. I argue
in my new book that our experiences embody knowledge and represent the epis-
temic privilege of people fighting the colonialism of the state in taking away self-­
governance from a minoritized school district (Rogers, 2017). My point here and
7.12  Rebecca Rogers 355

throughout this essay is that academics can cross borders as scholars, elected offi-
cials, activists, parents, and teacher educators. CDA often calls us to do so.
The North-Atlantic roots of CDA clashed against my experiences of learning
with and about the global south. I sought out scholars who troubled the European
roots of CDA with Chicana feminist theory and eastern epistemologies, for exam-
ple. Mónica Pini, a professor of Cultural and Media Studies at the Universidad de
San Martín (UNSAM) in Buenos Aires, Argentina invited me to contribute a chapter
to her book which focused on critical discourse studies (Rogers, 2009a, 2009b).
This invitation resulted in a multi-year collaboration which included me earning a
Fulbright to be a CDA scholar at UNSAM. This was an opportunity for me to study
Spanish full time to prepare for my teaching and research in Argentina. With the
help of several skilled interpreters, I translated my CDA lectures and presentations
into Spanish. As I prepared for the course, I found some CDA work by the ‘found-
ers’ that had been translated into Spanish—Fairclough, Kress, and Gee, for exam-
ple. However, I was uneasy simply importing these North Atlantic frameworks into
the Latin American context. Yet, I did not yet have access to some of the CDA work
available in Latin America. Teun van Dijk’s enormous contribution of Discurso y
Sociedad [see Set. 7.3] was a monumental resource for me and students at
UNSAM. Through this journal, critically oriented scholarship was made accessible
to the Spanish speaking world and could serve as a place for Latin American schol-
ars to publish their work. Through the work of students in my class I became aware
of the traditions of indigenous education, digital literacy, and popular education in
Latin America. I also learned more about Latin American databases, research col-
laborations, and the geo-politics of publishing. The important CDA work of Latin
American scholars came into focus (e.g. Resende, 2010; López-Bonilla & Fragoso,
2013; Mora, 2015; Bolivar, 2016; Álvarez Valencia, 2016). It was also within this
time period that I sought out opportunities to have my CDA research translated into
Spanish for Discurso & Socieded (Rogers, 2009a, 2009b, 2010). It became visible
to me that the work of translation has historically been shouldered by Latin American
scholars not by those in the global North and this has resulted in inequitable flows
of knowledge.
Rather than simply apply CDA as a researcher to data that had already been gen-
erated, my work increasingly sought to engage people in the work of CDA through-
out the life of the project. For example, Meredith Labadie, a Kindergarten teacher,
and I designed an action research study that invited young children to engage with
critical language awareness. Set against the backdrop of a Systemic Functional
Linguistics-inspired unit on signs as a genre of persuasive writing, the class read
and inquired into children’s literature that featured social justice movements. We
invited the children to critically analyze the protest signs in Sí Se Puede (Cohn,
2002) in terms of their textual, interpersonal, and ideational properties. This analy-
sis supported the children to move more deeply in their understanding of the strug-
gle for workers’ rights and in the design of protest signs for the causes they identified
as important to them.
356 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

When Ferguson erupted10, I was teaching a pre-service literacy teacher education

class in the school district where Michael Brown went to school. In this group, there
were approximately 16 white teachers and 3 African American teachers. All of the
young children at the school were African American. Protest circled around us.
Schools were closed. School districts posted notices telling teachers not to talk
about “Ferguson” with their students. The public discourse to avoid issues of racism
was in direct opposition to my philosophy and pedagogy as a critical, anti-racist
educator. In class, we read and discussed these newspaper articles and linked the
current media reports with the longer history of racialized violence in Ferguson. My
students were charged with working with elementary students who were also in the
midst of the protests and trauma induced by racism. We found the children’s book
“Painting for Peace in Ferguson” (Swartout Klein, 2015) to be a useful entry point
into discussion and critical analysis. The pre-service teachers heard first hand from
their students the impossibility of silencing this event because it lived in their hearts,
minds, and bodies. I invited teachers to use art and collage making to represent their
developing racialized understandings. During this time, we co-constructed counter-­
narratives, shared our own racial justice interventions, and connected the dots
between the cradle-to-grave-pipeline of institutionalized racism. ESJ offered teach-­
ins and workshops at local community colleges which some of the teachers in my
class participated in.
In 2013, I was elected to serve on the Executive Committee of the Literacy
Research Association (LRA), culminating in my presidency in 2016–2017. I have
been part of an impressive group of leaders that established a strategic plan for the
organization which includes a strand focused on equity, diversity, and inclusion. I
have also seen how easy it is to recenter whiteness and fail to truly challenge the
ongoing privilege that is amassed by white scholars in white dominated institutions.
In 2016, I was Chair of LRA’s annual conference. It was a daunting academic
responsibility to plan a conference with all of the sensitivity to language, power, and
privilege when institutional norms and processes often function on imbalances of
power. I tried to be mindful of how these dynamics play out across contexts, people,
time, and modes. I wanted the conference theme to capture the diverse research
interests of LRA’s members and also send a call for literacy research to be respon-
sive to the world in which we live (Whittingham, 2016). A world that includes a
refugee crisis, aggravated environmental disaster, threats of nuclear war, continued
violence against Black and Brown people, and the shrinking of public institutions.
“Mobilizing Literacy Research for Social Transformation” captured the idea of
movement across borders and also the importance of using our evidence base to
make an impact. The question of LRA having a more visible presence in the public
sphere is one that has arisen many times. During the conference, I interviewed
scholars whose research intersects with policy makers at local, state, national and
global levels. I worked with a videographer to produce a short video that could

 “Ferguson” refers to an incident in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014 in which 18-year-old

10

Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer. Protests broke out soon after leading to the
Black Lives Matter movement.
7.12  Rebecca Rogers 357

p­ rovide a springboard for dialogue and action. The video can be found on LRA’s
website.
Moving into my role as Board President, I continued the work of setting up orga-
nizational structures that promote diverse epistemologies. The Board room, in par-
ticular, was transformed from reading reports to a place for learning and inquiry. I
organized workshops for the board focused on racial equity and internationalism.
The objective was to examine how Western and Northern epistemologies, racism,
and linguicism can be recognized and interrupted in the policies and procedures of
the organization (e.g. appointments, reviews, conference sessions, and committee
meetings). Along the way, I found it important and necessary to learn more about
the history of the organization both from the perspective of those who were in power
and those who continue to be marginalized. I read former accounts of Presidents,
watched videos, studied some of the archives.
In 2016, LRA passed the “The Role of Literacy Research in Racism and Racial
Violence” which was a watershed moment for the organization. Over time, our
membership, leadership, conference sessions, and keynote speakers have included
diverse people, ideas, and traditions. The organization’s procedural manual consis-
tently includes reference to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Yet, some of the most
prestigious areas in the organization are entrenched in whiteness (e.g. awards,
Presidents) (Rogers, 2017). With leadership that is in tune with the dynamics of
power, discourse, and social transformation, we are seeing the strengthening of a
literacy research organization. Transformation, though, is often incremental. It is
not fast enough for people to occupy the margins and too fast to those with institu-
tional privilege. It has been tremendously rewarding to think through the parallels
between individual’s racial equity journey and the development and evolution of an
organization. Organizations live and breathe and go through periods of rupture, ten-
sion, and transformation.
Throughout this essay, I have drawn on the concepts of “critique” “discourse”
and “analysis.” Here, I will try to bring some of these ideas together. Critique, as I
alluded to above, has often been described as a critique of domination. I have argued
(Rogers & Mosley Wetzel, 2013; Rogers, 2017) along with Martin (2004) and
Bartlett (2012) that critique might also be thought of as appraisal and can be used to
study discourses practices that inspire, encourage, transform as well as to those that
oppress, silence, and subjugate. Discourse, is obviously central in all of this. CDA
has been critiqued for its overemphasis on written language at the expense of mul-
timodalities. However, I have argued that this is not a shortcoming of the framework
but rather of its application. Indeed, my approach has consistently attended to the
functions of multiple modes across time, people, and contexts. Finally, analysis is
central in the work of CDA. Here, I have tried very much to invite and inspire peo-
ple—from very young to seasoned community activists and teachers—to ground
their critique borne of struggle in the materiality of discourses. That is, I have
learned working alongside people who are working for equity that in many ways
they are already engaged with a critical analysis of discourse practices. I have
learned from many people how to deepen and strengthen my formalized approach
to CDA. Likewise, along the way, I believe I have shared tools for analyzing texts,
358 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

across contexts that has been put to work in the service of creating more equitable
and socially just classrooms and communities. Indeed, the point of this essay is to
share some of those examples and how I have created institutional spaces for CDA.
Full circle, I return to my family’s literacy practices. We are a part of an initiative
called We Stories which aims to cultivate racially aware families through the use of
diverse children’s books. In the context of this group, I share my research on racial
literacy, organize with other parents for racial equity, and deepen my family’s ways
of interacting, representing, and being a racially conscious family. In short, it is the
merging of my scholarly and parental commitments to discourse, power, and social
change. Last night, Sofia and I reread “Seeds of Change” by Jen Cullerton Johnson
(2010) which illustrates the life of Wangari Maathai, the first African woman and
environmentalist to win the Nobel Peace Prize. We lingered on the brightly illus-
trated pages and talked about how Maathai created environmental and social change
with her commitment to the environmental justice and gender equity. For me, CDA
is a tool for planting and cultivating “seeds of change” in all of the intersecting
venues of my life.

7.13  Paul G. Renigar

7.13.1  Short Biography

Paul “Paolo” Renigar, Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT),
has had training in applied linguistics and cryptologic linguistics. Currently, he is
Education Program Specialist for the Department of Veterans Affairs, US. His main
interests are in: CDS, multimodal semiotics, critical pedagogy (CP), computer
assisted language learning (CALL), mobile assisted language learning (MALL) and
in the way language is used to sediment social and political structures of power. His
most recent research focuses on the integration of social justice within the foreign
language classroom, the use of Web 3.0 resources for CP, and experiences of radi-
calization through social media. He continues to challenge the artificial dichotomy
that separates scholarship from activism while using education as a bottom-up
method of promoting social and political progress. His future research plans include
topics that span the use of social media by politicians, the social justice dilemmas
created by postmodern interpretations of language and identity, and ways of bring-
ing foreign and domestic controversy to earlier levels of language learning courses.
Below is a description of his work in his own words.
7.13  Paul G. Renigar 359

7.13.2  Moving CDA/CDS Beyond the Boundaries of Academia

CDA and CDS, by their very focus and the nature of their analyses, encourage
change in the world that is authentic. The way we, as humans, interact with each
other in relation to the controversial issues of our time, is rarely simple. When
U.S. policy on immigration led to the deportation of one of my friends, I was sur-
prised to learn of his undocumented status as much as I was outraged by the conser-
vative media’s portrayal of immigrants with metaphors, adjectives and adverbs that
did not even remotely represent the kind and honest man I had come to respect and
care for. When President Donald Trump began to incite his supporters with trium-
phalist rhetoric of a wall that would further divide us, I sensed on a very personal
level how what appeared to be impersonal policies could have devastating personal
ramifications that touch the lives of countless people.
One of my ongoing heartbreaks is the knowledge that there are countless chil-
dren who are caught up in a system of foster care that is profoundly broken. I could
not just ignore this knowledge and so I went to the local Human Resources of the
county in which I lived at the time to register for classes on foster and adoption care.
During this period the State in which I resided voted to allow certain adoption agen-
cies to deny adoption rights to LGBT people. Once again, I was directly impacted
by systems of oppression that were also adversely harming both LGBT communi-
ties and needy children. These are just two examples of why I believe it is impera-
tive to intersect my research in CDA/CDS with personal and collective activism and
social/political movements beyond the walls of academia.
One foundational approach to this is the disintegration of the dichotomy between
activist and scholar so that my students, colleagues, readers, audiences, family and
friends grasp that the issues I address are not for mere intellectual pursuit. For
example, although I played the role of moderator in an upper level foreign language
course on Conversation and Debate, I also openly mentioned to students that I
would be attending a rally to protest President Donald Trump’s Muslim Ban, a gath-
ering to stand against his decision to build the aforementioned wall between Mexico
and the United States, and a march on Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a visible activ-
ist against the ongoing and prevalent racism that still plagues our country.
I constantly introduce students, colleagues, friends, and family to art, movies,
non-academic books, and music that carry a heavy but positive discursive load to
stimulate the consideration of social/political issues from the perspectives of
respected celebrities, writers and artists. Sometimes the same message packaged in
non-academic language can be far more effective at reaching larger audiences. I also
make use of social media to promote all the above in ways that can be shared, liked
and linked to other social media sites so that what is life-affirming can be dissemi-
nated at a rapid pace and, hopefully, create a growing polyphony of voices that
systematically drown out the pervasiveness of hate speech.
However, I do not only share the artistic work of others. I previously published a
short story that purposefully targeted religious audiences steeped in patriarchal
views of faith and the divine. The purpose of the non-canonical work was to use
360 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

actual findings from history to provide a feminine lens by which we may reconceive
of the greater reality in which we live. Two examples of non-academic involvement
in social justice include the personal use of music, which has always been a personal
passion for how it has a way of easing the listener into complex, nuanced and diffi-
cult concepts while raising awareness of unquestioned ideology, metaphor, meton-
ymy, and dominant discourses. For the Druid City Pride event in Tuscaloosa,
Alabama, I performed U2’s song “One” while participants in the background used
other modalities (colors, signs, hashtags and memes) to emphasize the metonymy,
specifically synecdoche, implied in the famous #WeAreOrlando hashtag that was
trending since the massacre of LGBT people at the Pulse club in Orlando. Images
of that event were documented in the local news and continue to be reminders of the
tragic fact that LGBT people are still oppressed on a global scale. This was a peace-
ful means of calling people to action to prevent such atrocities from continuing and
getting involved politically on a local and global scale.
Prior to the release of the famous movie “Loving”, I recorded a cover song origi-
nally written and performed by singer and songwriter Ray Boltz titled “Don’t tell
me who to love”. There were six specific reasons to rerelease this updated version
of the song:
1. The message of the song is a reminder of the United States Supreme Court’s civil rights deci-
sion to finally disintegrate racist laws that criminalized interracial marriage (Loving v. Virginia,
388 U.S. 1, 1967), a social and political fact still opposed by many as evidenced in the more
recent visibility and emergence of white supremacist groups across the United States and
Europe.
2. The song raises awareness of the fact that, just as Richard and Mildred Loving were imprisoned
for their marriage, due to its violation of Virginia’s anti-miscegenation Racial Integrity Act of
1924, the rhetoric of the time still prevails in many communities within the United States and
in other countries.
3. Implied within the song is a comparative look at discourses of those who supported racial seg-
regation and more current discourses of those who continue to seek ways to criminalize or
penalize marriage between members of the same biological sex or gender. The song specifically
addresses the sources of opposition to marriage equality as steeped in legal and religious ide-
ologies and proposes a revisionist approach to both. A first version of that song is now available
to the public on YouTube (and is being shared on other social media sites).
4. The original author and singer of the song is a former musical celebrity for the religious right.
Upon revealing that he is gay, he was ostracized by the conservative religious communities and
banned from related events. He eventually released his 2010 album “True” in which he cele-
brates authenticity and vulnerability. Considering that Ray Boltz is now considered an under-
dog by those in power, it seemed both appropriate and honorable to carry on with his legacy.
5. Furthermore, my goal is to eventually perform the song in public settings, such as Pride events
or social justice events, to reinforce the interconnectivity of discourse and a growing and uni-
fied community on a global scale that is fighting for equality for all people regardless of
socially-constructed boundaries that divide us.
6. Finally, I also share the song with people whose political persuasions keep them bound to
essentialist notions of identity so that people who are currently opposed to equality may eventu-
ally question the validity and relevance of their position and, through critical thinking, move
away from bigotry and toward enlightenment.
Therefore, I use activism fomented outside of academic circles to inspire others
even within academia to think of new and unconventional projects that could be
pursued for the advancement of social justice in matters of personal interest. I
7.13  Paul G. Renigar 361

r­ ealize that placing my music into the public eye carries the risk of harsh backlash
and strong negative comments on social media, expected risks that I discuss openly
with my own students by introducing them to the extensively controversial nature of
CDA/CDS and CP, all of which underscores how and why activism is never meant
to be an inconsequential choice. What I’m discovering is that today’s students are
not generally intimidated by controversy once they have enjoyed a longer period of
exploring issues without judgment, particularly if these are issues that truly matter
to them.
Related to this, in a recently published case study (2018), Linda Waugh and I
discuss ways to intentionally bypass the limitations of foreign language curricula,
which do not tend to free themselves from essentialist notions of culture and do not
include critical perspectives. Coaching students in the practices of CDA/CDS and
CP encourages agency and involvement through dialogism, interconnectivity to for-
eign language speakers, and global collaboration that, hopefully, leaves a socially
and politically positive legacy by the next generation of potential activists. The inte-
gration of CDA/CDS/CP allows students to grasp a cohesive understanding of how
ideologies are embedded in second language (L2) discourse much like they are in
first language (L1) discourse. For example, students were trained to research dis-
courses related to racism, sexism and homophobia as a foundation for discovering
their own true passions about problems that they found most salient in the world.
With the emergence of movements like Black Lives Matter and the Women’s March,
students who were analyzing these topics from historical perspectives may continue
to find ways to get involved to make an authentic impact in the world. We assume
that what is important to the students in their personal lives may include topics that
we have not yet considered as educators. Some students decided to analyze the way
that a major international corporation (i.e., Monsanto) markets its toxic products in
other countries. Based on their choice of the topic to be analyzed, students were
trained to use principles from CDA to observe the corporation’s website’s language
use to erase critical perspectives, humanize itself, minimize controversy, “befriend”
the visitors of the website, and index positive aspects of its actions that would
detract from the discourses of those protesting its presence in, and harmful effects
on, the local community and the world at large. This self-selected topic by the stu-
dents eventually led one of the participants in the study to become an activist who
sought to recruit others for a cause that she began to feel was truly her own. The
point is that knowledge is not only power. Knowledge can lead to passion and that
passion can alter the direction of someone’s life.
One of the problems that became self-evident in having students analyze dis-
course is that we are often limited in access to diverse perspectives from news
sources with a clear agenda. That is why I encourage students to analyze hot news
topics through other means, such as sentiment analysis or metaphorical analysis.
Understanding that bias is prevalent on all sides of the media, students are then more
likely to seek out non-canonical resources and real people within their own country
and other countries to gain a more global perspective of the issues. This is often
achieved through social media. However, as my own students came to see, in studies
related to CALL or MALL, little consideration is given to the value of extending
362 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

social networking sites (SNSs) to L2 discursive analysis. Beyond simple communi-

cation with proficient speakers of the L2, SNSs are windows into global discourses
that may lead to a deeper understanding of the world as well as higher levels of L2
use with real people in real contexts. I have experimented with giving students the
option of choosing a more traditional approach to foreign language education (writ-
ten essays, textbook activities, etc.) or a digital form of foreign language education
with social media as the central platform for dialogues, debates, assignments and
class preparation. Invariably, even the students who prefer traditional approaches
cannot ignore the affordances of technology to achieve a far broader and deeper
understanding of world issues. Students in two courses documented their progress
throughout the courses through the creation of e-portfolios, which revealed that,
although there may be initial resistance to the use of Web 3.0 resources for second
language acquisition, these do tend to allow for more than basic levels of language
understanding from simple sentences to discursive analysis of topics not addressed
in the curricula that are, however, of deeply personal interest to students. Three
social media tools that my students have used outside of class to connect to people
around the world in multimodal ways are Reddit, Facebook and HelloTalk.
Furthermore, mobile devices allow dialogues to continue from nearly any location
in synchronous and asynchronous ways, both respectfully useful for quick discus-
sions and thoughtful consideration of responses to more challenging questions. The
purpose of coaching students in both CDA/CDS and online resources is to practi-
cally model how racist, homophobic, sexist and xenophobic discourses may be
countered through the efficient affordances of multimodal resources that intercon-
nect us through technology to a globalized world in constant dialogue.
Another way that I move CDA/CDS beyond the physical boundaries of academia
is through fomenting interdisciplinary dialogue. In a graduate course that I taught
on Foreign Language and Technology, I periodically invited guest speakers of other
disciplines to shed light on their work in matters of oppression, deception and
power. Students were exposed to the way that language use shapes, and is shaped
by, the social and political realities that we often take for granted. The idea behind
teaching both graduate and undergraduate students how to analyze real world lan-
guage use in US politics, marketing, movies, music and social media is that they
may, in the process, become sincerely excited about doing the same as these relate
to other languages/cultures of personal interest. For this reason, I always create a
social media page for my courses so that students can connect to each other, other
students beyond the classroom, and proficient speakers of other languages who may
provide different perspectives, and cultivate the practice of dialogism on a global
and local scale that leads to personal activism.
Of relevant interest to my graduate students was the fascinating and unprece-
dented misuse of Twitter by President Donald Trump. Together we problematized
the concept of “alternative facts” in the media by focusing on the challenges that
emerge with “open readings” of texts as evidenced through two different types of
political and popular cultural texts, the first demanding a departure from the mean-
ing expressed through tweets and the second requesting a return to the intended
meaning of the author. This allowed students to explore how other politicians in
7.14  Emily Suh and Katelyn Hemmeke 363

countries of their interest were also using Twitter in more factual or subversive
ways. However, it also revealed to students how they could use the same medium to
spread knowledge and bridge divided communities.
Related to this topic, I use social media and ongoing research to present my find-
ings on how the current U.S. Administration appears to communicate publicly about
the President’s intended meanings in light of the way in which his consistent lack of
cohesiveness and consistency in his tweets distorts a Barthesian engagement with
his communicative practices as well as with the social construction of the social
media version of “Trump” as readable text. Relating this to popular culture, I’m
developing a contrastive study that I intend to present in both academic and non-­
academic circles on his insistence on departures from meaning as opposed to the
frustrations that Annie Proulx raised in 2014 when she claimed that the intended
meaning of her short story Brokeback Mountain had been lost on a public with
divergent agendas. I propose that the dilemma is that there are readers and viewers
that appreciate the possibility of engaging forms of art, media and communication
as a dialogic practice that places a comma where the producer of meaning may have
intended to place an undeniable period. Proulx implies that the semiotic process
ended with her short story. Her critics assume that her story has different meanings
for different audiences at different times. Outside of this discourse we find The
White House, which bypasses the debate on the importance of meaning altogether
to imply that, when intended meaning becomes inconvenient, readers and audiences
should consider alternative readings.

7.14  Emily Suh and Katelyn Hemmeke

7.14.1  Short Biography of Emily Suh

Emily Suh is an Assistant Professor of Education at Texas State University where

she prepares educators to be practitioner-scholar-activists working with culturally
and linguistically diverse students and families. Her research examines discourse
and the ways in which it both informs and is informed by access and identity within
various educational contexts and for different groups, particularly immigrants and
multilinguals. Her work includes MCDA (see Sect. 4.6), transitivity analysis, ges-
ture analysis, and metonymy and metaphor analysis. Emily is a Korean-American
adoptee. She won the American Association of Applied Linguistics Dissertation
Award in 2018 and was also recently awarded the International Society for Language
Studies (ISLS) Founders’ Emergent Scholars Award for her work on adoption dis-
course. Her forthcoming publication in the journal Critical Inquiry in Language
Studies as a result of this award is entitled “Adoptees.Speak: A Multimodal Analysis
of Korean Adoptees’ Adoption Narratives”.
364 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

7.14.2  Short Biography of Katelyn Hemmeke

Katelyn Hemmeke received her M.A. in English from the University of Nebraska-­
Lincoln. Her thesis examined Korean adoptee memoirs and trauma theory in rela-
tion to birth family search. As a 2016–2017 Fulbright Junior Researcher in South
Korea, she conducted further research on birth family search and reunion, including
an oral history project through which she interviewed 30 Korean transnational
adoptees. She currently lives in Seoul, South Korea, where she teaches literature
and composition at an international high school. Katelyn is a Korean-American
adoptee and a founding member of the activist group SPEAK (Solidarity and
Political Engagement of Adoptees in Korea). Below is their story of their activism
in their own words.

7.14.3  Unmasking Ideology Underlying Adoption Discourse

Since Bertha and Harry Holt’s 1950s campaign to “save” the Korean “war orphans,”
adoption agencies have portrayed international adoption as “the salvation of orphans
with Christian family values and patriotic citizenship” (Patton-Imani, 2012: 294).
This international adoption narrative presents all children available for adoption as
orphans; further, it benefits adoption agencies and individuals hoping to become
parents through adoption by cloaking the latter group’s personal desire for family in
altruism. In addition to privileging the values of adoptive parents and agencies, such
discourse contributes to a public understanding of adoption as child rescue. Critical
adoption studies seeks to uncover the ideologies of race, age, language, and social
class underlying dominant narratives of adoption and focuses on adoptee voice and
perspectives in adoption stories (Suh, 2018).
We use CDS to support our critical adoption studies research which analyzes the
language of international adoption in blogs as presented by adoption agencies,
adoptive parents, and adoptees for the purpose of uncovering power dynamics
within adoption. In a project analyzing blog posts from the website of Minnesota-­
based Children’s Home/Lutheran Social Services, an international adoption agency,
we conducted a transitivity analysis (Halliday, 1985; Fowler, 1996; Hart, 2011) of
13 blog posts about international adoption to understand the ways in which bloggers
presented certain actors as having greater or lesser ability to affect others within an
adoption. The findings from this study suggested that the adoption agency blog
posts about international adoption reified the dominant adoption discourse through
blogger verb choices which represented adoptive parents and the adoption agency
as being highly powerful. In addition, the analysis uncovered how adoptive parents,
not adoptees, were the actual subject of the dominant adoption narrative. While
adoptees were presented as performing 44 transitive verb actions, adoptive parents
were the subjects completing 79 transitive verb actions. Adoptive parents and agen-
cies were also more likely than adoptees to be paired with material processes.
7.14  Emily Suh and Katelyn Hemmeke 365

Machin and Mayr (2012) explain that material processes produce the highest levels
of transitivity and representations of subjects’ agency. Adoptees were most fre-
quently represented through the mental process of waiting; mental processes are
often used to convey passivity since the participant is presented as being busy but
without the ability to impact others (Machin & Mayr, 2012).
In response to adoption agencies’ and adoptive parents’ control over public dis-
cussions of adoption during National Adoption Month, a group called the Lost
Daughters created an online movement to “flip the script” of adoption (González,
2014, as cited by the Lost Daughters, 2014). As members explain, the movement’s
goal “isn’t about giving adoptees a voice. We have a voice. It demands we stop
being silenced” (AmandaTDA, 2014, as cited by The Lost Daughters, 2014). Often
times, by flipping the script, adoptees introduce critical reflections on the implica-
tions of race, belonging and power to stories of adoption. As a follow up to the
CHLSS blog project, we are currently conducting a transitivity analysis of a collec-
tion of blog posts about adoption by five Korean Adoptees (KADs). KADs are the
largest international adoption community (Tuan & Shiao, 2011), and many utilize
social media to voice their adoption stories. The corpus of our second study exam-
ines the blog posts of five KADs and includes 19 blog entries and the posted
responses. We hope the work will provide additional insight into ways adoptees
continue to claim agency and challenge the dominant narrative of adoption pro-
duced and controlled by adoption agencies and adoptive parents.
Through CDS, we have begun to unmask the ideology underlying adoption dis-
course. Although in the early stages, this research substantiates adoptee claims
about how they are silenced in adoption agency and adoptive parent-controlled nar-
ratives about adoption (Kim, 2010; Trenka, 2009). Our work uncovers the power
dynamic inherent in adoptee-adoptive parent relations and seeks to change the dom-
inant adoption narrative, particularly as it is used to present adoption to potential
adoptive parents. We argue that potential adoptive parents must enter adoption
understanding the power differential between themselves (and the adoption agency)
on the one hand and adoptees on the other.
In particular, we take our CDS work to the streets through our efforts to work
primarily with adoptees, and also with mental health experts counseling adoptees
and adoptive families. The second author, who currently lives in Seoul, is on the
steering committee of SPEAK, a new adoptee activist organization. Through educa-
tion and activism, SPEAK aims to bring adoptees together and raise critical aware-
ness of adoption issues. The organization hopes to not only draw attention to
systemic problems within the adoption industry and discourse, but also to equip
adoptees with the knowledge and tools to lead their fight for social justice. In
response to mental health counselor interest from our presentation at St. John’s
Adoption Initiative (Suh & Hemmeke, 2016), we are also creating mental health
practitioner trainings to help therapists provide adoptees with language empowering
adoptees in the therapy sessions and beyond. As KADs ourselves, we concur with
other adoptees who note, “[There is] Nothing about us without us” (Johnson, 2014,
as cited by The Lost Daughters). We arm ourselves with the tools of CDS to analyze
others’ representations of the actors involved in adoption and (re)present ourselves.
366 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

7.15  Ian Roderick

7.15.1  Short Biography

Ian Roderick is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier

University, Canada. He is author of Critical Discourse Studies and Technology: A
multimodal approach to analysing technoculture (Bloomsbury, 2016) and currently
serves as Special Issues editor to the journal Critical Discourse Studies. His research
focuses upon the intersection of discourse, power, technology, and space.
Next, Ian Roderick explains how he envisions his own work in the context of this
chapter in a description he entitles “Teaching against Employability”:

7.15.2  Teaching against Employability

It is understandable, in these neoliberal times, if upon being invited to offer an

example of how, as a CDS scholar, one has applied their academic work outside of
the academy, it could be taken as a further internalization of the audit culture that
currently grips us. However, as I understand this project, it is not an invitation to
give evidence of our effectiveness but rather to give pause to reflect upon how we
reject and transgress the bifurcation of scholarly and so-called ‘real world’ activity.
To crib from Marx’s Thesis 11, discourse analysts must do more than interpret the
world in various ways, they must help to change it. Accordingly, I am most grateful
to Linda Waugh and Theresa Catalano for this opportunity to contribute to this
project.
Of course, the notion that the work of academics has been too disconnected from
the needs of the ‘real world’ has also been used not as a call to action but as a means
to discredit and render impracticable challenges put for by academics working for
change. This is again premised upon the idea that there is a clearly demarcated bor-
der between the academy and the ‘real world’ out there. Interestingly, under neolib-
eralism, this border has been rendered more permeable. The discourse of the ivory
tower has been further mutated to mandate that institutions of higher learning now
remake themselves as relevant and connected to the ‘real world’ insofar as they
work to service the needs of particular privileged spheres of the ‘real world’—those
of economic activity, to be exact. This is what our new audit culture is all about, of
course—making higher education accountable not only to the state and the private
sector, but also seemingly to student-consumers. It is in the context of this newly
redefined ‘partnership’ between higher education and industry that the regime of
employability emerges.
Elevated to the level of a ‘planetspeak discourse’, employability recontextualizes
unemployment by changing how we understand labour markets such that a scarcity
of employment becomes instead a scarcity of skills and citizens go from being
employed or unemployed to being employable or unemployable (Fejes, 2010: 91).
7.15  Ian Roderick 367

Employability, accordingly, shifts the burden onto the individual citizen just as has
been done for education. Recognizing this burden and the consequences of falling
on the unemployable side of the coin, it is not surprising that I increasingly find my
students evaluating their own learning against this discourse of employability. So,
while the classroom is still seen as a rather quixotic space removed from the ‘real
world’, it is increasingly called upon to interact with as well as service that ‘real
world’. This presents both an interesting contradiction and also an opportunity.
Suddenly the division between the classroom and the anticipated world of employ-
ment is not so clearly defined.
Since students are already interested in how their learning will translate into
employability skills, I find it quite easy to initiate discussions with them about the
relationship between how they currently work in the classroom and how they expect
to work in the future. Typically, I start by noting how the classroom itself has
changed, focusing particularly upon the changes to the layout of the room from the
traditional lecture hall to the decentered room filled with screens, tables and rolling
chairs. When I ask them what kinds of activities are expected of them in each type
of classroom, they readily recognize that while the older lecture hall layout pre-
sumed that students worked individually with all eyes to the podium at the front of
the room, in the new classrooms they are expected to do both individual and group
work and to readily and seamlessly shift between the two. Furthermore, it usually
doesn’t take too long before someone observes that the anonymity afforded by the
lecture hall is gone in the new ‘active’ classrooms (obliging them to come more
prepared and participate). At this point, I like to raise Gramsci’s observation that the
regimented work processes of Fordism ironically afforded line workers greater
intellectual freedom. We then talk about the kinds of discourses about learning,
creativity and work that are resemiotized into the active classroom and how these
might carry over into the workplace. This eclipsing of the campus and the office is
made all the more apparent when I show them clips of company promotional videos
from employment websites like Glassdoor. We talk then about the ways in which
work at these companies is presented as fun, dynamic and even liberating—and
students will often then contrast these with their own work experiences as interns
and junior employees. Against these representations I then show the students videos
produced by office furniture manufacturers and discuss how office design employs
aesthetics and sociality to produce spaces that are highly ‘extractive’ in order to
build ‘corporate value’. My immediate objective is to recast the seeming empower-
ment and liberation of these workplaces as recontextualizations of neoliberal dereg-
ulation and flexibilization. However, my aim, ultimately, is to invite students to
rethink how they have come to see themselves as entrepreneurs-in-training and that
entrepreneurship has become a mode of conduct that normalizes their own increas-
ing experiences of flexible and precarious forms of work. In chasing after employ-
ability, they are setting themselves up for always trying to grab what structurally
must be kept out of reach for some. Instead of thinking about their time in the
classroom as being in the service of an employer-to-be, we can instead talk about
how class time can be a means to (re)formulating other modes of learning and
368 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

c­ onduct that might be truly freeing. The idea is not to shit all over their dreams but
to alert them to the reality that we are all workers.

7.16  Timothy Reagan

7.16.1  Short Biography

Timothy Reagan is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Foreign Language

Education and former Dean of the College of Education and Development at The
University of Maine, and he has held other senior faculty and administrative posi-
tions at a number of universities in the U.S., South Africa, and Kazakhstan. His
primary areas of research are applied and educational linguistics, language policy
and planning, and issues related to sign languages. Prof. Reagan is the author of
more than a dozen books, including Language planning and language policy for
sign languages (2010), Language matters: Reflections on educational linguistics
(2009), and Critical questions, critical perspectives: Language and the second lan-
guage educator (2005). He is also the author of more than 150 journal articles and
book chapters, and his work has appeared in journals on education, language stud-
ies, language policy and planning, sign language studies, and semiotics. He has
served as co-editor of Critical Inquiry in Language Studies and as Editor-in-Chief
of Language Problems and Language Planning. Reagan writes about his work and
connection to CDS below:

7.16.2  I nfusing a Critical Perspective on Linguistics Topics

in the Educational Domain

The common theme in much of Reagan’s work is the need to infuse a critical per-
spective on linguistic topics, especially in the educational domain. He argues that
given the centrality of language in both our daily and professional lives, the amount
of misinformation about (and ignorance of) language issues—among educators and
others—is not only surprising, but dangerous. Among the concerns that Reagan has
raised are the challenges posed by “linguistic legitimacy” in educational and social
discourse in our society. Basically, the ideology of “linguistic legitimacy” is
grounded in a set of beliefs and attitudes about the relative value of different lan-
guage varieties. Thus, some language varieties—including, for instance, African
American English, American Sign Language (ASL), Spanglish, and others—are
commonly viewed as somehow flawed or incomplete in comparison with other (typ-
ically “standard”) language varieties. Such beliefs and attitudes presuppose that lin-
guistic differences (i.e., differences related to phonology, lexicon, morphology,
syntax, and so on) in some manner lead to cognitive or communication barriers.
7.17  Grace E. Fielder 369

Such beliefs and attitudes are especially powerful in the educational context, where
classroom teachers often make important decisions about student learning, aca-
demic achievement, the assessment of student learning, curricular issues, teaching
methodologies, etc. based on misinformation and misunderstanding of language. In
short, the ideology of “linguistic legitimacy” serves to reinforce social biases in
society, as well as both reflecting and providing support for racism, classism, sex-
ism, audism and ableism, and linguicism.
In his work, Reagan has argued that an awareness of and sensitivity to language
issues from a critical perspective should be seen as an essential component of the
teacher education knowledge base, as well as a key aspect of reflective practice for
classroom teachers and educational administrators. He has long advocated the
inclusion of specific linguistics training as a part of teacher education programs and
has recently been involved in the design and development of such a course as part
of the revision of the undergraduate teacher education program at the University of
Maine. An important aspect of what Reagan has called for is that a traditional intro-
ductory course in linguistics, although certainly a valuable contribution in its own
right, is not on its own what is required for future educators. Rather, he advocates an
applied linguistics course that in addition to common topics in linguistics such as
phonology and morphology incorporates issues and topics such as language varia-
tion, linguistic legitimacy, sexism and/in language, linguicism, and linguistic
human rights.
One important area in which Reagan has made substantial contributions in his
work is sign language and the rights of d/Deaf children. He has been a vocal advo-
cate for the acceptance of ASL as an appropriate way for students at all levels, to
meet foreign language requirements, and has been very supportive of efforts at both
the state and national levels for the official recognition of ASL. He has also strongly
argued for the linguistic and communicative rights of d/Deaf people, especially in
the United States and South Africa.

7.17  Grace E. Fielder

7.17.1  Short Biography

Grace E. Fielder is Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies and Second Language
Acquisition and Teaching. She received her Ph.D. in Slavic Linguistics from UCLA
in 1983. In 1992, she was delighted to relocate back West from the University of
Virginia to the University of Arizona. Her research interests are in discourse, prag-
matics and semiotics, primarily in the languages of the Balkans (Bulgaria,
Macedonia, Greece, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, and
Albania). She teaches graduate courses in historical linguistics, semiotics, language
identity and ideology. In the next section, she discusses her work (in her own words)
and its connection to the communities of focus.
370 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

7.17.2  CDA/CDS and Community Outreach

Through collaboration with the Australian Macedonian Human Rights Committee

and the EFA-Rainbow Party in Greece, my research on the history of the Macedonian
language, both as a standard language in the Republic of Northern Macedonia and
as a minority language in Greece and Bulgaria, has been presented at two scholarly
conferences in 2013 and 2015, which also resulted in two publications (Fielder,
2015 and forthcoming), that included the local community whose contested lan-
guage was the object of inquiry. In Melbourne, Australia, the local Macedonian
community (the majority immigrants from Northern Greece), after a long legal fight
to be recognized by the Australian government as Macedonians (rather than Slav
Macedonians) were able to realize the scholarly importance of their language and
its acceptance as something of value to scholars. During the discussions following
the presentations it became clear that this external validation contributed to a posi-
tive self-identification. This positive impact on the local community inspired the
organizers to reach out to the EFA-Rainbow Party (a human rights group in Northern
Greece) to arrange a similar conference in Florina (a town with the Macedonian
name of Lerin before WWII) and then to the minority Macedonian community who
have been struggling for linguistic human rights (as well as recognition) from the
Greek government. Again, the local community attended the conference and my
talk presented evidence that the Macedonian language was recognized by protestant
missionaries in the early nineteenth century — as opposed to having been invented
by Tito in 1945 as is the official Greek government position. The presentation of this
evidence at a public forum had a powerful impact on the validity of their claims.
Their presence was itself a political statement since the state police were in atten-
dance and both participants and audience were filmed. We also attended a local folk
celebration that had until recently been prevented from taking place by authorities.
Another impact of my work is that I include not only Macedonians, but the Roma
in my coursework on language and identity and semiotics. The Roma (disparag-
ingly referred to as gypsies) have been a marginalized and persecuted group for
centuries. Most of my students have never heard of them and this raises their con-
sciousness and brings to the classroom the importance of attending to the social
responsibilities of doing research. One of these students includes first author of this
book, who began her work with the Roma in my graduate class.

7.18  Linda R. Waugh

This section was co-written by both authors of this volume, with Theresa in the
lead, providing much of the structure and the wording. It first gives a brief ‘synthe-
sis of Linda’s academic career, and then describes how she has tried to make a dif-
ference in the world based on her knowledge of CDA/CDS.
7.18  Linda R. Waugh 371

7.18.1  Short Biography

Linda Waugh taught at Cornell University starting in 1971, becoming Professor of

Linguistics, Romance Studies and Comparative Literature on the basis of her inter-
disciplinary interests, and also serving as Chair of the Department of Modern
Languages from 1995 to 1998. She moved to the University of Arizona in 2000,
where she became Professor of French, English, Anthropology, Linguistics, and
Language, Reading, and Culture. She was Chair of the Graduate Interdisciplinary
Doctoral Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) in
2002–2010 and Founder and Co-Director of the (government-funded) Center for
Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy (CERCLL) in 2006–2014.
She became Professor Emerita in 2016 and has spent much of her time since then
working with her remaining doctoral students as well as being co-author both of this
book and, with Monique Monville-Burston, of an overview chapter on the history of
linguistics in the twentieth century for their co-edited book (Cambridge History of
Linguistics, Waugh, Monville-Burston, and Joseph forthcoming, Cambridge
University Press). In addition to many articles and chapters, she has (co-)authored
and (co-)edited 12 books and monographs. She is recognized for her work with the
renowned linguist Roman Jakobson, especially her co-authorship with him of the
book The Sound Shape of Language (1979/1987/2002, which was translated into
several other languages—see Waugh, 2018 for more details). Because of her work
with Jakobson, she became a Trustee (and then Executive Director) of the Roman
Jakobson Intellectual Trust in 1986, designated to administer Jakobson’s intellec-
tual estate and to promote the study of his work. She recently passed those duties on
to de Gruyter-Mouton Publishers in Berlin.
Waugh’s road to CDA/CDS was long and winding, starting with her teaching and
research in French and general linguistics, then also in semiotics (including Peirce’s
work), which led to her being Vice-President/President of the Semiotic Society of
America in 1989–1991—as well as in French semantics, pragmatics and discourse
analysis (especially media discourse)—while at Cornell University. After her move
to the University of Arizona, where she greatly expanded her interdisciplinary
research and teaching interests, she taught courses in general and English discourse
analysis and semiotics on a regular basis and worked with many doctoral students
on topics of relevance to (C)DA/(C)DS. It was then that she began in earnest to
analyze media discourse in English, which led eventually to her own work in CDA/
CDS. As a result, she has produced a body of work with her former students, includ-
ing Theresa, co-author of this book, which utilizes this framework.
372 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

7.18.2  Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign

Because of her background as a semiotician, Linda is attuned to the multiple layers

of meanings in everything around us, and how signs can be interpreted in different
ways depending on a variety of social and contextual factors. In her classes, she
always focused on meaning, and how language, and other semiotic systems, could
be used to do many different things. As such, CDA/CDS was a natural step for her
to take in her research and her teaching; her semiotic perspective always goes back
to signs and what they stand for, especially in her focus on metonymy, which is an
important way in which she has contributed to (multimodal) CDA/CDS work. In
particular, she has focused much attention on the subtle (and often unnoticed) way
that metonymy is used to manipulate people and to persuade them to support par-
ticular ideologies, such as the way it has been adopted to present undocumented
populations as a threat, conflate different groups of people, and obscure issues
related to border security and nationwide immigration policy reform (cf. Smith &
Waugh, 2008). In addition, she has worked with Theresa to show how a critical,
metonymic (and metaphorical) and multimodal approach can be employed to study
how various groups are represented in media discourse (Catalano & Waugh, 2013a,
2013b, 2017). She has also worked on a critical, metonymic and multimodal
approach to ‘English Only’ websites (cf. Kohler & Waugh, 2015; Waugh & Kohler,
2015) and on a CDA approach to second language teaching and learning (cf. Renigar
& Waugh, 2018).
In addition to publishing with her Cornell and Arizona students on a number of
different topics, she has presented papers with them and co-sponsored symposia at
various conferences that they participated in, and in general mentored them (e.g.,
she won a mentoring award for her work with students in the SLAT program) and
she is very proud of all of their accomplishments. For her, social justice starts with
the way you treat the people around you, and so she has done her best to take care
of and advocate for her students, colleagues and friends around her. She believes
that if you are serious about doing good in the world, then you treat everyone fairly
and try to bring out the good in others, if possible. Indeed, she cares for those
around her intellectually and emotionally, most especially her students, coming to
their aid when needed, and generally providing guidance and advice—some for
many years after they graduate. Evidence of the high regard her students and col-
leagues have for her can be seen in the engraved brick pavers placed in the Women’s
Plaza of Honor on the University of Arizona campus upon her retirement with the
inscription, “Prof. Linda R.  Waugh. SLAT Chair. CERCLL Founder. Visionary.
Inspiring Mentor.”
As is the case with many individuals discussed in this chapter, Linda has
impacted the world through the way she has shared CDA/CDS with her students. In
fact, several of her students (including Theresa) have written in this chapter about
how they have been inspired to work with CDA/CDS and also attempt social change
through that work. And, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, she chal-
lenged her students not only to study and write about ­CDA/CDS, but also to think
7.19  Theresa Catalano 373

about how they can use it. Case in point, it was her original question to Theresa on
her doctoral comprehensive exams about how CDA/CDS matters that became the
impetus for this chapter. Furthermore, it must be added that without her careful and
thorough approach to looking at the history and development of CDA/CDS, the
Waugh, Catalano, Al Masaeed, Hong Do, and Renigar (2016) chapter would not
have been so long and hence this book might never have been written.

7.19  Theresa Catalano

7.19.1  Short Biography

Theresa Catalano is Associate Professor of Second Language Education and Applied

Linguistics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), and works in the
Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education (which is in the College
of Education and Human Sciences). She is co-author of this volume, and also author
of a book about global migration (2016), which analyzes metaphors used in inter-
views with migrants from around the world. Her research focuses on education and
migration, critical language studies, and global citizenship. Some of her recent pub-
lications include an article with Grace Fielder on the Roma and online reader com-
ments (2018), another with Jenelle Reeves and Stephanie Wessels on teacher
learners in contact with emergent multilingual students (2018), and on the represen-
tation of Central American migrant children in public discourse and the implica-
tions for educators (2017). She also co-authored an article on how the media subtly
distract attention from, or diminish severity of crimes by Mafia groups (cf. Catalano
& Waugh, 2017), after earlier work on the same topic about CEOs before and during
the financial crisis of 2008 (Catalano & Waugh, 2013a) and the perpetuating of
stereotypes of criminality about Latinx populations in the US (Catalano & Waugh,
2013b). Below she describes some of the things she has been involved with recently
that connect her scholarship to the world.

7.19.2  CDA/CDS and My Community

7.19.2.1  Graduate Classes

Like many others in the field, the biggest way in which I have made a difference in
the world with my work has been through my students. In my doctoral seminar on
multimodal textual analysis, I give my students tools of analysis (rooted in SocSem,
CDS and CogLing) that prepare them to conduct their own CDA/CDS related
research on educational issues or other relevant fields. Students in the seminar gain
real practice in conducting multimodal analyses as part of their fulfillment of their
final project requirement. In several cases, students have published their work from
374 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

this seminar or presented it at conferences or developed dissertation topics. For

example, in 2014, two students did an analysis of Teach for America (TFA), a non-­
profit that recruits college students from top universities in the United States to
commit to teaching for two years in public or charter schools in low-income com-
munities. They then presented their work at a national conference and later pub-
lished it (2015) in Critical Education. The paper focuses on the misleading way that
TFA represents itself to the public, enabling those “who have not interacted with the
organization, and also may have very little understanding of it, to form an opinion
about its work and effectiveness, thus creating and reinforcing beliefs that align
people for or against TFA” (Faltin Osborn & Sierk, 2015: 1).
More recently, I have collaborated with another student from that same seminar
(Tony Fucci) to analyze anti-intellectualism as it has recently manifested itself in
Nebraska. This paper (published in the Journal of Language and Politics in 2019)
uses MCDA to explore the ways in which media discourse about student/faculty
activism during an incident at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was framed as a
violation of professionalism on behalf of the university. At the same time, we exam-
ine how media coverage failed to address the complex relationship between the
organization involved (Turning Point) and public universities within the political
context of neoliberalism, anti-intellectualism, and education. The idea for the analy-
sis began because the events that were the focus of the analysis occurred in real time
throughout the semester, and so they provided great examples for students to see
abstract concepts like neoliberalism they had been learning about come into play in
their own back yard. In addition, I attempted to model for my students critical lit-
eracy, and the way that CDA/CDS can be a powerful tool in ‘fighting back’.
Currently I am working on a similar piece about anti-intellectualism in my state,
which I will have my doctoral students read and discuss. This time Associate
Professor Ari Kohen and I examine an incident in which he was threatened by a
local politician’s staff because of a post he liked on Facebook which showed a
humorous photograph of a campaign poster which had been altered. In our paper,
we employ positive discourse analysis (PDA, see Chap. 5) and auto-ethnography
(since Ari’s opinion as the person involved in the media discourse is a feature of the
paper, see Sect. 6.5) in the hopes of modeling successful ways in which to respond
to anti-intellectual attacks. In this way, we are using CDA/CDS as a tool of resis-
tance to help academics and anyone else who might find themselves in similar situ-
ations in which powerful political forces attempt to violate their Freedom of Speech
for ulterior motives.

7.19.2.2  Social Media/Soft News as Curriculum

As a regular part of the graduate seminar I mentioned above, students join a class
Facebook site and remain connected to the course even years after taking it, and I
often use the site to connect what we do in class to events and programs that explore
these same topics, although they don’t always use the same terminology to do so.
Below I provide examples of two types of Facebook posts I made to the page in
7.19  Theresa Catalano 375

2017, attempting to show my graduate students (who are on Facebook with me)
how (1) activities by academics who are in the public domain and (2) certain types
of T.V. shows relate to what I have taught them in class. Students then respond and
comment on these issues, and continue to think about the concepts they learned
in class.
1. Activities by Prof. George Lakoff of the University of California, Berkeley11:
In a Facebook post, I pointed students to an interview of George Lakoff with
Travis Smiley (Smiley, 2017, see the link below in the footnote to view the video)
in which he talks about some of the very concepts my students are learning
(essentially, critical metaphor/metonymy analysis, but he doesn’t call it that).
Lakoff has written numerous books (e.g., 2012, 2014) that are aimed at the gen-
eral public, as well as aspiring or current politicians, and he has done an excel-
lent job of showing his own students (as well as the general public) why his work
matters. Although he doesn’t call his work CDA or CDS, his critical analyses of
metaphor and metonymy (such as those found in his The Little Blue Book, 2012),
illustrate the use of such tools to think critically about political issues.
Lakoff has done much more than just write books. He has made numerous
public appearances which are available on YouTube12, many of which have been
viewed by over 100,000 people, such as his talk on ‘moral politics’ on University
of California Public Television (Swartout, 2015) in 2008. Since the election of
Trump, Lakoff has been even more active, appearing on shows such as MSNBC
(MediaOne Studios, 2017) and the Carol Rosin Show (American Freedom
Radio, 2016) to talk about how Trump won and to give journalists advice on how
to deal with Trump in press conferences (however, there is no public evidence
that they have taken his advice). In addition, he (along with others) has analyzed
Trump’s tweets, and in his interview with MSNBC, he claims the tweets have
four properties; (1) They pre-emptively frame things whenever possible, (2)
They divert attention from real issues, (3) They attack the messenger and deflect
accusations, and (4) They test public reaction to see if the public will accept it.
According to Lakoff, “everything Trump tweets is strategic and he knows how to
use other people’s brains to his advantage”. He also notes that it’s important to
recognize that Trump is very smart and often what he does is covering up for
what Republicans are doing at that moment (e.g., putting very conservative
judges into federal courts). Lakoff has done much more (including numerous Op
Eds in prominent online news sources in the U.S., blogs, and many other TV
interviews, particularly since Trump became President in 2017).
One reason he stands out to me is because in 2011, I visited him at the
University of California, Berkeley where he taught (he’s now retired), while I
was doing research on the Occupy Movement. Not only did Lakoff meet with
me, but he discussed the movement with me at length, and he also told me how
he advised his own students at Berkeley about using current events as an entry

11
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OC-aS_QyHU.
12
 www.youtube.com.
376 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

point into the cognitive linguistic content he was teaching at the moment, and
connecting what students were studying to the world around them. This made an
impression on me and has greatly influenced my own teaching since I try to
make learning relevant to student interests; in addition, this has helped me shape
my own efforts to take my scholarship and use it for social change.
2. TV shows in the category of ‘soft news’, typically involving comedy and/or
satire:
I posted the link in the footnote below13 on Facebook (for my students) from
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which discusses Donald Trump’s political
slogan “build a wall” (also discussed below), and it specifically mentions meton-
ymy. John Oliver’s show is one of many that fall under the category of “soft
news”, that is, programs that often blur the line between information and enter-
tainment. “Soft news creates a more knowledgeable citizenry by educating an
inattentive public that would not otherwise follow traditional hard news” (Baum,
2002 as cited in Baumgartner & Morris, 2006: 342). Other U.S. soft news pro-
grams such as The Daily Show (previously with Jon Stewart and currently with
Trevor Noah as host), The Colbert Report (no longer running), Full Frontal (with
Samantha Bee) and Saturday Night Live’s (SNL) Weekend Update are great
examples of how critical scholarship can be taken to the public and in some
cases, influence their viewers.
Some soft news or similar types of shows based in countries besides the U.S.
include the Dutch Zondag Met Lubach [Sunday with Lubach], Egyptian come-
dian (and former heart surgeon) Bassem Youssef’s show Al-Bernameg [The
Show] which was very popular in Egypt (and elsewhere) from 2011 to 2014,
when political pressure forced him to end it. In addition, Canada has Royal
Canadian Air Farce (similar to SNL), This Hour Has 22 Minutes, and the Rick
Mercer Report (note that many of these shows can be viewed on YouTube14). In
South Africa, there is the Late Night News (LNN) featuring Loyiso Gola (which
is quite similar to The Daily Show) and ZA News, which has become a web
series. Pakistan had Saad Haroon’s Real News which became even more popular
after it released the parody song “Burka Woman” (jpgrumberg 2010) and inspired
interesting conversations among Muslims about women’s dress and larger issues
related to Islam (which can be seen when reading the comments on the Burka
Woman site). Saad Haroon is now reaching his audience directly through www.
youtube.com. One of the most watched weekly programs in Israel’s history is
Eretz Nehederet [Wonderful Country], which has been described as one part The
Daily Show and one part Saturday Night Live (Iqbal, 2011) and features host
Eyal Kitzis. Additionally, even more similar to The Daily Show (in style and
delivery, but not structure) is Gav Hauma with Lior Schleien. In Germany there
is Oliver Welke’s Heute-Show [Today Show] and in Japan, If I Were Prime
Minister, with Hikari Ota, which poked fun at Japan’s cabinet, multiple prime

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xecEV4dSAXE&t=364s.
13

 www.youtube.com.
14
7.19  Theresa Catalano 377

ministers and submissive relationship with the U.S (it appears to be no longer
running). In Italy, there is Crozza, (with Maurizio Crozza) which is quite differ-
ent than many of the other shows (resembling the US’s Saturday Night Live in
some ways, but also featuring dialogue between characters and an unseen com-
mentator). This show gained popularity when Crozza’s impersonation of Trump
went viral (Editorial Staff, 2016). Finally, in Brazil, there is Programa do
Porchat, The Noite com Danilo Gentili and Greg News.
I posted the link to John Oliver (LastWeekTonight, 2017) mentioned above
for several reasons. First, because my class is about analyzing multimodal texts,
soft news shows are ideal. They are highly multimodal and intertextual. There
are frequent video clips and images used to illustrate points in a humorous way,
and there are references to hashtags that connect to other discourses (usually
with humor) and other satirical or soft news shows or even clips from more seri-
ous investigative news shows such as Frontline (which is on US Public
Television). Second, this particular episode talks about the “build a wall” slogan
from Trump’s campaign (about putting up a wall between the southern border of
the U.S. and Mexico, in order to keep Mexican migrants from entering the U.S.).
In the clip I posted a link to, Oliver notes (bold added for emphasis):
Yes, while we are all furiously chanting “build that wall” we all understand in this con-
text, “wall” is a clever use of metonymy, or a figure of speech, in which one word ‘wall’
in this example, is used as a stand in for a saner more sensible immigration policy…

The above comment is exactly the type of detailed critical analysis that CDA/
CDS scholars engage in, including linguistic terminology such as ‘metonymy’.
Here Oliver takes statements by Trump (‘build that wall’) and shows sarcasti-
cally how, according to Peter Thiel (advisor to President Trump and venture
capitalist) whom Oliver mentioned earlier in the clip, people should “take Trump
seriously but not literally” and therefore be thinking that “build that wall” means
a thoughtful and logical immigration policy, instead of the irrational, ineffective,
and astronomically costly idea of actually building a wall (which Trump was still
insisting on at the time of writing this text and was in the process of being built
across stretches of the border between Arizona and Mexico). In effect, John
Oliver illustrates how the strategy of saying that Trump didn’t mean what he said
helped get him elected because people didn’t necessarily support his policies, but
they didn’t feel they had to, because people like Peter Thiel worked hard at pro-
moting the idea that he should be taken ‘seriously but not literally’. In the pro-
cess of applying his detailed analysis to Trump’s administration, Oliver also
makes fun of people like us (e.g., CDA/CDS scholars)—who do an interpretive
analysis based on such ‘big words/ideas’ as metonymy. I should also point out
that one thing I often tell my students when I show them clips like these is that
people like John Oliver and Trevor Noah do a job that is similar to mine, except
that they have a large budget and they are funny and they’re on national TV (!).
378 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

7.19.2.3  Reaching Communities

Besides the work I do with my own students, I have tried to reach larger audiences
of graduate students. In 2015, I was featured in a national podcast from the American
Educational Research Association (AERA) together with well-known scholars
Dolores Delgado-Bernal and Valerie Kinloch (2015); it was aimed at graduate stu-
dents and discusses conducting research and using specific research frameworks,
such as CDA/CDS and Critical Race Theory. I have also attempted to teach under-
graduates to analyze their own writing critically in an effort to recognize the ideolo-
gies they carry with them as student teachers and how these affect their students. In
a recent article, two colleagues and I analyze the discourse of our students as they
reflect on their student teaching experiences with emergent multilingual students
(Catalano, Reeves, & Wessels, 2018). At the end of our analysis, in which we reveal
both monoglossic and heteroglossic language ideologies as well as lingering ideolo-
gies related to language rights, we propose that in future iterations of the course
(entitled “Teaching Multilingual Learners in the Elementary Classroom”), we pro-
vide students with opportunities to examine their own reflections and look critically
at the way they think and talk about their students. We are now in the process of
piloting this project and we hope that the experience of students using CDA/CDS to
think about their own ideologies and how they affect the way they teach their stu-
dents will result in improved conditions for marginalized emergent multilingual
students in classrooms in our state.
Another way I have put my work out in educational venues has been by giving
presentations for student teachers at their professional development meetings (e.g.,
Catalano, 2015b, an earlier version of Catalano, 2017, which focuses on the repre-
sentation of unaccompanied minors from Central America in the local news). In
addition, I presented on the same topic to teachers at a local elementary school
(2015a) and I gave a presentation on the way Romanies in the U.S. and Canada are
represented in the media at a local middle school in order to counter the negative
view of Romani people that students are exposed to in Elie Wiesel’s Night, which is
required reading for local 8th graders (Catalano, 2014).
I have also brought my work to the local community by working together with
various local organizations to counter dominant narratives regarding immigrant
populations and programs associated with them. For example, several of my publi-
cations focus on the way that bilingual education programs (i.e., dual language) for
emergent bilingual/multilingual students (e.g., Catalano & Moeller, 2013; Lu &
Catalano, 2015) are represented in the media. Hence, when local parents asked me
in early 2016 about trying to establish dual language programs in Lincoln, Nebraska,
I gladly accepted the opportunity to work with this group (we are now called the
Lincoln Public Schools Dual Language Coalition, which readers can find on
Facebook). Since then, we have worked together to build a case for dual language
programs in our local district and we have presented our ideas to the local school
superintendent and personnel, the local school board, and finally, the media, which
covered our school board meeting (61 people came to it and over 17 of the attendees
came forward to make a case for dual language in our district).
7.19  Theresa Catalano 379

After writing about the problematic way in which dual language programs are
sometimes represented (which often have mixed results), I found myself to be in the
surreal position of doing exactly that. Hence, when interviewed by local journalists,
I attempted to apply the critiques I made in my articles that used CDA/CDS to sug-
gest better ways to represent these programs so as to promote a more positive public
opinion of them (Reist, 2016). However, I will be the first to admit that although you
can control what you say, you cannot control how what you say is written up or
presented by others/journalists. And yet, I still believe that raising awareness about
how best to present the programs to the public can only help the case for them. And
I’m happy to say that recently, the nearby Catholic Archdiocese established dual
language programs in their district. I was also invited to talk on a local Spanish TV
station (Telemundo) about the role of teachers and dual language programs, and
recently my former student Jessica Sierk and I had a chance to take work on non-­
urban communities in Nebraska (Sierk, 2016; Sierk & Catalano, 2017) and attempt
social change by bringing the findings of the study to the school district leaders to
show why we believe that dual language programs could lead to positive social
change in these demographically changing communities. Unfortunately, the com-
munities we visited still don’t have dual language programs, but I am happy to
report that my own city has begun plans for a dual language program in the district
very soon, and so this is a small (but substantive) victory for the coalition, and all
the dual language supporters that have advocated for this for years.
Besides dual language issues, I have also worked to bring together local migrant/
refugee groups and the community (e.g., my graduate students) in order to dispel
stereotypes and counter anti-immigrant sentiment expressed by President Trump,
local politicians and others. I am attempting to do this by using the medium of dance
as a vehicle for community-building and expression (see Catalano & Leonard, 2016
for more). One of the ways I have done this is through the Dance Away program
(sponsored by Yezidi International15 which provides underprivileged children in the
Yezidi community with a chance to learn to perform and develop appreciation for
different types of music.
In this project, I took my graduate students in my Intercultural Communication
class (most of whom are local teachers of various subjects and grades) to a work-
shop with the Yezidi girls in the program. The girls were given interview questions
to ask their parents about their experiences in Iraq, their reasons for migrating, their
experiences adapting to the U.S., and what they wished their teachers would know
about their children in order to teach them better. My students then discussed the
interviews with the girls, and worked in groups to re-create elements of the stories
their parents told in the form of dance. Although none of my students were profes-
sional dancers, they wrote about their experiences and the incredible empathy and
knowledge they gained about the Yezidi people through listening to the stories and
re-creating them with their bodies. In addition, many students noted the power of

15
 http://www.yezidisinternational.org/.
380 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

dance in helping students build community together and hence, understand each
other better.
Besides my work with Yezidi International, I have also worked with Yazda,
another local non-profit organization dedicated to support the Yazidi16 ethno-­
religious minority and other vulnerable groups to which I have donated my pro-
ceeds from my 2016 book. One of the co-founders of Yazda was also my master’s
advisee, Hadi Pir, who has been instrumental in the organization’s founding and
development. At the same time, he has been a student of mine and has consulted
with me on numerous occasions about language loss in his Kurmanji Kurdish speak-
ing community. Due partly to the classes on multilingualism and intercultural com-
munication he has taken with me (as well as other classes), and his connections to
the community and government organizations, Yazda has been able to be a key force
in establishing the newly formed after-school Kurdish language and culture pro-
gram which was launched in early 2017. Hadi recently graduated, and as part of
completion of his Master’s degree, he presented his project about Yazidi language
loss and maintenance to an audience of more than forty Yazda members (in Kurdish).
In addition to this project, I have collaborated with Yazda members and preservice
teachers to prepare teachers to work with immigrant populations through arts-based
interventions and explore how engaging community partners in dance and visual art
can lead to civil discourse.17

7.19.2.4  Activism

A final area I would like to highlight is my local activism that relates to the way that
education is portrayed in the media, particularly charter schools, which threaten
public schools by taking some of the state/local funding meant for public schools
and are often not well regulated. In Gatti & Catalano (2015) and Catalano & Gatti
(2017) we tackle the negative narrative about public schools by investigating the use
of metaphors such as EDUCATION IS A BUSINESS and the overall discourse of
failing schools, which creates an opening for private businesses to profit in the run-
ning of charter schools. Since the election of Donald Trump, my colleagues and I
have worked hard to counter this narrative and the building momentum to put char-
ter schools in Nebraska (see Sect. 6.3), despite the wishes of a large portion of the
populous. I was featured in the local paper with my colleagues18 protesting our local
senator’s confirmation of Betsy De Vos, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of
Education, who has been a big supporter for charter schools and is highly unquali-
fied for the job. Some of the things De Vos has accomplished since taking office

16
 You may have noticed different spellings for Yazidi/Yezidi. This is because in translations, both
spellings are accepted and the two different organizations mentioned in my description chose to
each spell them in different ways.
17
 https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/catalano-eyes-art-to-promote-civil-discourse/.
18
 http://journalstar.com/news/state-and-regional/federal-politics/protesters-gather-at-closed-
fischer-event/article_b6d1edfa-7025-5a4b-8f9d-91f549da6184.html.
7.20 Conclusion 381

include rolling back or rewriting regulations put in place by the Obama administra-
tion to protect students who take out loans, promoting a budget which makes broad
cuts but allots $400 million to expand charter schools and vouchers for private and
religious schools, and overturning 72 policy documents that outline the rights of
students with disabilities which were deemed unneeded by the Trump administra-
tion. I feel that documenting both anti-immigrant sentiment locally and nationally,
and the negative public narrative about education, as well as my participation in
these local events, work directly to counter negative public representations of
migrants that result in policies that have negative consequences, particularly for
migrant children in schools (see Catalano, 2013 for more), and public and media
narratives about education. As well, although I have written a lot here, I constantly
feel that I have not done enough [as her co-author, I need to say that I know how
hard Theresa has been working and I don’t agree with this assessment].

7.20  Conclusion

Above, we have shown what the CDA/CDS scholars who responded to our call for
input into this chapter have done to make positive change in the world based on their
research and their firm belief in using that research to make the world better; and we
know that these scholars are representative of many others in CDA/CDS and allied
areas who have been and continue to be active. Additionally, we must mention that
since we began writing this chapter, much has also been done by national and inter-
national organizations that include members who are devoted to CDA/CDS (and
other types of) work. Organizations such as the American Association of Applied
Linguistics, American Anthropological Association, Malmö Institute for Studies of
Migration, Diversity and Welfare, European Civil Society Platform for
Multilingualism, International Society of Language Studies, and many others have
posted or sent out position statements regarding racism and “Othering” and have
organized many panels, symposiums and conferences that focus on the role of lan-
guage in creating more inclusive societies.
We now encourage our readers to consider the possibilities of their own contexts,
whether it is a political blog, a novel, or fine arts work aimed at countering inequal-
ity and “Othering” of immigrant populations, or any of the other interesting and
inspiring things happening like the ones described here. Each of us has our own
talents and ways of reaching the world besides publishing in academic journals,
giving presentations at conferences, and working with (graduate) students in the
area of CDA/CDS. Hence, we encourage CDA/CDS scholars to continue to think
about the work they do in academia, and how they could actually use that work to
counter oppressive regimes, human rights abuses, policies or laws that discriminate
against sexual orientation or gender, race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, or any
other reason for “Othering” people.
We hope that in the future more CDA/CDS conferences and events can be sites
of contestation and places where we can all share our work in the “real” world and
382 7  What CDA/CDS Scholars are Doing to Make a Difference in the World

make plans together to help CDA/CDS scholarship to be involved in real social

change. As Umberto Eco once said “theoretical research is a form of social practice.
Everybody who wants to know something wants to know it in order to do some-
thing.” If researchers claim that they want “to know it only in order ‘to know’ and
not in order ‘to do”, that means they “want to know it in order to do nothing, which
is in fact a surreptitious way of doing something, i.e. leaving the world just as it is”
(1976: 29).
Hence, we hope that more of us as we write and do research, will continue to ask
ourselves the question, “to what end?” And to give the answer, “let’s do something
to make this world a better place”.

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Epilogue

In our Preface at the beginning of this book, we acknowledged the many major
political and social events that occurred during its writing, including the election of
Donald Trump as President of the US, the resurgence of white-supremacist and neo-­
Nazi movements, ongoing racism, antisemitism, bigotry and hate and so forth.
However, between the time we submitted our final version of the book to the pub-
lisher and when we received our proofs, COVID-19 happened, turning the world
upside-down. The global pandemic exacerbated and highlighted inequities that
existed previously. As we write, it seems as if the US is imploding. Unrest that
began with the murder of George Floyd, who was killed with the knee of a police-
man on his neck, has spread across the country and the world. People continue to
march to support the end of police violence against Black people, systemic racism,
and the legitimization of discrimination and exclusion in democratic societies (see
Wodak’s Foreword: xxi). Many of the side effects of COVID-19, such as serious
health issues, fear of infecting others, economic turmoil, unemployment, break-
down of social and educational structures, and unequal possession of and access to
resources have disproportionately affected vulnerable communities, especially
(poor) communities of color, around the world. Because many people in the US
have been sheltering at home or are unemployed, and are largely unhappy with the
way the government has handled the pandemic, Floyd’s killing by the police (height-
ened by centuries of slavery and myriad human rights violations against African
Americans) brought to the forefront the “infernal and seemingly eternal inability of
American people and institutions to treat African Americans as if their lives have
meaning and value” (Pitts, 2020: A7). People are angry, and they want to see change
happen. And, while there are many signs that democracy in the US is being threat-
ened by forces both within and outside, in other places in the world, it is also under
threat (e.g., Hong Kong). And worldwide, there has been an overall increase in the
rejection of scholarly expertise and the rise of anti-intellectualism, facts have been

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 389

T. Catalano, L. R. Waugh, Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse
Studies and Beyond, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 26,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49379-0
390 Epilogue

gradually degraded to the status of opinions authoritarianism has increased world-

wide with the outbreak of COVID-19, and in many countries (e.g., Brazil, UK, US)
scientific advice on how to handle the pandemic has been ignored or discounted.
Hence, we stand by our initial reason for writing this book—to encourage and
guide scholars as they pursue social change. We hope that they will continue to
work toward understanding how to communicate better about issues of public
health, how to solve disparities and systemic racism, and how to deal with the cli-
mate change that is threatening all of us everywhere. Furthermore, we implore
scholars and activists to instill and keep democratic values so that vulnerable popu-
lations are not hit twice as hard as privileged ones every time there is a crisis, and
especially, to teach us all how communication of every type matters and shapes the
way people think and act.

Reference

Pitts, L. (2020, June 2). Floyd’s death raises old question. Lincoln Journal Star. Retrieved from
https://roanoke.com/opinion/commentary/pitts-george-floyds-death-raises-an-old-question-
how-long/article_3c89d675-71d6-5631-aba1-b8062b4dbc75.html.
Index

A B
Active and passive sentences, 21, 29, 34, 42, Babaii, E. & Sheikhi, M., 5–6
52, 182, 200 Baker, P., 9, 161, 163, 190–193, 225, 303
Activity theory, 189 Bakhtin, M.M., 23, 44, 93
Adoptees/adoption discourse, 363–365 Barthes, R., 179
Affordances, 49, 51, 184, 186, 225, Bernstein, B. 17, 22, 57, 75–76, 122, 135
346, 362 Bhatia, A. & Jenks, ., c, 4–5
American Anthropological Association Bilingual education, see Dual language/
(AAA), 277, 381 bilingual education
American Association of Applied Linguistics Black Lives Matter, 38, 356, 361
(AAAL), 252, 363, 381 Blommaert, J., 80, 225, 228–229, 268,
American Dream, 4–5 280–281, 349
American Educational Research Association Bologna declaration/process, 257
(AERA), 378 Bourdieu, P., 87, 114, 179, 182, 239,
Amsterdam, symposium/meeting in, see CDA 256, 281
Anthropology, 10, 13, 14, 16, 41, 71–72, 107, Brexit, xvi, 56, 130, 172, 224, 300, 325, 334
126, 134, 248, 249, 267, 271–277, British linguistics, 8, 14–15
280, 371 Bublitz, W., 294–297
Anti-Muslim/Islamophobia, 277, 329, 333 Butler, J., 291
Anti-racism/anti-racist, 10, 106, 109, 224, 274,
329, 356
Antisemitism/antisemitic, see Wodak C
Appliable linguistics, see Systemic functional (CADAAD) Critical Approaches to Discourse
grammar/linguistics Analysis across Disciplines, 79, 288
Applications, practical, xxii Caldas-Coulthard, ., , , , , , , , c, 34, 79–81,
Applied linguistics (AL), 5, 10, 28, 31, 75, 108, 137, 259, 290, 347
113–114, 140, 237, 248–249, See also van Leeuwen
251–252, 327, 358, 368–369, Caldas-Coulthard, . & Coulthard, M.,
373, 381 C, see CDA
Approaches to CDA/CDS, see CDA/CDS Cameron, ., d, 282, 286, 287, 290–292
Argumentation (strategies of), , , , , 101, Cap, P., 77, 80, 157, 159–162, 195, 200
124–129, 177, 299 Capital, 6, 87, 114, 167, 237, 254, 263, 282,
See also Discourse-historical approach 350, 360

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 391

T. Catalano, L. R. Waugh, Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse
Studies and Beyond, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 26,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49379-0
392 Index

Capitalist/capitalism, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3, 43, journals, 78, 79, 113

47, 86, 87, 91, 93, 139, 165, 194, linguistics and, 74, 76, 226, 227, 296
235, 256, 303, 377 original/early group/scholars and
See also Fairclough;Marxism scholarship, 7, 72–78, 159, 167,
Capone, A., xv, 297, 298, 300 169, 173, 178
Carbaugh, ., d, 278, 280, 281 precursors to, 13–63, 155
Catalano, T., vii, xv–xvii, xxiv, 182, 183, problem-oriented approach, xxiii, 1, 3,
185–187, 193, 199, 227, 230, 263, 74, 77, 173
265, 278, 279, 299, 325, 372–381 reflexivity, 74, 223, 236–237, 259, 260 (see
(CDA) Critical discourse analysis also Reflexivity/self-reflection)
Amsterdam, symposium/meeting in, 1, 9, research questions/topics, 4, 74, 77, 125,
71–140, 158, 331, 352 159, 179, 234
CDS, relationship to, 1–3, 9, 13, 81, text (language use) and context, 74
157–159, 164, 170 theories/theoretical backgrounds/attractors,
constitutive approach, xxiii, 3, 74, 92, 75–76, 163
118, 188 unifying parameters of, 74
context, variety of factors of, 74, 159, 176 use of CDA term/acronym, 2, 156,
(see also Context) 158, 234
Coulthard, . & Coulthard, M., Texts and See also CDA/CDS; CDS; Critical
Practices, c, 79, 81, 108 linguistics; Social practice(s),
critical linguistics and social semiotics, discourse/language (use) as
relationship to, 31–32, 35, 42, 45, (CDA/CDS) Critical discourse analysis/
49, 71, 73, 79–80, 140, 157, Critical discourse studies
178–179, 337 applications of, xxi, xxii, xxiv, 4, 174, 196,
critique in, 2, 9, 77, 161, 169, 190, 193, 200, 239
196, 219–240, 280, 288, 349, 357 approaches to, 2, 8, 78, 155–202, 247, 285,
definition, foundational concepts, goals, 290, 296
xxii, xxiii, 1–4, 8, 13–63, 115, 121, commonalities of, 2, 164
137, 179, 248, 284 critical, definition of, xxiii, 2–3
description vs. interpretation, 74, 89–91 definition, aims, goals of, xxi–xxii, 1
difference from discourse analysis, 8, 102 difference from discourse studies, xxii, 79,
Discourse & Society, Special Issue on, 78, 161, 237
94, 110, 111, 221, 222, 229, discourse context and modalities of, 4
236–239, 291, 293 discourse, definition of, xxii, 82, 85, 88,
discursive aspects of social disparities/ 89, 163, 171, 175, 181, 188, 230,
inequalities, 74 281, 290
eclecticism/pluralism/heterogeneity of, eclecticism/pluralism/heterogeneity
77, 78, 189 of, 77–78
emancipation/enlightenment, 2, 75, 77, examples of, 4–7, 19
168, 286, 360 ideology vs. discourse, definitions of,
Fairclough & Wodak chapter about, 110 Forward xxiii
Halliday and systemic functional grammar/ inter/multi/cross/trans-disciplinary nature
linguistics, 8, 13, 15–19, 54, of, 3, 78, 247
75, 84, 186 language, status of, 2
hermeneutic approach of, 77 main approaches, criteria for, 167–168
history/beginnings of, 2, 13, 15, 79, 158, multimodal and semiotic approaches in, 2
183, 220, 333 relationship to discourse studies, 2
institutional beginning of, 79 theories/theoretical background/
inter/multi/cross/trans-disciplinary nature attractor, 77–79
of, 3, 74, 156, 165, 247 (see also topics of, 3, 4
CDA/CDS; Inter/multi/cross/ unifying parameters of, 77
trans-disciplinary/ use of CDA/CDS term/acronym, 2
interdisciplinarity) See also CDA; CDS
Index 393

(CDS) Critical discourse studies social, 17, 29, 31, 47–48, 53, 60, 72, 89,
change from/relationship to CDA, 117, 134, 135, 174, 178, 180, 254,
159–162, 301 267, 272, 294, 298, 372, 396
definition of, 163 socio-cultural, 17, 81, 84, 285, 396
difference from discourse studies, 2 socio-political, 1, 84, 125, 249, 347
history of, 10 See also CDA; Critique of CDA/CDS;
use of CDS term and acronym, 2, Sociocognitive approach
161–163, 237 to CDA/CDS
See also CDA; CDA/CDS Conversation analysis (CA), 2, 227, 286
Chamness Iida, P. (aka Chamness Miller, P.), approach to multimodal research, 185
342–344 differences from CDA/CDS, 185, 221, 226
Charteris-Black, J., 9, 197 Corpus linguistic approach to CDA/CDS
Chilton P., 9, 35, 131, 236 (CorpLingA), 189
cognitive linguistics, 194–202 associated scholars, 9, 190–194
‘critical’ aspect, 223–234 central concepts/distinguishing features,
critical linguistics, 35, 37–40 78–79, 190–191, 224–225
(see also Critical linguistics as a multimodal approach to, 194
separate entry) research focus/foci, 225
culture and discourse, 235–236 Corpus linguistics (CorpLing), 31, 159–160,
political analysis, 167–169 190–194, 224–225, 227, 229,
Wodak, collaboration with, 109, 284 251, 304
Citizenship, 3, 92, 108, 251, 265, 288, 293, Coulthard, M., see CDA
334, 342, 348, 364, 373 COVID-19, 389
Climate change, xvii, 4, 174–176, 304–305 Crime/criminal(ize), 18, 28, 98, 101, 120, 127,
Code (restricted vs. elaborated), see 129, 185, 230, 240–241, 265, 279,
Bernstein, B. 299, 360, 373
Cognitive linguistics (CogLing), 28, 38, 80, Critical (stance), xxii, 3, 335
160, 191, 194–202, 227, 231, 261, Critical applied linguistics, 10, 248–252
277, 278, 297 Critical cognitive pragmatics (approach), , ,
Cognitive linguistic approach to 164, 204
CDA/CDS (CogLingA), See also Cognitive linguistics
160, 194–202 Critical consciousness, 255
associated scholars, 9, 194–202, 231 Critical discourse analysis (descriptive
central concepts/distinguishing phrase), 18, 22–24, 52, 59, 71–72
features, 194–202 Critical discourse analysis, see CDA
research focus/foci, 195–197 Critical discourse analysis/critical discourse
See also Metaphor and metonymy studies, see CDA/CDS
Colonial/colonialism/ Critical discourse studies, see CDS
post-colonial, 108, 109, 232, 284, Critical Discourse Studies (journal), 155–158,
285, 339, 349, 354 161, 187, 234, 238, 274, 275,
Commodification of discourse/universities, 288, 344–345
91–92, 257 Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 81, 263,
Constitutive approach, xxiii 3, 74, 118, 174 291, 365, 370
Context, xxii, 2–3, 9, 34, 57, 178, 197, 261, Critical language awareness (CLA)/study
272, 289, 291, 293, 297, 300, 337 (CLS), see Fairclough
educational, 30, 250–254, 268, 273–274, Critical linguistics (CritLing)/critical linguists,
276, 363, 369, 374 13, 31–45
historical, 82, 124–125, 198, 296, 354 Chomsky’s approach, 34
institutional/organizational, 55, 85–87, critical theory/theorists, 34–36, 39
112, 114, 126, 258, 275, 328 definition and foundational
of situation, 14–17, 24, 30, 71, 86, 123 concepts, 31–34
(see also Halliday; Systemic Halliday’s approach/Systemic functional
functional grammar/linguistics) grammar/linguistics, 33, 36
394 Index

Critical linguistics (CritLing)/ Cultural approach to CDA (CCDA/CCDS),

critical linguists (cont.) 236, 280–285, 288
ideology, 39–40, 47 Cultural codes, 281–283, 302
implicit/invisible meaning, 35–37
interview, 42–5
Language and control (Fowler et al), D
32, 34–38 Dialectical-relational approach to CDA/CDS
Language as ideology (Kress & Hodge, (DRA), 164–170, 257
Hodge & Kress), 32, 39–40, 46, 49 associated scholars, 164
Linguistic processes in sociocultural central concepts/distinguishing
practice (Kress), 42–45 features, 164
linguistic theories, 32–34 definition of discourse, 174
headlines in newspapers, 34, 37, 38 dialectical reasoning, 169
newspeak/Nukespeak, 38, 40 method, 77
Orwell 1984, 38 research focus/foci, 164
Social semiotics (Hodge & Kress), 45–49 text-orientation, 160
(see also Social semiotics as a theory and concepts, 75–77
separate entry) three basic properties, 165
social semiotics, 41 use of approach, 8
sociolinguistics/Labov, 36 Discourse analysis (DA), 2, 8, 9, 14, 16, 20,
transformations in, 33–34 63, 71–74, 79, 84, 86, 89, 94–96,
Trew, 34, 38, 39 104, 105, 109–111, 135, 155, 158,
Whorf, 36, 39 185, 187, 188, 190, 191, 193, 201,
See also Hodge; Kress; Fowler 223, 227, 233, 239, 247, 251,
Critical literacy, 254, 259, 262, 349, 350, 259–262, 265–267, 272, 275, 277,
358, 374 278, 281, 286–287, 291, 295,
Critical metaphor/metonymy analysis, 5, 160, 331, 371
191, 196–202, 297, 374 Discourse & Society (journal), , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Critical multimodal discourse analysis 94, 110–111, 113, 200, 221, 222,
(CMDA), , 6 229, 236–239, 256, 257, 287,
See also Multimodal critical discourse 291, 293
analysis co-editors, 80
Critical pedagogy, 6, 252, 254, 260, 334, 358 founding, 94, 111
Critical text linguistics, 73 launch, 78
Critical theory/theorists (Frankfurt School), , , Special Issues, 78, 94, 110, 111, 187, 200,
, , , , , , 1, 35, 39, 41, 46, 76–77, 221, 222, 229, 236–239, 291, 293
110, 255 See also van Dijk; CDA; Discourse
See also Wodak analysis (DA); Discourse
Centres for research into text, information and studies (DS)
communication in society Discourse-historical approach to CDA/CDS
(CRITICS) group/foundation, 112, (DHA), , , , , , , , , , , 121–127, 129,
329, 333 130, 136, 159–161, 163, 167,
Critique of CDA/CDS 173–178, 231, 255
context, 219–221, 225–227 2000 version, 121–122
deconstructive nature, 231, 234 2018 version, 173–178
definition of ‘critical’, xxiii, 249 antisemitism/racism, 121
Euro-centricity, 235, 269 associated scholars, 178, 183
generative critique, 221, 234–235 Austria First petition, Haider, 124–125
ideology and culture, 220, 238 central concepts/distinguishing features,
methodological shortcomings, 224 164, 172
need for self-reflection/reflexivity, 10, 223, combined with other approaches/
236–237, 259, 260, 284, 288 frameworks, 200, 237, 303
overly-linguistic perspective, 229 critical theory, 122
Index 395

critique (social), 122 cultural/ethnic/gender/linguistic, 139, 197,

discourse, definition of, 164, 174 248, 267, 274, 278, 381
method, 124 of interpretation/texts/theoretical
national identity, work on, 119–121, 126 approaches/methodology,
principles/characteristics, most important, 74, 77, 239
123, 174 Dual language/bilingual education, 263–264,
Reisigl, M., 76, 98, 109, 111, 119–123, 269, 378, 379
125–128, 130, 131, 158, 160, 167,
173–178, 200, 227, 247, 294, 295,
305, 328–330 (see also Reisigl, E
M. as a separate entry) Eclecticism/ pluralism/heterogeneity,
sexist language use, 122 see CDA
social practice, discourse as, 123, 180 (see Ecolinguistics, 10, 248, 301–306
also Social practice(s), discourse/ Education, accountability of, 262, 274,
language (use) as) 349, 351
socio-philosophical orientation, 173 Educators for Social Justice (ESJ), 347, 352,
theoretical background/attractor, 76 354, 356
topos/topoi, fallacies, argumentation Emancipation (social), emancipatory, , , , , , , ,
schemes, 124–125 , , , 2, 75, 85, 118, 168, 231, 233,
triangulation, principle of, 122, 173 286–289, 300, 345
Vienna group/school of discourse See also Social justice
(analysis), 119, 121 Emic perspective, 177
See also Wodak; Social practice(s), Employability, 366–368
discourse/language (use) as Epistemology/ies, 76, 353, 357
Discourse(s), xxi–xxiii, 2–3, 35–36, 43, Ethnic prejudice(s), , 98–107
71–72, 76, 116, 132, 136, 138, 155, See also van Dijk
219, 228–230, 249–250, 331, 340, Ethnography/ethnographic approach, 2, 10,
354–358, 360–377 14, 16, 31, 94, 117, 123–125, 128,
Discourse sociolinguistics, 113, 116–119, 121, 138, 174, 177, 185, 228, 230, 248,
226, 227, 287 267, 271–277, 281, 293, 347, 350,
See also Wodak 352, 374
Discourse studies (DS), dimensions of, 2, 72, and education, 275
87, 134, 160, 172, 288 and fieldwork, 123, 174, 275
See also Discourse analysis (DA) and mental health arena, 275
Discourse Studies (journal), 95 auto, 374
Discrimination, xxi, 1–2, 98, 101, 104, 108, critical, 272
113, 115, 124, 125, 171, 177, 234, multimodal, 185
268, 270, 329, 335, 336, 343 of speaking/communication, 31, 267, 281
See also van Dijk Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), 263
Discurso & Sociedad, , , 279, 287, 331, 355
Dispositive analysis approach to CDA/CDS
(DPA), 187–190 F
associated scholars, 164 Facebook, 362, 374–376, 378
central concepts/distinguishing Fact(s) (alternative)/fact-based knowledge,
features, 164 xxii, 8, 234
discourse, definition of, 189 Fairclough, N., 73, 79, 81, 83–85
dispositifs/dispositives, 188 Althusser, 87, 88
Foucault’s discourse theory, 43, 85–87, Bourdieu, 87
94, 114, 118, 135, 140, change, discursive nature of, 94
187–190 common sense, definition of, 84, 85, 88, 90
Diversity, 75, 77, 138, 140, 166, 192, 222, critical discourse analysis, article on with
235, 238, 251, 264, 269, 270, 274, Wodak, 63, 75, 81
334, 340, 356, 357, 381 Critical discourse analysis (book), 93–94
396 Index

Fairclough (cont.) Fowler, R., Hodge, B., Kress, G. & Trew,

Critical Language Awareness (CLA), 73, Language and Control, 8, 13,
93, 164, 254, 255, 355 34, 35, 40
Critical Language Study/ies (CLS), 73, 81, Frames/framing, 5, 55, 57, 58, 60, 62, 74, 117,
84, 86, 89, 93, 164, 253, 255, 123, 130, 131, 134, 163, 165, 175,
296, 373 177, 201, 230, 240, 242, 261–264,
critical linguistics, 80 277, 281, 290, 293, 304, 341, 351,
discourse, definition/types of, 100–101, 352, 375
104, 124, 263, 267, 282 Framework(s), xvi, 3–4, 16, 18–19, 23, 30, 39,
discourse and social change, 90–92 41, 46, 48–50, 52, 77, 78, 80, 84,
early work/research program, 83–85, 91 86, 88, 89, 92, 93, 105–108, 131,
explanation, 89–90 133, 135, 158, 159, 164, 165, 167,
Foucault and social theory in, 85–87, 91 173, 174, 177, 180, 198, 200, 222,
Habermas, 87 237, 239, 251, 260, 263, 281,
Halliday/Systemic functional grammar/ 283–285, 291, 295, 303–305, 350,
linguistics and, 75, 86, 91 351, 355, 357, 371, 378
ideology in, 84–88, 91 Frankfurt school, see Critical theory/theorists
interpretation, 89–90 Freire, P., 252, 254, 255, 263, 264, 270,
Lancaster, University of, 83 349, 354
Language and power, 74, 84–90, 115 Functional grammar/functional(-semantic)
Marxism, 75, 77 linguistics, see Systemic functional
Media discourse, 90–92 grammar/systemic functional
naturalization, 84, 88 linguistics
neoliberalism, 5–6
order of discourse, contemporary,
85, 87–88 G
power (relations), 85–88 Gavriely-Nuri, ., d, 160, 236,
semiosis vs. discourse, 94 281–284, 302–303
social order and change of Gee, J.P., 259–262, 284–285, 352, 355
discourse, 87–88 Gender, 3, 10, 44–45, 113, 117, 130, 139, 156,
universities, marketization of, 92 197, 238, 248, 267, 269, 285–291,
See also Dialectical-relational approach; 293, 330, 343, 347, 348, 358,
Education; Capitalism; Marxism 360, 381
Fauconnier, G., 194, 195, 200 Gender studies, 10, 113, 156, 248, 285–290
Feminist(s), 43, 45, 156, 278, 286–290, Gender and Language, 287, 290
349, 355 Genre, xxiii, 8, 20, 23, 30, 42–45, 72, 84,
Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA)/ 90–93, 121–126, 128, 129, 132,
feminist CDA, 288, 289 134, 138, 139, 165, 166, 171, 173,
Fielder, G., 298, 369, 370, 373 174, 177, 224, 232, 250, 260, 297,
Firth, J.R., functional approach, , , , 298, 330, 355
13–15, 19, 75 Globalization, 3, 7, 87, 91, 126, 138, 165, 167,
See also British Linguistics 169, 184, 250, 269, 281
Flowerdew, J., 1, 155, 157, 158, 160, 169, 170, Goffman, 76, 129, 140
227, 232, 345 Grand narratives/theories, 75–76, 124, 163,
Forceville, ., c, 197, 199 174–175, 247
Forchtner, B., xxi, xxiii, 8, 131, 178, 187, 200,
219, 238, 239, 272, 285
Foucault, M., 20, 43, 75, 76, 85–87, 91, 114, H
118, 135, 140, 165–166, 179, 181, Habermas, J., 76, 78, 87, 91, 114–115,
187, 188, 190, 261, 291, 349 118–119, 123, 173, 239
See also Dispositive analysis approach; Haider, J., see Wodak
Orders of discourse Halliday, M.A.K., , , , 7–8, 186, 302
Index 397

See also Systemic functional grammar/ Inter/multi/cross/transdisciplinary,

linguistics; Critical linguistics; interdisciplinarity, , xvi, xxiii, 1, 3,
Social semiotics 8, 10, 29, 34, 40, 46, 50–51, 59, 72,
Hart, C., 77, 80, 157, 159–162, 179, 76, 78, 86, 94, 110, 119, 123–125,
194–196, 200–202 129–130, 133, 140, 156, 165,
See also Cognitive linguistics 177–178, 247, 329, 363, 366
Hasan, R., see Systemic functional grammar/ See also CDA; CDA/CDS; CDS; Wodak
linguistics Interdiscursivity, 91, 125, 166–167, 174
Hate speech, 199, 227, 277, 359 IASR: International Association for the Study
Hemmeke, K., 363–365 of Racism, 112, 329, 333
Heritage language, 269–366 International Society of Language Studies, 381
Heteroglossia, 93 Interpersonal (interactional) metafunction/
Hodge, B./R., , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 8, 11, 13, 32, meaning, see Systemic functional
34–35, 38–42, 45–51, 56, 84, 89, grammar/linguistics;
117, 179, 180, 277 Reading Images
See also Critical Linguistics; Kress; Social Intertextual(ity)/context, 90, 123, 125, 133,
Semiotics (book); Fowler et al 174, 226, 269, 282, 377
Holocaust Memorial Day, 345 Islamophobia, see Anti-Muslim
Holzscheiter, A., xxii
Horkheimer, M., 1, 78, 114, 122
Human rights, 8, 335, 354, 369–370, 381 J
Hymes, ., d, 14, 267, 268 Jackson, R., 340–341
Jäger, M. & Jäger, S., see Dispositive analysis
approach to CDA/CDS
I Jakobson, R., 14, 371
Ideational metafunction/meaning, see Jenks, ., C, see Bhatia
Systemic functional Journal of Language and Politics (Special
grammar/linguistics; Kress and Issue of), 79, 113, 127, 138, 187,
van Leeuwen 237–238, 287, 374
Ideology/ideological, 1, 163, 175, 184–187, Journal of Pragmatics, 295
200, 202, 222, 224, 236, 238,
252–256, 279, 304, 337,
364–365, 368–369 K
definition of, 48 Knowledge-based economy, , 256
point of view, 36, 39, 43 See also Fairclough
racist ideology, 198 Korean adoptees (KADs), 363, 365
vs. discourse, xxiii, 2–3 Kress, G., , , 33, 79–83
See also CDA/CDS; Critical linguistics; CDA, criteria/basic assumptions of, 82
Fairclough; Kress; Wodak critical linguistics and social semiotics,
Image(s), see Kress and van Leeuwen relation of, 45–49
Image schema, see van Dijk discourse, 39–52
Indirect reports, 298–299 Fowler, Hodge, Kress and Trew (see
Inequality/ies, 40, 42, 74, 78, 91, 104–105, Fowler et al)
117, 119, 137, 163, 172, 223, 249, ideology, 39–40, 44–52
253–254, 271, 275, 295, 303, 381 interview as genre, 43
educational, 275 Language as ideology (Kress & Hodge/
language, 268 Hodge & Kress), 32, 39–40, 46, 49,
reproduction of, 172 56 (see also Critical linguistics)
rising, 266 Linguistic processes in sociocultural
social, xvi, 1, 163, 233, 274, 286, 337, 344 practice, 42–45 (see also Critical
Instagram, 7 linguistics)
Interactional analysis, 185–186 motivation/non-arbitrariness of the sign, 81
398 Index

Kress (cont.) Doing Visual Analysis: From Theory to

multimodal learning, education, literacy Practice (Ledin & Machin), , , ,
pedagogy, 83 158, 187, 340 (see also Ledin)
Multimodal discourse (Kress & van ethnographic dimension, 228
Leeuwen), 61–63 multimodal critical discourse analysis
sexist discourse, 45 (MCDA), 6, 178–180
Social semiotics (Hodge & Kress), 45–47 multimodal turn/multimodality, 163, 184,
social process/practice and 185, 187
language, 42–45 neoliberalism, about, 256–257, 301
See also Multimodal approaches; Critical Special Issues, 157, 187, 237, 347
linguistics; Multimodal discourse; visual studies, 229
Reading images; Social semiotics See also van Leeuwen
Krzyżanowski, M., , , , , , , , , , , , , , xxi, 111, Macgilchrist, F., 232–235, 338–340
126, 131, 156, 157, 173, 177, 178, Macquarie University, see Sydney
213, 238–240, 275, 288 Maier, F., 9, 76, 131, 160, 188–190
See also Discourse-historical approach Malinowski, B., 8, 13–15, 19, 75, 76, 179
Malmö Institute, 381
Marketization of discourse/education/
L universities, , , , , , 7, 92, 192,
Labov, W., 17, 36–37, 286 237, 255
Lakoff, G., 194–298, 375 See also Fairclough; Commodification of
Lancaster University, xxi, 73, 83, 113, 128, discourse/universities
173, 253, 327 Martin, J., see Systemic functional grammar/
Language policy/planning, 3, 250, linguistics
271–274, 368 Matthiessen, ., C, see Systemic functional
Language testing, 250–251 grammar/linguistics
Latinx (aka Latino/Latina), 269, 271, 373 Marx, K., Marxist, Marxism, xxiii, 29, 32, 35,
Lazar, M.M., 286–288 47, 75, 77, 83, 87, 164, 255, 266,
Ledin, P., , , , , , , , 158, 178, 187, 256, 301, 297, 349, 366
336, 338 Mautner, G., 9, 160, 191–193, 225, 237, 256
See also Machin McEnery, T., 191–193, 251
Leont’ev, A., 189 Meaning, social, meaning-making, meaning-­
Lexicogrammar, see Systemic functional potential, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
grammar/linguistics , , , , xxii, 2, 7, 17–21, 30, 31,
LGBTQ/LGBTQIA(+), 292 35–37, 41, 46–49, 55, 60–62, 83,
Linguistic legitimacy, 368–369 86, 94, 132, 134, 137, 139, 163,
Linguistic relativity/determinism, see Critical 165, 179, 180, 186, 192, 346
linguistics; Whorf See also Halliday; Kress
Link, J., 188 Media (mass, global), xvi, xxi, xxiii, 39, 47,
Literacy Research Association (LRA), 51, 61–62, 88, 90–92, 104–106,
353, 356–357 137–140, 262–266, 338–341, 345,
London, Institute for Education, 51, 82, 131 347, 349, 356, 358–363, 365,
London, University College of (UCL), 371–377, 381
14–15, 82–83 discourse, 4, 30, 87, 90–92, 99, 104–107,
133, 137–140, 230, 233, 251,
262–264, 290, 297, 299,
M 333, 371–374
Machin, ., vii, d, 9, 48, 50, 51, 53–57, 62, education and, 264–266
137–140, 156–158, 163, 178–187, mediated/mediatized, 25, 39, 80, 89, 90,
190, 225, 227–229, 237–239, 256, 108, 119, 137, 198, 221
275, 276, 289, 290, 300, 326, multimedia, 3
336–340, 345, 347, 365 racism and/in, 104–109, 325, 329–335
Index 399

sources, 5 See also Reading Images; Multimodal

studies, 35, 39, 51, 82, 228 social semiotics; Multimodal
visual, 197 discourse; Social semiotics
See also Fairclough; Multimodal discourse; Multimodal approaches in CDA/CDS,
Social media; van Dijk; van , 178–187
Leeuwen; Wodak associated scholars, 181, 186
Metafunction(s), 7, 26–28, 31, 33, 49, 51, central concepts/distinguishing
53–60, 62, 89, 137 features, 180
See also Systemic functional grammar/ definition of discourse, 179, 181
linguistics; Reading Images multimodal turn, 184, 185, 187
Metaphor, 5, 28–29, 102, 160, 196–201, 263, research focus/foci, 184, 187
270, 271, 282, 297, 305, 359, 360, theoretical background, 76
373, 375, 380 See also Social semiotics; Multimodal
conceptual blending (theory), 200 social semiotics; Critical
conceptual metaphor (theory), 160, multimodal discourse analysis
197, 270 Musolff, A., vii, 195, 197–199, 227,
dominant (e.g., security) metaphors, 38, 261, 333–334
201, 263, 378
mental spaces, 200
multimodal/visual metaphors, 44, N
186, 199 Naturalization, , , , , , 2, 84, 88, 251, 292
scenarios, metaphor, 198, 227 See also Fairclough
See also Cognitive linguistic approach to Neoliberal(ism), 3, 5–6, 85, 87, 91, 139,
CDA/CDS; Critical metaphor/ 168–170, 186, 255–258, 266, 268,
metonymy analysis; Metonymy 301, 351, 366, 374
Methodology/ies, 3, 51, 74, 75, 77, 79, 81, New London Group, 82, 261
113, 123, 126, 130, 155, 158, 164, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), 263, 274
173–175, 191, 193, 223, 224, 228, Nominalization, 28, 29, 38, 43, 236, 299
261, 267, 271, 272, 281, 285, 296, Nomination/functionalization, 182
304, 369 Non-verbal (semiotic, multimodal, visual)
Metonymy, 28, 196–199, 290, 299, 360, 363, aspects, xxii, 3, 51, 58, 118, 182,
372, 375–377 183, 258
critical metonymy analysis, 193, Normalization, xxi, 99, 129, 130, 283
196–199 (see also Cognitive Normative (immanent) critique/rules, , , , , , , ,
linguistic approach to , 2, 52, 90, 169, 174, 239, 285, 292
CDA/CDS) See also Fairclough
multimodal metonymy, 186 Norrick, N., 294–298
Mey, J., vii, 117, 294, 295, 297, 300 See also Bublitz
Meyer, M., see Wodak
Mode(s), 1, 2, 22, 23, 41, 44, 49–51, 58,
60–63, 92, 108, 133–135, 140, 179, O
181–186, 202, 219, 238, 239, 272, Oliver, J., 376, 377
278, 356, 357, 367 Orders of discourse, 86, 87, 92, 114, 116–121,
non-verbal, 182 165, 254, 256
semiotic, 132–134 See also Fairclough; Foucault; Wodak
visual, 135, 179 Orwell, G., 1984, 38
See also Systemic functional grammar/ Otto, M., 338–340
linguistics
Moscovici, S., 77, 99, 170
Multicultural(ism), 6, 260, 274, 275, 283 P
Multilingual(ism), 240, 264, 272, 380, 381 Passive sentence, see Active vs.passive
Multimodal(ity), , , , , , 9, 50, 61–63, sentence
81–84, 137–140 Pennycook, A., 249, 250
400 Index

Perspective(s), 2, 5, 10, 16, 18, 21, 29, 31, 55, Prejudice(d), 97–104, 108, 110, 113, 119, 120,
56, 77, 86, 92, 117, 121, 123, 137, 125, 126, 171, 222, 297, 336
140, 158, 170, 175, 200, 201, 230, See also van Dijk; Racism, antisemitism;
233, 267, 269–273, 276, 277, Anti-Muslim
283–289, 291, 294, 295, 298, Presupposition(s), 85, 97, 102, 112, 114, 125,
302, 303, 337, 357, 359, 361, 368, 294, 297, 299, 300, 329
369, 372 Privatization, 17, 168, 258, 262, 265
CogLing, 77, 161, 195, 197, 200, 230, 247,
261, 298
critical (CDA/CDS/CritLing), 10, 51, 84, Q
96, 97, 117, 158, 170, 258, 269, Queer/queering, 10, 248, 285, 290–293,
271, 286, 297, 337, 361, 368, 369 317, 343
discourse, 92, 222 Queer linguistics/queer discourse studies, 10,
discourse-historical, 121, 173, 175, 248, 285, 290–293
177, 247 hetero/normativ(ity), 285, 286, 291–293
ecological, 301, 303 binaries/binarism, 285, 291
feminist, 286, 289 queer theory, 285, 290–292
Foucault, 187 sexuality and gender, 2
pragmatics, 197
Queer, 248, 291
sociocultural, 16, 21, 92, 252 R
social semiotic, 48, 187 Racism/racialization, xvi, 10, 97–113,
systemic functional linguistic/Halliday, 119–121, 124, 126, 137, 157, 171,
13, 16, 31 250, 255, 271, 275, 277, 325,
theoretical, 100, 253, 291 329–333, 335, 343, 344, 351, 353,
Point of view, see Cognitive linguistic 356, 357, 359, 361, 369, 381
approach anti-racism, 10, 106, 109, 224, 256, 274,
Politics of Fear, see Wodak 329, 332, 333, 356
Populism/populist parties, xxii, 129, and antisemitism (see Discourse-historical
130, 299–300 approach to CDA/CDS; Wodak)
See also Wodak; Politics of Fear denial of (see van Dijk)
Positive discourse analysis (PDA), 10, 161, discourse/language of (see Media)
162, 221, 231–234, 352, 374 elite discourse, in, 107–109, 157, 331
associated scholars, 164 (re)production/expression of, 100,
central concepts/distinguishing features, 9, 104–107, 111
164, 172 reverse, 106, 275
generative critique, 10, 221, visual, 136
234, 235, 340 work on, 98, 103, 105, 109, 171, 332
postfoundational thought, 234 xeno-, 126, 329
research focus/foci, 164, 168, 279 See also Media; van Dijk; Wodak
Power, definition of, xxii, 1, 3, 35, 114, 249, Reading Images (Kress and van Leeuwen), , , ,
261, 295 , 49–60, 82, 131, 186
Pragmalinguistics, 296–297 angle (perspective), meaning of, 55–56
Pragmatic turn, 294 art theory and, 54
Pragmatics, xv, 1, 2, 10, 13, 14, 19, 71, 72, children’s drawings/books, 53
74–76, 84, 86, 89, 95, 96, 110, 117, coding orientations, 57
126, 129, 137, 155, 159, 160, 177, criticism/critique of, 51
197, 199, 219, 247, 248, 266, grammar in, 49–50
276–278, 286, 294–301, 325, ideational meaning/representations, 54–55
369, 371 ideological analysis, 52–3
definition of, 294–297 interpersonal/interactional meaning, 55–6
Precursors to CDA, see CDA materiality of meaning/ material
expression, 59–60
Index 401

meaning potential, 60 Semiosis/semiotics, 17, 45–48, 59, 60, 81–84,

metafunctions, 49–52, 54–59 94, 131–135, 140, 164–167,
modality, 56–57 259, 272
motivated sign, 53 geo-, 185
multimodality, 50, 61 visual/multimodal, 50, 52, 84, 133, 135,
reading paths, 59 138, 264, 288, 295, 296, 358
representational structures, 54–55 See also Social semiotics; Reading Images;
semiotic potential, 53 Multimodal approaches
semiotics, 50 in CDA/CDS
social semiotics, use of the term, 49 Semiotic Society of America, 371
Sydney/Newtown Semiotic Circle, 51 Sex/sexuality, see Queer linguistics/queer
textual function/composition, 57 discourse studies
three-dimensional objects/visuals, 60 Sexism/sexist discourse, 45, 277, 288, 289,
van Leeuwen’s role in, 49 300, 351, 353, 361, 369
visual design, grammar of, 8, 49–61, Sheikhi, M., see Babaii
136, 346 Shi-xu, 235, 280, 281, 283, 284
visual sign, 53, 54 Sign language, 368, 369
western visual language/mass media, 52 Social action(s), 2, 29–31, 54, 76, 84, 108,
See also Multimodality; Critical 118, 119, 132, 136, 166, 174, 180,
linguistics; Social semiotics; 181, 295, 297, 328, 351
Systemic functional grammar/ Social actor(s) approach (SAA), see
linguistics van Leeuwen
Reagan, T., 368–369 Social change(s), 1–2, 10, 34, 45, 83, 87,
Recontextualization (Discourse as), , , , , , , , , , 90–93, 105, 169, 233, 234, 239,
, , , , 76, 124, 129, 135, 136, 160, 260, 287, 298, 301, 328, 354, 358,
162, 167, 180, 181, 240, 282, 367 372, 376, 379, 382
See also van Leeuwen; Social semiotics; Social cognition(s), , , , , , , , , , , , 75, 78, 103,
Social practice(s), discourse/ 105, 108, 110, 111, 170–172, 195,
language (use) as 197, 261
Reflexivity/self-reflection, 10, 124, 193, 202, See also van Dijk
220–221, 223, 236–237, 251, Social justice, , , , , 306, 327, 336, 342
259–260, 267, 272, 280, 284, 288 See also Emancipation (social),
See also Wodak emancipatory
Refugees, 5 Social media, xvi, 4, 7–8, 51, 160, 162, 178,
Reisigl, M., 98, 109, 111, 119–123, 125–128, 184, 358–363, 374
130, 131, 167, 173–178, 200, 247, challenges, xxi
294, 295, 305, 328–330 movements, 365
See also Discourse historical approach radicalization, 358
Relevance theory, see Cognitive linguistic use by politicians, 234, 358, 362
approach See also Facebook; Twitter
Renigar, P., 358–363, 372, 373 Social practice(s), discourse/language (use) as,
Richardson, J., 131, 155–158, 160, 161, 169, xxiii, 72, 74, 118, 123, 187,
170, 344–345 260, 267
Roderick, ., i, 157, 160, 162, 187, critical linguistics, 37
238, 366–368 Fairclough/dialectal-relational approach,
Rogers, R., 232–234, 252, 253, 257–260, 265, 86, 89–90, 92, 123, 164, 166, 258
273, 275, 326, 347–358 Gee, 262
gender, 290
Halliday/social semiotics, 17, 29
S Hodge & Kress, 47, 49
Saussure, F. de, 47, 50 interview(s) as, 42–45
Selfie, 6–7 knowledge as grounded in, 135
Semantics, see Meaning Kress, 42, 45–47, 82
402 Index

Social practice(s), discourse/language Social Semiotics: Key Figures, New Directions

(use) as (cont.) (Andersen et al), 62, 140
Kress & van Leeuwen, 61 See also Kress; van Leeuwen
Machin and van Leeuwen, 238 Social theory/ theorists, see Critical theory
multimodal/nonverbal, 62, 123–124, 187, Sociocognitive approach to CDA/CDS, 77,
238, 252 170–173, 285, 331
New London Group, 82 associated scholars, 170, 173
non-discursive/non-verbal, 123–124 central concepts/distinguishing
pragmatics, 294 features, 173–176
research as, 256, 382 context models, (see also van Dijk), 171
Rogers, 252, 259, 351 definition of discourse, 171
sociolinguistics, 267 research focus/foci, 170–172
talk in school, 272 social cognition(s) (see Social cognition(s);
van Dijk/Sociocognitive approach, van Dijk)
72, 95, 170 theoretical background/attractor, 76–78
van Leeuwen,–3, 40, 76, 132–135, 160, See also van Dijk
170 (see also van Leeuwen as a Socio(-)cultural nature of language, 17
separate entry) Sociocultural context, 17
Wodak/Discourse-historical approach, Sociolinguist/sociolinguistic(s), 2, 10, 14, 17,
123, 173 31, 41, 73–75, 85, 113–114, 116,
Social semiotic, language as, 8, 15, 17–18, 117, 119–120, 125, 159, 186,
31, 49–50 248–249, 253–254, 261, 266–271,
See also Social semiotics; Systemic 276–277, 280, 285–287, 297, 298
functional grammar/linguistics aspects of, 30
Social Semiotics (Hodge and Kress), background, 30
46–48, 180 critical, 73
Social semiotics (SocSem), 7 definition of, 114, 266
intersemiotic relations, 184–185 discourse, 117, 121 (see also Wodak)
meaning/semiotic potential, 2, 7, 17, 19, examples of CDA/CDS and, 266–270
21, 31, 53, 60, 62, 134, 137, gender studies and, 285–287
179–180, 186 (see also Systemic mechanisms of control, 42
functional grammar/linguistics) order, 254
multimodal social semiotics, 62 relationship to CDA/CDS, 266–267
recontextualize/recontextualization variation, 36–37
(discourse as), 5, 124, 129, 132, See also Discourse sociolinguistics
135–137, 167, 177, 180, 238, 240, Sociopragmatics, 296–297
256, 258, 274, 282, 301, 370 (see Sociosemantics, see Systemic functional
also van Leeuwen) grammar/linguistics
relation to CDA, 179, 185, 186 Soft news, 374–378
semiotic choices, 185 SOS-racism, 333
semiotic production, 134, 137–138, 184 Spanish (as a) Heritage Language
semiotic resources, 52–53, 61–62, (Studies), 269–270
133–135, 180, 186, 238, 350 SPEAK (Solidarity and Political
(see also van Leeuwen) Engagement of Adoptees in
social actors (see Social actor(s) approach; Korea), 364–365
van Leeuwen) Spielhaus, R., 338–340
types of, 48–49, 137, 178, 200 Stibbe, A., 303–307
tools, 180–181 (see also van Leeuwen) Stubbs, M., 195, 228–229, 231, 254
See also Multimodal approaches to CDA/ Suh, E., 363–365
CDS; van Leeuwen; Social practice, Symposium (meeting) in
discourse/language (use) as Amsterdam, see CDA
Social Semiotics (journal), 62, 132, 137, 161, Sydney, University of, Sydney school/semiotic
187, 287 circle, 15, 23, 51, 131–132, 344
Index 403

Systemic functional grammar/linguistics Syntagmatic (structure), 20, 59, 82, 159

(SFG/SFL), systemicists, 15–18 system, 19–21
appliable linguistics/social action, 29–32 tenor, 22–3
associated scholars, 15 text, definition of, 21–27, 31
Chomsky, Labov and, 16–17 textual metafunction (texture), 26–8
clause/clause complex, 22, 25 theme/rheme, old/new, 27–28
coherence/cohesion, 22, 24, 27 transitivity (types of), 24, 33
context/context of situation, 22–23 Webster, 31
definition of language use in, 16, 18 Whorf, 17–18
delicacy, 19 See also Halliday; Critical linguistics;
discourse semantics, 22 Bernstein
field, 22–23
functional(-semantic) approach, 16, 19–20
genre, 21, 23 T
grammatical metaphor, 28–29 Teaching English to Speakers of Other
Halliday Centre for Intelligent Applications Languages (TESOL), 250, 259
of Language Studies, 31 Technologization of discourse, 91, 93
Hasan, 15, 24 Tenor, see Halliday
ideational and interpersonal Terminology/ies, xvi, 2, 4, 8–9, 34, 58, 78,
metafunctions, 24–26 157, 161, 163, 185, 230, 261, 269,
interdisciplinary view, 16 283, 284, 296, 299, 304, 326,
International Systemic Functional 374, 377
Linguistics Association (ISFLA), 31 Text, see Halliday; van Dijk; Systemic
Introduction to functional grammar (IFG, functional grammar/linguistics
Halliday), 20 Textual metafunction/meaning, see Systemic
language as a social semiotic, 17–18 (see functional grammar/linguistics;
also Social semiotics) Reading Images
lexicogrammar/lexico-grammatical system, Topos/topoi, and fallacies (in argumentation),
19–20, 22 see Discourse-historical approach
literacy, 30 to CDA/CDA
Martin, J., 8, 13–15, 22–23, 28, 62, 132, Transformation, see Critical linguistics
140, 231–233 Transgender (people), 292–3
Matthiessen, ., c, 15, 20, 62, 140 Transitivity (types of), 24–25, 33, 43, 363–365
meaning making/meaning potential, 2, 7, Trew, T., 13, 32–34, 38, 39
17–21, 31, 52–53, 60, 62–63, 132, See also Fowler et al; Critical linguistics;
134, 179, 186 Active vs. passive sentences
metafunction(s), 24–28, 31, 33, 49, 51, Trump, ., xvi, d, 5, 56, 130, 175, 199, 224,
53–60, 62, 89 (see also 234, 277, 300, 325, 330, 357,
Reading Images) 363–364, 375–377, 379–380
mode, 23 Turning Point USA, 374
mood and modality, 26 Twitter, 4, 193, 277, 339, 362–363
nominalization, 28–29, 38, 42
paradigmatic (choice), 19–20, 59, 80, 159
realization/instantiation, 17, 20–21, 59, 62 U
register, 21–23 Undrum, .V.M., L, see Veum
semiosis/semiotics, 17 (see also Semiosis/ University College London (UCL),
semiotics as a separate entry) 14–15, 82–83
society/culture, 16–18, 23–27
socially accountable linguistics, 29–31
sociosemantics, 21 V
stratal-functional model, 19–21 Value-added measurement (VAM), 263
structure, 20 van Dijk, T.A., vii, 75–77, 94–97, 111, 335
Sydney school and genre, , 23 (see Amsterdam (University), 73, 94,
also Sydney) 100, 331–332
404 Index

Social practice(s), discourse/language See also Discourse & Society (journal);

(use) as (cont.) Sociocognitive approach
‘Call to readers’, 106, 108 to CDA/CDS
critical discourse analysis/studies (see van Leeuwen, T., vii, 40, 51, 75–77, 83,
CDA, CDA/CDS, CDS) 133–135, 140, 346–351
Centre for Discourse Studies, Pompeo Advancing multimodality and critical
Fabra University, 109 discourse studies (Zhao et al, in his
cognitive model of discourse honor), 140
understanding, 96 Bernstein, ideas of, 76, 135 (see also
context model, 99, 171–172, 285 Bernstein)
denial of racism, 112, 126, 275 Caldas-Coulthard, work with, 137 (see also
discourse analysis/discourse studies, 74, Caldas-Coulthard, as a
96–99, 109, 112, 114–115, 174 separate entry)
“Discourse, Racism and Ideology”, Special critical linguistics, 34
Issue (with Wodak), 103, 110 critical multimodal studies, 139 (see also
Discourse Studies (journal), 95, 133 Multimodal approaches;
discourse-cognition-society triangle/ Reading Images)
approach, 97–100, 104, 114 Discourse and practice, 135–137
discrimination (7 D’s of), 101 discourse as the recontextualization
early work, 94–97 of social practice, approach to
editorial work, journals founded, Special CDA/CDS, 76, 132, 136,
Issues, 94–95, 106 162, 180
Elite discourse and racism, 107–109 Djonov, work with, 137–140
ethnic peoples/minorities, prejudice early work, 131–132
against/ethnicism, 98, 107 genre, theory of, 84
Handbook of discourse analysis, 71–73 global/Western dominance in media/
interviews, features of, 103 communication, 51, 139
linguistics, generative, structural-­ Handbook of visual analysis (with
functional, 95 Jewitt), 133
media/news discourse, the press and immigration, study of fear of, 132
racism, 104–107 interview, 50, 62, 140
parliamentary debates, racism in, Introducing social semiotics, 133–135
108–109 Journal of Language and Politics, Special
Pompeo Fabra University, 109, 113 Issue on Multimodality (with
pragmatics, discourse 95–96 D. Machin), 237
prejudice, definition of, 99 Kress, work with, 133 (see also Kress, G.)
Prejudice in discourse, 74, 100–103 legitimation, 129
racism, ethnicism, 98 Leverhulme Trust grant, 138
racism and discourse, project on, 97–103 Machin, work with, 137–138 (see also
Racism and the press, 106 Machin as a separate entry)
Racism at the top (van Dijk & Wodak), 110 moving images, 60
scripts and (group) schemata, 95, 99 Multimodal Discourse (see Kress, G.)
social justice, focus on, 97, 112, 124, 336 multimodal discourse/multimodality, study
South, global, 105 of, 61–63, 134, 137–140 (see also
Spain and Latin America, racist Multimodal(ity); Multimodal social
discourse in, 109 semiotics)
Strategies of discourse comprehension (van Playmobil figures, pram rattle, 137
Dijk & Kintsch), 96–97 racism/racist stereotypes, 137
text grammar/ text and context, 95–96 recontextualization, 76, 124, 129, 132,
theoretical background/attractor, 76–78 135–136, 160, 240 (see also
Us (positive) vs. Them/Others (negative), Bernstein)
interactional strategies, 101–103 semiotics, semiotic studies, 45–49,
Wodak, collaboration with, 109–113 133–135, 346–347
Index 405

semiotic system/consumption/principle/ biographer/historian of CDA/CDS, 39, 89,

production, 1, 18, 47, 49, 55–57, 111, 130–131
60, 62, 136, 139–140, 188, 372 context, definition and types of, 119
social actors (approach), 76, 132, Critical discourse analysis (4 vol.), 113
136, 182–183 critical linguistics, 41, 80, 117
social semiotics, 41, 50, 62, 71, 81, critical theory and, 110, 114, 117, 122,
133–135 (see also Multimodal 124, 173 (see also Critical theory/
social semiotics) theorists as a separate entry)
Social semiotics: Key figures, new discourse, definition of, xxii, 119–120
directions (Andersen et al), 62, discourse/discursive practices/strategies,
140, 187 58–60, 124–127, 129, 177, 179
Social semiotic/multimodal approach Discourse Politics and Identity Centre
(MCDA) (see multimodal (DPI), 111–113, 122, 126–128
approaches to CDA/CDS (MCDS)) discourse sociolinguistics
social semiotic resources/tools, 180 (critical), 116–119
sociosemantic inventory, 132, 136 Disorders of discourse, 116–119
speech of radio announcers, 40, 60, 134 early work, 113–114
systemic functional grammar/ ethnography/ethnographic approach, 117
linguistics, 75–76 Fairclough & Wodak 1997 chapter on
technology (advanced/semiotic), impact of/ CDA, 42, 73, 79, 112, 118 (see also
global dominance of, 139–140, 250 Fairclough)
theoretical background/attractor, 76 Festschrift für Ruth Wodak, 111
three dimensional objects, 60, 134 ‘Foreword’ (to this book), xxi
toys as communication, 137 Haider/Haiderization, ‘Austria first’,
visual analysis/communication/design/ slogans, 120–121
representation, 40, 49–52, 57, ingroup/us vs. outgroup/them, 120
59–63, 73, 83–84, 132, 139–140, integrative interdisciplinary research, 119
187, 197, 229 (see also Lancaster (University), xxi, 73, 83, 113,
Reading Images) 128, 173, 253, 328–329
Zhao, work with, 139–140 Language, power and ideology, 73,
See also Systemic functional grammar/ 113, 115–116
linguistics; Social semiotics; CDA; Methods of critical discourse analysis/
CDA/CDS; Social practice(s), studies (with Meyer), 52, 72,
discourse/language (use) as 113, 138
Veum, A. and Undrum, .V.M., l, 6–7 national identity/Austrian vs.
Vienna group/Vienna school (of discourse), European, 119–121
see Wodak orders of discourse, 116
‘perpetuum mobile’ in populist/far-right
discourse, 129–130, 300
W Politics of exclusion (with Krzyżanowski),
Waldheim, K., see Wodak 111, 177
Waugh, L., xv, xxiv, 187, 199, 270, 279, 325, Politics of fear and populist discourse/
361, 366, 370–373 politics/parties, 128–130 (see also
Whorf, B.L., 17–18, 28, 36, 39, 75, 285 Politics of Fear)
Widdowson, H.G., 195, 220–224, 228 populist parties, nine features of, 130
Wodak, R., vii, xxi–xxv, 75–77, 113–116, principles of CDA, 118–119
177–181, 272, 273, 275, 276, 283, procedures of analysis, 77, 91, 125
286–288, 297, 299, 300, professional activities/interests/
305, 329–333 influences, 109–113
Amsterdam symposium/meeting, Racism at the top (Wodak & van Dijk),
73–78, 82, 113 108, 127
antisemitism and (neo)racist discourse, refugees/immigrants and nationalist/racist
104, 108, 110, 115, 119–121 discourse, 120, 230
406 Index

Wodak (cont.) Waldheim, K., Feindbild, 121

research interests, approaches and Wittgenstein Price for Elite Researchers,
work, 113 113, 126, 331
social justice/change/relevance, practical See also Discourse-historical approach
applications, improvement of to CDA/CDS
communication, 114, 117–118, 122, World Englishes, 250
129, 328
sociolinguistics, social theory, applied
linguistics and, 77, 115, 117 (see X
also Sociolinguistics; Applied Xenophobia/xenophobic/xeno-racism, 10, 111,
linguistics) 112, 120, 125–127, 129, 172,
theoretical background/attractor, 329, 362
76, 77, 108
topoi, 124, 125, 129, 176, 299, 305 (see
also Discourse-historical approach; Y
Argumentation, strategies of) Yulita, ., l, 334–336
van Dijk, collaboration with,
9, 109–114
Vienna University, Vienna Group/School Z
of Discourse Analysis, 113–114, Zhao, S., 50, 61–63, 82, 134–140, 179,
121, 127, 173 180, 346