National open university of nigeria school of arts and social sciences
Critical Discourse Analysis and Critical Linguistics
Download 0.49 Mb. View original pdf
|
- Navigate this page:
- Critical Linguistics
- 3.4 Language and Ideology
| 3.2 Critical Discourse Analysis and Critical Linguistics CDA has a strong historical link with an approach developed by a group based at the University of East Anglia in the s (Fowler, 1981; Fowler, et al, 1979) led by Roger Fowler. This group was strongly influenced by the work of Systemic Linguistics, combined with stylistic approaches borrowed from Chomskyan Transformational Generative Grammar and the works of Roland Barthes and early French semiotics. The earliest and one of the most influential linguistically-oriented critical approaches to discourse analysis is called Critical Linguistics. It was concerned with reading the meanings in texts as the realization of social processes, seeing texts as functioning ideologically and politically in relation to their contexts. This was very much an approach in which discourse was text, but there was little emphasis on the production and interpretation of texts, a too ready assumption of the transparent relationship between textual features and social meanings and a neglect of discourse as a domain of social struggle or of the ways in which changes in discourse might be related to wider process of social and cultural change (Threadgold, 2003). 108 CDA therefore, draws on poststructuralist discourse theory and critical linguistics. It focuses on how social relations, identity, knowledge and power are constructed through written and spoken texts. The techniques of CDA are derived from various disciplinary fields, such as Pragmatics and Speech Acts theory, Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Linguistics. Pragmatics and Speech Acts theory see texts as forms of social action that occur in complex social contexts. Systemic Linguistics shows how linguistic forms can be systematically related to social functions. CDA uses analytical tools from these disciplines to address issues on class, power, gender, race and culture. 3.4 Language and Ideology Scholars working within the field of CDA see a very strong relationship between language and ideology. The word Ideology is used in many disciplines with different, but overlapping shades of meaning. Ideology simply refers to attitudes, set of beliefs, values and doctrines with reference to religious, political, social and economic life which shape the individual's and group's perception and through which reality is constructed and interpreted. It is the belief of scholars in CDA that every instance of language use is produced from an ideological perspective. According to Taiwo (2007), inmost interactions, users bring with them different dispositions towards language, which are closely related to their social positioning. Kress (1990) also stresses that the defined and delimited set of statements that constitute a discourse are themselves expressive of and organized by a specific ideology. Download 0.49 Mb. Share with your friends:
|