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Critical Discourse Analysis
Professor Martin Conboy
8 December 2016
Discourse
how power and knowledge are expressed in language and in our case the language of the news media
Critical linguistics
The role of the critical reader
Identifying patterns
Language as a means of recreating conventional hierarchies
Normalizing function of such language patterns
Extended language analysis
social contexts
political contexts
power relationships
to explore the patterning of choice in language
Defining Discourse Analysis
In order to expose the subtle workings of power relationships expressed through language, discourse analysis undertakes systematic exploration of the patternings of language across larger bodies of text to identify common representations and messages that may be missed in more isolated reading.
Discourse analysis can demonstrate
How the language of the news media constructs social knowledge.
Relations between social groups - social cognition - socially shared representations of hierarchies
How language acts on the social but it is also shaped by it - dialectic
CDA can be used as whole or part of research
Complement to framing or content analysis
On its own to explore aspects of news media
As a semantic exploration
As a syntactic exploration
As a combination of both semantic/syntactic
Rhetoric
Any linguistic feature which has as its chief function the persuasion of a listener/reader to a particular point of view.
Calls to action.
Typographic rhetoric.
Numbers can also be used as a rhetorical device.
Rhetorical argument appeals to symbolic consensus of ideal reader through asserted common sense and common experience.
Rhetoric and persuasion
‘a journalist’s news report should aim to persuade the audience that his or her description and interpretation is the rational and appropriate one.’ (Kieran, 1998: 27)
Semantic tools
Classification
Register
Lexical mapping
Metaphor
Classification
Dominant actors.
Who gets to speak?
Register
Register refers to the use of a particular type of language in a particular context.
Cohesion and worldview embedded in language selected.
A version of the language of its ideal social grouping.
Register can reveal as much about the media institution as it can about its perceived audience.
Assumptions about what the audience knows – lifestyle, education, interests.
Assumptions about the language used and understood by audience.
Formal/specialist vocabulary. Informal/ Slang. Conversationalization
Education policy in the Sun
U-turn by Kelly over ‘old-style’ teaching
Schools were told to go back to old-style teaching methods yesterday in a bid to boost reading standards.
Trendy techniques introduced in the Sixties face the axe and teachers’ leaders welcomed the news last night.
But the move comes too late for generations of children let down by the system…..
Sun 3 June 2005
Education policy in the Guardian
Another round of structural change won’t by itself achieve universally high standards. Worse than that it could be a distraction. In five years’ time, whose children will be going to these new academies? Will choice and market forces once again squeeze out the children of the disadvantaged?
Estelle Morris Guardian 13 September 2005
Lexical mapping
The nouns, adjectives and verbs used in conjunction with the main protagonists.
Dominant, foregrounded, preferred vocabulary and metaphors sideline other potential readings of a story.
Metaphor
The description of one phenomenon in terms of another; a condensed and implicit comparison.
Politics is often depicted in metaphorical terms in newspaper language in general. It is a tendency which calls into question the objective and neutral nature of newspaper language given the emotive nature of much metaphorical association.
Lakoff (1987) and Goatly (1997) consider metaphorical language as having the structure of a bridge between the factual world and ideological persuasion and according to this hypothesis, metaphors have an important role in establishing common associations within newspaper texts.
The level of shared assumptions on behalf of an audience involved in the use of metaphor make it highly significant in terms of ideology.
Water/flood
Tony can’t turn the tide
A tidal wave of economic migrants is moving across Europe and is about to crash onto our shores.
Syntactic tools
Transitivity
Passive voice/agency
Modality
Nominalization
Transitivity
Who does what to whom and how.
Transitivity - allows options - is often ideologically significant in its preferences.
Sentences generally consist of Process (verb) – Participants (agents and affected) – Circumstances (adverbially expressed).
Passive constructions/agency
Active constructions make the Actor the theme/subject of the sentence.
Passive constructions provide the opportunity to represent an event without reference to an agent.
The agent is deleted from the process with the potential for shifting blame onto depersonalized forces or even the victims themselves.
Agents can be deleted … ‘for various reasons – perhaps because they are obvious, but also as a way of obfuscating agency or responsibility’ (Fairclough, 2000: 163).
Active constructions
Lib Dems oust Zac Goldsmith in Richmond Park by-election
(BBC New Website, 2 December 2016)
(Sarah Olney)
Passive construction
At least 200 Taliban have been killed in clashes with American and Afghan forces over the past ten weeks..
Daily Telegraph 2 June 2005
A British soldier was killed by a bomb blast in the troubled region of Amara in south eastern Iraq yesterday
Guardian 30 May 2005
Modality
Provides an opportunity for comment and opinion in language.
Modality is used to make claims for preference, truth, obligation, approval, normality.
Speech Acts.
Modal verbs: may, could, must, should, will
Negations of modal verbs.
Adverbs: probably, hopefully, surely.
Hutton enquiry:
‘Iraq may be able to deploy…’ was changed to ‘Iraq is able to deploy….’.
Gilligan: ‘….the Government probably knew the 45-minute figure was wrong.’
Nominalisation/noun phrases
Shift from a process to an entity, turning verbs (and adjectives) into nouns.
Much is deleted in the transformation involved in nominalization - time, participants, modality.
Use of nominalization makes for abstract reporting, distant from concrete events and the real people involved
Ideological abbreviation of a narrative.
Reports can hide the agents of decisions, the founders of rumours, the processes which have led to a situation. Nominalization presents the world in terms of already-known categories.
Nominalization - Examples
The insurgency
Globalization
Global warming/ Climate change
Sex beast
Noun phrase
Extended examples
New Labour’s (1998) Building the Knowledge-Driven Economy, cited in Fairclough, 2000.
‘In the increasingly global economy of today, we cannot compete in the old way. Capital is mobile, technology can migrate quickly and goods can be made in low cost countries and shipped to developed markets.’
CDA critique
‘capital is mobile’ transforms a transitive action into a relation
‘technology can migrate quickly’ ascribes agency to technology itself
‘goods can be made in low cost countries’ and ‘ [goods can be] shipped to developed markets’ are transitive actions processed without agents
Combinations of semantic and syntactic
Argumentation
Narrative
Argumentation
Ethos
Logos
Pathos
Ethos
Why I, an ardent Europhile, toast the French and the Dutch for rejecting the Brussels lie machine
Francis Wheen Daily Mail 3 June 2005
Logos
A toxic chemistry can occur when gangs of pre-teen youngsters are left unsupervised by adults, which they are more likely to be today, when truanting or after school, with parents still at work….
It is probably extremely rare that a child loses grip on reality so completely that it watches a scene on TV and simply re-enacts it soon afterwards. But the suspension of disbelief when viewing almost certainly loosens what can already be a weak grasp of the difference between fantasy and reality in vulnerable children.
We should not be surprised if, from time to time, the fantasies become reality and we reap the poisonous harvest that they sow.
Oliver James Times 3 June 2005
Pathos
BURN THE BITCH ON THE STAKE
SHE IS PURE EVIL
Daily Star 13 May
Argumentation: The Study of Argument
Arguments are the statements and strategies which a person uses to support an opinion or to draw a conclusion
Grounds – The initial assertions or implicit starting point
Warrants – Backing (What justifies the grounds being linked to the claim)
Claims – the summary/conclusion drawn from the grounds and the warrants
Come let us rejoice
Celebrating Australia Day is back in fashion, so grab your flag and start waving, writes Stuart Rintoul
THERE was a time when Australians, if they were at all good-hearted, were obliged to agonise on Australia Day.
If we had to celebrate a national birthday, the argument went, then we ought at least to reflect, however briefly, on the cost of establishing the nation as well as its achievements. We should be conscious that Aboriginal people regard January 26 as Invasion Day and reflect on the illogicality of a nation founded by a British governor and still tied to Britain’s monarchic apron strings. It was, all in all, a troubling kind of celebration.
Sick to death of this politically correct introspection, Australians elected John Howard and almost 10 years later are again blithely celebrating the simple joys of being Australian, according to some of the nation’s most savvy market researchers. As a result, flag makers are reporting bumper business.
The Australian, Features, 26 January 2006. p 13
How do the warrants fit into commonsense assumptions about the status quo?
A good example of the use of dialectic is to be found in this piece which charts and rationalizes the shift in Australian public life to embrace the celebration of Australia Day. It starts with the premise that the national holiday is something to enjoy. The warrants are the historical contexts which have led to liberal guilt about the past in Australia and the claim is that through a democratic reassessment, as expressed through the ballot box, Australians have decided to warmly embrace their own shared sense of national pride. The dialectic pits the ambiguities and difficulties of Australia’s colonial past and continuing link with the imperial power, Britain, against a political rejection of those anxieties which the piece claims are part of a “politically correct introspection”. Interestingly though, this rejection depends more on an emotional appeal against “political correctness” than a rational explanation for the political shift. Flawed in rational terms but dialectically persuasive in appealing to the emotions, the piece celebrates the return to fashion of the Australian Public Holiday.
Multimodal discourse analysis
including image
including typography
including aspects of web interactivity
Top Tips
First, find material which interests you
Choose a strong theme
Use CDA if it is relevant to your research
Identify what language features exist
Enjoy the trip….. If you want to take the ride!
Further reading
Conboy, M. (2006) Tabloid Britain: Constructing a Community Through Language. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge
Conboy, M. (2007) The Language of the News. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Cotter, Colleen (2011) News Talk: Investigating the Language of Journalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Machin, D. and Mayr, A. (2012) How To Do Discourse Analysis: A Multi-Modal Introduction. London: Sage.
Montgomery, M. (2007) The Discourse of Broadcast News: A Linguistic Approach. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Richardson, J. E. (2007) Analyzing Newspapers. Basingstoke: Macmillan
Thank you for listening.