PhD Course in Discourse Analysis April, 2019

Seminar in CDA College of Arts/Dept. of English

Approaches to Critical Discourse Analysis

A Seminar By
Abeer Kh. Hussein (PhD. Candidate)

Approaches to CDA1
1. Norman Fairclough: Discourse as Social Practice (The Dialectical
Relational)(1995 a,b , 2000, 2003)
2. Teun Van Dijk: A Socio-cognitive Model (1993, 1998, 2001)
3. Ruth Wodak: Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to CDA (Vienna
School) (1996, 1999, 2001, 2002)
4. Van Leeuwen: Social Actors
5. Jӓger and Maier: Foucauldian Dispositive Analysis
6. Wetherell and Potter (1992): The Social psychological approach

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Due to limited time available, only the first three approaches will be constrained on in the current work.

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 First Approach
Norman Fairclough: Discourse as Social Practice (Relational – Dialectic
Approach2) (Lancaster University, England)
➢ Norman Fairclough is considered as the most impressive and influential
practitioner in CDA as he has contributed to the field most significantly.
➢ In his earlier work (1989) he called his approach to language and discourse as
Critical Language Study.
➢ His main objective is "to help increase consciousness of how language
contributes to the domination of some people by others, because consciousness is
the first step for liberation" (Fairclough,1989:1).
➢ The work of Norman Fairclough presents a comprehensive and programmatic
attempt to develop a theory of CDA which links discourse, power, and social
structure.
➢ Fairclough examines the role of social institutions in shaping discourse practices,
and argues that language is always shaped by the material and social conditions in
which it is produced.
Fairclough’s Model
From Fairclough’s perspective, discourse is a three-dimensional concept which
involves the following aspects:
1. Texts (the objects of linguistic analysis)
2. Discursive practices (the production, distribution and consumption of texts)
3. Social practices (the power relations, ideologies and hegemonic struggles
that discourses reproduce, challenge or restructure).
In comparison to the three aspects of discourse, Fairclough (1989: 26-27)
identifies three dimensions for CDA:
• Description is the stage which is concerned with formal properties of the text.
• Interpretation is concerned with the relationship between text and interaction by
seeing the text as the product of the process of production and as a resource in the
process of interpretation.
• Explanation is concerned with the relationship between interaction and social
context, with the social determination of the process of production and
interpretation, and their social effects.

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It is a relational- dialectic approach because it focuses on two dialectical relations: between
structure (especially social practices as an intermediate level of structuring) & events (or between
structure & action, structure & strategy) & within each.
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 ➢ Three types of analyses are carried out in Fairclough's model, they are:
1. The text analysis
2. The discursive analysis
3. The social analysis.
See figure (1) below:

Figure (1)
1. Text Analysis (Description)
- Fairclough proposes that “textual analysis involves the analysis of the way
propositions are structured and the way propositions are combined and
sequenced”.
- Fairclough organized text analysis under four main headings: vocabulary,
grammar, cohesion and text structures.
Textual analysis
Deals mainly with individual words: word choice, word
Vocabulary
meaning, wording, metaphor
Deals with words combined into clauses and sentences:
Grammar
transitivity and modality
Deals with how clauses and sentences are linked
Cohesion
together: connectives, argumentation
Deals with large scale organizational properties:
Text structures
interactional control, sentence length and complexity

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 2. Discursive analysis (Interpretation)
Discursive practice dimension specifies the nature of the processes of text
production and interpretation.
Texts are produced in specific ways in specific social contexts and they are also
consumed differently in different social contexts. Consumption and production can
be individual or collective.
Within this type of analysis Fairclough uses three main aspects that link a text
to its wider social context, which are:

Discursive analysis
After text analysis, attention should be given to
The force of utterances speech acts in order to analyze the functions of the
utterances.
The coherence is sometimes driven by explicit
features of the text, such as anaphoric references,
connectives, transitional phrases, rhetorical
The coherence of texts
predicates, and signaling devices.
Sometimes the coherence relations are constructed
inferentially.
It is "the property that texts have of being full of
The intertextuality of texts
snatches of other texts”.

In the intertextuality of texts, Fairclough (1992:85) differentiated two types of

intertextuality:

- Manifest Intertextuality: To refer to original texts explicitly

This kind of intertextuality hides implicit ideological meanings. It is a strategy of
saving the text producer's face through alienating him/herself from the proposition
made by the original speaker.

- Constitutive (implicit) Intertextuality: No explicit reference to original texts

It refers to the complex relation of genres or discourse types’ convention. Fairclough
argues that “a text may incorporate another text without the latter being explicitly
cued: one can respond to another text in the way one words one's own text”.

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 3. Social Analysis (Explanation)
It looks at discourse as social practice. That is, discourse in relation to ideology
and power placing it within a view of power as domination, and a view of the
evolution of power relations as domination struggle (Fairclough,1992:86).
According to Fairclough social practices are the things people have accepted and
learned from the environment, culture and society they live in. Discourse is therefore
not only what is said, but also how something is said within a certain structure. The
function of social practice is to articulate discourse together with other non-
discoursal social elements.

Second Approach
Teun Van Dijk: A Socio-cognitive Model (1993, 1998, 2001)
- Van Dijk (2003) believes that there is no direct relationship between social
structures and discourse structures and almost always they are connected to each
other through personal and cognition structure.

cognition structure

discourse structures social structures

- Van Dijk (2003) claims that the study of discourse links between
society/culture/situation, cognition and discourse/language. This is the three-way
discourse-cognitive-society model of ideology that backs up Van Dijk’s socio-
cognitive approach.
Discourse: Refers to “communicative event” including conversational interactions,
written texts, as well as associated gestures, face work, images, etc.
Cognition: Refers to personal as well as social cognition, beliefs, representations,
mental or memory structures, etc.
Society: Refers to both the local micro-structures of situated face to face interactions
as well as the more global, societal and political structures variously defined in terms
of groups.

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- According to Van Dijk, the cognitive interface plays a mediating role in
understanding and interpreting the relation between discourse structures and
social structures.

- Cognitive structures (Van Dijk, 1993)

• Memory or Mind, as implemented in the brain, is usually divided into Working
Memory (WM) – also called Short Term Memory (STM) – and Long Term
Memory (LTM). LTM itself features remembrances of autobiographical
experiences and knowledge stored in Episodic Memory (EM), on the one hand,
and more general, socially shared knowledge, attitudes and ideologies in
Semantic Memory (SM), on the other hand.

• Mental models. Our personal experiences, as processed in Working Memory,

are represented as subjective, unique, individual mental models, stored in
Episodic Memory. Such mental models have a standard hierarchical structure of
a spatio-temporal Setting, Participants (and their identities, roles and relations),
Actions/Events, and Goals. Such categories also appear in the semantic structures
of the sentences that describe such experiences. Mental models are multimodal
and embodied. They may feature visual, auditory, sensorimotor, evaluative, and
emotional information of experiences, as differentially processed in different
parts of the brain.

• Social cognition. Whereas mental models are personal and unique, human beings
also have various forms of socially shared cognitions. Thus, we all have generic
and abstract knowledge of the world, shared with other members of the same
epistemic community. And as members of specific social groups, we may also
share attitudes (e.g, about abortion, immigration or the death penalty/pɛnəlti/) or
more fundamental ideologies, such as those of racism, sexism, militarism or
neoliberalism, or opponent ideologies such as those of antiracism, feminism,
socialism, pacifism or environmentalism.

In other words, social cognitions are "socially shared representations of societal

/səˈsaɪətl / arrangements, groups and relations, as well as mental operations such as
interpretation, thinking and arguing, inferencing and learning"(Dijk, 1993: 257).

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 Our personal experiences are interpreted, and hence construed and represented as
mental models, on the basis of these various forms of social cognition. Hence,
unique, personal mental models may be more or less similar to those of other
members of the same community or group. These crucial features of human
cognition allow cooperation, interaction and communication, and hence discourse.
Levels of (discourse) analysis
Van Dijk (2003) identifies two levels of (discourse) analysis:
a. Micro – level of social order: it is determined by language use, discourse, verbal
interaction and communication. The concern is on the semantic relations between
propositions, syntactic, lexical and other rhetorical elements that provide
coherence in the text, and other rhetorical elements such quotations, direct or
indirect reporting that give factuality to the news reports.

b. Macro – level of social order: It is central in Dijk’s analysis. It refers to power,

dominance and inequality between social groups.
- He defines “social power” in terms of control (Van Dijk, 2003) and views
ideologies as "the basis of the social representations of groups" (Van Dijk,
2006:131). He therefore argues that "groups have (more or less) power if they are
able to (more or less) control the acts and minds of (members of) other groups"
(Van Dijk, 2003:354-5).

- Van Djik (2004) mentions different discursive structures, such as:

Derogation, euphemization, castegorization, irony, hyperbole, lexicalization,
national self-glorification, disclaimers, polarization, presupposition, victimization,
etc. Accordingly, the job of CDA is to expose these intended and hidden messages.

Ideology in Van Dijk’s approach

- For van Dijk (1995: 18), "ideologies are the overall, abstract mental systems that
organize … socially shared attitudes".

- Ideologies "indirectly influence the personal cognition of group members" in

their act of comprehension of discourse among other actions and interactions
(ibid: 19).

- Thus, this approach is based on understanding ideological structures and social

relations of power embedded in discourse.

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- Van Dijk (2001b: 14) includes the following examples of ideological structures:
Membership devices (gender, ethnicity, appearance, origin, etc.): Who are we?
Actions: What do we do?
Aims: Why do we do this?
Norms and Values: What is good or bad?
Position: What is our position in society? and how we relate to other groups?
Resources: What is ours? What do we want to have/keep at all costs?

➢ The pattern resulting from Van Dijk’s approach to ideology, cognition and
discourse is an ideological square.

The two strategies of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation

characterise interaction within and between groups in terms of presenting oneself
and the others.

- The resulting pattern is (Van Dijk 1998b: 44):

Emphasize positive Emphasize negative

things about Us things about Them

De-emphasize negative De-emphasize positive

things about Us things about Them

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Socio-cognitive approach: Theoretical Framework
Van Dijk (2016: 10 - 12) illustrates the following theoretical framework for doing
socio-cognitive analysis:

1. Stress, intonation and word order of sentences depend on what information

is currently known, focused on, new or unexpected, and as currently shared a
dynamically changed as Common Ground among participants.

2. Meanings of words, sentences or sequences of sentences are produced on the

basis of the grammar and other linguistic and discursive knowledge of language
users, and on the basis of the shared generic, sociocultural knowledge of members
of epistemic communities.

3. Coherence relations between sentences or turns of conversation may be partly

expressed by linguistic or discursive forms of cohesion (e.g., by pronouns or
definite articles), but are based on and defined by relations between participants
or events in underlying mental models of language users.

4. Opinion and emotion words, as well as volume or intonation, are expressions

of personal opinions and emotions represented in (multimodal) mental models.

5. Global topics or themes (or frames, etc.) as semantic macrostructures are

planned and interpreted as the macrostructures of underlying mental models, and
control the sequential online production or interpretation of the local meanings of
sentences.

6. Deictic or indexical expressions refer to or presuppose information in the

schematic categories of the context model: Time/Place/Perspective, Participant
(Identities, Roles and Relations), current social or communicative action, as well
as the Intentions and current Knowledge (Common Ground) of the participants.

7. Speech acts are produced on the basis of appropriateness conditions defined in

terms of the properties of context models (such as the knowledge, wishes,
intentions or power of the participants) – as is the case for expressions of
politeness.
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8. Evidentials, whether as specific morphemes in some languages, or as more
explicit expressions in many languages (e.g., I saw, heard, read, etc. that…; She
said that…) are expressions of how knowledge expressed in discourse was
acquired, for instance in terms of current or old experience or context models.

9. The conventional, schematic, canonical structures (superstructures) of various

discourse genres are planned and understood as expressions of shared cultural
knowledge of the schematic organization of such discourse genres, as is the case
for narrative or argumentation, or the conventional organization of news reports
or scientific articles.

10.Metaphors are based on the multimodal structure of mental models of

experience. Thus, large numbers of refugees or immigrants may be (negatively
and manipulatively) described as WAVES because of the anxiety of the
experience of drowning in huge waves – as well as on the basis of general,
sociocultural knowledge of waves – as we shall see in more detail below in the
analysis of the editorial of the Telegraph.

11.Ideological polarization at all levels of discourse, emphasizing the Good

properties of Us (ingroup) and Bad properties of Them (outgroup), express
underlying attitudes (e.g. on immigration or abortion) and ideologies (e.g. of
racism or sexism), via particular, personal mental models of specific events, for
instance as polarized topics, lexicon, metaphors, images, etc.

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 Third Approach
Ruth Wodak: Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to CDA (Vienna School)
(1996, 1999, 2001, 2002)
Concepts in DHA
➢ Critique: It integrates three related aspects (Reisigl,2017: 50 -51):
1. Text or discourse-immanent (intrinsic) critique is primarily knowledge-
related. It assesses conflicts, contradictions and inconsistencies in text-internal or
discourse-internal structures, for example with respect to cohesion, presuppositions,
argumentation and turn-taking structures. This form of critique relies on rhetorical,
text linguistic, pragmatic, politico-linguistic and argumentation theoretical norms or
criteria.
2. Socio-diagnostic critique aims at exposing manipulation in and by discourse,
at revealing ethically problematic aspects of discursive practices. It relies on social,
historical and political background knowledge. This critique includes the critique of
ideology, the critique of the ethos of social actors, pragmatic critique, political
critique and “social critique” (relating, for instance, to social recognition.
3. Future-related prospective critique seeks to contribute to the improvement
of communication (for example, by elaborating guidelines against sexist language
use or by reducing ‘language barriers’ in hospitals, schools and so forth)
➢ Ideology
Ideology, for the DHA, is seen as an (often) one-sided perspective or world view
composed of related mental representations, convictions, opinions, attitudes and
evaluations, which is shared by members of a specific social group.
Ideologies serve as an important means of establishing and maintaining unequal
power relations through discourse.
In addition, ideologies also function as a means of transforming power relations
more or less radically. Thus, we take a particular interest in the ways in which
linguistic and other semiotic practices mediate and reproduce ideology in a variety
of social institutions.
➢ Power
For the DHA, language is not powerful on its own – it is a means to gain and
maintain power by the use powerful people make of it. This explains why the DHA
critically analyses the language use of those in power who have the means and
opportunities to improve conditions. Power is discursively employed not only by
grammatical forms, but also by a person’s control of the social occasion by means
of the genre of a text, or by the regulation of access to certain public scopes.
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Principles of DHA
Reisigl and Wodak (2009: 94 – 96) give the following principles for this approach:
1. The approach is interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinarity involves theory,
methods, methodology, research practice and practical application.
2. The approach is problem-oriented.
3. Various theories and methods are combined, wherever integration leads to an
adequate understanding and explanation of the research object.
4. The research incorporates fieldwork and ethnography (study from ‘inside’),
where required for a thorough analysis and theorizing of the object under
investigation.
5. The research necessarily moves recursively between theory and empirical
data.
6. Numerous genres and public spaces as well as intertextual and interdiscursive
relationships are studied.
7. The historical context is taken into account in interpreting texts and
discourses. The historical orientation permits the reconstruction of how
recontextualization functions as an important process linking texts and
discourses intertextually and interdiscursively over time.
8. Categories and tools are not fixed once and for all. They must be elaborated
foreach analysis according to the specific problem under investigation.
9. ‘Grand theories’ often serve as a foundation. In the specific analyses,
however, ‘middle-range theories’ frequently supply a better theoretical basis.
10.The application of results is an important target. Results should be made
available to and applied by experts and be communicated to the public

Research interests of the DHA

Reisigl (2017: 48) states that the Discourse-Historical Approach does not just
look at the historical dimension of discourses, but is – more extensively – concerned
with the following areas of discourse studies:
• discourse and discrimination (e.g., racism, ethnicism, nationalism, xenophobia,
islamophobia, sexism);
• language barriers in various social institutions (such as hospitals, court rooms,
authorities, academic language, media);
• discourse and politics/policy/polity (e.g., politics of the past/political
commemoration, nation-building, European Union, migration, asylum,
multilingualism, language policy, populism);
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• discourse and identity (e.g., national and supranational/European identity,
linguistic identity);
• discourse and history (e.g., National Socialism, fascism, commemoration, history
of discourse studies);
• discourse in the media (both classical print media and new social media);
• organisational communication (e.g., in institutions of the European Union);
• discourse and ecology (climate change).

Discursive features and strategies

In order to approach various discursive features and strategies, discourse-

historical analyses systematically go through five simple questions which are shown
in the following table:

Table (1)

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Doing a discourse-historical analysis
Three ways of doing a discourse-historical analysis can be distinguished: (Reisigl,
2017: 53 -54)
1. A discourse fragment or utterance is taken as a starting point, and its prehistory
is reconstructed by relating the present to the past.
To give an example: At the first glance, an utterance such as “We take care of
your Carinthia” produced by three Austrian politicians of the right-wing populist
party BZÖ in a regional election campaign in 2009 may seem to be “harmless”.
The seemingly “innocent” character gets lost if a discourse-historical analysis –
interested in recontextualisation – a crucial concept for the analysis of the
historical dimension of discourses – detects that the sentence “Take care of my
Carinthia” has both been uttered in 1991 by Jörg Haider and in 1945 by Friedrich
Rainer, the National Socialist Gauleiter of Carinthia, when he had to resign at
the end of World War II .

2. A diachronic series or sequence of thematically or/and functionally connected

discourse fragments or utterances is taken as a starting point, and their historical
interrelationships are reconstructed within a specific period. This way, specific
discourse elements can be related to each within a particular period of the past,
e.g., a period of some months, years, decades, etc.

3. A third way consists in the critical analysis of how different social actors, e.g.,
politicians in contrast to historians, talk, write, sing, etc. about the past, and in
the comparison of the different semiotic representations with respect to claims
of truth, normative rightness and truthfulness.

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References
- Fairclough, N. (1992) Discourse and Social Change, Cambridge: Polity Press
- Fairclough, N. (1989) Language & Power. Longman Group UK Limited.
- Reisigl, M. )2017(The Discourse-Historical Approach from: The Routledge
Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies Routledge
- Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (2009). The discourse-historical approach. In R.
Wodak and M. Meyer (eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis, 2nd edn,
87–121. London, Thousand Oaks, CA, New Delhi: Sage.
- Van Dijk, T. A. (1993). Elite discourse and racism. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage
Publications
- Van Dijk, T. A. (1995). Discourse Semantics and Ideology. Discourse & Society,
6(2), 243-289. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926595006002006
- Van Dijk, T. A. (1998). Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. London,
England UK: Sage Publications
- Van Dijk, T. A. (2001). Critical Discourse Analysis. In D. Tannen, D. Schiffrin,
& H. Hamilton (Eds.), Handbook of Discourse Analysis (pp. 352-371). Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press.
- Van Dijk, T., A. (2003). Critical Discourse Analysis. In D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen,
& H. E. Hamilton (ed), The Handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 352-371).
Maiden, MA: Blackwell.
- Van Dijk, T. A. (2004). Ideology and Discourse: A Multidisciplinary
Introduction. Barcelona: Pompeu Fabra University.
- Van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Ideology and discourse analysis. Journal of Political
Ideologies, 11 (2), 115-140.
- Van Dijk, T. A. (2016). Sociocognitive Discourse Studies (2nd ed.) in Routledge
Handbook of Discourse Analysis. John Richardson & John Flowerdew, Eds.

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Appendix: Applying Fairclough’s Model
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on NBC’s “Meet the Press" that
“the unborn person doesn’t have constitutional rights.”
Textual Analysis (Description)
She has chosen the word “person” instead of “fetus” or “baby” or
“child”. • Using the word “person” has been criticized by both pro-life
& also pro-choice supporters
Vocabulary Choosing the term “constitutional rights”, has the connotations that: •
She regards the law & legislations, • She will be a guard of US
constitution, • Only the rights will be protected that have been passed
by the US constitution
The utterance has been structured in negative declarative, simple
sentence.
Doesn’t have has been used to express negation, it consists of does
Grammar (auxiliary)+ not (negation marker) + have (here is used as a main verb
which implies the meaning of possession).
Doesn’t have has been shifted to has no in some news reports, which
is more dramatic & emphatic.
Cohesion Cohesion is found in the utterance.
Text structures Simple sentence structure
Discursive Analysis (Interpretation):
- The force of the utterance
The utterance is a direct speech act. The locutionary act is expressed in negative declarative. The
illocutionary act functions as explicit performative, to represent the speaker’s beliefs about
Abortion. She has made a reference to “constitution” to inform & assert that the issue is solved,
constitutionally.
- The coherence of the text
The coherence relations in the text are constructed inferentially. The hearers can conclude the
speaker’s beliefs & attitude to stand with abortion, from her speech that “The unborn person
doesn’t have constitutional rights”.
- The intertextuality of the text
The speaker has quoted from United States Constitution. The issue of Abortion has various
dimensions, such as ethical, religious, legal, medical, social, economical, and has also been
politicized. These notions have all been intermingled in the text.

Social Analysis (Explanation)

In relation to ideology and power, domination struggle between the pro-choice & pro-life
supporters is observed in the text. The speaker dominates power due to her professional and
political status. The ideology behind the text is secularism, and some feminism movements. The
intention behind the text is to win the pro- choice supporters votes in the presidential election
process
The text influences social practice legalizing & normalizing abortion, which leads to several
consequences, like: More illegal relations, reduction of legal marriages. More violence against
women & unborn fetuses. More fund for abortion clinics, and more taxes demanded from them to
the government or to support pro-choice candidates in the elections.

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 Points raised in the lecture
1- Discourse is a product and process. Explain
It is a product in the sense that it doesn’t only involve the text as an abstract, but
we are concerned with how discourse is produced and understood. The process of
production involves different stages:
• Intended message
• Encode message into linguistic form
• Encode linguistic form into speech motor system
• Sound goes from speaker's mouth to hearer's ear auditory system
• Speech is decoded into linguistic form
• Linguistic form is decoded into meaning

Discourse is a “product” in the sense that it includes a text (spoken/written), and it

is a “process” in the sense that it refers to the whole process of social interaction.
This process includes the process of text production and the process of interpretation.

2- What is meant by Episodic Memory (EP)

It is the ability to encode and retrieve our daily personal experiences (e.g.
memories of what you ate for breakfast, your first day of college, and your cousin's
wedding). Episodic memory is one of two types of declarative memory. Declarative
memory is a type of long-term memory that refers to facts, data, or events that can
be recalled at will.
Episodic memory allows you to consciously recall personal experiences and
specific events that happened in the past. This includes recalling information
regarding when an event took place, where the event happened, what occurred
during the event, and the associated emotions. Episodic memory is fully developed
when we are around age four.

3- What is meant by production and perception according to the cognitive

model?
According to this model, there are two stages for production in cognition:
The first stage, lexical selection provides information about lexical items required
to construct the functional level representation. These items are retrieved according
to their specific semantic and syntactic properties, but phonological forms are not
yet made available at this stage. The second stage, retrieval of wordforms, provides
information required for building the positional level representation.

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 As for, perception is the means to see, hear, or become aware of something or
someone through our fundamental senses. Perception is not only the passive receipt
of these signals, but it's also shaped by the recipient's learning, memory, expectation,
and attention. Perception can be split into two processes:
a. processing the sensory input, which transforms these low-level information to
higher-level information (e.g., extracts shapes for object recognition)
b. processing which is connected with a person's concepts and expectations (or
knowledge), restorative and selective mechanisms (such as attention) that influence
perception.
Perception depends on complex functions of the nervous system, but subjectively
seems mostly effortless because this processing happens outside conscious
awareness.

4- Intertextuality VS. Interdiscursivity (Fairclough)

Intertextuality and interdiscursivity are an integral part of the key concepts of
Fairclough’s model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Fairclough (1992:102;
1993:137) contends that texts are inherently intertextual. By that he means that texts
are constituted of elements of other texts. Stated differently, in one text there is an
articulation of multiple texts and voices. Texts are also interdiscursive. In other
words, in a text there is an articulation of different discourses and genres (Phillips
and Jorgensen 2002:73).
5- Difference and similarities between Fairclough and Van Dijk Model
In addition to the explanation in the seminar
Fairclough (1992: 9–12) says "Critical" implies showing connections and causes
which are hidden; it also implies intervention, for example providing resources for
those who may be disadvantaged through change".
According to Van Dijk (2001, in Schiffrin et al, 2003: 352), CDA as a perspective
“primarily studies the way social power, abuse, dominance, and inequality are
enacted, reproduced, and resisted by texts and talk in social and political context.
With such dissident research, critical discourse analysts take explicit positions, and
thus want to understand, expose, and ultimately resist social inequality”.
Difference and similarities between Fairclough and Van Dijk Model
Differences in Fairclough Van Dijk
Focus Ideological and power patterns Various ideas in various
language structures

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 Issues of discussion Social issues Political issues
The inquiry How and why what
Three-part model: Ideological analysis:
Model Social events, social practices Discourse, socio-cognition
and social structures. Socio analysis

Similarities: Both of them focus on the social dimension of discourse analysis.

Fairclough Van Dijk
Fairclough (1995) argues that the purpose Van Dijk (2003) asserts that the CDA
of CDA is to "systematically exploring the is a proposition that focuses on how
relationship of the victim who does not abuse of power, dominance and
clearly and decisively (between discursive inequality is practiced in the
practices, events, and texts, and broader discursiveness of social and political
social, cultural, relationships and contexts.
relationships, process ".

6- What is the implication of “CDA is a form of social practice”?

Social practice refers to the power relations, ideologies and hegemonic struggles that
discourses reproduce, challenge or restructure. Thus, The implication of CDA as a
form of social practice implies that we are dealing with all these factors when
analyzing a text (spoken/written).

7- What is the difference between CDA as an approach and as a theory?

CDA is an investigative approach that is essentially concerned with unearthing
the opaque meaning that underlies the discourse of social actors in a manner that
exposes the display of power and abuse of power, dominance, and inequality among
them. In other words, it is an exercise that aims to make explicit, power relationships
which are frequently hidden in text and talk.
CDA is a theory because it belongs to critical theory. And it involves hypotheses
and assumptions.
8- What is the difference between CDA as an approach and another
previous approaches of discourse analysis?
It is global explanatory. Not descriptive or local one.

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 9- Is DA a theory?
10- Society shapes language and language shapes society (interrelationship.
How?)
Sapir- Whorf hypothesis
11- Difference between CDA and critical linguistics
CL deals with how to link between language and ideology
CDA deals with why to link
12- What are the features of CDA? Included within the seminar
13- What are the principles of CDA? Included within the seminar
14- Macro structural analysis Vs. Micro structural analysis?
According to Teun Van Dijk. There are three elements of critical discourse analysis
as follows: macrostructure, superstructure and microstructure.
- Macrostructure: Macrostructure focused on the global meaning that more
emphasize on the meaning of discourse theme or topic. It is described by Dijk
(2003) as follows: “The meaning of discourse is not limited to the meaning of its
words and sentences. Discourse also has more 'global' meanings, such as 'topics'
or 'themes'. Such topics represent the gist or most important information of a
discourse, and tell us what a discourse 'is about', globally speaking".

- Superstructure: The superstructure specifically tends to be the discourse

framework or being organized by conventional schemata. It explains more on how
parts of the text arranged into the whole news, for example, the arrangement of the
introduction, substance, and conclusion. Which part is placed at the beginning, or
which part are placed later, it will be arranged as discourse-framer importance.

- Microstructure: Microstructure points on local meaning of the discourse, by

observing the semantic, syntactic, stylistic and rhetoric aspects. The use of words,
proposition, and certain rhetoric in media is understood by Van Dijk as the part of
the writer’s strategy. The use of certain words, sentences, and stylistic is not only
viewed as the way of communication but also as a method of communication politic
to influence common premise, create the backing, strengthen legitimate, and
evacuate the adversary or the opponent.

Microstructure is an effective way to observe the next rhetorical and persuasive

process when someone conveys the order. Certain words perhaps are chosen to
clarify the choice and posture, form political consciousness, etc. The, microstructure
is divided into four aspects, that are, semantic aspects, syntactical aspects, stylistic
aspects, and rhetoric aspects.
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 In sum, Social Cognition Approach was developed by Teun Van Dijk that focuses
on the issue of ethnicity, racism, and refugees. This approach is referred to as social
cognition, because of an important element of cognition factor in the production of
discourse. Therefore, according to this approach, the analysis of discourse can be
used to find out the position of the social groups, both as the ruler/dominant and
marginal groups.

15- Difference between DA and CDA?

While Discourse Analysis concerns itself with the study of relationships between
language and the contexts in which language is used, CDA is instead concerned with
issues of language, power and ideology within the discourse of texts (McCarthy,
2006: 5; Coffin, 2001: 99)
DA: Lacks concern with explanation (how discourse and discursive practices are
socially shaped/ their social effect), Descriptive analysis, local explanatory.
CDA: pays attention to ideational meanings, assumptions about social relations
underlying interactional practices, critical analysis, global explanatory.

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