Discurso y

comunicación
en inglés – Unit 1
Grado en estudios ingleses
2020
• Critical discourse analysis tends to be seen, certainly in
many linguistics departments, as a marginal (and, for many,
suspect) area of language study. Yet it ought, in my view, to
be at the centre of a reconstructed discipline of linguistics,
the properly social theory of language.

Norman Fairclough
 Units
• TEMA 0. What is discourse analysis? 30 January
• TEMA 1. Approaches to discourse analysis 4 & 6 Feb
• TEMA 2. Corpora and discourse analysis 11 & 13, 18 & 20, 25 & 27 Feb
• TEMA 3. Discourse, media and minorities 3 & 5, 10 & 12, 24 & 26 March
• TEMA 4. Discourse and politics 31 March & 2 April, 21 April
• Essay predentation 23, 28, 30 April, 5 & 7 May
FOUCAULT Corpu
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Fairclough
Approaches to discourse an
•Discourse according to Foucault: Discourse is a
system of statements which constructs an
object.
•Discourse is language in action.
• A set of meaning, representations, metaphors, images, stories…that
together produce a particular version of events…..
• Surrounding any object, event, person, there may be a variety of
different discourses, each with a different story, a different way of
representing it to the world.
•There is nothing outside discourse.
The role of CDA
• To disentangle the giant milling mass of discourse
• To uncover the techniques through which discursive limits are
extended or narrowed down
• To question and criticize discourses
• The analyst has to take a stand: cannot be outside discourse
• Critique is not ideological: ideology makes claims to absolute truth;
CDA does not
• CDA situated within values, norms, laws, rights, etc BUT these are
discursively constructed too.
Reality
• Discourses are material reality. Discourse not only shape but even
enable social reality.
• Discourse is not less material than ’real’ reality.
• A materialist theory.
• Discourses are not mere ideology; they produce subjects and reality.
Power
• Discourses guide the individual and the collective creation of reality
• Discourse > consciousness > determining action >> creations
materialized
• The subject (the individual) is the product of discourses
• Empowered = a term found in Foucauldian discourse theory
• Text >> little effect
• Discourse >> emerging knowledge
Dispositives
• Interplay between discursive practices, non-discursive practices
(actions) and materializations

• Examples: the control of mental illness or women in the past.

• Objects are themes, theories, statements, discursive objects.
• Dispositive: formation which has as its major function at a given
historical moment that of responding to an urgent need (to control,
to exercise power).
CDA toolbox
• Choose a subject matter
• The phenomenon of interest and the discourse strands: relationship
not straightforward
• i.e racism (subject matter) // discourse strands: immigration,
refugees, asylum seekers
CDA toolbox
• Choose a discourse plane (i.e. the media) papers? sitcoms?
• Corpus for analysis neds to be delineated
• Analysis
Fairclough
Approaches to discourse analysis
A social theory of discourse
• Fairclough, Norman. 2013. Critical Discourse Analysis the Critical
Study of Language. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.

• An intro:
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w_5riFCMGA
Social studies and linguistics: bridging the gap
• Like many linguists, I shall use discourse to refer primarily to spoken
or written language use, though I would also wish to extend it to
include semiotic practice in other semiotic modalities such as
photography and non-verbal (e.g., gestural) communication. But in
referring to language use as discourse, I am signalling a wish to
investigate it in a social-theoretically informed way, as a form of
social practice.
Viewing language use as social practice
• It is a mode of action (Austin 1962, Levinson 1983) and, secondly, that
it is always a socially and historically situated mode of action, in a
dialectical relationship with other facets of ‘the social’ (its ‘social
context’) – it is socially shaped, but it is also socially shaping, or
constitutive.

TENSION
Language as social
• Language use is always simultaneously constitutive of (i) social
identities, (ii) social relations and (iii) systems of knowledge and belief
– though with different degrees of salience in different cases.
• We therefore need a theory of language, such as Halliday’s (1978,
1994b), which stresses its multifunctionality, which sees any text as
simultaneously enacting what Halliday calls the ‘ideational’,
‘interpersonal’ and ‘textual’ functions of language.
Combining social and linguistic domains
• The categorisation of types of discursive practice – the elements of
orders of discourse – is difficult and controversial: for present
purposes I shall simply distinguish between discourses (discourse as
a count noun), ways of signifying areas of experience from a
particular perspective (e.g., patriarchal versus feminist discourses of
sexuality), and genres, uses of language associated with particular
socially ratified activity types such as job interview or scientific
papers (see, further, Kress 1988, on the distinction between
discourses and genres).
What is CDA?
• Discourse analysis which aims to systematically explore often opaque
relationships of causality and determination between (a) discursive
practices, events and texts, and (b) wider social and cultural structures,
relations and processes;
• to investigate how such practices, events and texts arise out of and are
ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles over power;
• and to explore how the opacity of these relationships between discourse
and society is itself a factor securing power and hegemony
• In referring to opacity, I am suggesting that such linkages between
discourse, ideology and power may well be unclear to those involved, and
more generally that our social practice is bound up with causes and effects
which may not be at all apparent (Bourdieu 1977)
Analytical framework
• I use a three-dimensional framework of analysis for exploring such
linkages, in particular discursive events. Each discursive event has
three dimensions or facets:
• it is a spoken or written language text,
• it is an instance of discourse practice involving the production and
interpretation of text,
• and it is a piece of social practice.
Social practice dimension
• My focus is political, upon the discursive event within relations of
power and domination. A feature of my framework of analysis is that
it tries to combine a theory of power based upon theconcept of
hegemony with a theory of discourse practice based upon the
concept of intertextuality.
• The connection between text and social practice is seen as being
mediated by discourse practice: on the one hand, processes of text
production and interpretation are shaped by (and help shape) the
nature of the social practice, and on the other hand the production
process shapes (and leaves ‘traces’ in) the text, and the interpretative
process operates upon ‘cues’ in the text.
Analysing the text
• The analysis of text is form-and-meaning analysis
• Any text can be regarded as interweaving ‘ideational’, ‘interpersonal’
and ‘textual’ meanings. Their domains are respectively the
representation and signification of the world and experience, the
constitution (establishment, reproduction, negotiation) of identities
of participants and social and personal relationships between them,
and the distribution of given versus new and foregrounded versus
backgrounded information (in the widest sense).
Analysing the text
• I find it helpful to distinguish two sub-functions of the interpersonal
function: the ‘identity’ function – text in the constitution of personal
and social identities – and the ‘relational’ function – text in the
constitution of relationships. The analysis of these interwoven
meanings in texts necessarily comes down to the analysis of the
forms of texts, including their generic forms (the overall structure of,
for instance, a narrative), their dialogic organisation (in terms, for
instance, of turn-taking), cohesive relations between sentences and
relations between clauses in complex sentences, the grammar of the
clause (including questions of transitivity, mood and modality), and
vocabulary.
colonisation of discourse by promotion may also have
major pathological
effects upon subjects,
and major ethical implications.
We are, of course, all constantly subjected to

promotional discourse
• The consequences of the generalisation of promotion for contemporary
orders of discourse are quite radical. First, there is an extensive
restructuring of boundaries between orders of discourse and between
discursive practices; for example, the genre of consumer advertising has
been colonising professional and public service orders of discourse on a
massive scale, generating many new hybrid partly promotional genres
(such as the genre of contemporary university prospectuses). Second, there
is a widespread instrumentalisation of discursive practices, involving the
subordination of meaning to, and the manipulation of meaning for,
instrumental effect. (discussed ‘synthetic personalisation, the simulation in
institutional settings of the person-to-person communication of ordinary
conversation )
Changes in modes of signification’
• the relationship between signifier, signified and referent. One aspect
of this is a shift in the relative salience of different semiotic
modalities: advertising, for example, had undergone a well-
documented shift towards greater dependence upon visual images at
the relative expense of verbal semiosis. But there is also, I suggest, a
significant shift from what one might call signification-with-reference
to signification-without-reference.
FOUCAULT Corpu
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Approaches to discourse analysis
 Corpus
linguistics

Approaches to discourse analysis

CL & CDA: Mautner (2010)
• CDA can work with much larger data volumes
• Reduce research bias
• CL software: QUAN & QUAL
• Analysing discourse: systematic attempt to identify patterns in text,
link them to patterns in the context and viceversa.