CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: BASICS AND METHODOLOGY

This paper endeavors to introduce the major thinkers in the field of Critical Discourse Analysis, with their models of analysis, fully described and explained. Among those thinkers are Fairclough, Van Dijk, Wodak, and others. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is practically oriented form of discourse analysis addressing social problem. ʹʹ Critical ʹʹ is used in the special sense of aiming to show up connections which may be hidden from people such as the connections between language, power, and ideology. It is a form of applied linguistics; linguistics applied to the remedying of imbalances of power and various forms of social injustice. In this view, since ideologies permeate society by disguising themselves as common sense, the way to resist them is to unmask them. CDA may be defined as being fundamentally concerned with analyzing opaque as well as transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control as manifested in language. In other words, CDA aims to investigate critically social inequality as it is expressed, signaled, constituted, legitimized by language use or in discourse.