4.1 Introduction: CDA, CDS and CDA/CDS
Before we describe the best known approaches to CDA/CDS, we need to address again the issue of the relation between CDA and CDS. As said in the Preface and also in Chap. 1, we view both CDA and CDS as part of the same overall research domain, as do many practitioners. It is clear that CDA is the ‘older’ name and CDS the ‘newer’ one. This is evidenced in this book by the (almost) exclusive use of CDA in Chaps. 2 and 3, which are focused on the precursors to and the emergence of CDA. But now that we are moving on to its further development, we will be discussing both CDA and CDS, since, in recent years, some of the critical discourse scholars have transitioned from using just CDA and have moved more toward (only) CDS (van Dijk, 2011). A few examples of this include the journal Critical Discourse Studies , but also recent books, articles, and chapters, and handbooks1 (such as van Dijk, 2016; Wodak & Meyer, 2016a; Flowerdew & Richardson, 2018a ). This has led to various subtle and substantive differences in the use of the two names. Some have kept with the original term CDA since CDA is widely known and used and they are comfortable with it (or they use both CDA and CDS, more or less interchangeably), or they see CDS as simply an organic extension of CDA in its more mature stage and thus CDA is still appropriate. For others, CDS is more commonly used to refer to the field as a whole while CDA denotes the methodology or ‘analysis’ in the narrow sense. And, for still others, CDS means that scholarship of this sort is more wide-ranging and expansive than in CDA (see Sect. 4.2.1 below). For example, they see CDA as interdisciplinary but centered on linguistics as its ‘pilot’ discipline with a more restrictive grammatical, lexical or textual orientation; and, in contrast, they see CDS as a broader multi/trans/cross-disciplinary field of study at the crossroads of language and society and other domains of human experience and in which various facets of expansive areas of context are studied and integrated (see Richardson, Krzyżanowski, Machin, & Wodak, 2014b ). And they also make a parallel between critical discourse ‘studies’ and ‘discourse studies’ (DS ) on the one hand and gender or culture or East Asian ‘studies’ (etc.) on the other hand, which for them points to the widening and the maturing of CDA into CDS and gives the field more credibility and a different positioning.
And yet, as Zhang, Paul, Yadan, and Wen (2011: 95) point out, “there is a large amount of work using the label ‘CDA’ emerging in other parts of the world, in other languages and under social and political conditions that are very different from those of liberal-democratic Europe”. Given the beliefs of critical scholarship, we do not want to ‘disenfranchise’ those who use CDA in various parts of the world and we do not want to ‘privilege’ either CDA or CDS; therefore we are using our own acronym CDA/CDS to show that we see them as tightly tied with each other both chronologically and intellectually and we also view everyone under this name, including ourselves, as working together “harmoniously” (Zhang et al., 2011: 105).
The development of a field of critical discourse studies, characterized as it is by a remarkable degree of interdisciplinarity, gives rise to a wide range of issues which we hope this journal will be able to address.
[…] I would like to propose to all of you if you would like to do, as I will do, henceforth, not use ‘critical discourse analysis’ but ‘critical discourse studies’ because ‘analysis’ suggests that it is mostly analysis and not much theory … so in the same way that we have ‘feminist studies’ or ‘gender studies’ and so on, I would like to propose that we henceforth use ‘critical discourse studies’ … (van Dijk, 2011).
And we should note the title of (van Dijk, 2013): ‘CDA is NOT a method of critical discourse analysis’ (see also Wodak, 2013b; Wodak & Meyer, 2016b: 2). Here, it is clear that van Dijk is (one of) the major proponent(s) of a move from CDA to CDS as the label of this research field . Much before the programmatic use of the term, van Dijk called it CDS in publications such as Elite Discourse and Racism (1993b, on the back cover), his paper ‘Discourse Semantics and Ideology’ (1995b), and then, more systematically, his book Discourse and Power (2008b), in which he explicitly proposed using CDS instead of CDA (van Dijk, personal communication, May 24, 2019), and he was also talking about it in public lectures (such as the one in 2011 we mention above). However, outside of the journal Critical Discourse Studies , the name still hadn’t caught on in titles of major academic publications until a few years later, and then not for everyone.
While CDS is rapidly becoming the favorite acronym, Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) was previously referred to as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and in fact, the initial pre-publication title for this volume used this term. While we prevaricated for some time over whether to update the title, our minds were made up with the change of the third edition of Wodak and Meyer’s (2016a) influential Methods of Critical Discourse Studies from the title of the first two editions, which was Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis . As van Dijk (2009b: 62) has observed, the rationale for this change of designation resides in the fact that CDA was increasingly not restricted to applied analysis, but also included philosophical, theoretical, methodological, and practical developments (of which not all use the term CDS). This indeed, is reflected in many of the chapters of this volume (although the case studies included as a part of nearly all of the chapters focus on analysis); hence our decision to update the title.
Flowerdew and Richardson are both on the editorial board of the journal Critical Discourse Studies (Richardson is current editor), so it is not surprising that they adopt this term in their book. A final example of this is Ledin and Machin (2018), whose recent book is called Doing Visual Analysis: From Theory to Practice. Although the authors use MCDA (multimodal critical discourse analysis) and CDA when they talk about the field as a whole (2018: 27–28), they note that “CDA as a field of research today has become institutionalized as critical discourse studies (CDS)”.
Given the above information, the historical and intellectual linkage of CDA and CDS with each other, the substantial overlap between them and general situation of CDA and CDS, we have decided to include both (using our own acronym CDA/CDS) in this book. We will now move on to our discussion of the best-known approaches to CDA/CDS research.
4.2 Panoply of Work in CDA/CDS: Criteria for the Main Approaches
4.2.1 Introduction
In this chapter, we will use the term ‘approaches’ (and sometimes ‘frameworks’ or ‘models’ or ‘research strategies’) as a way of talking about the panoply of work in CDA/CDS. Wodak (2001a, b; in Wodak & Meyer, 2001; see also Fairclough & Wodak, 1997; Reisigl & Wodak, 2001), who was the main historian and biographer of the early days of CDA (see Sect. 3.8.8), seems to have been the first to point out and document that there were various different approaches which could be listed under the heading of CDA (not just different critical approaches to DA , for which see van Dijk, 2006/2011; Fairclough & Wodak, 1997) and also that they could be seen as a strength of CDA. As Wodak points out (2001a, b; see also Sect. 3.1) the variety of approaches is in a certain sense the result of the natural evolution of CDA from the 1991 symposium in Amsterdam with five different scholars and their ‘shared perspective ’, which includes “the concept of power, the concept of history, and the concept of ideology ” (Wodak, 2001a: 3) in addition to a ‘critical’ perspective . And this is so in spite of the many differences between them—including the fact that, as will become clear, both the notion of ‘discourse’ and also ‘critique/critical’, ‘context ’, ‘power’, ‘history’, ‘ideology ’, and others, were understood in different ways by the ‘original CDA group’ as well as the successor groups and researchers (see Sect. 3.2). In other words, they were at the beginning—and they remain—as also said above (Sect. 3.1), “an international heterogeneous, closely knit group of scholars … bound together more by a research agenda and programme than by some common theory or methodology “ (Wodak, 2001a: 4). That is, there was a wide variety of different approaches and linguistic tools used to analyze discourse (as indicated by the subtitle of Wodak & Meyer, 2001, 2009a, 2016a). And Meyer (2001) also pointed out other issues that had not been adequately discussed (e.g., the operationalization of the various theories, the relation between the linguistic and social dimensions, the definition of ‘context ’, the achievement of ‘true’ inter- or cross- or transdisciplinarity, and so forth (see also Wodak, 2001a)).
4.2.2 Issues with the Main Approaches to CDA/CDS
The purpose of this chapter is not to document, describe or prescribe all ways of doing CDA/CDS work or to place each scholar’s work into neat little boxes (which, in any case, can’t be done). Rather, the purpose is to provide a convenient way of thinking about the domain of CDA/CDS, its approaches and its influences. In doing so, we recognize that many scholars (such as Wodak) are happy to take inspiration from a variety of frameworks, since she in particular feels that the basis of her work lies principally in her own approach (DHA) to CDA/CDS, with overlays/additions that show the influence of other models (such as van Dijk’s SCA) and of other fields, such as sociolinguistics (see Sects. 3.8.3 and 6.4), pragmatics (see Sect. 6.9) and so forth. Furthermore, it is actually more common to find CDA/CDS scholarship that combines two or more approaches than work which strictly adheres to one. We would also like to point out that across the numerous scholarly works that describe and explain CDA/CDS, there are differences in names and groupings (and even understandings) of the various approaches. Our chapter synthesizes them into the most commonly discussed, but also according to what we hope will make sense to our readers in terms of grasping the scope of work in this domain. We also want to underscore that we do not say that any approach is better or more useful, given that we feel this greatly depends on a variety of factors and the different contexts in which scholars are working (and because this is not the aim of our book). However, we do note in what ways each approach, in our opinion, makes a significant addition to the field .
The question of what approaches there are to CDA/CDS has become more and more complex as the field has developed, and perhaps even more problematic in the sense that many of them have changed greatly over time and increasingly they have tended to overlap with each other and even with ones outside of CDA/CDS (we expand on this below) or to bring into CDA/CDS domains that weren’t originally thought of as part of its scope (e.g., multimodality, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics). Since the 2000s CDA/CDS approaches have been defined and mapped out in various ways, such as in terms of their relation to various theories in other domains (e.g. post-structuralism and cognitive psychology) or whether they are concerned with linguistic content or structure (e.g. syntagmatic, paradigmatic, cohesive, conceptual) or if they focus on the cognitive or functional (social) dimensions of discourse (see Hart & Cap, 2014a: 6–8). And, as Wodak and Meyer (2016b: 19) point out, “different authors in the field use theoretical entry-points in a rather eclectic way depending on their specific interests and research questions”. In addition, scholars have brought attention to a past lack of recognition of the interconnectedness of each of the approaches to the others (Hart & Cap, 2014b; Wodak & Meyer, 2016b).
Even when the approaches are designated as the same, they are often referred to in somewhat different ways by different authors (e.g., ‘corpus based approaches’ vs. ‘corpus linguistic approaches’). Fairclough, Mulderrig, and Wodak (2011: 361–366) divide them into the following categories: critical linguistics (CritLing) and social semiotics (SocSem), “Fairclough’s approach”, SCA, DHA, argumentation and rhetoric, and corpus linguistic approaches (CorpLingA). Angermuller, Maingueneau and Wodak (2014: 361) categorize them as DRA, SCA, SocSem and visual grammar, DPA, and DHA, noting that they have been (and continue to be) “elaborated, challenged, changed, and reformulated”, and “new approaches have been developed”. Hart and Cap (2014b) give the topic of approaches much attention, discussing in detail each one, while adding some that are not listed in previous sources, such as critical cognitive pragmatics, legitimization-proximization model, cognitive linguistic approach (CogLingA), critical metaphor analysis and CorpLingA. Each of them is defined in terms of the most salient elements they analyze (e.g. grammatical metaphor, argumentation, conceptual metaphor, frequency and reference), epistemological orientation (e.g. post-structuralism, systemic functional grammar) and focus on structure versus content or functional versus cognitive dimensions of discourse. Roderick (2016) mentions four major approaches, DRA, DHA, SCA and SocSem and MCDA and also notes that recently there has been an additional alignment of corpus linguistics and cognitive linguistics with critical approaches.
Wodak and Meyer (2016b: 17–21) include chapters on the following five major approaches which are updated versions of the same approaches as in the 2009 version of their book: DHA (Reisigl and Wodak), SCA (van Dijk), DRA (Fairclough), DPA (Jäger and Maier), and discourse as the recontextualization of social practice (van Leeuwen). They also include three other chapters on: CorpLingA ( Mautner 2009, 2016), analysis of visual and multimodal texts (Jancsary, Höllerer, & Meyer, 2016), and CDS and social media (KhosraviNik & Unger, 2016)—which are more narrow in their conceptualization than the other five. Thus, several different types of ‘approaches’ are presented in Wodak’s co-edited ‘Methods of CDA/CDS’ books, including (as documented in Sect. 4.2) four that have been part of the CDA/CDS group across 2001–2016 (although each of them has evolved over that time period) and four others that were created during this time period and are still very active. In addition, we should note that Kress distanced himself from CDA very early on and hence is not included in the ‘Methods of CDA/CDS’ books at all, and Ron Scollon was included in Wodak and Meyer (2001), but not in later versions, since he withdrew from CDA and then passed away.
Most recently, Flowerdew and Richardson (2018b: 8), in their comprehensive edited volume, The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies , dedicate one section of the book to “current predominant approaches to CDS” and note that it covers “more established theoretical-analytic positions” (such as the DRA, SCA, DHA and MCDA). However, they also address “newer approaches” (2018a: 8), which stress the role of cognition (e.g., CogLingA) ( Hart & Cap, 2014a, 2014b ), culture (Gavriely-Nuri, 2018 ; see Sect. 6.6) and corpora (e.g., CorpLingA) (Mautner, 2009, 2016; Subtirelu & Baker, 2018 ), as well as positive discourse analysis (PDA, Bartlett, 2018; see Sect. 5.8). Although no other sources discussed above included PDA as an approach, Flowerdew and Richardson (2018b: 8) justify its placement in their book, saying that they chose to include it because of its focus on discourses and texts that “offer hope and solutions rather than emphasizing problems and negative forces, as is often the case in mainstream CDS”.2
4.2.3 Synthesis of our Analysis of the Major Approaches
Books/articles that address CDA/CDS approaches (in chronological order)
Name of approach (in alphabetical order) | Wodak and Meyer (2009a) | Fairclough, Mulderrig, and Wodak (2011) | Hart and Cap (2014a) | Angermuller, Maingueneau, and Wodak (2014) | Roderick (2016) | Wodak and Meyer (2016a) | Flowerdew and Richardson (2018a) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
CDA/CDS and Social Mediaa | X | ||||||
Cognitive Approaches | X (includes four different cognitive approaches—see below, Sect. 4.9.3) | X | X (stresses the role of cognition) | ||||
Corpus Linguistic Approaches | X | X (corpus based) | X | X | X | X(stresses the role of corpora) | |
Critical Linguistics | X | X | |||||
Cultural Approaches | X | ||||||
Dialectical-Relational | X | X (called ‘Fairclough’s approach’) | X | X | X | X | X |
Discourse Historical | X | X | X | X | X | X | X |
Foucauldian/Dispositive analysis | X | X (includes argumentation and rhetoric) | X | X | X | X | |
Positive Discourse Analysis | X | ||||||
Recontextualization of social practice | X (social actors) | X (social actors) | X | ||||
Social semiotics/multimodal approach | X (grouped together with critical linguistics) | X (Social semiotics and visual grammar) | X | X (analysis of visual and multimodal texts) | X (multi-modal CDA) | ||
Sociocognitive | X | X | X | X | X | X | X |
Given this variety in terminology and difference of opinion as to whether or not certain perspectives are included in the list of major (or most common) approaches to CDA/CDS, we have chosen to outline in this chapter the seven best known approaches according to the following criteria: they are frequently cited in the literature, have the most publications, have appeared in major journals in the field (especially Discourse and Society, Critical Discourse Studies , Discourse Studies , and Social Semiotics ) and are currently commonly used by scholars in the field . In addition, we will treat other emerging approaches or combinations of CDA/CDS with other disciplines in Chap. 6. We have also chosen to use names for the approaches that are most commonly found in the literature, or reflect current trends in the field , as in the case of the social semiotics/multimodal approach (SocSem/MCDA). Therefore, this chapter covers the following approaches: DRA, SCA, DHA, SocSem/MCDA, DPA, CorpLingA, and CogLingA, starting with the approaches of the original founders in the order in which we discussed them in Chap. 3. However, we would also like to affirm once again (see Hart & Cap, 2014a; Wodak & Meyer, 2016b) the interconnectedness of all of the approaches and the fact that much CDA/CDS work combines approaches, topics and fields of study which come from different schools of thought and a wide range of disciplines. In addition, it is rare to find a researcher who uses only one approach without the influence of, or the borrowing of terminology or concepts from, another. Wodak is an excellent example of a scholar who borrows from many disciplines and scholarly works and is also consistently forthright about how the work of others has influenced her own. Her highly regarded book (2015), The Politics of Fear (discussed in Sects. 3.8.7, 4.5, and 7.2), relies on DHA and also includes, e.g., multimodal analysis from a SocSem frame. Therefore, we agree that one of the advantages of CDA/CDS is “its lack of set ways of conducting analysis” ( Baker, 2012) and one of its strengths is the fact that different approaches can be combined with different disciplines (to be discussed in Chap. 6) and can be used to analyze different types of texts (see also Wodak & Meyer, 2009a, 2016a).
4.2.4 What the Approaches Have in Common
What is important about the different approaches and what ties them together is that they have a number of characteristics in common (see Sect. 3.2). For example, they are problem/issue oriented, interdisciplinary and eclectic, and share an interest in “demystifying ideologies and power through the investigation of semiotic data (e.g., written, spoken, or visual)” (Wodak and Meyer, 2016b: 4). In addition, they each aim to “investigate critically social inequality ” as it is expressed, constituted and legitimized in discourse (2016b: 12). Moreover, they work eclectically as a group in terms of theoretical background, touching upon an entire range of theories from Grand Theories to micro(-linguistic) ones (2016b: 17); they also state that “there is no accepted canon of data sampling”, but that “operationalization and analysis are problem-oriented and imply linguistic expertise” (2016b: 22). They also share core beliefs related to the role of discourse and society (see Paltridge, 2012: 188–190; Wodak & Meyer, 2016b; see our individual discussions of each approach below for more specific details).
Given this, most types of CDA/CDS seek to ask questions about the way specific discourse properties are deployed in the reproduction of social dominance, and (no matter the approach) attempt to define whose interests are being represented, e.g., which social actors, groups, or institutions have the power to convince, harm, dominate, or control others and to what ends. But it also has a role in helping people break free from the deleterious effects that are uncovered in CDA/CDS analyses (see Chap. 7 for more details). Social power is seen as a source of control, a power base of privileged access to scarce social resources, such as force, money, status, fame, knowledge, information, language, and specific forms of discourse, including especially public discourse and access to ways to instill beliefs about the world through discourse and communication. We would also add that all of the approaches have now taken a ‘multimodal turn’ (Jewitt, 2009; Machin, 2013) in the sense that they affirm and account for the fact that meaning-making in communication does not happen only through language and thus all of the approaches we describe here are in essence multimodal, but some more than others (and not all use the term). What’s new is not that communication is multimodal, since (as said in Sects. 2.6, 2.7, and 3.9) it has always been that way, but that it has been becoming increasingly more multimodal in our global and technologically interconnected world, which has led to both recognition of this fact in the CDA/CDS community and attempts to build multimodality into theories and into understanding of communication.
Despite these commonalities, the several frameworks of CDA/CDS scholarship vary considerably according to scientific methodology , theoretical influence and “ability to ‘translate’ their theoretical claims into instruments and methods of analysis” (Wodak & Meyer, 2016b: 14). Each approach, combination of approaches and school of thought has “different theoretical models, research methods and agenda” (Fairclough et al., 2011: 357) (see Sect. 3.2).
Below, we outline the origins of each major approach, associated scholars and research focus/foci, as well as central concepts/distinguishing features, including (when applicable) their definition of ‘discourse and other concepts given above.
4.3 Dialectical-Relational Approach (DRA)
4.3.1 The Major Properties of DRA
focuses upon social conflict in the Marxian tradition and tries to detect its linguistic manifestations in discourse, in specific elements of dominance, difference and resistance … He understands CDA as the analysis of the dialectical relationships between semiosis (including language) and other elements of social practice … His approach to CDA oscillates between a focus on structure and a focus on action.
One measure of Fairclough’s own maturation in CDA is a comparison of the first edition of his book (see also Sect. 3.5.5), Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language (1995) with the 2nd edition (2010a) . The former is a collection of ten papers written between 1983 and 1992, grouped into four sections: ‘Language, ideology and power’; ‘Discourse and sociocultural change’; ‘Textual analysis in social research’; and ‘Critical Language Awareness’ (see Sect. 3.5.5). In the second edition, there are 23 papers (six from the first edition) from 1983 to 2008, for which he kept the first two sections as before, renamed the fourth section as ‘Language and education’, and added four others: ‘Dialectics of discourse: Theoretical developments’; ‘Methodology in CDA research’; ‘Political discourse’; and ‘Globalisation and ‘transition”. The four new sections are a reflection of the ways in which his work developed between 1995 and 2010. In the general introduction (2010b) to the second edition he states that the broad objective of his work in CDA had remained the same: “to develop ways of analysing language which address its involvement in the workings of contemporary capitalist societies” and to better understand how capitalism prevents, limits or facilitates “human well-being and flourishing” (Fairclough, 2010a: 1–2).
Fairclough’s DRA approach to CDA has three basic properties. It is “relational” in the sense that it focuses on social relations and not individuals, and these relations are “dialectical” in the sense of “being different but not ‘discrete’, i.e., not fully separate” (Fairclough, 2016: 87), not either fully exclusive or separate from each other (Fairclough, 2010a: 4). In addition, it is “transdisciplinary” because when analyzing dialectical relations between discourse and other objects, elements or moments, as well as internal elements, analysis must cut “across conventional boundaries between disciplines” (Fairclough, 2010a: 4). Hence, there is dialogue between disciplines, theories and frameworks. The transdisciplinary nature of the approach also “allows for various ‘points of entry’ for the discourse analyst, the sociologist, the political economist and so forth, which focus upon different elements or aspects of the object of research” (Fairclough, 2010a: 5). His approach is also “realist” (see Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999, 2010; Fairclough, 1999, 2003, 2006, 2009, 2010b, 2012), because it posits that there is a real world (which includes the social world), which exists regardless of how well we know or understand it. In his ‘critical realist approach’, he recognizes that the natural and social worlds differ and the social world depends upon human action for its existence and is socially constructed.
With this as the basis, Fairclough (2016: 87) uses the term ‘discourse’ in various interlocking senses including: “(a) meaning-making as an element of the social process, (b) the language associated with a particular social field or practice (e.g. ‘political discourse’), (c) a way of construing aspects of the world associated with a particular social perspective (e.g. a ‘neo-liberal discourse of globalization’)”. In order to avoid confusion among these different meanings of discourse he uses the term ‘semiosis’ in Halliday’s sense (1985) of ‘meaning-making’ (e.g., how we understand the world) which “frames social interaction and contributes to the construction of social relations” (Fairclough et al., 2004: 219). But he also insists that elements such as social relations, power, institutions, etc. are only partly, not purely, semiotic , and thus he opens up the question about the “relations as articulations between semiotic and non-semiotic elements … and between semiotic elements” (Fairclough, 2010b: 164). Specific ‘discourses’ (vs. ‘discourse’) “are semiotic ways of construing aspects of the world (physical, social or mental) which can be generally identified with different positions or perspectives of different groups of social actors” (Fairclough, 2016: 88). And ‘orders of discourse’ (Fairclough, 1992—configurations of different genres, discourses and styles; see also Foucault, 19723)—are “the semiotic dimension of (networks of) social practices which constitute social fields, institutions, organizations, etc.” (Fairclough, 2016: 89). He reserves the term ‘text ’ for the semiotic dimension of events4; it encompasses written, conversational, interviews, and multimodal texts.
4.3.2 The Values of DRA
We see CDA as bringing a variety of theories into dialogue, especially social theories on the one hand and linguistic theories on the other, so that its theory is a shifting synthesis of other theories, though what it itself theorises in particular is the mediation between the social and the linguistic—the ‘order of discourse’, the social structuring of semiotic hybridity (interdiscursivity).
In fact, DRA refuses to be limited to specific fields or methodologies and, therefore, Fairclough et al. (2011: 362) posit that this approach “has explored the discursive aspect of contemporary processes of social transformation … [through a] commitment to transdisciplinarity—whereby the logic and categories of different disciplines are brought together into dialogue with one another”.
Fairclough (2016: 91–95, 104) organizes the implementation of DRA into four stages: (1) focus on a social wrong (e.g., an order which is detrimental to human well-being) with special attention to dialectical relations between semiotic and other ‘moments’; (2) identify obstacles to addressing the social wrong (e.g., what is it about the way society is structured that prevents it from being addressed?); (3) consider whether the social order ‘needs’ the social wrong for the greater good to occur (e.g., the suppression of political differences in favor of a consensus is seen as necessary for a state to operate); and (4) identify possible ways past the obstacles (e.g., texts that offer alternative imaginaries, oppositional strategies). He describes the core analytical categories of this approach as being semiosis (and other social elements), discourse/style/genre , order of discourse (and social practices), text (and social event), interdiscursivity (and interdiscursive analysis), recontextualization and operationalization (enactment, inculcation, materialization) (2016: 171).
An excellent example of DRA (included in Fairclough, 2009, 2016; see also Fairclough, 2000) is his political discourse analysis of the Foreword to a government document written by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and a critique of Blair’s ‘New Labour’ government by two former members of the Labour Party. Fairclough begins with a summary of the political condition at that time (with a detailed description of the role of globalization and neo-liberalism) and then shows how the texts define relations between the companies and national governments, and the contrast between what is, and what should be, inferred in relations between the EU and national governments, demonstrating the dialectical nature of these relations and placing the focus on semiosis. He then explains (2016: 105) how the first text “depoliticises by construing a consensus on the global economy as an inevitable fact of life and building national competitiveness as a necessary response” whereas the second text “politicises by construing the globalised economy as a stake in struggles between governments and transnationals, and capital and labour, and by opposing that construal to the government’s concensualist construal” (2016: 105).
Fairclough’s approach has been criticized for spending too much time on depoliticization and not enough on politicization (which he justifies as a known bias stemming from his involvement in the left-wing politics of the 1970s), and while he does not agree that this is a limitation, he does admit that more cognitively oriented research on discourse could be complimentary to the DRA (2016: 106). Some other work by Fairclough taking this approach includes his research on the discourse of New Labour (2003), which supplies many examples of applications of this approach, his (2005) analysis of neo-liberalism and its effects on the branding of Bãsecsu, a presidential candidate in Romania, his (2006) work on the politically powerful concepts of globalization, and various chapters in (2010b), described above.
4.3.3 Changes in Fairclough’s Approach
Fairclough and Fairclough (2012) present a new approach to the analysis of political discourse as a contribution to the development of CDA, somewhat different from the political discourse analysis of Chilton (2004, 2010), which we will discuss shortly, and Wodak’s DHA ( Reisigl & Wodak, 2009, 2016; Wodak, 2001a, 2009; de Cillia & Wodak, 2006, discussed below). What is new is “that it views political discourse as primarily a form of argumentation … practical argumentation, argumentation for or against particular ways of acting, argumentation that can ground decision” (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012: 1), and the 2012 book includes a framework for analyzing and evaluating political discourse from this point of view, using many examples stemming from the financial crisis (2007–2011). Since it is meant to be a textbook for advanced students, one of its objectives is pedagogical and methodological, “to provide a new and better method that can be replicated in the analysis of different sets of data” (2012: 13).
Fairclough (2015, 2016) stresses (again) the dialectical character of his approach, and how this aids in making it attuned to transdisciplinary research, enhancing the capacity of “various bodies of social theory and research to address often neglected semiotic dimensions” as well as taking from them perspectives and research logics that move the approach itself forward (2016: 105). He also addresses his critics (again), reiterating his response to the critique we mentioned above about spending too much time on depoliticization and not enough on politicization but also adding that he agrees with Chilton’s (2005a) argument that people are capable of doing their own political critique. However, he does not believe that this means they are “generally capable of seeing the dialectical relations between semiotic and non-semiotic elements that constitute the social, political and economic conditions of their lives” (Fairclough, 2016: 106). Hence, the “essence of CDA and what distinguishes [the DRA] from other forms of (critical) analysis” as he sees it, is the way in which it explains how discourse relates to other elements of the existing reality (2015: 6). It is these explanations for why particular discourses exist that make up the “critical” in CDA (2015: 7) and also what render it something that average media consumers do not normally arrive at on their own. Furthermore, he argues that if we don’t understand how existing societies work, we cannot understand how discourse figures within them nor how we can change societies for the better. Thus, we must emphasize “the power behind discourse rather than just the power in discourse” with the aim of raising consciousness of how language contributes to the domination of some people over others (2015: 3). In this view, social reality begins with discourse and thus if one wishes to critique the discourse, one needs to start with critiquing the existing social reality (a point discussed in Sect. 3.5). In addition, he reiterates how CDA “is nothing if not a resource for struggle against domination” (2015: 3), and its whole point and purpose is to provide those undergoing social struggle with a resource in advancing the struggle toward “social emancipation” (2015: 252) and against neo-liberalism. We believe that Fairclough’s emphasis on resistance to neoliberalism is a crucial research direction for many of the areas which CDA/CDS touches upon.
An excellent example of recent CDA/CDS work that tackles neoliberalism (and explains how CDA/CDS is an apt tool for doing so) is Ulysse (2013), who doesn’t explicitly say he is doing DRA, but he does cite Fairclough’s work frequently, and both his topic and his analysis are clearly influenced by it. In his chapter in Counterpoints: Paradigms of research for the twenty-first century, he describes how neoliberalism can be defined as a discourse and cites studies that trace its development (e.g., Davies & Bensel, 2007). Additionally, he breaks down concepts such as ‘privatization’ (which he says rarely delivers on what it purports to do), ‘the free market’, ‘deregulation’, and ‘freedom’. Ulysse declares ‘freedom’ to be symbolic and virtually impossible to enjoy on an equal basis in a neoliberal world (2013: 227–232). Most importantly, he demonstrates how neoliberal ideologies are propagated, implemented, and reinforced, overtly and covertly, with the ultimate effect of both consciously and unconsciously controlling “the thoughts and behaviors of people in their respective societies” (2013: 232).
Another excellent example of scholarship that makes the connection between CDA/CDS and its role in challenging neoliberalism is Chun (2018). In his chapter (in Flowerdew & Richardson, 2018a), he provides a detailed definition of neoliberalism and globalization and gives an example of counter narratives to neoliberalism put forward by reader comments in an opinion piece in the New York Times. He then suggests that these comments serve as models for discursive strategies and practices that contest “neoliberal common-sense beliefs” and “question who benefits and who is left behind in our societies” because of them (Chun, 2018: 431). He also argues that the primary aim of CDA/CDS is to “remake new common-sense beliefs based on our collective and communal agencies in solidarity among each other against the onslaught and ravages of neoliberalism” (2018: 431).
Up to now, we have explained the major characteristics of Fairclough’s approach as well as some of the changes in it over time. To summarizes these changes briefly, the first version was oriented to the post-World War 2 social settlement and centered on critique of ideological discourse as “part of a concern with the reproduction of the existing social order” (Fairclough, 1989); the second was related to the move to neoliberalism and centered on critique of discourse as social change (Fairclough, 1992); his third and latest version is “CDA as dialectical reasoning”, and in (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012), he examines the 2007 and after financial/economic crisis and focuses on deliberative discourse as a strategy to overcome it.
In this latest iteration, Fairclough defines ‘dialectical reasoning’ as a form of practical argumentation which emphasizes the connection between critique, explanation and action. He describes how it works in four steps—which are somewhat different from the four stages he described in Wodak and Meyer 2016a, discussed above. He explains that his most recent version puts more emphasis on supporting political action “to change social life for the better” such as seeking solutions to problems like the funding of education (Fairclough, 2018: 13, 17). The four steps named are: (1) normative critique of discourse (basically, describing the discourse); (2) explaining what features brought about this state of affairs; (3) critiquing this state of affairs; (4) advocating action to change the existing state of affairs for the better (2018: 16). Another valuable addition in Fairclough (2018: 24) that allows us to understand the evolution of his approach is the presentation of the essential elements of dialectical reasoning which are: (1) how to recognize an argument; (2) how to identify what type of argument it is; (3) how to identify the premises and conclusion of the argument; (4) how to evaluate it; (5) how to identify an explanation and its parts; (6) how to identify reasons, motives and causes and the connections between them; (7) how to evaluate and critique argumentation as a first step in the sequence of deliberation-decision-action-change; (8) how to develop counter arguments; (9) how to identify the ‘terms of debate’ and their limitations; and (10) how to approach changing the terms of debate. Finally, he envisions scholars in CDA as opening up a dialogue with those involved in political action, and he proposes dialectical reasoning as a way for CDA to “contribute to political action to change existing reality for the better”, and as a method of “showing how deliberation enables and constrains decision, action and change, which can be opened up by changing the terms of debate” (2018: 25). To illustrate this revised approach, he uses a case study of the Kilburn Manifesto (“a political manifesto for transcending neoliberalism”) (2018: 19–21). For a more recent and detailed look at how the DRA has changed over the years, see Fairclough’s own account of these changes (which we have cited a few things from above) in Flowerdew and Richardson (2018a), where he contends that there are three main versions of his approach, which have transformed in response to social changes (2018: 14).
4.4 Sociocognitive Approach (SCA)
The sociocognitive approach (SCA), first developed by Teun van Dijk in the 1980s with some changes since then (see van Dijk, 2016 and Sect. 3.6), emphasizes the importance of the study of cognition in the critical analysis of discourse, communication and interaction and the cognitively mediated relationship between discourse and society. Emphasizing his use of the term CDS exclusively (as opposed to CDA, see our discussion of this in Sect. 4.1), van Dijk contends that CDS is a critical perspective or attitude within the field of discourse studies (DS) that “uses different methods of the humanities and social sciences” (2016: 65). In this approach, ‘discourse’ is seen as a multidimensional social phenomenon which is a linguistic object, an action, a form of social interaction, a social practice, a mental representation, an interactional or communicative event or activity, a cultural product, or even an economic commodity that can be bought and sold (van Dijk, 2009b: 66–67).
The concept of ‘social cognitions ’5 is central to van Dijk’s approach, which represents the socio-psychological dimension of CDS, and draws on ‘social representation theory’ (Moscovici, 2000), which refers to the “bulk of concepts, opinions, attitudes, evaluations, images and explanations which result from daily life and are sustained by communication” (Wodak & Meyer, 2009b: 25). These socially shared representations of (perceptions of, ways of thinking about) societal groups and relations—as well as mental processes such as interpretation, thinking and arguing, making inferences and learning—form a core element of the individual’s social identity (van Dijk, 1993a; Meyer, 2001). Along with abstract knowledge of the world they link the social system on the one hand and the individual’s cognitive system on the other hand and are shared among members of the same social group, just as attitudes and ideologies are shared (van Dijk, 2016). In SCA, social cognitions are viewed as part of a discourse-cognition-society “triangle” in which relations between discourse and society are seen as cognitively mediated (van Dijk, 2016: 64, see Sect. 3.6). In her overview of CDA Wodak (2011: 60) notes that cognition provides the “missing link” that demonstrates how societal structures are “instituted, legitimated, confirmed or challenged by text or talk”, and we agree with Wodak that this is a significant element that SCA adds to CDA/CDS research. Control of the ‘public mind’ is accomplished through this linking of discourse to social cognitions, and social cognitions also explain the production as well as the understanding of discourse. Social representations are relevant in the context of (personal, group, cultural) knowledge, attitudes and ideologies (Wodak, 2011: 26) and the exercise of power involves the influence of knowledge, beliefs, values, plans, attitudes, ideologies, norms and values, all of which are part of social cognition .
Van Dijk also describes how discursive units (ranging from one word to sentences to very long utterances) are linked to the generation of prejudice and discrimination, turning his focus to the study of (discourse and) context (2001b, 2008a, 2009a). He argues that there has been much interest in context and contextualization in CDA, but little research on the details and theory of context , which he defines as dynamic representations of the ongoing communicative event (van Dijk, 2009b: 73–75; see also Sects. 3.6.1 and 3.6.2; Wodak, 2011: 61). This is accomplished by incorporating the very important idea of context models (see Sect. 3.6.1.2, aka pragmatic models), a type of mental model that is salient to the participants and “represents how each participant understands and represents the communicative situation” (van Dijk, 2016: 67) which helps them achieve a variety of dynamic processes. Thus, context models control much of discourse production and understanding, such as genre , topic choice, local meanings and coherence, along with speech acts, rhetoric, and style (2001a: 109). They represent the models of events that language users refer to in the discourse as well as “dynamic pragmatic models of (each moment of) the very communicative event in which they participate” (2012b: 589). They allow language users to adapt their discourse to the communicative situation in which they find themselves, and “since at least the time, the knowledge and the intentions of the context model change permanently during discourse processing (production, comprehension), context models are fundamentally dynamic” (2012b: 589). And, finally, they control the pragmatic aspect of discourse because they “define the appropriateness of discourse with respect to the communicative situation” and work to manage knowledge in interaction (2016: 67). In this sense, language users adapt their discourse to the assumed knowledge of the other participants, recognizing the intentions of other speakers/social actors (Tomasello, 2008). Groups in power affect discourse through the social representations shared by those groups. Thus, when looking at discourse, SCA can help us bridge the gap between the ‘micro’ level (language use, discourse, verbal interaction, and communication) and the ‘macro’ level (power, dominance, and inequality between social groups) of society, and is thus particularly useful in uncovering hidden ideologies embedded in the discourse. Furthermore, SCA helps us to understand how discourse can be a “primary source of evidence for underlying social representations” (van Dijk, 2014a: 290).
Throughout his more recent work in CDS—and linked to his pre-CDA and early CDA work on racism and discrimination in discourse and communication (see Sects. 3.6.1–3.6.4)—van Dijk has used SCA to focus on the (re)production of racism in discourse and communication (see recently van Dijk, 2012a, 2014a, 2016; Wodak, 2011: 60; and also Sects. 3.6.5 and 3.6.6) as well as the media, and also to examine more general questions of power abuse and the reproduction of inequality through ideologies, integrating elements from his earlier studies on cognition that found that those who control the most dimensions of discourse (i.e. topics, style, setting) have the most power (see Wodak, 2011: 60). He has also written extensively on ideology , in particular his book (van Dijk, 1998) in which he proposed a new, multidisciplinary theory of ideology based on the reformulation and integration of three central concepts: (1) the status, internal organization and mental functions of ideologies in terms of social cognitions; (2) the social, political, cultural and historical conditions and functions of ideologies; and (3) the formation, changes, and reproduction of ideologies through socially situated discourse and communication. For van Dijk (1998: 8) “ideologies may be very succinctly defined as the basis of the social representations shared by members of a group”, e.g., ways of organizing good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, true vs. false, us vs. them. Van Dijk’s more recent work investigates the role of knowledge in discourse (van Dijk, 2012b, 2012c, 2012d, 2014b), another area that he feels is underrepresented in the literature; he summarizes a theory of ‘natural’ knowledge and its relevance for the study of text and talk, as well as a basis for his own work on social cognition and discourse (van Dijk, 2014c). In his book on ‘discourse and knowledge’ (2014b), he takes a multidisciplinary approach to studying the relationship between discourse and knowledge and argues that discourse can only be produced or understood in terms of shared sociocultural knowledge, which is acquired through text and talk.
As in all the approaches we list here, SCA is often combined with other ones that overlap and complement it in some way, and hence render the analysis specifically suited to the data. One recent example that illustrates van Dijk’s triangular SCA, the multimodal turn of CDA/CDS and the way in which CDA/CDS often combines approaches, is from his contribution to Wodak & Meyer (2016a: 65–66). He examines a billboard in Britain for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) during the 2014 parliamentary elections in which UKIP used blatant racist and xenophobic propaganda to win (surprisingly, for many) 10 new members of the European parliament (MEPs) and 27.5% of the vote (Kirkup & Swinford, 2014). In his brief analysis, van Dijk shows how the interpretation of the multimodal messages in the billboard (such as image and color) requires cognitive structures such as shared sociocultural knowledge (aka background knowledge) about the unemployment situation in the UK at that time and the lifting of restrictions for workers from Eastern Europe (which brought new immigrants to the UK). In addition, he points to the role of attitude and ideology, as well as the ‘context model’ of readers of the billboard (e.g., how they understand and represent the situation), which features emotions such as anger and fear. We should also underscore the way that UKIP’s campaign played upon the emotions of voters was a major factor in UKIP’s rise to power, the eventual success of the 2016 BREXIT vote and the UK’s exit from the European Union. Hence, van Dijk’s analysis (which he conducted before the BREXIT vote) was spot on in identifying exactly how voters were manipulated by UKIP—and how SCA is very useful since it uncovered this fact.
Van Dijk has published the most of any scholar on SCA (and one could argue that he has done a large part of the work that explains and models SCA). Indeed, most of van Dijk’s work in this area has been as sole author, although he has occasionally co-authored with Wodak (e.g., Wodak & van Dijk, 2000; see Sects. 3.6.6 and 3.7; see also Clarke, Kwon, & Wodak, 2012) and a few others. However, there are a few examples of other scholars who have taken up CDA/CDS work using SCA, alone or in combination with other approaches, in recent years (such as Isbuga-Erel, 2008; Olausson, 2009; Foluke, 2011; Peyroux, 2012; Ushchyna, 2017).
4.5 Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA)
The term ‘discourse-historical approach’ (DHA) first appeared in Ruth Wodak’s studies that were conducted with the ‘Vienna School of Discourse Analysis’ (which included her current and former students and colleagues) and were about post-war Austria and antisemitic discourses (see Sect. 3.8.5). In general, DHA adheres to the socio-philosophical orientation of Critical Theory, especially the thinking of Habermas ( Reisigl & Wodak, 2001), supplemented with an approach that relates theory formation and conceptualization to the specific problems being investigated. It also features a multi-methodological, interdisciplinary approach to empirical data as well as the integration of available background information into the analysis of different layers of a spoken or written text (Ahmadvand, 2011; Krzyżanowski & Wodak, 2009: 21). Analysts using this approach perceive both written and spoken language to be forms of social practice and assume a dialectical relationship between discursive practices and the situations they are embedded in (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997). Wodak has focused on issues of methodology , hence the emphasis on ‘Methods’ in the title of her 2001/2009/2016 co-edited books with Meyer on CDA/CDS (and also of the non-CDA-oriented Titscher, Meyer, Wodak, & Vetter, 2000 (1998 in German)) which discusses each of the approaches (aka frameworks, research strategies) in terms of their different methods, among other issues (which shows that CDA/CDS in general is not a method (see van Dijk, 2012d)).
On her website at Lancaster University6, Wodak refers to DHA as “an interdisciplinary, problem-oriented approach which analyses the changes of discursive practices over time and in various genres”. With respect to the first principle, being “interdisciplinary”, Reisigl and Wodak (2009: 89) referred to its application to the collection and analysis of data from various sources and various analytical perspectives (which is also the case for other CDA approaches); and by problem-oriented, she meant (as discussed in Sect. 3.2) that the focus is on, e.g., some social problem or issue, not on particular linguistic issues. These both are related to the principle of ‘triangulation’ (Wodak & Meyer, 2016b: 26), which combines empirical observations, theories and methods from various disciplines, as well as background information in the study of a given issue. However, in the latest definition of DHA, Reisigl and Wodak (2016: 31) note again that it is interdisciplinary—which they identify as the first of the ten most important principles of DHA—but they re-frame it as involving theory, methods, methodology, research practice and practical application whereas earlier definitions did not include all of these (see Sect. 3.8.5). As to changes in discursive practices over time, of the founders of CDA/CDS, Wodak is the one who has insisted the most on the incorporation of (wide-ranging) historical data into any (C)DA /(C)DS , critical or not, including the historical embedding of discourses and texts and “explor[ing] how discourses, genres and texts change in relation to sociopolitical change” (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009: 90). And there are other important principles of DHA (2016: 31–32): it incorporates fieldwork and ethnography; it moves recursively between theory and empirical data; it studies numerous genres and public spaces as well as intertextual relationships (the way in which texts are linked to other texts, e.g., through taking a portion of one text and inserting it into another text , as in quotation) and interdiscursive ones (the way in which discourses are linked to each other, e.g., a discourse on one topic may refer to topics or sub-topics of other discourses (2016: 27–28), as when (racist) arguments about restrictions on immigration are used in discussions about combatting unemployment); its categories and methods that are not fixed once and for all (2016: 32); it uses ‘Grand theories’, which “conceptualize relations between social structure and social action and thus link micro- and macro-sociological phenomena” (Wodak, 2009b: 204) and augments them further with ‘middle-range theories’, which are concerned with “specific social phenomena … [or] specific subsystems of society” and provide a better theoretical basis; and it views the application of results and the communication of them to the public as important aims, along with some form of social action (see Sect. 7.2.1.2).
The definition of ‘discourse’ in DHA has evolved from the early 2000s and has become quite complex in the most recent version; “a cluster of context-dependent semiotic practices that are situated within specific fields of social action; socially constituted and socially constitutive; related to a macro-topic; linked to the argumentation about validity claims such as truth and normative validity involving several social actors who have different points of view” (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016: 27). The presence of intertextuality and interdiscursivity in the DHA framework means that discourses are often dynamic and open and hybrid, since, e.g., new subtopics are easily created, and discourses and their topics may cross from one social field to another, may overlap with each other, or may be socio-functionally linked with each other in some way. Scholars in DHA have also added to the theory of discourse by linking texts, discourses and genres ( Reisigl & Wodak, 2016: 28–29) with fields of action (Girnth, 1996), such that texts are parts of discourses that can be assigned to genres, which are “a “socially conventionalized type and pattern of communication that fulfills a specific social purpose in a specific social context [or a] mental scheme that refers to specific procedural knowledge about a specific text function and the processes of text production, distribution and reception” (2016: 27). Discourses can be realized through many different genres and texts; for instance, the discourses of climate change ( Reisigl & Wodak, 2016: 27) may be realized in genres such as TV debates on environmental policies, guidelines for reducing carbon emissions, speeches by climate scientists, online comments about articles on climate change, and so forth. And, finally, fields of action indicate segments of reality that make up partial frames of a discourse and are “defined by different functions of discursive practices” (2016: 28). For example, in the general area of political action, “formation of public attitudes” could be one field while “political advertising” could be another (2016: 28–29). Thus, there is a type of dialectical relationship between discursive practices and the fields of action they are embedded in. In DHA, ideology is seen as a perspective that is often one-sided and encompasses “a worldview, a system composed of related mental representations, convictions, opinions, attitudes, values and evaluations, which are shared by members of a special social group” (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016: 25). Fully developed ideologies such as conservatism are referred to as ‘grand narratives’. For example (in the version articulated by President Donald Trump of the US during his candidacy in 2016), it includes representations of what a society looks like now (e.g., it is going downhill), models of what the society should be in the future (e.g., ‘Make America great again’ [MAGA]), and models of how to go from the present to the future (e.g., don’t allow Muslims or Mexicans to enter the US, keep American ‘exceptionalism’ alive, keep American jobs in the US, etc.). These narratives differ from ‘grand theories’ (mentioned above) because they are not based on empirical evidence or scholarly research or a specific approach to social theory. Nevertheless, the ideologies serve as powerful means of “creating shared social identities” and of establishing, maintaining and transforming unequal power relations through discourse (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016: 25).
- (1)
Activate and consult preceding theoretical knowledge (e.g., collect, read, discuss previous research).
- (2)
Collect data and context information, which vary depending on a variety of factors such as events, media, social actors, etc.
- (3)
Select and prepare data for analysis (e.g., transcribe interviews or downsize data).
- (4)
Identify research questions and assumptions based on the literature review and first skimming of the data.
- (5)
Conduct a qualitative pilot analysis of context , macro- and micro-analysis.
- (6)
Include detailed (primarily qualitative but also quantitative) case studies of a range of data.
- (7)
Formulate a critique/interpret and explain results taking context knowledge and the three dimensions of critique into account.
- (8)
Propose practical applications of the results of the analysis that target some social impact.
Reisigl and Wodak illustrate DHA using their own pilot study on news reporting about climate change, which places special focus on ‘argumentation strategies’. They define ‘argumentation’ as a “linguistic as well as a cognitive pattern of problem-solving that manifests itself in a (more or less regulated) sequence of speech acts which form a complex and more or less coherent network of statements” (2016: 35), which (the speaker hopes) will persuade listeners. Topoi (singular ‘topos’) are “parts of argumentation that belong to the required premises” and “connect the argument(s) with the conclusion, the claim” (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016: 35; see the discussion of topoi in earlier work in DHA in Sect. 3.8.5); they are “socially conventionalized and recur habitually”. The reasoning can be convincing (sound) or not reasonable, i.e., not based on sound arguments, in which case the topoi are called ‘fallacies.’ They then list ten rules for ‘rational disputes and constructive arguing’ (e.g., rule 2, “obligation to give reasons—parties that advance a claim may not refuse to defend that claim when requested to do so” (2016: 36); see van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992; van Eemeren, Garssen, & Meuffels, 2009). Those rules enable discussants to differentiate sound topoi from fallacies; and if these rules are violated, then fallacies will occur (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016: 36). With regard to news reporting on climate change, they go through all eight steps in their ‘programme’ illustrating how the process would occur in this specific case. Some of the important, but fallacious, argumentation schemes they find from their analysis include the ‘argument from nature’ (topos or fallacy of nature) which argues that temperatures rise and fall naturally and therefore we shouldn’t worry about climate change, and the ‘argument of ignorance’ (topos or fallacy of ignorance) that “stresses the lack of (scientific) understanding of the issue under discussion” and puts forth the idea that scientists are just trying to scare people (2016: 54). Of note is their section on the application of the results, which contends that the study should not end with scholarly publication of the results. Rather, the insights need to be made available to the “‘general public’ (e.g., via recommendations, newspaper commentaries, training seminars, radio broadcasts and political advising)”, which means that the way it is written will need to be transformed for different audiences, genres, and communicative practices (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016: 56). We believe this is an important element that differentiates DHA from other approaches, not only because it is included as one of the steps of analysis, but also because it explicitly makes researchers understand that they cannot simply take their findings from their scholarly work to the public without involving some recontextualization (including rewording, adopting a different stance, different register, i.e., style of writing, etc.).
A highly important element of Wodak’s approach, which differentiates her from many adherents of CDA/CDS and which we want to emphasize here, is the inclusion of the ‘insider’ or ‘emic’ perspective through an ethnographic approach (mentioned briefly above), which she adopted before DHA was formulated and has kept ever since. Out of many examples, we can mention one way of examining how minorities or migrants actually experience racial or ethnic discrimination in today’s societies, by conducting focus groups in which relevant topics regarding the issue at hand are discussed (in Krzyżanowski & Wodak, 2009: 4; see also van Dijk & Wodak, 1988; Sect. 3.6.4). We believe that the incorporation of ethnographic approaches along with the fact that DHA traces the changes in discursive practices over time are what make DHA particularly comprehensive and insightful. For a clear example of how DHA works, see The Politics of Exclusion: Debating Migration in Austria (Krzyżanowski & Wodak, 2009). In addition, The Politics of Fear (Wodak, 2015) is informed by DHA but since it is meant for a larger audience, she doesn’t stress its theoretical underpinnings. The book also includes multimodal analysis from a SocSem frame which draws on the work of Blasch (2012), who develops the analytical categories of Kress (2003), van Leeuwen (1996), and Dyer (1998) to create a framework for “analysing the media constructions of (hyperreal) politicians’ identities and positionings on the World Wide Web” (Wodak, 2015: 136). See also our discussion of ethnography and CDA/CDS in Sect. 6.5, and more discussion of The Politics of Fear (and how pragmatics is utilized in CDA/CDS) in Sect. 6.9.2.
DHA is currently thriving through Wodak’s prolific scholarship, forceful presentations, impressive grasp of much work on argumentation and rhetoric, and continual development of her approach, which she sometimes combines with several other fields in or aligned with CDA/CDS (e.g., those discussed in Chap. 6, especially Sects. 6.4, 6.5, 6.7, and 6.9). Wodak continues to have a full schedule of research and writing and is currently involved in multiple projects related to DHA. For example, in 2015–2018 she was PI of a research project on the discursive construction of identity in Austria (2017a, a topic she had already explored earlier—see Sect. 3.8.4—but came back to with new insights); she was also involved in a project about the narratives told by children of Austrian Holocaust survivors (2017c); and she collaborated with her former students about the ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe (Krzyżanowski, Triandafyllidou, & Wodak, 2018). In addition, she is continuing to publish on right-wing populism and/or nationalism (e.g., Stoegner & Wodak, 2016; Wodak, 2016, 2017b, 2018a, 2018b, 2018d, 2018e; Wodak & Krzyżanowski, 2017; Rheindorf & Wodak, 2018; Wodak & Forchtner, 2018b); social media (Unger, Wodak, & KhosraviNik, 2016; Wodak, 2018c), and migration issues (Wodak, 2018f).
There are many publications by Wodak, some with colleagues and (former) students, and others without her, that utilize DHA in CDA/CDS scholarship, too many in fact for us to cite all of them, since she is very prolific, and so are her co-authors. Hence we will conclude this section by providing some references to DHA scholarship that include Wodak as sole or co-author that were not already cited above (stopping at our date limit of Feb. 2018). These include: de Cillia, Reisigl, and Wodak (1999), Krzyżanowski and Wodak (2009), Clarke, Kwon, and Wodak (2012), Forchtner, Krzyżanowski, and Wodak (2013), Wodak (2013a, 2013b, 2015, 2017a), Wodak and Boukala (2015), Forchtner and Wodak (2018), and Wodak and Forchtner (2018b). Finally, we list (some) publications that illustrate DHA by scholars besides Wodak, such as Graham, Keenan, and Dowd (2004), Machin and Suleiman (2006), KhosraviNik (2010), Krzyżanowski (2010), Von Stuckrad (2013), Boukala (2016), Forchtner and Schneickert (2016), Klymenko (2016), Wu, Huang, and Zheng (2016), Dimitrakopoulou and Boukala (2017), Dorostkar and Preisinger (2017), Krzyżanowski and Ledin (2017), and Sayers, Harding, Barchas-Lichenstein, Coffey, and Rock (2017). Also worth noting is Forchtner (2016), which provides an innovative approach to DHA in CDA/CDS and as well includes narrative theory.
4.6 Social Semiotics (SocSem) and Multimodal Approaches (MCDA)
4.6.1 Introduction
As discussed above (in Sects. 2.3, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 3.3, and 3.9), social semiotics (SocSem) has a long history and is connected with Halliday’s SFL, CritLing , multimodality, and, especially, van Leeuwen’s more recent work. SocSem is interested in both the way language is used in social contexts and the way we use language “to create society” (Machin & Mayr, 2012: 17) as well as the way society creates language. Note that ‘semiotics’ as it is used here is different from Fairclough’s use of the word, which was meant more in the classical sense, heavily influenced by Saussure’s work without emphasis on the social dimension. Based on our definition above of what SocSem is, we will outline what SocSem approaches to CDA/CDS are interested in doing and how this is accomplished. In addition, we decided to treat SocSem and multimodality8 (see Sects. 2.7 and 3.9) together because, although they are different, they are inherently intertwined from a CDA/CDS point of view in, e.g., MCDA; thus, this section explains the connection between them, as well as their connection to CDA/CDS.
A SocSem approach to CDA/CDS focuses on describing the available choices of signs used in communication so that we can go on to understand what it is that people are actually doing with them. Because SocSem can be seen as “a way of accounting for a radically changing society and re-orienting the field to deal with a whole new set of social issues” (Zhao, Djonov, Björkvall, & Boeriis, 2017: 10), it is easy to see why it aligns with the goals and aims of CDA/CDS. And, because communication is so much more than just language, this approach has considered all ways of making meaning, such as gesture, images, language, sounds, etc. (Kress, 2010). In a sense, SocSem has been always been about more than just language, because it is based in semiotics, which classifies language under a larger umbrella category of types of sign-making resources in various modalities (with an emphasis on the verbal and visual). Hence, researchers doing MCDA “see linguistic and visual modes of communication as manifestations of a single underlying semiotic capacity” ( Hart, 2015: 238). Influenced by a wide range of sociological and linguistic theories utilizing sources from Malinowski to Bernstein and Bourdieu (Wodak & Meyer, 2009b: 27; see above) and drawing on the work of M.A.K. Halliday (1978, 1985), Foucault’s notion of discourse (1972) and CritLing ( Fowler, Hodge, Kress, & Trew, 1979 ; see Sect. 2.4) as well as Chomskyan linguistics and French semiotics ( Barthes, 1973), the SocSem approach takes the view that all communication (not just language) has underlying patterns and conventions which determine why we do and say certain things, as well as why certain things stand for other things. Hence, in the SocSem theory of communication, the aim is to describe and document the “underlying resources available to those who want to communicate meanings” (whether these meanings are expressed verbally, visually, through materials, etc.) and then analyze “the way that these are used in settings to do particular things” (Machin & Mayr, 2012: 18). SocSem approaches are also interested in the ways that signs have been used both in the past and in the analyzed context , as part of their ‘meaning potential’,9 that is, the “range of possibilities that are able to carry the intended ideas, values and attitudes” of the discourse being analyzed (Abousnnouga & Machin, 2013: 22) as well as other discourses, including future ones. More importantly, SocSem is concerned with the interests of the sign-maker, and why he/she would want the signs to mean and do what they do, as well as what specific means were used to create them (Kress, 2010). For example, Abousnnouga and Machin’s (2013) study of the discourses of war as they are expressed in war monuments shows how materials like marble, granite and bronze suggest ancient times or the values and attitudes of the ancient warrior—because they are durable and long lasting, and have been used throughout time. Thus they can convey these meanings in a way that plastic or paper materials cannot.
Another important concept in this approach (which is based on Halliday, 1978, 1985) is the notion of ‘semiotic resource ’, which is central to van Leeuwen’s theory of SocSem (van Leeuwen, 2005, 2008; Djonov & Zhao, 2017: 2; see Sect. 3.9), and “reflects Halliday’s model of language as a social semiotic resource whose meaning-making potential is dynamic, and shapes (and is shaped by) the social contexts in which it is employed”. In this sense, semiotic resources do not have fixed meanings but instead they have (as said above, and in Sect. 2.6.2) a semiotic potential that can be applied differently in different contexts (Abousnnouga & Machin, 2013). A good example of this can be seen in Hodge and Kress (1988: 8–12), which explains in detail their theoretical framework for SocSem. In their example (see Sect. 2.5), they show a Marlboro billboard in which the original headline is “New. Mild. And Marlboro” featuring a photograph of a cowboy on a horse (smoking) and a packet of Marlboro cigarettes to the right of the cowboy. However, on the top of the billboard, graffiti artists have crossed out some letters and written over the original, changing the headlines to “New. Vile. And a bore”, with speech bubbles that say “cough cough” and “poo this macho stinks” along with “cancer sticks” and a $ sign on top of the cigarettes, and “r.i.p.” [=rest in peace] on an (obviously) fake tombstone in the background. In a careful analysis, the authors demonstrate the layers of meaning and the ways in which the graffiti writers revealed their interpretation of the signs ( Hodge & Kress, 1988: 8–12). They also note that in SocSem one cannot assume that texts produce exactly the meanings and effects that their authors hope for, and it is resistance and struggle as well as the “uncertain outcomes” that must be studied at the level of social action. SocSem approaches should therefore acknowledge the “importance of the flow of discourse in constructing meanings around texts”, paying close attention to its dialogic nature, as in their example. In addition, meaning should always be seen as negotiated, not just imposed on the reader/viewer by the author/s, and the attention of the analyst should be focused on how the social practices in question are represented ideologically.
4.6.2 SocSem Tools
One set of tools that helps for this has been provided by van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) (and more recently, an updated version by van Leeuwen, 2005, 2016; see also Sect. 3.9). These SocSem tools are particularly adapted to MCDA, which we will discuss shortly, and are based on the idea that discourses are ‘recontextualizations’ (i.e., transformations, van Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999; see Sects. 3.9.2 and 3.9.3) of social practice. That is, representation of social actors is based on what people do and thus texts (which are the evidence for the existence of discourses) should be interpreted as representations of social practice. In addition, van Leeuwen (2008: 6, 2009, 2016) stresses the difference between social practices themselves and representations of social practices, noting that in many texts, aspects of representation are more important than the (representation of) the social practice itself. Hence, when a person reads or views information about an event, someone else has prepared it—it is not the actual event that is being presented, but someone else’s version of it (e.g., the journalist’s as well as the editor’s, in the news media). In the same way, in an article with text and some photographs in an online newspaper about, e.g., the #NeverAgain movement (a grass-roots student led movement for gun control in the US), different aspects of it would be shown, depending on what the source is, which images or videos are shown as iconic of the events, and who the creator was. For example, the students might be represented as responding to the horrors of school shootings (e.g., Taylor, 2018) or as being anti-gun (“Parkland high school students,” 2018). Hence, the students could be depicted in a myriad of different ways because when an event is represented: specific choices have to be made (since space is limited), a coherent narrative has to be told, the newspaper may have already taken a stance (e.g., on shootings) or have a political stance (e.g., about gun control), the newspaper needs to pay attention to ratings (in view of the so-called ‘bottom line’, i.e., their financial success/well-being), and many other factors. Most importantly, the interest of the sign-maker (or those in control of the sign-maker) in portraying events or social actions in a particular way is typically given precedent.
Like other approaches, scholars with a SocSem lens view ‘discourses’ as the broader ideas communicated by a text (van Dijk, 1991; Fairclough, 2000; Wodak & Meyer, 2016a) and as “models of the world in the sense described by Foucault (1979)” (Abousnnouga & Machin, 2013: 24). In laying out the set of tools for analyzing discourse, van Leeuwen (2016, also 2009) highlights the crucial elements of social practices which are always present (e.g. actions, performance modes, actors, presentations styles, times, spaces, resources, eligibility, see Sect. 3.9). He also discusses important processes that can transform the representation of social actions (i.e., using deletion, substitution and addition in the text ) and describes how social actions are actually transformed through using verbs that are actions and reactions and are “cognitive” (e.g., ‘grasp’), “perceptive” (e.g., ‘has a nose for’) or “affective” (e.g. ‘feel’) (van Leeuwen, 2016: 148; cf Halliday, 1985; see Sect. 2.3). In addition, actions can be seen as “material” (e.g. ‘buys’) “semiotic ” (e.g. ‘articulate’) or “behavioral” (e.g. ‘communicates’). Actions and reactions can also be seen as “activated” (shown dynamically) or “de-activated” (shown in a static way), represented as brought about by human agency or not, and generalized or represented abstractly (van Leeuwen, 2016: 149–150). Fairclough (1995) had already argued that when these “transformations” occur, it is evidence that there is ideological work at play, and van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) provided a good example of how this is done in an analysis of official letters from the Austrian government that notify immigrant workers of the rejection of their ‘family reunion’ applications which would have allowed them to bring family members to Austria if they had been accepted. Combining SocSem (with emphasis on the recontextualization of social practice) and the DHA approach to CDA/CDS, van Leeuwen and Wodak were able to link the analyzed discourse to the history of post-war immigration in Austria more generally.
4.6.3 SocSem and Classification
In SocSem approaches that look at non-verbal modes, analysis focuses on social roles (such as ‘agency’) instead of linguistic/grammatical categories such as ‘nouns’ or ‘passive sentence’ and the elements examined are linked through the concept of ‘social actors’ rather than linguistic concepts such as ‘nominal groups’ (see van Leeuwen, 2008: 23–54, which offers an expansive inventory of the ways we can classify people and the ideological effects these classifications can have). These classifications often include ‘personalization’ vs. ‘impersonalization’ (e.g., in the former case, a statement like ‘Professor Smarty required students to attend the conference’ vs. in the latter case, ‘The university required students to attend the conference’). In addition, a distinction is made between ‘individualism’ versus ‘collectivization’ (e.g., ‘Two women, Mary Smith and Lisa Gonzalez, were injured in the riots’ vs. ‘Protesters were injured in the riots’), and ‘specification’ vs. ‘genericization’ (e.g., ‘Yassine’ vs. ‘a Muslim man’). Other classifications include ‘nomination’ or ‘functionalization’ (people referred to in terms of who they are or what they do), use of ‘honorifics’ (e.g., titles that suggest a degree of seniority or respect, such as the use of Sheriff Arpaio to legitimize the arrest of a Latino man and connect it to immigration issues, see Catalano & Waugh, 2013b ) and ‘objectivization’ (when objects are represented through a feature such as ‘the beauty’) (Machin & Mayr, 2012: 83). Objectivization can also be dehumanizing, such as when women’s bodies are equated to cars (e.g., in Italian, a woman can be described as having a nice ‘carrozzeria’, meaning ‘body’, but using the technical word for car bodies). In contrast, ‘humanization’ occurs when animals or objects are seen as human beings and given human characteristics. ‘Anonymization’ happens when sources are referred to by terms like ‘Some people…’ and ‘aggregation’ when participants are quantified and treated as statistics, as in ‘Hundreds of immigrants…’). A final category listed is ‘suppression’, which is the exclusion (see also ‘deletion’ above) of social actors or parts of an event in a text (Machin & Mayr, 2012: 85).
With regard to personalizing/impersonalizing or representing people as individuals/groups, image can do the same as language in the above examples by showing photos of people all dressed in the same way, e.g., the picture in (van Leeuwen, 2008: 145) of Muslim women wearing veils. Three key factors in representing people in images are distance, angle and gaze (see Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006: 114–153; also Sect. 2.6.3). Just as in many real life situations, in image, distance can signify social relations (van Leeuwen, 2008: 97) and as such, it becomes symbolic (2008: 138). Thus, if people are shown in a close-up shot, this can represent intimacy and the social actors are seen as “one of us”; the opposite is true if the camera distance is a long shot. In the case of angle, vertical angle (whether we see the person from above, at eye level or from below) can relate power distances. Thus, looking down on someone/something is the same as exerting imaginary symbolic power ( Bourdieu, 1991) over that person, while looking up at someone/something represents symbolic power over the viewer and authority or respect (e.g. photographs of eagles with upward camera angles symbolizing their majestic nature). The horizontal camera angle (whether we see a person frontally or from the side—or somewhere in between) can symbolize involvement or detachment, depending on the context, and can lead to objectivization, for example, when people are not looking at us and thus they are objects for our scrutiny (van Leeuwen, 2008: 141).
Also important in how we represent social actors visually is what or who is excluded from the image, such as in van Leeuwen’s discussion (2008) of Playmobil toys that have no black, brown or yellow people, or a photo supposedly representing the Roma people, where they are shown begging (see Catalano, 2012). From a SocSem viewpoint, the choices journalists make in how people are represented are based on the way they wish to signpost what kind of person they are representing (Machin & Mayr, 2012: 103). Thus, it is essential to describe carefully the various representational strategies for different participants according to the categories shown above (or variations of them, whether verbal or visual) and to connect this to broader discourses.
4.6.4 SocSem and Multimodality
As mentioned earlier, much CDA/CDS work using the SocSem approach has paid attention to non-verbal signs, beginning with early work such as Hodge and Kress (1988) and later Kress and van Leeuwen (1990, 1996, 2001, 2006) and many others, but scholars such as van Leeuwen have felt that the ‘social’ in SocSem should also be focused on more (Andersen, Boeriis, Maagerø, & Tønessen, 2015; Sect. 3.9.4). Keeping this in mind, it is clear that multimodality, as coined and developed by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, 2001; and later, van Leeuwen, 2005; Kress, 2010), was informed by SocSem and highly influenced by it (see Sect. 3.9.3). This area has now emerged as a field in its own right (Machin, 2016), as Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA), and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), mentioned above. For example, scholars such as Wodak and Meyer (2016a) have included analysis of visual and multimodal texts as one of the approaches to CDA/CDS in the latest version of their Methods of Critical Discourse Studies (see Jancsary, Höllerer, & Meyer, 2016). As we said earlier, the idea behind multimodality is that: meaning is communicated not just through language but also through other modes such as visuals, gestures, materials, packaging, etc.; often these various modes are used simultaneously; often, other modes are doing things that are different from, or have different effects than, language could have; and they are (often) working together.
The term ‘multimodality’ can be used to “designate a theoretical approach as well as a multifaceted scholarly practice” (Maiorani & Christie, 2014). Obviously (as said above), the fact that people have used many modes of communication is not new—people have always used image and other non-verbal forms to communicate; in fact, image, gesture, and other modes have been “a part of human cultures longer than script” (Kress, 2010: 5). And the fact that they are often combined with each other is also not new, since they have been part of face-to-face communication across human history and cultures. What is new (especially in the twenty-first century) is how they’ve become so prevalent through technology, the web, etc. The reason why there has been a “multimodal turn” (Jewitt, 2009) in CDA/CDS research (and in other academic domains) in the last decade is because “the world of communication has changed and is changing still; and the reasons for that lie in a vast web of intertwined social, economic, cultural and technological changes” (Kress, 2010: 5). Globalization is one major factor in this change. Forces of neoliberal ideologies have sponsored and amplified the conditions of globalization that make it possible for the characteristics of one place to be present and active in another (Kress, 2010). According to Kress, the effects of globalization have brought radical instability, which has caused far-reaching changes in semiotic production (e.g., how meaning is made), dissemination of messages and meaning, and mediation and communication—all of which have changed profoundly. The use of recent technologies (e.g., social media) “enables modes to be configured, be circulated, and get recycled in different ways” (Jewitt, 2009: 1) and we must have theories and tools that allow us “to understand and account for the world of communication as it is now” (Kress, 2010: 7; on this see also Machin & van Leeuwen, 2007).
The SocSem theory of multimodality (Kress, 2010, see also Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996/2006, 2001) on which MCDA is based views the relation of form and meaning as one of aptness and “best fit” (Kress, 2010: 55). MCDA is interested in the affordances of the various modes (i.e., what the mode facilitates happening or hiding or inhibiting), the way they shape meaning, and the way they work together. To give a mundane example, this author (Theresa’s) IPhone has seven different keyboards that allow her to move between the languages she needs to use when texting. However, if she does not remember to change from one keyboard to the next (when texting someone who speaks a different language), the keyboard stays the same and produces auto-corrected gibberish that she later needs to apologize for. Hence, the mode of IPhone texting affords her different keyboards that can alter her meanings unintentionally and shape all types of mis-communications. It also affords her the use of emojis, which have in turn led to mis-communication since she doesn’t always use glasses for reading and she has been known to send emojis with frowny faces when she meant to send smiley ones. In addition, she has been overcome with the desire (because it takes ‘SO LONG’ as opposed to using a computer) to use texting language such as “u” instead of “you” (to her co-author) and acronyms such as the infamous “LOL”, which has also affected meaning (and which seems to have different meanings for different people or in different contexts: laugh-out-loud, lots-of-luck, lots-of-love; see Heaney, 2013 for other meanings). Another excellent example of how different modes have different affordances was given by Kress (2010: 16) in which he demonstrates how a drawing of a cell with a nucleus includes information about, e.g., size and location, that simply saying “the cell has a nucleus” does not.
No [written or spoken] text is an image. No text or visual representation means in all and only the same ways that text can mean. It is this essential incommensurability that enables genuine new meanings to be made from the combinations of modalities.
A good example of how visual and written text can be in tension is in Catalano and Waugh (2013b) in which the authors studied the way that CEOs are represented in crime reports. They found that while some of the text descriptions of the CEOs talked about their negative actions, the photographs included with the analysis showed them in high status clothing (e.g., suit and tie) with smiles and friendly faces, as opposed to standard ‘mug shots’ which are common practice for perpetrators of street crime. These mixed messages were crucial to MCDA because they were able to show how images can contribute subliminal messages that change the overall representation of a social actor and result in a less (or more) negative impression of what the person actually did (in this case, less negative in the case of the heinous crimes committed by CEOs that harmed many people). Bearing in mind the Catalano and Waugh (2013b) paper mentioned above and the body of work we have done in this area, we cannot imagine doing CDA/CDS without taking into account multimodality.
4.6.5 Multimodality, SocSem and Other Approaches
There are many different approaches to the field of multimodality, but not all of them intersect with the interests of CDA/CDS (Machin, 2013). Hence, while much CDA/CDS work has taken a multimodal turn, the field of multimodality in general has not taken a critical turn. That is, with the exception of MCDA (also often referred to as a social-semiotic approach to multimodality) , most approaches to multimodality are not critical, and focus on issues like rendering visible (i.e., evident) those “phenomena that we are unaware of as participants in an interaction” in the highly descriptive Conversation Analysis approach (Jewitt, Bezemer, & O’Halloran, 2016: 102) or “analysing the nature of the intersemiotic relations that are established and identifying the expansions of meaning that take place as semiotic choices are resemiotised”, in the SFL approach (Jewitt, Bezemer, & O’Halloran, 2016: 50, see also Sect. 2.3). Even some work claiming to take a social-semiotic approach to multimodality is not necessarily critical in the sense that it does not aim to reveal ideologies behind the different modes of communication analyzed.
According to Machin (2016), the current state of the field of multimodality is fragmented internally and externally, due to a variety of divergent core interests. For example, Jewitt (2011) divides current approaches to multimodal studies into three areas: SocSem multimodal analysis, multimodal DA , and multimodal interactional analysis. Jewitt, Bezemer, and O’Halloran (2016) list the same approaches, but with slightly different terminology (e.g., multimodal DA is called the ‘systemic functional linguistics’ approach), but they also add other approaches: Conversation Analysis, geo-semiotics (or discourses of place), multimodal ethnography, multimodal corpus analysis, and multimodal reception analysis (which combines eye-tracking methods with a focus on cognitive processes). Machin (2016) categorizes them slightly differently, positing that they range from those influenced by O’Toole’s The Language of Displayed Art (1994) and Halliday’s SFL (1978), which focus on how different modes communicate different meta-functions (O’Halloran, 2008), to those interested in multimodal metaphor and metonymy ( Catalano & Waugh, 2013b ), to sociolinguists who study interactional analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004; Norris, 2004) and focus on the way that language use in settings is part of the interplay of different semiotic resources and complex ‘multimodal ensembles’ (Norris, 2004), to those influenced by Kress and van Leeuwen’s Reading Images (1996, 2006) and Halliday (1978) and who emphasize situated meaning and the affordances of semiotic resources rather than the system itself. We would also argue that some of these approaches overlap with each other.
Machin (2016) contends that scholars engaged in MCDA need to look toward other disciplines and take seriously the work done in many other fields (e.g. visual studies and media and cultural studies) that have been analyzing these things for some time. At the same time, he emphasizes that more attention and care needs to be given to the kinds of tools and approaches that best fit the aims of CDA/CDS. In his view (2016: 332), “we must favor an approach which better locates the sign both as motivated and as having form, but also which roots it in ideology and how this shapes the way the world appears to us”. In this sense, he encourages more work that analyzes semiotic resources while paying attention to wider discourses and institutional processes and dynamics of hegemony that shape the choice to use them and “the way that political ideologies are infused into culture more widely” (Machin & van Leeuwen, 2016: 243). In our opinion, this is the key element that multimodality brings to CDA/CDS, because if we just looked at language or each mode separately, we would not get the full ideological picture in the larger discourse.
Machin and van Leeuwen (2016: 251) lay out very clearly what an MCDA of political discourse stemming from the ideas proposed above might look like. They demonstrate how it progresses by first focusing on “the signifier” (e.g., visual or audible evidence) and describing it, then focusing on “the signified, or meaning”, by showing the meaning potential and how it is actualized in the particular context under analysis (and whether it comes from experience or cultural provenance). The third stage then focuses on the wider significance of the semiotic resources, which requires analysts to draw on their “knowledge of language and other semiotic modes, a knowledge of culture and history, and a knowledge of sociological theory to help us understand the role of multimodal discourse in social life” (2016: 254). This type of MCDA updates SocSem analysis in a way that is suited to current times and also makes it relevant to important issues of political power, such as neoliberalism and the struggle against it, which, as we noted earlier, Fairclough and many others believe is one of the most important issues that CDA/CDS should be concerned with at the moment. Indeed, in the interest of modeling how scholars make their biases explicit, we would also like to say that we agree wholeheartedly with this assessment and the need for more CDA/CDS work in this domain.
Because of the multimodal turn, there are many recent examples of articles that take a SocSem/multimodal approach to CDA/CDS, and in fact, in the latest issues of Discourse and Society, Critical Discourse Studies , Social Semiotics , Journal of Language and Politics and other important journals in the field , multimodal analyses combined with other approaches appear to be more numerous than purely textual ones. For example, Special Issues in 2016 of both Discourse and Society (Vol 27, issue 3) and Journal of Language and Politics (Vol 15, issue 3) included many articles that involve multimodal CDA/CDS and new conceptualizations in the field because of it. A few good examples of other recent multimodal work (informed by SocSem) that take approaches which align well with CDA/CDS include Moran and Lee (2013), Roderick (2013, 2016, 2018), Ledin and Machin (2015), Oostendorp (2015), Strom (2015, 2016), Catalano and Gatti (2016), Catalano and Waugh (2017), Lirola (2016), McMurtrie and Murphy (2016), Monson, Donaghue, and Gill (2016), Pérez-Latorre, Oliva, and Besalú (2016), Lindsay and Lyons (2017), Way and Akan (2017), Veum and Moland Undrum (2018) , Wodak and Forchtner (2018a).
In addition, if readers are interested in a guide to MCDA that provides tools for this type of analysis and with a critical lens, Ledin and Machin’s recent book Doing Visual Analysis (2018) is highly recommended, since they emphasize the range of semiotic materials included when we talk about “visual communication” (2018: 3). In the book, they examine the packaging of shampoo bottles, pasta, and baby food, as well as smart phone design, spatial design (such as in classrooms) and data representation (and more), and they provide a guide/tool kit for the analysis of these different types of visual domains. They also introduce a theoretical model based on the idea of how the visual is used to accomplish a variety of different objectives. Moreover, they argue that because discourse and ideology are fused into everything we create and use and which both direct and afford social practices, a critical approach is needed in order to reveal these discourse and ideologies. They posit that tools from SocSem are particularly useful in helping CDA scholars answer research questions about the ways in which the meanings of visual (or other types of) communication reference other “well-trodden themes and established institutionalized uses” (Ledin & Machin, 2018: 191), as well as how ideology and power drive the way we look at the world, and help shape what we think and what we do. We agree with many who have been mentioned in this section that multimodality and visual analysis, etc. in relation to CDA/CDS have many important contributions to make and should be very generative of ideas and publications in the years to come.
4.7 Dispositive Analysis Approach (DPA)
Many who practice CDA/CDS (e.g., Wodak) recognize implicitly or explicitly the influence of Michel Foucault’s discourse theory on the field. From the beginning, Fairclough, for example, has invariably cited Foucault (see especially Fairclough, 1992, Chap. 2: “Michel Foucault and the analysis of discourse”: 37–61); but few actually apply Foucault’s work in DA —rather they “put Foucault’s perspective to work” (Courtine, 1981: 40; cited by Fairclough, 1992: 38). However, the Dispositive Analysis approach (DPA) is in essence, CDA/CDS based on Michel Foucault’s discourse theory (Jäger & Maier, 2009). At the heart of this theory are the issues of what knowledge is (and discourse, for that matter), how it arises and is passed on to others, what function it has for constituting subjects, and what impact it has on societal shaping and development ( Jäger & Maier, 2009: 34). The DPA (as described by Jäger & Maier, 2009) is oriented toward the cultural sciences and of all the approaches reviewed in this chapter, it is the least concerned with the structural/grammatical/linguistic features of a text (the micro level) and the most focused on the macro level, “large categories, identified with equally large chunks of often undeconstructed text ” (Threadgold, 2003: 11). “Discourse analysis and its extension, dispositive analysis, aim to identify the knowledges contained in discourses and dispositives, and how these knowledges are firmly connected to power relations in power/knowledge complexes” ( Jäger & Maier, 2009: 34–35).
Jürgen Link and his team are the scholars most closely associated with developing this approach (1982, 1983, 1988, 1992, 2008; Link & Link-Heer, 1990). Link, an emeritus professor of modern German literature and discourse theory at the University of Dortmund, is known for his theory of normalism/normativity, which he provided a sophisticated analysis of in (1997/2013). Drawing on Foucault’s concept of ‘dispositifs’ (the total of all social means through which normalities are produced), he theorizes what constitutes the ‘normal’, how it is in a constant state of flux, and what is regarded as normal vs. abnormal (Mihan, Haakenson, & Link, 2004). According to Link, a ‘discourse’ is defined as “an institutional way of talking that regulates and reinforces action and thereby exerts power” ( Link, 1983: 60; Jäger & Maier, 2009: 45). ‘Discourse’ in this approach can also be seen as the flow of all societal knowledge stored over time (Jäger, 1993, 1999), which determines individual and collective actions and exercises power, thus shaping society (Jäger & Maier, 2009); and ‘discourse strands’ exist at the level of concrete utterances located on the surface of texts ( Foucault, 2002). Both are different from a (single) text since “a discourse with its recurring contents, symbols and strategies, leads to the emergence and solidification of ‘knowledge’ and therefore has sustained effects” ( Jäger & Maier, 2009: 38). As to ‘power over discourse’, since discourses are supra-individual, they take on a life of their own as they evolve; and thus only groups that have power can effect changes in discourse, for example because they have access to the media or more wealth.
DPA serves as an important analytical strategy for some CDA/CDS practitioners, enabling them to examine the multiple and complex dimensions of power manifested in the dynamic relationship of discourses, actions, and objects (Andersen, 2003: 27; Caborn, 2007: 113; Jäger & Maier, 2009: 39–42). Analysts using this approach “look to statements not so much for what they say but what they do; that is, one questions what the constitutive or political effects of saying this instead of that might be?” (Graham, 2011: 667). Moreover, the dispositive contributes to DA /DS by insisting that analysis should move beyond the exclusive domain of language towards work on non-linguistic elements.
As Foucault explains, the dispositive is a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, ‘the unsaid’ as much as (or even more than) ‘the said’ (Foucault, 1980: 194). The dispositive is essentially the “net which can be woven” between the above-mentioned elements (Foucault, 1978: 119–120) the interplay of discursive practices (e.g., writing, thinking), non-discursive practices (sawing a tree, walking across the street) and manifestations and/or the materializations of these practices (e.g., constructing a building and/or the existence of a school building) and the relationship between all these elements ( Jäger & Maier, 2009: 39). It is an eclectic assemblage of language and material objects that attempts to show how forms are linked together as functional elements of an apparatus. This heterogeneity of elements is significant in Foucault’s analysis of discursive and non-discursive practices of a dispositive, the various elements of which are viewed not as mutually exclusive but as connected. Thus it is “not so much the individual elements that make […] up [a dispositive but] the particular arrangement and the relations between them” (Bussolini, 2010: 92), which are important because they arise in response to a particular need. When an urgent situation occurs, society responds by organizing text , talk, people, organizations, institutions, and materials together (Jäger and Maier, 2009: 42). When these various elements come together, that is, when they are connected with the purpose of addressing a crisis, the connections constitute the dispositive. While Foucault sees these elements as being somehow connected, he does not explicitly link discursive and non-discursive practices together and is rather vague about the ‘bond’ between them.
Turning to Leont’ev’s ‘activity theory’ (1978) in order to extend Foucault’s notion of the dispositive, Jäger and Maier (2009) make an explicit connection among discourses, actions, and objects. In activity theory, meaning is assigned to an object when a need arises, for which human action is employed in order to shape raw materials into purposeful objects used to fulfill that specific need. More precisely, “meaning is assigned to an object through work” ( Jäger & Maier, 2009: 43). Leontjev’s activity theory (1978), they point out, is significant because it explains human action as the “bond” that connects “subject and object, society and objective reality” (Jäger & Maier, 2009: 43). In this view, the dispositive is the connection between discursive practices (thinking and talking), non-discursive practices (human action), and materialization (objects produced by human action) together, all of which are based on knowledge that is transmitted through discourse. Discourse is seen as powerful because it transports knowledge, which is the basis of all thinking and talking, acting, and material objects. On the basis of knowledge, we not only ascribe meaning to objects but also conduct our actions around the meanings we ascribe to them. This means that the attribution of meaning always entails physical action. Human action is used to transform raw materials into objects, which retain their meaning insofar as the discourse sustains them.
The DPA approach can be seen in microcosm in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1979) and History of Sexuality (1978) as well as in Klemperer’s (1995) diaries. However, in these examples, the method is applied implicitly by “analyzing the discourses, assembling knowledge, consulting statistics, critically deconstructing them, drawing conclusions from them and so on” ( Jäger & Maier, 2009: 61). Thus, there is no explicit “how-to book” on DPA, but according to Jäger and Maier, there are books (and others cited below) that can be used to generate ideas as to how we can analyze discourse, action and the resulting materializations and/or manifestations in the future . They themselves provide “a little toolbox for discourse analysis” (Jäger & Maier, 2009: 52–56) which was updated in the 2016 version (Jäger & Maier, 2016: 127–134) and point the reader to Jäger’s (2004) methodological justification for each of the tools. Prior to this, Graham (2011) had attempted to remedy the lack of a model for Foucauldian DA by developing a DPA methodological plan that includes description, recognition and classification and provides clear examples for each. Scholars interested in DPA might find Graham’s article useful particularly for doing educational research and for tracing “the relationship between words and things: how the words we use to conceptualize and communicate end up producing the very ‘things’ or objects of which we speak ” (p. 668). There are a small number of studies (cited below) that use primarily this approach: Link (1992), Jäger (1993, 2004), Jäger (1996), Klemperer (1999–2001; according to Jäger & Maier, 2009: 60, this “can be read as a dispositive analysis”), Popkewitz and Lindblad (2000), Graham (2007), Jäger and Jäger (2007), Graham and Slee (2008), McGrath (2008). But only Rodriguez and Monreal (2017) was published recently (2017, i.e., since Jager & Maier, 2009; Graham, 2011). Thus, from our point of view, there is an unfortunate lack of specific examples using DPA (see the footnote below for more on this10), since its knowledge of and adherence to Foucault’s original ideas mean that it shows promise and deserves more attention in the context of CDA/CDS.
4.8 Corpus Linguistic Approach (CorpLingA)
A common critique of CDA/CDS approaches (see Sect. 5.4 for more details) has been that researchers often ‘cherry-pick’ data, i.e., choose only those data that match a preconceived point/argument they want to make ( Baker, 2012). The integration of CDA/CDS with corpus studies research has come about in response to this critique and also to related criticism that not only early CDA but also CDS has traditionally lacked quantitative and comparative methods (Machin & Mayr, 2012: 216). Thus the introduction of corpus techniques (largely taken from CorpLing) into CDA/CDS helps to address the problem of the representativeness of the samples of language analyzed and the need to check the hypotheses developed in qualitative analysis so that they are quantifiably verifiable. In addition, it allows analysts to work with a much larger amount of data than when using manual techniques.
CorpLingA uses computer support “to analyze authentic, and usually very large, volumes of textual data” ( Mautner, 2016: 155). Alongside reference corpora such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Corpus of Historical American English (Davies, 2010), some examples of this type of computer support include concordance software such as Alongside Wordsmith, Ant Conc freeware (Anthony, 2005, July), Concordance, TextStat, AdTat, and tools to create collocational networks that represent relationships visually such as GraphColl (see Baker & McEnery, 2015b). Stubbs (1996) and Baker (2006) each give an excellent introduction to CorpLing and also explore its value for DA . Charteris-Black’s work (2004, 2006), also cited in the next section on cognitive linguistics (since he does critical metaphor analysis), is based on a CorpLingA. In his books, he explains why a CorpLingA should be used in analyzing metaphor because of the importance of having a large and representative sample of language (that includes a wide range of texts). He also describes how CorpLing can be used to measure the frequency of metaphors.
Mautner’s chapter in Wodak and Krzyżanowski (2008) deals with the analysis of newspapers, magazines and other print media using CorpLing and contains an excellent discussion of how to combine both qualitative and quantitative methods and methodologies. She illustrates how to put together what some have called a ‘small corpus’, which is often what is used, given the qualitative nature of much CDA/CDS research. Based on Bauer and Aarts (2000: 31–34), she outlines a cyclical (rather than a random) method of sampling (Mautner, 2008: 35) or, alternatively, a top-down approach (2008: 36), leading to a “specialized, topic-oriented and diachronic corpus (see Baker, 2006: 26–29)”. She says that the use of these techniques balances subjective judgment with “rigour and choices exposed to critical scrutiny. The key correctives are transparency and accountability” ( Mautner, 2008: 37). She then lays out the components of an analytical toolkit, using traditional aspects of both CDA/CDS and CorpLing . For example, she suggests that the connotative meaning (evaluative load) of words, which CDA/CDS analysts often work with and is widely shared in a speech community ( Stubbs, 2001: 35), can easily be checked by taking a word like ‘undesirables’ and getting comparative evidence from a reference corpus, such as the British National Corpus or Wordbanks Online (both of which have many millions of words). With the types of software available to deal with very large corpora, it is relatively fast and easy to find out what the shared connotations are (Mautner, 2008: 45). In this way analysts can put their judgment of evaluation in perspective and make sure they don’t over- or under-interpret (O’Halloran & Coffin, 2004).
Mautner also suggests that the typical CorpLing technique of finding the collocations that a word normally occurs in, which gives it a “consistent aura of meaning” or “semantic prosody” (Louw, 1993: 175), can be used in CDA/CDS. For example, for an expression like ‘rampant immigration’, the researcher can use the British sections of Wordbanks Online and find that, for ‘rampant’, the aura is consistently negative, given the types of words it typically is used with (e.g., ‘commercialism’, ‘consumerism’, ‘materialism’, ‘corruption’, ‘inflation’ ( Mautner, 2008: 45). She further points out that an expression such as ‘ethnic diversity’, which is an example of “nodes around which ideological battles are fought” (Stubbs, 2001: 188; see also Mautner, 2008: 46), and thus are of interest to CDA/CDS, can be either positive or negative, depending on who uses it and in what textual and political contexts. This necessitates going backwards and forwards in the text in order to check “the dynamism of meaning-making as the text proceeds” (O’Halloran & Coffin, 2004: 85), not only other words and expressions used in the text but also images, thereby incorporating MCDA as well. In the same way, Mautner’s (2010) book Language and the Market Society incorporates CDA/CDS and CorpLing to examine the marketization of language in various aspects of society. Mautner’s revised chapter in Wodak and Meyer (2016a) includes an excellent (updated) discussion of the potential contributions of CorpLing to CDA/CDS as well as different perspectives and therefore contributes to methodological triangulation ( McEnery & Hardie, 2012: 233); it also helps to reduce researcher bias, which has consistently been a strong issue in CDA/CDS. And finally, the combination of quantitative and qualitative perspectives on textual data allows for the detailed examination of “collocational environments” (a.k.a. co-textual contexts) as well as the ability to see patterns in the discourse ( Mautner, 2016: 156).
Mautner (2016: 174–176) also provides a detailed discussion of epistemological issues and warnings regarding this approach. In particular, she notes that evidence may be laid out by corpus software, but it “never speaks for itself” (2016: 174). Hence, human analysts (not computer software) must be the ones to make the connections. Furthermore, she points to the importance of working out an item’s social significance, being careful not to draw over-encompassing conclusions, remembering that corpora are not the only tools for observing language use, and remaining flexible and transdisciplinary. She also argues that analysts must recognize that corpus evidence is not superior to manual or qualitative procedures, but complementary, and that statements about the presence, absence or frequency of an item in one data set only make sense in comparison with others. Additionally, we need to clarify whether our software tools provide quantitative or qualitative data and avoid making “pseudo-quantitative statements” such as ‘some’, ‘most’, ‘the majority’, etc. when actual quantification did not occur, because in quantitative data, “you either count or you don’t: there is no legitimate half-way house” (Mautner, 2016: 176). Finally, she reminds analysts that corpus linguistic techniques cannot make up for flawed designs or samples.
This is why I would argue that any analytical tools and methods that are rigorous and grounded in scientific principles such as representativeness, falsification, data-driven approaches, using statistical approaches to test hypotheses and a desire to provide a full picture of representation (not just the negative cases) can only serve to help to improve CDA’s standing, ultimately making its findings more influential (2012: 255).
Taking the reader step by step through his analysis of the representation of Islam and
Muslims in the British press, Baker (2012) shows how corpus-driven procedures determined that Muslims tended to be linked to the concept of extreme belief much more than moderate or strong belief. However, he then methodically presents the problems and different choices he had to make as an analyst in interpreting this data. This leads him to conclude that no matter how much quantitative analysis and use of statistics we apply, they are still subject to human bias. Hence (not unlike Mautner’s warnings), he posits that we should be careful not to overstate the ability of CorpLing to reduce researcher bias. He suggests increased researcher reflexivity as one way to address this problem (see Chap. 5).
In their edited volume entitled Corpora and discourse studies : Integrating discourse and corpora (2015a), Baker and McEnery bring together studies that utilize CorpLing in DA /DS (including different text-types and different types of DA /DS , not just CDA/CDS). In their own chapter, the authors examine discourse on Twitter regarding people who receive government support (referred to as ‘benefits’) in the UK between the years 2008–2009 and 2011–2012. Using CorpLing , they found that the discourse around benefits in 2012 was less sympathetic and told more negative stories both at the individual level and on the level of the wider society, representing the previous government as soft, open to abuse, and in need of reform.
techniques from corpus linguistics such as keyword or collocation analysis are particularly helpful in supporting generalisations about discourse, both in the form of how words or phrases might be used generally as well as how characteristic of a set of texts a particular usage of a word or phrase is ( Subtirelu & Baker, 2018: 118).
In addition, they show how technology in corpus approaches can assist in making more credible interpretations about salient patterns in large amounts of data that might have been overlooked otherwise. We recommend this chapter to anyone interested in the development of the field, learning about new technologies in corpus approaches such as GraphColl (which can create instant collocational networks to give a visual representation of relationships, including those between concepts), and how CorpLing can be integrated into CDA. For those readers interested in the digital humanities (i.e., applying computational tools and methods to disciplines such as literature, history, and philosophy), Kieran O’Halloran’s (2017) book on corpora and digitally-driven critical analysis lays out a clear methodology for using a corpus approach to CDA in the context of digital humanities. The book goes into detail on how to use corpus tools as a way of examining arguments in the public sphere, and provides convincing arguments as to why corpus tools are useful in CDA/CDS.
Some other examples of corpus approaches include Kim’s (2014) study that investigates the way in which North Korea is constructed in the US media by analyzing collocational patterns, and Partington (2014), who looks at the role of a corpus approach in evaluating why certain terms are absent from corpora. Rheindorf (2018) provides a useful model for integrating quantitative and qualitative analysis in CDA/CDS scholarship; he is continuing to publish much more in this area, particularly on how to use a DHA perspective while combining corpus and qualitative methods. Additionally, see Bednarek and Caple (2014), Brindle (2016), Jeffries and Walker (2017), O’Halloran (2012), Pérez-Paredes, Jiménez, and Hernández (2017), Potts (2013), Potts, Bednarek, and Caple (2015), and Wilson and Krizsán (2017).
Although above we have stated the way in which corpus approaches have addressed shortcomings in CDA/CDS scholarship, we would like to stress that because of the ever-present need to take context into consideration, we believe it is important for CDA/CDS scholars doing corpus approaches to always return to context , which sometimes means having a small corpus and/or going through the data manually and taking the time to look at it in terms of how linguistic elements have different meanings in different contexts.
4.9 Cognitive Linguistic Approaches (CogLingA)
4.9.1 Introduction
Increasingly, cognitive linguistics12 (CogLing ) has influenced and been influenced by the field of CDA/CDS in multiple and varying ways, many of which are discussed in Hart and Lukeš (2007a, 2007b), as well as more recent work such as Hart (2011a, 2011b) and Hart and Cap (2014a) . A number of approaches to CDA/CDS incorporate a CogLing lens and theories and they address the analysis of discourse differently. Oswald (2014: 98) refers to this as the “cognitive turn” and like other scholars in this area, he finds a natural and complementary nexus between the two perspectives.
- (i)
to model the conceptual structures invoked by language;
- (ii)
to disclose the ideological qualities and legitimating potentials which conceptual structures, may carry.
CogLing approaches focus on “interpretation-stage analysis” (Fairclough, 1995: 59), which is concerned with how readers/viewers construct meaning (Hart, 2018a: 78). No other mainstream approaches besides CogLing commonly use cognitive theories of language (Hart, 2010), although other approaches, such as van Dijk (van Dijk, 1985, 1988, 1993a, 1993b, 1995a; see Sect. 4.4) attend to cognition (from a social psychological approach, as social cognition ). Some CDA/CDS scholars (such as Wodak) have noted that in the past, CogLingA have been largely excluded from CDS for unjustifiable reasons (Wodak, 2006), and Chilton (2005a, 2005b), a cognitive linguist, has argued that CogLing theories have been underused in CDA/CDS and have not received enough attention in the literature. Recently, scholars have begun to counter the critique (Widdowson, 2004) that CDA/CDS lacks a systematic linguistic analysis, or, as noted earlier, that SFL is inadequate for its needs (van Dijk, 2008a), and there has been an increasing focus on the possibilities that a CDA/CDS and CogLing combination allows in analysis. Adding to this, Jeffries (2010: 128) notes that the use of CogLing theories could help us to understand the mechanisms by which ideological influence operates (a point also made by van Dijk). Scholars such as Chilton (2005a), Hart (2010, 2011a, 2018a, 2018b), Hart and Cap (2014b), Koller (2005), Musolff (2012, 2014), and Wodak (2006) have been some of the most outspoken advocates for this combination, especially CDA/CDS and metaphor analysis, although Hart and Cap (2014a, 2014b) and Hart (2018a, 2018b) (to be discussed below) reveal many more areas where CogLing and its theories are compatible with CDA/CDS13.
While Paul Chilton is often cited as one of the founders of CDA/CDS, he has never explicitly applied the term CDA or CDS to his own work on the discourse of politics and international relations (cf. Chilton, 1994a, 1996b, 2004, 2005a, 2005b; Chilton & Lakoff, 1995) . He has participated in work with CDA/CDS scholars like Wodak, albeit typically as a critic of CDA (Chilton & Wodak, 2007; Wodak & Chilton, 2007). Chilton has more recently (like Hart, 2010) drawn on cognitive evolutionary psychology to ask whether there might exist an innate ‘critical instinct’ and if so, what the role of CDA/CDS is (Chilton, 2005a), a position that has been challenged by other CDA/CDS researchers (Fairclough, 2009; van Dijk, 2006/2011; Wodak, 2007). Chilton’s argument is that the most fundamental issue is whether societies provide the freedom to enable the ‘critical instinct’ to operate (Wodak & Meyer, 2009a: 14). His CDA-type work (i.e., Chilton, 2007) could be described as “comparative discourse analysis that crosses linguistic, cultural and political boundaries” (Wodak & Meyer, 2009a: 14) and is largely concerned with universal aspects of language and the human mind, integrating CogLing into CDA/CDS and attempting to address his own critiques about CDA/CDS work.
Chilton’s most recent work, with the exception of a 2016 Chinese translation of Wodak and Chilton (2007), focuses more on concepts in CogLing, and less on CDA/CDS. For example, his book, Language, Space and Mind: The Conceptual Geometry of Linguistic Meaning (2014) examines the geometric elements used to describe concrete spatial expressions and cognitions. The book lays out in detail ‘Deictic Space Theory’ (developed from Chilton’s earlier model of 2004, ‘Discourse Space Theory’) which is rooted in embodied geometry and has underpinnings related to neuroscience. The theory proposes a three-dimensional conceptual space that integrates different types of distance (i.e., attentional distance, temporal distance and epistemic distance) that allow for the unification of numerous linguistic-conceptual phenomena such as tense, aspect and modality. Nothing in the book’s description mentions CDA/CDS or an application of this work to CDA/CDS.
4.9.2 Critical Metaphor and Metonymy Analysis
There has been an increasing trend of integrating critical metaphor research into CDA (and often incorporating corpus approaches as well) which has been highly successful and numerous publications have occurred since Charteris-Black first introduced the term ‘critical metaphor analysis’ in 2004 (he also argued for ‘corpus approaches’ to critical metaphor analysis as noted in 4.8 and combined them both in his work). In the case of Charteris-Black, while he recognizes the value of the cognitive approach to metaphor because it explains the “correspondence between otherwise irreconcilable domains by accessing the semantics of metaphor” (2004: 17), he feels that it doesn’t account for individual speaker meaning. For that, he says that a pragmatic view of metaphor is needed, since speakers use metaphor with the goal of ‘persuasion’ (and thus he aligns his work on metaphor with rhetoric) and this means that metaphor choice is motivated by ideology (2004: 247)14. He argues that ‘cognitive semantics’ can explain how metaphors are understood, but a pragmatic perspective can explain why a particular metaphor is chosen and what purpose it serves in a given discourse context (we will discuss pragmatics in Sect. 6.9). In the end, he argues for a combination of a cognitive and a pragmatic approach to metaphor (and cites also Forceville, 1996: 35, who shares this point of view), and also, ultimately, a view of metaphor based on “the interrelatedness of linguistic, cognitive, pragmatic, cultural, ideological and historical factors” (Charteris-Black, 2004: 251; see also 2006), in which he uses cognitive semantics.
He carried this theme further in a series of books: (Charteris-Black, 2005/2011, revised and updated 2nd edition) focuses on rhetoric (and rhetorical schemes and strategies), the persuasive power of metaphors (and the myths they create), and ideology and political discourse, a detailed analysis of the speeches of several different British and American politicians; he develops this further in discussing the ‘design’ of leadership style (2007); he looks at metaphor and gender in British Parliamentary debates (2009); he encompasses various approaches to rhetoric, critical approaches to discourse (with special focus on Wodak’s DHA), critical metaphor analysis (with attention to social cognition as in van Dijk’s work) (2014)—and discusses various ‘case studies’ (e.g., speeches of British and American politicians); he wrote on ‘fire metaphors’ (and metonyms)—the discourse of ‘awe and authority’, language (lexical semantics, corpora and collocates), conceptual metaphor theory and thought—and more specifically it discusses a variety of religious and political discourses, including in visual media (British political cartoons) (2017). He also co-authored a book on gender and the language of illness ( Charteris-Black & Seale, 2010) which combines his approach with a sociological one.
Some examples of other publications featuring CogLing (and spanning disciplines) include Chilton (1994a, 1994b, 1996a, 1996b), Chilton and Lakoff (1995) , Santa Ana (1999, 2002, 2013), El Refaie (2001), Koller (2004, 2005), Musolff (2004, 2006, 2007, 2010, 2016), Goatly (2007), Maalej (2007), and Nordensvard (2013). In addition, in the Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language (2017) edited by Semino and Demjén, Musolff (2017b) has a chapter on metaphor and persuasion in politics incorporating CogLing , and Hidalgo-Downing and Kraljevic-Mujic (2017) address persuasion in commercial advertising, both of which specifically mention CDA/CDS (but neither of them say specifically that they use CogLing ).
Another important scholar who has established himself as a leader in this area is Andreas Musolff (also cited above) who, focusing mainly on metaphor analysis15 (2012: 303), underscores its importance in unmasking racist ideology in discourse, pointing out “the argumentative advantage that metaphor gives its users when they want to dis-qualify political developments, social groups or even individuals as threatening the identity or continued existence of a nation state” and thus metaphor’s relevance to CDA/CDS. Moreover, he demonstrates the usefulness of critical metaphor theories as a fundamental means of concept and argument-building, incorporating a modified cognitive approach informed by Relevance Theory (which provides a framework for explaining influence through the analysis of information-processing mechanisms, see Oswald, 2014) within CDA/CDS (Musolff, 2012: 303). Musolff also shows how critical metaphor analysis can align nicely with DHA. In Musolff (2014) he compares the metaphors used during particular political periods in order to help readers understand their danger when seen through a historical lens, such as the current re-surfacing of particular metaphors commonly used during Nazi times. Additionally, in his book Political Metaphor Analysis (2016), he integrates critical metaphor analysis with DHA and CorpLingA and demonstrates how using corpuses (corpora) at different points in time can reveal the origins of “metaphor scenarios16” that draw on past historical contexts and utilize them in current contexts. One point of focus is the metaphor JEWS ARE PARASITES. Reviewing documents such as Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1933) (and going back much further in time) Musolff traces the origins of this metaphor and then follows it into modern times as it is used to stigmatize individuals. Another important revelation in Musolff’s book is arrived at by using experiments in which students write their interpretations of the metaphor NATIONS AS PERSONS17. Through initial data collection in which students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds gave their interpretation of the way in which ‘nation’ can be described in terms of the human body (Musolff, 2016: 120), he found (2016: 129) that (as opposed to Lakoff & Johnson’s, 1980 claims) “metaphor understanding and interpretation is at least as variable as metaphor use and production”. Musolff then concludes, somewhat controversially, that because his findings show that hearers/readers vary greatly in their metaphor interpretations and creatively de- and reconstruct metaphors to fit new scenario versions, the idea of a naïve hearer/reader who understands and automatically accepts the ideological bias of political metaphors is no longer viable. Thus, we cannot absolve readers/hearers of dangerous metaphors “of their responsibility for letting themselves be manipulated” (2016: 131). For example, when people hear others call social groups ‘parasites’, we cannot let the notion of a naïve hearer/reader who is manipulated by metaphor “become a convenient excuse” for inaction and refusal to denounce racist discourse (Musolff, 2016: 131). Musolff does caution, though, that these conclusions are based on limited research, and much more needs to be done in order to truly gain evidence for this claim.
More recently, Musolff has begun to focus on hate speech (e.g., Musolff, 2017a, 2018). His forthcoming article (pre-publication draft) in Pragmatics & Society illustrates the strategic use of figurative language in self-legitimizing discourse which enables hate speakers to convey their message while denying that it is discriminatory or racist. This then makes it difficult to prosecute them for hate speech. Musolff argues for the presentation of sophisticated counter-narratives that undermine the implicit speech utilized by hate speakers so as to beat them at their own game ( Musolff, 2018 draft; 2019). Finally, Musolff has also moved into MCDA, with a multimodal critical metonymy/metaphor analysis of online news sources that report on unaccompanied youths from Central America and Border Patrol/immigration officials in the US ( Catalano & Musolff, 2018 draft; 2019). Findings from this study reveal verbal and visual metonymies that dehumanize and criminalize child migrants while Border Patrol/immigration enforcement discourse creates WAR/WILD WEST metaphors that justify the militarization of the border. The article also shows how revealing underlying conceptualizations of migrants by immigration and border control agencies helps readers understand the social imaginary which allows the government to garner public support for unjust policies and treatment of migrants (with particular focus on the Trump administration).
It is also worth noting that metaphorical discourse can be found in visual (and other) data, and MCDA of metaphorical discourse has been also conducted by scholars such as El Rafaie (2003), Forceville and Urios-Aparisi (2009), Bounegru and Forceville (2011), Forceville (2014a, 2014b), and Tseronis and Forceville (2017). As can be seen, Charles Forceville (who works on gesture, among other domains) has been a leader in this area, and his work (especially with Urios-Aparisi, 2009) is frequently cited in studies that examine multimodal metaphor, regardless of whether or not it is also combined with CDA/CDS.
Critical metonymy analysis has recently taken an equal place with metaphor in the integration of CogLing into CDA and several publications that feature analysis of metonymy (uniquely or in addition to metaphor) have emerged in the last few years, including MCDA of metonymy (Meadows, 2007; Portero-Muñoz, 2011; Riad & Vaara, 2011; Velázquez, 2013; Catalano & Moeller, 2013; Catalano & Waugh, 2013a, 2013b, 2017). These types of analyses (like those concerned with metaphor) expose the use of metonymy as a tool of persuasion and manipulation and add more depth, resulting in a more detailed and systematic analysis.
4.9.3 Hart’s Approaches to CogLing
Although much work has been done in CogLing with critical metaphor/metonymy analysis, Hart (2010, 2011a; Hart & Lukeš, 2007a, 2007b) believes that CogLing (2016: 336) has much more to offer CDA analysts. One major contribution that he has discussed (Hart, 2011a) that has not been fully utilized is the new perspective it can offer on objects of analysis such as the use of a passive sentence without the agent, which could be analyzed/interpreted through cognitive linguistic notions such as profiling/backgrounding (Croft & Cruse, 2004) and metonymy ( Reisigl & Wodak, 2001). In addition, Hart believes that Talmy’s theory of Force-Dynamics (Talmy, 1988, 2000), which refers to how entities react with respect to force, is useful in understanding and explaining our “conceptualisations of physical interactions but also, by metaphorical extension, social, psychological, political, legal and linguistic interactions”, particularly in discourse related to immigration (Hart, 2011b: 273). Besides force-dynamics, Hart also encourages the use of other CogLing concepts, such as mental spaces ( Fauconnier, 1994, 1997), conceptual blending (Fauconnier & Turner, 1996, 2002) and cognitive grammar (Langacker, 1987, 1991, 2002, 2008) (as cited in Hart, 2010: 25).
In their book, Hart and Cap (2014a) first categorized CogLing approaches into four distinct groups: ‘critical metaphor analysis’ (e.g., unmasking ideology in discourse), ‘critical cognitive pragmatic approach ’ (e.g., how language users try to influence their addressees or audience), ‘legitimization-proximization model’ (e.g., concerned with how speakers help legitimize their actions by showing that an external threat is encroaching on the addressee), and ‘cognitive linguistic approach’ (described above, including visual grammar). However, in (2018a, 2018b), Hart simplifies this classification and refers to all the different approaches as CogLing .
Since the publication of his 2010 book, Hart has produced a large body of work that continues to expand the applications of CogLing to the CDA/CDS realm (see Hart, 2011a, 2011b, 2014, 2015 2016, 2018a, 2018b). As we mentioned earlier, Hart (2011a) discusses how CogLing can inform CDA in so many ways other than just metaphor analysis, mainly due to the way it can explicitly address conceptualization, which CDA had taken for granted. Hart develops these concepts even further in (Hart and Cap 2014a, 2014b), adapting the vocabulary of film studies as a metaphor for the way the brain performs these construal operations.
In their introductory article to a Special Issue of Discourse & Society dedicated to “moving beyond foundations” Krzyżanowski and Forchtner (2016: 259) view Hart’s work on CogLing (along with others) as “indispensable input in the debate which concerns the need for empirical analysis that is oriented toward language-in-use”, and also as “theoretically well-informed and conceptually rich”. They also point out that “Hart presents an argument from cognitive linguistics which suggests that understanding language involves the construction of multimodal mental representations, the properties of which can be approached within frameworks of multimodal social semiotics and the wider multimodal CDS” (2016: 259). In Hart’s view, we should use CogLing to “illuminate the nuances of meanings communicated via language” (Hart, 2016: 345). Furthermore, he calls for a change in direction of influence from linguistic forms of DA influencing non-linguistic forms to the other way around (or at least a bi-directional influence). Here, he further develops the concept of ‘point of view’, including visual examples from The Guardian and The Telegraph in the UK and how each newspaper presented the same event of a political protest in different ways depending on the perspective that was featured. What is innovative about this work is the way in which Hart shows how visual grammar (such as whether a person appears on the left or right of the visual frame) can be analyzed from the perspective of the viewer, and how this can work together with verbal discourse from the perspective of ‘point of view’, in particular, anchor, angle and distance ( Hart, 2015; drawing on ideas in Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996, 2006 and others). Hart demonstrates how in conceptualizing visual images, viewers tend to sympathize more with those positioned on the right. This is based on the idea (Casasanto, 2009) that people tend to associate rightward space with positive ideas, and leftward space with negative ones (and left for old information and right for new information, Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). The reason for this is that most people are right-hand dominant, which means they can manipulate objects that are located to the right of the body better,18 which helps in the analysis of how pictures act as co-text.
What is noteworthy in this perspective is the way in which literal language uses as well as non-literal/figurative ones (e.g., metaphor) can actually be felt or visually imagined by those experiencing them verbally. For an example of this, Hart cites research that describes how when a reader comes across the metaphor IMMIGRATION IS A FLOOD, it can result in feelings of drowning because it involves a “simulation of events which are technically impossible but are imagined as if they were real” (Hart, 2016: 347). According to him, the most important thing to take away from multimodal studies that incorporate CogLing such as his own is the way in which they “illuminate some of the subtle ways in which language contributes to the social construction of knowledge and values” (Hart, 2016: 346), which is particularly important given the increasingly visual practices of news communication.
Hart’s work on CogLing has continued to progress. In 2018, he published two chapters in two different handbooks which demonstrate his evolving ideas in CogLing (Hart, 2018a, 2018b). In both chapters, instead of dividing up the sub-categories into four types, as above, he simplifies them in three over-arching categories: ‘image schema analysis ’ (e.g., a fundamental way of helping us understand the way the world works), ‘metaphor analysis’ (see Sect. 4.9.2, but it also includes multimodality), and ‘discourse world analysis’ (e.g., how meaning is construed in discourse beyond the sentence). However, this area of CogLing is clearly in flux at the time (Feb. 2018) of this writing, and is sure to change and develop more in the future (we note that Hart has announced a new book). We hope to see more development in multimodal work in this area, particularly in terms of using multimodal cognitive types of analysis as tools of resistance. We believe that because of the way that image/video can reach viewers on an emotional level, it is particularly powerful when combined with written text and other modes; hence, it is essential that scholars in this area use CDA/CDS tools to uncover the ideologies hidden in these types of texts.
Having finished our discussion of the major approaches to CDA/CDS, in the next chapter we will examine the large body of research that has critiqued CDA/CDS and ways in which more recent work in CDA/CDS attempts to address these concerns. In doing so, we will illustrate the ability of CDA/CDS scholars to be reflexive and thoughtful about their work.