Book reviews

479

Norman Fairclough, Language and Power Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2015; x + 264 pp.,
US$160.00 (hbk).

Reviewed by: Fábio Alexandre Silva Bezerra, Department of Modern Foreign Languages,
Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Brazil

In its third edition, marking the 25th anniversary of the first, this now classic work by
Norman Fairclough mainly discusses the role of discourse in the maintenance and/or
change of power relations in society, thus being indispensable reading for those interested
in the field of critical discourse analysis (CDA). CDA has become a well-established area
of inquiry dealing with how language and society are inextricably linked, spanning a
range of disciplines beyond linguistics, such as cultural studies, gender studies and media
studies, in which context the present work has played a central role in the past 25 years.
The previous edition (2001) brought a new final chapter dealing with language and
globalization, with considerations about some changes in society since the publication of
the first edition (1989), focusing on the idea of the global impacting on the local, and
vice-versa, while also shedding light on the significance of the Internet in that process.
In this new edition, Fairclough adds a whole new Introduction while the other chapters
remain essentially the same.
The new Introduction mainly discusses the development of Fairclough’s version of
CDA, which represents a significant change from the goal of this chapter in the first two
editions. The previous text did not presuppose knowledge of CDA from readers, which,
in my experience, has always proven valuable when introducing the discussion of lan-
guage and power with undergraduate students. However, there is also gain in that the
new Introduction systematizes and summarizes the main features behind the theorization
and applied work in CDA to date. The issue is that by presupposing knowledge of CDA,
it seems to defeat the purpose of the first pages in a book that still hope to be used as
introductory text in CDA. Therefore, this revised edition could have kept the previous
Introduction and added a new chapter with the discussion of the main features of CDA
and how they embody Fairclough’s present version of CDA.
Chapter 2 outlines the position that language is socially conditioned and also influ-
ences its social context. This concept is developed in Chapters 3 and 4, which deal with
how language can be used to exert power and how it is implicated with ideological mean-
ings. In Chapter 3, discourse is described as a place where actual relations of power are
construed (power in discourse), and social orders are claimed to be ingrained with power
(power behind discourse). Additionally, Fairclough contends that such power is a con-
stant site of social struggle. Chapter 4 focuses on the construal of common sense as a tool
to sustain relations of power. We are reminded that it is precisely when an ideology
becomes commonsensical that it is truly powerful, since its workings are disguised. In
order to tackle this issue, Fairclough presents insightful ways in which ideologies can be
foregrounded and challenged.
Chapters 5 and 6 bring what is arguably the main contribution of this work: Fairclough’s
framework of analysis with procedures in complementary dimensions – (a) description of
textual features, (b) interpretation of discourse and attending interactional aspects and
(c) explanation of the relations between text, interaction and social context. Chapter 5
presents ways in which textual features (e.g. vocabulary and grammar) can be described.

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480 Discourse Studies 18(4)

Fairclough provides a set of questions to guide such analysis, which has proven quite
useful in my classroom experience, since turning theoretical concepts into more objective
questions can be quite challenging. Chapter 6 addresses the other two dimensions. When
interpreting, Fairclough tackles the mediation between text and social context by reveal-
ing the discourse processes of text production. Then, the relations between such discourses
and the social context are explained by connecting the commonsensical assumptions
underlying them and the social struggle and power relations at play.
Chapter 7 shows a practical example of how these analytical dimensions may eluci-
date the discursive construal of political ideologies and identities by addressing the pro-
cess of text production. This analysis is certainly beneficial to the reader; however, in
discussing the process, Fairclough makes a claim that needs to be questioned. Explaining
how the text producer’s position may be problematized, he states that ‘mixed-sex inter-
action is widely problematic these days because of the increasingly contested relative
social positions of women and men’ (p. 178). Although there is a connection between
social relations and text production, the example used does not seem to hold true today,
since these social positions have undergone dramatic changes over the past 25 years. One
cannot rely on the sex divide to make claims about language use when the focus should
be on gender performance and its impermanence and instability. In other words, gender
does not lend itself to overgeneralizations about how relations between any two people
may influence text production and interpretation. Such criticism is further justified when
we see that Fairclough shows concern for the discussion of how discourse is related to
social change (Chapter 8) but focuses on consumerism and state bureaucracy in contem-
porary capitalism, thus leaving out other issues such as the development in the under-
standing of gender relations. Although this limitation is somewhat acknowledged by
Fairclough (p. 225), it assumes relevance vis-à-vis such conceptual oversight.
The final chapter would also have profited from the discussion of more current issues,
especially seeing that the theme of globalization has informed most of Fairclough’s
recent work in CDA. However, the text is still rather relevant as ‘a resource for struggle
against domination’ (p. 252), especially when taking into account the need for critical
language education (Chapter 9) in a world that is ever-changing, thus requiring the
awareness of the power relations being construed and the role language use has in this
oftentimes challenging context.

Helmut Gruber and Gisela Redeker (eds), The Pragmatics of Discourse Coherence: Theories and
Applications, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2014; vii + 295 pp., £83.00 (hbk).

Reviewed by: Chengjiao Sun, Centre for the Study of Language and Cognition, Zhejiang University,
P.R. China

With vigorous efforts from a wide variety of disciplines (e.g. linguistics, multimodal
semiotics, psychology and communication), substantial progress has been achieved over
the past few decades in the study of discourse, particularly in how it is connected and
structured, for instance, by means of linguistic cohesion and prosodic chunking.
Naturally, coherence research is assuming an increasingly important role in pragmatics
and attracting growing academic attention. Hence this volume of contributions on theo-
ries and applications in current coherence research is committed to reflecting the state of

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