Lecture 4

Wednesday, 27 September 2023 2:37 pm

Critical:
- Understand, expose and ultimately challenge social inequality
- Looking at why particular people and groups have more power than
others
- We are not trying to be neutral; we are interrogating what is normal and
traditional
Coercion: power being used to force people to say, do, think something
Consent: power being used to 'make you think you want to do something'
(Mooney and Evans, 2019, p.17)
Reclamation/ reappropriation: 'taking the power back'
- Less powerful people adopting labels that have often be used to derogate
them e.g. slut, queer, crazy, mad, psycho
How might reclaiming these terms be related to power
- Resistance, in group solidarity, empowering themselves
Discourse contains biased versions of reality

Different approaches in CDA: focus on social vs on cognitive issues and

emphasis on social change

Language and pronoun choices of trump supporters use on the topic of

immigrant and how they construct ethnic minority
- The people from …, I see it, they are…. I vs Them, white and the black, their
strategy-> ulterior, hidden motive, illegal, white supremacy, 'I'd like to
help them', 'shot them all'-> gun violence
- We are not emotionless-> try to portray themselves as rational and
trustable

Passive voice vs active voice example

- In New Zealand, a husband beats his wife every half an hour (power and
responsibility is placed in the man)
- A wife is beaten by her husband every half hour (victimises the woman
and removes the responsibility from the husband)
- Woman suffer domestic violence every day

Assertions/ statements vs questions-> show differences in knowledge status

Fairclough's model of CDA

Description (text analysis), interpretation (progressing analysis) and
explanation (social analysis)

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explanation (social analysis)

- Level 1: sociocultural practice

○ what are the sociocultural factors that shape the language and how
we understand it
○ Tying everything to the sociocultural level (macro)
- Level 2: discourse practice
○ How was the text produced or created
○ How it is received, read, interpreted and used by human subjects
▪ Who selects what is chosen; how is the news media represented
- Level 3: the text itself
○ The linguistic structures present in the text
▪ Sentences, word choice, body positioning, colour choice

Gee's method
Little discourse vs big discourse
- Prosody: how words are spoken
- Cohesion: how are the different utterances are sentences 'connected to
each other'
- Discourse organisation: how are the different sentences connect to each
other to bring out the theme or the lines of argumentation
- Contextualisation signals: the different ways that aspects of texts
production are indicated, meaning depends on context
- Thematic organisation: the ways in which themes are signalled and
developed

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