Critical Discourse AnalysisFairclough’s Genre/Discourse/Styles framework. Intertextuality and Assumption

1LX661 – Analysing Discourse

How is CDA done?

1. Starts with a ‘social problem’

2. Identifies the discursive dimension to the problem (i.e. identify relevant texts)

3. Analyses those texts showing the workings of power

4. Show how discourse is implicated in systems of power

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SFL Framework (Halliday)

The textual metafunction – Questions of how the discourse ‘hangs together’ into a coherent whole.What holds the discourse together? How is cohesion accomplished?

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The interpersonal metafunction – Questions of attitude, stance and how the discourse sets up identities for ‘speaker’ and ‘hearer’.

What are the speaker’s attitudes and stances?

Ideational metafunction – Questions of participants, processes and circumstances

Who’s involved? Who’s doing what to whom and how?

CDA framework (Fairclough)

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Styles - ways of being in discourse

How does the discourse set up speaker and listener identities?

Genres - ways of acting and interacting in discourse

Through what forms of language are participants acting and interacting?

What relations between participants are set up through these forms?

Discourses - ways of representing in discourse

How does the discourse represent the external world?

i.e. How does the discourse refer to participants, processes, circumstances?

Example text analysis

Oct 2010

WW1 – recruitment posters

David Cameron yesterday called on everyone in Britain to help him pull the nation out of economic gloom.

Quoting Lord Kitchener’s World War One poster, below, The PM, left with wife Samantha, said “Your country needs you”

He told the Tory conference his vision was to make the UK great again.

Intertextuality

3. Intertextuality highlights the connections, assumptions and multi-vocality of discourse

4. What other texts and voices are incorporated into this text? How are they incorporated? What other texts and voices are excluded from this text? What is this text assuming already to be true?

1. A recognition that no text exists independently of other texts

2. Texts relate to other texts in complex ways

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)

Assumption

• “a measure of the successful universalization of a particular representation is the extent to which it figures as a background assumption in a wide variety of texts” (Fairclough 2003: 46)What is the ‘background assumption’ here?

To what extent does this news item contribute to the ‘universalization’ (and therefore naturalisation) of the idea of ‘the ground zero mosque’?

Assumption• Explicit – “Next week, Margaret Thatcher celebrates her 85th

birthday. She’ll be doing it in Downing Street and I know everyone in this hall will want to wish her well.”

• Implicit: not explicitly flagged or ‘triggered’ as an assumption - “Remember what they said about us? They called us a dead parrot. They said we had ceased to be. That we were an ex-party. Turns out we really were only resting.”

Examples from David Cameron’s speech to the Tory Party conference 6.10.10

Types of assumption• Existential assumptions: assumptions

about what exists - ”But first let’s remember where we’ve come from. Three defeats.

Thirteen party conferences. 4757 days in the wilderness.”

• Propositional assumptions: assumptions about facts - “And it is impossible to pay tribute to previous leaders of this party, without mentioning the greatest peacetime Prime Minister of the twentieth century. Next week, Margaret Thatcher celebrates her 85th birthday.”

• Value assumptions: assumptions about what is good (and bad) - ”I want to tell you today, in the clearest terms I can, what we must do together.”

Reporting others

Ways of reporting others

1. Direct quoting and strategic quoting (uses original words)

2. Indirect quotation: summarising or paraphrasing (doesn’t use original words)

3. Unattributed voices, generalised attitudes and reporting of speech acts but not content

Direct and indirect quotation

1. Direct quoting and strategic quoting (uses original words)

2. Indirect quotation: summarising or paraphrasing (doesn’t use original words)

3. Unattributed voices, generalised attitudes and reporting of speech acts but not content

Cameron’s speech:Yes, we will play our part – but the part you play will mean even more. Your country needs you. It takes two. It takes two to build that strong economy. We’ll balance the budget, we’ll boost enterprise, but you start those businesses that lead us to growth. It takes two to build that big society.

Strategic quotation

1. Direct quoting and strategic quoting (uses original words)

2. Indirect quotation: summarising or paraphrasing (doesn’t use original words)

3. Unattributed voices, generalised attitudes and reporting of speech acts but not content

Unattributed voices

1. Direct quoting and strategic quoting (uses original words)

2. Indirect quotation: summarising or paraphrasing (doesn’t use original words)

3. Unattributed voices, generalised attitudes and reporting of speech acts but not content

In what he described as a “call to arms”, Mr Cameron repeatedly invoked his vision of the Big Society, claiming that by working together, the nation would share future rewards.

Framing• How does the text frame the

reported words?

• Choice of particular reporting words

• Evaluative statements on reported words

• Contextualisation across the text

Summary

Seminar

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Reading Fairclough, N. (2003) Analysing Discourse: Textual analysis for social

research London: Routledge.

Richardson, J. (2007) Analysing newspapers Basingstoke: Palgrave

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