week7-critical-linguistics-and-critical-discourse-analysis

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Weekly Readings:

• Blommaert, Jan, and Chris Bulcaen. 2000. “Critical Discourse Analysis.” Annual Review of Anthropology 29: 447–66.
• Billig, Michael. 2008. “The Language of Critical Discourse Analysis: The Case of Nominalization.” Discourse & Society 19(6): 783–800. doi:10.1177/0957926508095894.

Video Lecture Notes

• Introduction to Critical Linguistics

  • Definition and Scope:
    • Critical linguistics examines how language reflects and reproduces power relations in society.
    • It critiques the idea of neutrality in linguistic and social science research.
  • Origins:
    • The foundational text, Language and Control (1979), by Fowler, Hodge, Kress, and Trew, analyzes language use in social contexts (e.g., job interviews, news articles).
    • Focus: Revealing hidden social power dynamics in linguistic choices.

• The Debate: Criticism vs. Descriptivism

  • Criticism (Critical Approach):
    • Inspired by thinkers like Michel Foucault, this perspective argues that complete neutrality is impossible in science.
    • Advocates for exposing the researcher’s political and social stance to ensure transparency.
  • Descriptivism:
    • Prioritizes objectivity and avoids introducing political bias into research.
    • Argues that scientific work should seek truth independently of political agendas.

• Key Concepts in Critical Linguistics

  • Nominalization: The process of turning actions into abstract nouns to obscure agency and responsibility.
    • “Protesters attacked” (  active) vs “Attack on protesters” (nominalized).
    • “Market forces dictate prices” shifts focus from individual actions or economy-politics to an abstract concept.
  • Michael Billig’s Critique:
    • Billig highlights contradictions in critical linguistics:
      • Researchers themselves use nominalizations and technical language, perpetuating the inequalities they critique.
    • However, nominalizations also serve vital functions, such as simplifying complexity and enabling generalizations.

• Evolution of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

  • Development:
    • CDA grew from the foundation of critical linguistics, expanding to analyze discourses at multiple levels.
    • Ruth Wodak and other scholars have studied political communication, right-wing populism, and discriminatory language practices.
  • Challenges in CDA:
    • Early studies were criticized for relying on small datasets and overtly biased text selections.
    • The rise of corpus linguistics has allowed for broader, more systematic discourse analysis.

• Critique in CDA: Object-Oriented vs. Subject-Oriented

  • Object-Oriented Critique:
    • Focuses on identifying and analyzing problematic discourses (e.g., racism, discrimination).
    • Assumes that certain truths about discourse can be objectively identified.
    • Eleştiri, doğrudan araştırılan söylemlerin kendisine yöneltiliyor. Örneğin, bir haber metnini analiz ettiğini düşünelim. Bu metinde kullanılan dilin ayrımcı, cinsiyetçi ya da ırkçı olduğunu tespit ediyorsun. Burada odak, haber metninin içeriği, kullanılan sözcükler veya yapıların toplumda yarattığı etkiler. Eleştirinin amacı, metnin nasıl bir dünya görüşü sunduğunu, hangi güç ilişkilerini yansıttığını veya kimin sesini bastırdığını ortaya çıkarmak.
  • Subject-Oriented Critique:
    • Emphasizes the researcher’s role in the analysis.
    • Draws on Immanuel Kant’s idea of critique: distinguishing what can and cannot be known.
    • Requires researchers to disclose their social, cultural, and political biases.
    • Araştırmacı, kendi rolünü ve pozisyonunu sorgular. Yani “Bu çalışmayı yaparken benim toplumsal, politik veya kültürel konumum ne? Bu konum benim analizimi nasıl etkiliyor?” sorularını sorar. Örneğin, bir akademisyen olarak orta sınıf bir geçmişten geliyorsan, bu durum analiz ettiğin metinlerde neyi görebileceğini veya göremeyeceğini etkileyebilir. Bu yaklaşım, “Tarafsız olabilir miyim?” veya “Kendi değerlerim bu analizi nasıl şekillendiriyor?” gibi sorulara yoğunlaşır.

• CDA as a Global Field

  • CDA has grown into an international discipline, addressing diverse topics and incorporating voices from various cultural and social contexts.
  • Conferences and collaborations are increasingly diverse, reflecting a broader understanding of global power dynamics.

• Practical Applications of CDA

  • Analyzing News Media: Understanding how headlines frame events (e.g., omitting agents in acts of violence).
  • Political Discourse: Revealing how populist rhetoric influences public opinion.
  • Education: Examining the power dynamics embedded in language used in classrooms and policies.

• The Role of Reflexivity in CDA

  • Researchers are social actors whose work influences and is influenced by social contexts.
  • Reflexivity requires scholar to critically examine their methodologies, biases, adn the broader implications of their work.

• Conclusion: The Importance of Critical Linguistics

  • Strengths:
    • Reveals hidden power dynamics in language.
    • Encourages transparency and reflexivity in research.
  • Challenges:
    • Balancing critique with objectivity.
    • Addressing epistemological questions about the nature of truth and knowledge.

Reading Notes:

Michael Billig - The Language of Critical Discourse Analysis

• Paradox of Discourse Analysis
  • Discourse analysis uses language to analyze language.
  • Analysts might not separate their methods from the object of study.
• Critical Discourse Analysis
  • CDA is now an established academic sub-field.
  • Focuses on exposing power and ideology in language.
  • but faces the challenge of avoiding ideological biases in its own language use.
  • Critics, including left-wing and traditional scholars question its contributions and methodologies.
  • Some CDA scholars critique CDA for failing to examine its own language use critically.
    • Writing style is not just about clarity but reflects ideology, power, inequality.
• Focus of the Paper
  • How CDA authors use the same linguistic forms they critique, such as nominalization and passivization.

Nominalization and Passivization

• Nominalization: Turning verbs into nouns, often reducing clarity and deleting agency.
  • The company increased vages. → The increase in wages was announced.
    • The focus shifts from the company to the abstract noun “increase”, removing agency.
  • Headlines like “Attack on Protestors”
• Passivization: Using passive voice, which can obscure who is performing an action.
  • The government implemented new policies. → New policies were implemented.
    • Focus shifts to “policies”, potentially hiding who is responsible.
  • “Etkisiz hale getirildi”
• Nominalization and passivization allow writers to avoid specifying who did what and when.
• Ideological Effects of Nominalization and Passivization by Fowler (1979)
  • Deleting Agency: Concealing the actor in a sentence.
    • Nominalization ensures that the latter sentence contains less information than the former.
  • Reifying Processes: Turning actions into static entities.
    • How writers on economics can use nominalization to imply economic processes, such as ‘market forces’, are ‘objective things’ rather than the contingent results of human actions.
  • Positing Concepts as Agents: Speakers/writers can then use the abstract, reified concepts as agents of processes.
    • Instead of talking about people buying and selling commodities for various prices, economists, administrators, journalists etc might talk about ‘market-forces’.
  • Maintaining Power Inequalities: Creating specialized terms that exclude non-experts.

Problems with the Ideological Analysis of Nominalization

• Critiques argue that nominalization is not always mystifying or ideologically problematic. In some contexts, it can be functional or necessary.
• Congruency vs. Methaporicity
  • Halliday differentiates between ‘congruent’ and ‘metaphorical’ forms of language.
    • Congurent: Processes expressed as verbs; entities expressed as nouns.
    • Metaphorical: Processes turned into nouns, often through nominalization.
  • Critics like Fairclough question whether congruency is always a valid benchmark for clarity.
• Inconsistencies in Describing Nominalization
  • Nominalization is described as a ‘process’, but CDA analysts often fail to specify the details. And some questions remain unanswered:
    • How is nominalization achieved?
    • When does it occur?
    • Who performs it?
• Different Types of Nominalization
  • Linguistic Nominalization: Transformation based on syntactic rules
    • to decide → decision
  • Etymological Nominalization: Historical creation of nouns from verbs
    • to refer → reference
  • Psychological Nominalization: If speakers spontaneously (and congruently) think in terms of noun/active-verb sentences, and then transform these thoughts by nominalization when they come to express them.
    • “He decided” → “His decision.”
  • Between-text Nominalization: Changes between texts, where active verbs in one are nominalized in another.
    • Text 1: The government acted quickly.
    • Text 2: The government’s action was decisive.
  • Within-text Nominalization: Processes named in a text are later referred to as nouns.
    • We analyzed the data. This analysis was thorough.

Criticizing CDA About Language Use

• Self-Contradictions in CDA Writing:
  • CDA analysts often criticize nominalization for obscuring agency but unconsciously use it in their own work.
    • Fowler and Fairclough’s descriptions of nominalization often rely on the same structures they critique.
• Unconscious Use of Problematic Forms
  • Critiques passivization as “problematic” but uses passive forms like “can be considered” without specifying who considers.
  • Uses nominalized terms like “transformation” and “nominalization”, which obscure process and its agents.
    • Fowler describes nominalization as “a syntactic transformation, which is itself a nominalized phrase.
    • Fairclough defines nominalization as “the conversion of processes into nominals.
  • Nominalization is often treated as a fixed grammatical entity rather than an active process.
    • This reifies nominalization itself, turning it into a thing rather than foucsing on the people or contexts that create it.
• Key Insight: CDA authors tend to unintentionally replicate the same linguistic structures they critique. This diminishes the clarity of their arguments and highlights the need for self-reflection in CDA writing process.

The Return of the Agent

• Attributing Agency to Language
  • CDA criticizing obscuring human agency, but often attribute agency to linguistic forms instead of people.
    • “Nominalization can obfuscate agency and responsibility” → Here, nominalization is personified, actively hides agency, which is writer
    • “The passive structure permits agent deletion.” → Here, the structure is framed as the actor “permitting” something, rather than the writer choosing to delete agents.

Comments about the article:

The critique of “nominalization” sounds very similar to Marxist critique of “commodity fetishism” — both are forms of reification

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Jan Blommaert - Critical Discourse Analysis

The CDA Program

• CDA aims to analyze the structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power, and control as manifested in language.
  • the relationship between language and society.
• What is discourse then?
  • Discourse is both socially constitutive and socially conditioned.
  • It is often an opaque object of power in modern societies, CDA aims to make it more transparent.
• Fairclough’s 3-dimensional-framework
  • Discourse-as-text: Linguistic features and structures, like word choice, grammar, cohesion, text organization.
  • Discourse-as-discursive-practice: How discourse is produced, circulated, and consumed, including intertextuality.
  • Discourse-as-social-practice: Ideological effects and hegemonic effects of discourse.
• It also focuses on hegemonic struggles where discourses are reshaped
  • Societal changes like democratization, commodification, technologization are examined for their impact on discourse
• CDA explores how social structures influence discourse patterns
  • The goal is political: Empower the marginalized, amplify unheard voices, expose abuses of power, mobile

Methodology

• CDA uses various methods, prominently systemic-functional linguistics, but also text linguistics, stylistics, social semiotics, social cognition, rhetoric
• The discourse-historical method developed by Wodak combines original documents, ethnographic research and analysis of contemporary texts.
• Despite some calls for broader multimodal approaches (incorporating visual imagery), CDA primarily emphasizes linguistically defined text structures.

Preferred Topics

• Across all domains, CDA highlights power asymmetries and structural inequalities
  • Political discourse
  • Ideology
  • Racism and immigration
  • Economic discourse
  • Media language
  • Gender
  • Education

Social Theory

• Key theoretical influences
  • Power and ideology
    • Foucault (orders of discourse, power-knowledge)
    • Gramsci (hegemony), Althusser (ideological state aparatuses)
  • Structure and agency:
    • Giddens (theory of structuration): dynamic relationship btw. social structures and individual actions
  • Other influences:
    • Bourdieu (symbolic power), Habermas (communicative action), cultural studies is also used to contextualize discourse within social and historical frameworks.

An Example: Conversationalization

• Fairclough highlights how public life increasingly adopts the discursive practices of everyday conversation
  • This shift is seen in different domains: politics, advertising, welfare and reflects social changes like democratization, commodification and technologization.
• Over 35 years, political interviews have evolved from formal, rigid formats to casual, conversational styles.
  • Thatcher’s 1083 speech style exemplifies this shift, blending conversational elements to transcend class-specific rhetoric.
• This transformation aligns political communication with everyday speech genres, aiming for broader legitimacy and hegemony.
  • Blurs the boundaries between formal authority and casual interaction.
  • Obscure underlying power asymmetries between governments and citizens, institutions and clients.

Critical Reception

• CDA uses imprecise terms (discourse, practice, structure, text), and lacks clear theoretical models.
• CDA prioritize analysts’ interpretations, ‘critical’ part might be ‘bias’
• CDA imposes ideological meanings onto texts, portraying readers as passive recipients rather than active interpreters.
• CDA projects analysts’ biases onto the data, relying on political and social assumptions rather than participant-oritented evidence.