Norman Fairclough

Norman Fairclough

 

              Norman Fairclough was born in 1941. He is emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Lancaster University. He is one of the founders of CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis) as a branch of sociolinguistics or discourse analysis that looks at the influence of power relations on the context and structure of writings.

          Fairclough’s theories have been influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin and Michael Halliday on the linguistics field, and ideology theorists such Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu on the sociological one.

          Since the early 1980s, Fairclough’s research has focused on Critical Discourse Analysis, including the place of language in social relations of power and ideology, and how language figures in processes of social change. Over the past three years he has been working specifically on aspects of ‘transition’ in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Romania, from a discourse analytical perspective. This research is based upon the theoretical claim that discource is an element of social life which is dialectically interconnected  with other elements, and may have constructive and transformative effects on other elements.

His own recent contribution to this research has included three main elements:

    Theoretical development of CDA to enhance its capacity to contribute to this area of social research.

    Developing approaches to linguistic analysis of text and interactions which are adapted to social research.

    Application of this theory and method in researching aspects of contemporary social change.

Fairclough’s  line of study also called Textually Oriented Discourse Analysis (TODA) is specially concerned with the mutual effects of formally linguistic textual properties, sociolinguistics speech genres, and formally sociological practices.

          His book Languge and Power (1989) now in a revised third edition 2014, explored the imbrications between language and social institutional practices and of wider political and social structures.

 

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CDA & Political Discourse

 

 

 1. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

 Critical Discourse Analysis has been since 1952 when Zellig Harris created an article that its title is Discourse Analysis in language journal. In 1970's, the analysts realized that to be more critical when analyze a text or discourse is extremely important. Then, many experts try to make theories of CDA. 

 

           Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a branch of linguistics that seeks to understand how and why certain texts affect readers and hearers. Through the analysis of grammar, it aims to uncover the 'hidden ideologies' that can influence a reader or hearer's view of the world. Analysts have looked at a wide variety of spoken and written texts – political manifestos, advertising, rules and regulations – in an attempt to demonstrate how text producers use language (wittingly or not) in a way that could be ideologically significant. According to Fairclough (1995), CDA is one of Discourse Analysis branches that focuses on the connections and interactions between language use, ideology, power, discourse, and socialcultural change.

 

         CDA is not a monolithic method or field of study but rather a loose agglomeration of approaches to the study of discourse, all of which are located broadly within the tradition of critical social research that has its roots in the work of the Frankfurt School (Wodak and Meyer 2001). Though having developed, at least initially, largely independently of each other, these approaches are united by a concern to understand how social power, its use and abuse, is related to spoken and written language.

 

            2. Political Discourse  

            Political discourse is about the text and talk of professional politicians or political institutions, such as presidenta and prime ministers and other members of government, parliament or political parties, both at the local, national and international levels. Some of the studies of politicians take a discourse analytical approach (Carbó 1984; Dillon et al. 1990; Harris 1991; Holly 1990; Maynard.

 

This way of defining political discourse ishardly different from the identification of medical, legal or educational discoursewith the respective participants in the domains of medicine, law or education.This is the relatively easy part (if we can agree on what `politics' means).

From the interactional point of view ofdiscourse analysis, we therefore should also include the various recipients inpolitical communicative events, such as the public, the people, citizens, the`masses', and other groups or categories. That is, once we locate politics and itsdiscourses in the public sphere, many more participants in political communicationappear on the stage.

  

            Obviously, the same is true for the definition of the field of media discourse,which also needs to focus on its audiences. And also in medical, legal or educational discourse, we not only think of participants such as doctors, lawyers or teachers, but also of patients, defendants and students. Hence, the delimitation of political discourse by its principal authors' is insufficient and needs to be extended to a more complex picture of all its relevant participants, whether or not these are actively involved in political discourse, or merely as recipients in one-way modes of communication.

 

 

 

 

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