Texts and practices readings in critical discourse analysis

Preface One of the paradoxes of modern linguistics is that its most distinguished practitioner, Noam Chomsky, although world-famous as a political activist and campaigner, professes no professional interest in language in use— neither in analysing the speeches, committee meetings, letters, memos and books which he claims are subverting the democratic process, nor in reflecting on his own highly effective rhetoric. Discourse is a major instrument of power and control and Critical Discourse Analysts, unlike Chomsky, feel that it is indeed part of their professional role to investigate, reveal and clarify how power and discriminatory value are inscribed in and mediated through the linguistic system: Critical Discourse Analysis is essentially political in intent with its practitioners acting upon the world in order to transform it and thereby help create a world where people are not discriminated against because of sex, colour, creed, age or social class. The initial stimulus for this book was the need we felt as teachers to make more easily accessible to students in a single text the most recent theoretical statements of the major thinkers along with illustrative analyses of a variety of texts and situations selected from a variety of countries. However, in choosing the authors and topics we were always conscious of the other audience of fellow professionals. We hope that they agree both that there is a great deal that is new here in the theoretical chapters and that the analytical chapters offer new methods of analysis applied in novel areas. As a help to both readerships we have collected together the references from all the chapters at the end of the book and then supplemented them with any major items which were missing; we hope that the Bibliography can now be used as a first resource for those intending to undertake research in the area. The book itself is divided into two parts, Theory and Practice. In the first, theoretical section we have collected together contributions from the leading names in the field, and in the practical section we have set out to cover a variety not only of topic areas but also of countries, because we think that meaning belongs to culture rather than to language and different xi xii Preface countries have different experiences. The strength of the volume is that, although there is no single methodology, all of the chapters have one thing in common, that they view social practices and their linguistic realisation as inseparable. Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard Malcolm Coulthard Florianópolis March 1995 Part I Critical discourse theory Chapter 1 On critical linguistics1 Roger Fowler ‘Functional linguistics’ is ‘functional’ in two senses: it is based on the premiss that the form of language responds to the functions of language use; and it assumes that linguistics, as well as language, has different functions, different jobs to do, so the form of linguistics responds to the functions of linguistics. The first paper in Explorations in the Functions of Language (Halliday, 1973) makes this point about requests for a definition of language: ‘In a sense the only satisfactory response is “why do you want to know?”, since unless we know what lies beneath the question we cannot hope to answer it in a way which will suit the questioner’ (Halliday, 1973:9). In the interview with Herman Parret, Halliday accepts that there may be an ‘instrumental linguistics…the study of language for understanding something else’ and that an instrumental linguistics will have characteristics relevant to the purpose for which it is to be used. In doing instrumental linguistics, though, one is also learning about the nature of Language as a whole phenomenon, so there is no conflict or contradiction with ‘autonomous linguistics’ (Halliday, 1978:36). ‘Critical linguistics’ emerged from our writing of Language and Control (Fowler et al., 1979) as an instrumental linguistics very much of that description. We formulated an analysis of public discourse, an analysis designed to get at the ideology coded implicitly behind the overt propositions, to examine it particularly in the context of social formations. The tools for this analysis were an eclectic selection of descriptive categories suited to the purpose: especially those structures identified by Halliday as ideational and interpersonal, of course, but we also drew on other linguistic traditions, as for example when we needed to talk about speech acts or transformations. Our conception of instrumentality or purpose was quite complicated, and perhaps not fully enough discussed in the book. We were concerned to theorise language as a social practice, a ‘practice’ in the sense that word has acquired in English adaptations of Althusser: an intervention in the social and economic order, and one which in this case works by the reproduction of (socially originating) ideology (Kress and Hodge, 1979). In this way the book was intended as a contribution to a general understanding of language. But why ‘critical’? 3