critical linguistics and its examples 批评语言学及其例子分析.ppt

Critical Linguisticsand Its examples Definition Critical linguistics (CL) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) can best be defined as a shared perspective on doing linguistic, semiotic or discourse analysis (van Dijk 1993b: 131). Although CL and CDA are by many linguists seen as quite different in methodology, they can both be said to occupy the same paradigmatic space’. CL may be defined as fundamentally interested in analyzing opaque as well as transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control as manifested in language. In other words, CL aims to investigate critically social inequality as it is expressed, signalled, constituted, legitimized etc. by language use (or in discourse). CL focus not exclusively on spoken or written texts as objects of inquiry. A fully critical’ account of discourse would require a theorization and description of both the social processes and structures which give rise to the production of a text, and of the social structures and processes within which individuals or groups as social-historical subjects create meanings in their interaction with texts (Fairclough Kress 1993: 2ff). History In the 1960s and 1970s, many scholars adopted a more critical perspective in language studies. Among the first was the French scholar Pecheux (1992), whose approach traced its roots to the work of Russian theorists Bakhtin and VoloSinov, who had postulated an integration of language and social processes in the 1930s. In the late 1970s, a group of Hallidayan linguists at the University of East Anglia began applying the term critical linguistics (CL) in their research on language use in different institutions (see e.g. Fowler et al. 1979; Kress Hodge 1979). Kress Hodge assumed strong and pervasive connections between linguistic structure and social structure, claiming that discourse cannot exist without social meanings. The authors reacted strongly against contemporary trends in pragmatics (e.g. sp