Chapter 5 Discourse, power and access

One of the crucial tasks of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is to account for the relationships between discourse and social power. More specifically, such an analysis should describe and explain how power abuse is enacted, reproduced or legitimised by the text and talk of dominant groups or institutions. Within the framework of such an account of dis-cursively mediated dominance and inequality this chapter focuses on an important dimension of such dominance, that is, patterns of access to discourse. A critical analysis of properties of access to public discourse and communication presupposes insight into more general political, socio-cultural and economic aspects of dominance. This chapter merely gives a succinct summary of this broader conceptual framework. Leaving acide a detailed discussion of numerous philosophical and theoretical complex-ities, the major presuppositions of this framework are, for example, the following (see, e.g., Clegg, 1989; Lukes, 1974; 1986; Wrong, 1979)