Critical Discourse Analysis

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a methodological approach to the analysis of language in order to examine social problems, with a focus on power, particularly issues around abuses of power including discrimination and disempowerment. Analysis considers the language in texts but also considers the texts in relationship to the wider social context in which they are produced and received. Many critical discourse analysts carry out close readings of a small number of texts, focussing on how linguistic phenomena like metaphor, agency, backgrounding, hedging and evaluation can help to represent various phenomena or present arguments for different positions. This chapter focusses on how automatic forms of computational analysis (in this case, corpus linguistics) could be used in combination with the kind of ‘close reading’ qualitative analyses associated with CDA, particularly in cases where analysts are working with large databases containing hundreds or thousands of texts