Ingls para Fines Especficos Javier Galiano Bolea

Prctica 3: Widdowson

Critical Discourse Analysis In a few words, the first focus of this chapter is on the fact that language is often used to exercise socio-political control. In the same way, Van Dijk defines CDA as the analytical research that deals with social issues such as power abuse or dominance. In fact, he concentrates on how language, spoken or written, helps to reproduce and maintain those social structures in any case. Down through history, CDA has given discourse analysis much relevance in the broad sense of the word that it plays a big role in the study of moral causes and ideological purposes. In this connection, Widdowson is interested in how discourse analysis is carried out in CDA. Even though authors such as Roger Fowler or Norman Fairclough helped to develop the concept of CDA, Widdowson sees Hallidays S/F Grammar Model more appropriate. According to Fairclough, discourse plays three main functions which are: the construction of social self or identity, the development of social relationships between people and finally, the compositions of systems and believes. At this point, Halliday distinguishes the textual function which can be added to this original list. In some degree, Fairclough saw this new function as very useful too. Unquestionably, while Faircloughs three functions are concerned with text external factors, the intertextual function is relevant to text internal properties. In these times, we clearly do not understand text as a simply isolated object but as the features used in communication. At the moment, we cannot access to texts real nature if we only analyze them as text constituents. Of course, texts have a clear purpose and most of its constituents are carefully chosen. This is clearly due to the ideological investment expressed in it. At the same time, Labovs concern is introduced in the text. From his point of view, the central study of Discourse Analysis is what is said and what is done. Broadly speaking, Labov criticised Fairclough because he did not make a clear distinction between the meaning semantically encoded and pragmatically realized. In the mean time, Fowler believes that ideas from different perspectives such as speech act theory, Grices cooperative principle, relevance theory, schema theory or the prototype theory have to be taken into account because they are useful to CDA. To cap it all, Kress also introduces his model in which it is integrated the transformations and representations of reality.