Critical Discourse Analysis
Fad, Theory or Method?
Keywords:
critical discourse analysis, criticism, reception, representativeness, researchAbstract
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has been considered a potential theory for the unveiling of power relations and ideologies commonly found in discourse. Many theoreticians agree on the fact that CDA has contributed to the understanding of several linguistic phenomena that usually portray obfuscated hegemonies, since language is a powerful tool for disseminating biased assumptions as well as ideologies. Nonetheless, why did CDA attract severe criticisms from a wide range of scholars in the 1990s? These critics presented a full list of problems concerning the methods and approaches often utilized by critical discourse analysts. Among the criticisms, problems of reception and representativeness are claimed to pervade most of the treatment given by CDA researchers to their data. Despite all this, the keenness of critical discourse analysts to display a methodological ground to the discipline has had its positive results – CDA is now a recognized and well-established branch of Applied Linguistics in the international context, within the interface between the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Recent publication, principally from Fairclough and his colleagues, has taken into considerable account some of the criticisms, by responding to these critics accordingly. In Brazil, however, there has been a "deafening silence" about this issue, especially because researchers seem to disregard these criticisms. In this paper, I intend to "break this silence" and bring into discussion some of these criticisms and their impact on CDA and the application of its theory in Brazilian research. The main aim of the paper is to see whether some research on CDA in Brazil has presented the same problems posed by these critics, by analyzing four articles that use CDA as an orienting theory, published in a special issue on CDA from a well-known Brazilian journal entitled D.E.L.T.A. The results have indicated that some of the problems outlined by these critics also appear on the articles analyzed, which shows that critical discourse analysts in Brazil should pay special attention to the way they approach and treat their data.
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