Studies in language & capitalisim Critical discourse analysis: History, ideology and methodology

Critical discourse analysis is the study of the text and discourse. It has been studied from three perspectives: History, ideology and methodology.  A) HISTORY Minimalism: Language is studied in and for itself. ( Saussure 1916) without take into account the social context. They looked for the ideal speaker in a completely homogeneous speech community.

Saussure

Functionalism Language is never encountered in and for itself. The study of discourses constitutes a heterogeneous mass. They are not a unity. Pragmalinguistics: They study the role of the speakers in a context. Context are dynamic not static, creative, active not passive. Human beings produce language and consume language as well.

Production and consumption are being framed with the Marxist account of capitalism. It says that people who has the means of productions decide what discourses are going to be produced and consumed. Language as an organ of control is most clearly at work in language education. Especially in the school, the activity of the teacher is to suppress certain language activities in favour of others. If control is effective, it is not recognised as such.

Manipulated language is a consequence of an inadequate analysis of productive relations. Utterance and situations are bound up with each other, and the context of situation is indispensable for the understanding of words. Tangmemics They are linguistics that study unfamiliar languages. For example: Quechua is spoken by 10 million speakers in South America, but they are socially marginalised. Tagmemics study this language and record its folklore.

British functionalism is applied to the study of classroom discourse. See the example on page 35 Teacher’s discourse use standard language only. The task is artificial: Communication is subordinated to fine points of usage that the teacher illustrates without giving useable explanations. Analysis of conversation in ethnomethodology: it studies live talk in society. Conversations are usually managed by its participants with few breaks or disturbances.

The significance of utterances is clearly a function of the ongoing interaction as a whole rather than the meaning of word or phrases. Discourse processing: How do people actually process a discourse during real communication? When a word is recognised, all its meanings are initially activivated. Very soon the irrelevant ones are deactivated while the relevant to the context raise their activation and spread it out.

IDEOLOGY The analysis of discourse can not be objective because the analyst is always a participant. People are implicated in the production of the discourse being analysed. Left-wing ideology: it holds that human rights are inclusive and equal in theory, even though social conditions create exclusions and inequalities in practice.

Marx

Right-wing ideology: It holds that human rights must be exclusive and unequal in both theory and practice in exact proportion to each individual’s share of wealth and power, no matter how these were acquired. Language and the New Capitalism: Ideology of ecologism: It includes theory and practice in society, and a dialectical reconciliation of theory and practice in a transdisciplinary pursuit of human and democratic action, interaction and discourse.

Methodology Seven principles of textuality: Cohesion: The connections among linguisic forms like word- endings Coherence: The connections among meanings or concepts Intentionality: covers what the speaker intend. Acceptabilitity: what heares engage to do

Informativity: It concerns how new or unexpected the content is. Situationality: It concerns ongoing circumstances of the interaction. Intertextuality: It covers the relations with other texts, particularly ones from the same or a similar “text type ”