Analysis Of Fairclough, Teun Van Dijk And Ruth Wodak

Of the scholars who have placed great emphasis on the interdisciplinary dimension of CDA, the most noteworthy and relevant for my research have proven to be Norman Fairclough, Teun van Dijk and Ruth Wodak, each with their unique and valuable contribution to the trans-, cross- and multi-disciplinary expansion of CDA.
Fairclough’s Dialectical-Relational Approach to CDA is an essentially Marxist framework, anchored in his (1989, 1995) research on language, ideology and power, an approach that has been central to CDA for over more than the past ten years. Fairclough highlights the semiotic reflection of social issues in discourses, which translates into his interest in social processes (i.e. social structures, practices and events). Fairclough

This method is defined as an approach characterized by the interaction between cognition, discourse and society. What seems to be the main difference between Fairclough’s and van Dijk’s approach is the second dimension, which mediates between the other two. Whereas van Dijk perceives social cognition and mental models as mediating between discourse and the social, Fairclough believes that this task is assumed by discourse practices (text production and consumption). Cognition, the key element in van Dijk’s approach, is achieved in collective mental models as a result of consensus and becomes the interface between societal and discourse structures (van Dijk, 2009). There seems to be a dialectical relationship between societal structures and discursive interaction. Discourse is the medium by which societal structures are “enacted, instituted, legitimated, confirmed or challenged by text and talk” (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997, p. 266). Van Dijk considers that CDA requires a model of context based on Moscovici’s (2000) social representation theory: social actors involved in discourse do not exclusively make use of their individual experiences, but rely upon collective frames of perception known as social representations, a bulk of the concepts, values, norms, associations, explanations and images shared in

Her approach is capable of identifying and describing the underlying mechanisms that contribute to those disorders in discourse which are embedded in a particular context, at a specific moment, and inevitably affect communication. Wodak’s work on the discourse of anti-Semitism in 1990 led to the development of an approach she termed the Discourse-Historical Method. The term historical occupies a unique place in this approach. It denotes an attempt to systematically integrate all available background information in the analysis and interpretation of the many layers of a written or spoken text. As a result, the study of Wodak and her colleagues’ showed that the context of the discourse had a significant impact on the structure, function, and context of the utterances. This method is based on the belief that language “manifests social processes and interaction” and generates those processes as well (Wodak & Ludwig, 1999, p. 12). This method analyses language from a three-fold perspective: first, the assumption that discourse involves power and ideologies. “No interaction exists where power relations do not prevail and where values and norms do not have a relevant role” (p. 12). Secondly, “discourse … is always historical, that is, it is connected synchronically and diachronically with other communicative events which are happening at the same time or which have happened before” (p. 12). The third feature