Critical Discourse Analysis

Critical Discourse Analysis is a particular area of discourse analysis concerned with the way social identities and relations are encoded in and enacted through texts. This module will introduce you to foundational approaches and recent advances in critical discourse analysis, which draw on and apply a range of theoretical frameworks in linguistics, including systemic functional linguistics, pragma-dialectics, cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics. A variety of discourses will be studied, including discourses of immigration, war, civil disorder and corporate responsibility, as they are articulated in and across a variety of communicative modes and genres. Text types analysed will include print news media, political speeches, party manifestos, campaign leaflets and digital social media. The aim of the module is to enable you to identify and analyse the semiotic features of texts and conceptualisations that are involved in the discursive construction of ideology and the discursive legitimation of social action.