Attribute Of Linguistic Form Or Overplay Of Political Awareness

As a new trend of discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis (henceforth CDA) has been more recently announced internationally. The relative paucity of its appearance in the academic sphere of China encourages the author to explore it in a more serious and systematic way and has resulted in the present research in the form of a MA dissertation. The major contents and findings are abstracted as follows:First comes the historical review of earlier linguistic approaches to discourse analysis, covering text linguistics, speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, pragmatics and conversation analysis. These approaches are either related to this research or have more or less contributed to the development of CDAThe following chapter introduces the theory of CDA, covering its origin (including the philosophical and linguistic roots), the key tenets as well as the issues it deals with. Here, the framework of critical discourse analysis can be summarized in eight sentences (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997: 270): (1) CDA addresses social problems. (2) Power relations are discursive. (3) Discourse constitutes society and culture. (4) Discourse does ideological work. (5) Discourse is historical. (6) The link between text and society is mediated. (7) Discourse analysis is interpretative and explanatory. (8) Discourse is a form of social action. In addition, CDA is also explained in terms of its flexible goals such as exposing hegemony, demonstrating "hidden" ideological processes, equipping people in critical language awareness and the educational application of CDA, as well as its focus on the relations between discourse, society, ideology and power.The theoretical validity of CDA is examined with case studies, which are made in four subareas: political discourse, mass communication, discourse of science and technology, daily communication. Since it is supposed that subtle findings reviewed with CDA have more to do with language usage than linguistic forms themselves, such studies try to test CDA theory in terms of its basic assumption, analytical tools...