Critical Discourse Analysis Of Conversations In Downton Abbey

Critical discourse analysis, proposed by Fowler, Hodge and Kress in the late1970s, is a newly developed branch of discourse analysis. CDA sees discourse as a social practice and emphasizes the importance of social context in the production and development of language. It is a kind of analytic method aiming to explore the relations between discourse, power and ideology. Most CDA researches tend to focus on applied topics and social domains such as political discourse, media discourse, institutional discourse and so on. But individual discourses have long been neglected. In this thesis, the author makes an attempt to analyze conversations from the perspective of CDA, trying to identify ideological assumptions hidden in people’s utterances and detect power relations between conversation participants. The analytic data come from a British TV series named Downton Abbey.In this study, Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar and Fairclough’s Three-dimensional Model are adopted as analytical tool and theoretical framework respectively. The analysis will be carried out on the ideational level and interpersonal level separately and the data from Downton Abbey are analyzed from three aspects: transitivity, mood and modality. The analysis will be conducted in terms of three stages: description, interpretation, explanation. For convenience, the author combines the first two stages together. In the description and interpretation stage, the linguistic features of selected examples will be analyzed and the author will explore the context of utterance, the relations between the conversation participants, the purpose of the speaker and the implied ideology behind the utterance. In the explanation stage, discourse is to be analyzed from the larger social perspective. The author will connect discourse with social context and power relations to explain how the social factors influence people’s use of language.Through the analysis, three major conclusions are reached as follows:Firstly, upper-class people use language as an instrument to display authority and consolidate their social statuses. Secondly, language reflects upper-class people’s ideologies and exposes power relations between the speaker and listener. Thirdly, in aristocratic families, there exists obvious power inequality; but power is not absolute.This study is of both theoretical and practical significance. On the one hand, it is a complement and enrichment to previous studies on CD A. On the other hand, this study can give people some enlightenment about developing their critical awareness and in this way they can be sensitive to the underlying meanings of others’ utterances in their communication.