A Critical Discourse Analysis Approach To Generation Gap

As a fresh approach to discourse analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis has received widespread attention. While its main research focuses have been put on political discourse and institutional discourse, the present thesis intends to employ this approach to study the family conflict discourse. As small units of society, families have witnessed and undergone a lot of social transformations, thus study of family relations is of great social significance.Discourse is important in maintaining family relations. But people of different generations are born and grow up in distinct social background and participate in different social practices, different discourse systems are thus developed by them. Consequently, discourse conflicts become inevitable.Applying the perspective and methods of critical discourse analysis, the present thesis investigates the generation gap in the current internet era. Based on Fairclough’s discursive practice approach, with Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics and conversation analysis as analytical tools, the study analyzes the conflicts discourses between parents and children in case study. The analysis is focused on two levels, namely the occurrence of conflict discourse and its reasons. As for the level of reason, the thesis employs “order of discourse”to explore the changes of power relations in discourse struggles as well as the relationship between language, power and ideology in family discourse.Through the analysis of data collected from real context, the present thesis has the following findings. First, when parents and children in the case have discourse conflict, it is found that parents use more imperative and interrogative mood and they are more inclined to raise questions, which enable them to control the topic and development of conversations. Second, the power relations between two generations are dynamic. And it isthe constant changes of power relations that contribute to the discourse conflict, or generation gap in other words. Meanwhile, knowledge is interrelated with power. The comparison of data demonstrates that speakers who are dominant in the possession of knowledge or experiences are more likely to gain the upper hand in struggle for control.And the order of discourse in this case is exposed to constant challenges. Third, studying from the perspective of critical discourse analysis, the current thesis also draws some insights from theories of other fields, such as the “cultural feedback”, which echoes to the inter-disciplinary nature of critical discourse analysis.