Taking stock of critical discourse research – current work and new directions
Taking stock of critical discourse research – current work and new directions

Summary/Abstract: This paper gives an overview of the theoretical underpinnings and current work inCritical Discourse Analysis (CDA). It defines CDA as a transdisciplinary, text-analytical ap-proach to critical social research, aimed at revealing the power imbalance reflected in the useof language and patterns of dominance imposed through the use of language. Describing themost important schools and models in CDA, the paper demonstrates how critical approachesdraw on recent developments in different areas of linguistics, such as pragmatics, cognitivelinguistics and corpus studies. At the same time, it shows how the interdisciplinary researchagenda of CDA attracts the ‘classic’ theories and tools of linguistics to new empirical territoriesin political/public discourse. The final part of the paper illustrates the explanatory power ofthe legitimization-proximization model in CDA in a case study of the discourse of the war-on-terror.

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