Critical Discourse Analysis and Positive Discourse Analysis – Commonalities and Differences

Abstract

This study outlines an integrated new perspective on the relationship between critical discourse analysis (CDA) and positive discourse analysis (PDA). CDA typically attempts to unveil the uses of language and semiosis in the service of power and is best known for its foci on ideologically driven discrimination (gender, ethnicity, class, and related social variables). Yet, CDA has not offered accounts of alternative forms of social organisation, nor of social subjects, other than by implication (Kress 1996). Concisely, ‘critical’ in CDA does not equate to ‘neutral critical thinking’, but to negative criticism of the power/language relationship. A different orientation is provided, among others, by Kress (2000) and Martin (2004). Martin’s perspective on “language and semiosis […is] oriented not so much to deconstruction as to constructive social action, through PDA [2004:180-181]”. Other instantiations of PDA, where the potential of linguistic and discourse analysis for facilitating positive intervention in social issues is considered, can be found in Macgilchrist (2007), Bartlett (2012) and Rogers (2017). More specifically, the former investigated strategies for propelling marginal discourses into the mainstream news media, while central notions in Bartlett’s and Rogers’s vision are to give voice and access to dominant discourses to less privileged, racialised social groups, and then to re-shape such discourses. Largely, topic selection makes the major difference between CDA and PDA: by selecting only discriminatory discourses to be deconstructed, there is no scope for positive critical thinking, whereas, from a PDA orientation, new transformative meanings can emerge.

Keywords

• critical discourse analysis
• dominant discourses
• positive discourse analysis
• transformative meanings
• topic selection