How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis

Aimed at media and cultural studies students and scholars, this volume explains the use of multimodal critical discourse analysis, which includes methods for analyzing visual communication, to reveal how speakers and authors use language and grammatical features to create meaning and persuade people to think about events in a specific way, or manipulate them while concealing their intentions. The authors draw on the work of Gunter Kress, Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, and Theo van Leeuwen and introduce the main theoretical concepts underpinning their approach; the analysis of choices in words and texts; semiotic resources for representing the attitudes of speakers through verbs, gaze and interaction, and poses; linguistic and visual methods for representing people and what people do; the use of metaphors and other rhetorical tropes like hyperbole in different contexts; nominalization and presupposition in language as strategies for concealment; modality and hedging in texts and visual communication; and criticisms of critical discourse analysis and multimodal critical discourse analysis. Case studies of examples ranging from a speech by George Bush to magazine ads are integrated. Annotation Ac2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)