How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis

David Machin is Professor of Linguistics at the Institute of Corpus and Applications, Shanghai International Studies University.  He publishes in a range of academic fields applying multimodal critical discourse analysis to provide unique insights.  His books include Introduction to Multimodal Analysis (2020), Doing Visual Analysis (2018), Visual Journalism (2015) and The Language of War Monuments 2013). He is coeditor of the journal Social Semiotics, which publishes researching which uses multimodal critical discourse analysis and is on the editorial board of a range of leading journals in the field. Andrea Mayr is currently Associate Professor in Media and Communication at Zayed University, UAE, where she works in the fields of Critical Discourse Analysis and Multimodality, with a particular focus on crime and deviance, social exclusion and (digital) media activism. In her widely used books and peer-reviewed journal articles she applies mostly linguistic methods to the study of multimodal communication, such as in Language and Power (2019).

This is a practical, applied text that I consider essential for students pursuing communications studies, including those specialising in the visual arts - where the power of text tends to be ignored in favour of the visual turn.

• Introduction: shaping the world through languageMaking active choices: Language as a set of resourcesAnalysing semiotic choices: Words and imagesPresenting speech and speakers: Quoting verbsRepresenting people: Language and identityRepresenting action: Transitivity and verb processesConcealing and taking for granted: Nominalisation and presuppositionPersuading with abstraction: Rhetoric and metaphorCommitting and evading: Truth, modality and hedgingConclusion: Doing critical discourse analysis and its limitations