BRANCHES OF DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

A.    CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a branch of Dicourse Analysis ( DA ) which focused on the connection and interactions between language use , ideology ,power , discourse and sociocultural change ( Fairclough, 1995 ). As a method of analyzing these issues CDA has existed and been prominently used for long enough to establish itself as a recognized and generallyrespected branch of Applied Linguistic research. Depsite the fact that CDA is presented a way to bring underlying ideological currents in discourse to light, it often harbors a discourse of its ownin the form of its analysisand conclusion. The fact that research is carried out and writen by an idividual with idelogical leraning and that is approach with specific ideological in mind result in text with its own ideologically marked discourse often similar in discursive features to the text being analyzed.

B.     SOCIAL DISCOURSE

A social discourse is in fact never made out of a set of statically dominant ideas, representations, systems of belief, «ideologies.» It is thoroughly made out of regulated antagonisms between conflicting images, concepts, cognitive discrepancies, and incompatibilities that are still relatively stabilized without ever reaching a state of equilibrium. Social discourse is made out of a set of ideologemes in tension with each other, of «sociograms» (Claude Duchet) thematizing, on divergent vectors, conflicting social representations. It is through and beyond these tensions, conflicts, and compartmentalizations, beyond the cacophonic rumour of social languages that something like a hegemony will be discovered producing precedences and arbitrations between conflicting discourses, concealing topical axioms and basic principles of social verisimilitude, universal taboos and censorship that mark the boundaries of the «thinkable.» One should not dissociate from this hegemony the normative imposition of the legitimate language, a language always saturated with tropes and idioms, phraseologies and bombastic structures of feeling. It should perhaps be added that so-called ideologies never go in isolation even if the historian tends to isolate them (i.e. anticlerical id., antisemitic id., protofascism, republicanism and so forth) for the purpose of analysis.