Roger Fowler

Review: [untitled] Author(s): Roger Fowler Source: Language in Society, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 421-423 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4168779 . Accessed: 15/04/2011 11:45 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Language in Society. http://www.jstor.org Language in Society 26, 421-468. Printed in the United States of America REVIEWS NORMAN FAIRCLOUGH, Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of lan- guage. London: Longman, 1995. Pp. xiii, 265. Reviewed by ROGER FOWLER School of Modern Languages and European Studies, University of East Anglia Norwich NR4 7TJ, England r.fowler@ uea.ac. uk Fairclough has published four substantial books since 1989: Language and power (1989), Discourse and social change (1992), Media discourse (1995b), and the book under review - a collection of papers written between 1983 and 1992. These books have established him with a considerable reputation in the field of critical discourse analysis (CDA), which is Fairclough's term: he designates by it his own work and the type of critical analysis published in the journal Discourse and Society. It is not a uniquely distinctive approach, but one of a number of related models which currently engage with discourse at the interface of language and society. These are largely British in origin; British, Australian, and European in application. At their heart is the functional and systemic linguistics of M. A. K. Halliday, with its dialectical account of language structure as shaped by social and personal needs while, simultaneously, social and institutional relationships and identities are constituted by language practice and choice of structure. CDA shares this theoretical basis with other approaches, notably the school of "critical linguistics," which was pioneered in print in Fowler, Hodge, Kress & Trew 1979. Fairclough distinguishes CDA from critical linguistics in terms of the greater commitment to social and historical analysis in the former. But the two "schools" are very similar in their interests and practices, and in the intellectual sources on which they draw in addition to Halliday: notably Foucault for the theory of ide- ology, Gramsci for hegemony, Bakhtin for heteroglossia and genre, and Kristeva for intertextuality. In its ideal conception, CDA consists of "a 'three-dimensional' framework where the aim is to map three separate forms of analysis onto one another: analysis of (spoken or written) language texts, analysis of discourse practice (processes of text production, distribution and consumption) and analysis of discursive events as instances of sociocultural practice" (2). The first dimen- sion is textual, and the analysis employs traditional and functional linguistic methodologies. The second dimension examines discourses as communicators of ideology, and makes important use of the methods of genre, heteroglossia, and intertextuality. The third dimension concerns social and institutional rela- tions and practices; it has, for Fairclough, particular commitment to the cri- tique of hegemonic practices. If CDA were carried out thoroughly in all three dimensions, it would offer a far greater completeness of analytic statement than comparable models such as critical linguistics, or the "Birmingham" model of ? 1997 Cambridge University Press 0047-4045/97 $7.50 + .10 421 ROGER FOWLER discourse analysis (Sinclair & Coulthard 1975). However, any thorough deploy- ment of CDA in some specific institutional/discursive domain would be a very substantial research project - and no such project has yet been carried out. Fairclough has been reasonably comprehensive in Media discourse (1995b), though frankly this is less research-grounded than some other works in the field, e.g. Bell 1991 or van Dijk 1988a,b. The present collection of essays offers gems of practical analysis as illustra- tions; they are insightfully done, but brief. A wide range of genres is discussed - interviews, political speeches and pamphlets, a television discussion, conversa- tions, newspaper reports, university prospectuses, even an extract from Fair- clough's own C.V.! He is particularly good at relating structure, ideological tensions in discourse, and the historical development of those processes which are particularly implicated in hegemony: marketization, the ideological develop- ment and imposition of the notion of "enterprise," and technologization. (Fair- clough's -izations are a bit of a stylistic irritation, but they generally make good sense; thus the monstrous conversationalization refers to the well-evidenced per- suasive tempering of official discourse with informal, oral, and personal stylistic markers.) The best practical analyses are found in Section B (papers 4-7), which is perhaps a more agreeable entry point to the book than the somewhat dry and programmatic theoretical introduction. In functional linguistics of the kind propounded by Halliday, not only is the form of LANGUAGE shaped by its uses in society, the nature of a LINGUISTIC THEORY iS influenced by the uses for which it is designed. Critical discourse analysis is intended to be a branch of applied linguistics: it is designed for exposing the achievement of hegemonic power through discourse, for demon- strating ideological processes that may not be heeded on the surface, and for educating people in "critical language awareness" (Section D) - to scrutinize their own and others' uses of language. Fairclough is quite open and persuasive about such goals. What is less clear is the nature of the linguistic theory which best supports this kind of analysis. The theoretical sections of the book are densely and allusively written: I can make sense of the allusions, but I am not sure that they would appear transparent and organized to students, or to readers unfamiliar with Halliday, Foucault, or Bakhtin, none of whose ideas are ade- quately expounded. The lack of adequate explanation of the underlying linguistic, political, and critical theories is perhaps a result of the genesis of this collection: it was not written as a book, but originated as separate papers for professional journals with space restrictions and knowledgeable readerships. Although the essays seem to have been edited for economy and to avoid repetition, they really don't add up to a self-standing book which has to cater for uninitiated readers. However, experts in the field will welcome the appearance of this collection, which offers some interesting demonstrations of a potentially very illuminating analytic model and a valuable educational tool. 422 Language in Society 26:3 (1997) REVIEWS REFERENCES Bell, Allan (1991). The language of news media. Oxford: Blackwell, Fairclough, Norman (1989). Language and power. London: Longman. (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press. (1995a). Critical discourse analysis. London: Longman. (1995b). Media discourse. London: Arnold. Fowler, Roger; Hodge, Bob; Kress, Gunther; & Trew, Tony (1979). Language and control. London: Routledge. Sinclair, John M., & Coulthard, Malcolm (1975). Towards an analysis of discourse: The English used by teachers and pupils. London: Oxford University Press. van Dijk, Teun A. (1988a). News analysis: Case studies of international and national news. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. (1988b). News as discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. (Received 29 February 1996) DEBORAH CAMERON, Verbal hygiene. (The politics of language.) London & New York: Routledge, 1995. Pp. xvi, 264. Pb ?11.99. Reviewed by SUZANNE ROMAINE Merton College, Oxford University Oxford OX] 4JD, England romaine@vax.ox.ac.uk This book is a very welcome addition to sociolinguistics. While it will probably appeal primarily to scholars with diverse interests in standardization, language and gender, educational linguistics etc., it deserves to be read by a much wider audience. The book contains six chapters, the first of which introduces the notion of verbal hygiene, which Cameron defines roughly as "the urge to meddle in matters of language" (vi). This impulse manifests itself in a variety of ways, such as letters to the newspaper complaining about solecisms (e.g. split infinitives) and warnings about the decline of the language. Such complaints are not, of course, new. Nevertheless, linguists have generally dismissed such activities as prescriptive, and have been eager to divorce the field of linguistics from them by insisting on a strict distinction between prescription and description. Cameron is not the first to argue that the distinction is less than clear-cut, or that both perspectives incorporate ideologies about language. I was surprised to find that she does not mention Bloomfield's discussion (1944) of what he called "tertiary responses to language," which included the layperson's views on lan- guage, particularly attitudes toward non-standard speech - or indeed Bolinger's (1980) more recent discussion of related matters. While Bloomfield's labels in- dicate clearly his view that prescriptivism should not be of primary concern to linguists, he nevertheless provides one of the earliest and most entertaining ac- counts of the kind of cocktail party chatter about language with which most lin- guists are all too familiar. As both Bloomfield and Cameron observe, many people care passionately about language and have a great deal to say about it. Like Bloomfield, Cameron notes that the state of the language is one of the very few subjects about which Language in Society 26:3 (1997) 423 Article Contents p. 421 p. 422 p. 423 Issue Table of Contents Language in Society, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 327-478 Front Matter Communication of Respect in Interethnic Service Encounters [pp. 327-356] Naming Practices and the Power of Words in China [pp. 357-379] Shifting Contexts: The Sociolinguistic Significance of Nominalization in Japanese Television News [pp. 381-399] From Fisin to Pijin: Creolization in Process in the Solomon Islands [pp. 401-420] Reviews Review: untitled [pp. 421-423] Review: untitled [pp. 423-426] Review: untitled [pp. 426-429] Review: untitled [pp. 430-433] Review: untitled [pp. 433-436] Review: untitled [pp. 436-439] Review: untitled [pp. 439-442] Review: untitled [pp. 443-445] Review: untitled [pp. 445-450] Review: untitled [pp. 450-453] Review: untitled [pp. 453-456] Review: untitled [pp. 456-461] Review: untitled [pp. 461-464] Review: untitled [pp. 464-468] Notes A Language Is a Dialect with an Army and a Navy [p. 469] Review: untitled [pp. 469-470] Review: untitled [p. 470] Publications Received [pp. 471-477] Back Matter [pp. 478-478]