Fairclough N. Critical Discourse Analysis. The critical study of language

Longman Group Publishing, 1995. — 265 p."One of the powerful affirmations of interest in the underlying themes of the Language in Social Life Series has been the success accorded to Norman Fairclough's introductory book in the Series: Language and Power. Although itself well rooted in an existing tradition at that time of what has since come to be termed, not unproblematically, Critical Discourse Analysis, Language and Power has proved to offer a wide range of students of linguistics, language studies and professional education a framework and a means of exploring the inbrications between language and social-institutional practices and between these, taken together, with broader social and political structures. Its innovation for students of linguistics in particular, was to critique some of the premises and the constructs underlying mainstream studies in
sociolinguistics, conversational analysis and pragmatics, to demonstrate the need of these sub-disciplines to engage with social and political issues of power and hegemony in a dynamic and historically informed
manner, and yet as a fundamental part of this process of linking the micro to the macro to reaffirm the traditional disciplinary centre and basis of the subject, the detailed and polysystemic description of
language variation."
Contents: Section A Language, ideology and power; Section B Discourse and sociocultural change; Section C Textual analysis in social research; Section D Critical language awareness.