Norman Fairclough


Norman Fairclough is an emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. He is one of the founders of critical discourse analysis as applied to sociolinguistics. CDA is concerned with how power is exercised through language. CDA studies discourse; in CDA this includes texts, talk, video and practices.

Methodology of CDA

Fairclough's line of study, also called textually oriented discourse analysis or TODA, to distinguish it from philosophical enquires not involving the use of linguistic methodology, is specially concerned with the mutual effects of formally linguistic textual properties, sociolinguistic speech genres, and formally sociological practices. The main thrust of his analysis is that, if —according to Foucauldian theory— practices are discursively shaped and enacted, the intrinsic properties of discourse, which are linguistically analysable, are to constitute a key element of their interpretation. He is thus interested in how social practices are discursively shaped, as well as the subsequent discursive effects of social practices.
Language and Power explored the imbrications between language and social institutional practices and of "wider" political and social structures. In the book Fairclough developed the concept of synthetic personalisation to account for the linguistic effects providing an appearance of direct concern and contact with the individual listener in mass-crafted discourse phenomena, such as advertising, marketing, and political or media discourse. This is seen as part of a larger-scale process of technologisation of discourse, which englobes the increasingly subtle technical developments in the field of communication that aim to bring under scientifically regulated practice semiotic fields that were formerly considered suprasegmental, such as patterns of intonation, the graphic layout of text on the page or proxemic data.
His book New Labour, New Language? looks at the rhetoric used by the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, with a particular focus on the party's developments towards New Labour.

Influences

Fairclough's theories have been influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin and Michael Halliday in linguistics and by ideology theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu in sociology.

Awards

Books