Discourse and Power

This book is about two fundamental phenomena in society: discourse and power. These are also two of the basic notions of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), an academic movement that has quickly spread in linguis-tics and the social sciences since its first book publication in 1979, namely, Language and Control by Roger Fowler, Bob Hodge, Gunther Kress and Tony Trew, a team that advocated what they called 'critical linguistics'. Similar movements have inspired other disciplines, such as psychology, sociology and anthropology, all fundamentally interested in how power and especially power abuse are reproduced in society. Similarly, discourse analysts in the humanities and social sciences have specifically been interested in how discourse is involved in this process. They have shown that many forms of social inequality, such as those based on gender, class and race, are construed, perpetuated and legitimated by text and talk, and especially by the forms of public discourse controlled by the symbolic elites: politicians, journalists, scholars, writers and bureaucrats.