ABSTRACT
The antecedents of critical discourse analysis (CDA) are usually said to lie in Critical Linguistics (CL), a movement developed at the University of East Anglia during the 1970s. Scholars working in this group, led by Fowler (e.g. Fowler 1991, 1996a), but also including names such as Kress, Hodge and Trew (e.g. Fowler et al. 1979) were concerned to develop a social approach to linguistics which recognized power relationships as a central theoretical issue and text as its main unit of analysis (Kress 1989). Wodak (2001) emphasizes the commonality between CDA and CL. In the same chapter she also describes what she sees as the coming together of CDA in a meeting in 1991 in Amsterdam involving van Dijk, Fairclough, Kress, van Leeuwen and herself, probably still the major names in the movement to this day (although Kress and van Leeuwen have not emphasized the critical dimension of their work so much in recent years).
