ABSTRACT
Calling the approach ‘critical’ is a recognition that our social practice in general and our use of language in particular are bound up with causes and effects which we may not be at all aware of under normal conditions (Bourdieu, 1977) Specifically, connections between the use of language and the exercise of power are often not clear to people, yet appear on closer examination to be vitally important to the workings of power. For instance, ways in which a conventional consultation between a doctor and a patient is organized, or a conventional interview between a reporter and a politician, take for granted a wide range of ideologically potent assumptions about rights, relationships, knowledge and identities … the assumption that the doctor is the sole source of medically legitimate knowledge about illness, or that it is legitimate for the reporter—as one who ‘speaks for’ the public—to challenge the politician. Such practices are shaped, with their common-sense assumptions, according to prevailing relations of power between groups of people. (Fairclough, 1995a: 54)
