ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the history of linguistic investigations into power, identify some of the main developments and pinpoint some of the key players. It describes the approaches that are ‘critical’ because they focus on the social and ideological functions of language in producing, reproducing or changing social structures, relations and identities. The term ‘critical linguistics’ was coined in the late 1970s by Roger Fowler and his colleagues at the University of East Anglia in the UK, and the spirit of what was then a new and challenging approach to the study of language is captured in their seminal publication Language and Control. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) criticizes mainstream linguistic approaches ‘for taking conventions and practices at face value, as objects to be described in a way which obscures their political and ideological investment’. CDA scholars have sought to place the discipline on firmer ground by embracing corpus linguistic techniques to ensure the representativeness of data.
