ABSTRACT
This chapter maps out the intersections between Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Critical Rhetoric (CR), and the study of cognitive labor in order to highlight their commonalities while at the same time acknowledging, and perhaps easing, some of the tensions that exist between them. Fairclough's approach to CDA calls for analysis to proceed along three interrelated dialectically conjoined dimensions: "each discursive event has three dimensions or facets: it is a spoken or written language text, it is an instance of discourse practice involving the production and interpretation of text, and it is a piece of social practice". In many ways, critical discourse analysis, conceived broadly, and rhetorical criticism, similarly conceived, travel along parallel paths. Indeed, Ruth Wodak acknowledges that whereas CDA finds its roots primarily in functional systemic linguistics, other roots of critical linguistics (CL) and CDA lie in classical rhetoric, text linguistics and sociolinguistics, as well as in applied linguistics and pragmatics.
