CDA’s concepts on power and ideology
Again, as “one of the crucial tasks …show more content…
Since the locus of structure is primary in Foucault’s notion of power, CDA accords this perspective in terms of its analysis characteristics which take into account not only the linguistic features of the text but also consider how social structure determine the production of text as a social practice (Wodak and Meyer, …show more content…
Under Van Dijk’s SCA approach, discourse, communication, people’s understanding of social events and social relations are all governed and monitored by social cognition (Van Dijk, 1993, Wodak, 2006). In particular, social actors, within Van Dijk’s conceptualisation, when participating in discourses, they do not rely merely on their personal experience and strategies, but also their accumulative socially shared perceptions. These perceptions are termed as ‘social representations’. Given these social representations and perceptions, the social system is constructed in the cognitive system of the social actors through the coordination procedure of external requirements and social actors’ subjective experience. It accords with the perspective above in terms of power relations and dominance. Van Dijk points out that there is a cognitive dimension of ‘power’ stemmed from the social dimension of dominance where social actors’ understandings about power relations from the social event or institutions. These understandings are analysed in SCA through an intricate relationship between ‘text’ and ‘context’. It is notable that Van Dijk does not refer ‘context’ here to any kind of social variables, such as gender or age. Instead, context “is a subjective mental representations, a dynamic online model, of the participants about the for-them-now