Introduction

Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) is an inter-disciplinary approach to language in use, which aims to advance our understanding of how discourse figures in social processes, social structures and social change. CDS draws heavily on social theories and seeks to develop a critically contextualised approach to linguistics which identifies issues of ideology, power and inequality as central to our field of studies. The scope of critical discourse studies is not limited to linguistic studies, nor to work that is primarily empirical or analytical. However, like other approaches to discourse analysis, CDS is wedded to the principle of examining real-world examples of language in use, with the text as our main unit of analysis. CDS practitioners are united in seeing language as a form of social practice and that its proper focus is in its contexts of use (Fairclough 1989; Fairclough, Mulderrig and Wodak 2011; Wodak and Meyer 2016a). According to Fairclough (1989: 2), “using language is the commonest form of social behaviour”. In its view of language as social action, CDS is inspired by the work of Austin (1962) and Wittgenstein (1965), with their emphasis on language as always doing something. It is impossible to examine language in use – what people do with language and how this ‘doing’ is linked to wider inter-personal, institutional, socio-cultural and material contexts – if the tokens of discourse analysed are concocted by the writers. CDS is problem-driven (as opposed to theory-driven) and aims to uncover hidden features of language use and debunk their claims to authority. It aims to make the implicit explicit in language use. As Jaworski and Coupland (2015: 5) put it, “[CDS] is a forensic activity, with a libertarian political slant”. CDS is practised in a wide range of fields, apart from language studies, such as anthropology, business studies, geography, health studies, media studies, psychology and tourism studies. In this sense it is a very inter-disciplinary enterprise.