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restrictions are allowed into discourse, which perspective should be used, and which topic is discussed.
In this view, discourse discerns that language is always involved in power relationships, especially in the formation of the subject and representation of
actions presenting in the society. Since it uses a critical perspective, this category of discourse analysis is also called as critical discourse analysis or
CDA Fairclough and Wodak in Eriyanto, 2012: 6-7.
B. Critical Discourse Analysis
Previously, it is stated that discourse analysis concerns with the description and interpretation of language used for communication and how
the addressee worked on linguistic message in order to interpret them. Critical discourse analysis CDA offers not only a description and interpretation of
discourses in social context but also offers an explanation of why and how discourses work Rogers, 2004: 2.
CDA is practically oriented form of discourse analysis aimed at addressing social problems. Critical is used in the special sense of aiming to
show up connections which may be hidden from people such as the connections between language, power, strategies, and ideology Fairclough,
1989: 5. It can perhaps best be understood as a form of applied linguistics linguistics, applied to the remedying of imbalances of power and various
forms of social injustice. In this view, since ideologies permeate society by
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disguising themselves as common sense, the way to resist them is to unmask them Davies and Elder, 2004: 158.
Van Dijk ’s, Wodak, and Fairclough in Eriyanto 2012: 8-13 state that
the characteristic of critical discourse analysis are as follows. First, action concerns that discourse is observed as the matter which its goal is to influence,
to persuade, and to react. Second, context confirms that discourse considers the context such as background, situation, event, condition and all of matters
outside of the text and other factors which influence the meanings of discourse such as language participants and the situation when the text is produced. It
means that discourse should be interpreted in a certain situation and condition. Third, history places discourse in a specific social context and cannot be
understood without concerning the attached context. Fourth, power elaborates that discourse is not neutral and natural but it represents a form of power fight.
Fifth, ideology focuses on the text and conversation are a form of ideological practice.
In an ideological discourse analysis, making explicit the meaning implied by a sentence or text fragment is a powerful instrument of critical study van
Dijk, 2004: 47. More specifically, CDA focuses on the ways discourse structures enact, confirm, legitimate, and reproduce certain ideology or
challenge relations of power and dominance in society van Dijk in Schiffrin, Tannen, and Hamilton: 2001: 353.
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C. Discourse and Context
Context refers to the situation giving rise to the discourse and within which the discourse is embedded Nunan, 1993: 7-8. There are two types of
context: linguistic context and non-linguistic context. The linguistic context is the language that surrounds or accompanies the piece of discourse. The non-
linguistic context is within which the discourse takes place. It includes the types of communicative event, the topic, the purpose of the event, the setting,
the participants, and the background knowledge underlying the communicative event.
According to van Dijk 2008: 4 context is whenever we want to indicate that some phenomenon, event, action or discourse needs to be seen or studied
in relationship to its situation, that is, its surrounding conditions and consequences. Thus, it describes and also explains the occurrence or
properties of some focal phenomenon in terms of some aspects of its context. Contextual assumptions affect how someone understand language, and
that context of speech has to be better understood to develop realistic theories of language and of language learning Ervin-Tripp, 1996: 21. Therefore, the
researcher needs to consider the context of the situation in order to have a better understanding in analyzing the language used by the criminal defense
lawyer character in the Lincoln lawyer novel.
