Abstract

The overall purpose of the study is to make visible various aspects of CDA. It presents various approaches to discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis to justify the adoption of certain models over others. A general theoretical account of the various influential approaches to the text will be presented first, followed by a critical approach next to arrive at their range of usefulness as a means to an end. Besides the absence of a general terminological consensus among text linguists, the fact is that there is no one generally accepted theory of discourse analysis that undertakes to provide the complete analysis of texts. While all text analysts acknowledge the fact that a text has structure, coherence, function, organisation, character and development, their approaches differ as to how each of these properties is realised and mutually related to other properties, hence the advantages of the eclectic approach which provides for the necessary step of integrating a variety of compatible systems of discourse analysis whenever these are found useful and adaptable to the requirements of each study. Such an approach, while lessening the problems of indeterminacy and partiality, remains just one model yielding one specific interpretation. However, variation in interpretations is resorvable and can ultimately be made definitive given a text and the same vital background information and approache(s).

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