Analytical categories for Critical Disocurse (semiosis) Analysis

This is a tentative systematisation that I have put together for the categories, methodologies and aspects that are relevant and/or crucial in analysis of social representations of certain social actor(s) in discourse. This is mainly based on works of Wodak, Van Dijk and Van Leeuwen.

The three step analytical framework, on one hand, looks at what there is in terms of Actors, Actions and Argumentations and on the other hand, it considers how these three levels are operationalised and realised in a discourse. That is; it starts with what social actors are(not) present in the text, how and under what processes and aspects they are represented. Such what and how course of action is adopted for the argumentation level too.

The mechanisms listed under the aspect/ processes category are mainly discourse analytical ones in a sense that they have been proposed and adopted by many discourse(text)oriented research. However, the levels of analysis –actors, actions and arguments- can be applied to other modes of communicative events i.e. visual representations of social actors in movies, sitcoms or TV shows. Moreover, several aspects/processes mentioned here can also be applied in multimodal representations as analytical categories while some more can be re/defined based on the affordances of the medium and characteristics of the social actors under investigation.