The power of language (review)

Lynne Young and Brigid Fitzgerald have published an introductory textbook on salient phenomena within our modern, globalized world that all cope with, or are co-constructed through, language and communication. In this very elegantly designed book, they cover a huge range of topical themes, from gender and racism to advertising, language and war, and discourse and organizations.

The book introduces a specific manner of integrating functional systemic linguistics (FSL) with critical discourse analysis (CDA). First, the authors define relevant concepts of FSL in each chapter; and second, they propose another level of interpretation, the perspective from CDA. Hence, this book continues many discussions that address this challenging combination in systematic ways (e.g., Martin & Wodak, 2003), in addition to CDA research in the Hallidayan tradition (e.g., Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999).

The structure of all chapters is standardized, which makes the book very accessible: first, a definition of a topic or problem is provided; then, either a topical text or a debate introduces the field covered in the chapter (for example, a 'call to arms,' or a typical advertisement). A new grammatical concept is then introduced very didactically and with excellent examples (for example, 'mood,' or 'modality'). Finally, each chapter provides a thorough analysis of one or more texts from an FSL point of view, with a list of terms and a glossary. Then, the authors 'add' CDA, by extending the interpretation or by asking challenging questions that transcend the analyzed text and reach out to much broader contexts. In this way, the integration of FSL and CDA happens sequentially rather than in a truly integrated manner.

This approach is worth discussing in greater detail. Would alternative manners of presentation allow for similar didactic results? Let us assume that one could also pose some of the broader context-oriented questions as overarching research questions and the more descriptive-grammatical aspects as sub-questions. Alternatively, the detailed grammatical analysis could be viewed as an operationalization of the more general problem; other aspects would then require different, possibly interdisciplinary, approaches from sociology, history, or political science. In short, the division into descriptive grammatical and critical analysis suggests that CDA per se would not or even could not employ detailed analysis – which is, of course, wrong. Moreover, how would the second step, the purely hermeneutic interpretation, be justified and grounded? The division could also mean that this approach necessarily requires two distinct and independent stages: first a grammatical one, and second, an interpretative one. However, the many approaches to one problem (such as 'language and war') are never independent of each other; they all help us to understand and explain the particular object under investigation in complementing one another.

Thus, such a presentation of the combination of FSL and CDA leads to some false assumptions about CDA. In the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) (e.g.,Wodak, 2001), we have always integrated grammatical, rhetorical, pragmatic, and argumentative analyses with social science approaches. Of course, the detailed analysis has to follow a systematic procedure that is recursive; every stage, however, also requires interpretative and subjective decisions by the analyst. Grammatical analysis is also interpretative: the decision to employ FSL – and not for example, generative or functional grammar – is a subjective decision that requires justification. Hence, the didactic distinction should not be confused with more general features of FSL, on the one hand, and CDA (of whatever kind), on the other. It would have been useful to include some, even very brief, epistemological considerations on the approach chosen for this book in order to avoid possible misunderstandings about the functions of FSL and CDA.

Some final minor points. The coherent structure of the book implies that other approaches to CDA are unfortunately neglected. Some important topics are missing in this otherwise very comprehensive study, such as differentiated aspects of multimodality (Van Leeuwen, 2005). Research in languages other than English is rarely cited, pointing to the hegemony of a specific language in academia (see Wodak, 2006).

Nevertheless, apart from these few points of critique, the book fulfils its goals very...