How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Introduction

Want to use Critical Discourse Analysis, but not sure where to start? This book is the complete toolkit you need.

Each chapter presents distinct concepts and ideas in Critical Discourse Analysis, explaining how to use them in your research – and why. Packed with case studies of news texts, social media content, memes, promotional videos, institutional documents, infographics and webpages, the book shows you how to apply each set of tools to real life examples.

Most importantly, examples, case studies, and revised opening chapters of this second edition show how multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis can help us to understand the role of language in the functioning of society and politics today, shaping our priorities for what to do and how to act.

This book is an inspiring and valuable resource for any undergraduate students and researchers who wish to understand and use Critical Discourse Analysis.

David Machin is Professor of Linguistics at the Institute of Corpus and Applications, Shanghai International Studies University. He publishes in a range of academic fields applying multimodal critical discourse analysis to provide unique insights. His books include Introduction to Multimodal Analysis (2020), Doing Visual Analysis (2018), Visual Journalism (2015) and The Language of War Monuments 2013). He is coeditor of the journal Social Semiotics, which publishes researching which uses multimodal critical discourse analysis and is on the editorial board of a range of leading journals in the field.

Andrea Mayr is currently Associate Professor in Media and Communication at Zayed University, UAE, where she works in the fields of Critical Discourse Analysis and Multimodality, with a particular focus on crime and deviance, social exclusion and (digital) media activism. In her widely used books and peer-reviewed journal articles she applies mostly linguistic methods to the study of multimodal communication, such as in Language and Power (2019).