Systematic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) have a common interest in the link between language and society. CDA uses Systemic Functional Linguistics as a tool to analyse texts and discourses. While other linguistic models are useful to CDA, Systemic Functional Linguistics is of special interest to CDA, mainly due to its focus on language use, its informative and social functions. Other linguistic models are also useful to CDA but they may lack strong attraction to CDA analysts due to their emphasis on syntactic structure and less on functional aspects of language. This chapter gives a brief outline of Systemic Functional Linguistics and focuses on four grammatical features which have practical implications for CDA: theme, lexical density, nominalisation, and grammatical metaphor.