Text, Context, Pretext

* Focuses attention specifically on the work of critical discourse analysis (CDA) in light of the issues discussed.

Review

“This book is beautifully written, clearly and cogently argued and illustrated with interesting and persuasive examples. It is excellent for use with students, who would otherwise struggle in a field replete with difficult, if not tortuous, key texts.”

– Malcolm Coulthard, University of Birmingham

“It is unusual in discourse analysis to find a book as thought-provoking or as wide-ranging as this. Any student of pragmatics, discourse analysis (critical or otherwise), text linguistics or corpus linguistics will need to consider carefully what Henry Widdowson has to say; his positions are too well argued to be simply ignored.”
– Michael Hoey, University of Liverpool

“Text, Context, Pretext covers much ground in discourse analysis ranging from its early precursors (e.g. B Malinowski, Z. Harris) to its contemporary practitioners. The notion of pretext provides a new approach to the discussion of critical issues in (critical) discourse analysis.”
– Journal of Sociolinguistics

“The Volume, greatly ro its credit, raises the awareness of various critical issues which need to be considered when embarking on research in Critical Discourse Analysis.”
– Discourse & Society

Book Description

This fascinating examination of the relations between grammar, text, and discourse is designed to provoke genuinely critical discussion on key issues in discourse analysis that are not always clearly identified and examined. The inquiry into discourse analysis that Zellig Harris initiated 50 years ago raised a number of problematic issues that have remained unresolved since. The main question they all concern is the relationship between the analysis of the formal properties of text and the significance that is assigned to them in discourse interpretation. This book explores this relationship and introduces the notion of pretext as an additional factor in the general interpretative process. It also focuses attention specifically on the work of critical discourse analysis (CDA) in light of the issues discussed. Particular examples of analysis are subjected to scrutiny, and questions are raised as to how far the interpretations assigned are warranted by the analytic findings. This leads to a more general appraisal of the validity and coherence of the principles and practices of CDA. The result is a stimulating volume that makes explicit the distinctions between the key concepts of text and discourse, and between context, co-text, and pretext. It shows how they are related, providing a theoretical frame of reference for evaluating the work of critical discourse analysis.