The relationship between the social and the linguistic in Critical Discourse Analysis: A case study of Thai political science texts

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) views discourse and text as social practice. It examines how language is used to produce, maintain, resist or challenge power relations in society. This paper argues that CDA benefits from an account of the historical and socio-political context as well as a detailed linguistic analysis of the texts. Both perspectives are important because of the way in which the social context and language enable and constrain a rhetorical space within which texts are produced. Three Thai political science texts written shortly after the 2006 coup in Thailand were analysed. An understanding of the historical and socio-political context in Thailand at this time sheds light on the specific rhetorical context in which the writers were operating. At the same time, the tools of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) allow us to interrogate the texts, for example through transitivity structures, to identify the particular ideological positions of the writers of the texts and the rhetorical strategies they use to legitimise or challenge the discourse of the coup and the coup makers.