The Position of Nodal Point in Critical Discourse Analysis, with an Emphasis on Norman Fairclough’s Approach

As an interdisciplinary approach in Social Sciences, critical discourse analysis is a method of exploitation of the hidden message of the analysis unit data. It is a qualitative method being rooted in linguistics and aims to understand the content and meaning of the text. One of the most important of such a method is Norman Fairclough’s theory of critical discourse analysis. He regards discourse as a linguistic event, and part of social action. In Fairclough’s approach, discourse consists of three dimensions: text, discourse practice, and social action. Accordingly, the paper attempts to investigate the process of studying Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis in terms of description, interpretation, and explanation, and to determine the relation of each level with the nodal point. Finally, the relation is displayed in a graph. Given the theoretical foundations of critical discourse analysis, it is concluded that despite using different methods of analysis at each level of description, interpretation, and explanation, it is the nodal point that is the only principle limiting the elements and the commonality between the three levels. The descriptive-analytical approach and documentary data collection method is used in this paper.