Beyond the Obvious. Suggestions to Empower Critical Discourse Analysis

The essay discusses some of the theoretical and methodological criticism against Critical Discourse Analysis, focusing especially on the charge of belaboring the obvious, of providing empirical findings that were already implicit in the research premises and/or that were attainable by the average lay reader of the texts without the application of peculiar analytical techniques. Instead of following the sharpest critics in their overall rejection of CDA, the author looks for possible methodological solutions to improve its explanatory and critical purposes. In particular, she suggests to identify clearly the unit of analysis and to keep it fixed during the analytical process; in addition, she proposes to look more systematically for hidden meaning structures, revisiting the classical works by Propp and Toulmin.