1.

Van Dijk’s CDA Model

Teun van Dijk is a prominent name in critical discourse studies, and his model of CD analysis is one of the
influential approaches in the field. Van Dijk (1993) has described in detail how to inter-relate power and
dominance relations to text and discourse structures, thus relating macro level and social cognitive
understandings to micro level text and talk, and to find out how power and dominance is manifested,
produced and reproduced through discourse. The present analysis is an attempt to apply his model of
CD analysis to a Letter to Editor taken from Pakistani English newspaper Dawn.

2. Background

The letter is written in the broader national debate about Dr. Qadri’s intentions and in the aftermath of
Pakistani Supreme Court’s rejection of his petition to review the establishment procedure of Election
Commission of Pakistan. Dr. Qadri arrived in Pakistan in December, 2012 and he orchestrated an
impressive sit down strike in front of Parliament, and several demonstrations in different cities including
one in Lahore. His arrival created quite a stir among politicians and generally media campaign was
against him. After several demonstrations, he went to Supreme Court and petitioned to review the
establishment procedure of Election Commission of Pakistan, which was rejected by Supreme Court of
Pakistan as he was a dual national. At the same time, majority of media outlets criticized him for his dual
nationality, raised doubts on his intentions and accused him of derailing the democratic process. The
letter is written in this context, while it counters the majority negative discourse against Dr. Qadri, it also
highlights another issue i.e. the loyalty of overseas Pakistanis. The critical analysis of this piece of
discourse is as follows:

3. Analysis

3.1 Access: The letter writer appears to be a common Pakistani citizen with interest in politics so he has
no exclusive access to any media related genres; and he is dependent on the selection processes of
newspaper to get a place in letters to editor column. This fact makes his contribution a resistive and
counter discourse. As the background also suggests, general media campaign was against Dr. Qadri and
this letter favours his opinion.

The letter is written in English language, to an English newspaper which is considered one of the oldest
newspapers of country, and has a reputation among ruling elite, political and bureaucratic class of the
country. Thus the writer gets access to voice his opinion directly to the dominant group, though he
appear not to be from that class.

3.2 Genre: The genre is ‘Letters to Editor’ section of newspapers, which in different writers’ opinion is
“among the few outlets available to the public for voicing opinion” (Kapoor and Botan, 1992, p. 5).
Although there are ‘rules of selection’ (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2002) for Letters to Editor, still they provide a
window for the reader community to voice their opinion. The text type is argumentative in nature, and
usually are written in response to already printed editorials, opinion articles, other letters or broader
social and/or political debate going on in society. This letter is also an example of response to such a
political debate going on in national press, electronic and social media.

3.3 Communicative acts and social meanings: The letter is a counter discourse which tries to counter
dominant discourse of defamation of a political figure. It shows the heterogeneity of the society, and
disagreement among the masses about the legitimacy of Dr. Qadri’s quest to reform election process
including the Election Commission of Pakistan. The letter also voices concern about the impartiality of
highest court in the country, and thus again highlights the scars of disagreement among the society
about the role of courts or judiciary.

3.4 Participant positions and roles: As already mentioned the letter writer appears to be a member of
civil society, with apparently no or less significant authority in terms of political or social influence.

3.5 Speech act: The speech acts performed by the letter writer are assertive in nature. Taking the text as
a whole, the writer accuses higher courts of impartiality, casts doubt on their ability to be just, tries to
prove Dr. Qadri’s cause to be just, accuses politicians of the problems in the country. As well as, he
asserts that courts should be just and fair in case selection.

3.6 Macrosemantics: topics As the heading in line 1 shows the topic is “Dr Qadri’s petition: loyalty
debate”. The topic can be rephrased as “If Dr. Qadri is disloyal then all overseas Pakistanis are”, “Courts
should not rule on loyalty”, “Supreme Court is being partial regarding Dr. Qadri”….. Although the topic
given, most probably, by the ‘Letters to Editor’ section’s editor is less catchy, less emotional and looks
more reasonable, the content of the letter shows that above exemplified topics can also fit as a heading.
The topic thus is not just about Dr. Qadri being right or wrong, the writer overgeneralizes the available
facts and draws on the emotions of the readers to prove his point. In that emotional state, he accuses
the highest court in the country of being partial and unjust.

3.7 Superstructures: Text Schemata and Argumentation ‘Letter to Editor’ are mainly known as their
argumentative structure. Richardson (2007) provides a detailed review of argumentation strategies,
which was helpful in argumentation analysis of this piece of text as well. The writer uses two fold
strategy in argumentation: drawing on emotions of the readers as well as logical argumentation. The
argumentation seems to have two divisions which are mentioned here:

1) The Supreme Court’s decision regarding Dr. Qadri is wrong because:

a. Court cannot rule on loyalty or disloyalty (the writer compares a legitimate jurisdictional area of court
with other emotions.)

b. This way all overseas Pakistanis will become disloyal.

c. Taking oath doesn’t mean one is loyal to another.

d. Politicians are more disloyal then common overseas Pakistanis.

e. It has caused disgrace for Pakistanis.

2) Courts are biased because:

a. They are selective in cases.

b. They have personal grudges with petitioners.

c. They prolong hearings of legitimate cases while illegitimate ones are given undue importance.

d. The Election Commission does have constitutional problems in its establishment procedure.

3) Therefore:

a. Courts should not do this.

b. EC formation process should be reviewed.

The first argument of the writer mostly invokes reader’s emotions by using noun phrases like “ministry
of overseas disloyal Pakistanis” (line 12-13), “utter disgrace” and rhetorical questions (para 5). The
writer uses apparently flawed argumentation by including Dr. Qadri to common Pakistanis working
abroad and putting them against the ‘politicians’. He ignores the fact the Dr. Qadri himself is a politician,
thus he wrongly presupposes that Dr. Qadri is “not politician”, and “his intentions are good”.

The second argumentation uses logical arguments to prove the point. The writer provides a number of
examples to support his case that ‘courts are partial’, a few of which are apparently over-extended (e.g.
Senator Raza Abidi’s example, he was actually called in contempt of court case and wasn’t ignored at all,
the NRO case in which government was given grace period to act upon it and afterwards court did take a
strict action against elected PM in contempt case). The writer also ignores the background surrounding
Dr. Qadri’s sudden arrival, the rumors of derailing the system and a ‘technocratic government’ which led
Supreme Court to take immediate action. The writer also ignores the fact that Dr. Qadri orchestrated a
sit strike in front of Parliament and a demonstration in Lahore at his arrival which consumed (according
to some estimates) more than 1 billion rupees, which casts doubts on his intentions as a sincere
‘common Pakistani’ concerned about the political hegemony in the country.

Concluding the argumentation analysis, the writer though ignores certain facts, but provides a counter
discourse with certain good arguments which legitimatize the actions of Dr. Qadri and insist that the
courts to act in his favour.

3.7 Local meaning and coherence:

a) Level of specificity and degree of completeness: The writer over-generalizes the working class
Pakistanis abroad and implicitly includes Dr. Qadri among them, though that’s is not the case. He is a
politician, who took Canadian citizenship as a scholar and politician. The examples for his arguments are
present in abundance but opposite arguments are ignored and only an acknowledgement sentence is
provided (line 31) which in itself is highlighting the oncoming argument with traditional “Although xxx
but yyy” structure.

b) Perspective: The writer’s perspective is clearly against the general opinion about Dr. Qadri, and he is
against Supreme Court’s ruling about the matter as well.

c) Implicitness: As mentioned above the writes uses a number of presuppositions. He implicitly excludes
Dr. Qadri from the group of ‘bad politicians’ even though he is a politician, he presupposes that ‘judges
have personal grudges with all petitioners’ (line 29), ‘courts are selective’ (line 35). Thus he supports his
argumentation and opinion.

3.8 Style: variations of syntax, lexicon and sound: The word choice is simple and do not indicate any
particular register. There are emotion words e.g. ‘like, dislike, love, hate’ (line 10) which add to the
argumentation strategy i.e. to draw upon readers’ feelings. The terms like ‘judicial activism’ are used in a
negative and critical manner which is used here and adds to the opinion of the writer. Lastly, an
interesting choice of words is adopted to point towards ‘foreign countries’. Simply, pronoun ‘other’ (line
6) is used to refer to ‘foreign countries’, similarly the word ‘home’ (line 4) is used to refer to Pakistan.
This word choice is directly in accordance with writer’s opinion and strategy to invoke readers’
emotions.

The syntactic style is typical of newspaper discourse with long sentences, and one or two sentence long
paragraphs. The start of text has topicalizations (line 3, 4) which introduce writer’s focus in the
beginning. Similarly passive voices are used (e.g. line 4) to topicalize the theme as well as to reduce the
negative opinion to surface at start, which gets stronger as the argument develops and ends at strong
assertion using modal verb ‘should’ (line 35).

4. Conclusion

Overall, the text counters a dominant discourse in print and electronic media. It tries to shatter the
authority of dominant media opinion, and resists to authoritative decision of highest court of the
country. During this quest, the writer gets partial success but argumentative strategy appears to be
flawed at more than one occasions, as the analysis reveals. The letter tries to introduce a counter
discourse through ‘Letters to Editor’ section but apparently fails to do so as data collected from next 13
days (letter was published on 1st March, 2013) has no follow up or reaction on this issue.

References

Kapoor, S. and Botan, C. (1992). Studies Compare How Editors Use Letters. The Masthead 44(1), p. 5.

Richardson, J.E. (2007). Analysing Newspapers: An approach from Critical Discourse Analysis.
Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan.
Van Dijk, T.A. (1993). Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society, 4(2), 249-283.

Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2002). Understanding the Conditions for Public Discourse: four rules for selecting
letters to the editor. Journalism Studies, 3(1), 69 –81.