Different Angles on Discourse Analysis

One week ago my seminar “Introduction to analysing linguistic action: text and discourse” was filled with exitement as we welcomed Professor Kwabena Sarfo Sarfo Kantankah from the University of Cape Coast in Ghana.

He introduced us to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and gave us insights into his 2013 published paper “Language at War: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Speeches of Bush and Obama on Terrorism.”

As our main focus in this course is Functional Pragmatics (FP), we were curious to learn about other types of dicourse analysis, and about the pros and cons, the capabilities and limits that different types can provide.

Even more eye opening were the perspectives Professor Kwabena Sarfo Sarfo Kantankah shared with us on language, power and ideology.

Today the students of this seminar and I reflect together on his input, compare CDA to FP, get a greater understanding for the type of discourse analysis we learned over this semester (FP) and most of all:

We are very grateful for the insights our guest,
Professor Kwabena Sarfo Sarfo Kantankah, gave us.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

I personally hope there will be another chance like this again soon.

Many thanks to Paul Loef for taking this photo.