A social network approach to critical discourse studies

Viewing discourse as a social practice, one important task of critical discourse studies (CDS) is to unveil inequality, power, and ideologies through linguistic and discoursal analysis of social events, social identities, and social relations represented in oral or written texts. As such, it lends itself to social network analysis (SNA) which aims to discover relation patterns and structures among such social actors as people, organizations, and political entities. This article proposes an integration of SNA techniques into CDS and explores this possibility via an example in diachronic study on international relations represented in news reporting on China in The New York Times between 1980 and 2020 by examining subject-direct object pairs to approach the target relations between national actors. It is shown that the coupling of these two approaches effectively reveals international relation networks surrounding key national actors, based on which detailed linguistic and discoursal analysis further sheds light on the underlying ideological and socio-political factors in the news reports. Considering the fact that SNA consists of a great variety of network statistics, which can be broadly categorized into those related to the relative position of the actor in the network and those concerned with the structure of the network itself, there is vast space for the utility of SNA metrics in aiding CDS in further research.