Critical Linguistics (CL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) are
often used interchangeably. In fact, recently the term CDA seems to have been pre-
ferred and is being used to denote the theory formerly identifi ed as CL. Thus, I will
continue to use CDA exclusively in this paper (see Anthonissen 2001for an exten-
sive discussion of these terms). The roots of CDA lie in classical Rhetoric, Text
linguistics and Sociolinguistics, as well as in Applied Linguistics and Pragmatics