It is a reasonable question.

If both Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Forensic Discourse Analysis (FDA) deal with language in context, if both attend to what is implicit, if both move beyond the surface of words — then what exactly separates them?

The confusion is understandable. Some authors have even argued that the two are essentially the same, suggesting that doing forensic discourse analysis is, in effect, doing CDA (Onoja & Oguche, 2021). But once we look closely at how each operates, the equivalence begins to break down.

The difference is not superficial. It is structural.

CDA is concerned with discourse as a social force. It looks at how language participates in the production of power, how it sustains inequality, how it frames legitimacy. Its scope is necessarily wide. It connects texts across time, institutions, and ideological formations. As described in work like Discourse and Power, CDA is explicitly oriented toward uncovering how discourse reproduces or resists dominance.

FDA begins somewhere else entirely.

Forensic Discourse Analysis is not a critical project in that sense. It is a constrained application of linguistic knowledge within a legal context. Its function is not to expose systems of power, but to clarify what language can — and cannot — sustain as evidence. In forensic linguistics, as outlined in An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics and further developed in The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics, the analyst’s role is to assist the court by explaining linguistic evidence, not to advance broad interpretive claims.

The difference becomes clearer when we look at the questions each field asks.

CDA asks:
What does this discourse do in society?
What structures does it reproduce?
What ideologies are embedded in it?

FDA asks:
What was said?
What are the linguistically supportable interpretations of this utterance?
Under what conditions could it be understood in one way rather than another?

These are not the same questions. And they do not allow for the same type of answer.

Both fields require methodological clarity, internal consistency, and analytical accountability. The difference is not in the presence of these standards, but in how far interpretation is allowed to go.

In CDA, interpretive expansion is part of the method. The analyst is expected to move outward — to situate discourse within broader social patterns.

In FDA, the movement is the opposite. The task is to narrow down. To delimit. To identify the range of interpretations that can be justified without overreach.

This distinction becomes particularly important when we consider how claims are supported. The argument that FDA and CDA are essentially equivalent is often developed using literary data, such as The Trials of Brother Jero (Onoja & Oguche, 2021). That kind of corpus allows, and even encourages, interpretive expansion. It is designed for it. What remains unclear is whether the same equivalence would hold under the constraints of actual forensic practice, where interpretation must be explicitly bounded and defensible.

Because both fields share tools — pragmatics, discourse structure, implicature, context — it is tempting to assume they are doing the same work. But shared tools do not imply shared function. What changes is the protocol under which those tools are used.

In a legal context, interpretation must be explicitly bounded. Not because it is less sophisticated, but because it must remain defensible. The analyst is required to show how a conclusion follows from the linguistic material, and just as importantly, where that conclusion stops.

Not every plausible interpretation can be advanced as a forensic conclusion.

The role of the forensic analyst is not to determine what happened, nor to assign intention beyond what the language can sustain. It is to delimit the interpretive space — to make clear what is linguistically supported, what remains uncertain, and what cannot be claimed.

CDA and FDA meet at the level of analysis, but differ in the plumb of responsibility.

Daniel Avilán

References

Onoja, G. O., & Oguche, R. F. E. (2021). A Linguistic Exploration of the Interface between Forensic Discourse Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis in The Trials of Brother Jero.

Van Dijk, T. A. (2008). Discourse and Power.

Coulthard, M., & Johnson, A. (2007). An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics.