Ruth Wodak and the Discourse-Historical Approach: An Assessment Based on Application Examples

The discourse-historical approach (DHA) looks at how discursive practices have changed throughout time in political and historical contexts. This analysis is based on analyzing racist, discriminatory, antisemitic, anti-immigrant, sexist, and ethnically exclusionary discourses across multiple text types, alongside their subheadings in the historical and sociopolitical context. Texts use discursive tactics to establish ideological meaning at the linguistic level as components of discourse. The discourse constructed using these techniques arranges the language’s anti-democratic framework. For this reason, applying DHA in critical discourse analysis is crucial for language to establish democratic, equal, fair, and liberating communicative activity. The purpose of this study is to clarify the theoretical underpinnings, methodology, and discursive strategies of Ruth Wodak’s DHA, which is a component of critical discourse analysis. The study also aims to explain how analytical method is appliedand to provide examples of this. With this objective in mind, the study elucidates the application of Wodak’s analytical method while simultaneously revealing research papers that have utilized her DHA and analytical method in the Turkish national literature, as well as compilation pieces deliberating on the approach. In accordance with the scan results, the study presents 10 research articles that have used discursive strategies to apply the DHA analytical method four compilation pieces that have provided a descriptive treatment of the approach. In order to add to the national literature, this study describes the theoretical and practical applications of Wodak’s analytical method.