As a new discipline, critical discourse analysis (CDA) has made remarkable achievements, with more and more scholars devoting themselves to this interdisciplinary field of research worldwide. The major difference between CDA and other traditional discourse analysis approaches lies in the term “critical”, which presupposes researchers’ overt political positions and strong social concern. However, this presupposition has been questioned and deemed as problematic by many scholars who give priority to objectivity in research. This paper first explores the core concept of CDA, criticism, and points out CDA’s orientation to social problems. As a new discipline, CDA inevitably has some problems and limitations. However, one of the most important aspects of CDA is its openness. On this basis, this paper tries to sort out the latest developments in CDA. This paper discusses scholars’ criticisms of CDA in detail, together with CDA practitioners’ responses. Informed by diverse disciplines and theories, CDA does not provide a unified and systematic analytic framework. Scholars’ critiques have been targeted at both CDA’s theories and methods, specifically roles played by researchers and participants, linguistic theories employed, text analysis, data selection, context, etc. Some criticisms can be attributed to the different epistemological stances held by researchers and their different research traditions and backgrounds. Others like selective interpretation of researchers and participants’ reaction to texts are common problems in arts and humanities. However, problems and limitations are inevitable in the early stage of any discipline. When viewed more positively, it indicates great potential for CDA’s future development. Subsequently, this paper discusses new developments in CDA, namely corpus-based CDA, cognitive CDA, ethnography-informed CDA and positive discourse analysis (PDA). As responses to the problems presented previously by scholars, these developments not only enrich CDA’s analytic tools but also enhance its interpretive power, rendering its research results more convincing.

Keywords： critical discourse analysis ; cognitive linguistics ; corpus ; positive discourse analysis ; ethnography