CDA is an exercise in interpretation, not analysis [...]. CDA is too selective, partial and qualitative [...]. CD analysts [...] are the irst to really see and address the workings of power in discourse" [Machin and Mayr 2015, pp. 298-209]. Which of that assertions is true and more grounded than the other is not an easy question to answer. he book of David Machin and Andrea Mayr, at the same time, asks fundamental questions about what is and how to do critical discourse analysis and presents

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... troversies and arguments related to this research approach. he reason for preparing the study was a growing need for explaining and systematizing a set of tools for analysing texts and spoken language funded on a loose combination of approaches rooted in linguistics, but widely applied in media and cultural studies. Studies that use CDA, however, are not only limited to spoken or printed expressions, but also investigate images or video content and other signs of culture like monuments, sounds, toys, pictures, photos, graphics or memes. Especially, the multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) applied in order to investigate the visual communication practices forms the research toolkit that allows for more precise, systematic and careful description and accurate analysis of these practices. he greatest challenge that CDA is probably able to meet is to reveal the ideology buried in texts and images. By identifying some speciic language choices, the critical approach is employed to investigate how language and grammar can be used as ideological instruments, how communication decision are taken when categorizing people, events, places or actions, which persons and phenomena are foregrounded or backgrounded or even excluded, and how certain kinds of practices, ideas and identities are promoted and naturalised. By revealing the language choices, also the underlying deinitions of events that determine the social actions are possible to be disclosed. Nevertheless, as the authors declare, the CDA is not so much interested in the language use itself, but in the linguistic manifestations of social and cultural processes and structures: "CDA assumes that power relations are discursive. In other Pobrane z czasopisma Mediatizations Studies http://mediatization.umcs.pl