The Foundations of Linguistic Turn and Its Impact on the Formation of the Critical Discourse Analysis Method

Linguistics and its application in the social sciences in the nineteenth century relied on a structuralist perspective and, as a result, was largely fatalistic and rigid. At the beginning of the twentieth century, with the occurrence of the linguistic turn, an opportunity was provided for this rigid approach to become more flexible and also to provide the methodological and epistemological opportunities needed to interpret and explain plural discourses and language games. This opposition itself is embodied in the person of Wittgenstein. In the early phase of his thought, as an analytical philosopher heavily relying on formal logic, he practically considered only one discourse and language game as the opportunity for design, but in the later phase of his thought, he provided the foundations for accepting pluralism in the field of language games. His intellectual legacy and that of all the thinkers who in the twentieth century, in the form of post-structuralist approaches, began to think in the field of language and epistemology, was a methodology that, in the form of "critical discourse analysis", on the one hand, gives the opportunity for plurality and diversity in the field of discourses to human and social agents, and on the other hand, in analyzing the linguistic and discursive games of these agents, it pays attention to both their objective and personal context and interprets their text and language. Through this theoretical struggle, a methodology has been created that seems to be useful and applicable for interpreting and explaining any field of social interaction that is based on power relations.