Synchronic And Diachronic Analysis Of Barack Obama's Identity Construction In Public Political Speeches

Critical discourse analysis (CDA for short), a newly sprouting interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse, aims to study the relationship between language, ideology and power. As an important and practical apparatus to analyze the discourse in the social community, CDA functions to disclose both the identity of the speaker and the way how the personal identity is constructed, and interpret the psychological and socialization process during which different members of the community construct their certain identities by means of different discourse. The present thesis draws on the CDA theories to explore the identity construction of Barack Obama in public political speeches, in order to investigate how politicians construct their identities in discourse, and subtly impose their ideology upon the audience for achieving their political aims.This study takes public political speeches as the research material. Firstly, a small-scale corpus is established which composed of 47 speeches in different periods: speeches delivered when Obama was a senator (referred as pre-presidential speeches in the study), the speech delivered at Obama's presidential inauguration (referred as Inaugural Address in the study), and speeches delivered when he became the President (referred as post-presidential speeches in the study). The speeches cover diplomacy, politics, economy, cultural life, education, etc. Secondly, combine with Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar to analyze the data, particularly, the characteristics of the language, and discourse structures, with softwares WordSmith and Antconc as auxiliary means. Furthermore, CDA perspectives of Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, and Paul Chilton have been applied to further analysis and discussion of the data, in order to reveal Obama's identity construction and the relationships between discourse, identity construction and ideology and power in his public political speeches.The study has found that there are both distinctions and similarities in Obama's identity construction in three periods, and discourse, identity construction and ideology and power connect and interact with each other to some extent. It also indicates that CDA could reveal people's identities and the process of identity construction in a concrete social context.This research is expected to help people develop a critical awareness, so as to locate the aims that politicians want to achieve. Meanwhile, the study of identity construction can shed enlightenment on the English teaching and learning in China, in that it can help learners understand the in-depth connotations underlying this language and further enhance their linguistic competence and pragmatic ability pertaining to English.