A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Bush's Speeches On Iraq

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is derived from Critical Linguistics with the aim of exploring the relationships among language, ideology and power. CDA practitioners stress that there is a dialectical relationship between language and the social context. Discourse is believed to be not merely the 'mirror of reality', but also a force of social practice. Critical discourse analysis is mainly to identify and analyze those ideological assumptions hidden in the text that have largely been taken for granted. The thesis conducts a critical analysis of American president Bush's speeches on Iraq to explore the relationship between language and ideology. It also aims to represent how the language producer uses language to convey his ideology to others and exercise the power to help achieve the political purposes.Critical discourse analysis is a socially directed application of linguistic analysis. The major methodological resource of CDA is Systemic-functional linguistics. The Systemic-functional linguist Halliday holds that the nature of language is closely related with the functions it have. The grammatical features of language are determined by the need of the society as well as the purposes of the language user. Therefore, Halliday's Functional Grammar can be regarded as one of the analytical tools of CDA.In this thesis, the author mainly apply Fairclough's three-dimension model to do the analysis that includes three phases: description, interpretation and explanation. During the first phase, the author uses Halliday's Functional Grammar to describe the formal features of the data in terms of the three metafunctions: ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. And the second phase is to interpret how these linguistic features are produced and presented. It mainly focuses on three questions: 'what's going on', 'who's involved and in what relations' and 'what is the role of language in what's going on'. In the third phase, the author attempts to explore the social context and social determinants of the discourse trying to explain why Bush takes this military action and why he delivers the series of speeches as well as the power relation in discourse.From the analysis, we have observed that the language is ideological in nature. The formal features such as the use of vocabulary, transitivity, transformation, the modes of sentences, the modality, the pronoun and the different thematic structures are alldetermined by the functions of language and the language producer's ideologies socially. The president Bush, the authority representative who is dominating the public aims to gain the audience's support and let them believe all he said is in accordance with the facts: the America has to overthrow the Iraqi regime and set the Iraqi people free.The language use of the politicians is determined by the political purposes at certain time in certain social context. The textual features all contribute to the purpose of establishing solidarity and authority. Bush uses the speeches to construct the enemies of America and constantly emphasizes that the United States as the super power over the world has the obligation to save the Iraqi people from the 'dictatorship' of Saddam Hussein and bring 'democracy' and 'freedom' to Iraq. The ideologies such as authority, solidarity are reflected in the discourse, and in turn the discourse has helped to reinforce these ideologies. This shows the dialectical relationships between language and ideology. To explore the relationship between discourse and social factors of the discourse is to find out how the discourse is produced like that and why the discourse is presented in that way. This is the final purpose of CDA which enables us understand the language more deeply and better. The political discourse which is very powerful can be used as a tool by politicians for political purposes. Therefore, when doing researches of the political discourse, we should not only focus on the language itself, but also take the social factors such as the ideology, power, the international relationships, etc into consideration.The critical discourse analysis of Bush's speeches provides us a different perspective of discourse analysis. The methodology: Fairclough's three-dimension model and Halliday's Functional Grammar are applicable in critical discourse analysis. In addition, Critical discourse analysis is also helpful to increase people's ability of critical reading and cultivate their critical awareness in language.