On The Ideology Of A Political Discourse Through Critical Analysis

Since the 1970s, many linguists abroad have gradually shifted their attention from isolated language forms to the study of the communicative functions of linguistic form. Among them, M.A.K. Halliday's systemic- functional grammar is prominent. He believes that language is a set of social semiotics and emphasizes the functional property of language. He specifies three metafunctions of language: (1) ideational function; (2) interpersonal function; (3) textual function. Fowler and some other linguists have developed critical linguistics in which the concepts and methods are mainly borrowed from Halliday's systemic-functional grammar. Critical linguists claim that, by using appropriate linguistic tools and taking the relevant historical and social contexts into consideration, we can bring the ideology of a discourse to the surface for inspection. Van Dijk's critical discourse analysis studies the relations among discourse, power, dominance, and social inequality. So he pays more attention to sociopolitical discourse.First of all, under the guidance of these theories, we have done a critical analysis of Bush's State of the Union Message to Nation at multiple levels: lexical level, syntactic level, modality, transitivity, and pragmatic level. Then, through this critical analysis, we may bring the hidden ideology of the discourse to the surface for inspection.Although critical linguistics has a very short history and it is still in the process of development without ready and systematic analytic models , we still found critical discourse analysis can lead to a better understanding of a discourse.