| Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA) was proposed by Roger Fowler,Gunther Kress in 1970s.Since then,it has become one of the most influential and visible branch of discourse analysis.CDA is derived from Critical Linguistic with the aim of exploring the relationship among language,power and ideology.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.CDA is not a new approach to analyze the discourse.Many kinds of news discourse have been analyzed by CDA.However,political speech as target discourse in application of CDA has received relatively little attention.This thesis lays stress on Fairclugh's three-dimensional model and Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar,and then takes Hillary Clinton's race speeches in 9 states(Pennsylvannia,Puerto Rico,Kentucky,West Virginia,South Dakota,New Hampshire,Florida,Indiana and South Carolina) in the 2008 American presidential election as an example to explore how a polititian achieves her political goals in a political speech.Critical Discourse Analysis is a socially directed application of linguistic analysis, therefore,Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar is the major methodological resource of CDA.Halliday believes that the nature of language is closely related to to the functions it has to serve.The particular form taken by the grammatical system of language is closely related to the social and personal needs that language is required to serve.So language is social and is not a transparent medium for communication about an objective world.Halliday posts language as a social and interactive phenomenon performs three functions,namely,ideational,interpersonal,and textual.The three functions of language provide a useful prediction of what types of Grammar construction will be particularly revealing for CDA.Fairclough divides discourse into three dimensions:texts,interactions and contexts. Text,which is used for both written texts and spoken texts,is a product of social interaction.The formal properties of a text could be on the one hand trace of the productive process,and on the other the interpretative process.In the social interation, people draw on their knowledge of language,representations of the natural and social words the live in,values,beliefs,assumptions,and so on.Such process is socially determined and conditioned.Corresponding to these dimensions,three stages of CDA are distinguished:description,interpretation,and explanation.Description is concerned with the formal properties of the text—properties of vocabulary,grammar,textual structure, etc.interpretation is concerned with the relationship between text and interaction,or seeing the text as a product of a process of production,and as a resource in the process of interpretation.Explanation is concerned with the relatonship between interaction and social context—with the social determination of the process of production and interpretation and their social effects(Fairclough,1989:24-26).Through the analysis of this speech in details the study concludes,in political speeches,although the speakers emphasize the subjectivity and justic of what they claim the speech will be influence by the power and ideologies of the speakers' side.In this way the political speeches are persuasive and deceiving.Therefore,it is very necessary for the readers to set up the critical awareness so that they would not be deceived.This paper will discover the relationship among language,power and ideology and show fraudulence and falsity of political speeches and politicians.At the same time,the study can help the readers to set up the critical awareness and critical way of thinking in reading and is instructive to the English learners and teachers.It is helpful for the English learners to improve their critical awareness in reading so that they can have a better understanding of what they read and improve their reading ability.
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