An Analysis Of Obama's Victory And Inaugural Speeches From The Perspective Of CDA

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), proposed by Fowler, Hodge and Kress in 1970s, has now become one of the most influential and visible branches of discourse analysis. It is a kind of analytic method aiming to explore language, language use and the meaning of ideology. CDA is often applied to the analysis of political discourses, in which the speaker tactically wins favorite responses from the audience. Political language, used by the politicians in their political activities with the functions of persuading, controlling, and making the audience accept their own opinions and propositions affecting the audience's ideology, deserves people's attention and research. This paper tries to explore the relationships among language, ideology and power by analyzing Obama's speeches from the perspective of CDA. It mainly conducts a critical analysis of American President Obama's speeches to explore the hidden relationship between language and ideology with the major methodology of systemic Functional Grammar and Fairclough's three-dimension model. At the beginning, the author uses Halliday's Systematic Functional Grammar to analyze formal language properties of the speeches from three meta-functions:ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. The second step is to make a research on the relationship between the discourse and producer to interpret the process that the discourse has produced. Finally, the author attempts to explore the effect of social environment on the production of the discourse by analyzing the historical, internal and external factors affecting Obama's election campaign.It can be seen from the analysis that Obama manages to convey his ideology to the audience by telling people the reality and the new government's policies so that Americans can be convinced and inspired by his ideology. The author obtains the following conclusions: (1) Obama employs various methods in his language use from all the three meta-functions in order to convey his own opinions to the audience and enforce his power upon them to realize his political purposes;(2) Ideology and power are deeply hidden in political discourse. Speeches delivered by Obama also conceal his ideology and reveal authority, so his speech is made with some particular political aims;(3) Critical Discourse Analysis can reveal the connotative meaning of the discourse, through which the relationship between discourse and circumstance can be explored so as to help improve people's ability in critical reading.To sum up, the thesis can prove that CDA is an effective analytical approach to political discourse. By revealing the ideology hidden in the political discourse, it can raise the readers'awareness of perceiving unconscious ideologies in political discourse and help them to have a deeper understanding of political discourse and language features in political discourse.