A Comparative Study Of The Inaugural Speeches Of President Bush And Obama From CDA Perspective

As the political leader of the most powerful and influential country in the world, the president of the United States of America enjoy incomparable power and position to exert influence in and outside the United States of America. As an important part of the presidential inaugural ceremony, the inaugural speech provides a good chance for the president elected to show his political stance and ambition, so it can serve as a yardstick for the measure of the promises of the president. In this sense, the inaugural speech of the U.S. president is of historical and social significance and it can reflect the social and historical changes in the world. Critical linguist Fairclough holds that discourse is social practice and is closely related to socio-cultural change, which is realized by the change of power and its control over social relations. He has come up with a Three-Dimensional Framework to analyze linkages between discourse, ideology and power:text, discursive practice and social practice. According to the three dimensions, he proposes three steps in the actual operation of discourse analysis:description, interpretation and explanation. The stage of description is realized by the three metafunctions in Halliday’s Systemic Grammar to show the linguistic features of the text; the stage of interpretation requires the analysis of the process of text production, distribution and consumption both from the aspect of the information-giver and information-receiver; the stage of explanation provides analysis of the linguistic features in a social-historical context.From President Bush to President Obama, great changes have taken place in the American society and the global world. And this is embodied in the inaugural speeches of the two presidents. The current thesis conducts a comparative study of the inaugural speeches of President Bush and President Obama from a CDA perspective. Within Fairclough’s Three Dimensional Framework and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, the thesis tries to explore the relationship between language and social-historical change. In the dimension of text, the employment of the process types, participants, mood, modality and the choice of theme in the inaugural speeches of the two presidents has been described; in the dimension of discursive practice, the use of the participant "WE" filled with different social roles, modal verbs, modal auxiliaries and the cohesion and coherence of the inaugural speeches of both presidents has been compared to interpret the political intention of the speaker as well as the effect of the linguistic features on the audience; in the dimension of social practice, the ideology embodied in the inaugural speeches and the relationship between language and power have been explored with social and historical background. It is found that the employment of participant "we" with different roles, the selected process types and modal verbs can reflect the change of power and control.