Description, Interpretation And Explanation: Discursive Tactics Of American Government’s Launching The Iraq War

Critical discourse analysis is an important method to analyze news discourses. On thedatabase of CNKI, Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Model is used in many articles dealingwith American discourses concerning the Iraq war, in which systemic-functional grammaris utilized as the analytic basis. And all the researches mentioned above lay a solidfoundation for the author to employ Marin&White’s appraisal system to analyze Americangovernmental discourses for the Iraq War. Within the whole framework of Fairclough’sThree-Dimensional Model, namely, this dissertation will analyze those discourses from theperspectives of attitude, engagement and graduation..This dissertation is divided into five parts. The first part is a brief introduction to theresearch’s background, aims, methods in data analysis and significance. The second part isthe literature review, which mainly deals with current studies of analyzing the Iraq Warfrom the perspective of CDA both at home and abroad. The third part discusses theoreticalbases and methodology in this dissertation. It includes a brief introduction aboutThree-Dimensional Model as the macro-framework, appraisal system as the main analytictool, and the methodological combination of Three-Dimensional Model and languageappraisal system. The fourth part, as the key chapter, deals with data collection andanalysis. It gives a brief introduction of the data source’s reliability and authenticity, andthen starts discursive analysis in terms of description, interpretation and explanation. Bydescription, the author means that the strategy of perspectivization and the strategy ofemotional rhetoric used in data will be dug up through the analysis of appraisalsystem-attitude, engagement and graduation proposed by Martin&White. Threesub-systems can be further divided into affect and judgment and appreciation, monoglossand heterogloss, force and focus respectively. There are three reports, two from Washington Post and one from Time. By interpretation, relevant discourse practice isanalyzed from news source, reporting mode and news consumption. By explanation, thisdissertation will discover the social context in which American news reports published, andthen disclose the relationship between language, power and ideology in American newsreports. The last part is conclusion, which firstly summarizes the whole content of thisdissertation and puts forward what is found out in the process of analysis, then points outthe limitations and a suggestion which may be helpful for scholars who make research inthe future.