A Comparative Study Of Chinese, American And Russian Presidents’ New Year Speeches From The Perspective Of CDA

Critical discourse analysis(CDA) aims to reveal the relationships among language, power and ideology. This thesis analyzes Chinese, American and Russian Presidents’ New Year Speeches with CDA theory. In the light of Fairclough’s three-dimensional mode and Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar, the author attempts to explore the hidden relationship between language and ideology in the political discourse. The author also aims to explore how the language producer uses language to convey his ideology to others. In this thesis, the author mainly applies Fairclough’s three-dimensional model to the analysis that includes three stages:description, interpretation and explanation. In the first stage, the author uses Halliday’s three metafunctions to describe the formal features of the two speeches. In the second stage, the author explores the interaction between the speaker and the audience and interprets whether the use of linguistic features has any effect on the audience. It mainly discusses four questions: ‘what is going on’, ‘who is involved’, ‘in what relations and what is the role of language’. In the third stage, the author discusses the social context so as to explore the power relations and ideology in the discourse.Through the research, we find: Firstly, the speaker uses language to convey his ideologies and attitudes to the audience and achieve his political goals. Secondly, the main different language feature among the three countries is the selection of transitivity types, moods and words. Thirdly, the difference in language use exists among China, America and Russia due to the different historical background, cultural and social system of the three countries.