Critical Discourse Analysis On Dali Bai Minority Peddlers’ Spoken English

Critical discourse analysis(CDA) as its name indicates first, is a kind of critical device. It is proposed by Fowler and the other linguists in 1970 s. CDA mainly focuses on the questions of inequality and power;the relations of language and power. CDA is frequently used by critical linguists in analyzing speeches like political speeches, news, public speech etc. CDA and its approaches have had enormous amount of influence among the discourse analysts. Comparing with the traditional discourse analysis, CDA primarily investigates the way of social power abuse, dominance and inequality, cohesion and coherence of words, sentences, and talk in the social and political context.The author chooses Dali Bai Minority peddlers’ spoken English as the target discourse because few people can integrate the critical discourse analysis with minority peddlers. By detailed analysis of the discourse of Dali Bai Minority peddlers, we can get the features of peddlers’ spoken language then the features of spoken discourse and provide some principles.This thesis applies Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar and Fairclough’s three-dimensional model to do the analysis. Fairclough’s three-dimensional model is of great significance in critical discourse analysis, namely description, interpretation and explanation. As a basic analytical framework, Fairclough’s theories, the three-dimensional model, help to analyze the discourse step by step on the macro level. Halliday’s systematic-functional grammar, especially his three metafunctions of language, is a useful analytical tool for the detailed analysis of the discourse. Halliday’s systematic-functional grammar(SFG), language has three outstanding functions(metafunctions) which help people who expects from using a language. These metafunctions are “textual”, “interpersonal” and “ideational”.In analyzing the discourse of Bai Minority peddlers’ spoken English, Fairclough’s three-dimensional model respectively, description, interpretation and explanation as a basic analytical framework, the author applies Halliday’s systematic-functional grammar(SFG) to analyze the linguistic features of the data, including phonology(lexical stress, prosodic stress, intonation); ideational function(lexical density, vocabulary, powerful words, noun used as verb, transitivity); interpersonal function(mood); textual function(lexical cohension). CDA concerns not only the text itself but also the social and environmental factors which affect the effect of the discourse. The author adopts Fairclough’s four questions to interpret the text. The four questions are: What’s going on? Who’s involved? In what relations? What’s the role of language in what’s going on? The last step of the analyzing, the author puts emphasis on the social and environmental context of the speech and the power relations which is concealed in the discourse.Through analyzing, we can find that Dali Bai Minority peddlers use various methods of language to promote their goods and impose on the ideology of their class to them. They use intonation, stress, transitivity, mood structures, context and power words to make the whole speech much more persuasive as well as trustworthy. At the same time, the author has got how Halliday’s the three metafunctions are represented in the discourse? Halliday’s three main metafunctions help the language user to convey the meaning or perform other functional aspects of the language mainly by mood and transitivity.The author suggests that we should have a critical awareness to what we hear or read. That’s why we make a critical analysis of the spoken English of Dali Bai minority peddlers. In future English learning and teaching, critical discourse awareness should be paid attention by language teachers and students. Students are expected to learn language meanwhile know society.