| Critical discourse analysis is a frequently-used method in political discourse research nowadays.It regards language as a social practice and examines the ideological meaning hidden behind language by analyzing the language features in the discourse and the social historical background under which the discourse forms,so as to reveal the relationship between language use and unequal social power.Through the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods,this paper will carry out a detailed analysis to the three-round open television debates of 2016 US presidential election from the perspective of critical discourse analysis.From the synchronic dimension,under the framework of Fairclough’s three-dimensional and the guidance of Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar,it firstly explains US social background to present a macro context of presidential debates involved in this thesis,then it describes language features in terms of SFL,including transitivity,mood,modality,and cohesion etc.Meanwhile,by connecting historical context,it interprets how the hidden ideology is reflected through discourse so as to explain the dynamic relation among discourse,ideology and society.From the diachronic dimension,by comparing the linguistic strategies used by former and current U.S.presidents in the presidential debate,the author aims to reveal the individual linguistic strategies and styles of Trump,who was elected as president of the United States in 2016.The critical discourse analysis of debate discourse is helpful to enhance people’s critical thinking competence,meanwhile it can provide reference for the study of other texts in the same field as well as subsequent related research. |
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