A Critical Analysis On George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of the most influential political satires in the 20^th century and enters into the canon of anti-totalitarianism literature.Critical discourse analysis?CDA?,as one new branch of modern linguistics,attempts to reveal the ideology hidden in language and the subtle relationships between language,power and ideology through analyzing the linguistic features of a specific discourse and its social contexts.The present study adopts Fairclough's“three-dimensional model”as the theoretical framework and Halliday's systemic-functional grammar?SFG?as the analytical tool,resorting to the qualitative and quantitative methods,to conduct a critical analysis on Nineteen Eighty-Four from the dimensions of text analysis?description?,discursive practice?interpretation?and social practice?explanation?.The first dimension is text analysis,which describes the linguistic features of Nineteen Eighty-Four at micro levels of transitivity,transformation,word choice,modality and thematic structure based on Halliday's SFG.The second dimension is the analysis of discursive practice,which interprets the relationships between Nineteen Eighty-Four and the processes of its production,distribution and consumption by discussing the contents?activity,theme and purpose?of Nineteen Eighty-Four,the relevant subjects of Nineteen Eighty-Four and their relations,and the role of language in its production.The third dimension is the analysis of social practice,which explains the relationship between interaction and social contexts at a macro level through examining the international political contexts of Nineteen Eighty-Four and its ideological effects on society.Through the above analysis,two conclusions are drawn from the present study.First,George Orwell employs various linguistic features to transmit anti-totalitarian ideology——transitivity indicates the abuse of power by totalitarians through highlighting their evil conducts of persecuting the ruled class;transformation causes the cruel domination to be obfuscated and rationalized by obscuring totalitarians as the real agent of brutal actions;the choice of negative and institutional vocabularies implies the distortion of humanity under the reign of totalitarian politics;the unbalanced use of modal verbs implicates totalitarians'absolute discourse power;thematic structure emphasizes the mandatory indoctrination of totalitarians'collective ideology.Second,the language use in Nineteen Eighty-Four is affected by such socio-political contexts as power politics,the Spanish War,the Second World War and the spread of totalitarianism on the one hand,and has cumulatively ideological effects on the real society on the other hand.The present study provides a new research paradigm for the ideological studies of literary works,which is helpful to develop readers'critical mind and to improve their literature appreciation.