The Critical Genre Analysis Of U.S. State Of The Union Address

U.S.state of the union address(hereafter SOUA)is a typical political speech illustrating American internal and external policies.Many scholars have launched their own study on U.S.state of the union address.When studying it,scholars often take a single approach to study one special aspect of it.In other words,most researchers tend to use one linguistic theory to analyze it.Therefore their findings may not reach a thorough understanding of the research object.For the critical genre analysis of U.S.state of the union address,the present study constructs a synthetic“ Critical Genre Analysis System”(CGAS)which is based on Bhatia's multi-perspective genre analysis model and Fairclough's critical discourse analysis model.In this thesis,21 pieces of U.S.state of the union address are chosen for an establishment of a small corpus base.A qualitative analysis as well as a quantitative analysis are made.This paper intends to find out the distribution of each move in the 21 SOUA.And in the texts which are related to foreign affairs in the 21 SOUA,by analyzing the choice of modal verbs,subjects and relational process,the author tries to find out American ideology behind these linguistic features.The present study finds that: firstly,the generic structure of U.S.state of the union address is composed of the following moves: move 1: Initiating the speech with a greeting;move 2: Reviewing the past;move 3: Illustrating America's internal reform plans;move 4: Illustrating America's external reform plans;move 5: Ending the speech with best wishes.Secondly,certain American ideologies is conveyed by the language features in the texts related to foreign affairs in SOUA including the choice of subject,the choice of modal verbs and the use of relational process.America tries to hide its ideology of hegemony by the use of linguistic choices.