A Study Of Meaning Construction From The Perspective Of Critical Discourse Analysis

Critical Discourse Analysis originates from critical linguistics and is on the purpose of revealing the relationship of ideology and power on discourse behind the linguistic forms.Critical Discourse Analysis,on the basis of Systemic-functional Grammar,regards language as a part of social process and a major way of meaning construction.Based on the review of critical discourse analysis,the author studied Donald Trump’s victory speech by means of Halliday’s Systemic-functional Grammar and Fairclough’s three-dimensional model.The thesis is an attempt to discover how President Trump strategically organized his speeches to influence and control his audience and what kind of role his language played in achieving his political goals.The analysis consists of three stages:description,interpretation and explanation.In the first stage,based on Halliday’s Systemic-functional Grammar,the author described the formal language features of the speeches from the aspect of three metafunctions.In the second stage,the author tried to interpret how these language features were produced by means of answering two research questions:"What are reflected through such characteristics of distribution in Donald Trump’s victory speech in the presidential election from the perspective of SFG?" "How does Donald Trump structure and convey meaning in his speech?" Last,the author explored the social context and social determinants of the discourse and explained how the president gained the support from the audience.Through the critical analysis of Donald Trump’s victory speech,major findings are illustrated in the following.At description and interpretation stage,Trump intentionally chooses classification,modality,transitivity,personal pronouns and marked theme to convey an underlying meaning and to emphasize his points through the speech.From the stage of explanation,we can get a conclusion that all linguistic features serve as the social function of the language used in the discourse.The ideology and determination of Trump is conveyed to the audience by using the linguistic features.