A Critical Discourse Analysis Of American Diplomatic Discourse Towards Iran

The origin of critical discourse analysis can be traced back to the 1970s,and it developed in China in the 1990s.In the past 50 years,CD A was widely used in different kinds of social and political discourses,such as legal documents,news reports,official discourse,etc.,which was an important branch of lin guistics.In recent years,due to the rapid development of diplomatic discourse research,many scholars in politics,linguistics,communication and other fields have been attracted.Gradually there is a cross disciplinary research situation.Because the diplomatic discourse usually involves the ideology of discourse subject,more and more scholars pay attention to the study of the diplomatic discourse.Thus they explore the relationship between language,power and ideology based on CDA.The public audience is basically passive in accepting the public diplomatic discourse,so this thesis aims to find out the linguistic features especially lexical features of the diplomatic discourse issued by the United States towards Iran,and the language strategies adopted by the U.S.government to achieve their diplomatic purposes.The relationship between the United States and Iran has always been a hot topic of the international community.Because of its complexity and instability,many scholars have been attracted to this kind of analysis and research.The U.S.foreign policy towards Iran has been changing with the replacement of the presidential administration.The several sanctions of Donald Trump administration against Iran are worthy of a deep analysis.Most of the researches on the diplomatic relations between the two countries are based on the perspective of international relations,while the researches about the discourse analysis of the contents of American diplomatic discourse towards Iran are almost blank.The research corpus of this thesis includes five passages of diplomatic discourse towards Iran issued on the official website of the White House and 124 tweets written by President Trump on his Twitter platform.The theoretical framework of the study consists of Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework theory and Halliday’s systemic functional grammar.The research is carried out through careful study and elaboration of the related theories.Firstly,the thesis analyzes the American diplomatic discourse towards Iran from the perspective of explanation,explores the social and historical background factors reflected in the discourse,and displays the relationship between language and its ideology.The explanation analysis shows that the American diplomatic discourse is deeply influenced by the historical and social environment between the two countries;Secondly,from the perspective of interpretation,it explores the general contents of American diplomatic discourse and the participants involved,as well as the role of language in American diplomatic discourse,answering the question about how to convey the ideology,viewpoints and attitudes in the diplomatic discourse.Finally,from the perspective of description,this thesis uses the three meta-functions in Halliday’s systemic functional grammar to describe and study the American diplomatic discourse towards Iran.Under Halliday’s systemic functional grammar,the corpus is examined in terms of transitivity,transformation,modality,and personal pronoun selection.In the analysis of ideational function,this thesis chooses transitivity analysis and transformation as the analysis tools to understand the American diplomatic discourse.Based on the transitivity analysis of the corpus,it can be found that material process clauses are used most in the American diplomatic discourse,followed by relational process clauses and verbal process clauses.Through the analysis of transformation,it can be concluded that nominalization and passivazation are widely used in American diplomatic discourse in order to enhance the formality and conciseness of the discourse.In the analysis of interpersonal function,the author chooses modal verbs and personal pronouns to analyze.After classifying and analyzing all the modal verbs that appear in the corpus,it is concluded that modal verbs are more commonly used in American diplomatic discourse,especially the modal auxiliary "will".After summarizing the personal pronouns used in the materials,it can be found that the first-person pronouns are used most frequently,followed by the third-person pronouns.From the analysis of textual function,it can be discovered that some topics mainly involved between the United States and Iran,often develop by means of word repetition and expression repetition in the diplomatic discourse of the United States,which not only helps the cohesion construction of the text,but also emphasizes the expression of the key points.