| Critical discourse analysis (CDA) regards language as a social practice, and holds that language can construct the ideology of the discourse producer. The goal of CDA is to discover the relation between language, power and ideology. It provides a new perspective and methodology for sociological research. CDA holds the inclusion of social and political perspective in the process of analysis. Political official discourse is one of the hot topics in CDA. This thesis chooses ten political official apologies as data for analysis and tries to discover the following ideology behind discourse: to make image repair for some administrators or the government, and even to make a self-defense and minimize the responsibilities for some wrongdoing so as to mend the inter-group relations with the offended part.This thesis follows Fairclough's three-dimensional framework---description, interpretation, explanation. Firstly, it adopts Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar as an analytic tool to make a description of the language features of the political official apologies. Then it tries to interpret how the discourses were produced through analysis of relationships between participants of the discourses and the discourses. Finally, it attempts to explain the interactional function between social factors and discourses from the perspective of social practice, including the social context of the discourses and some relevant social activities.In the discourse of political official apologies, ideologies are invested at various levels. Specifically, the selection of different processes, passivization and some key words, the use of nominalization, etc. all serve the particular purpose of the speakers and reflect their ideology. The study of the thesis will expand the research field of political official apologies, and meanwhile help people to improve their critical literacy and also propose some beneficial enlightenments in understanding and maintaining the relationships between different countries. |
PDF Full Text Request