Underlying Ideology In Political Discourse

The present study, adopting critical discourse analysis (CDA) as its analytic approach, analyzes President Bush's two political speeches, which are delivered on the crisis caused by the events of 9.11 on September 11th, 2001 and September 20^th, 2001 respectively. The analysis is based on the lexical categorization and transitivity, modality and thematization analysis of the speeches. By doing so, the author uncovers the structural realization of how President Bush's voice becomes the voice of the nation of America and how Bush dominates public interpretation of the events of 9.11. Besides that, the author clarifies the subtle difference between the two speeches. The application section of the paper tentatively verifies the assumption that categorization, transitivity, modality and thematization can be effective analytical tools of CDA.The aim of present study is to provide a means of seeing through language and to help people take a correct attitude towards the Western media, which is conductive to the improvement of their critical language awareness; and it is suggested that the complementary findings for earlier CDA achievements can be revealing to English learners, and teachers as well as researchers for the sake of political discourse reading and teaching. It is hoped that present study, in its modest way, contributes to the field of CDA and stimulates further research to be undertaken at home in China.