A Critical Discourse Analysis Of President Obama’s Speech At60^th Anniversary Of The Korean War Armistice

Critical discourse analysis, which mainly focuses on the methods of discourse analysis,was first proposed in Britain in the1980s. Critical discourse linguists hold the opinion thatdiscourses are the outcomes of author’s choices of both language form and ideology. Criticaldiscourse linguists are devoted to finding out the relationship between ideology and powerwhich are always hidden in discourses and the adverse effect of discourse on the formation ofideology. Over the past three decades, large quantities of critical discourse linguists abroadand at home have made great contributions to discovering the hidden relationship betweenlanguage form and ideology within public discourses. Retrospecting Chinese Master theses oncritical discourse analysis, the author finds that most of the theses have focused on comparingnews reports chosen from Chinese mainstream media and Western mainstream media andpolitical speeches of famous foreign leaders are relatively seldom concerned. The presentthesis hopes to serve as a supplement to the current CDA researches and contribute tobroadening the scope of critical discourse analysis. In this thesis, President Obama’s speech at60thanniversary of the Korean War armistice chosen from the official website of AmericanWhite House is selected as the analytic material in order to analyze how Obama realizes hisideological control on audiences by strategies and how asymmetric power relationshipinfluences speech process.The present study intends to make a careful critical analysis of Obama’s speech byadopting Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model as theoretical framework and M.A.K.Halliday’s systemic functional grammar as the analytic tool. This study is conducted fromthree stages: description stage, interpretation stage and explanation stage. At description stage,classification, modality (modal verbs, personal pronouns, tense), transitivity andtransformation (nominalization and passivization) are analyzed to study linguistic features ofthe chosen political speech. At the interpretation stage, news sources and reporting verbs areanalyzed to study the relationship between text and its production, distribution andconsumption processes. At the explanation stage, institutional, situational and cultural contextare analyzed to explore whether the discursive practice reproduces or restructures the presentsocial and cultural reality and correspondingly influence the broader social practice.Through the critical analysis of Obama’s speech, major findings are illustrated in thefollowing. At description and interpretation stage, Obama fully expresses, publicizes andreiterates his political views in a seemingly objective way with the help of classification,modality, transitivity, transformation and quoting anonymous soldiers and reporter’s words.Then at explanation stage, linguistic characteristics are used for the realization of language’s social functions. The language chosen and used in the present speech is determined byObama’s political views and serves for his future political ambitions. Obama expresses andspreads his political views to the addressees as objectively as possible by the choice oflanguage. What’s more, the relationship between the addresser—Obama and the addressees isunequal. The asymmetric power relationship enables Obama have the absolute say in speechwhich allows him to orchestrate his speech perfectly in order to implement the furtherideological control.