Discursive Legitimation Strategies In The State Of The Union Addresses:A Perspective Of Genre Analysis

In the early 1990s,the Cold War ended and the United States became the only superpower in the world,a country that dominates the world order and has the discursive hegemony.The State of the Union addresses represent the political agenda of the American government,and this study explores the discursive strategies of the addresses in order to reveal the legitimation nature of American political discursive strategies and the hidden value system and ideology in the legitimation discourse.The political essence and communicative intention of the State of the Union addresses,an important genre of political discourse,are to legitimize the political agenda of the American government in order to gain approval and support from Congresspeople and the public.However,so far,few scholars have systematically studied the discursive legitimation strategies of the addresses.Moreover,the existing research on the legitimation strategies of political discourse is mainly from the perspective of critical discourse analysis,and there is still much room for improvement in research perspectives,research theories,research methods and research depth.This study applies the genre analysis of the Sydney School to the study of the legitimation-strategies of the State of the Union addresses,and proposes four interrelated research questions with their own particular focus.1)As typical government work reports,what priorities do the State of the Union addresses focus on?What policy changes are reflected in the priorities over the years?2)How does the speaker interact with the audience in the monologue discourse in order to obtain the desired space for dialogicity and negotiation?3)What are the core components and salient features of the generic structure of the State of the Union addresses in order to achieve the communicative intention?4)As a typical genre of political discourse,what legitimation functions do the State of the Union addresses have in terms of their genre features?What is the connection between the legitimation functions of the genre features and the traditional discursive legitimation strategies?The first three questions systematically analyze the genre features of the State of the Union addresses from the perspective of genre analysis,which provides the empirical evidence for answering the fourth question.By adopting genre analysis as a dominant perspective,the fourth question explores the legitimation functions of these genre features and the realization patterns of these functions.Besides,from the perspective of critical discourse analysis,the fourth question identifies the realization patterns and functions of the traditional legitimation strategies(van Leeuwen,2007;2008)in the addresses.This study selects the State of the Union addresses from 1989 to 2020 of five successive administrations as the analytical data.In accordance with different research questions,this study applies the relevant theoretical frameworks to annotate and code the data,and makes quantitative and qualitative analysis of the texts.This study systematically analyses the genre features of the State of the Union addresses in three dimensions:the priorities elaborated by the speaker,the dialogicity between the speaker and the audience,and the highly structured and regular generic structure of the addresses,in order to explore the discursive legitimation functions and strategies hidden behind these genre features.Firstly,by using the corpus analytical software Power Conc,this study extracts the top 50 keywords that highlight the subject matters of the 32 observed addresses,and then generates ten categories of priorities of the five successive administrations in the data:homeland security,economy,social security,education,family,employment,science and technology,crime,energy,and values,which reflects the continuity of the priorities of the successive administrations.Then,in the same way of extracting the keywords that highlight the aboutness,this study respectively compares the top 10 keywords of the addresses of each incumbent administration with the top 10 keywords of the 32 addresses.The 10 keywords of the 32 addresses cover six categories of priorities:employment,family,social security,education,homeland security(counter-terrorism)and economy,which are the common priorities of the five administrations.The result shows that except the Clinton administration,the other four administrations have their own particular priorities that they attach more importance to,which reflects the timeliness of the priorities of the four different administrations.Specifically speaking,the George Bush administration attached special importance to promoting the value of freedom and cracking down on drug crimes;the George W.Bush administration also stressed the value of freedom;the Obama administration regarded energy as an important issue affecting national interests and security;the Trump administration put the priorities of fighting against drug crimes,implementing new immigration policies,strengthening infrastructure construction and improving women’s status at the top of his political agenda.Secondly,based on the engagement system of Appraisal Theory,this study explores the interaction process in which the speaker uses a variety of engagement modes and engagement resources in the monologue discourse to interact with the audience in order to win negotiation space for himself.The dialogicity of the State of the Union addresses is mainly manifested in four aspects:two dialogic modes,i.e.,dialogic contraction and dialogic expansion;two main engagement modes,i.e.,disclaim and entertain;three core topics,i.e.,plans,problems and work styles/values,and two key factors,i.e.,the responsibility of the language userfor the current proposition and the space for dialogicity.Thirdly.based on the concept of schematic structure ofgenre proposed by Martin(1992),this study works out the prototype of the State of the Union addresses at the macro-and micro-level.The prototype consists of a series of five identifiable stages:Greetings^Prelude^Government Work Report^Declaration^Thanks,of which Stage 3 Government Work Report is the most important part,consisting of 12 core phases:social problems,priorities,(the need for)new policies,achievements,national pride,unity,challenges,values,government responsibility,(acknowledging)guests,storytelling and responsibilities for international affairs.On the whole,the generic structure of the addresses shows the characteristics of regularity,flexibility and recursion.Finally,based on the findings of the first three research questions,this study decodes the process in which the speaker employs a series of discursive legitimation strategies to prove the legitimacy of his political agenda.The results show that the genre features of the State of the Union addresses have the legitimation functions,including the ideological nature of priorities,the construction of an ideal audience and the traditional legitimation strategies used in the highly structured and regular generic structure(including authorization,rationalization,moral evaluation,narrativization and emotional appeal).The legitimation functions of genre features play a dominant role,while the various traditional legitimation strategies(van Leeuwen,2007;2008)serve as more specific ways to assist and enhance the legitimation functions of genre features.Among them,moral evaluation,authorization and emotional appeal are the three main discursive legitimation strategies throughout.This study is an innovative exploration of the legitimation strategies of political discourse.This study explores the legitimation functions of genre features,connects the legitimation functions of genre features and the traditional discursive legitimation strategies,and also expands the groundbreaking analytical framework of van Leeuwen(2007;2008)with the addition of institutional authority and religious authority under the category of authorization,narrative story under the category of narrativization and an independent category of emotional appeal.In addition,by combining the perspectives of genre analysis and critical discourse analysis(with the former as a dominant one),this study creatively constructs a research path to specially analyze the legitimation strategies of political discourse.This study makes up for the deficiency of traditional research on discursive legitimation strategies in terms of research perspectives,research theories,research methods and research depth.