Underlying Ideology In The Public Discourse

Critical discourse analysis (Abbreviated to CDA), a recent school of discourse analysis, concerns itself with language, power and ideology and their interrelationships. CDA explicitly intends to incorporate social-theoretical and social-political insights into discourse analysis and advocates social commitment in research. Public discourses are what CDA typically concentrates on, which refer to data like news reporting, political speeches, official documents and legal discourses etc. Present study adheres to the analytic paradigm of critical discourse analysis employed by Fairclough (1992) to analyze President Bush's Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, in the hope of revealing the underlying ideology embedded within the speech.This thesis defines and discusses the interrelationship among language, ideology and power since they are three important issues in CDA. From critical discourse analyst's perspective, language is a major mechanism in the process of social construction; power is defined as the social power of groups and institutions in terms of control; ideology refers to ways in which what people say, think and interact with society. The three issues are closely interrelated with each other. Language is a social practice,which influences and manipulates social construction by changing and reproducing ideologies. Discourse is the representation of language, hence a specified social practice. Power and dominance of groups are measured by their control over discourse. In the case of discourse, such kind of control indirectly influences people's ideologies, which leads to the naturalization of reproducing ideology.The analytical tools employed in the present study are Fairclough's Three-dimensional Model and Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar (Abbreviated to SFG). By discussing Fairclough's Three-dimensional Model, the author makes it clear that texts can never be understood or analyzed in isolation—they can only be understood in relation to webs of other texts and in relation to the social context. The choice of SFG as the analytic tool of present study is predicated upon its capacity to support a multifunctional representation of social reality.The text chosen for analysis is President George W. Bush's Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, which is considered as the most famous speech during the time of crisis caused by the events of 9.11. The analysis is based on the experiential value, relational value and expressive value of the lexical organization and 'transitivity', 'modality' and 'thematization' analysis of the speech. By so doing, the author uncovers the structural realization of how President Bush's voice becomes the voice of the nation of American and how Bush dominates public interpretation of the events of 9.11.The aim of present study is to provide a means of seeing through language; and to help Chinese foreign language learners increase theircritical language awareness. 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.